The Burning

Directed by: Tony Maylam
Written by: Peter Lawrence & Bob Weinstein
Full credits at IMDb

Released almost to the day a year after Friday the 13th—and the weekend after Friday the 13th Part 2—The Burning is a conspicuous cash-in on the new box-office formula that franchise spawned: in it, the victim of a summer-camp accident—this time a burning, not a drowning!—impossibly survives to wreak vengeance on the kinds of campers who did him in. (The killer's name, by the way, is Cropsy.) But aesthetically, this cult favorite exhibits more of the flair of Halloween or its underrated sequel, showcasing a refined style—trailing POV shots, stalking tracking shots—that's more pleasurable than the routine comeuppance the movie metes out to its randy teens. The Burning expertly balances its artful accruals of tension with its copious T&A and adolescent bonhomie.

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Psycho Sequels

Psycho II may be smothered by its more-classic-than-classic predecessor, but that’s almost an advantage: one of the movie’s chief pleasures is that, with the old sets-and-stars on display in brazen Technicolor, watching it feels like crawling into an old favorite and poking around. Perkins reprises his role as Bates, released from the nuthouse to the consternation of Vera Miles, still playing victim-kin. She repudiates rehabilitation and spends the film conspiring to re-derange the motelier, inundating him with messages from his “mother”. Oh, but there’s a twist; Psycho II fashions a knotty mystery, but also an engaging social critique about how unforgiving conservatives are themselves the real psychos. And, how America creates its own enemies.

It’s the best-scripted sequel, but its follow-up proves the most ably directed...

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Halloween II (1981)

Directed by: Rick Rosenthal
Written by: John Carpenter & Debra Hill
Full credits at IMDb

...Halloween, in terms of historical stature, is in a class by itself, and comparing the sequel to it—as critics and audiences often do, dismissively—is unfair. Sure, Halloween II lacks the freshness of its predecessor. But compared to films its own size—such as the sluggish Prom Night (1980) [or Rob Zombie's remake]—it's a goddamn masterpiece.

Though Carpenter handed off directing duties to Rick Rosenthal this time around, he and frequent collaborator Debra Hill lent legitimacy to the affair by penning the screenplay, which—in the tradition of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—opens immediately where the first film ended: Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is taken to a hospital after her climactic battle with boogeyman Michael Myers, who eventually follows, killing nursing staff and EMTs before chasing Ms. Strode through the building's (absurdly abandoned) corridors.

Rosenthal deserves more credit here than he usually gets...

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Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

Directed by: Steve Miner
Written by: Ron Kurz
Full credits at IMDb

The Friday the 13th series...[is] the sort of imitator that can tarnish the legacy of a true original. The first film in this neverending series was a crude cash-in on the Halloween phenomenon, with a little Carrie (1976) poaching for good measure. I haven't seen the original in many years, but it seems by now most of us agree it's weak, and that the big twist is a big disappointment. (The recent reboot was a mess, as well.)

Part II, on the other hand, has a soft spot in my heart: it's the quintessential 80s slasher, complete with promiscuous, plastered, post-Carter pueriles getting their reactionary deserts. Sure, it's a bit dopey (how is Jason so big if he was a boy in the last film, set five years earlier?) and sloppy (why do half the characters disappear from the film after the midway point?), but it also maintains an anchoring sense of driving logic—something that can't be said for so many of the horror movies that would follow as the decade progressed.

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Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982)

Directed by: Steve Miner
Written by: Martin Kitrosser & Carol Watson
Full credits from IMDb

Steve Miner, who produced the first film, helmed this entry as well as its franchise predecessor. Yet Part III is so inferior to Part II that we can probably blame the precipitous decline in quality largely on the screenwriters. Ron Kurz, an uncredited writer on the first film and the sole writer of the second, had bid the franchise ado by Part III, and was replaced by Martin Kitrosser and Carol Watson. (The former would go on to become Quentin Tarantino's regular script girl, er, guy.) They bring none of the second film's sensible motivation to this entry's killings: Jason's murders here are illogical and indiscriminate, heralding what we would later be able to diagnose as Rob Zombie Syndrome. In the first scene, Voorhees stalks and then murders a Lockhorns-esque couple because... well, for no reason at all. If the writers had thought to include a dog, Jason surely would have killed it, too.

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Wild at Heart (1990)

Written & Directed by: David Lynch
Full credits at IMDb

A dispatch from Lynch’s pre-Lost Highway accessible phase, Wild at Heart won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, though many critics maligned it: classic Lynch-hater Roger Ebert called it “sophomoric” and “dishonest”. Dishonest? But it grapples with the central fascination at play in much of the director’s early work: young lovers under threat from enormous criminal conspiracies. Nic Cage, before he became the self-parody he is today, stars as Sailor, clad in a snakeskin jacket that serves as a symbol of his individuality and his belief in personal freedom; a pre-Jurassic Park Laura Dern serves as his love interest in a performance so strong she makes you cry just by nipping at a candy necklace. He’s Elvis; she’s Marilyn. Gangsters chase the two across the country, and the film settles into a road movie, traveling through a Lynchian landscape of grotesques from Jack Nance to Willem Defoe. All the while, the director expresses his love of Americana and for cultural stuffs that predate the sexual revolution. Sailor sings “Love Me” and “Love Me Tender,” for example, but the work most on Lynch’s mind is The Wizard of Oz. At root, Wild at Heart is a trip down a yellow brick road — one that runs through the recesses of the director’s infamously nightmarish subconscious.

From the Program Notes for The L Magazine's SummerScreen series. Wild at Heart screens this evening.


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Kagemusha (1980)

Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Written by: Akira Kurosawa & Masato Ide
Full credits from IMDb

The famous final 90 seconds of Kagemusha, the sweeping rifles-and-samurais saga that marked the start of Kurosawa's late career mini-comeback, are as astounding as you may have heard. The camera surveys, in quick snapshots, a ravaged battlefield in combat's aftermath: dazed soldiers, bathed in blood-red paint, stumble through the decimation while injured horses flail like fish out of water. It's an enormously scaled tragic finale — with a vague anti-war suggestion about where our leaders' arrogance leads, maybe? — that affirms Kurosawa's standing as an Old Master; and it's desperately needed proof to refute the messy 10,000 seconds that come before, which call into question the director's reputation. Kurosawa once famously remarked, "In all my films, there's three or maybe four minutes of real cinema." Though an obvious, self-deprecating exaggeration, the observation comes close to describing Kagemusha.

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Rushmore (1998)

Directed by: Wes Anderson
Written by: Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson
Full credits from IMDb

Before Rushmore’s theatrical release, supernerd Anderson arranged a private screening for one of his adolescent heroes, the critic Pauline Kael. Predictably, the film mystified Kael, then retired and nearing 80: Rushmore, like Indian food, ain’t for grandmas. In fact, Anderson, like MySpace, often elicits confusion in those as young as 30. Some one-time enthusiasts feel they’ve since outgrown him. But a decade after Kael asked the director “Did the people who gave you the money read the script?” Rushmore’s jokes still snap and the director’s distinctive leitmotifs look and sound as fresh as they did at the film’s premiere: the deep-album soundtrack and Futura fonts, the baroque set-dressing and meticulous horizontal compositions. (Anderson’s juvenile characters move laterally because they’re incapable of “moving forward”.) Though a Gen-Xer by birth, Anderson is Generation Y’s defining (pre-Mumblecore) filmmaker and the
solipsistic, apolitical Rushmore is still the L train era’s signature film. With its simultaneously under- and over-achieving hero, a generalist and a monomaniac, and its metacynical deadpan, Rushmore is the missing link between ‘90s slackerism and aughties hipsterism. Unfortunately, the film’s self-indulgent heirs, from Mutual Appreciation to Juno, have lost Anderson’s adult perspective and abandoned his trademark moral: that growing up means getting over yourself.

From the program notes for The L Magazine's SummerScreen series. Rushmore screens on Tuesday, August 26, at Brooklyn's McCarren Park Pool.


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Blue Velvet (1986)

Written & Directed by: David Lynch
Full credits from IMDb

Isabella Rossellini appears early in Blue Velvet, draped in enough of the titular fabric to make Costanza green with velvet envy. But, by film’s end, she’s wearing nothing but a black eye. Roger Ebert, known Lynch-hater, cried misogyny but time and better sense has drowned him out—critics now regard Lynch’s film as one of the Reagan era’s finest. Opening amid candy-colored Americana, Velvet quickly undercuts its “Morning Again” innocence with violence, and Lynch’s camera swoops beneath a manicured lawn to reveal a civilization of seething black beetles. What evil lurks below the surface! Kyle MacLachlan’s discovery of a severed human ear launches his descent into a Nancy Drew nightmare of suburban depravity (which includes a PBR party, long before they were fashionable), but Velvet tackles more than red-county debauchery; it’s not only about sex in America but sex in movies. In a single scene, MacLachlan objectifies, becomes
objectified and finally witnesses his (and our?) fantasy perversely realized: Dennis Hopper (post-hippie, pre-corporate spokesman) squealing for mommy while he beats and rapes Rossellini. In short, Blue Velvet plays out like the baddest of bad dreams. But Lynch ultimately has the magnanimity to reassure us, with the closing shot of a bug-gobbling robin, that love can still conquer Mr. Hopper.

From the program notes for The L Magazine's SummerScreen series. Blue Velvet screens on Monday, August 25, at Brooklyn's McCarren Park Pool.


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The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Written & Directed by: Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez
Full Credits from IMDb

Grade: A-

In The Blair Witch Project, three student filmmakers set out to shoot a documentary centered on a legend about a mean ol’ witch who, it’s said, lives in the woods around a small town that used to be called Blair; the film we see is passed off as a copy of their raw footage. The documentary they’re making, on a formal level, is awful: The camera moves around arbitrarily and the interviewer, Heather Donahue, constantly interrupts her subjects with uh-huhs and yeahs. At first, that’s irritating—this movie (within a movie) is terrible!—but soon it’s almost tragic. All the terrible things about to happen to these kids—for this?

Luckily, the real (that is, unseen) filmmakers are not so clumsy. To get some location footage, the diegetic crew moves from the Maryland town into the surrounding woods, where they become hopelessly lost—and then shit gets scary. The daytime, woodland scares are thoroughly ambiguous, frightening the audience solely through suggestion: figures of bundled sticks hang off of tree branches! And piles of rocks—signifying grave markers—appear outside their tent overnight! Each serves as a symbol of a human presence eerily stripped of context; we never see anyone in the woods, but we know someone is there. “You ever see Deliverance?” one of the kids, Joshua Leonard, half-jokingly asks his companions. Compared to the supernatural obstacles our three filmmaking heroes face, the Reynolds-led gang from Deliverance had it easy.

That’s because the daytime creepiness is just the icing on a terrible cake; the true terror comes with nightfall. The Blair Witch Project’s central fear is primal: scary things (strange sounds, mostly) happen after dark, nightfall is coming and there’s not a single thing our heroes can do to stop it. What happens during the day is unsettling; what happens at night is petrifying as the filmmakers leave it all up to the audience’s imaginations—the cause of fear is entirely aural and invisible; the screen goes black for minutes at a time.

The filmmakers’ trump card is the first-person camera; by witnessing all the action through a camcorder, the camera becomes a character—we become the camera—and the terrifying mystery that the characters suffer falls on us, as well. All atmospherics and formal trickery, the film reminds adult viewers why it makes sense to be scared of the dark. (And why haughty cityfolk ought to pay more respect to the mysteries of “the woods”.)

In hindsight, the characters’ powerlessness and the frightening uncertainty that surrounds them perfectly tapped into the pre-millennial, late-Clinton-era zeitgeist. Having lost their map, the characters randomly choose the direction in which to travel, paralleling their country’s aimlessness. In Heather’s infamous, boogery, direct address confessional, she admits with shame her responsibility for what’s happening to her and her team, acknowledging that it’s a direct result of her pigheadedness. “It’s very hard to get lost in America these days,” Heather says earlier, reflecting the smug American confidence that would combust on September 11th.

But The Blair Witch Project also functions as a commentary on the compulsion to watch and produce movies. As they wander the woods hungry and afraid, Heather refuses to stop filming. Finally, Joshua snatches the camera and begins shouting, pointing the lens at her as though it were a weapon or accusatory finger. “I see why you like this camera so much,” Joshua tells her. “It’s not quite reality.” The easiest way to escape from the fear of Y2K and the impending unpredictability of a new millennium is, of course, through the movies. As Heather says, “It’s all I have left.” Ditto for America.


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Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Full credits from IMDb
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Written & Directed by: Woody Allen

Grade: A

Hannah and Her Sisters is one of Woody Allen's many penetrating cinematic analyses of the contemporary culture and his own kind: affluent, intellectual and neurotic New Yorkers. It might be his finest as well, although with such a strong catalog of films it's difficult to ascribe such superlatives to any individual Allen movie.

The film, a masterpiece of ensemble acting—Allen's mastery as a director of actors is often and unfairly overlooked—is built around a collection of spouses, siblings, friends and in-laws on the cusp of mid-life crises, each with a conspicuous lacking of varying kinds: Dianne Wiest, who steals the show with a performance so palpably nervous, insecure and strung-out that it approaches Woody Allen levels, lacks the direction of a career or relationship; Allen himself lacks the comfort and security of spiritual certainty; while Michael Caine, who won an Oscar for his performance, and Barbara Hershey lack romantic satisfaction in their respective relationships. It lunges them, ultimately, into an affair, following an awkward courtship (brilliantly executed), even though Caine is married to Hershey's sister, the titular Hannah (Mia Farrow).

Beginning at one Thanksgiving, that American, non-denominational celebration of family togetherness, and ending at another—with one more in between—the characters set out on chaotic, destructive attempts, doomed to failure, to fill those voids in their lives. The character arcs follow a parabolic trajectory: a plunging descent into abjection, followed by a redeemed return to originating normalcy. It is at once distancing and inviting, alternatingly pushing us away with its alienating chapter titles and drawing us in with its intimate, multiple point-of-view voice-over narration, a parallel to the characters' vacillating behavior towards one another.

One of Hannah and Her Sisters' driving dilemmas is, is "finding the right person" so important that it morally permits the destruction of families and the devastation of individual people? Though released before Allen's very public personal troubles, as a tale of interfamilial infidelity and betrayal Hannah and Her Sisters is, in hindsight, a personal working through of this question for Allen, a veiled, disturbing and piercingly autobiographical confessional of lust and domestic dissatisfaction. It seems, now, no accident that Allen cast himself as Farrow's ex-husband and she as an actress garnering raves for her portrayal of Ibsen's Nora; it seems as though he was practically begging Farrow to get the hint and leave him before he lost control of himself, advice that unfortunately went unheeded.

Though everyone gets a happy ending in the film—or at least deceptively happy, as it's tough to believe any of these characters could have lasting and meaningful relationships, evidenced at least by the ambiguously optimistic revelation that concludes the picture—Hannah and Her Sisters preaches that getting love right takes a couple of tries. "Boy," Allen naively observes in the film, "love is really unpredictable." The film is rife with divorcees and relationships that are like drinking glasses teetering on the edge of a coffee table, waiting for one slight push to send them on a shatter-bound course to the floor. Even the relationship between Hannah and her sisters' parents, a superficially pleasant and loving old couple with a seemingly happy marriage enduring through the decades, is exposed as a mere front behind which a couple of bitterly jealous and contemptuous old-timers have hidden their animosity and extramarital trysts for years.

But Hannah and Her Sisters concerns more than the mere crises of the heart and body, branching out to explore a crisis of the soul as well. (Allen would expand on this religious-philosophical aspect in his subsequent masterpiece and Hannah's companion piece, Crimes & Misdemeanors.) Allen plays a hypochondriac whose brief confrontation with mortality sends him hurtling on a seriocomic quest for meaning, including a stab at Catholicism that hilariously manifests itself in the seemingly compelled purchase of not only crucifixes but Wonder Bread and Hellman's. Despite its levity, the spiritual journey builds to a gorgeous and moving climax in which Allen, in a moment of rock-bottom despair, unlocks the meaning of life via a screening of Duck Soup. The secret to enjoying life, Allen tells us, is in finding the strength to enjoy living, God or no God, lover or no lover. It's a much needed lesson for any Woody Allen character—any modern human being, that is.

Secret Honor (1984)

Directed by: Robert Altman
Written by: Donald Freed & Arnold M. Stone

Grade: A-

As the recent Broadway production, and upcoming film adaptation, of Frost/Nixon ought to demonstrate, America's thirty-seventh president, who resigned in disgrace over three decades ago, is still a source of fascination for artists and audiences alike. It shouldn't be surprising, as Nixon's presidency and subsequent ruination has had far-reaching effects on American politics and society that continue to reverberate to this day. At the center of it, he himself is a difficult character to parse, as he's not easily reducible to simple motivations—except perhaps paramount paranoia. Several films in the past decade or so have focused directly on Nixon, from Oliver Stone's epic biopic simply called Nixon to the slight and forgotten farce crudely entitled Dick. (A quick IMDb search reveals many other titles: 1995's Kissinger and Nixon, 1997's Elvis Meets Nixon, and films like The Assassination of Richard Nixon in which Nixon is not the explicit subject; more than any other modern American President, Richard Nixon as man and legend enduringly refuses to stop popping up in pop culture—look for instance, for one of many minor examples, at his frequent appearance as a disembodied head on Futurama.) But in the years following the Watergate scandal and Ford's infamous pardon, talking about Nixon or making movies about him wasn't a popular pastime in the States, excepting 1976's All the President's Men, and it wasn't likely to win one any praise; he and everything he represented was something Americans just wanted to forget, or at least ignore, according to Philip Baker Hall (best known, unfortunately, to non-Paul Thomas Anderson fans as Seinfeld's Mr. Bookman) in an interview on the DVD's special features. So the 1983 stage production of Secret Honor, made into a film by Robert Altman at the University of Michigan, where he was at the time a visiting professor, was a risky anomaly, especially as it isn't particularly venomous in its treatment of the despised former president. As Michael Wilmington writes of the film, "Nixon emerges as not quite the comic villain of liberal imagination and not quite the conservative’s tragic hero but as an odd mixture of both." That's because Secret Honor is not merely a caustic rebuke of the Nixon years; it reserves its most vehement judgments for forces even larger than Nixon, whom the film ultimately reduces to a pawn.

Altman was on a streak of stage adaptations during the '80s, and Secret Honor is one of the standouts, though it has mostly faded into obscurity along with the rest of them, despite a Criterion release; I only even heard of it by pure chance. To say the least, it's unfortunate that the film doesn't retain a greater reputation, as Philip Baker Hall's portrayal of Nixon is nothing short of stupendous; without exacerbation I would say it's one of the finest screen performances ever recorded. He delivers an uninterruptible stream of energetic ferocity, portraying Nixon as a rambling manic who can never finish a thought, constantly wandering off into tangents and digressions; if Hall wasn't so assured and commanding, it would approach the caricatural.

Secret Honor posits a curious conspiracy at its climax, and as such comes with several disclaimers at its start, cautiously declaring, in as many different ways as possible, that this is a work of fiction. "An attempt to understand." Or, "A political myth," as its subtitle reads. Nixon is first introduced in the film as seen on a series of blue monitors, attached to closed circuit cameras, suggesting an apologia complementary to the opening disclaimers, that the Nixon we are about to see is an "image" and should be understood in that respect; it also speaks to Nixon's rampant paranoia—and narcissism, as he often has all four TVs set to himself—that he would even have so many cameras set-up outside of his study. Secret Honor gets off to an intentionally slow and unimpassioned start, as Nixon enters his study—the only setting for this wisely unopened theatrical adaptation—changes into a sweater, fixes himself a drink, tests his tape recorder, and sets down a loaded pistol in a prominent position on his desk. Nixon is casual, soon to be drunk, and ready to die.

At first, Nixon is inarticulate as he addresses quotidian matters, such as a gift for the gardener's sick wife, because he's got other things on his mind, namely himself; as soon as Hall gets going, he really gets going, never at a loss for words, only guilty perhaps of a spitting and hurried stammer, when it comes to discussing Nixon, and he brilliantly captures the spirit of a truly insane man grasping at a final attempt to tell his story; there's an urgency in this tape and video recorded confessional, as though this will be Nixon's last chance to set the record straight. Perhaps that gun is meant to stop anyone who might attempt to interfere. He speaks alternately in the first person and in the third, taking the persona of a defense lawyer, addressing the tape as, "Your Honor"—Nixon, you'll recall, was a licensed attorney before his political career and his subsequent disbarment following it. In moments of clarity few and far between, he offers instructions to "Roberto", the Diane to his Agent Cooper, about how to edit the tapes, suggesting he plans them as a posthumous revelation; or, a suicide note, but he acts at most times as though this will simply be the trial he never got, thanks to Ford's pardon, regarding which Nixon comes across as resentful. It's as though Nixon secretly suffered from an undiagnosed Tourette's Syndrome, as Hall makes him prone to uncontrollable vulgar outbursts on any of the myriad of subjects he tackles in this questionless self-interview. (There's also some historical basis for this, as the Nixon that emerges from the Watergate Tapes is not known for his delicate language.) He curses the Kennedys for stealing the 1960 election (and vaguely hints at a conspiracy in Dallas), rails against Eisenhower, and says of the Founding Fathers, "[they] were nothing more than a bunch of snotty English shits!" This animus for the Founding Fucking Fathers (!) plays into Altman and Hall's portrayal of Nixon's self-pitying self-characterization as an ordinary American, and a real man, that fell victim of the Eastern Establishment—"those Eastern pricks!"—and a tool of the overarching conspiracy he calls "The Committee of 100", who overlap with the shady Bohemian Grove collective.

Hall's Nixon saves his most direct and coherent vitriol for Henry Kissinger, whose painted portrait absurdly adorns the wall along with Lincoln's, Washington's, Eisenhower's and Woodrow Wilson's. "Dr. Shit-Ass," he calls him, hilariously, "ass-licking Kraut son of a bitch!" Hall paints Nixon a suspicious, paranoid, self-destructive, inferiority-complex ridden mess of a man, a smartly pitiable characterization rather than a sympathetic one, and he runs the emotional gamut with pitch perfectness, from madness and fury to rueful, mournful melancholy; he alternates between self-aggrandizement and self-pity, as when he shouts, "I coulda beaten Kennedy!" only to follow it a few minutes later with, "nobody coulda beaten Kennedy!" His rants jump around, as does Hall physically, from topic to topic, ripping through his personal history, with commentary, in a seemingly particular order that just doesn't work out; it's easy for the viewer to get lost amidst all of the naturalistic name-dropping and obscure historical references (the Wright Patman Committee?), but Hall's electricity keeps the viewer glued and provides most of the necessary information; dialogue, in fact, seems almost unnecessary, except to give Hall something to say as he tears through the set. This isn't Shakespeare, and the film's beauty is not to be found in the language itself.

Altman uses the above-mentioned portraits and other office miscellany as convenient cutaways, to break the monotony of the single set, but for such purposes he mostly he uses the aforementioned blue monitors, which increasingly take on significance and symbolic value, whether as a judgmental eye, the only interlocutor for a pitiably lonely man or, finally, a sort of moderntimes mirror, emphasizing Nixon's duality and suggesting that the only way the public can try, frustratingly, to come to know Nixon is through misleadingly mediated images. Altman also jazzes up the inherent theatricality of the proceedings with a snaky, prowling camera, but at times his style is too overpoweringly flashy, detracting from the focus of the film which isn't the script but the raging man at its center, Philip Baker Hall.

Nixon ends his ninety minute rant by offering up a sinister tale of Asian drug money, constitutional assault, the "true" nature of Watergate and, of course, a glowing portrait of himself. "I got out to protect the Presidency," he claims wildly, weepily adding, "I really did want to grow up to be Abraham Lincoln." Sure you did, Richie, sure you did. Secret Honor is a provocative exploration of Nixon the man and Nixon the historical figure, ultimately becoming a fierce admonishment of the thoroughly corrupted and irredeemable American political system of which Nixon is only the face, nearly a red herring; it provides a unique spin on Watergate, a fascinating alternate history (or "countermyth", in Stonespeak) that may or may not be the product of a madman's persecution complex, and a devastating portrayal of an endlessly fascinating human being. "The prisoner in the docks is guilty of one crime only," Nixon says of himself, "and that's being Richard Milhous Nixon." That may be true, but only because being Nixon comes with a hell of a lot of baggage.

Let's Get Lost (1988)

Directed by: Bruce Weber

Grade: B-

If Louis Malle's formally efficient Elevator to the Gallows (1958) announced, with its Miles Davis soundtrack and slick black-and-white Frenchness, the birth of the cool—albeit perhaps a few years late—then Let's Get Lost, a documentary as sleepy as a standard record by its subject Chet Baker, documents its death. When Baker debuted in the '50s, he was the James Dean, the Jack Kerouac of the jazz scene; with his steel-blue eyes & dark-brown hair, he had charisma to spare, he oozed a virile magnetism. "He was trouble and he was beautiful," a woman remarks in voice-over, summing it up quite well; "I was attracted to him photographically," explains photographer Will Claxton, "and the camera was too." And so was the whole world. Not only that, but he could play as well! As one unseen narrator reminisces, Charlie Parker once warned his brethren (Davis, etc.) that there was this white cat out in California who was going to give them a lot of trouble; record producer Dick Bock says Chet sounded like the history of jazz all rolled into one, channeling the gamut from Louis to Bix to Bunny Berrigan.

Let's Get Lost finds Chet Baker not in his glorious heyday of the '50s but decades later in 1987, still out in the blazing California sunshine that inspired his sun-baked sound, but his face now ravaged by heroin addiction. (He bears a striking resemblance to Alec Baldwin near the end of Beetlejuice, as the séance summons his rapidly aging body to the dinner table.) Chet's fifty-seven but he looks at least eighty four. "How strange, the change from major to minor," as says the Cole Porter tune "Everytime We Say Goodbye", sung by Chet in the film. His senescent voice trembles a bit more on the whole notes than it used to, though the timbre of his trumpet, at least, is still as crisp and smooth as ever. Chris Isaak, decked out as something of a '50s throwback, makes a cameo curiously hanging out at the recording studio, serving as a pointed contrast to Chet's age, as well as a reminder of how inspirational Mr. Baker was, if not musically (those kids and their dang rock n' roll) than at least in terms of image and style. As Mr. Baker recalls, after going on French leave while enlisted in the army, "the next day half the [army] band went AWOL," a testament to the power of influence he wielded even then.

Bruce Weber's desultory film is the meandering visual equivalent of beat verse, with the obscure but deliberate intention of a jazzy improv. There's no story or narrative arc to speak of; Let's Get Lost, a sauntering character portrait, just gets lost. Intercut into the '80s footage of Chet—often appearing to be on the nod, as he comes across as slow, weary and inarticulate—are talking-head-provided reminiscences, sounded over an inventory of vivified still photographs and various other documentary media. "Everybody has a story about Chet Baker," the director himself remarks in voice-over, and Let's Get Lost, an amalgamation of them, turns into Weber's.

Shot, by Jeff Preiss, in a noirish black-and-white as woefully outdated as Baker's obsolete sound, and edited with complexity and lyrical grace by Angelo Corrao, there are many staggeringly artful moments, such as a long scene in which Weber plays the sound of a man discussing the variegated styles of jazz over footage of puppies playfully fighting on the Santa Monica street. Within the sunny, smoky haze of the California summer—the setting is driven home by the prevalence of backdrop beaches, palm trees, chicks and cars—the film bops around like a stoned daydream. As an exploration of its subject it's appreciably thorough, as Weber lets all the players in Chet's life sound-off, even allowing quite a bit of unflattering stories to be told in an attempt to gently tease out the real man from the consciously constructed facade. In fact, as the film rambles on, the stories get increasingly grim. "Did he disappoint you as a son?" Weber asks Mrs. Baker, who, after a reluctant pause, joylessly admits, "yes". "It's a no-win situation with a junkie," Chet's on-and-off girlfriend Diane explains. By most accounts, Chet Baker was something of a conniving cad, but he was often easily forgiven because of the beauty of his music, not to mention his alluringly handsome face, bubbling with repressed sexuality. Weber aims to disentangle the myth from the man, leaving as honest a representation of Chet Baker as possible on the screen.

But while Let's Get Lost is easy to admire, it's tougher to enjoy. Weber seems to take for granted the audience's knowledge of jazz, jazz history, and Chet history by failing to clarify a lot of the information proffered by the interviewees, making Let's Get Lost hard to keep up with, particularly as Chet's many wives and girlfriends dizzyingly blend into one another. Let's Get Lost could be said to be a bit too thorough, especially as it goes through several false endings; if it's not exactly self-indulgent, it's certainly Chet-indulgent. As girlfriend Ruth Young explains it, Chet inspires a mix of "love and fascination", which would've been an appropriate alternate title, particularly in Weber, who lets himself get a little carried away.

Weber might care too much, but it's a counterbalance to the apathetic response Chet gets elsewhere. "People couldn't care less about the music," he laments after a set in France, but who could blame them as they're watching a drifting, junk-broken man who, at that point or in that state, can't sing for shit. Shortly after filming, Chet would be found dead, apparently having fallen out of the window of an Amsterdam hotel. With him went the cool, whose funeral took place long before it was documented in this alternately attractive, plaintive and soporific film. When Weber started filming cool wasn't dying, it was dead; and so, essentially, was Chet Baker.

Mala Noche (1985)

Written & Directed by: Gus van Sant

Grade: B-

"I have to show him that I'm gay for him," Walt (Tim Streeter) says of his object of affection early on in Gus Van Sant's debut, Mala Noche, a film that, with a line like that, might be laughable if not for its low-budget sincerity. Shot on high-contrast, black and white 16mm, it's tough to tell whether its shadowy look is a consequence of deliberate artistic intention or unfortunate budget constraints; either way (though most likely the latter) its look, along with an accompanying sarcastic-poetic voice-over from Walt, makesMala Noche play like, as Nathan Lee termed it, "slacker-noir". Set in the streets and flophouses of skid-row Portland, nothing actually sinister happens—save for an act of violence in the third act—although the primarily chiaroscuro lighting and smoky interiors seem to constantly threaten that it will, while the role of femme fatale is filled, defying convention queerly, by a harmless Mexican drifter by the name of Johnny (Doug Cooeyate), who claims to be eighteen, but Walt figures he may be as young as sixteen. His age is beside the point—with that boydumb face and Jim Morrison hair, Walt falls in love at first sight despite, at the very least, their language barrier, to say nothing of the cultural barrier that exists between a Mexican migrant and a puto gringo.

What follows is a rambling (one-sided) love story that feels at once earnest and disingenuous; when rejected or abandoned by Johnny, Walt seems just as happy to take up with Juancito's buddy, Pepper (Ray Monge), who, as Walt the maricón describes in narration, seems to use his dick as a weapon, a satisfying and specific expression of revenge against his otherwise abstract American oppressors. But Walt says it with a bemused and knowing acceptance—if all's fair in love and war, why not in war-like lovemaking?—that seems to betray a sort of sodomitical masochism. Is his attraction to Johnny, or Pepper, a result of their virile, irrepressible youth? Or is it informed by some sort of misguided liberal guilt over the undue savagery of the (illegal) immigrant-experience of police brutality and pitiful living conditions? Are his feelings respectful or condescending? Walt obviously thrives off of surrounding himself with the downtrodden, paying the rent (and for his muchachos) by manning the counter at what appears to be a small convenience store, though it's only patronized by bums and winos and the only thing they want to buy is Night Train.

As shown by a brief visit to the supermarket, where he insists on buying cakemix in lieu of "good food", Johnny's a "sugarfreak" (as one of Walt's friends calls him; does that make Walt his sugar daddy?) Or, put more simply, he's just a boy, an unavoidable truth for which Walt is constantly admonishing him; "driving's not a game for kids!" he shouts after letting Johnny drive his car, which he does so rather recklessly; later he scolds, "that's not a toy!" in reference to Johnny's new pistol. Freudian implications would seem unavoidable with that last one, but van Sant manages to eschew them. It's 7-Up, in its sugary ebullience, that becomes an iconic representation of azucarado Johnny, whether it appears as a can of soda being drunk by a Mexican or as a imposing billboard looming over a forsaken Walt; a doorsign at Walt's store reads, "7-Up Likes You", ironically taunting him while reflecting his deepest sexual desires.

But other than these small, practically accidental character-defining details and symbols, van Sant, in typical van Sant fashion, seems entirely unconcerned with Walt's or anyone else's motivations, focusing instead on the bare day-to-day intricacies of the characters' complex relationships to one another. Van Sant explicitly avoids any moralizing or psychologizing, forcing the viewer to follow suit or succumb to dead-ended, frustrating speculation, such as I briefly engaged in above. Mala Noche has an awkward and discomfiting relationship at its center, and yet van Sant avoids ever making it problematic or offensive, at least not for the obvious reasons, as he similarly did two decades later with a school shooting in Elephant.

At turns intriguing, absorbing, and dull, Mala Noche sports, at the very least, a share of great moments; the intercutting of a speedy joy ride with shots of a video racing game, for example, or the lyrically-edited scene of lovemaking, set to the sound of a passing freight train, in which you see nothing and yet see everything. But Mala Noche's only real claim at significance is that it announces a major talent, a vibrant new film artist with a powerful sensibility. Essentially, it functions as a love letter of sorts to the West Coast Mexican immigrant experience and the Oregonian underbelly of 1980's, or at least as a primer for the man's work to come; in particular for My Own Private Idaho, for which it seems like a photocopied rough draft, with its Portland hustlers and gorgeous landscape shots in which the screen is full of timelapse clouds that move forward as quickly and aimlessly as the characters and film itself. There is even a long stretch of straight road that van Sant must have returned to for filming the bookending scenes of My Own Private Idaho; otherwise, the country must be full of such tucked away two-lanes, though I suspect there could only be one road like that, just as there's surely only one Gus van Sant. "Fuck it, do I need him?" Walt asks near Mala Noche's end, "am I really that desperate? (beat) Of course I am." Fuck it, I need you too van Sant. I'm gay for your movies, just not so much this one.

Fire Walk with Me (1992)

Directed by: David Lynch
Written by: David Lynch & Robert Engels

Grade: A

When Twin Peaks, the popular '90s television series on ABC, was about to be cancelled due to declining ratings (and, arguably, quality), David Lynch returned, after a long hiatus from the show he had co-created, to direct its final episode. And what a cruel episode it is, packed with cliffhangers, leaving many beloved characters for dead or seemingly possessed by evil spirits, as well as featuring interminable—and hilarious—passages in which nearly literally nothing happens. (For example, there's a shot that lasts several minutes of an old man slowly walking back and forth across a room.) Fiercely loyal fans, who had coalesced into what you could call a "cult following", understandably wanted more, and it looked like they were going to get it: David Lynch announced he would be revisiting the world of Twin Peaks, later saying, "I couldn't get myself to leave [it]." The resulting film, Fire Walk with Me, is a prequel of sorts, taking its name from the line in a quatrain oft-repeated in the television series:

Through the darkness of future past,
The magician longs to see
Once chants out between two worlds:
Fire, walk with me.

That poem is about as obscure as the film itself, which was met at the time of its release by unanimous critical and popular contempt, unsurprisingly. (It was booed at Cannes, where Lynch had won the Palme d'Or two years earlier for Wild at Heart.) Fire Walk with Me is as mean-spirited a "fuck you" to the show's fans as the final episode was, Lynch bitterly purging the show and its characters from his psyche. Appropriately, then, the film opens with the smashing of a television set. Its opening thirty minutes focus on the investigation into the disappearance of Teresa Banks from Deer Meadow, ND, and introduces almost entirely new characters, most prominently Special Agent Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak) and his Capote-esque partner, played with a blinking problem by Kiefer Sutherland. Deer Meadow is, consciously, the anti-Twin Peaks, a small town entirely devoid of charm: the sheriff's station is uncooperative, hostile and downright rude, as are the patrons and proprietor of a nearby diner, contrasting sharply to Agent Cooper's (Kyle Maclachlan) reception in the first season of the show and Twin Peaks' corresponding characters. "You wanna hear about our specials?" the anti-Norma diner owner asks through her rotting teeth, between puffs of smoke, adding, after a beat, "We don't have any."

Though what starts off as a surreal procedural changes gears a few reels in, becoming a character drama concerning that familiar Lynch theme—a woman in trouble. Lynch, and the film, finally get to Twin Peaks, and as the theme song blares from the speakers any fan of the show's heart jumps—Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) is alive, and beautiful as she strolls down the gorgeous tree-lined streets. She meets Donna (Moira Kelly), unfortunately not played by Lara Flynn Boyle due to a scheduling conflict, and the two walk to school together. It's an idyllic sequence, the soft beauty of the suburbs shot in a dreamy haze, reflecting the innocence of its high-school aged characters. When they arrive at school, Laura bids adieu to Donna as she enters the ladies room, where she flops into a stall for a bump of cocaine. Suddenly you have the feeling, this isn't going to go as well as I may have hoped.

Like a lot of Lynch's other work, most notably Blue Velvet with its macrolens shot of nasty black beetles beneath the surface of the green lawngrass, Fire Walk with Me exposes the dark underside of the American small town, stripping it of its typical romantic regard. (The intention is announced right from the start, as fans will notice that the credits roll over blue static, blatantly recalling the blue velvet backdrop of Blue Velvet's opening credits.) Chet Desmond is introduced searching and arresting people outside a schoolbus while the children scream and cry inside, thusly reinventing a familiar icon of Americana as a symbol of pain and fear, or "garmonbozia" in Lynchspeak.

(Spoilers follow; while I believe, unpopularly, that Fire Walk with Me can still function as a stand alone film, seeing it before one goes through the two seasons of Twin Peaks spoils the show's central mystery of who killed Laura Palmer.)

Fire Walk with Me drops most of the television series' beloved humor for a far darker tone; but that only makes sense, because a whimsical quirkiness would be inappropriate for a movie about rape, incest, and filicide. Laura Palmer, homecoming queen, is rapidly unravelling psychologically; consider the following exchange:
Donna: "If you were falling in space, do you think you'd slow down after a while or go faster and faster?"
Laura: "Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn't feel anything. And then you'd burst into fire."

It's essentially a quick rundown of Laura's emotional progression; deeply involved in dangerous drug deals and salacious exploits, her freefall's spinning out of control, and she's about to be set ablaze. Laura's leading a double life and can't sustain it much longer; as she says to one of her lovers, James, "your Laura is dead." Pretty soon, everybody's Laura will be dead, in a less figurative and far more literal sense.

When she realizes pages from her diary have been torn out, she rushes tearfully to her friend Harold and explains that BOB must've taken them. "But BOB isn't real," Harold assures her. "BOB is real," Laura explains, "he's been having me since I was twelve." She then reveals that BOB has informed her that he wants to be her, or he'll kill her.

BOB is the central villain in Twin Peaks' mythos, but it's unclear what or who exactly BOB is. Is BOB an evil spirit? A poetic personification of the evil that men do? It depends how you want to read it, but what's certain is that, at least for the time being, BOB is Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), Laura's father; and though one supposes Laura has always subconsciously understood this, when she comes to realize it for certain it's a devestating, disgusting and terrifying scene. Sheryl Lee, who was a "local girl from Seattle" (according to Wikipedia) before being cast to play a dead body on Twin Peaks, shows off an impressive range in an incredible performance that goes through a plethora of emotions and mental states, often within a single scene, from hysterical high school girl to sultry sextress. One moment she is as frail as a sixteen year old, the other as self-assured as though in her late thirties. At times it could be argued that she's a little over the top, but given the nature of the story and the style of the film and its director, her performance is a perfect complement to the material.

Lynch's standard surrealist style is also a perfect fit to the story, a depraved tale of brutality, fear and torment. How else to express the psychological breakdown of a young girl being sexually abused by her father, other than in a dreamlike and abstract style? How can one begin to make literal sense of such aberrant behavior and the toll it takes on its victims? (Look to any Lifetime original movie for the answer.) Fire Walk with Me is an impressionistic nightmare, and features many frightening scenes, of which Leland demanding that his daughter wash her filthy hands, and a traffic jam in which Mike, the one-armed man and BOB's archnemesis, screams at Laura, "it's him! It's your father!" as a deafening cacophony of honking horns sound stand-out the most. "What's the world coming to?" Leland asks rhetorically after the incident. Indeed, sir!

"There's no tomorrow," Jacques Renault (Walter Olkewicz) tells Laura at a strobelit sex club. "Know why, baby? 'Cos it'll never get here." Sadly, that's true for Laura, who ends the film as dead as she was in Twin Peaks' pilot. While the TV show ordinarily kept its violence subtle and off-screen, Fire Walk with Me brings it unabashedly to the forefront, just one more way in which it seems like Lynch is angrily challening Peaks fans. "You want to see more Twin Peaks? How about Leland fucking his daughter?" A man is seen shot in the skull during a drug deal with greusomeness worthy of Croenenberg; Agent Desmond resorts to violence against a Deer Meadow deputy; Leo smacks Shelly in the face; Laura hits James in the face; Heidi has a bloody-nose; a microscope examines the flesh hanging to an excoriated fingernail. Some of those scenes, though not all, are actually pretty funny, but they're symptomatic of the violent vision Lynch has for the film, which culminates, in the unsparing final reel, in Laura's brutal, bloody murder in the traincar at the hands of her (jealous?) father/BOB, after a violent sexual encounter with Jacques and Leo Johnson (Eric DaRe).

Fire Walk with Me does however, thankfully, end on as positive a note as it could, with Laura Palmer crying tears of joy; however, earlier Agent Cooper is describing to his colleague Albert (Miguel Ferrer) the vision of Laura Palmer he has before she's killed (and before he knows who she is.) Albert asks Cooper to describe her: "She's sexually active...she's using drugs...she's crying out for help."

"Damn Coop," Albert responds, "that's half the high school girls in America!" It's a hilarious line, but one that nonetheless indicates the darkness of the film doesn't end when the final reel passes through the projector; the violent debauchery of Fire Walk with Me is Reagan/Bush's America, and we all have our own Laura Palmer.

Funny Games (1997)

Written & Directed by: Michael Haneke

Grade: A-

Condescending, pedantic and powerful, Funny Games is essentially an essay on film theory, masquerading as a narrative film, that hopes to challenge the way in which we process movie violence. It opens with a family on a drive, playing a game of "Name that Tenor" as the mother, Ana (Susanne Lothar) and father, Georg (Ulrich Mühe) take turns tossing on various CDs. "Bjoerling?" "Obviously, but what's the aria?" Obviously? Obviously, these are some pretty bourgeois folks, civilized and genteel to a fault. Haneke abruptly interrupts their arias with some John Zorn screamrock, foreshadowing the puncturing violence to come.

When Peter (Frank Giering), who professes to be a houseguest of the neighbors, stops by the family's lakehouse and asks to borrow some eggs, Ana lets him in without a second thought. After all, the neighbors are their friends, and friendly people help a friend in need. But the benign scene turns increasingly tense—enhanced by Haneke's camera that won't cut away—in an absurd-in-its-banal-believeability sort of way, as Peter breaks the eggs, drops their phone in a sink full of water, and breaks some more eggs. The situation escalates as Peter demands even more eggs and another boy, Paul (Arno Frisch), comes over; soon Peter and Paul have taken the family hostage inside their own home, breaking Georg's knee and scaring the bejesus out of little Georg, Jr.

Even though most of the actual savagery takes place off-screen, the physical pain and psychological torment inflicted on the victims is horrifyingly severe; the third fourth of the movie unsparingly examines the effects of violence, as the characters interrupt long actionless stretches with spontaneous vomiting, emotional collapses and heartbreaking breakdowns. Georg's moans of anguish mid-way through the movie are some of the most awfully visceral expressions of hurt I've ever seen on film.

But Funny Games is more than just a violent thriller; it's an exorbitantly self-conscious film that analyzes itself and the audience as it moves along. While waiting for the family to get their revenge, and for their sociopathic tormentors to get their comeuppance, Haneke, in effect, asks the audience what eaxctly we're waiting for. More violence? Really? Why? Not exactly some pacifist polemic, nor a rebuke of the self-defense imperative, Haneke's film simply asks us to ask ourselves why we ever see film violence as theraputic or cathartic; after all, wouldn't we would be far less likely to consider actual violence in the same way? This comes to a point when Haneke gives the audience exactly what they're craving, only to obnoxiously take it away. (I apologize for the opacity but I'm trying not to give too much away.) Bloodshed shouldn't inspire an ovation, and Haneke makes his intended audience, those who would applaud retributive brutality, feel embarrassed. Well, or bitterly frustrated. It's easy to get defensive and ask, "who the heck does this Haneke fella think he is?" but the film ought to inspire at least an introspective reevaluation and/or an enlightening discussion, even amongst those who would disagree with Haneke's assertions. As I've heard fans of the film say, "I never looked at violence in movies the same way again." Funny Games often provokes feelings of guilt and, while I'm sure that we may not want to watch movies that criticize us for watching them, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't. Sometimes even jerks have important points to make.

I'm not saying, with blind devotion, that Haneke is as infallible as the Pope and everybody better listen up; his arguments have their vulnerability, and his weakest point is one expressed by Paul, who propounds near the film's conclusion that what you see in a film is "just as real as the reality which you see likewise." Certainly the idea that the reality of a fiction is as real as reality itself is contestable, but at least Haneke, for his part, makes the effort to destroy the illusory quality of his own film, not least of all by breaking down the fourth wall and allowing Paul to speak directly to us, as well as by commenting on the film itself through the dialogue. While Paul is chasing Georg, Jr. through a dark and empty house, he says, "hold on, I'll put some music on for us," and slips in a CD that changes the tone of the scene, a smirkable comment on the manipulation of the image and the rousability of soundtrack. Even more biting, though, is when Ana asks her tormentors, "why don't you kill us right away?" to which Peter replies, "Don't forget the entertainment value. We'd all be deprived of our pleasure." And on the most basic level Funny Games is a satisfying thriller, so Haneke's got a point-what the hell is wrong with us?

Slacker

Written & Directed by Richard Linklater

Grade: A-

Anyone familiar with Linklater's work (cf. Before Sunrise/set) knows he's just about the only living filmmaker who can make a great film about people talking. Just, you know, about stuff. Slacker is a de facto documentary of early-'90s, Austin-American alienation; at the conclusion of the end credits there's a sly spin on a familiar disclaimer: "This story was based on fact. Any similarity with fictional events or characters is entirely coincidental." It's also, however, an avant-garde call to and celebration of artistic anarchy, going so far as to have a digression on the only American anarchist, though not an artist per se, worth his salt, Leon Czolgosz. (And, incidentally answering the age old question of how the heck you pronounce his name!)

Linklater intentionally and importantly opens his film with himself in the backseat of a taxi, describing a dream that he had to the cab driver in which he did nothing but read and watch television. (See the film's title.) He also talks about how he dreamt that every time we make a choice in life, the option we reject goes off to become its own reality, and how that reality, like ours, thinks it's the only one. All of these realities intercommunicate through dreams; it may, at least here, sound like a lot of gobbledygook, but it's the film's starting point: Slacker is, essentially, a series of phantasmagoric short films, told in long rambling takes by a curious camera and overseen by the omniscent dreaming director, connected only by the fact that its characters usually pass one another by, handing off the narrative like the baton in a relay race.

With a strong DIY aesthetic, every person who turns up on screen—and there are a lot—seems to be either a friend of Linklater's or some local character. Their conversations sway with ease from automotive mechanics to the intricacies of the Kennedy assassination—we are in Texas after all. (Any film that uses a woman randomly picking up Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment in a bookstore as an excuse to have an in-depth review of the individual merits of various assassination-books is all right by me!) Overflowing with interacting youngsters and philosopho-political digressions, it's the purest form of Gen X portrait, Baumbach stripped of his bourgeois morality and narrative conceits. It's also end-to-end hilarious; though it celebrates its generation's morally coherent turn-on, tune-in, drop-out, and sit-still ethos—"I may live badly, but at least I don't work to do it," one character intones—it also never stops laughing at it.

Linklater's a good sport, but beneath the good-humored veneer is a formal seriousness, a declaration of a radical break from the traditional filmmaking style; as one woman notes in the film, "breaking a wall is really making a brick," and so Linklater tries to tear down the Fortress of Hollywood in the hopes of ending up with his own tiny building block of the future. There's a scene in which some guys throw a typewriter off of a bridge, and the film ends with a shot of a dude tossing his movie camera off a mountain, suggesting: kill your parents' narrative-form, man.

Even better though than active destruction, the characters find, is inactivity as revolution. As in an early scene, a coffee shop patron, named "Dostoyevsky wannabe" in the credits, remarks on the great effort required not to create. Don't, however, confuse Linklater's generational avatars with the frightened, lazy smarms popularized later in the '90s in, for example, the films of Kevin Smith. Linklater himself, for one, is anything but lazy; it requires a great effort indeed to make a movie this good. For instance, when was the last time anything made you actually want to go to Texas?

Prizzi's Honor

Director: John Huston

John Huston, one of the all time top powerhouse Hollywood directors, continued to make films long after his former contemporaries (like John Ford) had ceased or become deceased. He was nearly eighty years old when he directed Prizzi’s Honor but his technique is nearly as flawless as it was over forty years earlier on his first film, The Maltese Falcon -- there are no superfluous shots or edits. He exclusively uses dissolves to move between scenes and the result is gorgeous. Why don’t contemporary directors use dissolves, by far the classiest transition device available in the grammar, much anymore?

But I digress. Unfortunately, the sophistication in the construction is mismatched with the content. For starters, I’m not ever offended by ethnic stereotypes, but even I was a bit put-off by the caricatural portrayal of Italians in the film, namely by the performances of William Hickey and Lee Richardson. Jack Nicholson stars, sporting a silly Brooklyn-Italian accent, as a hit man for the mob who falls in love at first sight. He marries the girl, a Polack contract-killer from California, and ultimately she brings him nothing but trouble. Nicholson’s acting style is typically over-the-top, and while it can be used to great effect in, for example, The Shining, here when combined with the exaggerated accent the performance approaches the cartoonish.

Which might even be ok, except that the film just doesn’t really work because while half of it wants to be a punchy comedy, the other half aspires to be a bit more serious-minded and sophisticated, and it never finds the right balance. Kathleen Turner’s great in it, but she is playing it pretty straight while Nicholson is playing it pretty silly, and like the two characters themselves, ultimately it just doesn't mesh.

Grade: B-

The Truman Show

I feel somewhat guilty about writing a disparaging word regarding The Truman Show, an admittedly intelligent and entertaining film, particularly after recently doing so amongst friends and being met with bitter resentment. However, I feel the film unfairly retains a reputation as an enlightening film, which warrants a brief discussion and dismantling.

The Truman Show does a lot of things right but ultimately it’s, like The Matrix (which comparatively does very little right), philosophically vacuous. Adapting solipsism to the age of reality television, presciently before its ubiquity on basic cable and network television, Niccol and Weir tell the story of the titular Truman (Jim Carrey) whose entire life has unbeknownst to him been broadcast twenty-four hours a day on his very own dedicated television network. Everyone, from his neighbors, friends, co-workers, and wife, is a paid actor “in on it”. The ratings are huge, and the jocosely presented product placements draw-in magnanimous revenues.

After seeing it in class as an undergrad, I remember a fellow student lambasting the film for attempting to criticize the standard modes of Hollywood filmmaking while adhereing to those very same methods. I understand the point, but I think it’s misplaced. The Truman Show has a lot to say about religion, consumerism, corporatism, and the relationships between art and commerce and art and life; the problem is that it never actually says any of it. Rife with potential critique, the filmmakers never allow any of the big ideas to penetrate the film’s slick and somewhat self-applauding surface, relegating them instead to the nether regions of subsubtext. The audience will see in the film what they will, but in itself it says next to nothing other than, like an attention-starved child, “Look at me!”

Directed by: Peter Weir
Written by: Andrew Niccol

Welcome to Sarajevo

Welcome to Sarajevo opens with a happy family blithely preparing for a wedding as a cheery pop song plays on the soundtrack. While I picked up my phone and began dialing my travel agent to book a trip to Bosnia, the family hit the streets, where the mother promptly received a midriff full of lead. I put down the phone.

A few scenes later, some reporters at a hotel bar are making a toast when a bomb explodes and rattles the walls. No one is injured, but by now I had taken the phone off the hook and hid it in the closet. Winterbottom ensures that the film is relentlessly grim and depressing, though he's careful to eschew the melodramatic. Nearly every peaceful scene of dialogue is followed or interrupted by some act of violence, and every time the characters are static, which is rare, the camera moves wildly around them. After all, war never has a moment of peace; it never stops.

Michael, played by Stephen Dillane in an extraordinary performance, is an English war-correspondent for ITN, stationed in Sarajevo during the civil war of the early 1990’s. After covering a forgotten front-line orphanage every day for a week, and having his stories bumped from the lead because the Duke & Duchess of York are having marital troubles, he takes it upon himself to try to help the kids.

Any movie about saving orphaned infants from a war-ravaged country is bound to end up inherently manipulative, but Winterbottom and Boyce aren’t exactly aiming for subtlety. The “Sarajevo” of the film is convincingly rendered as a nightmarish hellscape, a city where potentially deadly sniper-fire is as ubiquitous as broken faces and dilapidated buildings. Despite the film’s blatant artificiality, it possesses a visceral verisimilitude, thanks at least in part to the ceaseless violence, juxtaposed video footage, and affecting supporting performances by native Yugoslavians.

A pop music soundtrack serves as an ironic counterpoint to the on-screen violence, as well as point-out the relative and nearly insulting complacency of the West. Unlike many similar films, more than a fair share of the proceedings pays attention to the plight of the oppressed, not merely using it as a backdrop for one white Westerner’s personal growth. While specifically about Sarajevo, the filmmakers have also fashioned a broad anti-war movie that should stir connections in the contemporary viewer’s mind to other modern human rights crises, from Rwanda and Darfur to even present-day Baghdad. Ostensibly, however, it is an accessible film more about people than politics; it’s another movie about a time when we did nothing and someone else did something.

Directed by: Michael Winterbottom
Written by: Frank Cottrell Boyce