Moviegoer Diary: Forty Guns, Remember My Name

FORTY GUNS

Plot In A Nutshell
Samuel Fuller’s 1958 Western about a U.S. marshal (Barry Sullivan) who comes to a town in Arizona to arrest a man for robbing the mails, tangles with the self-assured female landowner (Barbara Stanwyck) who employs him, and eventually finds himself falling in love with her.

Thoughts
In his fantastic memoir A Third Face, Samuel Fuller offers a valuable piece of advice to scriptwriters: “If a script doesn’t give you a hard-on in the first dozen pages,” he counsels, “throw it in the goddamn garbage!” Forty Guns, for instance, begins with Barry Sullivan slowly driving a wagon across the plain, when on the horizon he spots a cloud of men on black horses galloping toward him. He pulls his wagon up short as the men, all 40 of them, led by an exultant Barbara Stanwyck dressed in black and riding the only white stallion in the bunch, all thunder past him on both sides, riding as close to his wagon as they can get, his horses twitching anxiously, barely keeping calm in all the confusion. Then the men are gone, Sullivan and his two passengers looking in wonder as they disappear. There’s a moment of calm, and as Harry Sukman’s rousing score kicks in for the first time, Fuller cuts to an shot of the men still galloping at high speed under the vast Arizona sky, clouds of dust under their horses’ hooves as that wonderful title Forty Guns appears onscreen. Clearly, Sullivan and Stanwyck haven't spoken a word to each other, but lives are on a collision course. Already the film is up and running. Kids, this is how you do it.

Forty Guns is only 75 minutes long, but it finds time not just to develop Sullivan and Stanwyck’s relationship from its initial antagonism to a hot-blooded romance, but to squeeze in a secondary romance between Sullivan’s kid brother Wes (Gene Barry) and Louvenia (Eve Brent), the cute blonde who works at the gun shop, Sullivan’s pursuit of Stanwyck’s amoral kid brother, a couple of gunfights, a failed ambush, some political intrigue, a wedding, a funeral, and even a couple of musical numbers. The script could use a little more focus — Fuller seems undecided as to whether he’s telling a story about sibling loyalty, the taming of the lawless West, or the way even the toughest-seeming women, when you look deep down, just want a man to look after them — but there’s always something lively going on, or some clever bit of direction to enjoy.

For instance, Fuller indulges in a couple of memorably playful point-of-view shots: Wes flirting with Louvenia as he gazes at her face through the barrel of a shotgun; or the screen going all blurry to show us how the world looks to the aging, half-blind town marshal. (The marshal is played by Hank Worden, who is perhaps best known as “Senor Droolcup,” the ancient, ineffectual bellhop at the Great Northern Hotel on Twin Peaks. Worden apparently spent at least four decades playing men overdue for retirement.) In the most memorable scene, Stanwyck and Sullivan are in a romantic clinch when they hear the sound of something thudding softly in the next room. What could it be? I won’t give away the answer, but suffice it to say it’s one of those great Fuller images, simple but surprising, a mix of sound and image that only the movies can pull off.

RATING: 3.5/5

* * * * *

REMEMBER MY NAME

Plot In A Nutshell
Alan Rudolph’s moody 1978 thriller about a mysterious woman (Geraldine Chaplin) who begins stalking a construction worker (Anthony Perkins) and his wife (Berry Berenson).

Thoughts
I don’t think Samuel Fuller would have approved of the opening of Remember My Name. For about 20 minutes, we get a lot of disconnected scenes of Geraldine Chaplin buying clothes, moving into an apartment, and lining up a cashier job as a hardware store, intercut with short scenes of Anthony Perkins working at a construction site and coming up with excuses for coming home late to his wife. For some reason, whenever we see a TV set, it’s broadcasting news reports about a massive earthquake in Budapest.

And yet the film is absolutely mesmerizing, thanks mainly to Chaplin, who gives one of the most remarkable and genuinely unpredictable female performances of the ’70s, a symphony of cryptic private smiles and unexpected flashes of violence. (We learn that Emily — that’s the character’s name — has been released after serving 12 years in prison, but it’s an open question whether her odd behaviour is the result of her incarceration, or if she was a little touched in the head long before she took up residence in that jail cell.) You truly do not know what Chaplin will do next — Chaplin’s thin, birdlike features give her a vulnerability that makes you feel protective towards her, but then her temper will flare and you’ll realize she can more than take care of herself. In one particularly jaw-dropping moment, she bursts in on a co-worker (Alfre Woodard!) who has told the boss she’s been skimming from the till, grabs her breasts, gives her nipples a vicious twist, and knees her in the groin. Then, for good measure, with the woman collapsed on the floor, Emily tells her to cover the cash shortfall out of her own pocket by the next morning! Chaplin twists the woman’s nipples! Such a vicious move, and she doesn’t hesitate a single second before doing it, either.

I talked at great length about my crush on Alan Rudolph a few posts ago when I wrote about Investigating Sex, and that wasn’t even one of his better movies. With Remember My Name, on the other hand, he’s at the top of his form. It takes place in a more realistic setting than Rudolph’s later films, so there is none of that somewhat overripe artificiality that turns a lot of viewers against him.

At the same time, Remember My Name has the same loose, free-associative, slightly tipsy plotting style as something like Afterglow, with Rudolph constantly wandering away from his main thriller plotline to spend time with characters like the black cop whom Emily seduces (Moses Gunn) or store owner Mr. Nudd (Jeff Goldblum!) who keeps hiring felons out of love for his mother, who herself is serving a long prison sentence. The laid-back song score, composed and sung by blues singer Alberta Hunter, adds to this thriller’s unconventional feel — it anticipates the song score producer Robert Altman would commission a few years later from Sandy Rogers for Fool for Love. And who knows what to make of all that Budapest stuff?

Which is not to say that Remember My Name doesn’t deliver as a thriller. The sequence where Chaplin sneaks into Perkins’ house and watches, an unreadable expression on her face, as Berenson chops up vegetables in the kitchen, is stomach-twistingly creepy — even though it’s staged in broad daylight. (I didn’t realize until the film was over and I looked her up on the IMDb that Berenson was Perkins’ real-life wife until his death in 1992. A photographer by trade, Remember My Name is one of her only four acting roles. She was on one of the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11.)

Remember My Name is currently unavailable on DVD, and I don’t know if there are many people clamouring for its release. But let me add my voice to that tiny chorus anyway; this is a real gem that’s just begging for rediscovery. If I ever got the chance to make a movie, I think this is the kind of movie I’d want to make.


RATING: 5/5

The Musicgoer: Stuart Murdoch's God Help The Girl

STUART MURDOCH
God Help the Girl
(Matador)
**** (out of 5)

It’s billed as “a story set to music by Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian,” but if only it were that simple! It’s still not clear, even after listening to it, if God Help the Girl might be a concept album, or the soundtrack to an upcoming feature film. There’s a short story in the liner notes about Eve, a young woman drifting in and out of university classrooms, rock clubs, and psychiatric wards — but many of the songs are attributed to characters whose names appear nowhere in the story. It’s not even clear if this is a Belle and Sebastian record — many of his old bandmates play on it, and he even covers two songs from The Life Pursuit.

What is clear is that these are some of the strongest tunes Murdoch has written since Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant. It’s not just that Murdoch writes so well from a female perspective; it’s that he so deftly captures the voice of this specific young woman, “born to be contrary,” carrying around a copy of The Independent “to make me look like I got brains,” “a slutty look accompanying my questionable gaze.” Newcomer Catherine Ireton — whom Murdoch found through a newspaper ad — hits just the right note of youthful resignation: her delivery earns “Come Monday Night” a place next to “Manic Monday” and “Monday, Monday” in the pantheon of sweetly melancholy pop odes to the beginning of yet another dreary work week.

On The Sunny Side Of Deceit

When the title The Brothers Bloom appears onscreen, it’s against a black background, the gigantic letters spelled out in big fat lightbulbs, like the kind that frame the mirrors in backstage dressing rooms, a couple of them artfully burnt out, a couple of the others sending out showers of sparks, as if the very title contained too much energy to be safely contained by those thin spheres of glass. The Brothers Bloom! The Brothers Bloom! Here it comes, folks! The Brothers Bloom!

The Brothers Bloom is writer/director Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Brick, his nifty 2005 film noir variation which transplanted hardboiled Dashiell Hammett tropes into a high school setting. But where Brick was made independently on an astonishingly thrifty budget of about $450,000, with The Brothers Bloom, Johnson had $20,000,000 to play around with, and there isn’t a second of the film where you can’t feel him swinging for the fences — every frame is crowded with offbeat details and people in oddball costumes. There’s a moment where Johnson pans his camera across a dining room on an ocean liner, just in time for us to catch sight of a man trying to kiss the woman he’s sitting with and her pulling away — that little tableau is onscreen for a little less than a second, but you can imagine Johnson doing take after take to make sure it registers on camera for exactly the right amount of time.

It’s a con movie, a caper flick, though, which is a genre that easily accommodates a lot of playful touches. Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody are Stephen and Bloom, brothers and gentleman thieves. Stephen is the idea man, the designer of cons so elaborate that, as his brother says, they have the detail and thematic complexity of a Russian novel. Bloom, meanwhile, is always stuck playing leading man, “the vulnerable antihero,” and as the film opens, he finds himself having played so many artificial parts, ever since childhood, that he has no idea who he really is. He tells Stephen he’s quitting the grift to finally pursue “an unwritten life,” but his brother ropes him into one last con. The target: Penelope Stamp (Rachel Weisz), a fabulously wealthy young hermit who lives in an enormous mansion in New Jersey and spends her days accumulating random talents, from playing the harp to juggling chainsaws to taking photographs with a pinhole camera made out of a watermelon. (She never mastered driving, though; instead of braking, she appears simply to crash her sports car into the nearest wall, whereupon a truck promptly drives up with a replacement.)

I know, I know: the whole thing sounds like an explosion at the whimsy factor already, and I haven’t even mentioned the alcoholic camel, the one-eyed villain named Diamond Dog, or Stephen and Bloom’s partner in a crime, a silent female Japanese demolition expert named Bang Bang. It’s sort of a hybrid of a David Mamet con-man movie and an episode of Pushing Daisies.

It’s a lot of fun to watch — up to a point. I’d say that point occurs at around the 60-minute mark, when you realize that the conflict between Stephen and Bloom, and Bloom’s desire to escape from the artificial worlds his brother keeps forcing him to inhabit, hasn’t been dramatized very compellingly. It’s never clear exactly what Bloom wants out of life, what desires he can only fulfill by breaking free of the con, and Brody’s performance doesn’t project anything besides a general feeling of hangdog mopiness. Johnson tries a tricky tonal shift late in the film, but we don’t have enough emotion invested in these characters for him to pull it off.

Still, The Brothers Bloom offers enough incidental pleasures and clever visual gags to be an enjoyable watch, especially if you go in not caring if the film works as a whole. Its biggest asset is Rinko Kikuchi from Babel, who plays Bang Bang. The role would be offensive — she’s really just an exotic accessory to the two brothers — if it weren’t for the inspired Harpo Marx-style gags she keeps performing in the corner of the frame. I particularly savoured the sight of her on the deck of a ship, peeling an apple with a knife, throwing the naked apple overboard, and then daintily eating the peel.

That’s The Brothers Bloom for you: it focuses enormous attention on getting the peel off in one piece, and then it throws the apple away.

"I'm Reading Charlton Heston's Autobiography, And That's That"

It's been a My Dinner With Andre kind of week for me: after not having seen it for 15 or 20 years, I rewatched it twice, took a look at the charming interviews with Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory, and Louis Malle on Criterion's new double-disc DVD, blogged about it, and talked about it in my "Hidden Gems" DVD segment this week for CBC Radio. Plus I've been raving about it to any friend or co-worker who will listen. It's a burst of talkativeness to rival that of Andre himself!

Turn off your electric blanket and click here to give the segment a listen.

Misanthropic Thunder

One of my big problems with Woody Allen’s 2004 film Melinda and Melinda was the way it cheated on its premise. That premise, you’ll recall, involved an intellectual argument between two writers over whether life was inherently comic or tragic; the film then purported to test their competing theories by telling the same story twice, once as a comedy, and once as a tragedy.

Except what Allen actually does is to tell two quite different stories that begin with the same situation but whose plots then go off in wildly diverging directions. It seemed to me that if Allen really wanted to be true to his premise, the two stories should have hit the exact same plot points, playing them for laughs and then playing them for drama.

Of course, the film I’m proposing probably would be incredibly tedious, but it struck me as I watched Allen new comedy Whatever Works that it would have paired up nicely in a Melinda and Melinda-style screenplay as a comic counterpoint to the Sydney Pollack subplot from Husbands and Wives. Both stories involve older men who leave their wives and take up with much younger women who are clearly their intellectual inferior — Pollack starts dating an aerobics instructor played by Lysette Anthony, while in Whatever Works, Larry David plays a curmudgeonly physicist who winds up in a relationship with a young Southern runaway named Melody Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood). In Husbands and Wives, the relationship has its sexual rewards for Pollack, but soon he tires of his new lover, and in a memorably ugly scene, he comes close to beating her up for embarrassing him in front of his intellectual friends. In Whatever Works, David’s romance with Wood also has a short shelf life, but nobody gets hurt and everyone (including Wood’s parents) comes out of it a better, happier person.

The problem with this whole theory is that Whatever Works stops being funny after about half an hour. Allen gives David a great opening scene, a long, misanthropic monologue that he delivers straight to the camera while his friends and passers-by on the sidewalk, who can’t see the audience like he can, look at him like he’s lost his mind. Meanwhile, David’s naturally aggressive line delivery gives Allen’s somewhat musty routines about hypochondria and how the entire world hates the Jews a much-needed shot of energy. But then a strange paradox creeps in: David’s character makes a living teaching chess to schoolkids, and while it’s hilarious to see him screaming at little children and calling them idiots, every time he calls Wood a microbe or an inchworm or a “submental baton-twirler,” you just feel terrible inside. You keep expecting Wood to stand up for herself at some point, but all of David’s abuse apparently just bounces off her. Wood is quite sweet in this role, but there’s a nastiness to the movie’s central relationship that kills your good mood, even though Allen apparently thinks it's charming.

Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr. both turn up later in the movie as Wood’s parents, red-state conservatives whose time in New York and in David’s company transforms them into sexually liberated bohemians. It’s not a bad joke — it’s a little reminiscent of the illegal Mexican workers in the background of Steve Martin's Bowfinger who by the end of the movie have gradually turned into Variety-reading Hollywood players — but it’s not really dramatized. It’s more like the outline of a funny idea, as if Allen didn’t really feel the need to show us the situation actually playing out when he could just give us a general idea of it.

I’ve stuck with Woody Allen through thick and thin, even that horrible patch of comedies that began in 2001 with The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, straight on through Scoop in 2006. Whatever Works is his best comedy in a decade, but it’s still a creaky, sour little movie that’s far from a return to his Annie Hall salad days. Granted, the man is 73 years old, but I’d like to think he still has another Purple Rose of Cairo or Hannah and Her Sisters left in him. Can he see out into the audience the way Larry David can? If so, I hope he can tell we’re all rooting for him.

The Musicgoer: Sunn O)))'s Monoliths & Dimensions

SUNN O)))
Monoliths & Dimensions
(Southern Lord)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

My home stereo is comically inadequate to the task of properly playing the music of doom-metal duo Sunn O))). Ideally, an album like Monoliths & Dimensions should be played through speakers as large as the slabs of Stonehenge, somewhere out in a forest clearing, at a volume high enough to pull the skin tight against your face, to make every earthworm within a mile radius come wriggling out of the dirt, to turn the sky purple and send the birds crashing from the sky. It should be as earsplitting as that noise on Lost when the hatch implodes and sends the island back in time. This is the kind of music that the Ents in Lord of the Rings would listen to — loud and majestically slow, the tracks stretching out as long as 17 minutes of nothing but ominous power chords lingering in your ears long enough to let you contemplate their texture in the fullest detail. Imagine Link Wray’s “Rumble” played at about 7 RPM, and you’ll have Monoliths & Dimensions.

This is also, paradoxically, one of the more beautiful records of the year so far, a vast, oceanic bath of sound whose effect is to calm rather than agitate. What do people do when they hear Sunn O))) live? It’s impossible to bang your head to this stuff; maybe they just curl up into fetal balls and feel their ribs vibrating.

Appetite For Discussion

How strange it feels to own My Dinner With Andre on a pristine DVD. Louis Malle’s 1981 film is the latest release from the prestigious Criterion label, and it has Criterion’s usual sumptuous packaging and tastefully chosen extras, including new interviews with stars Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory by filmmaker Noah Baumbach.

It’s quite an upgrade from the version of My Dinner With Andre I owned when I was a precocious 14-year-old film buff who never missed an episode of Sneak Previews, the show Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert used to host on PBS. I’d even watch a lot of those episodes twice, and it didn’t matter to me if the films they were discussing would never play Hamilton, Ontario, where I lived, or if they were rated R, which meant I’d never be allowed into the theatre to watch them.

My Dinner With Andre was one of the movies they championed most enthusiastically back then, and so when it was broadcast on PBS a couple of years later, I didn’t just watch it — I sat there in front of the TV set with my little audio tape recorder, holding the microphone up to the speaker, and flipping over the cassette every half hour, trying to miss as little of the dialogue as possible. Ah, the days before VCRs! Since the film was pretty much all dialogue, it didn’t lose much in the translation to my audio-only cassettes, and I must have listened to that recording dozens upon dozens of times. I’d put it on as I went to sleep, or listen to it in my room on rainy Sunday afternoons — as well as plenty of sunny ones. And then I moved away from home and somehow those cassettes were either misplaced or thrown out, I don’t really remember which.

Now My Dinner With Andre has come back into my life, in much the same way that Andre Gregory comes back into Wallace Shawn’s life at the start of the film — an old friend full of wild stories, come to shake me out of my workaday complacency. In the film, Shawn and Gregory play lightly fictionalized versions of themselves: Shawn is a playwright, Gregory a globetrotting theatre director. They’re meeting for dinner in a fancy restaurant, and Shawn’s discomfort in these expensive surroundings is quite lovable — he orders quail for his main course and when the dish arrives, he exclaims, a little disappointedly, “Oh... I didn’t know they were so small.”

The two men haven’t seen each other for years, and the first section of the film consists of Gregory’s accounts of all the crazy experiences he’s been having — teaching theatre workshops in a Polish forest, going on a retreat to the Sahara with a Tibetan monk, getting buried alive as part of a macabre Halloween ceremony — while Shawn listens politely, if a little dubiously. The film then subtly turns into a friendly debate about the proper way to live one’s life, with Gregory arguing for the importance of magic and transcendental, quasi-mystical experiences in exotic lands, and Shawn the pragmatist extolling the simple pleasures in life — a quiet night home with his girlfriend, a cup of cold coffee in the morning, putting on his little plays, and reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography. No one wins the debate, but they do both agree that a life lived mechanically, a life without joy and wonder, is no life at all.

When I listened to My Dinner With Andre all those years ago, Gregory was the one I waned to be when I grew up. I wanted to have crazy experiences out in the forest — I really could see myself eating sand in the Sahara or agreeing to being buried alive, just to be able to say I’d done it. Now, 20 years later, I see that I’ve become more of a Wally — the solace of a cup of coffee and Charlton Heston’s autobiography seems pretty appealing to me these days. (Also, the film takes a much more skeptical view of Gregory’s adventures than I realized when I was younger. I laughed, for instance, at the way Gregory prefaces his tale of being buried alive by casually mentioning that it happened at “Dick Avedon’s place out on Montauk.”)

I imagine I’ll keep on having different reactions to My Dinner With Andre every time I see it, noticing different ironies, being swayed by different arguments, changing my opinion as to just how much genuine wisdom Gregory’s notions contain and how much of them are nothing but bullshit. I could see myself watching it just to savour Jean Lenauer’s enigmatic performance as the elderly waiter who keeps the food coming.

But I can’t see myself ever failing to be refreshed, emotionally and intellectually, by this wonderful, spellbinding film — or moved by the simple, perfect ending, with Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” playing on the soundtrack as Wallace Shawn peers through the window of his cab, remembering his life, and anxious to get home to his girlfriend and “tell her everything about my dinner with Andre.”

The Musicgoer: Their Eyes Were Watching Cobb

Here's an article I wrote for the upcoming issue of SEE Magazine here in Edmonton — it's a profile of jazz legend Jimmy Cobb, who's best known as the drummer on Miles Davis' classic album Kind of Blue. It's the record's 50th anniversary this year, and Cobb is currently touring North America with his "So What" Band. The centrepiece of the show is a live recreation of Kind of Blue, and Cobb says that if the audience responds well, the band throws in a few extra Davis songs as a reward. He plays Edmonton on July 4, and it should be quite a show.

* * * * *

Jimmy Cobb is 80 years old and he’s been playing music for almost all of them. When he was just 18 years old, he was backing up Billie Holiday, and he could fill up an entire interview just talking about being a young jazz drummer in the ’40s and ’50s, knocking around his hometown of Washington, D.C., playing in a quartet with Frank Wess, a quintet with Charlie Rouse, and going on the road with Earl Bostic and Dinah Washington. He keeps up an active recording and touring schedule even today. (“You have to be in shape to drum like me,” he says. “I play hard and strong, so I have to be hard and strong.”) So it must be vexing that the only thing it seems people want to hear about is what happened in a recording studio over a couple of days in 1959.

Of course, when those sessions produce an album like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, you can’t blame folks for being a little curious. Kind of Blue is the Citizen Kane of jazz — the album that routinely gets voted the greatest jazz record ever made, and probably the best-selling one as well, a rare case of critical acclaim and mass popularity overlapping perfectly. Along with Dave Brubeck’s Time Out and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, it’s the jazz album even non-jazz fans can be counted on to have in their record collection; few sounds instantly set a mood of effortless, sophisticated cool like those chords at the start of “So What.”

Jimmy Cobb is the last surviving link to the creation of that casual, almost accidental masterpiece, and he has been for a while: Miles Davis died in 1991, saxophonists John Coltrane in 1967 and Cannonball Adderly in 1975, pianists Bill Evans in 1980 and Wynton Kelly in 1971, and bassist Paul Chambers in 1969. He’s become the custodian of Kind of Blue’s legacy almost by default — he’s currently marking the album’s 50th anniversary by recreating it live with a group he calls The "So What" Band — but he remains modest about his own contributions.

“I’ve had people tell me that if [Miles Davis’ longtime drummer] Philly Joe Jones had done it, it wouldn’t have been the same,” Cobb says, “because he played a different way. I don’t know. To me, with all those guys around you, anybody could have done it. That’s basically how I look at it. A lot of drummers could have done that. I was just fortunate enough to have been there at the right time and to have come up with what needed to be come up with. I figure I’m a lucky guy.”

Cobb even downplays his contributions to the album’s musical innovations, such as its popularization of so-called “modal jazz,” a liberating approach to composition which required musicians to improvise over a few simple scales instead of chords. “Modal jazz wasn’t that much of a challenge to a drummer,” Cobb says. “You just had to keep time and stay true to the mood of the music. The heat was on the other players, having to improvise over just a few chords and a few scales — it was a lot harder for them than me. The drummer doesn’t have to change his stripes, you know? You just pull it in when you have to and let it out when you have to.”

Cobb admits it can get a little overbearing at times having to tell the same stories about Kind of Blue over and over again, but he also recognizes that having played on that album opens up a lot of doors — what young musician wouldn’t want to play with Jimmy Cobb and hear all those firsthand stories about Davis and Coltrane? (“I get all the action!” Cobb says.)

Like every other jazz fan, Cobb listens to Kind of Blue all the time. He says he wouldn’t change a moment of it, not even the mistakes. Wait — there are mistakes on Kind of Blue? “I made one mistake on it,” he says. “There’s a cymbal crash I made on ‘So What’ going into the solos, but it turned out to be what people liked about it. So I figure, if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. Whatever happened there — that’s fate.”

Joe Versus The Volcano

James Toback's documentary Tyson opens in Edmonton this week, a film that deals with Tyson's infamous ear-biting bout with Evander Holyfield. And so, as sort of a tie-in, I chose another boxing documentary to talk about on this week's "Hidden Gems" DVD segment for CBC Radio — a film that deals with perhaps the second-most notorious boxing match of all time. The film is John Dower's Thrilla in Manila, a vivid account of the brutal 1975 fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Click here to give the segment a listen.

The Prehistory Boys

I’m not sure Michael Cera’s shtick will ever grow old for me. Actually, I’m not sure it even technically qualifies as “shtick” — Cera doesn’t so much tell jokes as quietly point out simple facts that seem obvious to him but nobody else in the movie. Most comedy is about upending social rules, but Cera has found a way to make politeness funny — maybe it’s the way he delivers his lines as if he always expects the other person to hit him over the head, even the girls. His characters work so hard to keep their head down and not get noticed, and yet somehow they always wind up in a mess of trouble anyway.

Usually it’s because Cera hooks up with a strong personality who pulls him, against his better judgment, into a crazy adventure. Sometimes, as in Juno or Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, it’ll be a cool, strong-willed girl; other times, as in Superbad, it’ll be a loudmouthed best friend. The new prehistoric spoof Year One belongs to the latter category: Jack Black takes on the Jonah Hill role as Zed, a primitive hunter with big dreams but limited hunting skills who convinces Cera’s meek food-gatherer Oh to join him when the tribe banishes him. Oh thinks they'll just fall off the edge of the world, but Zed thinks there's got to be more to life than sticks and dung.

The rest of the film is a ramshackle Mad magazine-style tour through famous Bible stories, strung together with enjoyable disregard for geography, historical chronology, or logical coherence. Zed and Oh witness Cain (David Cross) killing Abel (Paul Rudd), talk Abraham (Hank Azaria) out of killing Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), and pay an extended visit to Sodom. (“The sodomy here is fantastic!”) They don’t run into Noah or Moses, but you get the feeling at least an hour’s worth of plot tangents are lying on the cutting room floor.

It hardly matters: nobody goes to a movie like Year One for the airtight script. You go hoping the contrast between the Biblical setting, Black the overweight self-proclaimed rock god, and Cera the timid kid next door will generate enough laughs to fill 90 minutes. And it comes pretty close — there’s no way, given a storyline that involves cavemen, slaves, eunuchs, and virgin sacrifices, that an old comedy pro like writer/director Harold Ramis isn’t going to come up with a few decent jokes. That said, so much of the humour is dependent on Cera and Black’s delivery I’m not sure how strong a case I can make for it on the page. (I particularly liked the bashful way Cera accepts Black’s praise for inventing the concept of carrying water in a gourd. “I don’t know... it just seemed practical to me,” Cera blushes.)

There are a couple of gratuitously tasteless jokes, as when Black performs a way too thorough analysis of a freshly deposited turd, or when Cera finds himself having to pee while hanging upside-down in a dungeon — but even those scenes seem consistent with Ramis’ low-key, grunt’s-eye view of history. Everyone, no matter what century they lived in, wants the same things, Ramis seems to be saying: sex, good food, a good shit, a helmet that fits, and those big, musclebound guys in the tribe to quit hassling them.

Unless, of course, you’re Abraham, in which case you’re interested only in collecting foreskins. (“It’s a nice, sleek look,” he says. “I think it’s really going to catch on.”) Hmmm... would that make him a hunter or a gatherer?

Moviegoer Diary: Caligula, Investigating Sex

CALIGULA

Plot In A Nutshell
The notorious X-rated, Penthouse-financed 1979 historical epic starring Malcolm McDowell as the insane Roman emperor — officially credited to director Tinto Brass and screenwriter Gore Vidal, but with additional (mostly pornographic) scenes shot and written by many other hands.

Thoughts
Has any movie been more upfront about its troubled production history than Caligula? The behind-the-scenes turmoil is evident right there in the opening credits, which inform us that the movie was “adapted from an original screenplay by Gore Vidal,” and contains “principal photography by Tinto Brass” but “additional scenes directed and photographed by Giancarlo Liu and Bob Guccione.” Most cryptic of all: the credit that reads simply, “edited by the production.”

I can recall being 10 years old and seeing ads in the Hamilton Spectator advertising Caligula. I don’t know which made more of an impression on me: the poster image of an old Roman coin bearing McDowell’s profile, with blood running out of his eyes; or the fact that the tickets were selling for some outrageous price. Six or seven dollars, I think! In hindsight, it was kind of an inspired way to combat the terrible buzz surrounding the film — surely, if the movie was actually as awful as everyone was saying it was, they wouldn’t dare charge extra for it, would they?

I didn’t see Caligula until now, 30 years later, and somehow in all that time, I managed to avoid learning any specifics about it. Oh, sure, I knew that it was probably the most explicit film ever to feature such a prestigious cast (McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud), but I had no idea exactly what went on in front of the cameras? Did any of those British stars have sex on camera, or did they just walk around while the extras fucked up a storm? (Turns out, except for McDowell, it’s mostly the latter.) The only specific act of depravity I’d heard about beforehand was the scene where some poor soldier has his penis tied off and then, after he’s forced to drink an enormous quantity of wine, has his bladder sliced open. But I’d always assumed that McDowell did the slicing, when in fact it’s Peter O’Toole, playing the dying, syphilitic emperor Tiberius. An important distinction!

O’Toole gives probably the most memorable performance in the film, pale, gaunt, his naturally skull-like face covered with sores, consumed by his decadent ways even as he exhibits utter contempt for it. O’Toole balances his performance on the sabre-point of comedy — alone among the cast, he grasps the horrible humour of Roman politics, the way each successive ruler must figure out a way to kill as many potential enemies as he can while still remaining popular.

Meanwhile, McDowell — and it pains me to say this, because it seems like such ideal casting — is genuinely terrible as Caligula, telegraphing every emotion and shouting his lines as a way of indicating the emperor's encroaching madness. He seems cast simply for his willingness to do the role — to march around naked in the rain, to lie in bed with his horse like Harpo Marx in Duck Soup, to cavort among all the fornicating extra, and, in a moment I particularly could have lived without, to vomit right into the camera lens.

Caligula’s most valuable player is probably Danilo Donati, whose sets and costumes have the pagan otherworldliness he brought to Fellini films like Roma and Satyricon. Especially impressive is the central room of Tiberius’ court, which has a swimming pool surrounded by a sort of three-level stage with elevators to take him up and down, like Alex Trebek on the old Pitfall game show. There’s also a crazy arena where Caligula buries his enemies in the ground up to their heads, where a kind of octopus-armed series of blades swoops in and decapitates them. But perhaps the most memorable setpiece is the scene where Caligula decides to replenish Rome’s coffers by shanghaiing the senators’ wives into serving as prostitutes in an “imperial brothel” shaped like a gigantic ship, complete with slaves to pull the oars across the imaginary ocean.

Dementia on such a massive scale can’t help but inspire a certain amount of awe, but Caligula is anything but delightful — it’s an ugly-spirited film that may have began with Gore Vidal as an investigation into the allure of depravity, but which somehow turned into a demonstration of it. A couple of times in the film, Caligula sees someone about to die and asks them what it feels like and what they see — I couldn’t help but be reminded of the recent horror film Martyrs, which expands on this idea in a much more intelligent way. As that film demonstrates, you don’t need to be the emperor of Rome to conduct that kind of experiment; if you can remove your conscience, all you need is a secure basement and a good set of surgical knives.

RATING: 1.5/5

* * * * *

INVESTIGATING SEX

Plot In A Nutshell
Writer/director Alan Rudolph’s 2001 drama — released on DVD under the title Intimate Affairs — about a pair of female stenographers (Neve Campbell and Robin Tunney) in 1929 Massachusetts hired to take notes at a salon of artists and writers who gather for a series of quasi-scientific discussions of male sexuality.

Thoughts
I’m beginning to think that the cult of Alan Rudolph, which probably hit its peak in the early ’80s with Choose Me, has now dwindled to a group even smaller than the salon in Investigating Sex. Rudolph hasn’t made a film since 2002’s The Secret Lives of Dentists, and Investigating Sex, from 2001, didn’t even get released on DVD until last December, despite a cast that includes Neve Campbell, Terrence Howard, Jeremy Davies, a naked Robin Tunney, and a naked Julie Delpy. His close association, both personally and professionally, with Robert Altman seemed to help him get projects together, and now that Altman is dead, I worry that Rudolph will find it harder than ever to get his idiosyncratic projects off the ground.

I remember a remarkable interview with Rudolph in Film Comment back in the early ’90s — unbelievably, it was a cover story tied to the release of his now-completely-forgotten film Equinox, starring Matthew Modine as displaced twin brothers — in which Rudolph talked with some pain about all those reviewers who blamed him for Altman’s post-Nashville decline. But me, I loved the way Rudolph borrowed some of the signature elements of Altman’s style — the large casts, the roaming camera — and applied them to his special brand of romantic fable. They seemed like a great creative pair.

My favourite Rudolph film is The Moderns from 1988 (there is probably no film that I’ve rewatched more often), but I have a soft spot for almost all of them — for Choose Me, for Love at Large, for Trouble in Mind, for Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. I forgive him for Breakfast of Champions and Trixie, and wow, do I ever love Equinox. In that Film Comment interview, he insists that if you followed any randomly chosen person with a movie camera for a few days, their life would look a lot more like one of his films than most directors praised for their “gritty realism.”

I like that. And I love the sincerity with which Rudolph portrays love and romance, I love his excellent taste in music, I love all the paintings he hangs on the walls of his sets, I love his unapologetically stylized dialogue, I love his feel for the ’20s and ’30s, and I love the way he doesn’t like to draw a line between the thoughts in his characters’ heads and the images onscreen. Fantasies, subjective realities, get equal weight in Rudolph’s movies — which can sometimes make his films look ridiculous. In Investigating Sex, for instance, you sometimes see things from the point of view of Neve Campbell’s character, which means a few shots of Dermot Mulroney walking around naked.

Investigating Sex doesn’t completely work, but it doesn’t feel like hackwork either — or like the work of any other director, really. Rudolph has got hold of a great subject here — I love the way its characters approach sex as this gigantic, unexplored topic. Are male orgasms more intense than female ones? What do other people think about when they’re having sex? Who knows? The answers could be anything! It’s a pre-technological world where a mythical concept like a succubus can seem more important than the clitoris.

If Investigating Sex seems thin, maybe it’s because Neve Campbell’s virginal stenographer and Dermot Mulroney’s sex researcher never quite generate the necessary sparks. Also, Til Schweiger and John Light, two unknown actors in pivotal supporting roles, are handsome but dull, seemingly cast more for their bone structure than their screen presence. On the other hand, a British actress named Emily Bruni makes a strong impression as the wife of Alan Cumming’s perverse modern artist — she looks like she stepped right out of the Modigliani canvas Keith Carradine forges in The Moderns. And Nick Nolte is a lot of fun as Faldo, Mulroney’s wealthy patron — he gets a bizarre scene where he confesses that the first woman he ever made love to was a donkey.

It’s never quite clear why Faldo allows all these strange people to hang out in his mansion, but apparently it satisfies some perverse urge to thumb his nose at social propriety to have them around. We also learn that he’s bankrolled a series of short films directed by Jeremy Davies’ character, including an unsettling erotic short starring the neighbourhood butcher. Maybe that’s what Alan Rudolph needs to do: find himself a Faldo, and fast.

RATING: 3.5/5

The Musicgoer: Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca

DIRTY PROJECTORS
Bitte Orca
(Domino)
**** (out of 5)

One of the great crutches of the music critic is to describe a band’s sound by invoking other bands that sound a little bit like them: “It’s Beck meets Burial,” we might say, or “It’s like Cat Power and They Might Be Giants had a baby.” Toss of a few dozen words about the tracks we like best, and we’re done for the day.

Well, Brooklyn avant-indie popsters Dirty Projectors have kicked those comfortable crutches out from under me. It’s not that their album Bitte Orca doesn’t have moments that recall other bands — at times, they sound like everything from vintage Nico (the gentle “Two Doves” even half-quotes “These Days”) to Arthur Russell to the trust-fund Africanisms of Vampire Weekend (especially on “No Intentions,” where songwriter David Longstreth does this beautiful guitar hook that’s so intricate it sounds like something you’d more likely hear on a harp). It’s that just when you think you’ve spotted an influence, the band has already moved onto some fresh new melodic idea.

It’s a fascinating album to listen to, and I can’t get enough of those otherworldly harmonies of Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian that seem like pure sound — all diaphragm, no lung. At the same time, it’s a disc that holds you at arm’s length — Longstreth’s lyrics keep referring to sunrises, horizons, “fluorescent half-domes” faraway in the distance. I wanted a few more songs about things I can touch.

The Musicgoer: Gobble Gobble's Neon Graveyard

GOBBLE GOBBLE
Neon Graveyard
(independent)
**** (out of 5)

Either Cecil Frena (aka Gobble Gobble) is obsessed with death and decay, or else he just needs a whole lot of moisturizer. The songs on the Edmonton musician’s new album Neon Graveyard are filled with references to fountains of ashes, piles of salt, bones, acorns, windstorms of dust, unwatered lawns, sunburns, scars. There’s even a song called “O Sacred Dandruff” which Frena croons to the flaking skin on his knuckles “puckering up in blistered curds.”

Not that you’d be able to make out what Frena is saying without the accompanying lyrics sheet — his voice is run through so many filters, it’s as if you’re listening to someone play you a bad tape recording of someone whispering through megaphone over your cellphone. It’s the voice of a mummy, the voice of a dying toy robot, a voice without a trace of saliva or phlegm in it.

And yet, for all this, the album is surprisingly melodic, and bursting with sonic imagination. It’s also frequently very funny — on “Mountain of Flesh,” for instance, Frena sings, “If you’re a solipsist, well then, what am I?” Decay was never this much fun: put it on, shed your skin, and dance around in your bones.

Damme Quick, Damme Cool, Damme Hot!

Wow, JCVD sure is cropping up a lot on this blog lately — I swear I'm not as obsessed with this film as it might appear, but its postmodern take on Jean-Claude Van Damme, one of the great camp movie icons of the ’80s, sure does make it a fun film to talk about. I definitely enjoyed reviewing it in this week's "Hidden Gems" segment for CBC Radio. Click here to listen, and when you're done with that, savour the trailer for Double Impact:

Subterranean Heist-Flick Blues

As someone who has the entire David Shire soundtrack of the original 1974 version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three on his iPod, the idea that such a landmark of New York cinema would be remade — and directed by Tony (Domino) Scott, no less — seems like sacrilege. The original film is a love letter to municipal dysfunction, to the men who kept New York running, sipping bad coffee, acquiring deep, puffy bags under their eyes, wearing uncomfortable polyester slacks, and earning lousy pay for the whole privilege. What would Tony Scott bring to this material, other than hyperactive editing, slick cinematography, and a whole lot of commercial calculation?

Well, in fact, he acquits himself better than I expected him to. Is the opening blast of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” even one-third as bracing as David Shire’s brassy main title from the original? Does he come up with an ending that can even hold a candle to the original’s beautiful closing shot of Walter Matthau, opening a door for a second time, shaking his head at how close the crook on the other side came to getting away. Does the script even contain a single line of dialogue as memorable as Dick O’Neill’s reaction when he hears that an armed gang has taken an entire subway car hostage: “Screw the goddamn passengers! What the hell did they expect for their lousy 35 cents — to live forever?” No, no, and definitely, no, but taken on its own terms, this shiny new Pelham is a perfectly enjoyable summer thriller. And what the hell did you expect for your lousy 10 bucks — an all-time classic?

Denzel Washington takes over the Walter Matthau role as Garber, the train dispatcher who has to negotiate over the radio with the gangleader in the subway car. Even with some extra padding around his middle, Washington is clearly a movie star playing an “ordinary Joe” — but unlike many movie stars, Washington seems to genuinely enjoy engaging with his co-stars and playing off their energy, and he gets a good rhythm going over the airwaves with John Travolta, who’s in full, flamboyant, hambone Broken Arrow/Swordfish bad guy mode here. He’s great fun to watch, although his performance doesn’t leave a lot of room for the other actors in his gang, including Luis Guzmán, to make much of an impression.

The film’s premise requires Washington and Travolta to spend pretty much the entire movie in separate locations, and it’s too bad Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland don’t come up with any interesting business for the two adversaries when they finally meet. The one frisson is purely visual and possibly accidental: Washington’s left ear is pierced with a small diamond stud, and Travolta wears an earring too, this one shaped like a cross. And when the two men finally stand face to face, their earrings sparkle at each other.

The Musicgoer: That's Edmonton For You!

VARIOUS ARTISTS
That’s Edmonton for You!
(www.thatsedmontonforyou.com)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

It’s hard to listen to Amy van Keeken’s “Northern City,” the leadoff track to this all-star seven-track suite of songs about Edmonton (which will be performed live at a special free concert this Sunday afternoon in Louise McKinney Park), and not think that Edmonton has an unofficial new civic anthem. The lyrics are short and sweet, but they manage to incorporate references to rock ’n’ roll, cold northern winds, and hockey — plus, there’s the killer couplet where van Keeken reveals, “When I see the puck go in the net / It makes me happy, it makes me wet.” Add in the rousing chorus of “I live in a northern town!” and you’ve got an instant classic.

But what’s exciting about That’s Edmonton for You! is that it’s not all fist-pumping expressions of civic pride. I’m not sure if producer Trevor Anderson (The Wet Secrets) encouraged his contributors to head in this direction, or if the artists just naturally headed there on their own, but again and again, you hear the same themes coming through in the lyrics: resentment of the oil industry, despair at Edmontonians’ inborn tendency towards apathy, the nagging feeling that maybe we should do what so many others have done and move somewhere else. “The mentality that contributes to the cold,” as Nik Kozub puts it on the excellent closing track, “and weighs down everyone I know.”

At the same time, the musicians’ love for this city is never in doubt — if they criticize some of Edmonton’s more frustrating tendencies, it’s only because they take enough pride in living here to care. And besides, the very fact that an album as terrific as this one even exists is reason enough to be happy to proclaim you’re from Edmonton. Highlights include Colleen Brown’s “Workin’ Hard for Easy,” a Heart-style rocker about Big Oil and the average joe; “Lazy for Everything,” on which Cadence Weapon trades in his usual quick-tongued rapping style for a laconic vocal that recalls Beck’s “The New Pollution”; and “A Devil in the Woodpile,” an epic-length track from Shout Out Out Out Out's Lyle Bell, with its memorable image of Edmonton’s dark and cold getting inside your bones and “burrowing like a devil in the woodpile of your soul.”

I can’t wait to hear it live. Download it now and get ready to sing along with it in the park this Sunday afternoon.

The Musicgoer: The Sounds' Crossing The Rubicon

THE SOUNDS
Crossing the Rubicon
(Original Signal)
** (out of 5)

One terrific song can earn a band a lot of goodwill, enough to get you through 10 or 20 mediocre ones. Case in point: Swedish neo-New Wavers The Sounds, whose “7 Days a Week,” from their 2003 debut album Living in America, became one of my mixtape staples for the next three years. So peppy! So refreshingly unironic! Coming up with another song just as wonderful ought to be a snap, right?

Well, maybe it’s harder than it looks: even with Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger — a man who knows his way around a pop hook — helping them out on three of the tracks, their third album Crossing the Rubicon has little of the old magic. Instead, we get one overlong, unfocused song after another, the frequent lyrical references to violent relationships and political oppression at odds with the glossy music. The best melody is probably “Home Is Where Your Heart Is,” but the song is undone by the trite sentiment and muddled images like “Summer rain in my face like snowflakes falling from space.” (Why snowflakes? Why not raindrops?)

But hope springs eternal: I’ll still be there, fingers crossed, when they release album #4.

Moviegoer Diary: Coward, Barker, Leonard, O'Connor, Hammett, And More

I’m seein’ ’em much faster than I can write about ’em this week, and so in order to uphold the commitment I’ve imposed upon myself to write at least something about every movie I watch, here’s a “lightning round” blog post with brief reactions to half a dozen flicks I caught either at home or at the theatre this weekend.


EASY VIRTUE
Watchable, albeit excessively jaunty film version of Noël Coward’s play about a bunch of stuffy British aristocrats whose monocles pop when they meet the glamourous, scandalously modern American woman who has married into their family. Jessica Biel is a counterintuitive casting choice to play the bride; she certainly looks smashing with a head of platinum blonde hair and filling out the period costumes, and she gets the audience on her side the moment she steps onscreen, but I don’t know if she suggests the painful experiences lurking below her character’s glittering façade. (It also took me a while to register the fact that she’s supposed to be notably older than her husband; she has a coltish quality that makes her seem younger than her years.) Kristin Scott Thomas’ many fans will probably describe her performance as “delicious,” but I think she overdoes it. Director Stephan Elliott tricks the film out with a lot of anachronistic music and unnecessary camera tricks — there’s a lot of shots with characters’ reflections showing up on billiard balls, spoons, and telescope lenses. Like other comedies set in this era — e.g., Mrs. Henderson Presents, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day — there’s way too much peppy jazz music tootling away on the soundtrack. Still, the whole thing turned out surprisingly well, considering neither the director nor the star have a natural feel for the material.
RATING: 3/5


THE HANGOVER
This comedy about a group of friends trying to piece together the events of the previous night’s out-of-control Las Vegas bachelor party is funny, but not quite as funny as I’d hoped. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that’s it’s not quite as wild as I’d hoped — when we find out what actually transpired during that crazy night, the revelations are pretty mild (especially the whereabouts of the missing groom) and don’t seem to carry any serious repercussions for any of the characters, who improbably manage to come out of the whole experience some $80,000 ahead.... minus whatever it costs to repair their suite at the hotel. Maybe I was spoiled by the advertising, which not only gave away so many of the funniest gags and biggest surprises (including the Mike Tyson cameo), but which made The Hangover out to be nothing short of “the craziest fucking movie ever,” which it most assuredly is not. It’s more like a feature-length version of a really crass Super Bowl commercial. If only the movie as a whole had more of the energy and the anarchic comic spirit of the montage that plays out beside the closing credits!
RATING: 3/5


THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN
After The Hangover, here’s my second Bradley Cooper vehicle in a row — what are the odds? This horror movie, based on a Clive Barker story, starts out very effectively, with Cooper playing a photographer who stumbles across some very odd late-night doings in the New York subway system. The culprit is the hulking, silent, very menacing but quite impeccably tailored Vinnie Jones, a butcher who likes to sneak up behind unsuspecting subway passengers, clobber them with a stainless steel meat tenderizer, hang their corpses on hooks right there in the train car, and transport them to the meatpacking factory where he works to be disposed of. Director Ryûhei Kitamura (who’s best known for the tongue-in-cheek action film Versus) gives the scenes in the subway stations an arresting look, all blue and grey chrome with splashes of red, and I like the way he has Vinnie Jones come into the frame, often keeping him blurry even when he’s standing right behind his victim. But the story doesn’t make one goddamn bit of sense, and Kitamura starts going too far with the CGI in the killing scenes.
RATING: 2.5/5


KILLSHOT
Long-delayed Elmore Leonard adaptation directed by Shakespeare in Love’s John Madden, plagued by poor scores from screening audiences, forced to undergo studio-mandated edits. It’s not bad, but it feels rushed and unfocussed — and I suspect that even if the deleted scenes were put back in, it would still come across the same way. Married couple Thomas Jane and Diane Lane foil an attempt by Mickey Rourke and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to rob a realtor’s office, and tentatively rekindle their relationship when they’re forced to enter the witness protection program. Not a bad premise, but it doesn’t mesh well with the subplot about Rourke’s half-breed hitman-for-hire character wrestling with his personal demons. Gordon-Levitt, as Rourke’s trigger-happy fuck-up of a partner, gives a performance that might be a hoot in a different movie, but which seems all wrong tonally for this one. Rosario Dawson is completely miscast as Gordon-Levitt’s simple, shy, Elvis-loving girlfriend — why do directors keep casting this vibrant, gorgeous woman as a helpless wallflower? Best part of the movie is Klaus Badelt’s unusual, guitar-based score, which envelopes the whole story in a mood of sickening dread.
RATING: 2.5/5


WISE BLOOD
At the risk of looking stupid, I have to admit that I’ve never really “gotten” Flannery O’Connor. Maybe I’m not steeped enough in Catholic lore, or maybe I live too many miles north of Georgia, but I’ve never been able to get on that woman’s wavelength — I never know where to laugh, I never quite understand why any of the character do anything they do, and I usually come away from her stories with a lot of memorably strange images, but perplexed as to what message they spell out when I put them all together. That was the reaction I had to John Huston’s 1979 comedy/drama, to this date the only major Hollywood film based on O’Connor’s work. It’s great to see Brad Dourif — who I’ve enjoyed in everything from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Child’s Play to Deadwood — getting a substantial lead role, and here he delivers his lines with a barely suppressed rage that is compelling even if his character’s motivations remain murky. Ned Beatty, William Hickey, and Harry Dean Stanton are a lot of fun as three different preachers, all of them running various scams, and there’s a memorable scene were Amy Wright, as Stanton’s nympho daughter, tries to seduce Dourif in the woods on a bed of dry leaves. (“Ain’t my feet white?” she purrs, peeling off her tights, bits of leaves and twigs clinging to her clothes and hair.) But the overall film, like the nature of God, remains a riddle to me.
RATING: 3/5


HAMMETT
Like Killshot, this 1982 curiosity — it’s credited to Wim Wenders, but supposedly as much as 70 per cent of it was shot by Francis Ford Coppola — was plagued by reshoots and creative conflicts, but this time, the film that finally resulted from all that strife is an underrated gem. It was certainly the highlight of my movie-watching weekend, a moody noir homage, with sumptuous production design by Dean Tavoularis, an intoxicating score by John Barry, and a surprisingly appealing lead performance by Coppola favourite Frederic Forrest as writer Dashiell Hammett, roped into a missing-person investigation by an old buddy from his Pinkerton days (Peter Boyle). Hammett wasn’t the first film about a famous mystery writer solving a real-life case — The Seven Per Cent Solution comes to mind — but reviewers at the time seemed put off by the postmodern conceit. Nowadays, the idea of using real-life figures as fictional characters is commonplace, and Hammett can be enjoyed purely as an atmospheric detective yarn, albeit one more in the style of Raymond Chandler than Dashiell Hammett — and where many of the twists are pretty easy to spot. Jack Nance has a rare non-David Lynch role as a wormy pornographer, and Elisha Cook Jr. plays a cabbie (and a former Wobbly) who drives Hammett around town, armed with a gun so big it looks like it belongs in Navarone. He made Hammett nearly 40 years after playing Wilmer the gunsel in The Maltese Falcon, and he looks as boyish as ever.
RATING: 4/5

Zombie Vs. Shark: The Ultimate Conflict

There’s a stretch, about a third of the way through the 1979 gorefest Zombie, that may be the greatest 10 minutes of exploitation filmmaking of all time.

We begin on a boat somewhere in the Caribbean en route to the mysterious island of Matool, which seems to be the origin of strange reports of the dead coming back to life. It’s a beautiful day on the open water, and the wife of the captain tells him to stop so that she can go scuba diving — an activity, it turns out, that she prefers to perform topless. And director Lucio Fulci, who definitely knows which side his bread is buttered on, treats us to an extended sequence of the woman slipping into a thong, arranging the straps of her tank under her breasts and between her legs, and swimming amidst the tropical fish.

After a few minutes of this, however, a shark appears! The woman is too far away from the boat to outrun the beast, so she ducks behind a coral outcropping... only to have her wrist grabbed by a zombie lurking in the same place! She wrests herself free from the zombie’s undead grasp and swims away... leaving the zombie to battle the shark! The movie doesn’t cheat, either — you really do get to see a guy in full zombie makeup, underwater, battling what really does appear to be an actual shark. He takes a nice big bite out of it, too.

Boobs! Sharks! Zombies! Where does a film go from there? Amazingly, though, when Metro Cinema screens Zombie this Saturday (a fundraising event for the local horror festival known as DEDfest), that might not be the scene that gets the biggest reaction. Fulci, it turns out, has another trick up his sleeve: I hate to give anything away, but let’s just say that if you’ve ever had nightmares in which your eye gets impaled on a 14-inch-long shard of wood, you might want to look away from the screen.

Zombie (also known as Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie Island, Zombi 2, and Woodoo) is absolutely indefensible as art, but as an exercise in old-school, down-and-dirty, entrail-munching grindhouse cinema, it’s hard to beat. Fulci uses his makeup effects sparingly but he gets the most mileage he can out of every single one of them. These zombies don’t just bite people; they rip their flesh right off the bone. Worms spill from mouths and eye sockets, skulls explode in a shower of brain matter, blood pours down zombie chins... and wandering through it all is, of all people, Tisa Farrow, whose physical and vocal resemblance to her older sister Mia makes the film occasionally seem like a berserk cousin to Hannah and Her Sisters.

It’s a movie only a gorehound could love, but it should be noted that the production values are better than expected (especially the underwater photography in the zombie vs. shark scene), the primitive synth score achieves a certain cumulative, mournful power, and the plot (which begins in New York before moving to the Caribbean) is surprisingly ambitious. It’s also a key film in the development of the genre in that it combines the island setting of old-fashioned voodoo stories like I Walked With a Zombie with the ultra-violent, flesh-eating, unstoppable monster armies that you get in zombie movies from the post-Night of the Living Dead era.

Plus there’s the shark. Some 30 years have passed, and nobody’s ever topped the bit with the shark.

Searching For A Ferrell In A Sleestak

Land of the Lost takes place in an alternate dimension, a strange land where the past, the present, and the future all converge, and where the desert landscape is dotted with random junk from our world half-buried in the sand: a roadside motel, a Ferris wheel, an ice cream truck, a stretch limousine. Dinosaurs roam the land, pterodactyls patrol the sky, while villages of ape creatures and lizard men try not to get eaten. It’s basically a gigantic pop-cultural dumping ground... not unlike the neighbourhood multiplex during blockbuster season, where all the ephemera of the last four decades — from Star Trek to Transformers to X-Men to G.I. Joe, all of which we’d thought we’d seen the last of — falls out of the sky and plops onto the movie screens before us. And like the characters in Land of the Lost, we don’t need to spend much time in this world before we start wishing we’d just stayed at home.

Will Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a blowhard paleontologist whose theory that time warps can solve the world’s energy crisis (set forth in his book My Other Car Is a Time Machine) has made him the laughingstock of the science world. But cute young British scientist Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel from Pushing Daisies) believes he’s a misunderstood genius, and with her encouragement, Marshall finally finishes assembling his “tachyon amplifier” and heads out into the desert to test it out. It works too well, propelling Marshall, Holly, and the redneck proprietor of a nearby tourist trap (Danny McBride) into an alternate dimension with no clear way of getting back home.

Land of the Lost zooms through its setup so hurriedly that you assume there must be some amazing adventures ahead which the filmmakers just can’t wait to get to. If anything, though, the plotting gets even slacker once the heroes arrive at the other end of that transdimensional portal, and it’s hard to tell if the lazy screenwriting is intended as an homage to Sid and Marty Krofft’s original 1970s kiddie TV show or if screenwriters Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas arrived at that approach all on their own.

Rick Marshall barely even qualifies as a character; he’s more like a script hole that everyone was hoping Ferrell would fill with ad libs. Now, I’m a longtime Will Ferrell apologist — aggressively silly-stupid comedy, passionately committed to, sneaks past my defences every time — but even I have to admit that Ferrell’s performance here lacks that glint of bull-headed insanity that characterizes his best work. The one glimpse Land of the Lost gives us of that classic Ferrell persona — the kind of man who can insist with absolute certainty that “San Diego” is Spanish for “a whale’s vagina” — comes in a bit where Marshall comes up with a plan to make himself invisible to the tyrannosaurus rex that’s been chasing them by dumping a gallon of dinosaur urine over his head. It’s such a witless gag, which only made me root harder for Ferrell as he tried to make it work — and you know what? When he complained that the urine was making his eyes burn and tried to solve the problem by dumping even more urine over himself, thereby making the pain even worse, I couldn’t help myself. I had to laugh.

But I didn’t laugh long. And I didn’t laugh again. Not even when Ferrell got swallowed by a dinosaur and was pooped out the other end. Hey — I have my standards.

The Odyssey Couple

“Burt, do you have a doula?”

“Oh yes — it’s delicious!”

“No, not a dolma —a doula!”

That snippet of dinner-table dialogue is from Away We Go, but take away the au courant bohemian cultural references and you’ve got a setup and a punchline straight out of the most wide-lapelled ’70s sitcom imaginable. Strip away Ellen Kuras’ evocative cinematography and the deliberately shabby production and costume design, and Away We Go’s premise turns out to be pretty formulaic as well: when their in-laws abruptly announce they’re moving to Europe, expectant couple Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) realizes that they have nothing keeping them in their current home and so they take a trip around the U.S. (with a quick detour to Montreal) to sort of audition various cities. And in each city, they reconnect with a different set of friends or family members. Basically, the film is Four Christmases, but director Sam Mendes stages everything as if he were making Carnal Knowledge.

Many of the people Burt and Verona meet on their trip are unapologetic caricatures, especially Allison Janney as a Phoenix mother whose inability to censor herself gets worse, not better, when her kids are within earshot; and Maggie Gyllenhaal as an obnoxious New Age university professor so committed to “continuum parenting” that she won’t even allow strollers in her house and is shocked to learn that Burt and Verona are planning on keeping their child in another room when they have sex.

These scenes could be the building blocks for a light, amusing social comedy for the Utne Reader set, but it’s not enough for Mendes and screenwriters Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida to “merely” make a comedy; they want Away We Go to be something deeper, and so there’s a bunch of mopey Nick Drake soundalike songs by Alexi Murdoch that keep popping up on the soundtrack, and they throw in a stunningly awful scene where an old college buddy of Burt’s tells him about his wife Munch’s five miscarriages while they watch her onstage doing a chaste poledance during “amateur night” at a strip club — all to the accompaniment of The Velvet Underground’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’.”

I think I made a fundamental break with Away We Go during that ghastly sequence, and the film never came close to winning me back. (“Oh! Sweet Nuthin’”? “Munch”? Aaaaarrrrrggghh!) Every little thing about it started to bug me: John Krasinski’s ugly beard, his ugly glasses, even the decision to name his character “Burt.” Why is he wearing those glasses anyway? It’s never made clear just how poorly off Burt and Verona are — in the opening scenes, they barely seem to be getting by, living in an unheated hovel with a cardboard window and a bedroom one corner of which Burt apparently has converted into a wood shop. But then they go off on this capricious but fairly expensive-looking trip, crisscrossing the country from Colorado to Arizona to Wisconsin to Montreal to Miami, taking flights and sleeping in hotels, apparently without worrying about any of the costs. It begins to look like Burt could easily afford better glasses and nicer suits and shoes, but chooses to wear wallabies, camelhair jackets, and that ugly pair of specs that make his eyes look 50 per cent larger than normal.

Away We Go is more loosely plotted than most comedies of this type, and the settings are scruffier as well. That’s refreshing to see, but all the important moments feel phony as can be — we’re talking Garden State phony here, folks, like in the scene where Burt and Verona lie on a backyard trampoline and take turns making warm-and-funny promises about how they’ll raise their daughter. Sadly, promising to shave was not among them.

Charles Nelson Reilly Loves You

When I was a kid, I loved game shows, and as a result, two of my very favourite TV personalities were Paul Lynde from Hollywood Squares and Charles Nelson Reilly from Match Game. The obvious fact that they were gay zoomed way over my head; to me, they just seemed like crazy funny guys with big, fun, cartoonish personalities. (My favourite sitcom, come to think of it, was Bewitched — wow, it's a wonder I turned out heterosexual, isn't it?)

It was a great pleasure to reconnect with the late, great Charles Nelson Reilly through the concert film The Life of Reilly, which is my "Hidden Gem" pick this week on my regular DVD segment for CBC Radio. It doesn't have much to recommend it cinematically, but Reilly's winning presence supplies all the entertainment value a person could ask for. Here's the link to click to listen to my review, and here's where to click to order a stylish Charles Nelson Reilly T-shirt (which comes with a free Life of Reilly DVD).

The Helium Is The Message

Up begins so poignantly — with a beautifully conceived montage showing childhood sweethearts Carl and Ellie Fredricksen marrying, building a house, dreaming of having children and traveling to far-off locations but never quite managing either feat — that it’s a little surprising to see it climax high above the clouds with a wild action sequence involving a zeppelin, a Boy Scout, several hundred balloons, an exotic South American bird, and a pack of talking dogs. Even more startling: it all feels part of the same wonderful movie, one in which even the most mundane object — a bottlecap, a tennis ball, a garden hose — can take on huge emotional significance. When Ellie dies, she leaves behind a childhood scrapbook with a page optimistically labelled “STUFF I’M GOING TO DO.” Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, Up’s co-directors, must have filled several similar scrapbooks with their plans for the stuff they wanted to include in this movie, and it feels like they found a way to cram pretty much all of it in.

But at its heart, Up’s story is pretty simple — it’s basically David Lynch’s The Straight Story, only with a lot more helium. Like Richard Farnsworth’s Alvin Straight, Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) is an old man who needs to make an epic voyage and, without access to conventional transportation, resorts to other means of completing it. Alvin hops on board a riding lawnmower, while Carl prefers the more outré house-carried-aloft-by-a-bunch-of-balloons method. Both men know they look slightly ridiculous, but it’s a journey they have to make to give their lives closure before they die — Alvin needs to reconcile with his estranged brother, while Carl needs to prove to himself that Ellie’s spirit of adventure is still alive within his own heart. I like to think Lynch would approve of Up’s dotty brand of all-American surrealism — or at least identify with the Boy Scout character.

So many people have already written reviews praising Up so lavishly that, just for the sake of not merely echoing them, I feel obligated to come up with a few criticisms. Here’s a few I was able to think of:

• Docter and Peterson cheat a little near the end when they show the 78-year-old Carl performing several deeds far beyond what he ought to be physically capable of, sacrificing plausibility for a few more action “beats.”

• The “talking dogs” device has been conceived a little inconsistently. In the film, Carl encounters several dogs that have been outfitted with collars that translate their thoughts into human speech. Sometimes these thoughts are quintessentially “doggy” — “I just met you and I love you already!” “Squirrel!” — but I’m not quite as sold on the scenes showing groups of dogs chatting and conspiring with each other. It seems like we’re just seeing the kind of talking dogs we’d see in any conventional cartoon, if that makes sense, rather than hearing dog-talk translated into English.

• And I guess if you wanted to, you could fault Up for being too entertaining. In one scene, Russell, the Boy Scout who tags along on Carl’s balloon voyage, talks about hanging out with his father and observes, “It’s the boring stuff I think I remember most.” Up resolutely avoids including any “boring stuff” — even sentimentally eliding most of Carl and Ellie’s adult relationship, preferring to show them as adorable kids and adorable old people.

I could make that last argument, but I don’t really believe in it — I mean, what kind of person thinks, “Pixar, you really should stop making your movies so completely delightful”? Probably the same kind of person who’d see a house floating across the sky suspended from a bunch of balloons and immediately reach for their BB gun.