The Moviegoer: Radio Edition!

You've read my thoughts about The Guatemalan Handshake, and now you can hear me make essentially the same points about it; Todd Rohal's quirky indie comedy is the subject of my latest "Hidden Gems" segment for Edmonton AM on CBC Radio. Enjoy!

Moviegoer Diary: Paranoid Park, Doomsday, Recount

PARANOID PARK

Plot in a Nutshell
A teenaged skateboarder accidentally kills a guy. And skates around a lot.

Thoughts
Sorry for the paucity of posts lately, but I have a good excuse: I’ve been in southern Ontario, visiting my parents and grandparents, many of whom are currently in the hospital, so I haven’t had much time to spare for movie-watching. I’ve managed to squeeze in three titles over the last few days, though—and I’m not sure whether that makes me look admirably committed to this blog, or dismayingly inattentive to my relatives. Anyway, I’ll try to keep these entries short for a change.

I spent much of my time in waiting rooms trying to decide if Gabe Nevins, the nonprofessional actor who’s in pretty much every frame of Gus Van Sant’s latest film, Paranoid Park, gives a good performance or not. A lot of critics seem to be giving him the benefit of the doubt—on a recent episode of the online movie-review show Filmspotting, for instance, Matty Robinson and Adam Kempenaar echoed a popular critical sentiment by arguing that Nevins was fine and that Taylor Momsen, the only professional in the entire cast (she played Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas and currently plays the Kewpie-doll social-climber Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl), gives the movie’s only bad performance.

This is obviously incorrect. Momsen gives a perfectly adequate performance in her small role, while Nevins is clearly in over his head playing “Alex”—he’s unsure of himself in front of the camera, inexpressive in his body language as well as his voice. Even in the many extended sequences where he does nothing but ride his skateboard, it’s the contributions from Van Sant and cinematographer Christopher Doyle that make them memorable, not Nevins’ athleticism or his screen presence. I can’t imagine another director wanting to cast him in another role. (Well, maybe Larry Clark, but that’s about it.)

And yet, paradoxically, he seems to be giving exactly the obviously amateurish performance Van Sant wanted from him. There are several moments during Nevins’ voiceover narration where he stumbles over his words, as if he’s reading the script for the very first time. He’s not even a “raw” talent (like, say, Michelle Rodriguez in Girlfight); he’s... man, I don’t even know what the word would be. Uncookable? But it’s this guileless quality, this inability to put up any kind of front for the camera, that makes Nevins unusually convincing as a teenage protagonist. He reminds me of so many kids I went to high school with, coasting along, letting momentum carry them forward as if on polyurethane wheels, waiting for their personalities to kick in. Perhaps over the next hill?

Maybe that’s why Alex is never caught for the murder he accidentally commits down by the train tracks: if this kid were really a killer, wouldn’t he make a stronger impression?

RATING: 4/5


DOOMSDAY

Plot in a Nutshell
Directly Neil Marshall’s over-the-top sci-fi action flick about a team of commandos who become the first outsiders to venture into Scotland in the 30 years since it was walled off from the world in order to prevent the spread of a deadly virus.

Thoughts
While my mother was undergoing knee-replacement surgery, my dad and I passed the time in the cafeteria by watching Doomsday on my laptop. I thought Dad would go for it—he loves movies with lots of car chases and tough-guy action—but I think I may have miscalculated. I didn’t realize Doomsday was as gleefully violent as it turned out to be (was Marshall trying to break some kind of hand- and head-chopping record?), and he tells me he still hasn’t gotten over the gleefully sadistic moment where a bunny rabbit gets machine-gunned to smithereens right there on camera.

Doomsday is such a disreputable movie that I felt a little embarrassed to be watching it with my father (let alone laughing at some of its sicker jokes, like the grisly scene where a gang of cannibalistic punk rockers carve up the corpse of one of the heroes, like a roast beef at a hotel smorgasbord). But if I tried not to let it show outwardly how much I was enjoying this movie, inwardly I was having a ball. Doomsday may not have gotten terribly good reviews when it played in theatres, but on home video, where a coherent screenplay matters less than a brisk pace and sheer filmmaking gusto, I suspect it’ll find a very eager audience.

Sure, it’s a bit of a shame that Marshall doesn’t try a little bit harder to imagine how Scottish society might have realistically evolved after the world turns its back on them—I like The Road Warrior as much as the next guy, but to serve up nothing more than a cartoonish hordes of hooting, elaborately costumed and mohawked punks feels like a bit of a lazy move on Marshall’s part—but the presence does set the stage for a pretty spectacular car chase, where the punks, using nothing more than a few clubs and some Molotov cocktails, require only about 15 minutes to overpower two heavily armoured British tanks.

Doomsday could have been an authentic B-movie classic if only the star, TV actress Rhona Mitra (a dark, sultry beauty who’s had regular roles on Nip/Tuck, The Practice, and Boston Legal) had more screen presence. Ben Howard and Dan Auty got it right on the Mondo Movie podcast when they said Marshall was hoping to turn Mitra into another Linda Hamilton or Sigourney Weaver, but wound up instead with something closer to Kate Beckinsale in Underworld. Here character, Eden Sinclair, has been conceived as sort of a female Snake Plissken (she even has only one eye; her other one has been replaced by a robotic version that she can pop out of her socket and send out on brief reconnaissance missions), but while Mitra is physically convincing as an action heroine in her skin-tight uniform, there’s no texture to her performance, no stubble on her chin... er, metaphorically speaking. In a movie with all these entrails flying around, she comes off as a bit of a vegetarian.

RATING: 3/5


RECOUNT

Plot in a Nutshell
Directory Jay Roach’s comic docudrama (made for HBO) about the 2000 U.S. presidential election and the efforts of Democratic and Republican strategists to make sure the Florida recount favoured their candidate.

Thoughts
I watched Recount a couple of nights after Sydney Pollack died, and felt a second twinge of sorrow at his loss when his name appeared in the opening credits—I hadn’t realized that he was one of the film’s executive producers. (Apparently he was originally slated to direct it too, but I’m not sure whether he ceded the assignment due to health problems, or for some other reason. According to the IMDb, there are two more Pollack productions still slated for release, and both of them bear his usual stamp of class: Margaret, writer/director Kenneth Lonergan’s followup to the sublime You Can Count on Me; and The Reader, an adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel, directed by Stephen Daldry, written by David Hare, and starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes.)

It’s gratifying to see how many of the newspaper tributes that have appeared this week make special mention of Pollack’s acting—indeed, I suspect that if it hadn’t been for Pollack’s string of wonderful supporting roles in movies like Tootsie, Husbands and Wives, Eyes Wide Shut, and Michael Clayton, those obituaries probably would have been considerably more unkind. Or at least they would have been forced to make more of the fact that after he won the Oscar for Out of Africa in 1986, Pollack worked less and less frequently as a director, with less and less successful results. Does anyone even remember Random Hearts and Sabrina even exist? Does anyone remember Havana as anything other than a punchline on an episode of Seinfeld? (When Elaine returns a videotape she borrowed from him, Jerry grumbles, “Oh, thanks. Only two weeks late. Now that costs me $35 to see Havana.”)

My favourite Pollack film by far is They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which may be the most watchable completely depressing movie ever made. I pull out my They Shoot Horses DVD at least once a year just to savour its artfully grim, grimy atmosphere, the brilliantly edited “derby” sequences, the sharply etched characterizations, and Pollack’s ability to portray a sadistic, exploitative environment without becoming sadistic or exploitative himself.

And speaking of rigged contests... here I am, finally getting around to talking about Recount. It’s the kind of movie critics like to denigrate as a way of demonstrating how much more nuanced and sophisticated their understanding of current events is compared to the director and screenwriter, but I thought this was a pretty satisfying, responsible movie, with a script that skillfully condensed a complicated story and a lot of potentially dull, uncinematic information into an entertaining two hours, marred mainly by some unconvincing Gore/Bush voice and body doubles but redeemed by the presence of character actors like Gary Basaraba, Bruce McGill, Bob Balaban, and especially Marcia Jean Kurtz (one of my favourites!) as a no-nonsense Florida election official who’s one of this story’s few islands of sanity and straight thinking.

The film’s sympathies are obviously with the Gore team, but it resists the temptation to demonize the Republicans, portraying their victory not as a triumph of evil but as a result of having a more skillful, savvy team of strategists.

And, of course, of having Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris on hand to undermine any gains the Democrats are able to achieve. Man oh man, we need to see Laura Dern in more movies. Her performance as Harris is, by necessity, the broadest one in the entire film, but it stops just shy of caricature—her Harris is both aware that she’s in over her head, and yet serenely eager to assume her place in American history. I can think of no higher praise than to say it’s a performance worthy of Sydney Pollack himself.

RATING: 3.5/5

The Musicgoer: The Dresden Dolls' No, Virginia...

THE DRESDEN DOLLS
No, Virginia...
(Roadrunner)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

The latest album from the Tim Burtonesque punk-cabaret duo may be a hodgepodge of new originals, outtakes from their 2006 album Yes, Virginia..., and a sardonic cover of The Psychedelic Furs’ “Pretty in Pink,” but it holds together as tightly as the knot in drummer Brian Viglione’s ever-present necktie. Vocalist Amanda Palmer’s lyrics may occasionally be cryptic enough to make even The Fiery Furnaces scratch their heads—did I mishear, or is she really singing “Put Pat Sajak back in office” on “The Kill”?—but her turns of phrase are so fresh and unexpected and so full of darkly funny wordplay that you can’t help but keep listening for fear of missing the next epigram. (“Nothing is crueler than children who come from good homes,” goes the first line from “Night Reconnaissance”—that’s a particularly good one.)

But I like The Dolls best when they’re spinning out rollicking, intricate, piano-pounding story-songs like “Ultima Esperanza” (about an internet romance) and “Lonesome Organist Rapes Page-Turner” (er... okay, that one’s probably self-explanatory). It’s not even June, but No, Virginia... makes me hungry for Halloween to get here.

The Musicgoer: Robyn's Robyn

ROBYN
Robyn
(Konichiwa/Cherrytree/Interscope)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

According to “Curriculum Vitae,” the opening track to the new U.S. version of her self-titled 2005 album, Robyn suckerpunched Einstein, out-superfreaked Rick James, stunt-doubles for Jackie Chan on the weekends, and won the Nobel Prize for “superfoxiest female ever”—twice! Ah, but her heart breaks just like a little girl: by the end of the disc, on “Any Time You Like,” she’s crying herself to sleep in her pink silk sheets, begging the boy she likes to tell her he likes her back.

In between, Robyn delivers one showstoppingly inventive pop song after another, vowing to “kick ass all the way to Hong Kong” on the bubblegum rap song “Konichiwa Bitches,” taunting a cocky record producer on the make on “Handle Me,” proclaiming her freedom over a galloping violin section on “Be Mine!” and then breaking your heart on the simple, vulnerable “With Every Heartbeat.”

She's diva, clown, torch singer, and pop genius all wrapped up in one. By the album’s jawdropping final track, “Dream On,” on which she offers a glitterball benediction on all the “punks and lifers, pigs and snitches, scum and lowlifes” rotting in prison or sleeping in gutters around the world, Robyn’s ascension into pop goddesshood is complete. Watch your back, Madonna: if this girl ever fixes that awful hairdo, you’ll never be able to stop her.

Crack That Whip! Give The Past A Slip!

In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, everyone’s favourite whip-wielding archaeologist battles Communists, dodges thousands of poison darts and machine-gun bullets, and even withstands an atomic bomb blast as he goes in search of a fabled city made of gold. But with this new adventure, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford are hoping to capture something even more elusive: the magic of a beloved series that has been inactive for nearly two decades.

Many of the hallmarks of the Indiana Jones are here: a thick red line still traces Indy’s travels around the globe via ancient Pan Am routes; every ancient building Indy visits is still filled with gigantic stone pillars that slide in and out of their hiding places amidst much Dolby-ized rumbling and scraping; and Indy has lost none of his propensity for hopping into moving vehicles and punching out whoever’s behind the steering wheel. But not everything has remained unchanged: the Communists, not the Nazis, are the bad guys now (they’re led by Cate Blanchett’s androgynous villainess Irina Spalko); McCarthyite goons are questioning Indy’s patriotism; and Indy must put up with a young, motorcycle-riding tagalong named Mutt (Shia LeBeouf), who may or may not be his son.

Do all the elements snap right into place, like the headpiece on the Staff of Ra? Or are Spielberg & Co. too old for this game, no longer able to outrun the gigantic boulder of audience expectations? I caught an advance screening of the film with my friend, TV columnist Nicola Simpson Khullar (who's also the daughter of an archaeologist, no less!), and sat down afterward with her to compare reactions. Here’s our mildly spoiler-filled conversation.

Paul Matwychuk: Let me start by asking what you were hoping for from this movie. What did you want it to deliver?

Nicola Simpson Khullar: I guess I was hoping for the magic. It’s a franchise that’s supposedly based on action and one-liners, but with this one, I found that what magic there was comes from the music. The only times I felt really connected to it emotionally were when John Williams did his thing and those familiar themes would come up.

PM: Myself, I have to admit, I wasn’t all that interested in this movie when it was announced. The whole idea of returning to the well again after all these years just bored me. Harrison Ford just seemed way too old, he hasn’t given a really dynamic, engaged movie performance in ages—

NSK: You don’t count Hollywood Homicide?

PM: Afraid not, and I was about as interested in seeing him banter with Shia LeBeouf as I was in seeing him paired up with Josh Hartnett. But then a funny thing happened: I remembered seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was 12, the perfect age for it, and I realized how long it’s been since I’ve had that kind of magical, enthralling experience at the movies. And I started to think that maybe Spielberg could pull it off! And suddenly, the idea of sitting in a movie theatre as the lights went down and that Indy theme music started up sounded really exciting. So I completely changed my attitude—I was really looking forward to getting sucked into another rousing adventure.

NSK: So were you sucked in?

PM: Well, I think the movie starts out well and has a lot of fun with the ’50s setting, but once it heads into the jungle, it really starts to fall apart. None of the characters’ motivations are very compelling, the Ray Winstone character isn’t very interesting—the first time Ray Winstone has ever played the least interesting person in a movie!—and the action stuff just seems a lot more rote.

NSK: And there was definitely too much action at the expense of the characterizations. Once they get into the jungle, there are plot holes and anachronisms big enough to drive any of those trucks through. I mean, at one point, they’re driving through the jungle with this massive clearcutter creating a path through the trees, but then the clearcutter is taken out of commission and when the big chase scene starts, they’ve somehow got miles and miles of perfectly clear path in front of them. It’s like the end of Speed, where you just go, “Oh my God, will you just end this chase already!”

PM: Well, I will say that I appreciated the fact that Spielberg is one of the few remaining directors who still takes the time to put together a coherent action sequence. You actually know where everybody is in relation to each other, the editing is crisp and clean, and the shots give you all the narrative information you need with a minimum of fuss. Michael Kahn, Spielberg’s editor, is just a genius at this stuff.

NSK: But the action is so choreographed—it’s all too perfect. I was also distracted by some of the conspicuous greenscreening, especially in the scenes where Karen Allen is driving through the jungle. And that sequence in the cemetery looks really stagebound. I just don’t expect Spielberg to be lazy in that way. Maybe they were trying to duplicate the cheesy look that effects had in the ’50s? Or am I trying too hard to excuse it?

PM: Were you surprised that they didn’t make Indy’s age more of an issue? There are a couple of winking lines of dialogue at the start of the movie about how he’s not as young as he used to be, but it never becomes part of the stakes in the action scenes that he doesn’t have the physical stamina or agility that he used to have. It seems like there could have been a lot more tension in the movie if Indy had to rely on Mutt—this kid whom he doesn’t entirely respect—to do some of the physical stuff.

NSK: One of the best scenes in the original Raiders is when Marion nurses his wounds. He’s really taken a licking by that scene—he can barely move! In this movie, Indy takes way more punches, but he doesn’t wince or limp at all. And he’s 20 years older! You’d think at one point a hit to the chin would break his dentures. Indy’s lost a lot of the ordinary-guy appeal that he had in Raiders. He seems almost indestructible at this point. He’s almost more of an alien than the ones in the movie—which, by the way, really bugged me. It just seemed really X-Files to me. And I don’t want to spoil the whole plot, so maybe I’ll just say that the logic of that backstory seemed really hazy to me.

PM: The ending is a real letdown. And I don’t mean just the final little epilogue, which I think a lot of people are going to find very anticlimactic, but the big action climax feels like nothing more than a retread of the ending of Raiders, where the villain with the foreign accent is destroyed by the powerful object they’ve spent the whole movie trying to acquire. In the world of the Indiana Jones movies, too much power apparently makes your head melt.

NSK: What did you think of Cate Blanchett?

PM: I hate to say it, but I thought she was a big disappointment.

NSK: I gotta agree. And her dialogue coach should have been fired.

PM: Just from the way she’s dressed and styled, you keep waiting for that character to be more deliciously sadistic and kinky...

NSK: Exactly! You expect there to be some kind of sexual tension or flirtation to be there with Indy. The movie isn’t terrible by any means—this isn’t like the Star Wars prequels, where you really feel ripped off at the end of them—but all the missed opportunities do start to pile up. Maybe that’s because they had such a hard time getting a script together—supposedly M. Night Shyamalan wrote a script, Frank Darabont wrote a script. I don’t know how David Koepp wound up with the job. Now, I like David Koepp! I think he did a great job with Jurassic Park. But on this one, I’m sure Spielberg and Lucas must have been looking over his shoulder the whole time. I get the feeling this wasn’t the best script they could come up with; it’s more like the best script they could all agree on.

PM: How do you think people will react to it? Do you think they’ll feel we’re just a couple of cranky critics who are being way too hard on it?

NSK: Well, I think people will find it somewhat predictable. I’d be very surprised if people like the ending.

PM: Shia LeBeouf’s Tarzan routine, swinging through the jungle vines, is not going to go over well. And those gags with the groundhogs were a terrible idea.

NSK: Oh God, the groundhogs! They should have just gotten rid of all the CGI animals, period.

PM: If we’re judging it harshly, I think it’s only in comparison to the high hopes we had for it. Taken on its own merits, it’s a well-made adventure, and there were all sorts of touches in it that made me smile. I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from seeing it. But I miss the irreverence of the original Raiders. Remember the way the first movie ended, with the all-powerful Ark of the Covenant being filed away inside this giant government warehouse? Such a nice, deflating touch. So what does the series have reverence for now? Well... it has reverence mainly for itself. It’s enshrining itself and its place in the history of blockbusters.

NSK: It wants to put itself in a box and hope the next generation will rediscover it 20 years later.

Close Encounters Of The Cutesiest Kind

I’ve seen some unnaturally cute, big-eyed movie creatures in my day—E.T., Gizmo from Gremlins, Zooey Deschanel—but the title character from CJ7 takes the cake. It’s part Tribble, part Teletubby, part Tamagotchi, part Shmoo, and part Nibbler from Futurama: it has a green torso made of some kind of infinitely stretchable plastic, stubby little green legs, a brown, furry, football-shaped head like Stewie Griffin, gigantic animé eyes, and a floppy antenna that’s the perfect size and shape for blowing soap bubbles. It communicates through a series of burbles, coos, and purrs, and it giggles and wriggles if you scratch it on its belly. Your first instinct might be to scream and try to kill it, but since it seems about as malleable and indestructible as a ball of Silly Putty, you might as well give in and make it your pet.

That’s what little Dicky Chow decides to do when he accidentally comes into possession of it. As the son of a dirt-poor construction-site “coolie” (played by writer/director Stephen Chow), Dicky rarely gets luxuries like toys—he and his father are so poor, their idea of a fun game is seeing who can squash the most cockroaches on the wall of their tiny shack. With his ragged shoes (scavenged by Mr. Chow from a nearby dump), Dicky is the laughingstock of the private school his father has scrimped and saved for him to attend, but he hopes his new friend CJ7 can use its magical outer-space powers to help him finally win the respect of his rich and popular classmates.

CJ7 is an unexpected change of pace for Chow, following his exhilarating, tongue-in-cheek martial-arts comedies Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. Those films had an appealingly childlike, cartoonish quality to them, but this one is an outright kiddie movie, the performances and the gags even broader than the ones Chow usually goes for. Chow relegates himself to a supporting role; it’s Xu Jiao (the young actress who plays his son Dicky) to carry the bulk of the film. And she seems to be totally on Chow’s wavelength. Chow encourages her to mug for the camera a lot, but her transgender performance, which contains some quite skillful physical comedy, never slides into obnoxiousness.

It helps that Chow forces little CJ7 to undergo an almost unending series of physical abuses. The poor thing is stretched, squashed, and twisted in every direction. A dog mauls it, Dicky throws it in a trashcan, and his classmates take a saw and a power drill to it to try and figure out where the batteries go. All of this is absolutely hilarious—especially the bug-eyed look of terror on CJ7’s face as each new indignity begins.

I’m not sure who the North American audience for CJ7 will be. The subtitles make it problematic as a family movie, even though many of the gags—including a couple of wonderfully exuberant poop jokes and a slapstick fight with the school bully—traffic in exactly the kind of wildly exaggerated humour that kids adore. (Too bad a dubbed version isn’t available.) But adults may resist the bizarre images and Chow’s breakneck tonal shifts between slapstick comedy and tearjerking melodrama.

Who’s left? Childish adults, I guess, who can appreciate Chow’s loving homages to E.T. and his satire of Asian consumerism while giggling at the sight of the perfect Dairy Queen soft-serve turd CJ7 deposits in Dicky’s hand. (Even its turds are cute!) I don’t know how many of us there are out there, but if the film’s final scene is any indication, there are more than enough CJ7s out there to go around.

Thank You For Sending Me An Angel

Hagar Shipley is not happy. Her son Marvin and daughter-in-law Doris—living embodiments of the dull, obedient, bourgeois respectability she’s spent her whole life chafing against—have taken her to visit the nursing home where they’re thinking of placing her. It’s a cheery enough place, but in her contrarian way, the sheer cheeriness of it all rubs Hagar the wrong way. She has a great line when the “tour guide” shows the Shipleys the dining area, and points out the flowers on the tables and the large windows allow sunshine to stream into the room while everyone is eating. But all Hagar can see are the rows and rows of regimented tables: “I don’t know,” she mutters unhappily as she shuffles through the room. “I never much cared for army life.”

That joke—a sardonic line worthy of Philip Marlowe—sails right over everyone’s head, which only makes Hagar seem even cooler. One of the best things about The Stone Angel, writer/director Kari Skogland’s adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s CanLit classic, is its simple refusal to condescend to the experience of growing old and helpless. They never reduce Hagar (beautifully played by Ellen Burstyn) to being merely “feisty” or “crotchety” or any of those other belittling adjectives we like to apply to old people. Hagar’s not “feisty”; she’s sharp and funny. She’s not “crotchety”; she’s angry. And those personality traits don’t exist in isolation; they’re the result of a whole lifetime of decisions, some wise, some foolhardy.

For a supposedly “beloved” Canadian novel, The Stone Angel seems to generate an unusual amount of hostility—mostly, I suspect, from guys who were assigned the book in high school and who still resent having been forced to experience an entire story from a female point of view. I’m not sure what the problem is, though; Hagar’s the furthest thing from a drippy, passive heroine. As a long-limbed prairie beauty (played in flashbacks by Christine Horne), she’s unconventional enough to be attracted to the low-class Bram (Cole Hauser) and willing even to defy her prosperous Scottish father by marrying him. She even smokes the occasional joint.

But she’s also got her blind spots: she’s genuinely shocked when her father cuts her out of his will, and as a mother, she blatantly favours her younger, wilder son John over the more dutiful Marvin. Hagar’s famous “pride”—the subject of countless high-school essays—is nicely dramatized here: when Hagar, now forced to work as a maid, humbly asks her boss for some time off or visits former childhood friends in their much nicer homes, you can see how painful it is for this woman to be reminded of how far she has fallen socially.

Thankfully, Skogland’s screenplay jettisons pretty much all of the heavy-handed symbols and Biblical allusions that weighed down Laurence’s book and turns the film into more of a character study. It’s a very smart adaptation; there’s a stretch in the film’s middle third where you can feel Skogland having to compress a lot of incidents from the novel into a limited amount of screen time, but she takes care to make sure even these short scenes have enough texture—a small acting moment, a memorable image—to keep you from feeling she’s just glossing over them.

That’s not what the National Post or The Globe & Mail think, though; reviewers from both papers found the film to be well-made but a little bit sprawling and more than a little dull. Am I taking crazy pills here? The Stone Angel may not be flashy or particularly innovative, but as a citizen of the prairies, when I see those Toronto critics shrugging their shoulders at a film with this level of intelligence and old-fashioned craftsmanship while praising a crushingly dull, cinematically inert CanLit adaptation like Fugitive Pieces, I can feel my regional pride flaring up. And don’t you dare call me crotchety, either—no, I’m downright angry!

The Moviegoer: Radio Edition!

Allergic to quirk, you say? Fed up with Wes Anderson and everyone who ever imitated him? Yikes... well then, you'll want to avoid my latest DVD radio segment, which is up and ready to be listened to on the CBC website. This week's pick is Jeffrey Blitz's underrated teen comedy Rocket Science, starring Reece Thompson as a stuttering teen and Anna Kendrick as the fast-talking classmate who convinces him to join the debating team. Hijinks (but not completely predictable ones) ensue.

Moviegoer Diary: Charley Varrick, The Long Good Friday

CHARLEY VARRICK

Plot in a Nutshell
Walter Matthau is a part-time cropduster who pulls off a bank heist, only to discover that he’s inadvertently made off with a fortune in Mafia cash, in this 1973 crime picture directed by Don Siegel.

Thoughts
I put off watching Charley Varrick for years because of a dim memory of starting to watch it on TV when I was a teenager, getting bored by it, and switching the channel after only about 10 minutes. Wow, what kind of hummingbird attention span must I have had when I was a kid? This thing takes off like a rocket and never lets up. After praising The Getaway to the skies just a few weeks ago, I’m kind of amazed to run across another early-’70s robbers-on-the-run heist flick that I like even better.

And Walter Matthau, surprisingly, is even cooler than Steve McQueen. He does a great little trick throughout this movie, slipping effortlessly back and forth between the folksy act Charley puts on around the police and the ruthless, cool-headed professional criminal that he is in private. In the opening scene, this switch is played for shock, as Charley enters a bank disguised as a doddering old man, hobbling around on an ankle cast as he yammers away to the manager, and then whips out a gun and brutally disarms the security guard. A little while later, this switch is played for comedy: when a police car stops his van (with more than half a million bucks stashed in the back), Charley does an impishly funny hayseed routine, chewing a wad of gum, never once dropping his expression of deadpan innocence, not even when the cop asks him what’s inside those big canisters rattling around in the back of his van.

I love the detail that Matthau and his wife (who helps him carry out the bank robbery, and gets shot for her trouble) used to appear in air shows together—he’d fly the plane and she’d do a wingwalking routine. The notion is so romantic and yet so dangerous—you can believe it wouldn’t take much for them to graduate to robbing banks together—and the ignominious way she dies, bleeding to death in a car from a bullet wound in her hip, seems especially poignant.

Even the most minor characters in the film are imaginatively characterized. I love the banter between Matthau and the sexy passport photographer played by Sheree North—especially when he tries to take one of her lollipops from her bowl and she tells him it’ll cost him $500 extra. And I adored Matthau’s elderly neighbour at the trailer park where he lives—the one who claims to attract improper sexual advances wherever she goes. My favourite bit in the film just might be the moment where she hears her phone ringing inside her trailer and shuffles off to answer it, sighing, “Probably another obscene phone call!”

It’s hard to watch Joe Don Baker in this movie and not see his character, Molly, as a forerunner of Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Do these kinds of men exist in real life? Implacable, relentless hired killers who leave a swath of violence behind them as they track their prey, men so dangerous even the police leave them alone? Molly may not have Chigurh’s godlike detachment—he gets more of a sadistic kick out of his work—but I’d be just as terrified to have him on my tail.

Actually, Charley Varrick would probably get along well with Llewellyn Moss, Josh Brolin’s character in No Country, and probably would have told him what a stupid idea it was to go back to that crime scene to bring that guy some water. Forethought: that’s what separates guys like Varrick—“the last of the independents”—from guys like Moss. The tagline for No Country for Old Men reads “You can’t stop what’s coming.” Maybe so, but Charley Varrick would add, “But you can still lay a trap for it.”



RATING: 4.5/5



THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY

Plot in a Nutshell
John Mackenzie’s 1980 British thriller about Cockney gangleader Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins), whose organization becomes the target of a mysterious but well-organized enemy just as he’s about to close a business deal that will elevate him to a new level of social legitimacy.

Thoughts
I know The Long Good Friday is regarded not just as a modern gangster classic but a landmark of British cinema. And watching Bloody Business, the making-of documentary included as a special feature on Anchor Bay’s edition of the film, I could certainly recognize all of the film’s virtues: the complex characterization of Harold Shand; the raw emotion in Bob Hoskins’ scenes with Helen Mirren (as Harold’s posh wife) and Derek Thompson (as his untrustworthy right-hand man); the clever staging of the scene in which a car blows up outside a church.

So why did I feel just a little underwhelmed by the film while I was actually watching it? Is it the British thing? British movies seem so opaque to me a lot of the time. It just seems that so many of them, despite being well-acted, intelligently written, and complexly plotted, still lack a certain cinematic essence. You get one perfectly solid scene after another, often with some imaginative shots thrown in (like The Long Good Friday’s upside-down POV shot of Harold’s criminal rivals strung up from their feet in the meat locker, or the shot of Harold in the shower, his face distorted by the rippled glass) and yet somehow they’re like a string of uncoupled train cars... they don’t flow together in a way that inexorably pulls you along through the story.

Or, more accurately, that didn’t pull me along through the story. But maybe I’m not alone. I found the first six or eight minutes of the film—a fragmented preamble that serves much the same function as the teaser in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent—totally confusing, which put me ill at ease even before Hoskins made his entrance. But according to Bloody Business, confusing audiences was the point: director John Mackenzie says he deliberately wanted to put people off-balance and signal to them that they’d better pay close attention to what’s happening onscreen. But Mackenzie has a ragged visual style that doesn’t guide your eye toward the things you especially need to take note of. I don’t know... I hate to think I need a director to hold my hand throughout the entire story, but this just doesn’t seem like a very user-friendly way to start a movie. Of course, hardly anybody else seems to have a problem with it. So where does that leave me? Moving onto the next paragraph, I guess.

But if the beginning of The Long Good Friday left me cold, the ending is sensational: Harold climbs into his limo, realizing too late that an IRA thug is behind the wheel. As a second thug (a smirking Pierce Brosnan, looking impossibly young and dashing and evil) emerges from the passenger seat and trains a gun between Harold’s eyes, the camera gives us a long, long closeup on Hoskins’ face as Harold silently goes from seething fury to a quiet acceptance of his fate. (I have a bad habit of compulsively noting similarities between old movies and recent ones, but you can’t help but think of George Clooney’s long closeup in the backseat of the cab in the great final shot of Michael Clayton as you watch this sequence.)

In Bloody Business, Bob Hoskins says that filming this scene taught him an important acting lesson: that if you’ve prepared properly for the scene and if you’re thinking the right thoughts, the movie camera really can read your mind. I think Hoskins’ performance in The Long Good Friday is kind of uneven, but in this scene, he’s downright telepathic. (What’s even more amazing is that he did it without ever meeting Brosnan—according to Bloody Business, their halves of the scene were shot separately.)

This brief, wordless performance makes me wonder why Brosnan didn’t make a more interesting James Bond. Brosnan has the same streak of cruelty in this movie that Daniel Craig brought to his performance in Casino Royale and which seemed so fresh after Brosnan’s more dapper, Astaire-like take on Bond. Brosnan found this quality again in movies like The Tailor of Panama and The Matador; what did he do with it during his 007 days? Why couldn’t the camera read his mind?



RATING: 3/5 (but the ending is a total 5/5!)

The Musicgoer: Scarlett Johansson's Anywhere I Lay My Head

SCARLETT JOHANSSON
Anywhere I Lay My Head
(Rhino/Atlantic)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

Enjoy Tom Waits’ songs, but wish he were a voluptuous 24-year-old woman instead? Well, have I got the CD for you: Anywhere I Lay My Head, a collection of Tom Waits covers (plus one original) performed by bosomy starlet Scarlett Johansson, whose only notable previous contribution to pop music was modeling a pair of pink panties to the accompaniment of My Bloody Valentine’s “City Girl” in Lost in Translation.

Well, call me a heretic, but I haven’t enjoyed listening to a Tom Waits album this much since Mule Variations. The magic ingredient isn’t Johansson (whose singing voice has a decent, surprisingly husky timbre but not a whole lot of range), but producer Dave Sitek, from the band TV on the Radio. I’ve grown weary of Waits’ clinky-clunky-gruff-and-growly junkyard sound, and so I found it refreshing to hear Sitek use his melodies as the springboard for dreamy, almost shoegazey anthems as lush as the string-laden ballads Waits used to record all the time back in the ’70s. Waits fans will also appreciate clever touches like the way Sitek’s arrangement of “I Wish I Was in New Orleans” samples the music-box melody of “Take Me Home.”

What croaky-voiced singer/songwriter will get a ScarJo makeover next? Bob Dylan? Lou Reed? Excellent choices, but I’m hoping for Leonard Cohen—finally, a Cohen album I wouldn’t have to pretend to like!

Isabella Rossellini Goes Bugfuck Crazy

Last year, The Sundance Channel decided to start developing projects for computers, iPods, and cellphones—the so-called “third screen.” (Movie theatres are the first screen and TV sets are the second screen of the 21st-century media landscape.) The content would need to be short, colourful, and high-impact. It’s a simple mandate, and yet somehow it led to Isabella Rossellini in a bee costume hopping around a soundstage shouting, “My penis has broken off!”

That scene is one of the highlights of Green Porno, a delightfully odd series of eight short films (very short—they range from 90 seconds to just under three minutes) in which Rossellini describes the peculiar sexual habits of various common bugs, insects, and... er... whatever snails and earthworms are. Their visual style recalls an elementary school pageant or a children’s pop-up book come to life: bright, primary colours, with sets and costumes largely made of construction paper and cardboard. Everything looks deliberately artificial: the sky is obviously a bedsheet with fluffy white “clouds” stapled onto it, Rossellini’s “compound eyes” are obviously goggles covered with eye-shaped cardboard cutouts, and when Rossellini, playing a housefly, shows herself crawling on the ceiling, she’s obviously just crawling on the floor with the camera turned upside down.

It always used to seem strange that Rossellini, an internationally renowned beauty and the daughter of Hollywood royalty, was so willing to put herself at the disposal of oddball directors like David Lynch and Guy Maddin. But Green Porno makes the explanation obvious: she’s every bit as crazy as they are! But it’s a lovable, homespun sort of craziness—the craziness of that dotty spinster aunt we all have, the one with all those weird old clothes and antique gadgets up in the attic. It’s as if one of those nutty women who love dressing up their cats in homemade costumes had a side career as a top fashion model and knew a lot of New York gallery owners and theatre designers.

Rossellini brings a childlike sense of make-believe to these shorts that’s absolutely perfect for the material. She’s completely unembarrassed to dress up in ridiculous spandex costumes or deliver the strangest information straight into the camera: “If I were an earthworm, I would pee from each of my segments,” “If I were a dragonfly, I would find a female, grab her body, and clean her vagina to make sure she only had my babies,” “If I were a snail, I would twist my body to fit inside my shell; my anus would end up on top of my head... unfortunately.” She’s particularly funny in the “housefly” segment, yawning with mock alarm when someone tries to swat her with a newspaper, snacking on a giant plate of spaghetti, and then enthusiastically humping a giant female fly from the rear. “I have sex several times a day!” she boasts. “Any opportunity, any female!”

The more alien the creature she’s impersonating, the sexier Rossellini gets. In the “earthworm” segment, she’s deliciously serene as she describes the joys of hermaphroditic sex, and when she successfully passes her fertilized clitellum over her head, allowing a new litter of babies to hatch, she looks like the most radiant woman on earth. And words cannot describe the X-rated climax of the “snail” segment, in which Rossellini is both penetrator and penetratee, sadist and masochist, top and bottom, man and woman. “Sadomasochism excites me,” she coos—Dorothy Vallens and Frank Booth from Blue Velvet both subsumed into one small, slimy, ecstatic organism.

Besides being hilarious, Green Porno makes the world seem just a little more wondrous—who knew such perversities were taking place right under our noses? I don’t think I’d want to trade places with any of these insects, though. Well, all right, maybe I’d be willing to be a firefly, but only if I could be guaranteed that the female flashing back at me would turn out to be as cute as Isabella Rossellini. And that she wouldn’t eat me.

God Bless You, Ethel Firecracker

I think The Guatemalan Handshake might be my favourite movie so far this year, and yet I’m kind of at a loss to explain why I liked it so much.

But maybe I can start by saying that The Guatemalan Handshake is a celebration of genuine American eccentricity. Writer/director Todd Rohal seems to know that true eccentricity doesn’t just consist of a couple of cartoonish quirks; it’s organic, inexplicable... and odd more often than it is funny. True American eccentrics are people like Mr. Turnupseed, a stern old guy who keeps a stash of fireworks secretly stored in his backyard shed, the combination to the lock hidden in the sunshade of his vintage electric car, and a photo of himself, Willie Mays, and the world’s largest piece of bubblegum mounted on a piece of wood and hung on the wall of the TV room. It’s people like Stool, a social misfit who takes his shirt off whenever he gets excited and blithely keeps on drinking milkshakes even though he’s lactose intolerant. And it’s people like Turkeylegs, a 10-year-old part-time mechanic who conducts her own investigation when her 40-year-old best friend vanishes and no one else bothers to go looking for him.

Those character descriptions may sound silly and mannered, but if The Guatemalan Handshake resembles, say, Napoleon Dynamite, it’s Napoleon Dynamite after it’s filtered through the sensibility of George Washington and All the Real Girls, with maybe a pinch of Gummo. (And indeed, David Gordon Green is thanked in the credits and wrote an enthusiastic essay about the film for the DVD booklet.) Shot for only $70,000, the film is one of the most gorgeous-looking comedies I’ve ever seen, full of impeccable widescreen compositions and a palette of warm oranges, browns, and greens that Terrence Malick would flip over. (He’d also probably be flattered by the voiceover narration by top-billed little Katy Harwood as Turkeylegs, which recalls Linda Manz’ narration from Days of Heaven.)

The action unfolds in a small town in Pennsylvania that’s like a Brigadoon of ’70s detritus: the cordless phone doesn’t seem to have penetrated here yet; wood paneling has not yet gone out of style; men wear sideburns, large-collared dress shirts, and polyester shorts without irony; and everyone’s idea of a good time is going to the fair and taking in a demolition derby. But the ’70s fashions aren’t punchlines, the way they are in Will Ferrell comedies; rather, they’re used nostalgically, even poignantly, to evoke an age when wood was more common than chrome, when people were more comfortable with their own homegrown tackiness, when kids could spend the night chasing fireflies through a wheatfield without anybody worrying. It’s a place where phone booths still exist, where old (current?) issues of Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction sit on people’s coffee tables, and where the best possible fairground prize is a giant fake mustache.


In one scene, elderly Ethel Firecracker reads her own obituary in the town newspaper, and shuffles off, bewildered but resigned, to attend her own memorial service. In another scene, Turkeylegs prepares herself a meal by standing a hollow chocolate Easter bunny in a bowl of half-melted ice cream, breaking it in half, filling it with chocolate milk, and methodically topping it all off with whipped cream and chocolate syrup. In another, a pair of Boy Scouts drive down the highway, uncaringly tossing dollar bills, one by one, out the window behind them. Hey, it’s one way to pass the time.

Movies like The Guatemalan Handshake seem like small miracles, made with whatever materials and locations happened to be at hand, starring people on the street and in the schools, with no marketing plan, no interest in attracting Hollywood distribution, no goal of becoming “this year’s Juno”—a real-life version of the “neighbourhood filmmaking” celebrated within Be Kind Rewind, but made with a genuine artist’s eye and not a couple of amateurs with an old camcorder.

That’s the second time I’ve used “genuine” to describe this movie, but I can’t think of a better word to replace it. It’s genuinely funny, genuinely touching, genuinely original, and at more than a few times, genuinely perplexing. And I’m genuinely grateful to the people at Benten Films for making this gem available on DVD.

* * * * *

I hesitated about linking to this music video, even though it was directed by Rohal and features Guatemalan Handshake cast member Ivan Dimitrov and composer David Wingo—it doesn’t reflect the look or the tone of the film at all, and will probably scare off plenty of people from the movie just after I spent 700 words convincing them to give it a shot. But this video is just too damned bizarre for me not to show it to you. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ola Podrida’s “Lost and Found”...

05/09/1969

Happy birthday, Albert Finney!



Happy birthday, Candice Bergen!



Happy birthday, Rosario Dawson!



Happy birthday, Ghostface Killah!



Happy birthday, Joe Carnahan, Glenda Jackson, John Ashcroft, Billy Joel, and everyone else who was born on May 9. And happy birthday me!

Moviegoer Diary: The Howling, Benny's Video

THE HOWLING

Plot in a Nutshell
Joe Dante’s 1981 horror classic about a traumatized TV newswoman who checks into a self-help retreat that turns out to be a werewolf colony.

Thoughts
Reading various blog reports about “Dante’s Inferno,” the recent film festival at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles hosted by cult director Joe Dante, inspired me to check out The Howling for the first time this week—and what a great discovery it was! In fact, I’m ready to recklessly declare it the best werewolf movie of all time—and if any DVD packagers are out there reading this, yes, I'm trying to get you to quote me.

What I particularly like about The Howling is the way its lycanthropic characters take such unabashed pleasure in giving into their animal nature—in The Howling, turning into a wolf is a gloriously carnal experience. Nowhere is this theme better expressed than in the film’s justifiably famous midnight outdoor sex scene between Christopher Stone and Elisabeth Brooks. Will I sound like a complete freak if I say that this is one of the most erotic movie scenes of the ’80s? The outdoor setting, the stunning beauty of Elisabeth Brooks (a pillow-lipped maneater in the Angelina Jolie mould), the intensity of the attraction between the two actors, the way it links orgasm to metamorphosis, and just the way that the scene is a little more explicit and a little more tabo0-breaking than you expect it to be... it’s like the subtext of decades’ worth of werewolf movies is finally breaking through to the surface.

(And a moment of silence, if you please, for Elisabeth Brooks, an actress previously unknown to me. According to the IMDb, she made a cluster of TV appearances in the ’70s on shows like Starsky and Hutch and The Six Million Dollar Man. The Howling would seem to be a starmaking part for her, but instead the Toronto-born siren disappeared from movies for seven years, re-emerging in a Fred Olen Ray cheapie called Deep Space. She died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 46. I bet there's an intriguing story somewhere in there...)

I had been expecting The Howling to be sort of a tongue-in-cheek take on the werewolf genre—not a spoof, exactly, but maybe something along the lines of other John Sayles-scripted horror flicks from this era like Alligator or Piranha, with plenty of winking Joe Dante in-jokes. Those in-jokes are there, courtesy of cameos by Roger Corman and Forrest J. Ackerman (as well as a fun supporting performance by Dick Miller as the hilariously down-to-earth proprietor of one of those neighbourhood occult bookstores that only seem to exist in horror movies), but I was surprised at how intense a lot of The Howling turned out to be. The opening sequence, with Dee Wallace being menaced by a killer in a peepshow booth while a really rough-looking porn film plays behind her, was a lot sleazier and scarier than I was expecting from Dante. And the film’s final scene, with Wallace deliberately turning into a werewolf and getting gunned down during a live newscast—while the jaded viewers at home barely notice—is a perfect mix of emotion, scares, comedy, and genre-topping outrageousness.

One last thought: every time I watch the extra features on the DVD editions of some of these ’80s monster movies—movies like The Thing, Videodrome, An American Werewolf in London, The Fly—I get very nostalgic for what now seems like a golden age of movie makeup. I love hearing guys like Rob Bottin and his crew talk about staying up for 24 hours straight, trying to perfect some crazy effect, or watching these wonderfully unwieldy groups of eight or nine people, each of them cramped awkwardly into some tight space, each one operating some minute aspect of an overall animatronic effect.

Such crazy zest for their work! Someone really should make a fiction film set in this milieu—maybe set it during the time when prosthetics were just about to give way to CGI... you know, for added end-of-an-era poignancy. And by “someone,” I guess I mean “me.” Don’t steal my idea, you guys!



RATING: 4.5/5



BENNY’S VIDEO

Plot in a Nutshell
Michael Haneke’s 1992 provocation about a sociopathic teenager who brings a girl up to his room and videotapes himself killing her... much to the horror of his bourgeois parents.

Thoughts
Yep, it’s C.H.U.D. one week, Michael Haneke the next... you never know what you’re going to get next here at the ol’ movie blog!

But you do know what you’re going to get when you watch a Michael Haneke movie: videotapes, bourgeois families whose sterile homes are invaded by violence, finger-wagging indictments of the mass media, guilt-by-association references to Third World injustices, and an absolute formal mastery of film technique (especially his use of offscreen violence) that makes the whole package highly watchable even if you completely disagree with Haneke philosophically.

I tracked down Benny’s Video after listening to the latest Errata podcast, which dissected, with its customary intelligence and insight, pretty much Michael Haneke’s entire filmography. I was not a fan of Funny Games (either the original German version or its recent American remake), but I thought The Piano Teacher, Code Unknown, and Caché were all absolutely extraordinary films. And everything I’d heard about his post-apocalyptic chamber thriller Time of the Wolf made me think I’d probably enjoy that one too. Perhaps Funny Games was just an aberration, I thought, and the Errata guys made some of Haneke’s early work, Benny’s Video included, sound pretty intriguing too. Also, The Onion's recent list of "17 Notorious Living, Working Cinematic Provocateurs" contained a line from a Haneke interview—“I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence!”—that has become one of my all-time favourite filmmaking quotes. (Too bad Chris Sarandon never got to use the “independence” defence during the courtroom scenes in Lipstick.)

Well, Haneke’s early work has gone 0 for 2 with me. I thought Benny’s Video had many of the same qualities that turned me off Funny Games: the moralistic condemnations of pop culture and loud rock music, the contempt for young people, the directorial detachment that turns his characters into specimens on a microscope slide. These numbed-out, amoral young people who appear in Haneke’s films, trained to torture and kill people by hours of TV and movie-watching, never seem convincing to me—they seem like constructs, plot devices, outward projections of Haneke’s own anxieties about a modern culture he won’t even engage with.

Benny’s Video does contain one great performance, by Angela Winkler as Benny’s mother. Her reactions to her son’s crime have the insanity of truth to them: when her husband (Ulrich Mühe, from The Lives of Others and the original Funny Games) starts laboriously weighing the morality of reporting Benny’s crime to the police, she reacts to his accountantlike pedantry with a nervous giggle. And in the film’s best scene—the climax of a long, strange, late-in-the-film detour that sees her taking Benny on a trip to Egypt while her husband gives the body of Benny’s victim the old Raymond-Burr-in-Rear Window treatment—she suddenly collapses into sobs as she lies on her bed in her hotel room, no longer able to repress the horror of what her son has done.

I also want to point out the same bizarre Haneke motif that the Errata guys noticed: Benny’s Video and both versions of Funny Games all contain these odd scenes where characters have to wipe up a mess in the kitchen—in Benny’s Video, Benny spills some milk on the counter, and in Funny Games, the mother has to clean up some eggs that have been dropped on the floor. In all three movies, the characters onscreen do a really terrible job of cleaning it up—they basically just take a handful of paper towels and kind of smear the spill around, leaving half the mess still untouched. (In a parallel scene in Benny’s Video, Benny does an equally half-assed job of cleaning up his victim’s blood.)

What’s up with this? Is this how Haneke thinks you clean up a spill? Do they not have J-Cloths in Germany? Or is it some kind of private, fetishistic symbol he feels compelled to include in every movie he makes, like Stanley Kubrick and his scenes set in toilets or Quentin Tarantino and his shots of women’s feet? I’m anxious for insight.

RATING: 2/5

Jaw-Dropping Quote Of The Week

From the April 25/May 2 "Summer Movie Preview" issue of Entertainment Weekly:

EW: Any theories why your films are so popular in Spain, despite the language barrier?

Woody Allen: I don't know what my appeal in Europe has ever been. It's always surprised me. I grew up loving European cinema of the ’50s and ’60s so much that perhaps the sensibility or the rhythm of those films has gotten into me without me consciously imitating them [!!!], and in some way, I'm reproducing some quality that resonates with the European audience.

The Musicgoer: Portishead's Third

PORTISHEAD
Third
(Universal)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

Third, which is the first studio album in 11 years from legendary trip-hop innovators Portishead, features a song called, appropriately enough “We Carry On.” But this is no triumphant “don’t call it a comeback” leadoff track; it’s a dark, driving tune that pops up midway through the album, a repetitive phrase played on a wheezy harmonium accompanied by a sinister quick-march rhythm track. If the songs is about carrying on, it’s in the resigned, post-apocalyptic, Samuel Beckett sense: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Third is an album where even “Deep Water,” 90 seconds of singer Beth Gibbons accompanied by a ukulele, sounds ominous—Tiny Tim crossed with Trent Reznor, recorded in a fallout shelter. Or a cave, more likely, along with all the other ragged human beings who gathered there after civilization fell apart.

And yet there’s a strange beauty amidst all the dissonance on Third. The jagged, industrial clatter of “Machine Gun” isn’t enough to drown the yearning in Gibbons’ voice, still poignantly straining at the very limits of her upper register. And those loud, swooping tones, like an air-raid siren with the bass cranked up, which close out the album’s final track, “Threads,” manage to sound unearthly yet comforting at the same time—like whalesong. The future may look bleak, but at least it’s still got Portishead in it.

Moviegoer Diary: Lipstick, Teeth

LIPSTICK

Plot in a Nutshell
I can’t improve on the IMDb summary: “Composer Chris Sarandon brutally rapes fashion model, goes to trial, gets freed, comes back and rapes her little sister. She takes revenge.”

Thoughts
I can, however, improve on the IMDb user comments, which are genuinely bizarre. “This is a beautifully made film,” says Andy Ethell, “and we can appreciate the freshness of the Hemingway sisters, as well as understand the difficulties a disturbed young man faces when his desires get the better of him.... In the end, no one wins, [except] viewers who are treated to almost two hours of suspense, escapism, and possibly voyeurism as the girls are so attractive.”

Pardon the overused internet interjection here, but WTF??? Who watches Lipstick, with that long, genuinely unpleasant scene in which Chris Sarandon ties up Margaux Hemingway and rapes her for several hours, and interprets it as a sympathetic portrait of the difficulties of a guy whose “desires get the better of him”? The same person, I guess, who cheerfully cites Mariel Hemingway—who was about 15 (!!!) when she made the film, but who looks a couple of years younger—as one of its chief voyeuristic delights.

(Ethell also makes the utterly inexplicable argument that in the 1970s, “scripts and characterisations had to be good because this was pre special effects, they actually shot films outdoors in real life settings, not just studio caverns.” I don’t even know where to start with this one... the 1970s were “pre special effects”?)

I don’t know if anyone can confirm this for me, but I get the feeling Lipstick is slowly undergoing a certain amount of critical reappraisal—dismissed in its day as a fairly tawdry, manipulative revenge thriller, it seems as though some viewers appreciate the frankness of its rape scene and its sympathetic attempt to dramatize the way courtrooms of the ’70s frequently treated victims of rape with more hostility than the accused. The closing credits begin by thanking representatives from the National Organization for the Prevention of Rape and Assault, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and the New York City Police Department for their input and technical advice. I assume that’s the aspect of the film that convinced Anne Bancroft to take part in it—she plays the prosecuting attorney who tries, unsuccessfully, to throw Sarandon in jail.

I’ll give director Lamont Johnson credit for filming the rape scene in a way that isn’t remotely erotic. But it still feels exploitative—I just felt awful for the actress... it was as if she was being violated a little along with her character. These scenes are really tough to figure out how to pull them off in a responsible way—I think David Lynch managed it in Blue Velvet, as did Jonathan Kaplan in The Accused and (although I’m sure many would vehemently disagree with this one) Gaspar Noé in Irréversible—and I don’t think Johnson has succeeded here.

Boy, Chris Sarandon’s agent must have wanted to kill him after this movie: his first movie role was in Dog Day Afternoon, playing a pre-operative transsexual, and he follows that up with Lipstick, playing a guy who doesn’t just rape the heroine, who doesn’t just taunt her with evil phone calls during his trial, but who also rapes her kid sister! He gives kind of an interesting performance—there’s a boyish quality to him that reminded me, oddly, of Mark Ruffalo—but it’s surprising to see a good-looking young actor so willing to define himself in the public mind as a sexual deviant right out of the gate. (Amusingly, Sarandon’s character is a composer of avant-garde electronic music. During the rape scene, he turns on a cassette of one of his compositions, and it’s such an atonal cacophony that it’s not clear whether he gets off on hearing his own work while he’s violating his victim, or if he’s just trying to make the experience even more miserable for her.)

Here’s the film’s celebrated camp climax, in which Margaux Hemingway races from a photo shoot with Francesco Scavullo to gun Sarandon down—without even bothering to change out of her red Dior gown. I notice that on the original YouTube page, one of the comments reads, “I would totally rape that shit.”

Ah, internet... you really test my faith in my fellow man sometimes.



RATING: 2/5



TEETH

Plot in a Nutshell
Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 horror movie about Dawn (Jess Weixler), a virginal teenage girl who discovers her vagina contains a deadly set of teeth.

Thoughts
If only the Hemingway sisters were more like Dawn—Lipstick would have unfolded much differently!

I finished my rape-victims-fight-back double bill with this oddity from writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein, which definitely has a fresh horror-movie premise, but one that I doubt will spawn a wave of imitators. The truth is, Teeth is, no pun intended, kind of dull—it takes forever to get going, and it doesn’t really find its sick-comic groove until its final half hour. The premise is pretty outrageous, but Lichtenstein doesn’t come up with very many outrageous things to do with it; the story plays out pretty much exactly how you expect it to, and it’s no fun spending an entire movie waiting for the script to catch up with you. The only big surprise is Lichtenstein’s willingness to show you the gruesome aftermath of Dawn’s... er... “feedings” in unflinching, bloody detail. Teeth serves up more cocks than a Judd Apatow comedy... they’re just not attached to anything.

One cast note: Dawn’s adoptive brother is played by John Hensley, who also plays the son on Nip/Tuck. Am I alone in finding Hensley one of the skeeviest performers around? He’s boyishly handsome, but in a too-perfect, dead-eyed way—his face looks like a ten-year-old’s, but with the eyes of a porn star. He’s the anti-Shia Lebeouf. Maybe in real life he's a total mensch, but onscreen, he makes my skin crawl like few other actors do. Boy, was I happy to see him get his cock chomped off.

RATING: 2/5

Moviegoer Diary: The Devils, Iron Man

THE DEVILS

Plot in a Nutshell
Ken Russell’s 1971 drama about a flawed yet effective priest in 17th-century France who becomes a martyr when political machinations and religious hysteria overtake his city.

Thoughts
I’ve always feared that one of my flaws as a critic is my somewhat adolescent willingness to forgive completely undisciplined movies, to approve of horribly hammy actors for their “bravery” and their willingness to look ridiculous on camera, and to romanticize directors who can’t resist following their muse down the path that leads to nothing but swollen budgets and alienated audiences. Which often leads me to prefer intellectually incoherent movies to coherent ones. Which is kind of perverse, right?

Maybe it’s because I tend to doubt myself in my own life, to be cautious and shy in my social relationships, that I admire directors who go for broke on such a grand scale time and time again. (I'm the guy, after all, who put William Friedkin's Bug at the top of my Top 10 list last year... and John Turturro's Romance and Cigarettes at #10. I drew the line at Southland Tales, but it was a tough call.) I don’t think I could argue that it’s a better picture—or at least a more “serious” one—but on a gut moviegoing level, I do respond to the grotesque excesses of Ken Russell’s The Devils much more viscerally than, say, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, to use a comparison that is going to really put me in the doghouse with serious moviephiles. Maybe that makes me a vulgarian, but we're living in a vulgar age.

At the same time, I’d be much too embarrassed to actually watch The Devils with somebody else in the same room. It’s such a mortifying movie—and not just the famous, crazy scene where the nuns of Loudon strip naked and cavort around the room like maenads, humping candles and molesting a statue of Christ, a sequence so genuinely blasphemous that it makes even an atheist like me uncomfortable. It’s the way the movie lives at such an extreme emotional pitch that you can’t help but feel embarrassed for the actors, even the ones whose performances actually work. (Especially Vanessa Redgrave, playing a hunchbacked nun barely able to keep a lid on her desperate sexual urges—I love the way she keeps erupting into these short, sharp bursts of girlish giggles, as if her body needs to relieve the pressure building up inside her, like steam venting from an espresso machine. That Ken Russell does like his actors to cackle a lot, doesn't he?)

I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to watch The Devils on the gigantic screen of a movie theatre; people must have been staggering down the aisles once the credits started rolling. Just watching it on my laptop was enough to give me nightmares, with Michael Gothard’s Father Barré figuring strongly in them. Russell’s visual conception of this character, probably the most loathsome figure in the entire film, is a bit of counterintuitive brilliance: a young, handsome man with round, tinted John Lennon eyeglasses and a sleeveless cassock, he looks more like David Essex than an exorcist. And yet, despite his anachronistic appearance, he’s absolutely terrifying, going about his grim work without a trace of joy—just an implacable, self-righteous desire to prevail over anyone who opposes him.

There’s an excellent documentary by film critic Mark Kermode (one of the film’s biggest admirers) about the making of The Devils called Hell on Earth—you can find it on YouTube. It’s surprising to learn a film that is such an assault on the senses was apparently created in a spirit of tremendous harmony and mutual respect: composer Peter Maxwell Davies, editor Michael Bradsell, and actors Dudley Sutton, Georgina Hale, and Vanessa Redgrave all speak of Russell with tremendous respect, and the fierce pride they take in the film they made together is inspiring and surprising, given the controversy surrounding it. Even more surprising: of all the actors, the one who’s aged the best is Murray Melvin, who plays Father Mignon in the film, he of the bowl haircut, thin face, and freakishly birdlike nose, but who in his 70s has bloomed into a downright elegant-looking aristocrat.

I started out by saying that I was mortified by The Devils, even a little bit embarrassed by it. But I’m a little afraid of it too. And kind of awestruck by it. I’m an atheist, but the fact that a film this extreme and upsetting even exists makes me willing to believe that somewhere there exists... well, not a God, but maybe some minor deity who does what he can to help even the looniest movie find its way to completion.

RATING: 5/5


IRON MAN

Plot in a Nutshell
Robert Downey Jr. plays a wealthy arms manufacturer who becomes a crime-fighting superhero after inventing an invincible flying suit of armour.

Thoughts
Maybe it’s only because I watched the two movies back-to-back, but Iron Man reminded me a lot of The Devils. Like Father Grandier in The Devils, Iron Man hero Tony Stark is a womanizing playboy who finds unexpected depths of heroism within himself after being captured and tortured by religious fanatics.

Grandier and Stark both have skinny redheaded women who are secretly in love with them: Grandier has the insane Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), who writhes on the floor in sexual agony at the mere thought of him, while Stark has the much more self-composed Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), a girl Friday who channels her unrequited love for her boss into her PalmPilot instead of her rosary beads. At the end of The Devils, Jeanne is presented with Father Grandier’s charred tibia; midway through Iron Man, Pepper gets Tony’s artificial heart. Sister Jeanne bites Father Grandier’s lover on the arm and tears off her sleeve; Pepper Potts greets Tony’s lover the next morning with an armful of dry-cleaned clothes and makes a joke about “taking out Tony’s trash.”

Hmmm... I’m not sure where I’m going with this analogy. Does that mean Terrence Howard is Father Mignon? Is Jeff Bridges Father Barré? Or would he be more like Cardinal Richelieu? Is Stan Lee God?

Okay, maybe the comparisons don’t add up, but you can’t deny that these days, Robert Downey Jr. is looking startlingly like Oliver Reed.



RATING: 3.5/5

Broadcast News

My inexorable climb towards becoming King of All Edmonton Media continues!

About a year ago, I started doing short segments on Edmonton AM, the morning show on the local CBC radio station devoted to so-called "Hidden Gems"—terrific but little-known movies currently available on DVD. Doing them has been a lot of fun: Ron Wilson, the host of the show, is a great guy and a very skillful radio pro, and the challenge of having to boil down my thoughts about a movie to five or six minutes has had a positive effect on my writing (although you wouldn't realize it from the way these blog entries have been rambling on and on lately).

This week, the CBC rewarded me with my own page on their website, where they'll be archiving my segments... along with a photo that likely will kill any romantic fantasies my female readers currently have about me. Right now, there's only one review there—my take on the black-hearted 1961 noir Blast of Silence—but hopefully they'll be adding more soon. I've tried to pick movies that are genuinely under-the-radar titles, but which still aren't too alienating or "difficult" for a general audience. And I'm pretty pleased with the eclectic array of titles I've been able to talk about: my previous "Gems" include Helvetica, The King of Kong, Idiocracy, and Great World of Sound. I have to say, the producers have given me an amazing amount of freedom to pick which movies I want to talk about, and haven't pressured me in the slightest to make my choices less obscure.

I appear on the show every other Thursday, so try checking back in a couple of weeks and, if everything goes right, there should be a new clip ready to fire up your RealPlayer plug-ins.