ANY KENNEDY: THE MERCILESS, BLINDING SUNSHINE OF NIGHT MOVES

ANY KENNEDY: THE MERCILESS, BLINDINGSUNSHINE OF NIGHT MOVES

Even by the standards of gritty, mid-1970s, mid-budget, street-noir, Night Moves is ugly. It's shot like serial television; Director Arthur Penn possesses no discernable visual language. Most frames are functional, set up to deliver information. There's no noir shadowing - the whole bleak tale takes place in merciless blinding sunshine - no metaphorical frame composition, just basic prose presentation. The willfully cheap mid-'70s interiors feature that mid-'70s glaring overhead key light halo-ing everybody's relentlessly mid-'70s hair.

Cinematographer Bruce Surtees' first jobs (Play Misty For Me, Dirty Harry) were for the one-take-and-print-it master, Clint Eastwood, who worked fast, thought literal and wouldn't know a visual metaphor if one shot at him from horseback. The model here seems to be the brutal realism of Surtees' prosaic frames on John Flynn's The Outfit (1973). Yet between The Outfit and Night Moves,Surtees DP'd the expressionist, black & white, Lenny. So the aggressive simplicity of his work on Night Moves apparently derived from money limitations. And/or directorial indifference.

Dotting the film like truffles in an omelet are three dynamic tracking shots and and three mind-blowing, visually sophisticated stunt sequences.

These suggest that with more money, maybe Penn would have made an expressive, more visually noir noir. Or maybe not. Only when he showcases violence does Penn's visual grammar rise above the pedestrian. Like the bullet-spattered finale ofBonnie & Clyde, the orgasmic blood-letting of the climactic stunt of Night Moves features a bravura that doesn't manifest anywhere else. Penn keeps the quotidian moments exactly that, and the fulcrum moments get the full heavenly choir. Night Moves lurches about, but the crucial moments linger. Despite the Starsky & Hutch framing, you cannot take your eyes off the screen. And that's because Gene Hackman is in pretty much every shot. And Gene Hackman is in pain.

Parsing Gene Hackman's singular gifts is a sucker's game. Hackman doesn't look, speak, dress or move like a movie star. He has little grace and sports the gnarliest mid-'70s hair/mustache combo in the history of gnarly mid-'70s hair/mustache combos. Yet he commands every moment. His character - Harry Moseby - a pro football player turned second-rate private eye, lives out his self-loathing the same way he lived out its only escape - through his body. The more Harry Moseby's lied to, or the more his feelings are hurt - and they're hurt easily -- the more slumped, crushed and childlike his posture becomes. When Moseby channels all his self-directed psychic violence outward - as he did on the football field - he's ecstatic. It's not Penn who communicates the depths of Harry's indifference to the outcome; it's Hackman. Harry doesn't care if he wins or loses, if he beats or is beaten. He wants only the release of the moment, regardless of consequences. He wants only to escape himself.

So he immerses in the private eye life, following clues into the lives of others to avoid seeing himself. Harry takes control by remaining invisible. His dilemma is unique in noir. In The Conversation, Hackman's Harry Caul spied because without the Other, Harry Caul did not exist; he filled his empty shell with the conversations he stole. Harry Moseby suffers the opposite problem. Harry Moseby's interior existence is full to overflowing. And his exterior existence is turning into shit.

Even after he catches his wife fucking around (Susan Clark - who logged 150 episodes of Webster, God help her - rocking a seriously mid-'70s post-Jane Fonda shag mullet ), Harry has to endure a New Age lecture from her on all his poorly evolved aspects. The trouble is, she's right on every point. Her being in the wrong but absolutely right enrages him. Harry's all too human; his self-righteous anger drives away the connection that might save him. His wounded eyes ask: how dare his cheatin' wife give him such a drubbing? The simple answer: he deserves it.

Night Moves grapples with the most profound themes of noir: trust (betrayed), love (denied), greed (indulged), violence (solving/creating problems) and good old existential dread (by the truckload in Harry's case). The characters - no matter how extreme or contradictory their behavior -- remain complex, naturalist and recognizable. None are the walking plot-devices or living metaphors who appear in classical-period noir with quote marks around their heads – The Noble Negro, The Born Sucker, The Sidekick Doomed To Die, The Lethal Slut.

Of course there's a femme fatale (Jennifer Warren in an unapologetic frenzy of neurotic self-knowledge, self-disgust and determination - did she radiate too much intelligence to become a star?), and Harry, sap that he is, falls big. He doesn't realize that her trait he finds most annoying is exactly what makes him fall. Just like Harry, she's incapable of a straight answer.

This leads to a classic exchange:

She: Where were you when Kennedy got shot?

He: Which Kennedy?

She: Any Kennedy.

Harry pours out his touching memory, thinking she'll respond to the emotional openness he could never grant his wife. When he's done, believing a moment of true soul-connection has taken place, he queries hopefully: Why do you ask?

She: Oh, I dunno; it's the one question everybody knows the answer to.

Snap! The answer's a slap, and Harry retreats like an abused cur. For a noir hero groping after his own destruction with both hands, such treatment is catnip. Warren seduces Harry with a perfectly mid-'70s technique; first she confides her painful childhood memories, then she peels off her clothes as he watches. For a guy who craves intimacy and needs to spy, it's foolproof.

These delicious, poisonous moments - these cookies full of arsenic - come courtesy of Alan Sharp's venomous, entrapping, perfectly circular screenplay. It's hard not to regard him - rather than Penn - as the engine of Night Moves' enduring power. Sharp had an unbroken forty year career writing features and television. Of course he's responsible for a ton of crap: Damnation Alley's at the top of the pile.

But prior to Night Moves, Sharpe wrote three eccentric, quixotic, bittersweet screenplays that could have been produced only in the 1970s: The Last Run(1971), a depressive road movie featuring George C. Scott as a double-crossed small-timer mistaking his death sentence for a final, redemptive job; The Hired Hand (1971), Peter Fonda's dream-like, ultra-violent, psychedelic Western and Ulzana's Raid (1972), a Vietnam allegory revisionist Western (wait - is that redundant?) starring Burt Lancaster. All are marked by Sharpe's mordant Scottish wit and tough, spare language. Sharpe's not afraid to get his Harold Pinter on, as in this exchange between Harry and his wife, with whom he's come to a bruised rapprochement:

He: I didn't mean just you.
She: I know perfectly well what you didn't mean!

She begs him not to leave. But Harry, like all the battered children before him, refuses to face his own problems. He'd much rather solve someone else's, even if it, uh, kills him. So back he goes to the most accurate representation of the down and out Florida Keys ever set on film. Moseby was there before, rescuing the barely post-pubescent but definitely post-coital sixteen year old Melanie Griffith. Her incandescent energy, unaffected vulnerability and constant, guileless nudity suggest the career she might have had.

Penn seems indifferent to location, but he brings Harry to this grubby backwater for a reason. Harry's ping-ponging between two realities: the relatively polite social murder of LA and the straightforward primordial brutality of the swamp. Whether drowning someone in a dolphin pond, screwing a stranger while her boyfriend sleeps yards away or bashing a guy in the face using a ridged conch shell as brass knuckles, folks in the sticks exercise a lot less internal censorship. As dolphins cavort over a floating corpse, Harry's hosts unleash the Id.

Harry's not an Id dude, however. His rampant Superego makes him vulnerable to the machinations of those with excess will. It's not that the beachcombers pretend to be someone else; everyone's so straightforwardly corrupt they turn Harry neurotic (or, neurotic-er). He's deeply confused, and so are we. The sequence of narrative incident, that is, the plot, doesn't make a lot of sense, but so what? That's a hallmark of only the finest noir. (I have no idea what actually quote happens close quote in Out of the Past and it's one of my favorite pictures. And let's not even talk about Lady From Shanghai or The Maltese Falcon.) The casting of two down-and-outers who look a lot alike - one a villain, one an ally -- does not clarify several murky plot points.

But it does clarity the psychological reality. John Crawford, a B character actor with a lifetime of TV credits, incarnates a specific sea-side heartiness: slovenly, drunk, casual with no visible means of support, crooked, murderous. The history of his failure is written in his saggy body and Crawford plays him without vanity. Ditto Janet Ward as one of the worst mothers in all film noir - and that's saying something. Like Crawford, Ward's understated commitment to her selfish, soulless character speaks volumes about Penn's skill with actors. Several over-amped performances - James Woods and Kenneth Mars foremost - are counterbalanced by the realist nuances of Harris Yulin and Ed Binns. They portray semi-aware, world-weary, middle-aged men whom Sharpe's script pities but offers no mercy.

Would the film be improved if it were less low-rent? If Hackman got a better hairdresser or Penn a budget that let him properly light a set? It might be more engrossing; the crude visuals push one away from the story. And nothing pushes harder than the unspeakable mid-'70s score from hack composer Michael Small. The story screams for Bernard Herrmann, but Small gives us wanna-be Lalo Schifrin, all watery Fender Rhodes and pointlessly sustained bass notes. It takes great concentration to stay with the portrayed emotions when the music swells. No other film would be more improved by a new score.

No other film.

What sustains fascination is that Hackman's performance and Sharpe's words are driven by the steady, remorseless pulse-beat of editor's Dede Allen's rhythm. Allen cut all of Penn's pictures. Here her relentless momentum brings to mind - of all things - the apocalyptic, unwavering drums in the Beach Boys' Wouldn't It Be Nice? Up top, the Boys sing happy fantasies; below the pulse of life, the march of mortality, the ticking tock of time. Fantasize all you like, the drum says, but when you're done, I'll be waiting. Each of Allen's metronomic edits say to Harry (and to us): one step at a time, boy, one step toward that grave at a time. Each cut hits as a metaphor for the incidents that brings Harry nearer to his reckoning.

Allen's rhythm sharpens the action, and raises the harsh awareness of consequence that fuels film noir. When evil rises from the ocean depths, and the dying sink reluctantly in a fog of rising bubbles, Harry discovers a problem that cannot be observed; it must be lived. From that, and from himself, there is no escape.

Melville, Maggie & A Box of Classics

Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966), Dir: Jean-Pierre Melville, Criterion

The immovable object: Lino Ventura © Criterion 1966.

For Melville, physical courage exists to prove moral courage. Outlaw allegiance, upheld in blood and suffering, grants crooks their nobility —it renders their lives neither meaningless nor sordid. Conniving cops, with the law on their side, never pay for their lies, and are found wanting in honor by thieves and murderers. 

Deuxiéme embraces this contradiction directly. It’s what the story is about, never mind assassinated motorcycle cops, looted armored cars tumbling off thousand-foot cliffs or matter-of-fact bloodbaths in tiny rented rooms. That Melvilleian combination of casual, gutter beauty and meticulous order harkens to 1960’s Le Trou (Jacques Becker) and Classe tous risqué (Claude Sautet), and both are based on hard-boiled novels by former death-row inmate Jose Giovanni, who also wrote Deuxiéme.

Apparently Melville’s way of dealing with the nouvelle vague that threatened to make him irrelevant was to ignore it. His old-school visual grammar, which somehow co-exists with pyrotechnic capers and shoot-outs, becomes neoclassicism, and shows all les whippersnappers where they got their transgressive moral—and subversive visual—ideas in the first place. The moral rigor Melville finds more compelling than any heist or love story manifests in his throwback composition and cutting. His opening shots pay homage to Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1957), and Deuxiéme exudes an incongruous Bressonian air of penitential suffering and saint-like patience. Stone-faced Lino Ventura awaits his fate in a series of grubby hide-outs, and is undone only when he expresses the tiniest shred of human emotion. Give him men to kill and he does not blink; fool his murdering friends into regarding him as a snitch and he goes berserk. And, for all the blood on Lino’s hands, the way the cops trick him feels like an ethical outrage.

If Melville were just a hair less deliberate, the crime story would dominate. For any other director, the mind-blowing caper in the middle of the picture would be the climax—of the film and of a life’s work. Melville presents it all in a weirdly gripping monotone. Crime exists to pay the rent; the true struggle takes place inside a man’s soul. Melville’s rigorous Zen reductivism would find its true expression one year later in his masterpiece, Le Samourai. Deuxiéme remains his most sincere, least ironic noir, the one most vested in narrative. Of course it’s a classic.

The DVD extras feature a remarkably eloquent and illuminating interview with director Bernard Tavenier.

 

 

 Man in a sewer, "Do The Madison" and hot donkey love. © Rialto Pictures

10 Years of Rialto Pictures, Criterion

A godsend, a crucial library, an extraordinarily rich, efficient introduction to a range of cinema touchstones. The set includes (best film ever made?) The Third Man;Touchez pas au grisbi, an early, brutal, debonair French noir and a key influence on Melville, Becker, and Dassin; Rififi, Dassin’s existential, misanthropic caper-noir, featuring a history-making wordless twenty-minute heist; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the most concise and accessible of Bunuel’s comedies of manners; Band of Outsiders, which features Godard’s sweetest set-pieces: the six-minute Louvre and Do The Madison; and Bresson’s heartbreaking Au Hasard Balthazar.Balthazar functions for Bresson as this set partially functions for a particular period: as a profound gateway to more complex films and ideas. Given that the set contains six top-20-ever-made pictures, the remaining four suffer a bit by comparison. Army of Shadows might be the only accurate drama of the French Underground made by a member of the French Underground, but Melville’s narrative is too lugubrious for me. Billy Liar’s Angry Young Men concerns leave it dated, though Tom Courtenay still commands the screen. Murderous Maids—as a 2000 release the most current film by almost 30 years – tries to merge Chabrol-style working-class-vs.-ruling-class true-life violence with red-hot lesbo action. That’s a tough combo to pull off and it succeeds intermittently. Mafioso suffers from simply being an unfunny farce.

It’s almost a joke—a legend—how difficult it was to find these films before the DVDrevolution. How scratchy, miserable 16mm prints were projected on bedsheets hung in dormitory basements, and how seminal the Film Forum (Rialto partner Bruce Goldstein has programmed at the Film Forum for over 20 years) and other repertory houses were in providing the only glimpse possible of these pictures. And now here they are together, reasonably priced, a fingertip reservoir of history, influences and cross-currents, packed up smaller than a Tom Clancy novel: Cinema 101 in a box.

Maggie rules Paris © Zeitgeist Films (1996).

Irma Vep (1996), Dir. Olivier Assayas, Zeitgeist Films

It looked for a while there like Assayas was going to prove a significant, groundbreaking director. Instead he ended up making the same picture over and over, even if he always found new subject matter.Irma Vep appeared as an aberration, a backstage movie-about-a-movie, a comedy of manners and romance with more meta than most romances could bear. Twelve years later, this apparent confection is clearly Assayas’s best picture, his most heartfelt, and a genuine valentine to the nouvelle vague, to the jovial insanity of film-making and to the (at that time anyway) love of his life, Hong Kong action goddess Maggie Cheung. The most engaging meta (because it seems to be unconscious) is Assayas falling in love with his leading lady through the lens of his camera. Cheung glows with an inner light and perfect lighting as no one has glowed since Godard fell for Anna Karina. Cheung’s director is way smitten, and Assayas’s infatuation renders his pretensions more sweet than galling—most of the time. Truffaut’s alter-ego Jean-Pierre Leaud metas up a storm as a director who’s past his prime and crazy as a shit-house rat. Any laughter is undercut with unease, because Leaud does seem a total loon. And, speaking of goddesses, Bulle Ogier—Jacque Rivette’s muse and leading lady ­—here gleefully loses herself in a cameo as a meddlesome best friend. As in all of Assayas’s pictures, everyone is gorgeous, chic like mad and froggily verbose. Despite Vep’s excess of charm, watching involves a constant struggle between irritation (at its unnecessarily mannered and self-congratulatory style) and appreciation (at so many riotous self-referential performances). In the end, however, we are as powerless as Assayas before the astonishing beauty and grace of Maggie Cheung

Classes tous risques (1960) Criterion DVD

From left, Claude Cerval, Lino Ventura, France Asselin, Amié de March and Michel Ardan in Classe Tous Risques. © Rialto Picture

After fighting in the Resistance during WWII, Jose Giovanni became a small-time French hood. He helped pull a small-time robbery, somebody died, and Giovanni got death row. After months awaiting the guillotine, he gained clemency and spent eight years in prison. There, he wrote. And three of his many novels-Classe tous risques, Le trou and Le Deuxiéme Souffle- were adapted into classics of hardboiled French film noir.

 Le Deuxiéme Souffle, Jean-Pierre Melville’s seldom seen masterpiece, is finally out on a beautiful Criterion DVD and Le trou -a jailbreak movie without a jailbreak- became Jacques Becker’s ode to the futility of effort. Classe, based on the true story of a legendary outlaw whom Giovanni befriended on death row, is a treatise to the enduring noir trope that to live outside the law one must be honest. (And that fate will always undo your plans.)

Everything goes pear-shaped from the opening sequence, when walking Mount Rushmore Lino Venturi stages a heist on the streets of Milan with his pal Stan Krol, a charismatic French Lee Marvin who appeared in only three films. Krol was a jailhouse buddy of Giovanni’s. In the excellent, if brief, interviews included in the extras on this disc, Giovanni cites Krol’s ‘physique Americaine’; Krol provides the irresistible force to Ventura’s immovable object. There’s little point citing the millions of caper movies that copiedrisques’s opening crime, but the breath-taking vitality of its violence, it’s hair-raising chase scenes and its characters’ glee in being badass has not aged a day in forty-eight years. An animal as willful as Krol is not long for this earth, and his replacement in the loyal buddy capacity is Jean-Paul Belmondo in the last of his supporting roles before breaking huge in Godard’s Breathless.

Belmondo appears impossibly relaxed, charismatic and even shy – a complete natural slowly connecting to his own genius by staying out of its way. When he and Ventura share the frame, their stardom assumes such opposite form and expression. Ventura’s monosyllabic presence, with a capital P, gives room to Belmondo’s restlessness, and they become their characters: the embittered, unshakeable old pro and the brash, unbeatable young stud. Ventura believes only in family, whether of blood or obligation. Belmondo, determined to be worthy, serves as loyally as Venutra’s wife, pal and kids; little works out for any of them. Criterion’s print is flawless, and highlights Sautet’s stark framing and brutal high-contrast lighting. Glimmers of the oncoming Point Blank and the clearly influential Riffifi are equally apparent in Sautet’s clean, cold visuals and sparse dialogue. Sautet subsumes the noir that came before and slams a coffin lid on all its futile aspirations.

GENRE TRIUMPHANT: THE 11 BEST FILMS OF 2008

The best films this year were genre pictures: vampire, policier, art film, gangster, war movie…all using genre conventions to keep us anchored as they shattered every genre convention we know. The sensation of being on familiar ground and utterly unmoored made the usual fare seem even more schematic, yesterday’s news. Especially yesterday’s news was, for instance, the supposed cautionary tale ofWall-E; its metaphors of overconsumption proved unintentionally amusing in the face of the new economic reality. By the time Wall-E’s future arrives, we’ll all be fighting him on the slag heaps for those scraps of resonant refuse—Rubik’s Cubes, hubcaps, any sign of green life…

So many films this year seem equally time-warped, as if they didn’t realize their narrative methods just weren’t that effective. But the best of 2008 found ground-breaking story-telling modes (some are forty years old) and ways of conveying drama that rely on our inescapable visual sophistication. The best this year made nothing explicit and the implicit—wherein the emotional, thematic, and even dramatic material was held—was almost too much to bear. There was little arty self-consciousness in the Tarantino, Baumbach or Anderson mode. Why? Because there are only three American films on the list, and it’s only Americans who feel compelled to be self-conscious when they’re artful.

1) Let The Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in)

Love hurts. Love scars. It wounds and mars. Love will also get your arms torn right out of your shoulders if you fuck with someone a vampire loves. And loving a vampire might force you to spend the rest of your mortal days hanging innocents upside down from trees so you can drain their blood. The passive, aging Swedish hippies huddled in their Danish Modern state housing provide the perfect 21st-century equivalent to the terrified villagers who refuse to open their shutters when Count Dracula’s about, no matter how blood-curdling the screams. Despite the astonishingly original treatment of an old story, what lingers are the rigorous, gorgeous visuals, the twining of love and doom, the rescues that ensure only more brutality, the mysteriously disquieting presentation of what comprises gender, and an even more disquieting notion of soulmates.

     "No more sheep head!?!" © Blueeyes Productions.

2) Jar City (Mýrin)

2) Jar City

Contemporary artist Luke Murphy created a big pop-art graph that traces the relationship between Depression and Hidden Information. Director Baltasar Kormákur provides the real-life dynamic: an Iceland of the repressed, where seldom is heard an encouraging word and the skies are apparently cloudy all year. Toughness is admired (vegetarians get a hard time), toughness destroys (our protagonist cop’s junkie daughter comes to him only for money). The cop seeks not justice, really, or truth, but a moral cause, some proof that his corruption within is not wholly mirrored by corruption without. In that quest, as in all others, he will be disappointed. Jar City understands that the only the tiniest triumphs endure.

3) Help Me Eros (Bang bang wo ai shen)

A masterpiece of mise-en-scène and deploying color to convey emotion. At once lucid, apparent, and cloaked in mystery, joyous, transcendent, and heartbreaking. Taiwan’s loneliest man befriends a cigarette girl in a chaos dreamscape of urban pastels. He grows the best bud in town, and sells his priceless modern furniture in crap pawn shops to buy bread. He incarnates the artist’s dilemma manifest in the universe of the post-collapse of global markets. Deadpan Kang-sheng Lee directs and stars in a slow-moving poem of disconnection, alienation, and sex that achieves transcendence through a seemingly new cinematic language.

"When do we get our heads blown off?" © IFC Films.

4) Gomorrah (Gomorra)

Naples is one tough town. The mob stacks barrel upon barrel of industrial waste just down the street, murders moms who won’t give up their apartments, and functions with a mind-set that ensures its members and business partners the life expectancy of East Texas bikers, if that. Matteo Garrone, a thoughtful intellectual, chose a visual style that’s equal parts documentary and The Valachi Papers—half deadpan gaze, half lurid exploitation. As with all this year’s best, he explains nothing. We are hurled into the story as the locals are hurled into this milieu, and sink or swim with them. It’s strenuous, captivating, and it raises the bar for every gangster movie to come.

5) Waltz With Bashir

Guilt, confusion, the fog of war, political purpose, reluctance to bad-mouth one’s homeland, the determination to dehumanize one’s enemies, and an in-the-bone aversion to taking responsibility for atrocities committed on the periphery of one’s actions: these are the ingredients of national denial, as every American knows all too well. It took Ari Folman twenty years to come to grips with the terrors he lived through, the terrors he unknowingly enabled, and the terrors of slowly remembering who he was and what he did. He turned to animation in pursuit of realism, a genius move, and as counterintuitive as his methods of recovery, moral accusation and the refusal to forgive himself or his nation.

  "Why aren't we on DVD yet?" ©Image Entertainment

6)Human Condition (Ningen no joken 1959—’61)

Give it up for the Film Forum: 10 hours of Japanese Tolstoyan, Dostoevskian hopelessness, the unblinking depiction of Japan selling its soul, citizen by citizen, while building to the war; of the dying during the war and the crushing poverty of the land after. Never seen (never on video) and, once seen, never forgotten, not as story nor as one of the more significant visual influences on a number of masters—Bergman, Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa among them. Let’s hope that one day soon Criterion will give this film the treatment it deserves.

Lonely are the bullied; Let The Right One In © EFTI.

7) Celine And Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau—1974)

Give it up for BAM: 193 minutes of Jacques Rivette fucking around as only he could. Light-hearted Rivette proved a rare and lovely thing, and as I wondered when is he going to stop fucking around, he did. The contrast between the cat’s-paw decadence of the first 192 minutes and the door-slamming, party’s-over-oops-out-of-time of the final 60 seconds sear the film in memory. Like Human Condition, it’s set in a quite specific time and place that remains universal and constantly true.

  Three men who have not yet heard the terrible news. ©Blueprint Pictures.

8) In Bruges

Playwright, screenwriter, and director Martin McDonagh’s entire oeuvreseeks to prove the truth of Bertolt Brecht’s immortal line: “He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible news.” The poles of laughs versus terrible news form the yin and yang of McDonaghville, and the urge to escape remains as potent as the need to keep watching through fingers clamped over my eyes. He generates restlessness, and concern over whether to laugh. He makes us ask: is that too much? Has he gone too far? Has he responsibly connected all this gore and pain to something more? And the answer is: nope, and he ain’t gonna. Like Beckett, McDonagh omits what he regards as unnecessary. And like Beckett, that would be everything save ghastly humor and death. Those omissions resonate through his work and may grant a witty gangster farce more profundity than it warrants, but there’s no denying the laughs or the terrible news.

9) Shotgun Stories

As evidenced by …Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Revolutionary Road, Michael Shannon might be the best, not-so-unknown-anymore actor in America. He carries Shotgun Stories, the least embellished, most compassionate and accurate cultural and moral depiction of southern rednecks ever made. This is no small feat. Set in a succession of endless 1980s days in rural po’bucker nowhere, Jeff Nichols’s low-budget Neorealist approach captures the vanity, obsession, small-mindedness, and earned occasional nobility of white, hardscrabble, dead-end American life. As ever, violence and revenge offer the only possible transcendence.

 "I'm going to blast my fuckin' legacy right outta the water!"© WarnerBros.

10) Gran Torino

In the best Charles Bronson movie Charles Bronson never made, Clint proves more patient and more sentimental than Charles ever was. Having begun the cycle of revisionist Westerns by being (in Clint’s words) “the first hero to ever fire first,” Clint here repudiates forty-four years of on-screen bloodletting by refusing to fire at all. For both character and director the finale demonstrates true moral courage. Clint’s unregenerate misanthropy and his genuine wit—a late-career development—more than compensate for clanking exposition and underwritten characters. Much is lost by Clint’s insistence on singing over the closing credits, but it’s his epitaph, so what can you do?

11) Valkyrie

Every year the chickenshit sheep of American movie critics and irony outlets gang up on one picture before it comes out, label it ridiculous, and smirk as it fails. This year, they tried to lay that shit on Valkyrie, but audiences found it anyway. Cruise’s big vehicle is not his vehicle at all, but instead a perfectly solid, well-executed, dumb World War II movie, and I love dumb WWII movies. Is Cruise playing a good Nazi any more absurd or morally bereft than Michael Caine or Robert Duvall playing theirs (The Eagle Has Landed)? Director Singer assembled a Who’s Who of dignified British thesps—Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Terrence Stamp for god’s sake!—to embody the Third Reich as he sought to make a John Sturges picture and he came damn close. It’s our era’s Where Eagles Dare, and there is no higher praise.

And, not while sitting in the theatre during Rachel Getting Married, but afterward and since, Jonathan Demme’s Gus Van Zant Lite sent my bullshit detector off the charts. I expect in a couple years we’re all going to be awfully embarrassed at being taken in. Ditto for Wendy and Lucy.

NOT MUCH MIDDLE GROUND - THE 11 BEST FILMS OF 2007

The Eleven Best Films of 2007

2007 offered arty seriousness or genre kicks and little in between. Deep or stupid, the best films vested passionately in formal concerns (well, except for Superbad). Each drove their narrative with a disciplined, specific and original cinematic grammar. Most were as concerned with painterly beauty—or willful ugliness—as with stylistic rigor. The lapidary care lavished by directors made their stories more nourishing, subtle and memorable—even Deathproof. Filmmakers working successfully through such idiosyncratic styles rendered even more ludicrous those grasping after a visual identity. Paul Thomas Anderson, for instance, never found frames appropriate for his story. His grandiose visuals only showcased the bankruptcy of his narrative. Tim Burton chose a flashier set of hammers with which to pound us over the head, but Sweeney Todd remained, like There Will Be Blood, inert on the screen, dead on arrival, forcing us away from the story, turning us into mere spectators. The best films 2007, whether brilliant or moronic, offered sufficient embrace to make us all participants.

Photo courtesy of Mobra Films/Adi Padretu.

1) 4 MONTHS 3 WEEKS 2 DAYS

It’s not the what-choice-do-we-have? stoicism with which everyone negotiates the cloud-cuckoo-land of Romania under Ceausescu. Nor the evocative, realist frames that so bring that era to life. Nor how everything—a pack of Kents, a taxi ride, a woman’s body—is valued foremost as a commodity for barter. Nor the most stark, unsentimental, tragic presentation of abortion ever filmed. It’s not even Cristian Mungiu’s remarkable understatement: one-scene/one-shot, little intercutting, key moments played in fierce whispers or empty monotones, or his deceptively straightforward, multi-layered, unbearable tale. What makes this the best film of the year is how all these aspects merge into an atmosphere of incontrovertible truth: political, emotional, sexual, economic, historic, cinematic truth.

2) IMAMURA RETROSPECTIVE at BAM

Like Isaac Babel or Boccaccio, Shohei Imamura embraces sweat, greed, perversity, fever-lust and self-justification as fuel for the life-force. The working-class universe is his palette, and he paints with an ease for realist dialogue in all its opaque cross-purposes (sometimes folks mean what they say, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they have no idea). Imamura’s compassion for simple human needs overflows (The Eel) or he presents all human efforts as an infernal comedy like an unholy intersection of Balzac and Bukowski (Pigs and Battleships, The Pornographers). Imamura does not make Western-style films (like Akira Kurosawa); he’s obsessed with Japanese identity in the face of American occupation, and Japanese custom, whether enduring or crumbling. He likes to turn up the bleak (Vengeance Is Mine) and to tell it as it is (History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess) while turning up the bleak. BAM gave us a joyous overview of the master’s career, and screened his titles often enough that we all could see them. Good for them.

                             Photo courtesy of Miramax Films

 3) NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

The Getaway as conceived by Beckett:

1) Everything takes place at the fraying edge of the world.

2) The language, though filled with arcane meaning for the speaker, remains funny as hell.

3) Ain’t nobody gets away.

4) UNDERWORLD at the New York Film Festival

This year’s Festival offered stunning prints from the past that found sparse audiences. It’s a shame, especially in the face of the astonishing, layered but never disruptive original soundtrack—played live—by the three-man Alloy Orchestra (who were commissioned by the Festival). Von Sternberg’s uncluttered, theatrical frames give lie to the widely held notion that silent classics are boring.Underworld’s pace, mise-en-scene, character development, graphic violence and dirty sexuality play as modern as the best of this year, and with more knowing sophistication than most.

5) THE DIVING BELL and THE BUTTERFLY 

Can too much beauty dilute depictions of tragedy? To make the plight of his paralyzed protagonist more moving, Schnabel surrounds him with fabulous French babes, all devoted to his service, none of whom he can ever touch. Schnabel’s embrace of glamour, texture, mood and atmosphere emerge—for the first time—as a fully mature and aware style. His avoidance of hipster mannerisms and easy emotion, and his uncanny dream-like cutting, make the film play in the mind like the memories of his blighted hero: immersing, irresistible and always slightly out of reach.

6) THE HOST

An American makes a Korean pour bad stuff into a river. A decade later, a monster emerges, gobbling Koreans and causing the Americans to enforce a toxic cover-up. So, who’s hosting whom here? The monster a virus or Korea the meddling occupiers? Joon-ho Bong frames as finely realized a bogeyman since Alien with a family of loving bumblers who stumble their way to glory and to no particular new understanding of themselves or one another. With the apocalypse so near at hand, according to the director, paradise is a quiet meal at home with the TV turned off. Who can argue?

7) BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD

In 4 Months’ Romania, economics do not equal karma. Over here, they do. In Lumet’s most bitter, hopeless film, Americans suddenly realize they’ve missed out on the good life they deserve. Since that can’t possibly be their fault, they avidly pursue their doom. As the smartest Europeans turn to issues of class, identity and desperation (this year Cristian Mungiu, last year 13 Tzameti), most American filmmakers keep pretending they don’t exist. But for Lumet—as for Fritz Lang—incompetence at life means a guilty sentence with no parole from the self. Of course Ethan Hawke can’t act. The surprise might be that Marisa Tomei can.

8) EXILED 

Echoing Woo—as if he had a choice—director Johnny To privileges male bonding over any other bond, but his males bond more like The Wild Bunch than Hard-Boiled, and with fewer erotic close-up exchanges. Avoiding the endless exposition that gelds Infernal Affairs or Triad Election, Johnny To finds a beauty in set-pieces, using color like Michael Powell and gun-shot architecture like Leone. So many recent Hong Kong action films have sought—as opposed to the superabundant plot material of Korea’s The Host—content in form, depth in surface, poetry in style. Johnny To, alone, succeeds. Five years from now, Exiledwill not look like this year’s model. It will still be gorgeous, ground-breaking and have the best shoot-outs of the year.

9) DEATH PROOF

Tarantino masturbates more than usual, but the freedom of preaching to the choir helps him develop an incongruous charm. The boy does love his own voice; all the women sound just like him. Tarantino’s taste in music has improved, however, and it’s not (entirely) his fault that there was and remains a thriving genre built on watching girls look hot and then get murdered. If Tarantino’s repellently gleeful about the murders, he’s no less enthralled with Kurt Russell’s shameless whining, Zoe Bell’s joi de vivre or, bless his heart, (endless) car stunts. Tarantino possesses that rarest thing: a unique, instinctive, recognizable style. He once again demonstrates his purely American genius for brilliant cinema in the service of the most fantastically stupid plots.

Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

10) SUPERBAD 

I can’t help it; I laughed. Obviously, the writer/directors can’t tell their bad ideas from their good ones, and mistake gag quantity for quality. Happily, their blind joyful conviction in their own methods only adds to the exuberance that makes the film such a lobotomized good time. That, and their genuine compassion for the bullied.

Photo courtesy of The Weinstein Company, 2007.

11) THE MIST 

Made on the cheap and looks it, but thought through with a rigor that transcends budget. If the visuals/pacing/oratory remind you too much of Twilight Zone, then revel in Marcia Gay Hardin’s slowly building derangement, Stephen King’s heartfelt loathing for fundamentalists, and monsters that evoke the arrival of Satan. Featuring the bravest, most committed finale of any film in years.