A Very Coen Brothers' February....

So the wonderful folks at Deadshirt asked me to write about one of my favorite Coen Brothers films (so far), MILLER'S CROSSING. You can find that here.

I'd like to thank Max Robinson, who has been an amazing, sympatico editor for the two articles I've written for them so far, as well as my lovely wife Terra, for watching the movie again with me and discussing it as I tried to articulate my thoughts.

"This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but a tweet..."

Your Friends Close (2012)
Directed by Jocelyn Kelvin
Written by Brock Wilbur
Starring Jocelyn Kelvin, Brock Wilbur, Kovar McClure, Heather Wood, Laura Nicole Harrison, Blake Silver, Rob Ondarza, Ricky House, Michael Eliopolous, Lisa Renee Foiles, Ramsay Robinson and Yahtzee Croshaw [as well as many others]

[Disclaimer: I know Brock, Jocelyn and some of the other cast members from college. I also read an early draft of the script and served as an extra in a scene or two. That being said, I do not profit from this film, except the sense of pride someone gets from knowing about an awesome thing before other people and knowing the people involved in it]

Video game movies are pretty common at this point. Good video game movies are very very rare. Even rarer are movies that eschew adapting a video game to focusing on the people that make and play video games. Your Friends Close is not Super Mario Brothers or House of the Dead or Tomb Raider. It's not even Tron. It's more like The Bad and the Beautiful or Contempt. It's about awful, backstabbing people who somehow create something, for better or worse. As always, the question is whether that something is worth it.

Becca (Jocelyn Kelvin) and Jason (Brock Wilbur) are two up-and-coming game designers who happen to be married. They've just created a revolutionary new video game called "Your Friends Close" that basically turns the Turing Test into a multi-player strategy game. Users are put into a chatroom and must discover who is a real person and who is a computer. The winner could win anything from a rain forest named for them to a night with a porn star, depending on who the sponsor of the competition is.

Thing is, the game still needs to be developed and tested and Becca and Jason are about to fly to France to work on it. They're throwing a going away party the night before they leave, and they've invited their  best friends (a mix of family, friends, professional rivals, exes, current lovers and colleagues).

And the normal tension, regret and bitterness that crop up at any party are exacerbated by the fact that, just after the party starts, Randall Sconce (Michael Eliopolous), owner of the video game company developing YFC, wants Jason to stay in San Francisco to develop a tie-in TV show for YFC. Which means there's now a slot open for someone to fly to Paris with Becca and develop the game. It's the chance of a life-time, and Jason announces that the attendees are contestants who must convince him to give them the job.

Needless to say, this night will prove to be the end of relationships, maybe even Becca and Jason's.

The first thing to note is that Your Friends Close really understands that what makes a movie (or any story) interesting are interesting and complex characters. The script balances exposition and video game theory with the establishing of relationships and characterization while never breaking a sweat. This movie is extraordinarily quotable (there's a joke about Miles Davis and Secret of Monkey Island that cracks me up each time I think of it), but all the cleverness is in service of the characters and the story. The characters are mostly overly-intellectual nerds who delight in showing off their knowledge and their verbiage, and as the night drags on, it becomes apparent that even they cannot fend off disappointment, fear and despair with clever quips.

The direction by Jocelyn Kelvin (aided by DP Chad Nagel) is lively and restless, following the party from one corner of the house to another in extended Steadicam shots that impart a video game quality to the action. However, Kelvin knows when to pause on a moment, allowing us a tension-filled long take worthy of Rohmer when the story calls for it. Two long conversations between Becca and Kaylee (Jenni Melear), Jason's assistant and possibly his lover, unwind slowly and hypnotically, teasing us with violent resolution of the rivalry at any moment.

Of course, all of the technical skill would be for naught if the actors in front of the camera weren't equally skilled. Brock and Jocelyn each prove a match for their parts, with Brock slowly drawing out the childishness and fear underlying his manipulative ways and Jocelyn possessing a enigmatic and intelligent quality that reminds me of Lena Headey or Anna Karina. The rest of the cast is just as talented, with Blake Silver drawing out the nuances of a beta male trying to will himself into alpha male status, and Heather Anne Wood, as Jason's sister, slowly stripping away the disguise of a good girl with a secret life.  Finally, Yahtzee Croshaw deserves special notice for his voice acting on the titular video game, crafting a mix of charm and malevolence that is utterly entertaining and chilling.

At one point in the movie, Jason talks about how big a jump movies made between the 1920s and the 1930s, from chase scenes and pie fights to meaning and romance, before saying that video games are about to make a similar jump. I can't speak to video games, but I can say that Your Friends Close shows that movies can still develop and advance even in the video game age.

In which JCVD kickboxes a giant penguin to death...

This weekend, I was watching Sudden Death, a really cheesy mid-90s action movie, where Jean Claude Van Damme is a firefighter who must rescue the Vice President from a scenery-chewing Powers Boothe during the 7th Game of the Stanley Cup. It's a master-class in cheap dramatic irony (Sudden Death refers to both the end of the game AND the situation Van Damme is in!), mainly notable for a sequence where JCVD must fight a woman in a giant penguin costume to the death. It makes Hard Target look even more eligible for a Criterion Collection edition.

It's very clear that the pitch for this must have been "Jean Claude Van Damme does Die Hard at a hockey rink". And while Die Hard has reached a level of relative acclaim (despite being a blockbuster and the birth of a franchise), there's a tendency to rope it off from the films it inspired (including some of its franchise). Die Hard 2, Under Siege 1 and 2, Sudden Death, and Air Force One (maybe even Speed and Con Air, if you squint a little) are some of the more notable successors.

It's pretty easy to state the formula: working class tough guy squares off against a highly-skilled, intellectual bad guy during a hostage situation in a contained setting, with the working class guy kicking the ass of the flamboyant/foreign/intellectual/wealthy bad guy.

But what I forgot, until I watched such a generic version of the formula as the JCVD version, are the differences from the action films that came before them and after them.

First of all, the 1980s action template is usually something like Cobra or Commando, where an over-muscled tough-guy guns down a million faceless bad guys. There's still occasionally a flamboyant bad guy, but the focus is on body-count and sheer destruction. The good guy might have a braying lieutenant or commanding officer, but there's no sense that that commander has any authority. The good guy(s) might even go vigilante at the end, with the authorities showing up and telling them good job. Michael Bay's films revived this trend, upping the superhero element, where the hero is basically invulnerable. The last two Die Hard movies have trended even further in this direction as well.

Whereas, in Die Hard and its descendents, the lesser villains are usually individualized. Even though they are usually two dimensional, multi-ethnic terrorists or Eurotrash, that's still one more dimension than Cobra or Bad Boys provides us. I still root for Theo to get knocked out, or the crazy earring guy in Sudden Death to get shot through a helicopter, but they're not just cannon fodder that feeds our blood-lust. On top of that, there's an emphasis of one on one combat. The bad guys have guns, but the good guys rarely start out with them, so there's usually a lot of very brutal hand-to-hand fighting. Our heroes are usually bruised and bloody at the end of each fight, even though they've won. Once again, compare this to Commando, where Ahnuld takes out an entire army and just gets a gnarly gash on his stomach.

Most importantly, the Die Hard template has a working class, if skilled, hero who faces off both against a corrupt or hidebound authority and the actual bad guys. While it's not that unusual to have a cop/secret agent having to take a dressing down from the boss, it's in the Die Hard template movies that the authority is actively working against the hero's goals. Agents Johnson and Johnson, for example, in Die Hard, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Under Siege cause almost as much destruction and death as the bad guys, even though they have good intentions.

Furthermore, this working class attitude extends to a nuts-and-bolts attitude towards work that has become rarer and rarer as cinema has progressed into the 21st Century and the focus of international capitalism has been turning everyone into interchangeable office temps. Die Hard takes place in a classy executive office building, but the environment that Bruce Willis mostly occupies is the blue-collar work-site of a building still under construction. In Under Siege, the kitchen and other living/working areas of the battleship are intimately explored and become sites of battle and conflict, not just the command center. And Sudden Death gives us a detailed look at the day-to-day, banal and prosaic operations of a hockey rink before blowing them up.

Perhaps that is what I find most unusual in this day and age in these films is this interest in establishing the prosaic and banal of day-to-day working life, an interest that is harder and harder to detect in more recent cinema. The protagonists of most blockbusters are either tech-savvy kids, specially-trained and well-to-do secret agents, or independently wealthy superheroes. Even when the protagonists are down-to-earth people like in Date Night (in which the bourgeois banality of the protagonists, contrasted with generic thriller trappings they are roped into, are played for laughs), we don't really see them at work. Perhaps the only notable exception, off the top of my head, is Machete, which intentionally politicized work and labor as elements of an ongoing class and ethnic struggle.

Die Hard and its followers, despite their faults and flaws, honored the idea of working class labor. The modern blockbuster now only honors the wealthy superhero, a demographic that is excluded from labor (teens/kids), specialized agents, or a combination of the three.

Self-Promotion: WOMEN AND MEN AND WOMEN

So, some of you devoted readers (all...2 of you) might remember me nattering on about a short film I wrote and co-produced a while back called WOMEN AND MEN AND WOMEN.

Well, now that the festival submissions are all over, it's finally available on the internet for everyone to see!

It's a satire on male privilege, self-obsessed male writers, and the "bro-mance". 

Check it out here on Vimeo!

"Last of the materialists. That's like last of the dinosaurs": GHOSTWATCH

GHOSTWATCH (1992)
Directed by Lesley Manning
Starring Michael Parkinson, Michael Smith, Sarah Greene, and Craig Charles

Among a niche audience of horror buffs, Ghostwatch stands as the British answer to Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast. This is actually a little too simplistic, because whereas Welles' broadcast was never intended to be taken for a real news broadcast (it had been presented with the Mercury Theatre opening and credits, but station-switching audiences had missed the introduction), Ghostwatch was.

Ghostwatch was presented on Halloween in 1992 as a BBC news special, including normal television anchors and interviewers, who were investigating a haunted house on live television. This wasn't an "In Search Of" style show, where an expectation or suspicion of trickery lurks around the edges. Nor was the footage presented as pre-recorded and edited. And the anchors weren't faded TV stars or credulous mystics. These were normal, trusted BBC newscasters (imagine Mike Wallace or Stone Phillips or Bryant Gumbel perpetrating a similar hoax). The fact that this was a call-in show, that was supposed to include interviews with experts, discussion with viewers, and interviews with other people that had experienced hauntings, suggested that there was no certainty that the "haunted" house would even present any paranormal phenomenon. For the majority of the show, the anchors and reporters range from politely skeptical to outright condescending to the idea that the paranormal was even possible.

So it's no wonder that the public was shocked when the show was "interrupted" with technical difficulties suggesting paranormal activity, or that a bunch of "concerned citizens" blocked it from airing on Television in its original form for years to come.

But heading into a screening at Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre, I had to wonder how shocking it would be. After all, I already knew the backstory. And in an age of "found-footage" films and "mockumentaries", how ground-breaking would it really seem?

The answer is that Ghostwatch still has the capacity to scare. It's not really a gory film and the effects are rather simple (a wind machine, a lot of sound effects, a creepy figure in a costume), but the whole thing is handled to such an elegant effect that it haunted me long after I left the theatre.

To its credit, even knowing the central premise of Ghostwatch, the show was very suspenseful. The show tips its hand fairly early that there is something odd going on here, when the anchors broadcast footage previously shot in the haunted house and we see a shadowy figure that the anchors can't see, even when they slow it down and watch frame-by-frame. So the old axiom, attributed to Hitchcock, that watching two men play cards can be thrilling if you know there's a ticking time bomb under their chairs and they don't, is at work here.

Furthermore, the haunting scenario has a few twists and turns in it that will surprise even a viewer expecting to get spooked. For one thing, the theories of the paranormal investigator, Dr. Lin Paskoe (Brid Bevan), who is the only one other than the victims that believes in the haunting from the outset, turn out to be somewhat off-base. On the house's history, she's as much in the dark as the victims and the anchors. Usually in these types of films, the occult expert is usually completely right and the skeptics are completely wrong. It's refreshing to have both sides to turn out to be somewhat right in the details, but wrong on the big picture. And the scenes where she's arguing with a skeptical American researcher suggest that, for all her careful work and attempts to remain scientific, that she's a little too emotionally invested in this pursuit for her own good.

For another thing, about halfway through, the reporters capture footage on tape of a young girl making the "noises" attributed to the poltergeist. For the audiences at home, unaware of what was to happen, it must have lulled them into a false sense of security. For a more cynical viewer, it knocked me off my feet. How were they going to recover from that?

As for whether the show would hold up after years of films like the Blair Witch Project and several iterations of Paranormal Activity, the answer is that it does. Since this event is being filmed by a professional news crew, there's not a ridiculous over-reliance on "shaky-cam". And once all hell breaks loose, the broadcast has a variety of tricks to show us things going wrong.

The production design is also worth complimenting, given that the studio and house are both banal and ordinary enough to pass as normal, while taking on an increasingly creepy and ominous appearance as reality breaks down (I can't describe the effect apples swinging from string achieve, as lame as it sounds).

The performances and the writing are very sharp, with Sarah Greene showing a nice steely determination to protect the house's children even as she grows more and more terrified of the house and Michael Parkinson having a great arc from open-minded host to condescending bastard (when he believes he's exposed a hoax) to a confused and frustrated man unwilling to admit that reality is not what he thought it was.

There are a few mis-steps, mostly in the form of Craig Charles as the Odious Comic Relief who peppers his location-hosting duties with way too many jokes about how ridiculous Halloween and the supernatural are. He's a little too unprofessional to convince as a TV host and his tongue-in-cheek performance suggests there's some trickery afoot. It's a bit disappointing, given that I enjoyed him on "Red Dwarf", but he sticks out like a sore thumb here.

But despite a few laughs in the audience as Ghostwatch started up, by the end, everyone was shocked into silence. And we thought we were in on the joke.

"I knew I'd never take him alive... I didn't try too hard neither."

Yet another half-written blog post I've discovered from a couple of months ago. Figured I might as well post it, because, though it isn't a full review, you should at least consider it a recommendation.

DILLINGER (1973)
d. John Milius
Starring Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Michelle Phillips, Richard Dreyfuss and Cloris Leachman

John Dillinger (Warren Oates) is a famous bankrobber, working the Midwest, who has formed a super-gang with "Pretty-Boy" Floyd (Steve Kanaly) and "Baby-face" Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss). Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson) is the FBI agent tasked with taking them all down. Cue bloody shootouts.

... Whoah. This and the Don Siegel-directed Babyface Nelson are my must-see gangster films, so you can imagine my delight when Netflix Streaming added this to the queue. Unfortunately, it was a pan-and-scan version with occasionally poor picture quality. To be fair, for all I know, the DVD might be pan-and-scan. Not a lot of care is taken with AIP re-releases, and I'm sure we might wait in vain for Blu-ray versions of these films.

But even pan-and-scan couldn't sap this film of it's pungent hard-boiled flavor. And the visuals still retain their power. The opening of the film, viewed through a bank-teller's window, where we endure a fussy matron withdrawing her money, only to immediately have Warren Oates introducing himself as John Dillinger and then yelling at the viewer not to try anything foolish, packs a punch. The wit of Oates breaking the fourth wall to kick off the film just adds to the outlaw feel of this film. It's a daring start to a film that wants to prove it can match The Wild Bunch, Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands blow-for-blow.

Dillinger doesn't quite hit that heady goal, but it certainly comes close.

In case anyone needed an idea for a Christmas gift....

Warner Brothers' Archive (their Burn-On-Demand DVD service) just issued the film version of Richard Stark's The Outfit, one of my favorite Richard Stark novels. It's part of the Parker series, about a sociopathic robber/thug who is also strangely professional. This time, Parker (in the movie, his name is Macklin) and his outlaw cronies decide to start robbing from the mob.

And it's got Robert Duvall, Karen Black, Robert Ryan and Joe Don Baker. The film is a '70s exploitation fan's dream!

I doubt it's as good as the amazing and strangely European New Wave-influenced Point Blank, based on a different Richard Stark novel, but still, I'm excited.*

(And I noticed they just put out Pretty Maids All in a Row as well! Sleazy Roddenberry/Roger Vadim collaboration from the 70s! Yay! )
*Also, I forgot Godard's Made in the USA is based on The Jugger. It's great how love for Stark bridges high-concept action films and artsy weird films. Though now I'm just thinking of Anna Karina and Marianne Faithfull.

Under construction

Fooling around with new looks for the blog.
In the interim, some recommendations:
Nico's THE END concert album is a pretty damn amazing slice of wintry Nordic depression. You'll probably want to follow it up with something optimistic as a chaser, but it's a great album for a post-hangover mood or a "the holiday is over" feeling.


And maybe that chaser should be Big Boi's recently released Sir Lucious Left Foot... The Son of Chico Dusty, which is a salacious, gleeful and complex glob of funk that I can't stop listening to.


And if you need a movie that out-actions the summer blockbusters that are finally coming out on DVD, watch The Good, The Bad and The Weird. This Korean kimchee Western is a delicious mix of history, geopolitics, martial arts, gunfights and slapstick, that calls to mind Takashi Miike and Jacques Tati collaborating on an action film.

"Me? I'm a businessman. You and me are going to do a little business..."

Note: Another old draft I reread and realized was publishable. More new content soon.


Act of Violence (1948; d. Fred Zinneman, starring Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh and Mary Astor)

I'm a Van Heflin fan. That's kind of an odd thing to say, if only because his filmography, while not undistinguished, is fairly minor. An important supporting role in Shane, a lead in the original 3:10 to Yuma, and a bunch of roles in a mix of mostly forgotten films. However, he was one of the stars of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Kirk Douglass' debut! with Barbara Stanwyck), where his unshowy but solid performance provided the whole foundation of the film. Without him, there is no place for Stanwyck and Douglass' neurotic performances to go.

What I loved about his performance in that film is the way he played a tough good guy who is always one bad choice away from becoming a thug. He's got good impulses and empathy, but he usually bristles at the first sign of confrontation, holds onto grudges and loves to play the angles. And these might have served his character well in the army, but in Strange Love they keep pushing him to the edge of criminality.

So I feel vindicated by his performance in this film, where he plays a nice, hard-working family man... with a very dark secret. It's the polar opposite of his role in Strange Love, and he plays it like a craftman, carefully but with no showiness or cheap tricks. The rest of the film is like this, stripped down and sleek, with few frills, but it puts everything in service to the story.

Act of Violence starts with a limping man (Robert Ryan) in a rain-soaked trenchcoat going into his apartment, grabbing his gun and heading straight for the bus depot. He buys a ticket to California,  arriving on Memorial Day in a small town a couple hours outside of LA. He immediately gets a hotel room, ignoring all the festivities, and starts looking in the phonebook for Frank Enley.

Meanwhile, Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is at the dedication of a housing development he helped construct, where his business associates praise his hard work and joke about his distinguished war record.  After the ceremony, Frank, his wife Edith (a young Janet Leigh) and year-old son Georgie head home, where he packs for a weekend fishing trip at the lake with his neighbor Fred (Harry Antrim). He leaves a little bit before the limping man shows up, asking for Frank. Edith tells the stranger that he just left for the lake but he should be back by Monday. So the limping man, gun still concealed in his trenchcoat, sets out for the lake.

Bad timing and Frank's own surprising paranoia keep the limping man away for a day more, but when Frank leaves for a business conference in LA and Edith confronts the limping man, she finds out that Frank's distinguished service in WWII acquired an awful blot while he was in a POW camp and Frank's pursuer is his old army buddy Joe Parkson. As for how Joe got the limp... well, let's just say it's tied to that same POW camp. And by the way, we've still got another hour to go in the film. And we still haven't seen the titular Act of Violence yet...

For a movie that sounds like an '80's action film, Act of Violence is mostly devoted to building tension. Joe's unflagging pursuit of Frank hangs like a cloud over everything, even when Frank doesn't realize he's being chased. The first fifteen to twenty minutes, as we watch Frank barely evade Joe by sheer coincidence, is like a cinematic response to "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", with doom waiting around every corner, never thwarted, just delayed. 

For a film noir, in fact, this film actually contains a fair amount of moral complexity. It never sinks into the easy nihilism that imitators usually pick up (i.e. everyone's flawed and corrupt). Instead, it shows the crucible of war, where a fundamentally decent man makes an awful decision in a moment of weakness and is punished for it. I don't watch the movie wanting Enley let off the hook (there's a sense throughout that Frank knows he deserves to be punished but is afraid to face that), but Parkson murdering him will not solve anything. In fact, it will just corrupt Parkson. Act of Violence actually manages to find a cathartic way out of this conundrum that doesn't feel cheap or sentimental, but offers a hope of redemption all the same. B+

"It's not a screenplay. It's my life." June Film-log

While I was going through and deleting old drafts that were no more than a half-written sentence, I came across these two entries from my June film-log that were in publishable shape.


Popcorn (1991, d. Mark Herrier/Alan Ormsby?) - The release date says '91, but almost every other aspect of this movie screams '80s. A bunch of college students holding a horror movie marathon at an old movie theatre find themselves getting killed by a face-changing maniac. Most of the murders are committed with props from '50s b-movies (think William Castle-themed murders). Reasonably inoffensive, but does nothing both Scream, Darkman and Waxwork did better, with better casts. Alan Ormsby, as screenwriter and possible co-director, proves that Bob Clark deserves most of the credit for their collaborations. I wasn't even interested in finishing it. D

Up (2009, d. Pete Docter) - Don't know what I can add. Great film about an old man & a little kid finding in each other the family they've lost. The first 15 minutes, which elapses with almost no dialogue, has to be the poignant depiction of love and loss I've seen in a while. Personally, I love how the dog henchmen are still dogs underneath it all, down to the suspicion of mailmen. A+

Department of "Fan" Service, AFI Edition

Dear Tim,
you should know that Aaron Sorkin likes All the President's Men. As in, really, really, really likes All the President's Men. He said that it's a film that you can watch 8 or a dozen times and still find something new every time. So your good taste is shared by one of the luminaries of screenwriting.

No surprise, really, but sometimes validation is a wonderful thing.
Yours,
Mr. K
P.S. Everyone else, read Mr. Brayton's review of All the President's Men. He really breaks down why the film is amazing in much better ways than I feel capable of.

Baby steps to full posts...

In a Halloween mood today, I tried to watch some horror movies on Netflix Streaming. The first film I tried was Dario Argento's Phantom of the Opera, starring Julian Sands & Asia Argento.

What a poor choice. The dubbing was awful, the Phantom had psychic powers and had been raised by rats and (worse yet!) was not even deformed. Plus, Asia Argento was trying to play a normal person, which never works. All of that would be forgivable except Argento shows none of the visual flair or eye for detail he brought to Suspiria! Visually, the movie is as mediocre as a Syfy channel original movie. Sure, I stopped watching after 12 minutes, but this included two poorly-staged killings.

So I switched to Witchfinder General, which is a much, much better movie. More on that later.

I think Netflix is broken...

because the under-rated Anthony Mann western The Last Frontier, starring James Whitmore, Victor Mature, Anne Bancroft & Robert Preston and shot in Cinemascope (!) is garnering the same rating of three and a half stars as Saw & Death Sentence.

I know there's no accounting for taste, but this has to be a technical problem with the site, not that people actually like Saw or Death Sentence that much, right?