Nobody Knows Anything

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

The Golden Compass (2007) *

As I’m currently reading the His Dark Materials trilogy for the first time, it seemed like the right moment to nip to the cinema and catch New Line’s filmization of the first book in the sequence. I was deeply impressed. Who knew that Chris Weitz had a film like this in him after American Pie (1999) and About a Boy (2002)? Those two films were competent but only slightly surprising and certainly no standouts. No wonder Weitz walked off the project once, daunted by the technical challenges, but thank God (that’s a His Dark Materials in-joke by the way) he came back to finish what he started. The only blip in the continuation of the series is its dismal non-performance at the American box office. However, the film has done really well worldwide, and hopefully New Line will figure out some ingenious way to promote the film on DVD in the States and allow it to find its audience. Although it may look like a children’s film, it is so not, it’s about as deeply adult and disconcerting as fantasy films can get, and it knocks CS Lewis into a cocked hat, which is where he and the rest of his wretched Christian brethren belong.

Blade Runner (1982) *

For the record, this was the Final Cut version of the film, projected digitally. As magnificent as Blade Runner now looks on DVD (see previous post), this spanking new cleaned up digital version on a big screen with a decent sound system is simply overwhelming. Vangelis’ score has real presence, the special effects look better than CGI, and the subtlety of the performances and the great craft of the direction really come to the fore. The other thing, even though Golden Compass was coming to the end of its run, the cinema wasn’t crowded at all, but the Blade Runner screening was packed.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

So it takes Richard Linklater and Bob Sabiston’s proprietary rotoscoping software to bring Philip K Dick to the cinema really for the first time, reasonably undiluted and very out there. Maybe what a Philip K Dick adaptation needed was an approach as extreme as Dick’s own approach to science fiction, and it certainly gets it in spades here. Filmed in Austin, Texas, in the summer of 2004, it took 18 months to essentially reanimate the film frame by frame to deliver the final product. The blur suit, especially, would be a challenge even in CGI, but the approach here, halfway towards a comic book, works better than CGI would. A Scanner Darkly is an edgy, paranoid, very political film about drugs and the people who consume them and are consumed by them and the people who let people consume them for twisted purposes of their own.

Total Recall (1990)

The other kind of Philip K Dick adaptation is this beauty with its slam bang direction and driving Jerry Goldsmith score, which uses one or two ideas from We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and then has Arnold Schwarzenegger beat people up Dutch judo style, when he’s not shooting them in the head and delivering pithy quips, or using dead bodies as shields. By the way, the scene in the hotel room where the head of Rekall arrives to tell Arnold he’s living out a fantasy while suffering from a schizoid embolism is real; Arnold plants the “giveaway” sweat on the Rekall director’s head because he doesn’t want the fantasy to end; and the final fade to white, after Arnold has got the girl, killed the bad guys, and saved the entire planet, is a symbol of his ultimate lobotomy. And then he became Governor of California. Sorry, but can someone pinch me every time I read this or see this? Because it can’t be real, can it?

No cinema visits this week. Instead, I made the most of my Blade Runner box set Christmas present and watched the same movie five times in a row.

The Workprint (1982)

Disc 5 contains a 70mm version of Blade Runner that was used for test screenings before all of Vangelis’ score had been completed and before the voiceover panic had begun (even though the Workprint ends with a small piece of voiceover that was provided by one of the film’s screenwriters as opposed to the dreadful stuff long time Blade Runner fans have had to suffer through, which would appear to have been written by someone the producers met at a party). I don’t believe test screenings run by studios have ever made a good film better; what they have done is turned films that might have had a shot at artistic greatness into films that made a lot of money and were forgotten within a couple of years. Test screenings run by the filmmakers themselves would appear to be more successful; the Pythons were pretty systematic in conducting their own private tests so as to judge more effectively what worked and what didn’t in the comedy of their films. The results of the Blade Runner tests are well known: the imposition of the voiceover since the claim was that people didn’t know what was going on. Except that the voiceover is so bad that it doesn’t solve the  problem that didn’t exist in the first place. The intent with Blade Runner’s release 5 weeks after E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) was to mop up a lot of money with a big summer opening as a consequence of the budget overruns inevitable in a project of such scope and vision. Had Blade Runner been released at Christmas 1982, everything might have been very different. Memories of the production differ on the details. The memories that provide an emotional foundation for the replicants turn out to be elusive in the humans who made the film in deciding who made what decision or wrote what piece of dialogue.

The US Version (1982)

Science fiction writer William Gibson had only had a few short stories published in 1982 when he saw Blade Runner for the first time, but it would probably be fair to say that his breakthrough first novel Neuromancer (1984) existed in some form at that time. Gibson was initially distraught at what Ridley Scott had achieved. Right there on the screen was a vision of the future which William Gibson shared and had been writing about for a number of years on his own. There was the grime, the smoke, the rain, the decay, the mix of cultures, the artificial life debate, it was all there. However, at the end of the screening, Gibson realised that he had a card up his sleeve which hadn’t turned up anywhere in Blade Runner, and that card was cyberspace. So Gibson was able to see Neuromancer to publication and change science fiction forever, much to the horror of a number of science fiction purists around the world. Joanne Cassidy has a tattoo of a snake on her neck, a detail I have never noticed before, and I’ve seen Blade Runner more than any other film. What other details remain locked away in Blade Runner, lurking at the corners of the screen, impatient to be let out and revealed?

The International Version (1982)

It’s just slightly more violent than the original US release. The voiceover is really horrible and really indefensible. What’s offensive about it is pretty clear: all it does is tell us something we already know and can already see on the screen contained in the settings and the performances of the actors. It is one of the great redundancies of modern cinema, and feeds into my pet theory (which I may have picked up from someone else but never mind I’m going to pretend it’s mine) about the absence of that Vangelis soundtrack on Polydor that was never released in 1982 even though it’s promised in the end credits. Vangelis’ wonderfully ambiguous statement about this, that he “found himself unable to release the soundtrack” at the time is, I think, connected with the way in which the voiceover is used to bury some of the most beautiful parts of his score. This, and the endless messing about that went on, did, I think, contribute to the soundtrack’s absence in 1982. The visual effects have a stateliness and beauty that CGI has not as yet been able to achieve. This may have something to do with the pace of the film, which is slower than the fast cut bullshit being churned out at the moment, which serves only to deceive the mind and conceal the inadequacies of the filmmakers.

The Director’s Cut (1992)

In the wake of the 70mm screenings of the Workprint, Warner Bros realised they might have a money maker on their hands again, and commissioned a creation of a director’s cut at a time when Ridley Scott was embroiled in production on 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) and unable to give it his full attention. Elements could not be traced, all of the unicorn footage could not be found, but the voiceover could be removed as could the ridiculous happy ending and something resembling a director’s cut could be assembled. It was close but no cigar. The omission of the voiceover gave the film more space, and the introduction of the unicorn produced what I think may be the great MacGuffin of Blade Runner, the question of whether or not Deckard is a replicant. Ridley Scott is convinced he is, Paul M Sammon, on set journalist and author of Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, maintains that in the director’s cut Deckard is a replicant, Harrison Ford never played Deckard as a replicant, and Frank Darabont turns up in one of the supplements to maintain that if Deckard is a replicant, the film doesn’t really make any sense, and has in effect ceased to be true to itself. Blade Runner may be a film about a human who has lost touch with humanity, and can only be reintroduced to it by artificial beings who are more alive than he is, and who both save his life and offer to love him, when his other humans only see him as a killing machine without a soul.

The Final Cut (2007)

When I first got into DVD in 1999, Blade Runner in its Director’s Cut form had already been released in the UK, but I had already encountered internet forums and discussions with the people at Warner Home Video in the States where it became pretty apparent that the 20th anniversary of Blade Runner was only three years away and they were already working on a Special Edition DVD. Which didn’t appear in 2002. The legal issues that prevented this appear to stem from the circumstances of the original production back in 1982, where the budget overran, and Jerry Perenchio and Bud Yorkin became contractually entitled to more rights over the project than they would have done if Blade Runner had come in under budget, and hadn’t been the film of ambition and scope which it is. In the meantime, I wasn’t going to waste my money on a Blade Runner DVD that would be superceded by the coming Special Edition. So it has been, I have to say, a long fucking wait to own what is my favourite film on DVD. The Final Cut fixes a lot of what could not be fixed back in 1982, the wires on the spinners, Joanna Cassidy’s obvious stunt double, the “lip flap” in the snake merchant scene and so on. The scale of the film remains surprisingly intimate, a callback perhaps to an earlier version of the script where everything took place only in interiors. Ridley Scott’s desire to look outside the window and render that world using special effects led to some of my favourite scenes on film: I could watch forever the initial approach to police headquarters, the camera rotating over the building one way while the spinner rotates another. And if I’m really lucky, I might be able to see the Final Cut in a cinema next week. So yes, a little more Blade Runner to come.

No cinema visits this week.

The Man with Two Brains (1983)

If I have a soft spot for Woody Allen’s earlier, funnier work (and I do, hell, I think we all do), then I REALLY have a soft spot for Steve Martin’s earlier, funnier work. Steve Martin’s career started going downhill for me when he started taking not especially comedic parts in more mainstream movies than the low budget masterpieces he made alongside Carl Reiner. Parenthood (1989) pretty much marks the beginning of the end and Martin has only every now and then been willing to demonstrate the comedy chops that brought him respect in the first place. For every Bowfinger (1999), there’s been five pieces of execrable garbage like Sgt. Bilko (1996), the kind of unforgiveable mistake that makes one hope Martin isn’t a Buddhist since he’s going to be paying for that one on the old karmic wheel for all eternity if he is. Brains comes from the earlier, funnier period of Martin’s film career, and is, if anything, even funnier today than it was in 1983.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

As is this, which is a screening inspired by my current reading of Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years. One of the reasons the film works is the authenticity of the medieval background, although even here there are differences of opinion. For instance, every cast member and extra has had their teeth blackened and yellowed in tribute to the years before dentistry, but they were also the years before sugar, and there is evidence that a lot of people in this period had perfectly good teeth. Whatever, the medieval background feels right and is taken seriously by the filmmakers, and this allows them to take nothing else seriously at all. It’s interesting to note that John Cleese, despite his great comedy brain, felt that all this emphasis on shit and discomfort and knitted chainmail was getting in the way of the comedy, when in fact these were precisely the details that made the comedy work.

Titanic (1997)

So here we are ten years later and despite all the absolute works of genius that have been released in the interim, this wretched and despised hulk of schmaltz and bad screenwriting sits irritatingly atop the all time box office charts in the majority of countries around the world, sneering at all the Lord of the Ringses and Star Warses that have followed in its wake and been unable to top it for all around audience appeal. Has any recent film been so despised by men of a certain age, and male media people, and male posters on the internet? Here is a film that is sneered at, regarded with contempt and dismissed as an aberration, as if making a film that appealed to me and men like me not afraid to let the film in, young women, women in general and people over fifty all around the world were some kind of gross sin. As someone who saw Titanic FOUR TIMES in the cinema when it was released in the UK in 1998 and has loved it ever since, I am annoyed by this male hate. Titanic is not a film without flaws, nor is it a work of great art, but it spoke to people worldwide, and in the kind of cinema attendance numbers not seen since Gone with the Wind (1939). David M Lubin has written a rather excellent BFI Modern Classic on the film that does a much better job of defending the film than I have here, and he’s as aware of the film’s shortcomings as anyone is. For me, the film only really ups gears when the iceberg hits around 90 minutes in, and becomes the No.1 blockbuster in its second half that it certainly didn’t promise to be in the first, which is still mired in hokey irony, the Picasso incident, and too many references to the unsinkable ship that rather inevitably attracted the satirists of The Onion: World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg, Titanic Representation Of Man’s Hubris Sinks In North Atlantic and 1,500 Dead In Symbolic Tragedy. And yet as I cringe through Titanic’s opening, I’m reminded that Aliens (1986) works in exactly the same way, where, for almost an hour, an unbearably tense atmosphere of fear and suspense is worked up. Titanic takes the time it needs to establish the world it’s going to tear apart later.

No posts for three weeks and no cinema visits either. As is traditional in these parts, I’ve taken a Christmas break from watching films and have instead been reading books and watching DVD extras instead.

Boogie Nights (1997)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s sophomore film still astonishes with its virtuosity. I’ve yet to track down Legs McNeil’s harsh book about the realities of porn production in America in the 70s, but even in the John Holmes bio on the 2nd disc of Wonderland, there are hints that a very much rose-tinted view of the era is being presented here. Until the 1980s arrive, of course, and it all goes to hell in a handbasket. The clips of John Holmes talking to camera and defending porn are as hilarious as Mark Wahlberg’s deft impersonation of them (of course, Wahlberg had access to this material, as did Anderson, which allows them to recreate the “blocking the sex scenes” incident almost verbatim).

Wonderland (2003)

John Holmes was the kind of gleaming narcissist that actors of a certain type find immensely attractive, and Val Kilmer was absolutely the right choice to portray Holmes in this account of the Wonderland murders in which he may or may not have had a significant role. Since the travails of the porn industry had messed with his charismatic, dissembling, compulsively lying psyche, Holmes had a fresh story to tell about them to anyone who would listen. The truth was sacrificed, and no one has served any prison time for the murders. Wonderland is a tough good watch, and is successful on an artistic level rather than a financial one. The most startling moment comes with the introduction of Eric Bogosian as Eddie Nash, where it seems he has been styled after Alfred Molina’s Rahad Jackson in Boogie Nights. Or is it the other way around? Since Rahad Jackson is the fictional counterpart of Eddie Nash. The Region 1 DVD also includes the sobering half hour LAPD crime scene walkthrough video shot in 1981 with the bodies still in place, which may be more reality than any casual fan of the kitsch of 70s porn may want to face.

For Your Consideration (2006)

The take on this film is that it wasn’t quite as great as previous efforts from the team, and a little too “inside” for mainstream tastes. I don’t know, though, a lot of it seemed awfully funny to me on a first viewing, and I was certainly noticing enough bits that looked like they’d be even funnier next time through, the sure sign of a comedy for the ages rather than a comedy for right now.