TO BECOME IMMORTAL AND THEN DIE

A review requested by Ryan J, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 debut feature and declaration of war Breathless* is a curious case. In hindsight, everything that is most daring about it would be repeated to stronger effect in more interesting movies overall by the same director - most directly in Band of Outsiders and Pierrot le fou, though almost everything he made throughout the 1960s reworks some element of his debut - which makes it frankly a wee bit harder to regard it with the same esteem that besotted critics and cinephiles did when it was brand new.And yet, this is The One. The single movie that you need to see and grapple with if you're going to have a reckoning with Godard's first phase, and arguably with the entirety of French cinema in that decade (arguably with any of the European New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s, of which the French New Wave that Breathless co-created with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows was the wellspring). It's indisputably on the shortlist (the top ten, let's say) of Movies You Need To See if you're going to have a proper conception of cinema history and the potential of cinematic form. So even while my heart says that we should care more about Band of Outsiders or Contempt or Masculin féminin, my head says not to be fucking daft.

The place: Paris in the '60s. The time: America during Prohibition. Here we meet self-identified bastard Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a young man who has certainly built most of his personality from a steady diet of B-grade Hollywood crime pictures, not unlike the writer-director who created him. He's apparently some kind of a real criminal, though you could be forgiven for supposing it's all an overbaked fantasy in his noir-soaked head, and he's also a loudmouth given to braggadocio and toxic sexism. Who's to say if we're supposed to admire him or find him absurdly hateful: the camera insinuates us right along side him, Belmondo's prickly acting and the relentlessly, self-consciously disagreeable things he keeps saying repel us, and the editing by Cécile Decugis, famously, doesn't much intend that we regard him as a real character at all: he's a dude in a movie with the misfortune to somewhat suspect that's the case, which leads him to act far too much like a movie character. And this is partially to blame for why he shoots a cop during a drive in the country.

I hope it says more about the film than my inattentiveness when I declare that, having seen Breathless God knows how many times now (I went to film school, and I'm a self-professed Godard fan - that's good for at least six viewings right there), and remembering with great fondness that it's the first of Godard's gangster movie riffs, I am infallibly surprised to remember that the entire plot hinges on Michel's murder of a cop. It's just not that kind of movie, except that of course it very much is - the rest of the film down to the last scene all revolves around the detectives hunting Michel down and ultimately getting their hooks into visiting American student Patricia (Jean Seberg), possibly the most important of his current paramours; she's the co-lead of the film, but at the same time they don't really seem to like each other very much, the evidence of the signature bedroom scene notwithstanding. But I'm going all out of order.

It is so deeply tempting and dangerously easy to lock in and adore Breathless for all its little flair: the popular introduction of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous technique of the jump cut, which I think we typically remember as showing up during a car ride that gets propelled ahead in an attempt to make it seem artificially exciting and tense, with the full aid and comfort of Martial Solal's pounding jazz-influenced score. But that's at least the third major scene involving jump cutting, and the other two are both conversations, one between Michel and another one of his girlfriends (it just so happens to be right after Michel mentions his recent work at famed movie studio Cinécitta), one between Patricia and the editor nudging her journalism career forward, both relatively banal. I wouldn't suggest anything so trite as to say that the jump cutting is the film's attempt to hurry us through the dully quotidian scenes that shouldn't even be in a nervy gangster thriller in the first place, but I wouldn't tell you not to make that claim for them.

Or there's the brilliant way that the killing of the cop is shot, with close-ups of the gun and the unsynchronised sound of an gunshot, immediately followed by a scene moments later - the jarring image editing and discontinuous sound standing in as surrogates for the act of violence instead of that act being depicted (both times a human being is murdered with a gun in Breathless, the sound of the gunshot does not match the onscreen imagery. Just a fun thing to be aware of). Which would easily lead us to the film's bravura use of sound editing, which for my money is the far bolder aspect of Breathless's aesthetic developments, though the film editing was more quickly, more widely copied. And then I would talk about the floating, ghostly voices in the scene with a great, famous author (played by New Wave progenitor Jean-Pierre Melville) being peppered with high-minded but insipid philosophical questions leading to purposefully shitty answers ("Rilke was a great poet, so undoubtedly right" is his considered response to some journalist's "look how I did my research!" moment), and maybe the way that the score keeps jolting its way into the movie, mostly but not always motivated by the onscreen action.

The mistake I have personally had in the past with doing that is to lose the forest for the trees: Breathless is not just the sum of Godard's aesthetic. And it is here, I think, that something on the order of Masculin féminin argues for itself as an improvement over Godard's debut, since that film more clearly demonstrates the reason for its aesthetic rather than simply wandering, as Breathless occasionally does, into "look at me, I can be formally outrageous for the sake of it!" territory.

So let's not indulge that limited reading, huh? Step back from the jump cutting and the sound, from Seberg's stiff French and Belmondo's posing for the camera, from the litany of Hollywood genre film references and in-jokes, and Breathless does in fact take on quite a distinctive shape. It's not just Godard's riff on gangster movies of both the American and French tradition, and not even just his riff on the kind of young people so infatuated with pop culture that they'd fall into the trap of defining their identity in terms of the movies they enjoy most. Though that's getting us closer.

It's really nothing else but the first in a chain of films where Godard is interested in youth itself, the issue of how young, or at least young-ish individuals manage to find their way around a quickly globalising world whose values are evolving at a startling rate. For Michel, this means retrenching to an archly conservative, performance-based notion of masculinity, and the whole movie bends itself around him - though by no means does it do so uncritically - and eschewing the real world in favor of the fantastic one he thinks of in movies.

Reality, in the form of aesthetic realism, insists on pushing its way through; I return us to that bedroom scene, in which a film constructed out of three- and four-minute blasts of narrative propulsion jams on the brakes for 23 minutes as Michel surprises Patricia in her hotel, they have sex, they discuss art insofar as his dickish, petulant refusal to take her questions seriously permits. The editing slows down, the lighting (from cinematographer Raoul Coutard) turns ragged and rough, the setting becomes almost sublimely unexceptional and devoid of storytelling momentum. It's like the "other" New Wave, the one by Truffaut (who co-wrote this film) and Rohmer, based in languid humanistic moments of unadorned conversation pushes its way into Godard's more manic, formalist New Wave for the duration of a whole act. But for the most part, the film permits Michel his fantasy, even though it requires him to be betrayed by a woman who seems a little perplexed herself why she's been obliged to be a femme fatale in the film's glorious final shot, a deeply ambivalent close-up on Seberg's face that ends with her turning her back on us.

The jarring and groundbreaking post-modernism of the filmmaking - Breathless is not the first movie that is aware that it's a movie and which acts to make sure we're aware that it's a movie (that's not even an invention of the sound era), but it's the film that kickstarted that as a tradition that has never since gone fully into hibernation - isn't, then, simply a radical response to the hidebound aesthetics of the bulk of post-war French cinema. Of course it's partly that. To assert otherwise would be to deny the volumes of Godard's own writing at this time, when he was still a critic at the legendary Cahiers du cinéma. But the aesthetic violence of the film is also an attempt to encapsulate the rage of its characters, whose youthful energy is given no functional outlet, and so must explode somehow. Within the world of the film, that means destroying the traditional structures of cinema. In the real world, that meant the increasing unrest of the '60s that resulted in the May 1968 protests across Europe - and while I'll not be such a Godardian as to claim that he could predict those protests were coming, any quick glance at his films in '67 - Week End, La chinoise - and their continued development of the self-destruction begun with Breathless suggests that the nascent youthful resentment of this film had continued festering and growing ever bolder, more radical, and more intense. As much as they're any one thing, Godard's films are deliberate diagnoses of the era in which he made them, and Breathless is as precise an identification of the culture of the '60s-to-come as I have seen in the movies.

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WHEN IT RAINS, THE RAIN FALLS DOWN

A review requested by Jonathan Storey, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The title of the magnificent 1975 Warner Bros. release Dog Day Afternoon gives the game away: whatever else it's about, and there's a lot of things we could say it's specifically about, it's about how fucking hot it gets. 22 August, 1972, the day the true-crime story that screenwriter Frank Pierson turned into a screenplay (and which director Sidney Lumet and his cast then extensively revised through improvisation, though Pierson is the one who ended up with the film's solitary Oscar), was 81° F (~27° C) with a dewpoint of 59° F (~15° C), which is to say it was actually a rather pleasant day by late-August standards in New York City. But Dog Day Afternoon does not dick around with weather reports: it knows that the best version of its story comes from presenting a city torn against itself at a thousand fissure points, baking in the merciless sun that beats down on the asphalt and doesn't let up even when it drops below the horizon: the characters are even sweatier and more ragged at night than they were during the day. It forms one of the smallest subgenres ever with 1989's Do the Right Thing: movies in which the atmospheric oppression of summertime in the city can magnify everybody's impatience and readiness to blow up at exactly those fissures between the people keeping society propped up and the dispossessed. Spike Lee's film called upon Public Enemy to chant "Fight the Power", Lumet's finds Al Pacino nervously and angrily sputtering "Attica! Attica!" at retreating police to the delight of a crowd of bored onlookers, and it's all just another way of saying "fuck this bullshit". Or as Lumet's next film potently frames it, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore".

At its core, the story (massaged away from reality and with the main character undergoing a name change) is a good old-fashioned slice of Americana: the chestnut about criminals who make every possible mistake while regarding themselves as cool, smart operators. On that August day, Sonny Wortzik (Pacino), Sal Naturale (John Cazale), and Stevie (Gary Springer) plan to hold up a bank in Brooklyn, in and out in just minutes. The first problem is that the bank has no money - the criminals just barely missed the daily cash pickup. The second is that Sonny's impromptu backup plan involves setting the bank register on fire, and the smoke catches the attention of the cops, who quickly surround the bank. With little else to do, Sonny and Sal simply claim all the bank employees as their hostages (Stevie having jumped ship almost immediately), leaving the slightly baffled Sgt. Moretti (Charles Durning) to negotiate in the face of Sonny's increasingly colorful behavior and weird demands, all catching the attention of the media, who turn the fraught situation into a gaudy circus, dragging in Sonny's devasted mother (Judith Malina), his ex-wife Angie (Susan Peretz), and his new wife Leon (Chris Sarandon), a trans woman whose costly gender reassignment surgery, it turns out, was the motivating factor in Sonny looking to rob a bank in the first place.

With that last detail, we plunge headlong into the film's defining trait, its interest in the lives and needs of the kind of people typically left of the mass cultural narrative, but it's become clear long before that plot thread shows up (it is, in fact, presented as something of a twist, though not in the least bit prurient about it) that Dog Day Afternoon either possesses its own streak of anti-establishment energy, or it finds those who do to be thoroughly fascinating, with no moral judgment supplied. The famous "Attica!" scene doesn't come from the clear blue sky; that's not even the first reference in dialogue to the 1971 Attica State Prison riots, one of the great flashpoints for the early-'70s left-wing intelligentsia. But even more than in its specifics, the whole film brims with characters who are fed up and know that things aren't going right for them. Sonny, in his many squawks of petulant outrage, shows off his knowledge of a full list of cultural touchstones, some more absurdly wielded than others, all of which reinforce the sense that he's as much a symptom of urban helplessness as a person in his own right; this is certainly why he so quickly becomes so fascinating to the news media that latch onto the crime like lampreys, and to the crowd of people outside.

Dog Day Afternoon holds back from actually serving as a left-wing polemic; its satire aims in all directions, against Sonny's enthusiastic dimness as well as in tandem with his outrage. And its anti-police sentiments were tempered considerably by casting Durning in the role of the police representive whom we see the most of; in contrast to the spitfire Pacino and the wary, wired Cazale, Durning's calming tone of voice and relaxed features make him instantly likeable, even if he is the film's main emblem of The Man.

The main thrust instead is twofold: first , the film provides a comprehensive snapshot of a segment of the underclasses of New York at a certain moment, more of an act of gonzo journalism than a message film about social ills. Many of the best films in Lumet's career (and this is very much one of the best - among the handful of films I'd say jostle for the #2 spot in his filmography, behind his exemplary theatrical debut, 12 Angry Men) are holistic descriptions of some broad aspect of that city filtered through one colorful individual, and Dog Day Afternoon is more overt about it than most: before we meet any named character, we've been treated to a montage of the city's working class in all their aspects, set somewhat incongruously to Elton John's "Amoreena".

The other thing it does is, simply, to present a remarkable collection of human beings behaving under stress. Pacino certainly dominates the film and its subsequent decades of appreciation, and he earns that: its one of his best performances, from the moment he explodes the film's quiet, whispering opening scenes with his prattling, to the extraordinary scene where he recites his will, dripping with sweat and wearing a flat, distant look. Bbut Durning and Cazale aren't far behind him in terms of how much depth they weave into there characters with just expressions and body language - in Cazale's case, frequently doing so when he's not even in focus within the frame. The miracle of it, and where Lumet's impossibly giving direction most clearly manifests itself, is in the full sense of we get of the characters who aren't even "supposed" to matter - the bank employees, who emerge one by one out of an amorphous mass of victims to be unique personalities, worrying about their loved ones, giggling and chatting as they try to stay cool while the night marches on.

Insofar as the film is a tribute to messy, vital society, it's the way that it gives all of the hostages fully-realised personalities, leaving us with the sense that any of them could just as easily be the focal point of this exact scenario as Sonny is, that most insists on that tribute: there are no "side characters" here, just a bunch of human beings all mixed up and trying to muscle through an awful situation: awful because they're all beat down by The Man in their own way; awful because of the hard, flat sun that cinematographer Victor J. Kemper allows to blow out the windows in so many shots, and the glossy sheen of perspiration they're all wearing by the end of the movie. For all its "down with everybody" rhetoric and its willingness to caustically mock the behavior that happens within it, Dog Day Afternoon is tremendously interested in its humans, and almost generous towards them, given a very curious definition of generosity.

I have more thoughts on this one that I'm particularly proud of, in this 2012 entry in Hit Me with Your Best Shot.

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AMONG THIEVES

A review requested by Josep, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

There are plenty of things that could be one's immediate response to Big Deal on Madonna Street, a 1958 Italian caper movie that is one of the small handful of films directed by Mario Monicelli to have any meaningful presence on the radar of English-speaking cinephiles, despite his (and the film's) key role in developing an explosion of enormously popular sardonic social comedies in the ensuing decade. Mine was that it's nice to be reminded every now and then that there can be such a thing as comedy that boasts a deft screenplay, performed with brightness by a talented cast, and which is also good as a movie. It being the case that comedy, more than any other genre, has an annoying tendency (and has had it basically since the beginning of sound cinema) to coast on dialogue writing and staging physical gags, and to treat such niceties as well-constructed images and tight dramatic plotting as largely disposable.

Big Deal on Madonna Street - the infinitely less-evocative title of a film whose original Italian name, I soliti ignoti, means something akin to "the usual suspects" - is absolutely not that kind of comedy. As shot by Gianni Di Venanzo and designed by the great Piero Gherardi, it's a rich film of thick, moody atmosphere, low-rent and dangerous, perfectly etching out the grimy urban world its characters operate in and framing it as the site of constant hunted-animal tension. Take out every last joke but leave the rest alone, and you're still left with a crackerjack movie about a gang of frayed, mutually distrustful characters, operating in a mode that takes the spatial texture and busy, deep compositions of neorealism and genrefies them with the visual murkiness of film noir.

It's a splendid peek into a particular corner of the Roman underworld by any means, and that's a huge part of what makes it so much more interesting than a comedy content to keep the actors in frame, in focus, and clearly lit. But it's not only that. In fact, and this seems to have been Monicelli's great genius revelation, it's the very same aesthetic seriousness that makes Big Deal on Madonna Street such a great comedy - which it is to a degree that shocked me, given the difficulties of translating humor across language and culture, and the less than amazing state of film comedy generally around that period. The jokes present in the script written by Monicelli alongside Agenore Incrocci & Furio Scarpelli & Suso Cecchi D'Amico, as well as those inherent to the visualisation of that screenplay, come in a lot of different flavors, but if I had to pick the one thing the film tends to do over and over again, I'd go with its habit of allowing its characters to take themselves very, very seriously, despite their unfailing tendency towards incompetency. It's borderline parody how much the film mocks the figures at its center and the trappings of crime thrillers, and none of that humor would play if it didn't look so very much like an actual caper with its own internal reality. So the film gets it both ways: its style makes it thematically deeper and more sociologically alert than just any old dippy comedy about hapless idiots, and it's also a much funnier dippy comedy for the same reason.

The plot quickly becomes too sprawling to do much with a synopsis, but the basic outline is that minor criminal, Cosimo (Memmo Carotenuto) is in jail for a crime he did commit, but he wants somebody else to take his place regardless. After a great deal of finagling and hunting, his accomplices scrounge up Peppe (Vittorio Gassman), whose spotless record means he'll receive a much shorter sentence, to take the fall, but the unimpressed judge sees through the ruse and sends both men to prison. An irritated Peppe forces Cosimo to share the plans for a perfect heist, and is then immediately released on probation. This leaves him free to take over the heist himself, recruiting several of his and Cosimo's acquaintences for the job: the romantic Mario (Renato Salvatori); the tyrannical Michele (Tiberio Murgia), who keeps his sister (Claudia Cardinale) under lock and key; old Capannelle (Carlo Pisacane), who's munching on something almost every time we see him; and most delightfully of all, sweet Tiberio (an absurdly beguiling, fresh-faced Marcello Mastroianni), whose wife is in prison, leaving him to hall around a baby through all of the gang's planning. After receiving advice from a very dubious career criminal, safecracker Dante (Totò, an icon of Italian screen comedy), the gang is... not so ready to take the job on. They spend at least as much time bumbling around, living their messy lives, as readying to carry off the great heist, and it's not the remotest surprise that the heist itself is one fuck-up after another.

There are subtleties that are invisible to anyone who isn't a fluent speaker of Italian - my understanding is that the characters are all regional caricatures and the dialogue a smorgasbord of slang and casual expression - but even in the form that the rest of us can appreciate it, Big Deal on Madonna Street is delightful, a perfectly-timed comedy that turns the fizzy pleasures of a Rififi (its primary stated influence) into something even more lighthearted, with the moody lighting always making even the most inconsequential gags seem sharper and more unexpected and thus funnier. It helps that, for something that basically pivots on "stupid criminals sure are stupid", Big Deal on Madonna Street is extraordinarily intelligent, both in pacing out its jokes and in the implications of those jokes; it's an overreach and a half to call this a "satire", but like the visually similar, vastly more serious dramas that were still the main force in Italian filmmaking, it's attentive to how people live in the everyday modern world, and its observations about machismo and culture are pointedly mocking, however gently, and however full of love for the characters.

There's a baseline of social realism that the film shares with tonier, graver films of the same period, it's just filtered through good-natured ribbing instead of shell-shocked melodrama. The actors are all having an obvious good time, goofing around, and yet there's enough meat to their performances that it never feels like they're just fooling around - Gassman, in particular, was no kind of comic performer prior to this movie, and while its success altered the face of his career, he didn't at all abandon the basic sincerity of his dramatic work. Peppe, and all the rest, are still recognisable, grounded human beings, even if they're flopping around like clowns and being subjected to the silliest, lightest-touch humiliations available. This essential grounding in real-life, with a sharp eye towards using ridiculous comic excess as a way of calling attention to real-life behavior rather than distracting from it, is one of the cornerstones of the commedia all'italiana movement that largely began here, and while I greatly admire some of its followers - Divorce Italian Style is particularly close to my heart - it's pretty clear that this was one of the cases where the first of its kind got everything just about perfect, right out of the gate.

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RIPLEY AND ME

A review requested by Branden, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Writer-director Wim Wenders's The American Friend is, arguably, not a very good adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game at all: it backs off on the thriller elements considerably, alters the tone, jettisons important plot details and changes the ending in tremendously significant ways, and makes the American friend of the title, Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) more of a selfish but charismatic scalawag than the manipulative urbane psychopath of the novels. It backs down enough on the traditional characterisation of English-language fiction's best charming monster that "Ripley's Game" wouldn't be a remotely satisfactory title for the movie. It is far more interested in the relationships between people and the manipulations that happen on a smaller scale, between all of us, psychopaths or otherwise. Which is why it's actually a really great adaptation of Highsmith, whose books' crime trappings are the sugary coating that hides how much they're all basically about interactions between people who want to get something out of one another. Absent Alfred Hitchcock's sublime Strangers on a Train, it's maybe the best Highsmith adaptation, in fact, or anyway the best film sourced from her work.

The title might be in reference to the talented Mr. Ripley, and Hopper might be the top-billed, but the film is actually more interested in Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), a picture framer in Hamburg. Zimmermann and Ripley come into contact when the former insults the latter, knowing the American to be deeply involved in an art forgery ring; in retaliation, Ripley passes Zimmermann's name on to Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain), a French mobster looking for a hitman. Zimmermann is no hitman, of course, but he has a wife, Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer), and child whom he dearly loves. It takes surprisingly little effort for Minot and Ripley to use faked medical tests and innuendo to convince Zimmermann that he's dying of a blood disease, and with the promise of having a nest egg to leave his family after he dies, Zimmermann falls for Minot's plan with hardly a second thought about the grisliness of the job. Meanwhile, Ripley has started to befriend Zimmermann, who knows nothing of the American's various manipulations; and cold-blooded bastard that Tom Ripley surely is, he's not necessarily keen on turning any poor innocent fella into another one of himself.

Giving more away would spoil all of the fun and give the very wrong impression that The American Friend is a conventional thriller that pushes the viewer hard through a series of twists and turns, of crimes and psychological breaks. It does not do this, to a conspicuous degree. Sure, it's generically a thriller, and Wenders isn't above putting the characters through sequences of admirably high intensity - there's a longish sequence in the film's middle, set on a train, that's a terrific daisy chain of laugh-out-loud dark comic beats and dreadful tension, that's the most memorable element of the whole movie and, in fact, one of the most baldly delightful, entertaining genre moments in the New German Cinema. But that's not at all where the film lives. This is a buddy film, in its damned peculiar way; Ripley is a nasty piece of work and Zimmermann is a personality fracturing before our eyes, but they serve as the foundation for a greatly touching depiction of friendship and mutual support - contrary to my expectation headed into the film, there's nothing ironic about the title The American Friend. Ganz and Hopper, even as they're creating edgy, bleak characters, strike up rich, meaningful camaraderie, and the movie ends up working much less as a story of crime than of how crime impacts the private lives of criminals.

With its focus on the insides of its characters heads, the film serves as a kind of updated version of noir, and it's frequently described as such. I'm not wholly inclined to that reading, though at least two truths are undeniable: one is that the film has the heavy urban atmosphere that typifies noir as one of its most characteristic elements. The other is that Wenders is eager to remind us of of American genre film, casting as mobsters the directors Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller, two of the most beloved American outsiders to the various European New Waves, and it's impossible to suppose that a working knowledge of noir doesn't inform the way the film's plot works and how it relates to its characters. At the same time, the film's look is as far from noir as it gets: the great cinematographer Robby Müller shot the film with potent colors, brightly shouting out from the limitations of '70s film stock and lending a vibrant liveliness to the movie that cuts through the grottiness of the setting and scenario. This a movie that practically glows, it's so bold and pretty. That's a stark contrast between visual style and content, and it does a great deal to shift the film's energy away from anything that a plain recitation of its plot would suggest. Keeping in line with the reality that this is Zinnemann's film above all, the very particular look of The American Friend, with its pop-up colors, works in a way to evoke the very keen awareness of what things look and feel like that might occur to a man convinced he's in the last stages of his life, and being thrust into experiences far beyond anything within his sphere. It's an intense-looking film to suit the intensified perception of its protagonist, I'd argue, and a tremendously lovely one at that.

It's crafty and beguiling and unexpectedly smart about people, and the only shortcomings I can spot within it are those of context. This is not, to be horribly blunt about it, a particularly special film within the greater world of New German Cinema, nor Wenders's own career: very good, but also kind of ultimately normal. It's the first utterly "Americanised" film of that generation's self-described most Americanised filmmaker, which isn't a necessary problem. Though the director who had just completed his Road Trilogy - Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road - moving right into a genre riff couldn't help but feel like a step down. The American Friend is a very good movie that a lot of people could have made in a lot of places - Wenders, in West Germany, in 1977, doesn't leave the kind of stamp on the film that would have made it truly great (it is, however, quintessentially and irreducibly European in a way that no other Ripley film I've seen has been - but I have not seen Purple Noon). Still, not every auteur has to be turned on 100% of the time, and The American Friend is absolutely worth treasuring: a gorgeous, taut movie with vivid characters on impressively complex journeys, one of the most humane and cinematically articulate thrillers I've seen from that era.

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THE BLART OF WAR

By no reasonable standard is Paul Blart: Mall Cop a good movie. It is perhaps even a very bad movie, and a largely unamusing comedy. That's even adjusting for the already questionable comic standards of the "fatty fall down" genre, one of the loudest and most obnoxious of all possible subgenres.

So it is bizarre to say, and even more bizarre to think, but I am genuinely horrified by the things that Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 does to the original film, to the dignity of the titular character, and to the basic affability of Kevin James, who isn't funny but usually can be called upon to be likeable and sweet. He is, in PBMC2, a bullying asshole, miles from the puffed-up but still earnest and decent protagonist of the first movie, and this adds a pervasive sour note. But to be fair to the newer, meaner Blart, he comes by it honestly, as a reaction to the film's opening, which under the guise of "absurd comedy" piles a series of arbitrary cosmic cruelties on top of him worthy of an Ibsen play. This adds an additional sour note.

But yes, so after saving the day and winning the girl in PBMC1, we find that Blart's marriage lasted all of six days, until his new bride found herself so repulsed by his body that she couldn't stop vomiting, and so had the marriage annulled. Two years later, Blart's beloved Mama Blart was run over by a milk truck picking up the paper. And for the last four years, he has sat in his solitude, in the company solely of his teenager daughter Maya (Raini Rodriguez), upon whom he lavishes all his frustration and bitterness by micromanaging her life into a socially empty oblivion. Comedy tonight!

The surprising notes of meanness and bitterness extend into the main bulk of the film, which finds Blart rather snottily throwing his weight around (metaphorically; all he does with his actual weight is serve as the butt of low-intensity slapstick), acting like a big deal because of that mall heist he stopped in 2009, and then being humiliated. You know that absolutely wretched shot of Kevin James suddenly turning into CGI and getting kicked across the street by a horse that was in the trailer? In case not, now you do:

The movie is so proud of that horrible, horrible joke, it positions it as the very last gag in the whole movie. Two lines of dialogue spread across a couple of shots are all that stand between this image and the end credits. Spoiler alert, I'd say, but it's more of a humanitarian gesture. The point is, the film detests Blart a little bit. Not the easiest way to feel like you have a way to connect with anybody or anything going on.

The pretext is that Blart has been invited to Las Vegas for a convention of security officers, luckily arriving on exactly the same weekend that a disgruntled gambler named Vincent (Neal McDonough) is executing the theft of several priceless pieces of art from the excellent and glamorous collection at Steve Wynn's twin resorts, Wynn Las Vegas and Encore Las Vegas, home to shopping, fine food, and exciting live entertainment. While staying at the Wynn resorts, recipients of several five star and AAA ratings- beg pardon? A movie? What mov- oh, fuck, 2 Blart 2 Mall, that's right. Well, sometimes the film makes it really fucking hard to tell, particularly when Steve and Andrea Wynn show up for plastic cameos that bespeak the kind of pants-shitting horror people feel when they've never been on a film set before, and the director just yelled "action", and what am I supposed to do wait the movie is filming right now, and goddammit, keep smiling...

Now Blart, having no idea how conventions work, hears of a rumor that he's going to give the keynote speech that night, which adds even more to his insufferable ego, and leads to even worse mortification when he finds out otherwise. Eventually, he does get to deliver a speech, through the usual shenanigans - and by "usual shenanigans", I of course mean "sloppy blackout drunkenness", because this is a kids' film. And when Blart does manage to deliver that speech, he does so with timorous self-doubt that finds its footing and resonates really well with the audience, and that's it, there's no joke, no cringe humor. I was so unbelievably grateful to the film for giving me this one moment that wasn't irredeemably angry or demeaning that I was prepared to stand up and applaud myself. It is an oasis, filled with precious pure water, and in any other film it would be a solid 4/10 moment.

Dealing with a demoralising convention isn't Blart's only problem at the moment. As he does not know, Maya has been accepted to UCLA, and has to decide how to break the news that she's going to movie all the way across the country to her dysfunctionally clingy father; as he does know, she's also been flirting up a storm with Lane (David Henrie), one of the parking valets at the fabulous Wynn Las Vegas res- I am so sorry, I just keep getting confused whether this is a movie or a 94-minute tourism video. Meanwhile, his colorful polyglot coterie of security guard colleagues - including Fuckin' This Guy Ovuh Heeyuh (Gary Valentine), Sassy Black Lady, Mm-hm (Loni Love), and Vaguely Gross Narcoleptic Indian (Shelly Desai) - pal around with him as he needlessly makes an enemy of the hotel's head of security Eduardo (Eduardo Verástegui) by repeatedly, if inadvertently, sexually harassing the man's girlfriend, the hotel's general manager Divina Martinez (Daniella Alonso).

And so Blart struggles on to keep his masculinity intact in a world that keeps telling him he's a lonely fat loser with no purpose in life but to eat himself into a diabetic coma. It's a damn pity that no team of highly methodical yet easily buffaloed art thieves are around for a poor bastard like Blart to stymie with the help of his wacky security guard colleagues and thus regain the respect of his peers, his family, and the person who matters the most: himself.

I swear to Christ, I wish they still shot movies on film just so we could have something to set on fire.

1/10

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GOING HOME IS MURDER

I am very happy to kick off the reviews for the 2nd Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser with this special dedication - Tim H. would like to wish Marty and Melanie a very happy wedding today, with this review of Marty's favorite movie. And so would I.

I have in the past waxed some nostalgic over the miracle that was indie filmmaking in the 1990s, I think in part because I didn't have the good sense to notice it at the time (I was a teenager, and thus deep into my "only foreign films are worth a damn" phase. Ah, kids). But just as miraculous was the way that bled over into the mainstream. For example, if I say "romantic comedy about a hitman resentfully attending his 10-year high school reunion", it feels about right for the whole Miramax indiewood movement of the late '90s. But 1997's Grosse Pointe Blank isn't, technically, an indie film. It's a Hollywood Pictures production. There's Disney money in this thing. And for a Disney movie to dive so lustfully into the offbeat realms of '90s quirky indie comedy... it was a healthier time for mainstream cinema, that's all.

The hitman is one Martin Blank (John Cusack), and his reunion is in Gross Pointe, Michigan, which means that we have no less than a three-way pun going on in the title. That's not the sort of humor that defines the film at all, but it does speak deeply self-amused level of tossed-off snark that does fill every page of the screenplay, adapted by D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & Cusack himself from a draft by Tom Jankiewicz. Since I've already gone all nostalgic, and since the film itself in large part about the unexpected potency of nostalgia, here's another one: Gen-X. Remember when everything in the world for a little was Gen-X thinks/does/is this, or that, or the third thing? Well, Grosse Pointe Blank is a firmly Gen-X-ish movie: it has the deeply self-aware sarcasm born out of an intense desire not to be seen taking anything too seriously. There's an outlandish, fantasyland goofiness built into the scenario that the film sidesteps entirely being treating it with such deadpan remove.

The primary source and primary beneficiary of this bone-dry approach to absurdism and black comedy turns out to be Cusack himself. He's a wildly inconsistent actor, too easily straitjacketed by his characters, but he's always at his best when he's allowed to have a sharp, or nasty, or bleak edge, and he kind of gets all three of them here. When we first see Martin, calmly pausing a conversation with his assistant, Marcella (Joan Cusack) to shoot his latest target, he's already a bit frustrated and annoyed, and over the first third or half of the movie, that frustration blossoms into one of the most interesting, and probably the funniest, Cusack performance I have seen. As he gets wrangled into visiting his hometown during the reunion while taking a job; as he fences with the ebullient older hitman Grocer (Dan Aykroyd), who tries to sell him on the idea of an assassins' union with the loud confidence that older, fatter white men use on younger white men; as he grouses to his disinterested therapist (Alan Arkin); Cusack fills Martin with a savage, angry "why me?" attitude that's half pathetic, half just plain mean. It's appealingly free from any begging for our sympathy, an impressive achievement both for this actor (who's so boyish and innocent-looking that refusing our sympathy can really only come as an act of will), and for the general genre of "likable killers", which usually feels the need to make the lead assassin sensitive in some way, so we can feel good about spending time in his company. Grosse Pointe Blank has no interest in softening Martin's edges. He's scattered and demanding, impatient and petulant. The only thing that ends up keeping him from turning into an antihero - which he certainly doesn't, he's likable throughout and we always root for him - is that the movie as a whole is so sarcastic that it never feels like murder is a high-stakes game.

Making the central character so tetchy also gives the film a unique sensibility as a romantic comedy, particularly a John Cusack romcom. When he reconnects with his old girlfriend, radio DJ Debi Newberry (Minnie Driver), we immediately understand what mixture of standoffishness and neediness combine to make him such a dubious prospect for her. The conflict thus emerges not so much as "will he get the girl?", but rather "will he sufficiently fix himself as a human being to deserve the girl?" Which is, as far as the genre goes, a surprisingly mature attitude, though it doesn't help that it ultimately feels as pre-ordained as in any other romcom.

Still, the movie isn't taking its romantic A-plot any more seriously than it takes anything else. Director George Armitage and his cast glide through everything with a sardonic coolness that's privileges wry humor, deadpan quips, and smirking reaction shots, and while it only works by virtue of being funny, well, it is funny. Not always laugh-out-loud funny. Funny in that peculiarly '90s Gen-X way, where you see ridiculous things going on and shake your head with knowing superiority; but then, the characters here are in on the joke, so it doesn't feel like they or their movie are beneath us.

The side effect of resting so heavily on attitude, humor and a sense of well-honed ironic detachment means that Grosse Pointe Blank is ill-equipped to move in any other direction. It handles the love material well enough, simply because Cusack and Driver are operating on exactly the same level, and the ending hustles along as quick as it can without lingering on anything too potentially sentimental. But I'm not terribly keen on any of the film's shifts into action cinema, which start to pile up in the second half; Armitage (or, at least, his second unit) doesn't have the natural flair to make it actually exciting, and even if he did, I can't find my way to the argument that Grosse Pointe Blank actually benefits from having action setpieces in the first place. A Coenesque outburst of shocking violence, sure. But this isn't that - this is gun battles in exploding mini-marts. The film always quickly reverts to its set position, but these shifts all feel random and disruptive.

That leaves a healthy amount of movie that works pretty consistently on the levels that matter. The ironic humor is funny; the lovingly curated and omnipresent soundtrack of '80s indie rock gives the film an energetic spine and also a warm nostalgic glow; Cusack could not possibly have more perfect timing, and Driver could not be a better foil. The film's strengths are necessarily limited - it's immensely saturated in the kind of hip knowingness that died with the '90s and wasn't even liked by everybody at the time - and the last act suffers from too much drift from its strengths, but on the whole, it's terrifically likable, sly in the most inveigling ways, and puts enough of a spin on the basic romantic comedy tropes it subscribes to feel a bit fresher and intelligent than it probably objectively is. It's a fun little bastard of a movie, and an exceptionally lively time capsule.

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BDSM WEEK: ROSIE CHEEKS

If, for whatever reason, you wanted to make the most ice-cold, vagina-drying, boner-killing movie about sex in all of cinema history, you would first have to confront the fact that Exit to Eden already exists, and it has set that bar inordinately high. It's no surprise, really, that nothing good could should come of a film taking place mostly on a Pacific island commune dedicated to the pursuit of BDSM, in the hands of director Garry Marshall, a man with an inerrant ability to turn everything into a stiflingly obvious sitcom. There's no tinned laugh track that follows the litany of terrible, coming-from-a-mile-away gags presented in Exit to Eden, but it sure as hell feels like there should be. And to the surprise of absolutely nobody, that garrulous, eager-to-please Borscht Belt mentality is just about the worst conceivable fit for an erotic drama about a man too proud to admit that he likes to be dominated and a dominatrix too terrified of being hurt to allow herself to drop her defenses. Which, let's be blunt, is already a pretty groan-worthy set-up for a BDSM story, but when you put that in the hands of a man constitutionally hellbent on making cookie-cutter mass entertainment, you have the ingredients for a truly punishing exercise in the worst kind of dopey humor mingled with the worst kind of prurient fascination with kinky sex.

And that's without even mentioning the way that Exit to Eden pairs its damp love story with a comedy about two sharp LAPD officers trying to stop a diamond smuggler, which I understand to be the entire invention of screenwriters Deborah Amelon and Bob Brunner, a massively misguided add-on to the novel vampire maven Anne Rice wrote under a pen name. I think one could spend quite a long time trying to figure out what, on balance, is the worst thing about the film: its deeply unerotic eroticism, or its more deeply unfunny comedy. The sex scenes are more boring, anyway.

So let's meet our two threads, anyway. The first starts in Australia, in 1974, where a young boy named Elliot Slater (Brian Davila) purposefully gets himself in trouble so the family's busty French maid (Rajia Baroudi) will angrily spank him. 20 years later, the grown-up Elliot (Paul Mercurio) still loves to be punished, but he's had a difficult time articulating that to his potential lovers, which is why he has applied for a most singular program. His friend, Dr. Martin Helifax (Hector Elizondo) is the proprietor of a private island of the coast of Mexico, Eden, which is a combination retreat/therapy center for the personal exploration of sexuality as it relates to domination and submission. Elliot has passed the apparently rigorous psychological profiling necessary to travel to become a "Citizen", or submissive partner, there to be able to live out all his fantasies of being smacked, yelled out, and ordered around.

Meanwhile, Sheila Kingston (Rosie O'Donnell) and Fred Lavery (Dan Aykroyd), partners on the Los Angeles police force, are hot in pursuit of Omar (Stuart Wilson), a mysterious jewel thief who has never been photographed or described, and his right-hand henchwoman, Nina Blackstone (Iman). The first we meet Sheila and Fred, they're disguised as, respectively, a dancer and a DJ at a strip club, which is what we call "foreshadowing" in the screenwriting business. Clomping around in her boa, waving a gun, Sheila cuts in with the first wave of a nightmarishly persistent pattern of voice-over to snottily joke, "I'm a cop. Thought I was a supermodel? Don't feel bad, everyone makes that mistake". Because, you see, Rosie O'Donnell is a disgusting fatty who nobody would ever find sexy. That's the least fair kind of joke ever - and circa-1994 O'Donnell is pretty damn good-looking by every human standard outside of the mainstream American film industry - and Jesus Horatio Christ, is Exit to Eden ever ecstatic to exploit her purported hideousness, standing back with arms wide open to let in all the guffaws as this ungainly, graceless, tart-tongued woman talks like somebody who could possibly be found sexual desirable, en route to putting her in a snug leather bustier from which she pokes out in all the wrong places. It would be infinitely more dispiriting if O'Donnell's performance wasn't so brittle and arch and thus felt like it was feeding the meanspirited humor even more than the script already would have it.

The stories cross paths when Elliot quite inadvertently snaps a photo of Omar in the act of pulling out a packet of black market diamonds, on his way to Eden. The criminals are thus after him, and the cops chase both the criminals and Elliot's film cans, and so everybody ends up on Eden: Elliot to find himself quite besotted by headmistress Lisa (Dana Delany), Nina to enjoy life as a sexually predatory gorgeous woman, Omar to stand around grousing, Sheila to shoot off zingers followed by zingy observations about how everybody is a people, even the ones who like BDSM, and Fred is miserable and uncomfortable and obliged to pretend that he's a janitor to avoid having to partake of the sexuality in any way.

Picking out the worst thing about Exit to Eden is prohibitively hard, but a strong candidate would have to be that awful fucking voiceover, which O'Donnell delivers in a speedy staccato that obviously wants to evoke terse narration of film noir - which it doesn't - only in way that's sassy and robustly comic - which it isn't. Another strong contender would be the absolutely impossible performances given by Delany and Mercurio (the latter having only ever appeared in one film, the sweet-minded "wacky Aussies" comedy Strictly Ballroom, where his callowness and artificial mien were used to more stable effect), stilted and inhuman, so devoid of human warmth that when they doff their clothes to make out and have simulated sex that Marshall and company shoot with a kind of delighted "naughty child peeking between interlaced fingers" remove, it's a little surprising that you can't hear the plastic parts squeaking as they rub together. Seriously, nobody gives a good, or even halfway functional performance in the film (except for Iman, maybe, who also has the broadest major role), but even by the lowered standards here, Delany is shockingly inauthentic and forced. There is no pleasure here, nor self-reflection, nor even a particularly strong command of the English language, based on some of her line readings.

To be fair, Delany is particularly ill-served by the genial comic tone that Marshall spackles onto everything, since hers is the most serious of all roles. Aye, the comedy, that's another thing going spectacularly wrong: at its best, it's desperately obvious and corny, and sometimes it gets worse and adds tone-deaf tastelessness on top of it (e.g. O'Donnell's cringing parody of Iman's speaking voice; the running gag wherein Sheila mocks Fred by loudly describing her period). But the really awful thing is how the broad, surface-level humor collides with the frequent nudity and frank sex talk, reducing everything the braying world of particularly filthy burlesque. It's a leering, dirty movie, though I think entirely by accident; Marshall is not a leering filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination (think of how successfully he denuded the R-rated prostitute comedy Pretty Woman of any genuine sexual edge), just one who wants to make things as safe and accessible to the most basic mainstream audience. In applying that mentality to the defiantly un-mainstream world of BDSM, the perhaps inevitable effect is to titter at it with embarrassment, to linger on it and make it seem outright smutty. I have no stake in the behaviors being depicted onscreen; I do however, prefer not to have to deal with the confusing mental anguish of such featherweight jokes being steamrolled by such crass depictions of clearly artificial fucking.

All of this coalesces into a completely unacceptable, unwatchable cinematic object: only a handful of times does a joke manage to spark enough to generate any kind of energy, and it sputters out again the second that either plot clicks through another generic event, or any of the actors cough up another line through palpable self-loathing (Aykroyd), dogged determination to make anything out of this hellacious mess (O'Donnell), or just plain ineptitude (everyone else). It's a movie whose insipidity keeps being sharpened with every new wrinkle, every new line, and every new banal bit of staging; it feels like the flatness of it all should end up turning into anesthetic mush, but no, Exit to Eden keeps finding new ways to inflict pain. Just like its characters, only there is nothing all pleasurable involved in this act of sadism.

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BDSM WEEK: HELL FOR LEATHER

Like a great many films that were birthed in controversy, time has somewhat mellowed opinions towards Cruising since its notorious first release in 1980. Once a film universally condemned by gay rights groups for its apparent series of transitive arguments that male homosexuality = the leather/S&M scene = self-hating gays murdering everybody, the film has even to some degree been reclaimed as a precious time capsule offering a view into the New York leather subculture right before AIDS came along to largely eradicate it and its freewheeling casual sex. And it is beautiful that different people can see one object and interpret it different ways and take wildly different meanings from it, but I just don't see it. There are readings of the film that make it possible to take it as a deliberately cryptic mind-trip and not a foggily-expressed thriller with half-assed characteristations and a third act that collapse under the weight of its own ambiguity. But there are not, that I can imagine, any readings of the film that make it actually empowering towards gay people.

Reducing the film to its hook does absolutely nobody any favors, but let's anyway to get things rolling: somebody is murdering and dismembering homosexual men in New York, linked only by their general appearance and their frequenting of a handful of leather bars in Greenwich Village. Capt. Edelson (Paul Sorvino) of the NYPD homicide division has his job on the line if he can't crack the case, so he goes for broke: from the rank and file, he plucks up one Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), who physically resembles the victims, to go deep undercover. Specifically, Burns is to infiltrate the Village leather scene and offer himself as bait, in the hopes of flushing the killer out. But when this straight cop - who glides through Edelson's crass questioning of his sexual history, and has a female girlfriend, Nancy (Karen Allen), and everything - enters the bizarre realm of gay BDSM, handkerchief codes, and easy anonymous sex, things become far more troubling and distressing than just the ordinary stress of being undercover.

What, exactly, starts to happen in Burns's mind is exactly what Cruising remains steadily ambiguous on, but it seems in any case to begin with the sheer rampant Otherness of the leather fetishists. Writer-director William Friedkin took enormous pains to make sure that everybody understood that he wasn't making claims about gay men in particular, or even about the very narrow substrata of gay male life that serves as Cruising's backdrop, but it's hardly besmirching the film's aims or its effectiveness to suggest that it adopts a boggle-eyed confusion bordering on terror bordering on dreams in depicting the bars and clubs where Burns - hiding under the name of "John Forbes" - goes cruising for the killer. The way the camera peers around with prurient revulsion is half Alice in Wonderland, half David Lynch (or would have been, if there was a good base of David Lynch films to speak of by 1980), and while nothing in the film suggests that it, or Friedkin, or anybody else involved has any actual negative feelings about gay people per se, it's obviously the case that we are meant to feel spectacularly confused and disturbed by our plunge into that environment, which is presented with deliberately confusing editing and unearthly lighting and a very tense, darting camera. It is a waking nightmare, pure and simple.

This is not all that surprising a direction for Friedkin to take, given his career-long commitment to the idea that everything is awful, and people are corrupt and prone to wickedness, especially the ones who should most especially be held to a higher morality. The weirdness of the leather bars isn't a referendum on gayness so much as a referendum on humanity, and it's the rawness, visual distinctiveness, open sexual activity, and above all things the mainstream unfamiliarity of the setting that recommends as the backdrop for what is, ultimately, not the story of how a mysterious killer is (or isn't?) found out, but how a cop can have his identity broken and reassembled incorrectly. Undoubtedly, there's a healthy impulse to shock the squares present in the hard-R depiction of what goes on in Those Places, but it's not ultimately what Cruising is about.

What it is about can be a little difficult to parse. The most generous possible reading of the film would be to think of it as something of a riff on the more florid of the Italian gialli made in the idiom of the New Hollywood subgenre of filthy, gritty stories about street life in New York. Glance at a still frame, and you'd guess from James Contner's grainy, color-parched cinematography that it's one of the handful of attempts around the turn of the decade to desperately pretend that it was still 1975 and artfully artless urban docurealist filmmaking was still all the range. But put it in motion, pair it with the tinny, pasted-on sound design (a happy accident: the film had to work around protesters trying to ruin the shoot with noise), and Jack Nitzsche's industrial droning that passes for music, and you start to get a sense of sickly, creeping terror. It is a film whose visual and audible textures feel entirely ill, doom-ridden and death-soaked even without reference to the specifics of the plot, portraying a world of men doggedly, madly pursuing sex in the face of a well-publicised threat right in their midst, mysteriously selecting victims and killing them for their sexual behavior (one could say it predicts the AIDS crisis, but it's best, I think, not to risk adopting Cruising's corrosive cynicism as a frame to ever think about the spread of AIDS).

So the generous reading, again, is that the film is anxious to work first on the level of mood and impression reached more by Italian genre films (primarily; other examples can be found throughout Europe), to impart a sense of inexplicable awfulness, to work as a stylistic exaggeration of a cop story. Even the murder scenes, each of them a wildly different collage of violence with jarring visual discontinuity, have a certain European flair. And the blank slate Burns, an empty vessel into which we can pour all the psychoanalysis in the world only to find it all draining out immediately, would be perfect in a giallo.

That generosity stumbles a bit in facing what Cruising actually is, though. Whatever Friedkin's aims might have been - his career isn't marked by the kind of disconcerting non-realism I'm trying to make a case for, but it's not a complete out-of-nowhere curveball - the film itself is a bit more muddled than it is deliberately obscure. The biggest problem is Burns himself, or at least Pacino's performance; while there is value in giving the cop no backstory and only whispers of an interior life before it starts to be torn down by his disorienting experiences, and it's clear what Friedkin hoped to achieve by casting that actor of all actors (quintessentially masculine, but in a very delicate, breakable way, and he's weirdly "pretty" despite looking in no way effeminate), I don't see in Pacino's face the impression that he was making those connections. Instead, he seems to be largely walking, uninfected, through scenes that deny him any kind of Method hook to get into the character. And it's plainly uncomfortable - not in a way that reinforces the film's attempt to build discord, but in a way that reminds us that we're watching Al Pacino standing in front of a camera trying to decide what his character things about watching men screwing. It's alienating in the worst way for what the film wants to achieve.

There's also the whole matter of the script, which simply doesn't gel. Not in the sense that things don't make sense all the time - they don't, and a legendary cut 40 minutes is perhaps to blame - but that the film simply plops things together and expects story and meaning to emerge from the fact that they are now adjacent. It's most ineffective when it starts to flesh out the maybe-probably killer near the end, and the attempt to balance Burns's increasing fragmentation with the flat, generic crime movie staging of all the scenes finds the film tripping over rake after rake for some 30 straight minutes. But there's a nagging disconnect between how the film "feels" and what it does much earlier, such as when Burns is given a chipper gay sidekick in the form of Ted Bailey (Don Scardino), or every time Burns retrenches to the arms of the horribly underwritten Nancy, a series of gestures that don't suggest normalcy, self-delusion, or anything other than a calculated attempt to remind a skittish audience, at intervals, that the protagonist for real really likes pussy.

I want to admire the stylish madness of Cruising; but the film makes it incredibly hard to do so. It's certainly not the grotesque failure of art and morality described in 1980: as failures go, it's a tremendously interesting one. But a failure nonetheless: a failure at digging into a subculture with any kind of class or insight, of marrying a pointedly inscrutable psychodrama with Friedkin's muscly directorial style, a failure of building a basic meat-and-potatoes cop picture that fits together comfortably.

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HACK WORK

If your chief hope from the movies is that they tell well-crafted stories in a logically committed way, then no, Blackhat probably would not seem very good. The script by Morgan Davis Foehl isn't deficient, so much as it is vary puffy and disorganised, with no end to its dragged-out moments and inefficiencies, including a lengthy chunk in the back half of the film that hopscotches around Southeast Asia without any sense of narrative economy at all. And not in the "real life can be messy" way. Very strictly in the "we had way too much of a travel budget on this shoot, and decided to spend it all" way. And while it's uncharitable to say that reigning Sexiest Man Alive Chris Hemsworth isn't believable as a top-level hacker - no reason computer nerds can't be ripped and smoldering and have accents that don't quite know that they want to commit to "American" - it's a dubious bit of casting, no doubt about it.

The good news, then, is that Blackhat is a Michael Mann film, and storycraft and logical commitment are thus not as important as mood and style in providing the film's backbone. And oh, such mood and especially such style! Ever since he discovered digital cinematography, way back when with Collateral, Mann has been the American director most intently concerned with exploring how digital cinema can distinguish itself from traditional film-based cinema, rather than trying to find ways to mimic it. Sometimes, that results in Public Enemies, and we are all a little bit sad. But in the stylistic trilogy of Collateral, Miami Vice, (the first shot by Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron, the second by Beebe alone), and now this new film (shot by Stuart Dryburgh, who gets a lifetime pass from me thanks to The Piano) Mann has developed the representational possibilities of urban nights in directions that simply nobody else is interested in, while for the first time really digging in to find out how much he can push the distinctive digital look - hyper-crisp, grainless, flawless color separation - during the daylight hours as well.

If that sounds slickly inhuman, I don't suppose that I could argue otherwise. That being said, Blackhat tells a story in which its primary protagonist and primary (and largely unseen) antagonist communicate not just with each other but with the world largely through computers, and a certain willingness to replace the human with the digital is baked into it. It would be easy to look at the general scope of the plot - a team of American and Chinese government agents and outlaw hackers hunt down a cyber terrorist using his mad hacker skills to blow up nuclear facilities and destroy the stock market - and assume it's a panicky story about how too much internet can Kill Us All!!!, but if that was ever the thrust of Foehl's screenplay, it's absolutely not what Mann is interested in doing in the director's chair. The film is too laconic in its early stages, too eager to take CGI tours through the microscopic innards of computers, presented as beautiful environments of shape, surface and light, too fascinated by the guts of hacking - and, it must be said, too self-aware that "hacker blows up nuclear plants" is pretty much total bullshit - to sensationalise things. The movie ends up at 133 minutes, not because so much happens, but because what does happen isn't leaned on very hard.

So back to my point, which is that Blackhat is a film, to an extent, about computer realities replacing human realities, and the unmistakable digital sheen throughout the film helps to give that undercurrent some more weight. It's not a completely post-human thriller: it has the director's characteristic interest in male codes of conduct as executed by noble wicked hacker Hathaway (Hemsworth) and Chinese military officer Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom), cybercrimes specialist and Hathway's former roommate. With the wrinkle of Dawai's sister Chen Lien (Tang Wei) serving as Hathaway's love interest, while also being unusually well fleshed-out and autonomous for a woman in a Mann film. But the characters are never really more than the sum of their tropes; and that strands even as gifted a performer as Viola Davis in a part that doesn't require nearly her chops for such basic-level "tough guy fed" sarcasm.

Ultimately, then, it's definitely the case that the aesthetic matters more than the character drama, and the mechanics of the plot matter the least. So whatever hierarchy you require to find your movies satisfying, take that into account. But take into account well that the film's aesthetic manipulations are terrific: with precise control of focus and lighting and framing, this turns into a terrific meditation on bodies in motion through spaces, or just as often, bodies remaining firmly in place; it is a film where, late in the game, a shot of Hemsworth pointing a gun off-camera matter far more for its incredibly shallow focus on the gun barrel, leaving the movie star a blurry mass, than for where that gun is pointing or why. It's a film where the editing calls attention to shapes and colors and positions int he frame, more than it necessarily guides the plot. Primarily, the film is about being a physical human engaging with a synthetic, digital world; this is why the comically handsome Hemsworth, whose lean muscles and burly arms insist on his his flesh-and-blood presence even as they make him feel distinctly unreal, is actually an effective anchor for the computer-dominated narrative.

As a story, or even as an action thriller, it's not necessarily the most satisfying thing in the world, though when the same style is redirected to action setpieces, it can be awfully good: there's a gun battle following a slow-motion explosion that's just the most terrific thing. And even without being conventionally satisfying, there's something I found to be gorgeously magnetic about Blackhat: it immerses one into a mood and atmosphere without feeling the need to ground that mood in anything but itself, and it looks beautiful doing it. The ice-cold reception the movie has enjoyed suggests that this approach isn't for everybody, or even most people, but for myself, I found it to be totally absorbing from first to last frame, and a perfect cure for the Januarys.

8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR

Having been shot in color and on media that doesn't look like a 30-year-old VHS camcorder, telling something that resembles a story pretty much no matter how you look at it, and gliding in at a whimsical four hours and ten minutes, Norte, the End of History certainly earns its reputation as director Lav Diaz's easiest movie.* This means it's also probably in the top 300 easiest films released commercially in the United States in 2014. It's downright scrutable in fact, it's basically just a Filipino riff on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and who doesn't like a good literary adaptation?

The Dostoevsky angle is useful primarily in that it lets a viewer get a handle on a project that's other so broad and ambitious that it would be hard to know where the hell to start with it. But it's also reductive in the extreme to try and use that as a shortcut to "solve" a movie that's as minutely obsessed with class distinctions in the Philippines in the 21st Century, the political history of that country's radical intelligentsia, the impact of modern communications technology, and the representational capacity of cinema, as it is with the moral questions that could have consumed a 19th Century Russian novelist. Although those questions matter, too. The fact of the matter is, Norte is a film of wild ambitions, considering as many topics with as much complexity as it dares to. And with that much running time to play with, it gets to dare a lot.

The content seems simple enough: Fabian (Sid Lucero) is a law student, celebrated by his social circle as the most sophisticated thinker among them, and when we meet him, he's holding court on moral and legal theory. Something he apparently does quite a lot of, getting himself good and worked up about the depravity littered throughout the history of the Philippines, declaring that those who deserve to be punished have not been and that social justice shall never be achieved, and the sort of passionate fiery declarations typical of smart students. It so happens that he's borrowed money from the local loan shark, Magda (Mae Paner), and she's starting to get antsy about him paying her back. Also starting to feel Magda's angry pinch is the extremely poor Joaquin (Archie Alemania), trying to get a business off the ground to provide for his wife Eliza (Angeli Bayani) and their children. The desperate Joaquin is a bit more mercurial in his frustrations with Magda, leading to an angry, loud, public shouting match. But he simmers down. The outwardly calm Fabian, however, ends up exploding with rage and murdering Magda. And with perfect dramatic inevitability, Joaquin is sent to prison for the crime. And thus does the bulk of the movie follow the three strands thus set up: Eliza's exhausting attempts to survive by any possible means, Joaquin's eye-opening experiences in the Filipino prison system, and Fabian's descent into madness as he finds himself a prime symptom of the very arbitrary amorality and failure of accountability that he has spent his academic career decrying.

Befitting an (uncredited) adaptation of 19th Century social issues literature, Norte is greatly serious about explicating its themes under the assumption that the audience is smart and willing to think about the state of society, and its refusal to make good on its promises (the second half of the title is a fairly obvious, and entirely sardonic, reference to the "end of history" musings in the West when Russian Communism finally collapsed, and which the 21st Century has thoroughly shown to be pie-eyed optimism of the hollowest sort). But Diaz and his superb team don't rest on the script (which the director co-wrote with Rody Vera) to do all the intellectual heavy lifting; and given the enormous length of the film, that's certainly for the best. An unrelentingly idea-driven Norte would be an enormous slog, and even granting the more generous standards offered to this kind of long-take, wide-shot cinema, the film proves to be impressively full of energy and kineticism. It's brilliantly shot: cinematographer Larry Manda and Diaz manipulate their images on two axes, wide and deep, to explore the characters and the places containing them. It's impressive enough that the anamorphic widescreen is used so smartly, combining groups of people, and isolating individuals; but where Norte shines is in its exceptional use of deep focus - or, as needed, the absence of it. The ingenuity of moments like the murder of Magda, boldly combining off-screen space with careful management of where characters and shapes reside relative to the camera, is one of the best individual sequence of the year, but impressive shadowbox-like staging is very much the norm, rather than the exception.

The film's color palette is quite fantastic, as well; given Diaz's success with black-and white films, it's a little surprising, maybe, that the contrasts of blue water, pale sky, brown and green land, and the sickly wash of the prison interiors, would be so confidently employed in directing the viewer's emotions and engagement within scenes. And, too, for a director so accustomed to static shots - and Norte is made up largely of static shots - the handful of punctuation marks of camera movement are brilliant as well (between the deep staging and the cunning about what camera movement means when it's only sparingly employed, Norte feels something like an heir to Ozu Yasujiro, though for different ends).

The formalism in the film is very strictly used as a function of the storytelling and philosophy, mind you. This is very much a movie about Grand Ideas, and the images primarily serve to situate us relative to the characters, their words, and their actions, such that we either feel involved or distant in individual moments of thought or revelation (the way that the imprisoned Joaquin is framed, and Alemania's performance, suggest at times a modernist update of a medieval martyr painting into cinematic form). It's a complex and elaborate and extremely precise piece of filmmaking, that is to say, but one that's intuitively watchable and philosophically accessible far more than its on-paper content would suggest. I'm not a damn fool, and I won't go so far as to suggest that Norte is "fun", but four hours of academic moralising could be a hell of a lot more opaque than this crafty, organic film presents them as being, and the result is one of the year's best films, but better still, one of its smartest.

9/10

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GONE TO POT

Comparing Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice - the first Pynchon novel to be filmed, no less - with the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski is absolutely the laziest conceivable opening gambit the reviewer of the former film could engage in, but it has the merit of being inevitable. Both films are shaggy mysteries which are more interested in capturing a vibe than in carefully laying out the actual mechanics of the plot (though neither is insoluble, despite Inherent Vice having already picked up that reputation); both are stoner comedies for sober people; both are set in southern California. Both pivot on characters whose attitude towards life, rules, the Establishment, and drug use was forged in the '60s and left them stranded once the '60s ended; The Big Lebowski, set in the early 1990s, plays this for fish-out-of-water comedy, while Inherent Vice, set in 1970, allows a hint of melancholy to pervade its depiction of the death spasms of the counterculture.

The biggest difference between them, and it is the reason I have really bothered comparing them at all, is that at 117 minutes, The Big Lebowski is the longest that its loose-limbed hang-out attitude and laconic comedy can conceivably support (it is, in fact, one of the only Coen films that I think could do with some merciless trimming); whereas Inherent Vice is 148 minutes long, and no. Just no. There's nothing about this film that demand that kind of space and certainly nothing that benefits from it. Anderson hasn't been a particularly disciplined filmmaker at any point in his career - the only one of his films that absolutely cannot be any shorter is Punch-Drunk Love, which also happens to be his only other comedy - but this breaks new ground in dithering around pointlessly.

That being said, the parts of Inherent Vice that work are pretty terrific stuff: Anderson, his cast, and his crew have thrown themselves into the task of recreating their fictitious corner of 1970 Los Angeles with aplomb, resulting in some of the most invitingly tangible sets (designed by David Crank), costumes (Mark Bridges), and even hairpieces of the year: it has the scruffy, organic feeling like some lost corner of America that was permitted to rest unchanging for four decades, until the filmmakers came along to document it. In the lead role of "Doc" Sportello, well-practiced marijuana smoker and surprisingly dogged private eye, Joaquin Phoenix provides a splendid companion piece to his performance in Anderson's last film, The Master, once again capturing a particular moment in the history of American anomie with miraculous precision, this time playing his character's alienation from the mainstream with warmth and self-knowledge rather than as a horrifying blank. As one of the only people to get an appreciable amount of screentime, and certainly the only person for whom that screentime tops one-fifth of the total film, Phoenix's attitude and ability to inhabit the "whatever, man" flow of the befuddling story with its low stakes is the anchor for the viewer to find a way in. And thus he does.

All of which is as much to say: if Inherent Vice was just a simple little shaggy dog story, content to let us chill with Doc and enjoy his worldview, it could be great; even as a detective comedy, it could still be pretty great (The Big Lebowski proves that), with the unkempt storytelling ironically commenting on the complexity of the story and Doc's ability to remain true to himself and his values while being buffeted by social change funneled through this one crime story. It's certainly a solid enough riff on film noir, with its sardonic treatment of sex, its panoply of warped character names, and the procedural narration delivered by one of Doc's buddies, Sortilège (Joanna Newsom), with a twangy lack of urgency that ends up being the film's subtlest joke. But Inherent Vice is not remotely simple, containing two full acts that it doesn't require (for all I know they might kill on the page - I haven't read the book - but the pacing of a novel and the pacing of a film aren't identical, or even comparable), and yo-yoing between characters and situations without stitching them together. Coupled with the fact that the film is a who's who of distracting cameos - Josh Brolin and Owen Wilson have large enough parts to feel like characters, but Reese Witherspoon, Bencio Del Toro, Jena Malone, Martin Short, Maya Rudolph, and Eric Roberts are only some of the people who come in and out so quickly that by the time they're gone, one is still processing that they showed up in the first place - Inherent Vice never feels like more than a collection of individual anecdotes assembled into a narrative framework. Given the story, and especially given the attitude of laid-back disinterest with which the film approaches its story, that's not even an inappropriate strategy for following Doc around, but what it certainly doesn't do is make the two and a half hours feel and swifter. And it kills the sense of comedy; the longer Inherent Vice goes on, the harder it becomes to laugh at what turns out to be a fairly small repertoire of jokes.

Still, the film's charms and strengths are undeniable and they're certainly not very common. The lusciously grainy celluloid cinematography, by Robert Elswit, isn't all that complicated, but the roughness it adds to the film gives it a sense of period-appropriate decay, even though there's nothing about the lighting or framing that necessarily states "this looks like '70s cinematography". The use of music is, unsurprisingly for this director, right on point: a collection of familiar but not overused singer-songwriter pieces that enhance the zoned out feel of being stoned that the movie has such a fun time evoking in such quiet ways. And the dialogue, which I gather to be taken directly from Pynchon in most places, has a snappy bite that draws out some great line deliveries from the whole ensemble, though Brolin, as an irritable cop and sometime antagonist, is pretty undeniably having the most fun chomping his way through the script.

It's all awfully enjoyable, breezy and melancholy and neatly attuned to how culture changes and what happens to the people that get left behind when it does; but none of it is enhanced by the bloated last hour, or the logy overall pace. It's simply not deep enough to justify its own enormousness, and the one thing that a lark like this absolutely cannot survive being is boring; that's exactly what eventually happens to it.

7/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: WITH A VENGEANCE

Nothing in the description of Blue Ruin, the second feature and critical breakthrough of writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, makes it sound like much. And, if were are being mercilessly honest, that’s because there's really not that much to it. But it’s the very definition of a thing that's more than the sum of its parts: a stock revenge thriller put in a blender with a stock regional indie, and somehow, the alchemical reaction that occurs from that unusual but not exactly groundbreaking collision of tones results in a film of uncommon, gripping freshness. It's a lean piece of thriller filmmaking with a potent human core, the kind that encourages one to think about making some comparisons that could be awfully dangerous if you let them get out of control. A translation into film of the raw-nerve prose of Ernest Hemingway, that's one; or the thing you get if you let David Gordon Green direct a Samuel Fuller movie.

There's certainly a lot of the abstraction and wordless character building of Green at his best in the film's early going, when it introduces us to our protagonist, Dwight Evans (Macon Blair). He's a dirty drifter with an enormous thatch of facial hair and an animalistic knack for keeping himself alive outside of the normal channels of civilisation; Blair's performance makes him absolutely captivating without begging for our sympathy or downplaying the degree to which this is a person that you would probably find very uncomfortable to be around. This beginning sequence sets a high bar that, in truth, Blue Ruin does not reach again; it never relies so fearlessly on purely visual storytelling and the inductive editing that pull us into the curious life of this outsider by having to do all the work ourselves to figure him out.

When we do, eventually, figure him out - he shaves off his beard to signify the shift into more conventional genre territory - we have found that Dwight survived a years-ago family tragedy that left him and his sister Sam (Amy Hargreaves) on the outs with one another; he reaches out to contact her after being informed by a police representative that Wade Cleland (Sandy Barnett), the man responsible for their trauma, is out of prison. More specifically, he reaches out to her after he's killed that man in a gas station restroom, and comes to realise that this puts him and Sam and Sam's kid at risk from further retaliation by the Cleland clan. And thus begins the process by which this rather simple man, a mere dumpy schlub to look at him, wills himself into becoming a hardened killer, driven only by vengeance and the desire to protect what's left of his family.

It's all much more mournful in execution than exhilarating; we get to liking Dwight, and there's not a single Cleland who isn’t a vile shitstain, but there’s not any triumphalism on his part or the movie’s when he stomps down the path of righteous anger. Just a sad acceptance of how easy it is for a not-killer to kill, in the right circumstances. Saulnier treats this all with rough-hewn efficiency, taking no interest in stopping off for moralising or soul-searching: it is a brutal procedural at heart, present with a curt lacks of sentiment tempered by a surprising vein of wry comedy. The characters all seem vaguely aware of the arbitrary absurdity of the path they've thrown themselves into, and treat it with an acerbic bemusement that suits it. Particularly Ben (Devin Ratray), a high school acquaintance of Dwight's - the film does not imply that "friend" would an appropriate word - a pudgy gun expert who briefly serves as the film's kind of sort of Greek Chorus, offering wisdom and moral context while also indicating through his tone and peculiar bluntness that the whole matter of Blue Ruin is on the fucked-up side, all things considered.

The loose, even ungainly vibe of the occasional humor meshes well with the film's overall fuzzy DIY feel; this is American Indie Low-Fi through and through, with all of that styles strengths and none of its most debilitating weaknesses. Long-time readers will perhaps recall my seething hatred of unkempt sound recording techniques in low-budget filmmaking, and will hopefully share in my gladness that Blue Ruin's sound is as sharp and clear as the cinematography is hazy and diffuse - deliberately, I am sure. It is a particular strength of the film, in fact, that it depicts its rural Virginian locations with such scruffiness; it grounds the movie in a sense of physical actuality that helps to make the florid generic gestures of the story seem more meaningfully tied to the characters and their world. I have never been to the part of the world which Blue Ruin wraps around its cast, but the film offers, overall, the same half-impressionist, half-realist appeal of something like Green’s Undertow.

For all the ways that Blue Ruin does a good job of complicating and deepening the revenge movie framework it lives in, though, it's important not to miss the forest for the trees: it’s also a really damn good revenge movie. In part because of the same things that make it a good regional indie film: the leanness of it brings the same kind of deliberateness to the violence that it brings to the landscapes. The early sequence that finds Dwight killing Wade is a marvel at showing the lingering, awful way that human beings die, with more blood than seems possible, and blocking of Wade’s final twitches that makes it one of the most truly unpleasant death scenes in recent cinema. And this is clearly meant to evoke not just disgust in the viewer, but an awareness of Dwight’s own disgust at what he’s done, and what he will now have to do more of. Even as much as it makes no pretense to liking any of the Clelands, Blue Ruin doesn’t pretend that they’re deaths are anything but ugly and wasteful.

So by "really damn good revenge movie", I do not, to be sure, mean that it's a rousing piece of red meat for the action crowd (even when it has the wiry tension of a no-bullshit thriller, it never comes close to being an action movie). I mean that it showcases the hardness of revenge on the man executing it, and the senselessness of it, but also depicting it in a way that allows us to view him with sympathy and understanding for why he commits to this path even when it's clear to him that he's not equipped to be an indefatigable assassin. At its most basic, this is a human-oriented retelling of the boilerplate tropes of a revenge thriller, giving us the best of both worlds, and landing with a forcefulness that makes it far more memorable and interesting than its familiar ingredients ought to permit.

8/10

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