Buck *

(Time barely allows me the luxury of movie watching, let alone long writing blathery blog entries about what I watched. That may be for the better. It means the thoughts will get a lot briefer. Case in point...)

Buck is a pretty ideal character study documentary, in that it takes a character with a really concise and distinct hook, is clear about who he is and what he does and where he's come from -- and illustrates an insider's world with total clarity, such that a total outsider like myself is brought in. It's light on dramatic arc or sense of "journey," but it captures the character in a complete-feeling way, and it even allows us to see him fail (he was unable to tame the oxygen-deprived "predator" horse Cal), though I wouldn't have minded seeing more reaction to that failure -- nothing shows character like how one deals with a crisis, and outside of life-and-death scenarios, few crises are as big as the inability to do the one thing you're best at.

Mostly, though, Buck feels like it's a story about emotions, and how we channel what we're given or who we are into those around us. It's a story about paying it forward, and being aware of that cycle. Buck's dad abused him terribly, but Buck transforms the feeling of being a victim into compassion for another creature. Buck's clients are told repeatedly that how they treat their horses mirrors who they are as people. I've held that theory about household pets for years as well -- that the "personalities" of your cats and dogs are echoes back to you of who you are. Whatever aspect of you you show them that resonates with whoever they already are, that is what amplifies and reflects back from them. So much more so with more intelligent creatures like horses.

Seen at Cinema 21.

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.

Brazil

The world of Brazil is complex and rich, but for all its über-Gilliamesque intricacies that fold in on themselves, it never feels arbitrary, or odd just for oddness's sake. Maybe the best thing about the world of Brazil (and probably what makes it such a lasting and resonant film) is that for all the deep weirdness -- weirdness that goes far beyond just the surface of this world -- it's ideologically consistent. It's a study in bureaucracy that takes itself seriously enough to build up a layered world and it applies the skewed philosophy to every layer. It's populated with characters just as "ideologically consistent" as the world: petty and small-minded, people who can only see their corner of the puzzle, but who sympathetic and layered enough to be more than just props or fill-ins for necessary roles.

Actually, the characters here remind me of what I've been saying about science fictions films I've seen lately: it seems to me an easy (read: lazy) mistake to create the perfect character for the role you need him or her to fill just so your story can move along the beats you want it to. Seems like it would always be better storytelling if you put the wrong person for the job and then find a way to make them the right person, though their choices and actions. Instead of a washed-out astronaut hero with nothing to lose, why not make him a guilt-ridden alcoholic who can barely keep his shit together and has three kids back home he's ashamed of himself for neglecting? Now, when the Martian Almond Aliens ask him to join them on a crazy adventure to the center of the galaxy, you have your hero faced with an extremely difficult decision rather than a no-bainer.

In Brazil, Sam Lowry is a pointedly unambitious, keep-your-head-down man who not only believes in the bureaucracy of the system, but is perfectly happy to be nothing but another cog. His old friend Jack Lint is one of the main antagonists in the story (the true antagonist here is The System, with Jack as a common stand-in) not to mention a torturer and murderer, and yet Jack is the nicest, warmest man in the Ministry, an ambitious ladder-climber but also a capable husband and father (in a detached, working-dad/yuppie sort of way). Sam's old boss Mr. Kurtzmann, head of the Department of Records, isn't the right man for the job, traditionally speaking: he's a sniveling coward who can't control his work force, doesn't understand half the equipment in his office, and is so absolutely terrified of the culpability that comes along with committing any kind of action whatsoever that he fakes an injury to get out of signing his name to a document (arguably, in the world of Brazil these things add up to make him the exactly right person for the job of Head of Department of Records). Harry Tuttle, Jill Layton, Ida Lowry, and even the two mean-spirited bunglers from Central Services are just as good examples of the not-perfect person for the role they play. In each case, it's not as simple as choosing the polar opposite of what the role ought to require -- it's messier than that, and that's the point. But each character either struggles with himself or contradicts himself and his nature and that keeps the story dynamic, entertaining, and somewhat more nuanced.

I also went through the first act and did a beat analysis, studying how we move into the story and get the necessary exposition out there. Not shockingly, Brazil fares somewhat better than the other films I've watched this month. First, the exposition delivery systems (the method by which they dump all that info on us) are original and dynamic; second, they're entertaining and humorous; third, each moment and shot manages to work on a minimum of two levels (e.g., backstory and world-building; theme and characterization). It's just -- it's a classic. A tight, beautiful script, completely madcap but firmly controlled, directed by the right guy.

I didn't get into the visuals or the dream sequence or the art/effects/framing, but all of those are just as inspired and multi-layered as the stuff I did rave about. And the visuals! the flying-through-the-clouds dreams, the bizarre ducts-and-wires Rube Goldberg-meets-Orwell nightmare world, the miniatures throughout -- they're all so fucking pretty! Like I said, a classic. Hardly news to anybody: it deserves its reputation.

A Boy Named Charlie Brown

I've been reading the Complete Peanuts books lately and in a strange way have fallen in love with them, an impulse I had because so many respected writers and artists I know speak so lovingly of them, and because I'd remembered from a couple years back discovering that the Charlie Brown cartoons aren't funny but painfully, unsparingly melancholy. The comics, even more so. By the '60s it feels almost like Charles Schultz is no longer trying to be funny. I think he knew that nostalgia for a certain kind of childhood anxiety and emotional despair was plenty charming on its own. And I think he is right. There is something weirdly beautiful about Charlie Brown's endless, year-to-year cycles of the same kinds of pain, and Linus's neuroses, and Lucy's fussiness, and Snoopy's fantasies, and Schroeder's borderline-autistic love of music.

Halfway through rewatching it, I described A Boy Named Charlie Brown as "the unrelenting psychic dismantling of an over-anxious all-around failure, played as bittersweet nostalgia." Scene after scene we watch Charlie fall apart. He can't fly a kite. He can't manage a baseball team (or pitch). Lucy shows him a slideshow, categorizing and illustrating in painful, traumatic detail every single fault within him. Even when trying to cheer him up, Linus can't help but beat Charlie Brown at tic-tac-toe. Charlie Brown says he is a "born loser." Linus convinces him to join a spelling bee, and a couple of lucky words gets him past the local and state tournaments and into a national competition, where he agonizes over spelling rules, loses sleep and becomes a delirious wreck. When finally excelling at something, he finds he is more miserable than before.

Then of course, all that minimal success and popularity (even the other kids tune in to see, and after his own mini-crisis with a misplaced loaned blanket is resolved, Linus sits in the front row with Snoopy, eager to support his friend) is just a build-up for an even bigger failure than he's ever experienced before, as Charlie makes it to the last two spellers and blows it on the easiest word, the breed of his dog. He spells "Beagle" as "Beagel" and loses, in front of everyone he knows, when he was right there and could have had the trophy.

The spelling bee itself lasts about sixty seconds. The drive home after losing lasts something like five minutes, followed by Charlie walking the empty streets, Charlie going into his empty house, Charlie undressing and crawling into bed -- where he remains through the whole next school day and after. There is no question that this is being milked for all its poignancy and pain, basking in the miserable afterglow of failure. Linus comes to try once again to cheer up his friend ("We played a baseball game without you today; it was the first time we won all season,") and finally all he can say is, "Well, I can understand how you feel. You worked hard, studying for the spelling bee, and I suppose you feel you let everyone down. You made a fool out of yourself and everything, but did you notice something, Charlie Brown? The world didn't come to an end." It's the best he can offer, and it's enough to convince Charlie to get out of bed, get dressed, and go out.

Wandering by friends at play (mostly ignored) he goes to the baseball mound and kicks up dust. And from there he sees Lucy, her back turned, goofing with the football. He creeps up on her, momentarily confident all over again -- hope springs eternal -- and rushes her for a kick. But -- yank! -- Lucy was ready for him, and he goes flailing and crying out in true Charlie Brown fashion ("Auuughh!"), and lands unceremoniously on his ass. Lucy comes up to him and says, sort of sweetly, "Welcome home, Charlie Brown."

You fail at everything, Charlie Brown, but look on the bright side: your friends are still there to tease you, and there are always more opportunities to fail ahead. (In one strip, Charlie Brown tells Linus, "I've come up with a new philosophy: now I only dread one day at a time.") Children's humor doesn't get much blacker than Peanuts, and this film is a perfect, unapologetic example of that. The closest thing to a happy ending in Charlie Brown's world is the recognition that nothing has changed, even when he fails so spectacularly as this.

The thing is, I don't find any of it depressing, and I don't revel in the depression of it. I find it all enlightening, and even a little energizing. Not to get all hippie-deep on you, but: That's life, man, you know? Not to get all existential-nihilist on you, but: Life will continue to be absurd, cruel, and kick you when you're down, and your only choices are to get up or lie still, and neither will drastically change what happens next (life will continue to be absurd, cruel, and kick you when you're down), and so you might as well get up. Reading Peanuts and watching this (and, if memory serves, its successor, Snoopy, Come Home), I am reminded of one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut quotes: from the underrated Timequake. When Vonnegut wonders to himself "Why bother?" he comes with this response: "Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'"

Again, not to get all touchy-feely about a late '60s cartoon based on a popular newspaper strip about a bald little boy who sucks at everything, but: What can I say? There's something thoroughly grand and humanistic in this, a certain emotional and dramatic territory and language that gets almost no attention in the funny-pages or in children's cartoons. How could I not love it?

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

This film led to a long discussion about what holding auditions for actors is like, watching monologue after monologue, each one well-written, clever, and slightly overacted in that certain way: the actor wants you to know he or she gets it, that it's more than just words to them. Most monologues involve one character telling a single story to a captive, silent audience -- theater and film have concocted an endless number of excuses for this simple setup -- and basically, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men plays out as an endless stream of these. Part of that is inherent to the idea of interviews, naturally, and I suppose writer-director-actor John Krasinski had to choose between downplaying that and embracing it, and he clearly went with his theater and acting roots and embraced it. At times it becomes exhausting, but I wonder how much of that is just my own personal reaction after so many times sitting in an empty room behind a table and watching dude after dude after dude of roughly the same type and look deliver variations on the same two or three monologues directly to me. Not everybody's held auditions, so for some people this experience would be novel, or at least not flashback-inducing.

As to the content of the film, I haven't read this DFW novel collection of short stories so I can't say how much of it comes from that versus how much of it is the filmmaker's choice, but there is an episodic quality to the events in Sarah's life (the speechmaking guy, the neighbor at the closed door, the student obsessed with the positive-transformative side of rape, and so on), and I couldn't help but wish they were a little more connected somehow, or interwoven more than episodic. Mostly I wanted to see this applied to the subplot involving Daniel, the rape-obsessed thesis student, whose circular back-and-forth with Sarah was believable and interesting and aggravating (all at once), but in the end I felt that the beats of his story lost a lot of their impact by being piled on top of each other like they were.

Like the climactic speech of a good play, Krasinski's monologue at the end leaves a lot to mull over, specifically in the choices of the writers/director, and while it was a little offputting it wasn't displeasing, and it tied in nicely to the themes building throughout. If I follow the nonlinear storytelling properly, it was Sarah's breakup with Krasinski (sorry, I didn't catch the character's name) that directly led her to go to Professor Timothy Hutton and change the direction of her research into (briefly) interviewing (hideous) men. Withholding until this point what she was researching (feminism, and specifically what impact its advent has had on male culture) worked for me, in the way that a narrative shouldn't spell out its thesis until after it's already made it, if at all -- unlike a term paper or dissertation.

What didn't work for me in this reading, however, is something that speaks to what Professor Hutton said early on in the film, with regards to Nanook of the North: (I'm paraphrasing, but) "I know, it's kind of dry and uninteresting, but try and pay attention to the documenter, not the documented, and always remember to ask the big question: why?" At its heart, this isn't a story about the many ways many men react to a newly feminist world; this is the story of one woman and why she is pursuing this line of reasoning in the first place. And as Brief Interviews lays out for us, Sarah is pursuing this as a direct reaction to an awkwardly soul-baring speech by an ex-love confounded by his own fear of connection and suspicious of his role in the power dynamic of seduction.

Krasinski's confession that he never loved Sarah because he'd never known love hurts her, but her academic training kicks in like a (probably very common, judging from Krasinski's comments) defense mechanism, and instead of fighting back or taking a stand, she listens, she absorbs, and she quietly judges. She remains deadpan and stoic even after he's gone, furious and pitying that she cannot speak up or reach out (or even lash out). Her only reaction that we see -- again, if I've got the chronology right, and I think I do -- is to go to her professor and say, "You know, I'm tired of reading about feminism and women; that's been well-documented. I just realized men are a wreck because of this whole 'movement' thing, and there's a lot of rich, unmined territory there. I'd like to investigate that instead." It is hard to fault Krasinski for wandering astray, hooking up with what he thought was a pathetic floozy. It's just as hard to fault him for chasing an ephemeral moment of intensity upon hearing a story that embarrassed him out of his safety zones. (It's easy to fault him for having this pseudo-epiphany about connections with other humans so late in life, but there seems to be a recurring theme of just how emotionally stunted all these academics and intellectuals are anyway.)

Another thought: Daniel's speech about the empowerment and enlightenment that can only come after the most grievous acts of degradation and trauma has a clever reverse-parallel* in the point of her thesis. The opposite of degradation and trauma -- I guess you could make a case, the "opposite" of rape -- is liberation and equalization -- specifically in this case, the feminist movement. As such, the thesis that "empowerment and enlightenment can come from rape" can be reversed as "disempowerment and ignorance can come from feminism." Don't get me wrong, I'm not endorsing anything so glib in the slightest, but as a dramatic theme for a story, it's strong enough to string a lot of scenes on, and the clever head-to-tails contrast of these ideas is nice, though again that just reinforces my desire to see more done with the Daniel character and his incendiary philosophy.

Overall, the movie's interesting, and it's fun to watch a lot of these actors try overhard in a way that works (i.e., is neither hammy nor corny, nor any other food-based adjective I can think of), wrestling with a lot of quasi-provocative speeches and breathing life into a lot of wooden scenes. The ideas are strong and the film isn't a wreck, but it's not quite a success either, obviously for those same reasons. (It makes me wish I'd read the book, but who are we kidding? My to-read list is wildly disproportionate to my pace of books-per-year these days.) Glad I saw it. Not in love.



* Is that a thing, "reverse-parallel?" It should be. (I had to ask. Anyway, it wouldn't do to blog about a film based on David Foster Wallace without at least one footnote.)

Beat the Devil

Sometimes I do myself a favor by remembering that I very much want to see a film and allowing myself to forget the reasons why. It gives me the impetus to pay attention and adds the fun of trying to figure out what piece of long lost lore or trivia led me here in the first place. I remembered that Beat the Devil was a less popular (non-blockbuster) Huston film with Bogart, and that at one point I was very excited to watch it, but by the time I sat down to do so I'd forgotten why, and watched it with a blank slate.

Immediately it was obvious that Bogart was playing a kind of posh John Huston. Aged as he was, with his skin starting to sag and his teeth looking more and more like old-man teeth, he even looked like Huston. The mannerisms were good too -- a little affected, a little entitled, but also gruff and no-bullshit.

Billy Dannreuther (it sounds distractingly like everybody calls him "Dan Rather," and Humphrey is no Billy) is cynical and manipulative and knows when to put survival before dignity. He plays everyone against each other and like his Spade or Marlowe he tries to stay out in front of the various conniving bad guys so he can score the loot and get the girl. I found it impossible to watch this movie and not keep comparing it to The Maltese Falcon, right down to the appearance of an always-fun Peter Lorre and a languidly verbose, sweaty fat man who seems sometimes like the leader of the ragtag gang of ambitious crooks -- it isn't Sydney Greenstreet, but Robert Morley plays it with the same kind of fondness for his own blather. The main difference, though, is that here everything seems to go wrong, and often comically. The car going down the hill and off the cliff; the boat sinking; Billy fleeing the Arabs, getting caught, weaseling his way out of danger by throwing his companion under the bus in his place. It was almost like Huston was turning his own film on its head and shaking out all the hard-edged bravado, leaving only the nonsense and schemes and shifting loyalties and ever-changing backstories.

And so, when I finished the film I peeked online to see if I could figure out what had drawn me here in the first place. Sure enough, plain as day, Wikipedia says, "It was intended by Huston as a tongue-in-cheek spoof of his earlier masterpiece, The Maltese Falcon, and of films of its genre." Written (apparently on the fly, day to day) by Huston and Truman Capote, it was the director taking the piss out of a genre he helped make huge. It apparently tanked and Bogart disowned it to some degree ("Only phonies like it") and Wikipedia goes on to call it "the first camp movie," but I admire it beyond all of that. It has undeniably fun characters, and isn't boring for a moment. (The romance is just as rushed as its forebear, but there's vastly more chemistry between Bogart and Jennifer Jones than he ever had with Mary Astor.) The plot is insane, leaping (fairly seamlessly) from manic slapstick to shifty-eyed noir to weapy romance to high-stakes thriller, and it never slacks in any of these.

Beat the Devil comes off clearly as the work of an old-hat at genre film who's bold enough to challenge the expectations of an audience, but it's also got the punk attitude of a great director rewriting old formulas. If artists didn't so willfully color outside the boxes every now and then, we'd never move forward artistically. In that sense, it's easy to see this film as a predecessor to anything from Romancing the Stone to The Big Lebowski to Shaun of the Dead. Anything with a gleefully deconstructionist bent, really.

Personally, while I can see why it wasn't a huge success and isn't as fondly remembered as The Maltese Falcon or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Asphalt Jungle, I still really enjoyed this and am very glad to have seen it. It feels in its way like an important film, because it's bold enough to spit in the face of something both I and the filmmakers clearly hold dear. Dismantling a thing you love is a hard thing to do but it's so rewarding when it's done well. And here it's done well.

Blue Valentine *

It's been a while since I watched a film with this kind of emotional rawness or verisimilitude of character. The stuff I've watched lately has been classics, (good) Hollywood stuff, and silly adventures about wizard children. So in an odd way, although this was a little rough, it was also incredibly refreshing.

There was a point fairly early on where, even though I already liked both characters, I couldn't help but see all the clichéd plot points they were hitting, and was a little worried about where the story was going to go. The script takes some awfully familiar turns, like the use of extensive flashback counterpoints or Cindy missing her daughter's recital. I wasn't faulting it really, but I couldn't pretend not to notice. By the end, though, I think it actually did this cleverly, and in a way I was glad for it.

The characters are much more lived in than most movies (literally, it turns out, if you read any behind-the-scenes trivia about the filmmakers) and much more dimensional. Dean and Cindy act like real people, and they are both lovable and wonderful to each other, and deplorable and terrible to each other. For the writers to hang all this on a chain of familiar tropes is actually very clever, for a couple of reasons. First, it does have the effect of keeping your general audience a little more anchored and properly oriented -- that is, it keeps the tougher-to-take emotions more palatable -- but moreover I think it highlights the difference between this film and your typical romantic comedy (or drama).

At first glance, to this viewer, it seemed they were establishing Dean as the loving family man, capable of dealing with traumatic situations and keeping his cool, devoted to nothing so much as his wife and daughter; and Cindy as the more serious-minded, job-oriented marmish mother, concerned with propriety and a little neglectful emotionally of both Dean and their daughter Frankie. By the midway point however, these two traits had been magnified and on closer inspection, it became clear that Dean was oppressively affectionate, so intent on giving love that he was unable to see the recipient of it as a genuine person; and that Cindy had grown into who she was in part as a reaction to this, that her tongue-clucking and scatterbrainedness both stemmed from the difficulty of having a man-child love her too intensely. And by the end we see everything in such stark, unapologetic detail, that it's impossible not to blame both of them for their collapse, and yet it's equally impossible not to sympathize with both as well. Like Closer, a much more stylized story with equally flawed characters falling in and out of love messily, you sympathize because you've been that guy or girl.

Much of the film hits close to home, and of the people I saw it with, I think I had the least obviously relatable recent past. Even so, it hits hard to see the way you are, or more often the way you have been, up there on the screen, and see the good and the bad of it. Not enough films are willing to show that, to show love as messy and damaging and to show relationships as genuinely broken and unfixable and still the thing you want to cling to desperately (because at the end of Blue Valentine, against all odds and against all logic, I wanted them to work it out anyway).

This really was a hard-hitting story emotionally, and I'm not sure that comes through all this analysis of story and style. Only from the safe distance of home can I look back and see what I've seen. In the moment, I was Dean and I was Cindy and everything that hurt them hurt me, and all the tiny things that thrilled them thrilled me. It's rare to be swept into a movie, especially one that's sort of tonally bleak, but it's also a beautiful thing. Enough corniness now, though. It's a great movie, and I hope everyone sees it.

(And on a side note: that this almost got an NC-17 rating, I find atrocious and frankly, morally reprehensible. There is no excuse for shuttering a story like this and encouraging youth to see torture porn and movies with rape. Honestly, if protecting the children is the motivation of the MPAA, then a film like this where sex has seriously messy consequences and love and sex do not solve everything should be mandatory and films like Van Wilder and whatever Katherine Heigl is in right now should be reserved only for viewers 21+, who know better. End rant.)

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.

Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid

It's amazing, actually, how little really happens in this film. We meet them over a card game, they ride back to their gang, deal with a would-be usurper, follow through with the usurper's ambitious plan to rob the same bank train twice, get busted the second time, an extended chase across the Old West, flight to Bolivia, a little bit of bank robbin' until their pursuers track them down, attempts at going straight that end in a bloodbath, a little bit more robbin', then a final showdown. That may sound like a lot, but it's almost literally every moment in the story. A side story involving Sundance's girl Etta and a couple of short-lived celebrations in a brothel are all I left out. Most of the story is made of extended sequences of Butch and Sundance arguing and running, or montage sequences that push us along through time as things go well for them. In fact, the better things are going the more likely the script is to fastforward through their lives -- to such a degree that the most hopeful, safe and joyous time they spend is reduced to a montage of sepia-toned stills like some Old West music video. (And don't get me started on the soundtrack; aside from the eerie main title theme I pretty much think all the music here is as absurd and tonally counterproductive as the font in the title sequence, seen above.)

And this is famously and rightfully a film known for its screenplay. It's The Film known for its screenplay to some people, since it's William Goldman. The script, though, I must admit -- it's pretty brilliant. The dialogue is so easy and so telling, the characters so distinct and likable and unshowy, and the action so tight and well-paced, there is nothing to complain about at all in here. I've seen it a dozen times and still, each time, the dialogue (and Newman's and Redford's easy delivery) just sparks.

I think there's something to the fact that most of the big moments in this are outside our heroes' control, that this is a story of two people who've been in charge of their lives for a long time and are gradually losing that control. They never give up, and they keep trying their old tricks with less and less success, to the very end -- because what are you going to do? First their gang tries to turn on them, then the train companies are smarter than them (and meaner than them), then the hunters are smarter than them (and meaner than them), and eventually they are simply out of options. Etta sees it, and duly leaves them. Their friend the old sheriff sees it, and refuses to help them. Even Sweetface "the lying son of a bitch" is forced to see it and turns on them as quick as he can. It's not a world for good-old bank robbers anymore, with the organization of civilization moving in on them from all sides. And to the end, Butch and Sundance refuse to recognize this, dreaming of escaping to Australia -- of repeating the very same pipedream leap of faith that brought them to Bolivia in the first place. Every step of the story, they are backed to the edge of a cliff, and charming Butch and stalwart Sundance, they just keep jumping off. Right to the very last. Whether or not they can swim, or shoot, or speak Spanish.

I'm pretty sure there's a bold political read to this, and an easy existentialist one. But I'm not writing thesis papers; I'm just digging shallowly into great films while I rearrange and trim words out of scripts so I can make my own.

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.

De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped)

It's nice to have something more character-driven and naturalistic to watch. There's not nearly so much I have to say about this as, say, the Harry Potter series. Because this isn't a story about what happens next so much as it is about who it happens to and what their choices (or lack of choices) are, I feel like I'm watching with a different part of my brain turned on.

I really liked the tone of this. 90% of the story's tension is between Tom Seyr's dreams to be a pianist and the pressure in his world to be a crooked real estate man and petty thug for his father, but neither of those storylines felt like they depended on any shorthand or easy formulas from the hundreds of films that came before it. The way the piano playing was depicted was concise and clear, even to a non-musician, and having a coach who didn't speak his language kept the scenes from ever relying on easy exposition or colorful language to carry the action, instead showing us that he cannot relax, that he plays too quickly and stiffly, that his concentration is off or his anger issues are getting in the way, strictly through the playing or the non-verbal interactions between him and Miao Lin. Likewise, the real estate "thug" half of the story -- seemingly so disparate from the world of concert pianists (I have not seen Fingers, which I now recall this is a remake of; that's okay with me, though I may someday seek it out) -- never feels like a crime-story cliché. Instead, it feels awkward and desperate and messy and emotional and brutal. It feels like what you'd expect real crime feels like: quick, dirty, and often improvised.

The only other thing I have to say is, the last ten minutes -- the "two years later" coda, makes the story for me. Up until that point it was just another character-driven drama with a lot of expertly-done tight handheld camerawork and some gritty performances. Something about the epilogue transported it for me to a different kind of movie, I guess in the way it was all so painful and full of consequence but ambiguous. From the moment [SPOILER] Tom came home and found his father dead to the moment, two years later, that he sits in the audience, shaking and covered in the blood of his father's killer (or so we assume, and so does he) and shares a look with Miao Lin, everything moves so quickly and so definitively that you almost can't keep up. It's like Tom's playing: he doesn't slow down or take breaths, he just rolls through, excited and anxious about each next note, and then over in a flash. That kind of performance may hurt a delicate piano piece, but here that pacing strengthens the end of an already pulled-taut drama film.

Cutting to black on that look is just the right way to end it: all judgments and reactions have to exist outside the film. Room to breathe would have only made room for sentiment and consideration, and for better or worse, Tom's world hasn't had a lot of those things in it.

Black Swan *

Upon second viewing, I'm really left with the same impression as from my first viewing, only heightened: the same antsiness or impatience with certain repeated beats, the same detachment and distance from what's going on and who it's happening to. It occurs to me, in fact, that my emphasis on the precision of the storytelling (which led me to think on precision in filmmaking in general) comes right out of the story's themes -- how could I not come away pondering the dichotomy between precise attempts at dramatic "perfection" and the looser, "losing oneself" naturality that must be achieved to really "transcend"? It's right there in the text.

And in that sense, I think Black Swan plays out like the most direct metaphor for artist-versus-art Aronofsky has laid out yet. Just as how everybody read Inception as a manifesto for Nolan's approach to filmmaking, this might be an analogy for Aronofsky's style, and maybe Nina Sayers is an analog for how Aronofsky sees himself. The majority of his fims are precise, philosophically rich, clinically well-produced films about characters either struggling to or struggling not to let go. If the line is drawn between control and imprecision, Darren Aronofsky clearly (and accurately) places himself firmly as one on the controlled camp, though he seems to look longingly across the divide. He acknowledges that the best of the best are the times when the two sides come together impossibly, and he seems to yearn almost desperately to find that place himself. But like the Coens, both Andersons (master P.T. and hipster Wes), Nolan and Fincher and others, he isn't known for letting go. The argument makes me want to revisit The Fountain, which feels to me like it might be his boldest move toward letting go and losing himself to a story that's more poetry than prose, but I haven't seen it in years and I can't say I'm not tainting my memory by trying to place it as a fascinating outlier among his works.

Black Swan holds up for a second viewing, but for me it still feels a little too arm's-length, too deliberate and tightly plotted, and Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis and Vincent Cassell -- though they all give really good performances -- never rise above feeling like performances. In fact, the whole film reminds me of a Sean Penn or Daniel Day Lewis performance: a profound impersonation of every tic and subtle gesture that's just a little too spot-on and accurate, and comes off as calculated rather than organic and real. Most Coen Brothers films strike me like this to varying degrees (and I love and respect them, and Aronofsky, and Day Lewis and Penn, quite a lot, so bear that in mind as I lay down the critical hammer here), but it's always the ones that feel like more and less than mere performance that for me will stand out and rise above. Black Swan isn't quite that for me. It's too perfect.

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.

Black Swan

I made a completely off-hand joke before we watched this that Black Swan was "that ballet movie by Darren Aronofsky," which meant that it was "essentially Step Up 4: Requiem for a Dream." But really, since I'd heard that at one point this ballet story was being developed along with the wrestler's story in The Wrestler as a single film, I was more prepared for this to be in that vein than like Requiem. I'd say maybe it splits the difference, but it felt for my money like it leaned just a hair further toward the dark-surreal psychodrama of Requiem than into the exhaustive sheer physicality of The Wrestler. Either way, there is no doubt this was a Darren Aronofsky film. Actually, as I sit here and let it sink in and try to decide what I really thought of it (above and beyond "I really, really liked it"), it occurs to me that there's a healthy dose of The Fountain in here, as well, with its dreamlike structure, enfolding narratives and singularly obsessed, just-this-side-of-unsympathetic main character. So there you go.

Parts of the ambiguity and double-perspective fakeouts, particularly toward the end, felt a little overlong or repetitive to me on first viewing, but I have a strong sense this may be the fault of the viewer and not of the filmmaker. Not surprisingly I came out of the movie tense and full of nervous energy, and maybe I've been feeling a little wired/burnt-out lately and the movie just rubbed something raw in me. It's funny to sit through a scene and think, "Is this still happening? Are we here again?" and simultaneously think, "I bet that's just me, I bet I'm just antsy." Maybe I'm only defending the film because I am biased toward a filmmaker whose work I've so often loved, but I don't think so. I'm actually pretty positive that on second watching I'll be even more blown away than I was this time, though I won't mind putting a couple of days (or weeks) between me and the movie before returning. Like many Aronofsky films, it's quite the intense ride.

Buried *

This was a film I knew I had to see.

The story I'm focused on right now involves characters alone in an enclosed space (a house), for the most part in near-complete darkness, with frightening and unknown threats both inside and outside, and they are helpless. Buried is like the distilled and hyperexaggerated version of this exact situation: one man alone in a much more cramped, much more enclosed space (an old wooden coffin), in near-complete darkness, facing threats from within and without, alone and helpless.

It is tense, smart, and unflinching. It depends on Ryan Reynolds's performance to work, but even more than that it leans heavily on a smart script. (I read that the writer intended to shoot this himself on a shoestring budget but some friends from a production company read it and convinced him to sell it and get it made as a low-budget studio film instead.) Paul faces a series of threats, builds relationships with some characters over the cell phone, and the stakes build steadily (and relentlessly) to a nail-biter climax that in all honesty is the tiniest bit pat, but works nonetheless. The various strings of Paul's story could feel episodic but they weave together (to run with this metaphor) just enough to feel like one story, not several little stories. It even manages to get some fairly brutal criticism of the way the west has handled post-war Iraq in there without feeling too confusing.

Some things that really stuck with me as object lessons include the sources of light (and plot- and character-driven justifications for each) and use of technology as a lifeline in a tight spot. After reading multiple stories of people who were trapped in the earthquake in Haiti and stayed alive by accessing first aid info on their iPhones and tweeting for help, it was nice to see a film really play on the desperation and isolation of that lifeline. (I have similar ideas running through my story; it also was gratifying that none of my cooler beats were done here first.) It also strikes home just how crucial casting is, because while I think the script is suspenseful enough and smart enough to sustain a lesser actor, it would have come off as a more hollow exercise without the kind of give-all performance Buried gets out of Reynolds.

I'm really glad I got to see this on the big screen (though as a side note: what kind of a person brings a child to see this and feels it's okay to have whispering conversations with them during all the tensest and most emotionally affecting scenes?). And I'm really glad it ends like it does (with one exception: [SPOILER] when Dan Brenner on the phone declares the man in the coffin they opened Mark White, by name, that was far too much for me, far too convenient). This is a good movie, made just the way it ought to be made. I'm bummed that Cortés's other films don't seem to be available in the US. Maybe when this hits DVD/Blu-ray and gets the boost it deserves, they'll release some.

Seen at the Hollywood Theatre.

The Brood

Here's a horror film that's purely character driven. It's late and I wake up early, and it always bothers me when I have to make concessions of that sort but life is what it is and I can only say a little. The Brood is the product of clearly a different era, but you can't deny that every single scene comes from the drives of the characters. Frank is driven to solve the mystery and protect his child, and everything he does is to that end (though leaving her with her heavy-drinking grandmother early on seems strange, I guess it's better the known evil of boozy grandma to the unknown evil of crazy mom beating her). Hal the doctor is driven to cure those who are sick, though he uses extremely unconventional methods to do so. And at the heart of both stories is understanding Nola, whose every desire and fear is being translated into a literal child-sized monster. Everything, every strange and creepy event or crisis or turn in the story, can be traced back to these three characters. Every action is motivated, and every motivation is consistent and clear. Sometimes the underlying psychologies of the characters are a little too on-the-nose, a little too direct, I admit, but so be it. That's part of the creepy tone of the story. Her most basic urges are becoming manifest. That's what it's about.

Excellent work with child actors and with putting children in the scenes, "witnessing" the violence and horror, too. A bit of nice casting combined with some red-eyed makeup and fake tears and you really believe her both as a traumatized child and a child under attack. The film wouldn't have worked if it had shied away from the children's suffering or fears, or if the children hadn't been in real peril. That's all I have tonight. Like I said, it's late, and in all honesty I hadn't intended to watch this whole film tonight, but I got caught up in the tight pacing and short running time, and just kept watching.

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)

Okay, I lied. This truly is the best of the trilogy. With each film, Leone expands in all the right ways. For one, the budget goes up considerably, as does the polish and production value; but more than that, the characters multiply and deepen, the world gets bigger, the plot more complicated (in an interesting way), and the themes become more nuanced. By the time we get to this, the most famous of the three, everything seems to be working together, a perfect storm of a film. The damn thing is three solid hours long, and although it feels it, you're never bored at all.

In fact, the three hours seem almost perfectly broken into equal-sized acts. The first hour is spent building the three characters, particularly the relationship between Blondie (the Good) and Tuco (the Ugly), with the ever-looming spectre of Angel Eyes (the Bad) homing in slowly on a load of money. At the one-hour mark, Blondie and Tuco stumble upon Bill Carson and each learn half the information needed to find the treasure. Act Two is spent bumbling through a mission, the confederates, the yankees, and eventually teaming up with Angel Eyes and his gang. At the two-hour mark, the showdown in the ghost town equalizes the three and sets them up for the final chase to the cemetery. Act Three is spent crossing the final thresholds and squaring off one-on-one-on-one in a fascinating if awfully convenient standoff to end all standoffs.

It's such a film about sides and shifting loyalties! You've got a constant backdrop of the end of the civil war, and the characters bounce between both sides, impersonating with little difficulty whichever side is likely to help their cause. Then you've got Blondie and Angel Eyes, explicitly demarcated for us as "Good" and "Bad" respectively, even though both are fairly underhanded throughout (but it's never ambiguous: Blondie is definitely the compassionate one, Angel Eyes the ice-cold murderer), and this obviously leaves Tuco, our Ugly, as the wildcard, the middle, the shifter. Tuco bounces easily between being as backstabbing and devious as Angel Eyes or as warm and amiable as Blondie (which, for this world, is remarkably warm and amiable, actually), and this has a double effect. First, it makes him the key to the whole story, because shifting allegiances and constantly choosing sides is what the story hinges on in so many ways. It also makes him the most interesting to watch, as he is the most dynamic, unpredictable character of the three. (Eli Wallach is really the star here, if you ask me, stealing every scene he's in.)

The climax of the film hinges on the fact that Tuco has more or less sided with Blondie throughout, that he was never really as bad as Bad, he never really allied with Angel Eyes after all, and since it was a pull for power between two (not three) sides, since this was a tug-of-war between Good and Bad, having Ugly side with Good tipped the scales. In a film all about shifting allegiances, it has to all come down to who the wildcard sides with.

The story deals so well with the absurdity of right and wrong, the brutal pointlessness of war, the fundamental lack of difference between "good" and "evil" as opposing forces, and the soul-wearying effect war has on a culture, not to mention comments on class, desperation, friendship, religion, family, and community as well. It's so rich. Too layered for me to do it justice here, that's for sure. I've heard somewhere or other that Leone's masterpiece is supposed to be Once Upon a Time in the West, but it's hard to imagine a film better than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for revisionist 60s westerns (spaghetti or no). Then again, I said something similar about For A Few Dollars More pretty recently, so.

Only one way to find out.

Bad Lieutenant

This was interesting to watch immediately after the Herzog film. For one, I think there's a little more remake going on that they admit. Although the primary crime and the third act are definitely different, and the central themes are clearly more spiritual in Ferrara's and more moralistic in Herzog's, the stories share an awful lot of similarities, like the sexual abuse of authority, the gambling-himself-into-a-hole subplot (and the requisite sympathetic bookie) and the twisted way the title character can't let go of his case.

As I said earlier, the new one feels like it riffs on the same themes but tells a different story. Cage's Bad Lieutenant and Keitel's Bad Lieutenant are both self-destructive, brutal monsters of men, both driven by a weird anti-hero's moral principles (almost a noir-hero's sense of right and wrong taken to telling extremes). But where Cage's character seems to be reptilian in nature, an aggressive walking id trying to stay one step ahead of the terrible wake he leaves behind him, Keitel's character's is haunted by a sickening loss of faith and a repentant respect for and guilt from his religion. I'm not sure which is simpler, but they're drastically different.

(One quick tangential note, thrown here in the middle because I had no way to connect it to the other comparisons I've made here: Nicolas Cage's slowly-deteriorating voice and body language reminded me increasingly of Woody Harrelson's Larry Flynt, in a way that I always chalked up to heavy pain-killer use distorting one's ability to speak. Nonetheless both times I was reminded of it. Here, Harvey Keitel's character reminded me a ton of his role in the other film he did in 1992: Mr. White from Reservoir Dogs. They are both mean-spirited quasi-good-guys who kill and steal and cheat but have strong moral backbones, and they both break down into sobs in almost exactly the same way. It's almost disappointing, because the two characters lose a bit of distinction when placed side by side, and both movies came out the same year, so. Yeah. Anyway. Just something I thought of, comparing the heroes of these two movies to other well-known characters.)

The end of this one, the first Bad Lieutenant, stands in contrast as well. In Port of Call Nicolas Cage's hero (McDonagh) pushes past some threshold of immorality and comes out miraculously, impossibly clean -- and ready to start the pushing all over again. In Ferrara's film, Harvey Keitel's nameless hero comes off to me as more furious at the world, daunted by its miracles, and lost when confronted with grace. He's a man who expects the savage, merciless law of the jungle to prevail, and crumples when he has to face greater powers than himself, forces of good and forgiveness. Or that's what this atheist pulled from the Catholic-heavy imagery. Maybe someone more spiritual can do more with that. In the "original," he is "redeemed" by helping the rapists escape, and then he is released from further sin by murder. In the "not-remake," if he is "redeemed" it is by discovering the cold, morality-free nature of nature, and committing enough "evils" that eventually something came up "good," and he is pointedly not released from further sin at all. In fact, it is implied he stands on the cusp of beginning again, though this is left open to interpretation.

Although both are pretty good films, story-wise there's no question which I'm a bigger fan of. Moral righteousness in the face of a Catholic ideal of guilt and baptism vs. moral ambiguity in the face of a capricious and arbitrary world? Yeah. Sorry, Mr. Ferrara. You made a great movie, and a brilliant character study, but put me on Team Herzog.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans

I liked this when I saw it last year in theaters, even more than I thought I was going to. Nicolas Cage gives not just a typically batshit performance; he gives a surprisingly nuanced batshit performance. He gives us a character that actually evolves and develops throughout the story, and it's fascinating to watch.

The script is fun as hell, too. I admit to not yet having seen Abel Ferrara's original (edit: Now I have), but I know this isn't a remake at all. It feels -- and this is clearly wild speculation -- more like riffing on a theme than any kind of homage or remake. And to that end, this story about a "bad cop" who keeps pushing further is great. There's so much tension in watching someone pulled tighter and tighter and waiting for everything to snap, explode, collapse.

But the story here is smart. The moral world of Port of Call is complex and unnavigable. Even the good cops play loose and dirty with the law. The authority doesn't really get involved, and the worst punishment seems to involve being kicked out of the game -- and even that is shockingly temporary. The deeper into depravity Terrence McDonagh goes, the more he drags along those loved ones foolish enough to tether to him. Eventually he pushes well past the limits we even expect him to, until he seems to break miraculously though some kind of membrane and come out not just clean, but having yanked his entire world inside out with him. The bad guys get caught and/or killed, his loved ones have become a (clean?) "family," and he himself has been promoted from Bad Lieutenant to Captain.

At the end, we have two perfect codas: first, we see Terrence back on the prowl for preppie kids with easily snatched drugs and girlfriends, proving he hasn't changed his ways at all, and the cycle will continue itself; second, we see Terrence lost in a drug-haze in a hotel room, encountering Chavez, the felon whose life he saved in the prologue. It was the act of saving this man's life that transformed him -- it permanently damaged his spine and put him on pain pills (making him Bad) but also won him a promotion and the reputation of a hero (making him a Lieutenant). So this encounter at the end is a major moment -- will (or even can) Terrence be saved by the man he wrecked his own already-questionable life saving? The answer at the end is as obtuse and enervating as the iguana shots during the stake-out: it's Terrence and Chavez, sitting together against an aquarium wall. Chavez looks spaced-out, possibly bored. Terrence looks like... is he about to laugh? What is going on in his mind? Then -- "Ha!" -- a single half-chuckle, like he's about to tell you what's so funny, and then that cut to black. That's all you get.

It's morally ambiguous, but more aggressively so than films usually get, and madman poet Werner Herzog is a perfect match for the material. A lot of elements that feel like they wouldn't work really work. It's a strange movie -- what Herzog film isn't? -- and I'm glad it exists.

The Black Hole

Everything about this film feels dated, from another era -- even wistful and naive. The effects don't quite hold up, the acting is hit-and-miss, the dialogue less than nuanced, and the science... well, it's important to remember this film was made nine years before Stephen Hawking starting releasing books. They do (quite casually) use terms like "event horizon," which shows that they did their research, so that's something. Anyway, my point with all this isn't that The Black Hole sucks. I was actually trying to build up to saying, everything about this film feels dated, and yet it's pretty damn spectacular if you can overlook that. The plot is thoughtful and epic in scope and (if you disregard some unmotivated shifts in personality) very character-driven -- and it's darker than anything else I think Disney's ever done. It's brutal, Nietzschean dark, one part 20,000 Leagues and one part Heart of Darkness with Reinhardt playing the Übermensch/Nemo/Kurtz who has stared long and hard into that abyss (black hole) and found it staring back. The things he has done are fairly horrific, even by today's standards of dramatic villainy, and the portrayal of him as a man (as literally as ever) on the edge of an infinite madness is rich and frightening.

Plus, the look of it: The Black Hole's special effects don't hold up, but the art direction holds up wonderfully. The look of the shots, costumes, robot and ship designs, even the look of asteroids and black holes, as unscientific as they are -- the style of this film is fucking beautiful. The end includes a twisted 2001-esque journey through a wormhole into heaven and hell, and a somberly paced bit of mind-fucking visual poetry as Reinholdt and his nightmarish second-in-command robot Maximillian embrace in a fiery whorl of zero-gravity, only to merge into a single being that's last seen standing atop a mountain, as though victorious, overlooking the fiery landscape of hell, while a small army of mirror-faced zombie-drone-monk-bots are gathered at the foot of the mountain. And even that, the lingering image of this hybrid-creature's closeup reveals Reinholdt's eyes inside Maximillian's visor are furtive, almost panicky -- a man trapped inside a monstrous machine? That's a lot to ingest when you're a kid, and that shit sticks with you. And it's not something a movie would do with its last act now.

Every time I put this on, which is about once every three or so years, I begin with mild embarrassment and curiosity because of the odd balance of what holds up and what doesn't, and by the end I am again unnerved and invigorated by the sheer tenacity of the story and its characters and world. TRON may have the bigger following, but there's a reason that for years I've been arguing that these two films showed a bolder, more intelligent side of Disney and of science fiction cinema, than much of anything that's come since. In both these films, there are so many layers of metaphor and meaning to be found in its seeming pulpy simplicity, and both feel daring and original in their way. I keep using the word, but I really think it applies here: The Black Hole is visual poetry, and I totally love it.

Bad Day at Black Rock

For a movie made in the 1950s, this sure has a lot of aggressive tension in it. It wraps up a little too fast, as films often did in that era, but the slow powderkeg build getting up to it, starting approximately six minutes into the film when the train finally stops and not letting up until the final confrontation about six minutes from the end, feels like a precursor to Straw Dogs, and that's saying something. Spencer Tracy is so inactive, even reactive, for a classical protagonist, and the length they go to keep us in the dark about his true motivations feels like a bold move, leaning on the morally ambiguous side of the fence. Even though you're pretty sure you could guess (and in the end it's just like you'd imagine), there's a good deal of ambiguity in not knowing just how pacifist this wounded war vet really is. The whole time, from beginning to end, you're waiting to see everyone blow up, and you're feeling just as flummoxed and disgusted with the tiny town as Macreedy himself.

Surprisingly visceral for its era! But then again, I did just recently see Bigger Than Life, so maybe the 1950s just have an undeserved and inaccurate reputation for pulling punches. Because like I said, the end is quick but the rest of it leaves me anxious, with the real feeling that violence is just around the corner, not to mention a shadow in everyone's past.

Blue Velvet

I had no idea how much this film has gotten under my skin over the years. Lynch is truly an artist in touch with the subconscious; he's not just accessing his own with unusual focus but he's apparently communicating to mine very directly as well. The more I watched the more I started to recognize shades of Blue Velvet in four or five different stories I've been working on -- and in different ways. I don't feel particularly bad about this, since I'm hardly ripping off David Lynch with my stories, but I find it interesting that so many disparate ideas may have been tinted unknowingly by this one film, which I've only seen a handful of times over the years.

The obvious is Jeffrey's quixotic journey down a rabbit hole into conspiracy and criminality, the desperate and slightly unmotivated obsession with discovering clues and uncovering something darker and bigger than himself and his world. Right there, that could describe three different characters or stories I've got locked up in my brain wanting out. But a more interesting one is one I hadn't consciously noticed in Blue Velvet before tonight: the use of parallel worlds bridged more by contrast than anything else. It seems obvious, but I hadn't been thinking so literally in these terms before tonight's viewing. Jeffrey straddles the line between the "good" side (Sandy, Detective Williams, his family) and the "evil" side (Dorothy, Frank Booth, Frank's "family") of the world, and each time he makes strides forward in one he makes the same strides forward in the other.

The easiest example is the obvious Sandy/Dorothy parallel. Jeffrey flirts with Sandy despite her having a boyfriend; Jeffrey ingratiates himself to Dorothy despite her being involved with Frank (and married!). Jeffrey confesses his love (the "good" expression of romantic feelings) for Sandy; Jeffrey fucks Dorothy (the "evil" expression). Jeffrey gets caught by Frank and beaten badly by him and his gang for his transgressions; Jeffrey gets caught by Sandy's boyfriend Mike and might have gotten beaten less badly (and less expertly) by Mike and his drunk friends, had the dark side not bled over and Dorothy wasn't standing naked and bruised on Jeffrey's lawn. Each of these events helps us chart the emotional difference between the two worlds, but more than that it shows us that these are both sides of one man: Jeffrey willingly pursues Sandy with feelings of love less than ten minutes of movie time before forcibly kissing (and eventually rolling around naked with and punching) Dorothy. These are both Jeffrey. One man, two sides, straddling two emotional worlds, having his cake and eating it too.

This duality of emotional worlds is the exact same territory Lynch explores in Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and arguably Inland Empire. So it shouldn't be much surprise that it was here first. It also shouldn't be much of a surprise that I picked up on it more this time, as I sit with my "doppelgänger story" in front of me, the story of a man coexisting in two different emotional worlds, one which could be called passive or "light" and the other aggressive or "dark." Just one more story I'm working on that owes a great unconscious debt to Blue Velvet.