The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) in a 70 mm print

That'll be the day

Finally saw John Ford's The Searchers (1956) in a 70 mm print and the experience is as sprawling and expansive as the VistaVision landscape.

(WARNING: Plot of this 69-year-old film discussed in explicit detail!)

Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025)

'Who is that masked man?!'

I have yet to warm up to Ari Aster, a talented filmmaker who does inventively staged and shot twists on classic horror but has yet to deliver a cohesive feature. Hereditary his debut starts off with a fairly unique premise-- a mildly dysfunctional family where the horror arises not from supernatural evil or witches' covens but from a peanut allergy; later Aster drags in the evil and covens, in a weak-tea attempt to emulate Rosemary's Baby. Midsommar is Aster's stab at remaking The Wicker Man with twice the budget and half the subtle wit. Beau is Afraid is arguably his most original work-- or at least his work with the most wide-ranging influences such that it seems original, even autobiographical-- and perhaps the one feature I like best to date. 

Eddington feels like a step backwards. Aster starts off well-- he almost always starts off well-- introducing a small town and half a dozen of the interlinked characters of that town, mainly Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and his boss Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and as Phoenix usually plays characters who lean into their awkward grotesqueness and Pascal usually plays charismatic patriarch figures you can be sure these two alpha males will lock horns at the mayor's re-election campaign. 

The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021)

Power of the perverse

(Warning: some hints and suggestive talk about the film's narrative twists)

Jane Campion's latest-- her first feature in eleven years-- is hailed as one of her finest yet; high praise considering, for the director of Sweetie, The Piano, Bright Star, Top of the Lake among others. 

Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone)

Anti-social distancing

(Warning: story and plot twists described in explicit detail)

Locked down and stewing in your home, it can be a relief to view the works of Sergio Leone, particularly the later titles. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; Once Upon a Time in the West; Duck, You Sucker; and Once Upon a Time in America all have the expansive feel of a tale told of long ago, set in a mythological West (or America) so vast it makes the real thing (glimpsed at in daguerreotypes) feel claustrophobic. A pipe dream, in effect, concocted by your favorite nutty uncle sitting at the fireside with other kids gathered round, listening raptly. 

America, about Jewish gangsters in Prohibition New York, may be Leone's most sprawling ambitious work and possibly his masterpiece but West is arguably perfection, impeccably cast and executed. Even the stunt of using Henry Fonda as villain pays off-- as the young boy looks slowly about him Leone inserts shots of his decimated family; enter the killers to the blare of an electric guitar, emerging from the surrounding brush like wraiths. The killers approach, and at one point the camera following behind swings around to peer at one of the faces and it's Mr. Lincoln-- sorry, Mr. Fonda, not so Young anymore, as hired gunslinger Frank. The lined face the pale blue eyes, so iconic in American films, are pitiless here, faintly contemptuous even.

Wichita (Jacques Tourneur, 1955)

A good man with a gun

(Yet another film on the soon-to-vanish (Nov. 29) Filmstruck--in this case easily found on other venues (Google Play and iTunes) but difficult to find in Cinemascope; even Turner Classic Movies resorted to showing the cropped pan-and-scan version. Filmstruck presents the film in its original aspect ratio, and if ever the term 'quietly glorious' applied to a picture it applies to this. Again the plea: make the site (or one like it) available again--and available to other countries!) 

Say the name 'Jacques Tourneur' and the first word that comes to mind for most folks is 'horror' (the second possibly 'cat'). Tourneur has been directing since 1931 (mainly shorts) finally made a splash in the early '40s working for producer Val Lewton in Cat People (lowbudget, eerily beautiful) and I Walked With a Zombie (despite the pulpy title, my favorite adaptation of Jane Eyre). Say his name and the word 'westerns' rarely pops up--but his westerns do in fact represent some of his finest most memorable work.

Hell or High Water (David Mckenzie)

Cops and robbers

David Mackenzie's Hell or High Water, from a script by Taylor Sheridan (Sicario) turns on a terrifically compelling premise: that brothers Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine and Ben Foster respectively) are so financially threatened by the reverse mortgage loan lent them by a bank--the fictional Texas Midlands--for their recently deceased mother's treatment that they've taken to carefully robbing that same bank's smaller branches (teller's drawers only; no vaults, no bundles, no large bills) to repay the loan.

The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino)

Eight is enough

Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (released on DVD earlier this year) is reportedly his most middling production yet, with decent (not great) boxoffice numbers, with critics divided more than usual-- some calling it "a high-wire thriller" and "quintessentially American," others declaring it "Tarantino's worse." 

Birdman (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, 2014), Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948), I Love Melvin (Don Weis, 1953)

Up up and away

(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail here--in short, watch the film first!)

For  ninety percent of its running time Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Birdman (2014) is great fun, an immersive experience of the craziness that is the Broadway stage production that you appreciate especially if you know something about the theater stage or if you know something about filmmaking, preferably both. 

Much of the picture (written by Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., and Armando Bo) dwells on the nitty-gritty of stagebound life as it swarms through the warren of narrow corridors and sudden corners and claustrophobic rooms backstage. Inarritu gets a lot right, from financing (forever wobbly) to accident-prone rehearsals (opening scene features a spotlight dropped on an actor's head) to the revolving-door sex lives of cast and crew to the power struggles between cast and crew--in particular the struggles of actor-producer-director Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton as the former star of three hit Birdman movies) to control his production (a stage adaptation of the Raymond Carver story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love") and its one mercurial star, stage actor Mike Shiner (Ed Norton at his abrasive best).  

Keaton of course was the star of Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns, and this is supposed to add a meta-dimension to his ex-Birdman character (personally I prefer the Burtons, the latter being in my book a great comic-book film). More interesting than the casting (Keaton's always been a nervy, unpredictable performer) is the decision to have the superhero's voice speak to Riggan in his head--a device borrowed I'm guessing from Frank Miller's seminal Batman comic-book mini-series, The Dark Knight Returns, where an aging Bruce Wayne is haunted by his cowled persona (the avenger's voice growls from inside the caverns of his subconscious, goading him into acts of aggression or insanity; Riggan responds or resists according to his mood at the moment, his changing circumstances). 

Inarritu's style helps, the long takes that wend their way up front and back stage, sometimes wandering into the streets outside--way I see it, these shots (known in the Philippine film industry as tuhog (skewered) shots) help the actors' performances breath, allow them the chance to control pacing and influence the mis-en-scene. Inarritu in using these shots evokes the continuity of a stage performance, the theater stage being what it's all about; interestingly it gives the segueways into fantasy a more unnerving feel, suggesting Riggan is having trouble distinguishing from what is real and what is not--it's all the same to him.

The film starts to become problematic about a hundred and ten minutes in: after The New York Times' theater critic Tabitha Dickinson (Lindsey Duncan, in a particularly uncharitable and unjust portrait) informs Riggan she's going to destroy him he goes into a tailspin; reality and fantasy flip positions at an accelerated pace, and suicide is attempted--not just once but three times. I know it's in the cards--portraits of artists in artistic deadlock usually have them seeking the ultimate exit door (see: 8 1/2, All That Jazz) but the repetition here hits a point of diminishing returns; it feels silly, as if Inarritu didn't know how to end his film and was trying on all kinds (symbolic, poetic, transcendent), to see which fits.

Oh, one can complain about half a dozen other things--the digital effects are second-rate, the Birdman costume especially cheesy (at least Keaton in Burton's Batman movies sported a cool black-armor look), the actors aren't really allowed any inward moments (they have to be intensely on all the time, a complaint I can level at the acting in practically all of Inarritu's pictures), the word 'understated' and 'restraint' don't really come to mind--but for once Inarritu's jagged over-the-top intensity has found an appropriate place to roost, or as appropriate as can be imagined. One can see him spreading his wings wide as he can (because the theater stage is meant to accommodate all kinds of outsized egos, because onstage all of us no matter how megalomanic are birds of a feather). One can see him crowing to the heavens, daring the gods to pull him down;  one (despite the flaws, despite reservations of all kinds) can be forgiven for being impressed. 


Suicide is painless

(Again--watch the film first!)
 
Easy to cite Fort Apache as exhibit #3 in any thorough reply to Quentin Tarantino's head-scratching rant against John Ford,  (#1 and #2 being Sergeant Rutledge and The Searchers respectively) but watching the film again on TCM (which came back to Dish Network just when I was about ready to abandon my barely tolerable cable provider) it occurred to me that I had little idea why I'd cite this as proof of Ford's racism, relative lack of. 

Oh, there are obvious reasons--it's basically a retelling of the Custer legend, with Lt. Col. Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) standing in for the famed general,  locations in Monument Valley for Little Big Horn. It's one of the earliest sympathetic portraits of Native Americans, with Cochise (the magnificently weathered visage of Miguel Inclan) speaking fluent Spanish (as opposed to Hollywood Indian) and outlining grave grievances against the U.S. government, promising defiance not out of sheer malevolence, but as the only sane reaction to continuous and systemic abuse. But if the film features Ford's ever-developing view of other races, it also shows Ford's ever developing view of racists--in particular, Fonda's Col. Thursday.  

Most folks remember Fonda as the soft-spoken idealist in The Grapes of Wrath, or the thoughtful, gangly lawyer in Young Mr. Lincoln. The forbidding, officious Thursday is probably far less well known, the same time it's probably closer to Fonda's true-life persona; here for perhaps the first time Ford gives that persona free rein on the big screen. Thursday is not a pleasant man: he's cold; by-the-book; at best a dictatorial father to his daughter, ironically named Philadelphia (Shirley Temple). Privately he's frustrated with his backwoods appointment and hungers for military glory; even more privately he feels nothing but contempt and mistrust for the Native Americans he has to deal with. 

It's a withering portrait of a racist and if that was all it was--amply aided by Fonda's oddly authentic performance--the film would certainly be memorable, perhaps great. What makes it greater, helps complicate the film's already involved emotional texture is the way Fonda sneaks under the radar to win our sympathy anyway, despite Thursday's racism. Where another officer frustrated in his dealings with the Native Americans might react in frustration, even fury, Fonda's Thursday reacts with a shellshocked bewilderment; it's as if he realized these were not the natives he was expecting to fight, nor was this the victory he expected to win. 

He grows if anything stiffer, even more officious, as if clinging in desperation to the tatters of his notion of military honor. Not because he's intellectually stupid--he can see what's going on, he knows he's badly beaten--but because he can't think of any other way to accept the inevitable. He backs himself into a version of honor--not the kind he had in mind but more honest, the kind one ends up with when faced with one's end. 

And John Wayne's Captain York can't help but respond: like Thursday York's all about the military; like Thursday York can be arrogant, insistent on his own way. Unlike Thursday York can back up his position with hard experience, at least in the west (you wonder how things might have panned out if it was York who had to fight in the Civil War). Given a choice--expose Thursday for the fool he was or forever keep his peace--York (Wayne, laying rest to the notion that he was at best a limited actor) gives us what may be the bitterest expression in all of cinema. 

Why? Not quite sure--possibly York felt more empathy for Thursday than he expected ("there but for the grace of God--"); possibly York realized that Thursday was pushed as much as chose his ultimate circumstances--that he was as blinkered as anyone facing a new foe in a new land, and--like York--all he had to fall back on when he stumbled was Army protocol. Silly and in the end suicidal...not to mention fully and recognizably human. 


I love Donald

Don Weis' I Love Melvin made a year after Singin in the Rain was obviously an effort to cash in the success of the former but in many ways I prefer this lesser-known nonclassic--for one thing they dumped the blandly good-looking lead star (Gene Kelly, who in this film does honor us with his visage in a cut-out mask) and went with the athletic comic relief (the glorious Donald O'Connor, who delivered the in my book greatest single dance number in Singin'), and while the lead love interest (Debbie Reynolds) remains numbingly pert and cheerful (can you imagine O'Connor having to deal with the inimitable Jean Hagen?), she partly makes up for this by donning a pointy helmet, curling up into a football, and having herself booted high into the air every night (it's a dance number).

And y'know what? It worked. Can't make the case that Melvin's songs are better than Singin's--they aren't--but I'd put up the former's dance numbers side-by-side against anything in the latter, with perhaps my personal favorite being O'Connor on roller skates in a gazebo (think how difficult it must have been to choreograph and shoot; beats Kelly splashing potholes in his tailor-made set, in my opinion). 

The ending (watch the film!) is gloriously loony, the plot being all about the value of appearances--Frank Schneider (Allyn Joslyn) wants a respectable husband for his daughter Judy (Reynolds); Judy a.k.a. Judy LeRoy (already with the screen name!) wants a Hollywood career; Melvin (O'Conner) wants Judy on the cover of Look Magazine, even if he has to fake the cover. 

Nice little reversal then when Melvin wakes up from a session of self-pity in the middle of Central Park and realizes Judy is on the cover of Look Magazine! Wish fulfillment at its most surreal, not to mention most charming (it's all a ruse in the name of love, and of course it's the girl who delivers). The lovers are reunited in the end, but that's not too big a reveal nor is it the point of the picture--and if I have to explain that, then you're overthinking all this. Which I would imagine is the real point of the picture.

Return of the Dragon (Celso Ad. Castillo, 1974)

(Entire film available online, dubbed in English)
 
Rampage the dragon 

Officially the '70s Golden Age of Philippine Cinema started with Lino Brocka's bildungsroman Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) a commercial and critical success; unofficially it's not so simple. Ishmael Bernal's sophisticated showbiz expose Pagdating sa Dulo (At the Top) screened two years earlier; Celso Ad. Castillo  began directing in the mid-60s and as early as the Fernando Poe Jr. gunslinger drama Asedillo (1971) showed a flair for visual and narrative drama that would mark him an equal to Brocka, Bernal, de Leon and O'Hara, if not their superior.

Don't think I can make the case that Ad. Castillo's Return of the Dragon is in any way superior to Brocka's Tinimbang (its contemporary); the former is an unabashedly commercial mishmash of Bruce Lee martial arts flick (Filipino actor Ramon Zamora cast and coiffed to look like the legendary star) and spaghetti western, the latter a neorealist mural of small-town life. That said, there's an exuberance, a marshaling of forces visual and aural in Return that's exciting to behold--a bold pop style that's not necessarily superior to Brocka's realism but different, with its own more modest ambitions, its own brashly gonzo integrity.

On first look it is bizarre. A band of thugs wearing Mexican Bandit Chic and grimy karategis massacres a (faintly Ifugao-looking) tribal community; Paylon (Ramon Zamora) swears vengeance on behalf of his wife Amihan (Lotis Key) and her deceased family, then proceeds to wipe out said gang, one sneering mustachioed hoodlum after another.

As revenge flicks go this one promises to push limits. A crucifixion-style torture session is performed in parallel with a gang rape; Paylon pinions a thug wheelbarrow-style, then pounds his crotch into steak tartare. Sometimes the violence is outre enough to constitute sadistic poetry, as when Paylon plunges a sword into a man's fundament offscreen, and we see the handle tremble to the rhythm of the man's fading heartbeat. As with the films of Chang Cheh, pain and body mutilation are the price of honor, same time you sense a faint homoeroticism fetishizing the bodies being mutilated (Homoeroticism? But of course! Men bathing at a river are beaten to death, their pubic patches flashing the screen like a bouquet of scattered blossoms; Paylon himself spends much screen time half-naked, his increasingly scarred flesh a scoreboard of progress towards his goal).

First indication that this might be more than just your run-of-the-mill revenge flick: Paylon's face as he plunges a dagger into someone's belly. His face is a portrait not of satisfaction but of agony, as if the knife were twisting in his own gut, and each succeeding death serves not to relieve that sense of suffering but intensify it.



The mystery is explained in flashback: Paylon was a pacifist turned lawman, with a long and bloody career of killing criminals; he had since grown sick of bloodshed and sought a life of peace (hence Amihan and her tribe). Amihan's death changes the situation: he forces himself to resume the violence, each murder in a sense an act of self-destruction as he murders yet another corner of his anguished soul.

It's an interesting dilemma that at the same time helps resolve an issue familiar to pulp revenge flicks: since you know the hero is faster and stronger than anyone, and you know it's just a matter of time till he achieves his goal, where's the suspense? Ad. Castillo substitutes a 'man-vs.-man' type conflict with 'man-vs.-himself:' a pacifist driven to kill despite his beliefs.

The key scene here is his encounter with Joaquin (Joaquin Fajardo). Disarmed and helpless, Joaquin pleads for his life, his wife (who Joaquin only minutes before had been verbally abusing) pleading beside him. Paylon refuses; he walks away with Joaquin's wife hurling curses at him, with a ferocity she never once directed at her husband when alive. Ad. Castillo's retreating camera follows Paylon as he strides away, a tender love song playing in the background. Love for a dear departed is what drives the man--but what of Joaquin and his wife? He yelled at her, humiliated her, but when pinned down she begged desperately on his behalf just the same. Was his love (or hers) any less powerful, or deserving? 



Zamora made his career playing comic roles, but he was perfectly capable of drama: on one level conflicting emotions of remorse and revenge battle it out on his sweat-strained face; then you look closer and realize the conflict has long since been resolved. Joaquin's wife can't move Paylon because whatever she's going through he's already been there; more, there's nothing she can threaten him with--divine retribution or ultimate damnation--that he hasn't already inflicted, again and again, on himself. 

Return rounds out its theme with a plot twist involving the mysterious Rita (Leila Hermosa) and the formidable Leon (Tsing Tong Tsai). By the picture's bloody finale we learn this much about the nature of vengeance: it's not circular, not a spiral; it's a tangle that catches us in a hopeless snarl--everyone victimized, everyone indicted, no one coming away clean. Ad. Castillo and his scriptwriter (Mike Relon Makiling, who in his own directorial efforts never showed this level of narrative sophistication) have basically constructed a revenge picture with its own built-in criticism of revenge pictures: not perhaps the first to have done so but a well-made example nonetheless, and ultimately an affecting one. 



That's the story; it's hardly the film's essence. You don't go to Ad. Castillo for mere story, just as you don't go to Brocka for mere realism, Bernal for mere cynicism, de Leon for mere intellect or O'Hara for mere despair; you go for the poetry, and Return of the Dragon has more than its share elevating it beyond its pulp--the marriage ceremony with its ridiculous rock-thumping ritual, where through near-magical editing the clacking of stones suddenly stands for the beating of newlywed hearts (corny, but with the lovely Ms. Key's soulful eyes boy is it effective); the showdown location, a basin of sand with a pool of water reflecting one of the most dramatic skies I'd ever seen (a mountain range of clouds, a baleful glare of sun); and finally Zamora's deliriously kinetic leaps, simply Zamora crouched and shrieking against a pure azure sky, sometimes framed by a perfectly circular lens flare--you think perhaps Zamora's Paylon needed those uncanny high jumps to touch the sky, to reinvigorate strength and spirit. Brief moments and mere images perhaps, but without them Return of the Dragon would merely be a grave, unusually well-written lecture on the futility of revenge; with them the film is a soaring song on vengeance, its seductive power, its ultimately fatal spell. A great little film, absolutely.

First published in Businessworld, 11.27.14