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VEILED THREATS by Phil Mershon
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This Film is Not Yet Rated
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The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
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W. C. Fields and Me
Hitler: The Last Ten Days
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
The Executioner's Song
Paul McCartney Really is Dead
Erik the Viking
Sometimes They Come Back
A Bullet for Pretty Boy
If you took the Velvet Underground, mixed them with the Marquis de Sade, laced them with Lord Byron, stirred in some Idi Amin, blended it up with the more closeted aspects of 19th century English bourgeois sophistication and added the party cast from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, you still would not approximate the extreme decadence of Adolf Hitler and company during their last hurrah in the infamous bunker just before the Third Reich was crushed by the Allies. Strangled up inside due to massive doses of amphetamines and hose cement, the Fuhrer and his party of Captain Hoffman, General Krebs, Hanna Reitsch, Eva Braun, Josef Goebbels, Martin Bormann and the others all coalesced in a suicide party of degenerate, absurd, psychotic, racist, delusional, cruel and jolly activities that sharply contrasted with the holocaust and world war raging on above them.
The 1973 film, Hitler: The Last Ten Days, is about this time in the bunker with Adolf, although we are given the occasional relief from the claustrophobic enclave with brief shots of the masses shouting "Zeig Heil!" and with the uninterred bodies of the Reich's millions of victims and as such it would seem that this was an important movie to be made as well as to view.
Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Alec Guinness gives us an Adolf Hitler with all the deranged intensity we've come to expect and Simon Ward does fine as Captain Hoffman, the man whose notes became the book that became the Ennio De Concini screenplay. Diane Cilenta (aka Mrs. Sean Connery) scares the hell out of us as Hanna Reitsch and Doris Kunstmann as Eva Braun is satisfactorily pathetic. We get a strong sense of the humored confusion these people exercise as Hitler barks out one psychotic order after another and at one point even admits that he knew Germany was defeated two years before it actually happened. No, the acting is fine, the staging is adequate, the claustrophobia works, the horror of the evil comes across as intended.
The problem with De Concini's movie--he also directed--is that there is no character development and hence the decomposition of those characters becomes ultimately meaningless.
I'm going to just sit here patiently until you come up with what's bothering you about that last sentence. Take your time.
Aha! It was Hitler! you scream. We all know about him so there wasn't any need for character development and besides the movie was almost two hours long as it was.
Actually this film was sorely in need of character development because whether or not one possesses the historical knowledge to grasp the complexities of these people, because this really is a movie and because the audience cannot help but be aware of that--as opposed to something that is happening in "real time," stock footage of Hitler's victims is somehow inadequate to forming an appreciation for the magnitude of the man's degeneracy.
Here was a man who took corporate backing, who came to power under the auspices of democracy, and who was nothing more or less than a failed artist of moderate intelligence, and he made himself into the most profligate mass murderer of all time. Here was a man who embraced cruelty for its own sake, a man many thought of as a messiah, and a man whose name is synonymous with evil, and his devolution during the last ten days of his life has no historic context whatsoever because we are given no motivation for the actions of the Soviets and the Americans, just as we cannot understand the lust Hitler's admirers had for him.
Whether through the use of flashbacks, dream sequences or masturbatory fantasies, this film needs some means of establishing who these people were so that we can properly despise them for what they have become. After all, if "I am he as you are he as you are me" really is true--as I believe it is--then the so-called defeat of the Axis forces by the Allies led inevitably to the transmogrifying of the Allies into the Axis, a theme frequent readers of Philropost have endured ad infinitum. It therefore behooves us all to understand the nature of this evil in order to diagnose and remove it from our own systems, both personal and public.
What this movie does get right, however, is our sense of disgust at the unimaginable hypocrisy of these German bastards. We very much get it when, near the end, Hitler marries Braun and the cleric who performs the cloistered ceremony is required by German law to ask Hitler if his ancestry is pure and if he has contracted any social diseases. Here is a bunker full of people who dismissed as bourgeois--as in "petty" bourgeois--notions of marriage and other middle class conventions giving into those demands once it is apparent to even the dumbest among them that the end is near. In other words, certain aspects of this film are very effective despite the entirety of the movie being a failure due to the lack of dimensions to the characters. And that's too bad because this is exactly the kind of subject the our contemporary society--with its plethora of parasites ranging from Gingrich to Koch to Romney to Paul and the fetus-worshipping Santorum all vying to be the next Adolf in the sense of luring corporate backers and then taking them over--needs to learn about so we can fathom the present stench of evil the Newts and Mitts spew forth. Hitler: The Last Ten Days should have been that film. That it was not opens the opportunity for you to make your own.
With all the well-deserved brouhaha about the auteur director in the early 1970s, some of the people often overlooked in the cinematic process of this period are those to whom a previous generation turned for their inspiration: the players. This occasional oversight is endemic, of course, because it was with the enlightenment of this period that the classical attributes of an actor pulled back in favor of the ability to be interesting instead. Two distinctions in particular came to a head, one becoming quite clear, the other remarkably blurred.
Perhaps the clearest distinction in the enlightenment that Hollywood believed had engulfed the ticketed audience was that between actors and movie stars. The distinction that with some grace thankfully blurred was between actors and actresses.
As in previous years, all poodles were dogs, yet not all dogs were poodles. A movie star was no longer by necessity considered to be an actor, although the overlap did still occur. But if it were classic good looks that were sought, audiences quickly learned to adjust their dials as to exactly what was beautiful. And what was interesting is what became the new standard: Bruce Dern, Jack Nicholson, Paul Sorveno, Stacey Keach, Dustin Hoffman, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Alan Arkin, Peter Boyle, Elliott Gould, John Cazale, Ned Beatty, Roscoe Lee Browne, Gene Hackman, Bernie Casey, Jack Lemmon, Richard Pryor, Woody Allen and John Belushi could all hold their own against the pretty boy actors such as Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Melvin Van Peebles, Jeff Bridges, William Devane and Warren Beatty, to name the first ones to come to mind. Even these latter pretty-boys held an interest beyond their good looks because they did and said things that film stars of an earlier time did not, except maybe Robert Mitchum, who had the respectability of getting busted for grass.
Just as fascinating was the blur between men and women, one which resulted, at least for a while, in both genders being thought of as actors. This didn't happened because of a political movement. This happened because the women involved worked very, very hard to achieve parity. The political movement may have given this hard work a name. The hard work is what accomplished it.
Some of the greatest women actors who made their initial dance into the whirlwind of brilliance in the 1970s were Jane Fonda (Klute), Liza Minnelli (Cabaret), Mia Bendixsen (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), Faye Dunaway (Network), Sally Field (Norma Rae), Ali MacGraw (The Getaway), Julie Christie (Shampoo), Diana Ross (Lady Sings the Blues), Diahann Carroll, Margaux Hemingway, Jill Clayburgh, Goldie Hawn, Isabelle Adjani, Brooke Shields (Pretty Baby), Shelley Duvall (Brewtser McCloud), Linda Blair, Glenda Jackson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jodie Foster (Taxi Driver), Tatum O'Neal (Paper Moon), Pam Grier (Coffy), Meryl Streep, Gena Rowlands, Lily Tomlin (The Late Show), Candice Bergen, Ellen Burstyn, Senta Bergerm Jenny Agutter, Karen Black (Five Easy Pieces), Dyan Cannon, Carole Kane (The Last Detail), Susan Sarandon, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton (The Godfather) and, yes, at long last, Eileen Brennan.
Mother of God, you talk about hard working! Eileen Brennan is the hardest working woman in show business and has been such since her short-lived stint on TV's "Laugh-In" back in 1968. Some of you will recognize her from the recruitment film Private Benjamin (she played Captain Lewis), while others may know her work as Zandra from the TV series "Will and Grace." I guarantee you know her from somewhere, be it The Sting, Reckless, Texasville, Rented Lips, Sticky Fingers, or the more than one hundred television appearances she has made.
One of her best performances was a brief one in a 1973 film called Scarecrow. As was common in those days, she played an attractive, feisty woman of some complexity and, as was also common, she played against a pair of guys who overshadowed her only because their talent was so magnificent, certainly due to no lack of ability on the part of Brennan herself. She simply made the error of being a great actor in a film with a pair of young geniuses, in this case Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. Chances are you are less familiar with Scarecrow than you are with Eileen. I hope that by the end of this piece, you will be motivated to watch for both.
Scarecrow is the story of two men who are down but not quite out. Max, played by Hackman, is fresh out of the joint on a six year stretch. Lionel (Pacino) is fresh out of the Navy where he spent the last five years. The world has changed in their absence and because of that Max has developed a plan to which he is determined not to waver. Lionel, on the other hand, wants to make people laugh. He is a good-natured clown and watching the man prove that is one of the treats of this movie, as is Hackman's character's eventual transformation. This movie is about the beauty of the road, the horrible price exacted by vengeance, the stupidity and absolute necessity of being tough, and it is also an opportunity to watch some of the most exciting actors of all time strut their stuff. Eileen Brennan is only on camera here for a few brief minutes. I guarantee you won't forget her.
American Graffiti is the film that made the reputation of George Lucas. The film's narrative style of sliding from one scene into the next with recurring images and concepts loosely uniting the vignetted story of one night in Modesto--one night before the world of the teenager seeps into that of the adult--has never been done better. The film also went a long way towards dispelling the idiotic notion that the kids of pre-JFK assassination American were naive and simple-mindedly idealistic when what they really wanted were the same things kids have always wanted: the get messed up, to get laid, and to drive around cruising all night. Oh, and some of us wanted to stay alive. If that's idealistic, then go fuck a tree.
What's really most memorable about the movie is the thoroughly brilliant soundtrack selection, some of the tunes being total crap and the majority being perfectly suited for the 1962 night the film purports to recreate. This is a soundtrack in the most essential sense of the term because the music does not merely accompany the movie; it is interwoven into the movie, which is the only way to endure a bit of dross like "16 Candles" right alongside a genuine treasure such as "Little Runaway."
So it's a beautiful film, it gets the details exactly right, it's edited so that we never get tired of the characters or their interactions, the music is great, and the tragic elements are not only explicit, they are even implied. Oh, and the acting was incredible, featuring as it did the best work ever of Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, as well as some first-rate work by Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfus. So what's not to love?
The film was in many ways a turning point. By 1971, two years before this film's release, everyone in Hollywood with any awareness at all recognized that the three big up and coming dudes in movie work were Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Just as a new band of actors had taken over the entertainment industry and just as new ways of financing and distributing films was coming down, so was the new style of director. Lucas took three-quarters of a million dollars of Coppola's money and made a film that grossed more than 115 million. That's a hell of a return. That type of return doesn't happen today, despite all the Avatars, Batmen, and Harry Palmed Pottery flicks. So, again, what's the problem?
Lucas used the money from American Graffiti to help finance Star Wars, which a lot of people have liked, even though this writer has stubbornly made a point of never having watched either the original or any of the follow-up product. But, hey, science fiction benefited from Lucas and that's a good thing, yes?
Well, yes, of course. My only problem with any of this stuff is that here's George Lucas, a talented guy by any standards, one with tremendous vision and a dedication to making films that change people's lives. And how did he go about this? He went about this by taking the best inspiration from the experimental and daring directors of his time and commercializing those elements while adding fresh ideas of his own and channeling the whole thing through a prism that insisted that MOVIES THAT THREATEN TO ROCK THE SOCIAL SYSTEM SHOULD NOT BE MADE. Lucas has said that he was tired of movies that made Americans feel guilty. Okay. There's certainly no national guilt in Graffiti, no more than in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Escapism has its place and there's nothing specifically inappropriate about it, as any fan of "Seinfeld" will tell you. However, within the context of what was going on around him, it would have been downright inspirational if both Lucas and Spielberg had directed their indisputable brilliance into something a tad more worthy than CARS, for God's sake!
What I'm actually saying here is a little unfair since I've always insisted that it is wrong to criticize an artist for failing to do something that he didn't set out to do. At the same time, I feel completely justified in criticizing Lucas for what he set out to do. His movies suffer, when they suffer at all, from being safe. There is nothing controversial about American Graffiti. Hell, even a curmudgeon such as myself praises the fucking thing, even though it's less social relevant than a film Pauline Kael properly referred to as a "fascist masterpiece," that film being Dirty Harry, a movie that at least had the courage of its convictions, twisted convictions that they were. Eastwood's character co-opted the anti-hero, gave him a badge and made him the strong man amid a sea of twinkies. Lucas took a time-piece where American kids were being fattened up for the slaughter and made it no more significant than a drag race.
Where were you in '62? was the movie's tagline. Me, I was four years old. But here's what was really happening.
The Navy SEALS came into existence.
Fidel Castro was kicked out of the Catholic church.
A military coup rocks the Dominican Republic.
Francis Gary Powers is released from Russia.
The first K-Mart store opens, as does the first Wal-Mart.
Project Mercury orbits the earth.
Eichmann is hanged.
Three men escape from Alcatraz.
The SDS formulate the Port Huron Statement.
Mandatory school prayer is properly banned.
Marilyn Monroe dies.
James Meredith becomes the first black student to enter the University of Mississippi.
We have the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Linus Pauling won the Nobel Peace Prize.
These things are all pretty important, important enough that even a messed-up kid with triple hormones cruising around in his hot rod in Modesto might even be aware of some of them. The deepest thought these kids have is whether or not surf music will catch on.
In the final analysis, Lucas' film remains more quaint than the period of time he sought to encapsulate.
Michelangelo Antonioni made so many outstanding films, it's a pity Zabriskie Point isn't one of them. Before we get too far into this conversation, I should admit that many people love this film and those who do will probably dislike me very much for saying that it dry heaves Saltines. The good news is that as with a lot of movies that don't quite accomplish all to which they aspire, Zabriskie Point is an occasionally enjoyable failure and it still stands heads and eyebrows above the underwhelming majority of stupid love stories popular in that year of 1970, including the most popular turd-licker love story of all time, Love Story.
The first clue that this movie may not be Antonioni's master work is the soundtrack. The opening credits terrified me by announcing music from The Grateful Dead as well as from Pink Floyd, two reasons to leave the theatre if you have anything at all pressing to do. On the other hand, a lot of people find drugged-out hippie music to be exactly what they want after a long day of committing home foreclosures and initiating hostile takeovers, so perhaps I should try to keep an open mind.
I will admit the cinematography is superb, possibly the best aspect (ratio) of the film, especially if you favor fly-along shots of airplanes approaching the top of 1952 Buicks, which I do and so should everyone. The photography is so good that I am not bothered in the least that the movie has no conventional plot. Conventional plots are so. . .well. . . conventional. After all, were it not for the photography in this movie, we would have no choice but to rely on the meager story-line, wherein we find that George cannot be a revolutionary because he is an assassin instead (probably--we never know this for certain), just as mercenaries cannot be fascists. Both assassins and mercenaries work best alone, rendering whatever political persuasion they may favor to be largely beside the point. Because he cannot be a revolutionary, he buys a gun and maybe shoots a police officer. What he does do is steal a small plane and take off after Daria, one of the best reasons to shoplift an airplane that I have ever seen. (In fact, it is the third most popular all-time reason. Number One is: Go to Cuba. Number two is: Leave Cuba. Number three is: Take off after Daria.)
Daria is pretty and George is handsome and politics is so. . .well. . .political. Student activism permeates the first half of Zabriskie Point, to the extent that the discussions in which the globs of young folk engage seem all too real for their inability to persuade. One of the most frustrating aspects of 1960s radicalism was the occasional dip into party ideology and this film misses not one cliche, even if the lines are delivered as tired gospel.
"How you get there depends on where you're at." So reads the movie's theatrical tagline. Whaddya want? Good grammar or good movies? Either one would be fine.
The final uplifting feature of this movie is, ironically, that it is actually about something, whereas so many love stories are about love, which is probably the most uninteresting type of film. Zabriskie Point uses love as a metaphor for flying, and vice versa, what with 1970 being a great year for metaphors of this type, Brewster McCloud using sex in the same exact way, only funnier.
It's up to you. Either you favor Roger Waters and Jerry Garcia making mood music for moderns or you have better things to do, such as thinking. But those airplane shots will still reimburse you for the cost of the DVD or download.
This is the history: The Confession (1970, Costa-Gavras) is the true story of Artur London, a loyal Communist who served with the International Brigade in Spain and with the Communist anti-Nazi underground in France, and who suffered a long term in a Nazi concentration camp. In 1949, Mr. London returned to his native Czechoslovakia from France to become Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the Communist Government of President Klement Gottwald. Two years later, along with thirteen other leading Czech Communists (eleven of whom were Jewish), Mr. London was arrested for treason and espionage and found guilty in what became known as the Slansky trial. This trial, named for the secretary general of the Czech Communist Party, who was also a defendant, was one of the last major wheezes of the Stalinist purges that began with the Moscow trials in the 1930s. All of the Slansky defendants were found guilty and all but three, including Mr. London, were executed. Mr. London lived not only to see the defendants rehabilitated and to write his book but also to return to Czechoslovakia on the day in August, 1968, when Soviet troops invaded his country to end the short Czech spring.
Yep, that is the history. Yet as we see in this beautiful and horrifying film, truth is a lie. Only a lie can set you free. Or so it was in the post-Stalinist trials and purges that swept through the Soviet bloc throughout the years of Khrushchev and his reign of impotence. London, played with such dignity by Yves Montand, is broken down one layer at a time, forced to admit to objective facts while insisting that subjective truths also matter.
Q. You associated with the traitor Smith in 1949?
A. Yes, but I did not know he was a traitor until 1952.
Q. Are you denying that Smith was a traitor?
A. No. I am--
Q. We will deal with the subjective elements later. First, you must memorize your confession. Doctor, bring in the sunlamps. We must prepare this man for trial.
What happened in Czechoslovakia is one of the reasons that some people have abandoned politics altogether. Economics is dependent upon politics for its implementation. Politics is religion and religion is madness. Faith guarantees the freedom of the bull whip. You may go to sleep. What is your number? Louder! Assume the position. Guards! Only your confession can save you. Do you believe what your wife says in this letter? Has this man been bathed in twenty-one months?
The Confession is not Costa-Gavras' most popular film. That would probably be Amen, Missing, or Z, any of which are powerful testaments against authoritarian forces. However, The Confession remains vital in the way it makes no compromise to an uninformed, uninvolved public. One needn't be a student of post-WWII Soviet or Eastern European history in order to get this. One need not have memorized every word of Orwell's novel to find a similarity in the absurd processes used to extract falsehoods that everyone from the interrogators to the members of the tribunal to the general public understood to be falsehoods.
The goal here is not to lead people to a rejection of politics based in apathy. It is rather to tell Artur London's story with some degree of accuracy and to convey the permeating sense of dread that flooded those awful times just as they did, it must be admitted, at other times in our collective history, whether in the days following the attacks of September 11, 2001, or in the days following the revelations of Abu Ghraib. Costa-Gavras does not flinch. The psychologically overlapping flashbacks that let us in on London's "rehabilitation" spoils nothing. On the contrary, the more we learn of his ultimate fate, the more horrified we are at what happens to him in the process of getting there. The colors are bleak, the staging stark, and the acting unbearable in its verisimilitude, or at least its relation to what we are unable to dispute as true. A rose dipped in liquid nitrogen remains a rose, at least right up until it shatters like glass. This film is the liquid nitrogen. Our sensibilities are the rose.
The estimable William Friedkin directed and Mart Crowley wrote the screenplay for The Boys in the Band, the first overtly gay film with a budget in the seven figures. The film starts out funny and uncomfortable, just like the party it is superficially staged around. The plot turns bitter once a nasty telephone game is introduced to the birthday shenanigans and honesty gets put on the chopping block.
Anyone threatened by the campy artifice enacted by some gay men will become positively apoplectic from watching these wild characters and other viewers may find themselves just as jarred as the character Michael is when the party is punctuated by the presumably straight Alan, a friend from college. The dialogue, or the chatter, or the bright badinage, is often brilliant and anyone who cringes just because of the sexual orientation of the people in the film is denying himself/herself one hell of a good ride through the uncanny realism of a culture that has not changed all that much since its release in 1970.
And that's pretty interesting because, as with the previous film--The Magic Christian--and for a completely different set of reasons, this film wouldn't stand much of a chance of being made today, although people would love it if it were. You see, the film is smart, something which is not true of all Friedkin product, the credit for which going to screenwriter Crowley. No, you couldn't make this film now because of studio fear that people wouldn't want to see it or that psycho-zealots would boycott or from their own terror at the prospects of being linked to such a film. This film in fact is so gay that most religious zealots would refuse to boycott it just because they would fear being linked, if only in opposition. This is not La Cage aux Folles. This is an angry movie that uses humor as a whip.
The only problem with the film or the off Broadway play from which the entire cast was drawn is in the self-deprecating nature of the dialogue. When I was in college, a lot of my friends were gay, or said they were gay, or wished they were gay, and so I found myself at the occasional party when I was one of very few straights and was often treated as if I fit in, which was actually a compliment to me, so I didn't mind. Well, one thing and another and alcohol would pour and people would become more loose in their speech and I would hear people referring to themselves or to one another as bitch, faggot, queen, and the like. At first I was surprised to hear lines like "Oh, you've had worse things than that in your mouth," delivered from one man to another. Hell, you get used to it, I suppose, just as I did when I was hanging out with African-Americans who referred to themselves and one another in similarly disparaging manners. In The Boys in the Band, the sub-dermal self-loathing (masquerading as parody of straight stereotypes but a little too close and constant for that to be all it is) balls its fists and punches you repeatedly in the stomach, over and over, as if to say, "Hey! You get it? I'm pissed!"
We get it, we get it, take it easy, everything's okay.
Everything, that is, until you read the Facebook entry of a cretinous friend of a friend of mine who taunts the posthumous life of one of the teenage boys who offed himself rather than endure the constant tortures and taunts of his presumably post-enlightened classmates. I strongly considered giving up this imbecile's name just so anyone so inclined could ring him up and give back a little of what he and his slithering ilk dish out, but then I realized that anyone undeveloped enough to think that saying "Splash!" somehow negates an opponent's argument isn't worth the trouble. I will, however, suggest that you watch this film on YouTube and then consider ordering a copy that you can send to your most despicably bigoted colleague. Think of it as film as guerrilla warfare, something sorely missed in modern cinema.
Because I never cared for the films of Blake Edwards (too obvious and far too pro status quo for my tastes), I never got around to enjoying the Pink Panther movies and as a consequence I dismissed a lot of the work of Peter Sellers. That does not mean that I lacked appreciation for the actor's best works, such as Dr. Strangelove and Being There. What it does mean is that I often questioned Mr. Sellers' judgment. That's all. So when it came time for me to reevaluate the film The Magic Christian, I didn't know quite what to think. On the one hand, starring Sellers and Ringo Starr, with cameos by Raquel Welsh, Roman Polanski, and Richard Attenborough, with a script by the brilliant satirist Terry Southern, with contributions by some of the guys who would soon become Monty Python, and with a soundtrack by Badfinger,the bloody thing could hardly seem to miss. And yet for some reason I recollected not caring much for it when I first saw it as a wee bit of a lad upon its initial release way back in December 1969.
Rest assured, my cocoon worshipers and friends of many-colored nomads, time has only improved the quality of the humor which constructs The Magic Christian, a film with the revealing tagline "The Magic Christian is: antiestablishmentarian, antibellum, antitrust, antiseptic, antibiotic, antisocial & antipasto."
The storyline really doesn't matter all that much, as you may have guessed. The premise, however, is that Guy Grand, played by Sellers, asserts that anyone can be bought for a price. Okay. Money sucks, especially if you've a lot of it and have the safe perspective of being insulated. But, wait! Isn't that Ringo playing a bum sleeping in the grass? Why, yes, I believe it is, and that suggests that the Beatles drummer really was, as everyone said in those days, the best actor of the bunch. He actually was a mighty fine study of a fellow, and no one should ever take that accomplishment away from him, other than to add that despite Caveman, Ringo actually is a first rate thespian in his own right and needn't be compared to other musicians for his credentials.
The only reason to watch the 92-minute feature film these days, it stands to argue, is that Starr and Sellers work so well together that it is almost possible to believe that the two real life hipsters were indeed related, if not to one another, then to someone, for certain. The actual skits that loosely construct the film haven't aged particularly well, and the plot, as I say, is a tired one now, as it was forty-odd years back, although fans of Python will probably find something there to amuse themselves and rightly so.
Aside from the comedic brilliance of the two main stars, the other reason to lap up this film like milk on a doorstep (if one were a cat, that is) is because of the truth of the tagline. I can't speak to the anti-pasta sentiments, but it certainly was and remains everything else on that list of words and even to this very day in this very new year resounds with disrespect for the stalest elements of the pablum and pap that the 1970s would stomp the guts out of, such as the nauseating mainstream musicals, of which My Fair Lady was perhaps the most abominable example. The perversity of mediocrity and their merchants did not die easily, of course, and so we would soon enough find ourselves swallowed up in the reactionary swill of Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair, Grease and all the other spoiled cream that the squares imagined the 1960s were really about. The Magic Christian is simply a fish slammed against the face of people leaving the theatre asking (as many did when presented with genuine brilliance, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey), "What the bleeding hell is this movie about?" The very framework of a motion picture having a beginning, middle and end, in the Aristotelian sense of plot and progress, was one which movie-makers did not presume to universally accept. You could not make The Magic Christian today any more than you could make 2001, specifically because Guy Grand was correct: people do have their price and can be seduced into selling out. That, it seems, is the precise reason why I hope that someone will try.
With Scanners (1981), writer-director David Cronenberg presented himself with one of the all-time great cinematic quandaries: how do you convey the act of telekinesis without making the actor appear ridiculous? What you want to avoid is having your actor look like William Shatner in an old episode of "Star Trek."
You also want to stay away from the actor trying overly hard to appear cool while in the midst of mentally forcing someone to do something against his will, as with David Keith in Firestarter.
What you do want is a fast cut to the protagonist so that the audience doesn't dwell on the inherent absurdities in the situation, which is one of the reasons why Sissy Spacek was so credible, not to mention terrifying, in Carrie.
In Scanners, lead actor Stephen Lack looks simply stupid.
So stupid does he look, that one can hardly distinguish between the times when he is scanning out and those occasions when he is vaguely normal.
None of this would matter much to the sophisticated cinema-philes who frequent these pages were it not for the lost opportunity during the first few minutes of the movie when Cameron (Lack) stumbles through a food court, snatching cigarettes and eating off deserted food trays. We gather that he is homeless and possibly schizophrenic. We are half right. Two proper middle-aged women observe this and one of them reckons aloud as how Cameron ought not to be permitted out among decent people. Cameron takes this in and goes all scanner on her: speeding up her heart rate, bloodying her nose, and giving her one nasty migraine. Because he is properly paranoid, when two CIA agents catch him in the act of scanning, he flees up and down escalators, eventually getting tranked and sent to visit the friendly old professor-type secret agent, Dr. Ruth.
Ruth points out to Cameron that he isn't nuts at all. He is a scanner, one of two hundred or more special people who can look into the minds and bodies of mere mortals.
Right there we have what could have been a brilliant set up. All those sad folks we see walking the streets screaming about how Henry VIII shouldn't have run off with Catherine the Great are not psychos at all. In fact, they might just be more tuned in than the rest of us.
Unfortunately, we have no such luck. It's just a bunch of special effects nonsense, pregnant pauses that amount to nothing and some meaningful glances between Cameron and anyone unlucky enough to meet him.
The absolutely only reason to watch this movie is to take in the scene where Cameron is on a school bus for special kids that plows right into the local Disco-Mart, destroying all manner of crappy albums by the Robert Stigwood Organization, the latter actually paying for product placement to have their merchandise go up in flames.
That's all the personality this thing offers. None of the actual characters display enough humanity to evoke our sympathy in any regard and the complete dependence on plot and effects yields the usual results: if the choice is between watching this and contracting smallpox, go with the disease.
 "May you live in interesting times" is said to be a seminal Chinese curse. The time--though not the curse--has eluded us of late. I would place the demise to be May 1985, but whatever the specifics, more erudite minds than mine have pegged the end of our enlightened era at the mid-1980s. Two movies that featured actor Tom Cruise hammered in the nails. Top Gun was a Pepsi commercial intended as overt propaganda in support of a President looking for a war and The Color of Money, which was intended to be nearly everything it turned out not to be, was a cooptation and slap in the mouth of Hollywood talent of years gone by, as well as of the radical dreams they inspired.
But if directors Tony Scott and (inadvertently, one assumes) Martin Scorsese pounded the nails, it was the unfortunate Lawrence Kasdan who shot movies in the frontal lobe with the abysmal film blanc The Big Chill (1983).
Former idealistic teenagers from the late 1960s get together in contemporary settings to mourn the loss of their best and brightest friend Alex. The friend had the most promise and consequently didn't amount to much, whereas all the others did quite well by themselves and spend the rest of the movie (the song "You Can't Always Get What You Want" plays at the funeral) bemoaning how they are having a hard time getting over being the sell-outs they happily became. Think of it as The Breakfast Club for thirtysomethings.
The cast cannot be faulted for the pathetic choice of subject matter. Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Tom Berenger, Mary Kay Place, Kevin Kline and JoBeth Williams offer more than is expected of them by the Carson Company (as in Johnny Carson, who, whatever his skills at delighting late night TV viewers, was as square as a peg. Indeed, the entire film reeks of being exactly what the squares thought the people of the 1960s were all about).
Kasdan was completely in his element here. Before embalming the cast of this film, he had amassed a strong reputation among studios that loved blockbusters with his screenwriting of The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat, and Continental Divide (the latter his apparent attempt to embalm John Belushi pre-mortem). Kasdan went on to exploit all he could get out of his Star Wars tie-ins despite having worked on both Silverado and I Love You to Death, two movies even more lacking in soul than The Big Chill.
Kasdan is all about the shine. When we glimpse a coffin, we are supposed to imbue the inhabitant with unearned grace because of the number of people who attend the funeral. When Scott Glenn saddles up, we are intended to admire him because of the revolver he polishes. When Han Solo remarks something glib, we are supposed to swoon in anticipation of the shared looks of the supporting actors. It's all shine and it adds nothing to the value of movies. It does save a writer from having to do the hard work of thinking up something original, or something to which the audience can feel by way of empathy or confusion, or something that has not been accomplished in quite the same way before.
The Big Chill is a cynical sellout to a Reagan-era pack of salivating sheep ready to slurp up any swill the master would sling together. For those of us who spent much of our formative years in movie houses with our eyes wide in wonder of the exploits of Bonnie and Clyde, of Billy and Wyatt, of Alvy and Annie, Kasdan's movie was a below-the-belt blow that I for one still reel from thirty-four years later.
Thirty-four years? Seriously?
I watched Warren Beatty on the Oscars thing last night. Here is a man who has been more things to more people than almost anyone else in Hollywood history: actor, director, producer, stud, philosopher, historian, heartthrob and genuine talent. And yet some schmuck hands him the wrong envelope and he gets treated like garbage by a pack of ignorant loudmouths who have never seen a great movie in their rancid little lives, or if they had seen one, they wouldn't know what was so great about it. The whole idiotic affair completely overshadowed his onstage partner Faye Dunaway, who for her work in Network alone deserves to be not only worshiped but studied. Host Jimmy Kimmel (who otherwise did a fantastic job of making the four hour presentation about the show rather than himself--hint to Ellen DeGeneres) blew all the great work he had done by going for a cheap laugh at Beatty when what he should have done was to just shut up and let the actors work it out, which is what happened anyway.
So, yeah, thirty-four years and I'm still nursing the wounds to my presumably sturdy sensibilities.
What we watched last night on the Academy Awards was revelation unspoken. We saw, for one thing, people defying the present political administration in the most poetic of ways, rather than in the exploitative manner he reserves for his own enemies. We also saw black people getting nominated for their roles in contemporary films. Maybe films such as Moonlight, Fences, and Hidden Figures will inspire a much-needed renaissance in the film industry. The edginess of the subject matter won't do it, just as the superior talent of the acting won't do it, just as the excellent scripts won't do it--though all three issues helped make these three movies the deserving successes that they are. What it will take is a sensibility among directors who are able to convince decision makers at studios that movies are more than merely mirrors of the times in which we live. Sometimes, when the right combination of elements coalesce, a movie can change the way we experience those interesting times in which we live. And that is not a curse at all.
 On the one hand, I come away from director Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994) with a strong sense of "who cares," without the question mark. But movies without conventional plots, shot in black and white, with vaguely existentialist themes sprinkled throughout do on occasion have their value and seeing as how the film had the decency to lack special effects, the least I can do is offer up a cursory review without damning it with too much severity.
The best thing to be said for this movie is that it might be used at success coach seminars by people who have an abundance of slackers in their audience. Even slackers prefer to believe they are worthy of being elevated by the lectures they receive, so the Wayne Dyer pull-your-own-strings attitude gets mixed with some verbal self-reflection, as when Randall, the video store clerk, bluntly tells Dante, the convenience store clerk, that all the latter's bitching is pointless because he is doing exactly what he wants to do in both his personal and professional life--well, you may get the idea that you have not stumbled into a prequel for Avatar, not that such a thing would be any more enlightening.
Probably the most depressing aspect of this admittedly amusing film is that none of the people to whom the wit is directed actually rise to the level of the movie itself. When the director cuts away to illustrate some of the stupid people with whom Dante must interact, he's actually talking about other under-achieving gen-xers, even though he doesn't know it. Out of every ten people who watched this when they were in their early twenties, maybe three caught the reference implicit in the main character's name and of those three, one might have read somewhere that the film is divided into nine segments, corresponding to the circles of The Divine Comedy.
Of course, I don't actually believe any of that. I never did believe there ever was such a thing as Generation X, unless you are referring to the Chelsea group that spawned Billy Idol. Was there ever a specific post-boomer age of disaffection and directionlessness? That sort of widespread apathy would require a level of social engineering far beyond the abilities of any governmental or corporate officials I've ever had the displeasure of meeting.
Now if you want to argue that music and movies went to the turd factory by the late-1980s, I will shake your hand and stroke your brow. But that has been a symptom of the crass behavior of the people in the entertainment industry rather than the disaffection of youth, per se. If you want to persuade me that the acceptance of narcotics use has become so widespread that we as a whole--and especially the young--have collectively dropped our brains into a cesspool of stupidity, I assure you that I come pre-persuaded. I am likewise convinced that dwelling on it is counterproductive. Sophomores--sophisticated morons--have always walked amidst the rest of us. Being reminded that even sophomores are smarter than some other people is a drag.
Pardon me? What happened to me saying something nice about the movie? The director plays Silent Bob, friend to a drug dealer, and a cooler-looking person in a black and white movie I have never seen. The acting is spectacular, especially given the rapid-fire pace with which the lines are delivered. And without onscreen nudity of any sort, the movie manages to be so verbally profane that you will either laugh yourself to tears or commit suicide. The choice, you will understand, is all yours.
The truth is out: I would not bother to walk across the street to vomit on Samuel P Huntington. As co-author of The Crisis of Democracies: On the Governability of Democracies, Huntington's report to and from the infamous Trilateral Commission in 1976, Samuel P put forth what he considered the necessity of what the more conspiratorially-minded among us refer to as one world government and what those with a more academic orientation speak of as globalization. The Trilateral Commission was and remains one of those nefarious groups that receives monumental criticism from both the right and the left. Barry Goldwater claimed it was a skillful attempt to consolidate political, monetary, intellectual and religious power. Noam Chomsky said that the Commission was a concerted attempt by the liberal elite to moderate democracy, to induce indoctrination, and to foster passivity.
Both points of view have some merit.
One need not be a kind of conspiracy buff to suspect that immigration policies, international trade agreements, the blackmailing techniques of the International Monetary Fund, the extortion by the World Bank and the intellectual rationalizations of the Trilateral Commission, all have "coincidentally" worked to bring about a global merging of brain trusts and finance which thrives spiritually, economically and politically by the creation and development of international tensions among components of the developed world and between that world and those agents who claim to represent emerging states and nations.
Let me be clear. I do not believe in the existence of an Illuminati (unless one is referring to a group of the Enlightenment, from which the term got its name, formed in 1776, founded by Adam Weishaupt, a society of sorts that stood opposed to most of the things the fictitious Illuminati is always being accused of promoting, such as religious influence and abuses of power). Likewise, I maintain that Alex Jones and the entirety of the Infowars empire are a bunch of turd-lickers who exploit the power of the fears that they themselves propagate. But if both the narrow-minded and the expansive of intellect can agree on the unwarranted influence of globalization, then the subject certainly deserves some consideration from the likes of the rest of us.
Mitch McDeere, it is safe to say, never read any reports by the Trilateral Commission. Years of law school, among the top five students in his class, hard working son of a gun, snappy dresser--yet he never took the time to consider the sources of real power in American society. Yet he does not bother to invest thirty seconds of his time into looking into the client base of the Memphis law firm that has just hired him. Had he done his homework, he would have learned that the organization that pays the firm's bills is the Chicago branch of the Mafia. Try to leave The Firm (1993) and the merger of legal minds and organized criminality will see to it that you die. Sure, director Sidney Pollack gives us the typical John Grisham twists, but in this film they come off as contrived. The sad fact is that everyone working on this movie behind the camera only wanted one thing: to impress us all with the talent of star Tom Cruise. And because nothing in the movie except the conclusion does anything to convince us that his character, McDeere, could navigate a pay toilet in a diarrhea ward, the ending feels false and we are left with yet another Grisham adaptation that should have been much better than it was. This lack of translation from the written page to the big screen with John Grisham is not unique. Hemingway's novels and short stories never worked on film, Ray Bradbury never once made the leap, and Stephen King only had occasional luck in this regard. And satisfying as his novels may be, Grisham is no Hemingway, Bradbury or King.
Ed Harris, as the frustrated FBI agent, does everything he can to breathe some life into this film. Even Wilford Brimley stands out as a convincing sinister head of security. But otherwise, Pollack's motion picture is a masterful misuse of talent at least on a par with that of Cruise. The character played by Gene Hackman: wasted. Hal Holbrook: wasted. David Strathairn: wasted. Gary Busey: well, you get the idea. This movie was supposed to be the literary vehicle for The Star's career, much as Top Gun served as an ideological co-optation of the entertainment industry by the military industrial complex, unless you think all those MTV videos and Pepsi commercials were "coincidence." And to make sure no one watching missed the point, Pollack changed the ending from the one in the novel so that Cruise's character is a hero instead of a coward.
And that was one of the typically staid director's worst decisions because, for my money, the best role Tom Cruise ever played was that of Vincent in Collateral. He played a hit man. A bad guy. A killer. A not very nice dude. He played it against good guy Jamie Foxx and the dynamics between those two powerhouse performances was nothing short of engaging. Engaging is not what The Firm was about. It was about 150 minutes of tedium in the guise of harmless entertainment. It was symptomatic of corporate expectations for the producers and directors in their employ. It was no more convincing than a Samuel P Huntington treatise, although it was every bit as manipulative.
 If one cogitates on the most obnoxious elements of the late 1970s, some of the images that slither across the mind will include the assimilation of all the most reactive responses to the women's movement, a fixation with the insolent parts of Elvis Presley's persona, a division of labor between men and women, extremely bad popular music, singles bars, pick-up trucks, mechanical bulls, constant drunkenness, and the state of Texas becoming its own sovereign nation. Could any one motion picture possibly encapsulate all of these components without putting its audience into a condition of extreme catatonia?
Of course not. That is why it was presumably necessary for Irving Azoff to finance the making of Urban Cowboy (1980). After all, if the public would swallow the scam of disco, surely Azoff could convince a similar sty of idiots that ultra-slick country music (without the western) was worth working oil rigs to raise the money to buy. So he gave us John Travolta in tight cowboy clothes, Debra Winger as a tomboy turned tart, and a soundtrack of some of the most horrible ear-swill ever foisted onto the tape decks of the American public. While Bud Davis (Travolta) holds his long neck beer bottle like the phallic symbol it is, we get to suffer through the most bathetic songs ever to infect the human ear tubes: Jimmy Buffett--"Hello Texas," Dan Fogelberg--"Times Like These," Bob Seger--"Nine Tonight," Mickey Gilley--"Stand By Me," and Johnny Lee--"Lookin for Love" all resonate with an agonizing twitch that neither years nor whiskey can erase.
Few movies have been so instantly offensive as Urban Cowboy. None outside the horror genre have ever led to as much in-theatre regurgitation. Once we come to accept the film as nothing more than a 132-minute commercial for Gilley's nightclub (you may remember Mickey Gilley as the least talented of the cousin-hood of Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart), we then settle in for a bull ride competition between Bud and Wes, the latter being an ex-con who enjoys beating women even more than does Bud.
Wes is played by Scott Glenn and it must be admitted that Glenn actually does something with the role. While Travolta sulks and Winger struts, Glenn at least affects some type of personality. When Bud inadvertently whacks him in the back of the head with a hamburger, we know that Wes is going to seriously mess him up. In fact, that would have made a decent movie in and of itself: two hours of Scott Glenn beating snot and mucus out of Travolta, screaming "There's more to acting, boy, than curling your upper lip!"
Travolta went on to better roles which revealed that he actually had tremendous skill. But after this dreck and Saturday Night Fever, he came close to presenting himself as a parody of fake style.
Addendum: God help us all. The Fox network is releasing a pilot for television of a remake of this movie, which means that with Jim Belushi's help, a whole nation of young whelps are liable to be convinced that large numbers of people actually behaved like these morons. And Azoff will laugh all the way to the laundromat.
KISS ME DEADLY
 As Pauline Kael supposedly said of Dirty Harry, so do I say of Kiss Me Deadly (1955): "A fascist masterpiece." Seldom does a movie sixty years of age continue to offend on so many levels while providing a disturbing degree of engagement. What claws at the conscience has less to do with the apocalyptic conclusion or the general sense of embraced brutality, but the amazing cinematography of Ernest Laszlo and the taut tone of director Robert Aldrich. In short, the damn thing persuades the viewer that things are not only the way they appear in this movie, but that they are almost supposed to be this way.
What way is that? Well, that a quite young Cloris Leachman (as Christina Bailey) should be running down a roadway in the middle of the night as an escapee from the laughing academy; that Ralph Meeker (Mike Hammer) should be driving a Jaguar he cares more about than he does his own mother; that all of the women in this movie radiate a blurry weirdness that leads us to recall the "Bogart" line from Play It Again, Sam: "I never yet met a dame who didn't understand a good slap in the mouth or a slug from a .45"; or that a hydrogen bomb could somehow be contained inside a lead crate and opened and closed at will. This manifestly misogynist movie succeeds on the stilts of its own callous stupidity and not because Meeker's acting is especially persuasive or because the story makes any sense at all or even because we give a hoot about what happens to any of the characters. We are more impressed by the fact that Hammer has an in-home answering machine in his wall in 1955 than we are with the story itself. What makes this ridiculous film cling to our jacket pockets after all this time resides in the film work, as I mentioned (especially the overhead shots of Hammer on the sofa pulling the plot together in his brain, as well as the recently restored ending with the couple on the beach), and the decidedly refreshing interaction between the reptilian Hammer and his nervous yet fun-loving mechanic Nick Va Va Voom. The only time Hammer exudes anything resembling humanity happens when he and Nick are working together, helping one another out, sharing a hearty laugh as the brothers in struggle that they are. Hammer's not-well-disguised hatred of society screeches to a halt when it comes to his relations with working men, be it the gas jockey, the bartender, or the mechanic. Hammer may need women for sex, but he clearly grooves on the company of his gender mates.
It doesn't hurt that we get to see a fight that includes a young googly-eyed Jack Elam and a short sequence with an even younger Strother Martin (who we keep expecting to lament "What we have here is a failure to communicate"). These two, and Leachman, join a support cast that's actually too good for the movie they're in, which simply adds to the frustration of trying to stomach the unending callousness, as when Hammer instructs a man whose house he wishes to search to tell his wife to shut up and the man shrugs and tells her, "Shut up."
Mickey Spillane wrote the novel, reportedly hated the movie, and was probably responsible for the incongruous literary references sprinkled throughout the film. Recommended to those who prefer their sadism to be artful.
 Diane Keaton plays her cinematic roles with such precise imagination that it can be fun to argue that no one else could have embodied her characters in the early Woody Allen movies, or in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Crimes of the Heart, The Godfather, The Little Drummer Girl, or the majority of her other successes. It also holds true that on rare occasions some of us wince in pain when exposed to movies beneath her talent, movies that failed less because the roles were uninteresting and more because the premises of these films subvert the proud deviations her best works have celebrated.
Baby Boom (1987) stinks on ice.
No reasonable person can blame the odor on the acting. Keaton, Sam Shepard, James Spader, Sam Wanamaker, the twins who play the baby, even the typically estimable Harold Ramis all work their lines with brilliance. The script itself--and its directorial delivery--smells up the theater in this movie. It accomplishes this formidable task by its fevered embracing of the Yuppie Aesthetic so omnipresent during the 1980s love affair with what some sociopath decided to call romantic comedies.
Keaton plays J.C. Wyatt, an executive in some corporation who puts in a one hundred hour work week, has scheduled sex sessions with her paramour that last one full minute, and certainly has no time for a baby of her own. When one gets handed to her (it doesn't really matter how this comes about), she resists the idea and eventually gives in (as we know she will because otherwise there's no movie and what are we all doing sitting together in the cinema?) and moves, as all yuppies do, to the country where she develops her own brand of baby food which takes off like the Yarnell Fire and sweeps across the nation because clearly Keaton's character is made of stronger stuff than you or (especially) me.
If the storyline sounds moderately uninspired (I'd call it immoral, but I've taken a twelve minute vow of restraint), you should check out the dialogue that was geared for yucks.
Doctor Jess Cooper
You know, you kind of remind me of some kind of bull terrier.
J.C. Wyatt
I'll bet you say that to all the girls.
And then there's:
I can't have a baby because I have a twelve-thirty lunch meeting!
I know. Sad, isn't it? Perhaps the musical accompaniment will enhance the experience of being subjected to pre-programmed drivel? No chance. The songs were by Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager, the latter once described in writing as being so laid back it's a wonder she can stand up.
No, the entire enterprise (and that word is selected with serious intent) exists for no other reason than to reinforce the psychotic drive to be the best you can be by enlisting a supreme act of will and drive, one which deprives the actor of any auxiliary aspirations--doing what you do for the good of the company, the husband or boyfriend, the species, the child, the town--when there is no Godly reason to expect any person to forego an appreciation of the things in life that actually matter, things such as the company, boyfriend, species, child, town--things that might be valued if the actor/savior (after all, her name is J.C. for a reason) weren't so busy burning herself out to appreciate them.
Maybe that's one reason no one uses the word "yuppie" any more. It's certainly the main reason nobody rushes to Netflix or elsewhere looking up romantic comedies from the 1980s.
The truth of a given writing has not always been considered a legitimate defense in support of its publication. It was not until 1734, when John Peter Zinger published a satirical article about colonial governor William Cosby, that the suggestion of truth as a defense became relevant in defamation cases in what would soon become the United States of America. Defense attorney Andrew Hamilton convinced the jury that if a published statement can be proved true, then the charge of defamation cannot hold. Verdict for Zenger.
Forward to 1960. The New York Times published an advertisement titled "Heed Their Rising Voices." The ad addressed what the writers construed as an attempt to intimidate newspaper publishers from reporting on Southern actions against participants in the civil rights movement. The ad further alleged that the arrest of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. for perjury in Alabama was part of a campaign to destroy King's efforts to integrate public facilities and encourage blacks to vote. L. B. Sullivan, the Montgomery city commissioner, filed a libel action against the newspaper and four black ministers who were listed as endorsers of the ad, claiming that the allegations against the Montgomery police defamed him personally. Under Alabama law, Sullivan did not have to prove that he had been harmed. A defense claiming that the ad was truthful was inapplicable since the ad contained minor factual errors (the ad stated that Montgomery had arrested King seven times, whereas he had been arrested only four times, for instance). Sullivan won a $500,000 judgment.
The Times appealed to the United States Supreme Court. That court ruled in favor of the newspaper, stating "The First Amendment protects the publication of all statements, even false ones, about the conduct of public officials except when statements are made with actual malice (with knowledge that they are false or in reckless disregard of their truth or falsity)."
Thus was established the concept that even false statements are not libelous unless the person who claims he or she was defamed can prove that the writer or publisher was motivated by their dislike of the individual to do the proper checking to make sure the words correctly reflect reality.
In director Sydney Pollack's movie Absence of Malice, Paul Newman plays Mike Gallagher, a Miami liquor wholesaler who may have some connection to organized crime. After all, he is in the liquor business in Miami. Megan Carter, played by Sally Field, is the reporter who gets fed a false story about Gallagher by the FBI. She publishes the false tale and Gallagher takes her pretty ass to court.
This could have been a moderately entertaining and even an important film. Newman does what he does best: he allows his boiling intensity to fester beneath the surface without exploding into the camera. Someone (maybe Stella Adler, I don't know for certain) said that the key to acting is to develop the ability to show the character thinking one way and behaving another while both elements are clear to the audience. Newman does this with considerable panache.
Sally Field is not given that opportunity, which is a shame because she has the ability (as anyone who has seen Norma Rae or Places in the Heart can attest). Here she is given the task of being age thirty-nine and that is all. As a result, the audience cannot help but wonder what kind of sadistic impulse gripped the director that he would allow Newman tremendous freedom and yet hold Field back.
 Oh, what a sequence of disgust! But that is what one might expect from former "Saturday Night Live" writer-actor Tim Kazurinsky, who along with wife Denise DeClue, wrote this mess. Kazurinsky also appeared in some of the Police Academy exercises in banality. Unless your goal in life is to watch Demi Moore and Rob Lowe simulate genital-locking, this attempt at making gamesmanship "hip" will only amuse you because of the profanity of Jim Belushi, whose presence is refreshing mainly because his existence is the only part of the process that does not feel contrived whether in retrospect or real time.
The basis for the movie, David Mamet's one-act play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, exploited simple-minded tensions between the two primary genders better than the movie because the play did not opt to blast the audience with the kind of audial tripe then-current on MTV, whereas the movie uses the dialogue as filler for the sonic vomit of Sheena Easton and Jermaine Jackson. On the other hand, if the mention of the names of these two plastic people lift your heart into the realms of perpetual titterhood, then please reverse all the bile and vituperation above and get yourself several copies post haste.
None of this should be misconstrued to imply that director and Chicago native Edward Zwick did a bad job accomplishing what he set out to do. About Last Night boasts a slickness that speaks to its self-confidence in exploiting the boring concept that men and women are often sexually attracted to one another without necessarily liking one another for any other reason, yet dressing up their desire in psychological excuses for not murdering one another, necrophilia being far too controversial for a movie that needs its audience to identify with its desperate craving for hipness. Zwick went on to direct Glory and Blood Diamond, each substantial improvements and better uses of his talents.
In 2014 some geniuses decided to remake the damned thing, this time moving the locale to Los Angeles and the race to African-American, both perceived by Sony Pictures as more hip than white Chicago. And hip is what this nonsense is all about.
My much younger niece and nephew, Lori and Wendell, came over to hassle me about movies. In particular, they taunted me about something they had read on these fine electronic pages a while back, something that had left them questioning the judgmental wherewithal of Yours Truly regarding just about everything I've ever written, said or thought. "Like the thirteenth chime of a crazy clock," declared Lori. "It casts doubt on all that came before and all that comes after."
That's not what I said! What I said was that you might have been wrong. Don't gum this up with your hype, okay?
Hey, I'm just trying to give you some credibility, Lori McStory.
That's not my name, Uncle Phil!
Fine, fine. Kids today got zero sense of humor. Hell, in my day everybody had nicknames and we were damned proud of it. Not like today where every swinging dick calls himself OC-Kid Knockers or some such pseudo urban rubbish.
Hey, Phil! Maybe you could just tell the story, huh?
Indeed I shall, Lord Wendell. By the way, if anybody ever needed a good nickname, nephew o' mine, it's a guy named Wendell. When I was your age, we'd would have caught a guy with that name by the collar and trolled his ass over the bridge just for carrying a flute in one pocket and a box of baking soda in the other.
Okay, all right! Sorry. Just a little harmless fun. We never actually did things like that. Truth is we were mostly too busy watching movies on late night TV or down at the Starlite Drive-In to have time to work up a good sweat over something as boring as a name like Wendell.
Will you get on with it?!?
What had so upset these little urchins was a remark I made about movies from the 1970s being more or less inherently superior on their own merits compared to your garden variety slime of prequels and sequels and reboots and offshoots that pass themselves off these days as entertainment. Lori pointed out, with some justification, that the 1970s actually did have its share of lemons which by any standards whatsoever could not stand the test of time or for that matter even the test of a single screening.
You even admitted, uncle dear, that Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the worst movie ever made.
Quite right, young lady. And up against some strict competition came that 1978 fiasco. Let's see, there was another music-oriented stack of swill called Saturday Night Fever, which came out the year before. The soundtrack wasn't half bad, I'll admit. But the story itself tried so hard to be about something by transcending the banality of the lifestyles of the characters that it stunk up the theatre.
Don't forget I Spit on Your Grave.
If I only could, Wendell. Some genius decided to remake that despicable layer of toad puke back in 2010. Probably thought it was campy. The original from 1978 was mostly a vile reaction against the women's movement. You see, back in those frequently unenlightened times, every time something progressive actually permeated the public consciousness--something like civil rights, or being against the wars, or the women's movement--pretty soon some Hollywood cretins would decide that the squares needed to feel reassured that Hollywood wasn't entirely comprised of communists, which is why we ended up with that entire series of Dirty Harry movies.
Wendell, do you remember reading in our Modern Film class that writer who called Dirty Harry a fascist masterpiece?
I think she was talking about Magnum Force.
Clint Eastwood movies.
Yeah, Pauline Kael got a lot of things right. But as I was saying, there were--
That whole anti-hero crap was so prevalent. A Clockwork Orange was pure fascism.
Where'd you pick up that pearl of wisdom, Lori?
From you!
Oh. Well, in any case, what you too brats were prattling on about earlier was what you declared to be a stench of racism in certain movies from the otherwise beloved Seventies and I have to admit that at first I thought you two were dead wrong. Then you stomped your Buster Browns and screamed to watch The French Connection. Now at first that may seem to be a tough call because even though the storyline itself was somewhat fictionalized, the movie's two main characters were based on a pair of real cops: Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso. Egan and Grosso actually did participate in a major heroin bust nine years before the movie came out, but most of the chase scenes in the movie were just there to sell tickets.
Didn't they take away Egan's pension or something?
They tried, young Wendell, they tried. Mishandling evidence was the charge. Mostly the New York police brass were hacked off that their boy had gone Hollywood. But a higher court reversed the decision and Egan lived to laugh another day. What I was getting at, though, in between the interruptions, is that all the street scenes and foul language and crazed violence was intended to give director William Friedkin's movie enough verite to make it interesting. Or at least artful. As to the racist language and behavior--well, that's hard to justify, in my opinion. Sure, you can say that some of it was just police technique, trying to startle or intimidate the perpetrators or suspects, by saying and doing things that policemen weren't expected to do or say. Like when Hackman's character, Popeye Doyle, demands the dealer answer his question, "Did you ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?" that question blows the dude's mind because it doesn't make any sense, right?
But cops back then did act that way. They also took suspects down back alleys and kicked the shit out of them, just like in the movie.
Hey, little girl, I was just getting to that. You're right. And that's part of the problem with this movie as a whole. An engrossed audience will forgive just about anything, I suspect. But they sure do hate it when they see the movie makers are liars. Or when they don't explain certain things that very much need explaining. When Popeye spends night after night on these essentially free-time stakeouts trying to catch the French heroin traffickers, when he drives a civilian's car into the ground, when he shoots dead a federal agent and then keeps right on looking for the bad guy--a guy he calls Frog One--we wonder why he has this deranged obsession. We wonder, but we get no clue whatsoever, other than that he is a policeman. Is his being a cop supposed to be justification for his duty to catch the bad guys at any cost?
You could argue that Friedkin was just making a damned movie, just as he did with The Exorcist a couple years later. But that was accused at the time of being a reaction against women asserting their rights. On the other hand, I don't know if it's fair to claim the title of "reactionary" to Friedkin considering he made The Boys in the Band, one of the first mainstream movies about the friendship of gay men. I think it might be more fair to argue that the director was attracted to what some fool decided to call "edginess" in his work.
You're saying it's acceptable to use blatantly racist phraseology in a movie so long as it could have happened that way in real life?
That's really the rub, isn't it, Lori? I mean, the movie would have been far more stupid had there been some third cop chasing after Popeye and Roy Scheider with a notebook taking down all their inappropriate language, right? Especially if that had been to remind the audience of something it was already expected to know: It's wrong to use racist language. It's wrong to kick a suspect in a field. It's wrong to barge into a bar and debase every patron on account of their ethnicity. It's probably even wrong to shoot and kill a federal agent, or at least I'm pretty sure it was in 1971. Friedkin would probably have said that he was giving the audience credit for knowing the difference between right and wrong behavior.
Now hang on. I can see that both of you are about to explode with some brilliance of your own, but I'm getting tired of having to point out to the reader which one of you said what, so just let me anticipate your objection. In The French Connection, the drug smugglers are all very good looking people. You've got Fernando Rey, who is arguably the most suave individual ever to be in a motion picture. And Tony Lo Bianco was damn near the definition of cool. But all the drug dealers were black guys and all the cops were working class stiffs, which is exactly what the director's real life father was--working class, that is. What we have, then, is the smugglers are rich and attractive and refined. Not a foul word from any of them. But the working guys, cops and criminals alike, were all pretty mangy, except Scheider, who always looked great no matter what he was doing.
And what about Ferguson?
Yeah! What would be the reaction to a movie like that one today?
You tell me. We just watched it.
What? No answers? Fine. I'll tell you what I think. I think that power is what most things come down to. Or at least the perception of one group having power over another. The policeman has a car and a gun, a radio and another gun. A canine and one more gun. He can run red lights and stop people on suspicion of anything. The rest of us realize that if we tried to do those things we'd get in trouble. So the police's self-perception gets reinforce by the public's inherent distrust. Even people who admire law enforcement don't necessarily trust them. Pretty soon you get into an Us versus Them mentality on both parts, the difference being that the cops have a responsibility to behave as if that weren't the case. Instead, you add some racism, something that makes it easier to believe that you're better than the other guy. The rest of us, though, we tell ourselves that they've got the guns but we've got the numbers. With the constant reporting and speculations by the media, always done by airblown model types, the message gets lost within what you might call the entertainment business that blurs the distinctions, kind of the way that movie did.
Christ, you're cynical.
Wendell, Lori, don't ever be like me.
Aw, you're all right.
DOWN 3 DARK STREETS
 Oh, to be young, hip and free now that murder is in the air.
If, as I believe, George Orwell was correct when he wrote that all art is propaganda, then what is trash? After watching the movie Down 3 Dark Streets (1954), pure, unfettered propaganda smells like the answer.
A few days after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as the Censor in Chief. Hoover teamed with popular "journalists" Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell, along with many Hollywood executives to overemphasize the victories of the Allies and send up the failures and incompetencies of the Axis. Well, if there has to be a bias, I'll likewise err in favor of killing Nazis. Unfortunately, Orwell was also correct in his various depictions of leaders as soulless individuals who misuse their power simply because they can. That leaves us with two types of fascism: one where jackbooted thugs stomp on the faces of their enemies for the good of the Volk, and another where guys in suits and ties scramble the minds of their followers for the good of the followers themselves.
It also gives us rather wretched art. They Came to Blow Up America (1943) and The House on 92nd Street (1945) were among the worst. But the immediate Cold War following World War II found Hollywood policing itself, churning out stench such as I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), Walk East on Beacon (1952), My Son John (1952), Pickup on South Street (1953) all of which painted the FBI in strokes of honor, efficiency and glory, as did tonight's giggle, Down 3 Dark Streets.
It may surprise the more cynically inclined among the readership to discover that the camera work in this film is very good. In addition to street scenes that capture the Los Angeles of the early 1950s with an awkward authenticity, we're also treated to a Hitchcock-style scene behind the giant Hollywood sign on the hills. Otherwise, of course, the movie is a pathetic attempt to glorify the brilliance and tenacity of the FBI, so much so that today's audiences rightly find it hilarious.
Of course. We are so young and hip and free these days. Anything out of time feels like such a charade. Being young, hip and free, we would never fall for such transparent nonsense.
Yet a twenty-two-year-old pampered and precious little shit fuck named Elliot Rodger bought into the current propaganda that his self worth was somehow connected to his socio-economic class, which in turn was dependent upon him getting laid by hot blondes from a specific sorority and being seen in the finest of cars. And even though this pusillanimous putz was bullied as a young teenager, that fact in no way mitigates his well-to-do parents enabling his moronic lifestyle choices, much less his easy access to expensive weaponry. He was a media junkie, as befits the spoiled offspring of the assistant director of The Hunger Games. He uploaded multiple videos of his planned escapades, the grizzly details of which need not be recited here. You see, Elliot Rodger understood that the only way you count in this world is if you have the acceptance and acknowledgement of rich white hemorrhoid breeders such as Mark Cuban and Donald Sterling and their supporters at ESPN. This twisted little smidgen of puked up worm snot knew in his elitist bones that he would only matter in this world if the future dental assistant blondes of his choosing fawned over him to distract him from his own creeping impotency. This reject from the Borderline Personality Disorder ward knew it was thrilling to use his intellect and unctuous charm to con the police into believing he was merely throwing a video tantrum rather than foreshadowing disaster when he ego-plotted his mission on the installment plan with YouTube. (There's a reason shrinks can't cure Borderline Personality Disorder. It is not a disorder at all. It is a complex series of character flaws, of which the vile Elliot Rodger had in abundance.) Rodger swallowed whole the lunatic propaganda of the National Rifle Association when he oozed with the temporary power of purchasing his Glock 34 semiautomatic. And he thoroughly absorbed the joy of contemporary dread when he blew away his roommates and others he sought out last Friday night in Isla Vista, California.
He was, in many ways, the best and the brightest of his generation, at least if by best and brightest we mean tipped in favor of digesting expectations set up by everyone from Beyonce to Larry Ellison regarding what it means to be of true value in our world today. The same people who would view a scrap of well-produced drivel such as Down 3 Dark Streets with contempt and sneers view the propaganda of their own age with the same opened-mouth drooling as the Cold War generation did its own Dragnet-style fixation on law and order. Therefore we risk much by scoffing down our own elitist cuffs at the trash of long ago. Today's garbage may be shinier, but the stench is just as lethal.
This movie comes so close to being passably
good that to watch it fall short is more frustrating than seeing a good movie fail to be a great one. The Family (2013) was never going to be a great film. But it did stand a decent chance of being a good one, a movie that might be remembered over the duration of time passing between leaving the movie theatre and getting into one's automobile.
The upside of this movie, as you might expect, is the uses to which Robert DeNiro puts his talents in the fulfillment of the script by Luc Besson, who also directed. The screenplay has more than an ample amount of cleverness going for it. The real last name of the gangster clan being relocated through the witness protection plan is Manzoni--we are supposed to see this as a pun on Manson Family. Then there's the meta references in the film. What are meta references? Those are (again) clever references to other movies--in this case, other movies in which the actor Robert DeNiro has appeared. In a sense this is kind of cool because it sends up the typecasting of DeNiro as a perpetual hoodlum, just as he is in this movie. So we have him saying to himself, "Al Capone always said asking polite with a gun in your hand is always better than just asking polite," a line which anyone who watched The Untouchables will remember as being delivered by DeNiro in his role as Capone. We are also treated to a scene where Fred Blake (DeNiro) and his handler in the witness program, Robert Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones), go to a movie theatre where about two hundred Normandie France locals are prepared to watch and discuss a movie. Everyone expects it to be an old Sinatra flick, but that movie doesn't get there and instead they will be watching Goodfellas, which just happens to be a film in which DeNiro played a Mafia guy. Where our movie slips into uncharted goodness is when Fred Blake goes up after the movie and tells old gangster stories. There is a nearly cosmic delight in watching this multi-leveled bit of surrealism and that one scene is enough to make us want the rest of the film to be good.
Unfortunately, the attempts at humor fall flat. The efforts to humanize the characters are wasted. And the storyline is as predictable as the idea of having DeNiro play a gangster.
The closest the film comes to funny is when the fourteen year old son Warren (John D'Leo) observes to his sister Belle (Dianna Agron from "Glee") that the way their father speaks a certain four-letter-word can encompass anything from admiration of the beauty of nature to the observation that the world is coming to an end.
Michelle Pfeiffer, as Maggie Blake, is largely and unfortunately wasted. She isn't given much to do, other than to take jingoistic umbrage at the snobbery of the people at a French grocery which she carefully blows up. The son gets picked on his first day of school but has learned enough from his father to turn the tables on everyone in junior high and quickly enough run the school. And Belle, the daughter, falls in love with her math teacher, a guy who has no personality whatsoever. We almost feel for her in this instance. Almost. More likely we identify with her other key performance: beating an overly amorous boy to death with a tennis racket.
If all this sounds like a stale version of "The Sopranos," I suppose that might sum it up. Ultimately, the plot itself is covered with bread mold and crawling with bacteria. Manzoni has earned his witness protection status by ratting out his friends in organized crime. He and his family cannot quite change their evil ways and so they are constantly being relocated for their own protection. The mob boss, sitting in a comfortable prison, sends his coldblooded henchmen to do the family in. Oh--and we are supposed to be moderately aroused over Belle's use of weaponry. If everything else here weren't so hackneyed, that arousal might have actually worked.
THE BRINK'S JOB
The money security folks known as Brink's have suffered two significant robberies. The latter, occurring in 1981, was far more deserving of enshrinement in celluloid, considering it involved a group called the Black Liberation Army, along with some disaffected members of the former Weather Underground, then calling themselves the May 19th Communist Organization. Two police officers and one security guard were murdered. The robbers netted $1.6 million. Flash forward to 2008: conspirator Kathy Boudin was appointed an adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Social Work.
Now that's a fascinating true story.
The first big Brink's robbery happened in January 1950 when robbers made off with $2.7 million (slightly less than half in cash, the rest in checks). Six of the eleven-member gang were not arrested until six days before the statute of limitations was set to expire.
This, too, was a great premise for a motion picture.
Unfortunately, the movie we got was The Brink's Job (1978).
The casting and acting cannot be faulted. Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands, Peter Boyle, Paul Sorvino, Allan Garfield and Warren Oates: these people are absolutely at the top of their game. Sorvino, in particular, has never been more relaxed and cool than he is here.
The problem is that director William Friedkin simply didn't know what to with Walon Green's less than impressive screenplay. Evidently both men thought they were making a buddy film. First rule of the buddy film: the men involved need to like one another, at least once in a while, how ever grudgingly. Second rule of the buddy film: the audience must believe that the men in question are at least marginally capable of carrying out whatever operation that serves as the plot device. Friedkin and Green forgot these two crucial rules.
A good rule for making a movie about a robbery is that whatever significance the robbery may have be in some way communicated to the viewers--and it is not enough to call the robbery "the biggest."
The final problem with The Brink's Job is that it is staged as comedic, if not quite an out and out comedy. That would be no problem except that lame attempts at occasional slapstick work solidly against some of the film's best performances, especially one where Oates appears to struggle against collapsing psychologically when interrogated by the FBI men.
Oh, yeah: and don't waste the talent of Gina Rowlands.
JOHNNY COOL
When the Rat Pack minus Frank Sinatra makes a movie, it comes out Johnny Cool (1963).
That is not to say that the picture doesn't have its moments. But the over-all essence perhaps gets taken into question. Like f'instance? Allow me to explain.
First, you get William Asher as director. Remember him? He was the guy behind "I Love Lucy," "Bewitched," and "Gidget." If that suggests to you a pleasant aroma, perhaps you've stumbled into the wrong text by mistake.
Second, the executive producer is Peter Lawford, one of the least offensive and humble, albeit untalented, members of the Pack.
Then we find the usual assortment of suspects, such as Sammy Cahn as composer, theme song performed by Sammy Davis Jr., and used car salesman acted by Joey Bishop.
On the upside, we get to see pretty Elizabeth Montgomery's bare back, which is everything I imagined. We get to see Telly Savalas machine-gunned through the stomach, which is also everything I imagined.
On the very upside, an actor named Hank Henry plays a bus driver, in the process doing the all-time best Rodney Dangerfield impression of all time. We are also treated to a young Henry Silva in the title role. And therein lies the rub. Johnny begins life in Italy--fascist Italy. He watches one of Mussolini's black-shirts blow away his mom and instantly joins the resistance as the youngest guerrilla fighter in the regimen. A few years later, he has turned into a Robin Hood type character. He is the king of a town, stealing from the barons, doling out the proceeds to the week and needy. In other words, he is patterned on Fidel. The writers take a young man who battled tyranny and attempt to paint him as a corrupt communist. Corrupt? Oh sure. The Mafioso shoot and kill a guy who looks like Johnny, tell the townsfolk the real McCoy is swimming with the fish bait, and strong arm Johnny into traveling to AmerEEKa to kill off the don's unfriendly competitors.
And kill Johnny does.
In the process he hooks up with Dare Guiness, the aforementioned bareback lady with the witchy eyes. In three grueling days, she falls for the assassin and he for her. Theirs is strictly a sexual arrangement, but it seems to work, at least until she gets a parking ticket outside a beauty salon. Ah, it is there that Dare realizes that there is perhaps a wee bit improper about throwing a suitcase bomb into a swimming pool filled with a philandering oil tycoon whose kids just happen to be watching. She sells him out to the G-Men, but they're too late to save Johnny Cool from the enemies he's made among the American mobsters. The bad guys capture him and sentence him to a foul interrogation followed by a slow and painful demise.
This is one genuinely brutal film. The only light sequence is contained within a horribly tense episode where Johnny holds a gun to the temple of a craps player named Educated (Davis Jr), ordering the roller to roll a series of combinations. When Johnny says "Eleven," we're pretty sure Educated is going to bite it. His relief at succeeding is nearly hilarious. It's the only light moment in this otherwise serious and taut picture. Silva is incredible. Davis is great. Savalas is his usual nasty self. And Mort Sahl makes a cameo. A worthwhile ninety minutes.
PSYCHO FROM TEXAS
Setting is a Hollywood studio executive's office. Two men are sitting on opposite sides of a desk.
Rickster: I tell you what, Plankton. This boy, this wunderkind, they're calling him, he may just be the ticket we need to get our studio out of the red during the third quarter.
Plankton: You sound more enthusiastic than the people in accounting.
Rickster: What do you mean?
Plankton: From everything I've heard, this Philmer guy is pretty eccentric.
Rickster: No, that's not at all the word I would use.
Plankton: Would you call him crazy?
Rickster: Um. . .
Plankton: Blithering?
Rickster: Hardly.
Plankton: Irascible?
Rickster: Not so one would notice.
Plankton: Insane?
Rickster: No, you're cold.
Plankton: A wackadoo?
Rickster: I don't even know what that means, so, no.
Plankton: Robustly deranged?
Rickster: No, he's. . .
Plankton: Light in the loafers?
Rickster: No, that's Raymond in accounting.
Plankton: Deranged?
Rickster: You said that one already.
Plankton: No, I didn't.
Rickster: I have no reason to lie to you. You said it.
Plankton: I said robustly deranged. Not the same thing. Perverted?
Rickster: Of course not.
Plankton: Would you be willing to grant that he's a bad speller?
Rickster: What's the word I'm looking for?
Plankton: I've no idea.
Rickster: He's a bit eccentric.
Plankton: He's arrived, I think.
Rickster: Mona will send him in any second.
Philmer enters, wearing pajama bottoms and a tailored jacket with a Rolex on a chain around his neck.
Philmer: Gentlemen.
Rickster: Good afternoon, Philmer. I believe you know me. This is the other guy. Won't you sit down?
Philmer: I have an idea for a movie I think you're going to love.
Rickster: That's why we're here.
Plankton: Don't keep us in suspense. What's the title?
Philmer: I should tell you it's a sequel.
Plankton: Bit awkward.
Philmer: What do you mean?
Rickster: He means that title simply won't do. We try to avoid complete sentences in our movies. Oh, sure, there was You Only Live Once and there was You Only Live Twice, but what we favor are titles like Three Times Dead or Gilbert Gottfried at the Palladium. Things like that.
Plankton: It's nothing personal, you understand.
Philmer: That isn't the name. That's me telling the two of you that the movie is a sequel. A sequel from a movie from 1975.
Plankton: Who's in it?
Philmer: You mean in the original?
Plankton: I beg your pardon?
Rickster: Philmer, Plankton means who do you imagine will be in the sequel?
Philmer: Linnea Quigley.
Plankton: The queen of screams?
Philmer: She was in the original.
Plankton: What was that called?
Philmer: The original?
Plankton: Precisely.
Philmer: Psycho From Texas. Some people called it Wheeler, but that wasn't the real name. This was really just a cheap attempt to confuse people into thinking the movie would be a combination of a Hitchcock thriller with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Plankton: So this is a horror movie we're talking about.
Philmer: Sure, if you're seven years old, which is the whole premise.
Plankton: The premise of what?
Philmer: Of the sequel.
Rickster: You may have lost us here a bit.
Philmer: Either one of you guys ever hear of Pauline Kael?
Plankton: Isn't she the valet at Universal?
Philmer: No.
Rickster: No, of course not. She's the VP in marketing at CBS.
Philmer: Pauline Kael is dead.
Rickster: I hadn't heard that.
Philmer: She was a famous film critic who said, among other things, that young people go to movies and generally like almost anything they see because they have no frame of reference to have developed discriminating tastes. What I'm proposing is that we take that theory and test it by making a sequel of an unremittingly awful movie, a movie that gets a row of golden stars for badness, and play it very straight, redo the whole thing exactly the way it was the first time. The rights to this garbage couldn't cost more than a couple hundred dollars, which is about what it cost to make the original.
Rickster: You're saying we should make a movie that we're certain will be simply terrible?
Plankton: But with the idea that the youth market won't know any better?
Philmer: Yes, but not because we're trying to rip off the kids.
Rickster: Who are we trying to rip off then?
Philmer: I guess the answer is ourselves.
Plankton: Come again?
Philmer: So the movie comes out. It gets the same promotion to youth markets we'd give Twilight or any of that foolishness. We play it very straight. The current critics you have on staff can even say it's a challenging new approach to cinema verite, adding some long overdue culture to the current crop of crap out there.
Plankton: Now, see, I like that.
Rickster: I told you he was good.
Plankton: You said he was eccentric.
Rickster: You do realize the man is sitting right there?
Plankton: Indeed. Continue.
Philmer: The story-line is that Wheeler--that's the bad guy's name--
Plankton: That's his whole name? I like that. Does he have a car?
Philmer: Sure he has a car. Dodge Charger. He comes into a town, hits on the waitress at a diner, she rejects him, he breaks into her house that night with his Buck knife.
Plankton: I'm scare already.
Rickster: Hold me.
Plankton: Let go.
Philmer: Then we flash back to his childhood. He's about five and he catches his mom doing the wild thing with some man. Messes him up.
Rickster: Now why would that be the impetus for his deranged behavior?
Plankton: Eccentric, dammit.
Rickster: Philmer's eccentric, not the movie guy.
Philmer: In the original, that was one of the questions everybody had. I mean, so what, right? The answer is actually subtle. The soundtrack music that plays while the sex is happening is really what screws the kid up.
Plankton: Nice. Who'd you have in mind for the vocals?
Philmer: John Mayer with Brittney Spears.
Plankton: Christ, that is vile. Go on.
Philmer: Right. So Wheeler's back in real time. He gets hired to kidnap the local retired oilman. After all, this is Texas. His accomplice is an idiot. Imagine a young Ralph Cramdon as a kidnapper.
Plankton: I'm sorry. Who?
Philmer: Never mind. The oilman escapes, but it turns out it was his daughter's fiancee who hired Wheeler to kidnap him. Wheeler gets blown away in cold blood by the local sheriff. Now in the original, there was this very disturbing scene where Wheeler goes into a bar and tells the barmaid to dance 'cause she reminds him of his mother. She says no thanks. He insists.
Plankton: As only he can.
Rickster: You said it. Give me your hand.
Plankton: No such thing.
Philmer: He strips the barmaid naked and pours a pitcher of beer over her head and down her body while continuing to command her to dance. That was the Linnea Quigley character.
Plankton: She's older now, I suppose.
Philmer: Chances are, yes.
Plankton: So this could all be a flashback that she's having.
Philmer: If that helps.
Plankton: I mean, we don't want a sixty year old woman dancing naked in a waterfall of beer, do we?
Rickster: Depends. What were you saying about after the movie comes out?
Philmer: After all the puffery and bullshit about how this thing is some form of majestic, inspired art or something, we hold a press conference and admit that we were just making garbage because we recognize that young people have no real sense of history, can't have one, and that we as an industry have let them down and actually have a real responsibility to make better movies than this one, assuming we care more about the art and craft of the industry than we do about the bottom line.
Plankton: The Japanese markets would love that. Gives them a way to amplify the theme that American movies are disgusting.
Rickster: Just think: a movie aimed at ridiculing Hollywood that turns right around and makes a fortune for Hollywood.
Plankton: Timing is really crucial here. How soon do you think you'll have a script ready?
Philmer: If you're serious about this. . .
Rickster: What do you think? Two days?
Philmer: Two days?!?
Rickster: Today's Friday. Maybe you could have a treatment by Monday at noon?
Philmer: Terms?
Plankton: Indeed. We'll cut you ten thousand for the treatment. If we green light that, which I think we will, you write the bible for the same amount. I think we can probably dispense with a final script. Just fill in the normal array of wet and glistening boobs, some street rods, Texas poverty.
Rickster: We'll want you to be at the press conference. You can pretend to expose us all as a band of craven charlatans.
Philmer: Which you apparently are.
Plankton: Indeed.
Attractive yet wearied blond woman of approximately sixty years runs into room naked with beer dripping off her hair, head and body.
Woman: Do you bastards know who I am?
Plankton: Madam, there's a doctor in the next room. If you don't mind, we're trying to make a movie here. He'll give you all the cocaine you want.
Woman: [Screams] A movie? Is that what you call it?
Rickster: We could call it a film.
Plankton: A bit of cinema.
Rickster: A celluloid version of life.
Plankton: The stuff that dreams are made of.
Woman: Silence! My sisters approach!
Two women enter. They are identical to the first. They begin to chant.
Women: Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Plankton: As to the title. . .
Rickster: Right. What'll we call it?
Plankton: I fancy Philmer's idea.
Women: The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. . .
Rickster: What idea was that?
Plankton: Didn't you call it I Should Tell You It's A Sequel?
Rickster: A real draw, that one is.
Plankton: But let's change that pronoun to We. We Should Tell You, etc.
Philmer: These women, they don't concern you?
Rickster: Very much so. Can you see them as well?
Philmer: Do you recognize what they're reciting?
Plankton: Macbeth, I believe. The three sisters.
Rickster: Right you are.
Philmer: Yeats.
Philmer: It's a familiar poem by William Butler Yeats.
Plankton: Not familiar to me.
Rickster: Nor to myself. Mona will cut your check if you come back here after six.
Philmer: This is how it works, huh?
Plankton: Invariably. Take care. See you Monday.
Women: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born?
 Probably the most interesting and longest-revered essay about what has come to be called the Trash Aesthetic was written by a vastly talented film analyst and movie reviewer named Pauline Kael. Movies began to shift around about the time of the release of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. It was obvious to everyone--even filmmakers themselves--that an important segment of the movie-going public was doing some hard thinking about cinema right here in the United States. I do not suggest that Swedish symbolism or Irish militarism had permeated the mass consciousness stateside. But thoughtful individuals had simply allowed themselves to believe that the choice of what film one took in might actually say something important about oneself. It was even possible that those who made American movies actually had something more to say than "Buy War Bonds" or "Make Love Not War." Yet, unless one were blessed with a bank full of money or at least a sizable trust fund, how was one to merge the discipline of art with the nag of commerce? Well, there was always that burgeoning youth culture to consider, wasn't there? It had not only been Leonard Bernstein and his friends who had queued up to see A Hard Day's Night. The possibility existed, for what probably felt like the first time, that a movie could touch the inner spirit of a viewer and dare to transform that sentient being into a deeper, more cerebral and sensitive creature, one who would notice the colors of the rainbow as if for the first time, or who would comprehend the subtleties of two strangers meeting in a nightclub, or who might even find him or herself walking out of the cinema with a sense of being a new and improved person.
If that sounds ridiculous, the reason may be that you reading this are either far too young or far too old to have had the mad anarchy of The Marx Brothers slamming into you, or to have known the inspired anomie of a director such as Bob Rafelson strip you bare and roll you moaning down the aisle, or to choked on the tears in your throat at the death of a crime boss created by Coppola. Between 1967 and 1975--roughly between the release of Bonnie and Clyde and the release of Jaws--amazing experiences happened every day or so at the movies. Those things still happen from time to time, of course, just as they did prior to 1967. But the odds tend to favor the insipid, the trite, the pusillanimous, the dreary, the exploitative, the obsolete, the obscene. Or, to quote from the aforementioned visionary, Ms Kael:
When you're young the odds are very good that you'll find something to enjoy in almost any movie. But as you grow more experienced, the odds change. I saw a picture a few years ago that was the sixth version of material that wasn't much to start with. Unless you're feebleminded, the odds get worse and worse. We don't go on reading the same kind of manufactured novels—pulp Westerns or detective thrillers, say—all of our lives, and we don't want to go on and on looking at movies about cute heists by comically assorted gangs. The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again. Probably a large part of the older audience gives up movies for this reason—simply that they've seen it before. And probably this is why so many of the best movie critics quit. They're wrong when they blame it on the movies going bad; it's the odds becoming so bad, and they can no longer bear the many tedious movies for the few good moments and the tiny shocks of recognition. Some become too tired, too frozen in fatigue, to respond to what is new. Others who do stay awake may become too demanding for the young who are seeing it all for the first hundred times. The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new. And despite all the chatter about the media and how smart the young are, they're incredibly naïve about mass culture—perhaps more naïve than earlier generations (though I don't know why). Maybe watching all that television hasn't done so much for them as they seem to think; and when I read a young intellectual's appreciation of "Rachel, Rachel" and come to "the mother's passion for chocolate bars is a superb symbol for the second coming of childhood," I know the writer is still in his first childhood, and I wonder if he's going to come out of it.
I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I have used such a valid and touching excerpt as part of my introduction to ultimately write about a movie outclassed by the term "trash aesthetic."
I have just finished viewing a film from 1980 starring several people whom I quite like. Nothing about the movie particularly stank. The plot made a kind of sense. The photography was neither ostentatious nor boring. But if a lack of stench, a plausible story-line and competent cinematography were all that was required to make a movie, then you or I could do it. (Or, as Randy Bachmann once sneered, "If it was easy as fishin', you could be a musician." Or as I once quipped, "If making movies was a breeze, you could be in Cineaste," a failed rhyme, yet a good one.)
We could certainly do it better than the makers of Hopscotch.
I find myself characteristically annoyed by the watching of this movie, although in this case for decidedly uncharacteristic causes. Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Ned Beatty and Sam Waterston are easily among my personal favorites, acting-wise and otherwise. Each of them does exactly what was called upon them to do and even throws in a bit more. Certainly, the premise of the film sounded good enough: a gifted CIA agent gets reamed by his boss and decides to write a tell-all book about the Agency's mishaps during his time in the spy business. The CIA disapproves and responds by attempting to suppress publication by suppressing the former agent.
I imagine it is difficult to script such a premise. Make the characters too clever and the movie descends into absurdity. Make them too grim and the film gets bogged down in its own propaganda value. Yet either of those extremes would have been preferable to the middle road approach taken with Hopscotch. Glenda Jackson's character conveniently happens to be rich via the death of a husband who hadn't had the decency to loom. Sam Waterston's role just happens to have been a young admirer of Matthau's. And Beatty--one of the screen's most understated talents, a man who can boil with controlled rage just beneath the surface as he grinds your soul between his incisors--is very poorly used here as a frustrated buffoon.
The major problem is that we never have even a suggestion that the CIA as envisioned in this movie is any kind of threat whatsoever to Matthau. . . or to anybody else. And that's crazy, not only in light of significant events since 1947, but especially in this movie because it is the CIA, after all, that taught Matthau the very tricks he uses to evade capture. So when the Agency comes off looking like a bunch of well-dressed bunglers, one wonders precisely why they would care what kind of things Matthau writes about them. Being this incompetent would be the best cover imaginable.
By God, Waterston sure works his ass off, though. He looks good in this movie: young and smart, cagey and handsome. Glenda Jackson comes across with a sophisticated charm and husky beauty I've never noticed about her elsewhere. And Matthau. . . well, it's a little like watching Morris Buttermaker crossed with Charlie Verrick. It's decidedly Matthau, but so much so that I can't remember his character's name and it's only been an hour since I saw the film.
Yet there is a trash aesthetic at work here. I haven't quite figured out what it is yet, but I'll be sure to let you know if it ever comes together for me.
The premise of the movie Rollerball (1975) takes a while to reveal itself. We spend the first twenty minutes of this film looking on at a sport which is, to put it generously, somewhat eclectic. The game connects the violence of football with the design of roller derby, with the revved engines of motocross, the crashes of Nascar, the stuffing of basketball, the fielding grounders of baseball, and the suspension of sportsmanship and theatricality of the World Wrestling Federation. Oh, and let us not leave out the murderous impulses of physicians who execute prisoners with lethal injections. The best player in this, the only sport that matters, is Jonathan E., known to we folks at home as a young and beautiful James Caan. Being the best player at Rollerball is his big mistake.
The story happens in 2018. By then, corporations have wiped out the concept of the nation. Cities still exist, however. Jonathan plays for the Houston Energy team. What Houston gives the world is all forms of energy--and a championship Rollerball team. The sport--as explained by John Houseman, the evil Bartholomew--exists to vicariously allow the masses to work out their bloodlust. But what must be maintained, asserts the CEO of Energy, is that each person must be reminded that the individual has no chance of rising above the class or team. Because Jonathon E. is so accomplished, his existence is a threat. Bartholomew orders him to retire.
Failing to understand why, he declines. Bartholomew is disappointed. Jonathan leaves.
But he wants to understand. He flies to Geneva, where the world library is housed. Jonathan discovers the library to be a librarian, played by Ralph Richardson, and a lava lamp-style computer named Zero, an apparent reference to things of a binary nature. Zero won't tell Jonathan what he wants to know. Jonathan leaves.
Jonathan gets invited to a party held in his honor. Expected to announce his retirement, he declines. Bartholomew is disappointed. Jonathan leaves.
Jonathan Leaves would have made a good name for this movie, since it provides the only logical consistency in the motion picture.
Despite the fact that the concept of this movie is vastly superior to the plot, the acting, the editing, the directing, and the uniforms, that concept itself is worth anticipating. In the same way that Rollerball is an eclectic sport, so the politics of this movie are both Corporatist and communistic, both pro libertarian and pro government.
Even this confusion would be tolerable were it not for the miserable directing by Norman Jewison. Here he was with some mighty hot talents at his disposal, none more mighty and none more disposable than that of Mr. Caan. Probably, Lewison was aiming for some type of "acting without acting" stylism that he thought would amplify the sterility of the futurist society. With one exception, this does not succeed. The only scene--or segments of scenes--where the bloodcurdling essence of vacuity comes across is in the scene where a bunch of Luded and coked-out partygoers greet the dawn by drunkenly firing a flare gun at some innocent pine trees, the latter responding by going up in flames to the laughter of the soulless mannequins. That one brilliant scene does what the rest of the movie does not. It makes us angry. And anger is supposed to be the emotion consequent with this film. It is not. That is why this well-thought-out movie lands on its back and gets run over by an athlete on skates.
Speaking of violent images, they are plentiful, and even though the movie has dated in other ways, the violence here is just as contemporary as last week. A case in point is one where Moonpie, an accomplice and player of Jonathan, faces off against some Tokyo players, one of whom strips off Moonpie's helmet so that another can whack the back of his head with a lethal karate chop. That scene makes us mad, too, although there's no good reason for that feeling since Moonpie displays all the humanity of a statue of Porky the Pig.
That lack of humanity is perhaps the main reason why this movie fails to connect. Without some internal frame of reference or moral center with which to compare the interior events of the movie, we are unable to emit or revel or even imagine the tragedy that would otherwise be the lives of these pawns. That such talent was wasted on what quickly became known as a "cult movie" is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.
THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL
 Imagine a movie that has nothing to do with blowing up buildings or exploding car chases or sons undergoing sex changes so they can work in the strip club to put themselves through cosmetology school. Instead, imagine that these three male stars, each a tad long in the tooth, convey their respective roles with a modicum of understatement, knowing as they must that their very presence alone will be enough to muster public interest in the project, and yet each of the performances is so engrossing that you'd pay good money just to watch them breathe hard. Got it? Okay, now imagine that two of these three senior stars play very high-ranking Nazis who escaped from the Third Reich to South America where they plot world domination while the third big star represents a tired old Jewish man who has heard every stupid conspiracy theory in the book, and yet who has himself stared true evil in the eye and brought enough visceral strength to bear on the situation to restrain himself from blinking. I know that's a tall order to demand, but while we're there, imagine that one of these escaped Nazis has a viable plan for producing nearly one hundred Adolf Hitler clones and unleashing those young men on a planet which will be, to say the least, unprepared.
With all this imagining going on, the engaged reader may suspect that contemporary audiences might scratch their heads and mutter, "Adolf who?"
Right. Also correct.
Such bespeaks the tragic nature of our contemporary malaise. None of that, it must be understood, reflects poorly on The Boys From Brazil (1978), the subject film in question. The reality is that while this film falls more than a tad short of excellent, it still avoids the putrid reek of other doom movies of the time, of which The Omen was the most unctuous. Based on the novel by Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby), the movie stars Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck, and James Mason. We are also treated to a very early performance by Steven Guttenberg. He plays a young idealist with his hands and face down in the dirt in Paraguay where none other than Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, has gathered together a number of well-dressed henchmen to murder ninety-four male civil servants throughout the planet. None of the conspirators understands why. Niether does Guttenberg, who gets on the phone to Olivier to let him know there are Nazis in Paraguay.
"What a news flash," Olivier smirks with condescension. "Nazis in South America. Let me write that one down."
I would wager a year's pay that less than half the college students in America would have known that following World War II, several thousand Nazis were aided by European and American allies in their escape from justice, in some cases through the auspices of ambitious yet despicable operations such as Project Paperclip, and in other instances "ratlines," as they were called, sometimes facilitated by the Catholic church, and in others by the financial and tactical support of the Office of Strategic Services.
As to some ready data on Josef Mengele, we turn to the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum:
Approximately 30 physicians served at Auschwitz during the period in which Mengele was assigned to the camp. As a requisite feature of their "rounds," medical staff performed "selections" of prisoners on the ramp, determining from among the mass of humanity arriving at Auschwitz who would be retained for work and who would perish immediately in the gas chambers. Known as the "Angel of Death," or sometimes as the "White Angel," for his coldly cruel demeanor on the ramp, Mengele is associated more closely with this "selection duty" than any other medical officer at Auschwitz, although by most accounts he performed this task no more often than any of his colleagues. Undoubtedly, this association is partially explained by his postwar notoriety, but the ubiquitous image of Mengele at the ramp in so many survivors' accounts has also to do with the fact that Mengele often appeared "off-duty" in the selection area whenever trainloads of new prisoners arrived at Auschwitz, searching for twins.
Mengele used his time in Auschwitz to experiment on twins. He was fascinated with the genetic and environmental factors unique to twins, so he performed all manner of surgical experiments on them, sans anesthesia, typically agonizing in the extreme, with a particular fondness for removing limbs. Mengele also developed a fascination with the irises of children's eyes and maintained quite a collection of them, extracted as they were from his murdered victims.
The Boys From Brazil extrapolates from all this and posits that Mengele had holed up in Paraguay to unleash his genuine Hitler youth (young boys cloned from the blood and flesh of Hitler) upon the world. To affect this, he recreates the environmental conditions under which his mentor thrived: a father much older than the mother, the former deceased, that latter extremely doting.
In point of fact, Mengele escaped justice by settling in Argentina, then Paraguay, and eventually Brazil. He was fascinated by eugenics and some evidence exists that he inseminated hundreds of eggs of concentration camp women with cells from Aryan men. But it is not the viability of the scientific possibility of this plan that matters. We live in an age, good or bad, when damn near anything is viable. The real issue is whether or not the United States, or any other country, would be susceptible to the wiles of snotty young Hitlers. And it is here than the movie fumbles its opportunities. Putting aside any moral quagmire that the movie makers wish to convey, the real horror is not whether something of a scientific nature can be created. We skipped over that Rubicon with nuclear weapons a long time ago. The issue is one of desire. What conditions would need to present themselves in the world in order for a Fourth Reich to take hold? To that, the movie makes not even the slightest nod of recognition. The only reference we get is when Gregory Peck, as Mengele, yabbers on about watching films of Hitler on late night America television. "The time is ripe!" he cheers. Maybe so. But you'd never get a clue about that from this otherwise persuasive film. In short, a lot of talent and not a small amount of work is wasted on a concept that could have been the movie of the decade.
 Because I do not require that movies make sense in order to get enjoyment from them, I find that I liked Side Effects (2013), Steven Soderbergh's release from earlier this year, recently made available on DVD. As a matter of fact, trying to force rationalism upon this fine product would do not only the film but the viewer a monumental disservice, in large part because--to the extent that the movie reflects what's going on in behavioral health today--everyone we meet in the picture is crazy.
In a motion picture, crazy can be fascinating. Unbelievable is not nearly as much fun.
Take for instance, the character of Emily Taylor, as played by Rooney Mara. Her rather nondescript husband Martin, played by Ken Doll of the Week Channing Tatum, gets out of prison after serving four years on an insider trading offense. Rather than being approximately happy about this reunited family affair, poor Emily sinks into a cancerous quagmire of depression. You might rightly suspect that getting back together with anyone as plaid and boring as Martin Taylor would be enough to lead a person to suicide, but that would be unfair to the people who staged the lighting in the party scene so that we could take it in the artificial glitz-amid-gloom dichotomy. Imagine looking at a person through those old orange negatives that used to accompany processed Kodak film and you'll get the flavor.
Emily decides she simply cannot withstand the struggle of rebuilding her life with this man and so straps herself into a nice shiny car and rams into the wall of a parking garage. Enter Dr. Jonathan Banks, otherwise known as Jude Law. He's a smart psychiatrist, working multiple hospital shifts while holding onto his practice with two senior partners in a Manhattan office. As the shrink on duty the evening of Emily's attempted suicide, he decides that Emily suffered a lapse in judgment and probably will not constitute a potential harm to herself or others and so releases her on the promise that she will visit his office within the next few days.
After an initial evaluation, Dr. Banks prescribes some Select Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors for his new patient. She suffers the not uncommon side effects of decreased sexual arousal, sleep walking, insomnia, and nausea. Or at least she appears to have these reactions. Eventually Emily "talks to her doctor" about a new medication called Ablixa, a controlled substance that is the most authentic element of the movie. Martin Taylor comes home from looking for work, sees the table set for three, finds his wife chopping tomatoes, and receives a rather fatal chop in the midsection. To borrow a line from Macbeth, nothing so became this character's life as his leaving it.
We never really get a clear picture as to why Emily had set the table for three, just as we never get an explanation as to why she felt the need to snatch a line from William Styron or why we keep hearing about a friend of Emily's named Julia or whether that friend actually exists. Answering these and many other pressing questions would risk jamming Side Effects into that nasty jar of Reason and that, ladies and germs, Soderbergh steadfastly refuses to do. Please do not misunderstand my sarcasm for total disapproval. This is an occasionally highly intelligent movie, one with twists and turns that are marvelously formulated, if not convincingly executed. It's just that all four main characters here are wackadoos and not especially sympathetic wackadoos, either. These people all exhibit symptoms that would get them their own section of Axis II disorders in the DSM-V and the director wasn't about to take chances with the integrity of his production.
Never mind that Catherine Zeta-Jones takes Buck Owens suggestion to "Act Naturally" to unprecedented depths or that every woman in this movie (except for a clerk in the hospital, and even then you never can tell) is set up to be either a shrew or a swindler. Never mind that when Dr. Banks apparently sleeps with Emily, it is Emily and her earlier shrink, Dr. Seibert (Zeta-Jones), who are made to look conspiratorial, whereas one might suspect that some ethical brouhaha would result from a doctor conjugating his patient with such a dangling participle. "But that's just the way things work these days," you say and of course you are correct. All Soderbergh was doing was satirizing the lousy morals of his audience by giving it just what it wanted.
Unless he actually does think that all women are either sadistic dominatrices or fawning housewives. I wouldn't want to suggest that possibility, despite reports that he looked upon Fatal Attraction as one of his big influences in making this film. After all, the auteur director here is doing a public service by showing us the cold world of modern pharmaceuticals. Certainly he would never exploit the genuine agony of mere mortals just to turn a lousy buck. The very suggestion is, I guess, irrational.
WHO IS HARRY KELLERMAN
Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971) often aspires to greatness. Unfortunately, the only time it approximates greatness is during the scenes with Barbara Harris.
It also attempts to answer the musical question: Are you really a paranoiac if you are out to get yourself?
Dustin Hoffman plays an unlikely popular songwriter named Georgie Soloway. At the beginning of the film we find him constructing a suicide note from atop a tall city building. Once he falls, we begin to get the idea that he just may be crazy.
Soloway being crazy makes it possible for the stream of consciousness thoughts that we get to see on his way down to be funny. Unless the idea of actor Jack Warden as the psychiatrist miming a tune by Ray Charles is your idea of humor, chances are you will be disappointed.
Hoffman brings nothing to the performance. He comes across sounding like a mix of his roles in The Graduate and Little Big Man. But Barbara Harris--now that is another story entirely.
She plays Allison, a struggling actress. Indeed, Allison is a struggling human being. She tells Georgie that he will tell her he loves her, that he'll promise to call and never do so. She accepts her own fatalism with a resigned good-natured humor that breaks our hearts, something that cannot necessarily be said for Georgie's ultimate demise as he flies his plane into buildings and winds up snow skiing in the afterlife with his shrink.
Hoffman was very active around the time of this film's release: Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man and Lenny were all major hits. Who is Harry Kellerman showed us the first crack in the armor. It would not be the last.
It's hard to imagine that any movie featuring Dean Stockwell in his first lead role along with both Ed Begley Sr and Sandra Dee in their final big screen performances could be anything short of either the most colossal firework-inducing blockbuster home on the range get down party of all time or else at the very least a mild bit of camp. But things here in that year of our Lord 1970 weren't always quite so simple as all that. Take tonight's flick, The Dunwich Horror. You could swallow a year's worth of vitamins, eat salami for a month, work on a construction site in Oklahoma with no shirt on all summer long and still you would be unprepared for just how downright annoying this motion picture turns out to be. I imagine somebody at American Pictures International--probably Roger Corman himself--got the idea in his head that what with Sandra Dee being the perennial video virgin, it might be fun to have Dean open up the gates of hell while thrusting his meager self into the heretofore unexplored nether regions of our Miss Dee while she roles about upon some kind of primitive alter out in the cotton woods of Massachusetts, half her face resisting while the other half seems to kind of dig it. Well, the reality is that it's not even sickly disturbing, as this description might suggest. Because of the craziness of the camera operators, all we in the audience get is annoyed. Come on! Either make us love you or make us hate you. Don't toy with us in a movie that only runs eighty-seven minutes yet feels as if it's longer than high school.
Watching the original version of The Andromeda Strain (1971) last evening, I was reminded of the first Star Trek movie. There my friends and I sat waiting for the story to unfold and there on the screen was what felt like more than an hour taking a tour of the new, refurbished Star Ship Enterprise. Granted, that space craft was a thing of technological beauty, Gene Roddenberry and crew pouring every effect they could muster into merging the possible with the imagination. This hour or so had obviously been intended as an homage to the patience of the die-hard fans who had waited so many years for the return of Kirk, Spock, Uhuha, McCoy, and the rest. The problem with this approach lay in the fact that most viewers--including my friends and I--had originally been enthralled with the characterizations far more than with whether Warp Factor Two left a comet trail or eclipsed nuclear explosions. The science had relevance, but it in no way was the thrust of the appeal of the original "Star Trek" television program. That appeal, as I say, hung on the interactions between extremely diverse and often fascinating characters. The relationship between James Kirk and Mr. Spock may have been timeless. The presumed glory of the special effects, it was understood even then, was ephemeral.
Director Robert Wise, in an attempt to stick with the relatively "hard" science fiction of the Michael Crichton novel, sacrificed the more timeless elements of the story, leading to the same kind of disappointment a tech-savvy teenager would feel if he woke up tomorrow to discover that his video game devices had all been turned into Atari over night.
That does not mean that in order for a science fiction film to have legs that all the equipment needs to be constructed from cardboard and magic markers. What it does mean is that--unless one is Stanley Kubrick and capable of building sets that will defy the future--then one has the responsibility to amplify what will last. And in the case of The Andromeda Strain, that should have been character development.
For that to work, the actors need to have something interesting to do and whatever that interesting thing is, it needs to be conveyed in a manner that is at least as believable as the surroundings of those characters. In this movie, the scientists and doctors are tasked with assessing the potential growth of Andromeda, a life form that has attached itself to a fallen satellite. The ticking clock device gets used nicely due to the discovery that any nuclear explosion within the research facility will in fact cause the "bacteria" to grow exponentially, thereby dooming humanity to become a sandwich for the strain to gobble. So we get a feisty female researcher named Ruth, who happens to have epilepsy. Her wisecracks are so consistent that they actually click the film along at a predictable pace. We get Arthur Hill as Jeremy Stone, the cheap cook and bottle washer of the operation, a character with about as much emotional commitment to the project of this film as a termite would bring to a water park. We get the tried and true David Wayne as Dutton, the cynical yet reliable colleague who predictably gets in a life and death problem that he should have been able to anticipate. And we get James Olson as Mark Hall, the physician who, being such, tries to save the day by being rational amidst a preponderance of scientific scatterings. If these characters sound fairly stock, well, they are. The most interesting person in the movie is the African American assistant Karen, played by Paula Kelly. Nope, I've never heard of her either, which is too bad because she adds some much needed humanity to this relatively sterile production.
But maybe what the film lacks in timelessness or characterization it compensates in verisimilitude? Well, not unless references to "space germs" are your idea of high science.
Perhaps the film has an urgent message to bestow, the necessity of which eclipses the slipshod approach?
The Andromeda Strain is not a message movie. Despite furtive references to the SDS, hippies and growing marijuana, this is very much an establishment film, one which, if anything, downplays the then-current concerns with unchecked technological growth.
In the end, it's a moderately entertaining way to spend an evening. The subject matter and the original Crichton writing deserved better.
White Dog (1982) was the monster movie that Cujo could have been.
Samuel Fuller developed the screenplay and directed this fascinating film which wrapped up in 1982 but did not see theatrical release in the United States until ten years had passed. Why? Paramount, in its infinite chickenness, was scared to release the movie they themselves had backed. The reason? Race fear.
White Dog, you see, is a movie about a dog that has been trained to attack and kill black people. It is also about the efforts of a man named Keys (Paul Winfield) to deprogram the race hate out of that attack dog.
Certain members of the NAACP objected to the subject matter and Paramount clasped their corporate hands and declared, "Oh my. This is nasty, ain't it?"
The history of German Shepherds and other big dogs being trained to attack African Americans makes some people very uncomfortable. The tradition goes back to pre-Civil War America, when plantation owners would sic their powerful canines on runaway slaves. By the 1940s, the progeny of those dogs were being used to track down runaway convicts. In the early 1960s, their descendants were terrorizing civil rights workers. By the 1980s, the dogs were sold as security specialists who would protect rich homes from black invaders. Look, there's a reason skinheads favor pitbulls, Shepherds and dobies. It's not because of some twisted concept of cuteness. It's because those dogs--perhaps not instinctively but after well-thought-out abuse training--are very effective at killing people.
(I know whereof I speak. I have two dogs, one a German Shepherd-Greyhound mix and the other some type of mongrel Pitbull. The Shepherd was never trained to be anything but sweet. The Pit, however, by the time we got her, had developed a severe distrust and hatred for African Americans, to the extent that black people in our neighborhood could not walk past out gate without fearing that Sarah the dog would leap up and over the gate and disembowel them. We have not been able to completely eradicate this evil impulse, although when she watches us being social with our black friends, she chills out a bit. Before she came to live with us, Sarah had been raised by racist drug dealers who kept her tied to a tree with a two-foot rope so that she could not relieve her bowels without standing up. Just like some people, she let her mind jump from the specific to the general and her fear of abuse became hate.)
White Dog is far from a perfect movie, but what it lacks in panache it more than makes up for in guts. Fuller cast Kristy McNichol and Jameson Parker as leads here, but it's really Paul Winfield and Burl Ives who do the acting. Winfield in particular is just incredible. The camera stays on his face as he discovers that the dog he has been trying to deprogram has killed a black man and left the man's body face down in a Christian Church, with Mother Mary and all the Saints looking on. We never see the man's body and there's no need for us to see it. Winfield's expressions tell us all we can bear.
I wish I could tell you that all the acting here is as great at Paul Winfield's. That would be a lie. Parker and McNichol do what is expected of them. They look wholesome and concerned, the type of liberal hypocrites who are on the side of the dog in good times and who want to have it shot when the going gets rough. Ives is likable, although his performance here is a hell of a long drop from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But what I suspect Fuller was going for here was something similar to what Roger Corman did more successfully with The Intruder. He made a family-oriented film that was almost positively going to freak out the family. I tried--unsuccessfully--to explain this to my roommate. After I had detailed the plot, she said, "This is a family film?" It really isn't, I suppose, that is, unless you're looking to shove a black finger in your family's face or trying to understand how come that stray you picked up off Mulholland is so sweet with you and so angry when the landscaper comes over.
UN FLIC
The last time we saw French actor Alain Delon, he was playing the title sociopath in the movie Scorpio. In that movie his villainy played opposite Burt Lancaster's heroic character. This time out he stars as a cop named Eduard Coleman in the Jean-Pierre Melvin-directed movie Un Flic, or A Cop, or Dirty Money (1972). His villainy in this movie contrasts with Richard Crenna, who plays Simon, the owner of a nightclub that features transvestites and who plans and commits major robberies in his off hours. Simon and Superintendent Coleman share three things: a mutual friendship, an icy nature, and the affections of Cathy (Catherine Deneuve), a woman who must decide which of her two paramours to betray--and when.
Friendship--or at least relationships--is what this movie is really about. That's a big part of what makes Un Flic so timeless, a fact that not so much speaks well for the movie as it does ill for the time.
Coleman is systematic. He has been doing what he does long enough to be able to do it without a semblance of emotion. His criminal friend, Simon, works out his robberies with cool precision. Melville cues us into the why of this from the first frame: "The only feelings mankind has ever inspired in policemen are those of indifference and derision." That statement, spoken by Superintendent Coleman, is not cynicism. It is philosophy. Indeed, it is the world he lives in and the world he has created. Like any other social disease, his philosophy is contagious. All of his assistants know to leave him alone, other than to hand him the phone when it rings and then get out of the way.
There is a little more humanity--very little--in Simon's world, mostly because of the spectacular support characterization performed by Michael Conrad, who as Louis Costa, the getaway driver and second in command, evokes more social awareness and superficial decency than all the others combined. He also carries himself--as he always did--with tremendous presence.
Simon, on the other hand, wears his coolness in an entirely different suit. Whereas Coleman is systematic, Simon is methodical. To that end, if you ever need to employ someone to steal a briefcase full of drugs from a gangster aboard a moving train, Simon is the guy to call. Like Coleman, he fancies himself a realist and when the time comes to croak a member of his own gang to prevent that man from telling what he knows to the police, he has no reservations enlisting Cathy to do the job for him.
Cathy is a strange duck. She seems to be playing both sides against the middle but we don't get any overt explanation for why she does so, although it's possible she hopes that her ultimate betrayal with either land her a bond with the frostiest man on earth or else will shake loose some humanity from one of them.
Actually, the most human character in the movie is the transvestite, a guy made up so perfectly that for the first half of the film I just assumed he was a woman. I wish I could tell you this character's name or who played him, but it won't come to me. Anyway, we genuinely care about this person because's she's so obviously in love with Coleman and feels just terrible when the information she shares about a drug deal with Suitcase Matthew goes sour because of the robbery Simon and crew commit. When Coleman roughs her up, it really hurts.
Everyone conventional here has a job to do. Only the transvestite--being the real outlaw--has any warmth. The other characters are sympathetic only because of their lack of humanity.
Influence is not nearly as important as contribution. All the same, Melville has been as much a French New Wave influence as Godard and Truffaut. Artistically, he may not quite hold those men's jock straps. Stylistically, he is certainly their equal. Just ask Quentin Tarantino.
The film of Bob Dylan's 1966 tour of Britain is not a remake of Don't Look Back, the brilliant and beautiful movie of the English 1965 tour. Just writing those words causes me to suspect you may be wondering about the value of analyzing a remarkably bad film from 1971-72. There actually is a point and we will get to it in short order. Meanwhile, your patience is appreciated.
One thing must be admitted: The film features Dylan at his best looking and at one of the peaks of his artistic talent. This is the period of his three greatest recordings (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde) and his most artistically successful work. The concert tour took place shortly before Bobby wrecked his motorcycle, an event which laid him up for a spell and kept him off the stage, although not away from music. Somehow or other he got it in his head that it would be nice to edit the film himself, a statement of fact causing more than one person to wonder what horrors were contained in the outtakes. Because Dylan did have an astute awareness of the power of film--having grown up on Elvis movies and having been a grown-up at the time of A Hard Day's Night--he knew just enough, as they say, to be dangerous. The film takes about ten minutes to move beyond scenes from a van of the English countryside, scenes which probably meant a lot to the farmers and shepherds but not to anyone else. This is quite simply one of the sloppiest, most literally unfocused films ever involving a major star.
And yet. . .
We get to see and hear four-fifths of the group that would soon become The Band. We get to see and hear Dylan sing a proud and intimate duet with Johnny Cash. We get to endure a tedious yet occasionally interesting car ride with Dylan and John Lennon, both of whom appear to be smashed, although John clearly handles the condition better. But most importantly we get to lay back shaking in awe of two live versions of "Ballad of a Thin Man," the second of which is so vituperative you'd swear the singer had swallowed a bayonet. For the duration of that performance, it is possible to forgive Bob Dylan anything, including the remainder of the movie, which has a running time of 54 minutes but which is nevertheless otherwise interminable.
Some genius at ABC-TV had encouraged the film's production, thinking the network might turn a handy dollar or two on the free-spending youth market. I am certainly not the first person to wonder if the entire cinematic enterprise were intended to be so bad that ABC would reject it--as they in fact did. The best arguments against that theory are (a) Dylan did choose to release the bugger, and (b) artists are driven more by ego than by any other thing. It's entirely possible Bob thought this film was a major statement. After all, he did write the book Tarantula.
Some of the lessons of the 1960s spoke to the dangers of over-indulgence, in one sense meaning that the human form is not invincible, as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Keith Moon, among others, can attest. In another sense, though, an over-abundance of self-indulgence can be nearly as lethal as a speed ball overdose. This film and its many cousins of that period are visual records of just how deadly dull ego-centrism can be when it's given no guidance whatsoever, unless chemicals count.
A lot of people called the 1966 concerts "The Judas tour," referring to an audience member who shouted that epithet at the stage. Dylan shouts back, "Aw, it's not that bad." Except for the aforementioned song, it actually is.
The creative surge which defined the 1960s spilled over onto the tabletop of foreign and domestic celluloid, one consequence being that the youth culture and all its undisciplined dollars came to properly recognize television as being a prime tool of the Enemy. Television was that thing used by Aaron Spelling to puke up "The Mod Squad," an attempt to co-opt the sincerity of youth rebellion. Television was a series of refusing-to-die westerns such as "Gunsmoke," "Cimarron Strip" and "Bonazza," none of which dared move beyond the cliches of good versus evil. Television was cop shows, medical dramas and situation comedies that either purposefully avoided social relevance or exploited significance for its own vile ends. So, yes, by 1971, television was clearly the domain of the square, the cube, the straight, the unenlightened, the hard hat, the tranquilized housewife, and strictly for those over the age of thirty.
Enter Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, two wise acres who aimed to change all that. They knew that the television box was inherently capable of doing good. After all, "The Dick van Dyke Show" had been good. "The Twilight Zone" and "Outer Limits" had been good. Good was not out of the question. What was missing was sincerity and relevance.
Bam! 1970. "Til Death Do Us Part" was piloted before an ABC-TV audience. The Archie Justice (later renamed Bunker) character played to perfection by Carroll O'Connor stormed onto the stage as a confirmed bigot. The liberal son-in-law was, in real life, the son of the man behind "The Dick van Dyke Show." Sally Struthers had a nice set and Jean Stapleton was a legitimate actress. And with stories about black people moving in next door, the racial make-up of Jesus, and a homosexual ex-fullback, one could hardly get more relevant.
ABC passed on the show. CBS picked it up the following year and "All in the Family" became the biggest kid on the block, first among the middle-agers and soon enough by young liberals and old conservatives, as well as the other way around. The name Norman Lear became one of the few behind the camera names to break into the public consciousness.
And then a funny thing happened. Time magazine named Archie Bunker its "Man of the Year." That fact put upon the program and its endless spin-offs the mark of left-handed respectability, something that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were about to do to the new crop of movies influenced by the creativity of the 1960s.
The second funny thing that happened was the release of a Norman Lear movie called Cold Turkey. At a time when very nice people such as Pauline Kael were pronouncing backlash movies like Dirty Harry fascist masterpieces, it was actual the liberal Norman Lear who inadvertently ruined everything with this charming little picture.
The movie's premise was clever enough. An evil tobacco company, looking to enhance its public relations, offers a small Iowa town $25 million for all of its citizens (all 4006 of them) to quit smoking for thirty days. The tobacco company doesn't expect to have to pay off, of course, so their benevolence shouldn't have to cost them anything. The reason the local parson--Dick van Dyke--wants the town to win is so he can get transferred out of what he perceives to be a dying town. The town council wants to win the money so it can build new hospitals, schools and shopping malls, the intent being to lure military contractors to their rustic village. Hypocrisy is the name of the game on all levels and Lear quite correctly perceived that a savvy youth would be hip to the idea of exposing the core hypocrisy inherent in the American class system. The only problem. . .
The only problem was the actors. Without exception, each and every actor in the film was one associated with the generation presumed by youth to be responsible for all the hypocrisy in the first place. Bob Newhart, Jean Stapleton, Bob and Ray and the rest of the cast--among the nicest people one could hope to meet and certainly excellent comedic actors, one and all--were not going to lure Bobby and Rose to the drive-in to watch a movie. And of course, the old folks didn't go see too many movies in 1971, what with musicals changing into things like Cabaret and everything else so fuckin' dirty and damnably violent.
So the movie bombed, leaving a crater the size of Hollywood, dragging half the talent in America down with it. Jesus, if a naturally hilarious plot and ready-made talent in the hands of the biggest name in television couldn't make the transition to movies--
A ha! That was the problem. The transition to movies very seldom works, as the people who made the first Star Trek movie can attest. TV is obvious while motion pictures are subtle. TV has a live spontaneity while movies are polished and refined, however crude the topic. TV has low budgets while movies cost millions. And certain actors, such as the cast of Cold Turkey, are thought of as TV actors and the people at home don't want the two worlds to intermingle.
None of this means that the movie is anything less than wonderful. While certain bits of the comedy are predictable, most of it is still hilarious and the internal ambiance of the town is so exact and accurate it's scary. What it does mean is that the confusion over audience identification doomed the picture while the attempt at making the jump to the big screen not only failed to elevate television, it cast aspersions on movies in general.
I'm not saying Cold Turkey ended the adventurous nature of motion pictures in the 1970s. It would take the aforementioned Lucas and Spielberg to do that. What it did do was put a sizable chink in the armor worn by a creative army of Hollywood and overseas talent. Watching the film today, the humor is still ripe, you still hate the tobacco company, you still hate the clergy and the town council, you still marvel at the genius of Bob and Ray. It's an easy film to digest because there's nothing at all unsettling in the way it is presented. It is that worst of all old style films: safe.
 By now most of us are familiar with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. You may not know that in 1970 a film adaptation of the book was released. Directed by Caspar Wrede and shot in northern Norway, the film was banned in Finland until 1993 for fear on the part of the Finnish government that the movie would hurt relations between Russia and Finland, this film sticks quite closely to the author's fictionalization of his own time as a prisoner in a Stalin-era Soviet gulag.
The movie is not much fun.
It is, however, excellent propaganda.
I avoided reading the book for years and avoided even more strenuously viewing the film, not because I didn't believe the author's narrative, but rather because I did believe it and suspected that if anything he might he downplayed certain matters. I resisted the book and film because I already understood that these two things would cause me to hate totalitarian systems even more than I already hate them and yet somehow that never stopped me from reading about the Nazis or watching movies about the Holocaust. So what exactly was my problem?
I'm on the left. There is no sense denying that.
What bothered me was being reminded that my pro-government, pro-bureaucracy, pro-collectivist proclivities could turn into the type of nightmare Wrede so magnificently conveys in the film. The things I believe in are not supposed to turn into bad dreams. And yet they unquestionably do, just about every day.
Mitt Romney was on camera a couple weeks ago, getting fresh with an Occupy supporter about how if the supporter didn't like things in the United States he was free to go live somewhere else and let us know how he liked it elsewhere. That made me mad and I fired off a letter to Romney that suggested he himself might enjoy spending this summer in an internment camp in Cuba. I have yet to hear back.
But I meant what I said, which is more than the presidential candidate can claim. The old saw about "love it or leave it" still burns, just as he knew it would, which is why he said it, which is why I responded, which is why I watched this film.
The reason utopias turn into dystopias is because dreams make lousy realities. When the Soviets declare that the sun is at its peak at 1pm rather than noon, Ivan wonders if the commissars can actually make that happen. Whenever any of my leftist friends (or myself) demand the overthrow of the capitalist economic system, we need to be prepared to defend the people involved in that overthrow from the smirking evil that lies behind the misery any economic system is capable of instilling, be it social democratic, communist, libertarian, or what have you, because once the real life nightmare takes hold, it does not allow you to wake up. The people in One Day in the Life do not look forward to the sunrise. One of them even looks forward to blizzards to avoid having to go out into the weather. In the film, if the temperature drops below forty degrees below zero, they do not have to go out. A man climbs the pole to see the temperature, reporting that it says only twenty-seven below. the other replies, "They's never but up a thermometer that told the truth."
Or you may recall the first sentence of Orwell's most famous novel, the one that begins with the clock striking thirteen. It's part of an old joke. What time is it when the clock strikes thirteen? It is time to get a new clock. Just make sure the new clock doesn't make a habit of striking fourteen.
THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK
 A decade ago everyone who meandered through my life over a fourteen-month period lived on painkillers: Vicodin, oxycodone, morphine, Darvocet, Tramadol, you name it. Unable to sleep, they would load up on benzo jellies or anything in the lam or pam family. In the morning they'd do a line of soda or some crushed up psych meds and repeat the waltz. Christ, what an awful way to live, I thought. And I was right.
The Panic in Needle Park (1971) shows us pain. Admittedly, if heroin wasn't fun, no one would ever do it. I have been told it is the psycho-physical equivalent of napalming yourself. I guess napalm must be fun, too, or no one would ever have used it.
A lot of people take painkillers even now. I prefer to think of these things as "painkillers" rather than referring to them by their clinical or street names because I think it's important to remember that the reason people take them is to alleviate pain. Sometimes that pain manifests in a physiological manner. Sometimes the pain shows itself to be neurological. It really doesn't matter, I suppose, because if you are the person suffering then you want it to stop. When it turns out the pain not only goes away but is replaced by a decided sense of pleasure, well, it can be asking a lot to encourage someone to resist it.
In Panic, director Jerry Schatzberg gives us no particular list of reasons why these characters--Bobby, Helen, Chico, Irene, and others--have taken on the lives of junkies. Because Bobby (played in pure beauty by Al Pacino) has a burglar brother, the suggestion seems to be that it runs in families, or maybe it's just something white people do to try to identify with African-Americans. The Joan Didion script comes off just that disengaged, although Pacino and the late Kiel Martin (as Chico) do appear to be having the times of their lives, at least until the addictions become overly pricey and the greed of the fix takes hold. It's at that point that the struggling artist Helen, portrayed by Kitty Winn (who regular viewers of anything 1970s-oriented will recognize from being under-utilized in all manner of work, despite her winning the Cannes festival for her role here), turns to prostitution to feed her habit, just as Bobby turns to making big scores that will free the two of them from this rotten existence, except that it never quite does, it never quite does. The cop keeps telling Helen that she will sooner or later rat out her boyfriend because that is what junkies do and we see it coming and the real shame is that neither the screenwriter nor director give us any real reason to care. Only the acting saves this film--well, that and a very brief appearance by Paul Sorvino, which is worth watching for.
But the movie does bring up an interesting point. I mean, does everybody eventually rat out their friends and do the friends learn to take that abuse in stride? This movie screams that the drugs ear us down so far that even a betrayal that lands a lover in stir for six months--that is, if the lover in turn rats out the person above him on the dope ladder--is just business as usual, perhaps not a welcome behavior but certainly not an unforgivable offense, either.
With so much emphasis on the techniques of shooting up, fading out, nodding off and stringing along, none of which have any glamour whatsoever, The Panic in Needle Park loses whatever good will it may have hoped to garner. If the subject is important enough to warrant this very serious film, then aren't the people affected by it--or their on-screen representatives--worth developing as individuals? The only thing we see are people helping one another score, or a woman freaking out because Bobby almost dies from an overdose while she's expecting company, or just how debased life is here in New York City.
My first thought about a soundtrack that this film could have sorely used might have included the Velvet Underground's "Heroin." That my memory reconnected that in this day of merging time zones and infinity of perception, a better mix would be The Brains' original "Money Changes Everything," especially with its lines: "And you say, well who can you trust? I'll tell you it's just no one else's money."
Chris Kazan, son of Elia, wrote the screenplay for The Visitors, a film his father directed. The movie stars a young James Woods as a Vietnam War veteran who testified at the court martial of two of his friends, Mike and Tony. The film begins on the day the two friends get out of Leavenworth for raping a civilian Vietnamese woman while on a mission. Mike, played with eerie intensity by Steve Railsback, wants revenge. Tony, played by Chico Martinez, claims he doesn't hold a grudge, but we may be forgiven for not believing him.
Bill (Woods) finds himself surrounded by enemies. He lives with his girlfriend in a house own by her father. The father is a hateful old bastard who writes western novels, when he isn't busy taking vengeance on the neighbors by the behavior of their dogs. The old man despises Bill for not having killed anyone in Vietnam, for not having married his daughter, and for simply having been born. Funny enough, the old man gets along well with Mike and Tony.
There is a painful segment where the old man's dog Max gets attacked by a neighbor dog, in the process losing one of its legs. The old man curses, "What am I gonna do with a three-legged dog?"
For all intents and purposes, Bill is a three-legged dog. He tries to carry on as if nothing is wrong despite the ominous looks that Mike and Tony give him, despite the leering looks they give his girlfriend Martha (Patricia Joyce), and despite the old man liking them much more than he does the poor dog.
The Visitors is a very unpleasant movie in much the same way that The Deer Hunter was unpleasant. No moral value gets placed on the behavior of anyone in these films. Things simply happen, no judgment gets cast--in fact, Mike screams at Martha because he assumes she has the temerity of judging him--and people move on, silently changed, but only after they commit some crazed act. The message, to the extent that there is one, is that the filmmaker was bitter, which I'm sure Kazan was. Hated by Hollywood for years, the director may have thought he was regaining relevance with this film. While he should be given credit for hosting James Wood and Steve Railsback, no one else in the film is much of anything except dull, which is a pretty sad indictment on the lives of real people. Relevance hardly makes up for a script that unfortunately lacks the courage to say something sincere about atrocities.
I very much wanted to at least like Bertrand Blier's 1974 film Going Places, or Les Valseuses, if you prefer. I wanted to like the movie because it stars Gerard Depardieu and Miou-Miou, the latter a quite marvelous actor who has been in any number of fine French films, some of which even permitted her to remain moderately clothed. I also liked Jeanne Moreau and I rather foolishly had hoped her character would add a touch of maturity to this exercise in revolutionary behavior.
That just goes to show you what an idiot I can be.
The movie starts out flashing its counter-cultural credentials all over the place as the two young men, Pierrot and Jean Claude--Patrick DeWaeare and Depardieu--burst into the frame in a stolen shopping cart while pursuing a not altogether beautiful woman whom they hope to rob. The two young men charm the audience immediately, just as they make us recoil ever so slightly as they toy with this woman whom they decide to call Ursula. You see, Jean-Claude and Pierrot are apolitical nihilists. They are the ultimate extreme of a perfect misunderstanding of the influence the 1960s spread out over the following decade. They do not work, neither do they toil. They do not love, although they do conquer. They do not purchase, and yet they consume, at least for the moment. And while they do these things, silly music plays across the soundtrack, suggesting that the boys' inner charm is just a smile away.
Indeed, these two men do not exude repugnant behavior or attitudes. They are virtually amoral in their drive to avoid boredom. They are, in their way, the prototypes of punk. Except--
Johnny Rotten, to the best of my knowledge, never paid a woman to breast-feed Sid Vicious on a train while the woman rode along on her way to meet her military husband.
I'm not going to give away every item in this film that leaves me uneasy. However, I will say that the acting is universally outstanding and if what these hedonistic nihilists did all the time wasn't so socially counterproductive--not all anarchists are nihilists but all nihilists are anarchists, if you catch my drift--this film would stand out as the landmark it clearly yearned to be. The problem is that most of the people Jean-Claude and Pierrot confront are not the cause of the boredom. For instance, when Jean-Claude confronts the security man in the department store, the employee snarks off some sly remarks and Jean-Claude retorts in kind. Fine. But then again his plan is to buy suits with stolen money. Indeed, all of the targets in this film are middle or lower-middle class, and our guys ridicule one man as "Proletariat!" while addressing others as "Comrade!"
Technically, this film lacks any major flaws, unless you want to include a bit of potential irony that was either implied or allowed to slip away, I'm not quite certain which. Here is what I mean: The boys steal a barber/pimp's Citroen DS sports car after one of them gets shot in a testicle. The shooting victim is so outraged that he talks a friend into loosening one of the car's front wheels so that, once the vehicle is recovered, the wheel will come off and the driver will get hurt or killed.
So far so good. After a great deal of sex, the boys learn that the car has been sold to an insurance salesman. Nearly an hour later into the film, we find our presumed heroes driving down the highway in this same car, a car they have stolen three times. We expect the wheel to come off.
We expect a lot of things in this movie. Most of them never happen.
This film was supposed to knock down doors and build castles among the enlightened. What it does instead is simply trick a few ought-to-know-better critics into believing it actually had something to say.
The scariest novel Stephen King has written is Salem's Lot. I did not say it was the best. I said it was the scariest. That's probably a subjective thing, but I'll stand by it because around the time I read that book I had to walk home from work at night through a creepy and deserted part of town and I will tell you that even as the hardest-nosed skeptic against anything even vaguely metaphysical who ever doodled in math class, I was occasionally quite uncomfortable. I attribute my fear to Salem's Lot. Thanks, Steve. So imagine my disappointment at the two movies that have been made out of this book. The first, by Tobe Hooper--of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame--was the real disappointment since by the time the 2004 remake came along I no longer gave much of a damn. But why anyone would have cast David Soul from "Starsky and Hutch" in the role of Ben Mears is beyond the reaches of my trembling imagination, just as I still reel from the idea of casting Lance Kerwin from "James at Fifteen" in the role of the boy. The problem with both these actors is that they are more stiff than Billy Joel at a communion. Still, the movie did feature the brilliant James Mason as the vampire's helper, as well as the nearly brilliant Fred Willard as Crockett, the real estate agent, so going into it there was some reason for hope.
Things begin well enough with Mears and the boy in the present time roaming through unpronounceable regions of Mexico, on the lam from what we imagine are the pursuing spirits of pissed off vampires. That fades away and we revert to two years earlier, which is where the story really begins, with Ben Mears, budding novelist, returning home after far too many years away. The camera work in the opening segment is great, especially the way Hooper puts the camera right down in the weeds as we look at James Mason descending from the evil Marsten House, just about the place where a young Ben Mears would have been all those years ago. I mention this as just one example of Hooper;s skill as a way of highlighting the fact that in terms of technique, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this film, except maybe the vampire itself, who, based on his appearance, would not have frightened a teenage girl scout, much less the people of that town. Likewise, the sound is excellent, resonating just under the action when necessary and just over it during drive segments.
Part of the craft that Tobe Hooper brings to this movie--and to Chainsaw, easily the most terrifying movie ever made--is an occasional disregard for getting in and out of scenes easily or with finesse. Sometimes we go from a daytime conversation in the rooming house where Mears is staying to an exterior scene at night with Mears standing alongside his jeep, with no concern at all for continuity. What makes this artful instead of clumsy is that Hooper simultaneously weaves the cast of characters in and out of the scenes with what I can only think to describe as a sneakiness that actually adds to the suspense. The use of headlights for nighttime exterior lighting is also a clever move. Hooper even adds an element to the movie that was missing from the novel: a tepid suspicion by the townsfolk of the writer.
"I like you, Ben. Modern aggressive partially liberated states her feelings," says the woman. "Does that make you uncomfortable?"
"No," says the writer. "It makes me feel good."
There's no telling how that little exchange would have disturbed the Phyllis Schaftley contingent of the audience.
Stephen King traditionally treats women in his books as if he actually likes them rather than desires to use them specifically to resolve his Oedipal tensions. It is the same with Tobe Hooper. The neat trick he manages to pull off in this film is a trick often missing from film adaptations of King product: he actually pulls off the sometimes insurmountable task of character development. Here the Ben Mears character is actually the weakest of the lot, so to speak, but the women, by golly, they get to be the most interesting people in the whole production. Susan Norton, the love interest, actually blossoms throughout, moving from strength to strength. (Her mother is likewise an interesting sort, just this side of being an overprotective pest, but not quite.) And Susan breaks free of her mother just as she breaks free of her ex-boyfriend, even as she attempts to leave behind what she feels are the limitations of her little town. This is not unusual in a horror film. What is unusual and what adds to the plus column in an evaluation of Salem's Lot, is that when Susan becomes a victim in this movie, it is not in retribution for her independence. On the contrary, the audience pulls for her to survive specifically because of her personal strength.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that everyone with whom I've ever discussed this movie has liked it much more than have I. Forewarned, if you can get beyond the Made-For-Television acting of two of the three lead characters, you may find that Hooper's treatment of the rural landscape, with its browns and yellows, and his attention to detail being so precise that even the crickets natter on cue, then you may find this quite the spine tingler.
A few closing points compel me. First, this is one of the most pro-human vampire tales of all time. There's no attempt to paint the vampires as misunderstood. They are tragic, yes, but not to be dismissed as lovable. Second, the treatment of women in this horror movie is a million times better than the way modern lawmakers treat real life women, just as things were back in 1979 when this movie came out. And third, James Kerwin only branched out into theatrical films two other times, one of which was 1995's rather hideous Outbreak. Nuff said?