Nobody Knows Anything

One cinema visit, marked with a *.

INLAND EMPIRE (2006)

So, does it still work on DVD? As long as you watch it in the dark. And crank up the sound system. Interestingly, once you claim to have figured it out, the film gets right up and baffles you all over again. Interpretation isn’t what this film’s about at all really, it’s like an ongoing negotiation between you and the experience you’re having. I found myself less interested in the rabbits and more interested in spotting how and when various characters recur. And, really, there is no experience more strange than watching David Lynch host a cooking programme: now there’s a niche market BBC2 are missing out on.

The Simpsons Movie (2007) *

The mantra about The Simpsons, endlessly repeated by disaffected thirtysomethings with a voice on the web, is that it ain’t what it used to be. That The Simpsons has now become too silly and unbelievable, that it has betrayed itself, as if an animated TV show where nearly everybody has yellow skin was somehow a paragon of realism. To me, the only thing that matters is this: is The Simpsons still funny? Answer: yes. So you can take your disaffection and shove it where the sun don’t shine. And yet, after all’s said and done, is there really any need for a Simpsons movie? Doesn’t the whole enterprise strike you as somewhat unnecessary? Well, it is awfully funny and it does have a song called Spider-Pig. What more do you want?

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)

I’m a big fan of Tartan’s Asia Extreme label, and in particular of a number of films that have been produced in South Korea over the last ten years. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that South Korean cinemas are stocked full of dark, twisted thrillers, brutalist takes on the cop genre and unimaginable horror pictures. They make ratty comedies just like the French do, it’s just that it’s the dark stuff that has found a worldwide audience. Take this film, the first in Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy, it didn’t do well at the Korean box office at all, and only found an audience on export. Possibly due to budgetary constraints, there are a lot of static camera shots and an overly oppressive soundtrack, but Park makes it all work for his own chilly purposes.

Oldboy (2003)

As a sign of how psychotic Cho Seung-hoi was (he was the instigator of the Virginia Tech massacre earlier this year, you may recall), here is People’s Exhibit #1, the evil DVD of the evil film that “inspired” this evil twat to kill 32 people and then himself. Except of course it did nothing of the kind. Only if you were a psychotic, could you claim this film as an inspiration, because if you actually watched the film and continued to function as a normal human being, what you would take away from it is the idea that vengeance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and lives will be ruined and minds will be broken and body parts will be compromised. If you’re psychotic, you don’t care about any of that stuff anyway, so you’ll pose for pictures holding a hammer and guns and then set about your filthy work. Oldboy did not make anyone kill anybody else. All Oldboy provided Cho Seung-hoi with was justification beforehand; the damage had already been done to him and the signs were sitting there waiting to be read - it is the failure of the people who were treating him, and the failure of the university authorities to deal with what was happening that led to all those deaths. And of course the failure of Cho Seung-hoi himself. Another loser looking for something to help him make it through the night. And he found Oldboy, a film he quite clearly never began to understand.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)

The vengeance trilogy of Park Chan-wook has one concern at its heart. There is a doubling of the vengeances in all of the films. Those who seek vengeance fail to realise that a vengeance is being sought on them as well. So, given that the third film is, as they say, one for the ladies, does this mean any softening of the focus or any pulling back from the extremities of the earlier two films? Oh no. Park sets up an intervention into the current debate on what to do with murderous paedophiles and comes to his own ambiguously disturbing take on what society calls justice and what the parents of a murdered child would call justice, and leaves his audience to swim in the immoral soup that results. And then there’s that title. It’s a great title. And boo hiss to Tartan for attempting to sell the movie in the UK as Lady Vengeance, as if that was what the film was about. Thankfully, Park was way ahead of them, and has titled all of his films in both English and Korean. So sympathy it is.

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.

There’s a very small chance of me ever writing anything negative about any of the films here since I’ve either made a conscious decision to go to the cinema to see them, or I’ve made an equally conscious decision to buy them on DVD and it’s very unusual for me to watch a film without wanting to. This is also a plus because films are a lot harder to praise than they are to pick apart. By the way, The Departed is genius.

One Hour Photo (2002)

For some reason, Robin Williams decided he’d had enough of playing the same part for a decade (you know, the child inside the man) and that it might be a really good idea if he started to demonstrate his range as an actor instead of repeato ditto. Presumably because there was a shortage of stage-trained British actors in Hollywood in 2001, two very different villain parts came his way and he jumped at them. Amusingly, in his audio commentary with Robin Williams, the director Mark Romanek refers to this film as his debut, when it is so not. Mark Romanek’s true debut feature was Static (1985), on which he was co-director with Keith Gordon, probably most famous for playing Brian De Palma as a teenager in Dressed To Kill (1980). Static is really really good, but it’s pretty impossible to find. In the 17 years between these two films, Romanek established himself in the world of music videos (see The Work of Director Mark Romanek in the Directors Label series). Thankfully, his second movie only takes the good parts from the music video genre (intense stylisation) and not the bad (fast cutting, inability to work with actors or direct way out of wet paper bag, eg. McG, Michael Bay et al).

Insomnia (2002)

Among the treats of this film: a good performance from Hilary Swank in a supporting role; Christopher Nolan’s commentary which rearranges (more or less) the whole movie in the order of filming and makes you appreciate just how good Al Pacino’s ability to convey the successive stages of insomnia really is since scenes were filmed wildly out of continuity; Robin Williams as a really nice bad guy.

Mulholland Dr. (2001)

Stop reading this right now and go out and buy this film on DVD and watch it immediately. It will change your life.

Sideways (2004)

Here’s the thing. Why didn’t Virginia Madsen become one of the biggest movie stars in the world? She looked spectacular and she was a great actress, and yet it just didn’t happen for her. It’s almost like she was too beautiful for fame, and somebody picked Demi Moore and her insipid psychobabble instead. There’s an engaging lack of vanity to Madsen’s performance in this film; there’s no attempt to hide her age and it only serves to highlight her beauty. An actual movie for adults by adults starring adults.

Zoolander (2001)

In a world of obsessive celebrity worship and reality television, where we’re now past celebrities famous for being famous into fake celebrities who weren’t famous in the first place, there is only one film that has taken a stance against uneducated morons with perfumes to hock and ghostwritten autobios: Zoolander. It’s the new Spinal Tap. Everybody loves them some Zoolander. It even has Paris Hilton in it.