The Round-Up: July 16—July 22, 2023

 I can't believe it's been almost three years since I posted anything. I've been doing daily reviews on Facebook and Tumblr instead of longer ones here, because there just isn't any time. So I'm just going to start posting my daily reviews here once a week and see if anybody notices. My pattern is to alternate horror, a genre I love no matter how bad the films sometimes get, with other films. I departed from that this past week because I wanted to follow a cute actor whose work I liked from UNINVITED to DEMON WIND. Boy, was that a mistake. As bad as UNINVITED was, at least he had some material and a character with which to work. With the move to DEMON WIND, he went from a so bad it's good movie to a so bad it's just bad one. And I'm not mentioning his name to spare him the embarrassment, assuming anybody ever reads this. Anyway, I shall not repeat that mistake.

But there were still some high points, so here goes:

DIAL M FOR MURDER

Ray Milland has to think fast when the wrong person gets DIAL M FOR MURDERed.

With Jack Arnold’s IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953), Alfred Hitchcock’s DIAL M FOR MURDER (1954, TCM, Tubi) is one of the only films from the early 3D craze to use the format artistically. Both avoid arbitrarily shoving objects in the audience’s faces (how many of us have nightmares about that damned paddleball in HOUSE OF WAX?). But where Arnold uses 3D to emphasize the vast emptiness of the desert, Hitchcock uses it to underline his film’s claustrophobic action, set almost entirely in the flat shared by retired tennis pro Ray Milland and his heiress wife, Grace Kelly. This account of a jealous husband plotting the perfect crime twice to keep control of his wife’s estate may not be the perfect thriller, but with Hitchcock directing, it’s hard to spot any plot holes (feel free to suggest them in the comments). The only noticeable instance of his shoving something at the audience is Kelly’s outstretched hand as she’s being strangled, and who could object to getting that close to those lovely digits as long as she’s not reaching for an Oscar she didn’t deserve. We’re so used to thinking of Hitchcock in terms of his great, near silent montages it’s a revelation to see how well he breaks up long dialog scenes, particularly Milland’s blackmailing former school chum Anthony Dawson into killing Kelly for him. Milland wisely plays against the villainy of the role. He brings his years of experience doing light comedy to bear on the role, and it works. He’s matched by John Williams’ droll playing as the chief inspector on the case. As Kelly’s secret lover, Robert Cummings has some light romantic moments, but he’s got a little more heavy drama to pull off, and to his credit, he doesn’t overdo it. Kelly’s best moments are silent. She looks delicious, but her big breakdown after the killing has dated badly. There’s a fascinating artificial quality to the film, partly because Hitchcock and Frederick Knott, who wrote the original play and the screenplay, haven’t done much to open up the material. There are some bad process shots on the few exteriors, like Cummings’ arrival by ocean liner, that fit into this. There’s also a cheery quality to Dimitri Tiomkin’s opening title music that seems to be telling us that we’re not about to see anything resembling real life. As a work of artifice, highlighting the plot’s mechanical construction (every important prop is painstakingly planted so even the dimmest audience members can’t miss it), the film seems to suggest that the beauty of the well-made plot is an illusion to disguise the chaotic nature of existence so prevalent in Hitchcock’s films.

NO ONE LIVES

Luke Evans make serial killing sexy.

With a title like NO ONE LIVES (2012, Prime), you start out with low expectations. Now, add the fact that it was produced by WWE Entertainment, and you’ll expect even less. Then throw in the directing credit, Ryuhei Kitamura, whose THE PRICE WE PAY (2022) I just hated (and no, I wasn’t planning on doing two of his films in a row, but Amazon doesn’t list directors). Is it possible to move one’s expectations into the negative zone? Yes, it’s the schlock de la schlock. But big surprise, it has a pulpy energy that carries through most of it if you have a high gore tolerance. Helping greatly is the fact that Luke Evans and Adelaide Clemens in the leads make something of their underwritten characters. She’s so good you can’t help wishing for a better ending. A group of crooks headed by Lee Tergesen — who has precious little to do before he goes the way of all Steve Buscemi, eh?— kidnaps a tourist (Evans) and brings his car and trailer to their remote forest cabin (at this point in time, would anybody even consider staying in a remote forest cabin?). When they go through the trunk, they find a bound woman (Clemens). Yes, they just kidnapped a very resourceful and inventive serial killer, and the van is his kill kit. The kills are highly imaginative and only one is sexually exploitative. It all moves like a house afire, and Evans makes even the cheesiest dialog sound almost clever. Sample: Clemens: “You must be out of your mind.” Evans: “I’m very much in my mind.” In this film, Kitamura’s direction is stylish without going into overkill. His camera glides along with Evans as he goes about his business and performs at least one pan that made me laugh. Since this is a WWE production, the cast includes one of their wrestlers, Brodus Clay (aka Tyrus aka The Funkasaurus), but the script doesn’t push him beyond his capabilities, and he has great physical presence. For those so inclined, I’ll also point out that Evans is one of the sexiest serial killers ever to grace a bad horror film. Hey, we take our kicks where we can get them.

LADIES IN RETIREMENT

Edith Barrett (l.) gets an acting lesson (not that she need much of one) 

from Elsa Lanchester and Ida Lupino.

A penny dreadful at heart, Charles Vidor’s LADIES IN RETIREMENT (1941, Prime) is crackling good fun as it builds up civilized scares in the grand Hollywood tradition. In a cottage in the midst of a foggy marsh, a wealthy, retired chorus girl (Isabel Elsom) lives with her buttoned-up companion (Ida Lupino) and timid maid (Evelyn Keyes). When Lupino’s dotty sisters (Elsa Lanchester and Edith Barrett) are threatened with commitment to an asylum in London, she brings them to the cottage for a short visit that lasts so long Elsom tries to throw them all out. So, Lupino strangles her as the old lady is singing “Tit-Willow” (everyone’s a critic) and walls her up in an old bread oven. Can she keep it together, particularly when her roguish nephew (Louis Hayward, having great fun as the fox in the hen house) shows up and starts asking questions? This is from the days when a murder was depicted by having the victim’s pearls drop a few at a time onto the floor. If you’re in love with slasher horror, you just may not get it. Entirely and obviously constructed on a large sound stage, the house and the marshes are a marvel of art direction, Vidor and cinematographer George Barnes create some vivid compositions that increase the tension while also reflecting character and relationship. Screenwriters Reginald Denham (who co-wrote the original play with Edward Perry) and Garrett Fort have been perhaps too faithful to the original. After a time jump, the dotty sisters’ disruption is communicated through exposition rather than a series of incidents accumulating over time. But the cast is superb, with special honors to Elsom, whose specificity is a marvel as she plays a woman pretending to propriety after a very improper past; Lanchester as the more sullen and rebellious of the sisters (it’s very different from her usual run of good-natured eccentrics) and particularly Lupino. Her character’s arc is similar to the one in THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT (1940), but the proper British setting makes it much more subtextual, and her restraint and stillness are marvelous to behold.

UNINVITED

The moral of the story: don't mess with cat lovers.

If you thought the infamous mutant killer bunny film NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1972) was really really scary, then Greydon Clark’s mutant killer cat film UNINVITED (1987, Shudder, Tubi) is the movie for you. Of course, if you laughed your posterior off at the former, you may need medical attention after viewing the latter. Scientific experiments have left a tiger striped tabby with the ability to shoot a bad puppet out of its mouth that immediately grows to medium dog size and kills or lethally infects anybody it doesn’t like. Talk about your meow mess! An early scene in which it takes out two men after they beat and rob someone who had fed it suggests the movie that might have been. I think a killer kitty taking out miscreants would be a great concept, and I’d be happy to write it up once the WGA strike is over. And I shall call it “Pussy Revenge.” Meanwhile, in this film it’s picked up by a college girl (Shari Shattuck, clearly playing a legacy admission) on spring break who brings it on board a yacht whose corrupt owner (Alex Cord) wants to shag her. She also brings along some frisky friends to replace the crew Cord has driven off, and they all set sail for the Cayman Islands, where Cord has stashed his ill-gotten gains. The cat has other ideas. Even without the ludicrous puppet, the sight of people trying to chase down the kitty is hilarious. The attacks are so unconvincing, you may never stop laughing. Cord and fellow criminals George Kennedy and Clu Gulager don’t act as if this were a stinker hardly anybody would see. They actually deliver performances that are worth watching, and Gulager is very funny as the team’s nebbish hit man. The women, however, are hopeless, but then, I don’t think they were cast for their acting abilities.

DEMON WIND

At least I got a kick out of Stephen Quadros' performance, if nothing else.

If you play the 2022 video game HIGH ON LIFE, you can enter a movie theatre in the game world and watch Charles Philip Moore’s DEMON WIND (1990, Shudder, Apple+, Tubi, YouTube in French) in its entirety. That’s one side quest you’d be well-advised to avoid. There’s surreal horror, and then there’s we-don’t-know-what-we’re-doing horror. This film, sadly, falls into the latter category. In 1931, a body burns on a cross. An old woman in a farmhouse tells her husband her wards can’t keep out the evil spirits any longer, so he turns into a demon and kills her. This means he develops really bad acne and pointy teeth and lets pudding fall from his mouth. Jump to the present, when Cory (Eric Larson) is driving his girlfriend (Francine Lapensee) to the same farm, which he inherited after his father killed himself, possibly motivated by his desire to avoid doing any more scenes in this film. His friends join them for some reason not even they understand, and suddenly they’re trapped there. The demons manifest first as three children who grab one of the women and vanish with her. Lucky her. She’s well out of it, probably having a beer with the dead father. The special effects mostly seem to be scratched on the film with a pin. The acting is of the “when in doubt, shout” school. And the plot advances because people do stupid things, like trying to walk out to get help when they know they can’t do that. But you do get a magician who does martial arts kicks, so there’s that. The ads proclaimed, “DEMON WIND: it’ll blow you away.” So can I after eating too much fried food, and at least I got to enjoy getting there. Hey, you knew that kind of joke was inevitable.

NIAGARA

Technicolor noir at it's best

The first shot of Marilyn Monroe in Henry Hathaway’s NIAGARA (1953, Criterion Channel) shows her lying naked under a sheet while smoking a cigarette. It has the kind of fleshy sexuality audiences in the early ‘50s were seeing in foreign films. Although the picture opens with shots of Niagara Falls and keeps going back to the local sights, Monroe easily upstages them. That’s not surprising, as the film is partly about commodifying her as the screen’s newest sex goddess. The only other film that dwells on its leading lady’s posterior so lovingly may be Antonioni’s LA NOTTE (1961). What’s surprising about Monroe’s performance as Joseph Cotton’s murderous, straying wife is how unlike “Marilyn” she is. The breathy, overly deliberate delivery that would become her trademark is here only used as a mask. It’s the public image she puts on when she needs to impress somebody. With her lover (Richard Allan) or husband, she’s got a much harder edge. As a result, this is probably her most provocative performance. It’s the actor as auteur of her own filmography. Despite the use of Technicolor, the plot is the stuff of film noir. Monroe tries to make those around her see how unstable her husband is so her lover can kill him but have it look like suicide. And as in all films noirs, things go wrong. To keep the picture from being too edgy for the conformist ‘50s, her story is seen through the eyes of a “normal” honeymooning couple who keep turning up whenever something important is about to happen. Fortunately, the wife is Jean Peters, who could make normal (and just about anything else) interesting, though she’s not smart enough to realize she’s married to a gay man (Max Showalter, billed as Casey Adams, and of course he’s not playing a gay man, but he sure doesn’t generate a lot of sexual energy, even when admiring Monroe). Hathaway keeps things moving. Even the travelogue scenes tie into the plot, and cinematographer Joe MacDonald creates some great shadowy effects while also lingering over all of Marilyn’s curves. Yet the ultimate effect is rather hypocritical. Monroe is presented as the supreme object of desire and must be punished for it. The alternative is the merely attractive Peters, who’s happily married to a man who sees their honeymoon as a chance to read Winston Churchill’s history of World War II.

MURDER MANSION

They didn't need a fog machine for this one.

All they had to do was tap into the writers' minds.

There are days I question this whole “I watch these so you don’t have to” approach to criticism. In Francisco Lara Polo’s debut feature MURDER MANSION (1972, Shudder, Tubi, YouTube, because why should I suffer alone) — aka THE MURDER MANSION aka MANIAC MANSION aka LA MANSION DE LA NIEBLA — a bunch of people wander around in the fog until they stumble on a spooky house in which to shelter. The writers, however, would appear never to have found their way out of the fog. Do I need to tell you the mansion is reputed to be haunted? Not if you watch it. There’s a pretty blonde (Evelyn Stewart) living there who tells them all about how her great aunt was supposed to be a witch or a vampire or something, and we later discover her coffin is empty. The old lady and her chauffeur died in a car wreck but keep showing up to torment the guests. At least I could wake myself up whenever the chauffeur appeared by shouting “Max! Max! Max!” at the screen. The guests include an heiress (Analia Gade) who has endless flashbacks that have no real bearing on the plot but help get the film to feature length and a drunken middle-aged wretch who stumbles around the place looking for female companionship. When Gade rejects him, he calls her a lesbian. I call her sensible. But then she proves me wrong with a mad scene that seems to have been cut in from an episode of SCTV. That rather fits the film, since the music labeled “ominous” by the closed captioning would be more appropriate in a Snagglepuss cartoon. The film has good color, to give the wretched piece it’s due (sorry, Sir Noel), which some viewers have mistaken for atmosphere. They’ve compared it to the work of Mario Bava and Dario Argento. That would suggest that some viewers really don’t understand Bava or Argento.

2020: THE BIG WRAP UP

 

This has been quite a year for me. In addition to everything the nation has been going through, I moved from Georgia to North Carolina during a pandemic. Among other things, this pulled me from one theatre community to another, both of them closed down for the time being. I haven’t been in a movie theatre since February, but, oddly, I’ve probably seen more movies than I would have without the quarantine. I’ve only done three blogs, and only one of them was posted since my move. And although some multiplexes near my new home are open, I can’t quite bring myself to risk it. As a result, I’ve had a very hard time keeping up with more recent releases, even though a good many of them are streaming through services to which I subscribe. That hasn’t stopped me from writing about movies. I’ve written short reviews of everything I’ve seen, no matter how inconsequential, and posted them on my Facebook page and in whatever groups I felt were appropriate. So, here’s a sampling of the best and the worst of what I’ve written about this year. The bests are a decidedly eclectic group. The worsts are all horror films, because I just can’t keep myself from trolling the depths of that genre in hopes of finding hidden gems.

 

THE TEN BEST FILMS I SAW LAST YEAR

 

1. TOTALLY F***ED UP (1993)

 

 

If John Hughes and Jean-Luc Godard had a gay kid, it would be Gregg Araki’s amazing fourth feature. This portrait of disaffected gay and lesbian youth in Los Angeles is one of the liveliest depictions of nihilism I’ve ever seen. The characters are struggling to grow up gay in the face of homophobia, bashing and AIDS. No wonder it all seems hopeless much of the time. Yet the focus is on resilience, as the lesbian couple tries to get pregnant and the young men keep reaching out for relationship. Their cynicism is really just a game, a wall against a world that seems out to get them. It helps greatly that the most cynical of the bunch is played by James Duval, who positively radiates star quality. Araki combines filmed footage — often in long, static takes reminiscent of both Godard and Yasujiro Ozu — with video shot by one of the characters, whose habit of recording everything in his life leads to one of the plot’s mini-crises. Told in 15 movements interspersed with titles and character interviews, the picture is like a series of variations on the futility of everything, even futility itself.

2. BPM (2017)

 

 

If you want to give your tear ducts a good workout, try this feature from Robin Campillo. Set in the Paris ACT UP chapter in the 1990s, the film paints a gay landscape of sex, partying and protest, all of which come together in the cathartic final montage. It raises a lot of issues about personal responsibility and the politicization of health care (sound familiar?) while following the relationship of Nathan (Arnaud Valois) and Sean (Nahuel Perez Biscayart), a couple who meet in the group and whose relationship progresses as Sean's health declines. Campillo made an effort to cast gay actors to play the gay characters, and it pays off with deeply authentic performances, particularly from Biscayart, who helps make Sean a fiercely political and painful presence. Watching all those beautiful young men fight for their lives in the streets, in board rooms and even in bed, is intensely moving. I didn't find it erotic. I just wanted to take care of them (and get them to quit smoking). Oddly, this film elicited more negative comments than almost anything I posted about on Facebook. Some people seemed to take offense that a French filmmaker chose to make a film about the Paris division of ACT UP rather than the American divisions in which their friends had taken part. I guess it a sign of how deep feelings about the AIDS crisis still run.

 

3. PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019)

 

 

Exquisitely shot by Claire Mathon, with painterly compositions that fit its storyline, This) is a slow, lovingly detailed account of the brief affair between a painter (Noemie Merlant) and the woman (Adele Haenel) whose wedding portrait she’s been hired to paint in late 18^th-century Brittany.  This is a film of many joys — a peasant bonfire suddenly enlivened when the women start singing, the way the two women and their housemaid create an egalitarian society as soon as mother has gone off on business, the final, long closeup of Haenel as she reacts to a performance of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” Writer-director Celine Sciamma has put in one or two too many visual iterations of the title, but that’s more than made up for by the film’s subtle comments on class and gender and the delicacy with which the attraction between the two women develops. There’s also a lovely use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that pays off powerfully toward the end and is well worth waiting for. This is streaming on Hulu and can also be rented at various locations. If you choose Hulu, pay to see it without commercials. You don’t’ want anything interfering with the film’s powerful cumulative effect. From the few negative responses I got on Facebook, I’d also point out that this film is not for all tastes. You have to be prepared for a slower pace than we’ve become accustomed to in gay films made for the mall audience.

 

4. ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959)

 

 

One of the most seamless blends of old Hollywood and the new generation of actors to arrive in the 1950s, Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama effectively melds James Stewart (in my personal favorite of all his performances) and Eve Arden with such relative newcomers as Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick and George C. Scott, not to mention an array of great character actors (who can forget Floyd the barber explaining the legal criteria for rape?). It’s still shocking to see the prosecution try to blame Remick’s character for her own attack, but probably more shocking to realize their attitudes are still held by many today. The film was based on a real case fictionalized in John D. Voelker’s novel. It was shot (very effectively by Sam Leavitt) near the places in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where it happened. Preminger keeps the camera moving during the first half of the film, mostly following Stewart around so we’re drawn into the character visually even as the actor is creating one of his most compelling characterizations. Once the trial starts, the camera is more still as Preminger focuses on the courtroom fireworks between Stewart and Scott, presided over by the hero of the Army-McCarthy hearings, Joseph N. Welch, who gets most of the best lines. The others go to Arden, who not only gets to crack wise as only she can but also does some effective listening and even has a nice dramatic scene as Stewart’s legal team awaits the verdict. Duke Ellington composed the jazz score and appears briefly at a local tavern. Can anybody envision Lana Turner in Remick’s role? Can you do it without snickering?

 

5. THE MORE THE MERRIER (1943)

 

George Stevens’ best comedy is an extended negotiation over space — the rooms in Connie Milligan's apartment and a place in her heart. Jean Arthur stars as the buttoned-down office worker who rents out half her apartment to eccentric billionaire Charles Coburn during World War II's Washington housing shortage. Seeing how sterile her love life is, he rents his portion of the apartment to Joel McCrea, who's waiting to ship out for military service (as was Stevens at the time). You know where this is leading, don't you? The surprise is how skillfully everyone involved keeps the whole thing afloat. It's a delight from beginning to end. Arthur subtly plays her growing attraction to McCrea from the moment she meets him, so none of Coburn's manipulations feel smarmy. And McCrea is so attractive and such an adept light comedian you can't help rooting for him to win her heart. The dialogue is thoroughly pixilated, and the pace is much quicker than you'd expect from Stevens' later work (sadly, it was his last comedy; filming the liberation of Dachau left him a much more sober artist, and he gradually forgot the lessons he'd learned during his apprenticeship with Hal Roach). Grady Sutton has a sweet bit as a waiter, and if you’re really good, you’ll spot Ann Savage.

 

6. THE BEGGAR’S OPERA (1953)

 

Peter Brook’s film-directing debut was way ahead of its time in its combination of cinematic conventions with 18^th-century theatrics. He stages the classic ballad opera with a sense of artifice. He keeps finding ways to frame the image so it seems as if you were watching some scenes live on stage. Laurence Olivier plays the role of the womanizing highwayman MacHeath to the hilt. He seems to be having so much fun juggling women and buckling his swash it’s almost like watching a different actor, a matinee idol in the tradition of Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn. And his singing is surprisingly good. Only he and Stanley Holloway — as Mr. Lockit, the jailer— do their own singing. The rest are dubbed quite effectively, and Sir Arthur Bliss has arranged the music with an eye for variety. In adapting the play to film, Brook and his writers (Denis Cannan and Christopher Fry) create a framing device, starting the piece in a prison where the real MacHeath meets a beggar (Hugh Griffith) who’s written an opera about him. From there the piece opens up to some lovely Technicolor shots of the English countryside. They also expand the role of Mrs. Trapes, the gambling hall proprietor, and Athene Seyler shows why she was an authority on comic acting (she even wrote one of the best books on the subject, ON THE CRAFT OF COMEDY). The film ends with a pair of dazzling crowd scenes. In the opera, MacHeath jauntily rides the tumbril to the gallows as the crowd around him responds as if it were some kind of carnival. In the real world, he escapes, too, and the other convicts run rampant through the prison in a scene that presages Brooks’ legendary stage and film productions of MARAT/SADE (1967).

 

7. EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960)

 

Although derided on its initial release, Georges Franju’s horror art film has more recently been hailed as an exercise in cinematic poetry. Pauline Kael called it “austerely elegant” after seeing the butchered, badly dubbed version initially released in the U.S. as THE HORROR CHAMBER OF DR. FAUSTUS. Fortunately, Criterion has a restored print that occasionally airs on TCM. The tale of a doctor (Pierre Brasseur)  kidnapping young women to transplant their faces to his daughter, hideously scarred after an accident he caused, is similar to dozens of B movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s and inspired a spate of horrid imitations by the likes of Spain’s Jesus Franco (Can we ever forgive Orson Welles for hailing him as his protégé?). It’s also a deeply subversive film. Instead of the mad scientist father, the film focuses on his daughter (Edith Scob), who wanders through his villa in Givenchy gowns and a featureless white mask. She’s the only one who can quiet the pack of wild dogs on which her father experiments, and that and her scarred face fit the archetype of the monstrous-feminine. Yet she’s ultimately the force for good in the film. In contrast, her well-dressed, socially acceptable father and his chic assistant (Alida Valli, who can make dumping a body in a river look glamorous) commit atrocities in an immaculately decorated salon. As in many of the great horror films, EYES WITHOUT A FACE renders the concept of monstrosity queer (you knew I had to get that word in somewhere), by questioning our most basic assumptions about the horrible.

 

8. BAY OF ANGELS (1963)

 

Jacques Demy’s second feature is almost a lightweight retread of themes from his first, LOLA (1961, q.v.). Once again, a feckless young man (Claude Mann) finds his life altered by a chance encounter with a mercurial woman (Jeanne Moreau). The film’s plotting seems to demonstrate how the idolization of the female is a form of misogyny. Moreau’s character could easily be seen as a mere device for changing the man’s character. What raises the film above its sketchy plot is Moreau’s performance as Jackie, a compulsive gambler who’s sacrificed everything — husband, child, jewelry — to her addiction. Jackie is a multi-faceted character so adept at posing she’s not always sure who she is, and somehow Moreau manages to dig through the layers of artifice to turn her into a compelling human being. And when she’s on a high, she’s almost painfully glamorous. During the gambling scenes, Demy’s cutting and Michel Legrand’s Mozartian score capture the thrill of staking your life on chance. It’s little wonder Mann gets swept up in Moreau’s folly. Were she a drug, she’d be the most addictive on the planet.

 

9. LOLA (1961)

 

Jacques Demy’s first feature is gently haunted by the past. The film is set in Demy’s childhood home, Nantes, and Raoul Coutard’s camera virtually makes love to the coastal city. The central characters, cabaret singer Lola (Anouk Aimee) and unemployed Roland (Marc Michel), are still stuck on their first loves, hers for the mysterious Michel who deserted her while she was pregnant, his for Lola, whom he knew as a child named Cecile. Even in the present, events echo the past. Lola tells of a blissful 14^th birthday spent at a fair with a sailor she met by chance, and then another Cecile visits the fair with a sailor on her 14^th birthday. Demy’s approach to all this is a kind of measured joy. He takes delight in the encounters that almost happen as characters just miss running into each other. Yet there’s also a sense of the pain in those missed connections and the way Roland yearns for Lola just as the older women he meets yearn for him. Although her character’s name and occupation are references to Marlene Dietrich’s Lola in THE BLUE ANGEL (1930), Aimee’s breathless, mercurial performance seems more an echo of another legendary blonde, Marilyn Monroe, at the same time as it points to Diane Keaton’s fast-talking quirkiness in ANNIE HALL (1975). All that referentiality seems natural for a Demy film. In a sense, LOLA is not a single film, but rather the birth of a cinematic universe. Aimee will return as Lola in his MODEL SHOP (1969), while Michel’s Roland will become the successful businessman who marries the pregnant Catherine Deneuve in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964). In that film, he even sings of his lost love, Lola, with a melody that first appears in Michel Legrand’s score for this film.

 

10. NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950)

 

Jules Dassin’s last Hollywood assignment before he was blacklisted is one of the great film noirs, a cynical view of the underbelly of post-war London. Richard Widmark never stops running as Harry Fabian, a nightclub tout so crooked his cons have cons. When he’s not dodging creditors, he’s feverishly trying to raise the money to set himself up to challenge the city’s wrestling kingpin (Herbert Lom). The only decent people he encounters are his abused girlfriend (Gene Tierney) , a flower seller (Ada Reeve) and a smuggler (Maureen Delaney). The rest are an assortment of crooks and cheats, all of whom seem to have it in for him. Most notable are Francis L. Sullivan and Googie Withers as clip joint owners trapped in the marriage from hell. Jo Eisinger’s script has the characters turning on an emotional dime, and the photography by Max Greene frames them against the night sky and cluttered, dirty rooms. Dassin stages a great impromptu wrestling bout between one-time world champ Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki. Unjustly derided by critics in 1950, the film found its audience more recently with the rise of interest in film noir.

 

THE TWO BEST 2020 FILMS I SAW LAST YEAR 

(lots more to come, I hope)

 

MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM (2020)

 

 

The wonder of the latest August Wilson adaptation is that almost everything done to open the play up cinematically adds to the meanings of the original. The film starts with a musical montage showing Ma Rainey in performance, first in a rural tent show and then in a Chicago theatre. It’s an electric sequence that makes it clear how completely Viola Davis has immersed herself in the role while also setting up her conflict with Levee (Chadwick Boseman). Although the play is shortened to just over 90 minutes, all the main points are there, and director George C. Wolfe keeps the camera moving during the longer, beautifully written discussions of African-American identity. He’s also assembled a sterling ensemble, including Colman Domingo, Glynn Turman, Michael Potts, Dusan Brown and Taylor Paige. Turman is so relaxed as Toledo he hardly seems to be acting. And Davis and Boseman, in his last film, capture the different kinds of totally justified anger driving their characters. The film is a fitting successor to Denzel Washington’s FENCES (2016) and has me very excited for the other film versions of The Pittsburgh Cycle.

 

LA LLORONA (2020)

 

 

The images in Jayro Bustamente’s hypnotic thriller are austere. With the exception of a few cases in which feverish action— the verdict in a controversial trial, a nightmare of racist oppression, a right-wing family’s attempt to get through a crowd of protestors — triggers frantic, jittery camera work,  Bustamente and cinematographer Nicolas Wong use long takes with almost imperceptible moves in or out. Were this a conventional horror film, which its status as a “Shudder Original” suggests, it wouldn’t work. But this is really a political thriller with elements of magical realism. Guatemalan General Monteverde (Julio Diaz) has just been convicted of genocide of the country’s Mayan population, only to have the conviction annulled by a corrupt government. He and his family are prisoners in their own home as it’s surrounded by protestors whose chants and music provide most of the score. Almost all the servants have already quit because of the General’s erratic behavior. When the mysterious Alma (Maria Mercedes Coroy) arrives in response to a call for help from the housekeeper (who’s also the General’s illegitimate daughter). the stresses tearing the family apart get stronger and stranger.  Diaz hears the sound of a crying woman and fantasizes the house filled with water. His wife, Carmen (a terrific Margarita Kenefic), has nightmares in which she’s a Mayan woman tormented by the military. The political ramifications are overwhelming. In courtroom testimony, a woman delivers a speech emotionally in Kaqchikel while her translator dispassionately repeats her tale of rape and murder. Carmen blindly repeats her husband’s justifications that the men killed were Communist terrorists and the rape survivors all prostitutes. Later, when her husband is accused of sexually harassing Alma, she acknowledges his lifelong womanizing but blames it on the women for exciting him and orders Alma to wear looser clothing. It’s a kind of poetic justice that she’s the one who experiences the genocide firsthand in her nightmares. This is Bustamente’s third feature, and he’s quite a find.

 

FIVE OF THE WORST FILMS I SAW LAST YEAR (BECAUSE POSTING TEN WAS JUST TOO DEPRESSING)

 

5. DEVIL’S PATH (2018)

 

There are some wonderful independent gay films available for streaming. This, alas, is not one of them. Two men meet in a gay cruising section in the forest. After misreading lines to each other, they decide they want different things. Then they have to work together to elude two gay bashers — if that’s what’s happening. The dialogue as they’re on the run is ludicrous psychodrama, as if the writers were in love with Albee and O’Neill but had no idea why. At one point, the more promiscuous of the two dismisses love as a chemical reaction, which made me wonder how the film would work as a Cole Porter musical. If the singing and dancing were on the same level as the acting, presenting such a film in public could be considered a capital offense.

 

4. MAUSOLEUM (1983)

 

We open with a rather unappealing child actress grieving in a cemetery after her mother’s funeral, though her acting is so bad you only know she’s grieving from the dialogue. She runs from the grave into a nearby mausoleum, where her eyes start to glow green, which provides her most expressive moment. She grows up to become professional scream queen Bobbie Bresee, who has two problems. She’s married to Marjoe Gortner, and she’s lusted after by some of Southern California’s less talented actors. Oh, she’s also possessed by a dyslexic demon named Nomed. The good news is he forces her to kill some of the bad actors. Even better, when he’s in full control her role is taken over by a stunt double and we’re spared her non-acting (another horror film where the leading lady is so bad you can’t tell when she’s in a trance and when she isn’t). There’s also a cameo by LaWanda Page as the housekeeper who saves her life by running off when shit gets weird with a cry of “No more grievin’; I’m leavin’!” I’m assuming there’s a semicolon because she’s in too much of a hurry for a period. With lyrics like “We’ve reached the end. Let’s hope we never look again,” the song over the closing credits seems like a review of the picture.

 

3. CAMERA PHONE (2012)

 

 

TANGERINE (2015) showed that you can shoot a really good film on a cell phone if you have the talent. Unfortunately, the people who made this waste of bandwidth didn’t. It’s not entirely shot on cell phone. Some of it purports to be police surveillance footage. Anyway, eight tiresome social influencers are invited to a party to further their careers. Then they start dying. You never see what’s doing it, but by the time they start kicking it, they’re so stupid that, like Kristianists attending mega-church services during quarantine, you figure it’s just Darwin at work. One fault with a lot of found-footage films is that the characters go on filming long after anyone else would have dropped the camera and run. In this film, after the power goes out, they wander around in the dark while pointing the light from their phones at themselves, the better to blind themselves with, my dear. There’s a sequel, but frankly, I’d rather set my hair on fire.

 

2. HOTEL OF THE DAMNED (2016)

 

When did telling a story in chronological order become uncool? I’ve been watching the new adaptation of THE STAND, and for some reasons they’ve jumbled the timeline, leading to flashbacks within flashback for no discernible reason beyond confusion. HOTEL OF THE DAMNED, which I’d hoped would be a horror film about Trump Tower, does much the same with even less purpose. The film opens by cutting between a woman racing from something in the forest and a car driving down the road. It’s so dark you can hardly see the people in the car, and the woman’s face is never seen. She dashes in front of the car, which swerves over an embankment and crashes as an ugly bald man kills the fleeing woman. Cut to an animated werewolf, which isn’t part of the plot; it’s the film company’s logo. Was this all a pre-credits sequence? Was it part of the logo? And who opens a film like this anyway? After the credits, we see a man (one of the less attractive Mandylors) getting out of a Romanian prison and meeting an old friend? Were these the people in the car? You don’t find out until they actually get in the car 20 minutes later and repeat the badly shot scenes we’ve already suffered through at the start. The ex-con kidnaps his daughter after beating up her new boyfriend. Why? We only find out later, in another flashback, that the boyfriend’s a junkie planning to take her to Italy so he can pimp her out to pay for his habit. Anyway, after the accident, they seek shelter in what looks like an abandoned hotel only to discover it’s the headquarters for a group of cannibals who are now chowing down on the woman from the opening. Remember her? At one point, after they’ve discovered the cannibal’s nest, they hear music, so of course they try to find the source without getting caught by the cannibals. They find a radio in a room with a window looking out on the hotel’s utility room. The door has no lock. There’s a trap door in the floor. And there’s clearly another doorway covered by just a curtain. So, daddy says, “Let’s hide here. It’s safe.” The picture is filled with howlers like that. You also get junkie-pimp-i-cide and lots of men running around shirtless who should not be allowed in public wearing less than three layers. At least I got some knitting done.

 

1. THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE (2019)

 

How could anything be worse than the previous nine films? Just wait. Picking up on an interview in which Sharon Tate spoke of a nightmare with similarities to her murder a year later, writer-director Daniel Farrands (writer of HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS, the worst of the HALLOWEEN movies, and that’s pretty damned bad) gives Tate multiple premonitions of her death in an effort to raise the horror stakes. Hillary Duff turns Tate into a whining bore, and why include photos of the real Tate that only point up how little the two actresses resemble each other. Jonathan Bennett plays Jay Sebring, and as an actor he makes a good Food Network host. It’s all bad in so many wrong ways — including an “it was all a dream” ending that mirrors the much better ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD (2019) —you can’t even laugh at it.

 

Remember, I watch these things so you don’t have to.

DRILL THE PIANO PLAYER

 

Film by Abel Ferrara; Color out of Dario Argento

 

I was at a loss last night for how to write about Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979), a challenging film not for everybody, but I hammered out something vaguely adequate and went to bed. Then I re-read Pauline Kael’s review of Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960). She argues that what other critics disliked about the film, the fact that it combined different genres that don’t gel, was exactly what she loved, because it reflects the real world at that time.

That postmodern approach to genre is exactly what The Driller Killer has. It’s a mix of video nasty horror film and black comedy in which an artist (Ferrara) is driven to psychosis by the pressures of urban life and eventually starts running around killing street people with a power drill. Ferrara lives in a broken-down apartment near Union Square (shot in Ferrara’s own apartment) with his girlfriend, Carol, and her lover, Pamela. He’s already under pressure to finish his magnum opus so they can pay the bills. And he lives in a city where he’s confronted with filth and violence every day. Then a punk band takes the place below them and drives him to distraction with round-the-clock practicing.

For all the horror, there’s an energy to the city scenes that’s oddly seductive. The homeless people Ferrara interacts with may be destitute, but they’re connected to each other and at times are endearingly funny. And it’s interesting that Ferrara chooses to score some of those city shots to an electronic version of Bach’s “B-flat Invention,” which creates a light-hearted, almost affectionate mood. This was his first feature, and it already displays the love-hate relationship with his home base that would come to full fruition in later films like Ms. 45 (1981) and Bad Lieutenant (1992).

The picture’s use of color almost makes it seem like the best film Dario Argento didn’t make. The opening scene is in a church where the crucifix is lit in bright red while the two alcoves flanking it are a sickly yellow with a touch of green. Ferrara’s fantasies of killing have him bathed in a similar red light. And there are neon signs all over the city. It’s a fascinating contrast to all the grit surrounding his character.

The plot seems based in psycho-drama. Early on, Ferrara rejects a homeless man who’s claimed to be his father, because he’s afraid he could end up similarly destitute. His choice of the homeless for victims isn’t just a crime of opportunity; it’s a form of self-loathing. That would be enough to make this an intriguing horror film.

But Ferrara doesn’t take the psychological undertones with plodding seriousness. The film is also wickedly funny in places. The punk band is not very good. Their main number opens with a  bass line identical to the opening riff of Henry Mancini’s PETER GUNN theme. And it’s led by a posturing egomaniac (D.A. Metrov), which befits their name, Tony Chicago and the Roosters Some of the scenes have an improvisatory feel and an edgy comic rhythm. Carol reads about the latest atrocities reported in the tabloids while Ferrara is falling apart. Pamela seems high on something most of the time and her lines ramble all over the place, yet often come back with a zinger. A homeless man terrorizes people waiting at a bus shelter before they leave, and Ferrara takes him out in a scene that’s borderline slapstick. There’s also one hilarious shot of Ferrara holding the power drill between his legs, the latest in toxic masculinity. 

 

 

Harry Schultz as Dalton, Abel Ferrara’s version of a gay art dealer (note the pink shirt) in THE DRILLER KILLER.

 

Eventually, however, the picture peters out. There’s no real pay-off to the victimology, and as the film loses focus, the killings stop being sickly funny and just become sick. When Ferrara comes on to his gay art dealer, Dalton, in order to kill him, the scene doesn’t have any zip. The dealer had been introduced in his office, where he’s on the phone setting up a date while dealing with business interruptions. The lines to the date are a nice bit of inversion. Dalton his date jewelry to get some action, only he’s talking to someone named “Antonio” when everything else sounds like he’s softening up a woman. But does the assistant who’s calling him have to be named “Bruce,” the quintessential name used to mock gay men?  Later Pamela suggests Ferrara have sex with Dalton to get more money out of him. When Ferrara responds with disgust, she explains that if he uses KY it won’t hurt, as if that were all it took to get a straight man to come across. Maybe she should have suggested he chug a six pack.

After Ferrara invites the dealer over with hints that they’re going to get it on, there are closeup shots of the artist putting on lipstick and eye makeup to get ready, but the finished product is a let-down. It’s neither a send-up of his straight notions of how to seduce a gay man, nor is it a full-on commitment to making himself more desirable. He just jumps out and drills him to death, which may be another attempt at a joke, but it’s sloppy pay-off to the scene’s setup.

From that point, the film pretty much falls apart. Ferrara stops killing the homeless, but the new victims don’t have any real resonance. When Pamela discovers the dealer’s body, Ferrara grabs her and threatens her with the drill. But then the film cuts to another location with no sense of what happens to her. Ferrara tracks Carol down to her ex-husband’s home (nothing like a little financial destitution to turn a girl straight?), but again there’s no clear sense of what happens. When she turns out the lights and climbs into bed with Ferrara thinking it’s her husband, who’s actually lying dead on the kitchen floor, it feels like the start of another darkly comic routine. But before the joke pays off, we just cut to the closing credits.

By that point, the film has moved from urban nightmare to being just another slasher film. The jokes have no point or pay-off, and the point of view seems to have been lost somewhere.  Maybe that’s a reflection of the production process. Ferrara shot the film on weekends over the course of two years, so the ending may have just been cobbled together to get something he could sell before moving on to his next project. But we can only go by what’s on screen, and audiences don’t usually give filmmakers an “E” for effort. More’s the pity, since the first part of the film is well worth seeing. My advice: turn it off when Ferrara calls Dalton and make up your own ending. That almost fits with the improvisatory feel of the film’s best scenes.

PARASITE: Who Can Afford a Future?

Park So-dam and Choi Woo-Shik try to find a signal in the midst of poverty in PARASITE.

 As the epigraph to the published edition of her deeply moving play about reproductive rights and Irish immigration, What a Young Wife Ought to Know, Hannah Moscovitch quotes political activist Linda Tirado:

Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain….Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don’t plan long term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.

In the play, it relates to the plight of Sophie and her husband, who desperately need to control the number of children they have in a society (1920s Ottawa, though it could be anywhere in the early 20^th century) that keeps all information about birth control away from the lower classes for fear of cutting into the pool of servants and unskilled labor.

I read the quote and the play while flying to New York, and it also applied to the first play I saw there, Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, inspired by E.M. Forster’s Howards End. Henry, a well-off businessman, counsels his boyfriend and future husband, Eric (the equivalent of the novel’s Margaret Schlegel), about the need to plan for the future. The concept is alien to Eric. He’s a social justice worker living hand-to-mouth. Without solid financial prospects, Eric has no way of planning a future.

A month later, the quote came back to me again while watching Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, my choice for the best picture of 2019. At one point the father (Song Kang-ho) of a family living a tenuous life in the slums says he has the perfect plan to solve their problems. That’s no plan at all, “Because life cannot be planned.” Shortly after that, his wealthy employer (Lee Sun-kyun) tells him about his own future plans. Like Eric in The Inheritance, Song looks at the scion of privilege as if he were speaking another language, because to people like Song and his on-screen family words like “plan” and “future” seem to come from a vocabulary they never learned.

Yet planning is so much a part of modern culture it’s almost a conditioned response, no matter what the class. Song’s family lives in crippling poverty in Seoul after a series of failed business ventures. Their son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), has aced all the exams to go to university but can’t afford the tuition. They leach wifi signals from nearby businesses and fold pizza boxes to make any kind of money. Then Choi’s university friend asks him to take over a tutoring job while he’s out of the country. The student and her parents are loaded. Within a few days, Choi has gotten his sister hired as the younger brother’s art teacher/therapist. Then they push out the family chauffeur so Song can get his job and the housekeeper so their mother can take her place, all without letting on that they’re related to each other.

The scenes in which Choi and his family move in on their employers are a kick, and for its first third, the film recalls the best of screwball comedy. In films like My Man Godfrey (1936) and Easy Living (1937), have-nots move into the world of the rich and save the haves, who are emotionally crippled by their privileged lives. The difference here is that Song’s family isn’t trying to make life better for their employers. The long-term goal is to get everything from them they can, with Choi even planning to court his student when she’s old enough. Their opportunism feels liberating, particularly with the working poor now facing quarantine and unemployment. And the family they move in on is so foolish they almost cry out to be duped. Lee is narrow-minded and somewhat vacant about what goes on in his home. His wife (Cho Yeo-jeong) comes across as something of a ditz. She’s like a younger, prettier Alice Brady, and the scenes in which she falls for the family’s manipulation are delicious comic gems.

Of course, that’s just the first third of the film. As things progress, Choi’s family makes a few mistakes. Song keeps threatening to overstep his place as chauffeur, and we gradually come to see just how jealously Lee guards the social distinctions that tell him he’s better than his servants. Jo’s daffiness has a harsher side, too. She may be clueless enough to fall for the family’s manipulations, but she’s also clueless about basic human decency. When the wealthy family returns unexpectedly from a camping trip, she thinks nothing of calling the housekeeper to demand a hot cooked meal be ready for them when they get home in eight minutes. Later, she and her husband just expect the housekeeper and chauffeur to throw together a birthday party, with no real physical help. After all, they’re paying them extra.

That’s just part of the tonal shift that takes place during the film. As it turns out, the ousted housekeeper has more roots in the house than they’d expected, which takes the film in a more violent direction. Screwball comedy becomes absurdist thriller, and once again, the plans of the poor fall apart. Bong pulls off the transition almost seamlessly. The comic and the serious, after all, are only a question of point of view. As the stakes rise for Song and his family, the film’s absurdities grow increasingly dark. In one virtuoso bit of filmmaking father and children sneak out of their employers’ house in the middle of a rainstorm. To get back to their basement apartment, they have to descend a steep flight of stairs (staircases figure heavily in the film as markers of social distinction). As they go down the steps, things get colder and wetter until they discover their entire neighborhood is flooded. It’s a horrifying moment of abjection that underlines just how few resources they have without the jobs they’ve cheated their way into.

Bong also loads minor details with meaning. The younger child has been traumatized by seeing a ghost in the kitchen late one night. That’s why his mother thinks he needs art therapy. As it turns out, the ghost was the housekeeper’s husband, who’s been hiding out in the house’s sub-basement since the wealthier family moved in, because he’s on the run from loan sharks. Like Choi’s family, he’s one of the dispossessed who literally haunt the world of privilege.

At the birthday party, Lee and Song hide out wearing dime-store Native-American headdresses as part of an elaborate scheme to make Lee’s son feel better. They’re going to attack his sister as she brings in the birthday cake, so the child can play cowboy and rescue her. The levels of cultural appropriation here are dizzying. The westernized, wealthy South Koreans are imitating a culture the West has spent centuries trying to erase and doing so using standard Western tropes that render the colonized peoples’ reality invisible. They’re stereotyped right out of existence, much as Song’s family are often invisible to their colonizing employers. And yet even the wealthy family is, in a sense, colonized by globalization. Their dreams of opulence are empty as they move through their sterile mansion (a great piece of art direction) with no sense of what’s going on around them. They don’t even know where all the rooms in the house are.

After his attempts to take over the wealthy family are destroyed, Choi can’t stop planning. At the end, he fantasizes about going to university and eventually becoming wealthy enough to move his parents into the house where they once worked. We see his dreams, which makes them real for us, before we’re pulled back to the reality of his life and the crushing poverty from which his family has managed all too briefly to escape. Is this the best Western society has brought us? Empty dreams of affluence without humanity? Bong depicts a post-human world, where the poor have no time for anything but survival, and the rich have no sense of reality. No wonder the picture has struck such chord with U.S. audiences.