Writer makes disappointing directorial debut. Also, dog bites man...

STITCHED (2011)
Directed by Garth Ennis
Starring Tank Jones, Lauren Alonzo, and Kate Kugler

Synopsis: The survivors of a crashed American chopper in Afghanistan face a greater threat than the Taliban when they are set upon by a seemingly invulnerable army of the undead. And then the SAS shows up...

I blow hot and cold on Garth Ennis. On the one hand, he has written some great and compelling comics (Punisher: The End, Punisher: The Tyger, Preacher, Hitman). On the other hand, he's a writer whose aesthetic interests I increasingly find hard to separate from his limitations. He writes the foul-mouthed badass & the strong, stoic man of action very well, but writes characters he doesn't agree with or respect as the most contemptible straw men. And sometimes his admiration of tough men making hard choices easily shades into fascism.

So, Garth Ennis making his directorial debut on a short film about soldiers in Afghanistan encountering a supernatural power more evil than the Taliban? Oh, and produced by the people at Avatar (a company that, for every good book it puts out, puts out seventeen stolen from Warren or Alan or Garth's commonplace books)? If it wasn't for the fact that chances to see this outside of Comicon were going to be rare, I probably wouldn't have lined up for it. And a small part of me hoped that Ennis, pushed into a new medium, out of his comfort zone, might do something interesting.

Unfortunately, Stitched isn't even an intriguing misfire. It's just a bore.

The writing isn't the problem, though what comes across on the comics page as clever exposition feels awkward coming out of a real person's mouth sometimes.

The bigger problem is that Ennis just doesn't have a grasp on how to do film. His time as a comic book writer has clearly taught him how to think visually, but the fact he doesn't have to execute those visuals means that good ideas are botched. The carnage of a previous battle that the soldiers stumble across is filmed in such a flat, matter-of-fact way that it comes across as a joke more than a horrific moment. And not a dark joke, but a Zucker-Abrams-Zucker joke.

A better example is a sequence of the soldiers climbing a hill. The soldiers are shot from behind and below as they ascend. It's a good idea either to sell the tiring nature of their trek or to give a mythic image to these tired warriors. In practice, the shot is framed and lit with the minimum amount of attention possible, and instead looks like a series of asses jouncing up a hill.

But the biggest problem is that Ennis can't direct actors. While it's hard to assess from the IMDB resumes of the stars how talented they are, the fact that all the line-readings are given with a similar lack of inflection, as if the scripts were handed to them five minutes before the shoot started and they were told this was merely a read-through. While Jones and Alonzo are poor actors, a special Razzie should be given to Kugler, who manages the amazing feat of being both dull and infuriating in her portrayal of a shellshocked PTSD soldier as a whiny teenager whose parents aren't letting her go to the mall.

Note to directors: stylized dialogue requires special attention to actors to make it work. Note to Garth Ennis: your dialogue is stylized.

If I sound so annoyed, it's because the monsters at the center of the short film are so fascinating. They're similar to zombies in that they are slow, stupid and can't use tools. And like traditional zombies, they're dangerous due to their numbers and tenacity as much as anything. But the visual, of creatures with every hole in their face (eyes, nose & mouth) stitched shut, who stumble along like the Templars from Tombs of the Blind Dead, is amazing. And Ennis' conceptual twists on these creatures (they can't be killed with a shot to the head or severing of the spine, for example) suggest a fascinating mythology.

But all of that is hidden inside a boring, indifferent film whose main purpose, at this point, is to serve as an extended trailer for the inevitable Avatar Press ongoing. Color me unimpressed.

And we're back! (almost)

Whooo... That was quite a crazy couple of weeks.

I just wrapped shooting on the first film I've ever had made out of something I wrote. The shoot was wonderful. I couldn't have asked for a better cast and crew. We did run into problems, but people kept their cool and we worked around them. And from the dailies I've seen, this project is going to be amazing. I'm not just saying that because I wrote it. The people involved took my words and ideas, and without rewriting them, made them their own.

It's a good sign, I think, when you're laughing at jokes on set that you wrote months ago and have written and rewritten several times.

Back to real blogging soon!

"A mother-in-law ought to know where her son-in-law can be arrested..."- The Three-Penny Opera, 1931, d. G.W Pabst

"Watch the picture, then. And don't move."

The post below contains my thoughts on Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire. This was one of the films I considered posting about for the Film Noir blog-a-thon, but didn't have enough original thoughts to bring it to a full post.

However, Ed Howard did end up writing a wonderful post about Crossfire. And, luckily for me, one of his thoughts, regarding the fact we know the culprit for the inciting murder relatively early on, plays into some of my thoughts on the performances in the film.

As I argue below, the tension for the film comes not from the mystery of who the killer is, but whether our heroes will let him get away with his crime.

Thoughts below the break...

UFA versus Hollywood: or, what Archie Hickox was talking about...

I'm reading Klaus Kreimeier's The UFA Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company 1918-1945, because I've been very interested in Nazi Germany art and culture for a while and the way the state interacted with artists beyond mere censorship. Watching Inglourious Basterds again, which briefly touched on the way UFA tried to be both a branch of the entertainment industry and of the propaganda industry, definitely piqued that interest, but there have been other factors as well.

Spotts' Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics already touched on the visual arts in Nazi Germany and Richard Evans' The Third Reich at War touched on the performing arts, though Evans is most interested in statistics of consumption, production and attendance. It wasn't until I recently watched the fascinating Goebbels Experiment on Netflix Instant Viewing and heard some of Goebbels' attempts at film criticism that I got an idea of how seriously the party (or Goebbels, at least) took the integration of art and propaganda in the film industry.

[A side note: only after watching The Goebbels Experiment did I get an idea of how unrepresentative of UFA's work Nation's Pride is. For the sake of the film, I understand why it ends up being a weird Samuel Fuller-esque shoot-out, but, at least judging from the clips of Uncle Krueger and Kolberg the documentary displays, UFA's directors seemed capable of some expressionism, but never such frenetic usage of editing and montage.]

I'm probably going to be blogging about it as I read, but right off the bat, what is most striking is how the early German film industry came down to a fight between big industrial interests and the military. Heaven knows Hollywood ended up being a giant collectivist trust, but it was never so heavily tied to the government and the corporatist state as the early German film industry was.  On top of that, both sides of that fight are conservative or right-wing, but in different ways.

More to come...

An epic problem's not a problem for me: 55 DAYS AT PEKING (1963)

Directed by Nicholas Ray (and Andrew Marton and Guy Green)
Starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, David Niven, John Ireland and a bunch of white people in yellowface make-up (including poor Robert Helpmann)

I better start off by admitting I've never seen King of Kings. I know Nicholas Ray as the guy who made Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause (among others). And they're big films, epic emotionally and physically, but still personal.

55 Days at Peking doesn't feel personal. It feels like a Samuel Bronston production. Mr. Cairns, whose Late Show Blog-a-thon I'm piggy-backing on, has already gone into Samuel Bronston's gift for Spanish tax shelters and destroying talented auteurs from the '50s (poor Anthony Mann). (At least Uwe Boll's main artistic victim is himself.)

And we're back in Spain (here playing Peking), with star Charlton Heston, and now it's poor Nicholas Ray having a heart attack trying to dramatize an epic historical event.

And it certainly feels like the kind of film that would give someone a heart attack. In most of the crowd scenes, the details are way too busy, overwhelming the eye and the attention, to the detriment of the story and shot composition. Eventually the story itself overwhelms any attempt at characterization by about an hour and a half in (about the time the intermission ends), and characters disappear for long stretches of time, to be replaced by explosions and extras. Spectacle qua spectacle just drains you, weakening previous effective scenes with repetition.

There are some nice grace notes, especially in the first part of the film. When Ray (or whoever is behind the camera) is shooting a couple of people together, it can be very effective. There are two scenes practically back-to-back about an hour and fifteen minutes in which first Heston's character and then Niven's character are put through the wringer as they risk losing someone they love to combat. Heston actually emotes in a subtle way, battling back a mix of prejudice, anger and despair as he tries to tell a half-Chinese girl her American father is dead. And it's framed in a half-ruined church, with a priest checking in from over an altar, in half-light.

On the acting front, Ava Gardner is flirty and beautiful, Charlton Heston is comfortably being Charlton Heston and Robert Helpmann, so wonderful in The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman, decides to try out for a role as Republic serial villain.

Robert Helpmann will finally crush Flash Gordon!

David Niven's the one who comes out of this film smelling like roses. It helps that his character is the most complex. He's a good husband, a loving father, and a talented diplomat; he's charming and friendly even to someone as frustrating as Heston's Major Lewis. But in the name of peace he's willing to risk the lives of everyone in the foreign sector, including innocent civilians, and we already know his larger goal of preventing large-spread violence is going to fail.

An interesting sidebar: I wonder if this film could have been released any time other than 1963. Earlier than that and too many people might been bitter about the Korean War to want to see a movie about China's first fight against the West. Make it so much as a year later, and too many people would have seen uncomfortable parallels with what was going on in Vietnam. The muddled politics would have probably made it too hard for either side, left or right, to cheer it on (unlike, say, The Ballad of the Green Berets). As it is, when Heston's Marine says something like, "I'm just a soldier patrolling rice paddies in the back country" before demanding more soldiers, I get an uncomfortable shudder knowing what is coming down the pike for '60s America.

Anyway, the Boxer Rebellion ought to be a dramatically interesting subject for a movie. The problem is that this film is wedded to a "oh no, these white people are in danger" story-line that really limits it. Perhaps the problem is that, after a certain point, all the initiative and maneuvering is taking place in other military camps or in the Forbidden City, so that we only see our heroes reacting to things. The plot itself becomes a war of attrition on our attention, which is thematically appropriate but rather boring when it happens unintentionally.

I'm pretty sure they stole this shot for Ghostbusters.

Maybe part of it is just that I keep thinking a movie about the Peking embassies trying to maintain their Western way of life in the face of logistical and political impossibilities on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion would have been a fascinating film. But it's not one that would have starred Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, let's be honest.

So we get a happy ending where a multi-national force marches in to strip China of its autonomy and Charlton Heston reaches out his hand from astride a horse to a little half-Chinese girl (who is really us, we all suddenly realize in the audience as the horns toot and strings swell and a supporting character gives an approving glance) and offers to give her a ride back to America.

But then again, there's a strain of cynical irony deep down in the grain of the film as we hear Russian aristocrats and Austro-Hungarian diplomats talking about imposing their will on China, not realizing they'll be in the dustbin of history in less than two decades. Or when Heston and Gardner flirt and waltz in an ancient temple, as an austere, ageless, uncaring Buddha stares down at them, knowing that this too shall pass. People come and go, but they won't stay. Nations come and go. Trends come and go.

And an exhausted Charlton Heston, worn out from a day of subduing natives, will collapse on his bed, a cross between the pieta and the dying Marat, and that little half-Chinese girl will look out from behind the rubble, afraid to approach. And she waits.

I'm so LA now...

Managed to get some tickets to the AFI Film Fest's events. So tonight I'm seeing John Sayles' new movie Amigo (about the Spanish-American War), tomorrow I'm seeing a Q&A with Aaron Sorkin & a screening of Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, and Tuesday I've got passes to a "Secret Screening", which I'm guessing is  either The Other Side of the Wind or Harry Potter 7.

I'll keep you guys posted.

The tightest 2 hours & 20 minutes in movie history...

The Honey Pot, d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1967

Starring Rex Harrison, Susan Hayward, Cliff Robertson, and Maggie Smith

"If not for Signor Perry Mason, each week in America, an innocent person would be convicted," says a police detective as he leaves for work, midway through The Honey Pot. That should give you an idea of how much respect Mankiewicz (who directed & wrote All About Eve, among other great films) feels toward the mystery genre. In this twisty tale, he seems to delight in yanking away the rug each time you start to figure things out. He does the same thing to the amateur detectives that always show up in these things, which is playing fair in a strange way, I guess.

Still, this is a two hour and twenty minute mystery/comedy, two genres where most people (myself included) value efficiency. Heck, I'm pretty sure that's a longer run time than Ben Jonson's Volpone, the classical comedy the movie is based on (and also commenting on). When Rex Harrison, Maggie Smith or Cliff Robertson are on screen together, you don't feel the length. But when one of Rex Harrison's character's three loves is on screen, you might feel the urge to check your watch. I certainly feel as if Mankiewicz is showing his age in this one, All About Eve being 17 years old at the point when this movie was made.

So the synopsis... Cecil Fox (Harrison) is an eccentric millionaire, the type who buys out an entire theatre's seats so he can watch a play by himself & then leaves at the end of the fourth act because he doesn't like how the play ends. He's decided to re-enact Volpone (whose title character's name means "Fox", after all) and his eccentricity extends to hiring an "administrative assistant" cum stage manager because the guy's last name is McFly (just as Volpone's servant is Mosca or "fly"). McFly (Cliff Robertson) and Fox lead Fox's three greatest loves, Princess Dominique (Capucine), Hollywood star Merle McGill (Edie Adams); and Texas tycoon Lonestar Crockett (Susan Hayward) to believe that Fox is dying and trying to decide which of the three should be his heir. However, when Lonestar O.D.s on sleeping pills that her nurse Sara Watkins (Maggie Smith) knows should have been placebos, it seems that someone is taking Fox's prank more seriously than was intended. You can probably start to see why this will take two plus hours.

As far as plotting goes, the double-crosses and twists are well-handled, so that even as you find yourself formulating theories, you wonder if it could really be that simple. And while this isn't quite a mystery that  you can solve on your own, when everything is revealed, there's no sneaking suspicion that characters weren't acting (relatively) rationally.

On the acting side, Rex Harrison is a wonderful fit as an eccentric millionaire whose eccentricities might not be so harmless. He's affable and witty one moment, flip and cynical the next. On top of that, Mankiewicz gets the best bit of physical comedy from Harrison's character's ambition to dance ballet. Harrison is amazingly agile, but he certainly lacks a dancer's body, though the comedy comes from the dignity and self-assurance he projects, as if his pirouetting were the most natural thing the world.

Cliff Robertson also does a nice turn as a clever and cynical drifter, capable of brilliance but afraid to pursue anything in life for fear he might fail at it. And Maggie Smith pulls off the difficult job of playing a rigid, repressed woman while hinting at her capability for deception and amorality.

When these three are sparring or flirting or quipping among the brilliant Venetian scenery, the movie is like dark chocolate, bitter with a tang of sweetness, tasty without becoming cloying.

Unfortunately, Harrison's former lovers/prospective heiresses are vague caricatures, all outline, with no substance. I'm not quite sure what drew his character to them in the first place, even though he has good enough reasons for going after them now. Lonestar, the one we hear the most about, whose lust for life nearly killed Harrison, fails to come off as a voluptuary clinging to life and instead seems vaguely tired. Though only a fourth of the movie is spent with them, each moment focused on them feels twice as long.

If I haven't spent much time on the visual aspect of the film, it's because there's very little to talk about. The set design is quite lovely and deliciously spooky when it needs to be, and there is one very good shot of one character reacting unexpectedly to another character's attempt to unravel the mystery that could have come straight out of a giallo. But except for the opening scene at the theatre, there's nothing particularly original or daring or exhilarating in the mise en scene.

Still, I don't want to be too harsh to a movie which ends with a main character recoiling in horror (via voiceover) from the expected "happy ending" tableau, as our two romantic leads bicker and quip across the Venetian cityscape. Hardly a lost classic, but as enjoyable as a big piece of candy.

Grade: B-

P.S. There's a weird way that it serves as a companion piece to The Last of Sheila, given they're both about eccentric millionaires whose games are hijacked by someone else's scheme. The Honey Pot is more flippantly cynical, yet has a happy ending. The Last of Sheila is more focused on the mystery, only to end on a viciously dark note. I don't know quite what to make of that.

"The men are dressed like children; the kids are dressed like superheroes": GREENBERG

Finally saw GREENBERG last night at one of the last theaters playing it in Chicago. It was a well-done movie, that really mined the awkwardness of situations and the problems of the characters for laughs. It might make you hate people for a little afterwards, however. I wonder how Noah Baumbach can still be so misanthropic after having married a woman like Jennifer Jason Leigh. But considering she is credited on the story, maybe it's like that 30 Rock episode where Tina Fey and a popular, handsome guy who asks her out find they share the same withering misanthropy for the human race (genders reversed, in this case, I assume).*

Tim Brayton (whose wonderful Antagony & Ecstasy I have already added to my blogroll) does a much better dissection of the film qua film than I could. So I'll use this post to address a few points he raises in his review.

Tim doubts that we can really like Ben Stiller's title character, that we can really only feel sorry for him. And yes, I mostly agree. Roger Greenberg is excellent at sucker-punching everyone when they let their guard down. There's a rather brilliant moment where, one second after he finally says something nice to his best (perhaps only) friend (played by Rhys Ifans)**, he asks for Ifans to tell him every criticism he's heard about Roger.

The thing is, I had a hard time not feeling empathy (which is a little deeper than pity) for Roger at a few moments. One of them was when his brother starts ripping him apart over the phone because the dog got sick  while Roger is house-sitting. His brother lays into him in such a way to suggest a person pissed off at an incredibly bad employee, not your flesh-and-blood. His brother laments the fact that his dog is sick and he can't be there because he's on vacation. He's not concerned about Roger, who was just released from a mental institution and has been abandoned in an empty house while his family is a country away... by their OWN CHOICE! Which might be an understandable reaction to Roger, but still, to feel less loved than your family dog would really, truly suck.

The other moment was towards the end, when Ifan's character calls Roger on all his shit, including ruining their band's one shot at a career. And Roger says that he knows he screwed it all up, but he never thought the whole band was going to make the call based on HIS decision. He made a really bad decision, that he didn't know the scope of when he was just out of college, and he's been carrying around the blame for that ever since.

As for what GREENBERG's about,  I think it's as much a state of the union and/or eulogy for Generation X as a character study. The casting of Ben Stiller certainly plays into this, given his own significant role as filmic stand-in for Gen Xers (Reality Bites, the Ben Stiller Show, etc.). Greenberg's attitudes towards authenticity & irony, his use of comedy to tear apart other people, his own self-seriousness in contrast to his mocking views of everyone else, all seem very specific (though not exclusive) to Generation X. He's even lived out the rejectionist ethos that Chuck Klosterman identified in his essay on Empire Strikes Back, which he suggests represented every X-ers' desire to not become their parents. Unfortunately, living that life out sucks.

And notice his fear of kids and young adults throughout the films, especially his epic monologue at the party his step-niece throws, about how kids today are better-adjusted and well-trained and that makes them vicious to people like him. And given the way his step-niece and her peers treat him like some sort of amusing pet, who they overindulge unhealthily as much as they do the dog, only to get annoyed at the consequences, it's hard not to sympathize with Greenberg's point-of-view at least a little. Of course, a human should have more agency than a dog, but... well... Baumbach's not really interested in the "should'ves".

I know that doesn't quite say what Noah's message is, but there is something a little more than character study here. How else to explain the apocalyptic/epiphanic tones of Greenberg, walking in darkness after seeing laughing, impressed young adults fishing the drowned rat/skunk (?) out of the pool...

*Do not take that as a dig at Noah Baumbach. I just have an extremely high opinion of Jennifer Jason Leigh.
** If there is a character who symbolizes for this movie what people should be like, it's probably Ifans' character, who is subjected to so much hurt, but never glories in it the way Greenberg does. He's a better friend than most of us deserve, but he's able to stand up for himself when he realizes things aren't going to change. This might not be any kind of ideal, but he's probably the only person in the movie you'd want to hang around with in real life for any extended period of time.

Dept. of Burying Your Lede, Econo-blog Edition

Some day I will post the final part of that blogging Tyler Cowen's book on capitalism & the arts, even though by now I've forgotten most of what's not in that rough draft. Still, today he has a post about the oft-raised idea of a movie stock market, where investors can bet on a film's box-office.

And even though I have to admit I'm not as strong on some of the economic stuff, he does have a good final few sentences about how the highly variable quality of movies (which is what allows the occasional masterpiece to slip through, as well as atrocious misfires), ending with this kicker:

So much of our cultural industries have been built on consumer mistakes and those days are coming to an end, rapidly.

RTWT here (it's only a couple of paragraphs).

SON OF DRACULA (d. Robert Siodmak, 1943)

"A little irrational, maybe, the same as anyone after committing murder."

This is a weird, weird picture, unlike most of the Universal horror film I've seen. Imagine if Flannery O'Connor & Raymond Chandler had written a Dracula screenplay and you've got this film.

At the aptly named plantation Dark Oaks, Kay Caldwell (Louise Allbritton) has had an anxious couple of days. Her father died on the night of her coming-out party, family friend Count Alucard (Lon Chaney, Jr.) showed up on her doorstep the same night, and, in her father's will, she's received the almost worthless plantation property and her sister's received all the money. However, it seems that she understands the connection between these weird events and she's happy with the way it's all happening. Why, she's even in a rush to get married to Count Alucard, even though several people have told her the Hungarian government has never even heard of the Alucard family...

I know the plot sounds a little obvious, but trust me, the screenplay knows what we're assuming, and pretty quickly starts suggesting that there's something going on beneath the surface.

In fact, for a 1940s vampire film, it gets pretty "meta". One would-be vampire hunter actually reads Bram Stoker's novel, while a newly turned vampire outright treats the "v-word" as a pejorative ("Don't use that word, Frank, we don't like it."). And there are a couple of hints at the idea of vampires as immigrants coming to the New World to start over.

In general, the film hits a weird mix of Southern gothic/horror (there's an early scene in the swamp that reminds me of Val Lewton) and noir. And while few of the elements in the film are original (you can play "spot the convention" pretty easily), the combination of these elements is unique. For example, the "Renfield" of the film is also the "fall guy" for one of Dracula's victims, while holy crosses are less deadly to the vampires than double-crosses (pardon my pun).

Most of the players are pretty generic, in the less-insulting meaning of the term. They mostly play to type & genre, and most of them feel more comfortable in the noir style than the horror. Louise Allbritton seems like she should have gone into bigger and better things, and Robert Paige's initial freak-out when he realizes the world isn't behaving rationally any more is quite effective. And the comic relief, which is at its most odious in horror, is acceptable. It's at least believable, instead of jaw-droppingly stupid.Which leaves Chaney...


On a conceptual level, even Chaney's limited skills should serve the film well. He's not THE Dracula, merely one of the last survivors of that line, who has been scraping by on the picked-over remains of post-World War I Hungary. He's supposed to be a pale imitation. He's come to the New World in hopes of fresher, more virile blood, but the film makes apparent that he's not ready for the ambition and recklessness of America. Unfortunately, playing a buffoon who thinks he's smart takes some self-awareness, and Chaney doesn't have it. He has one or two moments (the ending moment where he realizes how screwed he is actually does have some pathos to it) that work, but mostly he drags the film down slightly when he's on screen (though he never ruins it).

Visually, the film is very well put-together, no matter which mode it's functioning. There's a beautiful shot of Dracula's coffin rising out the swamp, for example, and another great one of Paige in his jail cell. Even some of the effects are well done. For some reason, the mythology has vampires using smoke forms as well as rubber bats to get around, and the smoke certainly works better than the normal "fly a rubber bat in, turn off the camera, put actor on mark" effect.

But I have to say it's the intriguing mix of genres that works best. Even when a character makes a mistake, it doesn't feel like a bone-headed error so much as they don't understand the kind of story they're in.

"Dialogue dub/ now here's the rub/she's acting her reaction"

You know, most people who are blogging/have blogged about the Oscars have more to say about most of the subjects. The three things that got me are:
1. Seriously, a John Hughes retrospective? In a year where we lost Eric Rohmer, we spend 10 minutes on John Hughes?
2. I hope a zombie Lon Chaney Jr. kicks Taylor Lautner's ass and proves who is the most popular werewolf of all time (I mean, Lon Chaney Jr. was a limited actor, but unless you measure acting talent by abs, he was still a better actor than Taylor Lautner has proven himself to be).
3. Also, thank you, Academy Awards, for recognizing horror films how many years after completely ignoring them. It must suck for the rest of the world to realize that they've made nothing that could beat Saw and/or Twilight in the last eighty-two years.

Quote of the day: Movies and ideas

I can't find the original source, but D Cairns at Shadowplay is the immediate source:

"Lots of American movies start out with interesting ideas, but they usually wind up with a fight in a warehouse." - Olivier Assayas

Thoughts inspired by "Shutter Island"

Do you think that the trend of praising competent work as classic is a recent trend or something that has happened in all ages?

It could be Sturgeon's Law, and the 90% that is crap from previous eras is forgotten as footnotes. Or it could be the things that craftsmen valued in previous times are not the same thing businessmen value in these times.

Because Shutter Island is a decent movie and well-made. It's not great and doesn't deserve such praise for having a few really good performances, a well-sketched plot and some vivid cinematography. I would hope those would be starting points for a decent film, not grounds for effusive praise.

On the other hand, next to a trifle like Up In the Air, I can see why people like it so much. But that's not necessarily saying it's Goodfellas or even the King of Comedy.

New York's alright if you like Sophokles..

I'm sad that, right after writing that huge post on Lucio Fulci, I found out the Wooster Group is doing a mash-up of Dido & Aeneas AND Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires. I can't think of anything that symbolizes my interests any better in one thing. Classical myth? Cult horror films? Theatre? And all my previous rants aside, I don't mind going avant garde sometimes, especially if you've got the Wooster Group's bonafides.

But karma is kind, because the production I was afraid of missing, Classical Stage Company's An Oresteia sounds like a dud. Sadly, even this blessing is somewhat mixed, because the reviewer loves Euripides' Orestes (which is not continuous with either his Elektra or his Iphigenia plays) for ALL THE WRONG REASONS. I don't know how Ann Carson could have so awfully botched her translation of Orestes that it turned from a tragi-comedy (a la Shakespeare's Troilus & Cressida) into a plain old comedy. It's a play about high minded sentiments masking depraved cruelty and justice undone by political considerations, performed near the end of the Peloponnesian War, when Athens' folly was laid bare.

If there is any comedy in the play (and especially in William Arrowsmith's excellent translation), it's the darkest kind, laughing at how every character's words come to justify more and more grotesque ends.

It's easy to look back and laugh at people like Charles and Mary Lamb, Colley Cibber and Nahum Tate for having the gall to rewrite Shakespeare. But you have to wonder if, another couple generations down the line, if people will think the same thing about productions like these.

"Life is far from peaceful": Beatrice Cenci and Lucio Fulci

Lucio Fulci is sort of in a weird place, canonically. Despite his substantial contributions to both giallo and the zombie film, his filmography is marred by too many bad films, and even many of his good later films suffer from narrative problems. Mario Bava gets retrospectives reviewed in the NY Times and his work appropriated by the Beastie Boys. Dario Argento's newest films are still anxiously awaited by horror fans (no matter how poorly executed), and his daughter's acting and directing career has also kept him in the public eye. 

But Fulci? Other than a Blue Underground/Anchor Bay reissue of Zombie (a.k.a. Zombi 2), some of his most popular works (The Beyond and City of the Living Dead) are out of print on DVD.  Not to mention that his last films, co-written/co-directed by frequent Bruno Mattei collaborator Claudio Fragasso (also the director of the infamous Troll 2) returned to the zombie well one too many time to incredibly diminished results. No wonder the epitaph that seems to stick to him is Tarkovsky's dismissive comment about Zombi 2: "Ghastly; repulsive trash".

I'd almost say, right now, Ruggero Deodato's received more of a critical re-evaluation than Lucio Fulci.

On the other hand, the qualities that make Fulci amazing are the ones obscured by crappy prints and critical blindspots. He strikes me as a pop culture surrealist in the mode of David Lynch, with the same transgressiveness that launches from a deeply conservative worldview.

His films are filled with an obsession with the ways our bodies betray us (the maggots and rotting flesh which fill his zombie cycle, the torture, drunkenness and lust that fill Beatrice Cenci), the self-serving blindness of bureaucrats (Dr. Menard's single-minded obsession with a scientific explanation in Zombi 2, the incompetent police of City of the Living Dead, the manipulative Dr. Boyle and blasphemous Dr. Freudstein in House by the Cemetery) and, most importantly, lives upturned by irrational, inexplicable events, whether human (Francesco Cenci's violence against his daughter, the murders in his giallo), or supernatural (his zombie films).

Fulci's greatest strength lies in his eye for shot composition and his oft-misunderstood use of pacing (the eyeball scene in Zombi 2, for example). He's not a writer's director or an actor's director, and he's often let down by his screenwriters. But like his contemporary Argento and his successor Michele Soavi, he has an ability to direct films that seem like nightmares, which follow their own grotesque dream logic.

Unfortunately, writers prefer to honor writing or acting, because they are concrete elements you can point to assign credit to (I include myself in this assessment). So someone whose work is poorly translated and poorly acted twists in the wind, whatever their merits.

Next post: actually talking about Beatrice Cenci, religion, and body horror for costume drama.

Magnificent Odd Obsessions

I just found an amazing video/dvd rental place that carries the obscure stuff that Netflix doesn't.

Up next: reviews of Lucio Fulci's Beatrice Cenci (and yes, that is the Cenci that was the subject of Keats' closet drama), which will probably also touch on my feelings on Fulci as horror auteur, and Welles' Magnificent Ambersons.

This is going to be an amazing week.

"I just got tired of running..."

Journey Into Fear [1943, d. Norman Foster, starring Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Rio and Orson Welles]

Journey into Fear was Welles' attempt to close out his RKO contract by writing and producing it simultaneously alongside The Magnificent Ambersons. Since Welles put in uncredited work as a writer (the screenplay is attributed to Joseph Cotten!), along with acting in it, there seems to be the assumption that he also helped direct it. Having not read Hello, Americans yet, I want to withhold judgement. It is odd how self-effacing this film's credits are. No production or writing credits, and Welles gets billed last on the opening credits (without even so much as a "And Featuring"). He gets billed below a nightclub magician in only one scene! Makes you wonder if Welles was trying to wash his hands of a disappointing film or if the studio was trying to punish their prodigal son.

Because whatever role Welles had in the film's direction, his stamp is all over the film. His regulars fill out the cast, his mistress Dolores Del Rio gets top billing, there are visionary experiments with sound design, and the visual design is stunning.

So now to dispense with a plot summary. Joseph Cotten is the whiniest American naval gunnery expert ever and he's America's man in Turkey, helping the Turks rebuild their navy. I wonder if it was because none of his co-workers could stand him that he got this plum assignment. The upshot is, now he's the Nazi's number one target in Turkey since any replacement would take months to arrive. After a failed assassination attempt, Colonel Haki (Orson Welles), head of Turkish intelligence, all but forces him onto a dirty freighter at gunpoint, since the Nazis are expecting him to leave by train. Unfortunately, it seems like there is at least one German agent upon the boat with him, and given the eccentricities of his fellow passengers, Cotten's chances of pegging the right passenger for a Nazi are pretty unlikely.

First of all, this has to be a very dispiriting film to watch from an acting standpoint. Whereas most of Welles' other projects show an ability to cast to type, if not cast greats. Unfortunately, Joseph Cotten shows none of the ability that he showed in Citizen Kane or later in The Third Man. He's a whiny stuffed shirt for most of the picture, who manages to make even the most reasonable reactions come off as insufferable.

Meanwhile, Welles puts in a sleepwalking performance that relies mostly on his imposing bulk and a passable (for the 40s at least) Turkish accent. This despite the fact that the type, a possibly corrupt authority figure who is sympathetic mostly for his cleverness, is one that Welles would continuously return to. Here though, he's mostly trying to hit his mark, and it's hard to blame him since he was doing two films at once.

The rest of the cast is just kind of "meh", except when they become annoying. As for Dolores Del Rio, she is attractive, but she possesses little sex appeal and I see no threat of her successfully seducing Cotten. 

Then too, the tone of this film is weirdly inconsistent, veering between fish out of water comedy and tense thriller. Cotten's character seems as threatened by his lack of a topcoat as by the fact that Nazis are after him. By the final half hour, though, JiF almost feels like some nightmarish fantasy where xenophobia and paranoia are inextricably mixed and Cotten's inability to simply go from point A to point B becomes an existential crisis.

Because the elements of design, plot and direction in the film take on a life of their own and the flat acting fades into the weird dream reality of the movie. Sound blots out important information from both characters and audience. Turkish and German dialogue is left mostly untranslated. Cotten's stalkers on board turn out to be friends or mere mischief makers, while a pleasant acquaintance turns out to be the man plotting his death. There is an entire sequence devoted to Joseph Cotten's inability to find a convenient place to hide his gun, and another, upon his subsequent loss of it, on his inability to find another. Even the voiceover narrative, a letter written with the tone of a man talking from beyond the grave, turns out to be composed after the climax of the film.

There is also a very vague allegorical level here, with Cotten's well-meaning but befuddled researcher becoming a two-fisted man of action when his way of life is threatened, and while it is set up, Cotten's unlikeability and a lack of real emotion in the film undermines the message.

Certainly, Journey into Fear is no Touch of Evil or even another The Stranger. It lacks the ambition of any of Welles' later work, and yet fails at what little it aims for. At the same time, it suggests the idea of Welles as an unpretentious b-movie maker, who might have produced more satisfying work and not burned out so spectacularly.

This wooden Oooooh this is awful!

For discussion: Is King Henry VIII Shakespeare's worst play? If so, produce one memorable quote or moment. Cite specific productions as needed.

(I just started watching the BBC version produced by Cedric Messina and thought, "it's a bad sign when your prologue all but says, go elsewhere if you're looking for fun.")