David Mamet Was Kung Fu Fighting

To walk into a movie theatre—to walk down the aisle, to take one’s seat, to rest one’s buttocks on the cushions that have cradled thousands of cheeks before yours... this is not an honourable activity. The moviegoer is not a man of honour. He watches others, he watches beautiful people perform a shadowplay, watches them kiss and fire guns and argue and, if the moviegoer is lucky, watches them undress. And then home he goes and sins no more. Hot-fucking-cha-cha-cha.

But if the film is directed by David Mamet, if the film is Redbelt, then the game is different. The game is different how? How is the game fucking different? The game differs, my friend, because the man understands the rules. He understands the rules of men. The man has played cards, the man has rolled the fucking dice, the man has rolled up his sleeves and he has gotten out of his car. He has brass balls. He has walked down the streets and done more than whistle a happy fucking tune.

Here’s a man. The man is named Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor). He’s a fighter. Do you need to know anything more? All right—he’s a teacher. He teaches policemen. He’s a professional. He’s a samurai. A Spartan warrior. He is the proprietor of a jujitsu studio in Los Angeles. City of Angels, but you can’t even trust a fucking angel anymore. The only person you can trust is a samurai like Mike. A man with a code. For what is life, what is manhood, without a code, without honour? One might well ask, what is hopscotch without a stone?

Mike passes down the age-old wisdom. “There is no situation you cannot escape from.” “There is always a way out.” A woman comes to him to learn to fight. Mike stands several yards away from her. “Can I strike you?” he asks. “No,” she says. He asks her to come closer. “Can I strike you?” “No.” Closer still—only a couple of feet away. “Can I strike you now?” “Yes.” Then he passes down the age-old wisdom: “Then don’t stand there.”

Is Mamet standing there? By which I mean, as a director, is he now standing where the critic may strike? Where the critic, the man of dishonour, may stand over his film, may straddle it and rain shit upon it? Yes. The critic may, for such is the way of the critic: to watch a fight and see only mindless physical exertion, to look upon Redbelt and see only contrivances and clichés, to look upon Tim Allen and wonder if he accidentally wandered onto David Mamet’s set from the Shaggy Dog sequel shooting next door.

But Redbelt is not playing the critics’ game. Mike refuses to play by the false values of the commercial fighting world, and if it means that he can no longer scrape together the shekels he needs to pay the rent on his dojo, then so fucking be it. So fucking be it. And if David Mamet refuses to play the critics’ game—if he wants to stage a climactic fight scene that even Sylvester Stallone would find a little on the phony side—then so be it. So be it in spades, my friend. Listen: nothing with a quill pen in it ever made a nickel.

Go to Ricky Jay, my friend, who plays a slimy fight promoter; go up to his pockmarked face and tell him you found Redbelt a little on the ludicrous side. Go to Joe Mantegna, who plays a slimy Hollywood producer, and tell him you thought Redbelt offended your feminist sensibilities with the scene where Mike tells a rape victim she should have been able to fight the guy off. Go to William H. Macy and ask him why he wasn’t invited to be in this movie too. Hell, go to Mamet himself and voice your pissant grievances, my friend, and see if you impress him the slightest jot or tittle.

You won’t, my friend. Because Mamet knows what he’s created. He knows Redbelt is as lethal as a perfect jujitsu move. He knows that if it he were Japanese and working with an all-Asian cast, those same critics would declare it a masterpiece. He knows he’s the master of the ring. He knows he has nothing to prove. He’s the professor. He’s the man behind the man behind the wheel. He’s so cool, sheep count him. What the fuck does any of that mean? You tell me. Who wears the redbelt? David Mamet wears the fucking redbelt, Junior. Now wipe that smirk off your face, you brain-dead liberal, before David Mamet wipes it off for you.

Moviegoer Diary: Diary of the Dead, C.H.U.D.

DIARY OF THE DEAD

Plot in a Nutshell
George A. Romero’s 2008 “reboot” of his zombie-movie universe, in which a group of student filmmakers making an amateur horror movie confront a real-life outbreak of zombies, and decide to document the escalating mass panic, uploading their footage to MySpace whenever they get a chance to breathe.

Thoughts
It’s been awhile since I saw George A. Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead, but my memory of it is that it, even though it was constructed as a “conventional” dramatic feature, it achieved a far more convincing sense of naturalism in the midst of unfolding horror than this disappointing new film, which actively aims at handheld documentary-style realism.

There are two big problems with the film. One is Romero’s surprisingly amateurish, overemphatic dialogue. Most of Diary of the Dead consists of a film-within-the-film, a documentary about the zombie outbreak called The Death of Death, begun by student filmmaker Jason Creed (Joshua Close) and completed by his girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan). Debra is not, sad to say, a gifted editor—her voiceover narration, full of banal observations about human nature and the fear of death, most of it perfectly obvious from the footage she’s showing us, is a major distraction.

Romero ruins some of his best jokes this way. For instance, the film begins with Jason filming a chase scene from his horror movie—a mummy slowly shambling along, chasing a nubile Elisha Cuthbert lookalike through the forest. When Jason yells cut, the actress sourly complains about what a horror cliché the whole sequence is: the girl falling down as the monster chases her, tearing her dress and exposing her tits in the process. Inevitably, that same actress winds up being chased through the woods by the same actor—only now he’s a zombie and he really is trying to kill her. And she really does fall down and tear her dress and briefly expose her breasts. It’s not the most inspired gag in movie history, but it could have been an amusing bit of cheap irony. So what possessed Romero to actually have the actress underline the moment by looking straight into Jason’s camera and saying, “It’s the same thing as in your stupid fucking movie!”

The actors in general struggle to sound spontaneous while reciting Romero’s awkward dialogue—none more so than Scott Wentworth, playing the students’ world-weary, alcoholic professor, whose lines are filled with lofty, pseudo-poetic turns of phrase that I guess reflect Romero’s notion of how literary people speak. It’s surprising that he didn’t dress him in a cape.

The film’s second big tonal problem is that, even though Diary of the Dead tries to create a “raw,” “in-the-moment” mood—we’re constantly told that Jason’s camera is documenting a “truth” that the mainstream media is trying to hush up—Romero can’t resist the urge to stage awesome “kills” at every opportunity. True, it’s pretty spectacular to see someone kill a zombie ER doctor with an IV pole, or to watch an Amish farmer ram a scythe through his own forehead, having it come out the back of his head, and penetrate the brain of the zombie who’s just bitten him—but these phony “Hollywood”-style death scenes only work against the low-key documentary universe Romero is trying to set up.

I know Cloverfield (another horror movie that purported to consist entirely of “found” footage) took a lot of critical flak earlier this year for its shallow characters and a few of its plot contrivances, but I think it does about as good a job as any movie ever has of establishing a successful aesthetic of what you might call “fake naturalism.” And I suspect that as more and more people become accustomed to the notion of filming their lives with ever-smaller videocameras and ever-smarter cellphones, I think more and more movies will adopt the “fake naturalist” approach to storytelling, with actors finding ever more sophisticated performing styles to accommodate it.

Diary of the Dead seems terribly dated even now—I hate to think what it will look like 10 years from now.

RATING: 2/5


C.H.U.D.

Plot in a Nutshell
Radiation and improperly stored industrial waste combine to turn New York City’s homeless population into horrifying “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers” in Douglas Cheek’s 1984 cult horror movie.

Thoughts
I remember a horror-loving friend of mine showing me this movie on video when I was maybe 15 or 16. I think it may have been the first film I’d ever seen on home video, so there was something exciting and thrilling about the idea of being able to conjure a movie onto your TV set whenever you wanted. And I was kind of a sheltered, sensitive movie-watcher back then—to be honest, I was always a little bit afraid to watch horror movies, even into my teens—and so I remember also feeling a little apprehensive as this one started. My friend was a big Fangoria reader and had a much higher tolerance for gore and violence than I did, so I wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle a movie with “cannibalistic” right there in the title.

I hardly needed to worry: ’80s horror movies don’t get much more goofy and genial than C.H.U.D.—much like Tremors about a decade later, C.H.U.D. has a quirky, good-hearted sensibility. It feels like the creators would have been just as happy to leave out the C.H.U.D.s entirely and make a movie about John Heard’s photographer hanging out with Daniel Stern’s soup-kitchen owner—which would have been just as well, since the monsters look pretty ridiculous—but had to put all the horror stuff in if they wanted anyone to invest in it.

There’s a surprising amount of talent in front of and behind the camera in C.H.U.D.: besides John Heard and Daniel Stern (both of whom are eager participants in the DVD audio commentary), the cast includes Kim Greist (from Brazil and Manhunter) as Heard’s model girlfriend, as well as early performances from future Coen Brothers regulars Sam McMurray, John Goodman, and Jon Polito. The film was edited, amazingly enough, by Claire Simpson, who just two years later would win an Oscar for editing Platoon. (She was nominated again recently for her excellent work on The Constant Gardener.)

The big mystery man in the credits is screenwriter Parnell Hall, whose name is roundly booed on the DVD commentary when it appears onscreen. According to Daniel Stern, he and co-star Christopher Curry (who plays Captain Bosch, the Roy Scheider figure in the script’s Jaws-like scenario) wrote “at least 50 per cent of this fucking movie” but never received credit for it.

I couldn’t figure out if Hall rewrote Stern and Curry or if it was the other way around, but C.H.U.D. is one of the rare movies that could have benefited from a worse screenplay—or at least a screenplay that was a little bit more comfortable with its own genre. Stern and Curry keep inserting “serious acting moments” into the action—most notably a long monologue for Captain Bosch in which he talks about the death of his wife—that just don’t have any place in a horror movie about radioactive monsters crawling out of the sewers.

At the same time, it’s kind of refreshing to watch a monster movie that has absolutely no teenagers in it whatsoever—everybody in C.H.U.D. is at least 30, living in a crummy apartment, and struggling to pay their rent or just hold down a job. You know what? I can actually relate to C.H.U.D. much better now than when I was a dumb 15-year-old watching monster movies at my friend’s house. I never thought I’d say this, but... C.H.U.D. speaks to me.

Anyway, here's a clip of Kim Greist chopping a C.H.U.D.'s head off. It's masterfully edited!



RATING: 2.5/5

The Musicgoer: Flight of the Conchords' Flight of the Conchords

FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS
Flight of the Conchords
(Sub Pop)
*** (out of five)

Well, it’s nowhere near as funny as the TV show.

Should I be more constructive with my feedback? Fine: Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie’s HBO sitcom about “New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk-comedy duo” that would be a minor masterpiece of deadpan comedy even without the dead-on parodies of everything from David Bowie space-rock to breezy ’60s French pop; this disc is merely a collection of funny songs. And there’s no Murray! (Well, okay, there's "Leggy Blonde"... but I want some band meetings, dammit!)

But on its own merits, Flight of the Conchords generates enough chuckles to be worth buying, or at least borrowing it for a few days from your comedy-nerd friend. “Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenocerous,” their most famous track, feels a little stale in this version, but their Pet Shop Boys parody “Inner City Pressure” holds up surprisingly well, as does “Think About It,” which is what What’s Going On might have sounded like if Marvin Gaye were a white guy whose awareness of urban violence was limited to a few dimly remembered episodes of Kojak. And it’s hard to resist a band whose idea of a seductive lyric is “You’re so beautiful, you could be a part-time model.”

Moviegoer Diary: Blast of Silence, Jar City

BLAST OF SILENCE

Plot in a Nutshell
A misanthropic hitman arrives in New York to carry out a murder in Allen Baron’s legendary 1961 crime flick, newly issued on DVD by Criterion.

Thoughts
Made almost at the same time as Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls, another independently made but surprisingly potent genre flick to get the Criterion treatment, Blast of Silence is part film noir, part New York documentary, part John Cassavetes-style character study, and part Notes From the Underground.

The main character, hitman Frankie Bono, doesn’t exactly cut a terrifying figure. He’s a bit of a shrimp, actually—he’s played by director Allen Baron, who bears a strong resemblance to Kevin Pollak. Frankie doesn’t talk much, but we sure to hear a lot of his thoughts courtesy of a near-constant voiceover.

Except it’s hard to tell if those actually are Frankie’s thoughts we’re hearing. Bizarrely, they’re spoken in the second person—everything is “you” do this and “you” think that—and they’re delivered by an entirely different actor (an uncredited Lionel Stander, whose tangy Bronx accent gives extra spice to lines like “You’re alone, just the way ya like it!”). Are we hearing the imaginary voice that Frankie carries around with him inside his head wherever he goes? Or have we become Frankie, victims of some strange cosmic transmigration of souls? It’s the craziest filmic device, and yet it’s kind of a brilliant strategy to get an audience to identify intimately with a character we’d otherwise feel completely alienated from.

And it gives us a personal stake in the amazingly bleak final scene. This 77-minute movie has so little plot that I hate to give away any of it. Suffice it to say that the bulk of the film takes place over the Christmas season in Manhattan—along with The Ice Harvest, Blast of Silence is one of the great Christmas-bummer movies of all time—and it ends with a gunfight somewhere in the marshes outside the city. The sequence looks like it really was filmed in subzero temperatures—the sky is grey, a cold drizzle is falling from the sky, and you can practically feel the wind slicing through the actors’ coats. I swear, the scene looks like something straight out of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó.

The whole thing is as nasty and nihilistic as noir can possibly get, and if you’re anything like me, that’s just the way ya like it!



RATING: 4.5/5


JAR CITY

Plot in a Nutshell
A weary Icelandic cop discovers that the motive for a seemingly senseless murder can be traced back to crimes that happened 30 years earlier in this engrossing police procedural directed by Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavik).

Thoughts
If I ever take a trip to Iceland, I’m definitely bringing my own food—if Jar City is to be believed, Icelanders eat even worse than the Brits.

Early on in the film, for instance, the cop played by Ingvar Sigurdsson is heading home after a long day on the job and makes a late-night visit at some kind of drive-thru window, where he orders a “sheep’s head.” Now, in my naïveté, I thought that this was just a fanciful name for some kind of sandwich or batter-fried meat—that it only sounded disgusting, like headcheese. Nope... in the next scene, we see Sigurdsson poring over the files of the case while he snacks on a literal sheep’s head, sticking a pocketknife into the eye socket to scoop out the eyeball and tearing apart the head’s grey, greasy flesh with his bare hands.

Kormákur seems amused by the disgusting eating habits of the Icelanders, so much so that it becomes a minor theme of the film. In my very favourite scene, a junior policeman joins Sigurdsson at a buffet restaurant. The character has evidently spent some time in the States, a fact that, hilariously, provides the other cops an excuse to subject him to nonstop comments about his manhood, even though there’s nothing the least bit swishy about him.

Anyway, Sigurdsson invites the younger cop to grab a plate and get something to eat. He does, but he takes one glance at steam tray after steam tray piled high with deepfried organ meats and asks the guy behind the counter if they carry anything without meat. “No,” the guy says contemptuously. “We don’t serve any of that guacamole bullshit in here!”

“Guacamole bullshit”! Oh God, I laughed for, like, two minutes at that. Maybe I’d have a good time in Iceland after all.

RATING: 3/5

Apple Danish

It’s not often that you run across a movie where a neo-Nazi skinhead is the only sensible character onscreen, but that’s what you get with Adam’s Apples, an intriguing little fable written and directed by Denmark’s Anders Thomas Jensen, the ultra-prolific writer of nearly every Danish movie you’ve ever heard of that Lars von Trier didn’t make.

The skinhead, who’s about 40 years old—Adam Pedersen is his name—is fresh out of prison and has arrived at a small countryside church, where he will fulfill the terms of his parole by performing a few months of community service. He is taciturn, antisocial, and uncommunicative: he hangs a picture of Hitler over his dresser, shows no interest in socializing with the two other ex-convicts living at the church, and when the priest, Ivan, asks him to set a goal that he’d like to complete by the time he leaves, Adam (who happens to be munching on an apple from the tree outside) flippantly suggests he’d like to bake an apple cake. “Fine!” the priest cheerfully replies, and assigns Adam the task of caring for the apple tree.

It’s right about here that Adam really begins to suspect this priest has more than a couple of screws loose upstairs. As played by Mads Mikkelsen (whose chiseled GQ-quality cheekbones arthouse audiences will remember from After the Wedding and who everyone else will know as the poker-playing villain from Casino Royale), Ivan is such a man of faith that reality barely even registers with him anymore. When a pregnant parishioner whose doctors have told her she stands a 60 per cent chance of having a severely handicapped child and asks Ivan whether she should get an abortion, he encourages her to have the child; after all, he says he and his wife faced the same dilemma, but their child came out perfectly fine. A few scenes later, we see Ivan’s child—who turns out to be confined to a wheelchair, and completely unable to move or communicate.

He wasn’t lying to the woman, though; he honestly believes his son is perfectly healthy. Ivan exists within a serene private bubble of delusion that prevents every potentially upsetting bit of news from getting anywhere near his brain.

Ulrike Thomsen (who played the troublemaking son in The Celebration) gets big laughs just from his silent, incredulous reaction shots as Adam watches Ivan blithely tell one baldfaced lie after another. His wife didn’t commit suicide, Ivan says, she accidentally overdosed when she mistook some pills for yellow M&Ms. That old man he watched die, frightened and alone, in his hospital bed? At his funeral, Ivan tells everyone he passed away celebrating the all-embracing love of God. And at a certain point, Adam figures out what his real mission at the church will be: not to bake a cake, but to force Ivan to confront reality and shatter his faith. If Ivan wants to believe that the devil is responsible for any misfortunes that enter his life, Adam decides to convince him that they’re actually the work of God.

With its blend of deadpan comedy, shaggy-dog plotting, and gnomic attitude toward faith and the existence of God, I can see Adam’s Apples appealing to moviegoers with a taste for culty-quirky foreign films like Bagdad Café or Schultze Plays the Blues. Myself, while I liked the setup and I liked Thomsen and Mikkelsen a whole lot, Jensen’s handling of the characters and his themes ultimately became too glib and cartoonish for me to take them seriously—especially the “reformed” Pakistani bankrobber who speaks in broken Danish and starts randomly shooting people the moment he gets a gun back in his hand.

Is it possible to like a movie without really liking it? There’s a Zen koan for you, and if I ever figure out the answer, maybe then I’ll know how sincerely I can recommend Adam’s Apples to you.

Fetus And Slack-Jawed Yokel

Baby Mama is one of those comedies where you get the feeling that the only funny moments are one-liners and offhand character bits that the actors sneaked in on their own—would this make them surrogate gag-writers?

The chief smuggler here is the brilliant comic Amy Poehler, in what I believe is her first above-the-title starring role: the role of Angie Ostrowski, a none-too-bright unemployed woman who agrees to be the surrogate mother for infertile corporate VP Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey), doesn’t have much of a centre, but Poehler doodles some amusing comic business around its edges. There’s a great little moment, for instance, in the scene where Kate drives the newly inseminated Angie back to her house: I love the hilariously insincere way Poehler pretends to search her pockets for some money to pay for her share of the gas. And Poehler finds an oddly sweet, humanizing moment in the scene where Angie’s water breaks: she looks back over her shoulder at the mess she’s made on the sidewalk and guiltily asks Kate if they should do something to clean it up.

But even with Steve Martin (playing Fey’s boss, a fatuous organic-food tycoon with a long, grey ponytail) and Sigourney Weaver (as the condescending owner of an upscale surrogacy clinic, still terrifyingly fertile well into her fifties) contributing some amusing supporting bits, they barely register under the sound of Baby Mama creaking along from one telegraphed plot turn to the next. So few comedies come out of Hollywood with two women in their 30s sharing the leads, so it’s amazing how Baby Mama still manages to seem completely conventional and familiar, from the opening scene of Kate scaring away a date by talking nonstop about wanting to have a baby, to the dishonest final plot twist, which I can only describe as a fetus ex machina.

Maybe Baby Mama wouldn’t seem quite so disappointing if it starred someone other than Tina Fey, whose TV sitcom 30 Rock is so fast, so funny, and so sharp about how it feels for a smart woman in her late 30s to still be trolling the dating scene. The episodes in which Fey’s character can’t seem to avoid falling back into her relationship with a crass beeper salesman pack more class-conflict humour into 22 minutes than Baby Mama manages in more than four times the running time.

There’s a lot of comedy to be mined from the idea of Kate’s entitled, touchy-feely upper-income notions about motherhood—all mommy-yoga classes and language-instruction CDs—colliding with Angie’s considerably more, shall we say, unrefined approach. (When Kate give Angie a glass of water to drink instead of her usual Red Bull, Angie spits it out immediately: “What is that?” she exclaims, genuinely appalled by what she’s tasting. “It’s horrible!”)

But writer/director Michael McCullers—who also co-wrote two of the Austin Powers movies—is weirdly unwilling to ask himself what kinds of arguments these two women might actually have with each other in this strange situation. He goes to the trouble of giving Kate a bitchy WASP mom (Holland Taylor) and a more understanding sister (Maura Tierney), but except for one rushed scene, never actually has them interact with the uncouth Angie. Halfway through the film, McCullers reveals that Angie has been faking her pregnancy the whole time, an annoying revelation that pretty much derails the film for good. The last quarter of Baby Mama is total hackwork: there’s a musical montage; there’s a freaking-out-on-the-way-to-the-hospital routine, even a climactic courtroom scene—always a sign of desperation in any comedy script.

And through it all, Tina Fey puts on a game face, even though she must be wondering what she’s doing in a part that might as well have gone to Teri Hatcher. Blergh.

I'm Going To Gitmo, Sucka!

Who would have imagined that a movie which begins with its heroes getting racially profiled at an airport, tossed into prison at Guantánamo Bay, threatened with rape at gunpoint by American soldiers (a practice that is depicted as so routine there’s even a slang term for it), and questioned by a Homeland Security officer who literally wipes his ass with the Bill of Rights, would also turn out to contain the most sympathetic portrayal of George W. Bush of any film in the last eight years?

Welcome to the topsy-turvy politics of Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, a sequel to 2004’s stoner cult movie Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. It’s four years later, but the action in this film picks up right where the previous one left off, with the marijuana smoke barely even given time to dissipate. Korean-American Harold (John Cho) has decided to travel to Amsterdam in hopes of hooking up with Maria (Paula Garcés), the pretty neighbour he finally worked up the nerve to kiss at the end of the first movie, before some hypothetical good-looking Dutchman can waltz in and steal her affections; for Indian-American Kumar (Kal Penn), the prospect of legal weed is enough to make him want to tag along. But when a fellow passenger mistakes the sinister-looking “smokeless bong” Kumar has sneaked onto the plane for a bomb, it’s off to Gitmo for our luckless heroes.

As the title implies, they’re not in there for long: federal prison is merely the first stop in a long, surreal journey that stretches from Cuba to the room in George Bush’s ranch where he goes to put his feet up, smoke a little weed, and hide out from Dick Cheney. (“That guy scares the shit out of me,” he mutters guiltily.) The climactic scene, in which Bush shares some of his stash with Harold and Kumar, fugitives from his own government, is the movie’s comic masterstroke: like Kumar, Dubya is just an easygoing underachiever sick of having done everything in his life just to make his dad happy. When Harold tells Bush that he’s not sure he trusts his government anymore after everything that’s happened to him, Bush gets the most sensible line in the entire movie: “Hell, I don’t trust the government!” he says. “You don’t have to trust your government to be a patriot. You just have to trust your country.”

Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who wrote and directed the film, trust their country too. They realize that it’s filled with plenty of right-wing douchebags and racist seniors and inbred Klansmen—and of course, there’s always that drugged-up sex maniac Neil Patrick Harris to watch out for—but the map is also dotted with helpful way stations where Harold and Kumar can be sure to find all the food, clothing, and naked women they need. Hayden and Schlossberg love to upend cultural clichés—in fact, their main comic strategy is to introduce a racial or regional stereotype and then leave you guessing whether it will turn out to hold true. A scary, muscular black man turns out to be an orthodontist, the shack of a deer-hunting redneck turns out to look like a Manhattan penthouse inside, and that Republican bride-to-be turns out to be a pot-smoking superfreak at heart.

For all its raunchy humour (which is often more off-putting than funny) and all the unnecessary reprises of gags from the first movie (including a return visit from the Giant Bag of Weed), Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is an unusually inclusive movie. In this contentious election season, it’s maybe the only comedy you can imagine Barack Obama and George W. Bush laughing at together.

The Musicgoer: M83's Saturdays = Youth

M83
Saturdays = Youth
(Mute)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

The Saturdays that the title of M83’s new album refers to belong to the long, lazy weekends of 20 years ago—those teenage days when you felt at once invincible and depressed, living in circumscribed surroundings but feeling panoramic emotions. And if you were French electronic music king Anthony Gonzalez, you were watching The Breakfast Clubover and over again, wearing out your Simple Minds and Cocteau Twins albums, and dreaming of the day you could afford some really good synthesizers and start making music that sounded just like it—only, you know, more epic.

With Saturdays = Youth, that day has arrived for Gonzalez, who’s even lined up Cocteau Twins collaborator Ken Thomas to produce it. The results are sublime, especially the achingly pretty “Skin of the Night” (featuring Morgan Kibby’s stretched-thin vocals) and the uptempo headfiller “Couleurs.” Even the closer, “Midnight Souls Still Remain”—11 minutes of slow, repetitive Enoisms—haunts more than it annoys.

Saturdays = Youth is a nerdily nostalgic project, I suppose, not unlike the ceramic elephant lamp Anthony Michael Hall talks about making in The Breakfast Club, with one big difference. This one lights up.

What If That Had Been Poop?

Remember when the climax of John Waters' Pink Flamingos was regarded as the foulest, most disgusting image even committed to celluloid? Eating an actual piece of dogshit: what concept could be more offensive, more stomach-turning, more unfunny, more guaranteed to send mainstream audiences running from the theatre?

Fast-forward 35 years, and the idea of poop-eating has become so funny that no fewer than two mainstream Hollywood comedies—one of them the year's most popular children's movie—have used it as a key sell-line in their trailers.

In the upcoming Tina Fey/Amy Poehler pregnancy flick Baby Mama, the joke is a fakeout:


But in the trailer for Alvin and the Chipmunks, it's a total Divine moment:


I mean, Alvin may be computer-generated, but he really does eat a piece of shit! He chews it up and swallows it! I saw this trailer multiple times in the theatre and I truly could not believe what I was seeing. When the Alvin sequel gets made, are the ads going to reference the 2 Girls, 1 Cup video?

Moviegoer Diary: Road Games, Forgetting Sarah Marshall

ROAD GAMES

Plot in a Nutshell
Richard Franklin’s 1981 thriller about a trucker (Stacy Keach) who becomes convinced that the driver of a green van he keeps crossing paths with as he travels down the empty Australian highway is killing female hitchhikers and dismembering their bodies.

Thoughts
I originally conceived of these “Moviegoer Diary” entries as short, snappy assessments of whatever random movies I happened to watch on TV or DVD—and I’ve watched in horror as they gradually started running several hundred words longer than my regular posts.

In that sense, I’m a little like Patrick Quid, the hero of Road Games, who fills the lonely hours he spends behind the wheel by talking, talking, talking to himself, saying whatever damn thing pops into his head. Okay, he’s technically talking to his pet dingo Boswell, but I don’t think Boswell understands half of what he’s saying.

In fact, Quid spends so much of Road Games alone and talking to himself that the film becomes as much of a character study as it does a thriller. This is the second film I’ve watched from Anchor Bay’s recent “Cult Fiction” series of DVD reissues—the first was Class of 1984—and it’s the second pleasant surprise in a row: well-made, well-structured, with a great sense of place. It’s the rare slasher movie that genuinely seems to like people, and which has more on its mind than merely setting up the next grisly kill.

I don’t know if director Richard Franklin planned the movie this way from the outset, but it’s almost as if he was so won over by Stacy Keach’s unexpectedly winning performance and his easygoing chemistry with Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a runaway heiress turned hitchhiker—this may be the only slasher movie that will make you think of It Happened One Night!—that there are stretches in the film where he kind of forgets about the serial-killer plot and just sits back and watches Keach and Curtis getting to know each other.

I’ve never been a big Stacy Keach fan, but now I’m wondering if I just haven’t seen him in the right movies. He always scared me a little, to be honest. He reminded me of the kind of dad who drinks a little too much and beats you up if you don’t do well at the Little League softball game. But he’s fantastic in The Ninth Configuration, which I finally caught up with a few months ago, and he really won me over very early on in Road Games with his reaction to a station wagon whose back seat is stuffed absolutely full of beachballs, footballs, and soccer balls. He watches the car drive past him and then somberly tells Boswell, “Now there goes a man with a lot of balls.”

Not that Road Games doesn’t have good scares in it. There’s a tense standoff between Keach and the man who he thinks is the killer in the men’s room of a roadside gas station, a giddily effective final shock, and you know how bad horror movies will try and goose you with a phony “cat scare”? Road Games delivers a “kangaroo scare” that just about propelled me through the ceiling of my apartment.


And there are enough strange directorial indulgences to make this into a proper cult film worthy of the term. I’m thinking, for instance, of the way Franklin shoots the first death scene, with white light absolutely flooding from the bathroom doorway in this tiny motel room—I swear, it’s like the portal to the other dimension from Poltergeist. And there’s a memorably bizarre semi-dream sequence as a sleep-starved Keach tails the killer’s van down the highway while trying to shake off the hallucinations his mind keeps conjuring up. I mean, just look at this crazy image Franklin put into this scene: he’s got the van’s rear windows sprouting a pair of eyes! It’s the rare horror director who’d try for an effect this surreal. What can I say? Now there goes a man with balls.

RATING: 4/5



FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL

Plot in a Nutshell
Jason Segel breaks up with his TV actress girlfriend (Kristen Bell) and goes on a Hawaiian vacation in hopes of forgetting her, only to find she’s staying at the same hotel with her new boyfriend, playboy British rocker Aldous Snow (Russell Brand).

Thoughts
Yeah, I laughed plenty. Jason Segel doesn’t quite reach the extremes of pathetic heartbreak that he made his specialty on Freaks and Geeks and especially on Undeclared, where his recurring role as the clingy lost-distance boyfriend of a cute college freshman remains one of the most breathtakingly go-for-broke comic performances I’ve ever seen. I mean, just check out this hilarious/disturbing clip...

So it’s neat to see how Segel (who wrote the script to Forgetting Sarah Marshall himself) has been able to turn himself into a comic leading man without entirely losing the sense that he could burst into uncontrollable sobs at any given moment. And like all the films from the Judd Apatow factory, it’s unusually generous towards its supporting cast. Jonah Hill’s (as a starstruck Aldous Snow fan) doesn’t quite connect, but Paul Rudd gets laughs as a blissfully stoned surfing instructor (“Do less! Do less!”). Maria Thayer (Tammi Littlenut from Strangers With Candy!) shows up as one half as a honeymooning couple, and delivers what for me might have been the film’s biggest laugh in the scene where she experiences her first orgasm and starts yelling, “Sex! Sex!”

But then, all the women in the film get to play funny, well-rounded, sympathetic characters—a rare thing in modern romantic comedies. Even Carlo Gallo, Segel’s ex-girlfriend from Undeclared, shows up in a funny scene as a one-night stand who ruins the mood by compulsively saying “Hi!” over and over again as Segel pumps away on top of her.

Two other quick observations:

(1) Like Knocked Up, the least interesting parts of Forgetting Sarah Marshall have to do with the characters’ travails in the entertainment industry. (Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up was an on-air personality on E!, while in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Kristen Bell plays the star of a CSI-style TV crime show, while Segel plays the show’s composer.) Sarah Marshall gets off some good laughs from William Baldwin’s sendup of David Caruso (“She won’t be winning anymore beauty pageants... not without a face!”), but all this showbiz stuff feels too rarefied and insidery—especially when much of Segel’s appeal comes from what a regular-looking schlub he is.

(2) Was I the only person who was a little bit disappointed by Segel’s much-publicized full-frontal nude scene? Or at least surprised by how briefly his penis was visible, given all the hype? All the advance discussion led me to expect the male equivalent of Julianne Moore’s bottomless scene from Short Cuts—an extended, unblinking moment of exquisite comic awkwardness, with Segel’s penis just hanging there, as sad as he is, after his girlfriend dumps him. We get a few shots of Segel’s junk, but the camera cuts away from the sight of it so quickly, I actually found it more distracting than a long, unflinching nude shot would have been. It’s almost as if the editor, William Kerr (who also edited Superbad and Tommy Boy) thought audiences honestly could not handle the sight of it for more than a fraction of a second. It’s bizarre.

Could the MPAA be the culprit. According to an interview with Segel in Entertainment Weekly, the MPAA automatically gives an R rating to any movie that shows male nudity “as long as it’s flaccid. But it was very important to me that it not be completely flaccid.” Could Segel’s insistence on non-total flaccidity have gotten the film in dutch with the MPAA? Are all those awkward, lightning-fast cutaways a compromise with the censors? If Segel had been just a little less excited to be sharing the screen with Kristen Bell, would the editing of the film be entirely different?

I want answers, dammit!

RATING: 4/5

Dearly Deported

Sometimes I think Anne Tyler is the greatest unacknowledged influence on the last two decades of American indie cinema—or at least that subset of indie cinema that tends to dominate Sundance. I’m thinking of those small-scale character comedy-dramas in which a repressed main character—sad, lonely, getting older, seemingly set in their ways—learns to embrace life again thanks to a chance encounter with a dynamic, “exotic” new friend or lover.

That’s the template that has served Tyler well in novel after novel; maybe she didn’t necessarily invent it, but in books like Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist, she definitely brought the genre to a new level of artistic refinement. And no Indiewood inheritor of the Tyler tradition, from Box of Moonlight to Shall We Dance? to Punch-Drunk Love to Garden State to, well, The Accidental Tourist, has ever quite matched Tyler’s unique ability to show a character coming out of their shell without ever quite dispelling the melancholy mood that the story started out with.

That is, not until The Visitor, writer/director Tom McCarthy’s beautifully executed followup to his 2003 debut The Station Agent. Richard Jenkins—that doleful character actor from Six Feet Under and Flirting With Disaster with the receding hairline and dour expression, whose looks so epitomize the dull, middle-aged office drone that you can hardly believe he ever went into a crazy profession like acting in the first place—plays Walter Vale, an economics professor whose life is on permanent autopilot, teaching the same syllabus year after year, eating the same food, and probably going to bed at the same time and having the same dreamless sleep.

Walter lives in Connecticut, but he maintains an apartment in New York. While in town to deliver a paper at a globalization conference, he enters that apartment, only to discover a young couple squatting there—a Syrian musician named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese wife Zainab (Danai Gurira). The two of them are obviously harmless, and Walter (who doesn’t have the heart to throw them out into the street and is likely starved for company besides) lets them stay.

He even strikes up a friendship with Tarek, who teaches Walter to play the djembe and even invites him to join an informal drum circle in Central Park. Later, when Tarek—who is in the country illegally—is arrested and faces deportation, Walter finds himself fighting Tarek’s cause with unaccustomed passion, hiring him a lawyer and making the long journey to Queens to visit him in the depressing detention centre in which he’s being held.

I know how terrible that plot summary makes this movie sound—how sentimental, how familiar and tendentious. “Too bad the Arab guy gets deported, but at least his repressed white friend learned to live again!” I know, I know: what kind of moral is that?

But McCarthy’s handling of this material (and the performances by Jenkins, Sleiman and Hiam Abbass, who makes a late but pivotal entrance into the story as Tarek’s mother Mouna) are so subtle and sharply observed that The Visitor resists simplistic readings. It’s not a movie about tired “we are all brothers” themes; it’s a movie about these specific people, who keep revealing surprising aspects of their humanity through small but significant gestures: the way Walter discreetly turns his head away when he visits Tarek and holds letters from Zainab up to the glass partition for him to read; or the empathetic way Mouna reacts to the news that the pianist on the classical CD that Walter loves to listen to is his late wife.

I’ve read some reviews of this film that have found its political messages too obvious, or its portrayal of its foreign characters too simplistic. I disagree; it all seemed remarkably graceful to me. There’s a scene early in the film where Walter is taking piano lessons and being admonished by his teacher to “let the train through”—in other words, to arch his fingers higher, as if to form a train tunnel. McCarthy plays a familiar melody in The Visitor, but he lifts his fingers high enough to let the train through.

Lucky To Be Alive

I stumbled into the men’s room after attending a screening of Fugitive Pieces, and as I washed my hands, I looked at myself in the mirror and was horrified at what I saw. Who was this old man staring back at me? When I bounded into the multiplex and bought my ticket, I felt young, spry, full of promise, and in love with cinema. But now, sadly, Fugitive Pieces had left me old, weary, barely able to stagger outside the theatre under my own locomotion, every last spark of life that once coursed through my bloodstream snuffed out by the crushing dullness, the suffocating tastefulness of Fugitive Pieces. So numbing was this film’s effect that I barely realized what this movie was doing to me there in the theatre—my skin turning dry and brittle, my hair turning grey, the muscles in my limbs atrophying. Thank God this movie didn’t last 20 minutes longer, or else I might have died right there in my seat, one more anonymous, unmourned victim of the English-language Canadian film industry. The scourge of the nation!

Fugitive Pieces is based on the novel by Anne Michaels, a book which I (like most people I know) read about 20 pages of before giving up on it. (Sorry... I can only handle so much "beautiful writing" before I bail out.) It’s the story of Jakob Beer, who as a young Polish boy watches Nazis massacre his entire family (including his beloved older sister Bella). After fleeing into the forest, he is rescued by Athos (Rade Serbedzija), a kindly Greek archaeologist who smuggles the boy back home with him to the idyllic island of Eidos, raising him on a diet of lamb, fish, and old Greek folk sayings.

After the war ends, Athos accepts a teaching job at the University of Toronto, where Jakob (now played by Stephen Dillane) grows up into a successful writer of insufferably pretentious-sounding books and the lover of Alex, a beautiful, high-spirited blonde shiksa (Rosamund Pike). But the loss of Bella continues to weigh heavily on Jakob’s mind—and only after many years, many, many return trips to Greece, and many, many, many scenes of Jakob staring expressionlessly at old photographs is he able to find true happiness with a new lover, Michaela (Ayelet Zurer), who finds Jakob’s morose personality, nondescript looks, and tendency to follow up sex with long, melancholy monologues about how his sister was raped and killed by Nazi soldiers inexplicably alluring.

Fugitive Pieces was written and directed by Toronto-born filmmaker Jeremy Podeswa, who has worked on a long list of high-profile TV dramas, including Six Feet Under, Rome, The Riches, Dexter, Nip/Tuck, and many, many more. Podeswa is by all accounts an efficient, professional director: he gets along with actors, he can adhere to a tight schedule, and he can deliver good-looking footage without any distracting auteurist indulgences getting in the way. But whenever Podeswa turns his hand to features, it’s his shortcomings that are more apparent: a problem with pace, dull visual metaphors, and a very Canadian kind of emotional reticence. Podeswa’s previous films, The Five Senses and Eclipse, are everything I hate about Canadian movies—the kind of superficially “intelligent,” “arty” indie fare that doesn’t actually do anything to startle your brain or your eye.

And in Stephen Dillane, Podeswa has found his perfect leading man—as Jakob, Dillane gives a performance so locked-in, so bloodless, so starved of vitality, it’s almost like some kind of acting stunt, as if he and Podeswa decided to see if it was possible for someone to go through an entire movie without doing anything even the slightest bit interesting.

How in the world did Podeswa extract this performance from Dillane? Did he demand multiple takes from him, to the point of exhaustion, like David Fincher on the set of Zodiac? Did he hypnotize him before the cameras started rolling, like Werner Herzog did to the cast of Heart of Glass? Or did he just show him the dailies of Fugitive Pieces and crush his spirit that way, setting up an infinite feedback loop of dullness?

Moviegoer Diary: Secret Ceremony, The Bank Job

SECRET CEREMONY

Plot in a Nutshell
Joseph Losey’s 1968 psychological drama starring Elizabeth Taylor as a woman who gets “adopted” as a replacement mother by a deluded child-woman (Mia Farrow) living alone in London in a gigantic Art Deco mansion.

Thoughts
Funny what sticks in your head. I’ve been mildly curious about this movie for years on the basis of nothing more than an offhand but enthusiastic reference Camille Paglia made to it in a 1992 essay on Elizabeth Taylor. Here’s what she says about it:

“One of the most spectacular moments of my moviegoing career occurred in college as I watched Joseph Losey’s bizarre Secret Company [sic]. Halfway through the film, inexplicably and without warning, Elizabeth Taylor in a violet velvet suit and turban suddenly walks across the screen in front of a wall of sea-green tiles. It is an overcast London day; the steel-gray light makes the violet and green iridescent. This is Elizabeth Taylor at her most vibrant, mysterious, and alluring, at the peak of her mature fleshy glamour. I happened to be sitting with a male friend, one of the gay aesthetes who had such a profound impact on my imagination. We both cried out at the same time, alarming other theatregoers. This vivid, silent tableau is for me one of the classic scenes in the history of cinema.”

Gee, I think she may be overselling it. The scene Paglia describes lasts just a fraction of a second, and in a movie packed to the rafters with bizarre moments—from a stark-naked Mia Farrow joining Taylor in the tub and asking her to play with her rubber duckie to Robert Mitchum dreamily recalling seeing an 11-year-old Farrow slide down a banister and thinking, “That’s for me”—the clash between Taylor’s violet suit and the tiles behind her didn’t stand out for me as being particularly notable.

I’d forgotten how strange Mia Farrow’s onscreen persona was before Woody Allen hooked up with her and started guiding her into movies like The Purple Rose of Cairo, Zelig, and Alice, movies in which her creepier qualities could be read merely as shyness and endearing social awkwardness. As Cenci in Secret Ceremony, she’s deeply unnerving, decked out in a long, straight, black wig that makes her look like Emily the Strange and wearing prim, childlike pinafores and nightdresses that accentuate her spindly legs. She looks like she weighs about 60 pounds, and yet there’s such an avid hunger in her eyes that you’d swear she could gobble you up whole. She’s the dark-angel counterpart to the spectral characters Farrow would go on to play later on in the ’70s, such as the serenely composed stalker in the all-star Agatha Christie mystery Death on the Nile or the blank-eyed cipher at the centre of the ceremony in Robert Altman’s A Wedding.

Speaking of Altman, for me, Secret Ceremony played like an amalgam of the films in what I like to think of as his unofficial “crazy-lady” trilogy: Images, 3 Women, and That Cold Day in the Park. In fact, I simply refuse to believe that Altman didn’t see Secret Ceremony and wasn’t deeply influenced by it—Sissy Spacek’s character in 3 Women is clearly an Americanized Cenci, right down to the scene where she emerges from a suicide attempt with an eerie new air of adult self-possession.

Secret Ceremony belongs to a period in Elizabeth Taylor’s career that strikes me as her Nicole Kidman phase, leveraging her fame as an international glamour icon and her prestige as an Oscar-winning actress into a series of bizarre arthouse experiments. (Kidman got her Oscar for playing Virginia Woolf, while Taylor merely appeared in a movie named after her.) This is the same busy two-year stretch that saw Taylor making Boom!, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Doctor Faustus, all misfires that nevertheless exert a certain fascination merely because a star as huge as Taylor agreed to be in them. Secret Ceremony is like Elizabeth Taylor’s Birth—a solemnly ridiculous drama in which she’s paired up onscreen with a creepy, clingy kid who keeps wanting to take baths with her.

Given the bizarre script, which doesn’t have a plot so much as a string of opaque character reversals (just wait until the two women go on vacation to a seaside resort and Farrow starts walking around with a stuffed animal under her dress and pretending she's pregnant), I’d say Taylor acquits herself quite well. I like how she brings glimpses of the coarseness she showed in Virginia Woolf to this new character—especially in the scene where she sits back in her chair after Farrow serves her breakfast and actually belches in the middle of saying how scrumptious everything was.

Paglia can keep her violet velvet and her sea-green tiles; that belch is the moment from Secret Ceremony that I’ll be treasuring.

RATING: 3/5



THE BANK JOB

Plot in a Nutshell
A small-time thief (Jason Statham) gets in way over his head when a plan to rob a bank vault turns out to has implications for a smut peddler, a black militant, several kinky MPs, and the royal family in Roger Donaldson’s heist thriller.

Thoughts
I had no idea I’d be yakking away for so long about Secret Ceremony, so I’ll try to keep this one short—this isn’t the kind of movie that invites deep analysis, anyway. It’s a smoothly paced heist thriller, with just enough nastiness around the edges (especially in the scenes involving David Suchet’s seedy porn king) to keep it from turning into The Score.

Where does Jason Statham stand in the Hollywood star system, by the way? Everyone I know likes the guy, but I don’t think he’s ever appeared in a movie with a proper A-level budget or a truly committed marketing plan behind it. (I assume loyalty to Guy Ritchie is the reason Statham agreed to be in Revolver, but I don't care how much he got paid: no one who’s getting the best scripts sent to him would ever agree to star in an Uwe Boll movie, the way Statham did with In the Name of the King earlier this year.)

Is it the British thing that’s holding him back? Because he really should be getting the kind of parts that Bruce Willis was landing back in the ’80s and ’90s—not only does Statham have Willis’ receding hairline (which humanizes him the way Arnold Schwarzenegger was humanized by his pumpernickel-thick accent), but he also has Willis’ endearing knack for seeming overwhelmed and in-over-his-head, even as he performs outlandish feats of physical strength. He’s relatable, even in his most superhuman moments.

In The Bank Job, Statham doesn’t do a single action-hero move until the very end of the film, but it’s worth the wait—he’s unarmed and hiding behind a car in an alley and it looks like he’s about to get shot by some goon, but then he kicks a brick loose from a wall, throws it at the goon and then headbutts him into unconsciousness for good measure. It’s all you can do not to stand up and cheer.

And if that’s not starpower, I don’t know what is.

RATING: 3.5/5

The Musicgoer: The Microphones' The Glow Pt. 2

THE MICROPHONES
The Glow Pt. 2
(K)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

The Glow Pt. 2, the 2001 lo-fi masterpiece masterminded by Washington’s Phil Elvrum, has been newly reissued on CD by K Records, and appropriately, it sounds as though it’s spent the last seven years buried under a pile of dry leaves and pinecones somewhere deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

It’s an album with hiss filling the spaces between songs, wandering melodies, unsteady rhythms full of bum notes played on acoustic guitar, words that don’t quite rhyme, images that don’t quite make sense but which evoke the outdoors—and the way that being outdoors, standing in the moonlight, shivering as the cold wind whistles through the buttons of your coat, can make you feel small but human in a way that walking in the city never can.

“We knew we’re just floating in space over molten rock and we felt safe and discovered that our skin is soft,” Elvrum sings in “The Moon,” his voice nearly drowned in white noise; “I’m alone except for the sound of insects flying around/They know my red blood is warm still,” he sings, a little more clearly this time, on “My Warm Blood.” Give The Glow Pt. 2 a listen, and you’ll remember that your blood is still flowing too.

I Left All My Money Right On Top Of That Book

Apropos of absolutely nothing, except that I haven't been able to get this song out of my head all weekend long, here's an old clip from TV's The Electric Company. I'm not even sure what its educational purpose is, except to warn kids to be careful around their TV sets—press the wrong dial, and those things will take off like a rocketship!

Moviegoer Diary: The Getaway, Three Short Films By Trevor Anderson

THE GETAWAY

Plot in a Nutshell
Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 action pic starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw as a fresh-out-of-jail bank robber and his wife who make off with half a million dollars in a bank heist, but are forced to kill a whole lot of people in order to hang onto it.

Thoughts
I never thought of myself as any kind of hardcore Sam Peckinpah fan before. That’s probably partly due to the piecemeal way I’ve been catching up with his filmography—randomly watching this movie or that one, one every couple of years, as likely to choose The Osterman Weekend as I am Straw Dogs. So it’s taken me a long time to figure out that Peckinpah has never once disappointed me. I even thought The Osterman Weekend was pretty terrific. Now, granted, I haven’t seen anything from that streak of movies he made during the years of his mid-’70s decline—Cross of Iron, The Killer Elite, Convoy—but if they've got even a fraction of the spark that animates The Getaway, Peckinpah's place in my personal pantheon of great American directors is assured. (Yeah, yeah, I know: stop the presses! Sam Peckinpah is awesome! Cut me some slack—I was slow to catch onto him, okay?)

Has there ever been a director of “guys’ movies” with a more poetic eye than Peckinpah? The Getaway has one of the most fascinatingly edited opening 10 minutes I’ve ever seen in an action movie—images of the numbing routine of prison life, of Steve McQueen being turned down yet again for early parole, fantasies of lying in his bunk and feeling the caress of his wife’s hand on his shoulder, all shown out of sequential order, tumbling around in such a way that the fantasy mingles with the reality, all set to the numbing, repetitive sound of the mechanical loom McQueen operates in the prison workroom.

And then, when McQueen does get paroled, there’s another great sequence when he and Ali MacGraw drive to a picnic area set up beside a lake—Peckinpah shows you McQueen and MacGraw diving into the water, so happy to be together again that they don’t even bother taking their clothes off. It’s filmed so dreamily that you think it’s just another one of McQueen’s fantasies—until you see McQueen pull MacGraw to the side of the water, whereupon Peckinpah jump-cuts to the two of them arriving home, their clothes still soaking wet. It’s such a sexy, adult sequence—it’s like a bit from Don’t Look Now got dropped accidentally into the middle of Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. What are the chances that a modern action picture would ever try for a mood this oblique? Unless Steven Soderbergh were directing it, almost nil.

I loved every nasty, violent moment of The Getaway, and it may be the most misogynist movie I’ve ever gotten this much enjoyment out of. There’s an amazing subplot, for instance, involving Al Lettieri, who plays a fellow bank robber that McQueen shot and left for dead, and who spends the rest of the film on his trail, determined to snatch the cash for himself. He forces a veterinarian to tend to his wounds at gunpoint, and then takes the guy and his wife hostage. Amazingly, the wife (Sally Struthers!) has apparently been dreaming her entire life for a brutal thug to whisk her away from her boring existence, and she volunteers to become Lettieri’s accomplice and lover the very first chance she gets. (The Quincy Jones music that plays under this scene is wonderfully sleazy.) Her behaviour is so appallingly slutty that it’s hilarious—even the scenes where Lettieri ties up her husband and forces him to watch them have sex are played for comedy.

The flipside of this scene is a moment that takes place between McQueen and MacGraw by the side of their car on the side of a highway. She’s just shot the criminal who’s set up the bank robbery (who’s also the guy on the parole board that she slept with earlier), and McQueen still can’t believe she’d do something that stupid. So he slaps her. And he slaps her again. And then he slaps her a couple more times. It’s a really ugly, vicious scene—one that feels absolutely right for the character, but which makes you recoil from him in a way that again I doubt any modern Hollywood studio (or male star) would have the stomach for.

But the movie’s misogyny is inextricable from its themes—the screenplay is all about these parallel stories of a “good” unfaithful wife and a “bad” unfaithful wife. Which may be why the only bum note is the happy ending, with Slim Pickens giving McQueen and MacGraw his benediction for a blissful life in Mexico. It’s quite a departure from the insane, cannibalistic final chapter in Jim Thompson’s original novel, but the problem isn’t that Peckinpah is unfaithful to his source (which probably would have been unfilmable anyway); it’s that after two hours of emotional violence every bit as bloody as the shootouts, the idea of any married couple living happily ever after seems highly dubious.

RATING: 4.5/5


THREE SHORT FILMS BY TREVOR ANDERSON

Plot in a Nutshell
A trio of shorts by the Edmonton musician, playwright, actor, and self-taught director.

Thoughts
If you don’t live in Edmonton, you’ve probably never heard of Trevor Anderson, but you do live here and you move in any kind of hip artistic circles, he’s a fixture. He’s in two bands, The Vertical Struts and The Wet Secrets (whose new CD Rock Fantasy is simply awesome); he writes plays (including a kids’ musical with the unimprovable title Nami Namersson: The Viking Who Liked to Name Things); he makes movies; and he’s just a funny sweetheart of a guy who can always be relied upon to help his friends out with whatever projects they happen to be working on too.

It’s his movies that I want to talk about here. He’s made three short films so far, and they’re collected on this half-hour-long DVD, which is available through his production company Dirt City Films. I don’t know if anyone outside Edmonton will feel the need to go online and order them, but they definitely show a filmmaker with promise, and someone who brings a sparkling sense of prairie humour to his stories of gay life.

Rugburn, the earliest film in the set, is a comic two-hander about a broke painter who phones in a complaint to the collection agency hounding him to pay his healthcare bill, only to discover that the operator on the other line is his ex-boyfriend. The premise could potentially be very visually static, especially in the hands of a first-time director, but Anderson finds all sorts of imaginative, organic ways to liven up the frame. And the relationship between the two men feels real—this is no mere comedy sketch. (I also am excited by the fact that film was shot literally three doors down from my old loft in a downtown artists’ residence. Bohemian memories!)

Dinx is the most ambitious of the three films, the story of a downtrodden “shooter boy” in a gay bar who briefly travels back in time to a formative experience from his childhood. The sight of star Farren Timoteo—diminutive, shirtless, wearing tiny red shorts, and still carrying his tray of tiny, multicoloured drinks—wandering through his old school corridors is a gag that never gets old.

But the best film of the three is the shortest: Rock Pockets, a five-minute piece in which Anderson recalls all the straight couples he used to watch at the carnival when he was 10, walking around with their hands in each other’s back pockets. Now a grown-up, he persuades a straight male friend to join him at the midway at Klondike Days and do the pocket thing with him, just to see what people’s reaction would be. If Anderson set out to expose Alberta’s homophobia, the finished product does something very different: it’s a very sweet, very hopeful statement about the ability of society to change, albeit more slowly than many of us would like it to. And Wes Doyle’s cinematography does a beautiful job of capturing the bright lights of the carnival in all their gaudy, tawdry beauty.

Oh, and Anderson deserves double credit for his willingness to include several mortifying photos of his 10-year-old self... complete with dorky haircut, glasses, and disfiguring orthodontic headgear. You're a braver man than I am, Trevor.

RATING: 4/5

Pacino Pockets A Paycheque

Filmed on the cheap almost two and a half years ago in Vancouver and only arriving in North American theatres now, 88 Minutes will likely be remembered only as one of the least distinguished starring vehicles in Al Pacino’s long and admirable film career. Pacino has taken paycheque jobs before (what actor hasn’t?) in movies like The Recruit and Two for the Money, but at least those films came with the consolation of being respectable box-office hits. 88 Minutes, on the other hand, seems destined for a quick, quiet death at the box office—albeit not quite as quick as the one Pacino’s character hears on his cellphone one morning on his way to class telling him he has only 88 minutes left to live.

Pacino plays Jack Gramm, a superstar forensic psychiatrist and university professor whose testimony was instrumental in convicting serial killer Jon Forster. (Meanwhile, the movie never makes a definitive ruling on whether his name is "John" or "Jon"—the spelling keeps switching back and forth.) It’s the day of Forster’s execution, a day Gramm has been looking forward to for years, but he can’t help but be a little distracted by the mysterious voice who keeps leaving him taunting messages (“Tick-tock, doc! Tick-tock!”) counting those 88 minutes down to zero. As if that weren’t bad enough, the woman Gramm slept with the night before has been murdered—the victim of a Forster copycat killer. (The first time we see this woman, she’s standing stark naked in the bathroom, brushing her teeth while holding one outstretched leg up next to her ear. When she’s found dead, she’s hanging from the ceiling by that same leg, which I guess is the movie's idea of a joke. Or irony or foreshadowing or something.)

This is one of those movies that doesn’t have a plot so much as a lot of confusing incidents designed to “keep you guessing” as to which of the supporting characters is the one who’s actually behind Gramm’s phone calls. And so director Jon Avnet—or is that "John"?—has asked everyone in the cast to make their line readings as sinister and ambiguous as possible. They’re not playing characters; they’re playing red herrings. Even the day player who’s been cast as the security guy in Gramm’s building has been coached to give this bizarre, distracting, twitchy performance—I can’t be sure, but he even seems to be wearing a fake mustache. (He looks like Ethan Hawke wearing his robbery disguise from Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.)

It’s a ridiculous scene, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the climax. I don’t want to spoil the movie by revealing the Shocking Final Twist, but let me just say that the actor playing the murderer delivers one of the most laughably inept “talking killer” monologues in recent years. Even Al Pacino seems as if he can barely believe what he’s seeing—and his pop-eyed look of stupefaction is probably the only believable element in the entire movie.

Once More, With Ealing: British Comedy At The Edmonton Film Society

What exactly is going on inside Joan Greenwood’s mouth that enables her to produce those wonderfully plummy vowel noises—the greatest voice in the history of motion pictures? Was she born with a double-jointed soft palate? Is she closing off air to her trachea in some way? Or is she swallowing her tongue with every line of dialogue? Or maybe all three at once? Whatever she’s doing to herself, she must be well-practiced at it, because in all of her scenes as Gwendolyn Fairfax in the 1952 British film version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest she exhibits a preternatural poise and calm. So serene is she, so perfectly posed in her spring dresses and her flower-bedecked hats, so impossible to faze, even in the midst of the most nonsensical romantic entanglements imaginable, you would never guess that she was in danger of choking on her tongue with every syllable she utters.

On April 21, The Importance of Being Earnest kicks off the Edmonton Film Society’s spring screening series—this one devoted to British comedies of the ’40s and ’50s. In some ways, Earnest is the odd film out among these eight titles. It’s a period film, for one thing, with sumptuous Technicolor photography and costumes so expensive and immaculate you can practically visualize the designer’s sketches as you watch the movie. And it’s loaded down with prestige in a way that the rest of the more modestly budgeted films in the EFS series aren’t—Earnest even begins from the point of view of someone watching the curtain rise on a stage production of the play from a luxury box.

Much like Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, the “play” quickly turns into a “film,” but (except for a clever dissolve from a close-up of Michael Redgrave’s dressing gown to the gardenia he wears in his lapel later that day), it never quite shakes off its stagebound trappings to turn into a fully cinematic experience. It’s a little stuffy and pleased with itself—it’s as if it knows it’s a classic already. The director is Sir Anthony Asquith, a name so ridiculously aristocratic that Wilde himself could have invented it.

However, it does contain Edith Evans’ definitive performance as Lady Bracknell, the terrifyingly imperious battleaxe whom Redgrave must win over if he hopes to marry Joan Greenwood. Lady Bracknell doesn’t really converse with anyone; she grabs them in her pincers like a housefly and slowly pulls their wings off. It’s sublimely funny; what other performer could find the music in a line like “Rise, sir, from this semirecumbent posture! It is most indecorous!” the way Evans does?

British comedy in this period is most closely associated with the lightly satirical films produced by Ealing Studios in West London, and three of their best-known titles are part of the EFS series, all of them from the banner year of 1949: Whisky Galore! (May 5), Passport to Pimlico (May 12), and Kind Hearts and Coronets (June 2). Kind Hearts is the one that probably holds up best, thanks to its blackly funny premise (a young man decides to become the Duke of Chalfont by systematically murdering the eight aristocrats standing between him and the title), but give Whisky Galore! a try too—its tale of a small Scottish island, wracked by wartime rationing, determined to keep the cargo of booze that’s just washed ashore for themselves, will resonate with any hoser who’s ever dreamed of finding an abandoned keg.

Two lesser-known relationship comedies are also in the series: 1953’s The Captain’s Paradise (April 28), a surprisingly sophisticated marital farce starring Alec Guinness as a cheerful bigamist, and On Approval (June 9), a dated 1944 comedy of manners redeemed by a rare screen appearance by Beatrice Lillie.

The Smallest Show on Earth (May 26) may have been a sentimental choice by the EFS programmers: this 1957 film is about a married couple trying to keep the run-down cinema they’ve inherited alive while showing nothing but dusty prints of old movies.

And the series concludes on June 16 with I’m All Right, Jack, a 1960 satire on organized labour whose racy double entendres and use of nudist-camp footage to bookend the action signaled a new era of British comedy was on the horizon: broader, lewder, more interested in guffaws than in wry smiles. So long, Joan Greenwood and Oscar Wilde; hello, Kenneth Williams and Carry On Cleo. Nothing against the Carry On gang, but we miss Joan.

Weird Tales Of Crime, Horror... And Censorship!

In 1948, Americans were buying somewhere between 80 and 100 million comic books a month, generating about $72 million in revenue annually. If “mainstream” publishing was making more money, it was only because a hardcover novel cost 20 times more than a 10-cent issue of Crime Does Not Pay.

But money did not buy comic books respectability: comics publishers tended to be independent entrepreneurs operating on the fringes, their artists and writers largely drawn from segments of society—Jews, blacks, women—who found it difficult to get jobs in the WASPier, more prestigious companies. And comic books gloried in topics that other publishers wouldn’t touch: from romances featuring teenage lovers sneaking around behind their parents’ backs to lurid tales of sin, violence, adultery, crime, and horror. A lot of it was unrepentant trash, but for the kids (and plenty of older readers) who loved them, comics had a lowdown vitality that spoke to them in a way that nothing else in pop culture could equal.

But by 1956, the entire industry was almost dead. And, unlike EC Comics mascot The Crypt-Keeper, it wasn't in the mood to laugh about it.

The immediate culprit was one man: a crusading German-born psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham whose damning testimony at a televised 1954 Senate hearing investigating the link between so-called “crime comics” and juvenile delinquency led to massive public outrage and a call to either censor their content or ban them outright. Wertham’s name is still anathema to most comic-book fans—he’s the prude whose McCarthyist crusade put hundreds of great artists and writers out of work and forced comics companies to spend the next decade or more to publish insipid, sanitized comics in compliance with the Draconian “Comics Code Authority.” That is, if they didn’t go bankrupt first.

But as author David Hajdu points out in his engrossing new book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, anti-comics sentiment had been brewing for more than a decade earlier. Mass burnings of comic-books had taken place in several American cities, and at least 50 municipalities had taken steps to keep the more extreme comics—and make no mistake: some of the books in question would make even Eli Roth blanch—out of the hands of children.

With The Ten-Cent Plague, Hajdu—the award-winning author of Lush Life (a biography of jazz legend Billy Strayhorn) and Positively 4th Street (about Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Richard and Mima Fariña, and the Greenwich Village folk scene of the ’50s and ’60s)—has provided the fullest account yet of the rise and near-collapse of the comics industry. Not only has he tracked down many of the artists whose careers were ruined by the anti-comics crackdown, many of whom had never been interviewed before about their experiences, but he also talks to comics collectors, who turn out to be the mirror opposite of the passive, intellectually stunted juveniles of Wertham’s imagination. The book is also a vivid piece of social history, capturing a moment in time when an entire generation of children began pulling away from their parents and developing a unique culture with its own irreverent tastes and values. It’s the story of the birth of youth culture—a culture that has evolved in ways that not even Hajdu whole-heartedly approves of.

David Hajdu spoke to me from his office at Columbia University in New York. Here’s our conversation.

Q: What drew you to this material? You dabbled in cartoons and illustrations when you were younger—was that part of the appeal? Or was it just that this was a story that you felt had not been fully told before?

David Hajdu: Yes. My background is as a journalist, so I’m conditioned to tell untold stories, or stories I can bring something new to. Now, when I first started poking around this subject area, I was unsure whether it would yield an article or a critical essay, or something larger. I really didn’t know until I was knee-deep in the research that there was so much here. In previous writing about comics and the culture of the ’50s, the most you’ll usually get is a couple of paragraphs here and there mentioning that there was some controversy about comics, and it’s usually depicted as the work of this zealot Fredric Wertham who stirred up a few crazies and reactionaries. But Wertham didn’t just come out of nowhere. The controversy actually started around 1940—it was not just a phenomenon of the 1950s—and it riveted all of North America.

Q: You conducted a lot of interviews with comics artists and writers for the book. I was wondering if you could talk about why that was so important for you, and whether it was difficult at all to get them to open up about their experiences in the comics industry. You get the feeling that a lot of them really clammed up about their comics work, especially in the wake of the Senate hearings, when saying you were a comics artist was like telling people you created child pornography for a living.

DH: Well, it was very important to me. Firstly, in the contemporary reports about the controversy, comics artists and writers weren’t interviewed. And even in the Senate hearings, no comic-book artists were asked to testify. That whole side of the war is scarcely represented at all! And secondly, a great many of the people who suffered most as a result of the clampdown on comics have never been interviewed at all. There are several artists and writers from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s who’ve since gone on to make appearances at comics conventions and so on, but they’re mostly people who came back into the field years later when it recovered. But there are all sorts of people who were driven out of work and never worked in comics again and sort of disappeared. Their stories are lost! So to get the story of the people who suffered most, I really needed to find the witnesses to the events and talk to them.

Q: Why weren’t the artists and writers asked to testify, anyway?

DH: That’s a great question. The reason, I think, can partly be tracked to Wertham’s rationale. In his book Seduction of the Innocent, he describes comics artists as jobbers; he actually has the nerve to say, “Nobody does crime comics by choice.” He depicts this Machiavellian, Faustian scenario where these sad, desperate people are forced into some kind of servitude, forced against their will to draw comics. And the precise opposite was true! Everyone I could find actually reveled in the freedom that comics provided, and they felt they were more welcome in comics than they would have been in other arenas like magazines or advertising. They believed in what they were doing!

Q: How legitimate do you think the fears of parents and teachers and authority figures were regarding these comics? I mean, some of them were pretty extreme. How much of the anti-comics sentiment was based on this dubious belief that comics caused juvenile delinquency, and how much of it was a gut-level feeling that a lot of this stuff was inappropriate for a 13-year-old to be looking at?

DH: I think those are both true. In a macro sense, what was happening was that comics were doing something that parents didn’t understand—they were expressing a sensibility that really rattled adults because it was so different from the frame of reference in which they grew up, this raucous, wild fixation on wrongdoing and bad behaviour, this cynicism toward authority. It was difficult for parents to come to terms with what they found on the pages when they finally decided to look. It all gets very thorny and hard to quantify definitively, but you also find kids changing and acting in a rabble-rousing way and adopting various modes of behaviour that were pathologized as “juvenile delinquency.” And parents blamed comics for a lot of that. That said, I have a son who’s about to turn five, and I would be uncomfortable with him seeing many of the comics that parents were outraged by in 1948. Free speech is one thing, but when young people are involved, I think being a parent carries the responsibility, the duty, to ensure their kids are exposed to the influences that serve them best. Now, that said, the issue of how kids are best served is a really complicated one. The presence of evil in comics isn’t by itself a bad thing. I mean, there’s evil in the Bible. It’s part of the reality of life, and I think there’s a risk in shielding kids from reality. Even in their gruesomeness and violence, comics provide a venue in which to work out issues of good and bad in their mind.

Q: It’s interesting how in the book, you frame a lot of the controversy as a battle over the right of kids to even have tastes and thoughts of their own.

DH: The key issue is an intellectual one: it’s the relative nature of aesthetic values. Which makes the book sound like Derrida or something, but there it is. The issue of taste is what got [EC Comics publisher] Bill Gaines in so much trouble when he testified at the Senate hearings and landed him on the front page the next day—he dared to defend these comics on the grounds of taste. And not just taste, but the right of young people to have their own taste, and by extension, the right to have a different set of social and aesthetic values from their parents, which boils down to being different people from their parents. And to a parent, that notion is terrifying! It suggests our own system of values is dubious or outmoded—which means we ourselves are out of date too.

Q: That account of Gaines’ disastrous testimony before the Senate, where he’s running on a tankful of Dexedrine, No-Doz, and Coca-Cola, is one of the most gripping passages in the book. Do you think there was anything Gaines could have done to have brought about a better outcome? Or was it a bad idea for him to have testified at all?

DH: Well, he was fairly lucid for most of the testimony and only floundered toward the end. I think he did the right thing by testifying, but he just didn’t stand a chance. One thing that’s very illuminating is that rock ’n’ roll came along just a couple of years later—why wasn’t rock ’n’ roll snuffed out the way comics were? Why weren’t rock ’n’ roll artists driven out of work? What’s the difference? Well, I think the differences are largely economic. There were no large companies publishing comics and not as much money going to the corporate power centres of American industry. It’s going to fringe operators—there was no equivalent of RCA or Columbia Records in comics. Which made these folks easy targets.

Q: So is there anything those of us in the present can learn from the comic-book scare? Is the uproar over violent videogames, for instance, just the same old story all over again, or is there something different about this new debate?

DH: You know, it’s very hard for me to answer that, because I’m a middle-aged person who probably doesn’t get the art of young people. I don’t like Grand Theft Auto, for instance. It really horrifies me. The idea of my five-year-old pulling the trigger in a videogame where you’re the serial killer is something I find deeply unnerving. I can’t see those ultraviolent horror films that are being made today, and if they’re the long-term outgrowth of a trend that started with the comic books of the ’40s and ’50s, that raises real questions for me—I don’t know what side I’d be on anymore.

Q: One of the artists you talk to, Al Williamson, says back then was “a bad time to be weird.” Is now a good time to be weird, do you think?

DH: [Laughs.] Maybe never better! [Pause.] But you know, we’re in this horrible war, with these unthinkable atrocities going on. I have a 24-year-old and a 21-year-old too, and when the images of Abu Ghraib came out, I was wondering why my kids in college weren’t marching in the streets. And then I realizes that they see that kind of thing all the time in entertainment. And you can’t help but think that as a culture, we’ve gotten inured and anesthetized to violence. I’m troubled by it. And if that makes me sound like a hypocrite, so be it. But what I tried to do in the book was explore all dimensions of the story and not be so one-sided about it. So there you go.

The Musicgoer: Gnarls Barkley's The Odd Couple

GNARLS BARKLEY
The Odd Couple
(Atlantic)
**** (out of five)

Has a pop group ever created a wider gap between their goofy public persona and the actual content of their music than Gnarls Barkley? If you went solely by their publicity photos and their live appearances, for which they’ve dressed up as everything from astronauts to prep-schoolers to characters from Austin Powers—Austin Powers! In 2008!—you’d think Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse were the worst kind of throwaway joke-rap act, a throwback to the MTV dress-up excesses of David Lee Roth and Phil Collins’ “Don’t Lose My Number” video.

But what kind of joke-rap act writes songs as full of tortured self-loathing as the ones on their debut album, 2006’s St. Elsewhere, and their followup, The Odd Couple? This is a disc where Cee-Lo sings about loving a blind girl because she doesn’t know how ugly he is (“Blind Mary”) and thanks his parents “for hurting me so bad” (“A Little Better”). The most propulsive track is called “Run,” but it’s not exhilarating—it’s about Cee-Lo fleeing something so terrifying he can’t even name it. Maybe it’s his own paranoia.

It’s hard to know whether Cee-Lo's efforts will be rewarded with a platinum record or a straitjacket. Maybe with The Odd Couple, he’ll wind up with both.

Moviegoer Diary: Class of 1984, 10 Rillington Place

CLASS OF 1984

Plot in a Nutshell
Early-’80s teensploitation about a new music teacher at a lawless inner-city high school who gets caught in an escalating battle of wills with the psychopathic leader of the school’s most feared gang.

Thoughts
Class of 1984 came out in 1982, and much of its genius is its title: by setting its luridly exaggerated tale of unstoppable drug-dealing teenage hoodlums two years into the future, the film suddenly seemed not unrealistic but prescient and provocative. “I Am the Future” is the title of the Alice Cooper song that plays over the opening credits, and in Class of 1984, the future contains teenage boys who openly wear swastika T-shirts to class and teenage girls so twisted that not only do they not mind when their male friends rape other girls; they ask to stay in the room so they can watch.

The title also evokes George Orwell, but pointlessly so: if anything, the world of Class of 1984 could use a few more oppressive authority figures. The principal has security cameras hooked up in the hallways, but he’s a milquetoast who only seems to use them to ogle the female students’ hindquarters as they saunter to class in their short shorts. The main cop character’s duties mainly seem to involve releasing dangerous criminals, and in one of the film’s bigger twists, Peter Stegman (Timothy Van Patten), the gangleader, turns out to live not in some run-down tenement, but in a luxurious apartment with his clueless, overindulgent mother.

Anchor Bay has rereleased Class of 1984 on DVD as part of a new series they’re calling “Cult Fiction”—budget-priced editions of 12 cult movies, mostly from the early ’80s. They were nice enough to mail me the whole set, so you can expect to see reviews of Heathers, The Long Good Friday, Road Games, The Quiet Earth, and many more films of that ilk in the coming weeks as I get around to them. But I’m glad I started with Class of 1984, which is a movie no one would ever mistake for art, but which was nevertheless made with a lot of B-movie vitality. This is a movie that realizes that if you’re going to stage a climactic battle in a high school, you’d better use the shop room and the auto shop.

The cast is a few notches better than is strictly necessary: Perry King, sporting a Richard Chamberlain beard, sells his character’s transformation from meek music teacher to vigilante; Timothy Van Patten (who went on to become one of HBO’s favourite directors, helming episodes of The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, and Rome) sinks his teeth into a wonderfully juicy role, even playing one of his own compositions on the piano in a scene that suggests Stegman is a lot more brilliant than anyone realized; a young Michael J. Fox, still carrying some baby fat, shows up as a trumpet player who’s about to testify to the police against Van Patten, only to get shivved in the cafeteria (an act of violence that director Mark L. Lester stages as if it’s happening in a prison movie); and Roddy McDowall is awesome as a biology teacher who snaps one day and starts teaching his class at gunpoint. (A few years later, Class of 1984 co-screenwriter Tom Holland would later give McDowall his last great role, as an aging horror-movie TV presenter in Fright Night.)

As a Canadian, it’s also amusing to see this nightmare vision of America’s future school system unfolding just off Yonge Street in peaceful downtown Toronto. There’s even a cameo appearance by those standard-bearers of ’80s Ontario punk, Teenage Head—whose four members all graduated from Westdale High School in Hamilton, just like me. Westdale was nothing like the school in Class of 1984, by the way... although Mr. Trussler’s final exams in Latin class could be pretty darn brutal.

RATING: 4/5


10 RILLINGTON PLACE

Plot in a Nutshell
Richard Fleischer’s 1971 true-crime drama about mild-mannered, middle-aged serial killer John Reginald Christie, who carried on a decade-long murder career before he was finally caught and hanged in 1953.

Thoughts
Man, you pop the DVD of Class of 1984 into the machine, watch a teenage hoodlum get his arm cut off with a circular saw, and you think you’re finally desensitized to violence—and then along comes 10 Rillington Place, which contains two of the most disturbing murder scenes I’ve ever seen.

They’d be funny if they weren’t so ghastly. Christie’s modus operandi was to gain the trust of his victims by telling them he was going to perform a medical treatment on them (promising to relieve their migraines was apparently a favourite ploy of his)—he’d tell them he needed to anesthetize them first, like at the dentist, and then hook up a facemask to the gas pipe and tell them to breathe deeply. The method had one important flaw, however: at a certain point, the victim would realize Christie was trying to kill them and start flailing desperately in their chair, whereupon Christie would frantically have to subdue them by punching them in the face.

Richard Attenborough’s performance as Christie deserves a place right alongside Peter Lorre in M and Anthony Perkins in Psycho—three timid little men in the grip of violent compulsions they can’t control. He’s absolutely astonishing, especially in the lengthy sequence where he quietly arranges to kill the young mother who’s recently moved into his flat with her husband. It’s amazing how much work he has to put into this scheme: he has to convince the woman that he can give her an abortion, he has to talk her Catholic husband (a young John Hurt) into approving the procedure, he has to take the morning off from work, and then he has to find an excuse to get his wife out of the house. He’ll never see this same constellation of circumstances again, so when a pair of builders unexpectedly show up to do some work on the building, he has no choice but to go ahead with the killing anyway while they pound away downstairs!

Is it creepy to admit that Attenborough made me laugh a few times as well in this movie? I love his pathetic attempts to show off his (nonexistent) medical knowledge to his victims—he’ll refer to carbon dioxide, and then add, “Or CO2, as we call it.”

I even managed to find a laugh in that absolutely horrifying opening murder scene. He’s invited a woman over to receive his so-called “headache remedy,” and he notices the flicker of distaste that crosses her face when she sees his grimy, depressing flat. “Oh, come in here—have some tea in here,” he says. “It’s much more cozy in here.” He then ushers her into a cluttered back room that looks about as cozy as that basement of that creepy silent-movie buff in Zodiac.

Here’s a vintage clip of Judy Collins and Pete Seeger singing a tune based on the Christie case, sung from the point of view of Timothy Evans—he’s the guy John Hurt plays in the film, a poor, illiterate labourer who not only had his wife and daughter killed by Christie, but whom Christie successfully framed for the crimes as well. A sadder dupe would be hard to find.

RATING: 4.5/5

Orchestral Maneuvers In The Dark

A man and a woman sit on a bench in what passes for a “park” in this small town somewhere in the middle of the Israeli desert. It’s evening. The man is the conductor of a small ceremonial orchestra employed by the Egyptian police force—they’ve been booked to play at the opening of an Arab cultural centre, but they’ve accidentally taken a bus to a city with a soundalike name. He looks a little foolish in his immaculate powder blue uniform—he has the air of a fussy, detail-oriented middle manager rather than a leader of men, and it’s obvious that his musicians tolerate him more than they respect him. Still, he’s a decent guy, and there’s something soulful about him too that appeals to the woman, the proprietress of the local diner, whose dark, sensuous beauty is like an oasis in this bleak setting.

She makes small talk, asking him what it’s like to conduct music, to be the centre of attention. It looks like the most important thing in the world, she says.

No, he replies—communicating, like the woman, in slightly imperfect English, since she doesn’t speak Arabic and he doesn’t speak Hebrew. The most important thing in the world is fishing.

“Fishing!” she exclaims. “But it’s so boring!”

No, no, no, he says, it’s not boring at all. For perhaps the first time in the movie, we see the man—Tawfiq is his name—allow himself to smile. Gently and simply, he describes the peace that exists when you’re fishing—the sound of the waves, of the bait hitting the water, maybe some children playing in the distance. It’s like a symphony, he says, and again, underneath that meticulously trimmed mustache, a small smile of pleasure flashes across his face.

“And what about the fish?” asks the woman, whose name is Dina. “You cook it?”

“Well,” he chuckles, “usually I don’t catch. But sometimes I just put them back to the water.” There’s a slight pause as a shadow crosses his face. “Before, when my wife was alive, I used to take them home and she used to cook. But now, I just... put them back.”

The Israeli film The Band’s Visit is full of exquisitely beautiful scenes like that one, in which the characters never seem closer than when they’re describing just how lonely they are. The film is being marketed as a comedy—and indeed, the sight of the Egyptian musicians marching across the featureless desert landscape in uniforms the colour of Secret deodorant is the kind of quirky fish-out-of-water image that suggests a Middle Eastern version of Napoleon Dynamite. But there’s an undercurrent of sadness to these characters’ lives that keeps welling up to the surface. Even the film’s funniest sequence—a sort of silent, deadpan Cyrano de Bergerac routine in which the handsomest band member coaches a shy villager on how to make the moves on the girl sitting next to him—somehow manages to seem a little bit sad, even though it’s set in a roller disco.

I can’t say enough good things about the two leads. As Tawfiq, Sasson Gabai lets you see the vulnerability underneath a character who initially seems like a stuffy martinet—there are hints throughout the film that the police force will soon disband the orchestra, and you can’t imagine what Tawfiq will do if that happens. It’s like that ridiculous uniform is the only thing holding him up—and in the lovely final scene, when you hear him sing, you can see how much joy he takes in performing.

And as Dina, Ronit Elkabetz is fascinating the moment she comes onscreen. There’s a knowingness in her eyes, an amused expression on her lips—you can’t imagine how a woman this exciting wound up living in a town so lacking in stimulation. You never find out much about Dina’s history, but it’s probably better that way—that aura of mystery suits her. Black is definitely her colour, but you can understand why, for the few hours in which the film takes place anyway, she’s drawn to powder blue.

What It Was, Was Football

I guess when you make a football comedy that doesn’t quite deliver on its promise, the way actor/director/uncredited rewriter George Clooney did with Leatherheads, you pretty much know the headlines you’re doomed to get. If I had a nickel for every newspaper that went with “George Clooney fumbles”... well, I could probably afford to buy the Duluth Bulldogs, the struggling 1920s pro football team whose desperate attempts to scare up fans make up the bulk of the film.

Clooney plays Jimmy “Dodge” Connelly, the team’s aging captain, a completely untrustworthy hard-luck schemer who’s sort of like Everett Ulysses McGill, Clooney’s rascally character from O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but with a touch of Danny Ocean’s smarts, and his skill with the ladies. It’s 1925, and pro football is in its infancy: there’s no rulebook, but no fans either, and the games are played by a motley crew of underpaid farmboys, overgrown schoolkids, and assorted knuckleheads looking for any alternative to working in the mines. The games are played in muddy fields where the livestock often outnumbers the human beings—and unless Connelly figures out a scheme to attract bigger crowds, the Bulldogs will soon be playing their final game. (As the film opens, the Bulldogs have to forfeit a game because they’ve lost their football and they don’t have a spare.)

The scheme Connelly comes up with is to convince Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski, from TV’s The Office), a college football sensation who’s also a war hero, to join the Bulldogs, in hopes that he’ll bring his enormous retinue of fans along with him. The plan works: soon the Bulldogs are filling arenas, but matters are complicated by the presence of Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger), a hardboiled newspaper reporter determined to prove that Rutherford’s hero act is a fraud.

The scenes between Clooney and Zellweger are the best thing in the movie—their banter might not be in the same league as His Girl Friday, but my God, what is? Their first encounter in a hotel lobby, during which Clooney alternately flirts with Zellweger, trades insults with her, and pretends to be so engrossed in the copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal that he’s picked up at random from the table in front of him that he can’t even be bothered to talk to her, generates plenty of comic fizz on its own terms. How refreshing it is to see a woman in a romantic comedy who’s actually allowed to say things every bit as clever and funny as the man! Usually, all the woman gets to do in these things is laugh at the man’s jokes and maybe fall down a few times. And I know lots of people can’t stand Zellweger—yeah, yeah, I don’t know what’s up with the squinting either—but she’s got a tart, persnickety quality that makes a nice contrast with Clooney’s smooth underplaying. And she wears the period costumes well—what other contemporary actress looks as right as she does in vintage lingerie?

Too bad the bulk of the film consists of a lot of huggermugger surrounding Carter Rutherford, a character who never comes into focus (Krasinski can’t seem to decide if he’s playing a cocky spotlight hog, or just a dumb kid who’s gotten in way over his head) and whose presence doesn’t really lead to any interesting plot complications other than an oddly undercooked love triangle between Carter, Lexie, and Dodge.

The whole “phony war hero” angle seems intended to recall Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero, but Leatherheads lacks Sturges’ wild, unflagging comic energy or his affectionate eye for the absurd extremes of American behaviour. (That said, there’s a couple of supporting characters here that Sturges would have been proud to have invented—especially Stephen Root’s drunken sportswriter and a delightfully uncouth flapper played by Heather Goldenhersh.)

It’s all a little too mild, a little too amiable, a little too content to bask in its own nostalgia. My God, you’d think it was a film about baseball.