The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak)

Twisted Sister

 Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase, an oddly neglected noir, begins with an act of shared voyeurism: people gathered at a hotel's darkened dance hall to watch the latest of novelties, a motion picture (D.W. Griffith's 1912 silent The Sands of Dee, doubling as William Heise's 1896 The Kiss*). Siodmak's camera rises to the floor above to witness another wordless drama unfold; a young woman with a slight limp preparing for bed. She opens her closet door, pulls out a nightgown, steps back; the camera moves in on a row of hung dresses, and Siodmak cuts to the closeup of an eye, zooms in on the eye ostensibly glaring at the woman though we aren't fooled for a second: the eye is really glaring at us, daring us to cry out a warning to her. 

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009)

Sugar and spice

Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) is an intense if misshapen little thriller, easily the most entertaining of that by-now debased genre, the serial killer flick.

Here the focus of interest is not on the killer but on Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous tattooed girl. As played by Noomi Rapace, she's long of face and fierce of countenance, with a sullen "fuck you" look backed up with either a golf club (she possesses a vicious swing) or laptop (she supports herself through freelance hacking, and online investigations). Rapace is an actress, of course--in numerous videos and photos she seems warmly feminine, with hardly a hint of the character's fierce demeanor; when she does play Lisbeth, however, you can't imagine anyone else in the role (the American remake--but of course there's always an American remake--will feature Rooney Mara as Ms. Salander (no, I can't imagine her doing it either)).

The rest of the picture develops in reaction to the girl's presence (she's both catalyst and responder to the surrounding men and their various activities). Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) conducts the movie's main action, the search for a long-lost young woman, a search that leads him to a cunningly hidden serial killer. Blomkvist comes to depend on Lisbeth for clues and, in an unofficial capacity, for a quick roll in the hay (Lisbeth on top and in charge, naturally); Blomkvist also plays Boy Friday to Lisbeth's punk avenger, dangling helplessly from a line while Lisbeth rides to the rescue (a refreshing change from the endless number of helpless damsels waiting endlessly in distress for the hero's rescue). Nils Bjurman--Lisbeth's legal guardian, a nasty customer--offers small favors in exchange for oral sex and, on occasion, much worse; Bjurman is Lisbeth's bete noir in this picture, though beyond him--in this and succeeding novels (this is the first of a trilogy)--stand far more malignant, far more powerful male authority figures.

It's that 'much worse' from Bjurman that gives the movie its most powerful and--to my mind--most problematic moment (please skip the rest of this paragraph if you intend to watch the picture). Bjurman's assault on Lisbeth is intensely and graphically staged and shot, so intense and graphic it throws the rest of the picture out of whack--why fear sociopathic former Nazi officers and their soundproofed basements when you have Bjurman the fat bureaucrat with his rather sadistic notions of rough sex? A climax that occurs in the middle is not a climax but a misplaced high point, after which the rest of the picture can only be a disappointment.

Author Stieg Larsson was reportedly driven to write the novel when at the age of fifteen he witnessed the gang rape of a girl and failed to help her--the horror of violence inflicted against women is a constant theme in his work. A laudable sentiment, one that inspired Larsson to create a memorable heroine named after that girl of long ago.

That same sentiment tends to make Larsson protective, though--when push comes to shove, Larsson's Lisbeth will always do the right thing, or arrive too late to commit murder (she's not above inflicting violence in self-defense though, or rape with a dildo for revenge--but then the victim is a sex offender, so that must be all right). Larsson inflicts horrors on his heroine, but falls short of truly testing the heroine's moral integrity--it remains as intact as an untouched hymen.

Which is a pity--when was the last time we saw a convincingly complex heroine, or at least female protagonist, on the big screen? Carey Mulligan's sixteen year old schoolgirl in An Education (2009) comes to mind; so does Andre Techine's eponymous youth in Girl on a Train (same year), Melissa Leon's working class mother in Courtney Hunt's Frozen River (2008) and, on a more pop level, Angelina Jolie's double agent in Philip Noyce's Salt (2010). But Jolie's espionage caper is a simpleminded shoot-em-up with breasts attached; I was thinking more of Linda Fiorentino's smart, sexy Bridget Gregory in John Dahl's hard-edged noir The Last Seduction (1994)--now there was a woman (with a wicked sense of humor, no less) willing to do whatever it takes to get what she wanted, humanity (not to mention nine out of ten commandments) be damned. Going further there's the eponymous housewife in Filipino filmmaker Laurice Guillen's classic Salome (1981) and the serial lover in Guillen's much underrated Init sa Magdamag (Midnight Passion, 1983)--films where women are willful entities who struggle bitterly to assert their right to their own sexuality, even their right to choose their own path of self-destruction. Lisbeth Salander sports a Mohawk hairdo and corresponding attitude but when push comes to shove she's really a softie at heart, a girl scout, right hand to breast and the other raised in familiar salute.

First published in Businessworld. 3.31.11

The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom, 2009)

I say 'whip it!'--Jessica Alba in The Killer Inside Me

Bad to the bone

Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me (2010) is a mess. It largely misses the import of noir writer Jim Thompson's gleefully evil 1952 novel the same time it visualizes the book's most violent setpieces with unflinching courage. It's strong in many ways, yet seems completely clueless about the inimitable Thompson flavor--the sulfurous taint you taste with every helping of his bleakly funny fiction.

It's a perilous task, adapting Thompson; he seems so deceptively easy, so surprisingly difficult to bring to the big screen (Sam Fuller once said of Thompson's 1959 The Getaway that the book could serve as the movie's own shooting script--it's full of intricate plot, memorable dialogue, and little fat). But Burt Kennedy's 1976 version of The Killer Inside Me turned out to be a mostly toothless affair (despite featuring Stacy Keach as a massive Lou Ford), and Sam Peckinpah--"Bloody Sam" he's sometimes called, whose balletic slow-motion despair might have beautifully realized Thompson's terminal nihilism--ended his 1972 The Getaway at the point when it should have gotten really interesting. Critic and poet Geoffrey O'Brien called Thompson a "Dimestore Dostoevsky" and while Thompson's writing doesn't have the magnitude and complexity of Dostoevsky's moral vision, he does seem to share Dostoevsky's uncanny understanding of abnormal and criminal minds.

Stephen Frears did a good job adapting The Grifters (1990) from Thompson's 1963 novel--the whirling, fast-talking world of malignant gamblers, crooked businessmen, and money-grubbing con artists served as a seductive, glittering facade against which moved a figure of pure evil. Bernard Tavernier managed an even more difficult feat, transposing Thompson's 1964 work Pop. 1280 from a racist town in what is possibly Texas to the equally racist French West Africa (where the first slaves were shipped to the Americas) in Coup de Torchon (Blow to the head, 1981), and shooting what is said to be Thompson's darkest novel in the relentless African sunshine. Tavernier captures much of the dark humor, throwing in a few jokes of his own--the film's opening states that it was adapted from Pop. 1280; the end credits say it's from Pop. 1275, and it takes us a few moments to remember five whites died during the course of the picture.

The Killer Inside Me is not quite on the level of Pop. 1280, but builds up considerable irony on its own--the narrator Lou Ford, the town's deputy sheriff, presents himself as an affable bumpkin; the book's essential action strips away that facade to reveal an opportunistic schemer not above committing murder to exact revenge or protect himself, then peels away that layer to reveal a psychopath, pure and simple. Winterbottom sets himself a difficult task, attempting to replicate this action mostly without the use of Thompson's first-person voiceover; besides a few lines of narration taken from the book, Affleck's Ford keeps his thoughts to himself.

The task proves too difficult; without that constant voiceover we feel little empathy for the character, fail to follow close his descent down Thompson's noir hell. Possibly Robert Bresson, a master of the voiced narrative, could have done something about evoking the vast distance between what Ford says and what he does (or what he eventually says in an attempt to explain what he does)--Bresson's 1959 Pickpocket (basically Crime and Punishment set in the streets of Paris) could be seen as spiritually connected to Thompson's book, the eponymous criminal a distant cousin of Lou Ford. Winterbottom is no slouch at adaptation, but where I think he's brilliant at bringing a writer like Thomas Hardy to vivid cinematic life (as witness his 1996 and 2000 adaptations of Jude the Obscure" and The Mayor of Casterbridge), Thompson seems to keep a step or two ahead of him, playing existential games in a way Winterbottom can't quite understand, much less capture on film.

That said, the film isn't a total botch--in many cruder ways, it's a powerful experience. Casey Affleck's Lou Ford is a hoarse-voiced softshoe seducer whose tired-looking eyes bring to mind someone who just woke up and hasn't caught up with what's really going on--perfect guise for a killer. When he goes into action, the disconnect between his tired eyes and his efficient, economical moves helps evoke some of the disconnect Thompson was striving for in his novel.

Where I think Winterbottom really comes into his own is in the casting and directing of Jessica Alba as Joyce Lakeland: Thompson pictured a hardened pro, Winterbottom casts a waiflike angel with a stripper's bod (her sex scenes with Affleck have real sexual heat to them, and Affleck bends and clutches and mauls her body in ways that seem both playful and painful). Winterbottom exploits Alba's eagerness to please her director and win critical respect the way Lou exploits Joyce's eagerness to please him, and the parallels are doubly unsettling. When Lou pulls back and delivers a blow to Joyce's face, her response of hurt bewilderment is every bit as horrific as the beating that follows--it's like looking at a bright child prodigy, model student and teacher's pet who doesn't understand why she's being punished. She waits patiently, uselessly for an explanation that will never come. 

Alba's Joyce helps put some kind of alternate complexion to Thompson's nihilism, bring it closer to what Dostoevsky had in mind. It wasn't just human depravity that was the Russian novelist's unique province; he insisted on writing about human grace and redemption, on the light as well as the shadow, arguing that in many ways one cannot exist without the other. Winterbottom seems to want to suggest that kind of dichotomy, risking huge plot imponderables along the way. A brave attempt--not quite successful, but worth seeing, even acknowledging as such.

First published in Businessworld, 10.07.10

"Psycho" (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Mama's boy

(Warning: story discussed in close detail)

It's been fifty years--half a century--since Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho first screened in theaters, and for the occasion there are plenty of articles written for the occasion. Jack Sullivan in the Wall Street Journal insists that Bernard Herrmann's slashing music score not only enhanced the infamous shower scene, but saved the film; J. Hoberman sketches the historical context in which the film appeared (it was released in roughly the same period as Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura), then reprints in whole Andrew Sarris' then freshly-minted appreciation:

“Psycho should be seen at least three times by any discerning film-goer, the first time for the sheer terror of the experience...the second time for the macabre comedy inherent in the conception of the film; and the third for all the hidden meanings and symbols lurking beneath the surface...”

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009)

Tattoo you

Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (from the novel by Stieg Larsson) isn't bad; if anything, it's the best example I've seen recently of the by-now ridiculous serial-killer genre.

I like the strong feminist context. I like it that Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is the real protagonist, both confronting and chasing after the killer, and that journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is mostly a Boy Friday, providing access and information (and the occasional late-night boinking, with Lisbeth firmly on top), by film's end acting as Dude in Distress for Lisbeth to rescue.

I like the way Oplev instills a chilly mood to the film--the ever-pervasive sense of cold; the dark mood, even in broad daylight (Thanks to Jens Fischer and Eric Kress); the ominous music (Jacob Groth). 

As for the rape scenes--understand that Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson) is basically a foreshadowing of the evil yet to come, but the actual assaults are so extended and so intensely staged and acted they tend to upend everything that follows. There could be a rational for this--to suggest how frightening a character could be, have him (or her) do something frightening right off; then you can have the audience flinch at the sight of him for the rest of the picture. But Bjurman is not the killer, and his story only has a thematic and not direct relationship with the main plotline; we basically have a subplot that's taken over the picture, in terms of tone and impact.

To be fair (skip the next three paragraphs if you plan to see the picture) when you do meet the killer, he's chillingly matter-of-fact. Bjurman is all sweaty eagerness; the actual killer has the calm and confidence of a practiced veteran (that little business about the glass of water is brilliant). More, he sounds and looks reasonable; you have to think his words through to realize he's a sociopath, and (most disturbing of all) some of the things he says reflects what some politicians, in the United States and in Europe, are saying nowadays. 

Larsson is an outspoken liberal; he writes (or wrote--the manuscripts were submitted shortly before his death at the age of 44) on the side of the angels, and there's a righteous liberal fury burning away at the heart of his story. But he tends to go soft sometimes; you can tell from the climactic chase between Lisbeth and the killer that he wants to absolve her from any irredeemable wrongdoing, that he's basically preparing her for the sequels to come (there are two more books, in fact).

And Larsson tends to paint with a broad brush. If we are to believe him, every powerful man is a potential if not actual rapist and possible serial killer; of the family of Vangers, three are Nazi sympathizers (funny the women are briefly but never seriously considered suspects--the novel's title actually translates as "Man Who Hates Women"). Ultimate evil is a soundproofed basement, and a man rich enough and intelligent enough to indulge his hobbies for decades without giving himself away.

I don't quite subscribe to that; Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer points to a more persuasive villain, one that can't be as easily attacked by a golf club or a laptop computer, though perhaps at best you can uncover an operation or two--try, anyway. Oplev does well with what he's got but in my book Polanski does more, with less. No need for rapes or soundproofed basements--the violations are more insidious, more metaphysical, and the secrets kept hidden under a more secure set of locks and keys. 

Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Dreck on wheels

Death Proof (2007), Quentin Tarantino's contribution to the Grindhouse omnibus released together in the USA earlier this year, is having its solo premiere in Manila's commercial theaters. How does this slightly longer version play, so many months later?

Pretty much the same. Tarantino has added a few minutes of eye candy--Vanessa Ferlito manages to do her lap dance for Kurt Russell (who luckily isn't wearing his Escape from New York eyepatch) instead of having the entire scene written off as a 'missing reel' (the film for those that need the explanation replicates every aspect of the grindhouse theater experience including scratched prints, mismatched footage (the film's midpoint sequence is in black and white), and lost scenes). Russell later manages to caress Rosario Dawson's dangling toes while passing her car door ("He accidentally brushed against my feet. It was creepy"); I'm assuming the director is indulging his fetish for feet (many of the women wear flip-flops or walk about shoeless or prop said limbs up high at the slightest excuse, purely for our delectation) and perhaps Latina women (Russell closely studies Ferlito's lap dance, enjoys the feel of Dawson's soles).

Tarantino does his level best to reproduce '70s style cinematography, from the garish colors to the bright lighting to the racking focus practiced by Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond. More anachronistic are the stealthy tracking shots that glide across rooms past people and furniture (a trademark move by a director who (presumably) likes the sense of foreboding), not to mention the numerous long takes of people speaking pages of his dialogue to each other.

The dialogue--Tarantino's talk is more or less enjoyable, but the rhythms, the way his people chat and curse have become (from the eight previous feature films I've seen) terribly familiar. "You know," says Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), "how people say 'You're okay in my book' or 'In my book, that's no good?' Well, I actually have a book. And everybody I ever meet goes in this book. And now I've met you, and you're going in the book." Rhythm and repetition and recycled twists of syntax are the tricks of his trade, the word 'book' like a regular beat to each sentence (my book, a book, this book), the word 'have' a kind of exclamation point changing the nature of the statement, referring not just to a theoretical 'book' but an actual, physical object Russell produces in his hand. Said dialogue can be funny ("I don't wear their teeth marks on my butt for nothing"), it can be chilling ("It would have been a while before you started getting scared"), but it all sounds as if it had been spoken by the same mouth, composed by the same mind. Tarantino really needs to listen more to the great variety of speech patterns and accents found in the United States at the very least, maybe throw in a foreign accent or three, maybe even a deaf-mute (maybe not; his Bride in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 didn't talk, and she was a dull, dull girl before she was allowed to express herself more in Kill Bill Vol. 2).

I've always declared that Tarantino was a better writer than filmmaker, and perhaps a genius at casting (John Travolta in Pulp Fiction; Robert Forster and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, David Carradine in Kill Bill Vol. 2)), that his default style (sinuous or static long takes) was mostly a way for him to present his dialogue properly. The first half of Death Proof doesn't do much to change my assessment--talk, talk, talk, mostly in the one bar, with maybe Ferlito's lap dance thrown in to relieve the verbiage. Midpoint in the movie, when Russell's Chevy Nova smashes into an oncoming car, the collision is all repeated slow motion and (I'm assuming) digitally enhanced carnage (a severed leg, a tire wheel literally rubbing someone's face out). The second setpiece sequence, a faceoff between Russell in a Dodge Charger and a second set of girls in a white Dodge Challenger ("Kowalski!" exclaims Tracie Thoms, recognizing the reference to Richard Serafian's great 1971 road movie Vanishing Point) is a different creature altogether; I wouldn't blame anyone for skipping the film's first hour to sit in at this far superior second one, a duel between two muscle car classics that's shot (far as I can see) entirely without computer effects or even an undercranked camera--just real cars racing at real speeds, a real stuntwoman (Bell playing herself) clinging with near-real panic to the hood of the car.

As an advertisement for feminine empowerment the movie is a dodgy proposition: we're asked to accept the dismembering of the first set of girls by Russell's Stuntman Mike as setup for the second set of girls to take vengeance, with the second set's main justification for surviving being that they don't do booze or drugs, that two of them (like Mike) are professional stuntmen, and (most importantly) that one of them (Thoms) carries a gun. An earlier exchange between the girls ("You can't get around the fact that people who carry guns, tend to get shot more than people who don't." "And you can't get around the fact that if I go down to the laundry room in my building at midnight enough times, I might get my ass raped.") is entirely justified by Mike's appearance on the scene ("See?" you can imagine the less skeptical in the audience pointing out to each other, "Good thing they were packing."). I won't go so far as say Tarantino is anti-gun control, only that he's simply following the anarchically amoral conventions of the genre; it follows, then, that just because an innocent biker gets brutally thrown against a roadside signboard and the girls leave one of their own (Lee, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, whose only crime seems to be a serious case of stupidity) behind, presumably to be raped, one shouldn't be upset; such elements are only to be expected in these kinds of pictures.

Sure, fine; whatever. Perhaps my biggest problem with this tribute to those kinds of pictures is that it seems so superfluous, at least to us Filipinos. We have grindhouse-type theaters showing grindhouse-type fare, in Cubao, in Manila; we have prints full of scratches and missing reels, moldering away in our unairconditioned warehouses. We have politically incorrect movies--brutal rapes, shameless melodramas, slipshod action vehicles, rubbery monster suits splashing about in gallons of patently faux blood (for some reason, possibly budgetary (and for all I know they've since corrected this), our fake blood is pinker than Hollywood's) of a number and variety to rival any American filmmakers' most outrageous, most perverse tastes.

Here comes Tarantino spending over thirty million dollars (over sixty if you count Robert Rodriguez's contribution) faking what we've been doing for decades and you want to ask--couldn't he just hand all that money over directly to our filmmakers instead? It would be less trouble for everyone all around.

(Published in Businessworld 12/14/07)

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)

Compulsion

Perhaps the single most surprising fact about Zodiac is that David Fincher directed it--one might think that Alan J. Pakula had been raised from his grave and given a far larger budget than when he did All the President's Men (1976), or that Sidney Lumet had been asked to remake his Prince of the City (1981) with a hunt for a psychopath at its center, or that Curtis Hanson--an excellent thriller filmmaker who raised the stakes mid-career when he made his epic L.A. Confidential (1997)--had suddenly developed a taste for serial killers. Fincher, a music video director turned feature filmmaker, showed such taste early on; he first became famous for the grotesque Se7en (1995--about a man who staged his killings around the Seven Deadly Sins), but had already made an earlier film about a nonhuman killer (Alien³, 1992) and later, a film about a serial terrorist prankster (Fight Club, 1999). Whatever the story, Fincher's camera seems to constantly seek out and focus on the character living or even temporarily thrown outside the norm (of society, of humanity) looking in, his actions dictated by his needs or obsessions.

A quick comparison of the two filmmakers should be instructive. I've always admired Hanson's attention to detail, storytelling skill, and gift for characterization, something that's kept him in good stead in films from L.A. Confidential to 8 Mile (2002) to his latest this year, Lucky You; overall, he makes clearer, more coherent films than Fincher. But with Fincher I've always had expectations, often disappointed by his not exactly disciplined approach--Alien³ was a shaky-camera mess, Se7en's plot was preposterous (genius killer who slays to make a philosophical point?),   Fight Club was brilliant satire that degenerated into comic-book ludicrousness (a worldwide conspiracy of bomb-planting waiters?). That said, there's a look to each of his films that often varied in tone and palette (from the ambers of Alien³ to the murky grays of Se7en to the sumptuous sheen of Fight Club), but was almost always ringed by an encroaching, ever-present gloom. Few recent Hollywood filmmakers made shadows as menacing as Fincher, and you suspect that if you ever opened up his cranium and peeked inside, you'd find the world viewed through similarly darkened lenses.

Then came Zodiac, where Fincher successfully trains those lenses on a script (by James Vanderbilt, based on the books by Robert Graysmith (played here by Jake Gyllenhaal)) that either Pakula or Lumet or Hanson might have been happy--might have killed--to direct. The film covers the nearly ten years starting 1968 during which the Zodiac Killer terrorized San Francisco, and during which the police force tried to hunt him down; it goes on to trace Graysmith's investigations of the killer, past the publication of his book on the subject in 1986, and some time after that. It deals with roughly twenty characters (portrayed by a cast of excellent actors, from Gyllenhaal to Robert Downey Jr. to Mark Ruffalo to Brian Cox to Chloe Sevigny, John Getz, Candy Clark, Elias Koteas, Charles Fleischer, Philip Baker Hall), at least half a dozen of them major, and ranges all over San Francisco (and some cities nearby), from the murder sites to the police precincts to the newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle to even the apartments and houses of various people involved.

It's a huge, sprawling project, and a viewer might be forgiven for not getting all the particulars straight (this film, if any recent mainstream film ever did, demands additional viewings); more, there's so much story to tell, so much detail to wade through, that Fincher barely has time to illuminate the motives of anyone involved (the killer himself exists mostly as a glimpsed-at shadowy figure, a few brief scenes, and a quick climactic confrontation). Critics have cited this as a major flaw, but I see it as a change in Fincher's point of view, a change of heart, almost. Ever a man to glory in the surface, even texture, of his pictures, Fincher here is using surface--what a man does in killing, and what people do in trying to capture him--to suggest the mystery of what goes on underneath (the surface of things, of one's cranium), in this particular case the extremes to which a man will go to obey his need to kill, accomplish, explore, question, believe; beyond that, the film's surface suggests that truism with which any ambitious artist must eventually come to grips, the ultimate unknowability of things, the sense that final solutions or answers are rare, or false, or often impossible.

Actually, Fincher seems to have been straining to evoke this throughout his career. In Se7en, for example, we hear the killer's rationale, but we barely understand it, much less accept it at face value (as a detective so callowly put it: "You're a movie of the week. You're a fucking t-shirt, at best"); in The Game (1997) the nightmarish circumstances in which a man suddenly finds himself turns out to have (after two hours of chase and anguish) an all-encompassing explanation (and even when the credits roll, you wonder if that IS the final explanation); in Fight Club we never get a clear reason for the protagonist's split personality. In each of these near-fantasy settings, however (Fincher's films almost always seem to be set a few years in the future, or in some alternate reality), the mystery seems more like a conceit to get an unlikely premise rolling; they're easy to accept because they seem so shallowly conceived--gimmicks to help a gimmicky director.

Zodiac is different: thoroughly grounded in the San Francisco of the '60s and '70s, it creates a familiar, even banal everyday world, one we've seen and come to take for granted after years of films and TV shows, here presented to us--thanks to Harry Savides' use of the Thomson Viper FilmStream Digital Camera--in all its larger-than-life glory (the inspiration was American photographer Stephen Shore's '70s pictures). Occasionally Fincher would cut loose--an overhead shot of Paul Stine's taxicab, from killer's pickup to driver's death; a hilariously creepy visit to film projectionist Bob Vaughn's cavernous basement--but these moments seem more like baroque curlicues, to frame the essential realism of the film, a realism with slightly deeper shadows than one might normally expect.

The effect is unsettling, to say the least--like Blue Velvet, David Lynch's vision of small-town life (Zodiac would be Fincher's vision of big-city life), we're given a glittering shell, and can't help but be aware of the void beneath; more, the portrait of obsession (the film isn't so much about the killer as it is the effects the killer has had on those hunting him) uncannily mirrors Fincher's own obsessive qualities in making this film (aside from the painstaking work of recreating '70s San Francisco, Fincher and his collaborators spent an additional eighteen months conducting their own investigation into the Zodiac case). The two hour-plus film (the running time is roughly a hundred and fifty-eight minutes, and word is the DVD release will have an even longer director's cut) is arguably Fincher's Dorian Gray painting--a source of dark power, and Fincher's best chance yet for artistic immortality.

(First published in Businessworld, 6/1/07)

Hannibal (Ridley Scott, 2001)

Inspired by the Film Criticism Blogathon:

Days of swine and grossness

Noel Vera

(Fragment of a rejected draft for Ridley Scott's Hannibal)

BARN INTERIOR. NIGHT.

A fully grown BABE enters large wooden arena with his fellow boars. In the center of the arena is a forklift; tied to this forklift is a large man in a hockey mask.

BABE: Are you my mom?

MAN: No little pig. My name is Dr. Lecter. Why do you ask?

BABE: Never saw my mom so when I meet someone I ask. Otherwise I suppose I should go ahead and eat your toes.

LECT: You are welcome little pig but allow me to satisfy my curiosity: do you miss your mother?

BABE: O yes sir.

LECT: I too suffered loss when young, the death of my beloved sister. That story is told in the latest novel about me, not in this film version which seems to lack heart. Do you like heart little pig?

BABE: Yes sir! Especially when it's still beating.

LECT: So do I little pig so do I.

BABE: If you don't mind sir I'll start on your big toe now

LECT: But I do mind little pig. Not that I disapprove of your snacking; you are after all trained to eat human flesh, and as we are already shared childhood confidences I have no objection to sharing my toes with you. I am however disappointed in my current situation.

BABE: You mean being tied up? Why is that sir? Are you a bad man?

LECT: Very bad little pig. I am what you might call a man without hypocrisy; I treat the world exactly as it would treat me, kill or be killed, without regard for sentiments that might compel me otherwise. 

BABE: But isn't that what I do? If someone tries to hurt me I hurt him.

LECT: There's a difference. You do what you do in innocence, without guilt or remorse. Even feeding on my feet would be understandable, since you were no doubt starved beforehand and would like to rip my leg off at the knee.

BABE: Oh yes sir may I?

LECT: You speak so avidly because you speak with your whole heart. We do similar things, but certain sentiments are supposed to hold me back such as 'justice' or 'morality.' I don't heed these sentiments and so am considered insane.

But that was then; things have changed. There were three novels written about me by Mr. Thomas Harris, and in the first one, Red Dragon, he called me a monster.

BABE: Weren't you mad when he did that?

LECT: He did a fine job of portraying me, despite the insult; he amused me. In the second novel, The Silence of the Lambs--lovely title, don't you think?--even gave me a more interesting diversion, a young woman by the name of Clarice. You should meet her little pig; you would get along well.

BABE: Does she like heart too?

LECT: She won't admit it but I'm sure she can be persuaded. She has your innocence little pig, your idealism and freshness. She wanted to catch a killer, and I decided to help her. Mr. Harris in turn liked that about me; it touched something in him that I was capable of such kindness, and his attitude towards me softened considerably. Of course while everyone worried about Starling's killer I managed to escape--Mr. Harris probably felt pleased I showed such initiative, dismayed that I showed such independence.

BABE: But see you're caught again!

LECT: That's because we are near the climax of Mr. Harris' third novel Hannibal, named after yours truly thanks to the success of the second novel.

Hannibal was the end result of Harris' evolving attitude towards me. Where in the second he felt ambivalence in the third he shows definite sympathy. It helps that the morality of a serial killer doesn't seem so bad, compared to the corruption and stupidity of institutions Mr. Harris once respected--the police, the FBI, the U.S. Government as a whole. Hannibal's real story is Harris' growing disenchantment with society; it's both his declaration of independence from the rest of the human race and his oath of fealty towards m, ah sensibilities, for want of a better word. Quite a disturbing book in its implications when you think about it, at times cartoonishly written and not entirely persuasive. My nemesis for example, Mr. Mason Verger, is more grotesque than evocative, a horrorshow scarecrow rather than the greater evil to oppose my already great evil. Mr. Harris also hoped to make me more appealing to readers by 'explaining' me through the death of my sister. I had their sympathy all along of course--didn't need the help. But Mr. Harris didn't want me to just be the protagonist; he wanted me to be the romantic lead.

BABE: You mean with Clarice?

LECT: Yes little pig very good: with Clarice indeed. I hope I can introduce you to her, she'll be along any moment now to rescue me.

BABE: You still haven't said why you're so disappointed. Or should I ask? I'm really starving.

LECT: Appreciate your forbearance. In the first novel I was the inspiration for the killer named Dolarhyde; in the second I was the imprisoned monster who begins to show signs of compassion. The more known of me the more I shrink in stature, the more human I become to readers. It is a transaction of sorts, awe traded for affection. I suppose ambivalence would be the most natural reaction I can have towards this change. Still hungry little pig? You are drooling heavily now.

BABE: Yes sir very much. Couldn't I just nibble on a toenail?

LECT: Not much longer now. All three novels were made into motion pictures. Red Dragon was adapted by Mr. Michael Mann into Manhunter, a rather cold film with a nevertheless interesting visual texture. But Silence was the real success, commercially and critically winning a collection of what are known as "Oscar" statuettes.

BABE: Are Oscars good to eat?

LECT: You need a lot of ketchup.

Part of the success of Silence may be due to its director. Mr. Jonathan Demme is a fascinating man, full of empathy and compassion for the characters in his films.

BABE: He likes heart too?

LECT: Very much. Please step back little pig your sniffing tickles my toes. Thank you. At the same time, Mr. Demme told the more gruesome aspects of my story--my violent and bloody escape, for example--with real relish. You see, little pig, he tends to empathize with all his characters, good or bad; he must have been disturbed to find himself empathizing with me. 

More he has been accused of homophobia, which shocked him; he had carefully established what Harris also stated in his novel--that the killer Buffalo Bill was not a real transsexual. But the power of the word on the printed page is nothing compared to the power of the image on the silver screen: people saw a man trying to become a woman by killing other women; some equated transsexuals with serial killers. Demme was dismayed with the end result--the outcry and the audience reaction--that he presumably refused to direct the third film.

BABE: Who did it then?

LECT: Shan't tell you if you don't step back a little further. Thank you. Mr. Ridley Scott directed, with the help of producer Dino de Laurentiis.

BABE: Does Mr. Scott like heart?

LECT: Don't think he has one. Ridley Scott is a gifted hack, able to pour his considerable visual skills on both gold and garbage alike. He was the unfortunate choice to do Hannibal, unfortunate because he doesn't seem to have or seems to have lost the ability to tell a story with clarity and coherence. He begins the film for example with a fish-market shootout where you couldn't tell who was doing what to whom, what was happening or why--very confusing the way it was shot and put together. I dislike confusion little pig; I dislike it intensely.

More, you miss Mr. Demme's way with characters, his knack of using a telling detail or line of dialogue to reveal a person. Take my dear Barney, for example: in Silence, he has a brief scene in the hospital where he explains the rules when entering my cell to Starling, gives her a warm smile and tells her: "you'll do just fine." Later I thanked him for the services he's done for me, and Mr. Demme treats the quiet little moment as the culmination of years of acquaintance and respect--he is in those few seconds in Silence a richer, warmer human being than he is in the many minutes he enjoys in Hannibal. Then there are my face-to-face interviews with Starling, which have an intimacy missing in Hannibal--Demme photographed us full on, in giant close-up, to catch every nuance and shift of emotion; Scott has us talking through cellular phones with a merry-go-around whirling behind, as if he felt that what we were saying wasn't interesting enough. Demme’s focus in short is on the human face; Scott’s seems to be on the merry-go-round.

Scott likes to pose his characters against beautiful landscapes and setting suns, substituting visual drama for the missing narrative drama. He is careless about action sequences, unable to build much suspense (Mr. Demme does a better job creating tension with his flowing camerawork and elegant, unhurried editing). Scott ultimately is a shallow director who loves surfaces; any profundity in his work comes from the script, and the script of this film comes from a novel that does not represent Mr. Harris at his best.

That is it in a nutshell, little pig. I am perhaps not too unhappy with the my growing fame…but I am unhappy about Mr. Harris' inability to maintain the level of writing in his third novel, and extremely unhappy about this slipshod vulgar insulting little film they have made of the novel, all for the sake of money. Hence my distress.

BABE: But that's awful! Terrible! Those swine!

LECT: Aren't they, little pig? "Free-range rubes," I like to call them. Free for the picking--only I'm incapable of doing any picking at the moment.

BABE: Let me help you.

LECT: Certainly. But how little pig?

BABE: I don't know. I can bite their toes off.

LECT: If you go back into the pen from which you came you'll see to the left side the latch that keeps the door closed. Take a stick in your mouth and lift the latch. Go right, take the first stairs you see, and you'll be in the arena's upper seating. Ridley Scott should be the rube in the red shirt to the left of the camera, Dino de Laurentiis the rube in the yellow jacket behind Scott.

BABE: Gotcha.

LECT: Have you ever heard of Dante Alighieri? He wrote a long poem, part of which was called Inferno, where various sinners were punished, their punishments formulated according to the nature of their crimes.

BABE: Gosh, really?

LECT: Don't kill those two, little pig; it's important to me that they remain alive. De Laurentiis deserves to live for producing La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, Mandingo, Flash Gordon, and Danger: Diabolik. Scott deserves to live for the lovely images of Florence, and for the blackly amusing way he staged the climactic dinner--the single best scene in the picture. His life should also be spared in the hope, foolish perhaps, that he will someday gain the courage to do at least one more film of consequence. Will you do this for me, little pig?

BABE: It'll be my pleasure. Should I bring you back some toes?

LECT: Thank you, but I'm not that hungry at the moment. Bon appetit.

(With thanks to my evil twin brother  for the initial idea).

(First published in Businessworld, 3/2/01)

Keka (Quark Henares, 2003

From my old blog--Quark Henares' Keka



I can see where Quark borrows--basically, Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black with maybe a little of Brocka's Angela Markado (which takes off from Truffaut), some heavy influencing by Mike de Leon's Batch '81 and, I'm guessing here, deadpan black-comedy tone via the Coen Brothers. I wouldn't know where "Kill Bill" comes in--I'd say Quark and Tarantino just followed parallel muses.

Nothing wrong with borrowing; as a matter of fact, Tarantino's bag is bigger and more varied. But there's borrowing extensively and there's making a film; one requires knowledge, the other talent. Tarantino's knowledge may be far bigger, but I'd give Quark, smaller budget and all, the credit for being the better talent, somewhat. He knows how to cut and frame his images, he knows how to put together his shots and make them flow. It's not just a style cobbled together by an expert cinematographer and a good editor; it's a look that's an extension of the filmmaker's sensibility. Well, I suppose Tarantino has an edge on scriptwriting--though I'd say that's an extension of his grab-bag knowledge.

But Quark's young--damned young. He'll grow, for sure.

Some flaws: the Bhong character feels more like a plot function, and his and Katya's conversations seem unbelievable, talking so breezily about murder and all; I thought it would have streamlined matters better if she went at it alone, and the relationship be mainly a triangle betwee murderer, cop, and intended victim.

Also, the psychology isn't deep; this isn't much of a character study of a young girl turned vengeful psychotic. The motive felt weak--Angela Markado had a far better reason for cracking up and killing (so did The Bride in Kill Bill, come to think of it). There are some plot loopholes--the cop when he realizes the answer shouldn't have gone elsewhere to confirm his suspicions, he should have gone straight to the girl. I'd like the confrontation between girl and final victim to have been more physically inventive.

But those are minor cavils, especially the ones about psychology--at least, they don't totally destroy enjoyment of the film per se. Quark, unlike say fellow Filipino filmmakers Erik Matti or Yam Laranas, know how to juggle his storyteling, to inject just enough style to make the film watchable, pay enough attention to the story so that it's not blatantly stupid, give enough emphasis to character and story so that your interest is sustained. He knows how to keep his balance, in other words.

It's fun; I think the best part is the musical number, which makes fun of and at the same time is an affectionate tribute to all those musical numbers in local commercial films (I think Quark's best humor comes from his knowledge of his social class and age group, and from his knowledge of local cinema).

I think the final final scene is fairly original (at least I don't remember anything exactly like it, if someone could tell me otherwise please do so), a sort of joke about what kind of film this really is.

No, there's not a lot of profound social comment in this film. Some acid commentary, some satiric subtext of among others male models, untouchable politicians (or their sons), policemen, and the state of morality of the Filipino youth.

The film IS, however, a pretty accurate portrait of the state of mind of a certain kind of middle-class youth today, one that I'm sure the professors of a certain educatonal institution holds in utter contempt. Well, this is their movie, nor do I think they care about who would feel contempt for them. It's one more film to add to the diversity of Philippine cinema.

(The film is available on Netflix)