Nobody Knows Anything

After last week’s unrelenting barrage of political satire, sleazy metaphors and full frontal nudity, I needed a break from the sturm und drang and spent the week watching a few lighter movies. No cinema visits this week.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)

For the record, this was the unrated version. One of the most amusing commentary track experiences I’ve had recently is listening to the creatives involved in this movie moaning about not having enough money to make the film the way they wanted to. The budget for this movie was $110 million. In what way is that not enough money to make a no-think action comedy with half a dozen action sequences? This is why they call Hollywood La-La Land because the rules of reality no longer apply.

Enter the Dragon (1973)

Meanwhile, 32 years earlier, for under a million dollars you had this. Apart from seeing campy clips in other circumstances, this was probably my first experience of a genuine Hong Kong action flick from the 1970s. Except of course it isn’t quite that, because it was made by an American crew with American money. But they did have access to those astonishing audio whooshes and simulated limb and bone cracks that Hong Kong cinema audio mavens had been dreaming up for decades. And they had Bruce Lee, who, I’ll be damned, is every bit as astonishing as he’s always been hyped up as. The guy was a real action hero, and he puts the Van Dammes and Seagals of this world to shame. And to die so young by accident… Sigh.

Addams Family Values (1993)

The rare example of a sequel being so much better than the original that the original still hasn’t been released on DVD in the UK. But if Paramount hadn’t released this sequel, an angry mob would have tracked them down and burnt them at the stake. And as much as they tried to share out the mayhem amongst the cast, the standout is Christina Ricci, who delivers one of the most brilliant comedic performances of the 1990s as the deadpan, death-obsessed Wednesday Addams. It takes a special kind of film to pull out the best from Ms Ricci, The Opposite of Sex (1998) being another example, so I am very much looking forward to Black Snake Moan (2006).

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Although I pride myself on holding positions on certain movies at direct contradiction to received wisdom or majority opinion, there are some films where I fall in line with everyone else. And this is one of them. It is the best one of the six. Lucky Irvin Kershner. He didn’t have to spend any time introducing characters or working on the plot, he just had to go shot by shot making sure each one had a cool piece of character emotion or humour, and glue it all together later. I also think that the 1997 Special Edition is better than the original. Of course, it’s now the 2004 Special Edition since there was a little more fiddling before the box set came out. That they were able to go back to the original elements and recomposite all the individual pieces of the special effects shots so they worked more perfectly in the digital realm than they ever could through the optical printer, just shows how damned good the work was in the first place. There are very few digital additions to Episode V; it doesn’t need them. One more thing, watch the closing credits of this film and you will see an astounding number of crew people who have defined Hollywood special effects and movie making for the last 27 years.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

Has its time come yet? Are people ready to admit liking it after all? This is what you would have got if you made Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940) with a $40 million budget in 1940. I guess it’s one of those things where you either go with the look of the thing or you don’t. Along with a well-thumbed visual appeal, it also has a terrific, aggressive soundtrack that will, as they say, really give your subwoofer a workout.

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *.

“A film that depicts depravity has to be a depraved film.”

– Tinto Brass

Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) *

So if Hero (2002) is a political film, and House of Flying Daggers (2004) is a love story, then the new film from Zhang Yimou is a family drama. In short, Hamlet with ninjas, and who could fail to love that, eh? In fact, it made me think that one of the real shortcomings of Shakespeare as a dramatist is his failure to deploy a gang of ninjas ascending from the ceiling on ropes at apposite moments in the play. Sounds like a job for the RSC to me.

Salon Kitty (1976)

My week of 70s style Euro depravity begins with this, somewhat alarmingly based on real events. It does seem wildly implausible that the Nazi regime would set up a brothel stocked with loyal party members employed as prostitutes to entice top ranking Nazi officers to verbal indiscretions which were relayed via microphones to a team of eavesdroppers in the basement. And yet they did. And does Tinto Brass take every opportunity to portray this lurid slice of real history in as bizarre and tasteless and exploitative a manner as possible? Oh yes. The sight of twenty naked women disrobing on a stage turns up pretty early, and once past that, you’re kind of prepared for anything, which is just as well. Because it’s simulated sex with midgets and amputees next.

The Damned (1969)

It would seem that the grandfather of the Nazi chic/exploitation vein which ran throughout the 70s is this film directed by Luchino Visconti. The film seems to take place over a longer timescale than it does, but actually it’s only a couple of years from the Reichstag fire in 1933 to the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. This is still plenty of time for a respectable family which owns a steel mill to plummet into chaos and disorder through their embrace of the Nazi regime. It’s Macbeth with swastikas, a moral bloodbath with nobody left standing uncorrupted or dead.

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975)

Meanwhile, in Italy, Pasolini is demonstrating the evils of fascism through the extended metaphor of one of the most notorious books of the Marquis De Sade. Four establishment types round up, imprison, molest, abuse, torture and kill a group of young people made compliant through their own acceptance of the fascist regime that has decided to destroy them because it can. Pasolini uses every distancing device in the directorial book: the film mostly takes place in long shot, there is no characterisation for the victims, and the four establishment types communicate only in sentences of long-winded debate that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever read any of the Marquis’ work. It certainly hasn’t become any easier to watch, but nor would footage shot by a documentary team on location in Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib Prison.

la grande bouffe (1973)

A lot of these films are about what men do, and most of them were made alongside the rise of feminism. Although there are key female characters in the above three films (and the three below), this effort from Marco Ferreri is the only one to show some awareness of this, even if only slyly. Four men (I wonder if Pasolini saw this film before he made Salò) eat themselves to death over a weekend in a satire of the bourgeois. Although they employ three prostitutes to spice things up at first, it is another woman, Andréa Ferréol, who is the only one to see them all to their deaths. Whereas there is something clearly pathological about the male obsession with food here, Andréa’s character is able to eat without angst.

Immoral Tales (1974)

So either Walerian Borowczyk is a genius liberating cinema from narrative through an animator’s obsession with details and metaphors, or he’s an exploitative hack concerned only with photographing as many naked women as he can before he dies. After this film, I remained undecided. Perhaps the scene in which thirty (or is it forty) naked female teenagers tear a pearl encrusted dress off Picasso’s daughter, Paloma, inspired the mass disrobing in Salon Kitty. It’s kind of hard to tell. A lot of the naughtiness seems awfully tame today, and the lampooning of religious figures and religion in general has certainly lost whatever bite it once possessed.

La Bête (1975)

On the other hand, this is a work of some kind of genius. So I’m prepared to cut the old boy some slack. Walerian Borowczyk’s follow up to the above film was sufficiently shocking to the British censors that it remained uncertificated for 26 years. And yet the film isn’t so much shocking as very funny. It’s the Carry On film that was never quite made. The 200 year old flashback in which la Bête (a man in a big furry suit) has its way (shall we say) with a young woman (Sirpa Lane) was originally a short film that caused quite a stir when it was first shown as part of a work in progress version of Immoral Tales. Borowczyk went back to this short after completing Immoral Tales differently and constructed a modern day frame in which, in classic horror movie style, an unsuspecting bride (Lisbeth Hummel) arrives at a remote castle to be wed to something that isn’t quite human. Since this is 1975, the bride masturbates with a rose at a late point in the narrative, which I have to say would not be my flower of choice (all those thorns). As well as the groom, the castle is packed (in a low budget kind of way) with a team of eccentrics right out of the Carry On universe. My first favourite is Sirpa Lane’s pursuit through the woods in which the branches of the trees are mysteriously able to remove all of her 18th Century costume; I’m convinced this was a Benny Hill bit. My second favourite is the butler who’s never able to come when he’s called because he’s too busy having sex with the daughter of the father of the groom; when he gets up to get dressed, he leaves the unsatisfied daughter to finish herself off with a large knob on a bedstead; it’s that kind of film.

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Where would the late night erotic thriller be without Last Tango? What would the unemployed saxophone players of Los Angeles do for work if there weren’t all those tastefully softcore sex scenes to embellish with their haunting solos? And in the end, it was the film that featured Marlon Brando’s last acting performance and turned Maria Schneider into a drug-addicted lesbian. Allegedly.

Conclusion

So what have I learned from a week of depravity, 70s style?

1. Pubic hair is very, very good, but if it’s shaved off a man, it makes his penis look longer (ref. Helmut Berger’s sauna scene in Salon Kitty).

2. No one ever took any exercise (and looked all the better for it), and no woman had any plastic or chemicals injected into any part of their bodies (and looked all the better for it).

3. The Nazis were bad, and fascism was evil. Duh.

4. It really, really helps to know that in a scene where the characters are either a) eating shit, or b) sat in a giant tub of shit, that the shit was made out of chocolate and orange marmalade.

5. That it probably isn’t a good idea to meet a stranger in a flat, have sex with them for a few days, and then attend a dance competition drunk out of your mind.

6. It won’t end well, mark my words.

Carmen (1983)

To make it clear, this is the Carlos Saura flamenco version of the classic story. This is an object lesson in how to film dance sequences. Whole chunks of screen time are consumed by nothing more than elegant Spanish dancers of both sexes winding sinuously around each other to the accompaniment of nothing more than their own feet on a wooden floor or a single acoustic guitar. Bizet’s Carmen was the first opera I really learned to appreciate, and this modern take on the story surfaced at the same time. Reality (the rehearsal of a flamenco production of the Carmen story using some of Bizet’s music) slowly starts to bleed away and the Carmen story itself takes over, which does not bode well for the flamenco director (playing Don Jose) and his ill-founded relationship with his tempestuous leading lady.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Warner Home Video’s Ultra Resolution process has made an astonishing difference to the video quality of this classic film. Clips from earlier telecine transfers turn up in one of the making of documentaries and the difference is like night and day. In the new transfer you can actually see the bricks of the yellow brick road, and the sepia tone of the original opening has replaced what I always remember seeing in black and white. Which leads me to…

Wild at Heart (1990)

Or, Dorothy goes on the road with a guy in a snakeskin jacket, a symbol of his individuality and his belief in personal freedom.

Nikita (1990)

Luc Besson’s movies wouldn’t be half as good as they are without Eric Serra’s music. And Nikita is really a highpoint in their collaboration. Even the end title song doesn’t suck. How come no American director can make an action movie as good as this?

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)

First of all, I lived through the 70s but I don’t remember the fashions being quite as horrible as they were. Cruel Picture indeed. Tony, the pimp who abducts Madeleine, hooks her on heroin, and prostitutes her to his friends, first appears wearing a fantastically awful suit, shirt and tie combo that really should have warned Madeleine not to get into his car in the first place, but alas. Tony takes her to a restaurant and plies her with drink, and the restaurant has this appalling mural painted over an alcove. Truly, it was the decade that taste forgot. Perhaps it also accounts for why this film was made in the first place. For this was a time when it probably seemed like a really good idea to shoot hardcore inserts and place them in the scenes where Madeleine has been forced to service Tony’s clients. Even for an exploitation picture, this seems like a step too far. But I don’t know that it is. There is a kind of honesty and integrity to the inserts, there is no shying away from what is really going on. And it is an unfortunate fact that real women from real Eastern European countries are really being brought to Britain and locked up in houses and forced to have sex with men who are only too willing to ask no questions and have sex with mute witnesses who speak no English; a couple of male and female Tony’s were arrested in my local area for doing exactly this. The inserts seem shocking, but what they’re really saying is that this is the reality of this situation, does this seem right to you? They’re the opposite of eroticism. And away from the fashions and the sex, the film flat out ceases to make any sense on a whole number of occasions. My favourite non sequitur occurs when Tony and friends with Madeleine in pursuit drive up to an empty racecourse and proceed inside to a fully functioning bistro. What the hell? It’s a deserted racecourse, why would a bistro be open? It’s true that the film has this whole Ingmar Bergman directing a sleazy movie feel to it, it’s a sleazy movie with artful compositions, a distorted electronic music score and a heroine without a line of dialogue but lots of scenes shot from her point of view. It’s certainly put me in the mood for some more Eurotrash, so that’s what next week may hold.

One cinema visit this week marked with a *. Maybe another season of a director’s work next week, maybe not.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)

For the record, this was the 1988 Turner Preview version of the film. If The Wild Bunch (1969) was the funeral of the Western genre, then Pat Garrett is the burial. Working with a poetic script that occasionally doesn’t make a bit of sense and against the wishes of the then-head of the studio, James Aubrey, the film is suffused with a deep melancholy and sense of hopelessness. It is, as ever, the characters of Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch seen a little further down the road: the outlaw who’s sold out and become a sheriff, and the former friend he has to kill who’s stayed true to himself. There is no longer a place for these people in America, and they, along with every great character actor from the history of the genre, are to brushed aside by the money men who smell profit in the open range.

INLAND EMPIRE (2006) *

And so, final proof, if proof were needed, that Hollywood has got it completely wrong when it comes to film marketing. For every executive who’s sat in an office and complained that their pet audience of 13 year old boys has to have every plot point explained to them again and again as if they were simpletons, for every writer who’s put the studio’s spin on a good script and made it worse, for every up and coming director with a background in music videos and adverts who knows they’re weak on dealing with actors and having anything of any substance to say, here is this, the first film in five years from David Lynch, “a gob of spit in the face of art”. How could you preview this? Who would get past the first appearance of actors in rabbit costumes? Who would survive the first rumble of ambient sound paired with indecipherable, dimly lit images? What’s wrong with the quality of the images? Why are things out of focus? Why does one image follow from the next to the next to the next? Make it stop, make it stop, give me the summer of sequels instead!!

Possibly, INLAND EMPIRE is about this: a blonde actress receives a visit from a disturbed neighbour who predicts that she will get the part in her next film. The film is a remake of a Polish film which was never finished because something happened to the two actors during its making; there are rumours of a gypsy curse. At some stage, the same “something” starts to happen in the production of the remake, and after that, you’re on your own. While the film seems anchored in a concrete reality, it’s actually not. Roles slip in and out of the film, the reality of making the film, the Polish film, the reality of making the Polish film, watching David Lynch’s film, the very film you’re watching, where there’s an entire world both behind the projection booth and in front of the screen and behind the screen.

Like Mulholland Dr. (2001), this is a film about acting, about playing a role, about burying yourself in a part so deeply that you become someone else, but for a purpose, perhaps the purpose of lifting the curse, perhaps to die on screen and be reborn, perhaps to discover who you truly are and who you truly are not. If you’re bored with contemporary film, if you like a challenge, if you like the idea of something where the filmmaker wants you, the audience member, to bring something to the table as well, then this is the film for you, all three hours of it. If you give yourself up to it, those three hours will pass like a dream. This is the best film I’ve seen in three and a half years. People are going to be unravelling its mysteries for centuries.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

It seems that every actor who played a lead role in a Peckinpah film ended up playing Peckinpah himself. Hence, William Holden’s moustache in The Wild Bunch which made him look more like Sam. Hence, Warren Oates’ sunglasses in this film which do the same. Only seven minutes in do we discover that this film takes place in the present day as El Jefe dispatches his minions to do his dirty work for him. The parallels with Watergate are deliberately clumsy and completely intended; Peckinpah took Nixon’s betrayal of America personally and even dispatched a telegram to the White House to tell Nixon exactly what he thought of him. It’s a film about what you have to go through to make a film, about what part of your soul you have to rip out to deliver the severed head of a man you’ve never met to another man who wanted that act done.

The Killer Elite (1975)

Sam Peckinpah, meet cocaine, I think you two are going to get along very well. I was puzzled by the dialogue of this film that seemed to be taking the mick out of the script until I discovered courtesy of David Weddle’s biography of Peckinpah that Sam had directed his actors to improvise mocking lines as part of a deliberate strategy to belittle material that Sam had been shanghaied into directing and felt was beneath him. This is a really irritating thing to discover because this film has ninjas, swordfights, Uzis, shootouts, all cool Peckinpah stuff that Sam no longer felt he had any time for. Instead of approaching this material with the cool intent of his hero, Don Siegel (who would have done it a whole lot better), Sam was too busy getting high.

Cross of Iron (1977)

Financed by the legendary soft porn baron Wolf Hartwig (who gave us Schulmädchen-Report (1970) amongst many many others but was way out of his depth on this one), Peckinpah did have one great film left in him. It’s true that some scenes lack focus, but for the most part this is a scarifying account of modern warfare circa World War II on the Russian front from the viewpoint of the Germans, and one Corporal Steiner in particular. Every war film is an anti-war film, and this is no exception. Steiner no longer believes in any cause, no longer believes in the Iron Cross he’s been awarded, the Cross which the newly-posted Prussian patrician Captain Stransky covets so much. Steiner’s just trying to get through this with the lives of his men intact. But there are too many advancing Russians, and too many enemies on his own side as well. Peckinpah’s use of slow motion cut into fast motion reaches its apotheosis here in the horror of war. There’s no glorification of violence here, just mud and dirt and blood and shit and waste.
Convoy (1978)

What a waste. By this stage, Peckinpah’s addictions had got the better of him. Whole chunks of this movie were directed by James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson and Katherine Haber, Sam’s long suffering personal assistant. Sam was in his trailer with his drink and drugs, often too wasted to make it to the set. Does it show in the finished film? Oh yes. My heart sinks when I’m watching a film from the 70s and that yee-hah bluegrassy banjo and fiddle and boom-chicka beat starts up, because this is a car chase, this is fun y’all, we’re gonna have a good time tonight, yessirree. Deadly. Smokey and the Bandit (1977) was a big hit but it isn’t any good. Convoy was a big hit as well, the biggest of Sam’s career, and all it does is lie there on the screen like a dead dog begging you to like it.

The Osterman Weekend (1983)

Perhaps starting the film with the death of a naked woman wasn’t the best choice to make. It seemed to turn people off right up front, and it would have been much better to introduce this material later in the film, when some more time has been invested in developing the characters and laying out the situation. And in fact this actually happens: at one point John Hurt’s character explains his motivation for targeting Rutger Hauer’s friends and he plays the tape that starts the film. I wonder if Sam knew this, but we’ll never know, he was taken off the picture and never allowed to finish what he’d started.

Sam Peckinpah died a year after the release of his final film. He was 59, but he looked two decades older.

David Lynch is 61, has practiced Transcendental Meditation since the 1970s, and has just made the best film of his career.

Oh dear, three months in, and I’m already adjusting my DVD watching so as to make a nicer set of movies to write about. See next week, if things work out.

Trading Places (1983)

This is why I’ll never make a killing on the stock market; I flat out just don’t understand the commodity trading scenes in this film. It’s a reminder of a lot of things, of a time when John Landis could still direct, and Eddie Murphy could still be funny, and American film comedy could still have something to say.

Showgirls (1995)

By now, I’ve clearly gone insane. I spent all my time talking about Pandora’s Box last week talking about Showgirls, and this week I’m gonna spend all my time talking about Showgirls talking about Pandora’s Box (sort of). Taking my cue from the Pandora’s Box commentary track from academics Thomas Elsaesser and Mary Ann Doane, here are some very odd thoughts about Showgirls that link the film to Pandora’s Box more than they should. Consider the film as a fetishistic object. Consider the following as an allegory of cinema: the prostitute, the pimp and the client standing for the leading actress, the director and the spectator. These themes can be found in the films of Godard and Fassbinder, especially in films concerning the spectacle of women. And Showgirls is about nothing else than the spectacle of women. It all fits. Nomi Malone is clearly the prostitute figure at the heart of the film, who denies that she’s a prostitute at the same time as she exploits her body to get ahead; the late plot detail that she’s been arrested for soliciting earlier in her life is not much of a surprise. Nomi is surrounded by pimps, men who exploit her and encourage her to exploit herself: the guy in the pickup truck at the start, the boss of the Cheetah, the guy at the disco, all of the men at the Tangiers, and the rock star who rapes her friend. Nomi is also surrounded by clients who watch her and pay for her services, whether with money or employment; it starts on stage at the Cheetah, continues in the lap dancing back room, and finishes on the stage of the Tangiers. And somewhat inevitably, this plays into the subject of the film itself. A naive and inexperienced actress, Elizabeth Berkeley, has been persuaded into exposing more of herself than perhaps she should have done by a couple of pimps: Joe Eszterhas and Paul Verhoeven, all for the supposed delight of anyone who’s ever watched Showgirls. The exploitation of Nomi is the exploitation of Elizabeth, so how complicit is the viewer of the film in this exploitation?

All That Jazz (1979)

There was a fair amount of accusations of pretentiousness levelled at this film when it first appeared and did all those things that Hollywood would prefer American movies don’t do: win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, excoriate the whole business that is show, reveal that the man behind the curtain isn’t a wizard but a painfully flawed human being after all. And yet All That Jazz is one of those films that’s improved over the years like a fine wine. Bob Fosse only directed five films, but all of them are great, and I guess that isn’t so bad.

Chicago (2002)

Rob Marshall’s directed two, and nobody has anything good to say about Memoirs of a Geisha. It is odd that Chicago has the structure it has, in which the musical numbers all take the form of dreams or nightmares (except perhaps the last number). It’s almost as if Harvey Weinstein had a backup plan in case the film didn’t work for an audience: Chicago the musical without the songs.

Ed Wood (1994)

How fabulous is this film? Before the Academy recognised Johnny Depp, I already knew he was one of the best actors of his generation. As Joel Schumacher and Michael Bay continue to prove, all you need to make a bad film is a total lack of talent. Ed Wood’s films were terrible, of course, but at least they didn’t drain the resources of Hollywood and clog the multiplexes of the world to keep the studio limping on for another year.

Sunset Blvd. (1950)

So here is the flip to David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001). Norma Desmond is really creepy and it’s great to see an actress really commit to playing completely unhinged on the big screen. This is a film about what happens when the studios don’t want you anymore because there’s always someone younger and hungrier waiting to push you down the stairs backstage and take your place in the show. This is a film about what the show does to you, and what’s left when there’s no one remaining to worship your image any longer.