BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE LIVES OF RAPPERS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Straight Outta Compton is a full-on biopic of N.W.A., the world's most dangerous group. Rather than visit one of history's other rap biopics - because they're pretty much all dreadful - let's take a peek at something of a freer, more impressionistic pseudobiopic of its subject and lead actor.

History is littered with movies in which popular music stars attempt to show off their acting chops, often playing a variation on themselves, and the results are disastrous. The list of films that are A) impressive as cinema, and B) demonstrate that their stars have anything resembling screen presence or acting talent is a brief one: 1964's A Hard Day's Night, with Richard Lester directing the Beatles to heights that defy the project's obvious "let's cash in on the teenybopper!" impulses.

That said, A Hard Day's Night is so fucking good that it has encouraged generations of filmmakers and pop stars to try again, almost always to no damn good effect at all. So this much credit must absolutely go to 2002's 8 Mile, starring Marshall "Eminem" Mathers as an impressionistic gloss on himself in the mid-'90s: it's a pretty strong movie. Director Curtis Hanson leads a terrific below-the-line team including the great cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, editors Craig Kitson and Jay Rabinowitz, and costume designer Mark Bridges, in the creation of a striking vision of urban decrepitude embracing and nurturing its inhabitants. Meanwhile, the director fills out the margins with wonderful performances by Mekhi Phifer, Brittany Murphy, Michael Shannon, and Anthony Mackie in a virtually nonexistent role that still benefits enormously from his extraordinary ability to control the camera with his scowling face.

So that handles A), though this is not a Lester-esque explosion of inventive style (on the contrary, the film subscribes to a stock-issue "let's film urban poverty" aesthetic, it just happens to execute that aesthetic tremendously well). It does not, however, do well by B). Eminem doesn't embarrass himself in the way that Britney Spears did in the repellent Crossroads earlier in 2002, or Mariah Carey did in the insipid Glitter the year prior. He's perfectly unexceptional, with a fairly limited palette of facial expressions that leave the impression that his character doesn't feel feelings; he looks uncannily like Elijah Wood much of the time, and that's all it took me to long helplessly a re-casting in which Eminem could be taken out of the movie that only exists because he is in it (also, "how much better this would be with Elijah Wood in the lead role!" is a pretty awful place to be in).

Eminem's alter ego in the script written by Scott Silver is Jimmy Smith Jr, an automobile factory worker in Detroit whose life is in that singular state of perpetual collapse that only true poverty can create. As the film begins, he has just moved back in with his mother Stephanie (Kim Basinger), whom he resentfully tolerates, his kid sister Lily (Chloe Greenfield) who is unique among living human beings in having the ability to make him feel joy and love, and his mom's abusive wretch of a boyfriend, Greg (Shannon). When he's not slacking off at his job or skulking around his house with undisguised disgust, he pursues his great calling, freestyle rap; he has immense talent but no confidence at all, and at a rap battle emceed by his best friend Future (Phifer), performing as "B-Rabbit", he chokes completely, humiliating himself in front of virtually everyone whose opinion he cares about, and earning the disdain of Papa Doc (Mackie), who lambastes Jimmy as nothing but white trash trying ineffectually to muscle into the African-American territory of rap.

The film is not, in truth, very plot-heavy; there's a bit of back and forth involving Jimmy and Papa Doc's rap gang, the Leaders of the Free World (I'm looking for some kind of irony with Papa Doc's name, and I can't figure out if it's actually there), and the danger in which it puts Jimmy and his friends; there's a B-plot in which Jimmy's relationship to a young woman he meets accidentally one day, Alex (Murphy), helps to drive him to stop being such a resentful lump and take some ownership of his actions. But this is mostly a hang-out movie, of a particularly bleak stripe: the bulk of the film is scenes of Jimmy simply inhabiting his world and bumping against the people in it, with his character arc slowly coalescing as we observe the minute shifts in his behavior from moment to moment, rather than big dramatic shifts that come as the result of melodramatic incidents. The film doesn't even end melodramatically: the film eschews the rags-to-riches arc of Eminem's own life in favor of ending with the triumph of Jimmy being ready to seriously grapple with his life and nascent music career, rather than having actually become a success anywhere but in the tiny world he has always inhabited.

It's a refreshing way to build a story that is ghoulishly overfamiliar in nearly all its particulars, and it leaves 8 Mile feeling like it has earned its emotional claims on the audience, rather than just blindly insisting that we should be moved because of the poor. Parts of it are undernourished, beyond a doubt: the most troubling is the film's decision to steadfastly not think about race beyond Papa Doc's mockery of Jimmy for his whiteness (though it's not the most absurd "let's pretend that nobody is having conversations about Eminem's place in politics and culture" moment: that would be when he stops the film cold to explain why it's not okay to make fun of people for being gay), and while Murphy is utterly incandescent in the role of Alex, bringing a fire to the cold grey movie that emphasises better than anything else just what the absolute, burning desire to get the hell out of there looks like, there's no denying that the romantic subplot is the one that the film has by far the least desire to do anything with.

The biggest case of undernourishment, though, is Jimmy himself, owing mostly to Eminem's fine but basic performance, and the central relationship with his loved, hated mother, owing to Basinger's. The common complaint against her when the film was brand new was that she was too beautiful for the role of a broke drunk, and that's true; but it's also true of Murphy, and she didn't have a problem overcoming it. Basinger, though, simply retrenches to shticky performances of grinding poverty, with director Hanson failing to draw out the same once-in-a-lifetime brilliance that made her so shockingly potent in their previous collaboration, L.A. Confidential. "Shit. We're be-ing evicted. God damn it" she intones at one moment of crisis, and the effect is not "woman who is too far gone into the bottle to have human responses", which might have saved it; it's "didn't think through the right emotional tone for this most important scene". Her onscreen son, meanwhile, has a confrontation with his possibly-pregnant ex-girlfriend (Taryn Manning), and he stares and speaks at her like a Scandinavian tourist dropped into the heart of Detroit with only a tourist's dictionary to get by, so perhaps wildly unacceptable line readings are genetic within the film or something.

There's an absolute upper limit to how good the film can be when its two most important roles are filled by its two most disappointing actors, but 8 Mile comes remarkably close to that ceiling. Its depiction of urban squalor is right on-point without being so realistically hellish that it no longer makes sense to locate an unresolved Horatio Alger fable there; Prieto shoots it with moody, almost horror movie shafts of light and shadow that make it all look interesting without glamorising it, and the frequently impressionistic editing - which starts right from the bravura opening sequence, which muddies the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music as Jimmy practices his rapping, while the editors keep flashing from point to point around him - keeps our attention on the physical environment as an object and a force, not just the backdrop for the characters.

The film's depiction of urban Michigan is stellar, visually; it could, of course, be a bit more rigorous sociologically, but given what the film easily could have been, I am inclined to be excited for any little victories. Ultimately, the takeaway is that all this is a touch too easy and a touch shallow, which is far, far better than I'd have ever expected from it: a narcissistic autobiography of a non-actor is one of the most surefire no-win situations in cinema, and that Hanson, his crew, and most of his cast were able to haul this into something that's at least somwhat admirable is a huge triumph.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE PLAY VIDEO GAMES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the notorious insta-flop Pixels is an adventure about a group of competition-level video game players. It's also pandering to '80s nostalgia, so let's go ahead and travel back to that decade

The dominant criticism of The Wizard when it was new in 1989 was that it was transparently a commercial for Nintendo, crudely fashioned into a simulacrum of a feature film, and the idea was this was somehow a filthy trick to play on the children in its target audience. Having been exactly the right age with exactly the right interests to care, I would like to promise those worried adults: we knew. The fact that it was a commercial was in fact exactly the draw - this was the movie which would offer North America its first opportunity to see footage from Super Mario Bros. 3, and it was advertised on precisely that basis. If you were Nintendo-playing grade schooler in '89, this was about on par with Christ returning to play Himself in a movie before inaugurating the end times. That being said, despite being the exact sort of person who this movie was made for, I never bothered seeing it - I mean, hell, it was a feature-length commercial.

A quarter of a century later,* The Wizard looks no less like a commercial, and its single-minded commitment to the style and attitude that children of the late 1980s perceived as cool leaves it feeling very much like a communication from some alien species. The last half-hour of the movie, in particular, is an incomprehensible frenzy of sound and noise and color that feel like a bad acid trip. Or perhaps a really, really good acid trip.

Not that you would know this at first, for among the film's many peculiarities is its earnest desire for almost its entire first hour to function as a mordant domestic drama. The opening image, underneath the credits, is a telephoto shot of nine-year-old Jimmy Woods (Luke Edwards) walking along a featureless desert road, arriving nowhere and doing it slowly. It's a dead ringer for something out of a '70s movie, and it's frankly rather presumptuous for an '80s kids film of any sort, let alone one that has every intention of trying to sell us video games. And this will very much continue on as the film sketches its rather bitter family scenario: Jimmy is the autistic son of the divorced Sam Woods (Beau Bridges) and Christine Bateman (Wendy Phillips), the latter of whom has since remarried a snappish control freak (Sam McMurray), and retained custody of Jimmy. Having finally concluded that he's too difficult for his and everyone else's own good, the Batemans have made the hard choice to put him in an institution. This makes Sam unhappy, but it really pisses off his second son, Corey (Fred Savage), from his first marriage, who decides to spring Jimmy from the institution and run away from home with him. The Batemans hire a sleazy bounty hunter, Putnam (Will Seltzer), to track the boys down, while Sam, anxious to keep Corey from their punitive hands (we are assured that Christine, in her days as Corey's stepmother, didn't even feign affection for the boy), takes his eldest son, Corey's full brother Nick (Christian Slater), on a trip with him to track the boys down.

So far, so good: a little over-plotted, and you need to pay a bit of attention to catch all of the nuances of how these people are related and what they think about each other, but if the world actually required a serious '70s style domestic drama about the ugly fallout from a divorce done up as an adventurous road movie for children - and I really do not suppose that it did - this is good enough to get the job done. But this is merely the overture; the warm-up, even. From here, thing start to get enormously weird, and they do it fast. Trying to buy a bus ticket, Corey and Jimmy encounter Haley (Jenny Lewis), a girl Corey's age who seems to be some kind of '30s Depression-comedy vagabond in the body of a 1989 13-year-old. It's astonishing. She throws out punny, cutting quips, delivered at a rapid-fire clip in a snarky tone that the young actor is visibly confused by herself; it's like director Todd Holland took her aside on the first day of shooting to demand that she play her character as Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and refused thereafter to listen to any of her questions as to what the hell that meant.

As the quick-witted dame with a con artist's soul, it's Haley who figures out how to monetise Jimmy's newly discovered skill at video games, by betting against businessmen and tough skaterboarders and the like. It's at this point that it's impossible to stop noticing that The Wizard is no less than Rain Man with children, and thus at this point The Wizard turns into a mostly surreal experience. Not totally surreal; we still have to get to the final act for that. Before that happens, our plucky trio has to cross paths with Lucas (Jackey Vinson), the ballingest video game hot shot in the Southwest, who introduces them to the holiness that is the Nintendo Power Glove, and after quietly slipping around in the background, with a little music from Super Mario Bros. 2 here, or a little flash of the NES controller there, the movie explodes into its truest self, as a shameless plug for buying things from Nintendo, playing Nintendo, idealising Nintendo as the pinnacle achievement of human technology and society. For the Power Glove. One of the most notoriously awful video game peripherals ever built. "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad" the boy says with the self-satisfaction of a dreadful yuppie from the era's sex comedies, and it at least half of that is the truest statement in this entire movie.

The shameless wallowing in Nintendo prowess and ownership as the keenest of all social dominance markers, plus Holland and screenwriter David Chisholm's constant inability to treat this kids' movie like a kids movie, forcing the poor child actors into positions of pantomiming adult behavior in their conversations about video games, or sometimes accusing innocent bystanders of being pedophiles ("He! Touched! My! Breast!"), plus the dazzlingly dated costumes and hairstyles, are all enough to make this an extravagantly weird viewing experience, now that we're a generation past its sell-by date. But we're still not to the part where the movie goes off a cliff. That happens at Universal Studios Hollywood, where Video Armageddon, the nation's premier Nintendo gaming competition, is held. For starters, the set of Video Armageddon looks like a combination of the boiler room on an aircraft carrier and an athletic shoe store. Second, the event's announcer (Steven Grives) declaims lines in a manner not compatible with any dialect of English, dancing about and grinning manically like he is the actual Satan and this is some particularly tacky corner of Hell. Third, there's not even a cursory relationship between the proclamations of gameplay and points scored announced over the loudspeaker, and what we can actually see with our own damn eyes.

In short, what is most mystifying about The Wizard isn't that it's a movie set up as a feature-length ad for video games despite being welded onto an emotionally lacerating domestic drama: it's that it's an ad for video games that makes video games look like a peyote hallucination, throwing fragments of game imagery up on screen in ways that make the games themselves seem like jagged, incomprehensible masses of arbitrary movement and the players all puppets in the grip of some helpless madness. It makes videogaming look like the most unpleasant, frenzied activity on Earth, better suited to punishment than entertainment

It's shockingly bad, and coupled with the enormous tonal shifts that happen throughout the movie, it feels basically like The Wizard has an aneurysm right as we're watching it. This is an appallingly jagged and messy film, ugly to look at and saddled with narrative developments that simply happen because the film knows that its end point has to be a video game competition. Everything within it is incongruous to everything else. For those who grew up in the video game culture it depicts, I think it probably serves as a fascinating enough snapshot to serve as a kind of hell-dimension nostalgia trip; but for everyone, its completely batshit insane concept of what human beings are like and what kind of physical spaces the inhabit makes it a thoroughly mesmerising So Bad It's Good spectacular.

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FANCY STARTING A WAR ON SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY

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

If there exists a more pleasant, humane story of the constant horror of life during the London Blitz than John Boorman's Hope and Glory, of 1987, I am thoroughly unfamiliar with it and frankly don't know that I could even imagine it. This is the source of the film's charm, which is considerable, and also its rather distinct limitations as a drama, which are only a bit less considerable. It belongs to the same genre that Terence Davies would later mine so effectively, the one where British filmmakers direct pseudo-autobiographical snapshots of childhood over a period of a few months, linking scenes and events more along a thematic and emotional spine than a particularly narrative one. Done at its best, this can result in piercing, frightfully intelligent depictions of domestic behavior. At its worst, it can result in formless blobs of ideas that get dumped on the screen without any rhyme or reason. Hope and Glory is at neither of those poles, though it tends towards the side of the best; its strongest moments land like small explosions of human insight filtered through an amount of nostalgia that's not enough to discolor the truthfulness inherent to the moment. Its weakest moments, meanwhile, are easy to dismiss as "cute", which is still better than one can say for plenty of superficially similar movies.

One thing it doesn't have, though, is much in the way of a sustained plot. It begins in late 1939, when the United Kingdom officially declared war on Germany, though it smooshes time together; the opening scene involves the characters watching an air raid preparedness newsreel, war is declared in the second scene, and the Blitz of September, 1940, feels like it starts at most just a week or so later. The film's focal point in all of this is the Rohan family, with father Clive (David Hayman) leaving to fight early on and dropping all the responsibility for keeping things safe and stable to his wife Grace (Sarah Miles). And this she does, though it's beyond one woman's emotional and physical resources to control every moment in the lives of her three children in the middle of a literal, actual war zone, which means that teenge daughter Dawn (Sammi Davis), little Sue (Geraldine Muir), and middle child, 10-year-old Bill (Sebastian Rice-Edwards) spent a lot of time fucking around the bombed-out corners of London with the other young folks they can find who didn't make the trip to safety in the country. Our main entry point to this world is Bill, a surrogate for the writer-director though he's a few years older than Boorman was at the same point in time; but we're not necessarily limited to his understanding of things. In fact, one of the film's greatest achievements is to play the goofy insouciance of a boy who has no real context whatsoever for all the grave developments happening around him against the audience's blunter awareness of the inherent tension of the Blitz.

Even in that case, though, the film's more nuanced than just "kids are innocent, adults are terrified"; one of those charms I mentioned up top is that Hope and Glory spends a fair amount of time watching Grace and the other grown-ups she interacts with on a regular basis, and those interactions are frequently of a light-hearted, pragmatic register, with people acknowledging the basic seriousness of their situation but not forgetting to go about the business of everyday life. In part, we can assume, because this is their way of clinging to a basic foundational reality that can be built upon assuming the godforsaken war ever ends; but it's the film's good sense to allow, equally, the impression that it's because life does go on, even in wartime, and stiff-upper-lip sloganeering and weepily earnest homefront melodramas notwithstanding (we see one such melodrama when the family goes to the movies; Bill pantomimes his disinterest as baldly as his mother has a whole-body reaction to the sad tales of brave men leaving their women for the greater good), the petty details of normal life can't entirely turn themselves off just because of a little bit of bombing is happening across the street.

The intersection of utterly uneventful daily life with the chaos of war is exactly the heart of Hope and Glory, which depicts basically two kinds of events: ones in which the war happens, but the characters respond with basically quotidian feelings (my favorite such moment: "Drop it on Mrs Evans, she's a cow!" prays Dawn, when the bombs come too close to the Rowan house), and ones in which life plays out almost completely without reference to the war at all. It exists as a literal backdrop, scene in the distance and notable only for forming a ready-made playground of crumbling bricks and timber for the local kids to play at the very important business of having nothing in particular to do and doing it with grand intent, with all the fixed lack of continuity of childhood. Thus can a sequence in which Bill and his gang bribe a neighborhood girl to let them all look down her panties immediately transition into them goofing around like it never happened, the instant that they get bored with the mysteries of sex.

It would be inaccurate to charge Hope and Glory with being shapeless, though it comes awfully close. It has internal chronology, and in Dawn's sexual run-in with a handsome Canadian airman, it has a distinctive plot that spits echoes forwards and backwards. What it does not have, and probably couldn't have, is a particularly strong, clear spine: it is after all tightly yoked to Bill, who perceives something of an eternal present, and who doesn't actually know a great deal more at the end of the movie than he does at the beginning of it. Though he does have a broader range of experiences. It would be unfair in the extreme to call this a "flaw" within the movie, since it's virtually a requirement of the scenario. Still, it leaves the film awfully shaggy; Hope and Glory runs a bit less than two hours, but there's no clear reason it could end at 80 minutes, or stretch on to two and a half hours. It's just an accumulation of scenes, and the particular scenes involved don't build to any sort crescendo in and of themselves. The ending, in particular, has no sense of summary; it just hits a point where the movie runs out of variations on a theme and so excuses itself.

The overall feeling is one of indulgence; Boorman adopts the position of a man eagerly reeling off story after story about his youth, and it's not very long before you realise that the joy he takes in telling stories overwhelms any particular reason to tell those stories. As far as Boorman's indulgences as a director, it's far better to have this than his extraordinarily batty Zardoz of 1974, or the petulant childishness of his point-missing Exorcist II: The Heretic. Still, his best movies, which I think to be unambiguously if not objectively Point Blank and Deliverance, are the ones where he has the strictest framework to operate in, with clear and relentless momentum connecting scenes. Compared to those, Hope and Glory is shambling compared to those, and the obvious personal love the director has for his material doesn't inject it with any deeper urgency of purpose.

Still, obvious love justifies itself, to a certain degree, and the precision of the characters and the performances that Boorman draws out of his actors (most impressively the allegedly uncooperative Rice-Edwards) make Hope and Glory a pleasure even when when it's a bit pokey and aimless. Miles, in particular, is absolutely terrific in a low-key role that requires all of her best work to be done in the margins and between the lines. Her terror at being alone, her regret for the life that she didn't live, her feeling of simultaneous protection towards and alienation from her children, all make hers easily the most interesting performance of the most complex character in the movie. The kids are all a bit more elemental than she is, and a bit more naturalistically "there" than visibly acted; taken all as a whole, it's a warm, generous, and palpably accurate portrayal of people being people in the absence of any real narrative pressure. That is not anywhere near my favorite register for a movie to inhabit, but even I have to admit that this is a strong example of the form.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: NEW HOLLYWOOD HORROR - THE DEVIL INSIDE

1968, the bright dividing line between contemporary and classic horror - in the autumn of that year, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead brought terrifyingly explicit violence and gore to the genre and things change forever. But that groundbreaking horror classic was beat to theaters by a few months by a film whose seismic impact on the genre was just about as different as it possibly could have been. Rosemary's Baby - for of course that is the earlier release to which I refer - is subtle, classy, refined, and restrained in all the places that NotLD is raw, loud and punishing, but it too showed that horror could be something nobody had tried since at least Val Lewton's tenure at RKO: it is a horror film that's also a smart, urban drama for and about adults, a deliberate consideration of human behavior under extreme stress that just happens to involve a coven of Satanist witches. It is the movie that triggered a generation of smart horror by smart filmmakers invested in psychological realism and character-driven storytelling - without Rosemary's Baby, it's that much harder to imagine The Exorcist, and without The Exorcist, the subsequent history of grown-up horror looks massively different and largely empty. It's not overreaching to claim for Rosemary's Baby that it belongs in the company of the natal films in what would later be called New Hollywood Cinema - it has their pessimism and their grounded sensibility, even if unlike all of the other important New Hollywood seedlings, it lacks a home-grown director.

It was the first American production helmed by Polish émigré Roman Polanski, though it very nearly wasn't, and it is one of the most fascinatingly awful "what if?" exercises in cinema to daydream about what Rosemary's Baby might have looked like. For not only did it very nearly find itself directed by a true-blooded American, that American was none other than William Castle, the great huckster who'd made a name for himself in the late '50s and early '60s with horror movies that hinged on a single, highly ludicrous interactive gimmick that cropped up in the last act. He'd evolved out of that phase of his career by the mid-'60s, and not for the better; a Rosemary's Baby under Castle's direction would be competent at best, and the worst is best not to contemplate. Paramount felt the same way, and bought out the option on Ira Levin's novel that Castle had snatched up when the book was still in galleys, leaving Castle the dignity of staying on as the movie's producer, the most incongruous title in his entire filmography.

And so the studio brought in Polanski, who had left the Communist bloc behind to make a trio of horror or horror-esque movie in the United Kingdom, starting with 1965's Repulsion. That film was surely the primary qualification for getting him Rosemary's Baby; both movies are psychological thrillers about a woman's growing feeling of confusion and paranoia centered on the threatening physical space of her apartment. The primary difference being that Repulsion is ultimately about unreliable self-awareness, while Rosemary's Baby presents its threat as entirely real, and its protagonist's mental disintegration is shown as the result of the abuse she receives from others.

Almost a half-century of influence later, there's no reason to be precious about the film's plot: this is the one where a meek housewife is impregnated by Satan, as facilitated by a coven of Manhattan witches. She's Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), late of Omaha, Nebraska, and with her ineffective actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes), she's newly arrived in the Bramford, a gorgeous old New York apartment building overlooking Central Park. It's a building of grim and violent history, none of which bothers the Woodhouses overmuch when their previous landlord and good friend Hutch (Maurice Evans) tells them all about it with enormous relish, though we know better - we heard the freakishly minor-key lullaby with a mindless female vocal la-la-ing over over it in the opening credits (Krzysztof Komeda's score is all variations on that lullaby, and it is creepy as all hell), and we've been noticing the pile-up of broken, erratic compositions that Polanski and cinematographer William A. Fraker use to film the interiors of the Bramford, starting with a disorienting tilt down to the floor of an elevator. And when the thin walls dividing the Woodhouses from their next-door neighbors, the Castevets, let the young couple hear some manner of guttural chanting late at night, we're not as quick as they are to dismiss it.

Meanwhile, the septagenarian Castevets, Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman (Sidney Blackmer) start to insert themselves as very present members of the Woodhouses new life, not entirely welcome. That starts to shift when Guy becomes infatuated with Roman's wild tales of a long life, well-lived, which happens right as his acting career starts to pick up following a bizarre accident that leaves an actor friend of his blind and Guy with the other man's part. At this point, the Woodhouses begin to seriously talk about having a baby, and on one of their target nights to conceive, Rosemary blacks out - following too many drinks, says Guy, but the conspicuously chalky-tasting mousse that Minnie made for the couple earlier in the night says otherwise. That night, Rosemary has a peculiar series of bad dreams, one involving a surrealist boat excursion, the other involving a cluster of nude people - including both of the Castevets and Guy - gathered around as a black figure with talon-like hands and reptilian red eyes rapes her. A month later, she's pregnant - Guy having sheepishly confessed to fucking her during her intoxicated night - and the Castevets arrange for her to get a phenomenal deal from their good friend, New York's finest obstetrician, Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy). And all is well, if you don't count the lancing pain that Rosemary constantly feels in her abdomen, or the way that she loses weight in her body and face, her skin growing pale and damp until she looks like a pregnant skeleton padding around. And this starts to convince her that maybe, possibly, her neighbors and husbands have some seriously ulterior motives regarding her and her unborn child.

Polanski adapted Levin's book himself, the first of his movies from a published source; the rumor goes that he wasn't aware that he had the legal right to actually deviate from the source material, which led to Rosemary's Baby being one of the most faithful adaptations in cinema history. And this leads to the only significant flaw I can point to in the entire movie: the pacing isn't great. It's well past the 40-minute mark that Rosemary finally has her demonic encounter, and almost an hour beyond that before she starts to openly wonder if there's something paranormally wrong with her. The film ends up at 136 minutes, and they are not boring minutes by any means. But there are places where the point has been made, and it would be nice if Polanski trusted that we knew what was going on. Because it's not really hard to figure out what's going on.

That being put out of the way, I have not a single meaningful complaint about one of the best-shot, best-scored, and best-acted supernatural thrillers ever made. Long before anything has happened in the plot that's plainly threatening (the first "scary movie" moment is the sound of the black mass being chanted in the Castavets' apartment, 16 minutes into the movie; the next isn't until her rape nightmare), the way that Polanski frames the inside of the Bramford has given the movie all its necessary horror bona fides. The shot of Gordon sitting on a bed, half-obscured by a doorframe, is well-known; but it's merely one of a countless number of shots of doorways in the film, all of them used to present half-seen and obscured spaces, to make the geometry inside the Woodhouse and Castavet apartments feel both sprawling and discontinuous. The interiors are deeply unsettling, without any need to fall back on typical haunted house design or lighting. It's just wrong, in a way that we can detect because of how Polanski shows it to us; Rosemary, can't see things the way we do, which explains and excuses how long it takes her to notice the terrible things around her.

Despite or because of her limited perspective, Rosemary is the film's not-at-all-secret weapon, one of the great protagonists in all horror; and Farrow's performance is one of the great marriages of character and actor in the genre. Set in 1966, the film is cosmopolitan enough for Rosemary to already be a bit of a throwback: a perfect doormat who allows herself to be guided by everyone around her, anxious to put her husband forward as the locus of her identity (she chirpily recites "He was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross, but now he's doing television and commercials" enough times for it to qualify as her mantra), and interested in nothing but having Guy's babies. This isn't as transparently a feminist parable as Levin's The Stepford Wives, but there's no missing the subtext of a movie in which a pathetically cheery woman relies entirely on the wisdom of her husband, her doctor, and her older friends, only to find that they are all working actively against her. The first sentence out of Guy's mouth is a lie (inadvertently, but still); Minnie Castevet blows past Rosemary every time the younger woman tries to open her mouth - the energy differential between Gordon and Farrow is astonishing and drives so much of the film - Sapirstein barks orders at her that resemble cult indoctrination, and even her first and less-Satanic obstetrician, Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin) dismisses all her believes and hands her over to the the official men in her life. The horror of the film is hardly "the Satanists have put a grotesque Satan-baby in my body", which is appalling enough, it's "in my moment of need, all the people I have trusted to keep me safe and emotionally well have turned out to be exploiting me," which is decidedly worse on account of being more grounded and everyday. This is an early example of the beloved '70s genre "you can't be too paranoid to stay ahead of the people trying to kill you", but with a specifically gendered twist that makes it even more sociologically acute.

None of this is necessary to appreciate the film on its basic level as a visceral depiction of an out-of-sorts world. The claustrophobically tight compositions of the backs of heads and too-small doorways, the alarming contrast between Minnie's garish clothes and the brown-grey-black palette of the majority of the film, the blasts of electronica on the soundtrack, and Farrow's effortless ability to diminish herself in the frame, to look ever smaller and more damageable, all build terrifically to creating a constant sense of wretched rottenness in the world. And yet, there's also a rich variety of tones that Polanski employs in putting the terror across: chatty melodrama and pungent black comedy (mostly in the last scene and the strait-laced goofiness of the Satanic ritual in the rape sequence) both interrupt the pressure-cooker tension of the horror. It keeps Rosemary's Baby varied enough that it never really goes slack or loses focus across its undeniably overlong running time, and makes it one of the most compulsively watchable of all horror films, in addition to being one of the most urbane and intellectually precise.

Body Count: 2, with the admission that "How many people die in Rosemary's Baby?" is a question that really does not need the asking.

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BUT AH, PARIS!

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

As both a production company and a shorthand for describing a certain flavor of self-consciously middlebrow literate cinema, Merchant Ivory takes its name and identity from professional and life partners James Ivory, who directed, and Ismail Merchant, who produced. But there is a third figure who had just as important a voice in the team's best-known and best collaborations: screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. I mention her now on the occasion of turning to one of her most singular achievements under the Merchant Ivory banner, their 1981 adaptation of the Jean Rhys novel Quartet, which has absolutely none of the cachet and prominence of the team's later blockbusting E.M. Forster adaptations. And to be fair, it's not nearly as satisfying as those movies, either as a work of art or a piece of costume and set porn, so I'm not going to go for bat that it's a movie you desperately need to see.

It is, however, one of the Merchant Ivory films in my acquaintance that is most heavily dependent upon its screenplay more than the rest of its production, even more than its rock-solid cast. Ivory's direction, which is never particularly noisy or aggressively present, recedes almost into invisibility: he and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme favor still shots at a respectable distance from the actors, using close-ups almost exclusively in conversation scenes, and the pace of the editing (the film was cut by Humphrey Dixon) is resolutely calm and deliberate. The production design by Jean-Jacques Caziot, and costumes by Judy Moorcroft, meanwhile, are as succulent as in any Merchant Ivory production (and in this case, the hairstyles, overseen by Jean-Pierre Berroyer, are particularly present as well), but the film's setting is relatively conventional enough that it doesn't "pop" like a 19th Century costume drama. So the story and the dialogue are weighted unusually heavily here.

The marvelous irony is that Jhabvala didn't even want to adapt Quartet, which she viewed as being unnecessarily bleak and crippled by a complete lack of sympathetic characters. And that's what I find so impressive about what she did here: not that her script is required to do so much of the film's work, but it that it does that work on top of being something of a chore for the writer to grind through. You cannot tell; Quartet is a feverishly tight piece of writing, with a quick-moving scene structure and precisely worked-out character beats that let it make sharp, swift observations about the behavior of blunt, self-centered people in an environment that happily encouraged selfishness, and does it in a relatively compact 101-minute frame. How much of this is an inheritance from the novel, I cannot begin to say. But Jhabvala's concision and focus in putting the script together is admirable (and possibly aided by her detachment from the source material - she could afford to be merciless), and while there are ways in which Quartet can tend to be a bit less interesting than the big-time Merchant Ivory productions, the writing's not one of them.

As the title suggests, this is a tale of four humans getting muddled up sexually and romantically. In the frivolous Bohemian world of 1920s Paris, Marya Zelli (Isabelle Adjani) charms an older British couple, H.J. Heidler (Alan Bates) and his wife Lois (Maggie Smith). When her husband Stephan (Anthony Higgins), a Polish art dealer with ties to the black market, is imprisoned for selling stolen artwork, Marya finds herself in an economic crisis, unable to make any kind of living due to her immigrant status. The Heidlers take her in - for kindly reasons, they imply, but the reality turns out to be much darker than that. In keeping with the sexual freedom of that time and place, they're actually bringing Marya into their home to be H.J.'s newest sexual plaything, with Lois's benefit being some obscurely-defined hope that if her husband can get his ya-yas out, it will save their marriage. Certainly, neither of them give a damn about Marya as a human being, and her own thready marriage to a selfish asshole and criminal, whom she dutifully visits weekly despite the Heidlers' objection and Stephan's loutishness, begins to fray in its own right.

Quartet's biggest strenght and its biggest weakness are the same thing: the acting. And we can draw the dividing line strictly by gender. Bates (whom I have greatly admired in other films) and Higgins (whom I have not) are appallingly bland and at best functional in their roles; Higgins also has to cope with a Polish accent that he's not great at, and a character literally hemmed in by the prison set and the snug shots with which he and it are filmed, but he's certainly the fourth-most important member of the quartet, and his insubstantial performance doesn't do much harm. Higgins, though, has quite a meaty part indeed, full of unstated tensions and dark undercurrents, and it hurts the film a great deal that he's not terribly memorable or imposing.

The flipside is that the leading women are both utterly terrific. Smith is a real surprise, words I'd never assume I'd have cause to type out: it's the least-characteristic role I've ever seen her play, wounded but cruel, strained with nerves, pinched in by the period clothes and hairdos that she wields like a sword and shield. Every line reading is underplayed and crackling with self-hatred, self-satisfaction, self-righteous rage; it's like watching the world's quietest thunderstorm flashing out of Smith's big, intense eyes. I realised in watching Quartet how guilty I've been of taking Smith for granted: she's so good so much of the time, but frequently relaxes into a certain kind of role (tart-tongued, authoritative, preternaturally old) that makes it easy to think she's just "pulling a Maggie". And to see her stepping outside of that so forcefully and effectively is stunning. It's a great performance, tightly-wound, wholly natural, desperately serious.

In the film's sort-of more-or-less lead, Adjani isn't quite as striking as Smith - it's the same sort of "porcelain doll on the outside with a deeply conflicted interior" role that she she got stuck with in a lot of her early English-language roles - but it's hard to imagine a better choice, in 1981, for the role of a young woman who doesn't belong in the environment she finds herself occupying, and who doesn't mean to exude the intoxicating sexuality she possesses. It's certainly a good enough performance to confidently sell the crux of the human drama even in the face of the men being a bit tepid.

With the bitter scenario and potent female leads taking up the most of the oxygen in the film, there's less space left over than I'd have expected for Merchant Ivory's stock in trade: skillfully bringing past eras to life. '20s Paris is a particularly stylish, brazen era that a company of costume drama specialists were undoubtedly eager to attack (it's the only film they made in that era and place), and it looks perfect, with Ivory favoring shots that present the action in stiff tableaux that focus rather on the stagy brittleness of the culture than the luxurious fashion and licentious joy. Given that script, it couldn't be any other way - Quartet is every bit the harsh tale look that Jhabvala didn't want to be involved with, cynically considering the ideal of an accepting, indulgent society as just another thing that can be exploited by the cruel to take advantage of the innocent. It's nasty-hearted in a way we don't tend to think of Merchant Ivory films as being, but that's one of its strengths; there's something different going on here than the usual stuff of bringing an epoch to life with a humanist tale to tell, and while I won't claim that it's one of my favorite efforts from that team, it leaves more to chew on than many of them.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: MALE STRIPPERS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Magic Mike XXL continues its predecessor's look at the lives of men who dance dirty for a living. Not the commonest subject in a male gaze-dominated medium, but nor is it the first time this milieu has been plumbed.

A Night in Heaven is a romantic drama about a community college professor stuck in a dying marriage who has an affair with one of her students after discovering he's a dancer at the local strip club. So obviously it starts off with golden hour shots of Kennedy Space Center. What possible other opening gambit could there be?

So it's a disastrous film, anyway. The splendidly inappropriate opening isn't the reason for that (though it absolutely doesn't help). What it is, though, is perfectly symptomatic of the film's deeply broken sense of self. It's easy to joke, "what kind of movie about strippers opens with several minutes of Cape Canaveral location footage?", but the fact that A Night in Heaven is the answer to that question is telling of how unclear its goals are, as well as its execution of those goals. It is a film divided between the impulse towards smut and towards socially-minded character drama; it is exactly what you get when the Oscar-winning director of Rocky, John G. Avildsen, and the writer of the core material of Nashville, Joan Tewkesbury, find themselves in the business of making a star vehicle for Christopher Atkins, primarily known then and now as the male half of the teen soft-core drama The Blue Lagoon. It's possible to tell, if you hold the film at the right angle, that Avildsen and Tewkesbury had in mind a steady-handed narrative of marital stresses, female desire, and the hard cost of making ethical choices instead of economic ones, and found themselves obliged to readjust everything in the wake of a lead actor whose primary skill was his ability to not wear a shirt. I will say on behalf of the film's novelty that it is maybe the only thing ever filmed that derives virtually all of its dramatic value from the level, complex presence of Lesley Ann Warren.

She plays Faye Hanlon, a skittish-looking teacher of public speaking at a Florida community college and the wife of a bored, boring NASA engineer, Whitney (Robert Logan). For his part, he's facing down an industry in decline, and the company he specifically works for is hunting down Defense Department contracts to make ends meet. This sits poorly with Whitney, who chooses to be laid off rather than work towards what he considers immoral ends, a fact he massages when relating it to his wife. There is surely a deep and interesting subplot involving Whitney to be explored, but A Night in Heaven is resolutely disinterested in it; at 83 minutes long, it could probably afford a little more meat on its bones, but the film is hellbent on getting to the steamy stuff as fast as possible and staying there as long as it dares, and Whitney's existence comes to feel more like an imposition levied on the the film than a possibility for dramatic expansion early in the proceedings.

Faye has a particular student, Rick Monroe (Atkins), who's one of those quintessential movie youths, a brilliant kid with all the potential in the world and no drive to exploit it. So she is compelled to flunk him, on the very day that her sister Patsy (Deborah Rush) is coming to town for a few days of girl bonding, including drinking and a night at Heaven, the local strip club that she found on her last trip. The most popular and lusted-after of all the dancers there is one Ricky the Rocket, and you get zero points for guessing ahead of time that he's the exact same student that Faye just bawled out. She's both mortified and transfixed by his tremendously overt sexual energy, his fearlessness in grinding against patrons and passionately kissing them, and his inappropriately perfect abs. He can tell she's transfixed, and comes along to give her his special treatment; this turns into an intense mutual infatuation that leads her to (gasp!) lie to her husband and (shock and horror!) go back to the strip club to continue ogling. And eventually, it leads to them making tender love. But this was the '80s, and social standards must be maintained, and that means a very abrupt series of plot developments that feel more like the notes for a third act than actual third act. The upshot being that Rick turns out to be a callous little shit.

There are no ways around it: the story is a dog, collecting musty clichés and not even pretending to freshen them up. Avildsen is not without an eye for capturing the sweaty fatigue of environments, and that trick serves him well at multiple points throughout this movie, but it's mostly just spackling a respectable gloss on a tawdry scenario in a tawdry milieu. Which is not, in and of itself, a problem, except that none of the filmmakers seem tremendously interested in making a tawdry movie and that's just not really an applicable strategy here. When the action switches to Heaven, and there's no choice but to make it a tasteless cartoon, it's palpable how weirdly the energy rotates: suddenly the lighting and framing become very self-conscious, like we'll hopefully be so aware of the abstract qualities of the shots that we'll ignore the gyrating men who are, by and large, given curiously unerotic dance moves - witness the Dance of the Kitchen Stools!), or the fever dream hectoring of the Heaven M.C. (Spatz Donovan). His dialogue is the one element of the film that's so incomprehensible that it turns out to be funny - "They'll steam the crease right out of your polyester, ladies!" he leers at one point. "Do you wanna see Ricky take his clooooooothes off?" he later asks, in the kind of hyper-literal statement that suggests children play-acting at strip club management. For unclear reasons, he has been costumed to look like a disco version of the Mad Hatter, but that's just part and parcel of the uncompromising hideousness of the wardrobes. Anna Hill Johnstone, the costume and production design, had an apparent vendetta against the cast, burying Warren especially in costumes so over-the-top in their '80s signifiers that it feels like an Expressionist nightmare about the decade. "You look like a hibiscus in bloom!" coos Patsy to Faye before their first night of debauchery, and that is a thoroughly accurate statement, which certainly would appear to be meant as a compliment.

The strip club sequence is at least appropriately erotic (less so the couple's sexual encounter, which is rushed through like Avildsen - editing as well as directing - just wanted to get it over with), and it's here that Warren really shines. In a lengthy scene that relies entirely on her reaction shots, the actor is able to evoke longing and an immediate wash of guilt at feeling that longing; a desire to stare but also conspicuously trying to make sure that nobody notices her staring; and, uncomplicated by any libidinous urge, a very real sense of confused horror that her professional life and her off-hours gallivanting with Patsy have been blended. It's remarkable acting, and it builds up an aura of goodwill towards the actress attempts to redeem the insufficiently probing remains of Tewkesbury's compromised script, which largely involves adding lots of complicated self-doubt and fear to the surface-level horniness. It's the most human, interesting material in the film, and it's largely wasted, but Warren deserves a lot of credit for the effort.

Nothing was going to actually humanise this material, not with Atkins sucking all the energy out of the room. He's pretty as hell, undoubtedly, but limited to one vapid expression of innocuous self-regard, and prone to making terrible decisions like rolling his eyes so hard during class that it resembles an epileptic fit more than an expression of annoyance, or wearing a nominally flirtatious grin that has virtually no sex in it, just the distant smile of somebody who just remembered the leftover pizza at home. Given his prominence in the story, and the prominence of his body in the film's visual scheme, his callowness, static expressions, and inability to build a solid character are limitations that A Night in Heaven was certainly never going to survive. Warren fights as hard as she can to buck this odds; Avildsen nervously tries to ignore it with needless shots of rockets and a blazingly fast pace; most everybody else just gives up and tries to slap some crap up there onscreen. It's not much of a tribute to the male body or the female libido, and it's an outright joke to pretend that we can cobble together the dog-ends of ignored subplots into a treatise on economic tension in the early years of the Reagan presidency. It's not sordid enough to be decent junk, but the filmmakers gave up on it before had stopped being any kind of junk at all, and other than offering the unusual sight of male objectification in a Hollywood studio picture, there's nothing about it that justifies so much as a sidelong glance.

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NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS

The first thing to point out, because it's really amazing the more you think about it, it's a miracle that Pixar Animation Studios' 15th feature, Inside Out, functions at all. It's a feature-length metaphor, in which everything we're watching as the story isn't "actually" be happening, possibly not even within the world of the film. Most of the characters are literally concepts rather than psychological actors in their own right. The driving conflict is "there's a ticking clock and we have to get back before it runs out", or basically the third act that's always the most uninteresting part of Pixar movies stretched out to the full length of the 94-minute film

Regardless, it's Pixar's most effective and most moving feature since the six-year-old Up, and while I think the "Pixar's best!" chatter that you can find here and there is premature, it's very easy to see why somebody would want to promote that opinion. Surely, it's the most ambitious film in the studio's history: it's a feature-length metaphor, after all, which isn't something for the squeamish. Specifically, it's a metaphor about the processes of human memory and emotions in a time of extreme stress both environmental (moving to a new city) and biological (doing so at the very earliest years of adolescence), setting up shop in the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) and literalising the concepts of cognitive theory as physical spaces for the adventures had by her five core emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Fear (Bill Hader). Who are also literalised, as color-coded humanoids made out of quantum particles that you can just barely see in close-ups as a mottled, almost fuzzy surface of tiny floating spheres.

The actual "what really happened" plot is that Riley has just moved from Minnesota, where she loves her friends and adores playing hockey, to an old rundown building in San Francisco. Picking up on the extreme frustration and stress felt by her father (Kyle MacLachlan), whose business - the reason they moved in the first place - is hitting a potentially fatal snag, and her mother (Diane Lane), helplessly trying to track down their missing moving truck and clearly none too happy about being uprooted herself, Riley tries to force herself to be the same happy-go-lucky child her parents have always praised her for being, but this quickly curdles into a perpetual state of peevishness marked by bursts of terror, and eventually she decides to run away back to Minnesota. And as she does so, she slides into a depressive state where she can barely feel anything at all.

But ah! the way that Inside Out chooses to tell that story is gorgeous and complicated and crazily imaginative: inside the control room of Riley's mind, which has been the domain of the upbeat, bullying Joy for all of recorded history, an accident has sent her and Sadness spiraling into the recesses of Riley's memories, leaving the ill-equipped Anger, Fear, and Disgust to run the show. Meanwhile, Joy and Sadness journey through Riley's headspace, finding her subconscious, her imagination, and the chasm where all of her lost memories are dumped, never to be retrieved again, escorted by the cotton candy-cat-elephant-dolphin hybrid Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley's mostly-forgotten imaginary friend. The film presents all of the mercurial and abrupt shifts of personality that accompany being 11 and thrust into a new life as the results of the emotions' desperate attempts to find a solution to their predicament, with everybody (and especially Joy) anxious to get back to the unmixed state when Joy wouldn't let anybody else call the shots. Though with Sadness's shocking, newfound ability to alter the nature of Riley's memories just by touching them, it's clear to us long before the emotions are willing to admit it that Riley's days of unmixed joy are behind her.

The idea that our thoughts and feelings are sentient creatures bumbling around in our heads isn't new, of course: the earliest cinematic version I can name is the 1943 Disney WWII propaganda cartoon Reason and Emotion, and the image of the mind as a person sitting in the body directing it is an ancient one. But Inside Out is as perfect a filmed depiction of that hook as has ever been made, coming up with an expansive, highly creative world of intricately worked-out rules to explore the concepts of cognitive psychology in a simplified, even fabulistic way. It does an extraordinarily good job of establishing its world one piece at a time, so we grasp the basic vocabulary intuitively enough that when the movie starts to use that vocabulary in complicated ways later on, we don't need to have it explained what's going on. Knowing that colors map onto emotions, we can grasp the enormous difference between a day that has produced mostly yellow (Joy) memories and a day that has produced a slurry of green, red, and purple (Disgust, Anger, Fear) memories at a visceral level, both because the colors themselves are unpleasant and toxic all mixed together, but because the film trained us why that's upsetting without having openly told us it was doing so.

Cognitive modeling and inventive visual storytelling aside, Inside Out is simply a great amount of fun to watch. The actors are exemplary: the five core emotions are all obvious but phenomenally on-point casting decisions, especially in the subtle details, like how Poehler isn't just perfect for Joy, but perfect for a specifically bossy, arrogant Joy. And with that handled, the film has already done a huge part of its work, making the emotions appropriately broad, bold personalities to go with the film's searing bright colors and Seussian designs of the spaces inside Riley's head. With those personalities in place, the film can go about the business of mixing them around and working not just as a fun story of two mismatched characters on a journey, but, increasingly, as a deeply effective study of emotions jockeying for prominence, and learning the hard truth that feeling sad isn't always inappropriate and should be embraced when it's the right time for it. Which is a lesson that's not just bold for a nominal children's movie (though not since Ratatouille has Pixar made a movie that strikes me as more geared towards adults), but bold for anything made in American cinema. It's one of the ways that Inside Out feels like Pixar's very own Studio Ghibli film, more emotionally sophisticated and trusting of its audience than even the very best of what we'd normally expect from corporate family filmmaking.

It's also one of the ways that Inside Out is clearly the third film to be directed by Pete Docter, whose two previous films - Monsters, Inc. and Up - already marked him out as the feelingest of Pixar's director stable. His balance of goofy comedy and dumbfounding heartbreak is excellent here, as it would almost have to be; I'll confess that I was promised more robust, devastating tears than I got (the opening montage and scrapbook scenes in Up are both harder-hitting to my mind, as is the incomparable finale of Toy Story 3), but none of Inside Out's feints toward tear-jerking, nor its dumbest, most stereotyped jokes feel at all unearned or unconsidered. It tries to cover the whole range of feelings and it largely gets there.

It has a few rough patches, undoubtedly. Docter and his co-writers never came up with a really interesting idea for Disgust, who feels by far the least consequential of the core emotions, and outside of it main themes, Michael Giacchino's score is disappointingly rote, given that some of his career-best work has happened in Pixar films. And there are other nitpicks and niggles her and there. But the grandness of the film's ambitions and its ingenuity in realising those amibitions, its sheer cleverness and sophistication as a most unique kind of character study, these things eradicate any nitpicks and render niggles the nastiest kind of pettiness. This is at most only a hair shy of top-tier Pixar, and not just the kind of aesthetically adventurous storytelling that all animation should aspire to, it's what all of mainstream American cinema should want to be - funny and meaningfully sad, deeply thoughtful about its world and story.

9/10

(A hedge; I'm not quite willing to commit to 10 yet, though "yet" is the key word there. I can easily imagine liking this more with subsequent viewings, and I cannot conceive of liking it any less)

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LIVING WITH THE PAST

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

It should be no surprise when a movie titled The Milk of Sorrow turns out to be unrelentingly bleak, but the film's opening minutes are shattering beyond anything one could be prepared for: over black, we hear an old woman reciting a kind of lullaby in a tuneless sing-song. Within moments, this bland, innocuous prattle has shot into the realm of nightmare, as she begins reciting the litany of abuses piled upon her during the period of violence that rocked Peru in the 1980s: rape, torture, debasement. All of it presented in the same flighty warble. For a film that proves to be especially muted and low-key in all of its doings, this is an outrageously "big" opening gambit, but it has the merit of setting up the parameters of the movie in unmistakable terms: this is to be a story of how past traumas can devour the present, and how society as a whole avoids a full reckoning with the ugliness of history.

That theme is borne out not just through the plot (which is, anyway, very minimal), but even more through the basic facts of who the characters are. The litany of suffering that opens the film is being sung by an old woman on her deathbed and overheard by her adult daughter, Fausta (Magaly Solier), who we quickly understand has been listening to these stories all her life. And that would be enough to give the young woman a good excuse to be convinced that all is hell and misery, even without the wrinkle of a folk belief that Fausta, along with all the other children whose mothers were subject to the rape and violence of the '80s during their pregnancies or while nursing, has been contaminated by "the milk of sorrow". Which isn't even a figurative attempt to translate the actual Spanish phrase for the condition and the original title, La teta asustada - "the frightened teat" And in fairness, it's really hard to imagine The Frightened Teat being nominated for an Oscar, or any of the other wonderful things that happened to the movie, though the distinction between the concepts is significant enough that I'm a little annoyed by the shift regardless.

The point being, Fausta's mother dies, leaving her daughter in a quandary: she's too poor to afford to bury her mother's corpse, and too convinced that the world is a depraved, rancid place to enter into it. Eventually, she finds employment as the maid to a haughty Lima pianist named Aída (Susi Sánchez), and makes a solitary friend in the form of Noé (Efraín Solís), Aída's gardner, who agrees to walk the petrified young woman home every night, where her family is busy preparing for a grand wedding. Meanwhile, Aída becomes so obsessed with Fausta's own songs, made up ditties about the pain and loneliness of the world, she offers the young woman a single pearl for every one she's willing to share. And this is all going on while the potato Fausta inserted into her vagina as a way to ward off any potential rapists is beginning to sprout roots and cause serious harm to her body.

It's not what it sounds like, at least assuming that you join me in thinking that it sounds like a gaudy melodrama. On the contrary, the dominant mode of The Milk of Sorrow is hushed, claustrophobic, and very close to neorealism in its detachment and lack of overt "handling" of the characters. Throughout, director Claudia Llosa demonstrates the precious skill of being able to set up the camera in a way that very clearly indicates how we're supposed to read the characters and the situation containing them - very very clearly, in some cases - but is also so unforced and devoid of any shine or fluidity that it doesn't feel like anything has been staged for our benefit, but we just got very lucky to happen to watch it from that angle. Mixing a very clear aesthetic style with an attempt at politically engaged realism is tricky enough; doing it in a movie where half the characters believe in the ghostly "frightened teat" and the protagonist has to keep trimming the potato vines growing out of her nether regions is halfway to a miracle. It's a combination of a lot of things that go into this: Llosa's grimy mise en scène, cinematographer Natasha Braier's rock steady control of color and lighting to give the impression of a constantly overcast world where nothing seems too vivid and cinematic, Solier's dauntlessly muted performance, the immaculately realistic sound recording. But the net result is that, for as much as it could be a basket of contrivances, The Milk of Sorrow has a casual docurealist aura about it that keeps its feet planted firmly on the ground no matter what Llosa's script has to say about it.

And that's especially good because the balance between this working versus being a goofy mess of overbaked writerly ideas is razor-thin. The 2009 film, Llosa's second - she has since made a third, Aloft - is an improvement in every way on her 2006 debut, Madeinusa, but she repeats that film's most obvious, film studenty error of treating the characters as placeholders for ideas, and foregrounding the way that the plot is a surrogate for greater societal conflicts while shortchanging it as an individual story of people. Putting it bluntly, The Milk of Sorrow is rotten with symbolism, in every single turn of its narrative and many of its visuals. I shall readily concede that some of the visual symbols are well-made enough that they still work like gangbusters: placing two characters at opposite sides of a giant X is corny, but the garish pink motif that keeps cropping up in the wedding preparations is such a striking contrast to the sandy palette that Llosa and Braier otherwise employ that it's always impressive when it arrives, and it's frequently used in compositions that are simply gorgeous in and of themselves (an overhead shot of pink spoons arranged with artful randomness on geometrically precise plates is an image that I'll carry with me a long time.

Just because the symbolism is obvious doesn't mean it can't also work: the representation of Aída as the Disinterest Bourgeoisie using baubles of know value to themselves but precious to the put-upon rural classes as a bribe to encourage Fausta, the Exploited Underclass, to keep selling her tales of woe in a purely narrative context where Aída doesn't actually have to think about the reality of the horrible history she's hearing; that's a framework straight out of '20s Soviet propaganda, but it's drawn up through the characters enough to make it feel organic and real and genuinely insightful. Other symbolism is, well, SYMBOLISM: that vaginal potato, trying to flower but turning into something pustulant and dangerous because it's being kept inside rather than expressed, that was pretty much never going to to do it for me.

The great limitation of The Milk of Sorrow, then, is that it keeps wanting to turn into an op-ed about the need to engage with Peru's sordid history and in engaging with it, stop clinging to trauma as a defining element of personality, and it wants this so bad that it chokes itself off as a movie about people. Whereas the great triumph is that it's so precise in the world it builds and the way it places characters in that world, it's still basically a solid movie about people anyway. The praise it received is maybe a bit outsized compared to the balance of its strengths and weakness: Oscar nominations are one thing, but taking the top prize at Berlin against Everyone Else and About Elly is rather more questionable. That said, the film ably gives voice to a period in history almost completely invisible to the world at large, and it does so while providing a great deal of dignity if not quite a great deal of individuality to its equally invisible central characters, and given the difficulty in finding any Peruvian cinema available in an English-friendly context, the film's values patently outweigh its flaws.

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STRANGERS AND OTHER LOVERS

A review requested by Nathaniel R, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. And happy birthday, Nathaniel!

The primary characteristic of Love with the Proper Stranger, in defiance of its handsomely poetic title, is that it is fucking blunt. That is the first thing it wants us to be aware of. The movie launches right into itself without any warm-up, opening with a loud scrape as a metal grate is rolled back from a door. Then come the credits, warmly scored with Elmer Bernstein's romantic title theme, and all seems well until the credits peter out and we're pitched into the teeming mass of bodies in a local musicians union in New York, with people desperately looking for work and people absently looking for musicians. Whatever gracefulness might have tried to sneak in is forcefully and crudely stamped out, and we don't even know who our characters are yet.

And that bluntness continues to apply once the plot shows up. The script, by Arnold Schulman, starts off well after the beginning of the story: a young woman, Angie Rossini (Natalie Wood), fights her way into the crowd to catch the attention of the distinctly older Rocky Papasano (Steve McQueen). They verbally fence for a couple of moments as he fails to place her and pretends that he's doing it to be cute, and she eventually runs out of patience and just comes out with it: he got her pregnant a couple of months back, and she wants to know if he's going to help her take care of the situation. And it is at this moment that the film won me over to its side as much as it ever could: not just for the forcefulness of having two characters in a movie from 1963 talk about an unwanted pregnancy in language that's barely coded at all (and in fact, all of the coding that's done is around the hoped-for abortion, not the pregnancy itself), but for the narrative audacity of starting off at this point. We don't know anything about these people, only that a few months ago, he connived her into having sex and now she's more flatly disappointed than pissed, while he's infinitely more embarrassed than contrite.

It's easy to imagine a dozen different movies incorporating this plot point after an extended introductory prologue, or as the midpoint to a lengthier, more holistic romantic drama. Love with the Proper Stranger skips all of that in favor of presenting the characters at their roughest and rawest; it's a suitably aggressive start to a movie that exemplifies the lacerating realism that cinema had just barely invented and still had no idea what to do with. Five years later, you'd swear it was part of the coalescing New Hollywood Cinema; instead, it's one of those marvelous one-off experiments in frayed anti-style and boundary-shattering adult content that fluttered around the late '50s and most of the '60s, ultimately clearing the path for the New Hollywood to come in. Which is kind of the entire idea behind the dual career of director Robert Mulligant and producer Alan J. Pakula, a team responsible for much of the "Edgy, Smart, and Grown-Up" dramatic cinema of the period.

If you're looking for it going into the film, you can kind of see the tatters of a more classical mode of filmmaking sticking to its ribs: the characterisation of most of the side characters, the third act, the presence of a radio-friendly title track. But for the most part, this is slice-of-life realism at its most severe. It tells barely any story - Angie and Rocky batter around New York trying to scrounge up enough money for her surgery in the first half of the movie, taking up about one day. Then they have a falling out, and he realises he's in love with her and tries to make up for his crass, rude behavior. The writing is full of half-delivered sentences that the actors swallow up in nervous tics and inarticulate thoughtfulness, offering a precise snapshot of urban working class society in a certain time and place.

Even the fact that it's headlined by two enormously charismatic movie stars doesn't really hurt its sense of realism, though neither Wood nor McQueen is terribly convincing as a New York Italian. But the sheer shock of seeing these two gorgeous people in this guttural setting has the effect of making that setting "pop". And even more than that, the graceless, acerbic performance Wood gives, fearlessly violating her ingénue persona, seems all that much harsher if we know Wood's earlier work (McQueen, bless him, simply isn't all the way there: he gives it his absolute best as an actor, and it's certainly not bad, but it's impossible to square the cultural memory of the coolest movie star in American history with the figure he's inhabiting here; he has great chemistry with Wood, but it's not exactly the same thing as great acting). It's a calculated move for the actress, beyond a doubt, with her career over the first half of the '60s operating on virtually a film-by-film basis to slowly stretch her and grow her up in front of the audience. Two years earlier, Wood was playing a young, virginal member of a different New York ethnic group to dubious effect in West Side Story; in '62, she played the world's most famous stripper as a guileless girl in Gypsy. A sexually experienced Good Girl is a natural next step in that evolution, and there's a degree to which it feels a bit of a mechanical effort for Wood to put on and take off the trappings of young adult sophistication. But it's still probably the most difficult role she'd taken to that point in her career, and she's always one of the film's strongest elements. The sense she never quite shakes of a little girl play-acting at being a tough adult describes Angie as well as it does the actor playing her, and it's hard to say where it falls between canny casting, smart directing of a limited performer, and just plain great acting on the part of someone who clearly did a lot of thinking about how her character walks, talks, wears clothes, and observes others.

The two main characters and the city holding them and the social issue they provide a window into are, in basically that order, Mulligan and Schulman's primary interests; Love with the Proper Stranger is best at sitting down and watching Angie and Rocky slowly and painfully learn about each other, and it's very nearly as good at taking a snapshot of what New York's poorer enclaves looked like in the early '60s. It stumbles a bit when it tries to inhabit those enclaves: with nearly every meaningful character in the film an Italian Catholic, the film is at its most goofily old-fashioned when it tries to show off that world, with some largely absurd results. "If you tell your papa, I break your face", says Rocky's mother (August Ciolli) as she lovingly presses money into his hands, and this is one of the broadest lines in the movie (coming at the end of what is certainly its broadest scene), but there's a lot of film that's more or less adjacent to that register of stereotype, even if the two central lovers are themselves always treated respectfully and honestly. I should qualify that - they're treated that way up until the last act, where the film becomes a bright, bubbly comedy very suddenly, and frankly, not very well. The tonal mismatch with the low simmering harshness of the first and change is stunning and disruptive, although the film successfully rights itself for a very sweet last scene that marries the froth and the grit in an effective mixture.

All these flaws are what they are; the fact is that far more of the film is outstanding rather than otherwise. At its best, when it's squatting down to watch the characters muddle around, the film's sense of real life that just happens to have a camera in front of it is peerless. I am particularly fond of a scene in which Angie's family forces an awkward suitor played by Tom Bosley to join them at the table; it's a masterwork of organically overstuffed production design and faultless naturalistic dialogue, and it has some of the best non-Wood acting in the movie. In moments like this, when everything clicks into a rich, messy depiction of New Yorkers spilling into each others' lives, the film reaches absolute perfection and impresses me more than anything else in the Pakula-Mulligan canon: even more than the legendary To Kill a Mockingbird, for it contains none of that film's self conscious Importance-with-a-capital-I. Of course, not all of Love with the Proper Stranger is at that level, and it has the misfortune to frontload most of its finest moments. But taken as a whole it's absolutely terrific, and thoroughly undeserving of its weird invisibility and unavailability relative to many weaker films in both Wood's and McQueen's iconic careers.

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METALHEAD

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

The danger of talking about The Iron Giant years later is that it's enormously tempting to talk about in terms of how nobody ever talks about it or has ever seen it, and thus joining the seemingly limitless number of essays on the same topic. It's a prime example of the paradox of the film that everybody agrees that nobody else likes.

And yet, as long as we live in a world where The Iron Giant isn't readily mentioned in conversations about the masterpieces of American animation, then yes, not enough people have seen and love it. It really is that good - it is maybe my favorite animated feature made in the English language without any kind of financial stake from the Walt Disney Company. This despite being an incredibly obvious re-tread of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial that waxes nostalgic for boyhood during the Eisenhower era to a degree that should by rights be impenetrable to anybody who didn't experience that firsthand - including the film's director and scenarist, Brad Bird, who was born in the same year that the film is set, 1957. And yet, it's an exemplary work of storytelling that uses its period to inform and deepen its emotions rather than as self-indulgent window dressing, using its boilerplate "boy and his pet monster" hook with a level of sensitivity, charm, and insight into the somewhat ugly ways of childhood like just about nothing else from that particular wing of children's cinema. By rights, it should have put Warner Bros. Feature Animation on the map, instead of serving as one of the primary nails in that studio's coffin, though it had the benefit of raising Bird's already admirable profile high enough that he was invited to the inner sanctums of Pixar, where he made The Incredibles and Ratatouille, and arguably bettered himself. Arguably.

For bettering The Iron Giant is not the kind of thing that happens every day, neither as a work of animation nor as a adventure fable. The story, adapted from Ted Hughes's 1968 children's book The Iron Man (and more directly Pete Townshend's 1989 concept album based upon it) so loosely that it's almost impossible to detect the ingredients beyond the existence of the title character, takes us to the world of the '50s as seen by a child but understood by an adult: it's set in a small town nestled in the Maine woods, the kind that its protagonist finds best for wandering around aimlessly and endlessly riffing on the pulpy pop culture of the day, while the calm, "everything was simpler" attitude insisted upon by the light touch and warm re-creation of period detail runs up hard against the steady hum of Cold War paranoia that's everywhere in the movie even before it starts to specifically direct the plot. This is, then, a child's-eye-view movie released in 1999 that requires a working knowledge of 1950s politics to even start unpacking it, and I suppose this probably has as much to do with its utter commercial failure as anything else (that, and the perversely bad marketing that allowed the film to slip in and out of theaters without hardly anyone but appreciative critics noticing).

In particular, it centers on Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal), a preteen boy obsessed with science fiction and largely disliked by his peer group, leaving him with no companions but his widowed mother Annie (Jennifer Aniston) and his wild and woolly imagination. The first thing to even slightly take him out of his shell comes when he meets Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick, Jr.), at the restaurant where his mother works; the arrival of a hip artist-type - Dean works at the local junkyard, for the access to scrap metal that he twists into sculptures - is the boy's first indication that people with different attitudes and interests about the world than the rest of the sturdy folk of Rockwell, Maine (how's that for a leading place name?) exist. The more important thing that happens is that while Hogarth tears ass around the woods, playing at whatever goofy superhero nonsense he has in mind that afternoon, he stumbles across a huge human-shape creature made of metal. We know, from the first scene, that the creature arrived from outer space, coincidentally around the same time that the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite and inaugurated the Space Race. That's really all we ever know, and the iron giant can't provide any more information; it received a dent to the head causing it to suffer from whatever robots have in place of amnesia. But for a fanciful kid like Hogarth, with his addiction to comic books, all that matters is that he has a metal man of the coolest sort to be his new best and only friend. And that would be that, except that the giant's tendency to eat huge chunks of metal has caught the attention of the young NSA, who arrives in the form of the arrogant, preening Agent Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald) to poke around and generally be a prick while Hogarth and Dean work to keep the giant's existence a secret.

That could be, and has been, the basic shape of too many movies, but The Iron Giant is made up of almost nothing but reasons why it's better than all of them. The most accessible reason is the simplest: it has a pair of absolutely wonderful characters in Hogarth and the giant, with terrific performances to match: Marienthal won that year's Annie award for voice acting, while the giant's grunts and handful of coherent vocalisations are provided by Vin Diesel, whose visible career to that point functionally consisted of nothing but a part in the ensemble of Saving Private Ryan that nobody has ever declared to be one of that film's highlights. And yet he's devastating in the tiny confines of the part, turning guttural Frankensteinian utterances of monosyllables into a beautiful portrait of straightforward emotional vulnerability and honesty that ranks among the most moving vocal performances in animation (on the evidence of this and his utterly sweet turn in the 15-years-younger Guardians of the Galaxy, it seems fair to suggest that Diesel's perfect career would consist of nothing but voiceover work with a severely limited vocabulary).

To pair with these terrific performances, the animators created two fantastic characters - the giant is the obvious triumph, a mixture of clunky and sleek elements that evokes '50s sci-fi and comics without being needlessly constrained by it, and permits enough range of motion in the character's face and body that it can communicate all the feelings it could ever need without having to fake it by flexing its rigid metal parts. And it's also the first major character in an otherwise traditionally-animated feature to have been made entirely through CGI, though unlike Disney's awkward early experiments in that direction, the CGI effects were all coated in "paint" that made them match the cel animation more cleanly than in many lusher, costlier productions from the 1990s. But as brilliant as the giant is, I honestly find myself more impressed with Hogarth: the humans in the film are all exaggerated characters of human form, gangly and angular and at times unafraid to be a little off-putting and ugly; it gives the film a hell of a lot of personality and makes it one of the very few major studio animated features of its generation to do anything other than blindly try to copy Disney, for good (DreamWorks's Prince of Egypt) or ill (Warner's own Quest for Camelot). The downside is that the rushed, somewhat inexperienced team of animators (though supervised overall by high-ranking Disney vet Tony Fucile) was sometimes stymied in making these unconventional shapes move properly, and if I could dredge up the single meaningful flaw in The Iron Giant, it would be that most of its cast can be unpleasant to look at in the wrong ways, and often unexpressive. But Hogarth triumphs over all that; he was drawn with care, patience, and love, and he's one of the most vivid, feeling protagonists in an American cartoon to be found anywhere in that last heyday of theatrical 2-D animation.

The film is a visual success for reasons entirely unrelated to its characters, though; the design team created a version of small town Americana that is at once both detailed and realistic in it smallest touches of props and interior design, while also gauzy in places after the fashion of '50s art (Norman Rockwell himself is a clear touchstone). Even more impressively, it manages to evoke the overblown colors and compositional strategies of '50s cinematography, feeling at times like a bunch of animators decided to turn their boys' own sci-fi adventure into a crypto-homage to Douglas Sirk.

Hell, there are scenes where it plays around with out-of-focus foregrounds to pull attention to the middle of the frame, in a 2-D animated film. Which is one of the most pointlessly showy things you can do, though it adds immeasurably to the film's reality, and the sense that the characters exist in a place that's physically tangible to them, if not to us. If there's a single meaningless flaw that nonetheless keeps kicking at the back of my seat as I watch the movie, it's that it does feel at times a bit too much of a "look at us! we're awesome! we can play with the big boys!" tech exercise; a snowstorm that doesn't need to be there except to show off that the animators could put together a hell of a snowstorm; lighting that calls attention to how difficult it would be to carry it off; a couple of jarringly ambitious camera movements.

But then, as a tech exercise, it proves exactly that, and the fact that this team couldn't keep making movies at Warner to rival or better what Disney and DreamWorks were working on before the bottom fell out of 2-D animation is one of the great lost chances in the medium's recent history. At least we got Bird out of it, and in Bird we have one of the most reliable directors in contemporary Hollywood; and at least we have the film itself, which is all the more precious for being the one shining triumph of the studio that made it. This is, in every way, one of the highlights of both animation and family-friendly cinema in the last quarter-century, a bottomless pleasure no matter how unfairly obscured by market indifference and evolving tastes.

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