Jiney, in the hands of Race Wong, is a talented but unsatisfied arts student. As she tellingly explains to a fellow student, just because she wins awards with hr photographs doesn't mean she's necessarily satisfied with the results. She witnesses a fatal car accident but while she's initially shocked and horrified, she finds herself drawn to photograph the victim. From then on she finds herself seeing a darker side to the art she creates, which makes for disturbing viewing, not just for us but for the characters in the story.
First it's just painting a line of blood delicately wending its way down a nude model, then its paying a street vendor to butcher chickens for her camera. Soon she's photographing every dead animal she can find and she's seeing the photos in her dark room literally drip blood. Vegetarians would not find this comfortable viewing, that's for sure! She develops a death obsession, only partially because of the similarities between photography and death. It doesn't take long for her to dance around on the wrong side of the rail ten floors up screaming into the night. Her girlfriend Jas, bizarrely played by Race Wong's real life sister Rosanne, is understandably upset about the whole thing.
As always, Oxide Pang provides a visually powerful film. Through the eyes of his character, he demonstrates how good a photographer he would be. He has a highly astute sense for composition of frame, something that seems to be apparent both in still and moving pictures. However there's still quite a bit of the stylised jerkiness that he seems so fond of and which I'm enjoying less and less with each of his films. As always though, the concept of movement is well addressed. I have no conception what cultural phenomenon makes Asian cinema able to treat movement with such consistent innovation, when nobody else sems to have a clue.
Especially after dealing with a fellow student who has a serious crush on her, Jiney gradually realises how far she's getting to the edge and so, with the help ofJas, pulls way back. But if you think everything's suddenly going to be sunlight and roses then you haven't seen much extreme Asian cinema. Next thing she knows she's receiving photos and video footage of what appears to be a deliberate murder for art, and the only person who might conceivably know enough and care enough to want to fake a snuff film to impress her doesn't seem to be responsible.
The final scenes are violent and relentless, but they seemed ineffective to me, certainly when compared to the initial ride that Jiney took herself through. I felt that Oxide Pang handled that buildup superbly, full of psychological depth and symbolism. So much had to do with the detachment of being behind a camera, so much had to do with keeping that detachment intact. Yet the real wake up call felt like a tacked on Hollywood serial killer story. We can understand the motivations but really don't care and the accoutrements seem artificial. The very end is disappointing too. Watch this for the visuals and the psychology of the first hour, but not if you're a vegetarian...
Sunday, 10 August 2008
Roma (1972)
Fellini is never the easiest filmmaker to fathom, but this is apparently a looser, less traditional film, even for him. In fact it has no plot to speak of, so it's difficult to compare it to anything. He doesn't give us a story beyond the story of the city itself, but even that only in impressions. Fellini shows us in broad strokes what the city was when he first experienced it in the early forties, and what it is now, now being the early seventies. In doing so, he also shows us what it has been, throughout its long history, again in both reality and impression, how it has changed and how it is likely to change further. As such this is far more of a painting than a film.
Fellini can be found on screen in this film as himself in the 1972 documentary sections of the film, though he's mostly portrayed as an 18 year old by Peter Gonzales Falcon, new to Rome from rural Italy in the early years of the Second World War. The film divides out into rough sections but there are themes that run throughout. Much of the fun here is identifying what Fellini is making comparisons between. He's obviously comparing the way he arrived in Rome by train to the way people arrive in modern days via motorway and he's obviously highlighting the importance of food to Romans throughout, but what else?
The film is broken down into sequences, with a deliberate shakeup of timelines. One sequence looks at how the Varieties worked during early wartime, complete with hecklers, tap dancing electricians, fights and interruptions for war bulletins. One heckler throws a dead cat onto the stage. A mother gets her young son to empty his bladder in the aisles. It all ends abruptly with an air forcing everyone into a shelter, where the young Federico ends up with a German singer. However this is less about the Varieties per se and more about what a typical night out in Rome was thirty years earlier. The comparison is to the demonstrations and police brutality we see in the seventies, where the youth hang around the fountains and the steps and get into trouble even when they're not getting into trouble.
Back in the forties there's sexual exploration via prostitution, but instead of actual sexual encounters, Fellini shows us the crowds waiting for the hookers to be free and take their clients on up the stairs to bed. We see the low class cheaper end of things where this is something of a cattle market and we see the higher class end where everything is more polite and every now and then there are interruptions while an unknown VIP takes the lot. It's very voyeuristic so the comparison here is presumably to the surreal and grotesque fashion show that Fellini provides using the bizarre theme of ecclesiastical garb. Quite what it means I'm not sure but it's certainly striking.
Fellini was always a master of surreal visuals and this fashion show is only the most obvious. More subtly, there are recurring visuals throughout. I especially noticed children doing bizarre things with their tongues and very large people. They are everywhere here, from the large to the truly Rubenesque and on up to those who wouldn't seem out of place in a circus sideshow. One looks suspiciously like Tor Johnson. There's so much else here that I have a feeling that each viewing would highlight different visuals, but this time through I especially appreciated the rush to gain newly freed up seats at the cinema, the men playing cards in the back of a removals truck and young Federico's first house in Rome where there are new people everywhere he looks.
I also loved the use of colour, again something Fellini has proved time and time again that he is highly inventive with. One long scene uses the red lights of emergency vehicles to highlight a wide variety of car passengers stuck in a motorway traffic jam in the dark and in the rain. Another has an antiques dealer working on a large piece of furniture outside his store, in an alley lit up orange by a kid playing with a bonfire. Possibly the best has the blue light of a welding torch light up a recently deserted city street at night, with magical shadows.
There's great use of shadows in a tunnel in the early morning sunlight too, and in the long scenes underground looking with a documentary eye at the work being done to dig subway tunnels. These link the present with the far past in a fascinating and unconventional way. Not everything is so successfuly though, as some of the documentary style footage leaves much to be desired, or so I feel after just a single viewing. It's always dangerous to comment on Fellini after only one viewing. After one viewing I didn't appreciate the full majesty of La Strada, let alone something as unconventional as this. Gore Vidal appears as himself in street footage that may or may not have him sitting next to a young Cassandra Petersen (long before her Elvira days), but I have no conception what these scenes mean or how they contribute to the picture. For now this is the least of the eight Fellinis I've seen, but however much it's overshadowed by his other work, it still has much to offer.
Fellini can be found on screen in this film as himself in the 1972 documentary sections of the film, though he's mostly portrayed as an 18 year old by Peter Gonzales Falcon, new to Rome from rural Italy in the early years of the Second World War. The film divides out into rough sections but there are themes that run throughout. Much of the fun here is identifying what Fellini is making comparisons between. He's obviously comparing the way he arrived in Rome by train to the way people arrive in modern days via motorway and he's obviously highlighting the importance of food to Romans throughout, but what else?
The film is broken down into sequences, with a deliberate shakeup of timelines. One sequence looks at how the Varieties worked during early wartime, complete with hecklers, tap dancing electricians, fights and interruptions for war bulletins. One heckler throws a dead cat onto the stage. A mother gets her young son to empty his bladder in the aisles. It all ends abruptly with an air forcing everyone into a shelter, where the young Federico ends up with a German singer. However this is less about the Varieties per se and more about what a typical night out in Rome was thirty years earlier. The comparison is to the demonstrations and police brutality we see in the seventies, where the youth hang around the fountains and the steps and get into trouble even when they're not getting into trouble.
Back in the forties there's sexual exploration via prostitution, but instead of actual sexual encounters, Fellini shows us the crowds waiting for the hookers to be free and take their clients on up the stairs to bed. We see the low class cheaper end of things where this is something of a cattle market and we see the higher class end where everything is more polite and every now and then there are interruptions while an unknown VIP takes the lot. It's very voyeuristic so the comparison here is presumably to the surreal and grotesque fashion show that Fellini provides using the bizarre theme of ecclesiastical garb. Quite what it means I'm not sure but it's certainly striking.
Fellini was always a master of surreal visuals and this fashion show is only the most obvious. More subtly, there are recurring visuals throughout. I especially noticed children doing bizarre things with their tongues and very large people. They are everywhere here, from the large to the truly Rubenesque and on up to those who wouldn't seem out of place in a circus sideshow. One looks suspiciously like Tor Johnson. There's so much else here that I have a feeling that each viewing would highlight different visuals, but this time through I especially appreciated the rush to gain newly freed up seats at the cinema, the men playing cards in the back of a removals truck and young Federico's first house in Rome where there are new people everywhere he looks.
I also loved the use of colour, again something Fellini has proved time and time again that he is highly inventive with. One long scene uses the red lights of emergency vehicles to highlight a wide variety of car passengers stuck in a motorway traffic jam in the dark and in the rain. Another has an antiques dealer working on a large piece of furniture outside his store, in an alley lit up orange by a kid playing with a bonfire. Possibly the best has the blue light of a welding torch light up a recently deserted city street at night, with magical shadows.
There's great use of shadows in a tunnel in the early morning sunlight too, and in the long scenes underground looking with a documentary eye at the work being done to dig subway tunnels. These link the present with the far past in a fascinating and unconventional way. Not everything is so successfuly though, as some of the documentary style footage leaves much to be desired, or so I feel after just a single viewing. It's always dangerous to comment on Fellini after only one viewing. After one viewing I didn't appreciate the full majesty of La Strada, let alone something as unconventional as this. Gore Vidal appears as himself in street footage that may or may not have him sitting next to a young Cassandra Petersen (long before her Elvira days), but I have no conception what these scenes mean or how they contribute to the picture. For now this is the least of the eight Fellinis I've seen, but however much it's overshadowed by his other work, it still has much to offer.
The Flower of My Secret (1995)
The first time I saw a Pedro Almodovar film it was one of his earlier comedies, a highly unusual one but a comedy nonetheless. I saw a couple more of these, quickly became a fan, and then discovered a far more serious side of Almodovar in films like Talk to Her and All About My Mother. So when this film opens with a couple of doctors trying to persuade a mother that her son Juan is dead, I'm not surprised. He's only 16 years old and he's on an artificial respirator so he appears to be breathing even though his brain no longer functions. The doctors are trying to find a way to ask her to donate his organs to save other patients.
However Almodovar is never obvious, so it's not too surprising to find that none of this is real. The 'mother' is a nurse and she's acting out the role to doctors training to be part of an organ donation plan. Our main story intersects with this one but how is not obvious for quite some time. The real focus is on Leo Macías, a professional writer of romance novels who has been hidden under the pseudonym of Amanda Gris for a couple of decades. However while she's highly successful she's certainly got problems.
She has problems with her husband, who is an army officer who is away in Brussels for very long periods at a time tied up with the war in Bosnia. He was in the ministry of defense but volunteered for the peacekeeping force which she sees as a deliberate effort to keep away from her. She has problems with her family too, as her mother and sister can't talk to each other without everything becoming a drama. This would seem to be at least one of the key reasons why she has problems with her work. She's contracted to five romance novels a year for three years, but now she's having trouble writing them because everything she writes pink turns out black. She's writing grim reality and her romance publisher is more than a little upset.
In accordance with what she's writing, she gets hired into the literature department of El Pais, a major newspaper. This puts her into the bizarre position of writing a scathing attack on her pseudonym, under another pseudonym, while her employer writes the flipside complimentary piece, not knowing who she really is. Yes, this is Almodovar alright, whether it's light hearted comedy or deep and meaningful social commentary, and this turns out to be both, a dangerous tightrope that he seems to be able to walk without any worries. Most modern directors would fall off before they ever got up the ladder.
This one was engrossing but not quite as powerfully memorable as either Talk to Her or All About My Mother; it was also amusing but not as funny as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or What Have I Done to Deserve This? It would seem to be a logical midpoint though between old school Almodovar and new school Almodovar, say between Kika and All About My Mother. The change in Almodovar's own writing doesn't quite mirror the change in that of Leo Macías. The only other film that fits in this slot would be Live Flesh, but I haven't seen that one yet.
Even if it's not Almodovar's greatest, it's still a fascinating film and there's much that impresses. As always almost all the key characters are women with depth and the cast are well up to the challenge, especially Marisa Paredes in the lead as Leo Macías aka Amanda Gris. She's an Almodovar regular, as are so many of his actresses, dating back to Dark Habits in 1983. He doesn't provide easy roles but he has a knack of either picking actresses who can fulfil them properly or of wringing great performances out of them. There's only one male role of substance here too, for Juan Echanove as Ángel but that's one out of probably seven or eight substantial roles in this film. Almodovar himself has said of Hollywood that 'the studios have forgotten that women are fascinating'. He certainly hasn't.
The story is engrossing, but the other thing that leaps out here to the senses is the way in which everything is designed. There's a serious care given to the way rooms and houses are decorated, not just the colours but the placing and the space. I'm not going to suddenly redesign my own house to match but I was impressed with the effort given and the depth and fulfilment of that effort. This is yet another great Almodovar. One day I may get to see one of his films that isn't, but it hasn't happened yet.
However Almodovar is never obvious, so it's not too surprising to find that none of this is real. The 'mother' is a nurse and she's acting out the role to doctors training to be part of an organ donation plan. Our main story intersects with this one but how is not obvious for quite some time. The real focus is on Leo Macías, a professional writer of romance novels who has been hidden under the pseudonym of Amanda Gris for a couple of decades. However while she's highly successful she's certainly got problems.
She has problems with her husband, who is an army officer who is away in Brussels for very long periods at a time tied up with the war in Bosnia. He was in the ministry of defense but volunteered for the peacekeeping force which she sees as a deliberate effort to keep away from her. She has problems with her family too, as her mother and sister can't talk to each other without everything becoming a drama. This would seem to be at least one of the key reasons why she has problems with her work. She's contracted to five romance novels a year for three years, but now she's having trouble writing them because everything she writes pink turns out black. She's writing grim reality and her romance publisher is more than a little upset.
In accordance with what she's writing, she gets hired into the literature department of El Pais, a major newspaper. This puts her into the bizarre position of writing a scathing attack on her pseudonym, under another pseudonym, while her employer writes the flipside complimentary piece, not knowing who she really is. Yes, this is Almodovar alright, whether it's light hearted comedy or deep and meaningful social commentary, and this turns out to be both, a dangerous tightrope that he seems to be able to walk without any worries. Most modern directors would fall off before they ever got up the ladder.
This one was engrossing but not quite as powerfully memorable as either Talk to Her or All About My Mother; it was also amusing but not as funny as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or What Have I Done to Deserve This? It would seem to be a logical midpoint though between old school Almodovar and new school Almodovar, say between Kika and All About My Mother. The change in Almodovar's own writing doesn't quite mirror the change in that of Leo Macías. The only other film that fits in this slot would be Live Flesh, but I haven't seen that one yet.
Even if it's not Almodovar's greatest, it's still a fascinating film and there's much that impresses. As always almost all the key characters are women with depth and the cast are well up to the challenge, especially Marisa Paredes in the lead as Leo Macías aka Amanda Gris. She's an Almodovar regular, as are so many of his actresses, dating back to Dark Habits in 1983. He doesn't provide easy roles but he has a knack of either picking actresses who can fulfil them properly or of wringing great performances out of them. There's only one male role of substance here too, for Juan Echanove as Ángel but that's one out of probably seven or eight substantial roles in this film. Almodovar himself has said of Hollywood that 'the studios have forgotten that women are fascinating'. He certainly hasn't.
The story is engrossing, but the other thing that leaps out here to the senses is the way in which everything is designed. There's a serious care given to the way rooms and houses are decorated, not just the colours but the placing and the space. I'm not going to suddenly redesign my own house to match but I was impressed with the effort given and the depth and fulfilment of that effort. This is yet another great Almodovar. One day I may get to see one of his films that isn't, but it hasn't happened yet.
A Man Called Horse (1970)
John Morgan is an English nobleman who has spent the last five years looking for something to do. He's resigned from his honorary position in the Guards and travelled halfway around the world on a hunting expedition in the west of the United States. Given that this is the 1820s, this west is still wild and sure enough, Morgan's party is attacked by a Sioux raiding party and killed. Morgan is the only one that they don't kill because they see his strength and so drag him naked back to their camp and give him to an old Sioux woman as a beast of burden, hence the title of the film.
This was 1970 and American westerns were generally all about Americans kicking the ass of either the heathen Indians or the heathen Mexicans, even when they were made in Italy. Only the East Germans, who had a very deliberate political axe to wield, told anything different. While there was a growth of insight into history over the many decades of American westerns, there really hadn't been anything that attempted to do what this film did. It's a pretty groundbreaking film in a lot of ways.
After the initial scenes in which Morgan's American hunting party is killed, everyone here is an Indian, beyond John Morgan himself and another captive, the tolerated Batise who is of French origin. Everything we see is Sioux: their camp, their people, their customs, shot with the assistance of the Rosebud Sioux of South Dakota. We see their side of the story and it isn't shown from the perspective of some sort of early political correctness concept. These Sioux are savage and cruel, though what they do they do for very good reasons. They're just not the reasons that the rest of us follow for doing anything. The obvious comparison is Kevin Costner's Oscar-laden Dances with Wolves, which is a longer, more politically correct, version of the same thing, something not lost on Richard Harris who fully realised that Costner stole whole scenes from this movie.
As you can expect, given that he's played by hard boiled, hard living Richard Harris, John Morgan is no wimp. He tries escape a few times to no avail so bides his time and learns what he can. When opportunity presents itself he kills a couple of Shoshone warriors, bringing back their scalps and their horses to trade with his original captor, Yellow Hand, for his sister as a wife. The key is that this is all done to get that little bit closer to escape and return to England, yet the longer he lives among the Sioux the more he finds what he had been looking for all along.
It's all done very nicely indeed, but it's not without flaws. The biggest one for me was the casting of Corinna Tsopei as Running Deer, Yellow Hand's sister. She's fine as an actress but she doesn't look Indian enough. Her real name is Kiriaki Tsopei, she's Greek by birth and was presumably cast because she was a relatively recent Miss Universe. Much more appropriate is the casting of Manu Tupou as Yellow Hand, but unfortunately he reminds so much of James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian.
The most surprising casting has to be Dame Judith Anderson, highly talented and regarded Australian actress as Buffalo Cow Head, the old Sioux woman who initially owns the man called Horse. While she can't quite mask the facial characteristics of her race, she does a far better job than most have done in situations like this and she speaks Sioux throughout. She had a habit of picking quirky roles and would follow this up a couple of films later with a spot as Spock's mother in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. She won awards for this role and it isn't surprising. She gets a few great scenes here with some surprising sutbtlety and she shines more than her role was designed to let her. The shot where she realises she's lost her pack animal is a peach.
There is subtlety here, though you wouldn't see it if you're only looking at the powerful savagery. The centrepiece of the film, the transition of John Morgan into Sioux, comes through a ceremony called the Vow to the Sun, and it's not a pretty picture. It involves a lot of protracted pain and it's not surprising that the US government banned it in the late 1800s. It makes for a highly memorable few scenes for Harris, to go along with the early scenes in which he was mostly naked. You can't say the man didn't put himself into his roles.
This was 1970 and American westerns were generally all about Americans kicking the ass of either the heathen Indians or the heathen Mexicans, even when they were made in Italy. Only the East Germans, who had a very deliberate political axe to wield, told anything different. While there was a growth of insight into history over the many decades of American westerns, there really hadn't been anything that attempted to do what this film did. It's a pretty groundbreaking film in a lot of ways.
After the initial scenes in which Morgan's American hunting party is killed, everyone here is an Indian, beyond John Morgan himself and another captive, the tolerated Batise who is of French origin. Everything we see is Sioux: their camp, their people, their customs, shot with the assistance of the Rosebud Sioux of South Dakota. We see their side of the story and it isn't shown from the perspective of some sort of early political correctness concept. These Sioux are savage and cruel, though what they do they do for very good reasons. They're just not the reasons that the rest of us follow for doing anything. The obvious comparison is Kevin Costner's Oscar-laden Dances with Wolves, which is a longer, more politically correct, version of the same thing, something not lost on Richard Harris who fully realised that Costner stole whole scenes from this movie.
As you can expect, given that he's played by hard boiled, hard living Richard Harris, John Morgan is no wimp. He tries escape a few times to no avail so bides his time and learns what he can. When opportunity presents itself he kills a couple of Shoshone warriors, bringing back their scalps and their horses to trade with his original captor, Yellow Hand, for his sister as a wife. The key is that this is all done to get that little bit closer to escape and return to England, yet the longer he lives among the Sioux the more he finds what he had been looking for all along.
It's all done very nicely indeed, but it's not without flaws. The biggest one for me was the casting of Corinna Tsopei as Running Deer, Yellow Hand's sister. She's fine as an actress but she doesn't look Indian enough. Her real name is Kiriaki Tsopei, she's Greek by birth and was presumably cast because she was a relatively recent Miss Universe. Much more appropriate is the casting of Manu Tupou as Yellow Hand, but unfortunately he reminds so much of James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian.
The most surprising casting has to be Dame Judith Anderson, highly talented and regarded Australian actress as Buffalo Cow Head, the old Sioux woman who initially owns the man called Horse. While she can't quite mask the facial characteristics of her race, she does a far better job than most have done in situations like this and she speaks Sioux throughout. She had a habit of picking quirky roles and would follow this up a couple of films later with a spot as Spock's mother in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. She won awards for this role and it isn't surprising. She gets a few great scenes here with some surprising sutbtlety and she shines more than her role was designed to let her. The shot where she realises she's lost her pack animal is a peach.
There is subtlety here, though you wouldn't see it if you're only looking at the powerful savagery. The centrepiece of the film, the transition of John Morgan into Sioux, comes through a ceremony called the Vow to the Sun, and it's not a pretty picture. It involves a lot of protracted pain and it's not surprising that the US government banned it in the late 1800s. It makes for a highly memorable few scenes for Harris, to go along with the early scenes in which he was mostly naked. You can't say the man didn't put himself into his roles.
Saturday, 9 August 2008
The AbsentMinded Professor (1961)
The AbsentMinded Professor (no space, no hyphen) is Prof Ned Brainerd, professor of Physical Chemistry at the Medfield College of Technology, played by Fred MacMurray. He's a talented man with a passion for his work but he's even more absent minded than you'd guess from the title. As the film begins he's about to get married, but given that he's already failed to turn up for his own wedding twice odds are not good that he'll make it for number three. Sure enough he stays home to work on an experiment which blows up the house and leaves him unconscious.
In the morning Brainerd discovers that he's accidentally created a substance that breaks all the laws of physics. It doesn't just defy gravity, it provides perpetual momentum. He dubs it flubber for flying rubber because a lump of it bounces and bounces and... Naturally, given that this is an all-American film from Disney it won't come as too much of a surprise to find that the first two uses Brainerd puts his new wonderstuff to are to make his Model T Ford fly and to enable the Medford College basketball team to beat their rivals from Rutland. None of this makes the remotest sense and I can find logic flaws in every scene, but then I can hardly apply the laws of physics to a film about a gravity defying perpetual motion machine, huh?
What's most amazing about the entire film is that Brainerd's discovery, were it real, would revolutionise whole industries and shake the entire world up. Every technological discussion I read on Slashdot asks where our flying cars are. Hey, it's the 21st century. Yet Brainerd, who creates a flying car quicker than Tony Stark creates his suit (there are a lot of references to this film in Iron Man), can't seem to demonstrate anything to anyone. His girl won't listen to him, and only the bad guy (Alonzo Hawk, played with relish by Keenan Wynn) believes him because he saw the car fly over Medfield.
So he rings the government prompting the funniest and most subtle scenes in the entire movie. You see, the army, the navy and the air force have made up and they're all happily talking to each other without prejudice. The military is now completely united and all is right with the world, but the moment Brainerd's call comes in all three of them loudly mock his claims while quietly organising flights out to Medfield. Of course we have some subplots to tidy up before we work out what's going to become of Flubber.
This one is more fun than The Shaggy Dog and more consistent, if just as insane. It's a coin toss as to whether Fred MacMurray or Keenan Wynn had more fun with their parts. Nancy Olson also has fun as Betsy, Brainerd's long suffering fiancee. Tommy Kirk is back, though in a much smaller role, and there's even a part for Ed Wynn, Keenan Wynn's famous American clown of a father. I'm happy I finally caught up with this one, but then I can't say was missing that much.
In the morning Brainerd discovers that he's accidentally created a substance that breaks all the laws of physics. It doesn't just defy gravity, it provides perpetual momentum. He dubs it flubber for flying rubber because a lump of it bounces and bounces and... Naturally, given that this is an all-American film from Disney it won't come as too much of a surprise to find that the first two uses Brainerd puts his new wonderstuff to are to make his Model T Ford fly and to enable the Medford College basketball team to beat their rivals from Rutland. None of this makes the remotest sense and I can find logic flaws in every scene, but then I can hardly apply the laws of physics to a film about a gravity defying perpetual motion machine, huh?
What's most amazing about the entire film is that Brainerd's discovery, were it real, would revolutionise whole industries and shake the entire world up. Every technological discussion I read on Slashdot asks where our flying cars are. Hey, it's the 21st century. Yet Brainerd, who creates a flying car quicker than Tony Stark creates his suit (there are a lot of references to this film in Iron Man), can't seem to demonstrate anything to anyone. His girl won't listen to him, and only the bad guy (Alonzo Hawk, played with relish by Keenan Wynn) believes him because he saw the car fly over Medfield.
So he rings the government prompting the funniest and most subtle scenes in the entire movie. You see, the army, the navy and the air force have made up and they're all happily talking to each other without prejudice. The military is now completely united and all is right with the world, but the moment Brainerd's call comes in all three of them loudly mock his claims while quietly organising flights out to Medfield. Of course we have some subplots to tidy up before we work out what's going to become of Flubber.
This one is more fun than The Shaggy Dog and more consistent, if just as insane. It's a coin toss as to whether Fred MacMurray or Keenan Wynn had more fun with their parts. Nancy Olson also has fun as Betsy, Brainerd's long suffering fiancee. Tommy Kirk is back, though in a much smaller role, and there's even a part for Ed Wynn, Keenan Wynn's famous American clown of a father. I'm happy I finally caught up with this one, but then I can't say was missing that much.
The Shaggy Dog (1959)
I have a lot of catching up to do with the sort of American comedy film that transcended the boundaries of cinema and became part of the national cultural heritage. Given that it's Fred MacMurray day on Turner Classic Movies, I have plenty of opportunity but my DVR only gave me room for a couple, beginning with this 1959 Disney film suggested by a novel called The Hound of Florence written by the author of Bambi, Felix Salten. It's certainly fun but it's almost the definition of fluff.
MacMurray is Wilson Daniels, a mailman who hates dogs, but while he's the star he's hardly the lead. That role goes alternately to Tommy Kirk and an uncredited sheepdog, who both play the shaggy dog of the title. Kirk is Wilby Daniels, another in a long string of all-American boys that he played for Disney until they found out he was gay and destroyed his career. Wilby is a well scrubbed and well meaning specimen of the American youth of the fifties, but a clumsy one who's always getting into trouble. He's about as stereotypical as his parents: Wilson is a hard worker who looks after his family but is absolutely in charge, and Freeda is sweet, caring and a complete moron when it comes to anything except housework.
She's far from the only moron in the film, as if we pay attention to Disney it would appear that fifties America was full of them. Buzz Miller is one of them. He's the local skirtchaser and he dumps Annette Funicello (who always played a moron) on the fly when a beautiful girl moves into the house on the other side of the street. She's Franceska Andrassy, who speaks worse French than I do, and to try to impress her, Wilby and Buzz take her to a local museum. There Wilby accidentally acquires a cursed ring owned by the Borgias and reading its inscription accidentally transfers his self into Franceska's dog, Chiffon. Chaos ensues.
While this chaos is admittedly fun in a guilty pleasure sort of way, everything about this film is highly predictable, from Buzz Miller's shenanigans trying to take both girls to the country club dance to the whole spy subplot to the interaction between Wilby and his brother, played by Kevin Corcoran as he was in no less than five Disney films. Little brother Moochie is a moron too, as is Prof Plumcutt, who explains to Wilby everything about the shapeshifting but can't understand why he wouldn't want to be a dog. The peach of all the morons is Wilson Daniels himself who honestly tries to explain to a psychiatrist that his son is a dog. And don't even get me started on the cops.
I lost count of the continuity errors. I haven't looked up the gaffs at IMDb but they must span onto multiple pages. There's literally no attempt to make any of it make sense. They're annoying even for a fluffy comedy, which is the genre least likely for me to care about continuity errors. The film was remade in 2006 with Tim Allen, which would seem to fit as I don't believe he's ever played a character that wasn't a moron. Wholesome family entertainment in the Disney style would seem to be his forte. Unless of course he strays from the wholesome in his private life and then they'll kill his career too. Isn't Hollywood lovely?
MacMurray is Wilson Daniels, a mailman who hates dogs, but while he's the star he's hardly the lead. That role goes alternately to Tommy Kirk and an uncredited sheepdog, who both play the shaggy dog of the title. Kirk is Wilby Daniels, another in a long string of all-American boys that he played for Disney until they found out he was gay and destroyed his career. Wilby is a well scrubbed and well meaning specimen of the American youth of the fifties, but a clumsy one who's always getting into trouble. He's about as stereotypical as his parents: Wilson is a hard worker who looks after his family but is absolutely in charge, and Freeda is sweet, caring and a complete moron when it comes to anything except housework.
She's far from the only moron in the film, as if we pay attention to Disney it would appear that fifties America was full of them. Buzz Miller is one of them. He's the local skirtchaser and he dumps Annette Funicello (who always played a moron) on the fly when a beautiful girl moves into the house on the other side of the street. She's Franceska Andrassy, who speaks worse French than I do, and to try to impress her, Wilby and Buzz take her to a local museum. There Wilby accidentally acquires a cursed ring owned by the Borgias and reading its inscription accidentally transfers his self into Franceska's dog, Chiffon. Chaos ensues.
While this chaos is admittedly fun in a guilty pleasure sort of way, everything about this film is highly predictable, from Buzz Miller's shenanigans trying to take both girls to the country club dance to the whole spy subplot to the interaction between Wilby and his brother, played by Kevin Corcoran as he was in no less than five Disney films. Little brother Moochie is a moron too, as is Prof Plumcutt, who explains to Wilby everything about the shapeshifting but can't understand why he wouldn't want to be a dog. The peach of all the morons is Wilson Daniels himself who honestly tries to explain to a psychiatrist that his son is a dog. And don't even get me started on the cops.
I lost count of the continuity errors. I haven't looked up the gaffs at IMDb but they must span onto multiple pages. There's literally no attempt to make any of it make sense. They're annoying even for a fluffy comedy, which is the genre least likely for me to care about continuity errors. The film was remade in 2006 with Tim Allen, which would seem to fit as I don't believe he's ever played a character that wasn't a moron. Wholesome family entertainment in the Disney style would seem to be his forte. Unless of course he strays from the wholesome in his private life and then they'll kill his career too. Isn't Hollywood lovely?
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)
One of the earliest of the kitchen sink dramas, this one has vitriol dripping off the screen from moment one. It's a 1960 adaptation by Alan Sillitoe of his 1958 novel, that helped shake up the climate of British entertainment. Set in a distinctly working class environment and featuring prominent themes like adultery, abortion and punitive violence in a matter of fact tone. While each of these are handled less vividly than would be done today there's still plenty of impact and this became the beginning of a serious change of focus for British cinema. It's about as far from Noel Coward's drawing room farces and Carry On comedies as you could imagine.
Our focus is Arthur Seaton, a young machinist making parts for Raleigh bikes in a Nottingham factory. As powerfully brought to life by a young Albert Finney, he's arrogant, confident and loud. He works hard, though he loathes his job, and he's paid well, but he spends it as soon as he earns it because he lives hard too. We first meet him at the end of working hours on a Friday as he gets ready to hit the pub and we see what life to Arthur means. He outdrinks a depressed sailor (played by Colin Blakely in his film debut) only to spill a pint all over a nearby couple and fall down a staircase drunk as a skunk.
He also spends the night in bed with Brenda, the wife of a co-worker, with whom he's been having a long running affair. Soon he picks up a new flame too, a young lady much closer to his age by the name of Doreen and he has to start finding ways to juggle his life so that each of them carries on oblivious of the other. Inevitably though, things fall apart. Doreen ends up pregnant, but doesn't want to keep the baby, so ends up on a quest for whatever will undo the mess they've got into, whether it be an actual doctor or just some old wives' remedy. Just as inevitably Brenda's husband finds out and when he does, he has the benefit of a couple of squaddies to make the difference.
Arthur is an interesting character, vivid and powerful both through how he's written and how he's played. Albert Finney does a great job and I can see quite a few people I know in his performance. I'm sure Alan Sillitoe put a lot of people he knew into the character too. Arthur is loud because it makes him feel important and noticed, but it also adds to his rebellious attitude. He knows he doesn't know everything but he doesn't want anyone to teach him. He defies authority, not only when it gains him anything, but as a matter of course: this is most apparent in the windowbreaking scene that really has nothing to do with Arthur but firmly underlines who he is. Most of the film reflects a wish for actions without consequences.
Arthur also has the classic adolescent struggle: he wants to be grownup but he doesn't want to be his parents. One line defines that: 'There's a lot more in life than my mum and dad have got.' Arthur has no clue what that is but he wants it. To me while the film and the story as a whole is powerful and defining, the real power and definition is in these lines. They're everywhere and often appear to be throwaway lines but they're worth paying attention for.
'When's the next strike then, Tom?' Arthur asks a man in a pub who doesn't appear anywhere in the film. Tom hasn't worked that out yet. 'Weren't a bad picture,' says Doreen after Arthur takes her to a Hollywood film. 'Knew it would end like that though.' There are quite a few comments about the good old days. One telling line was even borrowed by the Arctic Monkeys for an album title: 'Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not.' This really plays like an English take on one of Brando's (and Hollywood's) most famous lines of all time: 'What are you rebelling against?' 'Whaddya got?'
There are plenty names here to pay attention to beyond Finney and Sillitoe, and even beyond Shirley Anne Field and Rachel Roberts who play Arthur's two girlfriends. Arthur's Aunt Ada is Hylda Baker from Nearest and Dearest. His slightly less wild best mate is Norman Rossington, the Beatles' road manager in A Hard Day's Night. The producer of the film is Tony Richardson, one of the most critical names at this point in British cinema. He had already directed Look Back in Anger and would soon direct A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The cinematography is by Hammer horror regular Freddie Francis, who has a lot more major films to his credit than you'd think. The music is by Johnny Dankworth and there's a certain Dudley Moore playing piano on the soundtrack.
Our focus is Arthur Seaton, a young machinist making parts for Raleigh bikes in a Nottingham factory. As powerfully brought to life by a young Albert Finney, he's arrogant, confident and loud. He works hard, though he loathes his job, and he's paid well, but he spends it as soon as he earns it because he lives hard too. We first meet him at the end of working hours on a Friday as he gets ready to hit the pub and we see what life to Arthur means. He outdrinks a depressed sailor (played by Colin Blakely in his film debut) only to spill a pint all over a nearby couple and fall down a staircase drunk as a skunk.
He also spends the night in bed with Brenda, the wife of a co-worker, with whom he's been having a long running affair. Soon he picks up a new flame too, a young lady much closer to his age by the name of Doreen and he has to start finding ways to juggle his life so that each of them carries on oblivious of the other. Inevitably though, things fall apart. Doreen ends up pregnant, but doesn't want to keep the baby, so ends up on a quest for whatever will undo the mess they've got into, whether it be an actual doctor or just some old wives' remedy. Just as inevitably Brenda's husband finds out and when he does, he has the benefit of a couple of squaddies to make the difference.
Arthur is an interesting character, vivid and powerful both through how he's written and how he's played. Albert Finney does a great job and I can see quite a few people I know in his performance. I'm sure Alan Sillitoe put a lot of people he knew into the character too. Arthur is loud because it makes him feel important and noticed, but it also adds to his rebellious attitude. He knows he doesn't know everything but he doesn't want anyone to teach him. He defies authority, not only when it gains him anything, but as a matter of course: this is most apparent in the windowbreaking scene that really has nothing to do with Arthur but firmly underlines who he is. Most of the film reflects a wish for actions without consequences.
Arthur also has the classic adolescent struggle: he wants to be grownup but he doesn't want to be his parents. One line defines that: 'There's a lot more in life than my mum and dad have got.' Arthur has no clue what that is but he wants it. To me while the film and the story as a whole is powerful and defining, the real power and definition is in these lines. They're everywhere and often appear to be throwaway lines but they're worth paying attention for.
'When's the next strike then, Tom?' Arthur asks a man in a pub who doesn't appear anywhere in the film. Tom hasn't worked that out yet. 'Weren't a bad picture,' says Doreen after Arthur takes her to a Hollywood film. 'Knew it would end like that though.' There are quite a few comments about the good old days. One telling line was even borrowed by the Arctic Monkeys for an album title: 'Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not.' This really plays like an English take on one of Brando's (and Hollywood's) most famous lines of all time: 'What are you rebelling against?' 'Whaddya got?'
There are plenty names here to pay attention to beyond Finney and Sillitoe, and even beyond Shirley Anne Field and Rachel Roberts who play Arthur's two girlfriends. Arthur's Aunt Ada is Hylda Baker from Nearest and Dearest. His slightly less wild best mate is Norman Rossington, the Beatles' road manager in A Hard Day's Night. The producer of the film is Tony Richardson, one of the most critical names at this point in British cinema. He had already directed Look Back in Anger and would soon direct A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The cinematography is by Hammer horror regular Freddie Francis, who has a lot more major films to his credit than you'd think. The music is by Johnny Dankworth and there's a certain Dudley Moore playing piano on the soundtrack.
Emma (1932)
Surprisingly this isn't an Emma based on the Jane Austen novel, unlike what seems like all the other films out there called Emma. This one is from a story by Frances Marion, one of the greatest screenwriters of the classic era, whether you choose to throw the additional and completely necessary word 'female' in there or not. It's a vehicle for Marie Dressler, one of the more unlikely yet most talented stars of the early sound era, for whom Marion had written Min and Bill a year earlier, the film that brought her a well deserved Oscar. She was nominated here too, which was again very much deserved. This is an underrated gem.
Needless to say, Dressler is Emma, and she works in the household of inventor Fred Smith, played by Jean Hersholt. Smith has plenty of kids and as the film begins he gains another one but loses a wife at the same time. Emma is the nurse who brings Ronnie into the world and many years later, when Smith's inventions have made him rich Emma has 32 years behind her as the unofficial matriarch of the family. She's really the housekeeper and the nanny and whatever other titles a highly trusted servant carries. However she's also effectively run the family as well as the household and when she finally takes a holiday, the first in those 32 years, Smith finally proposes and so Niagara Falls changes from a holiday into a honeymoon.
Ronnie is delighted. 'They should have done it years ago!' he says, but the other kids disagree. While he has his head firmly attached to his shoulders the others have gotten spoiled and greedy with the family's wealth. Izzy Smith, now Countess Isabel Smith Marlin, can only think of the headlines. 'Think of the position!' she spits. So when Smith dies, probably after overtaxing his weak heart while rowing in Niagara Falls, he leaves the estate to her and the ungrateful kids take Emma to court for murder. Only Ronnie would be on her side but he's in Alaska hunting bear and she's in a New York courtroom.
Like most people, I imagine, I've been a Marie Dressler fan ever since I first saw one of her films. She is hardly what anyone would expect as a box office draw: in 1932 she was a notably overweight 64 year old who looked like the back end of a battleship. Yet she was such a good actress, such a natural talent and someone who brought such an innate depth of decency to her characters without ever seeming to try, that she was named the top box office actress for thee straight years at the peak of the precodes. She dominates here, partly because the film is totally about her, partly because she's hardly off screen and partly because she's just so damn good at playing this sort of role.
In fact she dominates so much that sometimes it's hard to realise that there are other people in the film. Her employer turned husband is Jean Hersholt, a Dane who had been in film even longer than Dressler, and she was top billed over Charlie Chaplin in the first feature length comedy ever made, Tillie's Punctured Romance. He doesn't get to do much, like most of the kids, even though they include some major actors. Gypsy Smith is Barbara Kent, who had a short but notable film career with such highlights as Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo and Welcome Danger with Harold Lloyd. Bill Smith is George Meeker, prolific screen bad guy. Most notably of all, Izzy Smith is Myrna Loy, escaping from her exotic era to play a spoiled brat. It would be another two years before The Thin Man and the real start of a legend. In this company Kathryn Crawford as Sue Smith just faded into the background.
The kid that impressed me most was Ronnie, perhaps partly because he was the one decent one of the bunch and who went against everyone else's grain. He's played dynamically by Richard Cromwell, who reminds a little in different ways of Wil Wheaton and Franchot Tone. He's very likeable, calling Emma 'beautiful' all the time and somehow making us feel that he means it, if not in a physical way, but it would appear that this may be his best role. He started big as an actor after a brief career as an artist to the stars, but gradually faded away into B movies and obscurity. He's probably best known today for being Angela Lansbury's first husband.
Needless to say, Dressler is Emma, and she works in the household of inventor Fred Smith, played by Jean Hersholt. Smith has plenty of kids and as the film begins he gains another one but loses a wife at the same time. Emma is the nurse who brings Ronnie into the world and many years later, when Smith's inventions have made him rich Emma has 32 years behind her as the unofficial matriarch of the family. She's really the housekeeper and the nanny and whatever other titles a highly trusted servant carries. However she's also effectively run the family as well as the household and when she finally takes a holiday, the first in those 32 years, Smith finally proposes and so Niagara Falls changes from a holiday into a honeymoon.
Ronnie is delighted. 'They should have done it years ago!' he says, but the other kids disagree. While he has his head firmly attached to his shoulders the others have gotten spoiled and greedy with the family's wealth. Izzy Smith, now Countess Isabel Smith Marlin, can only think of the headlines. 'Think of the position!' she spits. So when Smith dies, probably after overtaxing his weak heart while rowing in Niagara Falls, he leaves the estate to her and the ungrateful kids take Emma to court for murder. Only Ronnie would be on her side but he's in Alaska hunting bear and she's in a New York courtroom.
Like most people, I imagine, I've been a Marie Dressler fan ever since I first saw one of her films. She is hardly what anyone would expect as a box office draw: in 1932 she was a notably overweight 64 year old who looked like the back end of a battleship. Yet she was such a good actress, such a natural talent and someone who brought such an innate depth of decency to her characters without ever seeming to try, that she was named the top box office actress for thee straight years at the peak of the precodes. She dominates here, partly because the film is totally about her, partly because she's hardly off screen and partly because she's just so damn good at playing this sort of role.
In fact she dominates so much that sometimes it's hard to realise that there are other people in the film. Her employer turned husband is Jean Hersholt, a Dane who had been in film even longer than Dressler, and she was top billed over Charlie Chaplin in the first feature length comedy ever made, Tillie's Punctured Romance. He doesn't get to do much, like most of the kids, even though they include some major actors. Gypsy Smith is Barbara Kent, who had a short but notable film career with such highlights as Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo and Welcome Danger with Harold Lloyd. Bill Smith is George Meeker, prolific screen bad guy. Most notably of all, Izzy Smith is Myrna Loy, escaping from her exotic era to play a spoiled brat. It would be another two years before The Thin Man and the real start of a legend. In this company Kathryn Crawford as Sue Smith just faded into the background.
The kid that impressed me most was Ronnie, perhaps partly because he was the one decent one of the bunch and who went against everyone else's grain. He's played dynamically by Richard Cromwell, who reminds a little in different ways of Wil Wheaton and Franchot Tone. He's very likeable, calling Emma 'beautiful' all the time and somehow making us feel that he means it, if not in a physical way, but it would appear that this may be his best role. He started big as an actor after a brief career as an artist to the stars, but gradually faded away into B movies and obscurity. He's probably best known today for being Angela Lansbury's first husband.
Friday, 8 August 2008
Aphrodisiac! The Sexual Secret of Marijuana (1971)
Director: Dennis Van Zak
Stars: Who Knows
Arriving late as always, I missed the opening credits and came in on some sort of documentary. Nobody speaks except the narrator, who tells us about how alcohol loosens inhibitions. Shock horror! Then we switch to a marijuana party where apparently weed has a similar effect. You may assume here that this is all good and maybe we should all go out and get drunk and stoned in order to get laid. I'm sure people left the theatre in 1971 at this point because anyone watching this on initial release probably needed advice on how not to scare the opposite sex.
But wait, there's a dark side! Get too out of it and you won't be able to get it up! You'll turn into some sort of Frankenstein's Monster, half comatose as a loose lady utterly fails to arouse you with any of her portfolio of loose tricks. I wonder how long it took those folks who left after the good news to find out the bad news. I can imagine some of them still trying it, hanging out in bars utterly wasted wondering why nobody wants to take them home. After all, this documentary about sex and marijuana said it would happen. One day they'll wake up and realise that they're now 60 years old and they missed the last two thirds of their life.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, there's a story going on. The film has that sort of effect, leaping around from here to there and back again, via all sorts of bizarre places, but then it was an apparently serious documentary that someone decided to spice up by adding in hardcore porn inserts. They weren't looking for consistency or enlightenment, they were looking for any crappy material they could use to pad out an hour and a half from a few salacious hardcore clips. However the best and funniest bits of the entire movie happen through bad editing that bizarrely seems to attempt to turn this from outright porn into a PG movie with educational nudity.
Needless to say, it utterly fails at that. Hey, what was that that just flipped back into view when the camera jerked around too much? Yep, bad editing, but surreal editing that provides much of the fun here. There's actually plenty to enjoy here, all from the so bad it's good school. Trust me, there's nothing here that would count as good, regardless what criteria you want to work from. What we get is plenty that counts as surreal, unreal and really really weird.
We visit a writer of fiction for women's magazines attending her first pot party, where she finds that stoners read poetry to each other before getting it on. I don't remember this sort of behaviour from That 70s Show but I think I probably only saw the same couple of episodes over and over again, just because they happened to be repeated every time I flew out to the States. What our fiction writer discovers though is the lesson of this movie, which seems to be that alcohol is bad but pot is good. We learn this gradually, being taught the history, then how to grow it, how to roll it, how to cook it, even what sort of profit margin we can expect to see if we sell it.
We're treated to a dramatisation of a husband struggling to deflower his wife on their wedding night. We see Indian men running naked through the fields, being whipped to harvest hashish. We discover that an appropriate dinner for a second wedding anniversary is spiked cookies and champagne. And always we learn things, courtesy of people like Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York during the second world war, who commissioned a Mayor's Report on drugs in 1944. If this film is anything to go by, it seems to have concluded that all diseases could be conquered if only doctors could use medicinal marijuana. Eventually we get to the point where smoking pot means you won't be gay or shoot anyone. If only California took notice...
Most surreal of all are probably the sensitivity sessions that last for days. I'm still trying to get my head round this concept, which deals with people of both sexes with inhibitions so severe that they need psychiatric help all congregating in a single room and stripping off on command because hey, the guy in charge said it was OK. Compared to this the protest session is nothing. Two protestors can't help but notice each other, probably because they're the only two protestors there, but hey, they're multiracial so this should seem important. He's her first grass, her first sex and her first black all at once, and she turns all bubbly. His lollipop is just like eating chocolate babies! Or something like that.
Now, if none of the above makes this film appeal to you, I should add that there are people here that you've heard of, in various states of undress. No, I'm not talking about Mayor LaGuardia, I'm talking about people like Suzanne Fields who played Dale Ardor in Flesh Gordon. And best of all, John Holmes, uncredited here in one of the hardcore inserts, as a boss whose secretary turns him on to grass. This brings him to the startling realisation that he's been using his weapon as, well, a weapon to bludgeon women with. Great imagery, huh?
Stars: Who Knows
Arriving late as always, I missed the opening credits and came in on some sort of documentary. Nobody speaks except the narrator, who tells us about how alcohol loosens inhibitions. Shock horror! Then we switch to a marijuana party where apparently weed has a similar effect. You may assume here that this is all good and maybe we should all go out and get drunk and stoned in order to get laid. I'm sure people left the theatre in 1971 at this point because anyone watching this on initial release probably needed advice on how not to scare the opposite sex.
But wait, there's a dark side! Get too out of it and you won't be able to get it up! You'll turn into some sort of Frankenstein's Monster, half comatose as a loose lady utterly fails to arouse you with any of her portfolio of loose tricks. I wonder how long it took those folks who left after the good news to find out the bad news. I can imagine some of them still trying it, hanging out in bars utterly wasted wondering why nobody wants to take them home. After all, this documentary about sex and marijuana said it would happen. One day they'll wake up and realise that they're now 60 years old and they missed the last two thirds of their life.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, there's a story going on. The film has that sort of effect, leaping around from here to there and back again, via all sorts of bizarre places, but then it was an apparently serious documentary that someone decided to spice up by adding in hardcore porn inserts. They weren't looking for consistency or enlightenment, they were looking for any crappy material they could use to pad out an hour and a half from a few salacious hardcore clips. However the best and funniest bits of the entire movie happen through bad editing that bizarrely seems to attempt to turn this from outright porn into a PG movie with educational nudity.
Needless to say, it utterly fails at that. Hey, what was that that just flipped back into view when the camera jerked around too much? Yep, bad editing, but surreal editing that provides much of the fun here. There's actually plenty to enjoy here, all from the so bad it's good school. Trust me, there's nothing here that would count as good, regardless what criteria you want to work from. What we get is plenty that counts as surreal, unreal and really really weird.
We visit a writer of fiction for women's magazines attending her first pot party, where she finds that stoners read poetry to each other before getting it on. I don't remember this sort of behaviour from That 70s Show but I think I probably only saw the same couple of episodes over and over again, just because they happened to be repeated every time I flew out to the States. What our fiction writer discovers though is the lesson of this movie, which seems to be that alcohol is bad but pot is good. We learn this gradually, being taught the history, then how to grow it, how to roll it, how to cook it, even what sort of profit margin we can expect to see if we sell it.
We're treated to a dramatisation of a husband struggling to deflower his wife on their wedding night. We see Indian men running naked through the fields, being whipped to harvest hashish. We discover that an appropriate dinner for a second wedding anniversary is spiked cookies and champagne. And always we learn things, courtesy of people like Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York during the second world war, who commissioned a Mayor's Report on drugs in 1944. If this film is anything to go by, it seems to have concluded that all diseases could be conquered if only doctors could use medicinal marijuana. Eventually we get to the point where smoking pot means you won't be gay or shoot anyone. If only California took notice...
Most surreal of all are probably the sensitivity sessions that last for days. I'm still trying to get my head round this concept, which deals with people of both sexes with inhibitions so severe that they need psychiatric help all congregating in a single room and stripping off on command because hey, the guy in charge said it was OK. Compared to this the protest session is nothing. Two protestors can't help but notice each other, probably because they're the only two protestors there, but hey, they're multiracial so this should seem important. He's her first grass, her first sex and her first black all at once, and she turns all bubbly. His lollipop is just like eating chocolate babies! Or something like that.
Now, if none of the above makes this film appeal to you, I should add that there are people here that you've heard of, in various states of undress. No, I'm not talking about Mayor LaGuardia, I'm talking about people like Suzanne Fields who played Dale Ardor in Flesh Gordon. And best of all, John Holmes, uncredited here in one of the hardcore inserts, as a boss whose secretary turns him on to grass. This brings him to the startling realisation that he's been using his weapon as, well, a weapon to bludgeon women with. Great imagery, huh?
Thursday, 7 August 2008
Mystery Train (1989)
I haven't seen many Jim Jarmusch movies but every one has impressed me in a different way, and his is a name I now actively seek out. Dead Man stunned me, Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai resonated with me and Coffee and Cigarettes fascinated me. Mystery Train is a compilation of three stories linked mostly by Elvis Presley and a Memphis hotel but also by timeframe and linked characters. Given that this is written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, it's not going to be your everyday story, and true to form it's a quirky joy to watch, in an amalgam of English, Japanese and Italian.
Far from Yokohama follows a young Japanese couple on a pilgrimage to Memphis. Jarmusch plays up the similarities (or lack of them) between Yokohama and Memphis but pays even more attention to the cultural differences and they're a fascinating pair. Mitsuko wears white lipstick and a leather jacket with Mister Baby painted on the back. She pays the bellboy in plums brought over from Japan and collects pictures of Elvis looking like other historical figures or statutes. Jun has slicked back hair and a green suede jacket, he looks depressed even when he's happy because that's just how his face is and he only takes pictures of hotel rooms. Everything else is in his memory, but the hotel rooms he'd forget.
They carry their suitcase around strung on a bamboo cane and argue in Japanese about who was better: Elvis or Carl Perkins. Jim Jarmusch characters are all fascinating and full of quirky insight. These ones arrive by train and from moment one nothing seems to be quite what they expect. Quite what they really think of their pilgrimage beforehand and afterwards is completely open to question because Jarmusch doesn't really tell us. He gives us hints but he lets us work it out, just like many things in this film.
A Ghost sees an Italian lady named Luisa with plenty of spare change stop off in Memphis because of a mixup with planes. She's transporting her deceased husband to Rome but an accident leaves her temporarily stranded in Memphis. She gets to walk around as much as the pair of Japanese pilgrims but with a little more of a sinister backdrop. She gets hassled by no smaller a guy than Tom Noonan, who spins her a great yarn about the ghost of Elvis entirely to fleece her out of money but then won't leave her alone.
She finds her way to the same hotel as Jun and Mitsuko, but ends up sharing a room with a stream of consciousness talker called Dee Dee who can't shut up. She talks about everything, it seems, but especially why she's leaving Memphis to get away from her boyfriend who she can't read because he never says anything. And just as she shuts up and goes to sleep, in comes the ghost of Elvis to talk to her instead.
Lost in Space introduces us to said boyfriend, Johnny aka Elvis, though he doesn't look anything like him. He's played by Joe Strummer from the Clash, who is on great form as a wild drunken Englishman getting into trouble in a foreign country, as he links our three stories together in time. Jarmusch populated this film with a bunch of music legends: not just Strummer and Hawkins but also Rufus Thomas, the voice of Tom Waits and even Rockets Redglare, who associated with legends being the bodyguard for Sid Vicious.
The Elvis played by Strummer drives around all night with a black guy called Will Robinson and his girlfriend's brother, Charlie the Barber, played by Steve Buscemi. They end up at the hotel too, to hide out after Elvis shoots someone in a liquor store. They are drunker than skunks (and probably were during shooting) making this whole section realistically down and dirty. In many ways it feels like a dream, which is aided by the dialogue and the cinematography.
One line or one shot in a Jarmusch movie can say more than many films manage in their entire length, and in Jarmusch movies the characters aren't just people: Memphis itself is a character here, a faded, run down, highly subdued Memphis with very few people around and lots of space. Jun compares it to Yokohama with 60% of the buildings removed and there's certainly lots of emptiness, between the buildings and between the people. Wandering around this dusty side of Memphis we see very few buildings that aren't rundown and dilapidated and we spend time in what must be all of them. It's surreal to experience what seems like everywhere within an entire side of town yet do so in a leisurely manner that floats through less than two hours. The wind howling among the wind chimes outside as I watch just adds character.
Beyond Memphis itself there are other supporting characters and all are memorable, especially Screaming Jay Hawkins and Cinqué Lee as the hotel night clerk and bellhop who continue through the three segments. Jodie Markell gives an awesome monologue as a Sun Records studio guide. She talks so fast it wears everyone out: our leads, played by Masatoshi Nagase as Jun and Youki Kudoh as Mitsuko and what appears to be a real family who must have just been there when Jarmusch arrived to film. Such synchronicity would fit very well. I wonder what else got made up on the spot. Very cool indeed.
Far from Yokohama follows a young Japanese couple on a pilgrimage to Memphis. Jarmusch plays up the similarities (or lack of them) between Yokohama and Memphis but pays even more attention to the cultural differences and they're a fascinating pair. Mitsuko wears white lipstick and a leather jacket with Mister Baby painted on the back. She pays the bellboy in plums brought over from Japan and collects pictures of Elvis looking like other historical figures or statutes. Jun has slicked back hair and a green suede jacket, he looks depressed even when he's happy because that's just how his face is and he only takes pictures of hotel rooms. Everything else is in his memory, but the hotel rooms he'd forget.
They carry their suitcase around strung on a bamboo cane and argue in Japanese about who was better: Elvis or Carl Perkins. Jim Jarmusch characters are all fascinating and full of quirky insight. These ones arrive by train and from moment one nothing seems to be quite what they expect. Quite what they really think of their pilgrimage beforehand and afterwards is completely open to question because Jarmusch doesn't really tell us. He gives us hints but he lets us work it out, just like many things in this film.
A Ghost sees an Italian lady named Luisa with plenty of spare change stop off in Memphis because of a mixup with planes. She's transporting her deceased husband to Rome but an accident leaves her temporarily stranded in Memphis. She gets to walk around as much as the pair of Japanese pilgrims but with a little more of a sinister backdrop. She gets hassled by no smaller a guy than Tom Noonan, who spins her a great yarn about the ghost of Elvis entirely to fleece her out of money but then won't leave her alone.
She finds her way to the same hotel as Jun and Mitsuko, but ends up sharing a room with a stream of consciousness talker called Dee Dee who can't shut up. She talks about everything, it seems, but especially why she's leaving Memphis to get away from her boyfriend who she can't read because he never says anything. And just as she shuts up and goes to sleep, in comes the ghost of Elvis to talk to her instead.
Lost in Space introduces us to said boyfriend, Johnny aka Elvis, though he doesn't look anything like him. He's played by Joe Strummer from the Clash, who is on great form as a wild drunken Englishman getting into trouble in a foreign country, as he links our three stories together in time. Jarmusch populated this film with a bunch of music legends: not just Strummer and Hawkins but also Rufus Thomas, the voice of Tom Waits and even Rockets Redglare, who associated with legends being the bodyguard for Sid Vicious.
The Elvis played by Strummer drives around all night with a black guy called Will Robinson and his girlfriend's brother, Charlie the Barber, played by Steve Buscemi. They end up at the hotel too, to hide out after Elvis shoots someone in a liquor store. They are drunker than skunks (and probably were during shooting) making this whole section realistically down and dirty. In many ways it feels like a dream, which is aided by the dialogue and the cinematography.
One line or one shot in a Jarmusch movie can say more than many films manage in their entire length, and in Jarmusch movies the characters aren't just people: Memphis itself is a character here, a faded, run down, highly subdued Memphis with very few people around and lots of space. Jun compares it to Yokohama with 60% of the buildings removed and there's certainly lots of emptiness, between the buildings and between the people. Wandering around this dusty side of Memphis we see very few buildings that aren't rundown and dilapidated and we spend time in what must be all of them. It's surreal to experience what seems like everywhere within an entire side of town yet do so in a leisurely manner that floats through less than two hours. The wind howling among the wind chimes outside as I watch just adds character.
Beyond Memphis itself there are other supporting characters and all are memorable, especially Screaming Jay Hawkins and Cinqué Lee as the hotel night clerk and bellhop who continue through the three segments. Jodie Markell gives an awesome monologue as a Sun Records studio guide. She talks so fast it wears everyone out: our leads, played by Masatoshi Nagase as Jun and Youki Kudoh as Mitsuko and what appears to be a real family who must have just been there when Jarmusch arrived to film. Such synchronicity would fit very well. I wonder what else got made up on the spot. Very cool indeed.
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