STANLEY KUBRICK: A BIT OF THE OLD ULTRAVIOLENCE

By no means is it an accident that the 1971 dystopia thriller and blackhearted social satire A Clockwork Orange opens - after the disorienting title cards, blocky white text on screaming primary color backgrounds with droning electronic music in the background - with a shot of its protagonist, Alex (Malcolm McDowell) staring directly into the camera, his head tipped forward and his eyes rotated up almost to the top of the their sockets, as he stares, unmoving, unblinking, as the camera pulls back slowly until his face is just barely still visible. It's no accident, because A Clockwork Orange is above all things about the viewer's relationship to film - this film, all films - and the things depicted thereon, and it will take great pains to fuck with us as hard as possible over the course of its 136 minutes. And it all kicks off with a young man in freakish dress staring at us with an expression that almost can't help but feel like an evil, knowing leer. He knows we're watching him. He delights in it.

Thus it is that from the minute it starts, the film begins to heavily invest itself in the idea of what "looking" is, and what it does to us to look. In the career of director Stanley Kubrick, only Lolita, nine years earlier, had ever or would ever spring from such controversially "lurid" subject matter,* in this case Anthony Burgess's short novel from 1962. It's a work the author himself dismissed in later years as a cash-grab which was "too didactic to be artistic", and oh, in later years how he hated the film that Kubrick (who also wrote the screenplay) made from it. But whatever Burgess happens to think about the book or film, it was a big hit, as books will that depict with unblinking attention sex and violence of a most unpleasant sort. And so too was the movie, and for the same reason. It was released in the United States with an X, while in Britain (where it was made; Kubrick now being a committed expatriate, and perhaps sealing the deal with the most vigorously British film of his career) it enjoyed only a short release before Kubrick himself asked to have it pulled, fearing that an apparent spate of violent crimes were partially inspired by the film. Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert both disliked it, making sure to talk about how titillating and nasty and pornographic it was, so everybody just had to find out if it was was really as vicious and saucy as all that.

Well, no, not unless you're hopelessly literal-minded (or, like Ebert, you decide to aggressively misread the film's visual schema). A Clockwork Orange is kind of the quintessential Stanley Kubrick film, based on the stereotypical things "everybody knows" about Kubrick: it is punishingly nihilistic and shot through with warped gallows humor, it stands at an icy, godlike remove from its characters, and it rubs our faces in the worst of humanity with a certain kind of joy at the privilege. It's a film that stares, emptily, soullessly at the action it depicts, and while I don't doubt that in 43 years, plenty of viewers (and I bet that they skew male and adolescent) have been effectively titillated and tweaked by the film's depiction of sexualised violence, it's clearly not what Kubrick is up to. His mode here is primarily diagnostic: we observe without taking part, either by rejoicing in the nastiness of it all or recoiling at the obscenity. Any notion that this is a film in which we're meant to secretly enjoy what Kael referred to as "pornography" doesn't hold up past the film's first rape scene - the fact that A Clockwork Orange can be described as having a "first" rape scene certainly speaks volumes as to why it gets people riled up - in which a woman is stripped naked in an extreme wide shot, hardly more interesting in the frame than the set design around her, and never once shown in anything like a close-up; when she runs offscreen, the camera blandly follows her with the detachment of any watcher being briefly caught by a flurry of motion off to one side. It is, in fact, far more upsetting than a film which reveled in watching her almost being raped; it is a film that largely doesn't care about her at all, no more than her attempted rapists, who are themselves also beaten to bloody pulps in wide shot.

A Clockwork Orange is the first Kubrick film to be conspicuously "shot": that is, the first in which not just the framing and lighting and depth matter, but the actual technology of the camerawork. It is a film in which the exact lenses used on a shot-by-shot basis matter tremendously to the meaning of the images: much of the film is captured with a very flat wide-angle lens that subtly distorts the edges of the frame to make everything seem unnaturally stretched out and separated. It's as direct a visual metaphor as you could ask for the idea of a society in which people are increasingly detached from each other and distorted within themselves; one thinks of the close-up of a mad author (Patrick Magee), of warped ideological politics and hypocritical desire for bloody revenge, so pulled apart by the wide angle that he appears almost to burst. It's satire, but not the funny kind; the kind that finds the desire to control and contain human behavior to be some kind of sick joke that deserves laughter because nothing else makes sense, and results in the displays of corrupt inhumanity that exclusively populate this movie.

It is, above all, a dehumanising film; it is the natural follow-up, then to 2001: A Space Odyssey, just as it neatly anticipates Full Metal Jacket, though it is far more joyless than either of them. The title, which is unexplained in the movie (but given two different explanations in the novel), already hammers home the image of mechanised, aberrant life, and nothing we see anywhere in the film really changes the basic notion of human beings as programmable machines - literally and disastrously, in the case of the plot, though what has always lingered me throughout my re-watching over the years is not Alex's suffering as a conditioned lab rat unable to make moral choices (truth be told, I think that stretch of the movie is by far its least effective), but the way that details on the edges communicate the notion that everyone in this universe is just a cog, having learned their part which they now act out: the psychiatrist (Pauline Taylor) whose face takes a moment to reboot when she's obliged to tell a reassuring lie; the simpering social worker Mr. Deltoid (Aubrey Morris), with his metronomically precise repitition of a sing-songy "yes?"; the prison guard (Michael Bates, absurdly wonderful) whose entirely personality becomes a thicker parody of Stiff Britishisms the deeper into the film it goes - it occurs to me only now that A Clockwork Oranges is one of those analyses of a society that could only be made by someone outside of it - all of them acting less like humans than like robots indifferently programmed to mimic human behavior. The protagonist himself is subjected to exactly the same treatment in the sardonic film's one laugh-out-loud comic scene, a high-speed threesome scored to a shrill electronica version of Rossini's "Overture" from William Tell, stripping all of the exoticism and pleasure out of an act that, in this presentation, is exactly as blunt and industrial as Alex's euphemism, "the old in-out-in-out".

And as that euphemism suggests, even the way things are described lacks humanity: Kubrick's immensely faithful adaptation copies Burgess's invented slang called "nadsat" in the book, a hefty borrowing of garbled Russian words that makes the whole story feel like it's being communicated through malfunctioning translating computers spitting out gibberish (the one way in which I generally prefer the novel to the film is that the novel, being itself written in nadsat, is an inescapable cacophony of strange words; the film, which visually depicts things we can easily recognise, is much easier to process and thus loses most of its disorienting potency).

This is all part and parcel of the world the story depicts: one in which humanity has been ground out of humans who live in a state of constant heightened feeling; mostly of fear, in the nice people, or of things much more savage in the case of the anti-hero. It's for this reason that I've always favored the ending of the film to the extended finale of the original book (Kubrick first read the American copy, where that ending was snipped out; my understanding is that he still had a chance to read the full version before committing to the version filmed. The extended version, which puts a moral bow on the whole thing, is hopeful; but at its best, A Clockwork Orange is a metaphor for an out-of-control world where people don't really trust hope, in those rare moments when it crops up. As Burgess put it in his rather snotty 1986 introduction to the first American edition of the complete text, "The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel." I fully agree with the letter of that judgment, though not at all the spirit; nothing about the profound alienation caused by the language, the science-fiction trappings, or the delirious obscenity of the violence, in print or onscreen, ever suggest that A Clockwork Orange is trying to be anything but a fable.

And a bleak, bitter fable it is, one in which the audience's de facto surrogate and only point of entry is a pointlessly loathsome and cruel bastard played with phenomenal detachment by McDowell in full-on glowering savagery mode - an early shot, from the side, shows his face dominating the frame in an uncomfortably backlit (the lighting throughout the first 20 minutes is, in general, divine; props to John Alcott, working for the first time as the "lighting cameraman", which I take to be the long-awaited concession that Kubrick rode his cinematographers like a dictator), weirdly-composed close-up that finds the actor intoning the line "Oh? And what's so stinking about it?" in a series of plodding monosyllables that drip with menace and brutality. If he is charismatic, it's only in a negative sense; all of McDowell's best moments are captivatingly animalistic whether the reptilian staring of the early scenes or the bellowing terror of the "Ludovico Technique" scenes, in which the actor was genuinely pinned inside a head-controlling contraption that didn't permit him to blink. No, this Alex is a monster, straight through, and its through him and from his lips that we are presented with this vision of what society might be like - in the future? right this second? At any rate, it's all dead inside, sterile despite all the filth we see in damn near every location.

Nothing nice happens in this world: the one source of explicit beauty, is corrupted by the intensely ironic treatment given to it by its director, whether by using symphonic overtures as the accompaniment to slow-motion balletic violence, or the infamous (and ad-libbed) "Singin' in the Rain" rape scene, or the way that Beethoven's 9th Symphony, treated in the film as an icon of emotional and artistic perfection, is chiefly represented by a synthesized reproduction programmed by the pioneering Moog artist Wendy Carlos (receiving professional credit at this time under "Walter"), whose overall contributions to giving the film a suitably detached, artificial feeling can't be overestimated. It is perhaps the most overall musical of all Kubrick's film's, and the music is sickly, gangrenous, wrong.

For all these reasons, A Clockwork Orange is an effectively perfect version of what it means to be; and for all these reasons, I confess that it's my least favorite of Kubrick's mature films (which I take to be those from 1964 onward). Still a masterpiece of using and manipulating cinema; and after all, it is a film chiefly about making us watch terrible things and recognising that we have made the choice to watch them. It's a dirty trick to play on a viewer, but a fair one. But it's so unrelenting! There's nihilism to spare in Full Metal Jacket, and in other late Kubrick as well, but A Clockwork Orange is just damn mean. Well, it intends to be mean; it succeeds, brilliantly. But a little viciousness goes a long way, and 136 minutes is very long indeed.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1938: In which bloody history is turned into a frosted cupcake

MGM was the stylish studio. If you know nothing else about Hollywood in the 1930s, that is the thing to know: when it came to the most glamorous stars wearing the most opulent clothes on the most richly detailed sets, acting out the most robustly dramatic scenarios while the most emphatic strings wept on the soundtrack, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had your back. When we think of the '30s as a decade of grand escapism in reaction to the the Great Depression, we are really thing of this studio and its remarkable ability to graft Cinematic Magic on an industrial scale rarely witnessed anywhere else. Watch an MGM production from the '50s, the '40s, but above all the '30s: you are, it is guaranteed, watching a god-damned Spectacle.

For a studio founded on such an aesthetic, a lengthy (149 minutes without overture and exit music, absolutely monumental for a film of its era) costume drama about the causes and early actions of the French Revolution could only turn out to be one thing; and 1938's Marie Antoinette is, indeed, largely the movie one might suppose it to be sight-unseen, particularly with MGM's First Lady, Norma Shearer (the widow of the studio's wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg, who'd died in 1936) playing the title role. Shearer was, in those days, in the declining period of her career, having made only a scattered handful of films in the preceding years (just three between 1933 and 1937, the last of them being the notorious 1936 Romeo and Juliet, in which 34-year-old Shearer and 43-year-old Leslie Howard played the most geriatric star-crossed teenaged lovers in cinema history), and the path that led from being one of MGM's most white-hot stars in the late silent and early sound era to being simply another '30s actor that nobody but classic movie buffs much remembers was already clear. But in this, the last project Thalberg put into motion for his wife before his death, she got one of her last chances to truly shine: Marie Antoinette is, in general, giddy nonsense as history and lumpy and overcooked as drama, but it is an excellent showcase for Shearer, in one of the rangiest and most convincing and ultimately most moving performances of a career that deserves better than it gets today.

Let's put off cooing over Shearer for a little bit, even if Marie Antoinette was received in '38 and remains primarily an excuse for watching her do her thing. For there's still a lot going on besides that, some of it good and much more of it loopy in the extreme. The idea behind it is obvious enough: a biopic of the famous and infamous French queen from her learning, in her homeland of Austria, that she was to wed the Dauphin and future king Louis XVI (Robert Morley, in his film debut), all the way up to her death by guillotine in the French Revolution. The expected stops along the way: rivalry with Madame du Barry (Gladys George), mistress of Louis XV (John Barrymore); a too-friendly relationship with the handsome Count Axel de Fersen of Switzerland (Tyrone Power), when her husband seems permanently incapable of generating any kind of emotion towards her; embroilment in an utterly stupid scandal surrounding a fabulous diamond necklace that has her unfairly accused of frivolousness by an increasingly hostile nation. No "let them eat cake", since this film is hellbent on making its Marie Antoinette a good figure, and while it lets some nastiness in at the edges, there's no room for anything that would make her quite that unsympathetic.

First things first: it's laughably bad history. But it's a Hollywood star vehicle from the '30s, and any real attempt to grapple with such matters would never have met with much success, especially at MGM of all places, so I bring this up more out of a sense of duty than of shock, or of a real desire to deal with it. Anyway, that would never be the biggest flaw of the film: the script by Claudine West & Donald Ogden Stewart and Ernest Vajda is a dense monster of a thing that attempts to include just about everything possible: political intrigue, romantic comedy, romantic drama, family melodrama, cloak-and-dagger thrills, and spectacular 18th Century parties. The writers (and those are merely the ones who got credit) never really manage to come up with one single tone, and director W.S. Van Dyke only makes things worse - a generic chameleon who made everything from documentaries to thrillers to, well, this, Van Dyke only ever really stood out, to my mind, in his light-touch comedies (his masterpiece, in this mode or any other, is The Thin Man), and he's not up to handling the sheer volume of different styles required by this project; not until the Revolution comes does the picture find a tone and stick with it, and this has far more to do with Shearer and Morley than anything else, though William Daniels's cinematography, which grows increasingly shadow-dominated as the film proceeds, does quite a lot to keep things deep and grim.

That being said, most of Marie Antoinette is parties and snarking rich people and Marie Antoinette herself oscillating from self-indulgence to social consciousness and back, and being constantly terrified that everyone around her thinks she's just some dumb flit from Austria, and frequently, Van Dyke gives up on trying to make sense of this and just makes sure that the staggering array of gowns designed by master costumer Adrian are properly accentuated. This is, above all things, an exercise in poshness, one that the Revolution happens at sort of arbitrarily - there's no apparent attempt to suggest that the poshness might itself be responsible for the raging violence of the citizenry, since the filmmakers know so clearly that they're selling lifestyle porn and not political history, so any twinge of awareness that maybe this actually is madcap indulgence and wanton extravagance has to be kept offscreen.

The whole thing is resolutely shallow, then, propped up only because the production is so very lavish. I suppose I can imagine a viewer being unmoved by the sheer mass of the set and costume design, though I am pleased not to have to switch places with them. And there's that one other thing: in the middle of all this finery, Norma Shearer is acting her ass off, finding ways to underline Marie Antoinette's essentially childish, self-focused behavior without making her any less appealing a heroine (and as far as childish goes, it's impressive how much the 36-year-old convinces as the teenage and grown-up Marie Antoinette alike, particularly since it went so badly for her in Romeo and Juliet). And then, when imprisonment and the guillotine hit, she reaches heights found nowhere else in her career: eschewing makeup, the actress adopts a kind of flat, staring intensity that's half wild animal, half pathetic human, and her tiny twitches where her desperate attempt to seem resolute breaks down - her last meeting with Louis is an obvious example - find Shearer engaging in far more minute and focused physical acting than the typically gesture-loving actor usually gave us. She's not the single highlight of the cast - Morley is a fantastic king, bland and doughy but fully able to suggest a feeling, sensitive human beneath that, and George's du Barry is an exqusitely sharp schemer with some brilliant line readings and expressions - but she's the only person who could have saved the film from its own excesses, and by God, if she doesn't do just that. Marie Antoinette, the movie, has nothing to say about history, class, violent revolution, or dynastic politics, but Marie Antoinette, the woman and character, has a full rich life and wide mix of feelings. Shearer makes sure of that, and it's enough to make this dodgy, obese slab of prestige moviemaking turn into something sparkling and engaging, the highlight of her entire career.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1938
-Michael Curtiz directs the glorious Technicolor epic The Adventures of Robin Hood at Warner Bros.
-Screwball comedy reaches its most demented extremes with Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby at RKO
-Mickey Rooney makes the leap from child actor to movie star with Boys Town, also starring Spencer Tracy

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1938
-The British Pygmalion, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, gives the play a new, infamous "happy" ending
-Sergei Eisenstein completes Alexander Nevsky, his first extant, complete sound film, in the U.S.S.R.
-French director Marcel Carné releases his first major works, Port of Shadows and Hôtel du Nord

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SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 2 POLL: PROTO-SLASHERS

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN
Thanks to everyone who voted!

The slasher film, as a genre, emerged in its final state with the release of Halloween in 1978; but that development came only at the end of a half-decade during which the rules of formula began to coalesce out of bits and pieces of horror and thriller films dating back as far as the late '20s and early '30s. This week, the vote will be between three movies that were released during the final years before Halloween finally set the rules in stone.

Drive-In Massacre (1977)
From IMDb: "Two police detectives try to catch a serial killer who is stalking a rural California drive-in theater, randomly killing people with a sword."

Home for the Holidays (1972, TV)
From IMDb: "An ailing man summons his four daughters home for Christmas and asks them to kill his new wife, who he suspects is poisoning him."

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)
From IMDb: "A Texas Ranger hunts for a hooded serial killer terrorizing the residents of a small town, set in 1946 Arkansas. Loosely based on a true story."

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DAYS OF BEING MUTANTS

New rule: Bryan Singer should only direct X-Men movies, and X-Men movies should only be directed by Bryan Singer. For here we are with X-Men: Days of Future Past, which is almost indisputably, I'd say, both Singer's and the franchise's best picture since X2 back in the long-ago of 2003 (from which early perch it remains, I would insistently claim, one of the five best superhero comic book movies of the 21st Century). Not bad for a series that's just hit its seventh entry and 14th year, and has spent more than half of that span lost in the rushes. Wanna run right out and re-watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Goddamn right you don't.

Written by Simon Kinberg - making up and then some for his contributions to the dismal, franchise-derailing X-Men: The Last Stand way back in 2006 - with a story he co-wrote with Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, the film takes the title and plot hook and very little else from one of the best-regarded plotlines in the history of the X-Men comic book universe, written by Chris Claremont and John Byrne in 1980. In its cinematic incarnation, DOFP picks up in 2023, where everything is going terribly for the mutants we've come to know so well through so many films - and by the way, the film expects you to have seen all of the previous films except for the aforementioned Origins: Wolverine, because standalone movies are for moral degenerates, apparently - with giant anthropoid robots that can adapt to, and reflect any attack launched against them demolishing what's left of the once-mighty X-Men and much of humanity besides. There's only one silver lining: at some point since The Last Stand, Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) has gained the ability to send other people's consciousness back in time to an earlier point in their life, and the mutant leaders Charles "Professor X" Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Erik "Magneto" Lehnsherr (Ian McKellen) have decided that the thing to do is send somebody back to 1973, when the key event in the development of these robots - Sentinels - took place. The volunteer, since 20th Century Fox is well aware what pays the bills, is Logan (Hugh Jackman), AKA "Wolverine", he of the indestructible body and almost non-existent aging process.

So back to '73 Logan goes, with an insurmountable job: find the younger versions of Charles (James McAvoy), now a miserable bastard who has locked himself away from the world, and Erik (Michael Fassbender), who has been locked up by others, specifically the U.S. government. With their help, he needs to stop Charles's former friend and Erik's former protege Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), now going by "Mystique", before she kills the inventor of the Sentinels, industrialist Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), and stirs up unprecedented amounts of anti-mutant sentiment.

So that's a lot of convoluted twaddle, I know, but DOFP presents it cleanly enough, and it understands, anyway (unlike a lot of its increasingly po-faced superhero genre colleagues) that it doesn't matter if these things actually make perfect sense as long as they have the appearance of making sense en route to being a grandly entertaining popcorn action-adventure. And in the particular case of DOFP's time travel gamesmanship, that grand entertainment is about bringing the cast of the initial trilogy that began with 2000's X-Men back into the fold and mixing them up with the best parts of X-Men: First Class from 2011 (which is to say, instead of having to make do with a movie where Stewart & McKellen or McAvoy & Fassbender are the highlight, we get to have all four of them in one go, though never, tragically, all at the same time - though Stewart and McAvoy do have a chance to interact, in one of the film's better scenes). And about wiping away all the shitty parts of the franchise so that future sequels can have a relatively clean slate, and given the intensity of some of the shittiness in the X-Men films, that's a pretty fantastic achievement all by itself.

In effect, DOFP ends up working for almost the same reasons (and - astonishingly - to something like the same level) as X2: it gathers up a whole bunch of characters we presumably enjoy seeing, puts them in a perpetual motion machine, and steps back to allow us to stare at them in bug-eyed delight as they fly around in setpieces that show off the very best shiny nonsense that computers today can make. The extravagant action scenes are particularly fine here; the film more or less opens with a sequence that I can't do better than the describe as a high-speed version of the game Portal done as a fight scene, with editing by John Ottman that flawlessly captures the rhythm of the action beats and always emphasises them just right (Ottman, Singer's go-to editor, is also more commonly employed as a music composer, which is 100% not coincidental in explaining how his editing works the way it does). It's the best fight in a comic book movie in years, recalling the same feeling of holy crap they can do that now that the Nightcrawler scene did when X2 was new. Later on, the film pulls out a legitimately great slow-motion action scene with a maybe too-obvious joke in the soundtrack, but it still works both as spectacular cinema and as a terrific character for one of the many, many mutants who gets nothing like enough development - as always, it's the Wolverine, Professor X, and Magneto show, with twice as many Professor Xes and Magnetos to go around (though the future characters get nowhere near enough to do - McKellen, in particular, is criminally underused, with only a couple of shots where he actually gets to demonstrate the depth of human feeling he's always brought to the franchise).

Still, the film figures out where to get its human moments in: Singer's aesthetic, which has largely remained unchanged since X2, feels positively stately in its willingness to slow down and let the characters be, in what are titanically long shots for the genre (that is, sometimes they are longer than five seconds). Nobody but McAvoy and Jackman really gets an opportunity to take advantage of that, though both of those actors rise to the occasion (the final scene includes what may well be Jackman's best facial acting in the series), and enough other characters get enough of their own beats that it has the feel of a movie that's balancing spectacle and character, even if it's not necessarily hitting that balance in actual fact.

The whole thing is definitely mired in fanservice (particularly in the post-credits scene, one of the worst that has yet happened in a modern superhero movie), a lot of in-jokes that don't do much besides pad the movie, and Lawrence, who we all know by now is a pretty solid actress, is still completely lost in the role of Mystique, like she has no idea how to play emotions using a latex-covered body, and so just kind of mopes. And it has the kind of non-resolution that modern franchise films tend to rely on in lieu of actually having storytelling discipline. But there's so much more that's going right! John Myhre's production design expresses a clear notion of 1973 that grounds the movie in a tangible place (compare First Class and its sort of vague "all the '60s lumped together" design), and Singer and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel aren't afraid to linger on those sets and move through them in some tracking shots that are there to let the action breathe, and not to show off. It's a fluid movie with kinetic, well-conceived action, and it does a fine job of portraying the broad-strokes emotional storytelling that popcorn movies are best at. It is, simply, both very fun and very operatic, large and imposing and dazzling in a way that I was honestly starting to lose hope about seeing in a superhero movie ever again.

Right about now, I usually would go with some kind of line like "of course, it's not a masterpiece or instant-classic in the genre". But you know, the jury might actually still be out on that one...

8/10

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BEST SHOT: HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY

It's 1941 Week at the Film Experience, kind of, and to mark the occasion, this week's entry in Hit Me with Your Best Shot is the Best Picture Oscar winner from that year, How Green Was My Valley.

The film is best known for a bad reason: having beaten Citizen Kane for the Oscar, How Green Was My Valley is history's foremost example of the Perfectly Fine Film That People Hate Because It Won An Award - its descendants including such films as Shakespeare in Love and The Artist. It's an unfair, stupid side effect of awards-watching, but never was it more unfair or stupid than in this case. Citizen Kane, after all, is hardly the only masterpiece of American cinema that lost an Oscar, and at least it got nominated (Singin' in the Rain, which couldn't get anything more prestigious than a Supporting Actress nod in the year that The Greatest Show on Earth picked up the top award, has your unfair right here, buster). And frankly, How Green Was My Valley is among the best Best Picture winners regardless of what films it had to beat to get there, so throwing it out for utterly trivial reasons, as generations of cinephiles have, is wanton absurdity. It's a John Ford picture, for chrissake, and if we can't give John Ford pictures the benefit of the doubt, then I don't know why to even bother having a film culture.

It is, admittedly, enthusiastically sentimental even by Ford standards, and feels like it's from a different planet than the caustically cynical Citizen Kane. And this perhaps does not help its reputation. It is a film about nostalgia: a family drama in which there is no real shape or conflict besides the recollection of a grown man (uncredited narrator Irving Pichel, with his warmly sober voice, tinged with acceptance of loss, makes at least as much of an impression as any of the flesh-and-blood humans in the film) of a period of change in the small Welsh town where he grew up. It's a mixture of right and left wing impulses - basically, a story about how the quest for corporate profits ruins the innocence and charm of rural life - in exactly the right way that makes it not entirely right for modern tastes. But I'm a huge fan, anyway; it's in my Ford Top 10, for sure, and that's not a man whose career is lacking for absolutely tremendous films.

Anyway, the shot.

This comes from waaaay early in the film, when our narrator is still introducing the bucolic peace of the town in his childhood:

In those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the sides of our hill. Not yet enough to mar the countryside, nor blacken the beauty of our village, for the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green.

Those are the words, more or less, underlining this image. We've already seen the "today" version of the town as a hellpit of belching black smoke and filthy surfaces, so we know exactly what he's talking about. If this moment, in a kind of half-montage (it's all chronologically continuous, but the cutting between physical spaces is more associative than narrative), is part of a general program of making the little town seem as dear as possible, with its lovely buildings nestled in amongst the rolling hills in a series of landscape shots that find Ford and cinematographer Arthur C. Miller doing their very best impression of 19th Century British landscape paintings. And yet, the future sneaks in: there's that chunky coal, rolling away from Donald Crisp and little Roddy McDowall - the hills are literally crumbling under the industrial development - and there, in the corner, is the single plume of jet black smoke, ominously echoing the corridor of smog that opened the film, looking down on the quaint buildings in the right.

It is, while a happy shot of a happy moment of father and son bonding, still an ominous one. It's not foreshadowing, exactly, if we've already seen where things are going, so let's just call it a splash of cold water. While everything else tries to convince us that we're about to watch a movie of untroubled people in an untroubled time, the implications of this frame bluntly and coldly remind us that there are, in fact, plenty of troubles on the way, and that you can't stop the march of progress even when the cost in humanity and beauty is severe.

Or let's just put it simply: from left to right, the shot presents an undesirable, run-down future, a present moment of family domesticity, and the already hazy past of idealised innocence. Can't pin down the film's range of themes more explicitly than that.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: TRAVELING TO THE PAST TO SAVE THE FUTURE

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: seven films into a 14-year-old franchise, X-Men: Days of Future Past trots out everybody's favorite hackneyed genre trick, time travel, to add some spice and get the widest possible array of desirable actors assembled in one place. Time travel being one of those conceits that transcends genre and tone, I thought it would be worth having a little fun with it, and checking out the other high-concept time-travel comedy of the 1980s.

There is nonsense; then there is abysmally foolish nonsense; then there is Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, a film that manages to make its almost unmitigated, frivolous nonsense into a legitimate strength. This can be done, though not very often, and rarely in the case of such an obviously trivial work - cult classic though it might be now, there's no sense at all that the filmmakers behind this weird little idiot-driven high school musical lark had any intention towards making something that would last even as long as its 1989 release date. The disintegration of De Laurentiis Entertainment group pushed the film, shot in '87 with an eye towards coming out in '88, back a whole year, and given the zestiness with which Bill & Ted anatomises Southern California metalheads of an extremely specific sort, there'd have been every reason to assume that it would be dated on arrival.

Instead, the film launched catchphrases and slang from a minute corner of the world into a whole nation (like the Frank Zappa song "Valley Girl", part of me wonders if the film tended to lead to the milieu it depicts, rather than the other way 'round), and making an unlikely move star out of Keanu Reeves, whose career for a quarter of a century now has rested mainly on people being utterly confounded how somebody who can't really act keeps getting such a weirdly broad variety of roles. For this, we can point to the obvious: no role in Reeves's career, not even the empty shell of slacker tropes Neo from The Matrix, is so well suited to his actual self in the moment of its creation. Need a loopy SoCal dude; cast a loopy SoCal dude.

Reeves plays, in the film, Ted "Theodore Logan", one-half of the spectacularly ambitious, spectacularly untalented garage band Wyld Stallyns in San Dimas, CA. His best friend and partner in crime is Bill S. Preston, Esq., the marginally more intelligent of the pair, played with a spaced-out élan to match Reeves's by Alex Winter (the vagaries of fate: insofar as it's possible to draw a line between the two performers, I think Winter is slightly more appealing and I can think of no reason that his career should have lain dormant while Reeves started getting role after role almost immediately, even those for which he was profoundly and obviously unsuited. Hi, Dangerous Liaisons. And a grand hullo and good day, Bram Stoker's Dracula).

But those are petty, niggling distinctions, in the face of the one epochal, unutterable truth of Bill & Ted: it is a very dumb movie that should be impossible to watch, but it turns out to be a truly dazzling and delightful sci-fi comedy, and it owes this almost completely to how phenomenal Reeves and Winter are in their roles. It may be, entirely, that this isn't really "acting" but simply being natural: nothing in Reeves's subsequent career suggests that Ted was much of a stretch for him, and of course there simply hasn't been enough evidence presented of Winter's range or talent. Maybe he has a life-changing, revolutionary Falstaff hiding in him just waiting for the right brave director, I don't know. My point, anyway, is that it doesn't matter: Bill & Ted puts all of its chips on Bill & Ted functioning as a very specific kind of easy-to-like doofuses: ambitious morons whose enthusiasm and unbridled innocence, almost a kind of pre-intellectual manner of understanding the world, flavors their generic bro-ness with sweetness and humanity. In life, Bill and Ted would be unendurable: their astounding stupidity, their crudely utilitarian understanding of women, their mutually reinforcing inability to comprehend the ways in which real life is nothing like their vision of it, would all make them impossible to tolerate for more than a few seconds. But the movie makes a solid case for them as a pair of utterly charming underdogs whose very obliviousness makes them figures of comic pathos, and that is due almost entirely to the acting.

It's not that Bill & Ted is otherwise "bad". It's just profoundly run-of-the-mill: director Stephen Herek, whose solitary previous directorial credit was the horror-comedy Critters, does as good a job as he needs to in keeping the tone frothy and pushing through the first act fast enough to quickly lay out the scenario provided by screenwriters Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon with clarity but without any chance to dwell on it. That scenario being that Bill & Ted, if they fail an upcoming history test, will flunk and be unable to find musical success, which in turn means that the will never become icons of peace and love and the centuries-distant future will be a dystopian hell. So an envoy from the future, Rufus (George Carlin, whose very level but distinctively ironic performance matters almost as much as Reeves's and Winter's in making us meet the film on its own level), has come with a phone booth time machine to let the boys travel through history and, as it were, learn by doing. There's a neat line the film walks, between letting that situation exist on its own terms and winking at us, saying, "it's awfully silly, isn't it? But let's run with it anyway", and the blunt speed of the opening is vital in building to that point. But Herek does not otherwise do much to give the film personality: it looks like a cheap '80s comedy (the visual effects and costumes are all pretty rough), shot without the remotest visual flair. Most of the humor that doesn't involve the title characters is played much too shrilly, with a game cast of mostly unknowns playing the gamut of historical figures that the duo end up dragging through time, and finding only a mechanical proficiency without doing anything to really sell the comedy (the only joke that I find actually works is one involving Rod Loomis as Sigmund Freud holding a corndog on a stick right up in front of his chest where you can't miss it; it is funny almost entirely because it's the one place where the film expects us, the audience, to know anything about the historical characters, and so does not bother stressing it or even mentioning phallus imagery in passing). And the climax of its "celebrities from history get lost in the mall!" montage is, I find, quite dire altogether, both because it is hackneyed and because it is doesn't really find anything fun to do with the characters, while being a little too okay with indulging in broad, boring stereotypes regarding virtually every one of the characters (which we might defend as being part of the film's indebtedness to the heroes' worldview, except that there's a lot of evidence that we're understood to be smarter than they are).

But there's a lot that you don't need when as much of a film is working as well as Bill & Ted does as a basic hang-out movie: we are aware that Bill & Ted are stupid, we laugh them, we acknowledge our superiority to them, and yet they are immensely likable and fun to spend a short 90 minutes with. They're entirely approachable, normal, everyday heroes: God only knows how much of actual '80s teen culture the film captures and how much it of it is just invented nonsense, but Bill & Ted themselves have a considerable touch of the real; they feel like the kind of goofballs that everybody knows or knew, and nobody every really disliked, because they were just too damn harmless. They are, in effect, stupendously easy to root for,because they are very average and ordinary and idle in their supreme teenage-ness. And once a movie has characters that you can't help but root for, it's pretty much already won the battle as a work of simple but effective entertainment. It's nothing like a great work of comic cinema, but there's a good reason it has clung stubbornly to a cult audience for a quarter of a century.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: CAMPING KILLERS

If there was ever a time when the notorious genre of the slasher film wasn't in its rotten, decadent phase, that time was at any rate not 1988. By this point, all the good ideas had been used up, all the mediocre knock-off ideas had been used up, the audience was all used up, and if it wasn't for VHS rental stores, there wouldn't have been any economic viability to keep making the things at all.

Which brings us to Cheerleader Camp, a co-production between an American indie nobody and Japan's Daiei Studios, of all the goddamn random things and it is the very model of a 1988 slasher picture, starting right off with its abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter title. It's some kind of unspeakable, Godless hybrid of a college sex farce and Friday the 13th clone, several years after any such thing had passed its sell-by date, and it wears its complete lack of inspiration or brains with something that looks almost like pride. It's as hokey, derivative, and dumb as any slasher movie ever was, and it's saved only by virtue of being so slapdash in every single respect that it reaches a kind of Bad Movie apotheosis: when nothing goes right, everything goes right, and Cheerleader Camp is an especially pure example absolutely not one goddamn thing going right.

The setting: cheerleading camp. The cast: cheerleaders. Our main crew is the cheerleading squad of Lindo Valley High, a hopeful group of youngsters hoping to make a splash at the annual competition held at Camp Hurrah. We've got Pamela (Teri Weigel), a bitch; Theresa (Rebecca Ferratti), a bitch; Suzy (Krista Pflanzer), a super-bitch; Bonnie (Lorie Griffin), an idiot; Cory (Lucinda Dickey), the team's awkward costume-wearing mascot (Lindo Valley's team is the Gators, so the poor girl has to wear a dismal-looking lizard get-up), and Alison (Betsy Russell), the one we meet first in the course of a traumatising dream sequence, and who has some kind of positive characteristics, so we can mark her down right away as our Final Girl. There are two boys along, as well, part of the team that does, something, I'm not quite sure what: Alison's boyfriend Brent (Leif Garrett, legendarily fallen teen idol), who likes to flirt openly with everybody who isn't Alison, and Fat Awful Timmy (Travis McKenna, who parlayed his success here into real movies like Batman Returns, where he played the key role of "Fat Clown"), who is fat, and awful. He's like ten pounds of rape culture stuffed into a five pound bag.

The plot is simple: the Lindo Valley team is divided by mistrust and bitchiness, and Alison's anxious dreams in which she finds herself killing people have a weird tendency to flare out in the real world, as people die right after wronging her, starting with Suzy and a very convenient suicide after she's gone off to hump Brent. Meanwhile, the team has earned the ire of Camp Hurrah's shrill head, Miss Tipton (Vickie Benson), whose first scene makes it seem 100% like she's a nasty old lesbian there to seduce and destroy the girls, but later on has vigorous sex with the local male sheriff (Jeff Prettyman); this leaves the film's dedicated sexual predator role to be filed by handyman Pop (George "Buck" Flower), the creepy old man who leers and licks his lips and drops witticisms like "[They'll] make your peepee harder than a ten-pound bag of nickel jawbreakers."

One thing we must concede to Cheerleader Camp: the two genres it tries to crossbreed, are unusually well-suited to it, hinging as the both do on the teenager's well-observed desire to have all the sex. Structurally, all that really has to happen is that the opening hour, which in any slasher film is the long wind-up in which nothing of the smallest interest happens, has to be full of ludicrous hijinks instead of misfiring "tension" building. And my friends, Cheerleader Camp is a veritable fount of hijinks. It's a slasher film with the sensibility of a '50s cartoon, a slasher film in which this happens:



Completely inadvertently, this allows the film to succeed in an almost unprecedented way for a bad movie. It looks, for all the world, like a bad comedy; it is a bad comedy. And it is known to bad movie lovers that bad comedy is never fun to make fun of. If it were funny, it would be a good comedy - comedy is only bad when it is tedious and drawn out and boring. But Cheerleader Camp gets to combine everything that is awful about bad '80s teen comedy - Miss Tipton, who talks and acts like she has a bug large enough to flatten Tokyo up her ass; the non-stop misery of wretched, wretched Tim, an uncertain marriage of horny asshole and "fatty faw down"slapstick - with a film-long awareness that, don't worry, people will start to die, so even if most of the film is bad comedy, it always feels like a bad slasher, and thus permits itself to be mocked and laughed at and pitied for being such a pathetic little also-ran years behind the curve.

For it is - oh dear God, how it is. If the film had come out in 1983, there'd have been some sense to it, anyway: its forthright attempt to copy earlier, if not better, successes in the genre would have made sense then. The awareness not just that this is a trashy horror picture but a trashy horror picture too feeble in conception even for horror fans manages to seep its way into the film itself: neither the actors nor the filmmakers seem to be at all willing to commit themselves to their project. For one thing, there's the amount of gore that the film doesn't have; the deaths are staged by director John Quinn quickly and plainly, just to get them out of the way, so we can get back to the scenes of cheerleaders practicing routines and yelling at them. The actors, besides Russell and Dickey, are palpably unwilling to take the script or the characters seriously at all, pitching things at a safely zany speed in which everything is flattened to the level of an indifferent sketch comedy where people hope that pummeling away at whatever one adjective they've been given to play can overcome the slack writing.

Everything about the film is lazy and stupid, played with enough flair to make it absolute catnip to genre aficionados, or those with a 24 pack of beer and enough friends to make a night of it: the very serious performance of our Final Girl standing out among the tattered nonsense of everything else amps up the campiness, the sheer gratuitous randomness of the film's generous nudity amps up the trashiness, and everything else, enthusiastically wallowing in the lowest kind of '80s cheese (the cheerleading rap performed by Garrett and McKenna should be lovingly preserved in a museum), amps up the silliness. The whole film is the best kind of terrible, good-natured in its imbecility in a way that perfectly embodies everything that makes slasher films the worst thing in the world and everything that makes people lifelong fans of the form regardless of that fact.

Body Count: 9, mostly heavily backloaded, and all but two denuded of any particular gore.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1937: In which budgets are exploded in the name of spectacle; and we learn an important lesson about film preservation

There's nothing easier than losing favor with Hollywood: no matter how successful a director's high peaks might be, all it takes is one project that ends up costing far too much and makes far too little back at the box office to tarnish even the brightest shining star. This truism takes us to one Frank Capra, who was the closest thing Hollywood in the '30s had to a brand-name filmmaker, and whose highly profitable run of movies with Columbia Pictures - one of the mini-majors, along with Universal and United Artists, but still responsible fora fair number of big hits - came to a bitter close over the matter of 1937's Lost Horizon, an epic that was green-lit with (by some accounts) the highest budget ever allocated to a Hollywood production, and still managed to shoot over it by a third. The film was cut from an assembly edit of six hours down to three and a half, down to two and a quarter, and finally down to 107, the length that was generally released in America to thoroughly unimpressive box office numbers. Capra and Columbia boss Harry Cohn fought nastily over the final cut, over pay, over contracts. And then the next year, Capra directed the Best Picture Oscar winner You Can't Take It with You, Columbia's biggest film of 1938, and it was like nothing ever happened. Because it's almost as easy to gain Hollywood's favor as it is to lose it. It's always, and only, about money.

Adapted by Capra's regular screenwriter Robert Riskin - they too had a falling-out, and didn't patch things up, either - from James Hilton's 1933 novel, the film tells of what happens when a planeful of Brits flees Shanghai following political upheavals in 1935. Cool-headed diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) is the head of the rescue mission, but it's really an Asian pilot (Val Duran) who dictates what's going to happen: the plane is crashed, deliberately, in the Himalayas, where the survivor (not including the hijacker) are found in the bitter snow by a team from a valley hidden deep in the mountains. This unbelievably idyllic place goes by the name of Shangri-La; a rural community guided, but not precisely "led" by the High Lama (Sam Jaffe) who dwells in the lamasery on a cliff overlooking the valley. He doesn't have much to do with everyday life, though; his primary actor is a certain Chang (H.B. Warner), and it is this Chang who explains the ins and outs of life to the survivors, including Robert and his brother George (John Howard), con-man Henry Barnard (Thomas Mitchell), paleontologist Alexander Lovett (Edward Everett Horton), and Gloria Stone (Isabel Jewell), sixth months past her due date for dying of some dread disease. At first, only Robert is terribly excited by the calm sensibility that permeates Shangri-La; he is encouraged in this upon meeting the lovely Sondra (Jane Wyatt), an oddly European-looking resident of the valley. But as the rest find, one by one, that the slow pace and simple needs of life in the valley can be more rewarding than the chaos of the West - and that the valley has some unexplained power that can restore health and prolong life to extraordinary lengths - only George ends up staying angrily insistent that, goddammit, they need to get out of this weird Oriental hell.

So let's knock the unpleasant bit out of the way first. Lost Horizon has a racial politic that almost can't help but make a modern viewer feel a bit queasy - just the yellowface is enough for that, really, but the story grips with particular enthusiasm an idea of hyper-spiritual, Zen-like Asian spirituality that is, at any rate, a lot easier to handle than the notion of ignorant savage hordes of slant-eyed monsters in the Fu Manchu mode. Still, it is by all of the standards of our time - less so by the standards of its own (in fact, the film was later re-edited to downplay its over sympathy for the Chinese, when this became a political liability) - a deprecatory representation that's long on exoticising foreign culture. And this is not true only of the script: there are many shots that find Capra and cinematographer Joseph Walker framing characters and the Stephen Goosson-designed Shangri-La itself with a kind of precious fussiness, one that, on hand, stresses the ethereal nature of the place (which I think to be appropriate and good), and on the other, is deeply invested in making some kind of Orientalist art object of the frame that denies any kind of life or flexibility to the content.

All that being said, this is a fable, not an social documentary, and a certain sense of rich mystery and formalised ritual in the story and the visuals suits the material just fine. After all, the explicit, top-level narrative of Lost Horizon involves a man - a very British man (Colman could play no other kind), that is to say a man who embodies all the things that the phrase "white European colonialist" calls to mind - being thrown into a completely foreign environment and finding that he is entirely the better for it, and that it is a deeply spiritual place to be. The specific trappings do, of course, put Lost Horizon squarely in a tradition of Exotic Other stories, but I am now thinking less of the degree to which, nearly 80 years after its creation, the film matches contemporary tastes, but of how well it functions as a drama driven by its visuals; and I am inclined to say, it does this very well indeed.

One of the things I perpetually re-learn, as I get older and less worked over what films have political and social agendas I agree with, is that Capra - a filmmaker whose politics are very infrequently cotangent with my own - was a talented motherfucker. For all that he's tarred and feathered with the seemingly immortal slur of "Capra-corn", and accused of ticky-tacky sentiment, that criticism only works if you haven't actually seen many Capra films, especially since his most famous work - It's a Wonderful Life, though I wonder how much longer till Mr. Smith Goes to Washington eclipses it - actively repudiates that line of thinking, though many people do not realise this. Not that Lost Horizon is some kind of dour, cynical downer, but it does pretty bluntly suggest that all of "civilisation" - a word that the film unmistakably puts in those exact ironic quotes - is savagery, violence, and base behavior, and what we should hope for is not that some genius will come to save us from ourselves, but that there's a wonderful land far off in the untouchable mountains where a cluster of decent humanity can be saved and groomed until the world is ready for it. The movie says that we all long for a Shangri-La of our own; in so doing, it implies that damn few of us ever get one.

But that has nothing to do with Capra's quality as a filmmaker, of course. What I was starting to say just then was that he's actually quite a gifted craftsman of stirring, interesting visuals, and an extraordinary director of actors - the list of performers who gave their best or near-best performances under his guidance is not a short one, and this film certainly adds Ronald Colman to that list. I have little use for him on the whole: there's a packaged dignity to most of his acting that I find largely indigestible. But his slowly percolating enthusiasm is communicated here with subtlety and restraint, as Capra builds Robert Conway's character through simply watching Colman's feelings move quietly up through his face. And the last act, in which Conway is full of regret, dismay, and fear at the thought of losing his Shangri-La, is simply the best stuff in Colman's career, bleak without being punishing and hopeless.

The other thing that's really extraordinary about the way the film is put together is its use of sound: Dimitri Tiomkin's music especially, but sound effects too. There is a simple, almost primitive scheme used here: when things are chaotic, driven by conflict, or full of negative emotion, the film is loud. When things are serene, thoughtful, reflective, and at peace, the film is quiet. The opening is a violent rebellion, and then the sound drops out to almost nothing but dialogue on the plane. The plane crash is busy and metallic, and then the early scenes in Shangri-La lack even the hint of ambient noise or music. It's elementally powerful, working on an almost wholly subconscious front - and yet, if it's so obvious and simple, why does it feel so unusual? That the film includes virtually nothing on the soundtrack at its most peaceful moments, besides human voices - no birds, no chimes, no wind in the grass - is genuinely startling, but by God, does it work.

Clever filmmaking, and impressively grand filmmaking too: for a hell of an expensive film, Lost Horizon looks it, with massive sets and setpieces, presented by the filmmakers with an eye towards emphasising their scale - the film looks like it takes place in a huge valley surrounded by massive mountains. The use of stock footage from documentaries about the Himalayas certainly aids in this illusion, but it's not the only reason: the mountain sets often seem just as vast, and it should be noted, not without regret, that the studio-shoot footage and the stock footage don't cut together so cleanly, so consistently, that there's much of an illusion to be had, anyway. But setting that aside, it's a sprawling, epic-sized film, and however much Columbia hurt for it, this was money well spent.

And now, a complete change of subject for our final word. As noted, Lost Horizon was generally released at 107 minutes, with 132 minutes being the longest cut that was ever screened for a paying audience. In the '70s and '80s, a massive restoration was attempted, using every scrap of footage that could be scrounged up anywhere in the world. Though a complete soundtrack for the 132-minute cut was found, several minutes of visual information could not, and so the film ends up with several scenes playing out over stills. Meanwhile, the quality of the restored footage is immensely variable, with some of it so blurred and scratched that only context clues make it entirely clear what's going on. To a degree, then, watching the "full" version of Lost Horizon is an act of interpretation: you can gather what's going on and suppose what it might have looked like, but it requires work to get there. And this is not entirely unknown - the reconstructed A Star Is Born from 1954 is exactly the same kind of hybrid.

What is kind of delightful, or at least instructive is seeing the footage that was snipped out, the footage that Cohn deemed inessential. This includes, mind you, the scene where Lama explains his vision of peace and harmony, and clarifies the entire backstory of Shangri-La. So much for an idea-driven movie (it also includes a scene - one of the still photo reconstructions - where the film-long homoeroticism between Henry Barnard and Alexander Lovett sounds to have exploded into full-blown homosexual domesticity. Since this could hardly have been possible in a film made in America in 1937, even one with Edward Everett Horton, the missing visuals must have downplayed things fiercely). Undoubtedly, this moved faster, but that's really the only thing that can be said on its behalf. The longer version of the film is actually a film, with a throughline and clear character moments; yet it is also a compromised Frankenstein monster of passable and unacceptable elements. And so it is with film preservation and restoration: always a situation of coming as close as possible, never actually getting all the way there. Some things, like Shangri-La itself, are hidden away where no one will ever be able to see them again.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1937
-The first cel-animated feature film in history, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premieres at the end of the year, going on to explode box office records
-Leo McCarey's devastating autumn-years romantic drama Make Way for Tomorrow opens, breaks everybody's heart who sees it
-Daffy Duck makes his first appearance in the Warner Bros. Looney Tune short Porky's Duck Hunt

Elsewhere in World cinema in 1937
-Jean Renoir's magnificent anti-war film Grand Illusion opens in France
-Little-known in the West Yamanaka Sadao's Humanity and Paper Balloons makes a profound impact on the future development of Japanese period dramas, or jidaigeki
-The Polish production The Dybbuk is one of the earliest important works of Yiddish-language filmmaking

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TIM AT TFE: DOROTHY'S REVENGE

I don't post about these anymore, because I take it for granted that you're all heading over there to read my stuff, RIGHT? But I was especially proud of my essay at The Film Experience this week, taking down Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return and the bizarre conspiracy theory that has poked up about it.

Go, read, enjoy! And I will have more reviews up here in the very near future - today was a traveling day, and I didn't have time to get anything completed.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 1 POLL: CAMPING KILLERS

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: CHEERLEADER CAMP
Thanks to everyone who voted!

There's no more seminal setting for a slasher film than camp, and no better place to start out a new edition of the Summer of Blood. The three candidates I've selected for this week are:

Cheerleader Camp (1988)
From IMDb: "An unknown killer is killing off the members of a small cheerleader group at a remote cheerleader training camp."

The Final Terror (1983)
From IMDb: "A group of forest rangers go camping in the woods, and trespass into an area where a backwoods mama likes to kill people who come onto her turf."

Just Before Dawn (1981)
From IMDb: "Five campers arrive in the mountains to examine some property they have bought, but are warned by the forest ranger Roy McLean that a huge machete-wielding maniac has been terrorising the area."

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VAMPIRE LOVERS

I have on three different occasions now described Only Lovers Left Alive as Vampires Who Write for Pitchfork: The Movie, and I still don't have the damnedest idea if I mean that in a disparaging or highly complimentary way. It's that kind of movie, where the singular weirdness of it more than trumps judgments that try to pin it down into good or bad, worth-it or not-worth-it. It is absolutely and unequivocally a Jim Jarmusch picture, at any rate, infinitely friendlier than his last film, The Limits of Control, but not in the least ways suggesting that he's seen a reason to alter or modulate the beyond-deadpan sense of humor and enthusiasm for squatting quietly to the side and allowing scenes to build up slowly through character behavior rather than plot concerns, the two traits which more than anything have dominated his entire career as a filmmaker.

Superficially, Only Lovers Left Alive - a most exquisitely suggestive and nuanced title - is the most populist film Jarmusch has ever made; it is about vampires. But that's a blind if ever I saw one; the director's character-driven gangster picture Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, itself only barely interested in playing by formula rules, is far more of a traditional genre picture than this one ever wants to be. Just about the most traditional gesture in the entirety of this film is its central metaphor by which blood-hunger in vampires is a metaphor for heroin addition in rock stars and other drug dependencies in artistic types, and even that's only "tradition" insofar as vampires have a long history of being used as symbols for other things. Mostly, Only Lovers Left Alive treats the state of vampirism less as the condition of being an undead ghoul possessed by evil (of which there is no hint), nor as the more modern, Anne Rice-ey condition of being a tormented soul unable to find release (of which there is more than a hint, but mostly so it can be drily mocked); vampirism, in Jarmusch's eyes, is the state of having been long enough to have gained a perspective on life and art that a single human lifetime can't possibly accomodate. These vampires are, above all else, deeply confirmed nostalgists, very aware of what has gone by in the past and sad that it has gone, though they are also fully capable and willing to be alive in the present with all its technology and communication (herein, vampires use FaceTime, terribly casually in a way that even most normal humans in motion pictures don't).

The vampires, and the lovers in question, are Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), there being at least a minor indication that they're in on the joke about their names. They've been mated for centuries, but present live on opposite sides of the globe: he's making underground club music in Detroit, she's off enjoying a quiet live in Tangier (no real explanation for why these dedicated soulmates would be separated by an ocean is given; one assumes it's the vampire equivalent of human couples spending at least one day per week away from each other to keep outside interests). Adam, far more moody and disturbed by the course of recent human history - "zombies" is their preferred epithet for alive humans - has recently begun having suicidal thoughts, and picking up on his depression, Eve heads over to the States to be with him for a time. All is calm and well in their lives until Eve's "sister" Ava (Mia Wasikowska), an unpredictable, self-indulgent loose canon, shows up and muscles her way into their lives, taking far too keen an interest in Adam's unwitting human gofer, Ian (Anton Yelchin) along the way.

I would not state some tired, trite thoughts along the lines of "Swinton and Hiddleston are the best thing about the movie", but the way Jarmusch builds scenes, it's awfully hard to disentangle the performances from the story, from the battered, warmly used sets and props, from the unusually small and domestic lighting (the production designer is Marco Bittner Rosser, the cinematographer Yorick Le Saux). At its very best moments, which far outweigh its most tiresome moments, the film does a superb job of dramatising the pleasure of being in a comfortable, low-key long-term relationship, the kind that thrives on talking about art and politics in between sex and cuddling, and would rather stay in than drive around having misadventures. Swinton and Hiddleston, both of them wrapped up in fascinatingly otherworldly make-up and a melange of out-of-time costume elements (Bina Daigeler's costumes are almost as important to building character as the actors are), exude a weirdness that's neveretheless comfortable and homey, and make domesticity look tremendously sexy in a way that films virtually never care about depicting.

All that being said, I found it impossible not to get a little itchy for lengthy stretches of the film: this is very much a film by the occasional Jarmusch who has really smart musical tastes and is fucking well going to make sure you notice them sort of like a much more erudite but also, somehow, much more obnoxious version of Garden State. There are so many conversations about this or that really gorgeous and even more obscure piece of midcentury blues or modern day underground rock that it sometimes seems if the vampires ever think about anything else but having cooler tastes than all of the rest of us. It's far beyond my place to tell a filmmaker who has given me so much pleasure, including in this very film, how much right he has to indulge his taste in lengthy musical scenes; but I do suppose that Only Lovers Left Alive is probably only entirely appealing to the viewer whose taste in music is exactly like Jarmusch's. Reader, I confess: I am not that viewer.

I am, however, the viewer whose taste in Elizabethan drama and Romantic English literature to get - I think - all of the jokes scattered throughout about various tortured artists through the years. I do not know if this means I am necessarily glad those jokes exist: it gives the film a modestly self-congratulatory feel, like it's proud to make its audience jump through all kinds of intellectual hoops to be worthy of its cleverness. This is very different from the much more overtly complicated matter of The Limits of Control, a film that doesn't care in the slightest if we're able to keep up with it, and doesn't give us a cookie if we can; I think I like that approach better.

Still, a vague but unmistakable line of pretension doesn't keep Only Lovers Left Alive from being one of the few altogether captivating vampire pictures of recent vintage, although as far removed from anything resembling the horror genre as vampire stories can go (there's only one scene that could really be called "horror" by any strict definition, and it bothers the characters as much as it bothers us). Tinged with a melancholy awareness of time passing that's never remotely maudlin or self-congratulatory in the "we're so much cleverer than the damn kids" register that something this obsessed with analogue musical equipment could easily have been, it's a very pleasurable, unexpected portrait of people observing time passing and thinking about how it affects them and everyone around them; and its virtually non-stop picturesque, almost fairy-tale nighttime photography leave it as beautiful, in its odd way, as most movies can ever hope to be. It's acerbically playful, judgmental about the Way The World Is without being a harangue about it, and knows better than any movie I've seen in ages how stillness can give us a chance to soak up characters and their world, and for all its archness, it's as singular an experience as I've had in a long time.

And now for the disgusting business of a number grade. I'll be unhappy with anything I put down here, but I've decided for the time being to low-ball it, on the grounds that I'd rather decide later that I liked it more than decide later that I liked it less.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1936: In which we bring a little color into the world

The second major technological revolution in cinema history, the arrival of color, was neither as abrupt nor as immediately ubiquitous as the rise of talkies: there was a certain mistrust of the artistic validity of the technology that lingered for years after Technicolor introduced Process No. IV, its legendary three-strip color system that permitted for the most vividly saturated, luminous colors that have ever been known; The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind came out four years after the first three-strip Technicolor feature, RKO's Becky Sharp from 1935. And as late as the early 1960s, there was still a certain division between black and white as the medium for serious dramatic filmmaking, with color used mostly for broad entertainment, historical epics and musicals and the like (for example, it wasn't until 1967 that there was an all-color slate of Best Picture nominees at the Academy Awards).

Still and all, the technology continued to develop and grow and prove itself long before color film ever became as standard as sound. And we are arrived now at one of the most important single steps in that development, with 1936's The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, the first three-strip Technicolor film shot outside of the reliable, easily-controlled environment of a studio; it was filmed entirely on location in the vicinity of Big Bear Lake in the San Bernadino Mountains, far east of Hollywood and the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It was the film that demonstrated the flexibility and utility of the Technicolor process, while also proving that the natural world could benefit from the realer-than-real depth of color that process provided to the vibrantly rich sets and colors of a studio production.

That was, anyway, the intention: I cannot begin to say if the fault lies more with cinematographers Howard Greene (the pioneering Technicolor expert making only his second film) and Robert C. Bruce, or more with a deficient DVD transfer released by Universal (the film was among the glut of Paramount titles acquired by Universal for TV and, ultimately, video distribution in the 1950s), who clearly have no real incentive to sink much money for a major restoration into a backwoods melodrama with a minuscule contemporary audience of historically-inclined cinematography buffs. But however it happened, the version of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine we have to watch now is a perversely muted affair, for something whose position in Technicolor history is so profoundly important: it is heavily brown across the board, with brown forests housing brown cabins in which brown clothes are worn by people with pasty, wan faces that haven't been lit anywhere near right (the absence of brown skin is, unfortunately, not remotely surprising).

So whether the fault lies in the filmmakers or their later archivists, the fact remains that The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is not so pretty to look at, circa 2014. And as the obvious point of entry for the film is its visual style, the fact that it's conspicuously lacking on that front makes it awfully hard to feel good about anything else in the movie, which is not, if we are going to be mercilessly honest, such a unique and special butterfly that it's worth fighting for above and beyond its unquestionable historic importance. The source novel, by John Fox, Jr, was adapted four times in the silent era - thrice between 1913 and 1916! - so something about it must have struck an intense chord with audiences back then, but the evidence as to why that should have been the case isn't easy to see onscreen.

Basically, this is a drab romantic melodrama that keeps acting like it's an action epic about a pair of warring families, with its secret heart set on being an historical docudrama about coal mining in the Virginia mountains in the early 20th Century. The families, whose feud is one of those "started so long ago that nobody knows the reason" jobs, are the Tollivers and the Falins; we are to be primarily concerned with the Tollivers, including patriarch Judd (Fred Stone), a fiercely reactionary man, and his sensible, long-suffering wife Melissa (Beulah Bondi); their near-adult daughter June (Sylvia Sydney) and little boy Buddie (George McFarland, "Spanky" from Hal Roach's Our Gang series); and cousin Dave (Henry Fonda), widely expected to be June's future husband. But what hunky outsider comes? Why, 'tis Jack Hale (Fred MacMurray), who hopes to buy the mining rights from the Tollivers and the Falins and whoever else owns coal-producing lands in those hills. June falls for him instantly, though it takes a little while for anyone else to notice it. It takes longest of all for Jack to notice himself, largely because he is a massive tit.

If The Trail of the Lonesome Pine had absolutely nothing else that was dramaturgically crippling, that would be enough: Jack Hale is a shit, so breezily assured of his objective superiority to all of the undereducated rural folk he meets that there's not, anywhere in the film's opening hour, even the merest sense of tenderness or charm to his bearing. It doesn't help that MacMurray was extraordinarily good at playing a peremptory, bossy asshole, and commits so hard to that version of the character that it's whiplash-inducing in the second half when he starts to be nice, or basically human. At any rate, it certainly makes the film's romance plot hard to swallow, since the only way to buy that June would be so infatuated with this man is if we take her for a complete and utter doormat, and while the Asshole/Doormat dynamic is hardly unknown in life or the movies, it's not the sort thing that you should really be expected to root for.

The other massive, crippling flaw: the stupefying dialogue all throughout Grover Jones's screenplay, which puts into the mouths of the Tollivers alarmingly colorful phrases that, one hopes, no human beings throughout history have ever actually said, at least in such volume. Particularly in the opening act, it feels less like a family drama than a peek backstage at a Yosemite Sam impersonators' convention.

What this all means, of course, is that the film's conspicuous flaws are front-loaded, and the back half (if you can make it that far) is a considerably more nuanced and thoughtful affair in which the corrosive effect of violence is explored with a bitterness and clarity that's suggested by none of the redneck cartoon shenanigans that open the film. Even at its worst, though, there's a kind of thoughtful gloominess to much of the film that primes us for this eventual drift from tepid romantic movie to morality play. It is a film aware of the harsh effects of violent living even when the plot and the characters are not (outside of Dave, and that owes mostly to how brutish Fonda could be when he wasn't constrained by the star system to play a Sensible Average Joe - his is the best performance in the film by at least a couple of laps). This was an early film in the career of director Henry Hathway, who'd end up making several key Westerns in the '50s and '60s ("key" not meaning "great"; he's responsible for the most turgid portions of the wearisome Cinerama epic How the West Was Won), and his later films, in that genre and others, all suggest a keen sense for how exterior locations can place certain emphases on the drama. That skill is in a nascent form in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, but there is certainly a clear relationship between the hushed, shadowy forests of the mountains and the closed-in, paranoiac lives that are lived there. It's not quite compelling enough to make up for how bland it is as a groundbreaking work of color (in fact, it almost certainly suggests that the film would be better in black and white), but at least there's a consistent visual scheme to the film. Dramatically, the film is at least half a washout, but as an atmosphere piece and visual expression of mental states, it has some skill to it that makes all the hootin' and hollerin' and widespread mugging in the cast (how much mugging? Spanky is comparatively sedate), if not forgiven, then at least relatively tolerable while we wait for the good stuff.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1936
-William Wyler's criminally underseen Dodsworth is released by United Artists
-Universal's 13-part serial Flash Gordon is one of the biggest hits in the history of the form
-The proto-noir The Petrified Forest from Warner Bros. makes a star of Humphrey Bogart

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1936
-Japanese master Mizoguchi Kenji has a banner year in Japan, directing the early triumphs Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, his oldest films that remain broadly available
-The Marathi-language Sant Tukaram is the first Indian film to find international success
-Hollywood production designer William Cameron Menzies goes to Great Britain to direct the science-fiction milestone Things to Come

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BEST SHOT: X-MEN

With X-Men: Days of Future Past breathing down our necks as the third superhero movie in a two-month span, Hit Me with Your Best Shot does a bit of time traveling all its own. Nathaniel R's selection for tonight is the first X-Men, the movie that kicked off the present superhero fad 14 years ago, and the subject of the very first episode of HMWYBS, so long ago that The Film Experience wasn't even at its current home.

I wasn't playing along yet at that point, so I get to take advantage of this rerun to share my pick for the best shot of a movie which, across such a huge gulf of time (14 years is about what, three generations in pop culture?), has a sort of elegance and classicism that makes it seem downright artsy compared the later films in the genre it birthed. Director Bryan Singer and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel use their pointedly limited color palette (blues, blacks, browns) and anamorphic widescreen frame with deliberation and care uncommon in 21st Century popcorn movies (though, strictly speaking, X-Men is a 20th Century popcorn movie). It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but there's a gratifying level of restraint and human-sized filmmaking, perhaps a reflection of the time the film was made - CGI wasn't as ready and cheap and 2000 as it was even just a couple of years later. The resultis a film that has aged unexpectedly well (when I last saw it in 2006, I didn't care for it nearly as much as I did now) as superhero movies have gotten bigger, noisier, busier, full of higher stakes, and altogether more generic. And this isn't even the good Bryan Singer X-Men picture.

Anyway, the film is positively laden with dramatic blockbuster-style images, the kind that are very impressed with their own dramatic weight and mood, but still work for communicating ideas in a blunt, burly way. It's filmmaking that's longer on iconography than sophistication and grace, but that's exactly the right fit for a superhero movie, wouldn't you say? Shots that go "WUMPH!", and not shots that sneak in and tap on the shoulder.

And with that, here is the WUMPH that I picked:

If the film has a protagonist, it's Hugh Jackman's Wolverine; and while this is not the first shot in which Wolverine appears (Singer has a fetish in this movie for introducing characters in the background of shots), it is the first shot that is "about" Wolverine. Here we find him pounding back something alcoholic in between bouts as a steel cage fighter, which is, we gather, how he gets all his money.

X-Men, thematically, is about feeling isolated because of who you are, and finding comfort and acceptance with those who understand what that isolation feels like. And as such, it has all sorts of metaphorical expressions of that isolation, whether narrative (secondary protagonist Rogue, played by Anna Paquin, and her inability to touch other people without killing them), or visual, such as the final shot in which former friends Erik Lehnsherr (Ian McKellen) and Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) are divided by the fact that Erik present lives in a plastic cube hovering in the middle of a giant empty room. Or, of course, in this shot, where we meet Wolverine as a caged animal. Theoretically, this use of his powers in the service of earning a living and supporting himself could be read as a fine act of self-sufficiency and behaving within the limits one was born with, but the impact of this "here's Wolverine" shot says otherwise: the life he is living has trapped him. X-Men depicts the process by which he learns how not to live in that cage; beyond this one character, the film - the whole trilogy, for that matter - is about the desire to live with freedom outside of the prison that has been both self-inflicted and elected by outside society. Three whole films exist as an attempt to repudiate this image; to allow characters like Wolverine to exist without cages and without the psychological torments that lead to that glass of booze. It's never explicitly referenced again, but it's a shot that lingers symbolically for a long time after, and that's what made it my easy pick for, if not necessarily the "best" thing in the film, then maybe the most resonant.

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STANLEY KUBRICK: BEYOND THE INFINITE

2001: A Space Odyssey is the sort of movie that frequently gets called "difficult". Which is, ultimately, never true of a film that costs that much money laid out by a major studio (MGM, in this case), though I'll concede that if by "difficult" one means "the ending is a deliberately obscurantist explosion of borderline nonsense", then I can see why you'd think that.

Here's my notion: 2001, it is generally known, came about because Stanley Kubrick, fresh off the triumph of Dr. Strangelove, wanted to do hugely ambitious things. And it was in that capacity that he reached out to Arthur C. Clarke, the great science-fiction author who was the most concept-driven and technology-oriented of the big names in genre fiction of the mid-'60s, and suggested that they make "the proverbial 'really good' science-fiction film". Through a great deal of wrangling that needn't bother us here, Clarke and Kubrick ended up collaborating on a pair of virtually identical narratives, both released to the public in 1968: one of these was the screenplay to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the filmed version of which premiered in April, and the other was the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was published months later, so as to avoid stepping on the movie's toes.

There are many tiny details, and a couple of substantive ones, where the book and the film split, but the biggest one is more a matter of tone and focus: Clarke's novel is, generally speaking, explicit about what's going on, and Kubrick's film is, generally speaking, cryptic. I think this is no accident, and not a flaw with either version of the story; it strikes me and has always done so, that the book and the film are complementary to each other. Both of them address roughly the same themes using the tools which their respective media are best at: the book is about the communication of ideas in a clear way, while the movie is about the relating of moments and sensations in a series of fluid images. The one is concrete, the other is intuitive. The one is descriptive, the other is experiential.

Shorter: if you don't understand what the plot of 2001 contains, and it really matters to you, read the book. That's what it's there for.

Anyway, this is begging the question, a little bit. To be frank about it, I think that getting too tangled up in the "why" and "what" in 2001 is missing the point of the whole thing, which is that the film specifically intends not to clarify things - it is a story about events beyond human conception, very literally. The final 30 minutes of the film depict a process that we, are homo sapiens are insufficiently evolved to comprehend; the greater sin would be if the film did make any sense in this passage. In seeing what happens, and not knowing what it means, we're occupying the exact same place as the human protagonist, until such time as he ceases to be the "human" protagonist.

That's the ending, anyway. At almost two and a half hours long, 2001 is about much more than its visually transporting, narratively obtuse conclusion. It's part mystery, part "what if?" ethnography of a speculative future (that was, in virtually every regard, wildly optimistic about what life in the year 2001 would look like; though in retrospect, the most shocking thing is that the film would predict video chatting and self-aware computers, but not touch-screen control of either of those things), capped with a depiction of spiritual development that would seem altogether New Agey if the film weren't so rigidly materialistic in every single detail. Most of all, it's a good old-fashioned space adventure as warped into new forms by an author noted for his fixation on scientific plausibility and a director whose approach to genre had consistently been to subvert norms; the most significant element of 2001 is, in fact, that it's an early example - among the earliest in the English language - of an anti-genre film, in this case an anti-thriller. Take the details of the plot (hidden objects on the moon, insane killer computers, aliens), and give it to just about anybody, and you get a snazzy little blunderbuss of intense moments, probably clocking in at about 70 or 80 minutes. But in Kubrick and Clarke's hands, these materials are grist for one of the most purposefully boring movies ever made on American studio dollars.

Which sounds like a criticism, but I mean it to be the highest praise. Thematically, 2001 has one overriding interest that it examines from multiple, wildly different angles: the human's interest in interacting with the world around it by means of technology. We are the tool-using animals; we are the animals that manipulate reality using labor-saving devices. And with that as its primary focus, the film spends an utterly, wonderfully absurd amount of time watching people utilising future technology. There might not be any other hard sci-fi film in history where the lingering over future tech feels so focused and keenly tied into the theme as this: the languid, almost endless shots of people manipulating buttons to make spaceships go, or watching people walking in zero gravity environments, or studying the rules of weightless toilets, or eating food in space; all of these individual moments build up to one statement, which is "this is how technology will enable us to live". No film to boast such groundbreaking, still magnificent visual effects work - and 2001 is probably the single greatest triumph of visual effects in the 44-year window between King Kong and Star Wars - has ever done it with so little interest in providing spectacular entertainment. Quite the contrary: the immensely convincing effects work (which, according to the credits, was all designed by Kubrick himself, though it is known that he somewhat bullied his way into that credit, which rightfully should have been more fully shared with several other men, among them future VFX icon Douglas Trumbull), eye-popping in itself and still fully convincing on even the sharpest 70mm print or in the bright crispness of Blu-ray (and I have seen the movie on both formats), the superbly involving and immersive effects work, is all presented in the most confoundingly banal way.

A film about humankind and technology; but not a terribly optimistic one, you see. There is the way that the first tool ever used by a proto-human is seen in the film as having been a weapon; there is the legendary cut from a falling bone to a drifting orbital nuke, bluntly suggesting that after millions of years we're still using all our cunning in the most savage, animal ways; there is the fact that such drama as the film actually possesses hinges on an artificial intelligence created so perfectly that it can have nervous breakdowns and go on murderous rampages, at which point the only thing left is to kill it - killing it being, in 2001, the one thing we're really good at. At any rate, the film's major thesis about the marvels of interstellar travel is that it's depersonalising and tedious, and the way that people live in its fantastical vision of the year 2001 is full of the same bullshit and nonsense as life in 1968, or every other year in the history of civilization. It's such a well-worn argument that I'm embarrassed to even bring it up, that the only character in the movie that has real feelings and whose fate is genuinely affecting is the mad computer HAL-9000 (voiced in the incomparably bland and soothing tones of Douglas Rain), while the actual people - including the ones that HAL kills - are dull ciphers. The astronauts Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) - the latter is our nominal hero and the focus of all future human evolution, which is undoubtedly why Kubrick and Clark gave him a surname referencing weaponry - are for all intents and purposes indistinguishable, and completely untouchable by emotions; Frank's birthday message from his awkward parents elicits barely any kind of response from him at all. The first human lead we meet, Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), says virtually nothing that's not mindless small talk, even when he's presumably briefing a team with information that can hardly be all that revelatory to them, mostly coming off as bureaucratese. It is the first film where Kubrick played a game that he'd return to frequently in his career: cast lifeless actors and use their very lack of affect or personality to comment on the character they're playing. Sylvester appeared in the 1964 horror film Devil Doll, which put in an appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000; there, one of the snarking robots observed during a particularly leaden moment of vacant staring, "This is the scene where Kubrick said, 'That's my Heywood Floyd!'", and even as a joke, that has a tang of truth to it.

Now, all that being said, the film is still magnificently watchable. Depicting tedium does not have to be itself tedious, and the actual effect of the movie is both mesmerising and invigorating, I have found; Kubrick, his cinematographers Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott (the latter receving only an "additional photography" credit, in his first of four collaborations with Kubrick - the only cinematographer to come back for more of the director's micromanaging after the first time), and his editor Ray Lovejoy collaborated to make one of the small handful of movies that fully and legitimately deserves to be called visionary; and that's without mentioning the music, which is a foolish thing not to do. 2001 was the first film of the director's career where the music choices were consistently thoughtful and extraordinarily important, especially his use of three pieces by György Ligeti (without Ligeti's permission), with the composer's jarring micropolyphony creating a sense of unearthly aural sensation, chaotic without actually being formless, that ideally suits the film's depiction of human beings getting in out of their element (of course, the iconic use of the fanfare from Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" - itself based on a Nietszche work where he discusses, among other topics, the idea of the Superman, which makes it thematically cunning and aurally pleasing - is also brilliant, though a bit damaged by almost a half-century of parodies). I can only complain about the pairing of the first space travel sequences with Johann Strauss's waltz "By the Beautiful Blue Danube", which though it creates an exquisite marriage of image and music, also serves to make the sequences that are, presumably, meant to especially showcase the tooth-grinding dullness of space travel, instead come across as especially poetic and lovely.

But anyway, the images, the editing; 2001 is an impeccably well-crafted piece of cinema. Visually, it is anchored by a handful of repeated shots and images that echo each other (the alignment of celestial bodies and the film's famed black monoliths; the repetition of set-ups within the spaceship Discovery that especially stresses the limited scope of the ship and life within it), giving it a consistent visual shape - it is a movie deeply in love with circles, for reasons that are obviously linked to its theme (cycles, repetition, species replacing species only to be replaced by other species). The stillness of its images and the length of its shots gives it a hypnotic, insinuating sense that is occasionally pierced by quick or dramatic cuts at certain moments - the interpolation of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" with the image of an ape-man wielding a bone and non-diegetic shots of a tapir dying is not the film's most famous sequence, but one that I particularly admire for its quick transposition of triumph, awe, and cruelty. Later, HAL's murders are committed through piercing beeps on the soundtrack and the brutal cuts between the sterile white sets of the spaceship interior (the three production designers do excellent work throughout of making a future that looks both plausible and lifeless) and blaring right lights. Editing is not only used to indicate violence in the film, though it does an outstanding job of doing so.

All together, this is extraordinary filmmaking, creating intellectual arguments mostly through image and music, with its story shoring up its form, rather than the other way around, as is typical of mainstream filmmaking. The only thing that the film can be knocked for is that the sheer scale of its themes makes it an easy target for accusations of being kitschy, or pretentious, or overly pop-sciencey; all of which are criticisms I've heard leveled against it, and they all strike me as coming from the same place. Most art doesn't deal with the actual big questions - What, if anything, is the nature of God? What is moral behavior? What is it to be "civilized"? Where does humanity fit into the rest of the universe? - and there are plenty of people who get very irritated when it tries to, for reasons that I'll not pretend to understand, or care about. At any rate, that 2001 asks questions in these areas is, I think, an absolutely noble trait; that it asks them in such a well-formed, bold mix of experimental and mainstream filmmaking technique, with such one-of-a-kind images and structural conceits, is why it's a brilliant achievement of cinematic art. To me, it's enough to make it Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, and one of the greatest films ever made.

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