Cabin in the Woods; Mirror, Mirror; Super Noypi; Citizens' Band; The Shanghai Gesture

The last word

Cabin in the Woods (2012) is fun, a deconstruction exercise the way Scream was only wittier and more imaginative, with some serious muscle behind the evil behind it all.

Best way to see it is go in knowing as little as possible, I'd say; Whedon's script lets you know quickly what kind of movie this is, then complicates matters as swiftly as possible.

I do like it that the film takes the time to individualize the characters--we get some sense of who they are, care if they survive or not. Also like it that the film pulls some fast ones in plausibility--some unlikely coincidences, some lucky breaks--that stretch but don't snap the rubber bands of credibility (can't recall the proper term, was best I could think of).

Joss calls this his reaction against torture porn; damn straight. We need more of this kind of horror, less of that dull torture fare.

Only wish Joss had directed it--think he's a fine director, that he can do more with the camera (even the handheld kind) than most directors his age, or younger.

It's just a fantasy

And to continue with the genre-benders, Tarsem Singh's Mirror, Mirror (2012) is every bit as sloppily told as his Immortals--sloppier, in fact--but for all the cheesy effects, the story does enjoy the benefit of a genuinely funny script, and a cast as good-naturedly game as it is energetic (the standout being Armie Hammer as the unreservedly silly prince--for once, genuinely charming--and Julia Roberts as the deliciously evil queen).

The film's real star is Singh, who (unlike, say, Gary Ross) knows how to stage and shoot sword fights--they come off as both coherent and inventive. He knows how to wring every ounce of drama out of his always impressive sets (a ballroom with a gigantic bow of an entrance; a cozy dwarves' den; an enchantingly enchanted forest) and his outrageous costumes (designed by the late Eiko Ishioka, whose work on this film was, alas, her last).  

Super hero

 Quark Henares' Super Noypi (2006) isn't without its share of problems--okay, more than its share of problems--and you can see what a frustrating experience this must have been for the filmmaker: he's finally gotten a decent budget, a chance to show what he's got, and he's forced to fashion what he feels to be a piece of ordure. 

But after all's been said and done--the movie isn't that bad. Yes, the effects are terrible and some of the sets and costumes worse; yes the storytelling can at times seem painfully awkward. At the same time it manages to communicate the essential sanity of teens, it's inside them the way John Hughes likes to think he is (mostly with upper middle-class Caucasian teens, and a lot less often than you'd imagine). 

The plot twist when it comes is genuinely surprising, and surprisingly moving, and you can't help but note the differences between this and something like Chronicles: in the former the anti-hero commits crimes in the name of a wronged father or mother or beloved other; in the latter the anti-hero suffers his past hurts and his angst and doesn't really give a damn about anyone else...

Talk radio

Jonathan Demme's Citizen's Band (1977) is a lovely tribute to middle America--to ordinary people reaching out and annoying each other from hundreds of miles away (anticipating the Facebook culture by some twenty-six years). It's a colorful cast--a bigamous trucker; a hooker operating out of her trailer home; a seductive-voiced siren; an eager operator determined to enforce the rules of on-air courtesy (Paul LeMat) at the risk of life and limb.

The last is the hero of the film, for no other reason than that he has the most screen time, and has the unthankful task of trying to rein in his fellow conversationalists--not going to happen, but we have a time watching him try.

Charles Dickens might have written the screenplay to this movie, if he ran a ham radio: the sense of teeming, overwhelming life; the occasional touches of sentiment and pathos; the sympathy for all people, no matter how 'little.' These qualities shine through and feel like a updated version of his fiction, only Demme's has an unmistakable American quirk to it--every character there realizes he possess by birthright the opportunity to reinvent him or her self on a larger, more vivid scale, befitting the larger, more vivid landscape, and does so accordingly.

Come with me to the casbah, darling
 

Adopted from a play by John Colton, Josef von Sternberg's The Shanghai Gesture (1941) had to turn the original brothel into a casino, the drug addict into a degenerate gambler--but what a casino, and what a gambler! The club rises in a series of concentric circles, with a roulette wheel spinning at the very bottom, each circle embraced by wrought metal rails depicting paradisiacal birds and lush forests, the floors teeming with Asians and Europeans of every type indulging in every kind of vice. Think of Rick's Cafe conceived as an oriental Dante's Inferno--hell choking cheerfully in its own cigarette fumes.

(And who else should be spinning the bottom roulette wheel but Marcel Dalio himself? Obviously Michael Curtiz or his producers had seen this film and appropriated the man as a kind of Seal of Authentic Decadence for their own (frankly impoverished-looking) gambling den, in a far more wholesome (read: bland) melodrama)

As for the beautiful Eurasian Poppy (the name being the only hint left of the girl's original addiction), the censors kept Gene Tierney from really cutting loose, but she and Sternberg did their level best to suggest hedonism at its most amoral and monstrous, and damn if they didn't come close, with Tierney draped over every available sofa and bar counter and man, her luscious body poured into the various slinky gowns designed for her by her then-husband Oleg Cassini.

Censorship be hanged--it's a heedless spectacle where Victor Mature recites Omar Khayyam-like verses with all the relish of a Penthouse Forum Letter of the Month, where Ona Munro as Mother Gin Sling lovingly describes her sexual degradation from one big-city harbor to another, and Walter Huston as Sir Guy Charteris smiles icily, thinking himself protected by money and power, unaware of the fatal course his destiny is describing--a gradual but inevitable spiral into destruction and despair. A masterpiece, in short.

4.13.12

Triangle; Shanghai Express; Morocco

Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To's Triangle is the kind of foolhardy enterprise we need more of--but no, I can't see Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola ever getting together to do a collaboration.

This is the next best thing--no, better; at least these three Chinese filmmakers don't suffer from the ravages of gigantism, of dealing with bloated budgets and self-inflicted angst and the ruinous need to be critically respected and commercially successful both; or, at least, they don't seem to show the strain of these pressures (at least one of them successfully balances the demands of all and sundry--is, possibly, the most successful filmmaker in Hong Kong at the moment). 

Ante's upped by the fact  that the three aren't doing three short films but a single film with three directors doing three sections--beginning, middle, end. Difficult to maintain consistency, even with the same editor and cinematographer, much less coherence (which doesn't really happen). 

Of the three I felt Tsui Hark was the least successful. He sets up the situation (to be fair, always the least rewarding task), about a trio of friends planning a heist. Hark has lost something--a zing, perhaps, a clarity and comic-book exuberance that was the hallmark of his Once Upon a Time in China series. Nowadays his action is incoherent, his photography muddled and ugly, his film's overall look and feel undistinctive and mean-spirited. It's not bad, exactly, but seems to resemble the kind of action flick any number of filmmakers--French or even Hollywood--might have made in the past ten years.

When they find the object of desire--a gold-plated armored breastplate--Ringo Lam takes over, and suddenly you're aware of a distinct auteurial presence. Lam was always the master of dark moods knotty relationships, understated drama, and--above all--urban suspense. There's a scene in an abandoned building involving handcuffs and a minivan that's a corker, and a vehicle run (strictly speaking it's not an actual chase) through the streets of Hong Kong that is brilliantly shot and edited, with a breathtakingly sudden climax. But then Lam, of course, is in charge of the middle act--he isn't allowed to end his sequence.

Suddenly suddenly things both simplify and complicate. In a series of economical moves the film jettisons most of the unnecessary plot elements (the pursuing triad, for one), adds its own (a scamming wheel-repair man with Tourette's (Lam Suet, an acting regular who cues you in on who owns this segment); a police officer on a bike). Suddenly the film becomes a dizzying shootout farce complicated beyond compare yet coherent as crystal, by turns funny and thrilling and poetic--sometimes all three at once.

Three filmmakers with three differing styles, doing a film on three friends, one of whom is involved in his own love triangle. It's an intricate stunt of a picture, one that doesn't quite come off successfully, but one applauds the attempt. Allez-oop!

Josef Von Sternberg's Shanghai Express is possibly a perfect film, all the more remarkable for being perfectly realized on a Hollywood studio backlot. The studio location probably helped enhance the sense of stylization, as Sternberg can micromanage every bit of Chinese calligraphy and spoken dialogue (accurate, as far as my limited Mandarin can tell--though I wonder about that clock face with Chinese numbers elaborately printed on its rim).

All in the service of its star, of course, the incomparable Marlene Dietrich, who here is lit and costumed and photographed (by Lee Garmes, with uncredited help from James Wong Howe) to within an inch of her life (to see the results of all this micromanagement, see photo above). Of all of Sternberg's effects, she's the most elaborate, most exotic effect of all: a hothouse German blossom in the provincial Far East, a woman without virtue who saves her honor for only one man, a world-weary cynic who dreams of an occasion to become the ultimate idealist.

Her co-star, Clive Brook, is unfortunately mostly a stiff upper lip; her true equal and an equally baroque grotesque is Warner Oland as Mr. Chang, a mysterious train passenger who as it turns out is a warlord, determined to exchange a valuable hostage for one of his captured officers. Oland skirts villanous oriental stereotype territory, but in Sternberg's hands he's a memorably villainous stereotype: when explaining to one victim what he intends to do to the poor man he runs a red-hot iron spike down a gauzy curtain, leaving behind a trail of softly burning cloth. It's the kind of casual touch that sends chills up the spines of the truly aware or, at least, reasonably alert.

That said, Sternberg's Chan does come out more fully rounded than one might expect--he tortures and punishes for reasons of pride (because he is humiliated, for example), and when he lusts after Dietrich it is with an effrontery us Asian types (in one of our more politically incorrect moods) want to cheer on.

Morocco I prefer for several reasons: the moment when Dietrich in tuxedo drag suddenly snatches a woman by the chin and busses her; the scenes where a simple mirror is occasion for extravagant demonstrations of cruelty and masochism; and the ending. Lee Garmes again does the sensuous cinematography, again with uncredited help by a legendary lenser (this time Lucien Ballard).

Gary Cooper is a far better match for Dietrich: where Brook was a stick in the mud, Cooper held his own with the kind of casual sexual confidence that makes one understand just what Dietrich saw in him (in Shanghai Express I kept expecting her to realize she really loved Chan all along).

As for the ending--the hypnotic pounding of drums; the wives and children, hopelessly and helplessly trailing after their soldier men; Dietrich, wind whipping at her dress and hair, a tall figure framed against a vast desert (think Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky). With the film's finale Sternberg reveals the film's (and his filmmaking's) true subject: passion--heedless, self-destructive, infinitely perverse. In his pictures each protagonist works out the terms of his or her particular obsession according to the unalterable laws of their twisted logic, losing themselves in that logic, ultimately destroying themselves and erasing themselves in the face of that logic. A great work.

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