Cinema Geek

James Bond is Invincible

2011-08-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

It's probably no surprise to anyone here that I'm a big fan of James Bond (even if he is a bit problematic -- especially in the much-beloved Connery films).

I made this little video for our favorite British super spy for the Club Vivid dance party at Vividcon. I hope you enjoy:

(the credited vidder is an alias I use in fannish pursuits)

Signals From Left Field: Wheels On Meals (1984)

2011-06-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

When I was a wee lad, I saw Jackie Chan in 1981's Cannonball Run and immediately became a fan of his infinitely kinetic, often comedic style of martial arts. I'd use my limited resources to see him in other movies, like 1980's The Big Brawl, which I didn't see until the mid-80's. The 90's rolled around, and I somehow got in touch with a VHS rental-by-mail company which predated Netflix by several years. They had a great international catalog, and lo and behold...there was Jackie Chan and a wealth of his films from the 1980's, when he enjoyed a hugely successful run as one of a wonderful action-comedy trio.

As a child, Chan attended and studied at the Peking Opera, where he met Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao. The three were fast friends in the grueling school, learning among other things, how to use their martial arts and gymnastic prowess to the fullest. They moved on into film, first as extras, then as marquee stars, directors, and choreographers. The 1980's were probably their busiest and most prolific, as they churned out hit after hit. They made films separately, but when they worked together, that was where the box office magic happened.

Their chemistry was as undeniable as the differences in their styles. Chan was the guy with the moves, and was the lead face in nearly every work they did. Hung was the chubby guy with the incredible comic timing and deceptive quickness. Biao was the smallest and the most acrobatic, using flips and lightning-fast moves. Where they were different in their styles and appearances, the influences were the same: classics like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were evident in the trio's mannerisms and stunts. They mixed martial arts with old school slapstick comedy and created a run of wonderfully whimsical movies during the 80's like Project A, Dragons Forever, and the Lucky Stars series.

One of the surefire staples of this period was Wheels On Meals (aka Kuàicān Chē, Spartan X, and Powerman among other titles), made in 1984 and directed by Hung. It's considered a favorite among classic Hong Kong action film fans not only for its obvious goofiness, but for the thrilling fight scenes, especially the climactic battle between Chan and real-life martial arts champion Benny "The Jet" Urquidez.

The plot is fairly simple and full of gags. Thomas (Chan) and David (Biao) run a food cart in Barcelona, Spain. During the day, they sell burgers and egg rolls in a popular plaza, and by night, they train in martial arts. The fighting skills come in handy when they have to run off a motorcycle gang terrorizing the plaza. When visiting David's father in a mental hospital, they're smitten by Sylvia (Spanish actress Lola Forner), the daughter of a woman David's dad falls for in the hospital. They run into Sylvia in the city, where she turns out to be a thief, posing as a hooker to rob men. However, there's more to Sylvia than meets the eye. Private detective Moby (Hung) is looking for her, as are some guys with more sinister motives. Seems Sylvia is the long-lost heir to a massive fortune and a local crime boss, Mondale (Pepe Sancho), wants to force her hand over the goods, preferably by marriage.

After the boys rescue her a couple times, Sylvia joins them, working as a waitress for their food cart. Eventually, Mondale sends his big boys (Urquidez and yet another real-life champion Keith Vitali) after Sylvia and they manage to kidnap her. The good guys can't let this happen, so they stage a daring rescue in Mondale's castle stronghold, taking on his henchmen and engaging in some tremendous martial arts battle, including the one I mentioned between Chan and Urquidez. While that is truly one of the best martial arts battles to grace the screen, you can't take away from the final fight between Biao and Vitali, involving many flips, plush furniture, and a pineapple as a weapon.

If you get a hold of this sweet little film, don't be put off by the dubbing. It can be excruciating at times, to be honest, but it's a very small price to pay to watch Chan, Biao, and Hung work their magic. The movies they made brimmed with eternal optimism: we will beat the bad guy and we will win the day. The jokes and gags are light-hearted and hammy. The fights and stunts are breathtaking, and they were an important component of Hong Kong cinema for years. Wheels On Meals exemplifies those qualities and adds the beautiful scenery of Barcelona into the mix. And yes, the draw is the Chan-Urquidez main event, a physical, sometimes brutal, sometimes funny controlled brawl. There are highlights within the highlights, such as Chan's character using positive thinking to change his style, tickling as an offensive weapon, and a kick by Urquidez that literally blows out some candles (which I understand was not a trick). Speaking of chemistry, Chan and Urquidez also battled in the wonderful Dragons Forever and that was a show-stoppers as well. They just work so well as foes.

If you only know Chan from his Rush Hour movies or more watered-down Hollywood releases, or Hung from his short-lived but fun American TV show Martial Law, then you really should treat yourself to Meals On Wheels, or any one of their 80's heyday movies. They're a blast, and may have you pulling a ligament trying to imitate their moves.

Not that I speak from experience.

Now enjoy the amazing final fight scene:

52 Perfect Movies: Young Frankenstein (1974)

2011-06-06T16:01:00.000-07:00

"Are you saying that I put an abnormal brain into a 7 1/2 foot tall, 54-inch wide GORILLA?!"

When one thinks of a "perfect film", it's more often than not a drama that comes to mind. In the course of this series, there are not very many comedies that make the cut, let alone ones as downright zany and farcical as Young Frankenstein. Yet there can be no denying the sheer genius of this, one of the most perfect comic motion pictures ever made. In a career highlighted by some damn funny movies, Mel Brooks truly outdid himself with this, the one he'll always be most remembered for.

Sure, there have been others, such as Blazing Saddles and The Producers, that come to mind as comedy classics. But none seem to touch the sublime combination of humor, homage and pathos that this one does. It's very easy to see that Brooks has a deep-seated, genuine affection for the Universal horror flicks he is parodizing here. It is exuded in every moment of screen time, and comes across in every single performance. It is a labor of love, and a joy to behold.

It's no wonder that Brooks would repeatedly revisit the formula he started with this film, of spoofing a favorite film genre. It works so well here, that it's only natural to try and recreate it. And while it did work again a few times, it never clicked quite as well as it does here. This is a film so good that it can actually stand amongst the very films to which it is paying tribute.

Most importantly, it's funny as hell. Mel Brooks has been accused of employing stale humor at times in his movies, but that is never further from the truth than in the work he put into Young Frankenstein. To be fair, a great deal of this can also be attributed to the great Gene Wilder, who conceptualized and co-wrote the project with Brooks. In fact, I'd submit that the movie's genius may be more attributable to Wilder than to Brooks.

Not only does Wilder excel as the co-creator, but also as the film's star. In no other film is his natural frenetic energy put to better use--this is a comic performance for the ages. And he's not alone, either, as the movie is rich with brilliant comic performances from the likes of Teri Garr, Gene Hackman, Peter Boyle as the Monster, and of course the late, great Madeline Kahn doing her best old-time movie starlet impression.

And then there are Cloris Leachman and Marty Feldman, two masters of comedic timing whose characterizations as Frau Blucher and Eye-Gor add so much to the film. Not to mention Kenneth Mars in a role directly spoofing that of Lionel Atwill in Son of Frankenstein. Together with the infectiously brilliant Wilder in the lead, this troupe of outstanding performers represent one of the finest comedy ensembles ever put together on film.

Like the very best parodies, Young Frankenstein bursts with genuine admiration and affection for the source material. It looks and feels like a Universal horror film, and is bursting with references and in-jokes targeted at ardent fans. The hermit scene alone is so memorable that for many, it has actually eclipsed the original scene from Bride of Frankenstein, upon which it was based. That says a lot.

There are so many timeless set pieces and gags scattered throughout by the keen comedic minds of Brooks and Wilder. The old "walk this way" routine with Eye-Gor. The doctor's ludicrous medical school presentation. "Abby Normal". Frau Blucher and the neighing horses. And of course, "Puttin' on the Ritz." And yet, even in a comedy as ridiculous as this one, there is room for genuine pathos and gravity, as can be witnessed, for example, in the scene in which Frankenstein and his monster come to an understanding while sharing a jail cell. This is more than just Brooks and his vaudeville schtick. This is comedy on a whole other level.

There is a reason why Young Frankenstein stands out from the rest of Mel Brooks' body of work--why the rest of his career was arguably an attempt to equal its greatness. With the help of Gene Wilder, he was able to craft something that has truly stood the test of time as the ultimate love note to a venerable subgenre of film that Brooks, Wilder and so many others hold so dear. Most importantly of all, it is uproariously funny, and a rare comedy that stands up to endless repeated viewings. Call it Frankenstein. Call if Fronkensteen. I call it brilliance.

NEXT UP: The Godfather Part II (1974)

All About Eve (1950)

2011-05-12T08:12:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a powerful moment of regret while watching All About Eve on the big screen. For the first time in a long time, I regretted being so young. It’s funny of course that I should be watching Bette Davis and all of Margot Channing’s reluctant acceptance of her age and rue the fact that I had been born in the 80s and not the 40s. Yet, there I was wishing that before I had seen just about any other movie in my life, I had seen All About Eve first. It goes without saying that this wish is due in part to the fact that All About Eve is a wonderful film but my regret also has to do with the fact that all I can think about while watching it is Showgirls.

These kind of moments happen quite often in my new life as a born again cinephile. I’ll see a classic film that I should have seen years ago and then have that moment of “Ooooh, THAT’S where that’s from”. The depressing thing is that most people my age won’t ever get to take that second step of seeing where the “original” came into the picture. They will instead hear talk of showbiz backstabbing and understudy shenanigans and immediately think of Jessie Spano being naked and licking stripper poles.

I’m not proud that my mind immediately brings parallels of what is traditionally thought of as the worst movie of all time, but would you believe me if I said that the existence of Showgirls is one of the things that makes me appreciate All About Eve the most?

It may be "all about Eve", but it's really about the women. In a feat that has still gone unchallenged today, All About Eve is the only film in history to have four of its actresses be nominated for an Oscar. The women in the film are in fact the stars while the men all seem to take supporting roles and remain diligently in the background as important plot devices rather than cold hard characters. The heartless and smarter than he appears Addison Dewitt (George Sanders) comes dangerously close, but ultimately we revel in the even more heartless Eve Harrington.

The women are scene stealer's in every way possible and it’s refreshing to see this, even as Bette Davis rifles out her monologue about the plight of a woman’s career and the cruel realization that you aren’t a woman until you’re married. In a time when women were considered little more than house wives or secretaries, the women in All About Eve maintain a steady stream of gumption and power. With every martini that Bette Davis drowns and every time time that she says she hates men, I can’t help but do a secret fist pump of glorification.

Bette Davis, who thrives in what is easily her best role, is still capable of making audiences roar with laughter and applause. And indeed she continues to speak the truth to us today, guzzling martinis and pointing out the unfairness of a man’s immunity to aging. It is this particular scene that fills me with an instant revelation of the idea that virtually every movie that tackles this same issue was in part inspired by Bette and her biting witticism. Goldie Hawn immediately comes to mind in The First Wives Club, downing martinis in a bar and lamenting the fact that as she grows older, she will be playing lead character’s mothers while Sean Connery will get to play lead character’s boyfriends. It’s never more apparent than in that scene, that Margot Channing is the mother of all great female characters that we love.

And then there’s Eve. Eve, whom until last night I always thought was the naïve hero in All About Eve, magically transforms into a grotesque villain of epic proportions. Her evolution into a monster modeled effortlessly on Margot is thrilling to watch. She may look the part, and talk the part, but we know she lacks the most important piece—Margot’s character and heart. Margot after all manages to have friends despite her diva-like attitude and desire to retain her stardom, which by the film’s end is something we know Eve will never have.

The evolution is subtle at first; Eve dresses in clothes similar to Margot, then begins carrying herself differently and it’s not long before we start wondering when Eve will light up her first cigarette in a simultaneous motion of relief and despair. It’s not until the final scene when Eve’s transformation is complete and the torch has passed, that Eve finally inhales her evils and sulks into the sofa. Eve’s charms wear quickly away after those first few scenes and soon I start recalling eerie hints of Single White Female behavior.

You can spot Eve’s mask a mile away if you pay attention, her breathlessness in her storytelling and the crafty way she bats her eyelashes at just the right moment, prove that she’s been an actress from the start. Eve—so beautiful and so ugly at the same time. We take such pleasure when Addison reveals her true past that we forget she’s still a human... then again—is she?

It is indeed in Addison’s reveal that I start drawing the strongest parallel to Showgirls. I can’t help feeling déjà vu as Addison rifles off truth after truth. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been here before, and I have. Kyle Maclachan admitting to Nomi Malone that he knows all about who she really is. And it’s pretty much the same exact scene in All About Eve only trashier and about prostitution. That’s all Showgirls is anyways, a trashier version of All About Eve, yet it still grants me a bigger appreciation for the film. Not like it needs it of course—All About Eve is surely one of the best movies I have seen. Riddled with sharp, biting dialogue and writing, unique shots and scene after scene of brilliance. But it is the shallowness and the carelessness of Showgirls that reminds me of the depth and beauty that resides in All About Eve. A timeless film that continues to remind us what greatness truly is.

Oddly enough, the line that best summarizes All About Eve comes from Showgirls after all. Cristal Connors, laying in bed with broken legs after being pushed down the stairs by Nomi Malone grants her one last piece of wisdom, “There’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you”, she says, right before Nomi flees town after beating a man to death while topless-- and damn, was she right.

52 Perfect Movies: The Exorcist (1973)

2011-04-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

"I'm the Devil. Now kindly undo these straps."

Horror films very often catch a bad rap, particularly from the "mainstream" film community, whatever that even means. The bottom line is, they are often considered no more than dispensible B-movies, the equivalent of pulp novels or comic books. Good for a thrill and a little fun, but then quickly forgotten. Needless to say, there are legions of serious horror fans who can tell you that this generalization is ridiculous, but it's rare that the casual movie-going audience is made to understand that horror can deliver some high-quality work--films that can stay with you not just on the basis of how frightening they are, but simply by virtue of how great they are as cinema.

The Exorcist was one of the first films of the modern era to really do this, to cross over into the mainstream consciousness and be recognized as a fine piece of film-making in its own right. To a certain extent, Rosemary's Baby had paved the way a few years before, but The Exorcist is far and away the superior film, and it forced critics and audiences alike to rethink their stereotyped opinions of horror in general.

Nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, The Exorcist is the work of William Friedkin, one of the geniuses who led the way during the formation of the new, auteur-driven Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Just the fact that he had agreed to helm the picture gave it instant credibility, and the talent he brought to the table helped transform William Peter Blatty's potboiler novel into one of the most important pieces of 1970s cinema.

The Exorcist is not only a superbly made film, but it also succeeds as horror because it is supremely scary. Granted, such a quality is largely subjective, but the fact remains that The Exorcist is more often than not the film that gets mentioned whenever anyone is trying to determine "the scariest movie ever made." It may not be so for everyone, but just the fact that it works so well as a horror movie while also being such a flawless piece of cinema is quite an impressive achievement.

During an era when realism in film was being stressed, The Exorcist was a bit of an anomaly. But, interestingly enough, it works exactly because it brings that realist aesthetic to the material. It should also not be forgotten that it remains the highest-grossing horror film ever made. So here you have a motion picture that was a rousing success financially, reached the high watermark of its genre, and also is recognized as one of the finest films ever made. Not a bad trifecta at all for a movie about a little girl possessed by the Devil.

As with all great films, what makes The Exorcist work in the end is the script, and the performances. And as with most films that surpass the novels on which they were based, the screenplay, adapted by Blatty, improves upon the original novel, delivering characters who live and breath and make us care very deeply for them. Father Karras and Regan MacNeil in particular, along with Regan's put-upon mother Chris, are all realized in startling fashion. These are real people in the real world, faced with very real struggles, despite the bizarre, over-the-top form which these struggles take.

A teenaged Linda Blair really makes us feel for the plight of Regan, the pure, virginal young girl who is so viciously and cruelly taken over by the demon (voiced in a highly effective fashion by Mercedes McCambridge). Set up in the beginning the way she is, it is truly tragic to watch her spiral into chaos, and to see the wholesome relationship with her mother so thoroughly devastated. And speaking of her mother, Ellen Burstyn makes the most of the best role of her career here, communicating all the desperation of a helpless mother faced with an unthinkable threat to her child about which she can do nothing.

But this movie truly belongs to Jason Miller, whose agnostic Father Karras represents the moral center of the entire narrative, and the character with whom viewers are invited to identify. He is the everyman forced to find his inner strength and redeem himself in order to defend good from evil. Miller's performance is so powerful, in fact, that it completely overshadows that of the very capable Max Von Sydow, who actually plays the titular exorcist, Father Merrin. Also memorable in a supporting role is the great Lee J. Cobb as Lt. William Kinderman.

The Exorcist still very much has the power to frighten on a very visceral, intellectual level. More than just shock value, the terror on display here is deep and profound, stemming from real spiritual concerns. And even though most do not really believe in the Devil or demonic possession, the notion of outside evil penetrating our world, and profaning that which is pure and pristine, is something that tends to touch us on a gut level, tapping into our primal fear of the unknown. This is a horror film in the truest sense of the term, and accomplishes that which few horror films ever really do--it fills us with absolute dread.

The Exorcist forever changed the horror genre in cinema, and was a part of a bold, innovative era in moviemaking which we haven't seen the like of since. There are those who snicker at its dire religious themes, who try to laugh off the deep-seated anxiety this film provokes. If anything, their nervous dismissals only serve to further establish the film's raw power. This is a movie that needs to be revisited by those who know it more as a cultural touchstone than an actual movie. It is only then that its impressive power is truly revealed.

NEXT UP: Young Frankenstein (1974)

52 Perfect Movies: The Godfather (1972)

2011-04-13T21:59:00.001-07:00

"I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse..."

Well, here we are. A while back, I committed myself to this series on what I consider to be absolutely perfect motion pictures...and as far as I'm concerned, we are at the epicenter of that list. Because Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather is not just any perfect film--it is the perfect film. Even amongst screen masterpieces, it stands head and shoulders above the pack, as what may very well be the ultimate expression of filmmaking yet seen.

In my humble opinion, and the opinion of countless others, The Godfather is the greatest motion picture ever made. It is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it is Mozart's Requiem; it is King Lear. Filmmaking may be a flawed art compromised to a certain by being a form of popular entertainment first and foremost--but all that aside, it can be safely said that it literally gets no better than this.

Do I even have to sell you on why The Godfather deserves such praise? The epic story of one family's corruption of the American dream and of the shocking effects of unbridled power, it is a work of sublime beauty, startling violence and technical mastery, all rolled into one transcendent viewing experience. In simple terms, it is the type of film which, once it is discovered while changing TV channels (usually when one gets to AMC), must be watched for the remainder of its running time.

Mario Puzo's novel is lifted by the once-impeccably gifted hands of Coppola to heights I would dare say even the author himself had never dreamed. With his accomplice in genius, the legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis behind the camera, Coppola approaches the material with a singularity of vision that is all but unparalleled in American cinema. This is Greek tragedy transformed into pop culture. This is that great, hardly attainable feat: entertainment both fit for mainstream consumption, and masterful enough to become high art in the truest sense.

With a cast of characters highlighted by career-defining performances from the likes of Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan and Robert Duvall, it is the kind of film in which plot is secondary, and character comes first. And for my money, that's really where it's at, and the true test of whether or not a piece of narrative will stand the test of time. It is also why lovers of the film (is there anyone who doesn't?) can watch it and rewatch it, gaining more pleasure from it every time.

Brando brings a complicated pathos to the role of Don Vito Corleone that is dismissed as a caricature only by the most cynical of moviegoers. Rather, the Don as played by Brando is a man desperately trying to hold his family together with the good intentions that he doesn't realize will always pave the road to hell. His son Michael (Pacino) is the moral center and narrative lynch-pin of the film; as we watch his descent from squeaky-clean war hero to cold and calculating mob boss, we can't help but feel we are witnessing a fall from grace as timeless as any depicted in fiction since the dawn of civilization.

Duvall deserves so much more credit than he ever gets for a restrained yet brilliant performance as consigliere Tom Hagen, an adopted son to the Don who in many ways would've made the best don himself, were he not a non-Italian. And then there is Caan, so utterly perfect as the hot-blooded Sonny Corleone that he has been recognized over the years by numerous Italian-American organizations, despite not actually being Italian in real life. Add to this unforgettable performances from the likes of John Cazale (Fredo), Talia Shire (Connie), Lenny Montana (Luca Brasi), Diane Keaton (Kay) and many more, and you have a veritable smorgasbord of gifted actors doing their finest work.

Nino Rota's brilliant and iconic score needs no introduction, and almost no justification for how powerful, moving and completely gorgeous it is, not to mention entirely crucial to the impact the movie makes on the viewer. This is film music of the highest order, lending an air of larger-than-life tragedy and gravity that compliments Puzo, Coppola and Willis' work with a level of perfection seldom, if ever achieved. Just a note or two of the score, whether it be the Main Title, Sicilian Pastorale, or Halls of Hear theme, can conjure up instant emotional reactions.

Much more than a simple gangster film, The Godfather is Americana itself--the tale of the immigrant and his place in the nation, of the bonds of family and how they can be warped to serve greed and aggression. It challenges our notions of good and evil, often drawing criticism, in fact, for the way it arguably glorifies the world it portrays and glamorizes the actions of those who live in it. However, when watching the film, one cannot help but be lost in this glorification, whether it be morally sound or not.

It is a testament to the power of the work that even though it paints for us the picture of a man twisted and transformed by the effects of power, we cannot help but marvel at the beauty of it all. Is this irresponsible? Is it cynical? I propose that it is neither--rather, it is art. Plain and simple. Take it for what it is. As for me, I choose to take it as the most thoroughly realized piece of storytelling ever put to celluloid.

Francis Ford Coppola never again reached the heights of The Godfather, unless it was arguably with his almost-nearly-as-perfect sequel two years later. But that isn't a slight against Coppola--after all, no filmmaker ever has quite reached the heights of The Godfather. "I believe in America" is the fitting first line of the film, uttered by Bonasera in the Don's study on his daughter's wedding day. For this is a tale of America first and foremost, for good or ill, warts and all--it holds a mirror up to us. And having basked in the majesty of The Godfather, the jewel of American filmmaking, I must say that I believe in it as well.

NEXT UP: The Exorcist (1973)

A Few Words on Cinematic Titanic

2011-03-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

I was back in Phoenix this weekend to join the family (mother, mother's husband, sister, sister-in-law, sister's mother-in-law) for one of the most delightful stage experiences I've had in a long time: Cinematic Titanic Live.

What is Cinematic Titanic? Well, it's one of two continuations of the brilliant cable series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (the other is Mike Nelson's Rifftrax). Cinematic Titanic takes five members of the MST3K cast -- creator Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein, Frank Conniff, and Mary Jo Pehl -- and has them "riff" on bad movies. On their non-live DVDs, the group perform in silhouette, much as Joel and the 'bots did on MST3K. I've been a fan of MST3K since before I was a pre-teen and I continue to be a fan of its offspring projects, but especially Cinematic Titanic.

Let me say this: seeing this group on DVD is nothing compared to seeing them live. It's not just that the immediacy of the performance allowed for on-the-fly riffs both topical (re: the Wisconsin union labor crisis) and localized (re: a bunch of stuff, but most memorably John McCain). It's that good ol' fashioned live show energy, the great feedback of give and take. At one point, and my memory is fuzzy so I might get this wrong, a character in the movie (Rattlers, if anyone is interested) said something like, "There are better ways to die" and Weinstein riffed "Sure! Just ask David Carradine." There was a smattering of uncomfortable laughter and he shot back "Uh, Michael Hutchence, then?" The line firmly recrossed, the audience was back with him and the riffing could go on.

The previous paragraph demonstrates something painfully true: live comedy retold is almost always retold badly. Even with an eidetic memory (which I'm nowhere close to having) and a beat-by-beat breakdown, I would fail to pass along what a great time I had.

I can say that there were moments of failure, mostly in the pre-riffing warmup acts. Conniff's standup was painfully unfunny and labored and Hodgson's very welcome performance of the KTMA-era MST3K theme song was marred a bit when he forgot some of the lyrics (but then again, I should give the guy a break: that version of the song is over 20 years old). I will say this, though, J. Elvis Weinstein's Elvis Costello impersonation while performing "Watching the Detectives" was uncanny and warmup act Dave (Gruber) Allen was hilarious.

The movie itself was appropriately awful; I can say this in full confidence because I'd actually seen it without benefit of comedic accompaniment. If Cinematic Titanic releases a DVD of their Rattlers performance any time soon, I'd recommend picking it up. It's a film just bad enough to make for good riffing fodder, but not so bad that it's dead boring.

Mostly this post is to direct people, out of a sheer sense of community service, to the Cinematic Titanic website to either find a show coming to their area or to buy a DVD. This is a project that the folks involved are doing simply for the love of the game and it deserves as much support as possible.

52 Perfect Movies: Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)

2011-03-03T22:52:00.000-08:00

"How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? The man can't even trust his own pants..."

Upon first viewing Sergio Leone's masterpiece, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I couldn't help but think to myself, "This is the epitome of the western. It can get no better than this." Leone's unique, European-tinted vision of the American West was so fascinatingly realized that I couldn't imagine it ever being surpassed. And it is perhaps the greatest testament to Leone's genius that he did actually surpass it--although that may be open to argument.

For as sublime and transcendent as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is, I am now of the opinion that Leone actually outdid himself just a couple of years later with that magnum opus of the spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West. For whatever reason, it gets a lot less attention than its predecessor (perhaps owing to the lack of Clint Eastwood), and it deserves a lot more recognition. TGTBATU may be quite the tough act to follow, but it is my opinion that Once Upon a Time in the West not only follows it with style, but actually overshadows it in terms of quality.

Ennio Morricone's score is just as iconic, if not more so, washing over the film and commanding the viewer's attention. It literally merges with the narrative in a way that happens in very few films. Whether it's Frank's jaw-dropping theme of villainy, the happy-go-lucky Cheyenne motif, or the unforgettable Harmonica riff, this is movie music at its finest. It may not have produced the big hit that TGTBATU main theme became, but no matter. This is music worth listening to and savoring, even without the accompanying images.

Joined with the images, we get a visual feast realized in a way few films ever are. Leone's brilliant cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli, who had previously outdone himself on TGTBATU, once again triumphs, with spellbinding shot after spellbinding shot. For those who thought John Ford was the high watermark of the Western, this is material to give one pause and force a reconsideration. So many of these shots have been mimiced so many times by inferior filmmakers that it's easy for their power to be lost. But this is the kind of movie that requires viewer sto strip all preconceived notions and thoroughly immerse themselves in the experience.

Charles Bronson is no Eastwood, but the majesty and quiet, almost native nobility he brings to the role of Harmonica thoroughly grounds the film. He is truly a classic Western hero, and one only wonders what would have happened if Clint had actually accepted the role, as Leone wanted him to. I happen to believe, that as great as Eastwood was, Once Upon a Time in the West benefits from the new blood. Eastwood's Man With No Name had run its course.

Then we have Henry Fonda, whom Leone specifically chose in order to achieve the jarring juxtaposition of having one of cinema's most beloved figures playing a deeply evil, despicable character. In an interview once, Leone stated clearly that when Fonda's blue-eyed visage first appears on screen, staring down a little boy he's about to murder, he wanted his audience to mutter to themselves, "Holy shit! That's Henry Fonda!" And that was indeed my reaction, having been so trained to believe in the pathos of Fonda's screen presence. Nevertheless, he manages to turn Frank into one of the most enjoyable screen baddies of all time.

Jason Robards excels as the very memorable Cheyenne, an amoral outlaw with a heart of gold who gets caught in the middle of the epic conflict. The gorgeous Claudia Cardinale is far more than just eye candy, once again adding a unique Mediterranean flavor to one of the Western's most tried and true tropes, that of the beautiful widow with a coveted inheritance. Together, the film's four leads form an ensemble which, for my money, is more effective than that of any Leone western.

To watch Once Upon a Time in the West is to experience all that the cinematic medium is capable of, in pure, distilled form. The script, spare as always in dialogue, nevertheless crackles along with kinetic energy, and boasts one of the single most gripping opening scenes in movie history--with barely a single word uttered. This is the kind of scene that film students should be required to watch in order to understand the power that can be achieved without having to rely primarily on language. Leone and his collaborators understand that they are working in the genre of another country and language, and so choose--very effectively--to work visually, first and foremost. And we get to enjoy the fruits of that effort, which is one of the great pleasures of film.

It's almost as if Leone had learned so much about making Westerns via his previous trilogy, which began with A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, that he felt the need to put all of those lessons to their best use by making one massive, stand-alone film that would synthesize everything good about the previous three, and take it to whole other level of greatness. And that is what he does, transforming the American West into a mythic place beyond any historical reality.

There are those who will always prefer The Good, The Bad and the Ugly to Once Upon a Time in the West. The former is certainly the more well-known. But I will contend that most who have actually seen and digested both of those films will side with me that the later, more underrated of the two is actually superior. I invite those who may not have seen Once Upon a Time in the West to give it a chance and decide for themselves.

The Western is, in many ways, the ultimate expression of American moviemaking, and it's quite ironic that it's greatest examples have come not from America itself, but from Italy. With an objective eye that came not from within the nation itself, but rather from an entirely different milieu, Sergio Leone was able to elevate the Western into something previously unimaginable. It's very fitting that the film's title seems like something out of a fairy tale--for Once Upon a Time in the West is more than just a period film. It is quite literally history transformed into legend. It is majestic; it is archetypal; it is absolutely glorious.

NEXT UP: The Godfather (1972)

Friday Night Films: Naked Lunch (1991)

2011-01-19T11:40:00.000-08:00

For some reason as of yet unknown, I decided recently that it would be a good idea to read William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch. I had previously read all about Cronenberg's adaption in Cronenberg on Cronenberg and was instantly drawn to it. Clearly I was enticed by a book that could possibly feature a drug addict's stream of consciousness and giant bugs. Well let me tell you something. If anyone tells you that it's a good idea to read Naked Lunch--kick them. Naked Lunch may in fact be the craziest thing you will ever try to read. Nothing makes sense, nothing is linear, and it's barely readable. If you don't know already, this is the book William S. Burroughs wrote while he was in a state of constant high thanks to some crazy Moroccan drugs. Yeah.

After about 30 pages I gave up and moved onto Cronenberg's take on the story. Cronenberg's film is actually less of an adaption of the book and more of an interpretation. He used real incidents from Burrough's life, kept some of the same names and places and the film became the story of how Burrough's came to write Naked Lunch.

Now, I want to make it very clear that I know Cronenberg. I'm used to his style, and his constant need to include something that resembles a penis in anyway that he can.

I'm used to his themes of blending the physical with the psychological, and how he often intertwines the two as though they were one. I'm used to the overtly gooey style of blood and guts and I'm used to how amazing yet utterly mind numbing and weird his films can be. That being said, Cronenberg's Naked Lunch is the strangest movie I have ever seen.

Watching Naked Lunch is basically a film that you just have to watch. By that I mean, you really can't think too much while you're watching it or you'll get incredibly frustrated. Don't try to make sense of why typewriters are suddenly changing into giant beetles.

Don't try to come up with a sane approach as to why the type writer bugs have ginormous penis' and definitely do not try to make any big conclusions about drug use and its effects on the writer. Just relax, and take it all in on a visual level. Worry about the deep meanings later....MAYBE.

Here's the thing about Naked Lunch---I have no idea what the hell it means and I don't really plan on ever finding out. I would rather just sit and marvel at how completely outrageous the whole thing is. Naked Lunch is one of those films that oddly knocks you back into reality. It reminds you that you are NOT as smart as you think, and that no matter how hard you try--you will never be able to make a film quite like this. That's what always throws me off about Cronenberg. He isn't one of those directors that make seemingly genius films yet refuse to tell anybody what they really mean (cough David Lynch). Cronenberg however knows exactly what his films mean and he explains it and this is the best part---it makes sense!

To be honest, I'm not at all interested in what the true meaning of Naked Lunch is. I'm much more interested in seeing the way that David Cronenberg processed the book into a logical movie (well, logical as in it does have somewhat of a plot). I can't even fathom taking a book like Naked Lunch and converting it into a readable screenplay. And then to see what he did with it---how he took real elements from Burrough's life and somehow involved all these giants insects and penis' and men hiding in woman's skin--

it's kind of mind blowing. As if the very concept and idea of Naked Lunch wasn't mind blowing enough...David had to once again blow us away with his creativity and intelligence.

So what if we may never know what it means? What's so wrong about just watching a film and not trying to dissect it? If there was ever a movie that stood for "Not giving a fuck"--Naked Lunch would be it. Yes, it's probably the weirdest thing that Cronenberg has ever done and yes it's insane but good god, I think I love it--and that's all I really care about.

Radio Days (1987) The Power of Nostalgia

2011-01-18T14:23:00.000-08:00

On the rare occasion I get back to my hometown in Cadillac, Michigan, I always stop by G & D Pizza to get what may very well be the best slices of pizza I've ever had. The taste of it takes me back to the mid-1980's when it was enjoyed as a lunch during school days or a late-night snack run during the weekends. Many memories from those days - good memories - are peppered with G & D pizza slices. If I eat them while listening to say, Dokken or KISS (which Cadillac has a connection to during the 1970's), then the nostalgia goes into overdrive.

The five senses can easily trigger nostalgia, and some more than others. The sense of hearing is one qualifies as one of the top triggers. Come on, admit it: you hear a song that played during a time in your life that was a big, red pin on your memory map and you get chills. Or you get sad. Or angry. Or you swoon. Everyone has a song - or even a whole soundtrack - that holds a place in their past.

In 1987, Woody Allen wrote and directed a fond love letter to the radio's golden age, the slice-of-life film, Radio Days. It stars a huge cast, mostly as the family which serves as the basis of all the vignettes and asides. A very young Seth Green stars as Joe, who is the narrator (Allen) as a boy. It might as well be Allen himself, but he does serve the stories up on a fictional plate. He lives in a crowded household with his parents (Michael Tucker and Julie Kavner), his aunt and uncle (Renee Lippin and Josh Mostel), their daughter (Joy Newman), his grandparents (William Magerman and Leah Carrey), and another aunt, the lovesick Bea (Dianne Wiest). The movie spans the years 1941 through New Year's Day, 1944, before television had come along and the greatest home entertainment you could get was on the radio.

There really is no plot to the movie, rather a series of short stories and vignettes. The older Joe as narrator reminisces about life as a young Jewish kid in Rockaway, New York, and how radio was central to the daily lives of different characters. He talks of how radio influenced him and led him to "collect" stories about the radio business, which results in the parallel story of naive, heavily-Brooklyn-accented, wannabe-radio star Sally White (Mia Farrow) as she struggles to achieve fame.

Sally's story takes her from being a cigarette girl in a nightclub to a witness to a mob murder, but her ditzy personality and hometown charm convinces the mobster (Danny Aiello) to help her out in a very funny scene. Just before her big break, Pearl Harbor is attacked and her fame will just have to wait. She shuttles from job to job before taking elocution lessons, which lead her to be one of the posh radio stars enjoying the very same nightclub at which she started. It's a sweet, often funny journey that makes you root for the never-say-die Sally.

Wallace Shawn voices The Masked Avenger

Much of the film is ranges from sweet to funny. Joe tells the story of how his desire for a Masked Avenger (voiced by Wallace Shawn) compartment ring leads him to a "life of crime" by keeping the proceeds his Hebrew school instructed him to collect to help support a new state in Palestine (indeed, Israel would be formed about seven years later). This gets him in huge trouble, as expected. Joe talks of his Aunt Bea and her search for love, included one hefty fellow trying to get fresh before he's scared off by radio reports of Martians landing in New Jersey. Songs remind Joe of specific memories, such as his cousin dancing to Carmen Miranda's "South American Way" or his first time kissing a girl he liked or attending a movie at Radio City Music Hall.

However, there is one very poignant scene devoid of narration and entirely chilling. When a little girl falls down a well, people from all walks of life stop what they're doing and listen. Not watch, mind you. They listen. The rich, the poor, men, women, children, everyone is glued to their radios. And when it's over, it can be summed up when the father, who had just been spanking young Joe with a belt for a chemistry set accident, holds his son close as life solemnly moves on. It's a brilliant, beautiful scene tied together only by the voice of the radio reporter on the scene.

While I tend not to gush over Woody Allen, I will not deny his place as one of the great directors. I have always believed him to be a fantastic craftsman. Radio Days is a movie I can watch anytime; it's comfortable and yes, nostalgic. I was not a kid in the 1940's, although I feel that way some mornings. But Allen paints such a gorgeous picture of New York life during the heyday of radio, that it's one of those stimuli that prompts me to wonder what it would have been like to have lived then.

When you watch the movie, it's fun to play "spot the star." William H. Macy has a wordless role as one of the performers with Sally when news arrives of Pearl Harbor. Jeff Daniels makes an appearance. Diane Keaton has a cameo as a nightclub singer. Also take a look for Mike Starr (countless films, such as Goodfellas and The Bodyguard) as a burglar in the beginning, Don Pardo as a game show host, Tito Puente as a bandleader, Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm) as a communist neighbor, the late Rebecca Schaeffer as the communist neighbor's daughter, and several others you'll just have to spot yourself.

It's a sweet-hearted movie, a definite love letter to 1940's radio and 1940's New York. It's funny, poignant in parts, with genuine love for the characters. It speaks not only to the power of radio and the spoken word, but to the strength of nostalgia, and how long-gone performers and certain avenues of artistic expression will live on in the memories and minds of those who promise to remember them.

Now me, I'm hankering for a slice of G & D pizza and a music block by Def Leppard...

You’re a whore, darlin’ : Spread

2010-12-04T18:09:00.001-08:00

That the final few minutes of director, David Mackenzie’s film Spread feature a bull frog digesting a mouse, must mean something. I think it was the director’s way of laughing at his audience – his way of saying, “Gotcha!” Because, as it stands, Spread serves up a plot that has been seen numerous times before, but in its last few minutes it diverts from what one expects and travels a whole other route.

Unfortunately, that’s about the only good thing that happens in this otherwise dreadful film.

Set in sunny Los Angeles, Spread tells the tale of , Nikki (Ashton Kutcher) an empty-head Midnight Cowboy seemingly fucking his way through the women of La La Land for cash. Through voice over, we get to hear Nikki’s philosophy of how to find, fornicate-with, and forget any girl he sets his eye on. And that’s the first problem we have to deal with in Spread; Kutcher’s hustler roams a Hollywood party smirking and jerking his was through the crowd, and it’s just like one of his Nikon commercials. In fact, I was waiting for him to pull out his camera and take some pictures.

Look, there is no denying that Ashton Kutcher is a handsome, photogenic man with a great head of hair, and a nice chest…but when it comes to things like charm and sex appeal, he’s somewhat lacking. Sadly, when you hang a movie like this on your leading man, he’s got to be a least somewhat believable, and, well, how does that song go in those commercials I referenced earlier: “Some people got, and some people don’t”… Kutcher don't.

Be that as it may, we suspend disbelief, because Spread is so much fun to watch. The glossy look, the blinding colors, the big gorgeous houses, the seemingly endless shots of its star semi-naked. That’s got to count for something.

Actually one of the big pluses of this movie is former Lesbian and UFO abductee, Anne Heche who plays a Beverly Hills cougar named Samantha. As soon as Nikki hones in on Samantha at a party, you know you are in for some campy fun. Whether she’s riding Nikki’s tool like a bucking bronco, or checking in to the hospital to have a vaginal plasty, Heche does not disappoint, in fact she’s the best thing about Spread. I might have enjoyed this film a lot more, if Samantha was the focus and not Nikki.

For awhile, Nikki and Samantha are happy in their arrangement, until eventually it falls apart (as relationships of this ilk are prone to do, one imagines), because Nikki finds himself obsessing over a waitress he met in a donut shop.

Margarita Levieva plays Heather, the food serving object of desire and as expected, she initially rebukes all of Nikki’s advances until he wears her down with his charm (i.e. his smirking and jerking) and suddenly we are in rom-com land. But then, Spread takes a turn when Nikki discovers that the woman he loves is actually a prostitute (quelle horror !). At this point, my mind began to reel at the possibilities of what might happen – Prostitution Hers and His –in fact there is even one interesting scene when Nikki and Heather go out to a party and he gives her tips on how to pick up potential customers. Unfortunately Spread drops this idea before too long and degenerates into a very predictable story of the gal who got away, came back, got away again, and causes the hero to take an 11th hour flight to be at her side, complete with an engagement ring.

Giving credit where credit is due, as I mentioned earlier, Spread does manage to pull the rug out from under the viewer in the last few minutes – but unfortunately it’s not enough to save this otherwise wreck of a movie that tries to be earnest, sexy, moralistic and edgy but just comes off glossy, neurotic and dull.

Friday Night Films: Singin' In The Rain (1952)

2010-11-29T19:56:00.000-08:00

Singin' In the Rain always brings me back to the 6th grade. We were assigned to do a music project on a musician, singer or dancer and present it to the class. While most students were busy planning how best to brag about their good music taste by using Bob Marley or The Beatles--I was busy gluing pictures of Gene Kelly onto my poster board. I brought in Singin' In the Rain to show the class a clip, opting for the less well known dance number "Moses Supposes". The clip was a huge hit, and I found I won over all those "cool" kids who thought I was lame for picking a male singer and dancer. Still, it's been such a long time since I had seen Singin' In the Rain and after the film got some recent credit on an episode of Glee, I thought it the perfect opportunity to share it with my sister.

Singin' In the Rain is still as wonderful as it ever was. The bright tantalizing colors, the extravagant costumes and of course the dancing. The film is a time capsule of so many different things that it becomes hard to keep track of them all. There's the glimpse into the 20s when movies were transitioning from silent films to talkies.

A glimpse into the hey-day of musicals, when it was socially acceptable for big stars to waltz around a studio set singing and smiling.

And then there's also the ever changing glimpse into how quickly Hollywood trends can change. Here is something I had never really given thought to before, but in this most recent viewing I was floored by how poignant the idea was. With every passing decade new trends are made, new stars are born and ways of doing things become obsolete against the ever growing presence of technology. When silent films were transitioned into talkies there was an uproar, and today as people try to tell us that one day all films will be in 3-D---there is also an uproar.We find the idea of all movies switching to 3-D to be ludicrous just as folks in the 20s found the idea of talkies to be outrageous and silly. Sadly we really have no control over the ever changing trends of Hollywood. Singin' In the Rain's prevalent theme however gets even more sad and perhaps even a little bit ironic when you stop and think about how quickly Gene Kelly's career fell apart once musicals also became a declining trend.

Aside from the parallels between then and now, Singin' In the Rain continues to be a crowd pleaser because it is just too darn entertaining. It's a musical for people that hate musicals. It's a spectacle and a glimpse into a time when people could do amazing things without green screens, and wires. Gene Kelly glides effortlessly around the stage while Donald O'Connor walks up walls. Singing' In the Rain will never fail to make me smile and that's why I love it so much.

There is just so much to love. From the costumes, to the perfect comedic timing of Donald O'Connor, to the sets, to the songs, to the shrieking voice of Lina Lamont, to the behind the scenes look at Hollywood in the 1920s, to the impeccably adorable face of Debbie Reynolds,

to the dancing. Oh the dancing.

Singin' In the Rain has enough dancing to make your head seriously spin. It tricks you into thinking that you too can perform an effortless dance routine by just putting on a pair of tap shoes and a cute outfit. The dancing makes you float out of your body and puts you right smack dab in the action. For that hour and 39 minutes, we are a part of the 1920s and submersed in a land of happiness.

Of course not all is happiness in Singin' In the Rain land as the levels of irony run deep in this movie. Just as it was a movie largely about the behind the scenes area of film and about tricking the audience--Singin' In the Rain held a few secrets of its own. In what is perhaps the most disheartening, we find that ironically Debbie Reynolds did not sing her own songs in this--nor was that her voice dubbing over Lina's in the Dancing Cavalier. Additionally, Gene Kelly was what is commonly referred to today as an "asshole". He insulted Debbie Reynolds for not being able to dance, and Donald O'Connor hated working with him because he never felt like he was good enough. In fact, Fred Astaire found Debbie Reynolds crying underneath a piano on the set and then helped her improve her dancing himself.

Donald O'Connor was smoking 4 packs a day while filming this--4 packs! Debbie Reynolds feet were bleeding after the "Good Morning" scene. Gosh, it's like several bombs keep exploding in my perfect dream world of Singin' In the Rain. A word to the wise--if you find that you are in tickled pink by Gene Kelly, try to avoid reading anything about him, because it will probably cause you to cry somewhere alone and feel let down. Finding out that the real world of Singin' In the Rain isn't as happy as we thought--and further more realizing that it was just not any fun for the people doing it, is extremely upsetting.

Which is why we will not focus on that, because Singin' In the Rain teaches us to focus on the spectacle, on the finished product. We can still live in that happy rain cloud and no one has to know the truth right? What it really comes down to is that Singin' In the Rain is just one of those delightful movies that makes us smile right away and allows us to keep that smile on throughout the film's duration. It has all the necessary ingredients to do what any great film should do--entertain us. And for that, we love it.

Signals From Left Field: Neverwhere (1996 British TV)

2010-11-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

"It's when you're safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home." ~ Thorton Wilder

Those words hold a significant truth about the basic theme of the 1996 British miniseries, Neverwhere, a story crafted by one of my favorite writers in Neil Gaiman. Upon watching the six roughly half-hour episodes, it sums up everything the protagonist experiences in quite the pretty little package. It's an adventure, pure and simple, underneath all of the fantastic and fairy-tale stylings in which Gaiman dresses the story. And some of the best adventures involve the fish-out-of-water, the inexperienced catalyst, the unaccounted-for fly in the antagonist's ointment. Neverwhere features one wonderful example of that type of character in an atypical hero named Richard Mayhew (Gary Blakewell).

Gary Blakewell as Richard Mayhew (above) and Laura Fraser as Door (right)

Neverwhere appeared first as the miniseries then as a book penned by Gaiman, a veteran of acclaimed comic book stories such as the tremendous Sandman series. The series aired on BBC Two and eventually became available on DVD through A & E in the United States (I first watched it on loan from Netflix). One of the most noticeable traits of the series, at least in the way it looks, is the "PBS video" appearance. Yes, Neverwhere is shot in video. It was meant to be edited later to give it more of a "film" appearance, yet that never happened, so it aired "as is." And you know what? It doesn't take away from the story's richness one bit.

Hywel Bennett as Mr. Croup and Clive Russell as Mr. Vandemar

The story is a modern odyssey, a retelling of The Wizard of Oz if Dorothy was a befuddled Scottish guy and the denizens of a reality right under our noses played for keeps. Richard Mayhew has a typical life with a bossy fiancée and a boring job, yet he's an optimist and has a notoriously kind heart. That heart gets him into trouble the minute he rescues a mysterious homeless woman named Door, a pretty little wisp of a girl who has the ability to open any door with the touch of her hand. She's pursued by hired assassins, the theatrical Mr. Croup and the Vinnie Jones-lookalike Mr. Vandemar, who wish to deliver her to an unseen benefactor. Richard's life takes a turn for the bizarre the minute he becomes involved with Door.

Door, Hunter (Tanya Moodie), and Richard

After nursing Door back to health and enlisting the help of the dandy scoundrel Marquis de Carabas (Paterson Joseph), Richard is left to find that no one remembers him. His brush with what's called London Below - where the homeless mingle with the fringes of time and reality - has drawn him into a world of political intrigue and high adventure against a backdrop of urban fantasy. Richard must now find Door and join her in her quest to reach The Angel Islington (Peter Capaldi) to find answers regarding the massacre of her family, royals set to unite the kingdoms of London Below. Like a dark reflection of Dorothy Gale's team of unusual beings, Richard finds himself teamed with Door, the legendary warrior Hunter, and the Marquis.

Paterson Joseph as the Marquis de Carabas

The journey is rife with the strange and unusual, and poor Richard is the key to the entire thing. There are "floating markets," street carnivals and trade shows that take place suddenly in abandoned buildings or closed-for-the-night tourist attractions. Souls can be bought and traded, or stored in inanimate objects for safekeeping. An ancient order of monks have been guarding an important key for centuries in a darkened corner under London. Every stop along the London tube lines has its own personality, a reason for its name. Through it all, Richard is the catalyst. He's the innocent, and that is perhaps his most powerful trait. He doesn't understand everything, but he wants to do the right thing every time. When his true trials come, you're never sure he's going to make it. He's not from London Below. It's not his world.

Peter Capaldi as The Angel Islington

Oh, and the ending. To me, the ending is one of the most satisfying conclusions I've ever seen. I will absolutely not spoil it here. I can tell you that when I read the book (which I did first instead of seeing the series), then watched it on the screen, I uttered an audible "yes." It's how I wanted it to end. Maybe it's an obvious ending, maybe you'll see it coming, but it really is satisfying.

I love Neil Gaiman's work. I enjoyed the Sandman series, his 17th century reimagining of Marvel superheroes in 1602, and the enormous imagination of Stardust, Coraline, and the book I just finished, American Gods. Gaiman is known for painstaking research and detail, digging up fairy tales and giving them a new wash for a new audience. Neverwhere demonstrates that word imagination very deftly. World creation in a fictional setting is never easy, yet here's London Below, as realistic and alive as if it actually existed. The characters, both good and evil, so endearing, you might wish you really knew them.

Neverwhere is pure adventure, pure storytelling from the mind of one of the great modern weavers of fantastic fiction. If you can get past the "PBS video" look of it - which really doesn't take much effort - you'll find a wonderful tale that should be listed among the great journeys that heroes have taken in literature.

But that's just me. Find out for yourself, and I hope you enjoy the adventure.

A Flawed Classic: New York, New York

2010-11-20T17:57:00.000-08:00

Mention Martin Scorsese to most and visions of Mean Streets, Taxi Drivers and pugilistic Raging Bulls come to mind. To be sure, Scorsese is a master of gritty, crime soaked cinema. So, it is very easy to forget that the man who gave us Goodfellas also directed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (an incredibly feminist themed film that went on to inspire a dreadful sit-com), The Last Waltz (The Band’s swan song), and The Age of Innocence ( a lavish adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel).

One of Scorsese’s more obscure films is 1977’s New York, New York. Oddly enough, everyone probably knows the theme song thanks to a certain iconic crooner who recorded it several years after the film came out; but most have probably never seen the movie that bears its name.

Set in post-war Gotham, New York, New York is a hybrid beast that is tough to pin down. Physically, it looks like a grand MGM musical – most of the movie was filmed on a sound stage, the sets are gorgeous, the colors lush, and the atmosphere is dream like. That said, the story is a rather bleak tale of two star crossed lovers who fall in love, fight (a lot) and do not end up happily ever after. The dialogue is mostly improvised, which might make New York, New York the Granddaddy of mumble-core. Oh, and one more thing, it’s also a musical; but wait, it’s not one of those films where people just break out into song; the main characters are in show business so we get to see them singing on stages, in plays, night clubs, and eventually, in movies.

Jimmy Doyle (Robert DeNiro) is a selfish cad who can blow a mean saxophone. The start of the film finds him wandering a massive VJ Day party hitting on women. Oddly, Jimmy is one of the few men not in uniform – in fact he sticks out like a sore thumb in his Hawaiian shirt. Be that as it may, he eventually sets his sights on a WAC named Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli). Sitting down at her table, making small talk, we get our first taste of the odd dialogue in New York, New York. In a scene that seems to go on forever, Jimmy repeatedly hits on Francine, and she keeps turning him down and it goes something like this,

Jimmy: I guess a little small talks in order here now
Francine: Can it get any smaller?
Jimmy: Now look I can take a hint
Francine: Can you also take a walk
Jimmy: Do you want me to leave?
Francine: YES!
Jimmy: I'll leave right now
Francine: BYE
Jimmy: You expect me to leave after the way you just talked to me?
Francine: Will you go away
Jimmy: I don't want to, I want to stay here and annoy you.

…and that’s just the start of it. Honestly, this give and take, which is sort of cute at first, becomes irritating at the five minute mark – I worship Robert DeNiro, but he’s no Groucho Marx, and Minnelli is no Margaret Dumont.

But hold on, it does get better.

Eventually Jimmy and Francine hook up and it turns out that his saxophone playing, and her singing voice are a match made in heaven, and soon the musical duo throw a band together and take their show out on the road.

Once they start performing, it’s clear that the audiences have come to hear Francine warble, and Jimmy has problems with this. His ego is so fragile that he starts coming apart, and his relationship with Francine begins to fray. In one of New York, New York’s more powerful scenes, the couple are engaged in a screaming match in a car. Francine (now nine months pregnant with Jimmy’s child) is hysterical over Jimmy’s behavior, and the more hysterical she becomes, the more terrifying and enraged Jimmy acts. At one he point he lunges over the back seat, hands clawed as if he were set to strangle, and screams in her face, “Did I tell you to have that baby?!?!” – and then suddenly Francine goes into labor and he rushes her to the hospital. This is where you’d think that Jimmy might come to his senses, instead, he visits Francine in the hospital, and when she tells him she had a boy, he tells her, “I can’t be a father”. And like that, he just walks out of her life.

After this New York, New York sets it’s eye on Francine and her bullet like rise to the top. Free of Jimmy’s hostile ways and hateful attitude, she becomes the star she always knew she would. Her songs become big hits, she is featured on the cover of dozens of showbiz magazines, and eventually she becomes a movie star.

The second half of New York, New York is Liza Minnelli’s film and she owns it. If her Francine is anything, it’s a white washed portrayal of her mother, the iconic, Judy Garland: a tragic love life, a brilliant career. But, unlike Judy, Francine is not self destructive, but like Garland, she can sing and preform like few before her.

Watching Minnelli belt out a song like “The World Goes Round” is nothing short of magic. And Scorsese’s camera loves her unique face…those huge eyes, that oddly formed mouth, those blindingly white teeth that form that famous overbite…for some reason, she looks beautiful in spite of everything – especially when she’s singing.

In one of New York, New York’s most imaginative moments, Jimmy goes into a movie theatre on Times Square to see Francine’s new film. Suddenly, we are watching a film that features Francine, as an usher in a movie theater, imagining herself as the star of the film on the screen (think about that for a second, it might make your head hurt). This fifteen minute section (which was cut from New York, New York when it was first released), is a gorgeous homage to the lost art of movie musicals, and makes up for the many less than stellar moments in the film before it.

In the final half hour , New York, New York is flawless. First up, Jimmy goes back to the club he first met Francine. She’s now headlining there. Then, we get to hear the title song of the movie and marvel over Liza Minnelli doing what she does best (at this point, it seems that she’s no longer playing Francine: this is Liza with a Fucking Z – from the clothes she’s wearing, to the cut of her hair, to the way she is performing …). After the show, Jimmy gets to meet his son, and then he asks Francine to meet him after the show so they can go out and get a cup of coffee.

Of course if this were a film from the 40’s or 50’s we know what would happen next. The lovelorn couple would have been reunited and walked off in a Technicolor sunset – Scorsese had something else in mind.

New York, New York is not for everyone, in fact it can be a real effort to get through – but that’s what makes it so incredible. If you do wade through the less than compelling scenes you are rewarded with some moments of sheer cinematic genius, and as long as you did not expect a happy ending, you may even come away appreciating it for the flawed classic it is.

Friday Night Films: Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967)

2010-11-16T08:20:00.000-08:00

I had a hankering to watch a Sidney Poitier film ever since learning about his groundbreaking Oscar win for Lillies of the Field in 1963. My allegiance to Poitier was strong, as I had loved him ever since I saw Sneakers at a young age--completely unaware of the history and legacy that had preceded him. This weekend while choosing between To Sir With Love and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, we settled on the latter after reading the extensive cinematic history behind the film.

The film was completed just 17 days before Spencer Tracy died. Katharine Hepburn ended up even using her salary as backing in order to make the movie, as the studio didn't think Tracy would make it to the end of filming. Hepburn's tears at the end of the film during Tracy's pivotal speech were in fact real tears, a relieved feeling of accomplishment, and a deep sadness evident in knowing that this would be his last film---and their last film as a pair.

These back stories remained fresh in my mind as I settled in to finally see what I had spent all day reading up on.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is an interesting film to watch now. On the one hand it's embarrassing to undergo the blatant racism exuding from almost all of the characters. On the other it provides an interesting commentary on why people get so uppity about marriage and further more--why they shouldn't. I kept wondering if the film was made today, would it take on the current problems surrounding the country involving gay marriage? Would the next generation sit down to watch it and exclaim in wonder at how they can't believe that at one point, gay marriage was illegal, the way that I couldn't believe interracial marriage was also? It's an interesting thing to think about, but perhaps most importantly, I think many of the themes are still relevant, especially Spencer Tracy's famous speech at the end.

When it comes down to it, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner really just makes me mad. It's a fine film, but the idea that someone can be prevented from marrying the person they love because of social implications, and the authority that people have over others is just ridiculous. A film like this is in many ways a time capsule, but it is also then a film that reminds us of how stupid we can be sometimes. A film that requires us to witness a transformation of our past view points.

Another aggravating point, is that several people have come out and said that making Sidney Poitier's character so respectful, well dressed, and intelligent is racist in itself. They believe that Poitier embodies in essence the character of a white man. One important thing to take note of however is that John Prentice should embody the character of a white man--because that in hindsight is exactly the kind of person the Drayton's want their daughter to marry. John is in many ways, the perfect man for their daughter, in fact he's almost too good for their daughter. Because of this, the idea that the only real thing standing in their way IS the color of his skin, and that is what makes things so infuriating. It's proof that racism is in many ways skin deep. It's for lack of a better word...dumb.

The film also does a fine job of pointing out how everyone has a prejudice of some kind.

The African-American cook has a boiling prejudice against men of her own skin color, accusing him of having something else up his sleeve. Her prejudice is an alarming one, as it concerns protecting the little girl she helped raise--but it's also just a surprising form of black on black racism. Tillie is perhaps the most angry at the newly introduced couple, and the look in her eyes is enough to send anyone running, while John merely laughs. Could it be that John himself is holding a prejudice against the fact that a house cook is telling him what to do?

Another form of prejudice is evident when Mr. Drayton gets in the car accident after his random search for ice cream. He backs up without looking, causing him to make quite a dent in a young man's car. A young man who just happens to be black. The young man yells at Mr. Drayton, pinpointing his old age as the cause of the accident.

He makes remarks about old people not being able to drive properly, when in all actuality Mr. Drayton just had something else on his mind. Being put in that position however upsets Mr. Drayton, and although he doesn't outwardly show it, we can notice a shift in his perceptions. Being the one that gets unfairly grouped in a stereotype based on his appearance is upsetting to Mr. Drayton, and slowly but surely he starts realizing that doing such a thing is absolutely ludicrous.

While the film is well done, I still find that the bulk of the praise around it revolves around how groundbreaking the themes are. While this was being filmed, interracial marriage was still illegal in a few states. Seeing Sidney Poitier's character try to talk some sense into his own father, and saying a line like,

"Dad, you're my father. I'm your son. I love you. I always have and I always will. But you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man. "

was epic. I mean, moments like that where characters say something that is so dead on just make you want to shout from the highest peak....YES! The same goes for Spencer Tracy's final speech in which he ends with the idea that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. What matters is how John and Joanna feel about each other--is so simple yet something that people continue to ignore. It's something that will continue to baffle me and although the film was an enjoyable one to watch, laden with fantastic performances and the chronically weepy eyes of Katharine Hepburn--I will always be drawn to the revolutionary way that this film presents the idea of marriage. Call it dated if you want to, but I will continue to disagree. Especially in this day and age when a person's right to marry someone they love is still being challenged.

Friday Night Films: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

2010-11-07T17:39:00.000-08:00

This week our movie night was switched to Sunday. I didn't mind so much as I had finally convinced my sister that we should watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I had watched the movie for the first time in a high school class entitled "Music in Movies" and became instantly infatuated with the witty and sarcastic quips of Paul Newman and Robert Redford's camaraderie. I had unsuccessfully tried a few times to convince my sister to watch this while it was being played on TV. She had expressed doubts that she was not a huge fan of Westerns. I can agree in a way, as Westerns are also one of my least favorite genres. However, I had pleaded with her to give it a chance--it wasn't really a Western after all, more of a buddy comedy disguised in Western clothing.

During this viewing I became aware of several things I had never given much thought to before. I was moved by the breathtakingly artistic shots at the beginning of the film. Paul Newman's face seemingly glowing thanks to the sepia tones.

I loved how both their reputations spoke for themselves so simply. It was a perfect way to open the film. Butch Cassidy makes a witty remark about the shame in getting rid of such a beautiful bank, and the Sundance Kid shows off his remarkable gun skills. Two men, two friends, two outlaws---that we love.

This time I was also sensitive to the unfortunate sadness that emerges around Butch and Sundance. Both men are stuck in a cycle--practically addicted to the fine art of bank robbing like a couple of junkies, their lives revolve in a constant circle. Like the lone shot of the bicycle wheel slowly rotating,

Butch and Cassidy go from one close call, to the next without ever realizing that it doesn't have to be that way. My sister was annoyed by this fact I think, and so was I in a way now that I think about it. Like all great tragic heroes however, there has to be something that prevents them from having it all.

Another discovery I had made this time around was another sad realization, that Etta was heartbroken. Without knowing whether or not her true heart resided within Sundance or Butch (I think in this case it's safe to assume she did love both of them) we can see that her real heartbreak involves the very same thing that aggravated us. After offering up suggestions of other things they could do besides bank robbing, Sundance and Butch seem to shoot down almost everything, claiming they didn't know how to do it, when really the two fearless outlaws are afraid of a world that does not revolve around robbing banks. They refuse to embrace the new-- the bicycle, and stick to their horses and criminal activity. In the moments that Etta tells the men she'll be going back alone, there is such a beautiful sadness that reads in her eyes.

Back in Wyoming, she had told them that there was only one thing she would not do, and that is see them die. In this moment, Etta understands that they will never change, and because of it they will sooner or later end up dead and she cannot bare to witness it. In some ways however, she already has, and perhaps that is where the true sadness forms.

In this viewing, I really felt for Etta. Not solely because I was now keen enough to realize that Katharine Ross was from both The Graduate and The Stepford Wives, but because she was such an interesting character I had never given much thought to before. In a very male driven story, Etta--the only female in the film not associated with a brothel, is surprisingly gutsy, smart and driven. She even becomes a vital part of their bank robbing plans in Bolivia, and demands that they learn their Spanish before trying anything stupid. Etta Place was something that Butch and Sundance truly valued but in they end they valued their outlaw status more.

Overall Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one entertaining piece of film. There's so much to feel good about, that it seems odd we are able to laugh and smile even in Butch and Sundance's lowest moments. Even in times where it looks like their luck has run out we can still feel happy because they make it so. Their camaraderie has inspired a wealth of buddy comedies, acting as a foundation for many of the best comedic duos we see today. They are the ultimate example of the complexities of relating to the bad guy. Our perceptions of who is good and who is bad is greatly altered in the film. We despise the lawmen, the civil righters, the people that obey the law--and we idolize, and cherish two bank robbers.

Even in their last moments we find that it's hard to hold back a smile. Bleeding, pale and just barely defeated (but not quite) Butch Cassidy still has his charms.

The two make plans about their next destination, all the while unaware of the Calvary's arrival outside. It's a genius moment of dramatic irony, and while it doesn't seem likely that the two will survive, we still hold onto that shred of hope. In that last freeze frame, we don't see them die, which in turn keeps them alive in our minds. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--two criminals, two heroes, two men that stole our hearts, and everything that comes in between.

Obsessed with Doubt

2010-11-06T17:12:00.001-07:00

I am obsessed with John Patrick Shanley’s film version of his play, Doubt. Shanley wrote the piece, adapted it for film, and directed as well. I suppose he is just as obsessed.

My fascination with this film began a little over a year ago when I first rented the DVD. By the time the end credits were rolling, I was ready to restart the film and watch it again. At first, my reason for another viewing was to see if maybe I had missed something; some plot point that cleared up the ambiguity of the story’s denouement. At least that’s what I told myself.

The second viewing actually took place a day or two later. It was a Saturday morning, very early. I settled in on the sofa and sipped a mug of coffee and found myself again mesmerized by this strange and fascinating tale of an avenging Mother Superior who goes toe to toe with an alleged pedophile priest.

Set in the late fall / early winter of 1964, Doubt takes place at an inner-city Catholic grade school where Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep) rules the roost like some kind of Ninja in a black bonnet. Sister Aloysius is not fond of ball point pens, candy, sugar, berets or long fingernails. She strikes fear into the hearts of her students as well as the rest of the nuns who teach at the school. More that that, she’s also not afraid to physically discipline her charges. Her only fear seems to be the winds of change that are blowing around her (both figuratively and literally), and she holds on with an iron grip to the past as she sees societal changes slowly creeping into her own cloistered existence.

Amongst the darkly clad nuns, and the solemn faced children at Saint Nicholas is Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a smiling, seemingly gentle, obviously personable, and very popular priest who treats the children kindly and often offers them words of advice. When he witnesses Sister Aloysius calling a boy out of line for some transgression, he murmurs to a novitiate, “The dragon is hungry!”   Father is also not afraid to shake things up on the pulpit, as is witnessed in a very early scene where he gives a sermon on the topic of doubt which he concludes, “can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.”

A young nun, Sister James (Amy Adams) is also a teacher at the school, and while it is obvious that she wants to impress Sister Aloysius, she’s also more concerned with teaching her students than terrifying them.   Strangely enough, though Sister James appears the most innocent of the three main characters, her actions are what set in to motion the film’s story.

One afternoon, Sister James notices something that she finds suspicious concerning the school’s only African American student, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster), and Father Flynn. Once she reports her suspicions to Sister Aloysius, Pandora’s box opens and no matter what she might try to do to close it up again, Sister James can not.

Doubt deals with very a delicate, but very timely, subject matter; the sexual abuse of a minor at the hands of a Catholic priest. And while it might seem a simple leap  for the viewer to believe this accusation against Father Flynn…well, as Ringo Starr once said, “It don’t come easy”. Indeed, my obsession with this film is partially based on my looking for clues as to the priest’s guilt or innocence. And that’s just it – there are no real clues, no witnesses, just a strong suspicion and whatever baggage the viewer brings to the table. Personally, I find myself flipping back and forth every time I view this film. One minute, every outrageous accusation that Sister Aloysius throws at Father Flynn makes perfect sense, then later, it just seems like she’s got some sort of hidden agenda, and maybe Sister James was right when she said to her, “You just don't like him! You don't like it that he uses a ballpoint pen. You don't like it that he takes 3 lumps of sugar in his tea. You don't like it that he likes Frosty the Snowman and you are letting that convince you of something that's terrible... Just terrible...”

Another thing about Doubt that I obsess over, are the performances. There is not one flat acting note in this film – even the linear characters ring true. Hell, even the school is a character – a Gothic sort of haunted house where light bulbs blow out over the heads of authority figures, and windows are found mysteriously open during wind and rain storms. That said, it’s the three principal leads (and one brief but brilliant moment by a supporting actress) that make Doubt so damn compelling.

Meryl Streep inhabits Sister Aloysius and infuses her with such ferocity that it’s downright terrifying. Our first introduction to her is as she’s silently gliding down a church aisle during mass quietly but sternly reprimanding the children in the pews – and even slapping one boy on the side of his head (and if you spent anytime in Catholic school during the 60’s or 70’s you know that sort of thing was the norm). With her wire rim glasses and black bonnet habit, Streep is a pale, cold vision of anger and disgruntlement – a woman who could only find a way to voice her frustrations at life’s injustices to women by hiding her femininity behind an iron tunic (we discover at one point, that before she joined the order she was married and her husband was killed in World War II). What’s also fascinating about Streep’s characterization is the way she finds occasional moments to infuse some sarcastic humor into the role. Indeed, some of – in fact all of – Doubt’s brief comic moments come courtesy of Sister Aloysius. Finally, for all her bluster and bravado, Streep makes it quite clear that her Sister Aloysius is also a woman terrified of the changes coming . She senses them all around her, and wants no part of them.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays Father Flynn as such a likable character, it’s almost impossible to believe he could do anything wrong, let alone molest a young boy. And yet, maybe that’s the genius of his performance. His monster , his wolf, is wrapped so tight in sheep's clothing, most can not see through it. But watch the film more than once and maybe you see the mask slipping (why does that one boy flinch when ever Father comes near him – in fact keep an eye on the boy called William London (Mike Roukis), he seems to be the wild card in this tale, you have to watch the film several times to see what I mean- why are Father’s fingernails long and almost claw-like, and, most importantly, why does he not go down without a fight?). Hoffman’s Flynn is so beguiling, because he is so hard to pin down.

Amy Adams take on Sister James could easily be overlooked, but that’s because she plays the young teaching nun so effortlessly. Adams gives this character heart and a conscience. She’s still feeling her way through the world of teaching and the convent life, she still seems to actually care for the children she teaches. I think Adams really shines in the one scene where, disgusted at herself for the trouble she might be causing, she mimics Sister Aloysius and starts berating one of her students. Later on you can see how heartbroken she is for her actions.

Of course there is not much that can be said about Viola Davis and her performance as Mrs. Miller. How astounding it is, that this woman who is on screen for all of maybe fifteen minutes (acting against Streep), almost steals the movie and tucks it neatly under her arm. Davis turns Mrs. Miller into a loving mother, desperate to make a better life for her son, and if that means sacrificing his innocence, so be it. And while that may sound cold, all one has to do is watch her performance and it’s very clear that her motives are pure.

Another reason I am obsessed with Doubt is due to what I call “The Showdown Scene”. This is the moment of the movie when Streep and Hoffman’s characters face off – it is a masters class in acting. It’s also a brutal moment when it is hard to tell exactly who is really the bad guy. This is when Sister Aloysius proclaims that she has no proof, but that she does have her “certainty” and then, looking both crazed and defiant, clutching her crucifix like it might be a dagger she screams at the priest,”I will step outside the church if that's what needs to be done, till the door should shut behind me! I will do what needs to be done, though I'm damned to Hell! You should understand that, or you will mistake me. “ Clearly this is woman with a rather large axe to grind. So when Father Flynn looks defeated, I ask myself is it because he’s guilty, or is it because he’s up against such an angry, unbalanced adversary who is willing to go to the police. Maybe it was just easier for him to walk away, than risk public humiliation.

But in the end, Father Flynn does leave – reassigned to another parish (with a promotion!) and by now the viewer might be willing to believe that he was up to no good, that Sister Aloysius did have the goods on him after all (she tells him at one point that she spoke to a nun at his last church). But then we discover that was a lie. And in the film's waning moments, we start to ask ourselves what went on. If that’s not enough, in the final scene, Sister Aloysius is sitting with Sister Jane on a bench in the dead of winter and the Mother Superior breaks down in tears, once more clutching that crucifix like a dagger, but then hiding it under her tunic and sobs, “Oh sister, I have doubts. I have such doubts!” That’s when I usually scream, “About what? His guilt, your faith in God, the way your run the school, your life’s profession?” And then I tell myself, I am going to have to watch this movie again, maybe then I’ll figure it out.

Who knows, maybe I never will.

Signals From Left Field: Big Trouble In Little China (1986)

2010-11-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

From Left Field? Just like many of the films I'll discuss, many of the choices I make might come "from left field." I like quirky as much I as like cake, and that's a whole lot, so I hope you enjoy my look at cult, semi-cult, and whatever movie strikes my fancy at any given time. And away we go with my first choice...

When I first saw John Carpenter's underrated gem of an action-comedy-martial arts-fantasy flick, Big Trouble In Little China, I was a student majoring in Amateur Party-Attending and Alcohol Consumption at Central Michigan University, circa 1987. It was a Saturday night, and I stumbled into my dorm sometime after midnight. Merrill Hall was good about having movies to watch in the commons room on Saturdays, and as my eyes adjusted to the non-smoky, bright interior of the dorm lobby, this is the wondrous sight they saw:

The stunning alley fight that establishes the line between good and evil, and puts our hero Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) in the thick of the strangest adventure that involves magic, demi-gods, and modernized Chinese mythology - that was it...I was drawn in and would never leave this movie's warm and goofy embrace.

Big Trouble In Little China is director John Carpenter's true cult film. Halloween may be his incredible debut and a study in suspense that would make Alfred Hitchcock jealous, but this 1986 tribute to true adventure and Hong Kong action films didn't fare as well at the box office. You'd think it would've done better, as nearly everyone I know loves the movie. But, in reality, it's just that my closest friends and I tend to like the same movies, and so when I ask a "movie non-buff" if they like it, I usually get a shrug and/or a blank look. Halloween usually gets more of a response.

"Seinfeld, four!"

Haven't seen it? Here's a quick rundown: egotistical yet philosophical trucker Burton and his buddy, Wang Chi (Dennis Dun), run afoul of local bad guy David Lo Pan (James Hong) who turns out to be a cursed demi-god in search of a Chinese girl with green eyes so that he can become human again. As a result, Jack loses his truck and Wang loses his girlfriend to Lo Pan and his admittedly kick-ass henchmen, the Three Storms who possess the names and powers of rain, thunder, and lightning. Enlisting the help of a group of good-guy warriors and tour guide/sorcerer Egg Shen (the great Victor Wong - you've seen him in Tremors), Jack and Wang storm Lo Pan's vast underground world to rescue Wang's girlfriend and intrepid reporter Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall, thankfully pre-Sex In The City). What follows can be described as John Wayne meets the dark side of Oz in a crazy battle underneath Chinatown.

Big Trouble In Little China always reminds of me what it's like to have fun watching a movie. You could describe the film as "good dumb fun," but really, there's nothing dumb about it. The hero is immensely likable, the villain is appropriately over-the-top, and the pure fantasy facets of the movie tell you screw reality and sit back to enjoy the ride. It looks good; there's a rich palette of colors, enhanced by neon and bright but unobtrusive special effects. It sounds good; Carpenter's minimalist score - as usual - fits with the action on the screen, and the whooshes and crackles of the battle scenes cartwheel out of your speakers.

One of the little details I loved about the movie is the hint of a wider world than we actually see. Yes, there's the actual story, but there are strong clues that this battle of good (the Chang Sing gang) and evil (the Wing Kong gang) has been raging for centuries. And not only the battle itself, but the characters as well, especially Egg Shen and Lo Pan.

When discussing his search for a green-eyed woman, Lo Pan remarks "There have been others, to be sure. There are always others, are there not?" Maybe there have been other adventures, other heroes that have thwarted Lo Pan with Egg's help. Hmm. We definitely know Egg and Lo Pan have crossed paths before, and Egg isn't just a lovable, kooky local magician. When Lo Pan tells the Three Storms that Egg is leading the band of heroes, the Storms give each other a fearful look. Egg apparently already has either faced them, or has carved out a reputation for himself battling other demons. And there's a telling exchange between the two adversaries during the climactic battle scene, as they battle to a magical stalemate, and Lo Pan brags, "You never could beat me, Egg Shen."

When a movie, no matter how much in the "big dumb fun" niche it is, stirs the imagination of my childhood and causes me to dream up my own continuing stories (I always called mine More Trouble In Little China - don't judge)...then it will win my heart. Big Trouble In Little China won my heart in 1987 on that post-party, not-entirely-sober Saturday night in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and has kept it for 23 years and counting. Although Carpenter has made a number of my favorite films, such as the aforementioned Halloween, They Live, Prince of Darkness, and The Thing, this movie - this true definition of a "romp" - remains my favorite of the bunch.

"ROMP!"

Enjoy, and remember to bring the popcorn.

Friday Night Films: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966)

2010-11-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

My sister and I have begun a new tradition in our apartment. Every Friday night we resist the temptation to visit some over crowded, smelly bar and instead we watch a Classic movie. I’m not exactly an expert on what classifies a Classic film so forgive me if our selections aren’t quite classic enough for you. Just know that these films are typically seen and adored by people who call themselves film fans and for one reason or another I have suspiciously avoided seeing them. Whether this is due to my non-stop horror movie watching or because I detest really long movies, remains to be seen. But know this, every week you’ll be getting a fancy review of the latest movie watched at the Dumas household and oh how lucky you are.

Last week we settled in to watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966). I admit to having avoided it simply because I had heard of its dark and depressing themes and how “heavy” it was. In fact we had plans to watch it the week before, only to switch it at the last minute for something more light hearted. When I was reminded by the synopsis on Netflix that our two main characters were George and Martha, I was immediately brought back to my childhood.

The George and Martha series by James Marshall was a staple of my literary repertoire growing up. Due to this, I could never listen to excerpts from the play or read anything about the film without picturing two very fat hippos trying to outdo one another. As it so happens, James Marshall came up with the idea for the series while his mother was watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. This of course means that he based his lovable characters on the dastardly and at times disturbing duo. After seeing the film, I couldn’t imagine that Marshall would want to use these two as models for a children’s book largely based around teaching morality lessons. I emailed my Mom and asked her to send me one of the George and Martha books for research.

What I found was that I was continuously raising my eyebrows during any moments that suggested George was less of a man. One story in particular depicts George as boasting about diving off the high dive. Once at the top however, George starts to panic. Martha than proceeds to climb the high dive and jumps off, while George sneaks off the ladder while everyone is distracted by Martha’s giant splash. Despite the book obviously catering towards a more light hearted level of fun and games, I can’t help but be secretly put off by George and Martha. Were their constant games in the book just warm up for when they bashed each others faults relentlessly in front of strangers? Was Martha secretly an alcoholic who had a soft spot for younger men? I had so many concerns about the two lovable hippos now that I had been exposed to their inspiration.

Watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is like renting Showgirls with your grandmother by accident. You just feel embarrassed, and you feel trapped--but also it’s very difficult to look away. It’s the very embodiment of watching a gruesome wreckage after a car accident. It’s a film that takes you on one of the wildest rides in emotional roller coaster history, causing laughter and fits of silliness one minute then plunging you down into a state of depression the next. What is that we can take away from a film as heavy as this? To be honest I’m not entirely sure. I had misgivings about even writing on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf because I wasn’t even sure that I did understand it.

I understood that much of it was beautifully shot, and that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were simply amazing in their roles. I understood the implications that Martha may have been barren, and how cruel George’s last game really was. But then I also understood how continuously cruel Martha was to George. Through all that she had done, the second that the “child” gets brought up, means that George is immediately seen as the bad guy? Or perhaps that’s just what I felt although that may not have been what it meant. Nevertheless, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is an extremely difficult film to watch. It stands miles apart from the likes of “torture porn” movies and causes you to understand what the term “disturbing” truly means.

I’m glad that I finally got to see it, but still find that I’m grappling with what it all really means. Does it have a larger meaning? Or are we meant to simply stare at its level of sheer horror while we unsuccessfully try to wipe its horror from our minds? I think I’ll stick to children’s books.

52 Perfect Movies: The Odd Couple (1968)

2010-10-29T21:36:00.000-07:00

"Now it's garbage."

Interestingly enough, when one mentions The Odd Couple, the first thing that comes to the mind of most people is the admittedly amusing 1970s television series starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. And while this is not meant as a swipe against that show, it is a shame that it gets more attention than the original play by Neil Simon, which inspired this absolutely classic late 1960s motion picture comedy, featuring one of the finest comedy teams to ever appear on screen.

Simply put, The Odd Couple is Neil Simon's funniest and most brilliantly written play. And that's saying quite a bit when talking about one of the greatest humorists and playwrights of the 20th century. Simon is somewhat underrated, as comedy tends to be overshadowed by drama, particularly on the stage. But make no mistake about it, The Odd Couple is a fine piece of writing, filled with witty lines, unforgettable characters and absolutely iconic scenes. It is the kind of comedy that approaches perfection, and that's why it makes this list.

Whoever first thought of putting Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon on screen together deserves some kind of award. Coming along as they did, a bit after the golden age of movie comedy teams, they don't always get the credit they deserve. But they brought a unique chemistry whenever they were together, and it's no wonder they did appear in so many films alongside each other. However, this one if the epitome of them all.

Lemmon's Felix Ungar and Matthau's Oscar Madison are so fully realized and play off each other so well, and it's truly a pleasure to behold as they interact with each other. Matthau and Lemmon really brought out the best in each other, not to mention struck the perfect balance of combativeness and actual warm friendship. In spite of all their issues, we know that Oscar and Felix are true friends, and this is as much due to the performances as it is to Simon's writing.

What's also interesting about this film is that it does not quite give us the happy, pat ending we expect from a film like this. Rather, it challenges us, ending on a note that rings truer with regards to the actual nature of friendship and human relationships than what we might expect given the light-hearted nature of the material. It's in moments like these that it's easy to grasp the vast difference in quality between a film like this, and the safer, more broadly comical TV series it inspired.

As if Lemmon and Matthau aren't enough, you have one hell of a supporting cast letting it all hang out here. Veteran character actors John Fiedler and Herb Edelman are excellent as Vinnie and the ubiquitous Murray the Cop. And of course, then we have the hilarious Pigeon sisters, played by Monica Evans and Carole Shelley. Politically correct they are not, but god damn are they funny.

It's very east to underrate The Odd Couple, or to dismiss it as a simply comedy. Usually the people that do this have not seen it in a while, or perhaps never at all. This is more than just a silly gimmick about a neat guy trying to live with a sloppy guy. It's more than just a very catchy theme song. It's actually a challenging movie about friendship, particularly two friends helping each other through the pain of separation and divorce.

And yet it's also laugh-out-loud, hysterically funny. Whether it's Felix' classic "sinus-clearing" scene in the restaurant, or the infamous spaghetti argument, this is timeless stuff--and much of the humor arises out of situations that are realistic and even stressful. This is a comedy that is not afraid to get a bit heavy--after all, one of its protagonists is literally on the verge of suicide. And yet, like some of the greatest of comedies, it uses this tragedy to create something that appeals on several levels.

This, in a nutshell, is what makes The Odd Couple work so well. So if you only know Neil Simon's play from the ever-popular TV series, do yourself a favor and check out the movie. You'll be very pleasantly surprised at what you find. Neil Simon was a true commenter on the human condition--and The Odd Couple is his greatest comment.

NEXT UP: Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)

A Face in the Crowd: Now More than Ever

2010-10-28T17:31:00.000-07:00

one pill makes you dumber

Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd.

I can’t help myself from recommending, urging, and cajoling everyone I know to view this masterpiece; now more than ever its message is a timely one.
Andy Griffith plays a down on his luck drifter who is discovered by a radio producer (Patricia Neal) while he’s cooling his heels in a jail for a drunk and disorderly violation. Neal’s character, Marcia Jeffries, begins an interview with Griffith’s character, Lonesome Rhodes, and within a few minutes it is quite obvious that Rhodes is a natural with his home spun wisdom and his folk singing.

Soon Rhodes is offered a job at Jeffries’ radio station and he quickly discovers the power of the medium – it seems that Rhodes can tell the masses something - anything - and they’ll do it. And just like that, a megalomaniac is born.

In time, Rhodes is courted by the New York media and is brought to the Big Apple to star in a TV show that quickly evolves into a bigger success than anyone could have imagined. Before long, Rhodes finds himself assisting a right wing political candidate who is supported by all kinds of special interest groups and faster than you can say, Rush Limbaugh, Rhodes is showing his true colors ;he claims to be one of the common folk, but in actuality he has nothing but contempt for the rank and file (this ultimately leads to his undoing).

From pushing snake oil medicines to philosophizing on what is wrong with the United States, Lonesome Rhodes becomes the new Will Rogers, albeit a dark one.

During his meteoric rise, Jefferies, though infatuated with him, is beginning to see the reality beneath his folksy veneer, and ultimately has to decide if she should expose him for the rat bastard he really is.

Considering that this film was made in 1957, it is astounding how much it echoes the world of mass media created demagogues we are surrounded by today. From Bill O’Riley to Dr. Phil; they all are the sons of Lonesome Rhodes.

Maybe it’s time America sat down and discarded reality television and The Fox Network for one night and watched, A Face in the Crowd. I wonder how many of us would recognize this timely story as the cautionary tale it really is.

Putting on a Couple New Additions

2010-10-28T15:13:00.000-07:00

Cinema Geek is not just about me and it's not just about my cohort B-Sol. It's about love of cinema in all of its forms (even when we don't like a movie, we talk about it because we love the movies). That love is not limited to just us. With that in mind, we have expanded the roster of Cinema Geek's contributors to include four more writers. Meet the all-new Cinema Geeks:

Ryne Barber of The Moon is a Dead World
Dod of WGON Helicopter
Andre Dumas of The Horror Digest
Pax Romano of Billy Loves Stu

With such an awesome set of writers, the future of Cinema Geek is looking very bright indeed.

P.S. I apologize that the promised second part of my Inception essay never materialized. Maybe it will once the film arrives on DVD. Time shall tell.

52 Perfect Movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

2010-09-18T22:23:00.001-07:00

"Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?"

To a certain extent, this can be said of virtually every film included in this, the 52 Perfect Movies series--but it is especially true of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: It almost requires no explanation at all for this film to be included here. 2001 is a work of pure, undistilled genius; a breathtaking piece of art put forth into this world by the combined intellects of Kubrick and the legendary Arthur C. Clarke, to be savored, pondered and debated for all time to come.

As science fiction epics go, it is the gold standard--an intoxicating, cerebral journey into the issues that resonate most deeply with the human race as a species, and with the human being as individual. There are no laser guns required, no Flash Gordon-esque childish gimmickry on display. This is science fiction for grown-ups, that speaks to us on a mature level, in our own time and place, rather than a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Kubrick famously rebuked those who tried to get him to explain the much-discussed finale to the film, insisting that they had to figure it out for themselves. Perhaps he was being clever, or perhaps he actually didn't quite know himself, but I will forgive him this bit of obtuseness. Whatever it may actually mean--and I have several theories, but this is not the place for them--it is quite true that it exists on another level, beyond the intentions of Kubrick or Clarke. It, like the rest of this monumental film, is there for the viewer to experience, to digest, to absorb and make of it what he will. Art at this level owes us no easy explanation.

Taking a genre of film that had long been the province of Saturday afternoon serial matinees or chintzy post-war monster movie fare, and elevating it to a place of beauty and depth of thought and feeling rarely seen in film, 2001 is the definition of a cinematic landmark. And even if the science fiction genre never quite lived up to the promise of this film, that does not take away from its achievement.

We see Kubrick here cementing his other-wordly, sterile, appropriately alien directorial style, approaching the material with the precision of a surgeon and the uncanny depth of perception we might actually expect from an observant alien race. The man was a gift to the craft of film-making, and it's entirely possible that this fact was never so completely established as in this motion picture, a model of perfection in editing, cinematography and sound design, among many other things.

As in much of Kubrick's work, it is the bigger picture here that takes us in and holds us. Kubrick was a stylized film-maker, no doubt about it, and here he sets a pace that certainly takes its time, paradoxically whizzing across various distant epochs in time, and millions of miles of space, and yet always moving at an even keel, fascinating us with the way the story is carefully unfolded, the characters patiently revealed to us. To those weened on music video editing styles, a film like this may seem a chore indeed, and that is quite sad. Because although it moves at anything but a brisk pace, this is the kind of film that must be slowly and deliberately savored, and rewards those who do.

From the masterful scenes at the "Dawn of Man", featuring tribes of primitive ape-men so convincing that suspension of disbelief is a non-issue, to the clean, bright, deceptively calm moments during the Jupiter mission, A Space Odyssey is an unstoppable juggernaut of a movie, cruising majestically along, metaphorically towering above the viewer like the implacable monolith itself. Here at the start of what many refer to as the "modern era" of movie-making, Kubrick shows us how it's done, setting the bar extremely high--perhaps too high, really--for any who woud dare to come after him, and taking the very practice of film-making to places previously undreamt of.

Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood are terrific as Dr. Bowman and Dr. Poole, the passengers on board the Discovery. And yet, the performance best remembered is that of Douglas Rain as the voice of the computer HAL-9000, whose tragic malfunction and spiral into madness is at the heart of what this movie is all about. Among Kubrick's fascinations was the conflict of the human against that which seeks to dehumanize or automate humanity, and nowhere in his body of work (although Full Metal Jacket comes close) is this theme so directly explored.

The concept of the foolproof, beautifully choreographed scenario slowly sent completely off-kilter into utter choas--this is another favorite idea of Kubrick's, and it's no wonder he took so thoroughly to Clarke's material, as it speaks to this concern of his quite directly. Clarke himself often said that with 2001, he wanted to raise more questions than he answered. Most devotees of the film (and actually, probably most of its detractors) would agree that he succeeded in doing just that.

The strains of Strauss' Also Spracht Zarathustra, famously used to such powerful effect in this film, almost serve to act as something of a clarion call, waking the movie-going public up to the notion that the era of the auteur film-maker had arrived; that directorial visionaries would, more than ever before, be able to create deeply personal works that directly expressed their souls, with far less outside intervention than the studio system had ever allowed. And to a lesser degree, among those who devoted themselves to genre entertainment, it demonstrated that speculative fiction in cinema could do the very same thing it had been doing for decades in literature.

When discussing greatness in film-making, from a technical point of view, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a film that will invariable be brought up, and rightfully so. It is a sumptuous delight to watch and to listen to, with its groundbreaking (and actually realistic) special effects and brilliant use of classical music, and yet it is also much more than that. It is a film that becomes more than a film. It is an experience. It is a journey, into the self, into that which is beyond ourselves. In short, it is the kind of a narrative work that comes along once in a lifetime.

NEXT UP: The Odd Couple (1968)

Gene Kelly - Dancin' with Myself

2010-09-09T10:37:00.000-07:00

So I should've posted this ages ago and I didn't. Sorry. This is a video I whipped up for exhibition at Vividcon's Club Vivid dance party this year. It's a montage of Gene Kelly clips set to Billy Idol's "Dancin' with Myself." Enjoy.

(note: the vid is credited to an alias I sometimes use in fannish pursuits)

52 Perfect Movies: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967)

2010-08-18T16:02:00.000-07:00

"When you have to shoot, shoot; don't talk."

It's fitting that the first color film profiled in this series would be Sergio Leone's 1967 masterpiece Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo, a grim yet sumptuous epic that practically redefined the motion picture spectacle for the modern era. The epitome of the beloved sub-genre known as the spaghetti western, it is a film that has so much to offer, and you don't even have to like westerns in general to enjoy it. It is a deeply satisfying film, which succeeds on so many levels and captures the imagination like few others.

A major crossover hit from the Italian cinema, it works because it speaks the language of action. Sure, the movie has some great lines, but the dialogue is sparse. This is a dynamically visual film, packed with unforgettable imagery, taking full advantage of the iconic Spanish countryside in which it was filmed, as well as some of the most interesting faces ever to be shown on a movie screen. Leone paints what is the very definition of a cinematic portrait, saying so much with expertly designed shots, careful and cautious editing, and some very bold artistic choices.

Together with Leone, cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli is truly one of the stars here, portraying each and every scene with a sense of heightened reality--vast, sweeping wide shots are intercut with the closest of extreme closeups. It's a technique that has been much parodied since, but it works so well here. That juxtaposition between the tremendously overwhelming, and the intimately introspective can be an intoxicating mix at times, as is the almost rhythmic alternation between shots that linger for alarming amounts of time, and those--such as during the climactic shootout--that whiz by at a dizzying pace. This film makes viewing it an active participation like few others do.

Together with Delli Colli, the film's other star is the legendary Ennio Morricone. Perhaps the most lyrical of all film composers, the scores he wrote for Leone in particular were things of absolute beauty. His daring work on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly represents one of the most recognizable series of musical motifs ever recording for film, and they have been so influential that nowadays it's easy to forget how jarring and unusual his combination of electric guitars, animals sounds, woodwinds and other instruments was, coming after decades of very traditional, much more "conventional" sounding cowboy-and-Indian music. Like few other composers, Morricone's music works so organically with Leone's films, and this film is the greatest example of that.

We have Clint Eastwood in the milieu that made him a star. Although no one would ever classify him as one of the great actors, he is a movie star in the truest sense, dominating the screen with a level of energy that belies his scant amount of lines. His very presence is a statement in and of itself, every time he enters the frame, no matter what he is doing. As the deliciously sinister heavy Angel Eyes, Lee Van Cleef, the New Jersey native with a face made to portray pure evil, is a film villain for the ages. His introduction scene alone is worth the price of admission.

But truly, although he often does not get credit for it, from a dramatic perspective, this film belongs to Eli Wallach. At that point mainly a stage actor, a previous role in The Magnificent Seven was something of a dress rehearsal for the career-defining role of Tuco, the guy who puts the "ugly" in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Conniving, deeply flawed, yet somehow undeniably charismatic, Tuco is one of the most unforgettable movie characters of them all, and Wallach brings a level of depth and humanity to him that I'm sure goes beyond what was on the mere printed page.

Westerns by this point had already become a tired genre, with a more jaded public now weary of the paper-thin representations of good and bad, and the sanitized version of America's past in which they existed. Leone's genius was in being able to take his love of the great westerns of John Ford and others, and push it through the meat grinder of his own decidedly non-American background and sensibilities. Perhaps it was this outsider's perspective that makes the spaghetti western so fascinating. It has been remarked that the most striking thing about them is the way the Italians represent such intrinsically American material.

The result is something at the same time familiar and exotic. This is, to be sure, not a realistic portrayal of the Old West, no more than the posturing of Gary Cooper and John Wayne is. But it is a slick, stylized and endlessly stimulating synthesis of it; a heady mix of symbolism, sound, color and music that results in something that can only be called "hyper-real"--the Old West as seen through a pulp fiction lens. It is also a world of muddied morality, where the good and the bad are not all that different, and where ugliness abounds. It is a world of mortality, of violence, and of unbridled human emotion.

The plot is almost irrelevant. Buried Civil War gold, hunted down by greedy and unscrupulous men, who cross paths along the way, and whose adventures take them through deserts, battlefields, graveyards and everywhere in between. But it's not about who did what to whom; the gold, and the search for it, is merely a device to put these incredibly drawn characters into motion, to light the powder keg of explosive action to which we are treated for the course of the film's nearly three-hour running time.

And yet this is not some mindless action flick, nor is it action in the same style that Sam Peckinpah was creating around the same time. This film is the very definition of a slow-burn, and it is not for the attention-span challenged. But for those with the patience and discipline to expose themselves to the work of a very deliberate and detail-oriented cinematic visionary, The Good, the Bad the Ugly is the kind of film that can grab hold of you and demand repeated viewings.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and other standout films of its kind, are of a type of artistic work that could have only occurred at the time they did. Not too far removed from the traditional Westerns of old, yet filtered through a thoroughly modern sensibility, seasoned and packaged in a foreign land and shipped to America, almost as if their makers were looking for approval from the land in which these legends originated, the spaghetti western is a sub-genre which was once marginalized and looked down upon, and is thankfully now rightfully recognized as important, engaging and beautiful. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly represents just about the very best they could be--and yet how ironic, that just a couple of years later, Leone was able to return another time to the Old West for a film that may very well have trumped it...

NEXT UP: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1967)

Inception: The Movies in Your Mind (Part 1 of 2)

2010-07-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

Note: I try to avoid major spoilers in the following piece, but a movie like Inception relies on the little pieces to make up the big picture, so almost any information is a spoiler.

Early in my viewing of Christopher Nolan's Inception, I wondered if it was a follow-up or high-tech remake of Nolan's debut film, Following. Beyond the confluence of two characters, both thieves, sharing a name (Cobb), there's also the idea of a voyeuristic practice (following random people / invading dreams) that has a number of rules that eventually get broken. Except it quickly became apparent that the voyeurism angle wasn't as much Nolan's concern anymore. Certainly, there's the sequence where Ariadne (Ellen Page) peeks in on Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he dreams of his past regrets, but it's an exception to the rule. For the most part, dreams in the film aren't the nest of uncontrolled memory and emotion, but conscious constructs formed by someone other than the dreamer, set to pull a specific response from the target. In Inception, dreams are movies.

In case you haven't seen the movie or aren't aware of the basic premise, Cobb works as an extractor. Supported by a team of fellow thieves, he performs corporate espionage by entering the dreams of his targets (CEOs and the like) to retrieve sensitive information. One failed mission turns up an unexpected benefit -- his intended mark offers him a job to plant an idea in the mind of a rival. Inception is nearly impossible, but Cobb accepts anyway, bringing Ariadne into the fold to design the multiple levels of dream needed to bring this job off.

Within the world of the film, dreams are created using the same system as movies (Cobb as director, Ariadne as writer, and various other members of the team working as actors, production managers, technicians, and moneymen). As in the movies, the most common dreams are the ones used to extract something from the audience/mark (emotion/information). More difficult are the dreams that inspire and create ideas.

Furthering the films-as-dream metaphor, each of the levels in the main dream resembles an action movie in its own right. First, there's a kidnapping caper, then a "who-can-you-trust" corporate thriller (that later turns rather Matrix-y), and finally a James Bond spy romp (complete with unusual modes of travel and guarded fortresses).

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Ariadne (Ellen Page) explore
the world of dreams in Christopher Nolan's Inception

However, there's one quote that really encompasses my whole argument:

"You create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream and fill it with their subconscious." -- Cobb to Ariadne on being a dream architect.

This has so many different layers of meaning when considering it in the context of film.

First, of course, there's the purely physical reality of film, which is nothing more than a series of still images that, when played back at a certain speed, cause our brains to fill the gaps, creating the illusion of movement.

Second, there's the normal act of viewing anything. We naturally fill in what we cannot see. A close-up does not eradicate the rest of the actor. Similarly any other characters in the scene are still "there," even if they aren't visually apparent. Rooms have four walls even if we can only see three, and they definitely have ceilings.

Third, there's the artistic language of cinematography and editing that's been in development for the past 115 years. A low-angle shot of a character indicates power, a high-angle shot indicates worthlessness. A roving, bobbing camera probably puts us in a character's POV (an assumption that Friday the 13th exploited to create suspense). Cutting between two shots creates an association between them, chronologically or thematically or emotionally.

Fourth (and somewhat related to the second), the world of any given film, like the dreams in Inception, is naturally incomplete. Even if there was a movie that followed its protagonist every single second of the day in real-time from birth until death, we still wouldn't know details like what smells surround this person, what happens to the people in his or her life after they leave the frame, or what thoughts are running through his or her head. Filmmakers do their best to represent those details that are pertinent to the story or the characters, but they are limited by the format, especially the commercially-imposed average runtime of two hours. So, as an engaged audience, we fill in the details from our own experience, our own subconscious. Office buildings smell like this, a person in this situation would be thinking that, etc. Sometimes filmmakers invite us to engage on a more conscious level, like when Quentin Tarantino never shows us what's in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Nolan makes his own invitation with the very last shot of Inception.

Leaving that aside, though, we create our own stories. We debate character motivations and discuss sequel possibilities. We read relationships between characters that aren't explicitly stated. We write fanfiction to extend the story or to bring it more in line with our understanding of the world or to simply make it something we want it to be at the moment. Even if we never talk about it, though, on some level we all put part of ourselves into the movies we watch. It probably goes without saying that the more a film gives in terms of quality and craftsmanship, the more likely we are to become involved. That's just the nature of art.

Tune in later this week (after I see the movie again, probably) as I look at Inception's scarier areas of dreaming/cinema.

52 Perfect Movies: Dr. Strangelove (1964)

2010-07-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here--this is the war room!"

It is rare to find a director with as awe-inspiring a body of work as Stanley Kubrick. Certainly, part of his highly successful "batting average" is due to the relatively small number of films he made--but much more so, it's due to his sheer genius, and the rare manner in which he voraciously and uncompromisingly brought his visions to life on the screen. There are a few Kubrick pictures which will be popping up during this series of 52 Perfect Movies--the first of them is his sublime political and social satire, Dr. Strangelove.

Kubrick would become known as a film-maker of gravity and intense seriousness, and yet here we have him delving into comedy, albeit comedy as black as coal, much like his previous effort of two years earlier, an adaptation of Nabakov's Lolita. And so we are left with a comedy as only the mind of Kubrick could've given us, wickedly funny, yet unrelentingly bleak; a "message film" concerned deeply with the fate of the world itself, yet also with the foibles of human nature, that manages to remain the complete opposite of preachy or self-righteous.

There really is no other film like Dr. Strangelove. Impossible to completely categorize, it is at times an all-out comedy--or more appropriately, a satire--which for much of the picture, doesn't "feel" like a comedy. With the exception of the appearance of the good doctor himself at the end--an example of Peter Sellers' brilliant physical comedy--much of the humor is slyly cloaked, and can even partly go over the head of some, shall we say, less astute filmgoers.

There's also the fact that it doesn't look like a comedy. Like most of Kubrick's work, it's heavy and ponderous looking, shot with stark shadows and sterile, almost dehumanizing production design. No one since Orson Welles knew how to use a camera as brilliantly to his advantage as Kubrick did, although in this particular case much of the credit goes to cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, the Englishman who would later work on such masterfully shot films as A Hard Day's Night, Repulsion, The Omen, and a little 1977 popcorn flick known as Star Wars.

In a lot of ways, Dr. Strangelove shows Kubrick really coming into what would be perceived as his "later" phase, in which his films are concerned with nothing so much as the alienation of the human soul, and the slow-burning anxiety of a seemingly perfectly balanced situation sent hopelessly and inevitably off-kilter. This was during the heart of the Cold War, when, despite how things turned out, many did earnestly believe that the world lay constantly on the brink of annihilation, and perhaps this was so. There's a real concern with this matter in Dr. Strangelove, underneath all that ludicrousness. As wry as the presentation is, and as bone dry the comedy is, the heart of this picture is quite serious.

Kubrick's flair for unforgettable imagery and jarring juxtaposition is here in full force. The sexualized mid-air refueling scene that opens the film, accompanied by romantic strings. The maniacal visage of Sterling Haydn's Gen. Jack Ripper, phallic cigar clenched in his teeth. Slim Pickens' iconic ride on the nuclear warhead. The closing moments of atomic Armageddon, set sardonically to the strains of the traditional wartime anthem "We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynn. No one will ever meet again, because the world is coming to an end--that closing tune mocks the manner in which the Western world clung to outdated concepts of warfare in a time when those rules no longer applied.

And yet just as much as Dr. Strangelove is a triumph from a technical point of view, it is one of those films that is also just as much of a triumph thanks to the stellar performances of its lead actors. George C. Scott is a revelation as the war-mongering Gen. Buck Turgidson (one of the greatest character names in movie history), a role that put the gruff actor's abilities to exquisite use. Haydn takes us to the depths of madness while at the same time never undermining the ridiculousness of the proceedings, painting the portrait of a deranged, potentially genocidal lunatic who would wipe out civilization to quell the paranoia and doubt raised by his impotence as a man and as a leader.

Then of course, we have Peter Sellers. One of the greatest comic geniuses of the 20th century in what may be, when all is said and done, the most impressive cinematic turn of his career. He was rightfully nominated for an Oscar for playing three different roles, giving him the interesting distinction of being the only actor so nominated for a movie in which he played more than one character.

As Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake, Sellers sends up British propriety and comments on the strained behind-the-scenes alliance of the U.S. and the U.K. in the face of a common enemy. As President Merkin Muffley, he is the epitome of the stifled, emotionally deadened American, a man whose ineptitude becomes both situation comedy and horrifying cultural commentary. And finally, as Strangelove himself, Sellers unabashedly displays his comedy chops as a crippled ex-Nazi desperately fighting to suppress his sheer ecstasy as the world collapses into chaos.

Any one of these parts would have made him the highlight of the picture. With all three, the movie is utterly and wholly his, and it's easy to see why he was a Kubrick favorite. It doesn't make sense somehow that Kubrick and Sellers would be such a perfect match, but it's undeniable that they were.

The razor sharp wit of Dr. Strangelove is rooted in a specific time and place in American history, and yet it's still paradoxically timeless as well. There are moments that resonate just as profoundly as they did 45 years ago, such as Turgidson's outrageous and often-mimicked tirade in the war room, Ripper's deluded rant to a terrified and helpless Mandrake about "precious bodily fluids", or Merkin's panicked, creepily childish yet at the same hilarious phone call to the Soviet premier.

Dr. Strangelove is a bold statement that cinema was changing and that the things film-makers could say--and the ways in which they could say them--was changing as well. To watch it is to watch a true visionary coming into his own, and proving that sometimes there actually can be something new under the sun. There are few experiences for a moviegoer as unique as this film, a complex, dark and endlessly amusing statement on the insanity of the world and its inhabitants that seems to tell us, "If you can't laugh at all of it, what else can you do?"

NEXT UP: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967)

The Great Unwatched: Bava, Argento, Cronenberg

2010-07-13T12:55:00.000-07:00

There are two goals to my Great Unwatched project. The first is to see some films that I might not otherwise give the time of day to. The second is to finally experience movies I should've watched a long, long time ago. This weekend, I focused especially on the latter goal, filling in gaps in the filmographies of three of my favorite horror directors: Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and David Cronenberg. I even made a special effort to watch some of their non-horror offerings mixed in with the usual fright flicks.

Film 1: Hercules in the Haunted World (1961, Mario Bava)
Bava's second (credited) turn as director is a fascinating tale of swords 'n' sandals with a bit of Christopher Lee thrown into the mix. Hercules (Reg Park) journeys to Hades to retrieve a mystical stone that will save the life of his lady love, Princess Deianira. What our musclebound hero doesn't know is that his girlfriend's wicked uncle (Lee) is machinating to use Deianira's blood in a ritual to make him immortal. Hercules in the Haunted World was Bava's first opportunity to show what he could do with color and he really wows. The scenes of hell in particular show his visual mastery. Reportedly Bava used a few movable walls and a handful of columns to form every interior set in this film, resorting to visual trickery when he needed it to look like he had more. He creates an expressionistic peplum film, which works best when taken as a visual feast hung on a loose plot.

Film 2: Erik the Conqueror (1961, Mario Bava)
An unofficial remake of Richard Fleischer's The Vikings (1958), Erik the Conqueror (also known as The Invaders) tells the tale of two Viking brothers, separated as children when their village on the coast of England is pillaged by the vicious Sir Rutford (Andrea Checci). Eron (Cameron Mitchell) is raised by his Nordic brethren. Erik (George Ardisson) is adopted by the Queen Alice of Scotland (or Britain, depending on whether you're watching the movie dubbed or subtitled) and grows up to become the Duke of Helford.

What struck me about Erik the Conqueror was the care taken that neither Viking or English were portrayed as villainous or unsympathetic. Both sides are caught in the cycle of violence known as history, occasionally manipulated by Sir Rutford to achieve his own ends. Certainly the Vikings are portrayed as more brutish and violently-inclined, but they're also largely honorable, honest people. The English are more cultured, but they are given to subterfuge and, in the case of Sir Rutford, outright treachery.

The best sequences, visually, take place in the Viking's headquarters, a large cave where Bava's colored gels run wild. The centerpiece of the set is the giant gnarled tree from Hercules in the Haunted World, which looks magnificent in this new context.

Overall, however, the film isn't that interesting, unless you're really into vikings.

Film 3: Fast Company (1979, David Cronenberg)
It's certainly possible to read a lot of Cronenberg's prevalent themes into Fast Company, most notably the intersection of man and technology and the betrayals of corporate America. However, I think it misses the point to a certain extent. This is Cronenberg working in established drive-in fodder territory for the first and only time in his career. He sticks pretty cleanly to the rules by providing a story with clear heroes and villains, plus the requisite amounts of sex and action. William Smith plays Lonnie "Lucky Man" Johnson, a race car driver in his twilight, doing the drag race circuit under the sponsorship of FastCo Oil. When FastCo betrays him (through their corporate liaison Phil Adamson, played by John Saxon), he strikes out on his own. Adamson uses every trick in his book to make sure Lonnie's cars never reach the finish line. Fast Company is slow-moving (ironically) and takes forever to get around to its central conflict. Cronenberg really only breaks out of the mold during a surprisingly brutal climax that kills off two characters and seriously injures a third.

Film 4: Inferno (1980, Dario Argento)
I still don't know what I feel about this one. Certainly it's the most beautiful Argento film I've ever seen. However, the plot is a huge wad of happenstance, with very little rhyme or reason. In some places it seems to want to emulate the structure of its predecessor, Suspiria, but it lacks a character like Susie Banyon for us to relate to. I'll admit that I was already starting to get a little burned out at this point in my marathon, so I might not have given Inferno the due it deserves. Next time I watch, I'll do it properly -- well-rested, with all the lights out, and the soundtrack up loud. Until then, I can't really give a strong opinion one way or the other.

As a bonus to my general theme, however, Mario Bava did some uncredited effects work for the New York segments of the film.

Film 5: Rabid (1977, David Cronenberg)
Rabid is much more in line with Cronenberg's general oeuvre. Marilyn Chambers emerges from experimental surgery with a retractable phallus in her armpit and a craving for blood. Those who she feeds from become blood-crazed zombies. Cronenberg expands on the themes he first posited in Shivers, with disease as a catalyst for societal breakdown. Moving outside the confines of a single apartment building into the city of Montreal, Cronenberg is able to analyze government and public responses to an outbreak of irrationality. Meanwhile, on a parallel track, Chambers is just trying to survive, oblivious to the effect her feeding has on her victims (and her victims' victims). Unfortunately, Cronenberg never manages to blend the external outbreak narrative with the internal vampire one, so the film gets narratively and thematically confused at times. Cronenberg would do better in later films by keeping his focus on a single character navigating through the chaos, as in Videodrome.

Film 6: Phenomena (1985, Dario Argento)
Not a lot to say about this one, except that it was the last film of the night and it didn't do much to grab hold of my already shaky attention. As a sidenote, at some point I may write an article tracking Argento's treatment of Daria Nicolodi's characters throughout their collaborations, as it does seem he gets more brutal with her after they broke off their romantic relationship.

My original plan, incidentally, had been to watch Four Flies on Grey Velvet, but my bootleg (purchased before Mya Communication announced their official DVD) was nearly unwatchable. Very disappointing.

52 Perfect Movies: Psycho (1960)

2010-07-13T08:49:00.000-07:00

"We all go a little mad sometimes..."

Where does one begin in talking about Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, one of those watershed motion pictures that can literally be said to have helped change the course of the development of movies as we know them? Here is a film that has been studied, analyzed and digested over the course of decades of scholarly attention and fan obsession, and anything I say to praise its greatness has doubtless already been said many a time. But truly, if there are any titles that a series called "52 Perfect Movies" immediately conjures up, Psycho has to be on the short list. The perfect blending of commerce and art, it represents the greatest heights to which popular entertainment can aspire.

At the time Psycho was made, the Hollywood film industry was at something of a crossroads. The "golden age" of the silver screen was coming to a close. Studios were rapidly losing their power, and the directors (and to a certain degree, the actors), were gaining more creative control. The often draconian hold of the censorious Hays Production Code limiting what film-makers could put on screen, was starting to lose its grip--a process that would continue over the course of the 1960s. It was the perfect time for a film like Psycho to come along.

Psycho wasn't the first of what we'd call "modern thrillers", having been preceded by pictures such as the French triumph Les Diaboliques, but what it did was popularize the concept amongst mainstream American audiences. It was something of a departure for Hitchcock, who, since coming to Hollywood, had become known for sumptuous, full-color "event movies". This time out, he went back to basics, stripping everything down to the bare bones, for a lean, mean, suspense machine of a movie that never stops being endlessly fascinating and never fails to work on every single level, a half century after the initial shock of its famous surprise ending has worn off.

This is the kind of film that the word "timeless" was meant to describe. Literally from the opening shot, we are drawn into this ominous, brooding, somewhat seamy world of adultery, larceny, intrigue and God knows what else. Janet Leigh is perfect as the sultry, flawed and yet charismatic Marion Crane, a main character we come to identify with only to witness brutally murdered not yet halfway into the picture--surely one of the boldest narrative maneuvers ever attempted in American cinema up to that point in time.

Her murderer, although we do not know it at that time, is the deranged Norman Bates, played with boyish charm and naivete by a young Anthony Perkins, whose performance was inexplicably denied the Oscar nomination with which Leigh's was recognized. Nevertheless, he is note-perfect as the stammering, seemingly harmless Bates, caught in the ultimate Oedipal struggle with his off-screen "mother"--it's easy to see how 1960 audiences would've been totally caught off guard upon discovering the true nature of that relationship.

And speaking of that, Psycho was particularly groundbreaking in its relatively frank approach to sexually charged subject matter. Remember, this was still a relatively culturally conservative time in American pop culture (to give you an idea, Psycho is the first American film to depict a flushing toilet bowl), and so Norman's cross-dressing, not to mention Marion's nudity during the shower scene, was pretty heady stuff.

It's that shower scene, naturally, that everyone still talks about to this day when discussing this unquestioned classic. A masterpiece of editing, sound design and photography, many have called it the finest scene ever put to celluloid, and it's tough to argue that. One of the most amazing things about it is that anyone who sees it, especially for the first time, will swear they saw way more skin and blood than they actually did--they may even claim to have seen the knife penetrate Marion's flesh, which we never do. That's powerful film-making.

That scene, and so many others in Psycho, would have lost so much of its impact were it not for what may be the most famous film score of all time, composed by Hitchcock veteran Bernard Herrmann. In an era of sweeping studio orchestral pieces, Herrmann chose to go with a small, all-strings ensemble, a relatively unheard of approach that would later become much more popular thanks to its success in Psycho. Not only the unforgettable staccato sounds of the shower scene cue, but every single cue in the film is burned into the consciousness of film lovers the world over. For my money, only the work of Sergio Leone rivals it in terms of combining such high levels of both originality and pure skill.

Films would be different after Psycho, particularly those films meant to scare, upset or disturb us. No longer would monsters and other supernatural things that go bump in the night be the primary tools of those purveyors of cinematic terror. Rather, Hitchcock proved in his brilliant adaptation of Robert Bloch's novel, that the most fearsome monster of all is the human mind itself, and it could be the one residing in the person living right next door to us. This became the message of modern horror: The monsters are us.

Hitchcock was known for his uncompromising perfectionism, and perhaps nowhere does it come across so powerfully as in Psycho. Making the most of a streamlined production crew assembled from the staff of his TV show, Hitch's fingerprints are on every single one of the great John L. Russell's breathtaking shots, in the almost palpable lighting that reminds us over and over again why this film had to be made in black and white, despite the industry's transitioning to color at the time. Nearly every line of Joseph Stefano's script has become an iconic quote, not just those given to Perkins and Leigh but also to outstanding supporting players like Martin Balsam as the hard-boiled Det. Arbogast, and Vera Miles as Marion's bereaved sister Lila.

Perhaps the finest intersection of art film and pop culture, Psycho has truly stood the test of time, and remains that one movie that film students most relish digging into. This is not some moldy "classic" forced upon younger generations by preachy academics--this is a living, breathing masterpiece, and a joy to experience over and over again.

For more, please check out The Vault of Horror's ongoing series, "Psycho Semi-Centennial"!

NEXT UP: Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Non-Movie Things

2010-07-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

After the antics that lead to this post, it's been maddeningly difficult to sit down and watch a movie properly, even moreso to write about one coherently. It's a long story, but the end result is that my apartment is in disarray and all of my DVDs and books are boxed up in a haphazard fashion. For a guy used to having his movies organized by year of release, it's a painful situation, but I have ways of dealing.

For one thing, my wife and I have been going through Babylon 5 at a breakneck pace. We started just three weeks ago and we're already a couple of episodes into Season 4. This is epic, epic storytelling. I am shocked at the breadth and depth of it. This is what Lost could have been if they'd really had a plan (so far, the Vorlon vs. Shadows philosophical debate is already more intriguing than Jacob vs. the Man in Black). Don't get me wrong. I love Lost. But I am head-over-heels gaga for Babylon 5. J. Michael Straczynski gives me the kind of characters I can follow mixed with the epic "sweep-of-history" mythos I can't resist. Sure there have been a few individual clunkers here and there (especially in the occasionally dodgy first season), but overall? Masterpiece. So far. I'll let you know if my tune changes once I've finished.

When not plopped in front of the television, I've been consuming Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, usually on my train rides to and from work. I picked it up because I'm a fan of the Hitchcock movie. The book is kind of a ghost story minus ghost, a haunted house story without a haunting. One young wife, uncertain of her place in her new husband's life, finds herself pitted against the memory of his first wife, Rebecca. du Maurier's descriptions of Mrs. Danvers, Rebecca's devoted maid, are particularly striking in their horror imagery and all the more evocative for it.

Anyway, I'll be at Madcap Theaters in Tempe, AZ this Saturday for their 12-hour movie marathon (assuming it goes off -- they still need a few more people to buy tickets in order to make the event cost-effective). I'll let you know how it goes.

52 Perfect Movies: Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

2010-06-24T06:08:00.000-07:00

"If you were a woman, Miss Plimsoll, I would strike you."

After making a film as perfect as Sunset Blvd. in 1950, many directors would have found themselves on that inevitable downward slide, forever trying to match the greatness of their earlier masterpiece. Not so with Billy Wilder. Not only did he continue to make such remarkable films as The Apartment and Some Like It Hot, but in 1957 he nearly equaled his 1950 achievement with a movie that has stood the test of time like few others: Witness for the Prosecution.

I first came into contact with this film thanks to a high school social sciences class which required us to watch it. Imagine a roomful of rowdy teenage boys (ah, Catholic school), sarcastically skeptical that this movie had anything to offer them, only to find themselves entranced by the drama and laughing at the comedy within minutes. This movie is entertainment at its most fascinating, a brilliantly acted, unflaggingly witty whodunit that just may be the finest courtroom drama of them all.

Years later, I had the pleasure of seeing Witness for the Prosecution on the big screen, presented by none other than Gene Wilder (no relation), who cited the film as one of his favorites, and one of his greatest influences. It might seem odd that a comic writer and actor would be so inspired by a courtroom potboiler, but this film is so much more than that.

Based on an original play by the queen of parlor mystery herself, Agatha Christie, the story was expertly adapted by early TV writer Larry Marcus, with the aid of Wilder and successful playwright/screenwriter Harry Kurnitz into a taut, brilliant script that alternates deftly between suspense and intrigue on the one hand, and whimsical comedy and wordplay on the other. It's quite an achievement, made even more impressive, as all movies are, when viewed in its proper setting.

Charles Laughton is magnificent as the stodgy-yet-irreverent Sir Wilfrid Robarts, the celebrated attorney who takes on the case of a young man, played by consummate movie star Tyrone Power, accused of murdering a rich, middle-aged widow. The plot thickens when his war bride, played by the devastatingly sultry Marlene Dietrich, is called as, you guessed it, a witness for the prosecution. But even that is grossly oversimplifying things--this movie is packed with twists and turns that need to be seen to be appreciated. And even though some of them may have become trite or cliche with the passage of time, they're done with such style that it doesn't matter.

Laughton's razor-sharp back-and-forth dialogue with real-life wife Elsa Lanchester, who plays his nurse, is nothing short of amazing (as an aside, I always found it amusing that the Hunchback of Notre Dame married the Bride of Frankenstein...) You see, Sir Wilfrid has recently suffered a heart attack, and isn't even supposed to be taking on such grave cases due to his health. It's his nurse, Miss Plimsoll, who is charged with the thankless task of keeping him healthy, which means doing none of the things he enjoys, ie. drinking, smoking and taking on murder cases.

As much as this is a courtroom drama, and a very effective one at that, I can't stress enough how it's comic elements are just as entertaining, thanks in large part to the obvious chemistry between Laughton and Lanchester. Dietrich is movie magic as always, a figure of towering charisma who doesn't even have to speak to steal a scene. Power can't be blamed for being no more than a good-looking prop, as his character is merely a device to set the other characters in motion around him. His arc pays off big-time in the film's big "gotcha" ending--which I won't spoil here for those who have yet to experience it.

Over the years, and even in its own time, people have mistaken Witness for the Prosection for an Alfred Hitchcock film, which is truly a testament to the effortless manner in which Wilder takes to the material, even mixing suspense and comedy just as effectively as Hitch himself did so many times. This was probably the "heaviest" film Wilder had taken since Sunset Blvd., and it really says so much about his chameleon-like quality--so common in Hollywood directors of the golden age--that he was able to seamlessly transition from stuff like The Seven-Year Itch, to a movie like this.

By the time this movie came out, the courtroom drama was already a tried-and-true staple of motion pictures, and yet Witness for the Prosecution added so much to the genre, and set the standard for many more films to come. This can be attributed in equal parts to Christie, giant of the mystery milieu that she was; Wilder, the man who made it work so well without seeming like a "filmed play"; and the supreme efforts of a brilliant cast, highlighted by Laughton, one of the true craftsmen of his time.

In a sense, Laughton was ahead of his time--a character actor able to headline a film. Nobody bats an eye nowadays to see guys like Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson--who are essentially character actors--headlining their own movies, but in the age of the handsome leading man, it was far more unusual. Only Laughton, one of the most underrated film actors who ever lived, could have pulled off Quasimodo, Capt. Bligh and Sir Wilfrid Robarts. And despite the presence of Power in Witness for the Prosecution, there is never any doubt that this is Laughton's movie. His performance truly makes this one of cinema's most satisfying experiences.

NEXT UP: Psycho (1960)

52 Perfect Movies: 12 Angry Men (1957)

2010-06-03T18:45:00.001-07:00

"Do you think you were born with a monopoly on the truth?"

There are many great ensemble dramas in the history of film. And then there is the great ensemble drama, which may very well be Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men. Adapted from a TV movie, this superb motion picture collects some of the finest actors of their own and any other generation, puts them in a room together for an hour and a half, and the result is absolute gold.

Let's have a look at the unbelievable assemblage of talent on display here. The gruff and cynical Jack Warden; the beguiling and childlike John Fiedler; the menacing and pompous Lee J. Cobb; the very young and unassuming Jack Klugman; the understated yet riveting Ed Begley; the regal and commanding E.G. Marshall. And of course, the beloved everyman himself, Henry Fonda as the central figure on the jury. And that's not even covering all 12 of the angry men!

To call this a dream cast would be the understatement of the century. This is the kind of a cast a director would kill to have working for him--a room full of unparalleled pros who take the already excellent material written by Manhattanite wordsmith Reginald Rose, and weave it into a tapestry of such sublime interaction, that the viewer is caught up in every nuance of the 90-minute conversation, from beginning to end.

How ironic that such an impeccable gathering of gifted actors would be brought together for first-time film director Sidney Lumet. Up to that point strictly a TV guy, Lumet was a hot young prospect at the time, and the homerun he hit out of the park with this Oscar nominee opened the door to an illustrious career that included such pictures as Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Pawnbroker, Serpico, Murder on the Orient Express, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Verdict, A Stranger Among Us, and Before the Devil Knows Your Dead.

Here, the 32-year-old auteur certainly has an advantage in a cast of gentlemen who could not give a bad performance if their lives depended on it. Naturally, it would be unfair to say that even a lesser director could've pulled off a classic given the material and the participants. Lumet was responsible for bringing it all together into a coherent whole, and he does so with the masterful confidence of a veteran, flawlessly staging the nearly claustrophobic goings-on with the help of Russian cinematographer Boris Kaufman, ratcheting up the tension higher and higher with the skill of an orchestra conductor.

12 Angry Men was a standout film in a sweeping sub-genre of "message" movies that Hollywood cranked out during the post-war '50s, somewhat liberal-minded pieces (which no doubt rankled the McCarthyites running roughshod with their red-baiting antics at the time) that fed into America's genuine desire to behave as the high-minded purveyor of principle its citizens considered it to be. And while this may not have always realistically been the case, it was an ideal that was genuinely striven for, and films such as Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind and 12 Angry Men are prime examples of its expression in film.

This is a film about ideas, that isn't afraid to hash them out in depth and with very little in the way of "action". The action here is in the dialogue, in the interplay of the characters, and in the development of their differing opinions over the course of the plot. It's a very thoughtful film, but manages to engage viewers of each ensuing generation, continuing to be amongst the most popular of all "pre-modern" motion pictures, owing most likely to the intensity and authenticity of the performances.

Fonda's wide-eyed innocence is here put to its best use since his younger days in films like The Grapes of Wrath. He is the film's moral center, the one we're supposed to identify with. The film revolves around his own moral journey, his search for the truth amidst a room of fellow human beings who range from tentatively fair-minded, to apathetic, to downright hostile.

In opposition to him is the bigoted, loud-mouthed Cobb, at his very best here playing the part of a man whom we may vehemently disagree with, whom we may see for the dangerous ignoramus he is, yet whom we still identify with as a human being. Most importantly, he is still written and acted as a whole person with motivations and ideas, and not just a cartoon character. This is a testament to the greatness of 12 Angry Men.

To do justice to the rest of the performances would take a series of posts like this one. Suffice it to say that each man in that room distinguishes himself at one point or another in the film--whether it be a handful of key moments, or a consistent presence throughout the film. Whether it be Warden's flippant comic relief, Fiedler's earnestness, or the meek charm of George Voskovec, there is so much here to be thoroughly enjoyed.

12 Angry Men is a movie about truth, and about the natural instinct of people to seek it out, within themselves and others. It's a movie about justice, and whether or not it can exist within the American legal system. It's a film that's high-minded without being heavy-handed, and packed with drama despite the fact that its characters never leave the deliberation room. They say that small people talk about people, average people talk about things, and great people talk about ideas. The same can be said of movies. And 12 Angry Men is one of the latter.

NEXT UP: Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

One of those Good News, Bad News Situations

2010-06-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

Bad: Getting a call from your apartment complex that your apartment might be flooded.

Good: Finding out that it's just a little bit of water leakage (and you don't have carpeting anyway).

Bad: The most significant damage is to your Creature from the Black Lagoon mini-poster, which is probably the first monster movie memorabilia you bought with your own money.

Amusing as Hell: The damage is that the plastic casing has filled with water, so the Gillman looks like he really is swimming (and oddly enough, the poster hasn't fallen off the wall).

Phoenix Comicon Schedule

2010-05-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, Nate here. Just a quick post to let you know that I'll be on a couple of panels at Phoenix Comicon this weekend.

Thursday:

Not Another Remake! (Room 152, 8-9PM) -- Join Arizona's top Horror Film aficionados for a spirited discussion of the pros and cons of the Horror Film movement of remakes. Hot on the release of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" remake, the discourse is sure to be lively! Why so many remakes? Panelists: Danny Marianino, Nate Yapp, Jeff Dolniak, David Hayes

Saturday:

Japanese Monster Invasion (Room 153, 9-10PM) -- AZ's top Japanese Monster "Kaiju" experts examine the cross cultural phenomenon entrancing fans for years. From Godzilla and beyond and from the rise of the Kaiju in its earliest incantations to modern day interpretations. Panelists: Damon Foster, Nate Yapp.

The convention is taking place at the Phoenix Convention Center and memberships are still available at the Phoenix Comicon website. Hope to see some of you there!

52 Perfect Movies: The Wrong Man (1956)

2010-05-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

"In the past, I have given you many kinds of suspense pictures. But this time, I would like you to see a different one."

Alfred Hitchcock is known primarily for his thrillers and suspense films, but this is a very different kind of Hitchcock film--which stands out as one of his very best, both for its distinction from much of the rest of the director's body of work, and also by virtue of being a damn fine motion picture.

Sure, The Wrong Man builds an almost unbearable amount of suspense, but in a very different way from many of Hitchcock's other works. This time around, the director tells the real-life story of Manny Ballestrero, a Stork Club musician and mild-mannered family man mistakenly sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. The majority of the powerful tension created here derives from the fact that we know Ballestrero is innocent, and are powerless to do anything but watch as he gets trapped tighter and tighter in a net of bad luck and circumstantial evidence.

But it's because of the magnificent performance of Henry Fonda that this whole ploy on Hitchcock's part works. The movie's ultimate good guy (well, until Once Upon a Time in the West), Fonda has boatloads of pathos in the role of the put-upon and unflappably virtuous Ballestrero, and we can't help but feel for the guy as things go from bad, to worse, to far, far worse. It's also a credit to both Hitchcock's direction, and the screenplay by Maxwell Anderson & Angus MacPhail, that somehow Ballestrero continues to act inadvertently as if he were guilty, even though he is not.

This character nuance rings true, and lends an air of realism to the proceedings. It also generates tremendous frustration, as the viewer takes in the worsening plight of the protagonist, mistaken for a stick-up man from a prior bank robbery, all the while agonizingly hoping someone will give him a break. Anderson, writer of such classic films as All Quiet on the Western Front, Death Takes a Holiday and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, as well as the original stage play of The Bad Seed, adapted the story from true events, and teamed with MacPhail--who had worked with Hitch a decade earlier on Spellbound--to create a maddeningly tense script worthy of the master of the nail-biters.

Joining Fonda is Vera Miles in the role of Manny's wife Rose. Also known to Hitchcock fans for playing sister to Janet Leigh in Psycho, Miles is utterly gripping in the role of a very flawed woman. Rather than play it all Hollywood, the film shows the true-life fallout of Ballestrero's plight and the effect it has on his spouse. Rose is a damaged character, and her arc, as brilliantly dramatized by Miles, is another testament to the unblinking realism of the picture. No easy way out here.

What I also enjoy about the film is its portrayal of ethnic Americans in a completely non-stereotypical fashion. Manny and Rose are Italian-Americans, and yet this is subtly downplayed throughout the picture, rather than played as some kind of broad character trait, whether for negative or positive effect. It's simply part of who they are, and only plays minimally into the story. When it does pop up, as with so much in the film, it rings completely true.

The movie is crisply shot by Robert Burks, Hitchcock's go-to man for much of the 1950s and '60s. Burks had shot Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and The Man Who Knew Too Much prior to this, so he clearly had no trouble interpreting what his director wanted. And clearly his director was pleased, as he would go on to use him for Vertigo, North by Northwest, The Birds and Marnie.

Bernard Herrmann, another Hitchcock stalwart, turns in a stellar score, less string-heavy and more jazzy to reflect Ballestrero's profession. It's a blaring, jarring, yet also beautiful piece of music, perfectly accompanying Manny's trials and tribulations, and even foreshadowing what Herrmann would bring to the table 20 years later for his final film, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Take Henry Fonda, one of the most beloved and well-liked actors of all time, team him with the man many consider the finest director of all time, and what you get is a film that is both touching and raw, suspenseful without being sensational. It deals with decent, everyday people, in very trying situations, all the more powerful because it really happened.

The Wrong Man is a film that is often overshadowed by Hitchcock's more sweeping, larger than life movies, or his more stylish, lurid and sexy potboilers. But it's one that should be sought out by film lovers, especially lovers of crime drama and post-World War II era cinema in general. And certainly by fans of Alfred Hitchcock, who thought enough of the picture to open it with a personal introduction.

NEXT UP: 12 Angry Men (1957)

52 Perfect Movies: Scrooge (1951)

2010-05-06T19:27:00.000-07:00

"Can you forgive a pig-headed old fool with no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with, all these years?"

Does it seems a little odd to be writing about this film in the middle of spring? Possibly, but Leonard Maltin once declared that Brian Desmond Hurst's 1951 adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol was far too good to only watch at Christmastime--and he was absolutely correct. Far beyond your typical seasonal heartwarmer, Scrooge is nothing short of a timeless masterpiece.

It's also a film that is nearer and dearer to my heart than almost any other. For as long as I can remember, I have been watching it each and every year in December, and it's very possible I've seen it more times than any other motion picture. I can recite nearly every piece of Noel Langley's adapted screenplay by heart, drawing as it does quite faithfully from Dickens' original text. Its characters, from Kathleen Harrison's shrill yet endearing Mrs. Dilber to Ernest Thesiger's grimly hilarious undertaker, are like old friends I've known my whole life.

The very sound of Richard Addinsell's unmistakable score can instantly put me in a mood, and conjure up tangible, unshakable memories. No other adaptation of the classic Christmas tale even comes remotely close to the greatness of this one--in fact, quite honestly, although some are quite good, it almost feels like a pointless endeavor to watch any other when Hurst nailed it so perfectly in every way.

Why does it work so well? More than any other reason, the explanation lies in its lead actor: Alistair Sim in the role of Ebeneezer Scrooge--a revered British actor interpreting one of literature's most well-known characters, and somehow managing to make him a real, textured, living, breathing human. Unlike other versions, Scrooge here does not come off as an irredeemable soulless wretch whose transformation seems forced and trite; nor does he either seem like a really nice guy only pretending to be mean.

Rather, Sim's Scrooge contains both aspects equally, balancing them out in such a way that we buy him completely as the unfeeling skinflint, and rejoice with him in his later redemption, which is pulled off so expertly that it can still give me chills a third of a century after the first time I witnessed it. His performance imbues the film with heart, yet without schmaltz; more importantly than anything else, he is authentic.

Dickens' message of hope and joy is brought to life in a manner which somehow avoids both sentimentality and cynicism at the same time. Scrooge's heartbreaking relationship with his ill-fated sister Fan; the unflappable Bob Cratchit, played by Mervyn Johns, putting on a brave face for Tiny Tim; and perhaps more than anything else, the old humbug's reconciliation with his nephew Fred, as he embraces the daughter-in-law who reminds him of Fan, as the strains of "Barbara Allen" fill our ears. Even in the liberties it takes with Dickens' plot, there is not a single misstep. This is film magic at its best.

There's an even-handed subtlety at work here; unlike other adaptations, it never feels cartoonish, and also never becomes too dark. There's a tendency with this story to sometimes either play it too broad, or otherwise to give in to the urge to make it a full-on ghost story. Maybe Dickens meant it to be a bit grimmer than Hurst's version, but no matter; like the finest of screen adaptations, it takes the essence of the source and does something remarkable that's all its own. Something about this story has touched people for over a century and half, and this movie seems to totally understand what it is.

The film holds both wonder for a small child, with its moral lesson and flamboyant ghosts (Michael Hordern's sympathetic Jacob Marley stands out), yet it also offers much to adults--in fact, I can personally vouch that the experience of watching it changes it deepens with age. This film holds profound power over me, so much so that I find emotions welling up inside even simply writing about it.

It's usually Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life that is typically held up as the quintessential Christmas movie. And as amazing as that movie is, for me, Scrooge will always be the one, a movie that transcends the holidays to become a deep experience, not just a great Christmas movie, but a great film. In my family, it has always been a tradition to watch it, to cherish each and every scene, to grin and hold back tears in turn as every scene, every line plays out.

Charles Dickens blessed his fellow man with a tale that touches something universal in us, and this adaptation is its most perfect cinematic distillation. I encourage anyone who has never seen it to get a hold of it, and allow the awe-inspiring Alistair Sim to floor you with his spot-on screen presence and profound understanding of the character. Hold off until Christmas to see it if you like, but really, why wait?

NEXT UP: The Wrong Man (1956)

The Great Unwatched: The Stranger (1946)

2010-04-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

Director: Orson Welles
Runtime: 95 minutes

Being married is a strange experience. Suddenly you have to justify a lot of things that you didn't even think about before. For instance, when I wanted to watch Orson Welles' The Stranger, there wasn't a question in my mind as to why -- a well-respected film-noir from one of the great directors? No problem. However, I'm having a stay-in weekend with my wife and so I had to pitch the movie to her. For her, a non-cinephile, the name Orson Welles meant little to nothing and the film's age was actually a strike against it. So I had to spin the plot (despite the fact that I haven't actually seen it) in such a way that it would intrigue her: a Nazi war criminal hiding out in small town America might get his cover blown by a wily investigator.

Of course, my story is true. What Professor Charles Rankin (Orson Welles) must tell his new wife isn't. Once upon a time, he was Franz Kindler, a Nazi war criminal who faked his own death and escaped to Harper, Connecticut. In this sleepy New England burg, he became Rankin, a history professor at a prestigious college. On the day he's set to wed Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), two new faces come to Harper who could expose him: an old compatriot, Konrad Meinike, and an investigator for the Allied forces, Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson). Rankin disposes of Konrad, but Mary holds the only piece of evidence connecting the two. Wilson, who doesn't know what Kindler looks like, suspects that Rankin is Kindler, but without Mary's cooperation, it's just that... suspicion. Rankin, meanwhile, begins spinning lies to Mary that fit the facts but not the truth, even as Wilson explains to her exactly to whom she is married. As the two stories battle in her head, Mary becomes increasingly unhinged, something that proves a danger to Rankin's cover and, by extension, to Mary's life.

Welles was reportedly dissatisfied with The Stranger; the final cut wasn't his. The released version eliminated both an extended chase sequence between Meinike and Wilson in the first act as well as the original screenplay's flashback structure. What's left is still an effective thriller, with Welles doing his survival-oriented villain bit, which he would later perfect in The Third Man (1949).^* My wife, who brings a unique perspective to elements I might otherwise overlook, noted that there was about 15% more melodrama than necessary. She's probably right, but after years of watching films from this era, I'm almost entirely accustomed to it. The best part of the film is, of course, the tense climax in the clock tower, as Wilson, Mary and Rankin/Kindler attempt to, ah, settle their differences. Welles uses intense close-ups, painted with cinematographer Russell Metty's brilliant shadow-work, to create a palpable sense of tension.

In short, I dig The Stranger quite a bit. My wife... was less enthused, but she did concede that it was "neat."

Worth the Purchase: It was a gift from a dear friend, but I would have gladly paid for it.

"If we walk without rhythm, we won't attract the worm." - David Lynch's DUNE

2010-04-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

At one point during Dune (1984), I forgot which David was directing. When the giant space slug slithers to the front of his special case and starts talking out of a vaginal mouth, I thought, "Yeah, this is totally Cronenberg." I didn't even realize the mental gaffe until I was preparing this brief blog post. David Cronenberg had no part in David Lynch's adaptation of the classic Frank Herbert novel and Lynch's been known to employ genital imagery from time to time (hello, Eraserhead). This has nothing to do with the rest of this post. Actually, the rest of this post has nothing to do with the rest of this post. Consider it largely a bunch of unrelated thoughts attracted by vibrations in the sand of my brain.

Netflix Instant Watch only offers the theatrical version of Dune, which is David Lynch's, ah, preferred version. That is to say, he hasn't utterly disowned the theatrical cut, as he did with the three-hour television version. To put metaphorically, he's more apt to take a punch in the face than a kick in the balls. All available versions of the film have been tampered with to one degree or another and none seem to meet Lynch's ultimate vision (although he admits, "it's not like there's a perfect film sitting somewhere waiting to come out"). Still, I'm curious to see the longer cut, if only because it might clear up some confusion that the theatrical version must bear for being only two hours (and change) in length.
It's kind of crazy how long Alicia Witt and Virginia Madsen have been working in movies. Witt was eight or nine when she filmed her part as Paul Atreides creepy little sister.
I wish I had not been eating a brownie bite during the "bug juice box" bit.
There's a lot of sci-fi visual gold in this movie, which largely makes up for its flaws as a story. I'm referring to the shield suits, the bluer-than-blue eyes, the sandworms (oft-imitated, never matched), and the aforementioned space slug. Still, it all feels very 80s.
The ever-present thought narration gets tedious, especially since much of it communicates emotions or concerns already apparent from the thinker's facial expression.
Sting says little, acts less. In one scene, he wears even less than that.
Holy crap I had no idea how much random phrases and concepts from Dune (be it book or movie) had infiltrated pop culture. I always thought "the sleeper must awaken" was a Cthulhu thing. Whoops.
The pain box sequence is gnarly and disturbed, even after having seen Don Coscarelli do it in Phantasm.

In conclusion, WTF:

52 Perfect Movies: Sunset Boulevard (1950)

2010-04-15T18:10:00.001-07:00

"I am big. It's the pictures that got small."

Among the most utterly enthralling 110 minutes you will ever spend watching a motion picture would be those you spent giving yourself up to Billy Wilder's masterful slice of film noir, Sunset Boulevard. From beginning to end, you are encapsulated within the sordid cocoon of the world created by Wilder and his co-screenwriters, Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr., a faded Hollywood where dreams go to die and souls are lost like so much spare change.

William Holden plays Joe Gillis, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who consents to rework the script of a secluded, highly eccentric, washed up silent film actress looking to make a comeback. Along the way, he becomes something of a "kept man", or gigolo for her, residing in her sad, dilapidated mansion with her and her mysterious butler, Max.

A movie star of middling status during the 1940s, Holden was catapulted to major celebrity and the heyday of his career thanks to Sunset Boulevard. Playing the character of Max is Austrian director-turned-actor Erich von Stroheim, who instills the part with a fascinating ambiguity suited to the bizarre secret he holds.

In the role of forgotten 1920s celebrity Norma Desmond is none other than actual 1920s leading lady Gloria Swanson, who won an Academy Award for her efforts, and rightfully so. An actor whose own path in life somewhat mirrored that of the character she played, Swanson brought a startling authenticity to the role.

As Norma Desmond, Swanson plays a woman so wrapped up in her own former glory that she literally loses herself within the alluring folds of vanity's cloak. She is delusional to the point of psychosis, carrying herself with a level of histrionics that belies her Silent Era roots. And although the character is decidedly over-the-top, that's entirely the point--Desmond has become a caricature of her former self. Much like Brando's Don Corleone, this is a role that has been often parodied, but if you strip away all that, you will find that it remains a raw and powerful performance.

All the elements of noir are in place, sucking the helpless viewer further and further in as the tale unfolds. We have Joe's hard-boiled narration, delivered despite the fact that he is already dead in the film's opening scene. There's the picture's hardened cynical presentation of life and love, both made into mockeries by the harshness of reality. Sexuality is dealt with in a fashion that was quite frank for the time--a fact that led some better-known actors to turn down the part prior to Holden's casting.

The noir phenomenon in American film had been gradually fermenting over the course of the 1940s, and this film represents something of a high watermark for the subgenre. Like a pulp novel come to life, Sunset Boulevard is brimming with unforgettable dialogue and sharply drawn characters. It's also shot with brooding brilliance by John F. Seitz, a cinematographer whose roots stretched back to the earliest days of feature films. He helps undeniably to cement the film's stylized quality with a keen sense of light, and most importantly, shadow.

One of the true auteurs of the golden age of cinema, Wilder is at his very best here, in what is arguably his finest hour. An Eastern European transplant who broke into Hollywood as a screenwriter in the 1930s, had made a name for himself as a director in the '40s with films like Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945), and would later distinguish himself with an astounding string of classics that includes Sabrina (1954), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960). Although nominated for Sunset Boulevard as both a director and writer, it would ironically be for his script that he won.

And what a script it is. One of the hallmarks of film noir is the importance placed on clever, fast-paced dialogue, and this film has it in spades. The twisted relationship of Joe and Norma is at the center of all the goings-on, and naturally, the scenes Holden and Swanson share are the highlights of the film.

Sunset Boulevard is the kind of film that stays with you. It's the kind of film that makes you forget everything while it's playing, makes you sit perfectly still in rapt attention, and as the credits roll after the gut-punch finale, makes you sit back and say, "That was one hell of a movie." Ready for a "close-up" that will never happen, the delusional Desmond waltzes towards us, her self-fabricated world in shambles, as we look on--dazed, spent, shaken to our core.

One hell of a movie.

NEXT UP: Scrooge (1951)

Dexter: You Don't Need CGI for an Uncanny Valley

2010-04-08T17:06:00.000-07:00

I recently started watching Dexter Season 1 via Netflix Instant Watch. My wife caught these episodes when they originally aired back in 2006, so she's been guiding me through, making sure I watch during crucial sequences (as I am occasionally less than focused). It never ceases to amaze me how a woman who claims that she has no love for horror or gore can watch (and even obsess) over shows like Dexter, Supernatural, and CSI: Some City. But I'm getting off topic (see what I mean about focus?).

Five episodes in, I'm really digging this show, and it largely has to do with Michael C. Hall's carefully layered performance as Dexter Morgan, forensics specialist by day, serial killer of serial killers by night. A key component of Dexter is that he is playing a character, or rather, characters -- affable co-worker to the Miami PD, caring boyfriend to Rita (Julie Benz), and supportive big brother to Debra Morgan (Jennifer Carpenter). The genius of Hall's performance is that we never see him playing those parts. Hall plays Dexter, troubled sociopath, and then lets Dexter do the rest of the acting. This apparent disconnect gives an eerie unreality to the friendly faces that Dexter puts on, one that hits the proverbial "uncanny valley" usually reserved for purely visual media (i.e. the closer something gets to looking human without actually being human, the more disturbing it is).

Dexter isn't a normal person. He doesn't have the responses to stimuli that a normal person would have. He has to fake all of these things and over the years, he's gotten quite good at it. As an audience we know it's all a show, so we're more apt to look for the places where he gets it wrong, but the achingly skin-crawling truth is that he really doesn't. He's dead-perfect, except... somehow he isn't. There's some element, some intangible tell that gives him away to those "in the know." The more effort he puts into being normal, the more subliminally discomfiting he becomes -- and the hardest part is that no-one around him (save an angry, suspicious cop named Doakes) seems to see it. Just watch Dexter as he apes a playful surrogate father figure to Rita's two children and tell me you don't get the screaming heebie jeebies.

Here's a quick promo video that appears to be from the show's first season:

52 Perfect Movies: White Heat (1949)

2010-04-05T20:09:00.000-07:00

"Made it Ma--top of the world!"

By the end of the 1940s, it had been years since James Cagney, once the ultimate movie gangster, had portrayed one on screen. Attempting to branch out as an actor and show all that he was capable of doing, Cagney had sidestepped pigeonholing and moved on to many other diverse parts. And yet, after enough time had passed, Warner Bros. was finally able to lure Cagney back to the genre that put him --and to a certain degree, the studio--on the map.

In doing so, Cagney created what is undoubtedly his most nuanced and fascinating gangster role, and most likely the greatest of his career, period. It makes sense that he would have held out for all those years, until such a plum part came along. Unlike previous racketeers he had played, like The Public Enemy's Tom Powers, who are guys relatively decent at heart that come to a bad way of life due to unfortunate circumstance, Cody Jarrett is a full-on psychopath, rotten to the core.

Watching Cagney dig into the part with relish is amazing. Jarrett is a bona fide monster, and yet Cagney plays him in such a fascinating, magnetic fashion that he never comes off two-dimensional or unbelievable. In fact, a good argument could be made that Cagney was one of the first to bring true naturalism to cinematic acting. Cagney's Cody Jarrett paves the way for James Caan in The Godfather, and especially Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. In that way, White Heat may be the beginning of the modern gangster film.

A demented, murdering bandit, Jarrett is famously coddled by his sinister mother, played sharply by Margaret Wycherly. The relationship is a twisted one, an unhealthy prolonging of the maternal influence, mixed together with Jarrett's amoral criminality to form an unforgettably warped character. By his side is the beautiful Virginia Mayo playing the archetypal gangster's moll, Verna--a hard woman who goes head-to-head with Ma for Cody's affections.

And speaking of Ma, it is her death that leads to the moment in this film that may be Cagney's defining scene. Upon discovering of her passing while in jail, Jarrett launches into an animalistic frenzy in the middle of the prison cafeteria, collapsing utterly into a subhuman mass of unreasoning pain and sorrow. There is nothing pretty here, no stylized dramatic presentation--make no mistake, this is raw stuff. And it demonstrates Cagney's absolute mastery of the acting craft.

Our director is Raoul Walsh, who had previously directed Cagney in The Roaring Twenties 10 years earlier, and had done another great gangster picture, They Drive By Night, with George Raft and Humphrey Bogart. Walsh seems intent on remaking the genre that had proven so popular during the 1930s, instilling a much darker edge, and also a bizarre fixation on technology that is probably very much in line with America's post-war tech obsession heading into the 1950s.

The writing team of Ben Roberts and Ivan Goff turned in the screenplay--these guys were personal favorites of Cagney's, and it's easy to see why. They deliver a script that is rich and layered, presenting the criminal element in a way far less romantic than what had been seen before. It's no wonder Cagney would use them again, including a few years later for his Lon Chaney biopic, The Man of a Thousand Faces (and in a totally random note, this same team would go on to create Charlie's Angels some 25 years later...)

One interesting aspect of Roberts and Goff's script, however, is the challenge of presenting undercover FBI agent Hank Fallon, who befriends Jarrett and joins his gang, only to turn him over to the feds. By post-modern standards, this character would be considered a rat and a heel, but in 1949 this simply would not have been permitted by the Hays Code, not to mention that mainstream American society hadn't yet developed that deep-seated and sanctioned contempt for authority. So instead, Fallon is a stalwart hero, doing his duty to take a vicious killer off the streets. It's an unusual take for those used only to modern gangster movies and their unbridled glorification of the criminal, but it works.

As for the climactic scene at the factory, any lover of film has at least a passing familiarity with Cody Jarrett's standoff, in which he utters the famous line at the top of this post. It's a powerful scene, literally ending in a gigantic explosion that spells the end of James Cagney as movie gangster. The movie itself also acts as a transition from the classic gangster pictures of old, presaging the much grimmer, bleaker, gangster cinema to come, populated with unhinged, violent sociopaths.

NEXT UP: Sunset Boulevard (1950)

52 Perfect Movies: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

2010-03-15T18:28:00.000-07:00

"Insanity runs in my family... it practically gallops."

I've covered the great Cary Grant comedy Bringing Up Baby in a previous post, and here we have another superb and sublime bit of hilarity from the screen's most revered leading man of all time. It's interesting to note that Grant himself never felt confident in his performance in this picture--rather, he believed it to be one of his worst, and completely over-the-top. However, the untold masses who have derived great pleasure from this movie would beg to differ.

Arsenic and Old Lace was based on a smash hit Broadway play of the early 1940s, and given to the great Frank Capra to direct. Capra was a master of slick, stylized slices of Americana. An Italian-American with high ideals for his newfound country and what it represented, he brought a certain irrepresible charm, as well as some unapologetic schmaltz to his projects. To put it plainly, he completely gave himself over to his films, using them to communicate a philosophy about American life in general.

The funny thing is, Arsenic and Old Lace represents a subversion of that perfect American dream. Except it does so in a completely disarming way, using comedy to present us with completely ludicrous situations that we can't help but laugh at. It's a farce in the truest sense of the world--the very definition of a screwball comedy. And it's a joy from start to finish.

There's a sense of delicious chaos that pulses through the script of Julius and Philip Epstein, one that almost no comedy gets as right as this one. And Cary Grant, one of the most versatile of all the matinee idols of his day, is more than up to the task of being the ringmaster in the midst of an absolute cinematic circus.

Raymond Massey shows up as the heavy, his Lincoln-esque features made up to look like those of Boris Karloff--who originated the role of Jonathan, but was prevented from carrying it over to the screen due to his obligations to continue the part on stage. Despite the absence of the man for whom the part was written, Massey imbues Jonathan with a sinister menace that is a wonderful counterpart to the flighty, ever-incredulous antics of Grant as Jonathan's put-upon brother Mortimer.

With Massey is the shady Dr. Einstein, played with aplomb by the very face of shady supporting characters, Peter Lorre himself. Josephine Hull and jean Adair play Mortimer's two aunts, who at first glance seem like two harmless old biddies, but are soon discovered to be a couple of delusional Kevorkians, poisoning elderly lodgers in their bed and breakfast and burying them in the basement. And then there's John Alexander as Teddy Brewster, Mortimer's other brother, who believes himself to be none other than Teddy Roosevelt. Even the always-terrific Edward Everett Horton shows up as the proprietor of the funny farm wherein Mortimer seeks to commit his murderous aunties.

In the grand tradition of this style of comedy, we can't help but sit back and enjoy watching everything unravel as Mortimer continually tries and fails to hold the entire unbelievable situation together. It's a performance in the same vein as Bringing Up Baby, in which Grant played straight man to the madcap Kate Hepburn--but this time, Grant is allowed to take it even further into the realm of broad humor. He may have found it to be a bit too much, but generations of audiences have discovered it over and over again, and embraced it.

It's not hard to figure out why Arsenic and Old Lace was such a successful play, and one has to give major credit to Capra for expertly translating the material to the movies, without losing the intimacy and charm of the source material. This is a pretty unique film in Capra's body of work. That's not to say it isn't just as heartwarming as much of his other output, but the difference here is the manner in which it goes about causing the "Capra effect".

Other films like It's a Wonderful Life had dealt with the darker side of the American dream, but Arsenic and Old Lace is black comedy of the highest order, with gallows humor to spare. It is the story of homicidal old ladies, a houseful of lunatics and a scarred, fugitive ex-con. And yet it never fails to be light, funny and just plain fun.

Arsenic and Old Lace is one of the most downright amusing comedies ever filmed. It has all the life and exuberance of Frank Capra, interpreted marvelously by Cary Grant, with a fantastic ensemble cast supporting him every step of the way. It's also funny as all hell, which, when you get right down to it, is the one thing all great comedies strive to be. And few pull it off like this.

NEXT UP: White Heat (1948)

The Great Unwatched: Legend of the 7 Golden Lawrence of Arabias

2010-03-02T16:08:00.000-08:00

I think we can all agree that Legend of the 7 Golden Lawrence of Arabias (American title: 7 Arabs vs. Dracula) would be an awesome movie. And Legends of 7 Golden Vampires and Lawrence of Arabia aren't that dissimilar when you come down to it. A white guy in an epic war helps a foreign people figure out how to combat their common enemy, believing he's doing it without impinging his own Western values upon their culture, but totally doing it anyway. In the end, our white hero is caught up in the violence and the whole matter ends an ambiguous note -- the battle won, but the cost far too great.

Of course, one is a 90-minute kung-fu vampire movie and the other is a 3.5 hour David Lean epic about the Arabian involvement in World War I. But otherwise, you know, same film.

Moving on.

There's a theory of film criticism (the name of which escapes me at the moment) that suggests that the written word is insufficient for interpreting film, because it is not, itself, an audiovisual medium. I am not riding that train of thought (obviously, since I can't even remember what it's called), but when I watch a film like Lawrence of Arabia, I can sort of see the point.

I could tell you about the amazing compositions, the way that Lean uses empty space to evoke a true feeling of grandeur. I could discuss the complex political implications and the fact that its protagonist is allowed to go an entire film being very wrong about a number of things and the film ends with him being very wrong about a number of different things.

This is not one of my favorite films ever and yet I am humbled by the task of discussing it. So I won't. Within the next year, however, I will, I promise.

But it might not be in writing...

52 Perfect Movies: Casablanca (1942)

2010-02-26T20:21:00.000-08:00

One of the most enduring of all movie classics, Casablanca is the kind of a film that finds a way to stand out, even amongst a catalog of so-called "perfect movies". As a writer, I can tell you it's the kind of movie I will watch, and be crushed by. The reason for that is that the screenplay, in particular the dialogue, is so completely and perfectly achieved that one cannot imagine anyone ever writing anything better.

Every word that comes out of every character's mouth for just about the entire running time is an absolute joy. Based on Murray Burnett and Joan Alison's play Everybody Comes to Rick's, Casablanca is a marvel in that, at the time, it was not treated by Warner Bros. as anything special. It was one of the many flicks that were put on the WB assembly line in 1942, and got no special treatment. Twin brothers Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, along with Howard Koch, were brought in to adapt the play, and that was that.

Granted, the Warners did bring on one hell of a director. Michael Curtiz was fresh off Yankee Doodle Dandy, for which he had been nominated for the Oscar. He had also been nominated three other times, for Angels with Dirty Faces, Captain Blood and Four Daughters. He was no run-of-the-mill Hollywood hack, to be sure. And he was able to take that magnificently adapted screenplay and translate it into on-screen gold. In fact, this would be the one that finally netted him that coveted statuette.

Of course, he also had some help in this regard with one of the most enviable casts ever assembled. Sydney Greenstreet as Signor Ferrari (reportedly the inspiration for Jabba the Hutt, of all things); Peter Lorre, perhaps the finest character of his age, as Ugarte; Conrad Veidt, a star of German expressionist cinema in his earlier years, as the Nazi Major Strasser; the always delightful Claude Rains as the cynical yet lovable Capt. Renault; and of course, Ingrid Bergman, a classic leading lady if ever there was one.

And then there's Bogey. A rising supporting player for years during the 1930s, Bogart had become a big star the previous year thanks to The Maltese Falcon. But in Casablanca he achieves absolutely immortality. As Rick Blaine, one of the most famous characters in movie history, he owns the screen. His world-weary brand of leading man would become a touchstone for generations of actors. Not an actor of classic good looks, he made up for it with performances of an excellence that appeared to come effortlessly. Casablanca may feature the very best of these.

With Bogart, Bergman and the rest on screen, reciting the lines written in that unbelievable script, there is a level of artfulness achieved that is fairly awe-inspiring. This is typically the go-to film that people mention when referring to or even thinking about films of this era, and when you watch, you can understand why. Again, the writing is so spot-on, and the actors dispatched to bring those words to life are beyond reproach.

So many things work so well, in so many scenes. The chemistry between Bogart and Rains is especially enjoyable, with its ceaselessly wry and witty repartee. The classic climactic scene at the airport between Rick and Ilsa, perhaps quoted more than any movie scene, ever. The general boldness of staging such a frank film about World War II, during the actual war itself, which maintains its integrity and casts the Nazis in an appropriately disapproving light, without devolving into crass jingoism.

Of course, we also have "And Time Goes By". To discount that song as a major part of what makes the film work is to really miss something special. Ironically, the song was not written for the film, and had actually been floating around for nearly a dozen years, a minor Rudy Vallee hit of the early '30s. In fact, by the standards of the great American songbook, it's probably nothing particularly special, but for some reason, when used as the main leifmotif of this film, and when performed on screen by Dooley Wilson in the role of Sam (as in, "Play it again, Sam") it achieves something very special. Thanks to this film, it's become one of the most famous songs ever written.

Casablanca is the type of film in which the actual niceties of the plot fade into the background. You're so caught up in the power of the characters, the music of the dialogue, and the boatloads of atmosphere, that who did what to whom becomes less important than the way it's done. Perhaps this is what has given the movie its longevity--it holds up to repeated viewings over decades, because it's not about the destination, but the marvelous journey.

By the 1940s, the Hollywood system had gotten the whole movie-making thing down to a fine science, and Casablanca is the ultimate example of this. It is a beautifully burnished gem of a motion picture. It is, simply put, the ultimate romantic motion picture. It is what American cinema is all about.

NEXT UP: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

52 Perfect Movies: Citizen Kane (1941)

2010-02-16T15:12:00.000-08:00

Well this is certainly an intimidating one, isn't it? What more could I possibly add that hasn't already been said? You will, I trust, bear with me if I cover some well-trod ground here. But to put it simply, Citizen Kane is often called the greatest motion picture ever made, and that may very well be the case.

Sure, it's been said so many times that there is sometimes a bit of a backlash, with people questioning if it really deserves such a status. And while I'm not sure I'd indisputably agree, I can certainly see where those are coming from who make that claim. Orson Welles' masterpiece is moviemaking at its finest--the ultimate product of a distinctly modern art form.

There are several reasons for this, but first and foremost, I believe the source of Citizen Kane's greatness comes from a technical standpoint. For one thing, there is a level of cinema verite achieved in this film that was unequaled up to that point--a level of realism in the acting and in the script by Welles and Herman Mankiewicz that was a sign of things to come, following as it did upon the 1930s, a decade in which the art of the sound picture was still being perfected.

The camera work by Welles' cinematographer Gregg Toland is astonishing. Anyone who's ever taken a basic film class has probably had things pointed out to them like the deep-focus shot in the Kane cabin at the beginning, or that classic image of Kane walking across the hall of mirrors. Yet as oft-repeated as these things may be, they continue to ring true. This is a film that visually engages you, and never lets go from beginning to end.

The opening newsreel sequence is another example of the realism at work here, as it plays out very much like the actual newsreels of the day, without feeling as if it were staged or created for a movie. Here, as also with the aforementioned cinematographical gymnastics, the editing plays a major role, and Welles' editor was none other than future director Robert Wise, obviously a man of prodigious gifts.

And yet even in a film of such technical prowess, we find dramatic performances of exquisite power--this is another testament to Citizen Kane's greatness. Welles had to be monumentally proud of what he was accomplishing--one can tell in his confident, multi-layered portrayal of Charles Foster Kane. Joseph Cotten, who won an Oscar for his efforts, is the McCoy to Welles' Kirk, if you will permit me a geeky comparison. The southern gentlemanliness of Cotten the actor may not jibe all too well with the supposed New Englander he is portraying, yet the authenticity of the part comes through in spades nonetheless.

I'm always especially struck by the campaign speech scene, perhaps because more than any scene in the film, this one for me most effectively combines the power of the film's technical proficiency, and the awe-inspiring power of Welles' dramatic performance. It does what movies were invented to do--overwhelm the viewer completely. Seeing it on a big screen intensifies the effect immensely.

Citizen Kane is a film which is the very definition of the word "epic", the type of event picture that fairly signaled that the motion picture as an art form had officially been perfected. If the 1920s and '30s was an age of experimentalism and trial and effort, Kane sets the tone for the slickness and masterful technique of the 1940s and beyond. This is Orson Welles' magnum opus, and watching it, one gets the feeling that more care and unadulterated passion was put into it than any other film of its era.

A big part of this is due to the fact that Citizen Kane is very much an auteur film, foreshadowing the director-as-visionary phenomenon that would really take over some 25 years later, after the collapse of the studio system. It was Welles' pet project, realized on a level few ever are--and yet unfortunately, fallout from the picture, whose main character was a fairly negative portrayal inspired by William Randolph Hearst, one of the chief media moguls of the day, would stymie Welles' career, which would never be quite the same again. Ironic for the man who made what may be the greatest movie of them all.

To those who have heard about it for years and find its reputation intimidating, I urge you to strip away all the academic hoopla and critical baggage the movie carries. Come to it as cleanly as you can; approach it as you would any other film. You will find that, on its own merits, minus the ponderous rep, Citizen Kane still has the power to move and astound. It is a timeless film, one of great richness and depth, and it also happens to be one which just might be the very finest film ever made.

NEXT UP: Casablanca (1942)

52 Perfect Movies: Bringing Up Baby (1938)

2010-02-07T21:22:00.000-08:00

When it comes to film comedies of the "golden age" of Hollywood, I usually go in for the classic comedy teams--Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, etc. But there's one major exception for me, a movie that completely epitomizes the "screwball comedy", and one which is proof positive that romantic comedies once had souls and were actually quite funny.

Bringing Up Baby is an utterly charming and arresting film starring two unassailable legends of the silver screen, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. And arguably, you have them both at the height of their powers here: Grant, cinema's ultimate leading man to this day, and Hepburn, easily the greatest film actress who ever lived.

What amazes me about them both is how adept they are at selling this movie as a laugh-out-loud comedy. Here you have two performers who were literally just as comfortable doing comedy as they were straight drama--and had just as much talent for both. Grant is at his zany, eye-popping funniest here in a performance that's right up there with his turn in Arsenic and Old Lace.

And Hepburn is the comedic glue that holds the whole thing together, playing the perfect flighty, wacked-out foil to Grant's straight man. In fact, I'd say that Cate Blanchett's pportrayal of Hepburn in Martin Scorsese' s The Aviator was more or less an impression of the actress' role in Bringing Up Baby.

The director is Howard Hawks, one of Hollywood's finest craftsmen of the period, and a man who was also be responsible for such gems as Scarface (1932), Sgt. York (1941), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and even the original horror sci-fi favorite The Thing (1951). Talk about versatility! At this time he was just building his reputation, and does a fine job of doing just that with this wonderfully filmed comic masterpiece.

This film is literally the blueprint for the screwball comedy, and a film I often recommend to those who have a hard time getting into comedy pre-1960, and/or are looking for something to give them a genuine laugh. Grant and Hepburn prove that romantic comedy doesn't have to be dull, cliche-ridden, phony and predictable. It can be genuinely hilarious, bold and irreverent. And a whole lot of fun.

It also has that great song going for it, Jimmy McHugh & Dorothy Fields' "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", one of the most irresistible of Depression-era pop standards. It's sung repeatedly throughout the movie by the characters, mainly referring to Hepburn's pet leopard, Baby--a source of much of the film's outrageous comedy.

You really don't need me to tell you this, but Grant and Hepburn play off each other so well, and that really is the key to this film's magic. When you watch them feeding off each other on screen, you are watching two consummate pros. Hepburn's is a one-of-a-kind presence like no other, infectious from the moment you see her, and building with every word she speaks and move she makes. And Cary Grant... only an actor so sure of himself and his art could so successfully portray someone so completely exasperated and unsure of himself. They are both perfection.

I came across this picture as a teenager, renting it with my then-girlfriend (now lovely wife), and not expecting much more than a fun little comedy flick. What I got was one of the true laugh-out-loud movie-watching experiences of my life. And there are not any comedy films that can really and truly elicit that effect in general. There are many other classic screwballs of the era, films like It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story. But for me, this one will always be the best.

And here's another recent review of Bringing Up Baby at the fine blog, The Moon is a Dead World...

NEXT UP: Citizen Kane (1941)

The Great Unwatched: The Deadly Bees (1967) and Out of the Past (1947)

2010-01-28T12:54:00.000-08:00

Out of the Past (1947)

Director: Jacques Tourneur
Runtime: 97 minutes

As the credits came up on Out of the Past, I thought to myself, "I have never seen a film-noir before this; I only thought that I had." This thought is particularly amusing, because as Tourneur's movie opened -- and despite the title card -- I thought that I'd put the wrong disc in the player.

Let me explain. Out of the Past has a reputation as one of the great film-noirs, a genre known for their oppressive cityscapes and chiaroscuro lighting. Tourneur's past work with Val Lewton's horror unit demonstrates that he has a way with shadowy cinematography. So it's a shock when the first sights we see in Out of the Past are open plains, the first sounds a slightly rustic musical cue. One of the credits notes that the film is based on a novel called "Build My Gallows High." When we finally see a hard-top car driving along the country road, it's a relief -- this is not a Western after all.

Of course, this is the genius of Out of the Past. It's a film that seems to define the film-noir experience, but it wouldn't work without the film-noir tropes already established by earlier films. One of the key elements of great film-noir is that those elongated shadows and endlessly criss-crossing city streets form a prison around the protagonist, locking them into the date with destiny they made when they gave in to their passion. Opening on a sun-bathed rural community is a calculated surprise; it drives the mystery before a single word is spoken. Why are we here and not the city? What is coming out of the past? The Western associations also work in Tourneur's favor. That car that drives up the road is both welcome (because it's a clue we're in the movie we expected to be) and strange (its dark color makes it look like an unwelcome invader of this dusty village).

The man in the car is looking for Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), the local gas station owner who used to be another person entirely -- Jeff Markham, private eye. Their meeting begins Out of the Past's descent into darkness, as night and shadow creep into the tale (both metaphorically and visually) with alarming speed. Markham became Bailey to hide from a big-shot named Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). Why he went into hiding is a story he tells his girl during the drive to Sterling's lodge, with the requisite flashback and narration. Why he needed to hide comprises the rest of the movie.

My original summary of the film isn't accurate; it's not that I hadn't seen a film-noir before, it's that I'd never seen a film-noir protagonist before. How could there be any other except Robert Mitchum? The rest, even his predecessors, seem like pale imitations, shadows if you will. Hard-bitten doesn't begin to describe him. When he breathes, "Baby, I don't care" to Jane Greer, you know that he goddamn means it. He has a way with conveying emotion that's guarded and revealing all at once. When his deaf station assistant tells him he has a visitor, his face barely moves, but his expression changes all the same. It's a masterpiece of performance.

Worth the Purchase? Oh definitely.

The Deadly Bees (1967)

Director: Freddie Francis
Runtime: 83 minutes

This one's a bit of a cheat, as I'd seen a truncated version of The Deadly Bees once in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. A lack of wisecracking robots does this film no favors, unfortunately. It's slow, repetitive, and silly. A pop star (Suzanna Leigh) goes to a remote island to recuperate from a nervous breakdown, only to be caught in a hive of villainy -- one of the island's two beekeepers is releasing a new strain of killer bees on the unsuspecting populace. Is it cold, forceful Guy Doleman or the doddering, avuncular Frank Finlay? Does the audience care? Notable mainly for a strong performance from that ubiquitous supporting player of British horror, Michael Ripper, as the local barkeeper/lawman.

Worth the Purchase? I should've been stingier with my money.

--

In Two Weeks: Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

The Return of the Great Unwatched

2010-01-22T12:36:00.000-08:00

When I started this blog 11 months ago, it was devoted to a project called "The Great Unwatched," the goal of which was to watch 400 movies, all of which I owned and none of which I had seen, in a year. That project fell through in a month, even though I found parts of it extremely gratifying.

The goal was noble, but the pace was... well, stupid. It amounted to 1.1 movies a day, which might have worked if I wasn't the type of guy to balance two or three other projects alongside it (not to mention my 40-hour-a-week job and my social life).

Here's the thing: I seem to find all sorts of time to be movie fan, but I put aside less and less time to actually watch movies. I find making the simplest viewing choices excrutiating, as I try to balance a million questions -- Will I be able to sit through this movie, given my ADHD? Will I be able to review this movie for Classic-Horror? Can I watch this movie with my wife, who has aversions to films without strong plots and, well, pretty much all horror? Most importantly, what will this film add to my existing understanding and apprecation of cinema?

The last question is both the most important and the least relevant. Over the last week I've watched several films, letting my id choose whatever looked interesting in my Netflix Instant Watch queue. The films have mostly been horror (Strait-Jacket, The Cat and the Canary '27, Pin...) with exceptions like the Singapore-based Cyber Wars (original title, no joke: Avatar). Not every film has been a masterpiece -- some I didn't like very much at all -- but they've all added something to my filmgoing experience. Looking back on the single month of The Great Unwatched's first iteration, I realize this is generally true. Even the films that were really terrible like The Dark and Pick Up have stuck with me in some form or another (not so much Las Vegas Lady, but I did watch that with my then-girlfriend/now-wife, so it's not a total loss).

I figure it's time to revisit the experiment, but as a matter of quality over quantity. Every other week, I'm going to have a PHP script randomly select three films in my collection that I have not seen. I will watch at least two of them and publish my thoughts here. This new Great Unwatched will alternate with B-Sol's 52 Perfect Movies feature, so there will be new content here on a weekly basis. I'm looking forward to seeing the best and the worst my collection has to offer me in a variety of genres.

52 Perfect Movies: Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

2010-01-19T17:48:00.000-08:00

My next film is certainly something that might be more typical for me to write about, given that I run a blog called The Vault of Horror. I'll admit I'm a little more in my element, but I'd go further than saying Bride of Frankenstein is one of the finest horror movies ever made--it is without question one of the finest movies ever made, period.

As horror films go, this could very well be the most skillfully made of them all--certainly of the so-called "classic era" of horror movies, in which, very often, they were treated as mere children's fare. Bride of Frankenstein is so much more than that. It's a sublime expression of cinema as art, wrapped subversively in the guise of a monster movie. And it is without question the finest hour of James Whale, the man I consider to be the greatest horror director who ever lived.

Whale's original 1931 Frankenstein was a masterpiece in its own right, but this was an improvement in almost every way (except sheer ability to terrify), making it perhaps the first sequel to surpass the original. With a much larger budget, and studio confidence on his side, Whale weaves a lush tapestry, giving greater license to Universal set designer Charles D. Hall. It's bolder and more impressive than its predecessor, with a script that's smarter and richer.

I won't be the first one to point this out, but the film is also tinged with a daring Christian allegory that only adds to the viewing experience. Who would've thought that the Frankenstein monster could become a Christ figure, yet this movie does it--having the creature literally descend into the grave and "rise again", associating him with a blind man in a scene which plays to "Ave Maria", and of course there's that iconic moment of the monster "crucified" by the townspeople. This is heavy stuff for a creature feature!

Boris Karloff gets to speak as the monster, and delivers a performance that is packed with power and pathos. Colin Clive, aged considerably by the rigors of alcoholism in the four years since the original, puts in another terrific performance as the good doctor, as well. But it's Ernest Thesiger who steals the picture as the one and only Dr. Pretorius--perhaps the greatest non-monster role of any of the classic Universal horror films. He also gets one of the great movie lines: "Here's to a new world of gods and monsters!"

Beautifully lit and shot by John J. Mescall, who had previously shot Karloff in The Black Cat for Universal, Bride of Frankenstein is filled with unforgettable scenes. Chief among these is the rightfully famous log cabin scene with the blind hermit. Parodied in Young Frankenstein almost as famously, this is nevertheless one of the truly immortal film scenes, and for my money may be the most emotionally moving one I've ever seen in a horror film. It's for moments like this one that the film totally transcends the genre.

Ironically, despite the genuine sincerity of the cabin scene, much of Bride of Frankenstein actually plays for laughs, which is pretty bold in and of itself, given the somber gravity of the first film. The incomparable Una O'Connor is on-hand to make sure things never get taken too seriously, and even some of the monster's violence is given camp value. Yet it never feels forced, or a betrayal of the source material. This is also part of Whale's genius, and the genius of William Hurlbut and john L. Balderston's screenplay.

And then there's that incredible score. German film composer Franz Waxman was one of the most acclaimed and prolific of his day, and Bride of Frankenstein was the first American movie he got a chance to work on after moving to Hollywood. It may very well have remained his greatest. Filled with themes instantly recognizable to any vintage horror fan, the score is as much a character as any actor in the movie, conveying the dread as well as the light-heartedness. The actual theme of the Bride herself is an exotic and beautiful bit of music that represents a high watermark for horror film scores.

Bride of Frankenstein is a film that is far more sublime and wonderful than it has any right to be. Filled with remarkable imagery and delightful performances, it is the kind of film you show to someone who has yet to appreciate the finer points of what genre entertainment has to offer. Plus, it all climaxes in the highly awaited reveal of the Bride herself, portrayed in her brief appearance by the beautiful Elsa Lanchester. With Clive, Thesiger, Karloff and Lanchester all together in this scene, it becomes the kind of thing you don't want to take your eyes off for all the world.

There is a handful of horror films of such high quality that one can literally classify them among the greatest movies ever made. Bride of Frankenstein is one of them. It's the shining triumph of the beloved Universal cycle of monster films, and in this writer's opinion, the best horror film made in Hollywood's "golden age" of the 1930s-1950--which covers a hell of a lot of ground.

NEXT UP: Bringing Up Baby (1938)

52 Perfect Movies: Top Hat (1935)

2010-01-06T13:41:00.000-08:00

The 1930s musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers will always hold a special place in my heart. Believe it or not, before our hyper-sensitive and more sexually aware era, it was perfectly acceptable for a straight man to love musicals without his "manliness" being called into question. I'm pretty sure your grandfather could hum a few Irving Berlin tunes in his day, but just try walking down the street belting out an Andre Lloyd Webber song--yeah, whole different scenario.

What I'm getting at is that these films come from a completely different era of motion pictures, indeed a more innocent time, when happy-go-lucky musicals filled with beautiful melody and beautiful people could transport us away from our troubles without the slightest hint of snark or irony.

I grew up with the movies and music of Astaire, and his musicals are a part of my childhood as much as Star Wars action figures and The Muppet Show. And for me, Top Hat will always be the best--the creme de la creme, with the world's greatest dancer at the height of his powers, and the stunning Ginger looking for all the world like an angel fallen to earth.

And then there's the music. What can one say, but that Mr. Astaire is, in large part, responsible for some of the greatest songs of all time coming into being. Composers like Jerome Kern, Rogers & Hart and Irving Berlin set to work writing masterpiece after masterpiece for his films, and in this case its Mr. Berlin who wows us with tunes that have become part of the fabric of our culture. The title song, of course. "Isn't This a Lovely Day?" "The Piccolino" And then... "Cheek to Cheek".

You don't need to have seen The Green Mile to understand the power of this song to move, and of the particular scene in which Astaire and Rogers dance to it. It's moments like this one that the name of this blog series was created for, because it's about three minutes of absolute, unassailable perfection on film--two larger-than-life beings moving on screen as no two humans ever did before or since. It can literally take your breath away.

The melody and lyrics are pure Irving Berlin, and it remains one of the most well-known songs ever written. I have a particular affinity for the Great American Songbook--in fact, I devoted a whole blog to it. And well, this is certainly one of the absolute marvels of that amazing literature of popular music. I hear a song like this, and I get a bit sad for the sense of melody and beauty that has pretty much been lost in what we now call popular music.

What's the plot, you ask? Who cares, really? It's your basic romantic comedy plotline, guy and girl falling for each other, one misunderstanding after another standing in their way, until they finally stand united at the end. But that's not finally what this is all about. It's the music that's the star, and also the ambiance being created. That's all that matters.

But believe it or not, there's even more than just Astaire, Rogers and Berlin to recommend this movie. The sumptuous art direction of veteran set designer Van Nest Polglase succeeds in putting across this magical fantasy world in which the characters reside. Delightful character actors Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore are pure gold in every scene they share. And Erik Rhodes is charmingly weaselish as the flustered heavy Alberto Beddini.

These kinds of 1930s musicals were designed to take people away from the dreariness of the real world going on outside the movie theater during the Great Depression, presenting them with gorgeous people moving gracefully through an elegant world, the cares of everyday life of no relevance to them. Unlike our modern audiences, which seek to wallow in misery when times are down, these were people who sought the blissful escape that entertainent could provide. And Top Hat gave it to them, in spades.

I prefer these classy musicals of the '30s to the more bombastic widescreen extravaganzas that would come in later decades. Top Hat is the epitome of the escapist film, creating a fantasy world through the music of Berlin, and the dancing and singing of Astaire & Rogers. To watch a film like this is to know what it feels like to fall in love. The word "heartwarming" was invented for it.

Forgive me if I've gotten a bit curmudgeonly or nostalgic with this particular review. But there's a phrase in one of the songs of the film, "simply reeks with class"--and that's what this movie does. There aren't many latter-day films we can say that about. Later movies would be great for other reasons. But what made Top Hat great, and what made the entire Astaire/Rogers cycle so great, is a quality which sadly is no more.

"Heaven! I'm in heaven," sings Fred to Ginger. And when we watch them move, so are we.

NEXT UP: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Us Among Aliens Among Us: Avatar and District 9

2010-01-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

I had the curious fortune to see James Cameron's Avatar and Neill Blomkamp's District 9 within days of one another. While I'm not really sure that District 9 did anything but confirm my initial opinion of Avatar, Avatar's flaws certainly deepened my appreciation of District 9.

Avatar

I saw Avatar in 3D on a "normal" theater screen -- no IMAX for me (but the IMAX they use for feature films hardly qualifies as proper IMAX). The visuals are breathtaking, yes, but here's the thing -- you get used to them after a while. That should be a good thing, since the visuals shouldn't distract from the story. In Avatar, however, the story is so old hat, it needs blocking badly. For all intents and purposes, Avatar is a CGI-heavy remake of Dances with Wolves as seen through the lens of FernGully: The Last Rainforest, with a little Braveheart thrown in for good measure. It's the precipice of the "What You People Need is a Honky" trope, wherein the White Knight teaches the People of Color how Things Are Done.

Somewhere in Avatar's fourth or fifth act (the movie has so much rising action in its 162 minute runtime that it borders on vertiginous), after human marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) uses his remote-controlled alien avatar to ingratiate himself to the denizens of Pandora, a strange boredom settles in. The plot has given up all of its secrets already -- when it comes down to choosing between the evil corporation hellbent on exploiting Pandora's resources and the tribal aliens (the Na'vi) that stand in their way, Sully's obviously going to side with not-evil. Cameron's world-building and the game-changing CGI have already done their work to a point -- they impress, but they don't add emotional resonance. Yes, it's very bad that the evil corporation ruins the environment and wants to displace the Na'vi and it's very good that Sully learns important lessons about ecological unity and honor. And? So? Maybe Avatar would resonate more if the corporation wasn't so evil, if the Na'vi weren't so honorable, if Sully wasn't such an empty receptacle for the Na'vi teachings (he actually comments on his "empty head" during his introduction to the Na'vi chief).I think Cameron wants the conflict to be complex -- Giovanni Ribisi's corporate exec looks perpetually ambivalent when giving damning orders -- but it never is and therefore the plot never surprises.

There are funny moments and thrilling moments and sexy moments (when Sigourney Weaver's avatar first shows up, I found that I can be attracted to a computer graphic). There are moments of pure awe and wonder. There are moments of none-too-veiled political commentary. But that's all the Avatar's impact is -- moments. These bits and pieces impress but don't last; they don't connect to the whole (which is ironic, actually, given some of the sci-fi/ecological concepts put forward in the film).

District 9

Sunday night, I saw District 9 for the first time, my wife for the second. At the film's end, as the credits rolled up my television, my wife turned to me, buried her head in my chest, and began sobbing deeply. She didn't stop for several minutes. My feelings did not run as deeply (I apparently cry only during scenes where families are reunited and at the very end of When Harry Met Sally), but I understood. It's a depressing film, a damning one, but also a brilliant one.

Like Avatar, District 9 is about a no-good corporation's efforts to relocate an alien species and the human caught between the two sides by virtue of weird science. However, director Neill Blomkamp layers on additional complexities. Here the aliens, derogatorily called "Prawns," are refugees whose ship showed up over Johannesburg, South Africa over twenty years ago. In those two decades, they've found nothing but hate and, worse, indifference. Even though the Prawns have been forced to live in filthy slums at the edge of the city, their human neighbors feel it is not far away enough, so a new settlement (no better than a concentration camp, one character admits) has been created. The corporation MNU has moved in to enforce the Prawns' migration (and scavenge whatever alien tech they find).

The Prawns themselves have largely settled into depression, accepting their poverty, and finding their few joys in in-fighting and cat food abuse. What do they have to look forward to anyway? Whoever isn't ignoring them or hating them is exploiting them. In one corner of the Prawn settlement, a contingent of Nigerian gangsters run all manner of criminal enterprises -- weapon trafficking, interspecies prostitution, gambling, black market goods, anything that might turn a profit. MNU has taken on the resettlement contract because they are also one of the world's largest arms developers. They want to unlock the secrets of the powerful Prawn energy weapons, which only respond to Prawn DNA.

In the middle of all of this is Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a South African bureaucrat who accidentally gets dosed with a Macguffin, which begins to rewrite his genetic code with Prawn DNA. The transformation would do David Cronenberg proud (it parallels Seth Brundle's in The Fly in some ways). Unlike Avatar's Sully, who can choose to exist in either the human or Na'vi worlds, Wikus is accepted by neither the humans (who see him as a guinea pig) nor the Prawns (who treat him with suspicion). District 9 also sidesteps making Wikus the Great White Hero. In fact, without Wikus's bumbling early in the film, one Prawn (given the human name of Christopher Johnson) might have carried out a two-decades-in-the-making plan to head home. Eventually Wikus does attempt to rectify his blunder, but his selfish drive to fix his own problem creates additional issues.

District 9's one significant flaw is one shared with Avatar -- the evil corporation is just too effing evil. Once MNU discovers that Wikus has been infected, they strap him down and begin a none-too-subtle mixture of medical experimentation and outright torture. Consider the stakes -- a whole bounty of alien technology that no human has ever been able to wield... until now. Why alienate (no pun intended) someone who is already sympathetic to the corporation's needs and desires? It would have been nothing for them to pretend friendship with Wikus to get what they want. Instead, they go straight for sadism and cease treating him as even vaguely human, even as he begs for compassion. No wonder he eventually sides with the Prawns, leading MNU to heavy losses in personnel, resources, and profit.

Blomkamp ends District 9 on a series of ambiguous notes, with the future of this mess uncertain. What is certain is that he's not that fond of humanity, even as he shares some understanding for why we act as we do. Without that empathy, District 9 would ring false, I think. Instead, it hurts like a motherf**ker.

Incidentally, I highly recommend my friend John Kenneth Muir's review of District 9. One of John's more infuriating traits is his ability to state my own feelings on a film with a greater depth of knowledge than I possess. I realize this is through no fault of his own -- his position just happens to line up with mine. In his analysis of District 9, John brings in comparisons both obvious (Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and Graham Baker's film Alien Nation) and surprising (Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi satire Robocop and the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). I dug it lots.

To Sum Up

Asking the same complexities of Avatar that exist in District 9 is ridiculous. Avatar follows the Campbellian "Hero's Journey." District 9 is a tragedy with action sequences. However, Avatar's excessive runtime demands a more complex film or it wastes the viewer's time. I only have so much patience for a film that builds in predictable ways to a predictable conclusion, especially one that wants very much to be revolutionary.

Black Dynamite is outta sight! (and later out of steam)

2009-12-21T17:48:00.000-08:00

Black Dynamite is the spiritual sibling (one might even say "soul brotha") of 2007's double-feature experiment Grindhouse, in that it takes a classic exploitation trope of yesteryear and tweaks it just enough to make it relatable to modern audiences. In Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez took the subgenre of Italian zombie films that popped up in the wake of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, reimported them into the American cinematic syntax, and added modern digital effects to achieve some gonzo concepts that kept with the mentality of his inspirations, although not their actual execution. Quentin Tarantino's approach in his hybrid action-horror segment Death Proof was to replace the mind-bogglingly dull dialogue of lesser grindhouse films with his own brand of post-ironic banter -- which, within the provided context, wasn't any less dull, but it was certainly more inane.

Black Dynamite director Scott Sanders and stars/co-writers Michael Jai White and Byron Minns start with a loving, if slightly cheeky, homage to 1970s blaxploitation pics like Cotton Comes to Harlem, Gordon's War, Shaft, and Black Belt Jones, and slowly begin to add layers of influence from a different source -- the spoofs of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker (The Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane, The Naked Gun). Instead of modernizing their concept, Sanders, White, and Minns create an unexpected but very welcome connection between two very different genres, making it a more successful homage than either of the two Grindhouse films, at least for the first two-thirds. Despite losing control of the escalating comedy elements in the final third, the filmmakers still have a lot to be proud of here.

What I love most about Black Dynamite (and what ultimately makes the last act so frustrating), is the restraint it shows at the beginning. Sanders and company understand that comedy, like suspense, is something you build -- something you earn. With that in mind, they keep their intentions close to the chest. The introduction of Black Dynamite (White), our composite blaxploitation hero (he's a former CIA agent, an expert in kung fu, and he plays by nobody's rules but his own), is played only slightly tongue-in-cheek -- the situations are knowingly cliche and the dialogue just a bit too arch to be serious. Most of the early gags involve the particulars of low-budget exploitation films in general -- frames are randomly dropped, a boom mike eases into frame, and one character smokes an unlit cigarette.

As the actual plot is brought in, direct nudges at blaxploitation cinema come in. Not only must Black Dynamite avenge the murder of his brother Jimmy by gangsters, but he also has to investigate the introduction of drugs into the community by those same gangsters. The funk soundtrack becomes key to the comedy at some junctures, as Adrian Younge's mood-setting lyrics often provide an accurate description of the scene we're watching! We're introduced to characters with names like Cream Corn (Tommy Davidson), Bullhorn (Minns), and Chicago Wind (Mykelti Williamson), who alternately hinder and help Black Dynamite on his quest for justice.

Before we've even realized the subtle evolution of the film's tone, it's already working on adding another layer to the comedy -- making fun of its eponymous hero. This is probably Black Dynamite's most sublime comic work. Poking fun at an already comedic construct should feel like more of the same; it shouldn't be unexpectedly side-splitting. The key here is really in Michael Jai White's performance. From the first frame he's in, he establishes Black Dynamite as a righteous, nigh-unflappable mofo who can get the job done, someone's who's just too damned competent at everything. Right as that characterization starts to get stale, however, White introduces a fallibility we didn't even know we'd been begging for. When Black Dynamite loses his legendary cool at a prostitute who's only crime is interrupting his jive monologue, the timing couldn't be more perfect -- the moment is where we want it to be in the scene and the scene is exactly where we need it to be in the film.

There are occasional sequences that drag on too long and one in particular (Black Dynamite and his crew cleaning up the streets) that is over before you can register it started. These are minor hiccups, though, and there are great moments within these scenes that make their unfortunate pacing forgivable.

However, the last act of Black Dynamite goes completely off the rails. During what seems like a climactic raid on a warehouse, Black Dynamite discovers that a new villain, hiding at a remote location, is responsible for the evil goings-on. I assumed that the movie would cut to a faux trailer for Black Dynamite 2 or something, because it would be ridiculous (and not in a way consistent with the film's humor up to this point) for them to go face this new, completely unforeshadowed threat now. Well, the movie does keep going, shifting into a weak, cut-down imitation of A Fistful of Yen (from The Kentucky Fried Movie). Then the movie gets even dumber still in a sequence I can't describe without making it sound ten times more awesome than it actually is. I think Sanders wants his audience yelling, "No f**king WAY!" but instead the response is, "You've gotta be f**king kidding me."

It hurts when a movie like Black Dynamite squanders its good will. There's so much that I love about the film's understanding of comedy, timing, and how to turn expectation into laughter. Alas, none of that understanding is apparent when the film enters its final act. A shame, too. Black Dynamite starts out as one bad mothaf**ka, but by the time the credits roll, it's transformed into a jive turkey.

52 Perfect Movies: Trouble in Paradise (1932)

2009-12-20T00:19:00.001-08:00

This is probably going to be one of the lesser-known films of this series, but it belongs nevertheless. From the first time I saw it at a special screening in New York's Greenwich Village, I have been in love with Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise--a shining example of an era in time and in cinema that is forever gone.

Trouble in Paradise is of a certain genre of movie that simply doesn't exist anymore, and for which there is no equivalent. A sly, sophisticated and slick romantic comedy, it is about as far as you can possibly get from the so-called "chick flicks" of today, offering viewers a sublime experience if they but open themselves up to it.

Director Ernst Lubitsch, a German expatriate who had come over to Hollywood during the silent era, became known for a very specific trademark style. In a time when studios controlled content and most directors didn't have anything like the kind of leeway they later would, Lubitsch managed to carve out a unique feel for his work, which became known as "The Lubitsch Touch". This can be seen in such films as The Merry Widow, Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not to Be, and Heaven Can Wait.

But before any of those was this one, a delicious comedy starring Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall as a couple of con artists who attempt to fleece a millionairess of her fortune. Along the way, Marshall begins to fall for his prey (played by Kay Francis), drawing the jealousy of his typically cool-as-a-cucumber accomplice/lover Hopkins.

Hopkins and Marshall are amazing, tearing into a delightful script provided by Hungarian playwright Aladar Laszlo--on whose play the movie was based--and Hollywood workhorse Grover Jones, who pulled off the screen adaptation. This was before the enforcement of the censoring Hayes code, and it's absolutely delightful how much innuendo and biting satire the writers were able to effortlessly weave into almost every line of this terrific screenplay.

This is movie screenwriting as it has never been done since those heady days of the early 1930s--intellectual without being pretentious, brimming with outrageous wordplay without being vulgar or obvious, and pulsating with grace and class from beginning to end. Along with Marshall and Hopkins, benefiting from this treasure of a script is a cast boasting such character actors as C. Aubrey Smith, and the one and only Edward Everett Horton.

Horton was a comic genius on screen, who nearly stole every Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vehicle he was in, and nearly does the same here, playing his patented bumbling middle-aged dandy to the hilt. He is one of my very favorite character actors of all time, and its always a pleasure to watch him work.

Those who equate movies of this time with the more chaste material of the late 1930s and 1940s are in for a bit of a surprise at the level of frank bedroom humor that goes on. In fact, although it would never draw such a rating today, the picture was given the equivalent of an "R" in some foreign countries, and was even banned in Finland. But it's all in good, harmless fun, and one can't help but chuckle at nearly every line of what is, for my money, a completely perfect script.

When the movie code went into effect in 1934, the movie was effectively prevented from being reissued to theaters, and so became something of an obscure little oddity for decades. In fact, it was never issued on VHS, and not on DVD for many years, leading lovers of the Lubitsch gem to seek it out at film festivals and from celluloid dealers. Thankfully, it was recently released on DVD, and I strongly urge lovers of 1930s cinema to immediately give it the Netflix treatment if they haven't seen it.

Lubitsch had a way of creating an atmosphere that was all his own, and this movie might very well be the earliest example of the "The Lubitsch Touch" fully formed. Although the script is largely what makes this such an unforgettable movie, it wouldn't have have been able to be so fully realized without the effortless richness and panache that Lubitsch brought to every production with which he was associated. He had a way of evoking elegance and suggestiveness at the same time, leaving much to the viewer's imagination, yet also making sure they got the point.

As I've said in previous entries, the early 1930s was a time of such exuberant experimentation in American film, and Trouble in Paradise is a beautiful example of that exuberance at its best. You know how they always say, "They don't make 'em like this anymore"? Well folks, in our far courser modern culture, they very literally do not make 'em like this anymore. But we'll always have Trouble in Paradise to remind us of when grace and class were at a premium in Hollywood moviemaking.

NEXT UP: Top Hat (1935)

52 Perfect Movies: The Public Enemy (1931)

2009-12-11T20:40:00.000-08:00

William Wellman's masterpiece The Public Enemy is not simply an excellent gangster movie. It is the gangster movie; that is to say, it is the prototype, the epitome of the classic gangster film. This should not be confused with something like The Godfather, which took the genre to a different, more specifically mafia-oriented place. I'm talking about the old-school, all-American gangster movie here.

And make no mistake, these movies are all about America. The American dream, or rather the very dark side of it. They're about what desperate men were willing to do to grab their piece of the pie and hold on to it, in a world that didn't give a damn about them. And The Public Enemy illustrates that concept to perfection.

Of course, none of that could have happened without the man whose presence is really what this movie is all about: The one and only James Cagney. In a time when film acting, especially in the new sound era, was still developing from the broad histrionics of the stage, Cagney brought the art into the modern age. He was subtle; he was nuanced; he was real. He has a charisma so powerful that you can't take your eyes off him for a split-second. He owns the screen, and this is the part that forever etched him into the mainstream consciousness.

As Tom Powers, Cagney is pure joy to watch. His every movement, and every line of dialogue is a gem. In this time before the Hays Code, movies were able to get away with a bit more, and so Cagney is able to portray a gangster we identify with and root on despite ourselves. He may "lose in the end" to prove that "crime doesn't pay", but we know that's just a pretense. Make no mistake, despite his ruthlessness, he is the hero of this movie.

He just may be my favorite actor of all time, and this movie will show you why. The naturalism--he comes across not as an actor, but as a genuine wiseguy off the street. Pacino and DeNiro would be nothing without this guy blazing the trail, my friends.

And that's not to say he isn't surrounded by a supporting cast worth a fortune. We have the sexy Joan Blondell; veteran actress Beryl Mercer as Powers' large-looming mother; hard-boiled Brit Murray Kinnell as mentor Putty Nose; Leslie Fenton as the slimy Nails Nathan; and best of all, the great Robert O'Connor as the cool-as-a-cucumber mob boss Paddy Ryan. O'Connor is cast just right, using what time he's given to create a truly memorable character--the potato chip-eating scene alone is worth the price of the DVD.

And then there's Jean Harlow. Some have harped on her seeming out-of-place in this picture, with a finishing-school accent that comes out of left field. I'm not one of those people. To watch the ultimate blond bombshell interact onscreen with Cagney is pure magic. The scene in which they glide into a nightclub together and start dancing, almost defies words. You just know you're watching two larger-than-life legends of the silver screen impose their aura on everything around them. I love it.

This is a movie that takes an unflinching look at the world of organized crime in the time of Prohibition, a virtual free-for-all of bootlegging and violence. And it's not all about glorifying, to be sure--the film shows us the seedy underbelly of this world as well, in a way that we wouldn't see again to such a degree until the new generation gangster flicks of the 1970s like Mean Streets.

It's a daring film from a daring era. Powers' seduction by Paddy Ryan's wife is dealt with in surprisingly frank fashion for the time, as is his out-of-wedlock shack-up with Blondell. Then there's the unforgettable climactic scene in the rain, beautifully shot and prefiguring 1940s noir, and that infamous closing image of Powers' "homecoming".

This is why the early 1930s is one of my favorite eras of movie-making, and The Public Enemy exemplifies the spirit of experimentation and exuberance that characterized it.

I've seen The Public Enemy many times, and I can honestly say I'm never not in the mood to see it. For me, this is comfort cinema at its best, and it's always my pleasure to worship at the altar of Cagney. I suggest you give it a try--you'll never look back.

NEXT UP: Trouble in Paradise (1932)