Radiator Heaven

DVD of the Week: Godzilla: Criterion Collection

2012-01-31T10:35:00.000-05:00

Godzilla is more than just some guy in a cheesy rubber suit terrorizing badly dubbed Japanese actors and stomping miniature cities. The original film, made in 1954, is actually a tragedy of epic proportions, a potent warning of an escalating nuclear arms race and messing with atomic power. Of course, Godzilla mainly works as an entertaining monster movie, too.

When a 7,500 ton freighter is mysteriously lost in the South Seas off Japan, the authorities are baffled. Soon afterwards, a fishing boat is destroyed in the same manner: from an underwater explosion. It is a mine? An underwater volcano? There are only a few survivors and one of them claims to have seen a creature in the water. Some elderly citizens immediately claim that it was Godzilla, a creature that lives in the sea and occasionally surfaces to feed on mankind when food in the ocean is scarce.

Sure enough, late one stormy night, something destroys several houses in a village in such a way that it could not have been the result of natural causes, like a hurricane. Director Ishiro Honda wisely prolongs the first actual appearance of Godzilla for 21 minutes, cleverly employing traditional horror film techniques to create tension and build anticipation. We never actually see the monster in the initial attacks – just a hint of him but nevertheless his presence looms large, much like with King Kong (1933). When we finally do catch a good glimpse of the creature, it is little more than a head but it is a fantastic shot that effectively establishes his massive scale and is more than enough to send the locals running for their lives.

The country’s leading scientist Professor Yamane (Takashi Shimura) theorizes that Godzilla is the result of atomic testing, a mutation that exists to punish his country for dabbling in the dangerous waters of atomic energy and radiation. Naturally, the Japanese government wants to destroy Godzilla but Yamane respects the beast and wants to study it. Yamane represents a sobering humanistic voice that mirrored Honda’s own beliefs and acts as a sharp contrast to the government’s foolhardy shoot first, ask questions later attitude.

Look past the guy in the rubber suit and the obvious miniatures and you’ve got atmospheric black and white cinematography by Masao Tamai that is haunting, especially the night scenes with an almost silhouetted Godzilla destroying Tokyo that is a devastating site to behold.

Godzilla was born from the ashes of A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the fallout of which Honda witnessed first hand. In fact, the film’s opening scene, where a freighter is destroyed by an explosion from under the water, was a reference to an incident in which a tuna trawler got too close to an H-bomb test courtesy of the United States and its crew became sick with radiation poisoning. With this knowledge, it’s hard not to see Godzilla’s swath of destruction through urban Japan as a metaphor for the A-bomb and a powerful critique of the dangers of atomic radiation. This is what elevates Godzilla above countless other monster movies from the 1950’s and has inspired countless sequels that have transformed the giant monster into a pop culture icon. The Japanese version is the way this film was meant to be seen with all of the stark footage of the dead, maimed and shell-shocked and numerous the A-bomb references – something that is missing from subsequent sequels that have turned into admittedly entertaining battle royales.

Special Features:

A few years ago, Classic Media released an excellent special edition of Godzilla with an unimpressive transfer and a decent collection of supplemental material, none of which has been carried over to the Criterion Collection’s new and improved edition so completists may want to hold onto that previous incarnation. As you would expect, Criterion’s transfer is near flawless and a significant improvement on the Classic Media version, making it more than worth the upgrade.

The first disc features an audio commentary by film historian David Kalat who provides a nice mix of analysis and production information. He goes into great detail examining the relationships between the characters and their purpose in the film. Kalat also touches upon the difference between the Japanese and American names for Godzilla. He also good-naturedly addresses the absurdity of the oxygen destroyer and other scientific inaccuracies. At times, he comes across as a little too enthusiastic but this is tempered by his encyclopedia knowledge of all things Godzilla.

“Photographic Effects” features effects director Kawakita and effects photographer Motoyoshi Tomioka revealing how some of the special effects for Godzilla were done with examples from unused footage. They point out the extensive use of matte paintings and composite shots.

Japanese film critic Tadao Sato examines Godzilla’s role in Japanese culture. He remembers seeing the film when it first came out and recalls his first impressions. He also points out how aspects of the film evoked memories of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan.

“The Unluckiest Dragon” is a 2011 audio essay about the Daigo Fukuryu Maru fishing boat tragedy that inspired parts of Godzilla. The crew witnessed a powerful U.S. atomic bomb test and became sick with radiation poisoning. This essay examines the socio-political implications of the incident.

Also included is a theatrical trailer.

For completists, both versions – the original 98 minute Japanese version and the 80 minute Hollywood version, entitled Godzilla, King of the Monsters – are included, each on their own disc, but after seeing the original it is really hard to go back to the other. American movie producers acquired the North American rights and promptly Americanized the movie, inserting a reporter played by Raymond Burr with only 60 minutes of the original film intact, the rest was cut and new footage shot. Criterion has also included a trailer and David Kalat returns for a commentary where he starts off by providing the brief backstory to the nuclear arms race between Russia and the U.S. He discusses the Americanization of Godzilla including its unusual structure of flashbacks, which he explains may actually be reminiscent of film noir.

There is an interview with actor Akira Takarada who talks about his experience working on Godzilla. He talks about his initial impressions of the screenplay and tells several filming anecdotes, including working with the legendary Takashi Shimura (The Seven Samurai).

Godzilla performer Haruo Nakajima (who played the creature in 12 films) talks about the challenges he faced playing the iconic monster. He recalls being told to study King Kong for how to move like a mythical creature. He talks about what it was like moving inside the suit and how he had to adjust his performance.

Features effects technicians Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai talk about their work on the film. They start at the project’s origins and go all the way through production providing invaluable recollections on how the various effects were achieved.

Composer Akira Ifukube talks about his long, illustrious career and, of course, his groundbreaking work on Godzilla. He talks about his humble beginnings in forestry to how he eventually got involved in scoring films.

The Color of Money

2012-01-27T09:28:00.000-05:00

The 1970’s saw the rise of the Movie Brats, a collection of filmmakers that had grown up watching and studying films. They made challenging films that reflected the times in which they were made and were revered by cineastes as much as some of the actors appearing in them. Directors like William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola, Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese made intensely personal films that blended a European sensibility with American genre films. However, the one-two punch of Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) and the failure of expensive passion projects like New York, New York (1977) and Heaven’s Gate (1980) ended these directors’ influence and saw the rise of producers like Joel Silver, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and movie star-driven blockbusters in the 1980’s and beyond. It got harder and harder for the Movie Brats to get their personal projects made. Most of them went the independent route, making films for smaller companies like Orion and doing the occasional paycheck gig with a Hollywood studio.

For years, Scorsese had been trying to fund a personal project of his own – an adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ. It was a tough sell and he ended up making After Hours (1985) and The Color of Money (1986) as a way of keeping busy while he tried to get Last Temptation made. At the time of The Color of Money much was made of it being Scorsese’s first movie star-driven film and some critics and fans of the director felt that he was selling out. It would not only be promoted as a film starring Paul Newman and Tom Cruise (and not as a Martin Scorsese film), but was a sequel (something that the director was never fond of doing) of sorts. Newman had been interested in reprising his famous role of "Fast" Eddie Felson from The Hustler (1961) for some time but he had never met the right person for the job – that is, until he met Scorsese.

The Color of Money begins twenty-five years after the events depicted in The Hustler and we find that Eddie (Paul Newman) is enjoying a comfortable existence as a savvy liquor salesman with his bar owner girlfriend Janelle (Helen Shaver) and occasionally fronting a pool hustler. His current investment, a cocaine addict named Julian (played with just the right amount of sleazy arrogance by John Turturro), is getting roundly beaten by a young turk named Vincent (Tom Cruise) who catches Eddie’s attention with his “sledgehammer break.” He becomes fascinated watching Vincent play and his cocky behavior between shots, like how he works the table. Eddie also watches the dynamic between Vincent and his girlfriend Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). What really catches his attention is not just Vincent’s raw talent but also his passion for the game. He’s even willing to play Julian after he’s won all of the guy’s money because he just wants his “best game.”

There’s a nice bit where Eddie tests Carmen’s skill as Vincent’s manager, exposing her lack of experience and schooling her on the basics of pool hustling in a beautifully written monologue by Richard Price that Newman nails with the ease of a seasoned pro. We get another healthy dose of Price’s authentic streetwise dialogue in the next scene where Eddie takes Vincent and Carmen out for dinner and continues to school his potential protégés: “If you got an area of excellence, you’re good at something, you’re the best at something, anything, then rich can be arranged. I mean rich can come fairly easy.” The scene is also nicely acted as Tom Cruise plays the cocky upstart with just the right amount of arrogant naiveté without being a typical goofball. As Eddie puts it, “You are a natural character. You’re an incredible flake,” but tells him that he can use that to hustle other players. The ex-pool player lays it all out for the young man: “Pool excellence is not about excellent pool. It’s about becoming something … You gotta be a student of human moves.” And in a nice bit he proves it by making a bet with them that he’ll leave with a woman at the bar. Of course, he knows her but it certainly proves his point. This is a wonderful scene that begins to flesh out Vincent and establish how much he and Carmen have to learn and how much Eddie has since The Hustler.

The young man is a real piece of work – brash, directionless but with raw talent. It is clear that Eddie sees much of his younger self in Vincent and decides to take the young man under his wing and teach him "pool excellence" by taking him and Carmen on the road. It’s an opportunity to make some money while also getting back Eddie’s passion for playing pool. The Color of Money proceeds to show the three of them on the road for six weeks, getting ready for an upcoming nine-ball tournament in Atlantic City. Of course, there are the predictable bumps in the road as Vincent’s impulsive knack for showing off costs them money and Eddie feels like the young man’s not listening to him. It’s a formula we’ve seen used in countless films but Scorsese does everything he can visually to keep things interesting, especially in the dynamic way he depicts the numerous games of pool, the use of music (for example, one game is scored to “Werewolves of London” by Warren Zevon) and the actors that play some of the opponents along the way, like a young Forest Whitaker as a skilled player that manages to hustle and beat Eddie at pool.

However, it is the camerawork by veteran cinematographer Michael Ballhaus that impresses the most. He and Scorsese depict each game differently, employing a variety of techniques, like quick snap zooms in and out, and floating the camera gracefully over the pool table or gliding around it. He even has the camera right on the pool table following the balls around. The camera movement and editing rhythm of each game is dictated by the mood and intensity of each match, like the grandiose techniques employed when Vincent shows off during a game of pool. As he revels in his own showboating moves, the camera spins around him as if intoxicated by his bravado. However, much like the chaotic pool hall brawl in Mean Streets (1973), the camera movement goes nowhere symbolizing the futility of Vincent’s actions. Sure, he beat the top guy at that pool hall but in doing so scared off an older player that had much more money.

While The Color of Money was made fairly early on in Tom Cruise’s career, his relative inexperience actually suits his character. His youthful energy mirrors Vincent’s. It is his job to come across as an arrogant flake of a human being, which he does quite well (too well for some who were unimpressed with his performance). Cruise has always been an actor that performs better surrounded by more talented and experienced people and with the likes of Paul Newman acting opposite him and Scorsese directing, it forces the young actor to raise his game. One imagines he learned a lot on the job much like Vincent does in the film. Scorsese knew exactly what he was doing when he cast Cruise and got a solid performance out of him. In the late ‘80s, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio acted in a series of high profile roles like The Abyss (1989), The January Man (1989) and this film. She’s given the thankless job of the girlfriend role but manages to make the most of it. One gets the feeling that Carmen is a fast learner and smarter than Vincent. She is much like Eddie in understanding the business side of pool hustling.

Naturally, Newman owns the film, slipping effortlessly back into Eddie’s skin after more than 20 years and it’s like he never left. The scenes between him and Cruise are excellent as the headstrong Vincent bounces off of the world-weary Eddie. Over the course of the film something happens to the elder pool player. As he tells Vincent at one point, “I’m hungry again and you bled that back into me.” We see that youthful spark fire up in Eddie again after so many years dormant and Newman does a fantastic job conveying that. While many felt that his Academy Award for the performance he gives in The Color of Money was really a consolation prize for a career of brilliant performances, this does a disservice to just how good he is in this film and how enjoyable it is to watch him get to work with someone like Cruise and Scorsese, watching how their contrasting philosophies towards acting and filmmaking co-exist in this film. There is an energy and vitality that Cruise brings and Newman feeds off of it and Scorsese captures it like lightning in a bottle.

When Paul Newman read Walter Tevis’ sequel to The Hustler it made him wonder what “Fast” Eddie Felson would be doing now and wanted to revisit the character. He had seen Raging Bull (1980) and was so impressed by it that he wrote a letter to Scorsese complimenting him on such a fine piece of work. The director was just coming off of After Hours and was attached to several projects, including Dick Tracy, with Warren Beatty, a fantasy film entitled Winter’s Tale, Gershwin, with a screenplay written by Paul Schrader, and Wise Guy, a book about the New York mafia written by Nicholas Pileggi. However, they all took a backseat when Newman invited him to direct a sequel to The Hustler. The actor had been working on it for a year with a writer. Scorsese was interested but didn’t like the script Newman showed him because it was “a literal sequel. It was based on at least some familiarity with the original.” Scorsese felt like he couldn’t be involved with the project if he didn’t have some input on the original idea of the script.

Scorsese wanted to go in a different direction and brought in a new screenwriter, novelist Richard Price who had written The Wanderers and also a script for the director based on the film Night and the City (1950). Scorsese liked the script because it had “very good street sense and wonderful dialogue.” For The Color of Money, Price and Scorsese’s concept was basically what became the film, exploring the director's preoccupation with redemption but with what Newman saw as "recapturing excellence, having been absent from it, and then witnessing it in somebody else." Newman liked it and Price and Scorsese came up with an outline and began rewriting the script. Price studied pool players and wrote 80 pages of a script. They took it to Newman and got his input. By the end of nine months, Price and Scorsese decided to make the film with Newman.

For Scorsese this was the first time he had ever worked with a star of Newman's magnitude. "I would go in and I'd see a thousand different movies in his face, images I had seen on that big screen when I was twelve years old. It makes an impression.” As a result, Scorsese and Price made the mistake of writing for themselves when they should have tailored the script to suit Newman and his image, or as Scorsese later said, "we were making a star vehicle movie." The actor wanted to explore aging and the fear of losing his “pool excellence.” He also wanted the character of Minnesota Fats, played so memorably by Jackie Gleason in The Hustler, to return but Price couldn’t get the character to fit into the script. He and Scorsese even presented a version of the script with Fats in it to Gleason but he “felt it was an afterthought,” said Scorsese.

It was Newman that suggested Cruise for the role of Vincent to Scorsese. The young actor had met Newman before when auditioning to play his son in Harry & Son (1984). Scorsese cast Cruise before Top Gun (1986) had come out but he was a rising movie star thanks to Risky Business (1983). He had seen the young actor in All the Right Moves (1983) and liked him. The project was initially at 20th Century Fox but they didn’t like Price’s script and didn’t want to make it even with Cruise and Newman attached. Eventually, it went to Touchstone Pictures.

Newman was not fond of improvising on the set and suggested two weeks of rehearsals before filming. Scorsese wasn’t crazy about this and found them “aggravating. You are afraid that you are going to say ridiculous things, and the actors feel that way too.” However, he agreed to it and brought in Price so that he could make changes to the script. Fortunately, everyone felt secure in character and with each other. Price and Scorsese didn’t have the film’s ending resolved and felt that they had written themselves into a corner. The studio wanted them to shoot the film in Toronto but Scorsese felt that it was too clean and chose Chicago instead. Both Cruise and Newman did all their own pool playing with the former being taught how to do specific shots that he played in the film with the exception of one, which would have taken two additional days to learn and Scorsese didn’t want to spend the time. Cruise had dedicated himself to learning how to play pool: “All I had in my apartment was a bed and a pool table.” He worked with his trainer and the film’s pool consultant Mike Sigel for months before shooting started.

In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “The Color of Money isn't Mean Streets or Raging Bull. It is, however, a stunning vehicle – a white Cadillac among the other mainstream American movies of the season.” Time magazine’s Richard Schickel wrote, “There is a ferocity in Cruise's flakiness that he has not previously had a chance to tap. That, in turn, gives Newman something to grapple with. There is a sort of contained rage in his work that he has never found before, and it carries him beyond the bounds of image, the movie beyond the bounds of genre.” The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott wrote, “It may be true that in gambling money won is twice as sweet as money earned, but in art, only the earned has savor; The Color of Money earns enough of it to turn most other movies persimmon with esthetic envy.” In his review for the Washington Post, Paul Attanasio wrote, “But in the final third of the movie, the real drama takes place within Fast Eddie himself, as his dissatisfaction with what he's become almost imperceptibly grows, and he tries to decide, in middle age, who he wants to be. That involves a shift in the movie's focus to Newman alone; and if what's lost is the excitement that Newman and Cruise had generated together, what's gained is a kind of depth another, simpler story wouldn't have had.” However, Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “Maybe the problems started with the story, when Newman or somebody decided that there had to be a young man in the picture; the introduction of the Cruise character opens the door for all of the preordained teacher-pupil clichés, when perhaps they should have just stayed with Newman and let him be at the center of the story.”

Some Scorsese fans marginalize The Color of Money as one of his paycheck films – the first he did for the money – and while it may not have the personal feel of a film like Taxi Driver (1976), it still has its merits, a strong picture that fits well into the man's body of work. I would argue that it is one of his strongest films stylistically with some truly beautiful, often breathtaking camerawork capturing all the nuances of playing pool: the energy and vitality of the game is there without sacrificing any of the story or the characters. This film also shows how a director like Scorsese can take a hired gun project and make it his own. It looks, sounds and, most importantly, feels like one of his films and not a commercial studio picture. Others must have agreed as the film not only became Scorsese's most financially successful film at the time but a critical hit as well. The director proved to the studios that he could deliver the goods at the box office while to himself he was still able to invest the film with some of his own personal touches. Ultimately, The Color of Money is about Eddie’s redemption and rekindling the spark he had in The Hustler before the screws were put to him. As with many sports movies, the story builds towards the climactic big game or, in the case of this film, the big tournament but Price’s script offers a slight twist in that Eddie’s victory is a hollow one and the real one is at the very end when his love for playing pool has finally come back completely. He is reinvigorated and excited about where his life and game will go from here and this is summed up beautiful in the film’s last line – “I’m back.”

Lost Highway

2012-01-20T09:28:00.000-05:00

After the critical and commercial beating David Lynch took with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), his next film Lost Highway (1997) was seen as a comeback after a dry spell of five years. At the time, there was certainly a strong push in appealing to a young, hip audience with a splashy cover story in Rolling Stone magazine (Lynch even shared the cover with Trent Reznor) that drew attention to the film’s soundtrack featuring then popular musicians Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and The Smashing Pumpkins. However, this did little for the film’s potential mainstream appeal as Lynch delivered another nightmarish neo-noir tale of jealousy and murder that may or may not be taking place inside the mind of a killer. In some respects, the film anticipated Lynch’s later masterpiece Mulholland Drive (2001), it too is a mystery that appears to take place within the fevered imagination of its protagonist.

Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is a musician whose wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) may be cheating on him. We’re not really sure and neither is he. One day, a videotape shows up on the steps of their front door in a plain brown envelope. When they watch it there is grainy camcorder footage of the outside of their house. They don’t think too much of it but another tape arrives and this time there is footage of the inside of their house and, most chillingly, of them asleep in bed. There is definitely some tension in their relationship judging from all the pregnant pauses in what little conversations they have. Or it could be Fred’s inability to perform adequately in bed, which she responds to with a condescending pat on the back and a, “It’s okay.”

Two police detectives investigate and in typically amusing Lynchian fashion are useless. Their ineffectual nature anticipates the equally useless cops in Mulholland Drive. Fred and Renee attend a party at Andy’s (Michael Massee), a friend of hers and someone Fred saw leaving with his wife one night while he was performing at a nightclub. At the party, Fred encounters a mysterious man (Robert Blake) dressed all in black and with Kabuki white makeup on his face. He walks right up to Fred and asks, “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” Fred doesn’t recognize him but the man says that they met at the Madison’s house and, most disturbingly, he’s there right now. Of course, Fred doesn’t believe him until the man calls his house and he responds. Fred is understandably unnerved after this creepy conversation.

He and Renee return home to find no one else there but we see a light moving fast through the upper floor of their place. The first half of Lost Highway is an unsettling slow burn of uncomfortable silences and a feeling of paranoia and dread in the Madison house. Fred often disappears into darkened hallways that almost feel like the recesses of his mind. Lynch accomplishes this through very little light and a subtly disturbing soundscape of atmospheric noises. The last videotape that arrives features Fred next to the badly mutilated dead body of Renee and before he knows it he’s on death row for her murder. This is where things get really strange as at some point Fred transforms into a young man named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). The authorities are understandably mystified and let Pete go.

He goes back to living with his parents, going out with his girlfriend Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner), and working at a local auto shop. On the surface, Pete is the opposite of Fred – he’s young and virile, having sex with not only his girlfriend, but a beautiful blond woman named Alice (Arquette again). He’s also friends with local mobster Mr. Eddy (a ferocious Robert Loggia), an intimidating guy who loves his car (“This is where mechanical excellence and one thousand horsepower pays off!”) and does not tolerate people who tailgate. However, Pete also gets involved with Alice who just happens to be Eddy’s girlfriend. Over time, Fred’s world slowly seeps into Pete’s. For example, Fred’s gonzo saxophone solo from the first half of the film plays over a radio as Pete works on a car and it gives him a headache.

The first and last line spoken in Lost Highway is "Dick Laurent is dead." Initially, it seems no more important a line than a simple teaser to draw us gradually into a dark, atmospheric world. However, much like the severed ear found lying in a field in Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), this phrase is the key to unlocking a mystery that lies at the heart of Lost Highway. The mystery that is central to this film seems to be a conventional one — nothing more than a man accused of killing his wife. This is only a superficial reading, however. Look a little deeper and it becomes apparent that Lynch has swathed this mystery up in layers of abstractions and contradictions that makes watching Lost Highway akin to solving a riddle. Another key line that I believe is crucial to understanding what happens to Fred is when he tells the cops, “I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.” So, the second half of Lost Highway could simply be him remembering things his own way.

While on death row, Fred tries to escape his fate by creating a fantasy world where he’s everything he’s not – a stylish neo-noir filled with dangerous gangsters and sexy women but this is only a temporary reprieve as the problems that he had bleed into his fantasy world. Like Fred, Pete wanders the darkened places in his home. He is Fred’s idealized image: young, strong and virile. He even has control over Renee’s doppelganger, Alice but this is fleeting and she once again exerts her dominance, this time as a dangerous femme fatale. She ropes Pete in on a dodgy job of robbing an associate of Mr. Eddy’s and predictably it goes bad but with a Lynchian spin where even his characters die in weird ways (it involves furniture). The sequence evolves into a surrealist nightmare. More importantly, this scene is where Fred and Pete’s worlds bleed together and it becomes obvious that Fred isn’t going to escape his fate.

This culminates in a scene where Alice and Pete make love in the desert while waiting for the man who will fence their stolen goods. It is one of the most beautiful and chilling moments in any Lynch film. He lights their naked bodies to the headlights of a car while the hypnotic “Song to the Siren” by This Mortal Coil plays over the soundtrack. Lynch then turns this beautiful moment on its head when Pete passionate tells Alice over and over, “I want you,” to which she replies by whispering in his ear, “You’ll never have me.” She walks off and once again Fred has failed to control the object of his affection and frustration, even in his own created fantasy world. It is inevitable that these two worlds collide because Fred is consumed by the guilt of what he’s done. Ultimately, he is unable to escape his true nature as symbolized by the film’s rather abstract climax.

From the powerful shot of a car speeding down a darkened, deserted stretch of highway at night that begins and ends the film, Lost Highway contains many stunning visuals (courtesy of cinematographer Peter Deming) that will haunt you long after seeing the film. For example, the use of light, or rather, lack of it adds to the mysterious atmosphere that envelopes the film. Characters disappear down darkened hallways only to reappear later on. Many of the scenes in the film are lit in such a way that they almost resemble a painting that you could reach out and touch. There’s also the fantastic introduction of Alice captured in slow motion as Pete sees her climb out of Eddy’s convertible to Lou Reed’s cover of “This Magic Moment” and we can see why Pete is immediately attracted to her.

Lynch's films are also known for their rather complex soundscapes. In one way or another, the director has always taken a personal approach to the use of sound in his work and how it matches with the images on the screen. Lost Highway is no exception and may well be the best use of sound in his films since Eraserhead (1977). The film's soundscape quite often layers sound upon sound with incredible effect. It may only be the use of minimal sound effects buried in the background to suggest a feeling of ominous foreboding in a scene or a piece of music brought to the foreground, threatening to overwhelm everything else. And for the music Lynch not only continued to work with his longtime collaborator, Angelo Badalamenti, but also enlisted the help of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and British musician Barry Adamson. Together, they take Lost Highway to new levels of menace that the filmmaker was never able to achieve before. Their contributions greatly enhance the film's already impressive soundtrack.

The origins for Lost Highway started with something strange that happened to Lynch. A stranger rang the director’s doorbell, pushed the button of the intercom and told him, “Dick Laurent is dead.” When Lynch walked to the window and looked out he didn’t see anybody. This understandably troubled him for some time. On the last night of filming the Twin Peaks movie, he had a brief vision that would become roughly the first third of his next project: “It was like the first third of the picture maybe, minus some scenes we had in the final script ...This thing I had went all the way up to the fist hitting Fred in the police station – to suddenly being in another place and not knowing how he got there or what is wrong.” A few years later, Lynch read Barry Gifford’s story Night People and at the end of the first chapter two characters talk about a lost highway. Lynch loved those words and contacted Gifford who suggested they write something together.

A year later, the two men sat down and began to exchange ideas they had for the film. Both men had their own notions of what the film should be and these differed quite radically – to the point where they rejected each other's ideas and eventually their own. "Then I told Barry about this series of things that came to me one night. The very last night of shooting Fire Walk With Me these things shot into my head. I was driving home with Mary Sweeney and I told her about them. What I told her sort of scared her and it sort of scared me too. And when I told them to Barry he said, 'Jeez, I really like that,' and that was the start of a brand-new direction.” Gifford and Lynch decided that at some point in the story a transformation should occur and it would result in another story but have connections with the first one. Within a month, they had written the screenplay.

Lynch always wanted to work with Bill Pullman and so when it came to casting the role of Fred Madison, he was the first actor he thought of to play the role. The director felt that Pullman had a “pretty intense side to him which wasn’t exploited in his previous roles.” Furthermore, Lynch saw in the actor’s eyes, “intelligence and a vein of madness inside them. And to force it to come out I pushed during rehearsals.” Another significant bit of casting was Robert Blake (In Cold Blood) as the Mystery Man, the creepy figure who may be a part of Fred’s imagination. The veteran actor was responsible for the look and style of the character. One day, he decided to cut his hair short, part it in the middle and apply Kabuki white make-up on his face. "And the makeup people said, 'You're going crazy, man! Nobody in this movie looks like that; everybody looks regular!' I said, 'Leave me alone; just give me some shit.' I put this black outfit on. I walked up to David, and he said, 'Wonderful!' and turned around and walked away." Blake clearly knew what he was doing as his character exudes a sinister vibe every time he appears on screen.

The first cut of Lost Highway ran just over two-and-a-half hours. After a screening with fifty people, Lynch cut out 25 minutes of footage. Not surprisingly it received mixed to negative reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave it two out of four stars and wrote, “I have nothing against movies of mystery, deception and puzzlement. It's just that I'd like to think the director has an idea, a purpose, and an overview, beyond the arbitrary manipulation of plot elements. He knows how to put effective images on the screen, and how to use a soundtrack to create mood, but at the end of the film, our hand closes on empty air.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “More in its imagery than in its baroque plotting, Lost Highway is best at creating a sense of unease. Working with cinematographer Peter Deming and longtime composing collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, Lynch has put together some thoroughly spooky situations. In the hands of this crew, even something as straightforward as a ringing phone in an empty room can create the feeling that the most awful thing is about to happen.” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, “Highway, which Lynch has pretentiously dubbed ‘a 21st-century noir horror film,’ is nothing more than a 20th-century cul-de-sac. The maker of such great works as Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks has finally run out of road.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “By the time the film reaches its heart of darkness (it has something to do with a porno movie), Lynch, for the first time, seems to be using avant-garde tricks to pass off as 'taboo' what looks to the naked eye like mere routine sleaze. Lost Highway has scattered moments of Lynch's poetry, but the film's ultimate shock is that it isn't shocking at all.” Long-time Lynch supporter Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “Despite the shopworn noir imagery and teenage notions of sex, this beautifully structured (if rigorously nonhumanist) explosion of expressionist effects has a psychological coherence that goes well beyond logical story lines, and Lynch turns it into an exhilarating roller-coaster ride.” Finally, in her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “A structure that begins and ends at the same moment in time, with a debt to the Mobius strip (or to Pulp Fiction), is another intriguing feature. But the film has more of these touches than it has explanations. Eventually it raises the overwhelming possibility that nobody is entirely in the driver's seat.” Most interesting, Lynch took Siskel and Ebert’s thumbs down verdict as a badge of honor and plastered it large on newspaper ads for his film.

So what is Lynch and Gifford’s take on what the film means? The director said in an interview, “It’s Fred’s story. It’s not a dream. It’s realistic, though according to Fred’s logic.” During filming, Deborah Wuliger, the unit publicist, came upon the idea of a psychogenic fugue, which Lynch and Gifford subsequently incorporated into the film. "The person suffering from it creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything – they forget their past identity,” Lynch said." In addition to being a mental condition, he also discovered that a fugue was also a musical term. "A fugue starts off one way, takes up on another direction, and then comes back to the original, so it [relates] to the form of the film.” Gifford took the idea of a psychogenic fugue and ran with it. "This was something I researched with a clinical psychologist at Stanford, so we had some basis in fact here. After we found that freedom, more or less it was just a matter of creating this surreal, fantastic world that Fred Madison lives in when he becomes Peter Dayton."

Ultimately, what makes Lost Highway so good are the risks Lynch takes. After the crushing commercial and critical defeat of Fire Walk with Me, one would think that he would have take the safe route and made a conventional film. No way. As he did with Blue Velvet, Lynch decided to follow his muse and make a film on his own terms. Lost Highway is easily Lynch's darkest, bleakest film since Eraserhead. There are no happy endings in this film. No one escapes into radiator heaven. Characters that stray onto the lost highway simply stay lost with no chance of escape. While watching this film, you must be prepared to think as Lynch constantly questions how you perceive things — both people and events. What is real and what isn't? He also plays around with the notion of déjà vu by not only repeating images but also dialogue which forces you to pay close attention to what is going on. Lost Highway really is a film that you have to see more than once just to get all the little details that you missed the first time around.

The Big Lebowski

2012-01-13T10:42:00.000-05:00

I’ve always wondered if The Big Lebowski (1998) was an attempt by the Coen brothers to address their critics, chief among them J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, who accuse the filmmaking duo of anti-semiticism in films like Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991). This is a rather odd charge considering that Joel and Ethan Coen are in fact Jewish. Keeping this in mind, one has to wonder what to make of Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), a character in The Big Lebowski who is proudly Jewish and even married and converted to Judaism for his wife. Then, when they were divorced, remained Jewish, defiantly so.

Clearly, the Coens were playfully thumbing their noses at Hoberman and Rosenbaum and this is further reinforced in the faux scholarly introduction to the film’s screenplay, which claims that it won the 1998 Kochba Award, “honouring achievement in the arts that defy racial and religious stereotyping and promote appreciation for the multiplicity of man.” Yeah … right. Furthermore, the unidentified writer (probably the Coens) goes on to explain the nature of humor with a hilariously in-depth analysis of what makes The Three Stooges funny and thereby making the point that if you have to explain why something is funny to someone else then they’ll never get it. So, are the Coens saying that critics like Hoberman and Rosenbaum don’t “get” their films?

Set in Los Angeles during the first Persian Gulf War, the Coens weave a decidedly unconventional tale about a man known as The Dude. Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) is a laid-back kinda guy, an aging Hippie who spends his days drinking White Russians, smoking pot, and bowling with his buddies — Walter, a bitter Viet Nam veteran, and Donny (Steve Buscemi), a not too-bright surfer. One night, two thugs invade the Dude’s home, rough him up, and urinate on his rug. It seems that they have him confused with another Lebowski, a rich millionaire (David Huddleston) whose young trophy wife Bunny (Tara Reid) owes money all over town. Bummed at having his prized rug ruined, The Dude decides to contact the other Lebowski and in doing so becomes immersed in a very strange, convoluted plot that involves nihilists, a kidnapping, Busby Berkeley dream sequences, British performance artists, and, of course, bowling.

I’m not going to write my usual in-depth article with production information, as that has already been done and better than I ever could. Rather, here are 24 of my favorite moments:

1. The Two Dumbest Flunkies. You’ve got one who pees on The Dude’s rug and the other who’s apparently never seen a bowling ball before. I love the one’s reaction when he realizes that The Dude’s humble abode does not resemble that of the wealthy millionaire they’re looking for.

2. The introduction of Donny, Walter and The Dude is awesome in how it shows the dynamic between these friends, like how The Dude and Walter bicker like an old married couple while Donny is the conversation cheerleader, occasionally commenting on what’s being said, like “a child who wanders in the middle of a movie,” as Walter puts it.

“Forget it, Donny. You’re out of your element.”

3. I love the scene where The Dude first confronts the other Lebowski and after schooling him on how he prefers to be addressed is then chastised by the blustery rich man – “The bum’s lost!” This sets up a class struggle between haves like Lebowski and the have-nots as represented by The Dude.

“…or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.”

4. “I’m just gonna find a cash machine.” Bunny Lebowski’s offer of oral sex comes at a high cost and Brandt’s (Philip Seymour Hoffman) reaction is hilarious (“That’s marvelous.”). Hoffman is so funny as the terminally uptight toady Brandt.

"That's marvellous."

5. “If you will it, it is no dream.” This is the first declaration of Walter’s Jewish pride as he quotes Theodore Herzel but this is unfortunately quickly forgotten when he freaks out all over Smokey’s (Jimmie Dale Gilmore) breaking of the rules of bowling. After all, this isn’t ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules. Fortunately, Smokey narrowly avoids entering a world of pain.

6. The Dude’s easygoing nature deflates the other Lebowski’s theatrics as he tells of Bunny being kidnapped by the nihilists. Jeff Bridges’ reaction shot at one point as he takes a drag off a joint and says, “Fuckin’ A,” is hilarious. Hoffman is also excellent in this scene as Brandt acts all upset over the news but as soon as he’s required to spring into action drops the act.

“This is a bummer, man.”

7. One of the greatest introductions of a character that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot ever. John Turturro makes the most of this scene as one of The Dude’s bowling opponents, from the licking of his ball to the little dance moves he pulls off after bowling a strike. The long pinky nail (for cocaine) and hairnet are nice touches as is the music that accompanies his intro – a cover of “Hotel California” by the Gipsy Kings. I also love The Dude’s laidback retort to Jesus’ bowling taunt: “Yeah well, that’s just, ya know, like, your opinion, man.” We even get a brief insight into Jesus’ life as a convicted pederast. Eight year-olds, dude. It is these little details that make this film so enjoyable to watch as even minor supporting characters are given a rich backstory.

“Nobody fucks with the Jesus!”

8. After The Dude’s team advances to the next round in the bowling tournament (amazing considering that Walter pulled a gun on a fellow bowler), Walter loses his shit when Donny tells him that their next game is scheduled for Saturday, the Jewish day of rest thereby forbidding him from bowling on that day.

“Shomer shabbas”

9. Logjammin’. Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore), a feminist performance artist/painter, shows The Dude a cheapo porno film that Bunny starred in with her nihilist boyfriend Karl Hungus (Peter Stormare) in which he plays a cable T.V. technician who arrives to “fix” her cable. When she scoffs at its predictable plot and how it will end, The Dude deadpans, “He fixes the cable?”

10. The Dude is suddenly manhandled by the other Lebowski’s burly limousine driver causing him to spill a glass of one of his beloved White Russians.

“Hey, careful, man. There’s a beverage here!”

11. The nihilists bust into The Dude’s place (“Hey, this is a private residence, man.”) and interrupt his relaxing bath by throwing a ferret into his bath water, thereby blowing his high and then threatening castration. Peter Stormare and Flea’s Eurotrash German accents sound like they came straight from the Saturday Night Live skit Sprockets!

“We believe in nothing!”

12. Ah, Sam Elliott as the film’s narrator known as the Stranger and who makes an appearance in full western garb to give The Dude some sage advice and comment on his usage of cuss words. With his awesome mustache and deep voice, Elliott is ideally cast as a mysterious cowboy cum Greek chorus.

“I like your style, Dude.”

13. And just what the hell is David Thewlis doing in this film as video artist Knox Harrington, armed with an annoying high pitched laugh and shaved head? Nothing really except yet another oddball that The Dude meets along the way. Knox and Maude seem to be sharing a private joke in their scene together, much to The Dude’s chagrin.

“Who the fuck are you, man?”

14. “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” I love the use of this fantastic Creedance Clearwater Revival song in the scene where The Dude tries to evade a mysterious car that is following him. The little yelp that Bridges lets out when his character drops a lit joint in his lap while driving is priceless.

15. Goodman’s best scene in the film is when Walter and The Dude visit an insolent high school kid they believe stole his car and a million dollar ransom that was intended to free the kidnapped Bunny. The scene becomes funnier the more frustrated Walter and The Dude get as the kid refuses to buckle under their “intense” questioning culminating in Walter’s memorable insult, “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!” over and over while trashing a sports car he thinks the kid bought with the ransom money.

“This is what happens…”

16. Ben Gazzara as Hugh Hefner. The John Cassavetes film veteran turns up late in the game as a classy smut peddler Jackie Treehorn who drugs The Dude. I love the way Gazzara says, “feelings,” when he tells Bridges how the porn biz has changed over the years. This scene is also notable for showing The Dude doing some actual detective work. Too bad it amounts to nothing.

17. Gutterballs. While there are two dream sequences in the film, this is by far the best as a drugged Dude dreams of teaching Maude how to bowl while a chorus line of beautiful women engage in a Busby Berkeley style dance sequence all scored to “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” by Kenny Rogers during his psychedelic period. Oh yeah, and Saddam Hussein gives The Dude bowling shoes and the dream ends with him being chased by the nihilists wielding huge scissors in a sequence that Freud would have a field day with.

18. The Dude hates the Eagles. Man, I’m so with him on this one.

19. I love the moment between Jeffrey and Maude where they bond after having sex. It’s a nice, quiet and amusing scene as we take a break from all the crazy people The Dude encounters and learn that he was briefly a roadie for Metallica (“Bunch of assholes.”). He was also a member of the anti-war group the Seattle Seven and helped write the original Port Huron Statement – not the compromised second draft. The chemistry between Bridges and Julianne Moore is excellent and The Dude’s reaction to Maude’s true intentions for their sexual rendezvous is funny. Plus, she helps him free up his uptight thinking about the mystery he’s embroiled in.

“Jeffrey, love me.”

20. Long-time Coen brothers collaborator Jon Polito pops up as a “brother shamus,” a private snoop trailing The Dude in order to find Bunny who has run away from home in Minnesota. The Dude tells him to back off from his “lady friend” (a.k.a. Maude) and alas that’s the last we see of Polito for the rest of the film.

“Like an Irish monk?”

21. “3,000 years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax…” We get Walter’s full-on justification for why he still practices Judaism despite being divorced. There’s something admirable about his devotion to this religion.

22. Why’d they have to kill Donny? Poor Donny didn’t hurt anybody and is taken out when he suffers a heart attack as the nihilists confront him, The Dude and Walter outside of their beloved bowling alley, which leads us to…

23. Donny’s Eulogy. Walter delivers a heartfelt if not misguided eulogy to Donny. Due to their modest means, Walter and The Dude transport their friend’s ashes in a Folgers coffee tin to a cliff where they plan to scatter his remains. However, the wind blows some of them back into The Dude’s goatee. Fortunately, not even Walter’s ineptitude ruins this poignant moment.

24. Despite Donny’s death, The Dude and Walter advance to the next round in the bowling tournament and our hero is visited by the Stranger once again. As The Dude departs to bowl another round, he offers the parting words of wisdom, “The Dude abides,” and the Stranger wraps things up and brings the film full circle to the soulful strains of “Dead Flowers” by Townes Van Zandt.

“The Dude abides.”

The Big Lebowski is my favorite Coen brothers film. For me, it is the perfect mix of their flashy style, eccentric characters, and distinctive dialogue. It is a rare comedy that can be watched over and over and never gets old. They have created a richly detailed world that is so inviting and entertaining that you want to revisit it again and again.

So, what are some of your favorite moments/scenes/lines of dialogue from this film?

NOTE: Screencaps from this film came from THE best Coen bros. site - You Know, For Kids!

My Favorite Posts/Blogs from 2011

2012-01-10T11:19:00.001-05:00

It's that time of year again where I post some links to articles from 2011 that really made me think, laugh and inspired me to raise my own game in terms of writing about film. As always, this is by no means a comprehensive list and I had real difficulty picking only one example from each of these blogs as they are all teeming with quality posts. My profuse apologies to anyone I might have omitted. And by all means, check these blogs out and support their creative endeavors. I have a choice quote from said post along with a link to it. Enjoy!

"If Kane had been around in the age of Facebook, maybe there wouldn't have been so much confusion over who or what Rosebud was: he'd have a picture of it in his albums! He'd have a sledding game on there, and a 'design your own vintage sled' app. The ornate picnics and famous guest-collecting could be canceled, because he wouldn't need to see his friends to prove they existed. He could make Xanadu online via one of those online worlds with the Sims."
- "The Rosebud Principle" - Acidemic

"Not only did this signal the arrival of a talented director-writer-producer, it changed the look, feel, and texture of the crime drama genre from that point forward. And though it’s approaching the 30 year mark, it remains an enthralling examination of a world few had explored as thoroughly as this new filmmaker. The film incorporated a solid cast, with more than one actor making their own screen debuts. It’s a gritty, authentic story – one that has a mesmerizing atmosphere and soundtrack in tune with this director’s now trademark visual style."
- "Anniversary 30 - Reprise: Thief" - It Rains... You Get Wet

"On the tail end of this coin is David Fincher. He has the opposite problem of Nolan in that I read all too many writers who see a lot of magical qualities in him as a director that I don't. As I said above, I'd pick him over Nolan anytime because I think Fincher is an excellent director but not a particularly ingenious one. I find that Fincher's fortunes rise and fall with the quality of his scripts more often than not. If the script is, say, Zodiac, everyone agrees, Fincher is a genius. If the script is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, not so much."
- "Clash of the Cults - Nolan and Fincher" - Cinema Styles

"Like The Blair Witch Project in 1999, Paranormal Activity proved that you don't need big special effects to deliver big scares. And unlike BWP (which I still consider to be brilliant), PA had more showmanship to offer, injecting more audience-pleasing jump scares into the mix. I love the rinky-dink, handmade quality to PA's brand of funhouse tricks (like the Ouija board that bursts into flames) and I love that they've carried that quality onto the rest of the series."
- "Paranormal Praise" - Dinner with Max Jenke

"This is a dark movie to be sure, not offering any hope outright, except in the process, the idea that despite the likelihood that it will all end badly, there are people out there who try to defend the helpless. Whether they're effective or not is another story. Sometimes they are, although even when they succeed, there are others who can't be helped. All in all, you have a compelling picture of two human disaster stories that have been kicked around enough to be able to deal with most anything, except the possibility that they won't achieve their purpose in the world. There is hope in the effort, there's also tragedy and futility, and at the end we find truth which only presents more dilemmas and possibilities."
- "Narc" - Criminal Movies

"76 minutes. That's right all you film makers who feel like you have to add filler to make your movie more substantial, Trancers clocks in at a cool 76 minutes, and it's probably more awesome than your 100 minute painfest. I'm just saying. Also, put the computer away-- or only use it when you have to, as opposed to using it as a crutch-- because this looked really nice, and in 1985, they weren't greenscreening and CGI'ing us to death. This was just a really fun low-budget sci-fi flick that has only gotten better over time."
- "Trancers (1985)" - Director to Video Connoisseur

"Miami Vice’s terse, deterministic approach to the usual beats of the action-crime genre, as opposed to the operatic prolixity of Heat, is one of the things I like most about it, but this also perhaps made it bewildering for many. Mann tries to explicate as much of the drama as possible through the behaviour of the characters rather than through what they say to each other, and he floors the notion that action is character. The casual shot in which Crockett notices that Montoya and Isabella are wearing his-and-her watches gives away a lot, though it also opens yawning abysses of subsequent uncertainty."
- "Miami Vice (2006)" - Ferdy on Films

"Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut, in fact, represents a radical restructuring of the first film’s narrative trajectory. It enriches the film’s dramatic power; heightens the emotional effect of the battles (the late battle at Gaugamela is seen at the beginning of the film); makes clearer the connections between the importance of mythology (and self-mythology) to Alexander himself-- and between the telling of stories on cave walls, in history books, and with a camera; and digs deeper into what Armond White rightly termed, in his thoughtful review of the theatrical version, Stone’s use of the warrior genre as a gateway into examining the very basis of manifest destiny."
- "'All Men Reach and Fall...' Oliver Stone on History, Mythology and Redemption: Alexander Revisted: The Final Cut" - Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule

"Seen today, Frantic plays sort of like Polanski’s sweet vengeance against the United States; he seems to be asking his audience, “How would you like it?” The film is full of eccentric characters that loom in the background and stare at the hero with a devilish glee, enjoying the heck out of giving him a hard time. The French police howl at his fury. A cackling Jamaican accosts him in the stall of a men’s bathroom. A dog watches him from the front seat of a taxicab, salivating at his curious demeanor."
- "Frantic (1988)" - Icebox Movies

"I'm not gonna lie. James Mason is my favorite part about this movie. Nobody does "SMUG CONDESCENSION" like James Mason. He floats in and out of the film, bending the citizenry to his will, killing children, and selling antiques at exorbitant prices. You believe wholeheartedly that he views Salem's Lot simply as a village of trifling insects to be exploited for his nefarious purposes. And it's James Mason. I mean, if you're not kind of rooting for him, then maybe you shouldn't be watching this movie anyway."
- "Television Review: Salem's Lot (1979, Tobe Hooper)" - Junta Juleil's Culture Shock

"Strip them down to their barest element and all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films are essentially very vivid character studies. While most modern American filmmakers are more comfortable building their films around situations, it is the people in Anderson’s films that guide them. All of them, from Sydney in Hard Eight to Daniel in There Will be Blood, are haunted by Quiz-Kid Donnie Smith’s line in Magnolia concerning the fact that “We may be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with us.” Like the great early seventies character studies by the likes of Rafelson, Altman and Scorsese, Anderson’s films are populated with people looking for something usually just past their grasp, while attempting to escape from something that is always close behind."
- "Faces and Names: Paul Thomas Anderson's Devotion to Character" - Moon in the Gutter

"It seems silly to toss superlatives onto Jennifer Jason Leigh for her work here, but she simply is Dorothy Parker, right down to her bones and maybe because people have always slightly associated the period affectations connected with this and HUDSUCKER she’s never really gotten the attention for it that she deserves. It may be mannered but mannered seems appropriate and as she becomes Dorothy Parker in front of the camera the cumulative effect of it all becomes mesmerizing, an ideal fusion of a lead performance complimenting what the director is doing."
- "You Might As Well Live" - Mr. Peel's Sardine Liqueur

"Personally, the film walks that always difficult fine line in an introductory hero film balancing excitement, character and origin story like a circus performer on a tightrope and the trick is a sight to behold. Johnston succeeds beautifully as we hold our breath. With such a sure and steady hand on the project it's interesting how Johnston often receives backhanded compliments regarding his work as if he stumbled upon good luck. He may not be Christopher Nolan, but his work is solid as it is here in Captain America: The First Avenger."
- "Captain America & The Invaders" - Musings of a Sci-Fi Fanatic

"Jennifer Eight never lived up to its potential and as a result it is almost forgotten today. Instead of two narratives beautifully weaved, Jennifer Eight is two films fighting each other: the dramatic narrative hurts the mystery and vice versa."
- "Jennifer Eight (1992)" - Quiet Cool

"Effective little chiller it may be, but there are plenty of instances where ‘The Devil’s Rain’ verges on camp. The sight, just minutes in, of Lupino wringing her hands and projecting wide-eyed sincerity and trying to pretend that she’s not in a B-movie horror outing while The Shat gives it the thousand yard stare to a point just off camera (I began to suspect that he was locked in a stare-it-out contest with the dude holding the boom) while DELIVERING all-his-dialogue IN A MANNER that-randomly-alternates … between … STENTORIAN ENUNCIATION and rat-a-tat-speed … with … more … pregnant pauses … than … a … Harold Pinter play. But. At. The. Wrong. Moments. I can only assume that when the man read a script, his brain automatically Tippexed out all the punctuation and he paused and stopped and raised his voiced and then spokerealfast at what he thought were the right moments. (They weren’t.)"
- "Summer of Satan: The Devil's Rain" - The Agitation of the Mind

"But what is interesting here, regardless of what is actually going on, is the way the concept of time travel is contextualized in these fleeting, almost subliminal moments in a way that so many movies dealing with time travel neglect entirely or gloss over: they convey the sheer abysmal, abstract horror that the experience of such a process would likely reap on the human psyche. Too many movies, ones more concerned with sprawl and gamesmanship, are saddled with lame, pat side effects accompanying their time travel: nosebleeds, earbleeds, headaches, whatever. But in The Jacket, you might as well lose your mind."
- "The Jacket (John Maybury, 2005)" - The Blue Vial

"Although All the President’s Men could be casually described as a film about two journalists taking down a corrupt president, the film is surprisingly free of any grand emotional crescendo. There’s no point in which Woodward or Bernstein are transformed from grinding members of the workforce into patriots, ala Norma Rae scrawling “UNION” on a piece of cardboard in a brave act of defiance. They begin the film as wide-eyed reporters and they end it that way, too."
- "Ordinary People" - The Cooler

"I’m not sure how The Night Flier escaped my attention for all these years. As far as Stephen King adaptations go, this is one of the most underrated I have seen. With a well hewn plot that both entertains on a surface level and deeper, The Night Flier is sure to please the casual viewer as well as those who tend to dig deeper."
- "The King of Wilmington - The Night Flier (1997): Why Turn Into a Bat When You Could Fly A Plane?" - The Lightning Bug's Lair

"Black Rain’s world is as teeming with visually fetishist detailing, and fascination for the textures of cultural cross-pollination in an urban setting, as Blade Runner, a world of high technology and colossal capital stricken with moral rot and criminal chimera. The mood also matches the sodden, clammy anxiety that underpins Nick’s relentless, kick-‘em-in-the-teeth drive to nail Sato and redeem his soiled manhood and professional pride. The film as a whole is a design classic, laden with that very late ‘80s blend of streetwise grit, video-clip chic, and gamy, expletive-riddled boldness."
- "Black Rain (1989)" - This Island Rod

"Or, more accurately, it's built on the charm, attractiveness and rapport of the two leads, who are at their most naturally charismatic here, radiating the self-assurance and sexiness that makes them irresistible both to each other and to audiences. Theirs is a mad love, a lunatic love built on seductive banter, utterly unbelievable in any conventional sense: why would a smart, capable woman dedicated to the law fall so deeply in love with the man who represents her complete opposite? But then again, why not? Clooney and Lopez are so attuned to one another, so comfortable in one another's presence onscreen, that the unbelievable is rendered not only plausible but unavoidable, fated, totally logical."
- "Out of Sight" - Only the Cinema

"O.C. AND STIGGS is like buying the new O.M.D. record in 1987 and finding out it’s King Sunny Ade, the juju musician who provides the jaunty songs and appear in a penultimate scene. Reportedly the movie was shot in a rush so MGM wouldn’t interfere and it shows — there’s a disjointedness that can be perceived as intentional if not completely successful. You can zone in and out of the film while you’re watching; I don’t even know what the hell to make of O.C. AND STIGGS."
- "Forgotten Films: O.C. & Stiggs (1987)" - Technicolor Dreams 70

"Dominated by a caustic aesthetic of anticipatory anxiety, a sense of psychic uneasiness that suffuses every frame, Mad Max is literally a movie about mankind speeding -- foot pressed hard against the pedal -- towards moral and spiritual annihilation."
- "Cult Movie Review: Mad Max (1970)" - John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film/TV

"Hal Needham, director of such astute visions of grandeur as Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run understood the United Statesian yearning for escape from such philosophical self flagellation and conceived a new vision, a new concept of proactive intervention that coincided perfectly with our desire for a resurrected self-image. Hegemony and war needed to be fun and sexy again, and Needham, pungent genius that he was, went right for the jugular, hell bent on stuffing as many wheelies and explosions into this foreign mis-adventure as Megaforce’s already strained spandex seams could take."
- "Megaforce" - Lost Video Archive

"It’s interesting to watch Day Of The Dead in wake of reading the script as Romero did work in images, set pieces and even entire characters into the new framework but all are presented in completely different context. What he delivered in its stead is this claustrophobic exceedingly nasty little movie, as much about mental apocalypse as physical. The meltdowns inside the characters own minds as well as the world at large.Where the original is epic, Day is almost intimate (Probably the only zombie film you could stage as a one act play), where Romero’s original script is unusually optimistic, a definite end point for his trilogy, the Day we ended up with is a bitter film, while Romero’s script has a much clearer brand of class commentary, the Day we end up with is a film uneasy about attempting to give any answers."
- "The Modern American Horror Film: Subtext and Text: Day of the Dead" - Son of Danse Macabre

"Produced by Ruby-Spears Productions, and created by veteran comic book scribe Steve Gerber (Man-Thing, Howard the Duck), this action-packed animated fantasy epic featured imaginative (if somewhat formulaic) stories, appealing characters, great voice acting, and character designs by two of the greatest comic book artists to ever wield a pencil. Thundarr and his friends were visualized by the animation veteran Alex Toth (Space Ghost, The Herculoids), while virtually every other character (and vehicle, setting and/or prop) were designed by the legendary Jack Kirby (Captain America, The Fantastic Four, Devil Dinosaur)."
- "DVD Review: Thundarr the Barbarian (1980)" - Space: 1970

"Two of the things that cinema does better than any other medium is the potrayal of texture and a state of mind, and Morvern Callar does both of those things better than just about any movie I’ve ever seen. Darkly comic, dislocative, and impressionistic Morvern Callar is a wonder."
- "The Unseen #62: Morvern Callar" - Things That Don't Suck

"Visually speaking the film takes advantage of filming in Las Vegas, and all the lights and the fakeness that comes with it. Most of the film takes place inside of hotel bars, casinos, hotel rooms, out on the streets of Las Vegas and in the dessert. There’s some beautiful cinematography on this one. I would rate this film amongst Gilliam’s best, no doubts. This film is the closest you’ll ever feel to using drugs, without using them. "
- "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)" - The Film Connoisseur

"One of the most over-the-top, silly, and gory movies of all time, Peter Jackson's Dead Alive is a flick that just keeps topping itself. You think it's got as crazy as it's going to get when it introduces the flip-top nurse zombie...then it throws in the famous Kung-Fu Priest (Stuart Devenie), bodies ripped in half, an animated (and strangely adorable) set of roving internal organs, and a skull-bursting Zombie Baby. By the time we get to the famous end party scene (Oh Crikey! It's Lawnmower Deth!), the viewer might rightly believe he's seen it all...but as Lionel warns his girlfriend, "I haven't seen Mum this evening...""
- "Dead Alive (1992): or, Kicking Arse for the Lord" - Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies

The World of Henry Orient

2012-01-06T10:10:00.000-05:00

George Roy Hill is an underrated film director, which is astonishing when you consider some of the stone cold classics he’s made: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1972), and Slap Shot (1977). His lack of recognition is due in part to his journeyman career that saw him dabble in numerous genres, from literary adaptation to the sports movie to the western. Also, each film he made is different from the other in terms of style and themes explored. Among his eclectic body of work is my favorite The World of Henry Orient (1964), a coming of age film based on the book of the same name by Nora Johnson, daughter of celebrated screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath).

Set in early 1960’s New York City, the film follows the misadventures of two teenage schoolgirls and their obsession with a pretentious concert pianist. Hill’s adaptation is a carefree romp tinged with elements of sadness that is not watered down for the audience. The opening credits play over a fantastic montage of the city, which now stands as a historical snapshot of a metropolis that sadly no longer exists. A school bus picks up various kids and when it arrives at a girls’ school we meet Marian “Gil” Gilbert (Merrie Spaeth), a girl in the eighth grade. By sheer chance, she encounters fellow eighth grader Valarie “Val” Campbell Boyd (Tippy Walker) and they quickly bond over both being new to the school, their mutual loathing of certain teachers, and the braces on their respective teeth. They soon agree to go adventuring on Saturday and on that day we see them frolicking through a picturesque Central Park in autumn. The two girls imagine themselves as two “beautiful white nurses” and in doing so come across a couple making out in the park. The annoyed man is none other than celebrated concert pianist Henry Orient (Peter Sellers) who happens to be having a covert affair with a married woman by the name of Stella Dunnworthy (Paula Prentiss). Gil and Val are smitten with Orient at first sight and soon pledge to devote their lives to worshipping the musician.

In these early scenes, Hill captures the energy and unbridled joy of being young and having New York as your playground with scenes of the girls giddily jumping garbage cans in the street. The girls hang out at Gil’s house and we learn that they are both children of divorce with Val living with her father and Gil living with her mother. They commiserate over their respective broken households and yearn for a normal family life, like Val’s fantasy of her folks reuniting for Christmas. Val, in particular, has had a tough time of it as her busy, wealthy father Frank Boyd (Tom Bosley) travels the globe frequently often leaving his daughter to her own devices. She may live in the lap of luxury but has to contend with her cold step-mother Isabel Boyd (Angela Lansbury). In comparison, Gil lives in a more modest place with her mother (Phyllis Thaxter) and grandmother. Their apartment is full of inviting, earth-toned colors, which complement the warm parents and loving atmosphere.

Henry Orient is a vain primadonna that affects a phony European accent despite growing up in Brooklyn. Peter Sellers, as always, fully inhabits his character, playing the film’s pretentious antagonist. He nails Orient’s self-importance in the scene where the musician plays a concert, which hilariously conveys all of the cliché “serious artist” affectations perfectly. Orient is a guy just begging to have his oversized ego deflated and Gil and Val are just the girls to do it. Sellers was an extremely gifted comic actor and this is evident in his character’s increasingly exasperated and paranoid behavior as he continues to cross paths with Gil and Val.

This was the first film for both Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth and Hill gets wonderfully natural performances free of self-conscious affectations out of both of them. The chemistry between the two young actresses seems genuine and we believe that their characters become fast friends. There are scenes where Gil and Val talk about girly things, like shaving their legs for the first time that feels honest and true. The Johnsons’ screenplay does a fantastic job of conveying how young girls idolize a celebrity, creating a rich fantasy world devoted to them through things like a scrapbook filled with photographs, ticket stubs, magazine articles, and so on. Gil and Val are adorable but not sickeningly so nor do they fall into the trap of being wise beyond their years like something out of a J.D Salinger story. They are normal girls dealing with growing up in broken households with a single parent doing the best they can. Walker has the more challenging role as Val and her difficult home life. It is the scenes with Val and Isabel that temper the film’s happy-go-lucky vibe with a slightly darker tone. Hill doesn’t shy away from Isabel’s cruel nature and the pain it causes Val.

It’s almost an hour into the film until we’re privy to Val’s home life when her father and Isabel throw a swanky Christmas party like something out of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Val is dressed up like a mini-adult and is treated as such by her step-mother. Angela Lansbury seems to be channeling her ice queen from State of the Union (1948), a woman who has no idea how to treat a child properly. Isabel eschews any kind of public display of affection for a handshake. She has forgotten what it’s like to be a teenage girl and is more concerned with appearances and her social status in the affluent circles she frequents. She is what Holden Caulfield would commonly refer to as a “phony” to use the parlance of the times.

Years before he played a kindly father on television’s Happy Days, Tom Bosley embodied a wonderfully warm and understanding dad in The World of Henry Orient. One gets the sense that Frank isn’t around much for Val but he does stick up for her when it comes to Isabel’s disapproving criticism, which makes one wonder just what he saw in this woman in the first place. Unlike Isabel, Frank understands that Val is just a young girl and should be treated as such. He doesn’t talk down to his daughter. He also comes to realize his own shortcomings as a parent and promises Val that he will pay more attention to her. The scene where they have a heart-to-heart is touching without being overly sentimental. It’s not a nice, neat resolution but certainly hints at a healthy beginning. With those kind eyes and sympathetic demeanor, Bosley is the kind of dad that most of us would love to have and he is one of the most endearing aspects of this film.

Elmer Bernstein’s delightful score captures the carefree whimsy of the girls playing in the streets of New York while also replicating Orient’s indulgent avant garde piano playing. Hill uses Bernstein’s score sparingly, more like punctuation in a given scene, like providing a wistful vibe to the girls’ playtime or to enhance Orient’s humorous scenes.

The origins of the film date back to Nora Johnson who grew up in New York City after her parents divorced and she hoped that some day they would get back together. She wrote a book entitled The World of Henry Orient about her experiences with the character of Val being her surrogate and Henry Orient was based on famous pianist/actor Oscar Levant. Johnson’s novel was published in 1958 but her father Nunnally Johnson didn’t envision it as a film because he couldn’t imagine two young actresses doing justice to the characters in his daughter’s book. However, child stars Hayley Mills and Patty Duke had become popular in the early ‘60s and Johnson thought they could be cast in a possible film adaptation. He bought the film rights from his daughter, brought her on board to write the screenplay and even gave her final credit after he re-wrote it completely.

Unfortunately, Johnson couldn’t work out deals with either Mills or Duke and went with two unknowns instead with Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker. For the role of Henry Orient, Johnson wanted to cast a recognizable movie star and considered the likes of Robert Preston, Rex Harrison, Tony Randall, and Dick Van Dyke. Then, he offered the role to Peter Sellers and he accepted, enticed by the opportunity to shoot his first film in the United States. When George Roy Hill accepted the job he had only directed two films – adaptations of stage plays Period of Adjustment (1962) and Toys in the Attic (1963). The World of Henry Orient allowed him to showcase his cinematic chops, which he did with the opening scenes on the streets of New York. The film premiered at Radio City Musical Hall in New York City on March 19, 1964 and went on to become the official U.S. entry at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was a modest commercial and critical success. It even became a Broadway musical called Henry, Sweet Henry directed by Hill in 1967 to less than enthusiastic reviews and closed after only 80 performances. One can also see the film’s influence on later fare, like Ghost World (2001), arguably the cinematic heir apparent to Henry Orient (there is even a movie poster for Hill’s film in the background of a scene).

Merrie Spaeth went on to act in two television series before quitting show business in favor of being a political and public relations consultant for several conservative clients. After The World of Henry Orient, Tippy Walker appeared in a handful of T.V. shows and acted in a couple of films before retiring from show business and opening an art gallery near Yale University. Henry Orient is a rare Hollywood film that realistically depicts the friendship between two teenage girls. The dynamic between them and the conversations they have are believable. It is also an excellent coming of age story as Gil and Val realize that the celebrity they worship has clay feet. This painful realization forces both of them to grow up a little bit while still remaining friends.

The Commitments

2011-12-30T17:01:00.000-05:00

Everyone wants to relive a magical cinematic moment. A film or theater or evening that just makes one want to return back in time. For me, one such experience was the first time I saw The Commitments (1991). It was a film that spoke endless depths of sincerity both in spoken and sung dialogue. When it first came out, Alan Parker’s film became a bonafide cultural phenomenon with the soundtrack album climbing up the charts. People were hungry for authentic-sounding music, tired of the hedonistic hairspray bands of the 1980’s. To its credit, the film still stands as an unabashed love letter to the belief that music can change your life and make a difference.

Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) aspires to be the manager of the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band, with only one kind of music in mind: Soul. Disgusted with the current state of bands in Ireland, this determined young man decides to assemble an old school Dublin soul band in the tradition of greats like Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett. Jimmy holds auditions out of his parents’ house (in which he still lives, by the by) and soon assembles his group of young musicians whom he can’t wait to mould. With the help of Joey “The Lips” Fagan (John Murphy), the only veteran musician in the band, Jimmy begins to whip the rest of the members into stage-ready shape.

One of the things that makes The Commitments work so well is its brazen cast of relative unknowns. These actors come with no preconceived notions or baggage that name actors bring to the table (Bruce McDonald’s rock ‘n’ roll movie, Hard Core Logo, would also successfully employ the same technique). With the exception of two band members, they were all real musicians, lending the film fresh authenticity. Parker showed his aptitude for working with first-time actors with Fame (1980) and did it again, more genuinely, with this film.

For such a large cast, all of the characters are beautifully realized. From the egotistical lead singer, Decco (Andrew Strong), to minor characters such as Jimmy’s Elvis-worshipping father (Colm Meaney), Dick Clement, Ian Le Frenais and Roddy Doyle’s screenplay provides each character with his or her own unique character tics that define them. From Rabbitte’s colorful one-on-one interviews to Decco’s repugnant outbursts, the actors and their counterparts provide hit after hit.

The Commitments has been said to be a musical with dialogue intervals, due to the infusion of music everywhere. Everyone in the community is in touch with music. From the local gangster (“Everything’s shite since Roy Orbison died.”) to Mr. Rabbitte (“Elvis wasn’t a Cajun! That’s fuckin’ blasphemy!”), it’s in everyone. It is Jimmy who articulates the very essence that drives the film when he delivers an impassioned speech about the power of soul music. “Sure it’s basic and it’s simple but it’s something else. Something special. Cos it’s honest. There’s no fucking bullshit. It sticks its neck out and says it straight from the heart.” What unites The Commitments’ band members; however, is really a bit more than a love of music. This band is a way out for them. It is a release for them. It is something that they can all look forward to, something that represents possibilities. Bernie (Bronagh Gallagher), stuck working a chippie van, or Decco, the bus conductor — they’re all in need.

The dialogue, in particular the banter between the members of the band, is another strength of the film. Their conversations are littered with “familiar profanities” that are utterly convincing considering that these kids (the actors, that is) come from the urban slums of Dublin. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the film’s source material is Roddy Doyle’s book of the same name. Finally, the best part of the film is the music. The concert footage (and its corresponding audio) was recorded live, which separates it from films that use previously recorded music that always sounds too polished, too lip synched. There is a rawness and energy to the musical sequences that perfectly captures the experience of seeing a band live. This is due in large part to how the musicians perform, most surprisingly Andrew Strong, who was only 16 years old at the time and had a voice made to sing gritty soul music. It is also due to how Parker photographs them all. He uses snap zooms and employs many close-ups of their faces and them playing their instruments. It gives these sequences a you-are-there immediacy that is very effective.

After making several Hollywood films in the United States, Parker “wanted to do something that wasn’t so colossally expensive ... I wanted to do something lighter and with music.” While making Come See the Paradise (1990), two British screenwriters, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, turned him on to Doyle’s 1986 novel The Commitments. Parker felt that he understood and empathized with the characters. Clement, La Frenais and Doyle ended up writing the screenplay together.

Parker started work on the film in the summer of 1990 when he flew into Dublin to hold auditions. It was important to him that all of his actors be musicians first. Casting directors assembled 64 bands from Dublin’s club scene and after seeing approximately 3,000 musicians, Parker picked 12 for the main cast. According to the director, the musicians were cast “to be pretty close to the kinds of personalities they already had, so they’re not playing roles outside of themselves.”

The Commitments received mostly positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “The result is a movie that doesn't lead anywhere in particular and may not have a profound message — other than that it's hell at the top, however low the top may be. But the movie is filled with life and energy, and the music is honest. The Commitments is one of the few movies about a fictional band that's able to convince us the band is real and actually plays together.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “The Commitments finds Mr. Parker again doing what he does expertly: assembling a group of talented newcomers, editing snippets of their exploits into a hyperkinetic jumble, and filling the air with song.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “The Commitments finds Mr. Parker again doing what he does expertly: assembling a group of talented newcomers, editing snippets of their exploits into a hyperkinetic jumble, and filling the air with song.” However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “The idea that the Commitments are doing something revolutionary by ‘bringing’ soul to Dublin is downright insulting. In Parker's hands, soul music becomes little more than a self-serving metaphor — an easy symbol for ‘commitment’ and integrity. His film celebrates musical daring without having a shred of it.”

The Commitments refuses to resort to sappy altruism. This music isn’t going to save the world but it does enrich these characters’ lives for a brief moment in time. Apparently, other people felt the same way. After the film debuted in theaters, the band in the film actually toured (and continues to tour to this day albeit with only some of the original members) the country and people fell in love with the movie and the music. The Commitments ranks right up there with Hard Core Logo (1996) and Almost Famous (2000) as one of the greatest films about a fictional band’s rise and fall.

White Hunter, Black Heart

2011-12-23T09:16:00.000-05:00

From early on in his career, Clint Eastwood has been interested in taking the path less traveled when it came to his career, taking on roles and making films that often subverted his Hollywood icon image. In particular, the films he has directed explore the darker side of humanity with topics ranging from stalking (Play Misty for Me), drug addiction (Bird), violence (Unforgiven), and child abuse (Mystic River). White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) is no different. Based loosely on Peter Viertel’s experiences working with legendary film director John Huston on The African Queen (1951), Eastwood plays John Wilson, a filmmaker more interested in hunting down and killing a wild elephant then making his next motion picture. He becomes fixated on this quest and Eastwood uses this story as an opportunity to explore the notion of obsession and how it can consume someone at the expense of everything else in their life.

White Hunter, Black Heart played several prestigious film festivals around the world and was admired by many critics but was never a commercial hit with audiences perhaps expecting an exciting adventure. What they got instead was something more akin to an art film that saw Eastwood yet again subvert the Dirty Harry persona that has defined his career for many years. White Hunter has become something of a forgotten effort in his filmography and considered a minor work but I’ve always felt that it was one of his more interesting pictures.

From the get-go, it is easy to see what drew Eastwood to this film. The opening voiceover narration describes his character John Wilson as “a brilliant, screw-you-all type filmmaker who continually violated all the unwritten laws of the motion picture business yet had the magic, almost divine ability to always land on his feet.” These words could easily be describing Eastwood and his career – one that saw him frequently go against prevailing trends to make the kinds of films he wanted to do. Wilson is gearing up to make a film in Africa and enlists the help of his good friend and screenwriter Peter Verrill (Jeff Fahey) to give the screenplay a rewrite. Pete’s not so sure as he’s working on a book and Wilson tells him, “There are times when you can’t wonder whether it’s the right or wrong thing to do … You just gotta pack up and go.” While they are there making the film, Wilson wants to go on safari and bag an elephant.

Wilson and Pete meet with the film’s producer Paul Landers (George Dzundza) who implores the writer to come on board if only to keep Wilson focused on the task at hand. It’s an entertaining scene as we see Wilson’s open disdain for Landers and the money men, especially when one of them informs the director that they’ve talked about replacing him with someone else. Wilson knows that all Landers cares about is that the film makes money no matter how just so long as it does. As he tells the exasperated producer, “You’d sell your mother down the river to make a deal.” Pete observes it all with the bemused expression of someone who has seen Wilson act this way before and is just enjoying the ride. The director doesn’t care about the business side of filmmaking – dealing with nervous producers and studio executives and every person who pitches him a lame idea for a film.

The chemistry between Clint Eastwood and Jeff Fahey is excellent in these early scenes as we see how well they play off each other, Wilson trying to convince Pete to do this film with him and the writer not really needing much convincing. The two actors do a nice job of conveying two men who have been friends for years by the way they act towards each other. In a nice, self-flexive bit, Wilson lays out his filmmaking philosophy but it could easily be Eastwood as he tells Pete that there’s two ways to go about it: “One is you can crawl and kiss ass and write their happy endings, sign their long-term contracts and never take a chance on anything and never fly, never leave Hollywood. Save all your goddamn money, every cent of it … The other way is to let the chips fall where they may. Refuse to sign their contracts and tell off the guy who can cut your throat and flatter the little guy who’s hanging by a thread that you hold.” Wilson is the quintessential film maverick and on the surface he certainly seems like one of Eastwood’s usual anti-authority protagonists – the cynic with a heart of gold. Wilson talks a good game, like how much he hates the movie business, but Pete knows him well enough to know that the curmudgeonly director wouldn’t have it any other way because he enjoys and thrives on conflict. It stimulates his creativity.

Once Wilson and Pete arrive in Africa, Eastwood opens the film up visually with stunning shots of the wilderness courtesy of long-time collaborator Jack N. Green and this gives a real sense of place. It’s a sharp contrast to the stuffy opulence of Wilson’s English mansion. There are also gorgeous aerial shots of herds of wild animals running across the plains. Eastwood really shows the exotic locale in all of its diverse glory: large lakes, jungle and dense wooded areas.

Wilson and Pete encounter quite a bit of racism from their English hosts. For example, there is the man who curses out and chastises the local team of football players for easily beating his team of all whites, or the posh wealthy woman who criticizes the Jewish people that lived in Soho during the Blitz in World War II. Wilson is disgusted with both of their attitudes and gets into a fist fight with the former and tells off the latter by recounting a hilarious story that really puts her in her place. Eastwood does a fantastic job of delivering this monologue with a mischievous twinkle in his eye as Wilson stands up for his friend Pete (who is Jewish). With the fist fight scene, we get a glimpse of Wilson’s self-destructive tendencies. Drunk and clearly outmatched physically, Wilson gets in a few good shots before being beaten down by the larger, stronger man. However, he feels justified in doing what he did because he stood up and fought for what he believed in.

While Pete continues to fine tune the script, Wilson plans their safari with the occasional detours to pre-production on the film. The director is all about testing his own limits, whether it is challenging a large man to a fight or taking a rusted out old river boat through dangerous river rapids. For him, that is what life is all about – experiencing it to the fullest with no regrets, much like I imagine Eastwood’s own outlook on life. Wilson thinks that bagging one of those giant elephants is a life experience he’s meant to have and becomes obsessed with it. Pete lets him know that he doesn’t want to shoot one because they are beautiful animals, a rare link to life before humans, which deserve to exist. There is something pure about them and shooting one would destroy that nobility, which is a rarity in this world. Over the course of the film, Wilson and Pete’s friendship is put to the test as the writer tries to keep the director focused on making the film.

Some critics felt that Eastwood miscast himself as a John Huston-type filmmaker but I think that what he does in White Hunter, Black Heart is fuse parts of Huston’s sensibilities with his own. In some respects, the two men are very much alike: larger than life icons that continued to make films well into the twilight of their lives, constantly bucking expectations and latching onto projects that interested them whether they were commercial hits or not. Eastwood understands the nature of obsession and how it can lead to self-destructive behavior.

Jeff Fahey is well cast as the audience surrogate and voice of reason. Pete may be Wilson’s friend but he won’t blindly follow him on every grand adventure that the director wants to pursue. Fahey brings an intelligence to the role, playing a character that has his own strong convictions and just doesn’t follow his friend around without question. The actor was on the verge of becoming a breakout star in the 1990’s with this film and The Lawnmower Man (1992) but for whatever reason his career didn’t take off like it should have and he ended up making a lot of forgettable genre films and television shows until as of late when he landed significant roles in high profile projects like Lost and Planet Terror (2007). It’s good to see this underrated actor enjoying a resurgence of sorts.

To say that The African Queen had a checked production history is a massive understatement. Most of the film was shot in Uganda and the Belgian Congo. Producer Sam Spiegel mortgaged his home in London and borrowed the rest while Huston made him sweat right up to the moment of filming with his indecisive nature. Spiegel put the film’s stars Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart (along with his wife Lauren Bacall) in an expensive hotel with no way to pay their bills. The cast and crew flew to their first location only to find out that the rains had come, which delayed filming. Instead of preparing for the project, Huston got the urge to shoot an elephant and took off on safari. The river that the director decided to shoot the film on was infected with bilharzias, a parasitic disease, Spiegel was bitten by a tarantula and almost died, while Hepburn drank only water and was stricken with dysentery. Peter Viertel, a novelist and screenwriter, had been hired to work on James Agee’s screenplay. He witnessed, first hand, Huston’s behavior and two years later published a little-read novel that fictionalized what had gone down. Incredibly, Huston actually liked Viertel’s book, signed off on it and even recommended a more tragic ending.

Over the years, the rights to the novel passed from producer to producer with Burt Lancaster showing interest at one point. Several screenplays based on the story were commissioned but it wasn’t until Eastwood was given a copy of the novel by veteran film producer Ray Stark that there was an actual possibility it would get made into a film. He read it on the way back from Italy where he had been promoting the Charlie Parker biopic Bird (1988). In the past, filmmakers had stayed away from the project because Huston was still alive, the lead character wasn’t very likeable and it didn’t have a happy ending. This didn’t seem to bother Eastwood who used his clout with Warner Brothers to get it made. He was drawn to the story because he liked Huston’s attitude and his speeches about taking chances, not being afraid to try something different, and not caring what the audience thought. He also had an understanding of the Wilson character. “Now, I’ve never felt I wanted to kill wildlife,” Eastwood said in an interview with The Guardian, “or anything like that, but I think there’s a bit of him in my nature … You want to break out of what you’re doing and live differently sometimes. It’s something you have to prove to yourself.”

Early on in development, Eastwood restored the book’s unhappy ending because he felt that it was more faithful to the source material. Originally, he looked at shooting White Hunter, Black Heart in Kenya but the authorities there wanted input on the script and he had heard that there was real demand for bribes in order to do business. Zimbabwe was much more filmmaking friendly with the government being very accommodating to the production and so most of the film was shot there.

White Hunter, Black Heart divided mainstream critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “In the early scenes of White Hunter, Black Heart, Eastwood fans are likely to be distracted to hear Huston's words and vocal mannerisms in Eastwood's mouth, and to see Huston's swagger and physical bravado. Then the performance takes over, and the movie turns into one of the more thoughtful films ever made about the conflicts inside an artist.” Time magazine’s Richard Schickel praised Eastwood’s performance: “Eastwood has dared to attempt a faithful impression of the director, his growling drawl, his loose-limbed stride, the arrogant tilt of his head. The result is a stretch for him as an actor, and fun for the audience.” In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, “White Hunter, Black Heart is a beautifully made elaboration of a thesis that has thankfully lost its antithesis to time.”

However, in her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “And none of it works as fully as Mr. Eastwood obviously wants it to, as a consequence of the sheer sweep and colorfulness of the man being portrayed. But even in this relatively stiff, sometimes awkward form, the John Wilson character is as compelling as Mr. Eastwood's desire to play him.” Entertainment Weekly gave it a “C+” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “In the end, though, White Hunter, Black Heart emerges as little more than a plodding shadow of the great film it could have been. An actor making a stretch is one thing. As Huston, Eastwood is so out of his depth he seems to have lost his entertainer's instinct, not to mention his modesty.” The Toronto Star’s Peter Goddard found fault with Eastwood’s performance but not Jeff Fahey’s: “It is Fahey's Verrill who has the power of self-absorption that Eastwood's paper-thin Wilson lacks. Any question about Eastwood's insecurities should probably stop with this film because – as its director – he's given Fahey, a vividly handsome actor, every chance he can to steal scenes. And Fahey, aware of what he's been given, does just that.” USA Today gave the film two-and-a-half out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “Yet despite one of Eastwood's more respectable directing jobs, we never sense the method to his madness – or even if it is madness. Nor can Jeff Fahey lick his own character's novelistic origins: the first-person narrator (and Trader script doctor) who by himself isn't too compelling.” Finally, the Washington Post’s Rita Kempley felt that, “White Hunter, Black Heart is not about the making of The African Queen. It's Mondo Machismo, Hollywood on safari, a self-aggrandizing epic reeking of man scent.”

In the end, Wilson realizes that he’s not the rugged protagonist from one of his films but a film director who is sabotaging his own motion picture with this foolhardy quest. He finally acknowledges that nothing good can come of his obsession and that he must make a decision – continue to pursue it despite the consequences or let it go and focus on things that really matter. Unfortunately, he learns this at a painful cost and Eastwood doesn’t let Wilson off easy. His obsession has terrible consequences and the shameful expression on his face at the end of White Hunter, Black Heart suggests that it is something that will haunt him and that he will have to live with for the rest of his days.

Also, check out Joe Valdez's excellent look at this film over at his blog, This Distracted Globe.

Mirrormask

2011-12-16T11:21:00.000-05:00

With Ghost World (2001) and Sin City (2005), comic book creators have been taking a more active role in the cinematic adaptations of their work. Following in the footsteps of people like Daniel Clowes and Frank Miller, comic book legends Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean became filmmakers. They both rose to prominence in the comic book medium collaborating on numerous graphic novels, including the popular and critically acclaimed Sandman series. With Gaiman’s impressive storytelling ability and McKean’s dazzling eye for design, a film of some sort wasn’t completely unheard of – it makes sense that they would do this as McKean’s artwork has always been very multimedia oriented, mixing photography with drawing and painting. He continued this approach with Mirrormask (2005) while also adding in CGI animation and music into the mix.

Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) is a young girl whose parents own and operate a circus. Normally, it is a kid’s dream to run away and join the circus but the fun and novelty of it wears off if you’ve grown up with it your entire life. Her father (Rob Brydon) keeps it running on “charm and peanuts,” but she doesn’t share his dream. In fact, it is the fantasy world she wants to escape for a more real one. Helena is a typically petulant teenager rebelling against her parents. Her mother (Gina McKee) is in need of a potentially life-threatening operation and has been hospitalized just as the circus begins to collapse in on itself financially. Helena is an aspiring artist with all kinds of illustrations wallpapering her bedroom (it’s like McKean’s portfolio exploded in there) and she has the most bizarre, surreal dreams.

It is during one of these dreams that she enters a strange world resembling an oil painting where eyeballs sprout spider legs and books can be opened and used to float through this dream world. It’s a place where everyone wears a mask and Helena’s circus skills become quite useful. She learns that a dark shadow is falling over the land, threatening to engulf it. The City of Light is in danger of being eclipsed by the Land of Shadows and the White Queen (McKee again) is asleep, unable to wake. Helena must find the Mirrormask if she hopes to defeat the Black Queen (also McKee) and wake the White one. This fantastical dream world and the conflict it is embroiled in is obviously Helena’s way of dealing with her real life trials and tribulations. Solving the problems in one world mirror the problems faced in the other.

The young Stephanie Leonidas does an excellent job as the audience surrogate in this strange cinematic world. She has to gain our trust and empathy in the real one so that we’re willing to follow her into the elaborately designed dream world. She is the cinematic equivalent of Little Nemo and we are invited to tag along for the ride through her Slumberland. There is also a lovely short-hand between Helena and her folks that is believable and endears us to these characters.

Mirrormask reminds me of when I saw a travelling circus as a child with its acrobats, illusionists, jugglers, clowns, and various performers. It’s a dying art form that runs the risk of becoming extinct what with so many other forms of entertainment vying for our attention these days. The early scenes in the film have a handmade feel to them and this is contrasted by the CGI landscapes of the fantasy world later on. Helena lives in a drab, colorless concrete apartment building, which is juxtaposed with the rich colors of the circus and fantasy world. There are all kinds of gorgeous shots, like a long one of the outside of the circus big top bathed in red light with nearby vehicles and trailers illuminated in gold all reflected on the water, which makes the film so fascinating to watch. McKean also shows a keen eye for composition of frame, like the shot of Helena and her father talking on the balcony of their apartment with the ocean visible to the right.

In 1999, the Jim Henson Company was studying the figures of their DVD sales for the library of their films. They noticed that their fantasy films The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986) sold very well with little to no promotion. They figured that there was a decent-sized audience for these kinds of films and looked into making a prequel to The Dark Crystal or a sequel to Labyrinth but in the end decided to create something else in the spirit of these films. Executive producer Michael Polis pitched this project to Sony Pictures and out of that came The Curse of the Goblin Kingdom, which originated from conversations with artist Brian Froud, the conceptual designer of both The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

Lisa Henson, CEO of the Jim Henson Company, was trying to get another Dark Crystal film going and Polis approached her with his project. She agreed to work with him on it. She was friends with writer Neil Gaiman and they were planning a film version of his television series Neverwhere when she contacted him in 2001 with the idea of making a fantasy film in the vein of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. She asked him if artist and regular collaborator Dave McKean was interested in directing and if so would Gaiman be willing to write the story. He sent Henson a copy of a short film that McKean had made and she was impressed with the visuals and that he had made it so cheaply.

Polis considered teaming McKean up with Froud but soon realized that for the sake of coherence there could only be one particular style for the film and sided with McKean because he was going to direct. Henson and Polis then pitched Mirrormask to Sony who greenlit the film with a $4 million budget in 2003. Although, Gaiman and McKean worked for almost no salary, they were given complete creative freedom. The two men lived in different countries on different continents and ended up meeting at Henson’s house in London, England where they spent ten days creating a general story outline. It was felt that this environment was more conducive to creativity then a sterile hotel room. Gaiman wrote the script based on McKean’s specifications in 2002. For example, Gaiman came up with the idea of a girl who was part of a traveling theater and her mother got sick while McKean changed the theater to a circus (more interesting visually) and came up with the masks and the two mothers. Filming of the live-action footage took place in Brighton, England in June and July of 2003.

McKean wanted Mirrormask to have “a painterly, illustrative feel to it.” To this end, he had a very “loose working” relationship with 15 computer animators, many fresh from college, allowing for improvisation. There was never a worry that the film wouldn’t fit together because it was all based on his imagery. For example, when he designed the film’s creatures, he made them quite simple in order to give the animators a lot of room to work with. However, this approach extended the post-production phase, which was originally budgeted for approximately eight months, to 17 months.

Mirrormask was originally set for a direct-to-DVD release but it was accepted in the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and this convinced Sony to give it a limited theatrical release in the United States. The film received mostly mixed to negative reviews from mainstream critics. Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, “I suspected the filmmakers began with a lot of ideas about how the movie should look, but without a clue about pacing, plotting or destination.” In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden called it, “an example of too much lavished on too little. Because there is often more on the screen than the eye can take in, the originality of its visual imagination is compromised.” The Washington Post’s Desson Thomson felt it was “so single-minded in its reach for fantasy, it becomes the genre's evil opposite: banality.” The Village Voice’s Michael Atkinson wrote, “The measure of conviction needed to make and read comic books is all that's brought to bear, and the result might make good dope software, if you can sit still and stay awake.” However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A-“ rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum called it a “dazzling reverie of a kids-and-adults movie, an unusual collaboration between lord-of-the-cult multimedia artist Dave McKean and king-of-the-comics Neil Gaiman (The Sandman), has something to astonish everyone.” In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Walter Addiego called it, “richly inventive.”

Naturally, Helena’s surreal dream world is where Mirrormask comes to life with one stunning visual set piece after another. As you would expect from a Gaiman/McKean production, it is very visual and rather non-linear in nature with a light façade but underneath lurks a darkness that is the hallmark of their collaborations. Every frame looks like a work of art, like one of McKean’s paintings come to life. There is so much to look at (like a landscape filled with red, spiral staircases) and it is a densely visual film much like a waking dream. Even though, at times, you may not know what is going on exactly, you trust that Gaiman’s storytelling abilities and McKean’s visuals are going somewhere. After recently watching Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009), I think it would make a fantastic double bill with Mirrormask as both films deal with vagabond performers traveling through England and how the real world becomes intertwined with a fantasy realm, each one feeding off the other.

DVD of the Week: 12 Angry Men: Criterion Collection

2011-12-13T10:36:00.000-05:00

Adapted from the 1954 teleplay of the same name, 12 Angry Men (1957) marked the auspicious feature film debut of director Sidney Lumet who had cut his teeth on live television in New York City. He brought a gritty, edgy realism to this film, an approach that flew in the face of traditional, more polished Hollywood cinema. With the exception of Henry Fonda, Lumet eschewed movie star casting in favor of actors with a background in New York stage and T.V. work, like E.G. Marshall, Lee J. Cobb, and Jack Warden. The film’s legacy has endured and been felt for decades and without it there would be shows like Law & Order or John Grisham novels. While 12 Angry Men was well-received by critics at the time, it certainly didn’t set the box office on fire but over the years its reputation has grown and is now regarded as a classic.

Lumet begins the film with a solemn opening shot of the impressive pillars of the hall of justice in New York City. In a court room, a Puerto Rican teenager has been charged with murdering his father. If the 12-man jury can find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, then he could be given the death penalty as is the case with first-degree murder. And so, the rest of the film plays out in a small room on “the hottest day of the year,” with no air-conditioning as these men must decide the fate of another.

Before they get started, the men engage in idle chit-chat – getting to know you stuff as their various personalities begin to emerge. During a preliminary vote, everyone says the kid is guilty except for one man (Henry Fonda) who doesn’t want to condemn him to death until they talk about it. As he points out, suppose they’re wrong. Each man says why they think the teenager is guilty and some range from flimsy (“I just think he’s guilty.”) to logical (E.G. Marshall) to opinionated (Lee J. Cobb) but no one can convince the dissenting juror who makes some pretty good points. The juror isn’t saying that the boy is guilty, just that he’s not sure that he did it. The longer they stay sequestered in that hot room, the more tempers flare up as their prejudices come to bear and the dissenting juror begins to garner support with his rational dissection of the evidence and the testimony from the case.

As the film progresses, this impressive cast of actors really impress as they bounce off each other in the small room, from the quiet, reserved juror played by Jack Klugman to the bluster of the juror played by Lee J. Cobb to the unwavering decency of the juror played by Henry Fonda. Lumet is able to keep our interest in the story that unfolds by maintaining the focus on his brilliant cast. He doesn’t try to get fancy with the camerawork or manipulate us with music. He lets the actors do their thing with the first-rate screenplay by Reginald Rose that results in a film that epitomizes the phrase, “hard-hitting drama.” 12 Angry Men is a powerful statement about the American judicial system – one that hasn’t changed much since this film was made except maybe it’s gotten worse – and how personal views and prejudices can influence a jury.

Special Features:

The first disc starts off with “The Television Version” that was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and which first aired on September 1954 for the series Westinghouse Presents Studio One. It obviously doesn’t feature the star-studded cast of the film but is a pretty solid adaptation in its own right. Ron Simon, curator at the Paley Center for Media in New York City, introduces it and puts the program into context, talks about the director, cast and so on. He points out that it was experiment to see if theater could work on T.V.

“12 Angry Men: From TV to The Big Screen” features film scholar Vance Kepley talking about how it went from a teleplay to film. Rather fittingly, he briefly gives the origins of 12 Angry Men and its numerous adaptations over the years. He talks about the challenges of working in live T.V.

Also included is a trailer.

The second disc includes “Lumet on Lumet,” a collection of archival interviews with the director who talks about his long career. He talks about getting into show business as a kid. He also discusses his work ethic and how he applied it to his films. Lumet also shares some of his interesting life experiences.

“Reflections on Sidney” features friend and collaborator Walter Bernstein sharing some of his observations of Lumet, like how he enjoyed working with actors. Bernstein also talks about how they became friends and tells some good stories.

Ron Simon returns to talk about the importance of writer Reginald Rose who wrote 12 Angry Men. He points that among the great early T.V. writers Rose is the least known and explains the reasons why.

Also included is Tragedy in a Temporary Town, a teleplay written by Rose and directed by Lumet. It aired in 1956 and features a few of the actors who would go on to appear in the film version of 12 Angry Men.

Finally, cinematographer John Bailey talks about fellow cinematographer Boris Kaufman’s visual style and work with Lumet. He gives a brief biographical sketch of the man. Bailey talks about Kaufman’s early, groundbreaking work with French filmmaker Jean Vigo. He also examines Kaufman’s work on 12 Angry Men.

Grace of My Heart

2011-12-09T09:37:00.000-05:00

Grace of My Heart (1996) is Allison Anders’ unabashed love letter to three decades of popular music, from the doo-wop era of the late 1950’s, to the rise of girl groups in the 1960’s to the psychedelic era of the 1970’s, all seen through the eyes of a female songwriter cast in the mould of Carole King, among others. Anders’ passion project finally gave a substantial role to character actress Illeana Douglas who, finally freed from the shackles of numerous supporting character roles over the years, delivers a career-defining performance. Despite the pedigree of having Martin Scorsese as executive producer and the likes of John Turturro and Matt Dillon in supporting roles, Grace of My Heart was not a commercial hit, and was quickly eclipsed by another nostalgic look at popular music from the ‘60s that came out the same year – Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do! (1996), which, incidentally, wasn’t a huge hit either but had much more advertising muscle behind it. For all of its flaws, which include a weak third act, Grace of My Heart is a fascinating look at a time when the craft of writing a good song mattered. It is a film that deserves to be rediscovered.

Edna Buxton (Illeana Douglas) comes from a wealthy suburban Philadelphia family whose mother has her life all figured out – marry a man from another wealthy family and live the rest of her life as an obedient housewife. Let’s not forget that the film begins in 1958 where this was the prevailing attitude. However, a chance encounter with a talented singer by the name of Doris Shelley (Jennifer Leigh Warren) backstage at a local talent contest inspires her to pick a different path in life for herself, one that is not planned by her controlling mother. Edna wins the contest, receives a recording contract and moves to New York City to make it as a singer.

However, Edna finds out that there are all kinds of women who sound just like her and sing the same kinds of songs. A kindly yet condescending engineer (Richard Schiff) tells her that guy groups are where it’s at. Her life changes when she meets Joel Milner (John Turturro), a brilliant record producer who convinces Edna to write songs for others. She figures that this will do until she can record her own material. He also changes her decidedly unglamorous name to the catchier Denise Waverly. They work out of the legendary Brill Building, the headquarters for pop-music during the ’50s and ‘60s and which saw the likes of Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Phil Spector and many others write some of the biggest hits at the time.

With Denise’s insistence, Joel records one her songs with a girl group known as the Stylettes and it is a hit, bucking the prevailing trend of popular guy groups. Joel then pairs her up with Howard Caszatt (Eric Stoltz), a Beatnik poseur who injects social issues into the songs he writes with her. I like that Anders shows Denise and Howard writing a song together and we see them coming up with ideas for lyrics and melodies. They soon become romantically involved and get married after she becomes pregnant. After she has the baby, Denise continues to work, quite unusual for the times, but it becomes obvious that she has a real knack for creating hit songs while Howard appears to be holding her back. This causes tension in their personal lives and it’s not long before she catches him in bed with another woman.

The next man in Denise’s life is popular radio disc jockey John Murray (Bruce Davison) who becomes smitten with her and uses his show to promote a controversial song she wrote. He’s a nice enough guy and seems like the one she should be with instead of the pretentious Howard; it’s just too bad that he’s married. During the course of the film, Anders also shows the rivalry between fellow female songwriters, like when Joel brings Cheryl Steed (Patsy Kensit) in to write hit songs and Denise immediately sees her as direct competition. Cheryl even gets a better office then Denise who has been there longer. Cheryl quickly becomes Joel’s new favorite songwriter, much to Denise’s dismay but she puts on a brave face in public.

Joel then decides to team her up with Cheryl as an experiment and the two women are instructed to write a song for bubblegum pop singer Kelly Porter (Bridget Fonda channeling Leslie Gore). Initially, they don’t know what to write about but after being privy to a secret part of Kelly’s personal life they figure it out. Cheryl and Denise bond over the Porter song, become close friends, and generate a hit. After years of writing songs for other people, Joel reminds Denise that she started working for him to create her own music and sets her up with Jay Phillips (Matt Dillon), a brilliant yet temperamental musician from the West Coast, to produce her single. It is at this point that Grace of My Heart shifts from songwriters working in the Brill Building to the experimental West Coast psychedelic scene and some momentum is lost. It may be that Jay and his world is just not as fascinating as Joel and his. It also doesn’t help that John Turturro’s performance is so strong and memorable, while Matt Dillon seems miscast as the mercurial Brian Wilson-esque Jay.

Illeana Douglas is an unconventional choice to play Denise. Her speaking voice doesn’t really match up with the person cast as her singing voice (the fantastic sounding Kristen Vigard) but it is refreshing to see someone who doesn’t look or act like your traditional A-list movie star and it would only happen in an independent film like this one. Douglas makes it work, using her considerable talents to show the different sides of her character – her doubts, fears and aspirations – while also running through the spectrum of emotions. There are scenes where she breaks down completely, is romantic, funny, and really digs deep within herself to fully inhabit Denise. The veteran actress shows a vulnerability that is fascinating to watch, especially the scene where she records her first single, the soulful and soaring “God Give Me Strength” (written by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello no less!). This is a criminally underrated performance that should’ve won her every acting award the year it came out.

John Turturro, with his black suit, goatee and sunglasses, plays a nicer, more neurotic version of Phil Spector, the legendary record producer and pioneer of the Wall of Sound production technique, mixed with Don Kirshner, a rock producer who gave Neil Diamond and Carole King their starts. Of all the men that pass in and out of Denise’s life, he is a consistent presence and the voice of reason, constantly reminding her about her considerable talent while never candy-coating his opinions on her music or her life. He plays a flashy personality and one of the film’s pleasures is watching how he plays off of Douglas. There is a wonderful scene between them where Denise apologizes for her first single leading to Joel’s financial ruin but he dismisses that notion, reminding her that she wrote his first hit and many after as well as inspiring him to take chances he would have never done otherwise. It a touching moment between the two characters – one in which we see Joel let his guard down for moment and in doing so it reveals a lot about him. It is so rare that Turturro plays nice, decent guys and so it is a real treat to see him refreshingly cast against type in this film.

In 1994, Allison Anders was gearing up to direct Paul Is Dead from an autobiographical screenplay with Hugh Grant lined up to star. Then, a month before the start of filming, the actor pulled out and with it the financing, which was contingent on his participation. Understandably upset, Anders was woman without a film. In stepped Martin Scorsese who had written a fan letter to Anders after seeing Gas Food Lodging (1992). He was eager to team up his then girlfriend and actress Illeana Douglas with Anders for a film that he would produce. After making Cape Fear (1991), Douglas had acted in but was ultimately cut out of a string of impressive films: Jungle Fever (1991), Husbands and Wives (1992), and Quiz Show (1994). Feeling depressed as a result of these snubs, she talked to Scorsese who recommended she start developing relationships with directors. Douglas went on to make a low-budget film called Grief (1993) and went to the Sundance Film Festival with it. There, she met Anders and they became friends. Afterwards, the two women kept in contact in the hopes of making a film together.

Initially, they wanted to do a biopic about American poet Anne Sexton but couldn’t get the film rights to her life. They were both obsessed with music, in particular Anders with girl groups from the ‘60s. Douglas told her about how she used to work in the Brill Building as an assistant for infamous New York publicist Peggy Segal and that maybe they should do a film about it. As a result, Anders wrote the role of Edna/Denise specifically for Douglas. When it came to writing the screenplay, both women put a lot of personal details into it. For example, Denise’s relationship with Jay was reminiscent of Douglas and Scorsese. When Anders thought of Douglas for the film, she was looking for an actress to “embody all sorts of contradictions. I have to find the right woman to speak to other women.” However, the actress was worried about how women would react to Denise’s habit of getting involved with men who aren’t good for and tended to sidetrack her dream of recording her own album, “because women don’t want to think Edna would let a guy interrupt a career. But that’s the big secret: Women always think that being loved is much more important than being talented.”

The script originally started as the story of one singer/songwriter but then Anders and Douglas started to add aspects of others: Joni Mitchell, Phil Spector and the Beach Boys. Legendary songwriter Gerry Goffin, who was married to Carole King at one time, was brought into write three songs for the film (including one with his daughter and recording artist Louise Goffin) and also gave Anders a lot of autobiographical information, which she incorporated into the script. Instead of using actual songs that came from the time period, Anders decided to have new songs that sounded like they came from that era because “it would have been very confusing to have these fictional characters writing songs that were already well-known to the public.” Originally, Douglas expected to do her own singing, having started out doing musicals, but the studio wanted to make a lucrative record deal and she had to lip-synch to Kirsten Vigard’s voice.

Grace of My Heart is a treasure trove of hidden gems for music fans who are hip to the music and the musicians of the eras it depicts. For example, towards the end of the film Denise uses her skill for crafting pop songs towards creating very personal ballads, much like Carole King did with her top selling record Tapestry, which inspired some of the songs. In her previous films, Anders used alternative rock (Gas Food Lodging) and hip-hop (Mi Vida Loca) as the soundtrack for stories about young women. While Grace of My Heart is about music from a bygone era, she had contemporary indie rockers team up with seasoned veterans. Gerry Goffin, the inspiration for Howard Caszatt, wrote a song with Los Lobos. Brill Building veteran Carole Bayer Sayer teamed up with Eurythmics guitarist Dave Stewart on a song. Easily the best collaboration on the film’s soundtrack saw Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach pen the signature song “God Give Me Strength,” which went on to become more successful than the film itself.

Grace of My Heart was made on a small budget and there wasn’t much money to advertise it. The film opened in only 39 theaters in North America and failed to make back its $5 million budget. To make matters worse, it was quickly overshadowed by Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do!, which came out shortly after. It received mostly mixed reviews with critics praising the time spent on the Brill Building era but criticizing the last third where Denise moves out to the West Coast to be with Jay. Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Once Grace of My Heart leaves the Brill Building, the movie gets stranded in a parade of '60s clichés. It turns into the most banal of melodramas, complete with a ''tragic'' finale that plays as borderline kitsch. Still, there's no denying Anders' talent. She should have been content to make a catchy single and not stretched it into an overblown rock opera.” The Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “In its embracing of easy melodrama, of the wronged woman who endures and then prevails, Grace Of My Heart hopes to emulate the elegant simplicity of the pop music it celebrates. But that combination, as potent as it is rare, is hard to bring off – like her hired melody-makers, Anders gets the simplicity yet misses the elegance. All the trite notes are there, but none of the redeeming grace.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Ms. Anders, who displayed such effortless, down-to-earth feminism in Gas Food Lodging, has to strain harder to make a heroine out of Denise. Ms. Douglas plays her eagerly, but the film casts her as an old-fashioned victim in many clichéd ways … This story offers so little novelty that the film's musical score and great retro costumes easily upstage its drama.”

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Edward Guthman wrote, “Anders is very good to her actors and writes smart, well-rounded characters. Her problem is loving them too much, embracing them too tightly and not knowing when to let go.” Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out four and wrote, “I would have preferred a more limited story that went deeper, instead of a docudrama that covers so much ground, so relentlessly, that we grow weary.” The Washington Post’s Richard Harrington wrote, “One major problem is that Grace of My Heart feels like a preview reel from some upcoming miniseries. Despite its two hours, events seem to unfold too quickly and in too little depth. Anders never really captures the communal bustle, competitive friendships or astounding productivity of the Brill Building's golden age.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Jack Mathews wrote, “Grace marvelously re-creates that atmosphere of sweatshop creativity, both the pressure and the joy, and Douglas' portrayal of a woman fighting for her own identity and a piece of the action gives the story a solid emotional footing.” USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and Susan Wloszczyna wrote, “Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging) infuses her epic with joy and a keen eye for pre-feminist details, before the pill and pantyhose set us free.”

Ultimately, Grace of My Heart is the story of a survivor. Denise endures all kinds of ups and downs in her personal and professional life with music as the constant thread that runs throughout. It is always there for her whereas the men in her life come and go. Her personal journey propels the film and when it hits a lull this mirrors the lull in her life until someone like Joel comes along and gets her going and the film’s narrative starts up again. By the end of the film you really feel like you’ve been on a journey with this character. Denise channels all of her life experiences into her music and so it makes sense that the film climaxes with her finally recording and releasing the full-length album she had always wanted to do. It is rare when you see a film that is such a labor of love as this one. Anders and Douglas poured so much of themselves into this project and it shows. Grace of My Heart may strain at times under its own ambition but one has to admire its desire to do so in a day and age where so many films and filmmakers play it safe.

DVD of the Week: Three Colors: Blue, White, Red: Criterion Collection

2011-12-02T11:12:00.000-05:00

With the unfortunate passing of filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski, cinema lost a great storyteller but he left behind an enduring legacy, most significantly Three Colors, a trilogy of films named after the colors of the French flag: Blue (1993), White (1993), and Red (1994). Each film explores the ideas that came out of the French Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity. Kieslowski was not concerned about them as political concepts but rather how they pertained to the protagonists of all three films. Incredibly, he wrote, shot and edited them all in under three years and they were released at the prestigious film festivals in Venice, Berlin and Cannes to much critical acclaim. Previously released in a box set by Miramax, the Criterion Collection has produced their own edition with newly remastered transfers of each film and several new extras, giving Kieslowski’s films their trademark deluxe treatment.

When her husband and daughter are killed in an automobile accident, which she survives, Julie (Juliette Binoche) is understandably devastated. She shuts herself off emotionally, never wanting to feel anything again after such a traumatic experience. In the opening scenes of Blue, actress Juliette Binoche displays an incredible range of emotions as her character tries to comprehend her world, which has been shattered. She ends up suppressing raw emotion with detachment.

Over the course of Blue, Julie experiences a series of epiphanies as symbolized by bursts of the color blue and a loud swell of classical music, which acts as an emotional Greek chorus. Music is her voice, channeling the emotion she keeps in check most of the time. As the film progresses, she finds a way to free herself from her past and from the revelations about her husband’s life. She puts herself through a series of exercises to test her feelings – is she ready to face the world without emotion? Julie has shut herself off from the world but eventually learns how to become a part of it again. Kieslowski draws us into this world so that we become invested in its inhabitants, in particular, Julie who endures unimaginable tragedy and must find a way to continue.

If Blue is ostensibly a tragedy, then White is a darkly comic revenge story. Karol Karol (Zhigniew Zamachowski) is a Polish hairdresser who lives with his beautiful young bride Dominique (Julie Delpy) in Paris but she divorces him early on in the film for failing to consummate their marriage. She takes him to court and coldly tells him that she doesn’t love him anymore. Karol soon finds out that his bank account has been frozen and he becomes homeless, which leaves him wondering if he has the strength to go on. Dominique has completely destroyed him and so he goes back to his native Poland where he rebuilds his life and plans an elaborate revenge plot.

Actor Zhigniew Zamachowski has an incredibly expressive face that he uses to make Karol instantly sympathetic but it isn’t too hard after all the horrible things Dominique does to him. Your heart really goes out to Karol just as Julie Delpy’s cold, cruel character really makes you hate her and hope that she gets her well-deserved comeuppance, but as with Kieslowski’s films, it’s never that simple and the ending is surprisingly hopeful.

The first third of White is utterly heartbreaking as poor Karol deals with one soul-crushing injustice after another. In the second third, he rebuilds his life in Warsaw in an inspirational turn of events as he is employed as a bodyguard for a local criminal while cutting hair for his brother on the side. Karol is a quiet, unassuming guy. As a result, people, like his wife and the local crooks, underestimate him. They don’t realize just how clever he is and this is used to his advantage. Finally, the last third of the film is Karol’s payback on those who wronged him. In White, the traditional roles are reversed as Karol is the ingénue while Dominique is led by her sexual drive. Over the course of the film, we see him reassert his own identity while refusing to lose his optimism or romantic nature.

Red concludes the Three Colors trilogy with a moving examination of the notions of fate and chance as a beautiful runway model named Valentine (Irene Jacob) crosses paths with Joseph (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a bitter retired judge, when she accidentally hits his dog with her car. She lives in Geneva and maintains a long distance relationship with her irrationally jealous boyfriend over the phone. There is also subplot concerning a young man studying to be a judge and who is also having relationship problems.

Joseph spends his time eavesdropping on his neighbors’ phone calls, an odd hobby for a retired judge. Valentine is struck by his honesty and fascinated with his outlook on life, shaped by years of his profession. Now, he is a voyeur, listening to other people’s conversations while he has no life of his own. She believes that people are basically good while he believes the opposite, which was no doubt cultivated over years of seeing the worst of humanity paraded in front of him. Valentine inspires Joseph to reconnect with humanity while he inspires her to be more independent and proactive in her relationships.

Initially, Valentine comes across as a ditzy model with no common sense (especially in regards to the dog) but Irene Jacob’s soulful performance suggests that there is more to her character and this becomes apparent over the course of the film. Like Julie in Blue, Joseph is emotionally disconnected from others and seems not to care about Valentine hitting his dog with her car. Jean-Louis Trintignant is excellent as the jaded ex-judge and it is fascinating to watch his character go from an indifferent observer to someone that can reconnect with the rest of humanity. Trintignant has wonderful chemistry with Jacob and it is fascinating to see the relationship develop between their characters during the course of the film. With Red, Kieslowski reminds us of the importance of being connected with others and with humanity. By that extension, the entire trilogy is an epic treatise on the strengths and weaknesses of humanity.

Special Features:

Those of you who own the Miramax box set might want to hold onto it as not all of the extras have been carried over to the Criterion Collection edition. For example, the audio commentaries film scholar Annette Insdorf did for each film have not been included. Also omitted are the selected scene commentaries that actresses Julie Delpy and Irene Jacob did for White and Red respectively. While some of Kieslowski’s student films have been included on this new set, Concert of Wishes, Trolley, and The Office have been omitted. Completists will want to hold onto the Miramax edition.

New to this set is “On Blue,” a video essay by film studies professor Annette Insdorf where she gives a brief background to the Three Colors trilogy before examining the themes explored in Blue. She also analyzes the film’s striking style as well as the moving classical score.

“Kieslowski’s Cinema Lesson” sees the filmmaker discussing a specific scene from Blue and the importance of close-ups in the film.

Also included is a selected scenes commentary by actress Juliette Binoche. She talks about meeting Kieslowski for the first time and how they talked about philosophy. She turned down a role in Jurassic Park (1993) to do Blue. The actress gives her impression of the director and what it was like to work with him.

There is a new interview with composer Zbigniew Preisner. He had worked with Kieslowski on several films, including the Three Colors trilogy. By the time they did Blue together the two men had a very familiar shorthand and knew what the wanted. Preisner recalls first working with Kieslowski and talks about his working methods.

“Reflections on Blue” takes a retrospective look at the film with critics and historians talking about the production and offering analysis. They point out that Kieslowski avoided making an overt political statement with these films by focusing on the personal: the tragic life of a woman. The film’s cinematographer, editor and Binoche also offer their thoughts on the film.

Another new extra is “On White,” a video essay by film scholar Tony Rayns. He provides backstory to the film. It was the first film Kieslowski had made since The Decalogue (1989). Rayns also provides details on the socio-political conditions in Poland at the time. In White, Kieslowski confronted the changes to the country since the fall of Communism.

“Kieslowski’s Cinema Lesson” features the director’s views and he talks about the opening scene of the film. He also explains why he included shots of the suitcase and how it ties in with the opening scenes of the other two films.

There are new interviews with actors Zbigniew Zamachowski and Julie Delpy. They talk about how they met Kieslowski and were cast in White. They both talk about working with the director and how he was very exact in his methods with no improvisation.

Another new extra is an interview with co-writer Krzystof Piesiewicz where he talks about working with Kieslowski. They first met in 1982 and Piesiewicz noticed that the director was lost in life having gone through some personal ordeals. They became friends and worked together over 15 years on 17 films.

“The Making of White” features some excellent behind the scenes footage of Kieslowski making the film in Poland. He describes White as a “lyrical comedy” and also a “sad comedy.”

Yet another new extra is “On Red,” a video essay by film critic Dennis Lim. He discusses the film’s themes, chief among them the notion of isolation. He also analyzes Red’s style, in particular, the use of color.

“Kieslowski’s Cinema Lesson” features the director discussing a scene with Valentine and the dog she accidentally hit with her car. He says that it is the film’s first critical moment. The ever eloquent director explains his intentions with this scene and why it was shot the way it was.

There is a new interview with actress Irene Jacob and she talks about her experiences working with Kieslowski on Red. She also discusses her first meeting with him and how that led to her being cast in The Double Life of Veronique (1991). Jacob talks about working with her Red co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant and comes across as a smart and engaging person.

Producer Marin Karmitz talks about the making of Red and tells a story about an elaborate shot that was achieved and the difficult logistics involved. He also recounts a story of how the film received three Academy Award nominations as an American film!

Editor Jacques Witta talks about why certain scenes in Red were cut and his impressions of working with Kieslowski. There are excerpts of this footage which are quite interesting but one can see why they were removed.

“Kieslowski Cannes 1994” is a short documentary about Red’s world premiere at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival where the director famously announced his retirement. There are interviews with the two lead actors who came to the festival to help promote the film. This is a nice snapshot of Red’s debut.

“Kieslowski: The Early Years” takes a look at the director’s early life with interview soundbites from film scholars and collaborators. He moved around a lot as a child and didn’t dream of being a filmmaker but rather fell into it. This featurette provides insight into what motivated Kieslowski to become a filmmaker and how it shaped his later films.

Also included are two student films, The Tram (1966), about a boy flirting with a pretty girl, and The Face (1966), where he played a tormented artist.

There are two short documentaries, Seven Women of Different Ages (1978), which looks at several ballet dancers, each one on a different day of the week, and Talking Heads (1980), a fascinating film where 40 different people of various ages are asked the three same questions.

Also included are trailers for all three films.

“Behind the Scenes of Red” features footage of Kieslowski directing the film juxtaposed with the actual scene as it appeared in the film. This featurette provides some insight into how he worked.

Finally, a new addition to this set is “Krzysztof Kieslowski: I’m So-So,” a 55-minute documentary made in 1995 shortly after he retired from filmmaking. He talks about his life and films. As always, Kieslowski speaks eloquently and thoughtfully about a variety of topics in this fascinating portrait.

Dogtown and Z-Boys / Lords of Dogtown

2011-11-26T18:06:00.001-05:00

In the mid-1970’s, California was hit by a crippling drought that made it impossible to surf any kind of decent waves. The locals that lived in an area of West Los Angeles known as Dogtown always had skateboarding to fall back on when the surfing wasn’t any good. They all hung out at a local surf shop that reflected their surroundings: a rough seaside slum that fostered a proudly anti-establishment image because they all felt like outcasts. The surf shop was a place where these kids felt like they belonged.

The core group consisted of 12 kids who rejected the tried and true skating techniques of the 1960’s for a more aggressive, stylish approach inspired by the way they surfed. Amazingly, no one had thought of doing this before and it blew the world of skateboarding wide open. Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) is a documentary that traces their origins and the rise and fall of this group, known as the Zephyr team (or Z-Boys for short), from the perspective of its members.

At the time, there were no skate parks so the Zephyr team had to skate in deserted schoolyards and then, once they discovered them, empty swimming pools drained by the drought. They ended up being the perfect spots for skating and ushered in the era of vertical skating thanks to the influence of surfing and the vision of one of their own, Tony Alva. The only problem with skating in background pools is that the Z-Boys weren’t supposed to be there and a session would end suddenly when the owners or the cops showed up.

Finally, skateboarding enjoyed enough of a resurgence that a national competition surfaced in Del Mar in 1975. The Z-Boys got a team together and came in with their punk rock aesthetic and blew the minds of people used to the hopelessly outdated ‘60s style. However, the downside came in the form of rich skateboard companies that broke up the Z-Boys with the lure of money and fame. Within a year, their beloved surf shop was out of business.

The documentary goes on to trace the rise of several of the Z-Boys, like Alva, Stacy Peralta and Jay Adams, into superstars. They were treated like gods in the skateboarding world and went from living on the streets to having all kinds of money, fame and women thrown at them. Some of them, such as Adams, couldn’t handle the sudden fame and fortune. It’s a shame because he was the most natural and spontaneous of the team, a brilliant “athletic stream-of-consciousness,” as one person puts it. However, Alva and Peralta were able to diversify and take control of their careers and still skate today, capitalizing on their early success.

The impetus for this documentary came from an article that appeared in Spin magazine about the Z-Boys. Within a week of it hitting newsstands, six major Hollywood studios contacted Stacy Peralta wanting to buy the life rights to their story and make it into a fictional film. Executives were able to get Tony Alva and Jay Adams on board but Peralta agreed only on the condition that he would have some input. The studio refused and he decided to do a documentary on the Z-Boys himself. Peralta was able to get Vans, a skateboarding gear manufacturer, to finance the film for $400,000 and give him complete creative control. With his connections to the scene, he was able to get access to all the key people who were around back in the day.

There is an infectious energy to this documentary that mirrors its subject. Gone are boring talking heads mixed with standard stock footage. Instead, we are presented with stills and vintage footage taken back in the day and that comes to life thanks to kinetic editing and period rock ‘n’ roll music setting just the right tone.

Like its subjects, the doc’s style lets it all hang out. For example, at one point, the film’s narrator, none other than Jeff Spicoli himself, Sean Penn, clears his throat in mid-narration. Most slick docs would have edited this out but director Stacy Peralta keeps it in. It is these little touches that make Dogtown and Z-Boys distinctive.

What also gives Dogtown and Z-Boys such authenticity is that it was made by one of their own, Peralta, and this gives the documentary unprecedented inside access that an outsider would never have. This is a fascinating look at these maverick skaters and how they influenced contemporary skateboarding that we now take for granted.

Dogtown and Z-Boys was a hugely successful documentary chronicling a group of wild skateboarders in Venice Beach, California in the ‘70s. Why dramatize an already great documentary that pretty much says it all? Naturally, Hollywood got interested and wanted to make a fictional version (because hey, no one watches docs, right?) with Fred Dirst (of Limp Bizkit fame) directing and David Fincher producing.

Fortunately, someone came to his or her senses and Dirst was out with Fincher taking over but the budget for his vision was too large. So, the studio opted for a low budget take with independent film darling Catherine Hardwicke, fresh from the success of thirteen (2003), taking over as director. In an effort to keep it real, Stacy Peralta, who made the Z-Boys doc, wrote the screenplay for Lords of Dogtown (2005) and worked closely with Hardwicke in order to remain true to what he and his friends went through all those years ago.

The film takes us back to the heady days of 1975 when the Venice Beach locals would surf the dangerous waters where you could easily get brained by a piece of the nearby pier. These were tough kids growing up in a tough neighborhood and out of it came a group of young surfers who adopted the same style they used to attack the waves to skate asphalt and concrete: Jay Adams (Emile Hirsch), Tony Alva (Victor Rasuk) and Stacy Peralta (John Robinson).

One of the reasons why Lords of Dogtown works so well is because of the superb casting. The actors who play the three lead Z-Boys are dead ringers for their real-life counterparts. In fact, the entire cast looks and sounds like the real people. In particular, Emile Hirsch is excellent as Jay Adams, a naturally gifted skater who comes from a troubled home. Hirsch is wonderfully cast against type as an edgy, brooding teen — it’s a world away from his naïve dreamer that he played in The Girl Next Door (2004).

Thankfully, the film’s producers didn’t raid the WB cabinet for the young cast. Instead, they got Hirsch, Rasuk (from indie fave Raising Victor Vargas) and Robinson (from Gus Van Sant’s Elephant) who have some actual acting chops but not a high enough profile so as to distract. They disappear into their roles as does, surprisingly, high profile actor Heath Ledger. He does an excellent job of becoming his character, one of the Zephyr skate shop owners who is a burnt out drunk but has vision and tries to protect his team of young skaters.

According to Peralta, he made sure to teach the actors how to “look comfortable on a board.” To this length, the actors portraying skaters underwent a three-month training course led by none other than Alva with surfing in the morning and skating in the afternoon. Of the three lead actors, only Rasuk had no board sport experience before the film. The actors not only had to learn the distinctive skating style of the ‘70s but also had to do it on vintage equipment from that era. Not surprisingly, the actors suffered all kinds of skating-related injuries during the course of training and filming but there hard work paid off as is evident from the final result.

Hardwicke adopts a down ‘n’ dirty approach to the look of her film. She uses a lot of hand-held camerawork and grainy film stock that makes you feel like someone who was there shot it. The film’s warm color scheme is filled with yellows, browns and reds for an almost sunburnt look with grey-blues for the ocean/surfing scenes. The style of the film is never gimmicky; the story dictates the style. The attention to period detail is flawless: the pool surfing, the convenience store cuisine and the music.

These kids aren’t driving around in brand new Mustangs or Woodies but beaten-up junkers as befitting their social status. The film uses period music that is typical of the era but doesn’t rely on the really popular, obvious tunes except during appropriate times like at a party where you would listen to crowd-pleasers like that and so it is justified.

The trailers for this film totally misrepresented it as an over-processed, heavily edited piece of lunchmeat. Instead, Lords of Dogtown perfectly evokes the times it depicts with unerring authenticity. It portrays skaters as they were back then — stylish and below the radar, just before the sport took off to the wildly popular institution that it is now.

Lords of Dogtown shows how fame eventually broke up the Z-Boys. It was inevitable. These kids came from nothing and were suddenly thrust into the spotlight and all kinds of money was thrown at them. Alva and Peralta became hugely popular and went corporate, constantly competing with each other while Adams stayed true to his roots and walked away from it all because he was in it for the love of skating and the thrill of the ride. This film will bring back a lot of memories for people who grew up and skated during these years, making this film more than just a simple retread of the Z-Boys documentary.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

2011-11-18T11:11:00.000-05:00

It was the film many thought would never happen and that languished in development hell for years, bouncing from studio to studio until New Line Cinema took a very big gamble with filmmaker Peter Jackson who, at that point in his career, was known for making slapsticky low budget horror films (Braindead) and had one art house hit (Heavenly Creatures). He wasn’t someone you would necessarily entrust millions upon millions of dollars on making a trilogy of fantasy films – not the most commercially successful genre (Willow, anyone?). Jackson was also tackling The Lord of the Rings, the much-beloved series of books by J.R.R. Tolkien – get it wrong and you’re going to have legions of very unhappy fans.

However, Jackson was a fan too and he had a vision, which, with the help of his co-screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, and an army of collaborators, brought The Lord of the Rings vividly to life. The first film, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), was a massive critical and commercial success and would be followed by two even more successful sequels, The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003). Everyone has their favorite film of the trilogy and for me it’s the first one because it has an intimate feel rendered on an epic scale, if that makes any sense. In other words, The Fellowship of the Ring is about a small group of characters, the Fellowship, and the journey they undertake.

Jackson establishes this intimacy early on with Bilbo Baggins’ (Ian Holm) birthday celebration. The Special Extended Edition DVD version takes its time introducing the hobbits and their world. Jackson uses warm, inviting colors and folksy music to convey that the hobbits are friendly, down-to-earth people who live in a tight-knit community where everyone knows each other. Most importantly, we are introduced to Frodo (Elijah Wood), the hero of this epic tale. For it is he who Bilbo entrusts with the last remaining Ring that he must to take Mordor to destroy so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of the evil Sauron.

The Shire sequences also establish the dangerously seductive lure of the Ring, the origins of the quest and the creation of the Fellowship as led by the mighty wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen). Aside from Frodo, fellow hobbits Sam (Sean Astin), Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) join him on his journey. The group starts simply enough and over the course of the film others join their ranks, including Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), a human ranger, Legolas (Orlando Bloom), an elvan archer, Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), a grumpy dwarf, and Boromir (Sean Bean), a human fighter. At heart of the Fellowship (and really all three films) is the friendship between Frodo and Sam. It is Sam who looks out for Frodo and sticks with him for the entire quest.

There are all kinds of parallels, story structure-wise, between The Fellowship of the Ring and Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). The Tolkien books were an obvious influence on George Lucas’ films. The main characters from both films are plucked from obscurity, a remote rural environment to go on a dangerous quest and are mentored by an elderly wizard type. Hell, Han Solo and Aragorn are characters cut from the same cloth and are both given cool introductions to establish their respective badass credentials.

Jackson manages to get some career-best performances out of many cast members. Elijah Wood, Sean Astin and Orlando Bloom, in particular, have never done anything better since (or before for that matter, except maybe for Wood and his chilling turn in Sin City) and this film launched a series of very eclectic leading man roles for the always watchable Viggo Mortensen (it doesn’t get more diverse than disparate roles in Hidalgo and Eastern Promises). Both Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee give the film some serious class and loads of genre credibility. It is Wood and Astin that anchor this film and give its heart. The relationship between their two characters epitomizes most noble aspects of friendship and of the Fellowship. This only deepens in subsequent installments.

Once our heroes begin their journey, Jackson establishes a riveting urgency as they are pursued by the nightmarish ringwraiths and a vicious army of orcs. And yet this only strengthens the camaraderie among the hobbits and the rest of the Fellowship despite its dysfunction in the form of Boromir. However, when it matters and when faced with dangerous opponents, they work as a team as evident in the exciting and visceral battle against a monster in Balin’s Tomb and the even grittier battle against the orcs at the film’s climax.

Contrary to popular belief, Peter Jackson did not have a lifelong ambition to adapt Tolkien’s books into films. Producer Saul Zaentz owned the film rights for years and gave them to Jackson when he and Fran Walsh met with him and expressed their passion for the project. Zaentz sold the rights to Miramax who wanted to make only one film with Jackson. Disney was the financial backer but they didn’t believe in the project, refusing to give Miramax the money to make it. Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax, gave Jackson three weeks to find someone else to make the film and in 1998, New Line agreed to make it into three films. Jackson originally proposed two films but it was New Line’s idea to make three.

In order to cut down on costs, Jackson decided to film all three films back-to-back over a grueling 274-day shooting schedule on location in remote areas of New Zealand in more than 100 locations with 20 major speaking roles and 20,000 extras. At the height or production, the film crew swelled to 1,300 people with seven units shooting multiple elements simultaneously. Jackson and company were at the mercy of New Zealand’s notoriously mercurial weather – unseasonal snowstorms and overnight flooding but in the end, the filmmakers accomplished what they set out to do and the proof is in the impressive final results.

The Fellowship of the Ring received overwhelmingly positive notices from most of the major film critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "Peter Jackson ... has made a work for, and of, our times. It will be embraced, I suspect, by many Tolkien fans and take on aspects of a cult. It is a candidate for many Oscars. It is an awesome production in its daring and breadth, and there are small touches that are just right.” USA Today also gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "this movie version of a beloved book should please devotees as well as the uninitiated." In his review for The New York Times, Elvis Mitchell wrote, "The playful spookiness of Mr. Jackson's direction provides a lively, light touch, a gesture that doesn't normally come to mind when Tolkien's name is mentioned." Entertainment Weekly magazine gave the film an "A" rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "The cast take to their roles with becoming modesty, certainly, but Jackson also makes it easy for them: His Fellowship flows, never lingering for the sake of admiring its own beauty ... Every detail of which engrossed me. I may have never turned a page of Tolkien, but I know enchantment when I see it." In her review for the Washington Post, Rita Kempley praised the cast, in particular, "Mortensen, as Strider, is a revelation, not to mention downright gorgeous. And McKellen, carrying the burden of thousands of years' worth of the fight against evil, is positively Merlinesque." Finally, Time magazine's Richard Corliss praised Jackson's work: "His movie achieves what the best fairy tales do: the creation of an alternate world, plausible and persuasive, where the young — and not only the young — can lose themselves. And perhaps, in identifying with the little Hobbit that could, find their better selves.”

The Fellowship of the Ring is one of those rare films that lives up to its mountains of hype. Jackson tells an engaging story and crams as much of the source material as possible into the film. Sure, certain characters and subplots have been cut-out but that is the nature of a feature film adaptation. Maybe, some day, someone can turn it into a mini-series so that everything can be included. Until then, we have Jackson’s magnificent films to enjoy.

Sideways

2011-11-11T09:41:00.000-05:00

Alexander Payne is part of an exciting wave of filmmakers who grew up during the 1970’s and were subsequently influenced by the films from that era. His contemporaries include the likes of Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David O. Russell to name but a few. And like his fellow filmmakers, Payne eschews the Hollywood trend of placing an emphasis on special effects and trendy actors in favor of character-driven, comedy-drama hybrids populated with character actors like Laura Dern, Matthew Broderick and Kathy Bates.

Payne’s About Schmidt (2002) continued his fascination with American cinema in the ‘70s by featuring one its biggest (and most prolific) stars, Jack Nicholson. His next film, Sideways (2004), continued the road movie motif from Schmidt and combined it with the buddy film. Jack Cole (Thomas Haden Church) is a failed actor about to be married. He decides to go on one last week of uninhibited fun with his best friend, Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti), a grade school teacher and struggling author. They go on a wine-tasting tour through California’s Central Coast and squeeze in a bit of golfing as well.

Miles is an avid (nay-elitist) wine aficionado while Jack is completely ignorant of wine beyond what tastes good to him and what doesn’t. Miles is trying to get his book published with little success and he’s grown cynical and defeated as a result. Initially, he comes off as an unlikable loser not above stealing money from his mother. Jack counters Miles’ repressed nature by coming off as something of an instinctive kind of person who indulges in his raging id. He was on a hit television show... 11 years ago and is now relegated to doing voiceovers for commercials. Along the way, Jack and Miles meet Maya (Virginia Madsen), a beautiful waitress who Miles knows from way back when, and Stephanie (Sandra Oh), who works at a winery and catches Jack’s eye.

Jack and Miles are complete messes as human beings. They lack direction and are hypocrites. Miles says he’s an author but his book is going nowhere, while Jack is getting married but hits on anything in a dress. They are hardly a sympathetic pair. And yet Payne is able to get a lot of comedic mileage from them. Miles is a wine snob who rambles on about the taste, color, and so on, only to have Jack sum up his opinion simply, “I like it,” which comically deflates Miles’ pontificating. They have an intriguing dynamic. While they lie to others – Miles to Jack’s friends about the status of his novel and Jack being nice to Miles’ mother when he clearly wants to get back on the road – they are no pretenses between each other. These guys are getting to the stage in their lives where they’re looking back as opposed to looking ahead. Jack sees marriage as an institution that will stifle his freedom while Miles has a very negative outlook on life, finding any excuse not to ask Maya out despite obviously liking her because he assumes that it will go nowhere.

An interesting thing happens during the course of the film. At first, Miles starts off as an unsympathetic character while we warm up to Jack’s funny repartee as the charming rogue. Halfway through the film they flip roles and it’s Jack who is exposed as a pathetic womanizer and Miles becomes more sympathetic thanks to Maya’s influence. She humanizes him and is easily his intellectual equal. She knows her wine and this clearly impresses Miles. She’s smart and beautiful so why is she even wasting her time with a sad sack like Miles? She gets to know him beyond his looks and liquefies the pretension of his character. Maya pierces his wine-speak armor that he throws up all the time with her easy-going nature and Miles realizes that he doesn’t need to constantly impress her. There is a nice scene where they get to know each other and it is great to see two skilled actors getting a chance to act and really delve into their characters. In this scene, we finally see someone thaw out Miles and get him to open up, stop worrying and thinking so negatively. They use their mutual love for wine as a way to share their passions and aspirations with each other. It’s a beautifully realized scene because you are seeing two people starting to fall in love with each other. Like a fine wine, Maya allows Miles to breathe and he gets better as time goes on. She’s a romantic who is able to cut through his cynicism and soften his hard edges.

Fresh off the success of American Splendor (2003), Paul Giamatti is one of those actors who make it look effortless as he inhabits the characters he plays so completely. Miles is a neurotic mess; a depressed cynic who is definitely a half glass empty kind of guy. Giamatti is able to tap into his character’s deep reservoir of pain and anger. In a couple of shots early in the film, Payne hints at Miles’ past when he looks at old photographs in his mom’s room. They evoke happier times with his father (now out of the picture) and wife (now divorced). Giamatti’s sad expression in this moment conveys more than any words could. During the course of the film, we find out more about why Miles is so miserable and a lot of it has to do with self-loathing, which explains why he tries to sabotage things with Maya. In some ways, Miles is a variation of Giamatti’s take on the equally acerbic Harvey Pekar in Splendor.

Ever since the short-lived television sitcom Ned and Stacy, Thomas Haden Church has been an untapped resource and with Sideways he was given the role of his career. As Miles’ crass, philandering best friend, he plays Jack as a middle-aged frat boy who still calls women, “chicks.” Haden Church has never been afraid to play abrasive, bordering on unlikeable, characters and he expertly does the same here as a guy who presents a jovial façade but underneath lurks a lot of pain and an insensitive mean streak. Haden Church’s dead-panned delivery of smart-ass lines works well against Giamatti’s uptight straight man. Together, they make an excellent team. After years of playing supporting character roles, it’s great to see Haden Church and Giamatti starring in a film. They play so well off each other that you’d swear they’d acted together before. Haden Church and Giamatti are very believable as long-time friends from the way they interact with each other.

For years, Virginia Madsen has been biding her time in direct-to-video hell and so it is great to see her in a high profile role like this one. From The Hot Spot (1990) to Candyman (1992), she’s always been an interesting actress to watch and with Sideways, Madsen is given strong material to sink her teeth into and she delivers a nuanced performance. Sandra Oh has been quietly building a nice body of work over the years and was unfairly overlooked in the numerous awards that have been lavished on this film. Granted, of the four main cast members, she has the least amount of screen time but she makes every moment she has count.

Producer Michael London was a former Los Angeles Times journalist and studio executive who had become frustrated by the studio development process of shepherding a film from script to screen. He bought the rights to the unpublished semi-autobiographical novel Sideways by Rex Pickett with his own money and gave it to Alexander Payne to read in 1999 while the filmmaker was promoting Election. Payne found himself drawn to “the humanity of the characters” and how it tapped into his desire to make films about “people with flaws,” and “unfulfilled desires.” He was not a wine expert but always liked it and thought that the subculture would be fun to explore and act as a backdrop to the relationship between Jack and Miles. However, he was committed to making About Schmidt next and so he and London kept optioning the book over the years. Then, he and his long-time writing partner, Jim Taylor, wrote the screenplay for free. Payne and London drew up a budget and financed pre-production themselves thereby allowing themselves the kind of creative control they wanted. They only began approaching movie studios once they had the script, budget and a preferred cast in place. Four studios were interested with Fox Searchlight winning out.

Based on the reputation of his previous films, several big name actors campaigned for roles in Payne’s film. Both Brad Pitt and George Clooney were eager to play the role of Jack and met with the filmmaker but it ultimately came down to Thomas Haden Church and Matt Dillon. Edward Norton expressed an interest in playing Miles and Payne seriously considered him for the role. With the exception of Sandra Oh, his wife at the time, all the actors auditioned for Payne and London. Haden Church had auditioned for both Election and About Schmidt (narrowly losing out to Dermot Mulroney on the latter) and even though Payne did not cast him in those films, he had been impressed with the actor. When it came to Sideways, Payne felt that Haden Church “kind of is that character,” and cast him as Jack. At the time, he had moved away from acting and when he read the script in May 2003, thought to himself, “I have no shot at this whatsoever, but I have to answer the call of duty. If I get a chance, then I gotta take it.” When Paul Giamatti auditioned for the film, he had not read the whole script, just an excerpt – the scene where Miles talks about his love of Pinot Noir wine to Maya. The actor found Miles’ obsession with the wine to be “an interesting theme for this guy” who was constantly “striving for transcendence through the wine and the wine milieu, and it just keeps collapsing in on the guy because he’s such a wreck.” After casting Giamatti and Haden Church, Payne insisted that they spend some time together before filming, hanging out and practicing their dialogue so that characters’ friendship would be believable.

The setting of the story was very important to Payne as he brought a documentary sensibility to capturing the people that inhabit the area. Before shooting, he spent four months living in the wine country of California, taking notes so that it would be accurately depicted in his film. The actors spent two weeks of rehearsals with Payne, “shooting the shit and indulging in good food and wine,” according to Giamatti. With a budget in the range of $16-17 million, Sideways was shot over 54 days in the Santa Barbara area. For the look of the film, he drew inspiration from the photographic style of Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970), screening it for his director of photography, Phedon Papamichael (Moonlight Mile), in order to study the softness of colors and the lack of sharp, vivid lighting that he wanted in his own film.

I think it’s safe to say that Sideways received almost universally positive reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “The characters are played not by the first actors you would think of casting, but by actors who will prevent you from ever being able to imagine anyone else in their roles.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss felt that it was “by far the year's best American movie.” In his review for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “Mr. Giamatti gives off soulful sparks with Ms. Madsen, a 41-year-old sultry-noir-dame veteran with generally unappreciated acting gifts. Maya, like Miles, is still recovering from a previous failed marriage, which helps make Sideways even more of a movie for grown-ups.” USA Today gave the film four out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “This is a building-block movie: Its stand-out excellence becomes apparent only gradually.” In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “But it takes more than courage to push actors to their limits of their talents, which Mr. Payne does here. You need to understand that the truth of both a human being and a screen performance doesn't exist only in grace and beauty, but in small fissures and cracks.” The Washington Post’s Desson Thomson wrote, “Church, best known for his character Lowell Mather in the television show Wings, is a revelation. He turns a cad into an unforgettable and, dare I say, lovable rogue.” Finally, in his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “Maya and Stephanie are vivid, fetching abstractions; Jack and Miles are male archetypes, as well as the two most fully realized comic creations in recent American movies.”

Payne’s film harkens to Bob Rafelson’s classic character-driven films from the ‘70s, like Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), featuring prickly protagonists. Payne rejects traditional mainstream tastes in favor of presenting unsympathetic characters and a conclusion that refuses to wrap things up neatly. He even employs multiple split-screen montages and snap zooms, which were very much en vogue during the ‘70s. Miles is the voice of reason while Jack is the voice of fun in Sideways. However, Miles understands who he is and is honest with himself and his lot in life unlike Jack who continues to live a lie, or rather play a role. Jack lives in a bubble and they always break. Miles doesn’t have to worry about that because he bursts his bubble on a daily basis. These men are idiots and it is the women who are smart and truthful. The men lie, cheat and are forced to face the repercussions of their actions. This provides them with a chance at redemption as embodied in Miles who learns to loosen up and finally let someone new into his heart.

Through the Looking Glass: Depicting the Conspiracy to Kill John F. Kennedy in Libra and JFK

2011-11-03T13:41:00.000-04:00

The assassination of American President John F. Kennedy is a watershed event in American history that has provoked people to question their own beliefs and those of their government. Yet, for such a highly publicized affair there are still many uncertainties that surround the actual incident. Countless works of fiction and non-fiction have been created concerning the subject, but have done little in aiding our understanding of the assassination and the events surrounding it. As Don DeLillo comments in his novel Libra, "Powerful events breed their own network of inconsistencies." DeLillo also makes this observation in an essay entitled, "American Blood" in Rolling Stone magazine, which contains the groundwork for issues that he would later explore in more detail in Libra. DeLillo's novel depicts the events leading up to and after the assassination like a densely constructed film complete with jump cuts and multiple perspectives. This creates a strong parallel between Libra and Oliver Stone's film, JFK (1991) which covers much of the same ground and uses many of the same techniques but to achieve different conclusions.

Libra and JFK present the assassination as a powerful event constructed by its conspirators to create confusion with its contradictory evidence, to then bury this evidence in the Warren Commission Report, which in turn manifests multiple interpretations of key figures like Lee Harvey Oswald. Libra examines the conspiracy to kill Kennedy as an ambiguous occurrence filled with many coincidences, loose ends, and viewpoints; in contrast, JFK offers a more structured examination of the conspiracy from one person's point of view where everything fits together to reveal a larger, more frightening picture implicating the most powerful people in the United States government. Libra and JFK are works which present the Kennedy assassination as a moment that contains many discrepancies and misleading facts, but differ in their presentation of how this affects our perception of the event.

THE PERCEPTION OF HISTORY

"Beyond this confusion of data, people have developed a sense that history has been secretly manipulated." – Don DeLillo

For DeLillo, the Kennedy assassination is an important event not only in his life, but as an author. The profound effect it had on DeLillo is evident in an interview where he states that "it's possible I wouldn't have become the kind of writer I am if it weren't for the assassination." The assassination left him with the feeling that he had lost a "sense of manageable reality" which made him more aware of "elements like randomness and ambiguity and chaos." It is these feelings that DeLillo would later convey in the character of Nicholas Branch in Libra. Branch must come to terms with his own feelings of confusion and self-doubt while investigating the death of Kennedy and the conspiracy that surrounds it. DeLillo expresses these feelings of randomness and ambiguity in the incidences leading up to the assassination. They are often presented in an uncertain way to convey the conflict between the facts, the eyewitness accounts, and the memories that often contradict one another, obscuring the truth:

“We still haven't reached any consensus on the specifics of the crime: the number of gunmen, the number of shots, the location of the shots, the number of wounds in the President's body – the list goes on and on. Beyond this confusion of data, people have developed a sense that history has been secretly manipulated.”

As DeLillo wisely points out in this interview, history has been manipulated so that we can no longer tell the difference between fact and fiction. There is a passage in Libra where Lee Harvey Oswald gets into a shoving match with some Anti-Castro Cubans and not even Oswald can remember how it was started. There is a sense that not only the reader is being manipulated, but the characters as well. This is apparent when DeLillo writes, "Lee felt he was in the middle of his own movie. They were running this thing just for him." Oswald recognizes that the boundaries between what is real and what is not are beginning to blur. The simplest facts, like his run in with Anti-Castro Cubans, "elude authentication" because the origins of the event are unknown and we are left to theorize what the motivations were for it happening.

JFK also creates this blur of reality and fiction by mixing real footage with staged footage so that it becomes difficult to discern what really happened and what is merely speculation. Oliver Stone does this in order to create what he calls "a countermyth to the myth of the Warren Commission because a lot of the original facts were lost in a very shoddy investigation." Like Libra, JFK presents the incident between Oswald (Gary Oldman) and the Anti-Castro Cubans as a simple event which becomes obscured by multiple interpretations. Stone begins the scene in 16mm, black and white film stock and then switches to Super 8mm in color with Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) narrating the whole scene. Stone is presenting three different points of views in this scene; one in 16mm black and white, one in Super 8mm color, and Garrison's own narration:

“It was a public event, it was seen by people, and to this day there are different versions of what happened that day. Were the Cubans really angry, or was it a stunt? Was it a staged arrest? We wanted to fracture the perception of it as a mere flashback from across the street.” – Stone

The change to Super 8mm symbolizes a different view or reading of the event as reconstructed in the mind of the film's protagonist, Jim Garrison. This is similar to what the characters in DeLillo's Libra experience, except that there is no single protagonist as there is in JFK. Instead, Stone creates different points of views or layers through the extensive use of flashbacks within flashbacks. This technique conveys the notion of confusion and conflict within evidence that Libra creates through its various protagonists.

THE WARREN COMMISSION REPORT

"Branch thinks this is megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred." – Libra

One of the major sources of this confusion of data and information stems from the Warren Commission Report which DeLillo describes as "a ruined city of trivia." This encyclopedic tome is a microcosm of the assassination itself. It takes simple facts and scatters them about to create a convoluted path that both Nicholas Branch and Jim Garrison must navigate in order to find the truth. As Garrison explains, "It's all broken down and spread around and you read and the point gets lost." Garrison begins to interview people who testified in the report only to find that, as one witness points out, "It was a fabrication from start to finish." Within the report there are contradictions and forged testimonies supporting the government's theory that Oswald acted alone and that there was no conspiracy. Like the assassination itself, the Warren Report contains all the facts but distorts and presents them in such an unorganized fashion that any attempt to piece together a coherent narrative or conspiracy is "like drowning." It is up to Garrison to make sense of this mess and establish a coherent narrative which he does at the conclusion of the film when he presents his case in court.

In Libra, Branch also realizes how confusing and misleading the Warren Report is to its reader. He understands that this is its purpose:

“He questions everything, including the basic suppositions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened.”

Like the actual events themselves, the Warren Report blurs the line between fact and fiction so that the truth is concealed. The whole notion of a conspiracy seems uncertain because no one fact supports it, but rather leads to even more questions and theories that must be sifted through. DeLillo's Libra presents on one side the conspirators, but contrasts this with Branch, the investigator, who must make sense of the Warren Commission Report. The facts clearly aid the conspirators who, with some convenient coincidences, like Kennedy's decision to visit Dallas, create a puzzling trail for Branch to follow.

OSWALD

"'Lee Harvey Oswald' often seems a secret design worked out by men who will never surface – a procedural diagram, a course in fabricated biography." – Libra

To this extent, the conspirators even create figures like Lee Harvey Oswald, who are ambiguous in nature. From the start, the conspirators plan to put together someone, to "build an identity, a skein of persuasion and habit, ever so subtle. He wanted a man with believable quirks." The conspirators construct multiple Oswalds to support a lone assassin theory:

“We want to leave an imprint of Oswald's activities starting today and ending when the operation is complete. A series of incidents. We want to establish Oswald as a man that people will later remember. What if Oswald doesn't cooperate? We create our own Oswald. A second, a third, a fourth. This plan goes into effect no matter what he does after Mexico City. Mackey wants Oswald all over Texas.”

By creating several Oswalds, the conspirators effectively create a metaphoric room of mirrors where the real Oswald cannot be separated from the many fakes. This confusion works well as Branch realizes, "They all look like Oswald. Branch thinks they look more like Oswald than the figure in profile, officially identified as him." Branch is presented with facts about Oswald that contradict themselves. Oswald appears in several places at the same time in a rather crude fashion so that Branch no longer knows what to believe. DeLillo shows how these multiple images of Oswald, created by the conspirators, are rough but effective in masking the real man. Branch is able to separate the multiple Oswalds, but this still does not get him any closer to the heart of the conspiracy or the true nature of Oswald. It only makes him "wary of these cases of cheap coincidence. He's beginning to think someone is trying to sway him toward superstition. He wants a thing to be what it is. Can't a man die without the ensuing ritual of a search for patterns and links?" Branch has become tired of sorting through these lies and longs for a more structured path where everything is black and white.

This structured path lies in JFK as Garrison and his team also sort through the multiple Oswalds. Stone presents many of the same events as described in Libra while also crosscutting footage of an unknown person piecing together a photograph. This in turn is crosscut with real photographs of Oswald and staged shots of Stone's Oswald. As the mysterious photograph is completed, it is revealed to be the famous Life magazine cover of Oswald with the rifle that supposedly killed Kennedy and that "pretty much convicted Oswald in the public eye," as one character observes. This mixing of footage, both real and staged, symbolizes Oswald's various pasts, both real and faked. By showing the famous Life photograph being doctored, Stone is using that as a metaphor for Oswald's past. On the surface it looks believable, but upon closer scrutiny there is a more complex story as Garrison wisely notes, "They put Oswald together from day one." This is true both figuratively as the montage of fake Oswalds demonstrates and literally as the construction of the famous photograph illustrates.

FILM TECHNIQUE

"We used a lot of different film stocks and formats to question the nature of reality. To a large degree, JFK is not a political film; it's philosophical. It shows how the truth is fractured until we don't know what reality is." – Oliver Stone

DeLillo is an author clearly aware of film techniques: the energy they contain and the power they convey. This is clearly established in his essay, "American Blood" where he states, "Violence itself seems to cause a warp in the texture of things. There are jump cuts, blank spaces, an instant in which information leaps from one energy level to another." This effect is used in describing the death of Kennedy. DeLillo presents four different perspectives of the event: one from Oswald's point of view, a second from another hired assassin, a third from a woman on the grassy knoll, and a fourth from Nellie Connally, the First Lady of Texas at the time and sitting in the car when Kennedy was shot. DeLillo effectively jumps from one perspective to another in order to show the assassination from all the crucial vantage points; from the casual observer, to someone right in the motorcade, to one of the assassins. Each jump cut causes "a warp in the texture of things" so that there is a feeling of chaos intruding on the event. As each account is presented, information "leaps from one energy level to another" and a disordered view of the assassination is revealed. By presenting these various perspectives, DeLillo is commenting on how an event can be interpreted differently by many people so that there is no clear cut reading.

JFK adheres to DeLillo's above statement in an even more precise fashion with its depiction of the assassination. Stone mixes real footage of Kennedy's motorcade with his own footage, while also using various film stocks to show the multiple interpretations of a public event that was viewed by many people. Stone jumps from Kennedy's arrival in Dallas to his motorcade heading for Dealey Plaza with several quick edits. He also crosscuts footage of a clock at Dealey Plaza to show that time is running out for Kennedy, he will soon be killed. This quick rhythm of editing creates an anxious mood and the tension increases. The film cuts to black followed by the sound of a gun being cocked and then fired. Kennedy has been shot. A black and white shot of a rooftop with birds flying into the sky appears with the sound of the gun shot echoing into the distance. Stone has taken what DeLillo has said in his essay and translated it visually. Stone "jump cuts" from the footage of the motorcade to a "blank space" for an instant so that "information leaps from one energy level to another" as DeLillo puts it in "American Blood." We go from the energy of the assassination to the shockwaves that ripple out by introducing the film's protagonist, Jim Garrison and showing his reaction to what has happened. This is the leap that DeLillo writes about it in his essay, but depicted visually. By mirroring DeLillo's statement with this sequence Stone creates the strongest link between his film, which seems conscious of DeLillo's essay, and Libra.

Libra and JFK are important works in the sense that they accurately portray the assassination of John F. Kennedy as a complex public event surrounded by chaos and confusion. Both works present an intricate conspiracy at the source of the killing, but diverge at how they present it. Libra reaches the conclusion that the conspiracy to kill Kennedy "succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance." DeLillo presents several points of view, ranging from the individual conspirators, who create a confusing web of information, and elaborate figures like Lee Harvey Oswald, in order to dissuade characters like Nicholas Branch from trying to make sense of it all. The conspiracy starts as a small affair discussed by a few men that grows into a large chaotic web that connects all the characters through chance and coincidence. JFK, on the other hand, contains one main protagonist who exposes the conspiracy to be an intricately constructed coup d'état. Stone does not have the time to go into as much detail as DeLillo's novel and as a result paints his canvas with broad brushstrokes and powerful images in an attempt to create "a countermyth to the myth of the Warren Commission." DeLillo opts for a more intellectual and detailed examination of the assassination as one character in Libra explains, "Let's devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second." JFK takes a larger, confrontational stance by boldly implicating the government in the conspiracy and the mainstream media in conspiring to cover it up. Stone is using the persuasive power of film to reach the largest number of people he can in order to wake them up and to reveal how they have been deceived by higher powers. There is no mistaking the importance of the assassination of Kennedy in American culture. Based on the excitement that surrounded Stone's film, the American public was still greatly interested in the event with more and more people believing in a plot to kill Kennedy. Both Libra and JFK are proof that Kennedy's death continues to intrigue and interest people who are more open to the idea of a conspiracy that these works openly advocate.

Italian Horror Blog-a-thon: Phenomena

2011-10-27T07:38:00.000-04:00

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the Italian Horror Blog-a-thon over at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies blog run by Kevin J. Olson. Please check out all the fantastic contributions over there.

Some fans of Dario Argento’s films feel that Phenomena (1985) should have been the third film in The Three Mothers trilogy and not the official installment Mother of Tears (2007). Structurally and, at times, visually Phenomena bears a striking resemblance to Suspiria (1977), the first film in the trilogy, in that they have a dark fairy tale vibe and feature young women battling against malevolent forces. Both films also begin with the brutal murder of a beautiful young woman. In Phenomena, a school girl (Fiore Argento, the director’s daughter) in Switzerland just misses her bus and looks for help at a nearby house. Argento cuts repeatedly to someone or something trying to free itself from chains attached to a wall. The killer chases the girl through the woods and then kills her with scissors in a way that evokes the first operatic death in Suspiria.

Inspector Rudolf Geiger (Patrick Bauchau) and his assistant Kurt (Michele Soavi) enlist the help of Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasence) to help them solve a series of murders via a radical theory that involves using insects to tell them the time of death. Meanwhile, Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), an American student, attends the Richard Wagner Academy for Girls in Switzerland, chaperoned by Frau Bruckner (Daria Nicolodi). We learn that she has a natural affinity for insects. She’s also a child of divorce who has been dumped there by her globetrotting father, a famous actor, and her estranged mother who lives in India. There is a really nice scene where Jennifer bonds with her roommate Sofie (Federica Mastroianni) as she tells her about how her parents split up. This scene is crucial in that it personalizes the film as we go from an objective third person perspective to the first person, empathizing with this poor girl who has been dumped into a foreign world with no friends or family.

Jennifer experiences eerie nightmares scored to Iron Maiden and is prone to sleepwalking on the ledge of a school building where she witnesses a murder and is eventually hit by a car. Only Argento could get away with orchestrating such an audacious sequence. Much like David Lynch he is able to seamlessly blend the dream world with reality. To make matters worse, Jennifer’s habit of sleepwalking makes her an outcast among her fellow classmates and a guinea pig to her teachers who poke and prod her like a lab rat. She meets McGregor and he helps develop her telepathic power over insects and they team up to stop the serial killer. He is the father figure that she is looking to fill the void left by her absent parent. In a nice bit of casting against type, veteran character actor Donald Pleasence plays a kindly old man, an academic type fascinated with the pursuit of knowledge along with his trusty chimpanzee attendant Inga (Tanga). The professor’s relationship with Jennifer is quite touching even though they make for an unlikely pair of amateur detectives.

With only one film on her resume prior to Phenomena (Sergio Leone’s gangster epic Once Upon A Time in America) and a background in modeling, Jennifer Connelly delivers a grounded, naturalistic performance devoid of the acting tics she would develop later on in her career. Under Argento’s expert direction, she creates a fiercely independent girl who also has a vulnerable side as evident in the tour de force scene where her classmates tease and torment Jennifer until she lashes out with her powers and the façade of the school is enveloped by flies while she looks on. Your heart really goes out to her as she’s misunderstood by her teachers and ostracized by her classmates. In addition, she’s learning to use and understand her telepathic powers. It’s a lot for a young girl to deal with and this is all beautifully realized by Connelly who acts very mature and poised for her age.

The origins for Phenomena came from a German news item that Argento discovered about crime investigators studying the behavior of insects in a room where a murder had been committed, leading to clues pertaining to the crime. He was intrigued by this idea and talked to the police who were quite supportive of this technique even though it was mostly theoretical and had only been applied once and not in a serious way. Argento then went to France and met with a famous entomologist who told him about how the world of insects applied to the criminal world. Co-screenwriter Franco Ferrini and Argento came up with the idea not to make a horror film but rather a supernatural thriller with this element introduced via Jennifer’s ability to telepathically control insects.

Argento sent actress Daria Nicolodi to the United States to cast Phenomena but she was met with a lot of rejection because of the subject matter. Argento originally wanted to cast Liv Ullman’s daughter Lynn in the role of Jennifer but when her agent read the screenplay he turned it down because it was a “splatter movie.” Another woman threw the script in Nicolodi’s face telling her, “You can’t torture an adolescent with such violent images.” Argento was taken with Jennifer Connelly’s beauty, in particular her eyes, and Nicolodi organized a meeting between them. She even showed the young actress’ parents a few scenes from Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), which they liked. Nicolodi even became good friends with Connelly and they bonded over dinner. The two became close during filming with Connelly regarding Nicolodi as a kind of second mother.

Like most of Argento’s films, he creates an incredible mood and atmosphere and this is particularly evident in the way cinematographer Romano Albani photographs the forests that feature prominently throughout. For example, the establishing shot of Professor McGregor’s house shows trees blowing ominously in the wind at night – the elements at their most primal. Argento also employs his trademark saturated lighting in a given scene, like bathing Jennifer in cool blue while she dreams. Heavy metal and horror films have been linked together for a long time – both are marginalized genres within their respective mediums, never getting the respect they deserve and never being particularly interested in getting it. So, it makes sense that for Phenomena, Argento uses songs by Iron Maiden and Motorhead along with a creepy electronic score courtesy of Simon Boswell, Claudio Simonetti, the Goblins, and a slumming Bill Wyman.

As is typical with many of Argento’s films, Phenomena builds to an absolute batshit crazy finale as Jennifer confronts the killer along with the help of a straight razor wielding chimpanzee. At times, the film tends to defy logic (like how the chimp obtains said razor) but that was never one of his main concerns. Phenomena follows its own kind logic, which can be maddening sometimes (like the boneheaded choices Jennifer occasionally makes) but one ultimately has to surrender to the fairy tale vibe that Argento creates and enjoy one of the more original Italian horror films to come out of the 1980’s. Much to his chagrin, the film’s title was changed to Creepers in the U.S. by distributor New Line Cinema and almost 30 minutes was cut, including bits of gore and crucial character development. Thankfully, it has been restored in recent years and Argento considers it his most personal and best film to date.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown

2011-10-20T22:48:00.000-04:00

By 1946 World War II had ended and joy and prosperity returned to the United States. However, a dark cloud hung over Texarkana (a city that resides in both Arkansas and Texas) during the spring of that year as a masked murderer known as the Phantom Killer terrorized the inhabitants of the town, killing five of them and severely wounding three others. These series of murders became known as the Texarkana Moonlight Murders because most of them occurred late at night. The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) is an unsettling dramatization of the killer’s reign of terror and the authorities’ attempts to apprehend him. It was written in just-the-facts fashion by Earl E. Smith and directed with gritty, lo-fi style by Charles B. Pierce, both of whom had worked together previously on the cult film The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972).

Early on, Pierce presents an idyllic small town full of promise and hope as we see a couple getting married, people buying new cars and a house being built. This is shattered on March 3 when a young couple – Sammy Fuller (Mike Hackworth) and Linda Mae Jenkins (Christine Ellsworth) – drive out into a wooded area known as Lover’s Lane at night. A man wearing a hood over his face soon attacks them. What is so striking about this scene is the lack of music. All we hear is the heavy breathing of the killer and the chilling screams of Jenkins who, amazingly, survives the attack as does Fuller. She manages to crawl her way to the road and is found the next day. While there is no blood or gore, the attack is brutally depicted with quick, jarring edits and no frills camerawork that recalls The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). And like that film the violence in The Town That Dreaded Sundown is not as graphic as we think it is – there is only the suggestion of it but our mind fills in the rest.

Buddy Turner (Rick Hildreth) and Emma Lou Cook (Misty West) are the next victims on March 24. We don’t see the attack, just hear gunshots as Deputy Sheriff Norman Ramsey (Andrew Prine) investigates, having decided to patrol Lover’s Lane. He finds the couple’s car and hears more shots off in the distance. Again, no music is used so that all we hear is the sound of the rain and the gunshots. When music is used it is done so sparingly.

A wave of fear envelopes the town with gun sales skyrocketing and locksmiths kept very busy. Soon, famous Texas Ranger Captain J.D. Morales (Ben Johnson) is called in and he takes over the investigation. Ben Johnson who brings all kinds of gravitas to the role-plays him with rock solid reliability. He also brings his trademark charismatic, good ol’ boy charm, which plays well off of Andrew Prine’s more laconic approach. Their eventual resignation to the fact that they’ll probably never catch the killer is discouraging but has a ring of honesty to it.

Once Morales arrives on the scene, the film takes on the feel of a police procedural as he and Ramsey visit crime scenes, question witnesses and search for clues. April 14 marks the next attack again at Lover’s Lane late at night. A couple is terrorized by the Phantom Killer who ends up stalking Peggy Loomis (Cindy Butler) through the woods. This is the most brutal and ferocious of all the killer’s attacks as we see him tie her to a tree and then repeatedly stab her with a knife tied to a trombone. There are no shots of blood, just the sounds of the knife stabbing her and her anguished moans of pain. We also see close-up shots of the killer’s eyes juxtaposed with Loomis’ terrified face, which are almost too much to bear. The next and final attack occurs in May at a couple’s home as the killer shoots the husband through a window and then smashes through a screen door to get at the wife (Dawn Wells). The striking point-of-view shots used during this sequence anticipate John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) by a couple of years.

If there is one glaring misstep in The Town That Dreaded Sundown, it is the odd bit of casting of Pierce as Morales’ inept driver and comic relief, complete with his own whimsical theme music. I imagine the director felt that the presence of this character would offer moments of much-needed levity to this grim story. Instead, it comes across as an unnecessarily jarring change in tone. Fortunately, the character is used sparingly and doesn’t distract too much from this otherwise excellent film.

Pierce and Smith present the events in the traditional, matter-of-fact style of a docudrama complete with an omniscient narrator, which only adds to the authenticity and was also used in contemporary television shows like In Search Of and later Unsolved Mysteries. Pierce does occasionally enhance his direction with stylistic flourishes like the use of slow motion during a car chase, which even includes spectacular crash. Another aspect that gives the film a real quality is the casting of largely amateur or non-actors. Aside from Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine and Dawn Wells, the cast consists of unknowns and so we have no preconceived notions of these people to distract us. The filmmakers use the rural locations very effectively. The lush, green countryside seen during the day conveys the arrival of carefree summer days with kids playing at the local watering hole, which is in turn juxtaposed with the creepiness of the forest on a late, rainy night.

Director Charles Pierce grew up in the area where many of the actual murders occurred. He remembered being quite frightened by the news stories when he was a youth. His intimate knowledge of the area and living through the actual events certainly gives The Town That Dreaded Sundown an authenticity that it wouldn’t otherwise have. When the film was released, Pierce was criticized for the graphic depiction of violence, in particular the trombone murder scene (the victim was played by his wife at the time) but he felt that this was necessary because the actual killing was brutal and he didn’t want to water it down. During the scenes with the killer Pierce created a suspenseful mood by filming with only essential cast and crew members. He made sure that they did not talk to each other while filming occurred and it certainly translates on-screen with incredibly tense scenes that are almost uncomfortable to watch.

This little-known film has a significant legacy with the look of the killer being adopted by Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), referenced in Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), and the matter-of-fact killings of couples along with the hooded murderer were also referenced in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007). Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the film, and of the actual events, is that the killer was never caught or identified. What happened? Did he perhaps get convicted of another crime? Did he move on to another town or state or did he go back to living a normal life in Texarkana? We will probably never know and it is these questions that nag at your brain long after The Town That Dreaded Sundown is over.

Many thanks to Christian over at the Technicolor Dreams 70 blog for turning me onto this film.

Friday the 13th: The Series

2011-10-14T11:11:00.000-04:00

In the late 1980’s, Frank Mancuso Jr., then caretaker of the popular and profitable Friday the 13th series of films, decided to branch off into a television series but without the hockey mask-clad killer Jason, much like John Carpenter’s decision for Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) to not feature Michael Myers. Of course, we all know how well that went over with fans of that particular franchise so most were expecting history to repeat itself with the Friday the 13th show. After much publicized growing pains, the show hit its stride towards the end of the first season as it followed the adventures of a trio of antique store owners searching for cursed objects. It became the second highest rated first-run syndicated show for the much coveted male 18 to 49-year-old demographic, just behind Star Trek: The Next Generation. The show went on for two more season before being cancelled and now enjoys a dedicated cult following.

After their Uncle Lewis Vendredi (R.G. Armstrong) leaves them his antiques shop, distant cousins Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay) and Micki Foster (Louise Robey) discover that it houses all kinds of supernatural-endowed objects. In the pilot episode, they attempt to sell off all the items in the store, not realizing their otherworldly properties. Pretty soon they meet Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), a friend of their recently deceased uncle and supplier of several of the items in the store. He informs them that the items they sold were cursed and together discover the store manifest. It turns out that Lewis made a pact with the Devil for some of the items in the store. And so, Jack, Micki and Ryan have to locate and retrieve each item before they do too much damage to their new owners.

First on the list is a possessed doll belonging to a spoiled brat of a girl (played by a very young, pre-The Adventures of Baron Munchausen Sarah Polley). Pretty soon the doll turns homicidal a la the killer toys in Stuart Gordon’s Dolls (1987). “The Baron’s Bride” features a cursed cape that transports a newly turned vampire as well as Ryan and Micki to Victorian England for striking sequences that are shot in black and white so as to evoke classic horror films with Bram Stoker featured as a prominent character. This is perhaps my favorite episode of this season and shows how the show’s producers were able to get a surprisingly atmospheric and cinematic look on a low budget.

“Faith Healer” was directed by none other than horror auteur David Cronenberg and features a smoke and mirrors miracle man by the name of Stewart Fishoff (Miguel Fernandez). In the opening scene, he’s exposed as a fraud by Jerry Scott (Cronenberg regular Robert Silverman), a friend of Jack’s. However, Fishoff discovers a magical glove that can transfer someone’s physical ailments to innocent people, killing them. Naturally, he abuses this ability for dubious personal gain, becoming famous on T.V. as a result. Jack happens to catch Fishoff’s theatrics on T.V. and discovers that the glove is a cursed item. Cronenberg’s trademark skepticism for power hungry public figures is channeled through the amoral Fishoff. This episode is anchored by a strong performance from Robert Silverman whose character, as it turns out, has his own agenda. He brings an eccentric style of acting that gives the episode emotional resonance, especially when he comes up against Jack and their friendship is put to the test.

“The Quilt of Hathor” is season one’s magnum opus, a two-parter about a cursed quilt that allows whoever sleeps under it to dream to death their enemies – Satan’s security blanket perhaps? However, it turns out that the quilt was created by Salem witches. Ryan and Micki travel to a village populated by Amish-like people. He even ends up falling in love with the preacher’s daughter in a forbidden romance a la Witness (1985), albeit with a supernatural angle.

Genre veteran Billy Drago stars in “Read My Lips” as Edgar, the owner of a supernatural ventriloquist’s dummy known as Oscar. The dummy forces Edgar to kill and before you can say Child’s Play (1988), their act has become a success. In an intriguing twist, Micki and Ryan discover that the dummy derives its powers from a cursed boutonniere that was actually used by Hitler in occult ceremonies. Edgar manages to break free from Oscar’s influence and the dummy latches onto a new owner, show biz wannabe Travis Plunkette (John Byner). Freed from playing one-note villains, Drago displays a refreshing amount of depth, imbuing Edgar with a twinge of tragedy.

“Scarlet Cinema” is an atmospheric homage to the classic Universal horror films with a geeky film student (Jonathan Wise) obsessed with The Wolf Man (1941), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Claude Rains. He discovers a cursed movie camera, which allows him to realize his own lycanthropic aspirations and get revenge on some of his classmates. There are even clips from the actual film integrated into this episode in order to show how closely this guy identifies with it. Highlights include the footage that manifests itself within the cursed camera, shot in black and white just like The Wolf Man. The use of noirish lighting during the night time scenes on campus are excellent, enhancing the cinematic feel of this episode. The tense, final showdown between our heroes and the film student are juxtaposed with the actual film for quite an exciting finale.

John D. LeMay plays Ryan as an energetic goofball and a bit of a geek who is eager to believe in the supernatural, while Robey’s red-haired Micki is beautiful and the resident skeptic. In some respects they anticipate the dynamic between Mulder and Scully in The X-Files by a few years. Ryan and Micki’s relationship with Jack, the older wiser mentor and bookish type, also anticipates a similar one in Buffy the Vampire Slayer between Buffy, her friends and Giles, the school’s librarian. The Curious Goods antiques shop with its cursed objects that often fall into the wrong hands with disastrous consequences seems to evoke the one that all the stories revolve around in the classic British horror anthology film From Beyond the Grave (1974).

From its inception, Friday the 13th: The Series was never intended to have ties to the series of films of the same name and was intended to exist in its own world. It was originally called The 13th Hour among other titles but the show’s creators – Frank Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams – soon realized that to survive in first-run syndication they needed a title that created awareness and curiosity. So, they took the title Friday the 13th from the popular horror film series and came up with a whole new idea around it. This was the first time that Mancuso had produced a T.V. show and he admitted that it went through some growing pains during the first season as “it took the first three or four episodes to figure out what we did and did now want to be doing.” He felt that it wasn’t as cinematic looking as he would’ve liked and they didn’t get the right mix of humor either. Mancuso candidly admitted that the show’s three protagonists were not fully developed and were often overshadowed by the flashy FX. However, he did feel that towards the end of the first season the show became more character-driven.

However, there was plenty turmoil behind the scenes as the show had a very rocky start. The budget for the FX was not very large and so screenplays featured 10-60 effects shots with only ten days of pre-production, forcing the crew to work fast and improvise when necessary. In addition, filming in Toronto, Canada forced the production to adhere to regulations of 50% Canadian talent. To make matters worse, a disgruntled former employee claimed that the story editors took control of the show, dictating the amount of special effects used leading to a breakdown in communication. Head of the FX department Michael (The Dead Zone) Lennick left the show after four episodes during the first season because of the long hours he worked for wages that did not reflect the time and energy he put it in. FX artist Al (Brain Damage) Magliochetti also left around the same time for similar reasons and cited the conflict between Mancuso, who wanted an effects-heavy show, versus producer Iain Patterson, who did not, and this resulted in confusion as to the direction the show should take.

Friday the 13th: The Series was the second highest rated syndicated series male 18 to 49-year-old demographic after Star Trek: The Next Generation. For its second season, the show moved from late-night to prime time going up against the likes of Freddy’s Nightmares and yet another incarnation of the Twilight Zone. Friday also enjoyed a significant increase in budget allowing for more elaborate sets and a wider variety of locations.

Despite some cheesy effects (check out the floating monk in “The Poison Pen”), the first season featured episodes directed by notable Canadian filmmakers like Atom Egoyan and the aforementioned Cronenberg. Along with genre shows like War of the Worlds and Freddy’s Nightmares, Friday the 13th: The Series pushed the envelope for what was known at the time as “acceptable content” with its depiction of violence, gore and sexuality on T.V. It was also part of an exciting mini-invasion of Canadian T.V. along with Diamonds, Night Heat and Degrassi Junior High. Its legacy continues on with shows like Warehouse 13, whose premise seems like a thinly-veiled copy of Friday the 13th: The Series with a goofy young man and sexy woman duo seeking cursed items with the help of an older mentor type. Regardless, Friday has endured with many episodes standing the test of time, featuring thought-provoking ideas, clever premises and a striking cinematic look that anticipated shows like Twin Peaks and The X-Files. I think it’s safe to say that the show has finally gotten out from under the shadow of its more famous cinematic namesake and deserves to be regarded among some of the best genre T.V. that the 1980’s had to offer.

Note: Check out this fantastic fansite dedicated to the show.

The Devil Rides Out

2011-10-07T11:17:00.000-04:00

Released in 1968, The Devil Rides Out (a.k.a. The Devil's Bride as it was known in America) is a classic Hammer horror film. It contains many of the elements that made the British movie studio famous: Christopher Lee's top notch acting, Terence Fisher's excellent direction, and James Bernard's atmospheric score. In the hands of these talented artists, The Devil Rides Out proves that horror films can be intelligent and do not have to rely on gore and cheap shocks to be effective.

The Duc de Richleau a.k.a. Nicholas (Christopher Lee) and Rex (Leon Greene) are old friends that reunite every few years. During their most recent reunion, Simon (Patrick Mower), the third member of their group, is absent. Nicholas informs Rex that he hasn’t seen Simon for three months. They decide to go to Simon’s house, which he bought recently, and notice a curious-looking observatory built onto it. They walk in on an exclusive party that he’s hosting for a group of rich socialites. He tells Nicholas and Rex that it’s a meeting of an astronomical society that he’s recently joined. Simon tries to maintain an innocent enough façade but he is acting a little strange – his mannerisms seem forced and he is evasive. The look on Nicholas’ face reveals that something’s not quite right. Simon introduces his friends to some of his party guests: a cross-eyed countess and Mocata (Charles Gray), a suave socialite who is polite enough but quickly excuses himself.

When Rex makes an obvious social gaff – Nicholas’ annoyed reaction to his friend’s blunder is priceless – Nicholas rightly assumes that something is off about this "meeting of a little astronomical society" and decides to investigate further. He expertly mingles through the crowd and looks pretty suave lighting a cigarette off a candle (nice touch) as he checks out the various members of the society. The way Nicholas messes with Simon, admiring the décor in his observatory when he obviously knows its true purpose, is amusing. It becomes readily apparent that Simon is under the influence of Mocata, who, it turns out, is the leader of a Satanic cult. Nicholas then confronts Simon and tells him, “I’d rather see you dead than meddling with black magic!” Nicholas tries to reason with Simon but when that doesn’t work out, he knocks him out with a punch and with Rex’s help they take their friend back to Nicholas’ house.

The driving force of the movie is Christopher Lee who is wisely cast against type as a thoughtful protagonist who relies on his wits and his extensive knowledge of the occult to battle the forces of evil. There are several moments in the film where Lee is shown thinking, which suggests that there is something going on behind his intense, captivating eyes. Nicholas is a smart and savvy protagonist determined to save his friend and take down the Satanic cult that has recruited him into their ranks. After playing so many villains during the course of his lengthy career, The Devil Rides Out remains one of my favorite films of his because he was so good as this endlessly fascinating character that fought for good instead of evil.

Leon Greene is the square sidekick to Lee's suave protagonist. Rex is something of an idiot. He leaves his car running with Tanith Carlisle (Nike Arrighi) in it – a follower of Mocata who already tried to escape while the car was moving. His ineptitude balances out Nicholas’ skill, I suppose. Greene is clean-cut and wears a brown suit like some stuffy college professor, which is in sharp contrast to Lee's black suit, goatee and European cigarettes. Greene's character is the audience surrogate, our window into this strange world and he plays off Lee with a wonderful Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson dynamic.

The Devil Rides Out was originally a novel written by Dennis Wheatley in 1934. It used Satanism as a conduit to Communism and a hatred of foreigners. In September 1963, Michael Stainer-Hutchins and Peter Daw bought the film rights to a collection of Wheatley’s black magic thrillers, including The Devil Rides Out. Up to that point, the author’s agents had resisted attempts to adapt his books into films and so Stainer-Hutchins and Daw appealed to Wheatley directly. Actor Christopher Lee was a neighbor of the author and also wanted to see his novels turned into films. He asked Hammer studios to strike a deal with Stainer-Hutchins and Daw, which happened in November 1963. Lee knew Wheatley personally, told him of his desire to turn his books into films and got the writer’s blessing.

Initially, Hammer was worried that the subject of Satanism and black magic wouldn’t get past the censors or that the Church would object. However, the story showed the evils of Satanism and ended with good triumphing over evil so the filmmakers ran into no problems in terms of content. Tony Hinds commissioned a screenplay written by American John Hunter but it turned out to be “far too ‘English’” and it was rejected. In September 1964, Hinds asked Twilight Zone scribe Richard Matheson to take a crack at it and Hammer ended up using his script. His final draft was submitted in July 1967 and was very faithful to Wheatley’s novel, although, he did change Mocata from a foreigner to a suave, British socialite. This made the film all the more subversive as the evil comes from within.

Principal photography began on August 7, 1967 and wrapped on September 29 of the same year at Elstree Studios with a budget of 285,000 pounds. From the start, Lee only wanted to play Duc de Richleau but the studio was tempted to cast him as Mocata. The actor was so into the role and the film that he went to the British Museum to find an authentic black magic incantation to use for the Sussamma Ritual in the film. Director Terence Fisher wanted to cast Charles Gray as Mocata but Hammer’s first choice was Gert Forbe, the villain of Goldfinger (1964).

During principal photography, Tony Hinds was worried that the film wasn’t going to be very good. Composer James Bernard remembers Hinds telling him, “you have to do all you can because I’m not sure the film is working out as it should.” He was asked to come up with music that the Satanists would dance to but actually came up with the title them first. The Devil Rides Out had its premiere on July 7, 1968 and was given a general release in the United Kingdom on July 21. It was released in the United States in December of the same year.

The Devil Rides Out is an intelligent alternative to the overabundance of hack 'n' slash horror films. This film demonstrates that Christopher Lee didn't always play nasty bad guys bent on world (or universal) domination for the forces of evil. Unfortunately, it didn’t do well enough to generate a sequel, thus sinking the hopes that Lee would continue to play Nicholas – a character that appeared in ten more novels written by Wheatley and remains one of the great missed opportunities. Perhaps someone else could resurrect this character and tackle some of the other books in the series but I doubt whoever is cast as Nicholas would bring the same amount of gravitas and intelligence to the role as Lee did.

Note: the production information for this article was taken from the excellent book, Hammer Films: The Elstree Studios Years by Wayne Kinsey. It is a must-read for any Hammer studio fan.

DVD of the Week: Carlos: Criterion Collection

2011-10-04T11:54:00.000-04:00

Notorious international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal came to prominence in the 1970’s and 1980’s with several politically-motivated bombings, kidnappings and hijackings in Europe and the Middle East. He eventually became a popular culture icon with thinly-disguised depictions in films like Nighthawks (1981) and gracing the cover of Black Grape’s debut album. His image was used as a cultural touchstone rather than an accurate depiction. Incredibly, it wasn’t until Olivier Assayas’ ambitious five-and-a-half hour miniseries Carlos (2010) that the man and his times were finally done justice. Assayas wisely doesn’t pass judgment on Carlos but rather depicts how he influenced the political climate and how it, in turn, influenced him. Far from a stuffy history lesson, Carlos is an epic political thriller with a charismatic performance by Edgar Ramirez as the infamous terrorist.

Carlos is presented in three, feature-length episodes that track his rise to power and notoriety; the man at the peak of his powers and his greatest triumph; and his inevitable decline and capture. Early on, Assayas establishes his take on Carlos (Edgar Ramirez), presenting him as a vain man who, at one point, is seen admiring his own naked body in a mirror to the strains of “Dreams Never End” by New Order. We also see him espouse his personal philosophy, that true glory is “doing one’s duty in silence. Behind every bullet we fire, there will be an idea because we act in harmony in our conscience.” And initially, he seems to adhere to this but once he becomes a superstar among international terrorists, he embraces and cultivates his inflated reputation.

In the first episode, Assayas shows Carlos’ clumsy attempts to impress Wadie Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour), co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), with a bungled assassination and a failed bombing. This segment builds towards an intense showdown between French domestic intelligence agents and Carlos at one of his girlfriends’ apartment in Paris where we see just how dangerous he is when cornered. The second episode starts off literally with a bang as Carlos and his group arrives at the OPEC headquarters in Vienna and takes oil ministers from all over the world hostage in 1975. This was his highest profile operation done at the height of his powers.

By the end of the second episode, Carlos has been kicked out of the PFLP and he starts up his own terrorist organization, effectively becoming a mercenary. The third episode tracks his inevitable decline as he wages a war of terror on France in the early to mid-‘80s after they arrest his wife and a close associate. It’s costly battle for both sides but more so for Carlos who can no longer rely on his reputation to get jobs or find safe haven in countries that used to be sympathetic towards him. He becomes more vulnerable to attacks because he has more to lose, chief among them a family.

Edgar Ramirez’s magnetic presence really comes across early on as he exudes the cocky confidence of the man and conveys his complete commitment to the cause he espouses so brazenly. The actor has Carlos’ terrorist swagger down cold, showing us the smooth ladies man with his perfectly coifed looks and stylish attire. Known prior to Carlos mostly for his strong supporting turn in Tony Scott’s Domino (2005), he finally gets to be front and center, playing the role of a lifetime: a larger than life historical figure in a sprawling epic. Assayas and Ramirez’s fascinating take on Carlos is that he viewed himself as a kind of rock star, a charismatic personality who clearly saw himself as someone of importance, destined to do great things. This is evident in the way Carlos idolized and emulated Che Guevara during the OPEC raid, sporting the iconic revolutionary’s trademark beret and scruffy facial hair look as if making a statement. Also, the rock star analogy is further explored in the use of post-punk music along with the third episode, which could be seen as Carlos' “fat Elvis” period of decline. Ramirez commands every scene he’s in, especially the OPEC raid where he prowls around rooms and hallways, expertly orchestrating this attack in order to get what he wants.

In an intriguing break from tradition, Assayas eschews a traditional orchestral score for source music, predominately post-punk rock. The opening track is “Loveless Love” by the Feelies, which sets the tone of the film. As the song builds so does the tension of the scene it play over – that of Carlos attempting to assassinate a pro-Israeli businessman in England. Assayas also uses a few tracks by Wire, one by A Certain Ratio and a memorable action sequence scored to “Sonic Reducer” by the Dead Boys. The attention to period detail and architecture is also excellent as Assayas takes us on a perverse travelogue through Europe and the Middle East with Carlos as our guide.

With its color-coded sequences and its objective direction that is slick and confident, Carlos resembles Traffic (2000) and Syriana (2005). These films are all ambitious and expansive in scope as they expertly blend personal politics with bigger political movements. Carlos is a towering achievement, a fascinating study of a man who was a reflection of the times in which he lived in and is embodied by Ramirez’s powerful performance spanning several decades. Assayas’ film is very relevant to our times as it examines the complex machinations of international terrorism with the agendas of terrorist groups clashing with that of the governments of countries all over the world. Carlos sees the struggle of the oppressed against imperialist regimes as a war that he helps fight. With the end of the Cold War, he is marginalized and considered a relic from a bygone era. Assayas has crafted an incredible film that is smartly written, well-acted and masterfully directed.

Special Features:

The first disc includes a theatrical trailer.

The second disc starts off with “Shooting the OPEC Sequence,” a 22-minute featurette examining how Olivier Assayas shot Carlos and his team’s raid on the OPEC headquarters on December 21, 1975. The director offers his thoughts on what he hoped to achieve with the film over footage of the cast and crew working on location. This extra provides some insight into his working methods.

There is an interview with Denis Lenoir, one of the film’s two cinematographers. He shot the second half of Carlos and talks about his approach towards the job. He didn’t prepare much for the film because he came in halfway through and goes into some of the technical aspects (i.e. film stock, lighting, etc.). Lenoir also talks about how Assayas works.

Lenoir also provides a selected-scene commentary, going into detail about the technical aspects of six scenes from the film. For example, he mentions the kinds of lenses he used, the lighting scheme and whether he used hand-held cameras or not.

The third disc features a 43-minute interview with director Olivier Assayas. He gives his take on Carlos and the times that shaped the man. The filmmaker talks about his intentions for the film. He admits that it did not originate with him because he would’ve considered too complicated a task to undertake and was actually approached to direct. Assayas talks about growing up during Carlos’ heyday and also about making the film itself.

There is also a 20-minute interview with actor Edgar Ramirez. He was drawn to the film because it dealt with the mechanics of terrorism and politics. The actor speaks eloquently about his take on Carlos and how the OPEC raid defined him. Ramirez also speaks about how he prepared for the role, including all kinds of research he conducted as well as gaining and then losing weight for the various periods of Carlos’ life.

The fourth and last disc starts off with “Carlos: Terrorist without Borders,” an hour-long documentary that aired on French television in 1997. It fleshes out many of the events depicted in the film and provides some background into Carlos’ politics as well as his rise to prominence. The doc mixes compelling news footage (including actual footage of Carlos) with talking head soundbites to paint a fascinating portrait of the man.

Also included is a 1995 interview with Hans-Joachim Klein, the German left-wing militant that was conducted by Daniel Laconte who went on to help produce Carlos. Most interesting, Klein wears a disguise and talks about how he must lie on a daily basis lest he be discovered by those who want to get him. At times, he comes across as more than a little eccentric.

Finally, there is “Maison de France,” an 88-minute documentary about the 1983 bombing of the Maison de France in West Berlin that was orchestrated by Johannes Weinrich for Carlos. It puts the incident in context with the political climate at the time. There is pretty gripping news footage of the bombing and the location is revisited in recent years to see how it has changed.

A Scanner Darkly

2011-09-30T10:49:00.000-04:00

“What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can’t any longer see into myself.” – Bob Arctor

Over the years, many films have been made based on the science fiction novels by Philip K. Dick – some good (Blade Runner and Minority Report), but mostly bad (Paycheck and Next). However, they all share a common trait: they only remotely resemble their source material. David Cronenberg recounted a story about how he began adapting the short story, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” for a Hollywood studio and when he handed in his screenplay, an executive complained that it was too faithful to the source material. They wanted something like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cronenberg wasn’t interested in doing that and left the project, which became Total Recall (1990). This explains why none of Dick’s material has been accurately translated into film until A Scanner Darkly (2006).

It was adapted by filmmaker Richard Linklater, not the first person you’d think of when it comes to science fiction but he had two things going for him: he was a fan of the book and he was willing to make it independently, keeping the budget low enough that he could have creative control over the material. He was also able to assemble a very impressive cast that consisted of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder. However, his choice to utilize rotoscoping animation (where animators basically draw over live action footage) was not embraced by everyone and ended up causing Linklater all kinds of headaches in post-production. That being said, the style of animation he employed was well suited for the film’s various drug hallucinations and in realizing the scramble suit technology.

Dick’s semi-autobiographical book was first published in 1977. It was a fictionalized account of his experiences with the 1970’s drug culture. Between 1970 and 1972, after his fourth wife had left him, he had a rotating group of predominantly teenage drug users living semi-communally at his home in Marin County. At this time, he had stopped writing completely and became hooked on amphetamines. A turning point in Dick’s life came in early ‘72 when he delivered a speech at a Vancouver science fiction convention entitled, “The Android and the Human.” The speech was the genesis of recurring themes and motifs that would appear in A Scanner Darkly. Around this time, his home was allegedly broken into and his papers were stolen, which fueled the paranoid vibe prevalent in the novel.

The book is about a man named Bob Arctor, who lives in a house with several other drug addicts. He is also Agent Fred, an undercover police officer assigned to spy on Arctor’s house. He protects his true identity from his fellow junkies and from the police as well – a requirement of narcotic agents is that they remain anonymous to avoid corruption. While under the guise of a drug user, Arctor has become addicted to Substance D, a strong psychoactive drug that originates from a blue flowering plant. He is also romantically involved with Donna, a drug dealer whom he plans to expose as a high-level dealer of Substance D. Arctor’s chronic use of the drug results in the two hemispheres of his brain to function independently and the book depicts his gradual disconnect from reality. Is it real or is it Substance D?

The film is set seven years in the future in Anaheim, California where 20% of the population is considered addicts. When we first meet Arctor/Fred (Keanu Reeves) he’s already struggling with his addiction to Substance D. He is addressing a local chapter of law enforcement officers and speaking about the dangers of and the war on D. Partway through his prepared speech, he veers off script and the tone of his talk shifts to a melancholic, defeated vibe, which ends things on an awkward note. He is also wearing what is called a scramble suit, which allows him to avoid being discovered by the latest voice and facial detection technology by constantly changing his appearance so that he looks like a “constantly shifting vague blur.” The film’s rotoscoping animation is perfect for realizing the suit’s technology as we see Arctor’s image constantly changing in dazzling kaleidoscope fashion.

After shedding the scramble suit, Arctor adopts his Fred persona and contacts Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder), his drug connection and girlfriend, to score some narcotics. We soon meet his friends and fellow drug users: James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), a motor-mouthed conspiracy theorist; Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane), a twitchy paranoid-type who has clearly done too much Substance D; and Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson), an aggressive junkie. Arctor hopes to get close enough to Donna and discover her supplier. Can I just say what a delight it is to see the likes of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder bounce off each other in the same scene? For example, one day Barris comes home with an 18-speed bicycle for only $50 and Luckman points out that it is in fact an 8-speed bike, which sends Barris into a tizzy as he tries to figure out what happened to the “missing” gears. It’s an amusing scene as Ryder plays straight man to the excitable Harrelson and the indignant Downey. The comic timing of the latter two actors is excellent.

Downey’s Barris, with his endless supply of elaborate conspiracy theories and paranoid ramblings about “covert terrorist drug” organizations, evokes some of the more eccentric character in Linklater’s Slacker (1991) and he would not look out of place in that film. Only Downey could impart the large chunks of dialogue Barris spouts so fast and intelligibly while also making it entertaining. It’s how he emphasizes certain words or drags one out for effect that is so fun to watch. In certain scenes Linklater wisely winds Downey up and lets him cut loose. This is particular evident in the banter between Barris and Luckman, which provides A Scanner Darkly with much-needed moments of levity so that we are not overwhelmed by the bleak lives of these characters.

Against such colorful actors like Downey and Harrelson, Reeves wisely acts low-key, only taking center stage in the scenes with minor supporting characters where Arctor is the focus. Reeves’ increasing dazed and confused expressions convey the effects Substance D is having on him. Arctor is losing his grip on reality, which is exacerbated by having to juggle two different identities. As he says at one point, “Now, in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things and surprising things, sometimes wondrous things spill out at me constantly and I can count on nothing.” Reeves has always been an easy target, his acting criticized or rejected outright but I always felt that his strength was reacting off of other actors. At times, he is the perfect blank slate for others to imprint on and this is why he is perfect for this film. His character is supposed to be observing drug users and reporting back to his superiors with his findings.

No longer the A-list darling she was in the 1990’s, Winona Ryder has wisely appeared in a number of independent films that she feels passionately about. She fits in seamlessly with this eclectic cast as the rather enigmatic Donna. She has good chemistry with Reeves while also conveying a vulnerability as Donna’s true nature is revealed towards the end of the film. As Ryder has gotten older and more experienced as an actress, her performances have improved. She seems more comfortable in her own skin. The easy-going nature of Linklater’s style of filmmaking clearly rubbed off on her as she delivers a loose performance devoid of most of her usual acting affectations.

At a certain point in the film, Arctor thinks to himself, “What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can’t any longer see into myself.” These thoughts are conveyed via voiceover narration and echo his fear of losing identity. He is experiencing a split personality and is told that the two hemispheres of his brain are competing against one another largely due to the effects of Substance D. The theme of examining and trying to recover one’s own identity is a prevalent theme in Philip K. Dick’s fiction and this is no more apparent than in A Scanner Darkly. The horrific part of the story is that Arctor loses a sense of who he is. Drugs have destroyed his life and those around him. In a nice touch, Linklater includes an abridged version of the afterword of Dick’s novel where he lists those nearest and dearest to him who died or were permanently damaged through drug use. It ends things on a sobering yet poignant note as Linklater drives the point home on just how personal the book was to Dick. His novel and the film show the dehumanizing and punishing effects of drugs. As he puts it, “This has been a story about people who were punished entirely too much for what they did.”

Richard Linklater began thinking about adapting A Scanner Darkly while talking to producer Tommy Pallotta before they made Waking Life (2001) together. Initially, he had toyed with adapting another Dick novel, Ubik, but stopped early on because of a rights issue and he “couldn’t quite crack it.” He moved onto Scanner Darkly soon after because he loved the book more and felt he could make a film out of it. According to Linklater, the challenge in adapting Dick’s novel was capturing “the humor and exuberance of the book but not let go of the sad and tragic.” He was not interested in turning the novel into a big budget action thriller as had been done in the past with some of Dick’s other works because he felt that Scanner Darkly was “about these guys and what they’re all doing in their alternate world and what’s going through their minds is really what keeps the story moving.” He related to the dysfunctional makeshift family of characters that was similar to his twenties spent in Austin. He wanted to animate the film much as he did with Waking Life because he felt that there was very little animation targeted for adults.

Linklater wrote the screenplay for A Scanner Darkly after Waking Life came out. After completing School of Rock (2003), he told Pallotta he wanted to make Scanner Darkly. It was important to Linklater that Dick’s estate approved of his film. Pallotta wrote a personal appeal to Russ Galen, the Dick estate’s literary agent who in turn shared it with the late author’s two daughters, Laura Leslie and Isa Hackett. However, they weren’t too keen on “a cartoon version” of their father’s novel. After the high profile adaptations of Minority Report (2002) and Paycheck (2003), they had taken a more proactive role in evaluating every film proposal, including unusual projects like Linklater’s. Pallotta told them that Linklater’s take would be a faithful adaptation of their father’s novel. They read the screenplay and liked it. They then met with him to discuss their respective visions of Scanner Darkly. Laura and Isa felt that the novel was one of their father’s most personal stories and liked that Linklater wasn’t going to treat the drug addiction/abuse aspects lightly. It was important to the filmmaker that he keep the budget under $10 million – that way he would have more creative control, remain faithful to the book and also make it as an animated film.

For the dual roles of Bob Arctor/Fred, Linklater thought of Keanu Reeves but figured that the actor would be burnt out from science fiction after making The Matrix trilogy. Robert Downey Jr. was attracted to the project when he heard that Reeves was going to star and Linklater to direct. He thought that the script was the strangest one he had ever read. Linklater wrote the role of Charles Freck with Rory Cochrane in mind. The actor was interested but didn’t want to recreate his Dazed and Confused (1993) role. Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder both agreed to do the film based on the script. Although, for the actress, she had a personal connection to the material – her godfather, counterculture guru Timothy Leary, had been friends with Dick, as was her father. Her and Reeves felt so passionately about the project that they agreed to work for the Screen Actors Guild scale rate plus any backend profits.

Linklater assembled the cast for two weeks of rehearsals in Austin, Texas before principal photography began in order to fine tune the script and get input from the actors. The shooting script became a fusion of Linklater’s take on the material, the novel and the actors’ input. Principal photography began on May 17, 2004 on a budget of $6.7 million and lasted six weeks. To prepare for their roles, Cochrane came up with his character five minutes before he got on the elevator to work while Downey memorized his dialogue by writing it all out in run-on sentences, then converting them to acronyms. Meanwhile, Reeves relied on the novel, marking down each scene to its corresponding page.

Finding Arctor’s house for the film proved to be a challenge with the filmmakers looking at 60 houses before they found the right one, located in southeast Austin. The previous tenants had left a month prior to filming and left the place in such a state that production designer Bruce Curtis had to make improvements so that it looked like Arctor’s run-down home. Linklater actually shot a lot of exteriors in Anaheim, California (where the story is set) and then composited them into the Austin footage during post-production. Dick’s daughters visited the set during filming and spoke with the principal cast and crew members. They made Laura and Isa feel like they were a part of the production. Since everything would be animated over later, makeup, lighting and visible equipment like boom microphones were less of a concern. However, cinematographer Shane Kelly carefully composed shots and used a color palette with the animators in mind. Sometimes they would show up to the set and tell Kelly what they needed.

After principal photography was finished, A Scanner Darkly was transferred to Quicktime for a 15-month animation process known as interpolated rotoscoping. It allowed the animators to paint over the live-action footage so that they didn’t have to hand-draw each line in every frame. The computer connected fluid lines and brush strokes across a wide range of frames. The technique differed from Waking Life in that the “one scene could be wildly different than the one that followed but on this film, we were always thinking in terms of a graphic novel that would have a similar design throughout,” said Linklater in an interview. It took up to 500 hours to animate one minute of film with 30 people working full-time every day.

To say that it was a trying process for Linklater is an understatement: “I know how to make a movie, but I don’t really know how to handle the animation.” The filmmakers used the same animation software that was utilized on Waking Life, created by MIT graduate Bob Sabiston. He updated it for A Scanner Darkly. Most of the animators were hired locally with only a few of the 30 people having moviemaking experience. Six weeks into the process and only a few animated sequences were completed while Linklater was off filming Bad News Bears (2005). Sabiston had divided the animators into five teams and split the work amongst them.

However, there was poor communication between the teams and the uniform animation style that Linklater wanted was not being implemented. After almost two months, some animators were still learning the software and he became frustrated with the lack of progress. In late November 2004, the head of Warner Independent Pictures Mark Gill asked for a status report. It was not good. There were no finished sequences as the entire film was being animated at once as opposed to from beginning to end. Under pressure, some animators worked 18-hour days for two weeks to produce a trailer and this seemed to appease Gill and Linklater.

Sabiston and his team were falling behind schedule and reportedly asked for more time, money and staff. This created tension and one Friday in February 2005, while Sabiston and his four-person core team were strategizing at a local café, Pallotta changed the locks and seized their workstations, replacing him with two local artists, Jason Archer and Paul Beck. The studio increased the film’s budget to $8.7 million and gave Linklater six more months to finish. Pallotta took charge of the animation process and instituted a more traditional Disney-esque production ethic: creating a style manual, having strict deadlines and breaking the film up into even smaller segments. The animation process lasted 15 months. On the post-production problems, Linklater said, “There’s a lot of misinformation out there … changes took place during the early stages of us really getting going on this that had everything to do with management and not art. It was a budgetary concern, essentially.” I think it’s safe to say that after everything he went through on Scanner Darkly we aren’t going to see Linklater make another animated film any time soon.

Originally, A Scanner Darkly was supposed to be released in September 2005. However, due to the lengthy post-production delays, a test screening was scheduled for December and that went reasonably well with a temporary soundtrack that was entirely comprised of Radiohead songs. A revised release date was set for March 31, 2006, but Gill felt that there wasn’t enough time to mount a proper promotional campaign and the date was pushed back to July 7th, putting it up against Pixar’s Cars and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

A Scanner Darkly received mixed to positive reviews. In his review for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “In the final analysis, A Scanner Darkly provides a stylish peek at the future, which will probably be even more discouraging than the present—or have you stopped looking at the news too? Mr. Linklater emerges once again as the Austin auteur par excellence, even if A Scanner Darkly is set in a ratty precinct of Orange County.” Empire magazine’s Kim Newman gave the film four out of five stars and praised Linklater’s take on the material: “For a start, he is the first director since Ridley Scott to take one of Dick’s major novels as a source; moreover, he might well be the first director ever to feel Dick is worth a faithful adaptation rather than the source for a handful of cool ideas that could be stripped while the rest of the matter got thrown away.” The Washington Post’s Desson Thomson concurred: “He infuses Scanner with the goofy spirit that enlivened his early films, Slacker and Dazed and Confused. His comic scenes are funny on the surface, certainly, but they're symptomatic of a civilization that's disintegrating.” In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “What's extraordinary about Linklater's animation, computer-rotoscoped in the fashion of his 2001 Waking Life, is just how tangible the Dickian labyrinth becomes.”

The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis wasn’t totally sold on Linklater’s decision to utilize rotoscoping animation: “Rotoscoping makes certain sense for a film about cognitive dissonance and alternative realities, though both the vocal and gestural performances by Mr. Reeves, Mr. Harrelson and, in particular, the wonderful Mr. Downey make me wish that we were watching them in live action.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C-” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “In A Scanner Darkly, we're watching other people freak out, but the film is maddening to sit through because their freak-outs never become ours.” In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wrote, “The movie itself is often startling and engrossing, but the question of what the heck is going on, and why, is never entirely absent from your mind.”

The rotoscope animation adds to the druggy atmosphere of A Scanner Darkly and is particularly effective during the moments when the characters have drug-induced hallucinations. The animation isn’t photo-realistic by any means but rather more impressionistic in nature, creating the notion that none of what we are seeing may be real, that it may exist only in Arctor’s fevered, drug-addled imagination. However, the style of animation limited the film’s mainstream appeal – that, and the stigma of animation being for kids only made it one of the more expensive cult films in recent memory. Linklater’s refusal to water down the material and make it more palatable for a mainstream audience also accounts for its marginalized status while also making it one of the most faithful and best Philip K. Dick adaptations ever put on film.