Month: February 2020

CREATURE COMFORTS: TERROR TRAIN and THE FUNHOUSE

robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 23, 2012

Screen Shot 2020-02-05 at 5.11.15 PM

Every Halloween, what’s old is made new again as Hollywood pumps out horror franchise sequels (Paranormal Activity 4, Silent Hill 2) and re-packages their money-making library scare flicks. The major home video release this season is the Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection set, which includes HD upgrades of eight of that studio’s classic creature features. But along with that big ticket item are some smaller cult curiosities that merit closer attention. Shout! Factory licensed  Terror Train (1980) and The Funhouse (1981) from Universal for their Scream Factory imprint, and put them out on well-appointed Blu-Ray editions last week. Both films were relatively cheap affairs set out to capitalize on the slasher box office boom initiated by Halloween, but manage to wring visual and thematic interest out of the venerable psycho killer and inbred freak genres.

In the early 1970s Roger Spottiswoode had become the favored editor for Sam Peckinpah’s slow-motion farragos (on Straw Dogs, The Getaway and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid), and was later brought on as a kind of “editor doctor” to various troubled productions. Sandy Howard was one of the producers who hired him for such surgery, and later remembering the favor, hired Spottiswoode for his directorial debut on Terror Train. Spottiswoode recalled that he was initially asked to write the script and refused, only to discover that his name was included on promo material anyway. Howard wanted the film to be a Canadian production, presumably hoping to get state funding, and Spottiswoode was born in Ottawa. Then, Spottiswood says, “I pointed out to Sandy that this really wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t take someone else’s writing credit. It wouldn’t work. So my name came off it and he said, “Why don’t you direct it?” And I thought, well, this I might do…”

It was a seat-of-the-pants kind of operation, as Spottiswoode reworked the script by T.Y. Hilton into a shape he could live with before starting on the 25-day shoot. The key was to get another Jamie Lee Curtis slasher film onto screens before the fad kicked off by Halloween (1978) had passed, and the harried nature of the project shows in its clunky exposition and flat performances. The college guys are interchangeable lugs, while the estimable Ben Johnson (Wagon Master) dutifully cashes a paycheck as the genial engineer. Jamie Lee plays Alana, a popular college co-ed whose boyfriend holds a raucous New Year’s Eve party aboard a train. One by one her pals (and a magician played by a helmet-haired David Copperfield) get picked off by a masked psycho. There is no mystery as to killer’s identity, as his backstory is revealed in the opening scene, of a pencil-necked nerd who gets brutally hazed by a gaggle of frat brothers.

What makes Terror Train watchable is the low-light cinematography of John Alcott, who had just come off an incredible series of collaborations with Stanley Kubrick. He began as an assistant on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and became a cameraman on A Clockwork Orange (1971) before being promoted to director of photography on Barry Lyndon (1975) and The Shining (1980). Instead of a light meter, Alcott just watched the light reflect off of his hand before determining the f stops of his cameras. Spottiswoode recalled to the Terror Trap:

I was proud to meet him but frankly, I wondered why he would want to do Terror Train. So I met with John and I asked him. I said, “Look, I’ve got twenty-five days to shoot this. I’m going have to shoot thirty set-ups a day. I’m gonna have to go like the wind. And he responded, “Well, Roger, if you can shoot thirty set-ups a day, you’ll make me a very happy man. I’m not used to that. On The Shining, I did ONE set-up a day.” It was the same with Barry Lyndon. It was often one or two set-ups a day and he thought it was boring! “I adore Stanley,” he said, “but thirty set-ups a day means a lot of fun for me.” (Laughs.)

Alcott’s work on Terror Train is kind of Lyndon by nite-light instead of that film’s famous candle light. The cabin interiors are quite dark, but instead of the warm flicker of lit wicks, the figures are etched in by the warm ceiling lights which Aclott had electricians install, while he highlighted eyes with pen lights he would shine himself. The movie is all edges of bodies and dumbstruck pupils, creating the feel of eternal night.

Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse is a more complete film, with a witty screenplay from Lawrence Block (not the great crime fiction writer), the hot colors of DP Andrew Laszlo (The Warriors) and the classical slow-burn tension that Hooper elicits from his balanced widescreen frame. Where the opening of Terror Train dispenses with backstory, The Funhouse sets up a whole world of resentments. An homage to Psycho, Hooper re-stages that film’s famous shower scene as a psycho-drama between brother and sister. Universal horror fiend Joey (Shawn Carson), whose poster of Frankenstein crowns his bedroom, stalks his older sister Amy (Elizabeth Berridge) into the bathroom, and gives her the fright of her life with a rubber machete. This frightful joke, set up with POV tracking shots through a suburban hallway, is the rehearsal for the horrors to come, as the monsters on Joey’s wall manifest themselves at the local carnival, where Amy goes on a double date with her pot-smoking pals.

Amy wants escape from the ‘burbs, from her creepy brother and her boozy, inattentive mother, who is half in the bag for the entire feature. Instead of Jamie Lee’s blank slate in Terror Train, Amy has a fully sketched out life, one in which her urge for adventure and escape becomes sadly believable. Hooper had an entire working carnival built in Florida, on the old set of the Flipper TV show, so he could display the event’s shabby glory in full with the help of a 150-foot crane, which provides vertiginous shots of the seedy bacchanal. The parade of hammy grotesque includes a gloriously debased turn from Sylvia Miles as a fake-Gypsy fortune teller who rasps at her callow teen clients and offers rough sexual favors on the side. The creepiest carnies though, are embodied by Kevin Conway’s gloriously skin-crawling performances as three different carnival barkers. They are all varieties of desiccated perverts, whose lascivious lowered-eye stares don’t make your skin crawl as much as gallop.

It’s his Funhouse barker though, who emerges as the bogeyman, a drunken abusive father, whose malformed son is forced to wear a Frankenstein mask while operating the ride. Behind the mask is one of makeup artist Rick Baker’s great creations, of what looks like a predatory naked mole rat with a deviated septum. But as with Frankenstein’s monster, it is the master has unleashed evil, not his benighted creature. Prodded and cajoled into a life of abject misery, the son’s violent actions are those of a wild animal absent of any human traces. This unbalanced freak’s connection to Joey is unsettling, as both are seemingly sociopathic boys with absent parents (Joey easily sneaks out to the carnival alone), yet only Joey has the face of a human, easier to blend in with the rest of polite society, continuing the cycles of neglect and reprisal.

THE MAN WHO SAW A GHOST: THE LIFE AND WORK OF HENRY FONDA

robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 16, 2012

Screen Shot 2020-02-05 at 5.08.19 PM

Devin McKinney has written a biography of uncommon urgency and feeling, about a man not prone to either.  Henry Fonda’s performances and, the book suggests, his private life, were built on varieties of withholding. Fonda’s greatest performances are models of underplaying, using his middle-Western sincerity to mask the losses that fissured his characters, manifesting only as haunted stares.   McKinney’s The Man Who Saw A Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda traces the tragedies in turn that marked Fonda’s personal life, those which lined his face and lie hidden behind his icy blue eyes. McKinney draws broad conclusions from these traumas, finding constant echoes in Fonda’s screen roles, an occasionally problematic approach that tends to reduce collaborative film efforts to manifestations of Fonda’s personality. But McKinney is a seductive and patient writer, and whenever he focuses on the physical details of a Fonda performance, his various postures and gaits, it is a revelation of the actor’s craft, how Fonda positioned himself most often to disappear, whether by shading his face or turning his back. McKinney exalts him for this reserve and modesty, a reticence and chastened demeanor the author will trace back to the ghosts that populate Fonda’s past and present, the human wreckage he has left behind in his fabulously successful life. Of all the iconic Hollywood screen presences, McKinney argues, Fonda stands apart, a symbol not of American exceptionalism but of hesitation and regret for the country that could have been.

McKinney is up front about the intent of his biographical project. It is not a data dump, replete with detailed production histories on all of Fonda’s stage and screen ventures, but selective, with “many interesting data, anecdotes, postulates, and possibilities…left out because they contributed insufficiently to the whole.” It is a crafted, thematic work, and might disappoint those looking for a linear immersion into his life. McKinney is after something grander, to position Fonda as a divided, haunted figure, his best performances “animated by the dark energy of contradiction”. He goes on to describe the types that fuel this dark energy, the “satisfied man’s paranoia, the good man’s bad urge, the hero’s despairing shade, and the patriot’s doubting conscience.” McKinney will then pair these fictional shades with Fonda’s real life losses, which include a spate of suicides of loved ones, his four busted marriages, and most paramount for McKinney, his witnessing a lynching at the age of fourteen in Omaha, Nebraska (anticipating the scenes in Young Mr. Lincoln and The Ox Bow Incident). McKinney argues that these real-life events creep their way into his work, and that through his performances “the hidden becomes visible, specters are raised, and shadows begin to move on their own.”

There is a grandiloquent intensity to these early passages in the book, using a dualistic template (light/dark, hidden/visible) that treats Fonda more as myth and symbol than as a man.  McKinney is mythologizing Fonda as much as Fonda did with Lincoln, which made him wary to take on the part. To such mythologizing, John Ford, director of Young Mr. Lincoln, responded with (as McKinney quotes): “What the fuck is all this shit about you not wanting to play this picture? You think Lincoln’s a great fucking Emancipator, huh? He’s a young jack-legged lawyer from Springfield, for Christ sake.” Early on, McKinney seems to forget that Fonda is a jack-legged actor from Grand Island, Nebraska, and not only a fading symbol of a conflicted America. But the book has a flashback structure which fills in Fonda’s life, his jack-legged roots, in between analyses of the myths he was creating in his movies. Patience is required to recognize the edifice McKinney is constructing.

Even as the structure goes up, there is plenty to inspect, as McKinney digs into the features he considers central to his career. He is dazzling when describing Fonda’s meticulous performance, but perfunctory and vague with questions of film style, or how Fonda worked with his directors or fellow actors. Consider this stunning bit on Fonda’s turn in The Grapes of Wrath:

From the start, Fonda’s body stance is nervous but composed, tense and ready. Skinny body in its black suit with high-water cuffs, arms angled outward to stick hands in pockets, pelvis jutting slightly; lots of sunlight between the bony elbows and narrow hips. Watchful eyes in a rectangular head, topped by a huge cloth cap shadowing the eyes throughout the story.

This is a conjuring act, making Fonda’s awkwardly intense Tom Joad appear before your mind’s eye, and indicating how he creates the character through angled limbs and and that insouciantly rebellious “pelvis jutting slightly.” Compare that to his description of John Ford’s compositions:  “Ford is in complete command of his early scenes… He shoots in high-contrast light and rough-hewn settings, pruning Steinbeck’s flowers of prose to leave only stalk and stem.”  Later he will say  the movie “threatens to break down when overheated by bad acting or false framing” without elaborating upon what would make a framing “false”.  I had hoped for more detail of how Fonda worked with collaborators on set, but that is something in rich supply during his extended Broadway period, which pulled him away from Hollywood for a while with the smash hit Mister Roberts (1948,  made into a film in 1955).

It is a tragi-comic navy tale for which Fonda will wear his own Navy blues, having recently been demobilized after serving as an officer on the U.S.S. Curtiss during WWII, deployed in the Marshall Islands. Mister Roberts  ends with a devastating kamikaze attack, one which Fonda himself narrowly escaped during his years of enlistment. The show was a huge hit, but Fonda still played things great interiority and reserve. Director Joshua Logan said that Fonda, “always wanted  to face upstage. I had to use tricks to get him so the audience could see him work.” As Tom Joad shades his eyes, Roberts turns away, and, McKinney writes, “the audience is again left to feel what is hidden.”

As McKinney returns again and again to Fonda’s deflective, recessionary performance style, and outlines his similarly distant relationship to his wives and children (although despite a rocky relationship, Jane’s political misadventures eventually do turn him against the Vietnam War), his arguments gain heft and weight. Fonda commits stage suicide in A Gift of Time, “a private act of empathy and remembering” for his ex-wife, Frances, who took her own life. The deaths that had marked his life continue to enter his work, until even offstage, his body begins to erode, and Henry Fonda is as synonymous with America as Abraham Lincoln. That McKinney can make one weep for the loss of his talent makes it a powerful biography, but then cry again for the evanescence of what he used to represent – the memory of a dream of a just United States, makes it a work of art.

THE 50TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL, PART 3

robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 9, 2012

Screen Shot 2020-02-05 at 5.04.23 PM

The New York Film Festival is in its final week, concluding on Sunday night with a screening of Robert Zemeckis’ return to live-action filmmaking, Flight. Most of the action this past weekend, though, took place during the Views From the Avant-Garde sidebar. In its 16th year, Views provides an increasingly large snapshot of experimental film practice around the globe. Taking place in the year-old Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, the series takes over two screens and an amphitheater space, where audiences can jump back and forth between programs, if they can afford it.  This year’s slate includes festival mainstays like Nathaniel Dorsky, future fixtures Laida Lertxundi and Ben Rivers, and the unclassifiable duo of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Raul Ruiz, who straddle the arthouse/avant-garde divide.

Nathaniel Dorsky presented two new 16mm shorts in his packed screening, which capture a cycle of mourning and recovery. August and After was made following the death of good friends, legendary underground director George Kuchar and Fluxus artist Carla Liss. It was shot on Fuji negative, which the company recently announced will be discontinued. Using this already obsolete stock, which Dorsky noted had a “lugubrious palette”, he captures singularly mournful images. There is a portrait of George, fading into his wheelchair, and his dumbstruck brother Mike, seemingly too tired for tears. This presages Dorsky’s interest in human forms, which he has largely echewed in recent work. Later in the piece he will enter the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, and capture a blur of shopping figures and fabrics and bags, evoking the feeling of being adrift in the flow of humanity. There are still beautiful textures, including the pilled flannel of a red and black checked coat, but they are subsumed in this flow. It ends though, on a vision of unsettling stillness – a kind of giving up-of a freighter lying motionless in a body of water.

April is an attempt to capture the world re-emerging following the trauma of loss. It was partly funded by a gift from Carla Liss, and shot on Eastman stock, which, Dorsky said, is not designed to be projected, but to be used to create a digital intermediate. But he was seduced by its pictorial qualities, and it is an identifiably sweet film, almost sentimental – you can sense a smile behind the camera as it winds through a San Francisco spring afternoon. Here his appreciation of human figures really becomes striking, with multiple shots of office workers and students on benches, the sun creating dappled patterns over their arms as they check their smartphones and sip their fruit smoothies. In these compositions Dorsky’s subjects look lit from within, religious icons instead of administrative assistants.

Laida Lertxundi, is another artist concerned with the beauty and terror of hanging out, being alone at home and in the universe. The world premiere of her new short, The Room Called Heaven, was conceived after she was asked to show some of the B-roll of her previous films. Looking at them, she was intrigued by how they played together, placed next to each other in incongruous conversation. Always one to speak in the present tense, though, she shot new footage, but edited it is if it was B-roll, scenes and fragments abutting one another. It is a similar editing approach as Dorsky’s, although her work is more artificial and composed. Where her previous work had obsessive visual motifs (windows, doorways, screens), here the obsession is with sound design. Her penchant for using a sole backing track (or soul, as with James Carr’s “Love Attack” in A Lax Riddle Unit), is replaced with snippets of songs and a more varied aural soundscape. There is ice is poured into a tin bucket, , a tearing page, and a blinking train stop-light. Then a woman sits, and replays the melody of the fragmented tune at a piano. The atmosphere is the same as her previous works, of a cloistered loneliness, but it achieved through different tools.

The same can be said for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mekong Hotel, a drowsily hypnotic sixty minutes that acts as a distillation of his style and concerns, but shot in HD rather than his usual 35mm. In a hotel near the Mekong River, Weerasethakul held a rehearsal for an old script he had dusted off, Ecstasy Garden. It’s filled with the director’s play on borders that was so resonantly deployed in Uncle Boonmee. As in that film borders are eminently permeable, whether it be between life and death, the spirit world and the physical world, men and women, Thaliand and Laos or past and future. The film’s pace is so gentle and lulling, set to a pacific, repetitive “classical Spanish blues” guitar melody, that the video can easily set one off to another border, between sleep and dream. But make sure to rouse yourself for the majestic final shot, of jet skis doing curlicues in the river in a super long shot, while a long canoe slowly makes its way to the other shore, the speed and power of the new contrasted to the grace of the old.

Ben Rivers is a filmmaker fixated on what is old and past – because what has been forgotten he can invent. An excavator and fabulist, Rivers is interested in outsiders and their ramshackle invented utopias. In his playful short Phantoms of a Libertine, he gives clues to the past of a rake and adventurer through deadpan notes and shards of photographs. We get clues like, “Oct. ’64. Nimes. I had acute diarrhea and was waiting for a train.”

Equally labyrinthine was a super rare screening of Raul Ruiz’s The Blind Owl (1987), which McElhatten had been trying to book for years, until he found the small French distributor who possessed the sole 16mm copy. A deliriously loose adaptation of Sadegh Hedayat novel of the same name and a 1625 play by Tirso de Molina, it follows the blinkered existence of a projectionist who fantasizes himself into the film on-screen, or perhaps the screen bursts into reality, a riff on Sherlock Jr. spiked with Ruiz’s elastic sense of time and space. Scenes loop, the world bends, and life is a grotesque horror-comedy-melodrama in an Arabic cinema in Belleville. Seen at the end of a marathon day of screenings, I was halfway to dreamland myself, but that is certainly how Ruiz himself would have preferred it, as I inevitably became another player on his stage of somnolent cinephiles.

In my exhaustion, there was much that I regret to have missed, from Phil Solomon’s remake of Warhol’s Empire using Grand Theft Auto, to David Gatten’s epic The Extraodinary Shadows, but I was left full to bursting with enough shadows of my own, which will cling to me until next year’s version comes back to town.

THE 50TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL, PART 2

robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 2, 2012

Screen Shot 2020-02-05 at 5.00.28 PM

The 50th edition of the New York Film Festival opened this past Friday night with a Gala 3D screening of Ang Lee’s The Life of Pi. While that digital projection was warmly received, later that weekend the first showing of Brian DePalma’s Passion was canceled because of an intransigent DCP (Digital Cinema Package). As the NYFF, like festivals worldwide, becomes dominantly digital, attending some of the few celluloid screenings starts to feel like a modestly defiant gesture.  Two 35mm dinosaurs,  Manoel de Oliveira’s The Satin Slipper (1985) and  Miguel Gomes’ Tabu (2012) use Portugal’s colonial past as their subject, with both using archaic forms to emphasize themes of negation and evanescence.

Booked as part of the festival’s Masterworks sidebar, The Satin Slipper (1985) is an adaptation of Paul Claudel’s 12-hour 1929 play, which Oliveira whittled down to a svelte 410 minutes. It is only the second time that the uncut film version has screened in New York City, following a brief run at the Public Theater in 1994 (Stephen Holden’s NY Times review: “not easy viewing”). It was programmed for the New York Film Festival in 1985, following its premiere in Venice, but according to associate Film Society programmer Scott Foundas, U.S. distributors Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus (of Cannon Films) would only consent to show a cut version of two and a half hours. Other titles Golan and Globus would produce/distribute in 1985: American Ninja, Invasion U.S.A. and Death Wish III. One can’t help but imagine a Cannon Christmas party with Manoel de Oliveira brushing elbows with Michael Dudikoff, Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson…

The opening line of Claudel’s opus is, “the scene of this play is the entire world”, which he attempts to capture through the strivings of 50 plus characters at the turn of the 17th century. It takes place after the disappearance of the Portuguese King Sebastian on his colonialist mission in Africa, after which King Philip II of Spain brought Portugal under his power, part of his expansion that also led him to the Americas. Against this backdrop of overreach and excess Oliveira focuses on its inverse, the painfully unrequited love between Don Rodrigue (Luis Miguel Cintra) and Dona Prouheze (Patricia Barzyk). Rodrigue is the rogue whom King Philip nominates to be Viceroy of the Americas, to rule in his stead. Meanwhile the beautiful Prouheze has been married off to the much older judge, Don Pelagio (Franck Oger), whom she honors but cannot love. To restrain her emotion, and maintain loyalty to Pelagio, Prouheze places one of her slippers with a statue of the Madonna, so that if she is tempted by lust she will approach evil “with a broken foot”. Pelagio, aware of her emotional distance, will send her to Africa to control the smitten Don Camillo in order to hold the line against the Moors. Separated by oceans, Rodrigue and Prouheze nurse their love over the decades – living lives of negation and sacrifice, hoping to be reunited in death.

In an “Author’s Note” to The Satin Slipper, Claudel writes, “The most carelessly crumpled back-drop, or none at all, will do.” Oliveira takes this to heart, staging the play as if on the budget of a community theatrical troupe, with a mostly static camera shooting long speeches with few edits, as if returning to the style of early cinema, the one-shot films of Edison or Lumiere. Only the presence of sound and the scattered slow zooms indicate this is a modern feature. The ocean is created by spinning sheaths of blue papier-mache on giant rollers, stalked by cardboard whales, while mountain ranges are simply sketched backdrops. Oliveira’s Satin Slipper is very playfully self-reflexive, pointing out the artificiality of its constructions at every turn – far more so even than his previous tales of unrequited love, Amor de Perdicao (1979)and Francisca (1981, both adaptations, of Camilo Castelo Brancoo and Agustina Bessa Luis, respectively).

He opens the film with a tour-de-force tracking shot of a crowd entering a theater, stand-ins for the viewers about to sit for close to seven hours. After a narrator, never to re-appear, introduces the play (his tongue planted in his cheek), the doors fling open and the viewers enter. The camera backs up into the theater, rolling slowly down the aisles, until it tilts upwards, revealing actors in Renaissance dress standing stock still in the balcony. Eventually one of these actors descends, and the camera pans left as he climbs up on the stage, the curtains parting to reveal not a stage set, but a film screen. He speaks of the constellations of stars visible to Don Rodrigue, tied up on a ship that is equidistant between the Old World and the New. After the camera zooms close to the image of Rodrigue on the screen, Oliveira cuts for the first time, to the image of the projector, its light shimmering over all in the audience.

As Rodrigue is reflected by the light of the moon and stars, the audience is bathed in the flickering glow of the projector, the distance between the fictional and the real collapsing. It’s constructive to compare this scene to the opening of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, which also begins in a theater, except those viewers are passive  and motionless, dulled by the clichés that Carax will enliven for the rest of his film. Oliveira is not bemoaning the state of cinema but attempting to cultivate an active viewer, as he is quoted in Randal Johnson’s Manoel de Oliveira: “My perspective is precisely to put the spectator in the action. In this way, the spectator goes from a passive, manipulated attitude to an active attitude in which he should draw his own conclusions and undertake a criticism of what he sees.” He is attempting to thrust you into the drama as it unspools, to share the light of the stars and the projector. There are the alienation effects of a jester who is shown painting backdrops and writing characters “who exist before I am finished”, and then he is able to immerse you in the emotion of the piece, seen to no greater ends then the monologue of a woman in the moon. In a long take, while slowly zooming in, Marie-Christine Barrault’s face appears in the firmament, straight out of Melies, but speaking of “never” as a kind of eternity, sacrifice as transcendence – and one begins to recognize and identify with that spark of religious belief that once lit the world ablaze.

In Tabu, Miguel Gomes is also concerned with old forms. It is a film split in two, both shot in black and white. Part One, (entitled “A Paradise Lost”, in 35mm) follows the aging human rights activist Pilar (Teresa Madruga), as she deals with the growing dementia of her neighbor Aurora (Laura Soveral), and the seeming indifference of Aurora’s black maid Santa (Isabel Cardoso).  The second half, “Paradise”, imagines Aurora’s past life in Africa, shot in hazy, grainy 16mm. This second half is narrated in voice-over, with the images from Africa granted sound effects but no sync dialogue, giving the impression of memories half-remembered, of potent emotions but vague details. This final section is set in the 60s, just prior to the African wars of independence that wrest the Portuguese colonies free of the domination that had bound them since the days of King Sebastian.

Gomes has reversed the order of these chapters from Robert Flaherty and F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931), in which the “Paradise” of a lovers’ tryst in the South Seas is then a “Paradise Lost” in Chapter 2, as they attempt to adapt to life on a French colony. In placing the Lost Paradise first, Gomes shades every action in the romantic Paradise with the knowledge of its ultimate outcome – his lovers are every bit as doomed as Rodrigue and Prouzhe. For a film suffused with themes of loss, the decision to shoot on 35 and 16mm becomes a part of the grander narrative. The frames on which these women are captured, stuck in silver nitrate, are now as fragile and disappearing as the narrative in which they enact. And while Oliveira could not have forseen it while he shot The Satin Slipper, his use of 35mm has become yet another distanciation effect, its depth and beauty another indication of what our present age has lost.

 

THE 50TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL, PART 1

robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 25, 2012

Screen Shot 2020-02-05 at 4.57.45 PM

The 50th New York Film Festival, which runs from September 28th – October 10th, marks the end of an era. Richard Peña, the Program Director of the Film Society at Lincoln Center, as well as the Festival’s Committee Head, is retiring after 25 years, to be replaced by the well-respected critics and curators Kent Jones and Robert Koehler. This year’s main slate, made up of 32 features from around the world, presents directors that Peña has long championed, including Alain Resnais (You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet) and the late Raul Ruiz (Night Across the Street), but also features artists poised to take their place in the fest’s firmament. Christian Petzold makes his long overdue main slate debut with the meticulously stunning Berlin Wall-era drama Barbara, while the astonishingly productive image-grabbers from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab make their second main slate appearance, following  Sweetgrass (2008) (Foreign Parts was a sidebar selection in 2010), with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s immersive fishing documentary Leviathan . Also making his second appearance is Leos Carax, with his weary ode to cinema Holy Motors, his first feature since Pola X (1999), which was his NYFF debut. Petzold is a classicist, the Ethnography Lab a group of experimentalists, while Carax is a bit of both – a provocative trio to kick off this year’s festival.

Barbara is the most unassuming feature of the three, a slow-boil suspense film in which the most action occurs in the eyes of actress Nina Hoss. She plays the title character, an East Berlin doctor in 1980 who is banished to a country hospital after being incarcerated for an unknown crime. Even at this distant outpost she is hounded by the police and forced to endure humiliating searches, as she plans to escape with the help of her slick West Berlin boyfriend. Only the attentions of the sympathetic wreck Dr. Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), and the decrepit state of a teen girl abused at the Torgau workhouse crack her determination to leave.

Petzold presents a world that is manifesting Barbara’s justifiable paranoia, one that constantly pokes and prods at her inviolable wall of privacy. He generally frames her in medium shot, with Hoss placed in corners, her eyes slathered in mascara so they pop out of her pale face, looking with the same intensity as the doctors in the reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulip that hangs in Dr. Andre’s office. She is alert and pensive, scanning a mise-en-scene that is rebelling against her. Her apartment’s electrical outlets blow out, the doorbell sounds like a clattering death rattle (and usually portends worse), and her bike’s tires pop at regular intervals. Then while at the office, she has to aid Dr. Andre in a lumbar puncture – with work the only place she can project her fears outward. Otherwise she is in constant surveillance of her environs, woman as prison-guard tower. Nina Hoss presents Barbara as an imposing edifice, a stone-faced sphinx who speaks in brief bursts, transmitting as little information as possible. But her eyes tell the tale, climaxing in an ecstatic close-up in the hospital, in which encrustations of anxiety fall from her face, and Barbara is ready to accept her fate.

The fate of the fish in Leviathan is never in any doubt. They will end up on our tables and in our bellies. Filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel are interested in how they get there – not the facts of it, though, but the experience, and from every conceivable perspective. The duo used waterproof digital cameras and tied them to fisherman’s heads, shoved them into a pile of the writhing new catch, and dipped them underwater on long poles off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Herman Melville worked as a whaler in New Bedford, and used the town as a model for Moby Dick, in which great whales are called “leviathans”.

This association reflects on the changing industry in New Bedford, which was the number one dollar value fishing port for the 12th consecutive year, thanks to the sea scallop industry, although it’s a long way from the dominant whaling port it was at the turn of the 20th century. But while the fish are smaller, the sense of awe is still present, as Castaing-Taylor, Paravel and sound designer Ernst Karel cut between the brute reality and industrial noise of life on the boat with the awesome beauty and gurgling solitude of the nature outside of it. When the cameras bob up and under the surface of the water, catching flickering visions of seagulls manifesting out of the dark, it looks as if the world is being created before your eyes. The filmmakers told Dennis Lim in the NY Times that while Melville, as well as philosopher Thomas Hobbes (“life is nasty, brutish and short”), were the original touchstones of their work, it was the original, biblical sense of leviathan as sea monster that ultimately animated their vision. It is a primal, visceral and overwhelming work, one of those artistic breakthroughs that intimates what it might have felt to view the Lumiere’s train riding towards you for the first time.

If Leviathan feels like something bracingly new, Holy Motors is obsessed with the old – with old films, old actors and old age. After years of failing to secure funding for his work, Leos Carax fueled all of his rage at the business and love for the medium into this weary spectacular. Denis Lavant plays Oscar, a burnt-out itinerant actor who travels in a stretch limo around Paris (which has a similar tomb-like quality to that of Cosmopolis), heading to nine “appointments” in which he performs scenes in a variety of genres, from softcore porn to tearjerking melodrama to a grandly romantic musical reminiscent of Jacques Demy. His whole life is performance, and performance is life, acting for an invisible crowd that we see in the opening scene lolling contentedly in their seats.

This is no celebration, though, for Oscar is exhausted, as Michel Piccoli notes in a crucial cameo. These forms and characters that Lavant so imaginatively embodies are losing their force – these grand emotions are as outdated as the lugubrious limo that creeps through town. Oscar’s tour is a joyous kind of eulogy, a superb rendering of these spectacles that is also their last. He straps on a motion capture suit, a human disco ball in a dark room, and engages in an intensely erotic pas de deux with a similarly outfitted blonde. Their bodies heave and contract as one – but their efforts result in the slick, inhuman CG of writhing dragons. Later, a movingly melancholic Kylie Minogue breaks out into a heartsick ballad, singing of her past love for Lavant, a gorgeous number in which Carax tracks the camera up a desolate building onto the roof, where they part. All that is left afterward will be some broken glass on the sidewalk, another performance ended.  In Holy Motors cinema still works, and gloriously so, but it is fated to die anyway. The film is Carax’s form of mourning this passing, and here’s hoping this film and his career will have a lengthy afterlife.

  In the coming weeks I’ll discuss the sidebar programs, including the Views From the Avant-Garde program and an ultra-rare screening of Manoel de Oliveira’s The Satin Slipper (1985) , along with more selections from the main slate.

ZOMBIE WATCH: A CONVERSATION WITH DAVE KEHR ABOUT PAUL W.S. ANDERSON

robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

September 18, 2012

It was a banner weekend for Paul Andersons, as Paul Thomas Anderson and Paul W.S. Anderson topped the specialty and worldwide box office. As PTA’s vaultingly ambitious The Master has understandably dominated the cultural conversation, I wanted to create some space to discuss the ever-workmanlike W.S. One of the few directors to fully embrace 3D, creating dazzling depth effects on half the budget of most Hollywood spectaculars, he’s an endlessly resourceful stylist. Despite this, W.S. has long been one of the worst reviewed directors in the United States. One of his staunchest defenders has been New York Times film critic Dave Kehr,  so I went to see Resident Evil: Retribution 3D (rated 30% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes) with him at the Regal Union Square in Manhattan. Afterward we sat down and had an informal chat about Paul W.S. Anderson’s work and career. [Warning: Spoilers Ahead]

RES: So you were first impressed by Paul W.S. Anderson by seeing Shopping (1994) at the Toronto Film Festival?

DK: I’m pretty sure that’s where I saw it. British punk movie, big rock score. Stylistically, it’s not as accomplished as his later work, but the elements are there. It’s all nighttime, it’s all glare and chase sequences that move into the next one. And the people who consider themselves the last representatives of humanity in a corporate world.

RES: Yes, his villains are always the ultra-privatized, corporate overlords.

DK: The classic figure, right. I interviewed him once [you can read the 2002 NY Times interview here], and he was a very affable guy, and was startled that anyone would want to talk to him. It was really an effort to track down his publicist, because he had given up on getting recognition years before that, even.

RES: Once he made Mortal Kombat (1995), he became associated with video games, which was just considered trash.

DK: No more serious consideration necessary, the guy makes video game movies. And he’s still making cheesy video game movies…

RES: But excellent ones!

DK: Yeah. And he’s seen a lot of movies. Who he reminds me of is Fritz Lang. I’m pretty sure I asked him about that, and he said, “oh yeah, love him.”

RES: The connection with Lang is with his use of geometric figures?

DK: All the underground stuff, worlds within worlds, imagined conspiracies. In particular the space used in Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), the geometry and symmetry.

RES: Also similar is the puppet-master, a Mabuse-like figure.

DK: Sure.

RES: Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil, Joan Allen in Death Race (2008)…

DK: The sinister boss figure hovering over all these people, and making them move and jump around. In the Resident Evil series, I guess it’s the computer, the Red Queen.

RES: It’s the corporation itself, a faceless entity.

DK: Yeah, it has its own life.

RES: It’s the entity that makes them jump around, but it’s how Anderson shoots this jumping around that makes him special. How would you describe how he shoots action?

DK: It’s hard not to think of the musical. It’s so perfectly choreographed. It reminds me of the first Hong Kong stuff in the 70s, with a real sense of exuberance in action that you haven’t seen in a long time. Real physical action, not just shooting guns at each other. Jumping off of buildings…

RES: While shooting guns…

DK: That came a little bit later, but what I’m thinking of is Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (1986). I don’t know if it stands up now. That style has been so overdone to the point of absurdity.

RES: Well, Hark’s Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (2011) was rather disappointing.

DK: Wasn’t it? I turned it off. So much CGI…

RES: Yeah, even with their weapons. And that’s the thing with Anderson’s films. There is tons of CGI, but they’re also very physical…

DK: He never gives you the sense that he’s faking it. The stunt choreography is really good. He clearly has a personal interest in that stuff. Getting to Budd Boetticher – the way people fight each other in Paul Anderson movies, it’s that kind of psych-out thing that Boetticher does. Through dialogue, through intimidation. It’s like a chess game, they’re anticipating each other’s moves. The fun is in seeing the twist at the end – how Milla Jovovich really out-thought the other person.

RES: Like in the opening of Retribution, Milla grabs a chain and lock, and works a number of variations on how she uses it in attacks. I did read that interview you did with him, and I remember he mentioned that he comes from a family of coal miners, explaining his fascination with claustrophobic spaces.

DK: Even when there are exteriors in his films, they turn out to be interiors. [In Retribution what looks like Tokyo, NYC and Moscow turn out to be an underground testing facility built by the evil Umbrella Corporation.]

RES: Each entry in the Resident Evil series has a very specific sense of place. The first was an underground labyrinth, the second an urban hellscape, the third a version of the West, and the fourth is the Western coast of the U.S. In Retribution, Anderson devises a plot where he can jump between these differing spaces.

DK: Although he does add the suburban section here. It’s fun to see her in normal clothes, playing at playing the mom. Then when she straps on the S&M gear, it’s very satisfying.

RES: Yes, the suburban sequence is really poking fun at traditional family drama, or even sitcom scenarios. It acknowledges the artificiality of genre constructions right up front.

DK: He really lays it on thick, with the deaf child. A perfect Spielberg suburb that turns out to be a deliberately unreal nightmare. These stock figures are actually trying to kill you.

RES: He shows these stock characters as stock – disposable. Even the little girl, who is the emotional center of the movie, is presented as fake, a clone with imprinted memories.

DK: Yeah and the little girl realizes it too, that Milla is not her mommy. I’m trying to visualize the scene where they see the cloning room. Are there any male characters there?

RES: No, I don’t think so. You see the clones of Milla, Michelle Rodriguez and the girl. Which goes to show how subordinate the male characters are in this film, they don’t even get decent clones.

DK: You hear complaints about there being a lack of action films with women, well, this is one of the most successful series out there, and it stars a woman. There are no compromises here, it’s just not a big deal at this point, in the Resident Evil world.

RES: What did you think of the use of 3D in this one?

DK: Great. It never seemed arbitrary, it always worked. I like all that stuff in the white prison cell, the geometrical form, the Umbrella design, it looks flat until something  pops out. It just has stuff you don’t see in other movies, including the lighting, backlit scenes with one or two lights. He doesn’t fill the frame the way Cameron does. Cameron has to have something going on in every corner of the frame. Anderson seems to be aware that, 3D isn’t just putting everything in one frame, it’s directing like as you would a normal film. Anderson knows how to put those shots together so it doesn’t feel disruptive, isn’t jarring. You need good solid old-fashioned match-shots on action. Where a lot of 3D directors get hung up is, they’re just framing every shot for what it is, and not thinking about what comes after it. It gets irritating after a while, with depth-of-field changing left and right.

RES: That’s what causes people to get headaches…

DK: It does for me. It pains me watching that stuff. I can’t help trying to put it together in my head.

RES: You saw The Avengers (2012).

DK: Every shot is just a guy shooting, with no sense of who he’s shooting at or chasing after. There’s just no relationship between this action and that action. It’s either complete in itself or it’s forgotten by the next shot. So it’s not about the logic of how you fight an army of 12 invincible zombies and get out alive, which has a certain amount of plausibility in the Anderson because the strategy is there, the athletic abilities are there, the ballet-like quality of moving through the air… It feels kind of serene in a way. It’s always so cool, she just knows how to execute it.

RES: You can see people thinking in Resident Evil: Retribution…

DK: Yeah, she’s thinking down the line – look at this person, what’s he going to do, how am I going to react.

RES: What do you think about his use of slow motion?

DK: It’s kind of a cliché since The Matrix (1999) but I find it pretty effective. It exaggerates, or brings out those qualities more. And I really enjoy seeing whoever that stunt-person is doing her flip three times through the air. You want to savor that moment. I can accept it as part of the conventions now.

RES: At least of the new conventions, it adds clarity to movement rather than muddying it. What about that opening scene, of the action scene rendered in slow reverse motion. It’s gorgeous, although it seems like Anderson and his crew are just fucking around.

DK: Was it in the last film? No it wasn’t.

RES: It’s a continuation, picking up where Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) left off. I don’t know what the point of it was, but I certainly enjoyed it.

DK: I also appreciated the recap at the beginning, because at this point, after five of them, I forgot exactly how it all got started.

RES: Although it’s not really a series where you have to know the mythology to enjoy it. Another thing I love are those architectural blueprint shots, which shows you where all of the characters are. Anderson is obsessed with letting you know where you are.

DK: He also does that in Event Horizon (1997). It’s important to know your position in space for a coal miner… I wonder if those are the same matrixes they used to model the CGI. Well, the Moscow stuff, I guess that was real location footage.

RES: Yeah, there was a second unit in Moscow

DK: The White House didn’t look all too real though…

RES: I’m sure they tried to get permission to shoot at the White House.

DK: Yeah, they called them up. “-I’m the producer for Resident Evil Part Five, we’d like to stage a zombie holocaust. –We’ll get back to you.”

RES: It’s interesting that they shot real locations and in the movie they made them into virtual places. Usually that works in the reverse direction. What are your pantheon Paul W.S. Anderson films?

DK: They’re all pretty good. He keeps getting better. Retribution is the smoothest and most satisfying. It does not feel monotonously fast. And it’s really tight. Every scene flows. And that’s exactly what Joss Whedon can’t seem to do. “Alright, that number’s over. We have two to three minutes of sarcastic banter between thinly sketched characters before it’s time for the next number to start.”

RES: This feels like the ideal Paul W.S. Anderson movie, plucking from everything he’s done before…

DK: You think it will convince people he’s got talent? [laughs]

RES: If one person is converted, we’ve succeeded.

DK: They don’t have press screenings for his films.

RES: And that’s not going to change.

DK: It’s not like that audience is going to respond, “hey, this got a great review in the Times! Let’s go see Resident Evil 5!” It’s funny how people get that label of being schlock directors. I don’t know what he did to deserve that.

RES: It’s just received wisdom. His name has become shorthand for schlock.

DK: Yeah, but is he Uwe Boll or something?

RES: It’s the subject matter.

DK: But Christopher Nolan became an international star directing comic book movies.

RES: Yeah, but Anderson does video game adaptations, there is a difference. Comic books have risen in cultural capital the last couple of decades. Not so for video games. Roger Ebert says video games are not art, so Paul W.S. Anderson is out. He’s out. People always forget how Hawks and Hitchcock were regarded as vulgar entertainers in their day.

DK: It seems like that lesson never gets learned. Each generation of critics blows it in their own way.

RES: Not that I’m saying Paul W.S. Anderson should be compared to Hitchcock…

DK: Well, he’s at least Far Side of Paradise at this point. [laughs] Maybe he’s Gordon Douglas. Anderson is not able to make the number of films Douglas was – Douglas could make five movies in a year, and Anderson makes one every two years, and he’s incredibly prolific for today. He has a little studio system set up now. He has a star, a franchise…

RES: It’s one of the great director-actress duos of our time…

DK: Absolutely!

RES: Len Wiseman and Kate Beckinsale – that’s the B-team.

DK: C-team. That’s bad because they bring out the worst in each other. She’s a fun light comedienne but terrible in action movies. I don’t know what Wiseman is good for actually [laughs].

RES: Any final thoughts?

DK: Well, it’s just such a pleasurable, kinetic experience to be moved through that. You don’t feel assaulted, irritated and beat up by a movie. It’s a movie that respects your intelligence, and has put some thought into how it’s going to work. It’s not one damn thing hitting you in the face after another. That’s just stimulation, lights flashing, sound going off, CGI crap falling on top of everything. If you get people hopped up and stimulated then maybe they’ll think it’s entertainment, but it’s not. I’m a grumpy old man.

RES: Justifiably so. What does that make me then?

DK: Well, I was a grumpy young man too.

GO HANG YOUR DREAMS: THE HANGING TREE (1959)

robertemmetsweeney1 Comment

September 11, 2012

Screen Shot 2020-02-05 at 4.45.33 PM

The Hanging Tree (1959) is a Western marked by illnesses and maladies, a portrait of a violent man at war with his own impulses. It deploys Gary Cooper as a crumbling totem, the actor’s aching hip tipping his performance from his famous underplaying into a kind of pained decrepitude. It is one of Cooper’s most emotionally wrenching turns, as he is seemingly aware that he was reaching the end of his career, which would end with his death in 1961. Then there is the sickness that felled director Delmer Daves over halfway through the shoot, necessitating that Karl Malden take over behind the camera, using Daves’ storyboards as guides. These sicknesses are made legible in the film, from the name of Cooper’s character, Doc Frail, to the sun exposure that fells Elisabeth (Maria Schell), the Swedish immigrant who Frail nurses back to health, and who tests the boundaries of the doctor’s seemingly impenetrable emotional defenses. Long unavailable in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, the Warner Archive has released a handsome anamorphic edition of the film on DVD, transferred from an inter-negative. There is some light print damage, but nothing to detract from the grandeur of Daves’ compositions, shot on location in the Oak Creek Wildlife Area outside of Yakima, Washington.

Cooper personally shepherded the project at Warner Brothers, the second film he produced following Along Came Jones (1944), through his Baroda Pictures imprint. His daughter Maria told Lou Lumenick at the NY Post that, “The story meant a lot to him. He was a Montana boy and had a real resonance with the characters and the drama of the era when there was a push to stake claims. He was born in 1901 in Helena when it was a funny mixture of a rough and ready town at the same time Montana had more millionaires than any other state in the union. Helena even had a hanging tree, so that was not a foreign dramatic touch to him.” The story was adapted from the 1957 novella by Dorothy M. Johnson, and regards the arrival of Doc Frail into the gold rush town of Skull Creek, Montana. He hides  wanted thief Rune (Ben Piazza) at his cabin, but asks for a form of indentured servitude in return. Rune reluctantly agrees, for a while, if only to avoid capture. So when Elisabeth is discovered in the desert, half-mad and blind, Frail and Rune are tasked with healing her. They go about their task increasingly insulated from the madness growing outside their doors, as gold fever has whipped up the town in an anarchic frenzy, encapsulated in the raving, violence-mongering preacher Grubb, played with grandiose menace by George C. Scott, in his indelible big screen debut.

This outside sickness, one of extreme individualism, is one that Frail is sympathetic to, having been burned by intimate relations in the past. So as the trio of himself, Elisabeth and Rune develop into a loving co-dependency, he cuts them off. Warm and giving when they are in need, Frail cannot stand the sight of the others when they have grown self-sufficient, the power relations shifting against him. There is an unsettling shot where Frail walks Elisabeth out to a cliff’s edge and determines that her sight is returning. The shift in his tone from solicitous caretaker to distant acquaintance is chilling in its swiftness and severity. It is clear that Frail has performed this act before, forever retreating back into himself. Daves repeatedly frames them against the dizzying rocky slopes of the Oak Creek Wildlife Area, images of serenity that ironically contrast with the relentlessly neurotic and interior Frail.

Despite her near-death experience, only Elisabeth seems truly comfortable in the land, opening a gold panning outpost with gusto, eager to work as much as any man. This confuses her dopey macho assistant Frenchy (Karl Malden), who with his floppy hat and head bob, looks like a schnauzer begging for treats. He is an idiot, and one who does not seem to have advanced beyond Freud’s polymorphous perversity stage, believing that everything and everyone around him is available for his pleasure. Frenchy is the representative of the town’s descent into narcissistic madness. Frail recognizes himself in Frenchy, in their selfish rejection of society. Perhaps this is why Frail turns aggressively violent in Frenchy’s presence, a bitter rage which results in a scene of shocking violence at the same cliff where Elisabeth regained her sight.

Malden not only gave a singularly unsettling performance, but saved the project from imploding. According to the AFI Film Catalog, production began on June 17th, and Delmer Daves’ sickness forced him to leave on July 25th. For the rest of principal shooting, which lasted until August 13th, as well as post-production, Karl Malden took over as director.  He recalls this period to Rose Eichenbaum in The Actor Within:

During the last two weeks of the picture, the director got sick and went to the hospital. So I got a call on Saturday to come over to Coop’s house. I get there, and he says they might have to close down production. ‘That’s too bad’, I say. So he says, ‘why don’t you finish directing this picture?’ ‘Me?’ ‘You can do it, you directed Widmark in Counter Attack. You can do it.’ So I said okay, but if I find that I’m lost and I don’t know how to do it, and we have to sit there and figure it out, don’t scream at me.’ ‘Kid,’ he said, ‘I’ve never spoken angrily to anyone in my life, and I’m not going to start now.’ So I accepted and directed the picture for two and a half weeks. When it was finished, Gary Cooper went over to Warner’s and said to them, ‘star billing!’ That’s the first picture in which I ever got star billing. That’s the kind of man Gary Cooper was.

In order to depict the destructive community of Skull Creek, which burns itself alive in a drunken revelry of greed, the production team had to function as a supportive one. Cooper had a chronic bad back as a result of a broken hip he had as a teen which was never set properly, and it was bothering him mightily on the set. He couldn’t sit side-saddle on a horse, as Marie Cooper tells Lumenick, so a special saddle was created where he would be perched off to the side. This worked for his character, allowing him to literally talk down to the characters Frail is so desperately trying to separate himself from.

The Hanging Tree is a fragile Western, one in which psyches are as easy to shatter as entire communities. Money is both their curse and their salvation, able to put their necks inside a noose as well as buy their way out of it.  The only thing it can’t seem to purchase is happiness, at least that found outside of a bottle. The final shots, in which Elisabeth divests herself of all her gold and land, and instead nuzzles Cooper’s downturned head, are some of the most radical, and radically moving, in the Hollywood Western.

BRAKING NEWS: MOTORWAY (2012)

robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

September 4, 2012

Screen Shot 2020-02-05 at 4.37.13 PM

Car chase movies are necessarily clamorous things, as they orchestrate squealing rubber, huffing pistons and the screams of crumpling steel. Which is why Motorway (2012), the new film from Hong Kong director Soi Cheang now out on HK Blu-Ray, is so unusual. It’s a particularly quiet automobile action movie, focused on the finesse of driving. The defining technique of the film is a 90 degree hairpin turn executed at 8,000 RPMs but only 2 Kilometers/hr. It requires great power exerted with careful, slow consideration, which holds true for the film as a whole. Pared down to a sleek 89 minutes during a prolonged two-year post-production process, back-stories and subplots were removed in favor of a film with narrative lines as clean as the ’89 Nissan 240 SX S13 that the traffic cops are unable to stop.

Motorway is the second film that Soi Cheang has made for Johnnie To’s Milkyway Studios, after the elaborately entertaining assassin drama Accident (2009). Where that is a clever expansion of the hitman movie, with its complicated Rube Goldberg made-to-look-like-accidents killings, Motorway is a reduction. Each of its characters is reduced to genre archetypes, with the audience using its knowledge of previous car chase films to fill in their background. The main driver is Chan Cheung (Shawn Yue), a speed freak gearhead who also works for the traffic cops in Kowloon. His partner is Lo Fung (the ever stone-faced Anthony Wong), who is near-retirement but is still haunted by the  getaway driver Jiang (Guo Xiaodong) who escaped him decades previously. So of course that wheelman returns to Kowloon in order to spring his imprisoned pal  Huang (Li Haitao), in order to set up the heist of a large diamond.

They are defined by their jobs and the roles as established by previous films. The enigmatic Jiang is descended straight from Ryan O’Neal in The Driver, whose every press of the accelerator seems to assuage some deep existential dread, while Chan, with his souped up vehicle and late night drag races, is a fugitive from the hyperactive Fast and Furious series – a hot-headed punk over his head. But while the characters are familiar, the chase scenes are not. They are uncannily intimate affairs, always at night under flickering neon lights, and they are paced and fought like duels. Cheang makes much out of dramatic pauses and rests. Jiang is constantly finding holes in the city to rest in, from the back of a truck to the obscured spot in a parking garage. There is a sense of vehicles as an extension of their bodies, no more so when Lo Fung rolls down his window in an effort to hear his adversary more than see him, as the darkening night corrodes his vision. The repeated close-ups of the engine block throbs with the energy of a heartbeat.

It is a thrillingly organic film, in which the lines of a map which Jiang is tracing morphs into the lines of the road, of the car, and of the street. And all of this rather quietly rendered structure  does not diminish the impact of the chases. Using a camera attached  low to the ground,  Cheang and his cameraman capture the stunt-drivers locking horns through the streets of Hong Kong. I only detected CG in one shot, in which a car nearly tips over a cliff. Everything else was, at least in the movie-verse, authentic. Cheang told Edmund Lee at Time Out HK what he was going for:

I’m not exactly a fan of racing movies, but I have fond memories for the racing scenes in several crime thrillers, such as [William Friedkin’s] The French Connection (1971) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), as well as the likes of Ringo Lam’s Full Alert (1997). When you watch the old movies, you can actually feel that someone is driving the car; when you see The Fast and the Furious movies nowadays, you can’t help but feel that part of their beautiful [action sequences] have been animated. I really want to go back to the human dimension of driving. I want to find out who these drivers are as human beings.

You can sense the characters’ human qualities through their driving styles. Jiang is elusive and fond of trickery in his ancient S13, while Chan favors a more barreling forward damn-the-torpedoes style in the police sedan. Lo Fung is harder to pin down, as he is only given one opportunity to show his driving chops, called back to the wheel after decades of refusal. He prefers a more sensorial style, as indicated when he turns off the AC and lowers the window. But everything can fail, especially when one depends on machines.

For in Motorway crashes have devastating impact, the steel frames of cars as permeable as skin. The more the vehicles are mastered and become extensions of drivers’ bodies, the more vulnerable they become. Every protagonist is either bruised, battered or dead by the end, with Jiang’s rabbit-punches keeping Chan off-guard until a final showdown on a pier, in which both woozy fighters circle each other in a screeching pas de deux. Motorway is a brooding original which turns the manic breathlessness of a car chase into a subtle duel of personalities.

THE OLD & THE NEW: BYE BYE BIRDIE (1963)

robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

Originally published at Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

August 28, 2012

Screen Shot 2020-02-05 at 1.36.54 PM

Against a backdrop of retina-bursting blue, the 22-year-old Ann-Margret waves goodbye to the classical Hollywood musical in Bye Bye Birdie (1963). Director George Sidney seems prescient in expanding Ann-Margret’s role at the expense of intended stars Janet Leigh and Dick Van Dyke, considering the explosion of the youth market less than a year later, when The Beatles would appear on The Ed Sullivan Show (which also makes an appearance in Bye Bye Birdie), cementing rock band movies/concerts as the musicals of the near-future. Now available in a gorgeous limited edition Blu-Ray from Twilight Time (for purchase exclusively at Screen Archives), Bye Bye Birdie is an eye-popping transitional work, with the old and the new Hollywood brushing up against each other with both awkward and thrilling results.

As a Broadway show,  Bye Bye Birdie was a gently satiric take on the gnashing of female teeth caused by Elvis Presley getting drafted into the army, told mainly through an adult’s perspective.  It follows struggling songwriter Albert Peterson and his secretary and sometime girlfriend Rosie Alvarez as they try to get rock heartthrob (and Elvis stand-in) Conrad Birdie to sing their tune on The Ed Sullivan Show. The character of Kim McAfee, the teen girl plucked from Birdie’s fan club to receive his last kiss before he enlists, is a distinctly supporting part.

But when director George Sidney saw Ann-Margret’s ebullient performance, he expanded her role to include five musical numbers (up from two), and cut out Janet Leigh’s big “Spanish Rose” routine. This shifts the perspective to the teenage denizens of Sweet Apple, Ohio.  One of Sidney’s inventions was placing Ann in front of a blue-screen to open and close the picture, a showcase in which she exhibits a faux-naivete (clutching her skirt), only to be replaced by a self-aware come-hither stare, in a performance which, as Dave Kehr wrote in the New York Times, is “so charged with erotic energy that you can practically feel a nation’s toes curling. She plays Kim, the head of the Conrad Birdie fan club, and her scenes are supercharged with hormonal energy, including her “How Lovely To Be A Woman” solo, in which her playfully aggressive donning of a sweater dress completely undermines the squeaky clean sexism of the lyrics (“It gives you such a glow just to know/You’re wearing lipstick and heels!”). Kim is fiercely in charge of her own life, especially over her milquetoast boyfriend Hugo (Bobby Rydell), who unfortunately is tasked with trying to one-up her at a dance-off during the “A Lot of Livin’ To Do” number (he loses).

In between all of this, Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh valiantly attempt to keep the supposed A plot, that of Peterson and Rosie, percolating. But maybe because Sidney was too enamored of Ann-Margret, their work looks flat in comparison. Leigh was inevitably disappointed with the finished film, writing in her autobiography that, “George had changed as well. I couldn’t exactly define the difference. It might be accredited to the transference of his Svengali attitude from me to the new and young Ann-Margret. He saw, perhaps, an opportunity to mold another budding career. I was ‘old hat’ after the numerous pictures and tests we had made together. His dismissing behavior wreaked havoc with my already precarious stability.” The only relative oldster who comes off with an equal level of energy or verve, is, of course, Paul Lynde, who takes on his stage role of Mr. McAfee, Kim’s befuddled dad. Knocking out a venomous version of “Kids”, Lynde’s particularly nasal wit makes it seem like being an adult is not the bore Peterson and Rosie make it out to be.

One thing that brings all ages together in the film is their desire to be on television. From Peterson to Kim to the mayor, everyone kowtows to Ed Sullivan and his producer, hoping the idiot box will goose their businesses or make them a star. Television, and variety shows like Sullivan’s, was part of the reason for Hollywood’s decline in box office in this period, and spurred their desperate search for what audiences actually wanted. But the film reflects that all people wanted was more TV. The finale, which turns the Sullivan show into an amped up burlesque, thanks to the effective sabotage work of Peterson and Rosie, is an attempt to depict television as, even at this late date, as a kind of rough and tumble Wild West of entertainment. The sequence makes it look like a particularly poor night at a community college’s talent show – as contrasted with the slick musical sequences from earlier in the film.

It is a sparklingly polished film, like a lollipop licked to maximum sheen, the popping primary colors captured in smoothly arcing crane shots. None of the colors register as sharply as Ann-Margret’s personality. A musical star was born, but right at the beginning of the genre’s slow demise. She would co-star with the real Elvis in Viva Las Vegas (1964), but aside from the rock-opera Tommy (1974), wouldn’t star in a full-blown musical again.

CITY OF ENTROPY: NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (2012)

robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

August 21, 2012

Screen Shot 2020-02-05 at 1.32.54 PM

The once legendary resort, like everywhere else that one visits now, regardless of the country or continent, was hopelessly run down and ruined by traffic, shops and boutiques, and the insatiable urge for destruction. -W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants

The setting of Kleber Mendonca Filho’s extraordinary debut feature Neighboring Sounds (opening on 8/24 in NYC) is not a resort, but the aging apartment blocks and flimsy, sprouting condominium towers of Recife, Brazil that bear similar scars of overdevelopment. The seemingly haphazard urban planning has the upwardly mobile middle class living on top of and among the blue collars who serve them. Filha’s film presents the neighborhood of Setubal as a series of constant intrusions, from the minor annoyances of a yapping guard dog and a stolen car stereo to the unsettling history of the area’s industrialist/colonialist past leaking into the present. The social contract in Setubal is built on as uneasy a ground as the swiftly built condos. As in Sebald’s description of a depopulated Deauville in The Emigrants, the whole town seems on the verge of collapse, haunted by the ghosts of its lost wealth. Yet all of this is subtext, woven into the comic-melancholic fabric of the neighborhood’s everyday routines.

The central node in this multi-character drama is Joao (Gustavo Jahn), a sluggish real-estate agent whose grandfather Francisco Oliveira (W.J. Solha) used to own all the land in town, his fortune made from a now decrepit sugarcane farm. Most of the land has been sold off to developers, with the neighborhood becoming a mix of gentrifying professionals and the old working class, mostly of African descent, hanging on in their yet-to-be leveled apartment buildings. One of them is Bia (Meve Jinkings), an insomniac middle-class mom driven mad by that barking dog, and who tries to stay sane with copious amounts of weed. Preying on fears of a violent underclass, a private security company led by glad-handing Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) wins a contract to patrol the streets. Clodoaldo and his crew slowly embed themselves into the town before he reveals his true, secret purpose.

The opening carefully sets up the clashes that will follow. The first images show B&W still images of Recife, of beauty queens and farmers, before a cut to the present and a low-angle tracking shot that follows a boy and girl wheel their way through a parking garage and onto a teeming condo playground. The photos show the faces that were displaced in order to make way for this luxuriant leisure, but a reaction shot shows it to be an ongoing process, as the boy curiously stares at a construction worker sanding off the rough edges of a window frame.

This is the first of many shots of frames-within-frames which throw the working and middle classes in uneasy equilibrium. In one time-traveling sequence, one of Francisco’s maids is shown changing in a doorway, transforming from a starched maid out of the 1950s into a sexually aggressive halter-topped woman of present day. Another, more depressing instance occurs when Joao is showing a mother and daughter a new apartment. The daughter wanders to the balcony and stares at a barefoot boy playing soccer in an alley below.  The boy is centered and enclosed in the alley. He kicks the ball over the fence and asks for her to return it in vain. The mother pulls her away before she can help. They depart, and there is a jarring cut to the ball bouncing back down the alley. Presumably Joao returned it, although that is left ambiguously.

Joao’s character makes pains to be friendly with the help, acting warm and flirtatious with his lifelong  maid Maria (her family is always hanging out at his place), and defending  his building’s doorman after the co-op meeting wishes to throw him out. His actions are cosmetic, with his character too apathetic to do anything so bold as give someone a promotion, or even a raise. He is caught between his family’s feudal past and his eagerness to be a young bourgeois liberal, with all the indolent self-righteousness that requires. This whole conflict comes to a head in the moodily elegiac sequence when he takes his equally affectless girlfriend Sofia (Irma Brown) to the sugar mill, a dilapidated relic of his family’s exploitative past. And yet it is a beautiful and seductive place, their lives slowing down to a crawl as they laze about in hammocks and waterfalls, channeling the leisure of centuries past. They wander through the decaying factory cinema, acting out hypothetical scenes for an audience long dead and gone, just like the plantation and its way of life. The sound design, which is intricately stunning throughout, is especially spare here, the score reduced to a bass-heavy thrum, and the background  noise rising until it subsumes its Joao, Francisco and Sofia in the same beneficent tones their ancestors must have heard, a brief illusion of time, and power, regained.

The images of the sugar mill are those of pervasive decay, recalling another line from The Emigrants, of one Dr. Abramsky who yearned for the destruction of his long-shuttered mental hospital, which housed so many brutalized victims of electroshock: “Nowadays I place all my hope in the mice, and in the woodworm and deathwatch beetles. The sanatorium is creaking, and in places already caving in, and sooner or later they will bring about its collapse.” This will be the fate of the mill – and of Francisco and Joao’s family, indirectly caused by the intervention of Clodoaldo – a kind of vengeful spectre from their fabled past. The only character not weighed down by this history  is Francisco’s maid, who in her off-hand costume change was able to slough off the past and stride toward the future with a brazen confidence.