Look Who's Walken!

Here's another "he said/he said" piece I wrote with my fellow SEE Magazine editor Matthew Halliday. In this one, we debate whether Christopher Walken is ruining his reputation as an actor by appearing in so many movies that require him to do nothing more than trot out his familiar "Christopher Walken" routine.

Probably the most surprising revelation in this conversation for me was to hear Matt, who's 10 years younger than me, say that his only experience of Walken is as a wacky comedian. Which is pretty amazing evidence of just how thoroughly Walken has transformed his persona. I remember working for a newspaper back in 1999 and having to edit an interview with Walken promoting Blast From the Past, that comedy in which he played Alicia Silverstone's father. In the interview Walken talked about how he really wanted to do more comedies, which at the time seemed like a completely bizarre idea. I even gave the article the believe-it-or-not headline "Christopher Walken: funnyman?"

How times have changed! Nowadays it's hard to encounter Walken in a movie and not expect to laugh at him. More amazing revelations and insightful observations follow. Enjoy!

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Paul Matwychuk: There may be no better example in movies today of an “acting auteur” than Christopher Walken. Other actors are hired to play characters; Christopher Walken is hired to be Christopher Walken. It doesn’t matter whether he’s in a comedy like Click, an action film like The Rundown, or a misconceived kiddie flick like The Country Bears: you can count on Walken to regard his co-stars with the same unnerving death’s-head stare, to exude the same playful air of menace, and to deliver his lines in those same lilting, punctuation-ignoring cadences so beloved by celebrity impersonators.

And beloved by audiences! I can’t think of another performer whose mere presence onscreen gives me an automatic grin the way Walken does. When I saw the trailer for the upcoming comedy Balls of Fury, in which Walken plays “Feng,” an Asian master criminal who presides over a deadly Enter the Dragon-style underground Ping Pong tournament, I couldn’t help but smile at his ridiculous costume, a cross between Fu Manchu and Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

But that grin was soon replaced by a wince as I recalled Walken’s Oscar-winning 1978 performance in The Deer Hunter as a competitor in a much grimmer underground Asian life-or-death “sports” tournament. Back then, Walken seemed poised to become a major American actor, in the league of Pacino, de Niro and Penn. Matt, do you think he’s pissing his legacy away doing “Walken shtick” in every lowbrow comedy that comes his way?

Matthew Halliday: Perhaps he’s already pissed it away, Paul, because I, a relative youngster at 26, am not even aware of Walken’s allegedly brilliant performances from the ’70s and ’80s (though one of my roommates has a copy of The Deer Hunter lying around, and I’ll probably watch it sooner or later).

No, I know Christopher Walken from his loveable goofball roles, the roles that only require him to do “Walken shtick”: Blast From the Past, Wayne’s World 2, Kangaroo Jack (hey, I saw it on a bus once—give me a break), and that Fatboy Slim video. Even the gold watch monologue in Pulp Fiction (“I wore this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass for two years...”) is sort of a winky, knowing performance.

And that’s how my generation sees him. We love him because he’s always a bright spot in a bad movie, but I mean, is that the kind of legacy a great actor wants to leave? Hell, if the American Film Institute ever does one of those retrospective tributes to Walken, they’ll have to leave out everything between 1995 and today.

PM: Wow, are you trying to make me feel old? Find a stool, sonny, and pull it up to my rocking chair as I tell you about Christopher Walken in his prime. He was always a cold actor, it’s true, with a haunted, alien quality that directors immediately pegged as perfect for playing outsiders, villains and weirdoes—one of his earliest high-profile roles was as Diane Keaton’s creepy brother Dwayne in Annie Hall, delivering a classic Walken monologue about the impulse he feels, every time he drives at night, to swerve his car into the oncoming traffic.

But he was also capable back then of playing more than psychos—in The Deer Hunter or The Dead Zone or in Jonathan Demme’s great short film Who Am I This Time? or even in a weird little picture like Communion, he’s playing men who are, at heart, more or less “average guys” who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. His character in The Dead Zone is even named “John Smith”—how much more Everymannish can you get? Part of the poignancy of Walken’s performances in those films is the way he suggests the normal guy trapped inside the tormented shell. Nowadays, Walken only seems to play people who were always nuts, and nuts in the same stylized, inscrutable way.

It’s fascinating to hear you say your only awareness of Walken is as a comedian. Do you think you’d be able to believe Walken in a role as a normal human being? Or would you be too busy waiting for the gags?

MH: Oh no, I think I could easily believe Walken in a “normal” role. Actually, I just remembered that I did see him in one, as the reluctant psychic in 1986’s The Dead Zone. But when I see him in a goofy role, I’m always aware that he’s playing shtick—though maybe that’s just because of the widespread popularity of Walken impersonations. But yes, my primary knowledge of Walken is as walk-on relief in bad movies—as in, “Hey, it’s a Christopher Walken cameo! This film is now marginally less sucky!”

What I’m really interested in is Walken’s motivation in taking all these goofy roles. Does he just not want to “act” anymore? Is he really just interested in light-hearted fare and dancing in music videos? If so, that’s his prerogative, but it seems like he’s gone off the rails, giving a thumbs-up to any crappy script that drifts his way. It’s like if de Niro had done nothing but Meet the Parents and Analyze This for the last 20 years.

The real question then, is, “What the hell is Christopher Walken thinking?”

PM: My God, does anybody know what’s going on inside that guy’s head? My best guess is that Walken’s notoriously indiscriminate approach to choosing scripts is a holdover from his days as a hungry young New York stage actor. In that world, you’re grateful to get cast in anything, and I get the feeling that Walken has never entirely shaken that superstitious feeling that you should simply never turn down work. This is a guy, after all, who went straight from his Oscar-nominated role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s dad in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (probably his best, most grounded recent performance) to a part in Kangaroo Jack.

And yet, unlike de Niro, people don’t seem to hold all those terrible movies against him. It probably helps that he doesn’t take himself at all seriously—he apparently once even tried pitching a Christopher Walken cooking show to MTV! (And wouldn’t you tune in every week to see Christopher Walken preparing lasagna?) I wouldn’t want to change that part of his personality—Walken’s sly sense of humour is part of what makes his work in films like True Romance, Pennies From Heaven and King of New York so special—but I guess I wish he could take himself just a little bit more seriously once in a while. It’s one thing to be a comedian; it’s quite another to deliberately turn yourself into a clown.

MH: I think people don’t hold these roles against Walken because he’s always been the outsider, the weirdo, et cetera. Sure, de Niro played Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta, two less-than-heroic protagonists, but he was always a good-looking leading man. Maybe Walken gets away with his goofy throwaway roles for the same reason Steve Buscemi gets away with being in tripe like Armageddon and Mr. Deeds: he’s ugly, bug-eyed, and a little scary-looking, and people don’t have the same expectations of him they might have of a more “classical” great-American-actor type.

Maybe Walken will get choosier as he gets older and starts thinking about his legacy. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s just having a lark. I’d like to see him get a little more serious too, but in the meantime, his presence always brightens the screen for me. After all, he still does the best damn Christopher Walken impersonation around.

I Can't Bereave I Ate the Whole Thing

No Reservations is based on a German movie called Mostly Martha which told the story of a chef at an upscale restaurant who’s such a tight-assed workaholic that she hadn’t had a date in four years. So naturally, when they decided to do an American remake, the role of this dowdy, dreary single woman went to... Catherine Zeta-Jones?

The character (here named Kate for some reason instead of Martha) is conceived so aridly that in some ways you can’t really blame Zeta-Jones for giving such an uninteresting performance—after you get one look at her suffocatingly tidy, perfectly decorated apartment, there’s absolutely nothing left to discover about her. But you can’t help but wonder what an actress like Patricia Clarkson, who plays Zeta-Jones’ boss in the film, might have brought to the role. Zeta-Jones seems so preoccupied with the challenges of playing someone unglamourous that she brings no other colours to the role—perhaps someone like Clarkson, who really is unglamourous, could have done more to suggest the prickly pride Kate takes in the meals she prepares, the autocratic manner that seals her off from her co-workers, or even the helpless resentment Kate feels at suddenly having to take care of her niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin, from Little Miss Sunshine) after her sister dies in a car accident.

I don’t understand why people who look down their noses at how “clichéd” action pictures and horror movies supposedly are nevertheless seem perfectly content to sit through movies like No Reservations, whose storyline unfolds with the relentless predictability of the alphabet. You know exactly what you’re in for with this premise: Kate’s clueless initial attempts at mothering; Kate silently joining Zoe as she sadly watches home movies of her dead mother; the moment where Kate lets her professional life take precedence over Zoe, prompting her to run away; Kate eventually finding Zoe sitting by her mother’s gravestone, crying over how she’s “already forgetting what her mother looked like.”

With its airlessly composed shots, the beige-hued cinematography, the piano score courtesy of Philip Glass, every scene in No Reservations is so tamped-down, so lacking in spontaneity, it could have been directed by Kate herself. But in fact the man behind the camera is Scott Hicks, who also made Shine, Snow Falling on Cedars and Hearts in Atlantis—movies for people weary of the vulgar showmanship of Lasse Hallstrom. There’s no life in this thing—compare the kitchen scenes in No Reservations to the ones in Ratatouille, and it’s bizarre to realize that the cartoon about the talking rat is actually more sensuous, more sophisticated and teaches you more about the art of preparing food than the grown-up movie about a woman caring for her dead sister’s daughter. Early in Hicks’ film, one of Kate’s regular customers tells her how she always finds a way to “surprise his palate”—no one would ever say that to Hicks. As a director, he’s a brothmaker.

It’s strange: Mostly Martha has pretty much the exact same story, and yet it never comes across as the rote exercise that No Reservations does. You could certainly tell where Martha’s plot was heading too, but there was enough texture to the characters and the individual scenes that you didn’t really mind—the route was familiar, but the sights outside your window were new. No Reservations, by contrast, feels like a dish copied from a recipe book. And, as a character in the film notes, the best dishes tend to be the ones you invent yourself.

Yellow Journalism

Here's a little piece I co-wrote with Matthew Halliday, my fellow editor at SEE Magazine, looking ahead to this Friday's release of The Simpsons Movie. Is it unprofessional to talk about a film without even having seen it? Maybe so, but this is the internet, baby! Those old-school rules don't apply here?

*****

The good but annoyingly secretive people at 20th Century Fox have been working overtime to promote the opening of The Simpsons Movie this weekend—Matt Groening has been working the talk-show circuit, Krusty-Os cereal is now available in stores, and—in one of the most awesome publicity stunts ever—7-11 outlets in select cities have been converted into operational “Kwik-E-Mart”s, complete with Squishy machines and real live “Apu”s manning the cash register.

They’ve done everything, basically, except actually show the movie to critics—in effect, forcing us to play the waiting game. But as Homer Simpson himself once so wisely observed, the waiting game sucks. So instead, SEE editors (and longtime Simpsons watchers) Paul Matwychuk and Matthew Halliday decided to sit down and share their thoughts on the state of The Simpsons series, and ponder whether they’re viewing the release of The Simpsons Movie with optimism or dread. Mmmm... conversational!

Paul Matwychuk: I’m a little surprised by how much I’m looking forward to seeing The Simpsons Movie, considering how I stopped watching the series regularly a few years ago. (That’s one of the great things about The Simpsons—you can skip a couple season and know that when you come back, Bart will still be 10 years old, Mr. Burns will still be evil, and Homer will still be staying up all night in the kitchen in his underwear eating 64 slices of American cheese.) Matt, what kind of expectations do you have for this film, very few details of which have leaked out to the press? Are you expecting an awesome experience along the lines of The Itchy and Scratchy Movie, or will it be a dud like Troy McClure’s The Contrabulous Fabtraption of Professor Horatio Hufnagel? Or will it be somewhere in the middle—a Look Who’s Oinking, if you will?

Matthew Halliday: Well, I can’t wait to see it either, though I’m bracing myself for disappointment. I stopped looking forward to new episodes a few years back too, so I think I’m expecting an Itchy and Scratchy Movie, but without the funny. (I hope, I hope, I hope I’m wrong.) My fear is that it’ll be an hour and a half of celebrity cameos, self-referencing in-jokes, and laboured pop culture references—basically a long version of a typical Simpsons episode, circa 2007. I don’t want to be constantly aware that I’m watching THE SIMPSONS MOVIE!, you know?

And speaking of Troy McClure, am I the only one who can’t imagine a Simpsons film without him? Or Lionel Hutz? I know Phil Hartman is no longer around to voice them, but still...

Uh-oh. Now I sound like Comic Book Store guy.

PM: Sounds like you and I have the same fears, Matt (and the same nostalgia for the great Phil Hartman). I think if this film is going to succeed artistically, it has to be more than just an embiggened TV episode. Either there needs to be an explosion of outrageous comic creativity along the lines of South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, or else they need to come up with a plot that tackles the Simpsons universe from an unexpected angle. I’m thinking of something like the “Frank Grimes” episode of the TV series—the one about the hard-working, conscientious guy who comes to work at the nuclear power plant and is literally driven insane by how easy life is for Homer and how everybody shows such tolerance for someone so stupid and irresponsible. But that was a very divisive episode, and I don’t know if the movie will dare to go that dark.

MH: Do you think the writers and producers have the imaginative wherewithal to produce an “explosion of outrageous comic creativity”? The show seems so tired nowadays. And some of the advance buzz makes me wary. Sounds like a lot of gimmicks: Green Day cameo? Bart’s full-frontal nudity?

However, I love the plot that I’ve heard of: Homer pollutes the Springfield River and forces the town to evacuate? Classic Homer, classic Simpsons, sounds like a big plot for a big movie.

The movie should go dark. The series’ best moments are the ones that are out-there enough to make you think, “Wow, this is on network TV? Amazing.” Remember the Christmas episode where Moe sticks his head in the oven with a note taped on his back reading “No Funeral”? It’s funny for no other reason than that Moe is a pathetic loser. Most sitcoms skirt around that sort of brutal honesty. Moe’s attempted suicide was funny—in part because there’s no way in hell Ray Romano is going to do that on his Christmas episode. The Simpsons used to derive a lot of its humour from the fearless way it steamrolled over the conventions of the family sitcom.

PM: But can they do the same thing for cinematic conventions? It will be interesting to see what effect, if any, the move from TV to the big screen has on the show’s writers. Free from the network censors, will the humour be darker, edgier, more “subversive”? Will there be sex jokes? Will there be any swearing, even? If Family Guy ever got turned into a theatrical film, I’m sure Seth MacFarlane would make a point of packing the film with as much envelope-pushing raunchy humour as he possibly could. But I have a hard time picturing The Simpsons going in that direction—the only character who it would be funny to hear swear would be Ned Flanders. Would an R-rated version of The Simpsons still feel like The Simpsons?

Hmm... let me rethink my position: maybe instead of going dark, the movie should go “warm.” I’ve always admired the discipline of a show like King of the Hill which stayed on the air for 10 seasons and always stayed true to its “realistic” universe, never devolving into wackiness-for-the-sake-of-wackiness. Some of the best Simpsons episodes are relatively low-key stories about school and family that wouldn’t have been out of place on Freaks and Geeks. (The episode where Homer pastes pictures of Maggie over his “demotivational plaque” at work so it reads “DO IT FOR HER”? So heartwarming!)
The Simpsons is such a ridiculously fast-paced show—each episode already feels like a two-hour movie condensed into 22 minutes. It might be interesting if they used the running time of a feature-length film not to cram in even more plot, but give the scenes the space to breathe that they never get on the series.

MH: Hmm... less is more? Yeah, I would hate to see the movie revel too much in its freedom from the restrictions of network TV. Slyly subverting those restrictions is why The Simpsons was so funny. (Well, one reason.)

I guess the real question is just this: since the show isn’t as funny as it used to be (Matt Groening’s opinion notwithstanding), is the movie doomed to disappoint us? Or would it disappoint us anyway, even if it’s great? Can anything be as great as the movie we’ve built up in our heads? Is the whole thing a hopeless, quixotic enterprise? Should I put aside my high hopes and just treat the movie as a curiosity?

PM: Are we an entire nation of Comic Book Guys, in other words? Maybe we are, although I think the experience of watching The Simpsons in a big room with 300 other people might be just the thing we need to shake us out of our cynicism and reignite our affection for this great series. (I’ve watched Looney Tunes cartoon festivals with a big audience, and it was amazing how freshly funny those familiar gags became when you heard all that communal laughter surrounding you.)

You could argue that the movie has no real responsibility except to tell good jokes. I mean, it’s a lot to ask, after 17 seasons, for one single movie to be not just the funniest Simpsons episode ever, but to make some kind of ultimate, crowning statement about the series and the characters as a whole. The series is a comedy continuum—dive in anywhere, and it’s still The Simpsons. Add an episode, subtract an episode, add a season, subtract a season, and it’s fundamentally unchanged. Forget this Simpsons Movie coming out this weekend; in a way, all those hours and hours of unbelievably smart and funny comedy that Groening and company have already created is the real Simpsons movie.

MH: I hope you’re right. I do look forward to sitting in a theatre full of Simpsons fans and laughing along with them. TV is solitary, and movies—at least in a theatre—are social. I guess I don’t want The Simpsons Movie to be disappointing because I want it to be a great communal experience. Maybe we should just let it go. I’d hate to think we were like all those Transformers freaks who were wetting themselves over a stupid movie about a bunch of toys. Are we just nerds of a different order, Paul? I know this: when I leave the theatre after seeing the movie, it won’t change all those hours of witty, often brilliant free entertainment Groening and Co. have given me. And it also won’t change the fact that the show now is a shadow of its former self. I just hope it makes me laugh.

Welcome to the Dahlhouse

Here's a profile of director John Dahl, the man who made Red Rock West, Rounders and The Last Seduction, that I wrote for an alt-weekly here in Edmonton. His new film, You Kill Me, opens here next week. I don't know if this is the most insightful piece ever written about him--I was given only 20 minutes to pump him for information--but he did say a few interesting things.

I was especially struck by an offhand comment he made--which I couldn't fit into this short piece--in which he basically said he didn't know much about noir movies, or at least the ones being made by his contemporaries. (He said when he's working on a movie, that's pretty much a year where he's basically too busy thinking about his own film to have time to watch the movies other people are making.) So, while he was interested to hear about D.K. Holm's concept of "film soleil," it's not a trend he ever noticed. I wonder if directors in the '40s and '50s felt the same way--were they consciously making "noir" movies, even though the genre wouldn't get that name until later, or were they too immersed in the business of actually *making* noir movies to notice they were carving out a distinctive new genre?

Here's my interview. Enjoy!

* * * * *

Director John Dahl has the misfortune of being really, really good at a genre that audiences almost never show up for. His first three movies (Kill Me Again, Red Rock West, and The Last Seduction) were noirs—not noir parodies or noir pastiches or Tarantinoid noir deconstructions, but the real deal: sexy, suspenseful, skillfully executed crime pictures about hapless men tangling with untrustworthy women, but enlivened by a modern sensibility that avoids the shadowy images and stylized dialogue of classic noir. The critic D.K. Holm calls this subgenre, which blossomed in the ’90s, “film soleil”—daylight noirs. Dahl’s never heard that term before, but he agrees that by the ’90s, the nature of crime movies had dramatically changed.

“I think what’s happened,” he says, “is that these used to be the seamy, untold stories that didn’t make the headlines. The idea of somebody having an affair was not front-page news in the ’60s, when I was growing up. But in the ’90s, the gloves came off; you read about the mayor of San Francisco having an affair, the mayor of Los Angeles having an affair. Nothing that happens to a leading figure shocks anybody anymore. So these tawdry noir dramas that used to be sort of titillating are pretty much mainstream news now. Now everyone’s in rehab.”

Which brings us to Dahl’s latest picture, an offbeat comic crime movie called You Kill Me, in which Ben Kingsley plays Frank Falenczyk, an increasingly undependable alcoholic hitman for a Polish crime family whose boss gives him a stark choice: join AA and dry out, or never work again. Reluctantly, resentfully, Frank chooses AA. But even with the support of a beautiful, improbably accepting new lover named Lauren (Téa Leoni), kicking the bottle is an uphill battle for a stubborn, hard-drinking SOB like Frank.

The trajectory of the story—a homicidal killer goes into therapy, and emerges out the other end a better-adjusted homicidal killer—recalls The Sopranos, but You Kill Me’s themes are more modest, its ironies more whimsical, its tone more deadpan. “It’s about that absurd way society puts sobriety on a pedestal and says, ‘This is more important than anything,’” says Dahl. “In that respect, it’s a bit of a lampoon of AA, but it also acknowledges the benefits of AA. I guess what I liked about this script [by Christopher Marcus and Stephen McFeely, who also wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, of all things] is the way Frank’s occupation makes the story of his search for sobriety a little more interesting and entertaining.”

Dahl resists the suggestion that You Kill Me marks a return to his earlier style—“Those films were 10 years ago,” he says, “so hopefully I’ve matured a little since then”—but there’s a distinctive personality behind the camera on this picture that the movies he made after The Last Seduction mostly lacked. There was Unforgettable, a Linda Fiorentino/Ray Liotta thriller memorable only for its contrived premise; Joy Ride, a Duel-inspired actioner starring Paul Walker; and The Great Raid, a very expensive WWII epic that got lost in the great Miramax implosion of 2005. The bright spot was Rounders, his 1998 poker movie starring Edward Norton and Matt Damon—but even that one had to wait until it came out on DVD before it caught on.

Maybe there’s something about Dahl’s low-key, character-oriented sensibility that simply plays better on the TV screen—even The Last Seduction, his most acclaimed film, was originally made for HBO before ecstatic reviews prompted the cable channel to give it a theatrical release. Filmed on a modest budget last year in wintry Winnipeg, You Kill Me is one of those movies that might come off as a little slight if you make the journey to see it at the theatres, but which seems like a satisfying gem if you happen to stumble across it one night on Showcase.

I guess that sounds like I’m saying, “Wait for it on video,” but Ben Kingsley’s inventive performance deserves to be seen on the big screen. The notion of Kingsley playing a killer seems like stuntcasting, which just goes to show how hard it is for an actor to change the public’s perception of them—even after Sexy Beast, Lucky Number Slevin, and House of Sand and Fog, people still think of him as Gandhi.

“Gandhi just hit such a core with people,” Dahl says, “and that shadowed him for years. It was great when I saw him in Sexy Beast because it just broke the box of what I thought Ben Kingsley was. He’s a very compelling guy on film, in the right role. He’s an actor’s actor. That all sounds like crap, but it’s true. He loves the greasepaint and the lights. It’s a real workman’s attitude: when he’s not in the scene, he just sits in his chair and waits for the next shot. He never left the set.... And I’m just not one of these megalomaniac directors who’s got to put their stamp on everything. I’m thrilled just to get these super-talented people together and then get out of their way.”

Harry Potter Myopia

Hmmm... I was just rereading my post below, the one about the new Harry Potter movie, and it occurs to me that my opinion doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I think the series as a whole plays it safe, I don’t think anything significant plotwise happens in this installment, I’m not too wild about Daniel Radcliffe, the lead actor, and yet for some reason I still think the Potter movies are the most satisfying blockbuster franchise around.

That’s the last time I try to write a blog entry on three hours’ sleep the morning after attending a midnight film screening. I stand by my criticisms of the Potter series, and Order of the Phoenix specifically, but I think my comments neglected to pay proper tribute to the things the film does right. A short, random list, off the top of my head:

• The agreeably leisurely pace. I like that the scenes take the time to put the kettle on, as it were—you don’t feel like you’re getting yanked from one “dazzling” effects setpiece to another.

• The way the stories in the wizards’ newspaper are laid out at right angles to each other, like the staircases in an M.C. Escher print.

• The way director David Yates captures the disappointed look on Ginny Weasley’s face when someone ribs Harry about how Cho Chang can’t take her eyes off him. He doesn’t call the least bit of attention to it, but it feels like there’s an entire film’s worth of subplot tucked into that one moment.

• The offhand shot of a girl making a friend laugh at the kitchen table by crossing her eyes and giving herself a duck face. It’s exactly the kind of silly thing kids would do if they had magical powers.

• Yates’ decision to quietly replace composer John Williams with Nicholas Hooper, who he also worked with on The Girl in the Café and the miniseries State of Play.

• Gary Oldman as Sirius Black—perhaps the only character Oldman has ever played who you’d ever trust to take care of your kids.

• The overall spirit of fun and playfulness. I know everyone keeps saying how "dark" this series is getting, but I like the way Rowling and Yates don't let that get in the way of their affection for the characters. This is a series with a profound tolerance for eccentricity—that sees eccentricity as a character strength, not a flaw. If anything, the tension in the film comes from how *nice* all the heroes are—you really can't imagine how these dear, tweedy old eccentrics are ever going to give Voldemort much of a fight.

• No Quidditch! Sorry, but that game makes absolutely no sense.

Gentlemen Prefer Wands

“It’s fun, isn’t it? Breaking the rules?”

So says an uncharacteristically rebellious Hermione Granger in a scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Her words are ironic, since it’s hard to imagine a film franchise more afraid of colouring outside the lines than the Harry Potter movies. I’ve never quite understood why these movies are as hotly anticipated as they are. Everybody in the audience knows going in pretty much exactly the experience they’re going to get: a faithful, expensively mounted, tastefully streamlined visualization of a story they’ve already read, probably multiple times. No one goes to a Harry Potter movie expecting to discover new nuances in the characters or distinctive directorial departures from the books’ central themes and images. If the Harry Potter audience ever caught a director “breaking the rules” on one of these films, the punishment they’d demand would be far crueler than anything Dolores Umbridge could ever conceive of.

That said, within its cautious parameters, the Harry Potter series remains arguably the most consistently enjoyable blockbuster franchise around. I always enjoyed the Potter movies far more than Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, for instance. That’s not exactly an acceptable critical opinion, I know, but J.K. Rowling’s sly, whimsical humour and her ever-growing cast of Dickensian professors and students just seems so much more inviting to me than the dreary self-importance of Tolkien.

And relatable! I’ve never met anyone as evil as Sauron in my life, and I doubt I ever will. But I’ve run into plenty of pinch-faced bureaucrats like Dolores Umbridge, and even the non-supernatural versions have caused me untold misery. Umbridge, of course, is Hogwarts’ new “Defence Against the Dark Arts” teacher, and she wastes no time enforcing a new regime of rote learning and unquestioning obedience to authority. As played, in a succession of grotesquely “sensible” pink outfits, by Imelda Staunton, Umbridge recalls Louise Fletcher’s Big Nurse from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a petty tyrant who hides her sadism behind an implacable facade of cheery politeness.

Staunton is merely the latest great British character actor to find work in the increasingly crowded Potter universe. (Helena Bonham Carter also turns up in the series for the first time here, as an Azkaban escapee with the glorious name of Bellatrix Lestrange.) A lot of the series regulars don’t get to do very much in this picture, but that’s okay: even a glimpse of Maggie Smith wearing that enormous black witches’ hat or Emma Thompson gawping at the world from behind those giant eyeglasses makes me unaccountably happy. There are also some lovely moments with Mark Williams’ Mr. Weasley, for whom the human world is as strange and wondrous as Hogwarts seems to us. (Harry and his friends think nothing of riding dragons through the sky, but for Mr. Weasley, just taking an escalator is a thrilling experience.)

I’ve never been able to figure out, given this colourful gallery of supporting characters, if Harry Potter himself is dull by design, or if actor Daniel Radcliffe just hasn’t figured out a way yet to make him interesting. The main conflict in Order of the Phoenix is internal: the evil Lord Voldemort has begun invading Harry’s mind, clouding his thoughts and even affecting his behaviour. “I just feel angry all the time!” Harry exclaims at one point, but Radcliffe seems incapable of conveying any emotion more powerful than mere petulance. (He’s better in Harry’s quieter scenes with fellow student Luna Lovegood, played by Evanna Lynch, whose moonstruck deadpan provides welcome relief from the mugging of Rupert Grint.)

Nothing of consequence really happens in this movie—it feels like the plot is treading water before Rowling delivers her final one-two punch. It’s just a placeholder episode. But you do feel that the series is in capable hands with new director David Yates, who knows special effects seem more special the more casually you treat them. I’m not sure if that witty, offhand shot of Sirius Black’s shadow changing from a wolf to a human behind a pane of frosted glass was Yates’ idea, but if it was, he deserves some kind of gold star from Dumbledore himself.

The Killer Inside Him

“When people come up to me and tell me Killer of Sheep inspired them or affected them or whatever, I’m always surprised. It always seemed like an ordinary film to me. Just a slice of life.”

Charles Burnett is one of the most genuinely modest film directors I’ve ever interviewed. His answers to my questions tend to be short, humble, and matter-of-fact. He makes no great claims to artistic genius, even though he’s won a MacArthur “genius” grant and Killer of Sheep, his extraordinary first feature, was one of the first 50 films the Library of Congress selected for its National Film Registry. The National Society of Film Critics put it on their list of the 100 essential films of all time, but Burnett’s not even sure he’d call Killer of Sheep his best work. Maybe that honour would go to To Sleep With Anger, the terrific, underseen 1990 film he made starring Danny Glover, or maybe Nightjohn, the 1996 TV-movie he did for the Disney Channel about a black man teaching a fellow slave to read. Maybe it’s Namibia, the historical epic he’s just finished shooting in Africa, which sounds like the most logistically ambitious project he’s ever tackled.

Still, Killer of Sheep will probably be the film that goes on his epitaph. Shot over a year’s worth of weekends in 1976 in Watts, with a cast consisting mostly of children and nonprofessionals, it’s a character study of Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a working-class husband and father whose proud spirit is slowly getting worn down by his chronic lack of money and his depressing job at a local slaughterhouse. But it’s also a loving but clear-eyed portrait of an entire African-American neighbourhood—the children roughhousing around the train tracks and the vacant lots, the low-level criminals and drunks, the women who put up with them. It’s a film of images and mood rather than story, a cross between Italian neorealism and the lyrical style of Terence Malick. Everyone considers it a masterpiece.

But Burnett says that he never thought that the no-budget black-and-white feature, his thesis project at UCLA Film School, would ever be shown theatrically—at best, he thought it might make a useful tool in social science classes. He didn’t even bother securing the rights to the various songs on the soundtrack, which range from Paul Robeson to Earth, Wind and Fire to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth” (which plays under a particularly heartbreaking scene of Stan numbly slow-dancing with his wife). But now, after years of piecemeal festival screenings and bootleg distribution, Milestone Films has restored Killer of Sheep and is finally giving this landmark movie its first “legitimate” American release.

Charles Burnett graciously took some time out from editing Namibia to talk to me about the experience of making Killer of Sheep.

* * * * *

Q: Have you been back to the neighbourhood where you made this movie?

Charles Burnett: Not too recently. I’m too busy trying to make films. It’s changed a lot. I look back at the film now, and it looks like a period of innocence. There were families there, and you could walk the streets and feel relatively safe. It had a sense of community. Since then, the whole crack thing sort of disrupted everything and the people who had a chance to move out moved out.

Q: How did you come around to the idea that you were going to become a filmmaker—that this would be the medium you were going to express yourself in? Is there something you could do in film that you couldn’t if you were a poet or a novelist?

CB: Well, when I was a kid, I always watched old black-and-white Hollywood films. Without even knowing that there was such a job as a cameraman or anything, I was always interested in photography and looking at still photographs—but I went to a school that wasn’t very encouraging about that kind of thing at all. When I got out of high school, the draft was on and so I went to City College—you could get a student deferment if you enrolled in college. I studied electronics there for awhile, but I was still interested in movies and eventually applied to the film program at UCLA. They made you do everything there—you had to make your own film and shoot it and edit it and everything.

Q: Did you make a lot of false starts before you arrived at your style?

CB: Well, when I got to UCLA, there were a lot of people there making personal films about alienation and nudity and that kind of thing, and I couldn’t identify with that stuff at all. There were political discussions all the time at UCLA—most of the people there were politically and socially conscious and you got a lot of films about the workforce being exploited where at the end of the movie they’d form a union and everything would be happy after that. But that wasn’t my situation, or the situation for the people I knew. So I decided I wanted to make a movie where I wouldn’t impose my worldview on the subject; I’d try to be as objective as possible. Killer of Sheep has a plot and a structure, but it isn’t a conventional one; it’s based more on the way life evolves, those rhythms from one day to the next.

Q: What was it like filming inside the slaughterhouse?

CB: Well, I was trying to think of a job for Stan that would produce this sort of alienation and estrangement from his wife. And I ran into this kid who I found out worked at a slaughterhouse, hitting animals over the head with a sledgehammer, and I just couldn’t imaging that someone could do that eight hours a day, every day of the week, and not be affected by it. I tried to find a slaughterhouse in L.A., but they all shut their doors to filmmakers because the whole vegetarian thing was starting up around then and there was a lot of negative stuff circulating around about slaughterhouses and meat-eaters. We eventually found a place in northern California owned by this one guy who was very nice and let us shoot there for a couple of days. And in fact, I became a vegetarian for awhile after that.

Q: Were you a star pupil at UCLA? Were you regarded as the guy most likely to succeed?

CB: No. But UCLA really wasn’t focused on getting into Hollywood anyway. We never thought we’d be making films for a living, in a way. At that time, if you wanted to be a cinematographer at a studio, you had to wait, like, 15 or 20 years before you could move up the ladder, or have an uncle already in the business. The independent film scene was just starting, but the idea of getting your movie screened still didn’t seem likely.

Q: Killer of Sheep, famously, never got a proper theatrical release until now. When did you start to become aware that it was acquiring this really exalted critical reputation anyway?

CB: Well, it still played a few festivals and won some awards. It won some prizes at Berlin. It got around. But you know, I think the fact that it wasn’t officially distributed actually kind of helped it. People kept hearing about it, but since it was unavailable, it was this mystery film. It had this mystique.

Q: Did all the acclaim you got for this movie make it easier for you later to line up subsequent projects and assignments?

CB: No. I mean, you’ve got to give them a film that looks like it will make a lot of money. But if you have a film that looks like a puzzle to them, it doesn’t work.

Q: Are there any images from the film that still particularly give you pleasure when you rewatch them?

CB: The funniest thing was the scene where the kids are riding their bikes and the dog chases them. I used to live on that block, and there was this huge dog that always chased you, and I expected the dog to do the same thing when we were filming—he always chased you, no matter what. But when the cameras were going, he just wouldn’t do it. So this neighbour had this little dog that he said would do it, and he was right! I like the irony of it, that this big dog turned out to be such a coward. Oh, God, and the scene of the kids jumping from roof to roof. That scene scares me every time I look at it—if any of them had slipped, they would have fallen down three stories. But the fact of the matter is, they did it all the time. Those are the two parts that I always remember.

Q: Did you learn anything from making this movie?

CB: I think what happens when you make a movie of any length that’s done well critically is that you feel confident that you can make a film. When you shoot a film, you always wonder if it’s going to work or not. All these people are looking at you with doubts about your ability. That can have a really negative effect unless you know you’ve done it before when all the odds were against you.

Jason in Training

The mockumentary Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon takes place in a world where Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees actually exist—and where an affable young man named Leslie Vernon dreams of one day joining their ranks.

That will take an awful lot of preparation and discipline, though. Not only does he need to be in peak physical condition (“I have to do so much cardio, it’s insane,” he says—after all, a serial killer needs to keep pace with his victims as they run away from him while looking as though he’s just walking), but he also needs to line up the proper cast of supporting characters. He needs an “Ahab,” for instance—some obsessive authority figure from his past who can serve as his nemesis. And he absolutely needs to pick out a good “Survivor Girl,” a virgin who he can leave alive at the end of the whole ordeal. Leslie's got big plans for a final battle in which his Survivor Girl will finish him off. (He won’t really be dead; as Leslie explains, serial killers usually take a lot of magic classes, so they’re good at faking illusions and making quick disappearances.)

Behind the Mask owes its premise (a documentary crew follows a chatty, deceptively harmless-looking young serial killer as he goes about his mundane daily routine) to the 1992 Belgian cult movie Man Bites Dog. But unlike that (somewhat overrated) film, Mask director Scott Glosserman isn’t interested in satirizing the media; he’s more interested in examining classic horror-movie tropes and asking what gives them such power. Leslie doesn’t just want to kill a lot of people; he wants to become immortal, an icon, and he knows that means he will have to kill them in a way that has maximum Freudian/Jungian impact on the popular unconscious. Leslie can talk for hours about the importance of letting his victims spend a lot of time in womblike closets and leaving a few appropriately phallic weapons scattered around for the Survivor Girl to use against him. This serial killer has obviously been reading a lot of semiotics textbooks.

Actually, the movie Behind the Mask reminds me of the most is Interview With the Assassin, a 2002 mockumentary about a movie director who stumbles into an uneasy friendship with a man who claims to be the guy who shot John F. Kennedy. They’re both great examples of how a smart director can turn a low budget and a lack of name actors into a virtue—if anything, the unpolished vérité style of both films makes their far-fetched plots seem oddly convincing. (Neil Burger, who made Assassin, went on to direct last year’s The Illusionist, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Glosserman also graduated to a bigger project in a couple of years.)

I hope actor Nathan Baesel gets some work out of this movie too. He plays Leslie with a boyish enthusiasm that’s utterly disarming—whenever he pulls off an especially neat trick, he’ll bound eagerly back to the camera crew and anxiously ask them, “Did you get that? Did you get that?” But he’s not a total goof—when he takes the filmmakers on a tour of the farmhouse where the killings will take place, you kind of have to marvel at how thoroughly and efficiently he’s planned for every contingency.

The logic of the film as a whole isn’t quite as airtight. It’s hard to understand why Leslie would allow a documentary crew into his life; and it’s even harder to believe that this director, a young, wide-eyed university student, would want to tackle a project this sleazy and morbid. Most of the twists are fairly easy to see coming as well, but since they’re just small parts of a large, very well-executed final action setpiece, you don’t get that crummy, joyless feeling that seizes your stomach when you realize you’ve just outsmarted the movie you’re watching.

There are a lot of intelligent young directors working in the horror field these days, but so many of them seem content to waste their smarts devising new torture scenarios. It’s nice to see someone like Scott Glosserman using his talents for good instead of evil—even if the same can’t be said for his film’s unsettlingly likable hero.

Robbin' Hitchcock

“Hitchcockian” may be the most misused adjective in all of film criticism. Most of the time it gets applied to any “old-fashioned” thriller that it would be safe to watch with your parents—movies like Derailed, Flightplan, or What Lies Beneath, movies without much blood but a whole lot of plot twists. Sometimes gimmicky thrillers like Phone Booth get called Hitchcockian too—I guess because they have a surface similarity to single-set Hitchcockian experiments like Rope, Lifeboat and Rear Window.

I’m not sure how Alfred Hitchcock, surely one of the most perverse directors ever to achieve success in the mainstream motion picture industry, became synonymous with old-school Hollywood wholesomeness, but I’m positive that if he’s got a DVD player up there in heaven, he wouldn’t be wasting his time with bloodless Hitchcock “homages” like The House on Carroll Street or Still of the Night—he’d be watching Paul Verhoeven movies like the sexy, twisted, utterly amazing Black Book... and he’d be chortling with pleasure all the way through it.

The film takes place in the dying months of World War II. Rachel (Carice van Houten), a Dutch Jew, has hooked up with the Dutch Resistance after watching Nazi soldiers mow down her entire family during an attempt to sail across the marshes under cover of night into Allied territory. During her first mission, she strikes up a chance acquaintance with Gestapo head Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch, the playwright with the bugged apartment in The Lives of Others). Soon she’s sharing his bed and working as his secretary. Müntze is no fool—he realizes that this woman, with her obviously dyed blonde hair, is a spy, but he decides not to blow her cover. Maybe he admires her nerve. Maybe he’s blinded by desire. Maybe he senses that she’s in love with him.

A Jewish woman falling for the head of the Nazi secret police! It’s an outrageous, even offensive premise—or at least it would be if Verhoeven’s filmmaking weren’t so skillful and the script (which Verhoeven co-wrote with frequent collaborator Gerard Soeteman) so complex, in its pulpy way, in its depiction of all the moral ambiguities that spring up during wartime. Many of the members of Rachel’s resistance cell are openly anti-Semitic—one in particular quite candidly says he has no qualms about letting dozens of Jews die if it means saving the life of his son. Meanwhile, many Nazi officers, sensing Germany’s doom, are busy working out deals with members of the Resistance to escape punishment after the war. As for Rachel, she somehow winds up being branded a traitor by Nazis and Dutch alike.

Black Book is Verhoeven’s first film in seven years since 2000’s poorly received Hollow Man—and the first film he’s made in his native Netherlands since 1983’s The Fourth Man. All that time away from the camera and from home (which in Verhoeven’s case may be the same thing) seems to have reinvigorated him: just about every shot and every sequence in Black Book is beautifully conceived and executed—every composition, every edit, every camera movement has a purpose. This is the kind of movie that makes you realize just how haphazardly most Hollywood directors arrange their actors within the frame.

Verhoeven will never be as beloved a filmmaker as Hitchcock. Hitchcock was an imp, with a mischievous sense of humour, but Verhoeven is a downright misanthrope. He lacks Hitchcock’s middle-class gentility, and goes much farther in his images—it’s doubtful, for instance, that Hitchcock would have ever done what Verhoeven does in Black Book to Carice van Houten and shown Tippi Hedren dyeing her pubic hair, or getting an enormous tub of excrement dumped over her head.

But I bet he would have liked to.

The Lady in the Water

The sign outside the remote Australian village of Jindabyne tells drivers they’re about to enter “A Tidy Town.” But when director Ray Lawrence shows us that sign at the start of the film Jindabyne, we know we’re in for a very messy experience indeed.

Jindabyne was adapted from Raymond Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home.” That’s the same story that inspired the Fred Ward/Buck Henry/Huey Lewis segment in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, the one about a group of male friends who go on a weekend fishing trip, only to discover the body of a dead girl floating in the river, whereupon they decide that rather than cut their fun short, they’ll tie the body to the riverbank, keep fishing and wait until they get home to report their find to the police.

Short Cuts spends most of its time on the fishing trip, and then climaxes with a devastating bedroom scene between Ward and Anne Archer in which the wife of one of the fishermen talks to him upon his return and slowly realizes, to her horror, that she has married a man capable of allowing a murdered girl to just rot in the lake while he whoops it up with his buddies just a few yards away.

Jindabyne, on the other hand, spends a lot more time on the aftermath of the wife’s discovery. Laura Linney plays the wife; in this version of the story, she’s a transplanted American living in Australia with her husband Stewart (Gabriel Byrne), a former racing champion who now runs the local garage. Cracks had started appearing in their marriage even before the fishing incident: after suffering some sort of unspecified nervous breakdown seven years earlier following the birth of their son Tom, Claire fled the house and left Stewart to raise the boy alone. Which only makes Stewart doubly resent the scolding glances Claire keeps shooting his way after she finds out about the dead girl—wasn’t her abandonment of duty even worse than his?

Lawrence and screenwriter Beatrix Christian complicate things even further by introducing a host of new characters into the story, my favourite being a little girl named Caylin-Calandria who keeps talking Tom into one morbid bit of mischief after another. They also make the dead girl an aborigine, a decision which adds an interesting cultural obstacle to Claire’s attempts to work out her feelings of guilt by visiting the girl’s home, taking up a collection in town for her family, and even, in the moving final sequence, attending her funeral.

Lawrence (whose previous film was Lantana, another Altmanesque ensemble film with a murdered woman at the centre of it) keeps the mood sombre, the colours muted—there’s little of the boisterous humour of Short Cuts here. Maybe he was influenced by the setting of the film—the vast, forbidding Australian landscape, the long, desolate desert roads, the huge, daunting skies. The original town of Jindabyne was intentionally flooded back in the ’60s and buried beneath an artificial lake, and the characters frequently mention the “drowned town” lying nearby. Lawrence creates an atmosphere of ominous, submerged emotions throughout Jindabyne the film—suppressed resentments, hidden prejudices.

It’s too bad he didn’t keep the identity of the girl’s killer hidden as well—if anything, the sight of this ordinary-looking middle-aged handyman skulking around the corners of the film only detracts from the drama at the centre of the film. Jindabyne has too many subplots too close to home, but this engrossing, well-observed expansion of Carver’s short story still counts as a small, good thing.