Thieves' Highway

The DVD for this movie contains a ridiculously charming ten-minute interview with Jules Dassin. I watched the interview before the movie, which was maybe a mistake if I wanted to have an "unbiased" viewing or something, but it was hard not to like this movie after watching that.

The Naked City was really good, but a lot of that had to do, I think, with its central gimmick being so interesting. With Thieves' Highway, there's nothing like that that could end up being seen as a weakness. It's just a good movie, with the exception of a few scenes that seemed a little superfluous; and here the interview especially helped because it explained why those scenes ended up in the movie in the first place.

Richard Conte plays Nick Garcos, the son of a California truck driver who has just returned home at the beginning of the movie. He finds out his dad's legs were lost in a trucking accident, probably because he got screwed by a San Francisco produce mogul named Figlia. Nick vows revenge, hooks with another trucker, buys a bunch of apples and trucks them north to San Francisco, where not really everything works out quite as he'd hoped. I was thinking for a minute how it was interesting that the movie has a very noir setup, but in place of the usual criminal underworld the action all takes place in the cut-throat world of produce shipping, but then I realized that, of course, that was the point. Apparently Dassin didn't get blacklisted for nothing (I mean the whole blacklist thing was stupid, but Dassin's got his communist heart emblazoned proudly on his sleeve here). The ordinary capitalist system that leads to you finding your fruit in the supermarket is here shown to be just as underhanded and bluntly evil as the criminal underworld, full of double-crosses, exploitation, and outright physical intimidation and violence.

Which is what made the tacked climactic scenes so interesting. I mean, they just don't work if your trying to evaluate the movie from a purely aesthetic sense, since they're just not done as well as the rest of the movie and they're thematically so different. But when the cop's head is suddenly full frame and he's yelling directly at you, the viewer, "You shouldn't take the law into your own hands! That's our job!" well, that's actually really interesting, I think. It's like... well, I can't think of any really good things to say that it's like, but it's kind of awesome. It was obviously an attempt by the studio to try to undo the "damage" the rest of the movie might have done, but by making the point so clumsily and overbearingly it kind of just goes further toward undermining traditional ideas of authority. I really was annoyed when the scene happened while watching the movie, but thinking back on it I actually think it makes the movie loads better.

Also, just like in The Naked City, the villain is ultimately more compelling than any of the heroes, for whatever reason, although it's not quite so pronounced here. And the prostitute with a heart of gold gives him a run for his money. If a filmmaker wanted to see how to do subtly sexy, s/he could do worse than to watch the initial scene when she takes Nick back to her room, and when she turns away from the camera to reveal that the top buttons on the back of her blouse are undone. I've seen whole movies that were based around trying to be sexy that didn't even come close to matching that one scene.

The Naked City

The main gimmick of this movie is the narrator, who maintains his kind of breathy 1950's "Aw shucks" attitude throughout the whole film, even while the story is at its darkest noir moments. It really holds up pretty well as a device, giving the movie a tone that I don't think I've seen in any other movie. The closest thing I could think of would be the scenes from Natural Born Killers with the laugh-track and Rodney Dangerfield, but this is so so much better than that. I think Stone was pretty much mocking the sit-com tone in those scenes (it's been such a long time since I saw that movie), but I don't think Dassin was strictly going after satire with the voice-over in this movie.

The only other Dassin movie I've seen before this was Rififi, which is one of the most amazing movies I've ever seen. I was expecting some kind of flair here, after I realized it was the same director, but there's really not a whole lot in this movie. That's probably necessary. I think if too much of it had looked like a really well-shot movie, it would've undermined the thing it had going with the voice-over guy. I do, though, wonder if it was intentional that the most compelling actor in the whole movie doesn't show up until the end: the killer. He actually managed to convince me they'd somehow got the wrong guy, despite the obvious impossibility of that.

And what was up with Niles's smokin' hot housewife?! Was she supposed to represent some kind of extremely subtle critique of late-forties societal sexism (because structurally she doesn't occupy a position that's supposed to be sexualized on the screen, but, seriously, she sure made me feel sexualized...)?

Ultimately, though I did want the actual noir part of the story to be darker and more intriguing. The actual plot itself just wasn't up to par with the device built around it. Also, I think the photography of the city was supposed to be impressive, but I don't think I know enough about the context or about the way cities were normally photographed in movies at the time, because I didn't see a whole lot that I felt impressed by, other than the final chase scene and the killer's ascension of the bridge tower.

Conquest

I want to say something more than that was ultimately kind of boring. But this movie frankly had no reason to be as boring as it was, so I'm kind of mad at how boring they managed to make it. The music was almost worth it, though. Hard to beat late-seventies synth stuff, especially when it's trying to sound all mysterious. But with some really great beats in there, as well, almost like whoever made the score had been sent back in time from the mid-nineties to show the fools some beats. I bet whoever did the score here hated Vangelis.

Oh, and the glowing bow with its light arrows. Well, okay, so it was actually lame, but it looked fookin' grand! So much prettier done this way than it would've turned out done by some discount CGI time, which is what would happen if this movie were made these days. I just like the fluidity of light they got with the old method of drawing right on the frame (I think that's how they did it...). Likewise, the black arrows from the... um... well, apparently the two dudes got attacked by some kind of plant? That hummed and shot hundreds of arrows of pure darkness right above their heads? Really pretty great to watch, though.

Okay, I take it back, this movie did pull some things off. How, though, did they manage to get Monty Python's Flying Circus to lend them all their hermit/cavemen to populate the countryside?

Rarely does it bother me when a plot is completely stupid. In fact, I generally would say, at least with a movie like this, that the stupider the better. But I did find myself wondering if whoever wrote this movie actually thought the plot was not stupid. Because it was absolutely moronic. And it wasn't even fully realized moronicness. It was just like this half-assed moronic idea that I hope they were making up as they shot, because if they thought about it at all then they deserve to have their brains gnawed out of their severed heads by a naked chick wearing a bronze chick-mask over her head, which was actually about the coolest idea in the whole movie.

Alucarda

I felt like it probably would have helped me enjoy this movie a little more to have had some kind of stake in the Catholic Church. Which is not to say at all that I didn't enjoy it, but that the movie was really serious in a way that most movies this ridiculous are not serious, and ultimately I don't think the serious aspect of it really got to me.

I mean, I really did appreciate the way all this really fucked up iconography from was being manipulated, cuz I think stuff like that is pretty interesting. And as far as pure blood and gore and satanism and nudity: totally satisfactory. Another thing about all that: with almost all horror movies that contain nudity it is really obviously there as fulfillment of the purported viewer's desire. That is especially the case with exploitation films. In Alucarda, though, I think Moctezuma was trying to do something more with the nudity. What exactly that was, I'm not really sure. But it didn't seem to just be an answer to the demand of the audience that the chicks' clothes get removed.

Oh! And the scenes with the nuns and the priests flagellating themselves were pretty frickin' rad. And the little switcharoo the movie manages, where it seems really obvious that we're supposed to be go along with how totally messed up and evil the church leaders are, that there's this free/subversive aspect to the satanic girls and it's evil that the church leaders are trying to oppress that and only couching it in terms of good vs. evil, but then as soon as the burned chick's body came back to life and priest guy has to hack away at it with a giant machete, and suddenly you realize you have no actual choice but to side with him.

Finally, I'm sad the chick who played Alucarda was apparently not in much else. She was totally compelling in a way that I think is pretty rare in cinema, in that she wasn't necessarily attractive and you didn't (or at least I didn't) want to be around her or whatever, but I just wanted to keep watching her. She really wasn't even a good actress, I think. She was just compelling in a very real way.

The Majorettes

Well, it satisfied my desire to watch a slasher flick. Really bad acting, although not atrociously so. Oddly enough, though, actually a pretty good screenplay, and well done cinematography throughout. I'm not sure if I've actually ever seen a small non-suburban town shot so well, and there were a few moments of actually kinda exciting framing, especially the marching band scene. And the typeface of the opening titles made me really happy, as well. I wasn't expecting all that.

Maybe in a different mood I would've been more pleasantly surprised when about 2/3 of the way through it suddenly turned into a Rambo style action flick, complete with shirtless gun-toting guy, but really I just didn't want it to stray from the crazy-psych-with-a-knife-randomly-murdering-majorettes theme. Oh, well. I'm glad I watched it anyway.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

It's hard after watching 12:08 East of Bucharest, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and now this--it's hard not to assume that Romanians are just built for making movies, or something. All of these movies--made by different people--are so good, and so good for a lot of the same reasons.

I put off watching this movie for a long time, clogging up my Netflix account pretty badly, mainly because of it's length (two and a half hours) and how bleak I assumed it'd be. I mean, did I really want to sit down and watch two and a half hours of a guy dying? Awesome... I finally put the movie in but started out by only giving it half my attention, I think kind of as a way to prevent myself from becoming overly attached to the character, but by the time an hour had gone by it had my full focus. It's done with much less of a flourish, ultimately, than 4 Months was, but it's no less perfectly crafted. Where are these Romanian directors finding all these amazing actors? They're all so good at seeming like their not acting--I don't mean just that they're good at playing their characters, but that they really don't even seem to be putting on a performance ever. Part of that, I'm sure, is a trick of directing. I wonder if it helps that I don't speak Romanian? Maybe they'd sound a bit more like amateur line readings if I spoke the language? Don't know.

I wound up thinking this movie is a lot like Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, both because of the obvious thematic similarity, but also in the way story not only worked in spite of the climax being the first thing you know about, but actually made use of that fact throughout the telling/showing of the story. Although, the movie seems nowhere near as semi-biblically fatalistic as GM's novel. We don't sense that some external power is pushing everything toward the climax of Mr. Lazarescu's death, rather that... I don't know how to finish that sentence. It's certainly a failure of a system, but it's also just the way minor everyday dramas can end up taking up yr whole existence and prevent you from really weighing properly the importance of what's happening around you.

The Deathless Devil

1. A brief attempt at justification for my thinking, while watching this, that it was kind of a triumph Jarry-an theater, at least according to Alfred Jarry's "Of the Futility of the 'Theatrical' in the Theatre," an essay I'd just read for my class:

Jarry:

The public only understood, or looked as if they understood, the tragedies and comedies of ancient Greece because they were based on universally known fables which, anyway, were explained over and over again in every play and, as often as not, hinted at by a character in the prologue.

Just like almost any comic book movie, this movie largely relies on the audience's familiarity with certain tropes, "universally known fables," in order for them to understand that characters. There is no explanation of the characters, they are simply: Scientist. Scientist's daughter. Hero. Mad scientist. Robot. Etc. You already know what's going to happen, essentially, before watching more than five minutes of the movie. The thrill is simply in watching it happen; not even in watching how it happens, since that's largely a given as well. Literally it is just about watching it happen.

Jarry:

The actor should use a mask to envelop his head, thus replacing it by the effigy of the CHARACTER. His mask should not follow the masks in the Greek theatre in betokening simply tears or laughter, but should indicate the nature of the character: the Miser, the Waverer, the covetous Man accumulating crimes....
[...]the eternal nature of the character is embodied in the mask.

Much like the last paragraph, this film accomplishes this largely because of the fact that it's so recognizably modeled after comic book tropes. Aside from Copperhead, of course, none of the characters wear a mask, but they may as well, really. Every character in the movie is given away completely by their face and their facial hair. The good men all have no facial hair, unless their old and distinguished in which case they may have a mustache. The bad guys all have facial hair. Etc. Likewise, nobody really has changing expressions. They sometimes convey emotions although they're all very basic emotions that are communicated more through the soundtrack and the way their faces are shot than by any actual facial contortions of the actors.

More Jarry:

They are simple expressions, and therefore universal.

This is the most Jarry-an aspect of the movie. There is not any attempt to convey actual human emotions, but rather every emotion portrayed is basic and universal. We do not have to wonder how a certain character might convey or deal with a certain emotion. They all convey emotions in exactly the same way, and, again, they're all conveyed mostly through sound cues and camera angles rather than through any actual "acting" on the part of the actors.

Well, enough of that. This movie is incredible. The soundtrack, for starters. All of the music seems to be stolen from mainstream American movies and thrown together without a lot of concern for consistency or anything, and mostly they are just clips of the most exciting bits of music, one leading directly into the next with no transitions or breaks. Add to that the exaggerated sound effects, especially from the fight scenes. The sounds for punching in this movie are amazing! They're just like this kind of explosion of random harsh-sounding noise, somewhat reminiscent of punch-sounds from other "better" movies, but in no way actually reminiscent of the sounds of real punching, and they sound like they've been turned up way to loud for the sound equipment, the sound of going all the way into the red. And really it is a result of trying to replicate an already faked sound but trying to outdo it.

And the movie just punches right along. There's so much plot in this movie, so many (completely expected) twists to go through, but it's only ninety minutes because the movie never bothers to slow down to give the actors a chance to try to actually portray characters or anything. It's just: exposition (always brief and concise), action, twist, expostion, action, twist, etc. I honestly don't remember ever seeing a single movie zip along as quickly and as excitingly as this movie. It was way more like an amusement park ride than, say, Cloverfield or even any slasher film, just because the movie isn't interest in engaging any emotions beyond excitement.

The "comic relief" guy who dresses up as Sherlock Holmes and feels like Dorf has just invaded the movie... the pointless sex scene... the Robot! Jesus, the Robot was incredible! Like, the ultimate slow crappy robot of all slow crappy robots, and everyone reacts to it as if it were the most horrible thing they've ever seen. No acknowledgment at all that it is slow and so immobile that it couldn't actually catch anyone. And their horror is so extreme!

And then there's the end, where the hero guy walks off balancing comic relief guy on his head! Just absolutely bizarre and nonsensical, but one of the most delightful things you'll ever see on film, possibly because of how bizarre and nonsensical it is.

I'm willing to acknowledge that a lot of what is so interesting about this movie is that it's a very rare example of an idiom that I've never been exposed to but that is very obviously a reaction to an idiom I very much am, so it inevitably seems fresh and exciting and new. But I don't care. This is flat-out one of the most exciting movies I've ever seen.

Invisible Invaders

1959 B-grade sci-fi flick in which invisible aliens from the Moon come to Earth to take it over by inhabiting the bodies of the dead, with a very 1959 sci-fi anti-nukes pro-world peace message.

In a word: amazing!

Best parts:

-After the alien-zombies contact Dr. Pemmer to tell him they're going to kill everyone on the planet unless they surrender and then he gets his daughter's "just friend" to go to the press with this story "This old retired scientist just told me that his dead friend's body walked into his living room and told him he was really a moonman inhabiting a corpse and demanded that we all surrender or they're gonna kill us all!" Instead of the press just ignoring him (like they don't get calls like that a hundred times a day?) every single paper apparently made huge front page stories making fun of the crazy old scientist. I wish the press really operated like that...
-The first disaster was a plane crash, which was portrayed via footage of a plane crashing directly into a gigantic 'X' painted on the side of a hill. Here's a hint: don't paint gigantic white 'X's on the sides of hills. Pilots are irresistibly driven to crash into them.
-Throughout the whole movie there's a voice-over narration which overexplained nearly everything thin the movie. Whenever something happened that wasn't re-explained by the narrator it was almost a surprise. Probably not exclusive to this movie, but quite charming nonetheless.
-The scientists decide that the aliens' only real weapon is their invisibility: that's why they have to take over our dead people and use our weapons against us. Um... seems to me that maybe the fact that they also have spaceships and are capable of "entering a dead body through the pores of the skin" would also count somewhat as weapons. But, then, I'm not a scientist...
-Lots of easy pickings, actually, of hilarious bits in this movie. My absolute favorite part, though, came when the intrepid quartet of humans had trapped an alien in the chamber (labelled above it in big white letters: "CHAMBER"), after the alien threatens them again saying they can't win and resistance is futile and all that, the army guy yells at him over the intercom, "Listen, friend! We're the ones who've trapped you!" I love that he called the alien "friend"! These things flew across space just to take us over and kill us all, but even that can't break the 1950s leading-man veneer of friendly speech! (Of course, GWBush has many times in the past referred to terrorists as "folks" so maybe this isn't that bizarre...)

Really, though, the best part of the whole movie, and this is not something I'm making fun of, was that at the end, when they finally figured out how to make the Invaders visible by shooting them with a sound gun, we're shown a couple of shots of them shooting the sound gun at animated corpses which then crumple to the ground and, after a few seconds, the translucent lumpy bodies of the aliens emerge from their bodies, stumble around a bit, and then collapse into little balls of mush. These shots were almost haunting, since what they actually looked like, aside from the context of the story, were little animations of men suddenly dying, their souls then emerging from their bodies but apparently weighed down by something. Unable to ascend or really go anywhere, the souls just collapse into a pile of glop. Wow.

The Thin Red Line

So after finding out the put the Siskel & Ebert archives on the internet and needing something to watch while I ate my Subway sandwich, I checked out their discussion of this movie. Siskel said it was the best war movie ever (probably pronounced "finest war film"), Ebert said it wasn't quite that though it was good (he actually said he thought Malick basically just remade Days of Heaven and set it a Guadalcanal, mistaking style for substance). I guess I agree with Siskel.

Unless you forget when this movie was released, it's hard not to compare it, at least a little bit, to Saving Private Ryan. Although I don't think it's possible that it could've been conceived as a response in any way to that film, it does essentially invert the structure of SPR: where Spielberg begins with an extended battle scene, then fills the middle of the film with a picaresque tale of the soldiers on their way to finding Matt Damon, bookended on the other side with another extended battle scene, Malick starts off with the non war stuff, as the main soldier guy isn't even with the rest of the army, having gone AWOL to hang out with natives on some SoPa island, who pretty obviously represent to him at this point the unspoiled natural world (although this is complicated a little bit by his voiceover ruminations about nature being at war with itself and stuff), then there's the leadup to the battle that focuses more on the characters than on the actual leadup to the battle, then we have the big battle for about an hour, then there's the rest of the movie after that when we get back to the soldiers just hanging out, talking about life and stuff. I guess there is again the little battle piece in which daydreamerguy gets killed, but it's really just a skirmish. Anyway, aside from the fact that neither Spielberg nor Malick are actually as interested in their characters as they want to be, Malick doesn't fall quite as deeply into the trap of making war seem pretty awesome despite trying to make an antiwar movie as Spielberg does. (Let me explain that a little bit more: Spielberg is just a little to good at making satisfying blockbusters for his own good with SPR. He wants the movie to show the brutality of war, which he does about as good a job as anyone has, but his instincts as a hugely popular filmmaker require him to also make the war scenes satisfying in the traditional way of making the battles a thrill ride. Malick almost completely avoids this: though it is fairly exciting when John Cusack steps in as action hero and leads the small group of soldiers to take out the bunker, for the most part the huge battle is actually the least interesting part of the film, and what's most interesting about the battle scene itself isn't really the battle but the way the characters act during the battle. It's actually possible while watching Malick's war film to wonder why these guys are even fighting this battle since it's pretty obviously not what any of them want to be doing and because there's an actual world that's been explored and portrayed around them that seems more important in lots of ways than the battle itself. By starting in the middle of a battle already in progress, Spielberg doesn't really allow for that type of questioning. And the final battle is also kind of inevitable, the way SPR's story is structured.) So Malick's film is ultimately more successful as an anti-war film that Spielberg's is. Whether or not it's actually better as just a plain movie, aside from it's message?

Well, I'm a little partial here. Malick makes movies that beautiful in ways that movie made by no one else (except Malick imitators) are, and The Thin Red Line might actually be his best one. But I should watch The New World again before I can really say that for sure. One thing I think this movie has over Days of Heaven is that it's just as beautiful a sound experience as it is a visual experience. Also, for fun, I think I'll read this book...

51 Birch Street

This movie is really, really good. Despite the fact that the music is kind of cloyingly bad, and it's very few interesting shots, and the way it's edited is quite often just as cloyingly sentimental as the music (wait a minute... what does cloyingly even mean? I totally am just using that word because I've seen it used in that exact way as a criticism for other things... whatever...), something about the movie works. Lots of the reviews discuss how incredible it is that the movie gets so much mileage of what is, really, a pretty average story. It's quite incredible that Block's parents stayed together for fifty years, but it's certainly not that out of the ordinary--at least not for people of their generation. Ultimately, I think what gives the movie it's profound emotional heft is that it really is a chronicle of Doug Block setting out to make a real connection with a person (his father) who's always been closed off to him--and succeeding rather remarkably. By the end of the movie, you can sense just how well he's managed to get to know both of his parents, and how he's managed to come to actually understand very deeply these two other human beings. It's not really the story of the marriage of his parents and how they made it work or even his father's largesse that is so satisfying, it's the very genuine connection the he makes with his father (and, I think, even though she's no longer alive, so certainly in a different way but still it's there, with his mother) that leaves you feeling you've just witnessed something pretty profound.

The Omega Man

Okay, so I couldn't help comparing this to "I am Legend." What is Hollywood better at doing than they were when this was made (or at least in this movie)? Well, lots of little things. "I Am Legend," or really any modern big-budget film, looks so much more slick than this movie did, and nearly every scene--heck, nearly every camera cut--is highly stimulating. There's so much slack in "The Omega Man." Even the scenes in "I Am Legend" with Smith hanging out with his dog and such don't have the feel of slack that there is in this older film.

Also, Heston didn't look insanely ripped like Smith does. I guess in contemporary movies the hero has to look so much more awesome than most people could ever be. Meanwhile, old Chuck Heston actually has the physique that you'd more expect out of a guy in his position.

Overall, I think the story in "The Omega Man" is more interesting than that of "I Am Legend," but ultimately they're both a little unsatisfying. I like "The Omega Man" better because it's way more interesting for the zombie/enemies to be some kind of weird Luddite cult than to just be CGI's screaming hugemouthed rage.

Duck, You Sucker

Really kind of awesome, actually.

The introduction of James Coburn's character has to rank near the top of the list of coolest entrances ever--so great that it almost made me forget about the twenty minutes preceding it until just now, with Rod Steiger acting perfectly disgusting but still ending up more likeable than than the rich snobby folks in their coach. The closeups of their mouths while they were chewing seemed especially refreshingly un-Leone to me, an intrustion of a Fellini-esque weirdness into the hard edge of Leone's usual style.

I think it's probably that exact excess of ideas that is the major difference between this movie and Leone's earlier trilogy. They were so focused and sharp--even TGTB&TU at nearly three hours never really meanders. This has the first half hour of pure Leone coolness and then it kind of wanders into a more... something else... I guess if there's a genre of small-guy-accidentally-getting-caught-up-in-historical-events, a la Forrest Gump and Zelig, it was kind of that for a while... the momentum of that first half hour probably doesn't quite hold up the rest of the movie, especially with the draggy flashbacks to Ireland. They were so long and weird that I have to assume part of the point of them was their length and their weirdness, but I'm not convinced that they were very necessary anyway.

I really have no idea what to think of the final flashback, where Coburn hands over his girlfriend to his future-traitor friend. It was already creepy how happy they all were and how into watching them make out Coburn's friend was, but what exactly the hand-off was there for is beyond me, unless as some kind of indication that the revolutionaries in Ireland were also sexually liberated or something, which is a point that doesn't really seem to have a place in the movie. But, whatever. I'll give it points for being weird and for being the logical conclusion of all the creepy shoulder-patting by Coburn's friend while they were kissing.

Can't forget to mention the shot when they finally get to Mesa Verde and the camera pans across the posters of the governer and then stops to settle on one poster for a while until suddenly a finger protrudes from the white space to the left of the governor's face and tears a straight strip across his eyes, and then from behind Rod Steiger's eye's move into the light and look out from behind the governor's face. No word for that but 'awesome.'

In a Lonely Place

Where this movie really got me was about fifteen minutes in (maybe less) when Bogart takes the coat check girl back to his place and she's blabbering on about the book, and the perspective switches for a few minutes so that she's suddenly talking directly at the camera. Except that I'm not completely sure that the camera was suddenly supposed to be in Bogart's head, because he wasn't in the same spot that the camera was when she started talking to it. Maybe it was still supposed to be a Bogey POV shot, but the effect was that she was talking directly to the audience. I just wasn't expecting it, and it completely sold the movie to me.

I do think I could watch Humphrey Bogart trade flirty barbs with his sassy costars for the rest of my life and never get bored of it. He just did it so well, and either he just got extremely lucky with his costars or he was able to draw it out of them, but I don't know that I've seen anybody else who could do it quite like that.

What was the deal with the masseuse lady, though, I wonder? Somehow she was supposed to be able to take care of any problems for Bogart's gf? It just seems weird that it was the masseuse who was supposed to be her savior...

INLAND EMPIRE

The ending of this movie, and I mean actually the closing credits of this movie, are one of the weirdest things Lynch has ever done in a movie. It's unclear at the end if Laura Dern is supposed to be Laura Dern or one or all of the characters she played in the movie, and then there's that chick from Mulholland Drive, the dark-haired chick, who wasn't even in this movie, blowing a kiss to Dern, who returns it. And then a bunch of girls who at first seem like they're the prostitutes from the movie because they're dressed like them but then you realize they're not all come out and dance and lipsink to a Nina Simone song. And it feels genuinely joyful and alive in a way that I don't think anything ever has in any Lynch movie before, even Straight Story. That is, it's obviously a staged moment, but it's also a staged real moment; it doesn't even pretend to have some symbolic referent that you might be able to get at to understand why it's there. It's just a bunch of women dancing to Nina Simone, plus Laura Dern and a few other people who are all pretending to or all actually are and probably a little bit of both enjoying it. I mean, the movie closed with a music video pretty much the way TMNT II did. That's fucking weird.

Mean Streets

It's kind of unbelievable how good this movie gets in the third act. Not that it's bad before then, but even though you know it's going to explode eventually, even though you see it coming through the whole movie, when everything goes to shit it's still shocking. And wow could Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro act back then. Did they just get sick of it or something?

Also, even though Scorsese's never really gone quite the way of those two, there's a real anger (or something, something trying to get out) that I'm not sure is present in his more recent string of really good movies. Maybe should see the Departed again, just for comparison purposes.

It could be that there's just something I find inherently more interesting and powerful when you can tell a person's trying to figure out there craft, that explosion of creative energy and power when they're just starting see what they can do and are maybe even a little in awe of it themselves, more interesting in that case than the type of controlled mastery Scorsese's been showing off lately.

I still don't think this is quite as good as Taxi Driver, though, but it certainly erases any sense that Taxi Driver's whole understated opacity was just all Scorsese really knew how to do, which I think I kind of thought. Though a lot of this movie is just about as opaque as Taxi Driver was, there's not a whole lot about that's understated, I'd say.

Plus, who knew that Wes Anderson cribbed his whole slo-mo film w/pop music thing from Scorsese? Some of the times Scorsese does it in this almost made me think I was watching a Wes Anderson movie for a second, but of course there's not even a hint of that storybook cuteness that Anderson somehow gets in every single frame. (A lot of that probably has to do with the framing of the shots.) I wonder if Scorsese did that a lot in his other movies? I don't remember seeing it anywhere else before...

Escape from New York

There were things about this movie that were much better than I expected. The cinematography, especially was really pretty, with lots of lens flares and stuff done very well--it seems more than in most movies.

Particularly, the whole opening sequence, with its long tracking establishing shots, with Carpenter's characteristic music. And then Kurt Russell shows up with his eye patch and kind of tears a hole in that whole thing. So it was all very pretty to look at, for pretty much the whole movie, but I can't help but think they totally fucked Russell's costume in this. Maybe it's because I just watched Death Proof so recently, but I know Russell is capable of seeming way more rugged and cool than he ever does in this movie, and it starts with how shitty is costume is. The eye patch just looks silly, and then, what, is he wearing that Under Armour stuff? And his nicely combed hair... Obviously, someone on the set knew how to do costuming, because Romero is fucking awesome--really creepy and cool looking, and he manages to do the creepy laugh thing right, so it actually is kind of creepy. Other than Romero, though, most of the costume stuff that is supposed to be awesome is pretty much not awesome.

What especially doesn't work is the script, which is so bad you'd almost think it must have been created just as a challenge for the actors--and a challenge that none of them are particularly up for, save Harry Dean Stanton. Even he obviously struggle to put something into the words, but at least a few times he manages to deliver effectively. Oh, yeah, and also Romero. Was someone else just in charge of everything involving Romero, or something?

I can't forget, either, the part when Russell (or Snake... oooohhh!! Snake!) floats into NY on his glider, the music playing is a Carpenterized La Cathédrale Engloutie! It was really pretty perfect actually. Which is exactly the embodiment of what is so weird about this movie. There are some things about it that are done so well, especially the cinematography, and basically all the scenes except for the fight scene when nobody's talking... But as soon as it comes to directing the actors or the action sets, it's just all so flat. Which is especially weird, because wasn't Carpenter supposed to be like an action director? Has the action in action movies really gotten so much better since 1981?

Actually, the establishing shots and all the longer takes and everything made me think, once again, that film vocabulary, as far as how you film a scene and set up the players and everything, was significantly better in the late seventies and into the very early eighties than it is now. Not that I want to be one of those people who's always complaining about all the quick cuts in movies now or anything, but they are a technique that is overused, for sure. It's so much more compelling when things are captured in one shot, generally, than a bunch of cuts. Specifically, here, when Snake and Brain and the Prez and Maggie (?) all come out of the room where the President was being held, after killing Romero, they run across a fairly wide shot, and as the camera pans to follow them, the shot is interrupted by a guy in the foreground shadows, who watches them run off. I think in most contemporary movies that would've been accomplished with a cut, but there's something so much more interesting about doing it the way they did it here, I think.

Heart of Glass

This movie is pretty much a failure. It's an interesting failure, but a failure. There's just not a whole lot that really works.

I somehow had forgotten that this was the movie where he used hypnotized actors the whole time, and I guess that adds a bit of interest to the film, but I'm glad that I was able to watch it w/o that knowledge--although I did find myself thinking a few times, "Why is everyone acting like zombies?" There are whole sections where the actors just stand there and proclaim their lines, and I'm not sure it would've made much difference had they been hypnotized or instructed to act hypnotized.

What I mainly thought while watching it was, "Here's a bit of proof that it really is hard to do a film like Lynch and get it right."

It seems like Herzog is at his best when he creates a situation in which he's inherently out of control and films the results. Even in Fitzcarraldo, for which he got the reputation of being a maniacal control freak, a lot of the things that are most interesting are the result of the difficulties involved in undertaking such an insane project, so there's so much that is just beyond his control, no matter what he does. Here, though, it seems like Herzog is in control of nearly every action, and nothing is quite as interesting, somehow.

The only part that really worked the way it was intended was the final bit about the two islands with the narration by the prophet guy. Herzog is just great at using long tracking shots of beautiful extreme landscapes with perfect music and sounds overlayed. The island was breathtaking, and the long shot all the way around with the lone figure standing on the precipice is pure Herzog at his best--the type of thing that I want to find a word for, something better than "Herzogian." Also, the shot from the inside of the little boat that they're rowing out to see was pretty incredible, followed by one of Herzog's many long takes of flocks of birds, another thing that he captures like virtually no one else.

There were a few other mildly interesting bits, but overall it felt like a lot of flailing around trying to find something interesting. Which is still interesting, and you have to give him credit for really trying to create something unique. But it's just never really interesting as a finished project. That's not a criticism; it's a description.

Also, the opening shots were very good. He'd already figured out how to do all that at this point in his career. The mist cascading over the wooded hills; the cattle idly chewing away at the grass in the foggy morning; and all those broad landscape shots that I think were maybe being filmed as a projection onto heavy cloth? Pure Herzogian goodness.

Detour

The bad transfer is almost like an extra stylistic effect, making the story seem even more murky than as it was originally filmed--and it was plenty murky. Neal's Roberts probably isn't supposed to be but comes off as kind of deranged. One minute he's a sullen pushover, but then he flies off the handle at slight provocation. The strangest shift was probably at the beginning of the flashback, when he gets sore that his dame is moving to LA and promised not to speak to her ever again. Next thing, he's pounding away at the piano in his club without a band, playing really brilliantly except he keeps shifting to a new song every twenty seconds or so. That is something that didn't seem intentional, although I'd believe it was. It makes the whole thing seem just a little bit more like a memory--a much more interesting way of accomplishing that than the standard fog flying around everywhere through these early scenes.

Further evidence for the total subjectivity of the flashback: his gf, once she's out in LA, apparently just sits there waiting by the phone with a blank hopeful expression on her face. Roberts apparently only remembers his side of the conversation, as he doesn't leave time for her to respond to any of the questions he asks. There's even a cut to her open face while he just rambles right on through her lines. Maybe he was on speed? It's the only time he ever appears happy in the film, and it seems like crazy happiness, not just being really happy about anything. Also, I think he just got up in the middle of his shift playing the piano and left the club to make his manic phone call.

Best shot in the whole film is Ann Savage walking toward the car after Roberts says he'll give her a lift. It's held just a little longer than it needs to be for the effect of just pushing the plot along, and it's really kind of a beautiful shot, with Savage's road-weary face and hair and her sure stride. The length of the shot turns it into something far prettier than it was intended to be, and it's kind of funny that it was probably basically an editing blunder, because I don't know if the vocabulary for that type of shot quite existed yet at the time this was made. But it's pure film, right there.

Then, later, in the car, with Vera sitting in the passenger seat exactly as Haskell had when he died, and Roberts is talking about that very fact, and suddenly Vera's eyes are open! Totally creepy! I didn't see her eyes open or anything, and she doesn't move her head or body at all which just made it extra scary. Her eyes are just suddenly open and she's staring at him, and he doesn't notice at first so he just stares out ahead of the car and rambles on in the voiceover. Then, Bam! Closeup of Vera screeching, "What have you done with the body!" Really brilliant!

Ann Savage really does steal the movie. She seems to be the only one in the show who can actually act, and the way she screeches half her lines outshrews even Liz Taylor, but with barely even a breath she's sometimes all of a sudden very sexy. It's amazing how she goes from repulsive to sexy so quickly, often without the help even of changed camera angles or anything. But you never really feel anything about her but fear.

Really funny but kind of cheap how Roberts lectures Vera on the way to the used car guy about how she should let him do all the talking, but when they get there he doesn't say a word. And then in the voiceover he talks about "we haggled" for the right price, but it still seems like he probably didn't speak.

Also it was especially creepy that Vera seemed the most purely attractive and sexy when she was dead. She was shot to look beautiful at that point, even. Instead of showing what would have been a truly gruesome picture, most likely, at that point she becomes a true femme fatale.

Deep Red

I read in a Reel.com review of Blowup that Dario Argento, who was a film critic at the time of Blowup, was upset by the invasion of the two teenage girls while David Hemmings is assembling the narrative of his photographs. He apparently thought it was indicative of Antonioni's inability to keep the plot moving. Which really seems to me like it was kind of the point of that scene, but whatever. The Reel.com review said something about Deep Red, which also stars David Hemmings, being Argento's response or corrective to Blowup. I think that negatively influenced my viewing of the film at first. I kept looking for parallels, or things that might seem to be directed at Blowup. Frankly, if this was meant to in some way one-up Blowup, it's a complete failure.

There are a lot of weird things in the movie, though. The Blue Bar: was it supposed to look like that famous painting of the Hollywood bar at night, the one with Marilyn Monroe and James Dean? I don't know enough about that painting, but the bar looked so much like it that it seems like the painting must either have been painted of the exact bar used in the film, or it was meant to look like that. I couldn't figure out what the point of the reference was there, though.

About the only thing that really seemed like a nod at all to Blowup was the way David Hemmings sees for just one second the murder-lady in the window when he walks into psychic-lady's house, but Argento lets it go by quickly and Hemmings is never really sure what he saw until the very end. That was easily the best thing about the movie, even though Argento almost ruined it with the flashback when Hemmings is investigating the apartment again. The flashback completely eliminated the question mark in the viewer's mind about what Hemmings saw.

The parts that were meant to be scary really worked, unless the violence was supposed to be scary. Especially the weird little robot thing that floats toward the professor before he gets killed. It was one of the most legitimately creepy things I've seen in a movie, especially because it seemed completely out of place. And then when it turns out not to be supernatural but to be a robot thing, well, that's not an explanation of why it's there. Also, the scene when David Hemmings sets the flashlight on the table and then hacks his way into the walled-in room, with the darkness behind the hole because of how bright the light immediately on this side of the hole is, was really creepy. Even the pulled back shot of Hemmings looking into the room with rotted corpse in the middle of his flashlight light was creepy.

At least in this movie, Argento obviously had some fascination with random things from the world being dangerous. Hemmings' little scare on the outside of the old house, when the facade starts crumbling beneath him was the first instance I can think of it, and it really was bad. It just seemed like random suspense for no reason, and the fact that it was because Hemmings had just stupidly decided to scale the side of the building without a ladder or anything made it even dumber. I mean, it was kind of funny, but completely out of the place for the movie. Then Carlo gets hooked by a passing garbage truck, is dragged through the streets until he's nearly dead, and has his head smooshed by a random passing car. All of which was actually pretty funny, I thought, but I wasn't sure that Argento meant it to be for laughs. And the final scene with murder-lady, Carlo's mom, who gets her necklace caught in the elevator which then beheads her. So anticlimactic from a plot point of view. And, really, the shot of her head being severed was kind of hilarious.

The murder scenes were easily the most compelling scenes in the movie, which was kind of the opposite of Belly of the Black Tarantula, in which the scenes with the investigator and his wife were most enjoyable to watch. The domestic scenes in this between Hemmings and reporter-chick were not especially compelling. There was this weird kind of slapstick thing going on with reporter-chick's car, and their conversations about chauvinism and feminism were really stupid. And the arm-wrestling scene? It's possible that was in there to make you think reporter-chick might be the killer, since she was demonstrating her strength. But overall, their romance seemed to come out of nowhere and Argento either didn't care enough to bother with it or really had no idea how to develop that kind of thing. It as interesting to the extent that reporter-chick seemed to be invading from some other movie every time she was on-screen. Then Argento seems to pretty much forget about her after she gets stabbed. Clearly, the relationship between Hemmings and reporter-chick was not as important as the amount of screen time it got.

Almost forgot: the conversation between Hemmings and Carlo about what Hemmings saw also seemed to in some way be a nod to Blowup. Was having it come out of Carlo's drunk ass meant to be mocking Blowup pretensions? It was all one shot, with Hemmings on the far left and Carlo on the far right, and most of the middle of the shot taken up by the statue of some reclining god. Really, it was almost a good shot. I wonder now if knowing who that god was would have added anything to it?

The other weirdest shot: Hemmings and reporter-chick walking down the hallway of the school. They kept looking at each other in a way that seemed like it was being kind of pointed out, especially reporter-chick, but it was unclear what the significance of it was. I actually really liked that. It was intriguing and not confusing in a bad way.

Blow Up

(with commentary)

For some reason, I was kind of excited when I saw there was audio commentary with auther Peter Brunette on the Netflix DVD I have, even though I have no idea who Peter Brunette is. I just tried watching it, but I could only make it about a third of the way through. I had to stop when Peter said, "presumably the line about queers and poodles wouldn't have made it into the script these days." Come on. Why not? Because he finds the line offensive, or because he assumes that everyone would find the line too offensive, or because he thinks everyone's more enlightened these days, or because he thinks the PC police would have stopped it? I mean, I assume this guy's supposed to be some kind of film historian or something, but does he watch any movies that actually come out these days? Of all the things in this movie that wouldn't make into a "Hollywood" film these days, why choose that to single out? Especially when I don't think there'd really be much fuss about the line anyway. What world does Peter Brunette live in?

The other problem with the commentary was just the general problem that many movie commentaries seem to have, which is that he kept talking about the film in such a way to avoid "spoilers," but why? Who is going to watch the movie for the first time with the commentary on? I think if you're doing a commentary, you can safely assume that anyone who listens to the commentary has already seen the movie at least once. So talk about the movie that way.

Peter Brunette, although he seems like a pleasant and intelligent enough guy, fell back too many times on his little critical tricks. Also, although he paid lip service to the complexity of the presentation of photog guy, he seemed incapable himself of anything but disgust for him. Even ordinary things like how he flips the camera from one hand to another, Brunette couldn't point out how suave it was without the word "suave" having some pretty obvious disgust quotes around it. Also, the fact that the junk shop leaves him utterly speechless is a little disappointing. He can't seem to talk about it because he doesn't know what it "means," because it doesn't fit into any of his critical tricks. Although I'm not saying this is the ultimate thing about the junk shop scene, it seems to me like at least one worthwhile conjecture is that photog guy is there because he thinks junk is interesting. Maybe Brunette couldn't offer that or another opinion because there wasn't anything easily condemnable about his interest in the junk shop? Who knows... Actually, it seemed to me like a simple case of not being able to offer any idea about the junk shop because he couldn't think of anything "profound" about it.

I really was hoping for an interesting commentary, though. Pretty much everything Brunette said about the film was obvious, surface-level criticism. "He's setting up a binary between the merry-makers and the poor people." Not only is that obvious, but it doesn't really expand on any of the oddness of the merry-makers. Or the fact that if that's all it is, it's a completely unbalanced binary, because the merry-makers veer so close to the completely surreal that the almost seem like they have to have some kind of rhetorical weight, whereas the poor people who come immediately after do not seem at all surreal. So while there's certainly an intentional juxtaposition of the merry-makers to the dour faces of the poor, they can't simply be a binary; they're not equivalent enough.

I worry, though, that by being so dismissive of Brunette but so emphatically in love with the movie that I'm setting Antonioni up to be "the master" just as much as Brunette so nauseatingly does in his commentary. Well... The film is a truly singular example of a spectacular film. Brunette's commentary is mediocre commentary. Nothing too disturbing about that formulation, I think. Or I want to think right now.

Another annoying thing Brunette did: all that talk about the camera being this "cold, medal" thing that was "mediating" between photog guy and the supermodel, or some such nonsense. Now, it is interesting that photog guy does seem to get some kind of emotional distance from reality through his camera, but that's more a psychological thing that's specific to him; there's nothing less real about taking a picture of something than just looking at that thing. Yes, it changes the way you're interacting with that thing, and just as with photog guy here it is possible for a person with a camera to use the camera for some kind of emotional distance from what they're photographing, but that's a psych thing, not an ideological thing. But simply taking a picture of something does not make your experience of that thing somehow less authentic. It merely is another aspect of your experience. The garbage Brunette spewed about the "cold, medal" camera was just lazy falling back on crit speak.