The Rules Of Film Noir (2009)
As it’s light out, a little warm and sunny, and London is feeling frisky, always remember those streets can be deadly;
For connoisseurs here is Paul Schrader’s influential 1971 essay on the genre, a great read – for more on colour in the movies here is an odd blog.
Stoker (2013)
Suburbia has always been a fertile ground for slaughter. What is it that drives the horrors committed behind those perfectly manicured lawns and immaculate white picket fences? Is it all those failed dreams, those mouldering marriages and the suffocating sense of bourgeois conformity that ignites the homicidal rage? Anyone looking for answers to those questions in acclaimed director Park Chan-wooks first American film had best not hold their breath as there is little illumination offered in this grim psychosexual fable, the swiftly sculptured realisation of one member of the so-called Hollywood ‘Black List’s’ of the best 10 unproduced scripts that had been pinballing around the various studios for the past three years. In an effort to preserve the mystery I only watched the trailer for the film once despite linking to it here numerous times, I’ve gleaned that it had split opinion from festival screenings (particularly TIFF) and had been likened to a contemporary update of Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt, his personal favourite of his 59 pictures. So whilst I got a flavour of what might be on offer I very little specifics about the movie’s plot or peccadilloes, other than a sense that a disturbingly mysterious murderous melodrama might be lurking on the edge of American Beauty town. I’m still not entirely convinced about Park Chan-wook, I quite liked his venerated but overrated ’Vengeance’ trilogy well enough and was reasonably seduced by the overlong but amusingly bloody Thirst from a few years back, of course it was the currently being remade Oldboy which instantly catapulted him to global visibility beyond the fringes of international cult film fandom, the latter already being a sobering ten years old. His violent fables certainly have their strengths, he has a idiosyncratic and refreshing visual sense in tandem with an instinctive grasp of the creepy and uncanny, but his films tend to sprawl and sputter without really going anywhere, an element which I’m afraid to say hobbles Stoker’s subversive designs.
Whilst everyone seems to be going crazy about clumsy Oscar® pilferer Jennifer Lawrence can I stealthily suggest that we also keep an eye on the increasingly high-profile Mia Wasikowska as a future star to watch? In Stoker she is the jeopardous India Stoker, a troubled and isolated young girl brooding in a crepuscular Southern American town, a melancholy which is compounded when he father dies in a slightly suspicious car accident on her 18th birthday, a symbolic timing if ever there was one. Her mother Evelyn, portrayed with the trademark brittleness of this phase of Nicole Kidman’s supporting star career is aloof and distanced from the tragedy, and doesn;t hesitate to invite her husband’s brother Uncle Charley (big bad wolf Matthew Goode who clearly want to ‘eat them all up’) to stay with the bereaved duo whilst they get back on their feet. Neither Evelyn nor India were aware of their smouldering and mysterious relative until he arrived at the funeral and soon they both become attracted to him in symbiotic repulsive and uncontrollable ways, with its fairytale, fable like qualities Stoker is clearly a film yearning for metaphysical, symbolic density, and although this is achieved its at the expense of any emotional or motivational integrity.
It’s always fascinating to see foreign filmmakers of note transplanted to the meat grinder of the Hollywood studio system as it stands today, either blessed or cursed with all the fantastic toys and tools which Welles famously called the ’the best playground a boy could imagine’, with a crop of internationally established star personas to populate their canvasses and first class special effect artisans to ameliorate their imaginations, their oblique glances at material and customs just prove to be a rejuvenating shot in the arm for ghettoized genres. Stoker is very much a Park Chan-wook film, with its fuliginous look and off-kilter production design, its symbolic use of colour and careful arrangement of visual symbol, it’s lurking and occasional very literal iconography, the problem as with his other films is that he erects this wonderfully fertile environment around which the plot and storyline waddle around in pregnant expectation, but the story and plotting are stillborn, particularly in Stoker with its rather botched and confusing finale. Park clearly has a fascination with buried secrets and obscured pasts which are concealed throughout his work, but like his indigenous Korean work a visual brilliance and atmospheric aura can’t completely overwhelm inadequate narratives and philosophical obscurity. At times I was reminded of Twin Peaks with a visit to an Edward Hoppersque diner, the next the entire incredulity stretching plot is revealed in a dramatically neutered flashback.
Like Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt which screenwriter Wentworth Gillman has confirmed was his core inspiration the film revolves around a young girls coming of age and her blossoming sexuality, what Hitch had to cheerily allude and suggest back in the Forties doesn’t require any coy metaphors in todays permissive era, but the film keeps these elements submerged in the metaphorical background and dresses India’s tale as a gothic fantasy, giving weight to Wasikowska’s disaffected and elfin performance. Some images breed symbolic succor but we never uncover the core of these characters or caress their passionate drives, there is no sustenance to gnaw upon as to why India or Evelyn would surrender to Uncle Charley’s incestuous charms other than them being up for a bit of how’s your (dead) father. Goode is effective enough as the creepy Uncle who smolders with sexually laced dialogue and predatory wandering eyes, Kidman is her usually highly strung Icemaiden who might just thaw under the hands of a ravishing beast. The always terrific Clint Mansell conducts a lightly lurking score which soundtracks India’s psychological lethargy, although one admires his aural tinkering one speculates on just how original hire Philip Glass could have enhanced the films melodic qualities. As I watched this movie with a creeping, slippery disinterest I was struck by the thought that this is the kind of film that Tim Burton should be making if he ever grows up and decides to make films for adults, and takes the plunge in optioning partially original material beyond the four quadrant marketing holy grail, although he seems to have completely abandoned that future path of breadcrumbs through the dangerous woods. In the meantime fans of brooding, suburban fairy tales will have to make do with the intriguing yet isolating seduction of Stoker, another rung in the ascent of Mia Wasikowska’s ascent to stardom.
BFI Polanski Season – Chinatown (1974)
‘Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown’ may just be one of the all time great closing lines, encompassing as it does a resigned acquiescence in the face of overwhelming horror and corruption at the pinnacle of Roman Polanski’s dissection of the history of his then adopted Los Angeles, a loathly poisoned valentine to the brooding, eternal malevolence of Hollywood film noir. I initially resisted going to see Chinatown as part of the BFI’s newly commenced and exhaustive Polanski season for the simple reason that I’d already caught the film at their facilities back in 2001, but then it occurred to me that such an immortal classic deserves a revisit every decade or so, and although I’m just getting started on a trio of projects for the new year I’d be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t pay lip service to one of the most psychological dense and malignantly mysterious directors who continues to produce provocative cinema, whilst the theatrical staging of Carnage left me cold I did enjoy some of the thrilling, Hitchcockian designs of The Ghost Writer from a couple of years back, and as someone whom is not particularly enamoured with Dickens in book or film form I heartily enjoyed his Oliver Twist back in 2005. Pushing aside his still controversial personal life – let’s not get too sidetracked by his horrendous sexual history or indeed his horrific early life and the notorious murder of his wife and unborn child – I’ve decided to take a look at a trio of his films divorced from the media construct, nothing too left field or obscure, just perhaps the three films most likely to spring to mind when someone mentions ‘Polanski’…..
Los Angeles, 1937, and the sun drenched coast of California is suffering a major drought. Irascible private eye J.J. ‘Jake’ Gittis (Jack Nicholson) is running a prosperous investigative agency and reluctantly accepts a commission from Evelyn Mulray (Diane Ladd) to follow her husband who she suspects of infidelity. Trailing his mark Jake makes a curious discovery, Hollis Mulray (Darrell Zwerling) isn’t just playing away from home with a much younger woman he visits but he also repeatedly visits the overflow pipes and reservoir installations of the city which are quietly discharging water during the evening, as Los Angeles Chief Water & Power engineer it appears that he and by osmosis Jake have uncovered a damp deceit. The next day Jake receives a surprising new client – the real Evelyn Mulray (Faye Dunaway) – armed with a lawsuit now that the story of her philandering husband has hit the press and ruined his credibility in publicly opposing the construction of a vast new reservoir in the north of the city. With the tenacity of a terrier Jake refuses to let the case slip as his honour has been smeared in this plot to manipulate him by unknown forces, but when Hollis turns up drowned he realises he might be out of his depth as a vast conspiracy may obscure even deeper and more terrible secrets…..
Robert Towne’s magnificent script is the icy foundation of the films daunting prestige, frequently studied from an academic perspective as a perfect mélange of tone, place, structure and motif, not to mention its unswerving ear for period dialogue and argot. It’s simply such a treat to wallow in a movie which doesn’t treat its audience like a barely literate dullard, sign-posting all the major plot points, interrelations and occurrences to the barely conscious, this is very much a film you need to meet half-way as Gittes slowly unravels the layers of the formidable and intertwined dual mysteries without any exposition emitting speeches or sequences. Chinatown is a masterpiece of narrative construction with disturbing elemental forces coursing through the picture like the storm drains churning under the unsuspecting feet of the Los Angeles denizens, it is a film about secrets and corruption on both a personal and political level, both birthing some of the worst and most heinous behaviour of the human animal. Detective stories can be an extremely potent narrative method to draw an audience into their orbit as the private eye or cop or FBI agent becomes our avatar into the tale, unearthing the plot points and turns as the audience becomes simultaneously devours them, with danger lurking around every corner for nosy private dicks;
As usual with the classics it’s the perfect mix of ingredients that aromotise the pungent elixir of a genuine classic. John Alonzo’s moody, sun bleached Panavision framed cinematography, Jerry Goldsmith’s sleazy saxophone siren score, and of course Richard Sylbert’s effortless and impeccable period design are all wonderful, providing the film with a timeless aura located at sa midpoint between the first cycle of noir of the fortes and fifties and more recent revisits to the period which resurfaced in the nineties and nougties. As for the cast Nicholson was in the throes of his unbreakable string of pictures from 1968′s Easy Rider to The Shining in 1980, arguably one of the most accomplished series of performances in cinema history. The resourceful Jake Gittes is one of his more restrained roles, a dedicated and jaded man with a core decency uncorrupted by the failings and anguish he witnesses on the streets, with unresolved secrets of his own that the movie never feels the urge to explain, exactly what did happen when he was a serving officer in the Chinatown district? Faye Dunaway isn’t an actress I’ve ever had much time for (and frankly she’s something of a screeching prima donna in real life) but with the benefit of hindsight you can detect a smart, nervous performance from her in the movie, her skin crawling with even a passing mention of her father, a twisted ball of impacted grief and not the usual double-crossing femme fatale that noir films frequently employ. She and Polanski loathed each other, a famous on set encounter occurring with a close-up which Polanski was growing increasingly frustrated with, calling cut and marching over to the set before violently plucking an errant strand of her hair which was displacing his perfect shot – she went ballistic and it took hours to coax her back out of her trailer to complete the scene.
The towering, Mephistophelian Noah Cross is one of the screens most quietly horrifying wicked monsters, played to perfection by the indomitable John Huston, the final scene where his dark goals are achieved and he shields the gaze of his new prize from her slain mother is frankly squirm inducing, there is simply no stomach for such pessimistic finales these days with the possible exception of Se7en and that is approaching twenty years of age. The closest style of film I can approximate to Chinatown is of course LA Confidential but even by the nineties the appetite for bleak, defeated endings had been exorcised, as much as I enjoyed that film and its well orchestrated final shoot out the happy, sunlit ending really jarred with the rest of the picture, a concession to audience relief that prevents the picture from approaching a masterpiece status in my manically scrawled book. Like LA Confidential the period perforations of Chinatown also harbours a Russian doll structure of secrets within secrets, riddles amongst enigmas, all obfustcating the whodunnits of the forties with a ‘why not do it’ in the subsequent decades.
The pint-sized prince of perversion is a natural when it comes to the definitions, maps and inherent gloom of film noir, Polanski’s work is infected with neurotic flayings and felicitous fractures, and like all decent noir the film has a contemporary edge, it mirrors the disgrace of an immediate post-Nixon Washington which drips with an ichorous despair at the industrialists and authority figures that run our societies, definitions and declarations which ensure that the film maintains relevance some forty years since its original release. So my next visit is programmed toward the end of next week, it could be tricky to achieve this given the screening time and my proximity to central London given my new employment status, we’ll just have to see how it goes. For serious neo-noir fans I should mention that the film has a sequel called The Two Jakes which I remember as being distinctly average despite the return of Robert Towne and Nicholson to the same milieu and character, Jack also directed but the poor critical and financial performance ensured that the final part in a projected trilogy was never completed – best to stick to the original;
The Square (2008)
I watched an effective little neo-noir to kick-off a new year of movies yesterday, The Square is an Australian crime thriller which is slightly unusual in itself, apart from the likes of Animal Kingdom or Snowtown here hasn’t been much material of this sort emanating from down under mate;
When Carla (Claire van der Boom) spies her live-in criminally aligned boyfriend stashing a bag full of money and blood-stained rags in their apartment she comes up with a risky scheme, to steal the cash and elope with her neighbour Raymond (David Roberts) with whom she’s been enjoying a secret tryst – as you’d expect things do not go to plan. It’s quite a dour, downbeat affair rather than relying on any overt stylistics, centred on two realistic performances with Roberts being the antipodean spitting image of the sadly missed Bob Peck, as one morally dubious decision soon spirals into a murderous miasma as the bodies start to pile up – no masterpiece but an efficient little thriller with an appropriately sour ending. I’m off to the movies later today to usher in the new year, I think I’ll ditch the New Year diet and have a slice of Life Of Pi…
Killer Joe (2011)
It’s not particularly difficult to see what attracted director William Friedkin to the twisted charms of Killer Joe, his new homicidal and unpleasantly hilarious southern baked neo-noir which opens today and seems destined to stir up a minor whirlwind of controversy for its risqué concoction of sexual violence and prepubescent sexuality. During the halcyon period of the early Seventies Friedkin was fettered as one of the saviours of American cinema, and both his critical, commercial and cultural smashes The French Connection and The Exorcist showered him with Oscar nominations and unprecedented box office success, but as is usual with such icarus like rises an inevitable, incendiary fall was soon to follow. After a string of flops over the next two decades with only the cult crime favourite To Live & Die In LA distinguishing an increasingly mediocre career – one can only assume that his long-term marriage to Paramount matriarch Sherry Lansing kept a flagging career buoyant – in 2004 he saw the stage play Bug, written by Tracey Letts and his 2007 film adaptation of this schizophrenic two hander finally put him back on the map with critical acclaim (winning a Cannes nod in the FIPRESCI strand) and an itchy cult cache, as the psychological horror film also garnered plaudits from the Fangoria and Cinéfantastique crowd. Killer Joe is Lett’s first play, another baking composite of deep south meteorology, panting trysts and bruising violence, hammered through with the literary senses of Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner and noir hood Jim Thompson. Lightning has struck twice, as this is a sizzling, delirious and brutal neo-noir, at turns horrifying and hilarious, with a remarkable performance from Matthew McConaughey as you’ve never seen him before….
Welcome to New Orleans most dysfunctional and disgusting sleazy redneck family. Chris Smith (Emille Hersch) is a reprehensible small time coke dealer who has fallen afoul of the local biker gang. Needing money fast he hatches a cunning scheme to have his estranged mother killed for her $50,000 life insurance, bringing his rather dim-witted and hulking father Ansel (Thomas Hayden Church) and his slutty step-mother Sharla (Gina Gershon) in on the deal. These impotent hoodlums hire the snake-eyed, black garbed, local lawman Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey in a career warping performance) for this incompetent iteration of the perfect crime, as the local homicide detective he’ll be the narc assigned to the very case he committed. As always with these affairs there is a catch, as Chris doesn’t have the 25 large to pay Killer Joe up front he instead offers his fourteen year old sister Dottie (Juno Temple) as a tempting Lolita to this monstrous brute, Joe having already taken a shine to the tantalizing teenager, and it’s not long before the double crosses, triple bluffs and barbarous beatings build to a crescendo, a baptism of fire for the Smith family who have severely underestimated the depths of Joe’s unholy wrath….
This sibilating, brooding, rain saturated neo-noir is shot through with an electrifying gallows humor of the blackest pitch, with a mischievous glint in its eye it’s the funniest and most ferocious picture I’ve seen so far this year. You have to salute McConaughey’s bravery, after numerous years in rom-com hell I doubt there are many actors brave enough to conduct such a u-turn of their screen persona with such a disgusting character, he is essentially a steely eyed, psychopathic paedophile of the most repugnant sort, and like every single character in this film their loss is humanities gain. Every single member of the Smith family is playing an angle, everyone is a money driven bastard of the most slithering sort, hell they’re even willing to literally sell their sister or daughter to a paedophile for a few thousand dollars, even Fred Phelps and his malignant brood would shy away from this crowd as being a little too unpleasant for their taste. Emile Hersh who seemed to go AWOL after the rebellious Into The Wild seems back on track and I was happy to see Gina Gershon back on the big screen, she’s always been a favourite of mine and she makes quite the unforgettable entrance in Killer Joe, but the majority of the attention is lavished on Juno Temple as a clear ancestor to both Sue Lyon in Lolita and Carroll Baker in Baby Doll, in a very uncomfortable portrayal of a potentially brain-damaged young woman, she’s the nexus of the fevered lust that drives the film to its controversial sequences that are fairly difficult to watch.
Killer Joe’s major achievement is its navigation of that tenuous thread between humor and horror, Friedkin is a massive fan of Dr. Strangelove and it’s equitable embrace of the hilarity alongside the holocaust, in a similar fashion this film has you doubling up in nervous laughter in one second before some truly horrendous, blood choked violence unexpectedly bursts forward, and it’s to the films credit that when it gets serious the tone appropriately shifts, as it builds a relentless countenance to the final, guillotine edited ending which seems to be increasingly fashionable these days. It won’t be for everyone, be warned that you’ll need a strong constitution to get through this nasty little tale, it certainly helps if your sense of humor tends toward the darker side but in a summer adrift of serious adult fare Killer Joe is like a nasty little uncle you don’t like or particularly trust, but when you go for a few drinks with him you still have a great time with some terrific stories, and a bruising tequila hangover to boot – this is a film that’s worth the pain;
Killer Joe (2012) Trailer
William Friedkin has had something of a patchy career since his seventies heyday – think The Exorcist, The French Connection and cult favourite Sorcerer - but he’s back with a southern baked neo-noir that has done well on the festival circuit, see what you think of this;
Like most trailers that probably reveals too much, but it satisfies my crime criteria and McConaughey is meant to be fantastic in it. The BFI are conducting a screening late next month which I just managed to get a ticket for, my arm was twisted as yes Friedkin is flying over for a post viewing Q&A and he’s usually a good raconteur, it’s been a while since I managed to get along to one of those events and I bet they get Kermode to compère. Anyway that’s enough with the stopgaps, I have a backlog of reviews to muster over the weekend, yes there shall be some Whedon fanboy adulation here after The Cabin In The Woods and catching The Avengers today, alas it’s overrated but the last forty minutes are worth the price of admission alone – I’m still giggiling at puny Hiddleston, (a-hem) if you’ve seen it then you know what I’m talking about……
Headhunters (2011) Trailer
Well it had to happen eventually, a promising movie has just been released that I won’t be able to catch due to my incapacitated situation, a curse on this pathetic body;
It’s had some strong reviews and I do enjoy a slightly noirish, twisty crime caper, I guess I’ll just have to wait. In other news, a series of immensely fascinating articles on the shift to digital storage and projection from that ancient, photochemical nonsense. Did you know that Europe produces 1,100 films a year? That it costs almost ten times to store a digital print than a 35mm print? The future is not so assured as the studios would have us believe…
BFI David Lynch Season – Lost Highway (1997)
As we approached the end of the 20th century US cinema took a decidedly schizophrenic turn. Fractured personalities, hidden worlds, alternate realities and a destabilization of universal truths propagated the popular culture with cinema leading the charge, upon reflection (heh) it was a minor renaissance of celluloid uncertainty that captured both awards and box office receipts in an appropriately mutilated manner. Consider this list of the most influential and admired films of the period – The Matrix, otnemeM, Fight Club, The Usual Suspects, A Beautiful Mind*, The Truman Show, eXistenz, Donnie Darko, Being John Malkovich, The Others, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, The Game, The Sixth Sense, Dark City, A Scanner Darkly, Eyes Wide Shut - granted it’s a wide net that stretches over a decade and I’m sure there are many, many others, but these modern, urban films are specifically populated with phantasms and illusions, a pre and post millennial panorama where paranoiacs finally got the proof they were looking for that someone’s definitely out to get them, with a neat sideline in narrative surprises, visual acuity and innovation, and a foreboding unease for the century ahead. Such psychological playgrounds are the stock in trade of David Lynch and he seemed to react to these incursions into his intangible territory with an initial pincer movement, firstly to make the most singular, direct and unobtrusive film of his career with The Straight Story in 1999 but two years before that he plunged us deeper into the rabbit hole, toying with the established preconditions of narrative tropes and diabetic (or should that be diabolic?) character densities during his second collaboration with Barry Gifford, Lost Highway is more a patchwork noir than Wild At Heart was a roaring road movie, with its parade of mysterious femme fatale, jaded and world-weary lawmen, Bel Air industrialists and sordid San Fernando valley pimps, it’s the first of a loose trilogy that map a truly remarkable late phase of his career which still yearns for a final, encircling chapter.
The City of the Angels, crucially the location of all of Lynch’s subsequent films, and intense jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is being creeped out by a series of anonymous video tapes, detailing an unidentified stalker filming his home – Haneke of course lifted this premise wholesale for his 2005 film Caché. Fred seems enamoured with the odd and off-kilter, both through the creepy minimalism of his home decor and chiefly through his choice of wife, the distant and eerie, raven bobbed Betty Page simulacra Renee (Patricia Arquette) who produces one of the most gently strange performances of the decade. The tapes intensify as the footage penetrates the house, and then something imperceptibly slips, and Renee (who also bears more than a passing resemblance of a sedated Vampira, another link to Hollywood female folklore) is found brutally dismembered, apparently at the hand of our confused and blood spattered anti-hero. Incarcerated and sentenced to death a blazing transformation occurs as Fred transmutes to the usual Lynchian crescendo of blazing lights and throbbing score into apprentice hoodlum Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), much to the authorities befuddled bemusement. Released under secret observation to his parents care (including Gary Busey, he always gets a laugh) Pete resumes his grease monkey job and resumes his mechanical favours for local kingpin Mr Eddy (the brutal cult fave Robert Loggia), seemingly with no memory of the nights events that led to his mysterious teleportation. A more Chandleresque plot then untwines as Pete falls for the most dangerous blonde since Stanwyck retired her sunglasses (check out the hairstyles), as Renee seems to inexplicably return to the corporeal world as the blonde quaffed Alice Wakefield, the coolly provocative girlfriend of Mr. Eddy, and a plot to extricate her from his clutches is mooted following an inevitable and unavoidable seduction. But what the fuck happened to Jeff? Are Alice and Renee related or the same spirit? And just who the fuck is that Mystery Man and what the fuck is he filming?
The first thing to say that this was a French print of the movie which caused some muffled grumbling when this supposed imposition was announced, as the BFI audience would have to endure the unimaginable agony of watching a movie with gallic subtitles – naturally this didn’t in the least distract from the nefarious thrills on offer and I forgot they were there after the first few minutes, such was the films overwhelming, oppressive power. I recently (and mildly) criticised Wild At Heart for being too loose and unstructured for my palette, for being a fun but surface collection of vignettes without any overarching rhyme or reason but Lost Highway sublimely emits echoes and reverberations that ricochet throughout the film, like some sort of deranged psychological echo chamber, mustering undefined queries and questions as the parallel plot strands chaotically collide in the film’s final conjectural conclusion. Any attempt at a solid, unimpeachable analysis is a hopeless task and that for me is the films ultimate triumph, like the next two movies in the trilogy you make of this tale what you will, as armchair detectives there are certainly enough clues and hints to construct your own mental picture of what you believe is happening and what has occurred, a conscious design that polymorphs the film into more of a feeling than a story, an atmosphere versus fable, images, sound, pacing and mood forging a memorable, uncomfortable, puzzling yet rewarding cinematic experience. I happen to ‘read’ it as the last desperate convulsions of a sweltering brain awaiting several thousand white-hot volts of searing electricity in the death chamber, anticipating a plunge into a gibbering, Gehenna tainted ether but that’s just me. Here’s Lost Highway’s sense of suburban romance;
There are two revelations that this Lynch marathon has revealed to me so far, the first being just how much fucking permeates Lynch’s films – and I use that word in its animalistic, uncontrollably driven with physical desire sense of the word rather than its vulgar, ugly permeation - it’s hardly surprising given how closely sex and fantasy, unconscious drives and bubbling motives drive the human condition which Lynch consistently taps, Zizek calls it as a 
metaphor of suburban ennui which I guess is one of many potentially lucid, rich and risqué observations. The second was the volume of references, allusions and celebrations of Hollywood as the dark belly of an intangible, ghostly, literal ‘Tinseltown’, the likes of Tarantino and his ilk can be groan inducingly obvious with their bludgeoning innuendos but Lynch submerges these celebrations in the unconscious depths of his films, like a cultural iceberg the surface only displays a fraction of the swirling genre influences, iconography and character tropes that are assimilated, perverted and transformed throughout his work. Case in point is the climax of Lost Highway, where Fred/Pete is sexually, mentally and narratively driven to a remote cabin that is precariously perched on sticks by the shore – a perilous structure that is awaiting to be engulfed by the nectarine waters of the id - a cognitive phantom that is inevitably consumed in an ego ignited conflagration which is a clear allusion to the spastic climax of Kiss Me Deadly, one of the all time great noirs which from its title alone you can thrust a comma into the premise and alter all potential preconceptions of the movie. Whereas 1955′s concerns was the catastrophic unleashing of a howling radioactive exterior, the Pandora’s box of a potential hot / cold war nuclear annihilation, by 1997 this exterior threat was internalized and swamped with interior terror, the seething unease of provincial psychosis.
One break from the norm was Lynch’s unusual choice of soundtrack, his usual sonic scribe Badalamenti was involved but Lynch also enlisted Trent Reznor to compose some nervous soundscapes to complement the initial creeping terror of the film, also successful for me was the Bowie opening piece, a Lou Reed track, and the Manson montage presented below (I’m not a Manson fan but that track works brilliantly in the film), less effective is the crashing Rammstein vortex of dreary doom metal and the now clichéd (Spoilers / Nudity!) Song To The Siren sequence but to be fair that may well be the first time that track was deployed and I can’t decouple myself from its subsequent, horrific movie insertions - I used to quite like that track. I’m not going to link to much background material as the clock is ticking and I have a mildly connected, exciting B-Movie documentary to view (and subsequently review, yup I got a screener) but here is the (sadly missed) David Foster Wallace article that I’ve not read yet, by reputation its a great piece but I didn’t want to prejudice my thoughts. Finally, hey maybe Fred evaded the Feds at the end of the movie and made it back to Hollyweird, suffered another disintegrating transformation and found him/herself cruising Mullholland Drive…
*Hey, it won the fucking Oscar OK so someone liked it….
The Big Sleep (1946)
Here begins my assault on my New Year resolutions – more golden age Hollywood. The BFI is hosting a mammoth retrospective of the career of Howard Hawks over January and February; a titanic figure in American film whose ease of transition from genre to genre, of effortlessly churning out one solid picture after another remains arguably unmatched since his death in 1977. Hawks was a true master whose career coincided with a turning point for the art-form, starting as writer and moving up to the directors chair just as the talkies were coming to fruition, his fifty year career spawning classic after classic with the likes of Red River and Rio Bravo nestling amongst the most influential Westerns, Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday ushering in the screwball comedy, from Scarface to The Thing From Another World, from Gentleman Prefer Blondes to Land of The Pharaohs (a personal favourite), he is one of the most versatile American masters of the twentieth century. Amongst the cineastes his popularity I’d wager is only matched by the likes of Billy Wilder or Hitchcock, or Ford and perhaps Nicholas Ray, like all those colleagues he was a massive influence on the French New Wave acolytes who repeatedly referenced and paid homage to his work throughout their own careers. As a massive film noir fan I naturally gravitated to seeing his criminal classic The Big Sleep, a new print of which is forming the centrepiece of the exhaustive retrospective, with screening runs programmed all over London and further afield around the UK throughout February and March.
The plot of The Big Sleep is notoriously convoluted so you’ll have to bear with me; in one of his truly iconic performances Humphrey Bogart is private detective Philip Marlowe, a world weary figure whose hang dog expression mirrors the depths of deceit and deception of his expository career. A wealthy new client by the name of General Sternwood, a widower who squats like a bloated spider in his family mansion offers Marlowe a job to absolve the gambling debts his slutty daughter Carmen has accrued with a shady extortionist by the name of Geiger – I use the word slutty here advisedly as that is quite simply the best way to describe her – Marlowe memorably describing her in one of the films numerous passages of scintillating dialogue as someone who ‘tried to sit on my lap when I was standing up’. Accepting the assignment Marlowe prepares to exit the mansion but is hijacked by Sternwood’s other daughter, the sleekly feline Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) a complication who claims that her father has other intentions and aspirations for Marlowe services whose real intent is to track down his missing friend Sean Regan, a drinking buddy and erstwhile companion of Carmen. After tracking down Geiger to his rare book boutique Marlowe shadows the miscreant to a remote Californian bungalow where the sounds of raised voices and crunching furniture are soon interrupted by the crack of pistol shots, rushing to the scene he spies a mysterious figure exiting the crime scene with a pursuer in tow, just as he breaks into the domicile to witness a giggling Carmen, wacked out of her mind on drugs, hovering over the dead body of Geiger. From there on out it gets increasingly perplexing….
Any responsible review of the movie has to highlight the two main attractions of this classic – the undisputed chemistry of Bogart and Bacall, a seduction invigorated by the sparkling dialogue of screenwriters William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett* and Jules Furthman, all plucked from the authoritative source novel by Raymond Chandler. Bogie and Bacall were the Brad and Angelina of their times, a romance steeped in controversy due to the yearning age gap between the two – 26 years – and the fact that Bogie left his wife of seven years to shack up with a younger model, an infraction which of course could kill a career stone dead in that period. Bogart is just a natural on screen, he just dwells in that coarsely arrogant face and his delivery doesn’t suffer from that arch, mannered form of screen acting that were the criterion of the period, the performance affectations that the likes of Dean and Brando disintegrated in the Fifties. This being an era when Hollywood was still hamstrung by the Hays code in terms of its restrictions of impropriety the sulking wordsmiths presented some of the best allusions and innuendos to kindle that seething heat between the duo – just take a look at this which generated a few laughs.
The direction of Howard Hawks is unfussy and direct, his leaning to cover scenes in panning wide shots as figures move into apartment buildings, or smoke drenched bars, or down rain sodden streets before cutting to the usual two shots editing rhythm lets the dialogue breath and bewitch – in short like Marlowe he gets the job done directly and promptly, with little regard for redundant, rhetorical techniques. Hawks was a straight talking, direct and inspiring figure to his numerous casts and crew, frequently bringing his pictures in on time, and on budget, even when the perils of location shooting seemed destined to thwart his goals. One of my favourite anecdotes concerns that other Hollywood legend, producer Samuel Goldwyn whom exploded in fury when he received a telegram from Hawks whilst was down in Mexico shooting a picture – probably Viva Villa!! – where he suggested to the panjandrum that his next project be a romance movie. ’Romance??’ Goldwyn was said to have bellowed, ‘that man’s idea of romance is a fire in a whorehouse’….
What I really like about the film quite apart from the brilliant leads and compact direction is that complex, labyrinthine plot which was quite remarkable for its age – I struggled to keep up with it all during the screening last night. The legend goes that on set they were discussing the narrative with both Hawks and his screenwriters confessing that they weren’t sure exactly whom had done what to whom during the production, and even a telegram to Raymond Chandler to ask whether the chauffeur had been killed or committed suicide resulted in his confession that ‘he wasn’t sure’. Like the best of Chandler and the noir genre as a whole everyone has an angle, everyone’s working a hidden agenda and soon the crosses and double crosses are ricocheting around the movie like an epileptic pinball in a CERN centrifuge. Some noir purists complain that it’s not genuinely worthy of that label as the central character of Marlowe isn’t conflicted, he has no psychological burden or disability that drives the plot and the film doesn’t necessarily display the supposedly essential low-key chiaroscuro lighting that such a pigeonhole demands. It’s a nonsense argument as the film does have a signature lighting style, even if it is not as manifest as the likes of The Big Combo or Double Indemnity, besides which it has two maybe three femme fatale figures and the entire dramatis personae are a litany of duplicitous, criminal sorts who’d sell their own grandmother for a whiff of some dead presidents. It’s also always a joy to see one of my favourite ‘you know, that guy’ in the movie, in this case the wonderfully dilapidated Elisha Cook Jr. who as usual suffers a cruelly ignoble fate. To enter clichéd waters they quite honestly don’t make ‘em like this any more, The Big Sleep is a high point of the crime genre that purloined expectations of thrills and spills in favour of enigmatic romance, essential for all trench coated apostles everywhere.
*Leigh Brackett performed an uncredited pass on The Empire Strikes Back script fact fans, another presumed reason for the successful romantic aura between Han and Leia. You’re welcome.
the killer inside me
As a crime literature fan (I’m currently loving this Ellroy fans) it took me a while to catch up with the work of Jim Thompson, a devastating oversight on my part when you consider that he co-wrote two of Kubrick’s pictures – The Killing and Paths Of Glory - as well as being the source author behind a number of other well regarded crime movies. I first read The Killer Inside Me a couple of years ago and like all the truly classic noirs it takes the traditional ingredients of the genre – money, sex, revenge, murder – and stretches them out to an almost cartoon dimension in order to explore the contours of human depravity and deception. It is that depravity that has generated a critical furore surrounding Michael Winterbottom’s presentation of violence, or more accurately the depiction of violence against women in this months release The Killer Inside Me, a film that depending on which media outlets you follow is either the most disgusting film since last years Antichrist or the most faithfully brilliant adaption of Thompson’s source material yet committed to celluloid.
Through a drawling voiceover we are introduced to the world of Lou Ford, a small town sheriff of a gloomy West Texan town in the late fifties, Lou being portrayed with a viper intensity through yet another scorching performance of Casey Affleck. Lou is torn between two women, the discreet hooker Joyce (Jessica Alba) who operates out of a remote shack on the outskirts of town and his long term girlfriend Amy Stanton (an impressive Kate Hudson) whom is urging them to elope to a more promising future together in the big city. Lou it seems has other plans, living in the shadow of his overbearing father who precede
d him in the lawman’s shoes and the shame of his brother being convicted of molestation some years earlier he has a number of grudges to bear against the towns populace and is currently embroiled in a dangerous blackmail scheme. Joyce has entranced the son of powerful businessman Chester Conway (the excellent as usual Ned Beatty) with her feminine charms and threatens to disgrace the family unless she receives $10K to flee the state. Seeking to keep the affair as quiet as possible Chester recruits Lou to deliver the money and escort the threat out of town, him being unaware of Lou’s passionate relationship with Joyce. A seemingly straightforward agreement falls foul when Lou’s psychosis rears its murderous head and a violently psychotic approach to problem solving results in the county coroner being roused from his bed. In the fallout questions are raised amongst the federal authorities as Lou begins to extricate himself from suspicion and conviction through a labyrinth of alibis and machinations that gradually reveal a sordid and damaged past … 
I’ll come to the violence later but the first thing to say is that I don’t feel The Killer Inside Me worked, given that I absolutely love noir and neo-noir in pretty much all its incarnations and consider Winterbottom one of the most interesting film-makers around at the moment this was vaguely disappointing. The performances are fine, the film follows the source materials suitably grim trajectory but there is nothing that really elevates this beyond a standard issue three star movie. One concern that Casey Affleck revealed that he had with the film was that there wasn’t any real sense of its period or place and I have
to concur, there is a curious lack of atmosphere or attention to period detail which could have provided an buoyant panorama for the action to uncoil within, Winterbottom usually uses real locations for his films, he likes hand held cameras and encourages improvised performances, all techniques which embroider an almost jazzy subtext, a history of documentary & fiction hybrids that give his work a very tangible sense of their moment in time, of events unfolding organically. The Killer Inside Me is much more a standard issue movie made to a template, it’s all very professionally rendered and perhaps this is my loss due to a sense of anticipation but I was expecting more than a cookie cutter project which could have been rendered by any reasonably competent director. Overall, the film simply doesn’t ignite. And now we come to the elephant in the room…
It is so catastrophically obvious to anyone with half a brain to that yes, violence is terrible and shocking, you will and should squirm and turn away from the horror on the screen – that is the point. You are meant to be disgusted, you are meant to be repelled, it is meant to cause an emotional and physical reaction – anything less would be a travesty not only to the source material but to such disgusting, cowardly behaviour. Article tag lines such as this are pathetic (which along with this are much of the reason I’ve stopped buying the Guardian but that’s a whole other boring tale) let alone the usual ignorant hyperbole in the other ‘newspapers’, I am fully aware that domestic violence and more holistically violence against women is a huge problem that is frequently under-reported in our society, I work in local government and have had first hand experience of working with rape shelters and various ‘Victims of 
Violence’ charities. I do not however support the claim that the presentation of such violence, particularly in such a brutal and unflinching fashion for one iota of a millisecond in any way justifies such behaviour. Are there sick individuals out there who may find this attractive? Perhaps, but what can be done about that unless you legislate and censor on the basis of a miniscule minority of the mentally ill? Some years ago I saw in a documentary that Jeffrey Dahmer apparently got off on the power dynamics of the final scenes of Return Of The Jedi – should we ban Star Wars?.……OK, OK, bad example but c’mon, let’s get real. There seems to be some confusion out there amongst the moral majority that a work of expression that illuminates some uncomfortable realities of the human condition somehow sanctifies or celebrates those horrors. By such logic is Schindlers List must be inherently anti-Semitic because it is choked with scenes that concern the killing of Jews?* Anyway, it’s probably best to steer the commentary back to the actual film. Aesthetically the film, like the novel, is facilitated through the eyes of Lou’s psychotic character, an unreliable narrator who perceives events and relations through a warped prism so the admittedly very uncomfortable moment when a character apologizes to Lou as she is being beaten to death should be considered as an artistic flourish, an obviously reprehensible moment that is coupled as a realist scene tinged with hallucination, an esthetical model that is repeated during the films closing movement that I would argue operate solely 
in Lou’s warped mind. To Winterbottom’s credit there are no strong indications, no obvious cinematic signals that this must be in Fords mind and that for me is a much more much uncomfortable and unique. It is in these ambiguities that the film does tread challenging ground and that is why I’d wager it has generated such disgust from certain quarters – recent events in sleepy Cumbria are testament to a a frenzied scrambling for cause and effect, not to mention a repugnant reportage that exploits such misery, when perhaps there is little more to be said that a serious mental malfunction combined with access to firearms can lead to a horrific outcomes. I’ll close with the always excellent Patterson who outlines some of Thompsons cinematic history and a quote of Stephen King who admired that ’he went running into the American subconscious with a blowtorch in one hand and a pistol in the other, screaming his goddamn head off. No one else came close’.
* When I saw Schinders List at the cinema back in 1993 there was an elderly woman with her family sitting in front of me who became very agitated whenever someone on-screen said ‘fuck’. She didn’t seem to blink when a child was shot or people were exterminated though - I’ve always remembered that….
Mintys Movie Masterclass – Robert Altman
I’ve said in the past that I’m not Altman’s greatest fan but I figured some of his past films are worth a re-appraisal given that I’ve recently picked up this extraordinarily priced box-set. The main reason for buying this was to finally get my hands on ‘O.C & Stiggs’, a film that has eluded me for years and I also fancied giving ‘The Long Goodbye‘ another spin so I figured it would be worth delving back into the mavericks’ CV for a couple of other movies to build up another blog entry.
Altman’s style can be loosely described as a free-wheeling almost indifferent approach to audiences with his preference for ensemble casts to elude specific identification with a central character, overlapping dialogue and sound to reproduce more realistic speech patterns, a purposeless and freestyle camera method coupled with a hippyish, anti-establishment credo. He likes to follow disparate narrative threads which are central in perhaps his two highest critically acclaimed films, ‘Short Cuts‘ and ‘Nashville‘ although ‘Gosford Park‘ also warrants a mention along with indisputably one of the finest films ever made about Hollywood, ‘The Player‘ which entertains from frame 1 with its opening homage to Welles’ ‘Touch Of Evil‘. So what did I get through?
In early 1980′s California two rebellious best friends, ‘O.C. & Stiggs‘ engage in pranks against the wealthy Schwab family, an emblematic target of their wider hatred of bourgeois and middle class society. There’s actually not much more to say, in act 1 there’s a wedding, some messing about in school in act 2 then a confusingly constructed and wholly unsatisfying conclusion. I’d read that Altman has pretty much dismissed the film and its easy to conclude why – it has no structure, no purpose and no plot. I’ve been keen to track it down since the film is allegedly the main inspiration behind Alan Moore’s alien comedy anarchists ‘D.R & Quinch‘ which is one of my favourite strips from 2000AD, you can see the connections but not the humor. The ‘O.C. & Stiggs’ tale had actually been lifted from a National Lampoon strip which is curious to view in light of the other incarnations. Not the best of starts, here is the closest the film comes to raising a chuckle.
‘The Long Goodbye‘ was probably my favourite Altman film prior to this revisit and remains undimmed on probably my fourth or fifth viewing. Adapted from the Raymond Chandler original by the great Leigh Brackett it’s a neat inversion of the film noir tradition of shadow cloaked urban entrapment transported to the sun drenched vistas of Southern California. Ellliot Gould stars as the laconic private investigator Philip Marlowe who investigates the disappearance of his friend Marty shortly before his wife is found brutally murdered. A seemingly unrelated case leads Marlowe to an alcoholic novelist played with aplomb by a cleverly cast Sterling Hayden in one of his final performances. A suicide in the Mexican badlands, a tenacious doctor and his secret Santa Monica Rehab clinic – are all these events and people connected in Altmans acid love letter to golden age Hollywood?
It’s Gould’s film all the way with his relaxed, studied performance holding the disparate elements in orbit. He’s practically catatonic, almost horizontally laid back with an exhausted cigarette perpetually hanging from his bottom lip. The film is a joy for cineastes as it’s stuffed with references to the George Raft, James Cagney and Edward G Robinson movies of the 30′s and 40′s which are always a joy to identify and decipher. DP Vilmos Zsigmond entraps the characters in murky bars and beach apartments by back-lighting the locations with sand refracted sunlight drenching the frame, pouring into the scenes from doorways and bay windows. This is still a dangerous and treacherous path for Marlowe to walk, deception is rife, agendas cloaked and allies scarce.
Released in the early 1970′s the film clearly emerges from the hangover of the apparently failed Sixties revolution with Marlowe as something of a counter cultural insurgent, refusing to co-operate with the authorities whilst forging his own path to the truth. Altman even takes a few shots at the 1960′s failures and introverted denials with Marlowes neighbours being a group of yoga practicing hippies, acid scarred airheads who can barely remember to feed his cat when he’s away. The films deep and abiding cynicism explodes quite mercilessly during the films quite shocking and unexpected final scenes. Fantastic stuff with the added ‘treat’ of a (thankfully) mute early appearance by Ahnoldt himself.
In 1970 the protests against the Vietnam war reached their nadir in the US. Against this backdrop Altman’s breakthrough film MASH was released with the Korean conflict setting of the film serving as a thinly veiled metaphor for which far eastern excursion the film was critiquing. The film like the popular TV series it spawned follows the exploits of a group of misfit rebel surgeons who battle and subvert authority within the confines of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.
I kind of admire its whimsical, light anarchy and Gould and Sutherland serve as perfect foils for each others antics. Altman’s improvised shooting style confused and alienated much of the crew and especially the actors, leading to Gould and Sutherland actually attempting to get Altman thrown off the picture – how’s that for gratitude? Ironically, given the conservative estimate of screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. (one of the key members of the Hollywood Ten incidentally) that 80% of his script was rejected in favour of improvisation he still went on to win the best screenplay Oscar. It has all the Altman trademarks and a few good quips (‘How on earth did a surgeon with such a terrible disregard with authority and procedure become a medical officer in our proud Army?….. ‘He was drafted’) but I just don’t quite connect with this. This is clumsy and the final football match with a rival surgical team and its broad slapstick comedy feels out of place to me.
‘McCabe & Mrs Miller‘ – One of the all time great revisionist westerns. M&MM concerns the relationship between McCabe (Warren Beatty), a misguided card sharp who teams up with Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), an ambitious British madam to establish a brothel and bar in the snowy wastes of North West Canada. It’s an early example of a realistic portrayal of the 19th century pioneers, shot in autumnal muted oranges and browns by the great Vilmos Zsigmond (yes, him again!!) He really was the best in the 70′s) on a fully functioning frontier camp set which was adapted for the actual crew to live on site, all adding to the films authenticity. It’s quite a departure from the usual chiseled chin cattle wranglers and their homely gingham clad wives, instead offering a collection of disheveled, hard bitten pioneers who huddle together for warmth in claustrophobic saloons, stores and churches.
Typical of Altman this one is all about the characters, specifically how dialogue and action define their internal worlds and motivations as opposed to narrative or plot. The supporting characters (amongst them Altman favourite Shelly Duvall) offer insights into their lives in brief vignettes that you feel could be spun off to another movie, all layering and texturing the film quite unlike any other western made up until its release in 1971. At the time Beatty was a major star even after the breakthrough SPOLIERS ‘Bonnie & Clyde‘ and as such was something of a prima donna, insisting upon take after take even when Altman felt he’d satisfied the emotions and intentions of certain scenes. Altman exacted his revenge by demanding twenty five takes of the films snow drenched finale, Beatty no doubt almost contracting pneumonia as he repeatedly struggled through the freezing waist deep drifts again and again and again. Special mention should also go to Leonard Cohen’s apt folk soundtrack which supplants any traditional dramatic score, the film is a first class piece of work and one of the key films of the 1970′s Hollywood renaissance.
So, holistically you can see the style driven through all four of these films and I must confess after this exercise my appreciation of his work has improved somewhat. Its a 50/50 split although the strengths of ‘McCabe’ and ‘Goodbye’ outweigh the mediocrity of ‘Stiggs’ and failures in ‘MASH’ – I’ll never warm to ‘Nashville’ though, you can take that to the bank. Nevertheless the obvious influence on the likes of PT Anderson and Alexander Payne with the focus on character and unconventional methods being placed as priority mark Altman as a true trailblazer, RIP. Next up, we’re off to Australia for my next monthly ‘master-class’ – can you guess who?
Diva
Zoot alors!! Ah, 1980′s French movies. I’m guessing that like me, you had a friend with a ‘Betty Blue‘ poster on their wall and a massive crush on Beatrice Dalle or Isabelle Adjani, or indeed both in my case. Predominant of the period was the so called ‘Cinema du look’ movement which critics at the time complained were visually arresting but empty and pointless texts, with films such as ‘Nikita‘, ‘Subway‘, ‘Diva‘ and ‘The Big Blue‘ tarnishing France’s proud cinema history. I seem to recall similar allegations that were aimed at the likes of Ridley Scott and Michael Mann, no doubt by the same cadre of critics who see cinema as more of a literary, theatrical model than a purely visual, aesthetic tool.
‘Diva‘ is the second movie I’ve seen as part of the South Banks European ‘Twilight & Treachery’ noir season and I was pleasantly surprised. I hadn’t seen the film for something like twenty years and whilst it occasionally merited some unintended laughter, it was good fun with a strong climax. The story centres on an opera-mad postal messenger, Jules who surreptitiously bootlegs a performance by his idol Cynthia Hawkins, an African-American soprano on tour in Paris. This cassette soon gets confused with another which is secretly pressed in Jules possession by a hooker on the run from a pair of assassins, a tape which details a major police controlled drug and smuggling ring. The tapes place Jules and his two unusual friends, a female Vietnamese photography student and, well some sort of weird Parisian philosopher into a noirish quagmire of treachery and homicide…
Considering its generation, it stands up quite well and doesn’t look too terribly dated like some films of the 1980′s. It displays many of the accoutrements of the era - generous use of neon strip lighting, plenty of reflections in chrome and mirrored sunglasses, pseudo pop-art painting murals. There is a cringe worthy scene with Jules and Cynthia wondering around a park which looks like a mid-eighties perfume or car advert but I reminded myself that the film came first, not the advert. Always remember that advertising ‘creatives’ are nothing more than cultural vandals, stripping and appropriating the visions of others from the visual (and other) arts, repackaging them into their ‘artistic vision’ to hawk their products. Fucking thieving scum, each and every one of ‘em.
Picked this up from the BFI bookstore, a book I’ve been meaning to read for quite a while. It’s Biskind’s follow-up to the seminal ‘Easy Rider’s, Raging Bulls‘ which is one of the most informative, entertaining and interesting film books I’ve read. Already ‘Down & Dirty is proving to be just as gripping - Biskind in the first twenty pages has set out the environment for the early 90′s indie movie explosion by summarising the ‘primordial swamp of alternative cinema that emerged in the 80′s, an era where the likes of Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmush, Alison Anders, Jonathan Demme (whom I’m seeing at a BFI event next week), Spike Lee and the great John Sayles’ all emerged to build the foundations for the Tarantino’s, Soderburgh’s, Rodriquiz’s, Ang Lee’s, Todd Solondz, PT Anderson’s, Darren Aronofsky etc. of this world. It’s quite rightly focusing on the twin strands of Miramax and Sundance, the two most critical facets of the film ‘movement’. Terrific, addictive stuff with some fantastic behind the scenes gossip and production stories coupled with a feeling for the industry and culture in which it developed.
Oscar 2008 Results
Well, the results are in and a can happily say that after a 50% prediction hit rate last year, this year I managed…….50%. Twelve out of 24. That’s actually not bad if you consider the total guess work that is involved with the short films and documentary subjects – well, that’s my excuse anyway. With the exception of Best Actress, I got every major category winner correct so I’m happy with that. Trust the French to screw things up eh?
Best Picture
Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Did I get it right? Of course. I think ‘Blood’ was a little too esoteric for most of the academy, thus the default vote for ‘Country’. I can accept that happily for me, at least they weren’t robbed by some terrible film.
Best Director
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jason Reitman, Juno
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Did I get it right? Again, quite happy to be right on this and was amused by Ethan’s acceptance speech – ‘I don’t have much to add to what I already said, so thanks’. Succinct!!
Best Actor
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises
Did I get it right? Obviously.
Best Actress
Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Julie Christie, Away from Her
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Laura Linney, The Savages
Ellen Page, Juno
Did I get it right? No.
Best Supporting Actress
Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There
Ruby Dee, American Gangster
Saoirse Ronan, Atonement
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton
Did I get it right? Oh yes.
Best Supporting Actor
Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James…
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton
Did I get it right? Easy one, and yes.
Best Foreign Language Film
Beaufort, Israel
The Counterfeiters, Austria
Katyn, Poland
Mongol, Kazakhstan
12, Russia
Did I get it right? Yes, I guessed as the Academy always likes a holocaust film – seemed as good a reason as any.
Best Animated Feature Film
Persepolis
Ratatouille
Surf’s Up
Did I get it right? Yes, given the outstanding reviews it had to be the rat movie.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Atonement
Away from Her
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Did I get it right? Yup.
Best Original Screenplay
Juno
Lars and the Real Girl
Michael Clayton
Ratatouille
The Savages
Did I get it right? No.
Best music (Score)
Atonement
The Kite Runner
Michael Clayton
Ratatouille
3:10 to Yuma
Did I get it right? No, I honestly can’t remember a single thing about the score for Atonement which may or may not be a good sign. Not an especially strong bunch of candidates anyway, since ‘Blood’ was excluded this is all largely redundant anyway.
Best Music (Song)
Falling Slowly – Once (performed by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova)
Happy Working Song – Enchanted (performed by Amy Adams)
Raise It Up – August Rush (performed by Jamia Simone Nash and Impact Repertory Theatre)
So Close – Enchanted (performed by Jon McLaughlin)
That’s How You Know – Enchanted (performed by Amy Adams)
Did I get it right? No.
Best Documentary Feature
No End in Sight
Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
Sicko
Taxi to the Dark Side
War/Dance
Did I get it right? Nah.
Best Documentary Short Subject
Freeheld
La Corona (The Crown)
Salim Baba
Sari’s Mother
Did I get it right? Yes, not bad for a guess !!
Best Visual Effects
The Golden Compass
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Transformers
Did I get it right? No, this must be a joke, the CGI was terrible in ‘Compass’ but as I said before, not much competition.
Best Cinematography
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Atonement
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Did I get it right? No, nice to see Elswert win for ‘Blood’ as it also looked terrific.
Best Art Direction
American Gangster
Atonement
The Golden Compass
Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
There Will Be Blood
Did I get it right? No. I honestly can’t think what was going through my mind when I opted for ‘Blood’ over ‘Sweeny Todd’ which now seems the obvious choice.
Best Animated Short Film
I Met the Walrus
Madame Tutli-Putli
Meme Les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven)
My Love (Moya Lyubov)
Peter & the Wolf
Did I get it right? Yes. Another lucky guess.
Best Short Film
At Night
Il Supplente
Le Mozart des Pickpockets
Tanghi Argentini
The Tonto Woman
Did I get it right? Nope.
Best Costume Design
Across the Universe
Atonement
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
La Vie en Rose
Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Did I get it right? Yes, always have to opt for the big, flashy costume period films for this category I think.
Best Make-Up
La Vie en Rose
Norbit
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Did I get it right? Yes.
Best Sound Mixing
The Bourne Ultimatum
No Country for Old Men
Ratatouille
3:10 to Yuma
Transformers
Did I get it right? No, ‘Bourne’ robbed ‘Men’ on this I think, the sound design was so atmospheric and tension building as opposed to deafening everyone. Pah….
Sound Editing
The Bourne Ultimatum
No Country for Old Men
Ratatouille
There Will Be Blood
Transformers
Did I get it right? No, as above.
Best Film Editing
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Into the Wild
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Did I get it right? Another crime. ‘Bourne’ won, and while it’s quite effective at giving you the story in several thousand cuts quantity does not mean quality, it does not trump being able to tell a story with dexterity and style as is the case with just about all the other nominees. That whole frenetic style is actually something of a cliche now I think….
Oscars 2008
It’s that time of year again. It looks like a good film might actually win this year given the quality of the nominations although I am mystified by ‘The Assassination of Jess James by the Coward Robert Ford’ being almost universally overlooked. Cest la ‘vie. Interesting to see ‘Juno‘ in there, I’ve heard good things about it and it’s nice to see a little independent movie fighting amongst the big studio pictures. Of course, this is all dependant on the writers strike being resolved by February 24th but I reckon theyll go ahead regardless.
Remember the code? I’ve bolded the films I’ve seen, italicised the ones I think should win and underlined the films I think will win. Some of this is total guesswork – I obviously haven’t seen any of the short films or documentaries nor indeed any of the best actress nomination films but sometimes you can judge the Academy on a political basis and history – they love disabled or ill characters (‘Rainman’, ‘My Left Foot’, ‘The Best Years Of Our Lives‘) so I’ll take a stab at Julie Christie as the Alzheimer’s sufferer in ‘Away From Here’. These predictions are all open to change, especially once I’ve seen ‘There Will Be Blood’ as I suspect that may change my mind about a few nominations. So on with the show:
Best Picture
Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Best Director
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jason Reitman, Juno
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Best Actor
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises
Best Actress
Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Julie Christie, Away from Her
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Laura Linney, The Savages
Ellen Page, Juno
I’ve read lavish praise for Linney in ‘The Savages’ but I’ve got to go with Christie.
Best Supporting Actress
Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There
Ruby Dee, American Gangster
Saoirse Ronan, Atonement
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton
Best Supporting Actor
Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James…
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton
I thought Holbrook’s turn in ‘Into The Wild ’ was terrific, but Bardem will get it.
Best Foreign Language Film
Beaufort, Israel
The Counterfeiters, Austria
Katyn, Poland
Mongol, Kazakhstan
12, Russia
Very surprised to see that ‘Four Months, Three Days…’ has been completely overlooked – evidently I’ve cursed it. Maybe abortion being such a divisive subject in America they Academy shied away from it. Cowards.
Best Animated Feature Film
Persepolis
Ratatouille
Surf’s Up
Pft. God knows.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Atonement
Away from Her
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
The Academy always seems to award prizes for independant minded scripts – think ‘Fargo’ or ‘Pulp Fiction’ so it’s got to be the Cohens.
Best Original Screenplay
Juno
Lars and the Real Girl
Michael Clayton
Ratatouille
The Savages
Got to be Clayton.
Best music (Score)
Atonement
The Kite Runner
Michael Clayton
Ratatouille
3:10 to Yuma
Best Music (Song)
Falling Slowly – Once (performed by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova)
Happy Working Song – Enchanted (performed by Amy Adams)
Raise It Up – August Rush (performed by Jamia Simone Nash and Impact Repertory Theatre)
So Close – Enchanted (performed by Jon McLaughlin)
That’s How You Know – Enchanted (performed by Amy Adams)
Good lord, I can’t even guess on the basis of something as stupid as the song title – they’re all terrible.
Best Documentary Feature
No End in Sight
Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
Sicko
Taxi to the Dark Side
War/Dance
Seen ‘Sicko’ which was OK but exposed Moore’s skill at editing – his vision of the NHS was a world away from most people’s experiences I suspect.
Best Documentary Short Subject
Freeheld
La Corona (The Crown)
Salim Baba
Sari’s Mother
Fuck knows. May as well throw a dart at three names pinned to a dartboard…
Best Visual Effects
The Golden Compass
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Transformers
God, none of these films deserve a nomination. I’ll opt for ‘Transformers’ for the sheer volume of effects work, rather than quality.
Best Cinematography
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Atonement
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Best Art Direction
American Gangster
Atonement
The Golden Compass
Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
There Will Be Blood
Best Animated Short Film
I Met the Walrus
Madame Tutli-Putli
Meme Les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven)
My Love (Moya Lyubov)
Peter & the Wolf
Best Short Film
At Night
Il Supplente
Le Mozart des Pickpockets
Tanghi Argentini
The Tonto Woman
More guesswork.
Best Costume Design
Across the Universe
Atonement
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
La Vie en Rose
Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Best Make-Up
La Vie en Rose
Norbit
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Quite how the Acacdemy has the guts to award any nominations to Norbit, commonly agreed as the worst film of 2007, is beyond me…..
Best Sound Mixing
The Bourne Ultimatum
No Country for Old Men
Ratatouille
3:10 to Yuma
Transformers
Sound Editing
The Bourne Ultimatum
No Country for Old Men
Ratatouille
There Will Be Blood
Transformers
Best Film Editing
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Into the Wild
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
I got 50% right last year, fingers crossed I can beat that…
No Country For Old Men
This is turning out to be quite a year. Admittedly we’re only three weeks in but I’ve been lucky as all the films I’ve seen have been good and now finally the long awaited ‘No Country For Old Men’ by the brilliant Coen brothers is out. Not only is this a welcome return to form after one minor and one major mis-step, they have produced arguably their best film to date and quite possibly an American masterpiece.
The plot is relatively simple and centres on three men – Sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a resigned and ruminative lawman who is approaching his retirement. Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone sour near the Mexican border and promptly flees the bloodbath with £2 million dollars in cash. Llewellyn is pursued through the Texan badlands not only by Sheriff Bell but also by the lethal assassin Anton Chigurh who has been despatched by the furious drug cartel to retrieve their missing funds by any means necessary.
Javier Bardem is quite simply brilliant as the personification of evil that is Chigura, a force of nature, ‘The Terminator’ with a weirder haircut. He is someone with whom one does not fuck – utterly ruthless, utterly remorseless and utterly terrifying. There is one scene, right toward the end which is simply breathtaking in its presentation of subtle terror and the evil’s at play within our world.
Usual Coen cinematographer Roger Deakins provides the visuals, capturing the hostile Texan desert and motels with his usual brilliant aplomb – with this and ‘The Assassination of Robert Ford’ under his belt he could make a claim for one of the top three cinematographers working today. Curiously the film has no soundtrack, just the occasional use of some clever source music. This makes the sound design and editing all the more direct and effective during a number of excruciatingly tense scenes as Chigruh skilfully prowls his prey.
I cannot stress what an absolute joy this film is – proper, adult film-making that skilfully weaves it’s mediation on life and death, good and evil into a gripping chase western noir. The characterisations and performances are magnetic leaving you anxious, demanding to find out what happens next. I’m a huge Cohen fan yet this even eclipses the heights of great films like ‘Miller’s Crossing‘, ‘Fargo‘ and ‘The Big Lebowski‘ – it obviously harks back to their low-budget debut noir ‘Blood Simple‘ and it’s a real relief to see them back, firing on all cylinders. They’re reigned in their more outlandish characterisations and opted to tell a brutal, bloody story as directly as possible – the frequent, graphic violence is shocking and delves to the films core purpose of illuminating a grim and difficult world.
It’s the first direct adaptation of a novel they’re produced, based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of 2004. You may recall me referring to McCarthy in an earlier post as the incredible author of ‘The Road’ which prompted me to delve into this – I’m about halfway through and it is stunning, he is the best writer I’ve discovered in the past ten years.
There seems to be a real sense of defeat in recent ‘serious’ American cinema when you consider ‘The Assassination of Jesse James’, ‘No Country For Old Men’ and if I’m reading my trailers correctly ‘There Will Be Blood’. All are set in America at various periods in the countries more immediate history, all are set in the rugged central states, all feature world-weary and morally questionable characters. I sense a very tangible thread of melancholic dismay at the world, evil triumphing over the noble and just, violence and greed dominating the human condition.
Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead
Second week of the year, third film – a good start and thankfully another good movie. Sidney Lumet puts his colleagues to shame - at 84 year old he’s crafted a tense, modern, robust little thriller with another incredible performance from the great Philip Seymour Hoffman.
New York, present day. Two brothers, Andrew Hanson (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Henry Hanson (Ethan Hawke) are both experiencing financial difficulties – Henry has crippiling alimony and a demanding daughter whilst Andy is struggling to keep his trophy wife Gina (Marisa Tomei) happy and content. The domineering Andy hatches an improbable scheme to rob their parent’s suburban jewellery store and convinces his brother to help him – of course crime does not pay and the heist does not go to plan, leading both brothers down a dark path of destruction.
The film employs the traditional noir flashback structure which can become hackneyed and steer a movie perilously close to cliche but it works here with sequences and moments being re-visited from alternate characters perspectives. This is a very effective method to slowly reveal the true depths of degradation that the brothers are engulfed in - financially, chemically (drugs and alcohol abuse) and morally. The lynchpin to it all is Hoffman who is just incredible as the screwed-up elder brother, a man striving for respect and position in the world yet accepting his escalating troubles with a world weary resignation. It’s that entrapment, the collusion of terrible events and coincidence, the existential dread of hopelessness that is the essence of noir, – no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you struggle and fight – you’re fucked. On a happy note you also get to see Marisa Tomei’s tits three times. Reee-sult.
Sidney Lumet always tends to get overlooked as one of the core directors from the 1970′s in favour of Scorsese, De Palma, Spielberg, Lucas and the rest despite his making some of the essential films of the period such as ‘Serpico‘, ‘Dog Day Afternoon‘ and ‘Network‘ which remains the best and most prophetic film ever made about Television, cinema’s bastard litter brother. His best film though is the low-key drama ‘The Verdict‘ which has Paul Newman’s career best performance as a ambulance chasing lawyer who is given one final chance to make amends for his immoral ways - not dissimilar to ‘Michael Clayton’ as it happens now that I think of it. Someone call the copyright police!!
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