HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1982: In which horror went mainstream when we weren't looking, and the New Age of the Producer has begun

The question of authorship of 1982's Poltergeist is not going to be resolved here. It is one of the great stubbornly unanswered question of film production in modern days: whether producer/scenarist/co-writer Steven Spielberg (it is one of only three films for which he took a screenwriting credit) in fact directed the movie for which Tobe Hooper received credit, or if he was simply a very, very, very hands-on producer. It is a situation that undoubtedly happens more often than anybody supposes, and the history of the studio system is thick with movie for which the producer had more of a firm hand on the final product than the director, or directors (for it is also the case that many more old films than you could imagine went through multiple directors, with only the last one, or the one who did the most work, getting the onscreen credit; the studios were factories then, not art classes). But in this case, fanboyism kicks in: an anxiety over whether the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the director, also in 1982, of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial "really" made Poltergeist, and how we're supposed to value it as a result. Which is nonsense, of course; whether Hooper was just there to facilitate Spielberg's vision, or if he was just there to serve as a blind for the DGA while Spielberg facilitated his own vision (and what is not contested is that Hooper had little to nothing to do with post-production, where the bulk of any film's actual personality emerges anyway), there was never any point whn Hooper might possible have ended up as the auteur of what is, every inch, a Spielberg film. And this is not the first time that a producer, and not the director, served as the primary creative spirit behind a movie: one needn't look beyond David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind and Duel in the Sun for two especially clear-cut examples. The desire to discover who "really" directed Poltergeist is a farrago, mired in 1970s-style belief in Director as God and the way that singular artistic visions can be communicated though an especially collaborative art form. But we are in the 1980s now; the director's artistic vision is dead, and it is now time for branding and marketing and a new iteration of the old studio machine to make movies for us, and not individual genius so much.

Anyway, the point of any film is the film, and whoever really directed Poltergeist, the film does not cease to be the thing it has always been and will always be: a fascinating and in some ways disastrously compromised dark twin to E.T. that also represents a weirdly family-friendly horror movie from an era when "horror movies" almost exclusively meant stories of grotesque psychos stabbing sexually active teenagers with lots of stage blood ensuing. It's one of those haunted house movies about the unpredictable terrors of home ownership, looking at the literal suburban hell faced by the Freeling family: dad Steve (Craig T. Nelson), who got the gorgeous new tract home they all live in as a perk for being the most awesome of all the sales reps for the Cuesta Verde subdivision; mom Diane (JoBeth Williams), teen daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne), young son Robbie (Oliver Robins), and youngest of all, little Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke), who's the first member of the family to actively notice the odd shifts and bumps that everybody else overlooks. She also develops, early in the movie, a peculiar fascination with the static that the family television receives when programming ends for the evening (ah, the days when TV wasn't broadcasting every hour of every day!). In fact, by the end of the first scene, she'll end up staring intently at the blasting white noise with an implacable look of calm on her face that contrasts mightily with the raging flickers of white light that make her close-up look unnaturally freakish for such a small child.

Something or someone is communicating to Carol Anne through that static, and it starts to mess with the Freeling household at large, creating a weird zone in the kitchen where objects and people slide across the floor, while also battering things about and shaking the house to no end. Inexplicably, the family doesn't take this as their cue to leave immediately; it's not until one particularly violent event during a terrible storm results in Carol Anne having been spirited right out of the house that Steve and Diane begin to suspect that something terrible might be going on; this sends them to call on local parapsychologist Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight) to help figure out what the hell is happening, and when she proves no better equipped to to explain the paranormal activity, she brings in the psychic Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), whose beatific attitude in describing the unholy nexus of dark psychic energy residing in the Freeling home is the freakiest part of the whole movie.

Poltergeist is a garden variety haunted house movie in a lot of ways; it benefits most from coming at a time when, after years and years of treating horror as a shoddy B-commodity to be hidden with shame, the studios were starting to realise, en masse, that there was some money to be made in the genre. And it especially benefits from being a pet project of Spielberg's right in the window of time when he could basically do no wrong: he had, between 1975 and 1981, directed three of the most indescribably enormous hits in the history of American cinema (and also the mega-flop 1941, from which he sprung back quickly), and if he wanted to oversee the first special effects horror extravaganza of the new popcorn movie era, nobody was likely to step in and tell him no. And so Poltergeist is executed with a tremendous array of cinematic tricks that were the absolute state of the art in 1982, most of which have aged fairly well. Though a lot of it feels sort of identical to his 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and therein lies the problem.

Poltergeist is a Steven Spielberg movie. I've said it, but it needs to be repeated: whether Tobe Hooper "directed" it or not, he was only executing Spielberg's very specific and very characteristic vision. That the film came from the exact same period in Spielberg's adulthood reminiscing about Spielberg's childhood as E.T. is absolutely impossible to miss, as both present a version of the California suburbs as a nexus for childhood fantasies - happy fantasies of finding a best friend and having adventures in E.T., scary fantasies of looming spooky trees and creepy clown dolls and the ineffable terror of thunderstorms in Poltergeist. But Steven Spielberg, for all the thrillers dotting his career, has an attitude that is completely at odds with the impulses of horror, and however much influence Hooper had on the pre-production and production (and nobody denies that he was active in the film's pre-production), the fingerprints of a man who certainly isn't known for his family-friendly work are clearly to be felt in patches here and there. So we have, on the one hand, a writer and producer whose instincts are unyieldingly safe and juvenile in focus: let's make Poltergeist a spooky story about the things that scare little kids, but not too spooky. And on the other, we have a collaborator who made America's most widely-seen film about cannibalism prior to The Silence of the Lambs. Given how much of the film ends up walking back all of the actual scary material with lengthy conversations about metaphysics and light shows in which ghosts look like even more gentle Spielbergian aliens, it's remarkable that Hooper, or whoever, was able to get as much of the legitimate nightmare fuel smuggled into the film as he was: it's never sustained for more than a scene, and it's usually only a single isolated effect at a time, but there's a reason Poltergeist started the conversation that ultimately led to the creation of the PG-13 rating. Rotting flesh hallucinations and giant hell-skulls and some acutely terrifying sound effects come along just often enough to pierce through the "let's tell a scary bedtime story!" attitude that is Poltergeist's main mode for it to feel legitimately darker and harsher than a first approximation of the story and the way the story has been told would ever lead one to believe.

At the same time, it leaves the film feeling erratic and lumpy: not like the largely gentle-touch of the horror was a deliberate choice to let those occasional high-impact moments land harder, but like the film was being torn in two directions. And again, we don't know that happened; but the story about how Jerry Goldsmith (hired to give a disappointingly generic John Williams impression) was shocked to find that he'd be working with the producer, not the director seems awfully telling in at least one respect. For the score, more than anything else, is the film's keenest tool in knocking the edge off its horror with a sweetness and even Romantic air that significantly undercuts the moody lighting and looming camera angles (particularly in the very last shot, which seems for all the world like it should be brooding, except that the music insists, in a most bullying way, "all is well, the heroes have won, la-la").

The production values alone are enough to make this one of the 1980s' most distinctive and important horror movies, showcasing what the genre could do when given unprecedented resources and support; its thematic concerns - living in the suburbs is actually bad for your soul! - make it essential viewing for any even semi-serious Spielberg aficionado, of whom I understand that there are at least one or two out in the world. Its interpolation of enormously ambitious shot set-ups and effects sequences into the modest domestic setting of a single family home set it out as one of the most unique of the first generation of post-Star Wars effects showcases. And yet for all that I'd basically recommend it as necessary viewing for everybody, I can't convince myself that Poltergeist actually works all that well. Truly, it achieves the exact goal it sets for itself, to provide the most intense scary movie experience that the whole family can enjoy. But speaking as a grown-up horror fan, I can't help but wish for more out of this one-of-a-kind marriage of Spielbergian extravagance with genre mechanics, and while Poltergeist does not fail on its own terms, it still feels very much like a missed opportunity.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1982
-Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger learns what is best in life in Conan the Barbarian, and becomes the most unexpected superstar in generations
-The lingering memory of the Holocaust poisons the present, as Meryl Streep is forced to make Sophie's Choice
-Fast Times at Ridgemont High is the film that launched a thousand puberties, and proved the teen sex comedy could be pretty darn good cinema, too

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1982
-The Palme d'Or victory for Yol brings Turkish cinema to new international prominence
-In the last year of his life, ultra-prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder releases his final masterwork, Veronika Voss
-Contemporary history is solemnly embalmed by the British-Indian co-production Gandhi

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OCTOBER 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

October! The month of scary movies and the first self-conscious awards bait! We had a banner year for October releases which I absolutely do not expect to see matched; that said, October is also the month of the Chicago International Film Festival, about which I am particularly excited this year. But more about that in a week or so.


3.10.2014

So first up, the film that splits the difference between generic thrills and Oscary respectability: the David Fincher-directed bestseller adaptation Gone Girl. About which I will mostly confess that I read the book and wish I hadn't; it's fine, if a bit beachy, but I don't quite see what the point of making it into a film could possibly be. But that said, the trailer makes it look like Zodiac Fincher might be the one who made it, and that is far and away my favorite Fincher.

Fans of groan-inducing prequel-spinoffs are lucky that the month's one and only R-rated horror picture - I hasten to remind you, it's October - is Annabelle, the story of that doll that was by no stretch of the imagination the most interesting thing about The Conjuring. Fans of Nicolas Cage making daft choices (and who isn't?) are even luckier, because his current daft choice is a remake of Left Behind, the evangelical Christian thriller that launched a cottage industry.


10.10.2014

I am way more interested in the Robert Downey, Jr./Robert Duvall father & son drama The Judge now that it's apparently terrible and not just harmless, lifeless Oscarbait. Schadenfreude is fun, kids.

Other wide releases... Disney is shitting out a dumb-looking farcical expansion of the slim children's book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, and the weird cultural obsession with taking all of our best pointlessly evil villain and making them sad anti-heroes has now extended as far as Count Fucking Dracula, though I guess the precedent for that has been there since at least the Gary Oldman movie by Francis Ford Coppola. Anyway, Dracula Untold. It's going to suck real bad.

There's also something about having an affair called Addicted, about which I have heard nothing prior to this moment.


17.10.2014

It's the time of year when limited releases come by too fast to bother trying to keep track of them all, but I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that Birdman is absolutely the "big" movie about which I'm most excited for the rest of 2014. And that is, I concede, almost entirely a function of Emmanuel Lubezki long takes, which are my favorite kind of long takes. And my favorite kind of Lubezki, for that matter.

As far as the bigger releases go, I have never yet liked a David Ayer project, and I don't know why the WWII movie Fury will change that. And I haven't liked a Nicholas Sparks adaptation yet, either, but that doesn't make me special, and The Best of Me feels like one of those movies that doesn't actually exist.

While those two duke it out, not being interesting, I'm still trying to figure out if the animated The Book of Life is going to be a gorgeous movie that's absolutely terrible, or a gorgeous and wonderful movie that got stuck with a relentlessly shitty ad campaign. I am not hopeful that it is the latter.


24.10.2014

The grand experiment in making movies about board games continues with Ouija, a PG-13 demonic possession that seems to labor in ignorance of the way that, y'know, ouija boards or their generic equivalents are in, like, every haunted house movie. And throwing a bunch of generic starlets at the problem isn't what makes it go away.

There's also this thing called Laggies, about which I'm sure other information exists, but seriously, that name...

Lastly, the IMDb summary for John Wick starts out, "When Russian mobsters kill his beloved dog, retired hit man John Wick..." so I'm basically seeing the Liam Neeson remake of Umberto D. happening here.


31.10.2014

Happy Halloween! Like horror? Too bad, because all you get is a Nicole Kidman/Colin Firth psychological thriller, Before I Go to Sleep, and a Jake Gyllenhaal psychological thriller, Nightcrawler, and while they both have horror-ish titles, that's as far as it appears to go.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - NICE GAMS

I wonder if 1995's Gamera: Guardian of the Universe is without precedent in how massive a shift it makes in tone from anything that precedes it? The closest thing I can come up with is Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, which brought a considerable degree of sharp-edged grimness to a property that most people still associated with bright colors and camp, but that ignores the huge volume of comic book material predating the Burton film that posited an even dark, more brooding Batman, stretching all the way back to the '30s. And it also forgets that the 1960s Batman TV show was craft, self-aware camp, and not just stupid kiddie schlock. Neither of those caveats apply to the eight Gamera films made between 1965 and 1980, all of which were stupid kiddie schlock whose campiness was unintential, and only the second, 1966's Gamera vs. Barugon, made any legitimate claim to being serious in any way whatsoever.

You would think that any attempt to do a dark and gritty reboot of the Gamera franchise could only happen in the spirit of parody, and yet when Tokuma Shoten Publishing, then the owner of Daiei Film relaunched the franchise in the mid-'90s, when Toho's second wave of Godzilla films was starting to wind down, that's exactly what they did. What's really surprising, though, isn't that a character whose entire filmography had, to that point, been the most lavishly camp-soaked nonsense you could imagine was randomly selected to be treated with gravity and rough realism, but that it would actually turn out incredibly well. Under the guiding hand of horror director Kaneko Shusuke and screenwriter Ito Kazunori - who, the same year, wrote the screenplay for the beloved sci-fi anime feature Ghost in the Shell - Gamera: Guardian of the Universe rather shockingly turned out to be one of the most sensible, creative daikaiju eiga of its generation, certainly equaling the best of the 1990s Godzilla films while breaking further from genre convention. It's a film that spends not one second wondering how to trade on the audience's built-in nostalgia for the franchise (how could it, when it represents such a massive and merciless overhaul of the franchise's basic goals?), instead working from the ground up to create the rarest sort of giant monster movie: one that functions as a movie, even when it's not wowing you with giant monsters.

Now, to be fair, the solution that Kaneko and Ito came up with to make the first-ever genuinely and objectively good Gamera movie basically involved cheating off of Jurassic Park's answer sheet whenever they couldn't come up with something on their own. Sometimes this is vague and probably coincidental, like the similar rhythm in the build-up to a Pacific storm; sometimes it's clear but transmuted enough that it feels like it's own thing, as in a scene where a giant prehistoric predator rears its head out of the jungle foliage in a very T-Rexish way, but for completely different narrative reasons. Sometimes, it's so exact that the only thing to do is ask if Jurassic Park hadn't been released in Japan yet, and the filmmakers assumed they could resort to blatant thievery without getting caught, like a scene in which a lady scientist digs in a huge pile of animal shit hunting for clues, in shots that are framed identically to JP's own shit-digging scene. Though it must be conceded that there is surely a finite number of ways you can stage that scene.

But as Jurassic Park copycats go, Guardian of the Universe has the decency to be one of the very best that I've ever seen, marrying the American thriller mechanics of that film to a distinctively Japanese idiom without the join ever threatening to split apart. There are moments scattered throughout that, hell, I'll even suggest maybe improve on anything to be found in Steven Spielberg's dinosaur movie: the first glimpse we get of Gamera, an enormous but indistinct tusked face underwater, is as close to a perfect creature reveal as you're ever going to get, awesome and just a little terrifying in the finest popcorn movie tradition.

The film's story is a bit more of a mystery than normal for a daikaiju eiga, which is possibly what you get to do when your title monster has only appeared in one bomb in the preceding 24 years: some kind of inexplicably moving atoll collides with a ship carrying plutonium, at around the same time reports of an enormous bird attacking villagers have been coming in from an island in the southwest of Japan. The atoll, for its part, cracks apart after scientist Kusunagi Naoya (Onodera Akira) discovers an ancient slab covered in European runes, and only one member of the investigating team, Yonemori Yoshinari (Ihara Tsuyoshi) catches a glimpse of the giant animal that has emerged from the atoll as it swims away. The giant bird is a much more immediate concern: ornithologist Nagamine Mayumi (Nakayama Shinobu) fairly quickly discovers not just one, but a whole population of enormous leathery creatures somewhere between a bird, a bat, and a pterosaur. In finest creature movie tradition, the government decides that these enormous terrorbeasts should be captured and studied (and, it's not quite spelled out, weaponised), and Mayumi ends up working to help lure the creatures even closer to Japan, hoping to trap them in the then-new Fukuoka Dome, a baseball stadium on the island of Kyushu. So that's one set of murderous daikaiju maneuvered right into killing distance of plenty of large cities; the other one is on its way. For as Dr. Kusunagi discovers with his teenage daughter Asagi (Fujitani Ayako, the closest this film gets to the series stock type of the child with a magical connection to Gamera) and Yoshinari, the atoll and the giant turtle inside of it is a chunk of the lost continent of Atlantis, and that turtle, called Gamera, is the protector designed to fight the same giant bird-beasts who were built by the Atlanteans in a fit of ill-advised genetic experimentation, called Gyaos. The pollution and nuclear toxicity of the 20th Century brought these creatures back to life, and now Japan is the battleground for an ancient monster fight to work itself out again. But the government, more concerned about Gamera's destruction than the Gyaoses', and perhaps looking to save their investment, would rather focus on stopping him than the flock of carnivorous hellbeasts, despite all Asagi's protestations that Gamera is a good turtle, who is kind and gentle. Or words to that effect.

There's a lot that's fascinating in all that: the government's initial decision to focus on stopping Gamera rather than the escaped Gyaos especially adds a wrinkle and level of complexity that's not at all common in the genre, and the anti-pollution, anti-nuke sentiments, though they are borrowed wholesale from the Godzilla franchise, are incorporated into the movie with a delicacy and subtlety that keeps the film from becoming any kind of haranguing message movie. But what's most impressive and admirable about Guardian of the Universe are the bigger strokes: the way that the filmmakers actually try to ground Gamera in some kind of plausible now, treating the build-up to the daikaiju in a very logical, story-first approach that makes this feel as rational and grounded as any daikaiju eiga since the very first Godzilla, 41 years prior. The characters are etched out just enough to give them personalities and plausible motivation, but thankfully, the movie isn't trying to throw together some ginned-up human subplot that weirdly intersects with the monster action; it provides a strong narrative reason for all of the people who are involved to be there, and proceeds to function as an anti-monster procedural as much as it is an action movie about giant creatures duking it out in and over and through Tokyo.

Though when it is that action movie, it's a good one. The effects, supervised by Higuchi Shinji, are absolutely terrific, suggesting a sense of scale that's not to be found in any but the best Godzilla films, and is totally absent in any of the preceding Gamera vehicles. The lighting, the slightly slowed-down action, and the camera angles all give Gamera weight and mass, and sell the primordial threat of Gyaos; I am stunned that a monster whose shovel-headed design I'd have considered so impossible to redeem could end up being such an effective, otherworldly but still plausible creature of nightmares given life. The film also boasts what are, if I am not mistaken, the first CGI effects in any daikaiju eiga: they're not flawless (the first shot of Gamera spinning around to lift off is a real disappointment, one of the film's few clear missteps), but they open up the possibilities for much greater scale and ambition in the fight scenes than any of the earlier Gamera pictures would have known what to do with.

Without necessarily addressing itself to weighty questions of life and death (though it has a sense of true danger), Guardian of the Universe never quite turns into anything but a top-notch genre film - but it is a top-notch genre film. The story structure is tight as a drum and has just enough mystery, even when we should already know damn well where things are headed, that it's always really exciting and interesting to follow, and that already is a huge achievement for a daikaiju eiga; tthere's just enough winking humor that it always remains fun, even at its most sober - "Someday, I'll show you around a monster-free Tokyo", Yoshinari wryly suggests at one point. It's not the perfect daikaiju eiga, or anything like that, but given the market of the 1990s, and the enormous baggage the film had to dispose of before it could even get started, I have a hard time imagining a more completely successful reset to the Gamera franchise than this one.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1981: In which a new decade of pointedly lowbrow high-concept comedy begins well enough

The first thing the writer on film must do is to confess to all biases, and here is the one that matters the most for me: the 1980s are my least-favorite decade in the history of American film. Masterpieces can be found - masterpieces can be found in any era, of course - but the standard level of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking reached, I think, its lowest level during this period. And it's perhaps not even the case, exactly, that the quality of the filmmaking in the '80s was at a particularly low ebb, but that it was an era of extreme caution and a level of conscious anti-creativity. It is an exaggeratedly safe time in American cinema; but then, it was an unusually conservative time in culturally, in both little-c and big-C senses. The dominance of the anglosphere's politics by Thatcherism and Reaganism doesn't have a one-to-one relationship with the kind of movies being produced - there wasn't exactly a wave of anti-union propaganda or popcorn epics about supply-side economics - but both come from the same general impulse to slowing down and consolidating and trying really hard not to rock the boat. The results, in the political and social and economical spheres, are beyond the scope of this project. But the results in movies were an enormous reliance on the tried-and-true, and an increasingly derivative, formula-driven approach to storytelling and craftsmanship alike that does not make, at any rate, for a terribly exciting cinema culture, even if you can cherry-pick masterpieces here and there, for masterpieces are of course to be found in every era, even among the carefully market-driven Hollywood products of this period. But whereas generic studio shlock from the 1930s, say, has a strong personality and prideful sense of work ethic, and the shlock from the 1960s is visibly desperate and anxious, shlock from the '80s tends to feel as anonymous and forgettable as the movies ever have.

It feels, at a first approximation, like the movies of that time came in one of five basic flavors, and most of these were also a little bit prone to what we would tend to associate with social or political conservatism, in one guise or another: the excruciating prestige dramas that hogged all the awards; glossy fantasy/sci-fi extravaganzas that were only good when Steven Spielberg was involved in making them in some capacity; horror films about implausibly creative violent psychopaths, xenophobic action films in which muscly men with unintelligible accents delivered leaden one-liners while mowing down wave upon wave of faceless henchmen; and puerile comedies about juvenile masculinity. The last of these are in some ways the most interesting cases, since they are the only ones to overtly espouse any kind of anti-establishment anarchism (a different thing from the low-simmering paranoia of government found in many action films), an inheritance no doubt from the single movie whose success largely established the genre: 1978's Animal House, which had more focused anti-social rage than the genial, sloppy movies which came in its wake. Not that they're political manifestos; political commitment has never been common in commercial American cinema, even when they openly bring in politics.

Nor can one imagine a film that should have more to say about the current state of the world, while simultaneously going almost visibly out of its way to avoid saying any of it than Stripes, one of the biggest films of 1981, and certainly the most important release outside of Animal House itself in definitively stating, "this is how we're going to make comedy now" - and to some degree, we've never quite stopped. The loosey-goosey plotting and especially the open and constant reliance on improvisation and riffing to build character and flesh out jokes is still very much with us; tightly-constructed and streamlined comic racecars still exist, as they still existed in the '80s, but never anywhere close to to quantity that existed in the '30s or '40s. Instead, the jokey, "let's just all hang out and have fun" vibe of Stripes is still found in virtually all of the comedies successful enough to penetrate the mainstream at all: the films of Judd Apatow and his many, many colleagues and spiritual descendants which dominate 2010s film comedy are cut from exactly the same cloth as Stripes, right down to a 2005 DVD release of this movie that added footage to take it up to a puffy 124 minutes of scenes plugged in because they're enjoyable on their own, not because they are in any way the result of discipline of any kind. And it should be noted that Stripes director Ivan Reitman has always seemed a little ashamed of the baked-in messiness of his big breakthrough picture, even in its cleaner 106-minute cut; this is perhaps why his son has specialised in directing rather more trimly constructed, script-driven comedies in the 21st Century.

As I started out saying, though, Stripes would have ever reason to be a deeply political film, and it was eleven years earlier when the same broad concept was turned into MASH: two jokey fuck-ups get involved in the straitlaced world of the U.S. Army, turning it into a sexually charged-up funhouse. Part of the difference is obvious: MASH was made during one major war and set during another, both of which heavily relied on conscription to fill the ranks of the military, while Stripes is a product of peacetime with a volunteer army. The early '80s were, to be fair a period of higher Cold War tension than was common, but it honestly probably wouldn't have mattered if the Soviet Union and the United States were about to engage in open nuclear war the weekend that the film entered production: it uses the military as a pretext, and only a flimsy one at that, much as the 1941 Abbott and Costello vehicle Buck Privates (yet another duo of jokey fuck-ups end up in the Army). Some films just don't care about geopolitics, not when they can have light-touch clowning.

And Stripes, at least, has plenty of that. It was the film that sealed the deal on Bill Murray, Movie Star, the year after the hit Caddyshack featured him as arguably the most instantly-memorable figure in its ensemble cast, and two years after the smaller success of Meatballs (also directed by Reitman, with most of its writing team brought on for Stripes as well)) showed that he had the chops to carry a feature. More to the point, it proved that a thing which we could fairly call "a Bill Murray picture", regardless of the director and credited writers, could be a great big deal that struck a nerve with vast portions of America. For Stripes very unmistakably is a Bill Murray picture: it is driven by a tone of just-hanging-out sarcasm that was already characteristic of the comedian's persona in '81, and later years have only served to confirm that yes, this is exactly the kind of movie that happens when everybody else mutually agrees to stay the hell out of Murray's way: Reitman, who first came up with the idea as a potential Cheech & Chong vehicle, allowed the actor to re-shape the material completely, bending scenes around his off-the-cuff witticisms; Harold Ramis (the director and co-writer of Caddyshack, and a writer on Animal House and Meatballs as well as Stripes itself) was cast as the co-lead in no small part because his longstanding friendship with Murray made it easier for him to instantly jump on Murray's improvisatory wavelength.

And so the film we have is a shaggy dog, all the plot logic and character detail you could hope for being junked in favor of letting Murray lead the way in a series of comic riffs punctuated with a few scenes of broad slapstick, a couple moments of jarring laddish smut ("You know how you can tell that the villain is a prick? Because he stares at naked women showering! These naked women, right here. That we are showing to you. The naked ones."), and, in a scene where the stereotypical happy & fat Army recruit played by John Candy mud-wrestles with several topless women, slapstick and laddish smut occupying the same space. It's absolutely and unmistakably a hang-out movie, where its value relies entirely the audience enjoying the chance to watch Murray's John Winger and Ramis's Russell Ziskey be quippy and thumb their noses at the hapless authority figures played by Warren Oates (as the grumpy one with a secret warm spot for these troublemakers) and John Larroquette (as the shrill, irredeemable asshole). If Stripes is better than the average "sarcastic guy tees off the stuffed-up antagonist, while making leering comments about women" comedy of the same period - and not only is it above-average, I'd say it's very close to being the best of the lot - this owes a lot to that same Murrayness, for even at his most peremptory (and Murray certainly has the capacity to be a know-it-all jerk in his comedy), Murray has a level of erudition and fast-thinking that's not found in most of the lowbrow comedy that Stripes is obliged, through genre and chronology, to rub shoulders with.

It is, mind you, eminently improvable: Reitman's ability to shape a movie around Murray rather than let him simply go off and take the movie with him hadn't fully formed, and their next collaboration, 1984's Ghostbusters, represents an extremely long step forward from Stripes in showcasing how to allow Murray room to explore, invent, and even dominate the overall tone of a film, while also making sure that he is contained within the limits of that film. Stripes doesn't manage this: even by the relaxed standards of comedy, it's hard to square the flippant irreverence of the Murray-Ramis school of "I'm better than you" humor with the training camp setting, which is too divorced from even the cartoon military environment of something like Buck Privates to justify itself - the film is wedged into a military setting, but the stars and the tone of the writing never take that setting seriously, and it never remotely resembles any kind of objective reality. This, in turn, proves deadly when the film leaves basic training and heads to Europe, where the boys get involved with an experimental tank that looks like an RV, and eventually end up having to execute a daring rescue. The narrative drive is too focused to permit the same loose humor that the first hour of the film boasted; in turn, the looseness of that hour means that absolutely nothing has prepared the film for the sudden escalation in (relative) seriousness and actual Cold War dramatic stakes. There's a solid 20 minute chunk of the movie that simply doesn't work at all: low-budget action awkwardly cut with Murray one-liners as an exact template for the terrible third act of damn near every action-comedy set around the Iron Curtain for the whole decade to follow. And the Reitman who so successfully married shaggy comedy to effects-driven action in Ghostbusters was also a very different, stronger filmmaker than the one we see here.

Problematic though it is, Stripes benefits immensely from being graded on a curve: it's no Ghostbusters, but it's no Police Academy either. The shagginess and smuttiness alike both feel like they're coming out of something that the filmmakers actually thought would be interesting and tethered to the characters, and not simply something that filled a marketing need. It's the kind of film whose success is entirely a function of the viewer's ability to get on the same wavelength as the filmmakers, which does entail some smugness, sexism, and political agnosticism. But at the same time, Murray's laconic energy is hard to deny, and while I do not personally count Stripes a personal favorite, it's not hard to see why it has remained a gateway drug for a certain era of casual ad hoc lowbrow comedy.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1981
-George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Gog and Magog of the new blockbuster age, join forces to make the practically perfect popcorn adventure Raiders of the Lost Ark
-The slasher movie officially explodes with the first wave of Friday the 13th knock-offs hitting theaters, among them Friday the 13th, Part 2
-John Derek's "movie" exploiting his wife Bo, Tarzan, the Ape Man, saves us from ever again having to wonder what the all-time worst Tarzan movie is

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1981
-George Miller's Mad Max 2, AKA The Road Warrior, proves to be Australia cinema's unlikely ambassador to the world at large, and invents a new genre along the way
-West German director Wolfgang Petersen scores an enormous international hit with the submarine epic Das Boot
-Hungarian animation has a banner year, with the release of both Vuk (The Little Fox) and Fehérlófia (Son of the White Mare)

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN

Once upon a time, like, four days ago, I brightly and innocently declared that I knew what I was getting into with Gamera: Super Monster. I was incorrect. Based on the only things I knew about it, it seemed easy enough to figure out why people hated it: the 1980 one-off resuscitation of the franchise attempted to keep the struggling Daiei Film afloat after a decade spent on the brink of receivership tried to keep costs low by culling a huge percentage of its footage (Wikipedia noncommittally describes it as "about one-third" of the 90-minute film) from the earlier Gamera films. Meanwhile, the new monster footage consists of a grand total of two minutes or less of a stiff Gamera prop whose only point of articulation is it mouth flying through space. That certainly sounds like enough to go on, but it's not really specific enough to know. I mean, they could have done just about anything with all of that recycled footage. This could have been the goddamn Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy of Gamera movies.

But the hell of it is, the third of the movie that was taken from other, better movies - and doesn't it already say a lot that Super Monster is bad enough to make me retroactively describe Gamera vs. Guiron and Gamera vs. Jiger as "better" - is certainly the best part of the movie, which is never more visually appealing and dramatically tight than when it lops the ends off of yellowing footage to fit it into the new movie's narrower aspect ratio, while the same exact narrative scenario plays out six times with no more variation in the screenwriting that leads to these fights than the bored narrator mentioning at one point that Gamera had to travel to "the planet where monsters are kept" in order to fight Guiron. Though I might have liked it even more if the film had just flatly declared that the rocky alien world of Gamera vs. Guiron was just some other part of Japan, and had the same reaction shots that we see elsewhere.

As for the bad part of Super Monster, it's hard to decide if I'm more aggrieved by the terrible low-impact story, or the unfailingly cheap execution of that story. Certainly, the bottomless depths of suckitude that the film will reach have been indicated before the slightest impression of the plot has been given: the cheerily dumb earworm of a march that had served as Gamera's theme song for several films running has been replaced here by something that resembles a Japanese approximation of a German oompah band, with vocals by a happy-sounding adult lady and not the sugared-up children's choir that had previously insisted with such energy that "Gamera is strong! Aliens from Venus or Mars are no match for his spinning jets!" It's the kind of heartbreak that instantly got the film on my bad side, and things only got worse as the narrator informs us of the great space battles that we'll be seeing in the form of paintings, in lieu of, y'know, space battles. These paintings serve to tell the none-too-exciting terror excited across the galaxy by the pirate space ship Zanon, which I take to be the Japanese word for "Imperial Star Destroyer", given that the Zanon is a dead ringer for that design and is even introduced in the exact same "ship moving over the camera, away from us" shot that opened Star Wars when we finally see it as a model and not just a cost-saving drawing. Everything about the opening minutes of Super Monster conspires to promise the cheapest, most unimaginative possible attempt to force Gamera back into the spotlight, and the hell of it is, the film only gets worse from here.

The audience identification figure is Keiichi (Maeda Koichi), one of many happy little boys in Japan in those days, reading his comics and punking wacky cops and daydreaming about his favorite of all hero-monsters, Gamera the turtle (it's not even slightly clear what history Gamera has in this world: the brand-new backstories for all of the other monsters would seem to indicate that it discards all of the earlier films besides the very first Gamera, but Gamera himself was still a villain at that point, which clearly isn't the case now). But the actual protagonists are a trio of aliens hiding in the form of Earth women, Kilara (Fumiaki Mach), Marsha (Kojimo Maeko), and Mitan (Komatsu Yoko), frequently engaging in a weird little background-dancer choreography when they need to adopt their true form: Earth-looking women in bright pink and white superhero capes and suits. Zanon, which is apparently sentient on top of everything, knows that these space women are the only thing that can stop it from conquering the planet, so it sends its own space woman assassin, Giruge (Kudo Keiko), to also hide herself as an Earth woman and try to kill the women by throwing giant monsters at them. But the turtle-obsessed Keiichi has apparently called up Gamera, friend to all children, or maybe Gamera just shows up, or whatever, but Giruge's increasingly frantic attempts all involve stock-footage fight scenes spooling up, with her and Keiichi and the good space women staring at it in new shots that almost manage to convince you that they might possibly belong in the same movie.

He also plays the new Gamera march, twice: once for his pet turtle, once for the space women, though at that point I think he still doesn't know that they're space women. Surprisingly, the plot kind of bleeds into itself a little.

The pervasive sense of littleness that affects every moment of the story makes it abysmally hard to watch to begin with: Zanon has no presence as a villain, so all we get is Giruge, and she spends half the movie freaking out that Zanon is going to execute her if she keeps messing up. There is never a trace of the idea that our protagonists, who aren't nearly active enough for the word "heroes", are ever in any kind of danger of being found by Giruge, let alone defeated by her in battle.

That said, I think the deathly pointlessness of the story is less galling than the terrible cost-saving filmmaking technique: when the inside of the space-women's secret hideout space inside a giant mustard-colored van is depicted as a room made of bed sheets with a fan blowing on them, any hope is dashed that the film will at any point invest in more than the absolute minimum effort necessary to put the feeble excuse for a script over. Assuming such hope remained after the whole "painted stills standing in for a first act" gesture. Anyway, it's pure, non-stop agony: crappy chroma-key effects of a sort that rival low-budget television in their sharpness and persuasive ability doing absolutely nothing to spice up the bland locations, which give the film the sickly pall of having been shot entirely in one suburb, possibly all in different rooms of a single suburban home.

To their credit, director Yuasa Noriaki and screenwriter Takahashi Nisan understood what a dismal heap of shit they had on their hand, and so ended the film with Gamera killing himself to take Zanon out once and for all, in what I can't even bring myself to call an "effects sequences", though it involves shaking the camera a lot. And so the career of the little daikaiju that couldn't finally coughed itself to death, and when a much-revamped and restructured Daiei decided to bring the unlamented beastie back to life after fifteen years, it would be in such a wildly different form as to count almost as a different franchise altogether. For which I can only give thanks: Super Monster might have represented the absolute worst possible daikaiju eiga made by an even remotely important film studio, but it also might not, and the thought of someone making another one on an even lower budget is the stuff of nightmares, pure and simple.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1980: In which the New Hollywood Cinema dies of autoerotic asphyxiation

The classic version of the story goes that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ruined everything, just absolutely every god-damned thing, when they released their big ol' popcorn movies Jaws and Star Wars in 1975 and '77, and made all the studios go "Whoa! We don't want to keep making little movies about the lives of real people anymore! We want to make big dumb movies about paper-thin stereotypes that make umpty-jillion dollars!" Which isn't true for a lot of reasons, one of which is that Jaws itself fits pretty comfortably into the New Hollywood Cinema wheelhouse (and Star Wars actually kind of does too, depending on what part of it you're looking at, and what angle you're looking at it from), that plenty of movies that weren't at all part of the New Hollywood made huge piles of cash throughout the '70s, and that Star Wars probably wouldn't have set records that nobody even dared to dream existed to be set if there wasn't a wide desire among the audience for some big, glitzy, largely mindless adventure cinema as a palate cleanser from all those severe stories of people on the edge getting made by the film school brats. The Age of Blockbusters was surely going to happen sometime around the turn of the '80s; Star Wars just made sure that it took a very specific form, perhaps a somewhat more openly mercenary and merchandising-driven one than it would have otherwise done.

It is, unfortunately, much easier to blame the death of the New Hollywood filmmaking generation on its own increasingly deranged sense of importance. The thing is, we like brave filmmakers to get all the resources they want; we like seeing what happens when they can work without limits. We, however, aren't fiscally responsible for those filmmakers. And far from being the fault of Lucas making the GDP of any randomly-selected half-dozen African nations combined for his one space picture, the end of the greatest period in auteur-driven American filmmaking was the result of those same auteurs losing all sense of proportion. The costly, showy failure of Martin Scorsese's New York, New York in 1977, right at the same time that Star Wars had people waiting in line for hours to see it, put a huge dent in the notion that American directors were indestructible visionaries whose work spoke so profoundly to the audience that was a moral obligation to support their work; and while 1979's Apocalypse Now made quite a lot of money (though not an amount that was so very exciting, post-Star Wars), it only did so after a legendarily awful production where Francis Ford Coppola shat away enormous amounts of money and time while devastating his own health and the health of many people around him. The timing was becoming perfect for somebody to slip up big, and prove to an increasingly nervous industry that the self-styled artists of the '70s need to be reined in, and hard. And that proof came in the form of one of the most notorious bombs in the history of the motion picture, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, a Western epic that cost $44 million - in 1970s dollars, mind - and made a grand total of $3.5 million between two releases in 1980 and 1981, effectively destroying United Artists, where all the boldest of the bold filmmaking happened in the '60s and '70s.

It's not hard, on the face of it, to see why Cimino would be trusted with such an ambitious project. His The Deer Hunter is one of the very best counter-arguments to the "Star Wars ruined everything" argument, making a very robust sum of money during its 1979 box office run (it opened in 1978, and won the Best Picture Oscar for that year). And this despite being New Hollywood to its bones. So when you are the forward-thinking studio for whom Cimino just made a great big basketful of cash on the strength of a three-hour movie about normal people living hardscrabble lives and fighting in Vietnam, all of it accomplished without a trace of gloss or romance, surely you give him the keys to do it all again. And that is perhaps the biggest reason that Heaven's Gate scared the moneymen and called an end to the New Hollywood game: its failure was built in to the auteur system that had been so vibrant over the preceding decade, and it was totally unpredictable. At least from the start - by the time of its November, 1980 premiere week, in a 3 hour and 39 minute cut (that was already shorter than Cimino's dream version by longer than a full hour) that was poisoned by the widespread reporting of the film's ballooning costs and out-of-control shooting schedule, it was clear that the film was DOA. And by the time of its wide release in April, 1981, at a condensed and incoherent 2 hours and 29 minutes, it was all over but the weeping.

I would consider it appropriate to keep this review from getting as wide-ranging, sprawling, and exhaustively long as Heaven's Gate itself, so with the history lesson out of the way, let me get right to the good stuff: I pretty much love this movie. That's no real bravery on my part; by the time I first had a chance to see it, the film had very clearly entered the "rapt critical re-evaluation" phase that eventually lended it a berth in the Criterion Collection, about as close to an agreed-upon canon as anything that doesn't have the words "Sight" or "Sound" in its name. While there are, as with any film, the cluster of people who still regard it as a failure - and by all means, there are plenty of obvious reasons why one would find Heaven's Gate a failure, such as like how it has about 35 minutes of plot stretched across the 217 minutes of its current incarnation (the 1980 premiere version without the intermission card and music, basically) - it's no longer a cultural joke. By this point, there are probably as many people who regard it as an all-time fantastic portrait of Americana as those who think it a colossal, ass-numbing botch, with the greater majority coming somewhere in between. As happens.

For now, let's go ahead and try on "all-time fantastic portrait of Americana", just to see how it fits. Certainly, it's what the film wants to be: an almost entirely fictionalised retelling of American history - the Johnson County War of 1892, in particular (the film sets it in 1890) - that both pays full tribute to the richness of history as a living, sloppy thing, making a strong statement about the immigrant experience in America (one of the thematic spines in The Deer Hunter, as well), while also drawing oblique but fervent and angry connections between that period and the recently-concluded era in American history in which Vietnam and Kent State and Watergate and police crackdowns of protesters and all had created the first major generation gap. I wonder if that, in part, explains the film's inability to find any kind of respect when it was new: the social wounds Heaven's Gate speaks to so potently were finally starting to heal themselves, the country had just loudly signaled a desire to retrench from the social upheavals of nearly 20 years by electing Ronald Reagan to the presidency in a lopsided election, and Cimino standing there with his enormous slab of cinema demanding that we all grapple with the ugliness and violence of America was hardly what audiences wanted. In the same year, it was possible for Martin Scorsese to smuggle his own indictment of American violence with strong critical support in his great Raging Bull, a remarkable transition out of the New Hollywood while Cimino stood roaring while the New Hollywood crumbled around him, because he disguised it with genre trappings and unusual aesthetics and a personal story that acted as proxy for social critique. Cimino was, comparatively, blindingly anti-subtle: the length of his movie, the story within it, the way it was filmed, the way it was structured, all essentially force the audience into submission. I love Heaven's Gate, but I don't deny that it's an enormous bully of a film.

Enormous - slow, long, taken up to something like three-fifths of its running time with luxuriant wide shots that find the director and no less a cinematographer than Vilmos Zsigmond using a painterly lighting and framing aesthetic like battering rams against the viewer's eyeballs. That is to say, enormous, but also gorgeous in its enormity: unnervingly so, given the desperation and cruelty that make up the story, but it never feels like Cimino and Zsigmond and production designer Tambi Larsen (whose re-creation of what feels like the entirety of the American West is as picturesque as anything in the dust-soaked, silhouette-heavy, exaggeratedly soft cinematography) are aestheticising depravity or suffering, but instead dramatically presenting the central conflict at the heart of a national myth: the beauty and perfection of the continent as a physical place, with its enormous range of ecosystems and natural resources, and the multiple centuries of almost uninterrupted violence it took to wrangle that physical place into the United States of America.

It is a film that invites pretension, as you can see.

Granted limitless resources and virtually no oversight thanks to a remarkably indulgent contract, Cimino and his crew were able, over the course of a maddeningly perfectionist shoot that left the director with the reputation of a mad visionary dictator, to create one of the most exciting depictions of the West as a living, sweaty, bloody, sexed-up place that has ever been filmed, while also depicting it in such a consciously constructed way that it manages to feel stylised and remote - a living, breathing world, but not our world at all, as attested to by the geometrically claustrophobic images and the oddball cast that includes, besides Christopher Walken as a charismatic hitman and one-third of the love triangle that gives the film its general dramatic shape for most of its middle, no performances that feel really natural and unforced. And when Chris Walken is giving a film's most relaxed performance, you know something's up. I wouldn't go so far as to say that people are bad - an ensemble containing John Hurt, Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, and Brad Dourif is certainly incapable of being bad. But in the leads, Kris Kristofferson (a singer-songwriter who has done a great deal of acting, some of it truly wonderful, but has more of a natural screen presence than what we might necessarily call "acting talent"), and Isabelle Huppert (who obviously does have acting talent, but there's a reason she's only made just a handful of movies in English, which is that her accent could be used to mortar bricks together), however much of an impact they make as psychological presences don't feel like people you could meet walking down the street on a weekend afternoon. They are abstractions, and they fit perfectly as the anchors to a film that exquisitely brings life back to history, but does not also bring that history up to the modern day to meet us. The only film that I can immediately think of that works in a similar way, for similar ends, is Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, from which Heaven's Gate is taking so many of its lighting cues that I take it for granted that Cimino & Co. must have seen it.

There are indelible moments galore: the prologue, set at Harvard's graduation in 1870, ends in an outdoor waltz where the sheer fact of moving human bodies takes on a force that lingers simply as an expression of kineticism, color, and shape, and a later dance sequence (the most notorious part of the film) does much the same, stopping the film cold for nine straight minutes of just plain watching and listening to human activity in a moment of pleasant repose. There are shots that use impossibly deep staging with Wellesian élan. Walken's introductory shot, through a whole he's just blasted in a bedsheet hanging to dry, is as iconic a moment as you could ever want to find in a Western. And there are moments which are indelible for being bad, to be fair: the violent death scene that closes out the main story is embarrassingly staged, a knock-off Bonnie and Clyde with none of its impact, only schmaltziness.

But in general, the sense lingering after Heaven's Gate isn't of its moments, but of its entire, bulky self: the very last scene, a coda set on a boat outside of Rhode Island in 1903, suggests that the whole thing has been as much a dream as a reality, and like a dream it's easier to remember it as a shifting series of impressions than as a specific chain of events of development of ideas. The only idea that matter is American History In Motion, and as Heaven's Gate has, itself, receded into that history, I find it has become easier to appreciate it than when it had the inappropriate patina of the new clinging to it. It's hard to say that by any objective standard, it's a masterpiece - other than a vague sense that it would lose its richness and lived-in feeling if it was shorter, I can't imagine how to explain why I think it earns that running time - but it's essential cinema no matter what "good" or "bad" judgments we lay against it, and if it had to destroy a studio and a generation of filmmaking for that one mad genius filmmaker to have that much power at that moment, I would consider that a fair price.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1980
-The Blue Lagoon becomes a huge hit on the strength of its implication that you get to see teenagers naked and screwing
-In slightly more dignified sociological news, 9 to 5 is an even more enormous hit that tells women that it's OK to be self-reliant, and tells men that it's not OK to be chauvinist dicks
-Disco is ruthlessly murdered by the epic failure of three of the most gloriously shitty musicals in history, Can't Stop the Music, Xanadu, and The Apple

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1980
-After many years wandering in the wilderness, an aging, ailing Kurosawa Akira has his first major hit in more than a decade with Kagemusha
-From out of nowhere, South Africa's film industry suddenly scores a major international hit with the comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy
-In Italy, director Bruno Mattei and writer Claudio Fragasso tag-team on Hell of the Living Dead, which if you put a gun to my head and asked me, might be my pick for the worst film I've ever seen

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A SEPARATION

It's not the fault of Love Is Strange that at no point while I was watching it, was I able to banish 1937's Make Way for Tomorrow from my mind. And it's even less the film's fault that it can't compete with Make Way for Tomorrow: if we were to throw out every film that wasn't as good as Make Way for Tomorrow, we'd be left with only several dozen movies from the entire span of cinema history.

It's not even the fault of Love Is Strange that it banks everything, ultimately, on the quality of its performances, using the subtle camerawork and gentle story rhythms and purposefully claustrophobic set decoration to serve as the backdrop for the characters and the actors bringing those characters to life. Because it has a pretty strong cast, doing pretty strong work, and on a scene-by-scene basis, the character work can reach some truly lofty heights that only the most steadfastly hate-filled viewer would be able to find fault with it.

And yet I find myself a little impatient with Love Is Strange, which takes a rather keenly-etched central relationship of a kind that is virtually invisible in pop culture, and proceeds to do most of the least interesting things it possibly can with that relationship, in the rare moments when it doesn't shamefacedly admit that it's actually a lot more interested in this story over here to the side. The situation is direct enough: after 39 years of partnership, retiree Ben (John Lithgow) and Catholic school choir director George (Alfred Molina) have decided to get married, for reasons that are clear enough that director-writer Ira Sachs (co-writing with Mauricio Zacharias) happily doesn't have to club us over the head with bromides about historical struggles and progressive triumphs. It's enough that we get a sense of Ben & George realising that it's a momentous event without having to stop everything to say, "Look fellas, it's Momentous Event time".

Momentous not just on a political level, but a personal one as well: the archdiocese in charge of George's school has been willing to not pay any attention to having a gay choir director as long as it was, like, "unofficial", but now that they're married, there's too much pressure to cut George loose. And in the blink of an eye, two senior citizens who have been living at a pace in their lovely Brooklyn condo that Ben's social security and George's handful of students aren't remotely enough to compensate for are homeless and broke. The best solution - outside of moving to the suburbs to live with George's niece Mindy (Christina Kirk), a solution the film and filmakers find so repugnant that they can only treat it as a joke - is for the couple to split up, with Ben moving in with his nephew Elliot (Darren E. Burrows), Elliot's writer wife Kate (Marisa Tomei), and their teen son Joey (Charlie Tahan), while George moves in with their younger gay cop friends Ted (Cheyenne Jackson) and Roberto (Manny Perez). And the movie tries, really hard, to pretend that George's life is really as important as Ben's following the split. There are scenes set in the cops' apartment and everything. But the fare greater depth and complexity of the dramatic scenario over at Elliot & Kate's place, not to mention the absolutely exquisite, film-dominating performance Tomei gives, suck all the air right out of things, and at a certain point, Sachs concedes the point entirely, shifting the anchor of the movie from "how can Ben and George cope with being separated?" to "what impact does Ben's presence have on the tendentious relationship between Joey and his parents?"

It's not an awful thing to do, though it means that Love Is Strange ceases to be the movie it told is it was going to be, and I can't stop thinking that it becomes less interesting in the process. It's also unfortunate how little oxygen this ends up leaving for Molina's really lovely turn as George, a quiet man with downcast eyes and suits that he wears like a shield against the world (as opposed to Ben, whose outfits feel more like a siege weapon he uses to assert himself in places that aren't entirely welcoming - at any rate, Arjun Bhasin's costuming throughout the movie is really terrific and nuanced), replacing him with Tahan's boringly petulant Joey. Though in Tahan's defense, it would have taken someone much strong than all but the best teen actors to survive the increasingly insane directions that Sachs & Zacharias take Joey, a character who they keep trying to make us think is gay, and then acting like they've played a magic trick when they go back to presenting him as straight, for no remotely clear reason.

And I'm disappointed by how the film's consistent structural technique of moving us through time without indicating how long has passed, or even necessarily what went on in the scenes we missed ends up under-emphasising the relationship between Ben & George as well. It's a clever thing, when it's done right: the transition from "what are we to do with the old men?" to "the old men are lonely and stuck in their new homes" is absolutely thrilling in how fluidly and cleanly it happens. But the same exact gesture is played at the end, and it's probably the biggest shift the film ever makes in deciding that it's really about Joey more than his uncles. This is doubly disappointing since Molina and Lithgow, friends for many years in real life, are so excellent in their handful of scenes together. Particularly in one late scene in a bar, where they find really incredible, rich ways of playing old, tired libidos and nostalgia and the comfortable flirting of two people who have no more secrets with one another. That Sachs adopts a structure which deliberately hides away this relationship is acutely frustrating - and in that regard, it's maybe even a clever device to make us feel the same way that the couple feels themselves. But it's not any more pleasurable for supposing that it's clever.

Still and all, no matter how upset I am with the film Love Is Strange isn't, the film it is still works really damn well, most of the time. Tomei and Lithgow's scenes together are masterclasses in crafting characters for the screen through small gestures and subtly unexpected line readings; she inadvertently makes the film about herself by being the most fleshed-out character with the most tense internal conflicts and unspoken resentments, and this does, perhaps, speak ill of the movie that it could be so firmly wrenched away from any of the characters we might plausibly describe as its protagonists. And her work consistently raises Lithgow's; that actor, prone to mugging and snatching away scenes and being generally too big, hasn't been this focused and precise in years. A delicate domestic drama about sad old men getting in the way of increasingly impatient middle-aged women isn't exactly the film that Love Is Strange declares itself to be, but it's a rewarding and interesting thing to watch anyway, and however far the film ended up from anything I wanted it to be, I'm certainly not sorry about what it actually is.

7/10

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GET ME OUT OF HERE

Well, we got there: 2014 was able to produce a sci-fi/thriller YA adaptation that's uglier than Divergent from back in March. Which isn't something I'd have necessarily predicted as a possibility, let alone a likelihood, and it doesn't strike me as being a sensible place to sink all that much time and energy. But the creators of the The Maze Runner did just that, no matter how much first-time feature director Wes Ball promises that he was trying to channel Terrence Malick in shaping the visuals of a movie that has about as little to do with Malick's soft natural exteriors and slow, steady camera movements as is possible for anything that takes place mostly outside.

(Anyway, The Hunger Games kind of already was the sci-fi/thriller YA picture to sort of crib from Malick. And it was a hell of a lot better at it).

Adapted by no fewer than three credited writers from James Dashner's 2007 book - which means, to his credit, that he wasn't riding the post-Hunger Games YA dystopia wave - The Maze Runner is about a super-special teenaged chosen one who has to crack the mystery of what's going on in a high-tech prison of sorts where unseen adult masterminds make him and several other adolescents dance like puppets. That whole thing. Also, do not the "him" part; our protagonist this time around is a certain young man named Thomas (Dylan O'Brien), and virtually the entire population of "The Glade" - a large meadow and forest enclosed on all sides by enormous stone walls - is likewise male, which deprives The Maze Runner of the one thing that Divergent at least managed to have going for it in amongst all of its sorriness, which is that it gave the world one of the far too rare female protagonists in an action movie.

What happens to Thomas in the Glade isn't quite Lord of the Flies, though it has echoes: the whole population of 40 or fewer boys ranging from about twelve to about eighteen (or anyway the "squint and pretend they're eighteen" age common to movies about teenagers and pornography) exists separate from the rest of humanity, or even the knowledge of humanity: they were all stripped of memories of anything but their given name before being dumped, one per month for three years, into the Glade, wearing the most lazily-designed clothing I would ever hope to see in a movie of this sort (seriously, it looks like off-the-rack stuff from Sears or J.C. Penny's, covered in a halfhearted layer of dust). And thus they have formed a primitive society of laws, traditions, and division of labor, overseen by the Glade's very first inhabitant, Alby (Aml Ameen), and his loyal second in command Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), and defended by the thuggish Gally (Will Poulter), whose adoration of the laws and traditions would undoubtedly make him a religious fundamentalist, if the Glade-dwellers had gotten as far as a religion yet. Also, when a girl (Kaya Scodelario) unexpectedly shows up, she incites not a drop of sexual ardor among any of the three-dozen teenage boys who have never once in their memories interacted with a female, which is meant to be a respite from the love stories in all those YA tales with women protagonists, I guess (The Maze Runner is clearly a "for the boys in the crowd" sort of story), but only ends up making them seem like implausibly emotionless robots and robbing the film of any measure of emotional stakes.

Thomas's, that is to say the viewer's, introduction to this world is a fucking miracle of filmmaking: Ball and cinematography Enrique Chediak shoot with cramped, unpleasant angles inside an underlit metal cage that we can only make out as an impression of shapes, while Dan Zimmerman's editing darts from one acute angle to the next in confusing, non-linear progression, as the lighting and sound effects conspire to give us the impression of dreadfully fast upward speed in the world's most angrily clamorous freight elevator. He emerges into the sunlight and the editing absolutely refuses to let up, throwing unidentified teenagers at us from angles that make no sense. And then Thomas runs, face-plants, and passes out. Every single frame of the movie up till this point is perfect, or close to it: an instantaneously disorienting mess of sounds and images colliding incoherently, plunging us right into the thick of the mystery: what the hell is going on and where the hell is it going on and why the hell and who the hell? Unfortunately, it becomes increasingly clear as the film progresses that, no matter how expertly the distracting editing and unbalanced framing have been employed to create a real barnburner of an opening, it's also kind of an accident, since a lot of the rest of The Maze Runner functions mostly the same way, to absolutely no effect other than to suggest that the filmmakers either are, themselves, visually and cinematically illiterate, or they presume their audience is, and requires lots of flash and quick movement and noise to remain entertained.

Meanwhile, as the filmmaking keeps wandering around being busy and distracting, the script starts the exposition dumps, of which there are many, and they don't ever let up. Early on, when Thomas is still terrified, confused, and suspicious, there's at least enough lingering tension to make all of this talking and explicating feel like it's building up to something. Eventually, though, we know most of what we need to know - the Glade is surrounded by an enormous maze, and at night unpersuasive CGI monsters stalk the maze, and "runners" dash through the maze by day, mapping it and looking for ways out - that Thomas can go on being the only one curious and brave enough to figure out what's going on, over the increasingly rage-filled objections of Gally. There's a version of this story that has some keen insights on the formation of traditions and taboos, and how adolescents are or are not cowed by peer pressure, but The Maze Runner does not come within leagues of being that version.

Eventually, we do find out what's going on, thanks to a soul-despairing cameo by one of our greatest, most consistently under-used actresses, Patricia Clarkson, stuck in what absolutely has got to be the worst role of her career, and the reveals make absolutely no sense on any level. And then, in case the reveals weren't horrible enough, there are two subsequent twists that cannot conceivably have happened in any real-world version of the events we see depicted. The last ten minutes of The Maze Runner are an insult: nonsense masquerading as shocking reversals, unpredictable only because they are so arbitrarily surreal and confusing. It is not the kind of ending that makes you want to find out what happened next: is the kind of ending that leaves you anxious to find out almost literally anything else, since as monumentally fucked in the skull as they left everything, "what happens next" can only be the very worst kind of thing. So obviously, they've already announced the sequel, and I look forward to seeing y'all back in this space exactly one year from now.

4/10

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THIS STORY IS A WARNING TO MANKIND

Gamera vs. Zigra didn't single-handedly drive Daiei Film to bankruptcy; but as one of the last handful of movies that company released before it did temporarily wink out of existence in December, 1971, it's a rather clear example of what was going on at the studio that forced such a drastic step. It's a dreadful movie, almost totally unwatchable in every way; if I were going to hunt around desperately, looking for something to say in its praise, I might fumble my way around to "it's not nearly as technically inept or painful to slog through as 1969's Gamera vs. Guiron, the film-before-last in the series", and if I really had to scrape the bottom of the praise-barrel, I'd add that it's remarkably better in its original Japanese cut than the Sandy Frank-produced VHS release from the '80s which remains the version best-known in America, owing largely to how much information the anamorphic widescreen film lost in the conversion to pan-and-scan, but also because some of Frank's dubbed lines needlessly obscured things which made at least some kind of sense in the original script. But that's not even really a defense, only an admission that based on my heretofore exclusive experience with the English dub, I was expecting a shit sandwich, and while a shit sandwich is exactly what I got, at least the bread was toasted.

For this seventh and final entry in the initial wave of Gamera pictures, we get the plot of the second through sixth again, slightly reworked and with a villainous daikaiju antagonist who I must concede to be one of the most unusual of the whole subgenre. But we'll get there only after a long, directionless, life-stealing amble through a plot that just never, ever starts to make sense. We start on a Japanese moonbase, and while the American dub quietly skips us ahead to 1985 ("ahead", whatever), the original film reflexively sets us down in 1971, as we'll find out in dialogue eventually. So a 1971 film, set in 1971, with moonbases. And Japanese moonbases, at that. This particular moonbase is attacked by what looks, initially, like a jester's hat made out of gumballs, and then we naturally cut to Kamogawa Sea World, where a peppy young boy named Kenichi (Sakagami Yasushi) tells us how his dad works there. And then we get to meet dad (Saeki Isamu), and dad's nominally American co-worker Tom Wallace (Fujiyama Koji, who isn't even wearing the pretense of whiteface). Kenichi and Dr. Wallace's daughter Helen (Gloria Zoellner) are best friends, and when their dads head off to do some investigating of Christ knows what in the open ocean, the children tag along. But don't get too excited about how quickly the movie is clipping along, because this only happens after, like, a half of a reel of Sea World footage, and chatter about the recent Magnitude 12 earthquakes that hit on precisely opposite sides of the Earth, which somehow has remained intact despite being subjected, twice, to quakes that requirs more energy than exists on the planet.

Anyway, the four travelers are at exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, and end up in the path of a teleportation beam from that same bizarre-ass gumball spaceship. Here they meet a gorgeous but obviously evil woman (Yanami Eiko), who doesn't even bother pretending to have anything but the most wicked plans in mind: she claims to be the representative of Zigra, which functions as the name of a planet, a population, the spaceship, and the enormous toothy creature perched over the ship's bridge watching the human prisoners. The Zigrans managed to poison their own oceans to the point that their civilisation was on the brink of death, and so they went out into the wide universe looking for the one planet that would perfectly serve as a new colony. Guess which one they've picked. Of course, you can't have an alien invasion movie without the aliens having a proper reason to invade Earth, but that's the second time the Gamera franchise has hauled out that exact scenario, almost down to the wording, in... how many films? Since Gamera vs. Viras, I think. This franchise has a tendency to blur together in a way that even the most generic of Godzilla pictures never figured out how to do (incidentally, 1971's entry in that franchise Godzilla vs. Hedorah, also adopted a completely blunt "take care of your fuckin' oceans, already" message, though it contrived to do so without recourse to minute upon endless minute of Sea World B-roll).

The evil woman is able to put the two adults into a standing coma, but the kids outwit her, and after a deadening low-speed chase around the bridge, they've turned her magic coma powers back against her and spirited their dads off the ship, to tell the whole world their story of terror, in darling, malapropism-heavy kiddie style. This escape pisses the living hell out of Zigra, who tasks the woman to head to Japan to stop them using any means including - especially! - murder. But leave the rest of the people she meets alone, because Zigra is looking forward to having all of humanity for its food supply, and losing the entire population of Japan in one sweep of a death ray would start things off at a deficit. Unsurprisingly, the harder she chases, the more of an inept bungler she turns out to be.

Somewhere in all this, an enormous flying, fire-breathing turtle shows up, but it's plain from the way this happens that screenwriter Takahashi Nisan hadn't really worked out why.

Beyond question, the most distinctive and interesting thing about Gamera vs. Zigra is Zigra itself, and not just because you need a flowchart to determine which of several distinct entities that name refers to at any given point. I am referring to Zigra the daikaiju, who transforms out of the ship into a being shaped something like a metallic goblin shark, and then finds that thanks to the lower pressure of Earth's oceans, it suddenly grows to enormous size, even larger than Gamera himself. Zigra stands out from the crowd for at least two reasons: one is that it spends virtually all of its time "underwater", though this particular film's ability to create a plausible aquatic environment through the means of some diffused shadows is rather unimpressive, particularly when Gamera starts breathing fire while standing at the bottom of the deep blue sea; the other is that Zigra talks. Which, for all the plot's aggravating boilerplate (oh, another pair of Japanese and American kids are the only ones who know what's going on when aliens try to destroy Earth with a giant monster, and are alone able to call up Gamera, friend to all children, to save the day? Well, did you evah!), is actually pretty cool, and serves to make the film feel unique, or anyway close enough to unique that I don't feel like I'm doing anything too vicious to the word by using it in this context. Zigra is more of a concrete, well-defined threat than any Gamera villain since at least Gyaos, almost solely because of the added personality that comes from hearing it speak in the menacing, merciless tones of Noda Keiichi.

That is, perhaps, the only way that Zigra is more threatening or in any way superior to the average Gamera villain, though I am obliged to admit that the monster design is rather more effective than perhaps any other monster in the series: the action the suit and models are put through tend to to a good job of hiding the limited articulation, one of the most reliable shortcomings of the Gamera monsters. This is the only remotely nice thing I can say about the fight choreography, which is absolutely dismal throughout, rather clumsily stitched-together shots of the monsters not even obviously "fighting" put over without any illusion of impact, mass, or momentum. And even the limpest moment in either of the big monster fights is preferable to Gamera's finishing move, when he plays Zigra's dorsal spines like a fucking xylophone, plunking out his theme song in lieu of actually taking care of business.

In the lengthy passages when it's not focused on the monsters, Gamera vs. Zigra grinds through scene after scene of tedious non-plot, culminating in an infamous protracted sequence where a Sea World employee and a hotelier argue over who gets to purchase the last fish being sold at market during the Zigra crisis, a conflict that Takahashi and director Yuasa Noriaki find so important that they divide it between two scenes. And the momentum is further compromised by the most absolutely ridiculous score, composed by Kikuchi Shunsuke in a capery tone resembling Henry Mancini at his least imaginative. While none of it is emphatically bad in the horrible way that Gamera vs. Guiron was bad, it's almost certainly more boring and directionless, the actors uniformly uninteresting in their execution of stock characters, and the human activity onscreen as arbitrarily divorced from the kaiju sequences as I can think of in any such film I have seen. It's more visually attractive than the baseline for the Gamera franchise, I guess, and there are a few scenes where the filmmaker stage the Zigra ship as a dominant threat in ways that are even kind of exciting (I am chiefly thinking of a sequence where it briefly stalks the characters like a shark). So it is surely not the worst of the series. But it is also not, by any means, a strong argument that, as of 1971, that franchise's temporary shuttering was any kind of loss to cinema generally, or to daikaiju eiga fans specifically.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1979: In which everybody wants to be the new Star Wars

Star Wars made an enormous shit-ton of money in 1977. We've clarified that already, but it's worth bringing it up over and over again, because it was the definitive truth in American filmmaking in the latter half of the 1970s, basically until E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial finally proved that a movie could make an even more enormous shit-ton of money in 1982.

Now, enormous shit-tons of money are the one thing absolutely guaranteed to get everybody's attention in Hollywood, and after Star Wars made one, every other studio immediately started figuring out the best way to leach onto its success with a furious sucking intensity. The most direct and famous example from 1979 - the year that the rip-off machine's efforts began to explode across the screen - was when Paramount realised, "what the heck, we have a preexisting franchise with 'Star' right there in the title", and attempted to copy George Lucas's fluffy, boisterous space adventure with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in which we spend something like six hours watching William Shatner travel in a shuttle pod through space dock. The most openly pathetic has got to be Moonraker, the movie where producer Albert Broccoli double-dog-dared us to believe that James Bond was in space and had a space laser now.

The particular wannabe Star Wars we're here to talk about now, though, is The Black Hole, which does double-duty as being the film where, out of the clear blue sky, the Walt Disney Company abruptly decided "fuck it, we're going to start doing movies for teenagers", after having spent its entire post-WWII existence peddling entertainment for children. And not even real children: increasingly, after around 1962 or so, the kind of sanitised conceptual children that Walt Disney himself believed that all children should be. I do not apologise in my affection for Disney's cinema and theme parks, but oh my, did their live-action films start to get fairly awful and pandering and smarmy there in the desperate years after Walt's 1966 death.

Walt Disney Productions deciding it wanted to be in the business of "edgy" big-budget adventure films (by Disney standards, meaning that The Black Hole probably doesn't make a list of the 100 edgiest wide-release American films of 1979) does not automatically equal Walt Disney Productions knowing what the goddamn hell it was doing when trying to make a film that would appeal to teenagers. Three years later, when the company tried again with TRON, it had figured out how to avoid the most obvious mistakes made in The Black Hole, which rather desperately tries to fuse Disney's characteristic kiddie funtime japery with Star Wars-style action and world-building, and - this is the really fucked-up part - a go-for-broke psychedelic final ten minutes that suggest what they really wanted to make most of all was a laser guns 'n' zombie cyborgs version of 2001: A Space Odyssey for the whole family to enjoy. It is a bizarre grab bag of concepts from all over the place that have been stuffed firmly into one by director Gary Nelson, a TV veteran who, to his immense credit, at least manages to massage The Black Hole into something that feels more or less contiguous, no matter how badly it lurches from tone to tone.

That said, Nelson wasn't very much equipped to make a big effects extravaganza; indeed, it's characteristic of the gibbering insanity that was Disney under the management of Ron Miller, Walt Disney's son-in-law who tried to mimic that man's hands-on producing style without having much of a sense for how movies work, that The Black Hole would include among its creatives almost nobody with any business making a concept-driven sciience fiction adventure: between the director, the producer himself, and the four men credited with cobbling together the story and screenplay from spare parts culled from '50s genre films, only scenarist Richard H. Landau (who, a lifetime earlier, co-wrote The Quatermass Xperiment for Hammer Film in the UK) had any kind of experience in this style of storytelling, which might have been a useful prerequisite for anyone asked to take on the job of shepherding the studio's big bid to take a seat at the grown-up table with one of those big space pictures of its own. And Miller had to work to assemble that shallow bench of talent: I had always assumed, without checking, that The Black Hole was put together by the usual roster of Disney contractors who cranked out all the studio's other live-action pictures, but in fact, there aren't really any meaningful Disney connections in any of those writers' filmographies. The crew heads are a different story: from editorial to sound to VFX to costume to set design, the actual work of putting the movie together was handled by a consortium of Disney lifers.

And perhaps that fact explains why, for all its unquestionable failures as a sci-fi adventure, or as any kind of self-contained work of dramatic fiction whatsoever, really, The Black Hole is impossible for me to actually write off. Not for the first time nor, I am sure, for the last, I find myself writing a review for a movie where all the script problems in the world can't disguise how unbelievably gorgeously the thing has been designed: everything else could have gone wrong (and only some of it does), but production designer Peter Ellenshaw, art directors John B. Mansbridge, Robert T. McCall, & Al Roelofs, and set decorators Frank R. McKelvy & Roger M. Shook would still have created one of the most perfect visual settings for any genre film in the immediate post-Star Wars era. And the several different visual effects teams - animators, matte painters, model builders, and so on, making up a solid half of the end credits - executed the realisation of the most fanciful, extreme elements of the film's design with great aplomb. Oh, you can see the seams pretty easily in some isolated cases (the titular black hole, for example, which always appears to be in a box separate from the rest of the universe), but usually the sheer magnitude of the effects overcomes the handful of places where it's 2014 at the time of this writing, and the movie came out in 1979 and there's an awful lot of evolution in the art form that went on between those points in history. Granting that, it's still not the state of the art: in the class of '79, Star Trek certainly had more accomplished VFX, and Alien presented a far more plausible, lived-in, functional world. But if I had to pick the one that I just wanted to look at, I honestly suppose it might be The Black Hole. For if it is not a very satisfying Disney film in any other way, it presents marvelous, fantastical vistas to gawk at.

I could go on and on about that, but at a certain point, it does to at least nod in the direction of the film's plot, if just for a moment (much like the filmmakers themselves). Sometime in The Future, an American spacecraft, the USS Palomino, is wrapping up a deep-space exploration mission, her population consisting of four actual crewmembers - Capt. Dan Holland (Robert Forster), Lt. Charles Pizer (Joseph Bottoms), science officer Dr. Alex Durant (Anthony Perkins), and Token Woman Dr. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux) - and one tagalong journalist, Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine). And, we must certainly not forget, one robot, V.I.N.CENT. whose name improbably stands for "Vital Information Necessary Centralized", voiced by Roddy McDowall. He's - it's? - kind of the only important entity on the ship, either to its operation or to the film's plot; he's also the thin pretext for Dr. McCrae's presence, since she communicates with him telepathically. Not, you might think, the kind of skill that could conceivably be necessary, but that's why you didn't get to write The Black Hole, isn't it?

V.I.N.CENT. is, anyway, the most aggressively Disneyish and awful part of the whole movie: he's a round floating grey thing with a huge red drum for a face with great big googly eyes on it, an obvious attempt to make an even more kiddie-friendly R2-D2, for those audiences who managed to walk out of Star Wars somehow feeling that the biggest problem with the droids was that they didn't supply enough goofy comic relief. I will say this: the technique used to create the robot is gorgeous: at no point did I ever stop to notice that he was not, in fact, floating of his own power and fluttering around, and while I loathe with burning hate the design details that make him look so broad and cartoon-soft, there's no way to deny that his big, open, stupid fucking face is tremendously fully of personality. Which personality I also loathe, FYI. Anyway, the film lives and breathes V.I.N.CENT. While the rest of the crew spends the middle of the film with their thumbs up their collective asses, he's the character primarily driving the plot forward, and his pissy little quips, delivered in the most exasperated voice McDowall can dredge up (so imagine how very exasperated it is), are the sole source of merriment in a film that otherwise mostly consists of people discussing astrophysics in serious tones. If the goal was truly to appeal to a wider audience than just the kids that were Disney's bread and butter in the preceding decade especially, V.I.N.CENT. was a drastic miscalculation: he's the quintessence of a distressingly cutesy side character who ends up sucking all of the film's attention and energy while providing absolutely nothing of value for a viewer whose age runs to the double digits. And before the film is over, he encounters a beaten-up older model version of his line, B.O.B., voiced with equally one-note comic frippery by Slim Pickens, proving that the only thing more disgustingly cute than a round robot with enormous googly eyes is the same robot but all smooshed in and crushed with carefully harmless comic pathos.

Back to the story, which finds the Palomino encountering the long-thought-lost Cygnus, an enormous research vessel that disappeared 20 years prior, holding impossibly steady just inside the event horizon of a local black hole. Though it should be pointed out that "event horizon" is a phrase much too scientifically precise for a script with the intensely ponderous fake science words The Black Hole trots out. This physical impossibility is thanks to the genius of Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell), the only human left alive on the Cygnus (which, when it went missing, also included McCrae's father among its crew, a fact that does not end up informing any element of her character arc, nor Mimieux's blank performance); he's described by a conveniently knowledgeable Booth in terms that make him sound ideally suited to be a long-lost genius mad scientist, immediately piquing Durant's icily scientific interest. And so, of course, when the Palomino crew runs into Reinhardt, he immediately starts playing the part assigned to him, he and his army of robots and especially the enormous, crimson-red knife-wielding thing he familiarly calls "Maximilian".

In every conceivable respect, The Black Hole plays like a '50s science fiction movie, from the tiny detail that the modern nations of Earth remain unchanged centuries into the future, to the frank anti-science bent of making Reinhardt's quest for knowledge indistinguishable from his psychotic disregard to human life, and making Durant the hapless apologist for the psychopath on the grounds that, "but... but learning!" Mixing wheezy old narrative tropes with modern filmmaking technique is about as classically Disneyesque as it gets, of course, and Star Wars itself openly pilfered from the '30s pulp rulebook in filling out its script. The difference is that Star Wars understands itself to be a throwback, while The Black Hole is obviously trying to do new, challenging things - if there was any reason to believe that the filmmakers or the company had anything near that much creativity, I'd be willing to call it a deliberate attempt to recapitulate the entire history of science fiction in cinema from the early '50s to 1968, beginning with the dry "let's talk science!" tone of Destination Moon, moving into the horror/sci-fi hybridisation of the later '50s, and ending up with its odd, explicitly Christian riff on the metaphysics of 2001's finale. But it's probably safer just to all it a dog's breakfast of lazy stortyelling crutches all serving to justify, however feebly, the extraordinary effects work that was meant to make The Black Hole stand tall among the glut of amazingly awesome future epics.

Oh, how it wants to be an amazing epic! It even opens with two and a half minutes of overture, a very brassy move for a picture that runs less than 98 minutes with that overture. It helps that the music, composed by John Barry, is just plain terrific: especially the main credits theme (which is totally different from the overture), a slightly threatening, insinuating piece of jagged spacey music that suggests both mystery and exciting danger, sounding precisely like the James Bond composer trying to do a Jerry Goldsmith impression, but ending up sharing the best of those dissimilar worlds. It feels like the music for a grand epic, just like the sprawling visuals look like they came from an epic, with their gloriously complex spaceships and dramatic lighting and enormous, rich starfields. And for all that, The Black Hole just can't carry it off. The story is convoluted and yet embarrassingly thin at the same time, the characters range from reedy stereotypes to aggravating comic robots, with the single, striking exception of Schell, who doesn't care at all what kind of movie he's in, and plays Reinhardt with frazzled mad-prophet edginess, glaring with a real sense of inhumanity in his enormous eyes. He's great, the film looks great, and it's a terrific technical accomplishment by every measure, but the lax directing and storytelling don't do anything with that: it's not "boring", but it goes absolutely no place, the kind of movie for which reading its "The Art of" coffee table book would be precisely as enjoyable, and for precisely the same reasons, as watching it.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1979
-Francis Ford Coppola releases the insane, enormous beast of Apocalypse Now, the last New Hollywood film generally agreed to be great
-Robert Altman releases the insane, not so enormous Quintet, a coke-fueled odyssey that absolutely not one goddamn person agrees to be great
-Woody Allen makes the gorgeous widescreen valentine to New York, classicism, and having sex with teenagers, Manhattan

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1979
-Having fought through a bitter, messy divorce, Canadian David Cronenberg overreacts a tiny bit in his "the female body is a pit of Lovecraftian horrors" flick The Brood
-Well-regarded Japanese animator Miyazako Hayao has the chance to direct his first feature film, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
-Insane director Werner Herzog and psychotic movie star Klaus Kinski start making Woyzeck literally the week after completing the arduous shoot of Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht

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