Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

One of the secrets of modern fiction is the 20 novel series about HMS Surprise written by Patrick O’Brian. This film encouraged me to pick up the first in the series, and it was, rather unfortunately, so good that I’ve resigned myself to reading the other 19. They’re on the list. This is the kind of movie that digital effects were intended for, a highly detailed recreation of a bygone era that, had it been made 30 years ago (and it could have been), would have had highly unsatisfactory models bouncing around in the tank at Pinewood. If you don’t believe me, check out the supertanker in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977); not for a moment is that believeable as a real ship, despite the best efforts of the Thunderbirds-trained effects technicians. There is something highly attractive about this kind of seafaring yarn, and, even better, due to the complex nature of the financing that required Universal, Miramax and 20th Century Fox to come together, there’s unlikely to be a sequel, even though the film’s ending begs for one.

Foxy Brown (1974)

To finally do away with the bad guys at the end of this film, Foxy Brown persuades the local gang of urban terrorists in a seedy basement filled with automatic weapons to help her out. It did strike me that, apart from all of the other stuff you couldn’t get away with nowadays, this is something you really couldn’t get away with nowadays. This is less fun than Coffy (1973), but still has Pam Grier with a shotgun blowing people away, and Antonio Fargas as 1974’s most badly dressed, most sleazy drug dealing relative (he’s Foxy’s brother).

Sin City (2005)

Still looks highly impressive. Although the movie is all on one note, it’s a helluva note, and if you get that note and enjoy listening to it, the movie does not stop delivering for you. This definitely seems to be one of those divisionary movies, so if there’s anything the slightest bit PC about you, the film’s guaranteed to offend. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We need more offensive art in our culture, not less.

Alien (1979)

Probably in preparation for The Week of Blade Runner (1982) (coming soon), I found myself drawn first to Charles De Lauzirika’s three hour making of documentary, then the film, and then the commentary track. The first time I saw Alien was the first time it was shown on ITV, in full screen, in mono, with adverts, back in the 1980s. My memory is that it was shown on a bank holiday and we had to rush back from a beach in Wales at my insistence to catch it. The first time I saw Alien in the cinema was I think at an all night screening in Brixton in the late 1980s. Since the film isn’t terribly great as a screen original (it’s a film as derivative of other media as The Matrix (1999)), most of the pleasure of watching Alien these days comes from admiring the sets and not necessarily the actors or the script. It’s a b-movie elevated through production design, and that’s not all that bad.

Seabiscuit (2003)

As befits a former scriptwriter for Bill Clinton, the films of Gary Ross, as both screenwriter and director, are straight down the middle Democrat fantasias of America, and Seabiscuit is utterly irresistible. Most of the unlikely plot twists of the film are true, and Jeff Bridges is handed the thankless task of providing a whole bunch of gooey exposition about Seabiscuit being the little man given a second chance in the wake of the Great Depression, and a whole bunch of dewey-eyed reporters are assembled around him eating this stuff up. The patriotic hokum at the press conference in The Right Stuff (1983) is subtly flagged by the sotto voce comments of the astronauts and the irony of Philip Kaufman’s script. There’s no irony in Seabiscuit, Gary Ross really believes this stuff, and I think as long as you don’t buy into it too wholeheartedly, so can you. Maybe. The liberal utopia of America will probably always remain a dream, mostly as long as the Democrats seem unable to come up with as convincing a Presidential candidate as Bill Clinton, and we all know what went wrong with that.

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. Contains one use of strong language. Sorry.

Jackie Brown (1997)

Film soundtracks are only intended for the seriously geeky. I mean, why would anyone buy the 2 soundtracks to Gladiator (2000) when they can have the same music delivered to them in 5.1 DTS with extra hacking and slashing and dialogue every time they watch the DVD? It’s very difficult to come up with anything resembling an explanation, but I’ve been buying film soundtracks for a long time, and in the days before the internet and indeed VHS, a film soundtrack was the only place to find that particular piece that seemed so transcendent when seen in the context of the film. Unless it didn’t make it to the soundtrack album. The best piece of music in The Hit (1984) was produced by Eric Clapton, and it isn’t on Paco De Lucia’s soundtrack. Among the frustrations of Blade Runner (1982) (see more later when The Week of Blade Runner starts) was the non-appearance of Vangelis’ soundtrack and its replacement with Vangelis’ music played by something called “The New American Orchestra”, an Alan Smithee style atrocity to line up with the worst of them. Away from all the conspiracy theories, what seems to have put paid to the 1982 Vangelis soundtrack we all wanted was nothing more exciting than legal bullshit of the kind that has bedevilled Blade Runner ever since the film went overbudget during production in 1981.

Quentin Tarantino very clearly loves film soundtrack albums, and, like me, he probably owns soundtracks to films he’s never seen, the ultimate example of soundtrack geekery. Jackie Brown, like all Tarantino’s films, is stuffed with pieces from other movies; in the case of the music from Coffy (1973) (see below), Tarantino uses the music more effectively in his film than Jack Hill did 24 years earlier. And Jackie Brown begins with one of the best title sequences in recent memory, Pam Grier in character as an air stewardess striding through an airport like an avenging goddess to the tune of Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street, from the 1972 film of the same name. This short three and a half minute sequence sets up so much of what happens later. We sense Pam Grier’s attitude, her strength, her dignity, but also her haste, and eventually the realisation that her job isn’t so hot, but just all she could get, and why she’s in the place she’s in, and why she’s couriering money into the country for Ordell.

American Gangster (2007) *

Across 110th Street turns up on the soundtrack to Ridley Scott’s latest movie as well, somewhat critically dismissed but popular with two key constituencies: moviegoers and Oscar-voting Academy members. If you’re being unnecessarily harsh (which I would suggest is a bad place to start when criticising anything), you could say that this film doesn’t contain anything that hasn’t been played out before time and again in any number of films: The Godfather (1972), Scarface (1983), Heat (1995); in short, the touchstone films of modern crime cinema. The important ace that American Gangster has to play is that it’s based on a true story, the vague details of which have surfaced above ground in my cultural memories, but never been connected together in quite this way before. I was aware of the police corruption endemic in New York City in the 1960s and 70s because I’d seen Serpico (1973), but not aware that the later cleanup and arrests of corrupt officers were in part informed by the testimony of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), the drug kingpin at the centre of events here, a man prepared to deal to the end to stave off life imprisonment.

The Big Doll House (1971)

Not being overly familiar with the Filipino women in prison films that supposedly inspired this one, a typically opportunistic Roger Corman intervention into a potentially lucrative market, it’s hard for me to say just quite on what level of satire this film operates. Or whether it’s just the low budget and odd performances that account for the all round low rent atmosphere. Christiane Schmidtmer’s overwrought performance as a Nazi prison governor into snakes, whips and torture is just one of the film’s baroque pleasures. The Big Doll House is the Halloween (1978) of women in prison flicks, the new set of clichés that spawned a parade of imitators, including the following year’s…

The Big Bird Cage (1972)

Pam Grier appears in both these films, first as a bitchy lesbian opportunist in Doll House and then as a bitchy revolutionary in Bird Cage. One of the clichés of women in prison films is that all of the prisoners have butch personas, skimpy clothing, and surprising access to haircare and makeup, with the exception of the one femme inmate who can be heard weeping softly in the corner. This excess of female machismo naturally results in encounters in the showers (no WIP film is complete without gratuitous nudity) and wrestling in the mud and sex-starved women holding knives to men’s throats and bellowing ominously, “Get it up or I’ll cut it off,” and mowing down rows of Filipino prison guard extras with machine guns. All tied off with a soupçon of revolutionary politics to keep the student crowd happy.

Coffy (1973)

Jack Hill directed both of the previous films, and this 3rd collaboration with Pam Grier effectively moves her centre stage as a vengeful nurse intent on taking out the drugdealing motherfuckers who got her 11 year old niece addicted to heroin. She does this by wielding a shotgun, having an affair with a potential congressman, posing as a highclass Jamaican prostitute to penetrate the organisation (as you do when you’re a nurse) and finding herself in quite a few situations where her clothes seem to fall off, no more so than in a hilarious fistfight with a whole bunch of other bitter and resentful (and indeed bitchy) prostitutes, during which their clothes fall off as well. This is a solid entry in the blaxploitation genre, complete with wah-wah guitars, absurd cars and really bad clothes (and that’s not bad as in good).