Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977) vs Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)

A bridge too far

You hear the debate at the fringes of socmed discussion: "Which is the better film, Henri-George Clouzot's black-and-white thriller or William Friedkin's $22 million tribute/remake?" Well let me tell you

(WARNING-- plot twists discussed in explicit detail!)

Nosferatu 2024, 1979, 1922 (Robert Eggers, Werner Herzog, FW Murnau)

The blood drinkers

(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in explicit and gory detail)

FW Murnau did a low-budget unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula titled Nosferatu (1922) which Stoker's widow pursued with a vengeance, demanding all prints and negatives be destroyed (despite which the film went on to achieve unholy immortality); Werner Herzog did a remake in 1979 employing ten thousand rats and his own inimitable filmmaking style; now Robert Eggers-- who professes admiration for the Murnau-- has crafted his own version, shifting emphasis from vampire to victim in his 2024 remake. 

And how does Eggers' compare? Well let me tell you.

Dune (Denis Villeneuve 2021; David Lynch 1984; Frank Herbert 1965)

Done

(Warning: plot details for the 2021 remake the 1984 adaptation and the 1965 original discussed in explicit detail)

Denis Villeneuve's long-delayed Dune (initiated 2016; shot in 2019; released 2021) does this much right: it tells Frank Herbert's story-- the societal complexity (Great Houses and Guilds), the skullduggery (plans within plans within plans within plans), Paul Atreides' meteoric ascent-- coherently. Villeneuve carefully hands over with both hands what Lynch in his 1984 version threw at us wholesale, not so much an info dump as explosive diarrhea. With Villeneuve you feel a touch overwhelmed; with Lynch it swirls past your eyebrows, climbing. 

The Wicker Man

Snicker man

Difficult to understand why anyone thought a remake of The Wicker Man-- the classic horror mood piece about a police officer who lands on a far island in search of a missing child-- would be a good idea: the film has a plot twist that once revealed was basically it for the audience; only thing left was to pick up your coat and look for the exit. Audiences who saw the 1973 production would know; those who haven't are advised not to bother.

Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005)

The dark knight deflates

Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins is a lot like the car featured so prominently in the trailers: muscular, oversized, not particularly imaginative (it's been called "a Humvee on steroids"-- basically Arnold Schwarzenegger on four wheels).

The movie borrows heavily from Frank Miller's Batman: Year One so heavily it's possible to call this an adaptation of Miller. I'd say it's the best to date, Robert Rodriguez's Sin City notwithstanding, which in my book is faint praise: judging from his printwork (the abovementioned plus his best-known The Dark Knight Returns) Miller's is a rather narrowly focused sensibility, bleak romanticism draped with exaggerated noir. If I prefer Nolan's picture over Rodriguez's that's because Nolan isn't as faithful; as an adaptation, Sin City is perfect-- black and white, louder than life, dreary as hell.

Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

Dead end

(Warning: plot of the 1946, 1947, and 2021 discussed in explicit detail) 

Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley, adapted from William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel, is arguably his most unabashedly grim head trip--leisurely paced, impeccably acted, sumptuously designed and shot, it forsakes the science fiction and horror tropes del Toro is fond of wielding (sometimes like a sledgehammer) to translate Gresham's nihilistic vision to the big screen.

Candyman (Nia DaCosta, 2021)

Call me by your name

The script of Nia DaCosta's Candyman is problematic, to put it mildly. It seeks to repurpose a pop gothic figure under a more politically correct ideology; it seeks to deliver a more hopeful overall message that acknowledges current racial tensions, while still administering intense doses of gore not to mention satire to a (presumably) bloodthirsty audience. 

Does it work? Tell you what I think:

Soldier (Paul WS Anderson, 1998)

Toy Soldier

The wittiest conceit in Soldier is that each trained-from-birth bred-in-the-bone infantryman is literally a item in a collector’s set. Director Paul Anderson plays on this idea in the shot where you see Todd (Kurt Russell sporting a crewcut) sitting alone on his bunk; the camera shifts position and only then do you see the long row of exactly identical men sitting in exactly identical bunks behind him. When these robotlike men (manlike robots?) are confronted by a platoon of new and improved soldiers (unlike Todd and company these newer models are genetically engineered), they eye each other, silently sizing each other up. Their superior officers proudly show them off and then, like wanton boys, pit one against another in a series of pointlessly brutal tests. Obsolete Todd loses and is tossed in the garbage bin; victorious Kane (a shaven-pate Jason Scott Lee) is reprimanded for allowing the loser to rip a good-sized new one round his eye socket.

A Star is Born (Bradley Cooper, 2018)

Star wars

There are as of this writing five count em five different versions of the story, of an ambitious young artist in love with a declining old star: George Cukor's What Price Hollywood? (1932) where film director Max Carey (Lowell Sherman) takes an interest in aspiring actress Mary Evans (Constance Bennett), based on a story by Adela Rogers St. John and Louis Stevens; William Wellman's A Star is Born (1937) where film star Norman Maine (Fredric March) spots aspiring actress Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor); Cukor's 1954 A Star is Born--for many the definitive version--where James Mason as Maine hooks up with Judy Garland as Blodgett; Frank Pierson's 1976 A Star is Born where Kris Kristofferson's John Norman Howard jumpstarts the career of Barbra Streisand's Esther Hoffman; and of course Bradley Cooper's spanking new version, with Cooper's Jackson Maine discovering Lady Gaga's Ally in a drag bar.

So which one's best? Well lemme tell you:

War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves 2017)

Chimp thrills

(Warning! Narrative twists and overall plot discussed in detail.)

First the good stuff: Andy Serkis' Caesar (last seen gazing thoughtfully at his kneeling followers in the previous Ape installment) returns as the franchise's digitally enhanced protagonist, all ferocious scowl and simian gait and flaring nostrils. All the apes look great, from the moonfaced Maurice (Karin Konoval playing a Bornean orangutan) to the intimidating yet ultimately gentle Luca (Michael Adamthwaite playing a lowland gorilla) to the hilariously craven Bad Ape (Steve Zahn as a common chimpanzee); they look different they act different, the human performers perfectly choreographed and translated into simian through motion capture. Gets to the point that you forget they are apes, and follow their story as naturally and effortlessly as if you'd been following a band of humans on a desperate mission.
  

Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders)

Shell sans Ghost

Rupert Sanders' remake of Mamoru Oshii's influential anime Ghost in the Shell is disappointing, but what did they expect anyway? The earlier film's ideas about virtual reality, machine intelligence, and the internet have been digested and absorbed and transmuted by nearly every intelligent science fiction film in the past twenty years, from the Wachowski brothers' (now sisters) The Matrix to Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report (his Dreamworks Studios helped produce this picture) to Cameron's Avatar to Spike Jonze Her to Alex Garland's Ex Machina to Paul WS Anderson's Resident Evil movies, not to mention various episodes of Dr. Who, Legion, and Black Mirror (the latter two arguably being the most inventive science-fiction series at the moment)--and that's only titles I can remember. Oshii's film has been remade several times over, through various interesting and even inspired iterations; Sanders is covering ground that's been thoroughly strip-mined, though one wonders if the subject has been well and truly exhausted (Black Mirror suggests maybe not).  

Beauty and the Beast (Bill Condon)

Furry tail

I'll say this much for Disney's live-action remake of their animated feature: it improves on one scene, where Belle (Emma Watson) gushes to the Beast (Dan Stevens) about Shakespeare's Verona-set tragic romance. The previous incarnation of Belle sang about her love of books but never once mentioned a title or author, just details about some generic standard-issue romance (Stephenie Meyer? E.L. James?); at least this one volunteers an actual name, a published work, a real writer.

The Beast rolls his eyes--of course she'd pick that! Belle indignantly demands that he suggest a better alternative, and he promptly leads her to his vast library stack, with shelves stretching above and away from her. Yes the earlier flick did turn on their supposed love of literature but in this one you actually feel the sexy give-and-take of two bibliophiles wrangling over their preferred texts. 

And the Beast's eye roll? Who has ever run their fingertips across a sheet of pulped wood and scribbled ink sniffing its heady aroma and hasn't felt some measure of condescension for the relatively uninitiated? It's the movie's best moment, so funny and honest (particularly because the Beast doesn't think much of his expensive education, possibly because it failed to lead to a high-paying job) it actually made me sit up and pay attention for maybe O an entire minute.

Pete's Dragon (David Lowery)

Pete's dragging

Walt Disney Studios in case you haven't noticed has been remaking its movies with mostly dire results. There was the live-action The Jungle Book (which digitally rendered India a uniform gruel gray); the live-action Malificent (which totally bypassed the splendor of the original--possibly the only Disney animated feature I really liked--in favor of a puny little girl-power parable) and I hear that Kenneth Brannagh did a live-action Cinderella (which I missed, thankfully; there's only so much punishment a critic can take).

The 1977 Pete's Dragon wasn't exactly a Disney classic come to life--it's not as funny as Jungle Book, does not feature cute rats like Cinderella, does not frighten you with a ten story high walking nightmare clad in clashing nightblack armor, bristling sable steel pikes a la Sleeping Beauty. There's room for improvement in the original, an entire apartment building's worth, tantalizingly promised by the opening sequence--man woman and child driving through forest road, reading a children's book (Elliot Gets Lost) and discussing adventure. "That's the other thing about adventures," declares Pete's dad; "you got to be brave." At which point of course the deer hits the fan. 

Superman III (Richard Lester)

Superman v Superman
 
Trying to get the bad taste of Zack Snyder's latest out of my mouth I took a peek at arguably one of the worst if not the worst entry in the franchise, Superman III--y'know, the one with Richard Pryor on skis flapping a pink cape.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Samuel Bayer, 2010)

In tribute to Wes Craven, 1939 to 2015, an old post. Rest in dreamless peace, sir.

Wake me when it's over

I wouldn't call Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) with its attempts to blur the line between dream and reality an especially great horror movie, or even a particularly unique one. Remember that Joseph Ruben's wittily conceived Dreamscape came out the same year, that David Lynch's no less nightmarish Eraserhead screened over a decade ago, that Roman Polanski's Repulsion had arms sprouting out of apartment walls to grope Catherine Deneuve almost twenty years before, that Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (to which Craven's film bears a striking similarity) played in drive-ins three years previous to Polanski's, that most of Luis Bunuel's career (from 1929 to 1977) was predicated on the blurring of the line between reality and dream, and that Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (arguably the greatest nightmare ever realized on the silver screen) was released in 1932, a silent film belatedly converted to sound--a time when dreams found their voice, and spoke to us directly.

No, I wouldn't call Craven's movie great or even unique, but it was driven by a couple of clever ideas, it had a handful of striking imagery, and it's directed with a supple, not entirely ungraceful, visual style. One remembers it fondly for the way it spoke to teenagers about the deceitful nature of adults, the vulnerability of youths left unaware of their secret histories, their childhood traumas. 

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014); The Immigrant (James Gray, 2013); Night Zero (premiere episode of 'The Strain,' Guillermo del Toro, 2014)

(WARNING:  plot twists and story of the two movies, one TV show--and in one case an entire franchise--discussed in detail)

Aping The Planet of the Apes 

Matt Reeves' Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is arguably better than its predecessor, the remake of the third sequel to the original adaptation of the Pierre Boulle novel. Where the latter traces the nascent development of human-level intelligence in apes, this--the sequel and remake of the fourth sequel to the original adaptation (pay attention!)--has the full-grown Caesar (an impressively motion-captured Andy Serkis) struggling to lead his band of brothers into an Arcadian paradise. Apes at this point are capable of serious log cabin construction (their spiky spiraling structure could stand proudly beside some of the cruder motte-and-baileys seen in the Game of Thrones series); the words "Ape not kill ape" are scrawled prominently on a teacher's neolithic Smartboard. All that's missing, really, is some seriously decadent vegan cooking to transform this into a particularly esoteric episode on glamping from The Travel Channel.

Then the humans come in. Tense moments follow. Hope for the future is offered--and quickly dashed to the ground, resulting in large-scale digitally rendered, fairly engaging action sequences. The movie ends on the same image it began, with camera tight on Caesar's ominously pensive face--nice little touch, there.

Interesting--where Caesar in the original comes to the realization that apes are no better than humans, here he does a bit of syntactic sidestepping. "You are no ape," he declares, dropping his foe (and himself) down a long slippery slope involving precise etymologies (untermensch, anyone?).

Might add that the apes have not improved their tactics much since the last picture. Where previously they launched a full-on frontal attack against heavily armed troops on a suspension bridge (it's all right, they've got plot armor), here they launch a full-on frontal attack on a fortified city, and only when an armored car is commandeered (by an ape on horseback--see aforementioned story trope) do they actually make any headway. Some of the apes happen to be gorillas; couldn't they have taught their fellow anthropoids an alternate method?

Okay, cheap joke.

The movie's an impassioned plea for interracial/intercultural/interwhateveral co-existence; that much I got. Maybe my biggest problem is that it falls far short of what Boulle's novel was trying to do, what  the best science fiction (as opposed to sci-fi) tries to do: refract real-life issues through the genre's distorting lens, in an attempt at a fresh approach. The key word is distorting: Boulle's novel was satire in the tradition of Swift, with some withering things to say about our pretentions to standing on the top rung of the evolutionary ladder; Reeves (and Wyatt before him) seem to be trying to serve up a deadly earnest drama about yet another socioethnic minority group clawing its way to acceptability. Where Boulle and Franklin J. Schaffner's '68 film presented apes as exaggerated mockeries of the worse humanity has to offer, these two reboots present them as just an evolutionary step upward from what you see in your local zoo, down to the zoologically accurate body language of the motion-captured actors. Despite what today's filmmakers might tell you, realism is not a virtue in satire; a clear view of the target is required, shining through the effects. You miss the dark humor, the comic-horrific sense of ordinary life turned upside-down (Schaffner captured Boulle's satiric thrust best; Burton's, while scattershot shallow, still managed to plant tongue firmly in furred cheek). 

Plus I miss Helena Bonham-Carter's Ari, all ape makeup surrounding a pair of soulful, sensual eyes, the single most subversive element in Burton's remake. Cornelia, Caesar's mate (Judy Greer), is about as sensuous as a hair shirt--you wanted to give her not sympathy but a bottle of industrial-strength tick powder; Bonham-Carter's Ari on the other hand was capable of inspiring a serious erection--she made you want to rethink the arguments against the practice of bestiality.

Stranger in a strange land

James Gray's The Immigrant despite its melodrama despite its flaws is extraordinary, a retelling of Vito Corleone's entry from Sicily into New York, only from the point of view of a woman. Ewa (Marion Cotillard) has traveled from war-torn Poland to Ellis Island with her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan) in tow. Magda's coughing gets her quarantined; Ewa faces a different problem--rumor has it that she's a girl of 'loose morals,' and will probably be deported.

The Godfather analogy is inevitable; Gray seems to be setting himself up as the millennial equivalent of Coppola (even his We Own the Night, which I thought was terrific, openly invites comparison), though not just Coppola--one is reminded of Guiseppe Rotunno's work on Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, and of Miroslav Ondicek's for Milos Forman's Ragtime, the kind of stately amber handsomeness that can be mistaken for White Elephant filmmaking--only Gray adds an emotional obliqueness that belongs more in an Ozu or Naruse film, and in the case of Joaquin Phoenix's Bruno a volatility that recalls--well, recalls Phoenix at his most unhinged. The emotional dynamics also resemble the tortured relationship between pimp and imprisoned prostitute in Kim ki-duk's Bad Guy, only told almost entirely from the prostitute's point of view--Phoenix does not make deadly with a paper dart, alas, but does share Han-ki's relentless, often contradictory obsession with his captive.

Bruno introduces himself gently into the picture, as a courtly well-dressed gentleman willing to take troublesome Ewa off state hands. He takes time in revealing his darker side; when he does it's an explosive outburst that frightens not because it's so violent or sudden, but because it's so indignant: he believes--or has long since talked himself into believing--that he's doing Ewa a huge favor setting her up, that she's being incredibly stupid or irrational or perverse turning him down. 

What sets Bruno apart from most if not all pimps is that he's enthusiastically backed up by his charges. The other girls are all over him, kissing and hugging, cornering him in all kind of sensual clinches. They're so convincing in their ardor and he comes through for them, especially Ewa, so often--sometimes at cost to himself--that you begin to wonder: maybe he's not such a bad guy after all, maybe it's Ewa who's the problem.

Cotillard is a marvel, and perhaps a measure of her achievement is that you can't quite put a finger on why she's such a marvel. Her Ewa is no pistol-packing take-charge heroine; most of the time she's just awkwardly stumbling into one form of trouble after another, helplessly clutching an iron pick plucked out of a coal bin to defend herself (rather feebly) against potential attackers. 

But--when you think about it--what can Ewa do? She's a woman in 1920's New York, a foreigner at that. If she speaks her mind, she's mannish and arrogant; if she resists she's unreasonable and stubborn; if she surrenders she's a whore. She's defiant after a fashion, but it's a furtive kind of defiance, defined by her strictly straitened circumstances: she has to steal her moments when no one's looking, keep them hidden like treasured jewels, like a secret identity. 

Ewa keeps saying it's all for her sister, and I believe her, or at least believe she is totally invested in  what she says, but at a certain point you wonder if maybe she uses that declaration as a rallying cry, a goal in life, an impossible dream she can look at above the muck she's in, neck-deep. Certainly it's for her sister, but I'd say it's also very much for herself; if she fails to rescue Magda, if her sibling dies before being rescued, she would probably have killed herself in despair.

Sometimes Ewa gives in, perhaps more often than she wants; but--crucial difference--she never gives up. Behind her eyes you sense an unbelievably tough kernel of intelligence watching, waiting for a chance. 

Ewa never gets that chance, at least not the way she would in a conventional drama (or conventional melodrama). Instead (and here I go into the film's climax in considerable detail) Bruno arranges for her to escape, but beforehand declares the true nature of their relationship once and for all. He tells her of how he first saw her, plotted her capture, sabotaged her chances of meeting her family; of how he treated her, abused her, used her worse than any of his women; he tells her her true role in their shared narrative--as a victim of sexual, emotional and spiritual rape for years on end, his plaything and slave, his unforgettable, unforgivable sin. She's his damnation--because of what he's done to her he's reduced to being less than a man; he's nothing.

And then her response. Not the blows she rains on him, a weak pummeling that wouldn't harm a kitten, but her absolute denial of his claim. "You are not nothing!" she declares, and in that simple little statement is a wealth of implication: I am not your victim--or I have been for years, but refuse to be only your victim. I refuse to play a role in your drama any more. I refuse to remain marked by your revelations, no matter how painful. 

I refuse to be your sin--to be the one who weighs you down, drags you to hell. I refuse to play the woman who hates you endlessly. I care for you, in as much as a person can care for someone who has both helped and hurt her so much. 

And I move on. I am free, and intend to live the rest of my life as I see fit.

Would like to take a moment to point out how closely (and rather recklessly of Gray, who I have to assume is a churchgoing member) Ewa's stance seems to hew to the Catholic position on such matters; to 'turn the other cheek' when one is wronged and 'love one another,' and so forth. Call Catholicism a passion or delusion but occasionally it's the evoking of older faiths--of centuries-old words or terms or ideas--that inspires the most potent emotional moments. Either it works for you or doesn't, you're free to respond according to your will (you must be; that's a crucial Catholic requirement for salvation, a defining characteristic of the human soul).

In this Gray joins the small group of fellow American filmmakers who focus on their Catholicism onscreen, or at least on the Catholic concepts of sin and guilt and redemption--Martin Scorsese, Abel Ferrara and, yes, Francis Coppola--with maybe a crucial difference: where Travis Bickle, The Lieutenant (or Thana, if you like), and Michael Corleone would probably seek retribution if they were in a similar position, Gray's Ewa opts for a more radical reply: not to kill Bruno or punish him but transcend him. She's a victim, but refuses to let that define her life.

In an extraordinary shot Gray slices the screen in two with a mirror and follows Bruno and Ewa as they flee to their respective fates. The moment isn't celebratory--if anything it has a pointedly mournful tone--but it does feel like a stopping point of some kind. Whatever future they have in store for them Gray isn't saying--we can choose one of several alternatives, or choose not to assign one at all; again, we are free to respond accordingly. 

Strained 

Guillermo del Toro's novel has been adapted for television with the filmmaker himself directing the premiere episode; the results sad to say are, well, not effortlessly achieved or easy to like. 

The contemporary setting directs our attention to the rather wooden characters; the dialogue lacks the kind of wit that enlivened the banter of a Blade or Hellboy (maybe they need to introduce a super-powered character or two, drily commenting on the action). The ostensible protagonist, a CDC officer, has marriage issues and is a control freak. We're basically setting up the story here, and so far the human side of the story is less than engaging. 

That said, it's handsome to look at, even on the small screen. Del Toro lights his huge sets in deep reds and greens, the better to set the tone, and during one of several exceptions--where everything is bathed in a dim steel blue--the impression is so striking it makes you want to shiver from sheer cold. 

That exception is actually a direct steal from the granddaddy of all vampire novels, Bram Stoker's Dracula, only instead of a dead ship we have a dead plane. The device still works, and del Toro still manages to direct an appropriately creepy little sequence, set inside the darkened jetliner. The episode is a study of contrasts, of juxtapositions between the medieval and the 21st century: ancient carved coffin sitting in an industrial warehouse; menacing sycophants in a plush corporate setting; an ancient evil loose in an ultramodern city. Del Toro is retelling the story, this time without the swooning sensuality and twinkling sentimentality; he's telling the story straight, using (to these inexpert ears) authentic epidemiological terminology, the latest CDC can offer. 

Two other sequences stand out: there's something unsettling about video footage depicting something inexplicable--in this case what looks like several hundred pounds of crated dirt suddenly vanishing into thin air. 

And then the morgue sequence: palm, burrowing worm, scalpel. Need I say more? 

I'm giving this one a chance. Hopefully they beef up the characters a little; unlike on the big screen, plot and dialogue matter more in a TV series. Del Toro directs with impressive panache--more than impressive, considering he's working on a TV budget--but he needs some solid writing in his episodes to firm them up for the long haul.

Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton, 2001)

In response to the latest installment of an ape-old franchise, an old post from 2001:  

Monkey pee, monkey do

I regret to report that despite my better judgement and capacity (admittedly limited) for logical thinking, I enjoyed Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes. It's a true guilty pleasure--I experienced pleasure and felt extremely guilty about it. It's a piece of ordure, by most standards; there's no reasonable way to explain my liking it--the screenplay doesn't make sense; the dialogue, when it isn't trying for lame one-liners, is leaden; characters are introduced and dropped, new ones inserted with nary a care for coherence; the ending cries out for a reshoot, maybe even an entire sequel that improves on this misshapen mess.

And yet I like this film. I feel affection for the 1968 original with its shock moments (the manhunt in the fields, the first spoken words of defiance, the 'surprise' ending) and Charlton Heston's inimitable straight-man performance, but I've always thought the premise silly (you land in a planet where they speak English and don't think it's Earth?) and the attempts at social commentary equally silly (Rod Serling, God help us, was the kind of earnestly profound scriptwriter the Manunuri would have approved of, except he wrote science fiction).

I consider Burton a more gifted fantabulist than the original's director, Franklin J. Schaffner (though Schaffner is admittedly the better storyteller); this Planet has the kind of perverse heedlessness only possible in an intensely personal filmmaker. Burton quickly takes on racism, sexism, fanaticism--the usual targets of social satire (and of Pierre Boulle's original novel), and as quickly drops them--possibly because the filmmaker has the attention span of a six-year-old, and focuses only on matters that interest him.

In this case, the apes. Complaining about Mark Wahlberg, Estelle Warren and Kris Kristofferson's almost uniformly leaden performances is beside the point, I think; Burton lavishes all his attention and love on the simians, not the humans. The makeup is a definite improvement over the original's--you see the actors' features more, see them as distorted versions of themselves, as if through a funhouse mirror. Their movements are surprisingly eloquent--Lisa Marie as Nova sways and sashays like a vamp, only one with prehensile toes; Michael Clark Duncan as Colonel Attar stands tall and impassive, a pillar of military discipline (decked out in the softest glossy fur); and David Warner as Senator Sandar is reassuringly statesmanlike. Even Charlton Heston, playing General Thade's father on his deathbed, is instantly, startlingly recognizable--you feel muleheaded conservatism and paranoia rising from him like a fever heat.

Of this vivid, varied menagerie, three stand out: Paul Giamatti as Limbo, a craven slave trader, has the most ghoulish, skull-like face (he's Burton's designated Beetlejuice figure, only without the magic powers), and all the best lines; Tim Roth as General Thade is all flaring nostrils and psychopathic glare (Roth seems liberated by heavy makeup--the way Olivier was in Richard III, or Welles in Touch of Evil--to create a villain more outrageously evil than would be possible using their own faces).

Then there's Helena Bonham-Carter as Ari, a liberal ape intellectual--daughter of Senator Sandar, she's a spoiled and pompous and faintly silly dilettante who makes all kinds of noises about ape-human equality. Yet through the course of the story she grows (the only character in the entire film to actually do so) into her convictions and, in the end, wears said convictions with genuine dignity.
 
And--Burton's best joke in the film--she's totally, helplessly, hopelessly in love with Mark Whalberg as Leo (the picture's alpha male). Bonham Carter is a beauty and has a vibrant glow in costume dramas like A Room With a View or Wings of the Dove, but I've never really warmed up to her as an actress--maybe because I never felt she was particularly passionate about anything or anyone. Decked out in ape makeup, with mouth distended and hair extended over  cheekbones, we're forced to stare at her huge brown eyes and they're stunning. Bonham-Carter easily outshines Estella Warren, a reputed model, who does have undeniable appeal--both on prominent display--but is otherwise as disposable as soiled toilet paper. When Ari looks with those melting, Spaniel eyes at Leo you want to slap the idiot upside of the head for not noticing. Their "affair," more suggestion than anything concrete--a series of smoky stares and uncomfortable silences--is perversely all the more exciting for being so understated. And (skip to the next paragraph if you haven't seen the movie) the quick buss Leo finally grants Ari crackles with more electricity (is, I'm willing to bet everything plus a truckload of bananas, possibly the reason why Burton agreed to do the film) than all the clashing armor that precedes it.

  
I admit it--I fell for Ari as hard as she fell for Leo, and think Leo's too stupid to realize how unworthy he is of her love (or of how richly he deserves the bleak 'surprise' ending Burton tacks on--the third after the 1968 version and Pierre Boulle's and easily the silliest of the three). I still can't take either the original or this version’s take on racism, sexism, fanaticism and all that jazz seriously, but on the subject of sexual tolerance and possibility of interspecies sex? I'm sold; I'm sold all the way.

First published in Businessworld 8.10.01

Maleficent (Robert Stromberg, 2014)

(Warning--story and plot twists in the movie discussed in detail)

Once upon a cream

Saw Maleficent over the weekend, and what King Stefan (Sharlto Copley) does to the eponymous fairy (Angelina Jolie) is nothing compared to what Disney does to its original film--from behind; over and over again; in the grossest most graphic manner possible. 

Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine), Evil Dead (Fede Alvarez)

Sprang brake!

Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is some kind of masterpiece--compared to all the Girls Gone Wild videos, and lord knows I've seen more of them than I want to admit, his movie is the Citizen Kane of teenage vacation pics. 

Easily the best moments come at the beginning, when the picture for maybe ten minutes doesn't really feel the need to explain anything--just splice together footage of girls and boys flashing nipples and ass cracks, gyrating and spraying beer everywhere like surf breaking on rockface, sprinkling cocaine on nubile skin like confectioner's sugar on a finely turned bun. For some ten minutes Korine achieves a verite ambiance, a brief vision that captures the langorous ennui of the American adolescent--the sense that life is mean and short and doesn't have much of a point, so one must grab what pleasure is available now, as much as one can. You almost believe he would pull out of all this a bloodily profound truth, something about these spring breakers from within their culture, on their own rap-booming, beer-spraying, bouncing-booty terms.

Yeah, yeah. Right off we're asked to believe that three girls wearing face masks and tiny shorts (they don't even bother pulling on decent denim) would rush into a diner, badger cook and waitstaff badly enough to receive money (and what was the cook with his pots of hot fat and kitchen knife doing all this time, hm?), and use the proceeds of that heist to fund a booze-and-drug fueled crawl through St. Petersburg, Florida (from the cash register of a fried chicken diner? Who eats there, Bill Gates?). We're asked to believe in a meth and arms dealer named Alien (James Franco) dumbass enough to scatter dollar bills all over his king-sized bed and loaded weaponry all over his room like M & Ms, yet smart enough to earn the money to buy a grand piano beside a drop-dead gorgeous swimming pool. Only in Florida, I suppose.

I'm not demanding realism, mind you; I know a demented fantasy when I see one, and the four coeds are an important part of Korine's fantasy.  Gomez plays the good girl--not only does she attend regular church, she hangs out in a bikini without flashing a nipple, sucks on an oversized bong once that I actually noticed, and bails early before she gets into real trouble. Rachel Korine is second-best girl, having only functioned as getaway driver for the diner heist, and using a bullet wound on the arm as pretext  for her exit scene. Only Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson go all the way, incarnating the director's concept of spring break's darker side, in day-glo bikinis. The girls' behavior is so precisely calibrated to their respective statuses (Gomez the Disney princess, Korine the director's wife, Hudgens and Benson as the bad bad girls), their rewards and punishments so schematically meted out that you can't help but think the story, with a bit of judicious sanitizing, could make for a nice discussion topic in next week's Sunday school. 

Korine joins his one-time Dogme 95 co-conspirator Lars Von Trier in staging handsome-looking pictures that are occasionally provocative (a scene with a gun barrel inserted in the mouth is sure to provoke some kind of reaction) but when you really think about them have little real application to the actual world--and are hence weightless. What's left, really, are Korine's stylings, illuminating the surrounding darkness like a day-glo g-string in the dank Miami night.

I'll swallow your sequel

Fede Alvarez's Evil Dead plays surprisingly better than it appeared, at least from the loud and splashy trailers: the requisite five pretty youths headed for an isolated cabin, the mandatory evil presence (redneck cannibal, or generic Abomination). Only Alvarez probably realized that this was his best chance for going big-time--despite being (or especially because it's) only a sequel--and he wasn't about to waste the opportunity. 

Alvarez's intent is announced with the very first shot, a breathtaking view of a vast wooded landscape (presumably Auckland, New Zealand) on the upper half of the screen--the shot is upside-down. Right off he's telling us to expect the usual, only it won't entirely be the usual. 

The script presents a more thought-out than is standard scenario: instead of five horny adolescents intent on an orgiastic bacchanal in the woods, it's three friends and a brother trying to force a troubled young girl to quit her heroin habit. The storyline involves us for maybe twenty minutes, then is completely dropped when more supernatural antics take place, but for those twenty--and especially the last ten of those twenty--the premise works well (skip the rest of this paragraph if you wish to see the picture): her friends and brother aren't sure if it's the addiction speaking, and they do all the wrong things for the right reasons. For those brief minutes the movie makes explicit the idea The Exorcist refuses to confront: that demonic possession is a metaphor for addiction (drugs, sex, whatever), a supernatural excuse for us to be the very worse assholes we can be, to satisfy our appetites. 

Love it that Alvarez doesn't use shaky-cam--at least not to the point of incoherence; love it that he doesn't slice the footage into a slurried mess (though he presents plenty onscreen, sometimes flung at the camera lens); love it that he largely avoids CGI--most of the special effects are either deft misdirection or classic magic tricks or plain, old-fashioned filmmaking. 

There's a scene I'd like to point out, of Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) perched at the top of the cellar stairs while Mia (Jane Levy) crouches below, tears streaming down her cheeks. We know Mia will turn evil and we dread the moment; Alvarez's camera is pressed close to Mia's all-too-human and teary face, and we're  aware that it looms over us while Natalie is poised upstairs, fidgeting with uncertainty--will she or won't she come closer, give Mia some comfort? Suspense and dread, and not a pixel in sight.

It's pretty good for what it is, an exercise in genre filmmaking; maybe its biggest problem is just that: it's a mere exercise in genre filmmaking. I've maintained that Drew Goddard's Cabin in the Woods, working from Joss Whedon's script, pretty much killed the genre--rendered all other permutations, no matter how well made, redundant by showing how silly it all is (Five kids isolated in a cabin in the woods--wouldn't they at least have cellphones? Paramedics on helicopters?). Watching this I can admire the filmmaking, the same time say the picture hasn't changed my mind any.

That is, till I saw Raimi's own Evil Dead 2 again on cable. Raimi had a big success with his first Evil Dead, and an offer was immediately put to him to remake the picture on a bigger budget. Raimi turned this down; he was hoping his upcoming Crimewave would be a hit, that he would win some financial independence. It wasn't, so he was doing the Evil Dead remake--only it wasn't just a remake; Raimi, presented with basically the same material, decided to change his interpretation and along the way throw in everything he knew about filmmaking which, as it turns out, is a lot.

 Watching this, all memories of Cabin (and by extension this remake) were blown away like so much brain matter. This is the cabin-in-the-woods flick to end all cabin-in-the-woods flicks, by turns horrifying, hilarious, and droll. There are images here that recall Ray Harryhausen (the Necronomicon gnashing its teeth), and images (the laughing furniture scene) that recall--well, I'm not sure what: Buster Keaton crossed with Jan Svankmajer maybe? There are moments disgusting beyond belief (the popping eyeball scene) and moments disgusting beyond that, if you know where to look (the discharge pouring from grandma's ear is actually brother Ted Raimi's sweat, pouring out of his rubber old lady suit). There's a phantasmagoric beauty to some of the frames (the undead Andrea twirling on her toes; Ash's Oldsmobile turning in the air; the massive trees groaning, pulling their rootlike knees up from the ground in arthritic pain), a requisite for truly memorable horror. This is the genre's epically surreal, no-budget masterpiece; the Platonic ideal all other lesser pictures aspire to, at the same time shattering the mold of that ideal with modern power tools, forever. 

Towards the end of this entertaining if ultimately disposable movie the iconic chainsaw finally makes its long-awaited appearance, and the audience members heave a sigh of recognition: "Yeah--" Dispiriting, till one realizes: who put that expectation in their heads? Accepteth no substitutes. 


4.6.13

Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

The flick that fathered a hundred sequels

Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966) might be called the bastard son of a bastard remake of a bastard parody. 

Arguably it was Sergio Leone's fault. He did not strictly speaking make the first Spaghetti Western (or as Italians call them western all'italiana)--Raoul Walsh did The Sheriff of the Fractured Jaw in 1958; Mario Amendola did Terrore dell'Oklahoma (The Terror of Oklahoma) in 1959; and you might say Puccini's 1910 opera La Fanciulla del West (Girl of the West) was an Italian production set in the California Gold Rush...

But--trying to stay on-topic here--Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) took Akira Kurosawa's jidai-geki samurai comedy Yojimbo (The Bodyguard, 1961), transposed it to the American West, and produced a hugely influential hit that turned genre conventions upside-down, morphed the noble white-hatted protagonist into a dark, cigarillo-chewing anti-hero, basically created a whole new mythology for a bastard new genre.

Which is doubly ironic--Yojimbo itself was a parody, Kurosawa's subversion of the chambara (or swordfighting, a subset of the jidai-geki) genre, his way of sending up ossified conventions that he himself helped establish (Of course Yojimbo would became a hit and revitalize the genre, spawning its own sub-genre with countless imitators). Adding just one more twist is the fact that Kurosawa himself was heavily influenced by classic western filmmakers--John Ford, Howard Hawks--and all we need to complete the circle is a Japanese ripoff of A Fistful of Dollars or Django (arguably Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) is just such a picture)...

Coming back to Django (and trying, again, to stay on-topic), Corbucci's film doesn't even try very hard to disguise its influences--as with Yojimbo and Fistful we have the lone hero; as with the previous pictures the hero comes between two warring factions (the Mexican bandits and a troop of renegade Confederates (needless to say, they're racists)). Corbucci does away with the cyclical nature of violence, the vision of man outdoing fellow man in greed and depravity--he probably felt the two previous pictures wasted a lot of running time and effort keeping the complicated plotline coherent, and damned if he wasn't right: Django lives or dies on its extravagant setpieces of sadism and suffering and little else (there's a subtext involving racism, a topic Corbucci would develop further in other films, particularly Navajo Joe (1966), but it's more subtext here--an additional sharpness to the stink in the air, almost--than anything bold, or especially memorable).

Corbucci's visual style unlike Leone's doesn't try capture the action through sweeping tracking shots, nor does he try create a sense of outsized scale (the vast barrooms, endless cemeteries, gigantic closeups of Leone's films). Corbucci's action is mostly fast and functional, stitched together with quick (but coherent) cutting; when Django faces off with a bandit Corbucci intercuts handheld, high-angled footage of the two struggling with even shakier footage of the breathless onlookers, giving the viewer a strong sense of you-are-there immediacy. 

When called for, however, Corbucci can serve up cinema as grand and operatic as anything from Leone. He introduces one confrontation with the sparely beautiful image of standing fences and a spindly water tower, a lonely flute playing in the background; renegade Confederates strut into view and Luis Enriquez Bacalav's baleful trumpets take over, a snare drum giving crisp accompaniment. 

Corbucci (unlike, say Leone) doesn't have his camera track backwards, following the soldiers; instead he shows us Django's patient point of view, angular rail fences pointing as if in alarm at the approaching soldiers, the reverse shots showing Django's doomed position, perched atop his coffin behind a gigantic felled tree trunk (remarkable the contrast in imagery--the soldiers' unstoppable approach, the tree trunk's implacable solidity). More soldiers appear, wearing Klansmen-type hoods, only (a baroque touch) dyed a bright blood-red. Django continues to sit on his coffin behind the tree trunk; the music, the editing, the emotions escalate to the point where the very frame vibrates with tension--you know the climax when it comes will be something...

It comes, and it is something; it's also the punchline to a long and elaborate joke, one that began preparations from the moment we set eyes on our hero. Here's another difference between Leone and Corbucci: Leone's Man Without a Name (played with lanky minimalism by Clint Eastwood) shows a trace of faint amusement at Leone's complex shenanigans; said Man embodies Leone's point of view, an Olympian sense of distance flavored with irony. Corbucci's Django (played with soulful earnestness by Franco Nero) isn't nearly as interesting a character--he's totally immersed in his situation, no distance or irony to his posture, a classic western all'italiana hero. If there is any humor in the film--and there is, considerably--it comes from Corbucci himself, who gleefully sets up intricate visual and narrative pranks which detonate, then with ceaseless enthusiasm begins preparations for the next gag. 

I'd earlier said there's little more to Corbucci here than sadism; I'm not a little wrong. Hands are a significant motif, from a bandit spitting into his hands preparatory to whipping a helpless prostitute, to a Confederate major pulling a blood-red scarf from his pocket to wrap round the neck, to Django tenderly slipping a woman's camisole off her shoulder...later clutching desperately at his coffin, and being as desperately clutched in return. Hands, Corbucci seems to say, are arbiters of one's fate and expressive of one's inner state; to damage them is a grave sin, to have them damaged a great suffering.

So, Corbucci or Leone--who is better? Leone is an epic lyricist, Corbucci a baroque sadist; Leone likes to build complex narratives that resolve themselves smoothly, in ingenious fashion; Corbucci can barely be bothered with narrative bumps (he can't even be bothered to hide the fact that his narrative was lifted from somewhere else). Leone is a poet, Corbucci a near-madman; the world is a richer place for having both artists, and I for one refuse to pick between them. 

5.5.12