SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR GETS MEAN - MEET THE PARENTS

Any honest accounting of the history of American horror filmmaking has to bow in the direction of the enormous influence of The Last House on the Left, the 1972 debut of writer-director Wes Craven and a solid contender for the title of most controversial movie of the last half-century. It is a film that links elbows with the two-years-younger Texas Chainsaw Massacre to go skipping down a primrose path strewn with body parts and pooled intestines, as the two most viciously nihilistic movies of an entire generation, the two movies that most directly and punishingly place the national psychic trauma of the late years of the Vietnam War into cinematic language, in which violence is shown as a depravity that makes you feel worst about life and yourself for having watched it. In terms of the marketplace, it triggered an enormous wave of knock-offs, and it more or less invented the subgenre "watch as the plot stops so that something absurdly wretched can happen to basically decent people in stomach-churning explicit violence".

Nothing I could say could ever take away the seismic importance of Last House in the development of a newer, burlier, nastier mode of horror, and I wouldn't want to try. That said, alongside its absolute, quintessential status in the genre's history, the film has also generally accrued a reputation as a great horror classic, on top of its evolutionary importance. And that just baffles the ever-living hell out of me. As I watch The Last House on the Left, I don't merely see a film that fails to be as good as it ought to have been - for that, we had better look to its altogether superior 2009 remake - I see a film that's borderline incompetent in all the places that matter the most, constantly sabotaging itself and robbing all of the impact from the handful of scenes that are able to accrue some measure of power. It's amateur-hour indie junk, not to put too fine a point on it, and whatever it manages to achieve as a powerful indictment of the human capacity for hatred and violence is nothing next to its status as a long lost Keystone Kops feature cut together with the world's shittiest folk musical.

Like all of the most grueling exercises in grind house viciousness, The Last House on the Left started life as an Ingmar Bergman film. The film is an uncredited remake of 1960 Cannes competitor The Virgin Spring, in which a medieval Swedish Christian girl is raped and murdered in the woods, her parents accidentally meet her killers and then kill them, and to cut off the cycle of vengeance and violence, her father dedicates her resting place to God and prostrates himself, begging for forgiveness, while the family's pagan maid looks on in wonder. Transfer the setting to 1970s Connecticut, remove the spiritual overtones and burning need for expiation, and hit Sven Nykvist in the head with a baseball bat until he forgets how shoot a movie that doesn't look like somebody dried off their sweaty testicles with the camera negative, and voila! You have Craven's attempt to fuse exploitation and documentary in one intense package.

It's the day before Mari Collingwood's (Sandra Cassel) 17th birthday, and she's got a big night planned: she and her edgy friend Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham) are going into New York City to see the band Bloodlust. It's a typical piece of adolescent overcompensation, trying as hard as she possibly can to shock her well-off bourgeois parents Dr. John Collingwood (Richard Towers, appearing under the hilariously ultra-WASP name of "Gaylord St. James") and Estelle (Cynthia Carr), and they respond with exactly the ill-concealed dismay at their daughter's life choices that she was undoubtedly trying to kick up.

Already, by the film's three-minute mark, we've encountered two of the things that will primarily ruin The Last House on the Left: terrible filmmaking and terrible acting. The latter, at least, is explicable: the film was conceived by Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham (who would, eight years later, drop another bomb on the horror landscape when he produced and directed Friday the 13th) as an actual hardcore sexploitation film, deciding only at the very start of shooting that it would be better for their artistic aspirations (which were "indict a culture of violence and rape", not "get main in raincoats to whack off to a rape scene") if they dropped that angle. But they'd already assembled a cast entirely out of pornography veterans. And even though pornography in the early '70s was at its all-time height of sophistication and cultural acceptance, it wasn't a Petri dish of high-end acting talent. That being said, just because we can rationalise on paper why everybody - literally, every individual in the film who speaks lines of dialogue - feels like they learned their line phonetically and has only had enough time to think of one strategy for physical acting (which leads to a lot of fixed snarling expressions, like somebody just had a big whiff of smelly garbage and is pissed about it), it doesn't lessen the deleterious effect that has on the film's second and third acts.

As for the terrible filmmaking, it speaks less to Craven & company's lack of talent, than the apparently undecided approach the film takes to itself. The director's chief intent was, supposedly, to present an supremely artless, unmediated vision of behavior, capturing actions without commenting or looking away, and in the individual shots he and cinematographer Victor Hurwitz put together, you can see that. But the editing, by Craven himself (assisted by future slasher director Steve Miner), is almost comically incompatible with any of that, feeling every bit what an ambitious newbie would make in '72 if he wanted to be "artsy". It feels like someone absorbed the technique of French New Wave editing without paying attention to the narrative and structural importance of that editing, which leaves it choppy and discontinuous to no effect whatsoever. So, the first scene: cross-cutting between the mailman (Ray Edwards) sorting through the Collingwoods' letters and Mari getting ready to shower (so much for indicting exploitative male sexuality), and every time he says "Mari Collingwood" (postmen read the address of every piece of mail out loud, you see), the film cuts to Mari's face. To make sure that we know who she is, and that it's her birthday, since while there were other, more organic ways of doing it, none of them were as easy. It's downright hilarious, or it would be, anyway, if we were watching a parody and not an ostensibly gut-wrenching exercise in agonising terror. The worst thing is, this kind of clumsy stitching together of disparate moments using awkward sound editing and is a fucking strategy in the movie. It shows up many fucking times. And while it's happening here, we're introduced to another of the film's great sins, the music by David Hess; it's soft, elevator-style noodling without a melody, sounding perfect for a 1972 douche advertisement, and not so much a 1972 genre film.

So anyway, Mari goads her parents, and her dog - she says "tits" in reference to her snug top with neckline that goes right to her chin, and Dad gets offended that she says "tits", and there is I swear to God an insert shot of the dog looking up with a cocked-head look of shock, like this is a '90s Disney family comedy. It is possible that Craven's goal was to lull us into a relaxed state, so that he could hammer us all the harder later on. If so, he failed: by this point - and we're still just a few minutes into it - I'm just peevish and irritable. Anyway, Phyllis and Mari leave for the city, cross-cutting merrily along the way, having long conversations about their boobs that sound exactly like a 32-year-old screenwriter's impression of what he wants to imagine nubile teenagers talk like. They hear a radio news report about some escaped murder-rapists at large, including a line of dialogue that should be enshrined in the bad exposition hall of fame: "The daring daylight escape of the two convicted murderers, dope pushers and rapists cost the lives of two prison guards, and surprisingly, the life of a German Shepherd". Surprisingly! We meet those killers pretty quickly: Krug Stillo (our beloved composer Hess, kicking a career that would consist almost entirely of shadings of this same character), "Weasel" Podowski (porn director Fred Lincoln), Krug's son Junior (Marc Sheffler, who looks much too close in age to Hess), and Krug's bisexual girlfriend Sadie (Jeremie Rain). They're reprehensible and animalistic (animal imagery is used fairly heavily in their early scenes, in fact), and the first time the movie even flirts with the idea of having some kind of sickening power, though the music and acting - Rain's in particular - do everything they can to deny that power.

In the city, the girls decided to hunt for pot before they go to the show, and they have the immense misfortune to hit up Junior Stillo on a subway platform. He takes them back to the gang's ratty apartment, and it's all downhill from the moment they realise that they've just been trapped: "Oh shit" says Phyllis with the irritable tones of a woman who has just discovered that her husband didn't do the dishes like he promised, and no the ones of somebody finding herself captured by a pack of almost literally slavering rape-happy ghouls.

The criminals bind their victims and toss them in a car trunk to drive into the country for their awful fun, which of course means it's time to break out the kazoos on the soundtrack, as Hess provides the worst of his many songs, "Sadie and Krug (Baddies' Theme)"; it's a jaunty ballad that earns having the word "baddies" in its title through bubbly jollity and wordplay, and whatever ironic contrast the filmmakers were going for between the knee-slapping fun of the music and the gut-roiling tension of two young women being driven to God knows where to have God knows what done to them is not landing at all. AT ALL.

What follows is the source of all the film's notoreity and most of its actual terror: Mari and Phyllis are released in the woods near Mari's house, and being just barely far enough from safety that it does them no good at all sharpens the sense of nihilism as the two girls are forced to degrade themselves. Phyllis makes a run for it and is caught and killed; Mari tries to trick Junior into letting her go, and for her cunning is raped before she's shot to death. It is serious, grisly stuff, and it needs to be treated with utmost intelligence and dignity. But the movie has already shat that bed. Leading into this harrowing sequence with the worst music cue in a film that is hellbent on showcasing Hess's poor musical judgment is enough to dispel any controlled mood that the film vitally needs at this juncture. And Cassel is unrelentingly terrible in her role that it's difficult to care about the vile things happening to the character: she's no more convincing at being scared and in pain than she was at talking about her boobs or acting casual with her parents. The dead-eyed blankness and lack of self that follows being raped - that's the thing she's good at.

As shot, this sequence at least tries to reach the savage documentary feel that Craven claims to have had in mind. The handheld camera is loose and raw enough to impart a level of queasy potency to anything it lands on, and there are points where the accumulation of dust and dirt on the gate gives the film the look of harried realism, where the filmmakers were too busy capturing footage to stop and make sure that it was pristine and polished. Later on, the same thing happens in a context where it adds nothing of value, so this is probably simple incompetent filmmaking, not an aesthetic choice. None of this is enough to actually elevate the movie: the editing and camera movement still do a lot to pull the film's punches, even beyond how badly the film bungles the lead-up to this sequence. To compare it to the other most controversial of all movie rapes, the six-years-later I Spit on Your Grave blasts it out of the water: it's longer, more detailed, and the victim is someone who has actually come across as a legitimate human being elsewhere in the film, and the resulting sequence is galling and wretched and openly painful, where The Last House on the Left can at best hope to be gross and upsetting.

While all of this has been going on, the Collingwoods have contacted the police, who've responded with a sheriff (Marshall Anker) and his deputy (Martin Kove), and they are the worst. Both at policework, and at being movie characters. They're comic relief of the biggest, loopiest, broadest sort, getting into all manner of slapstick scrapes and making bumbling asses of themselves. That's all I have to say about them, but they take up an enormous portion of the brief running time, and every single frame that includes them is a liability at least as great as Hess's addiction to the most inappropriate music cues in history.

Eventually, the killers find their way to the Collingwood home, little realising where they are, while John and Estelle little realise who their peculiar new guests are. At first. They all figure out the situation, but the killers add morbid stupidity to their list of crimes by not supposing they need to get the hell out as soon as they put 2 and 2 together. That gives Mari's parents a chance to spend the night rigging the house with booby traps, and then arranging a bloody revenge against the four human monsters under their roof. It's a better sequence by far than the rape, since Craven has a surer idea of how to use visuals in concert with content rather than trying to pull his punches; the film is a bit less explicitly bloody than one might think, though that surely has at least as much to do with budget as anything. The inherent dramatic strength of this segment of the narrative compared to the middle - it's the difference between horror as a concrete element that comes to your home and must be exorcised, versus horror as a sort of free-floating state of suffering - was picked up by the creators of the remake, who emphasise that plot and the Collingwoods' mental state far more than Craven & co. ever do (the remake also has much better actors, so it can afford more nuanced psychological study. Here, it mostly feels like a splashy Grand Guignol finale that traffics in bloodlust and a surprisingly robust strain of rightwing class resentment - the killers explicitly detest the Collingwoods for their wealth, and they have been depicted throughout as a parody of hippie culture, which adds a measure of counter-radicalism that's not at all rare in horror, but is a bit surprising from an indie movie in '72. Not that I suspect anybody thought this through that much; like the rest of the film, this is all slapdash and trivial. The aesthetic choices are clumsy as hell, with improperly balanced close-ups and blasted-out sound effects, on top of dirty lenses (an eyelash lazily sashays across a protracted take of Estelle and Weasel chatting, as she prepares to bit his penis off) and the usual cryptic editing - the Collingwoods find Mari after all of five seconds of searching in their backyard, as far as I can tell - and stilted porn actor performance. And then it ends with a freeze frame on the pensive, blood-soaked results of violence without having an iota of the Bergman film's curiosity about the moral cost of vengeance. And then "Sadie and Krug (Baddies' Theme)" plays fucking again, over cheery shots of the cast. Because that's a great way to wrap up your harrowing horror movie.

And from this font springs much of the rest of American horror: exploitative violence and basically entered English-language genre films here, Cunningham's career directly influenced the explosion of slasher movies, and you can draw a straight line from the last scene to the torture porn genre of the 2000s. So basically, all the shitty horror traces back to The Last House on the Left, and that's exactly as it should be: shit begets shit. There's nothing about this film that I'd care to defend as worth keeping

Body Count: 6, not counting the innocence of the American filmgoing public, nor my patience.

Nastiness Rating: 4/5, pretty damn Nasty. That's adding a point, honestly, for the notoriety of the film. There comes a point when even the most visceral rape scene starts to disintegrate from all those pulled punches. Still, there's a solid 7 minutes in the middle where the film really can make it seem like everything in the world is irredeemably awful.

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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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ABUSES OF POWER

A second review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Knowing, as one can't help but know, that Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the most god-damned notorious art film of them all for its grotesque displays of violence, warped sexuality, and bottomless imagination for depicting human cruelty, the film's opening is even more disorienting than it should be. And it's nothing but black titles on a white background! But underneath plays a jaunty, jazzy tune, Franco Ansaldo and Alfredo Bracchi's "Son tanto triste", promising a breezy tossed-off insincere experience to follow. In its own tiny way, it's as perverse and excruciating as anything that follows.

Truth be told, Salò's reputation for toxic, vile unwatchability is a bit overblown. It is, beyond question, a harrowing experience, and one that is very difficult to recommend - having at last seen it, I'm comfortable calling it an absolutely vital work of cinema that I'll never recommend to anybody for any reason - but it's nothing like a non-stop chamber of horrors that, once it stops, never lets up in punishing the audience. It's extremely formalised, in fact, and takes repeated stops to shift away from its depictions or even descriptions of depravity to indulge in circular conversation amongst its villains about European philosophy. True, these narrative pauses have a tendency to feel like the film is mustering its strength and drawing its breath for the next onslaught, so it's not like we're given a chance to relax in front of it. No, it keeps us pretty tense and wired throughout. Really, the parts of it that are most explicit are in some way the easiest to take, since at least in those cases we get to have a reaction and thus catharsis.

The film was the last to be directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose horrible murder came earlier in the same month as the film's November, 1975 premiere in France, giving its depiction of sexualised violence an extra charge of sickening potency - moreso when it was new than now, I am sure, and the papers aren't busily running photos of Pasolini's bloody corpse. He and Sergio Citti adapted it from the novel by the Marquis de Sade, added some of Dante's Inferno for the framework - though Salò describes only a one-way descent into Hell - and transposed the action to the Mussolini government during its final days as a puppet for the waning Nazi regime. How closely it hews to de Sade, I cannot begin to say, but taken on its own terms, the story adopts an almost poetic structure, built around four "stanzas", each moving through roughly the same sequence of events, while escalating the specific cruelty and intensity of those events. Simply put, the plot centers on a Duke (Paolo Bonacelli), a Bishop (Giorgio Cataldi), a Magistrate (Umberto P. Quintavalle), and the President (Aldo Valletti), who assemble a host of gorgeous young men and women, some kidnapped and some hired, to populate their castle on the outskirts of Salò, the capitol of the short-lived Italian Social Republic. There, they conduct an endless (or 120 days, anyway) experiment in causing humiliation and torture to their victims as a way of indulging their own pleasure. And that's basically it.

Pasolini's essays and interviews conducted in the last few years of his life leave virtually no ambiguity as to what he wanted to accomplish with this film, particularly in relationship to the three immediately preceding it in his career, the "Trilogy of Life" - The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights. Those films, the sunniest of his career, cumulatively present an idealised vision of pre-capitalist society, using primitive film technique and ancient storytelling style to depict sexual and social freedom, something not entirely unlike Rousseau's swoony Enlightenment-era adoration of noble savagery. In that way, it makes perfect sense that Pasolini would turn to de Sade, whose work was an explicit and purposeful contrast to Rousseau's optimism, showcasing the darker side of human possibility. For Pasolini, who had abandoned Marxism but not anti-capitalism at this point, the kind of joyful sexuality he had explored in the trilogy was fundamentally implausible in the corrupt capitalist world around him, based on relationship of power and the exploitation and ownership of the lower classes by the upper classes. It's not unusual to see Salò described as an anti-Fascist parable, using humiliation, torture, and rape as metaphors for the exploitation of a whole country by right-wing authoritarians during the war, but it's more the case that Fascism itself is also a metaphor, and the whole thing is a more general parable about the inherent abuses meted out by the self-indulgent leadership classes against the rest of society, baked into The System The Way It Is Now. This approach itself led to the film being attacked by the Italian intelligentsia, notably Italo Calvino, who viewed Pasolini's appropriation of Mussolini's real-life abuses to serve as an extreme parody in a provocative movie to be dangerously amoral.

That might very well be the case - the last thing I'm qualified to do is tell the intellectuals who lived through Fascism that they don't understand Fascism. Morally, I am genuinely uncertain what we should do with Salò, other than to firmly declare that it's grotesque excesses have very little in common with the like of torture porn or the Nazi sexploitation films of the same era. As cinema, though, the film is ingenious - one can debate the merits of Pasolini's intentions, but not the skill with which he carried them off, and even if we allow for Death of the Author and Intentional Fallacy and the like (and we should), there's no denying that the movie and themes the director described in the last year of his life is precisely the movie that we can watch today, those of us who don't live in countries where it's still illegal.

It's a marvelously crafty picture, Salò is, an enormous shift away from the artful crudeness of the Trilogy of Life and mostly unlike anything Pasolini ever did. It's a mercilessly aesthetic piece: the all-star team of production designer Dante Ferretti, set decorator Osvaldo Desideri, and costume designer Danilo Donati, in concert with Pasolini and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli's proscenium-like framing along strict gridlines, gives Salò the polish, richness, and geometric precision of classical art; for a film so jam-packed with ugliness, it's gorgeous, like, constantly. But also chilly and mechanical: what none of the visuals do is give any life to the movie, and the customary hollowed-out sound design of Italian film production does nothing to combat that, nor do the dispassionate performances which (much like the sound), only really have much vibrancy to speak of during the cruelest acts depicted. The film is so sharp and precise that it feels totally artificial, and the whole time one watches it, one is first and always aware of the artifice on display: the fussy staging, the inorganic cutting, the way that depravity turns on and off like a light switch.

It becomes uncomfortably clear, in other words, that the film anticipates an audience - ourselves, and probably Pasolini too, whose sexual proclivities weren't entirely unlike some of the ones being depicted in the film as so ugly. Particularly viewed in the context of Tree of Life, Salò is obviously a scream of primal rage, directed at a world where everything is cruel and even something as beautiful as sex has been curdled and turned into a device for the powerful to assert their control over the powerless (I'm not sure that I've ever seen a movie that so bluntly insists on rape as a totally de-eroticised act). But it is not righteous. It indicts itself, its maker, and its viewers for existing in the same system of abuse and exploitation as its subjects; even as the victimised characters start to become increasingly complicit in sustaining the sordid world they're suffering through, it grows harder to deny that Salò isn't letting us off the hook. Isn't it a beautiful movie to just look at? Aren't the many young men and women seen naked throughout the film attractive? Yes and yes - that's the movie's trap for us, for even though it's as thoroughly unpleasant as any film that does not depict actual dead humans or animals could possibly be, Salò anticipates its status as an unspeakable provocation, one of those movies that we all go see precisely because they're so shocking and upsetting and horrible. The film tricks us, though: first by including so much material that's upsetting without being shocking, its long passage of depressingly violent stories and shitty jokes and its slow-paced development of the visual and narrative rules, and sitting listening to its characters talk about how utterly vile they are without punishing them for it. And then when the shocks start to come, they're staged in a way that makes us feel like voyeurs - explicitly so, in one of the final moments. It's a film that indicts everything, up to and including itself for existing in the world it depicts.

It's a one-of-a-kind mixture of rarefied intellectualism and disgusting visceral spectacle, and its themes are so severe as to feel like a howl of despair more than an articulate statement of radical politics. But it is pure cinema. I was not glad to see it while I was watching it, but I'm glad to have seen it; it is quite a thing to grapple with. Movies like this simply don't exist: that's arguably a good thing, but it certainly makes Salò stand out as a singular artistic accomplishment.

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THE WORLD IS A FINE PLACE, AND WORTH FIGHTING FOR

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

I shall start with a personal anecdote, since who doesn't love personal anecdotes from nominally objective arts critics? But "a man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." And when the man now writing was a good deal younger - a boy, really, though I mightn't have thought it at the time, all of 18 and new to college - he saw for the first and until very recently the only time, David Fincher's 1995 breakthrough Se7en, the film with which that music video director proved that, absent the clusterfuck of studio intervention that made Alien³ such an unimpressive feature debut, he had the stylistic chops and tight control of tone required to be a Real Auteur. And upon this first viewing of Se7en, Wee Young Timmy Brayton was absolutely flattened - just so damn thoroughly unnerved and wrecked by it that, for 14 years and change, it was the one and only title on my list of movies So Good I Can Only Bear to Watch It Once. Now, obviously, the film's not that extreme, and in the intervening decade, I've watched many films that are far more punishing in every way, and for some years now, I've supposed that in this case, memory was exaggerating the titanic dreadfulness of how cruel and unabating the film was, and of course that turns out to be the case. Still, the point remains: it takes a hell of a movie to trigger that kind of response. And yes, Se7en is absolutely a hell of a movie - and a movie of Hell, I might idly throw out there, if I wanted to engage in feeble wordplay.

The film's impact has been seismic; along with The Silence of the Lambs, four years earlier, and maybe we could argue TV's The X-Files, which premiered in 1993, it's one of the creative works in what we might, for want of a clear term, call the Horror Cop genre: police procedurals which appropriate all they can from the gore and terror-driven horror genre (a genre that was, I suspect not coincidentally, in abeyance in the first half of the 1990s), to the point that they start to blur definitional lines. Silence, I think, is a horror film; Se7en, ultimately, probably isn't, but it's right there. And though these two films are, by themselves, almost the entire history of this experimental subgenre, their influence has been felt absolutely everywhere in the two decades since the latter film's premiere - Holy Mother of all things sacred, Se7en is 20 years old, when the fuck did that happen? - in less pure form. Take some of the horror back out, and you have the glut of TV procedurals in which grim-faced cops sorrowfully poke at the most hellaciously violent and often sexualised crimes, depicted with all the brio that standards and practices will permit. Go the other way, and lump in enough horror that it's impossible to deny that's what's going on, and you basically have Saw (a film whose aesthetic does not at all hide its theft from Se7en) and all its little torture porn offspring.

That's a pretty shoddy legacy, but let's not permit it to devalue Fincher's great achievement in anyway, which after 20 years - 20 fucking years - and countless copycats, hasn't lost any of its unnerving, devastating nihilistic power. It is a cruel, bitter movie, undoubtedly the film that most plainly expresses the theme common to all of Fincher's work, that humans are basically prone to cruelty and stupidity, and all decent people can do is try to not give into that impulse. And one may or may not respond to the bleakness and nihilism of that message - and if any English-language film can be confidentally described as "nihilistic", it's Se7en - but it's impossible to deny the potency and artistry with which Fincher and company execute it here. I do not hide my frequent lack of affection for the director's work, but this is a great piece of cinema, the kind that works on such a visceral, primal level to communicate its thoughts and feelings that quibbling with it like pissing in the wind. It is a powerful, brutalising thing, and maybe the most totally successful thing Fincher has directed; alongside Zodiac (which I'd call his best movie; it's also probably his most clinically intellectual), it suggests that whatever he does, Fincher should probably always make movies about serial killers.

The plot of the film, inspired by screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker's miserable stretch of time living in New York (it's a bit remarkable how not at all impressive Walker's subsequent career has been, when he's every bit as important for the film's impact as the director), is straightforward enough: in an unnamed city where it almost always seems to be raining, and which ends up even filthy after the rain than before it, Detective Lieutenant Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is in the last week of his employ with the police department, and is to spend the next seven days (the title has a double meaning!) showing the ropes to new transfer Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), who is more or less going to end up his replacement. On day #1, they find an appalling murder scene, where a man was tortured to death by being forced at gunpoint to eat till he burst; this turns out to be the first in a series of killings inspired by the seven deadly sins - gluttony, lust, wrath, sloth, pride, envy, and greed. As the two men investigate, the gulf between their respective worldviews begins to inform everything about how they respond to the ugliness and savagery of these crimes: Mills's conviction that right will out, and that the universe favors justice drives him towards passionate anger, while Somerset's work-honed certitude that there is more wickedness than the good people of the world can ever hope to combat leaves him doggedly pursuing clues with a detachment that's like depression, if only depression could somehow be even sadder.

The actual meat of the film is pretty easily gotten through; the content, for the most part, is a more or less literal tour of Hell. Not for nothing does the film heavily emphasise Dante's Inferno: like that poem, Se7en functions as a story of one wise old man guiding a younger, more optimistic soul through several tableaux vividly demonstrating the consequences of worldly sin. The difference being that, in Dante, the sins are against God, while in Se7en, they are punished only by one deeply broken human, played by - is a 20-year-old movie still covered by spoiler alerts? Because it's a huge spoiler - Kevin Spacey in the best work of his career, granite-faced as he spits out his bile in brittle, inhuman tones. There is definitely no God in the universe of Se7en; only psychopaths. And instead of the message "these are the punishments you might face if you misbehave", the lesson is the infinitely bleaker "these are the punishments you might face for having the misfortune to have been born".

Walker's script is insistently symbolic without being overbearing about it, and it's surprisingly willing to stop the narrative development entirely to favor scenes of the two leads talking about morality and philosophy, but the thing never drags. A lot of credit for both of these things must go to Freeman and Pitt, who might fall into the ordinary "sagacious black cop/fiery white cop" dynamic, but build such extreme personality into the parts that everything they say and do feels far more an extension of character than the requirement of the screenplay (it might be my favorite Freeman performance; it is, anyway, the one where he engages with his then-nascent "wise old black man calmly intoning advice" persona in the most interestingly off-kilter ways). And certainly, the quality of the filmmaking is at an extraordinary level: beyond Fincher's direction, there is the matter of Howard Shore's erratic, scraping score, Darius Khondji's cinematography, with its overtones of infection and dessication, and Richard Francis-Bruce's tightly controlled editing, all slow build-up to explosions.

It's an absolutely top-shelf thriller first and foremost; a movie that uses its nervy central gimmick as a great spine to pose the question, "so what happens next?" before plunging us through one of the most raw-nerve mysteries of its decade. The film is propulsive in the exactly the same gestures that it's nauseating and distressing. Hell, that's basically the thesis statement presented in the film's enormously influential opening credits, which combine punchy cutting and a thick visual sense of moral rot and so set the entire film off on the footing it will pursue forever after. Exciting on the one hand; immensely unpleasant on the other. It is a desperately involving and watchable film for something so absolutely starved of joy; it makes the expression of total nihilism vividly cinematic in a way that no other American film I can immediately call to mind has ever even attempted. It is not the kind of film I can honestly say that I could love, let alone do love; but I don't suppose I could possibly admire it any more than I do, for its absolute commitment to tone and the excellence of its construction in every scene and every frame.

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HARD TO FORGET, or: SOMETHING'S BETTER THAN NOTHING, YES, BUT NOTHING'S BETTER THAN MOORE

Still Alice is the kind of movie that exists solely to facilitate a great performance in the lead role, and Julianne Moore provides one. So that's, like, a good thing. And that Oscar she has not received yet for playing the role as I write these words, but surely will in a few weeks time - it shall be an earned Oscar. It's not my favorite performance of the year. It's certainly not my favorite Moore performance of all time. But she's right fucking good, and there's simply no way to deny or diminish that fact.

This is good for everybody: for Moore, who finally gets to have all the award recognition she should have received several times over (yes, boilerplate about Oscars are dumb and all that, but I still have to assume she's feeling good right now, and a world where Julianne Moore feels good is the kind I want to live in); for us, who get the treat of a corker of a headlining performance from one of the best actors working right now, and who hasn't had the unshared lead role in a movie since all the way back in 2008, with the dubious Blindness. Most of all, it's good for writer-director duo Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland, whose fourth feature together completely depends on having an absolute dynamo in the center if the film is going to seem like any kind of halfway decent work of art whatsoever. And make no mistake, even with Moore tearing it up, down, and sideways, "halfway decent" is still the best that Still Alice can scrounge up for itself.

The Alice Howland who is still herself is an international celebrated cognitive linguistics professor, who finds herself becoming unusually absent-minded, early in her 50s. When, finally, she decides to bother with a doctor, the news is the worst possible: she has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, a particularly rare strain with a genetic component. So not only does Alice herself have to deal with the corrosive effects of the disease, any or all of her three adult children - Anna (Kate Bosworth), Tom (Hunter Parrish), or Lydia (Kristen Stewart) - could follow her path. This cheery possibility casts an ugly pall over an already terrifying situation, as the children, and Alice’s wonderfully supportive but quite helpless husband John (Alec Baldwin) stand at an uncomfortable distance, watching as Alice slowly vanishes.

So that’s the whole plot. And it contains within it the biggest of Still Alice’s liabilities, which is that the film has no real idea of what or who to focus on. The last high-profile Alzheimer’s family drama, Away from Her is ultimately about the sufferer’s husband, who can’t square the physical and emotional presence of his wife with the absence of all the experiences and knowledge that made her identity. Still Alice, in contrast, is entirely about Alice: the family is strictly there to give context and shape to her story. There are lines and even whole scenes that clue us in to how they feel about what’s happening, but at no point is that what the film is about. In principle, this is a very worthy approach to take, but the great limitation is that the film is simply too stolid and milquetoast in its approach to actually get inside Alice’s head and fading memories. Crudely put, the best version of Still Alice needs to have a kind of Alzheimer’s itself, presenting the sense of dislocation and untethered now-ness of a person losing all her old memories and unable to form new ones. That’s not what happens here at all. The camera is always locked on Alice, and it strictly limits itself to what she perceives, but it never, ever adopts her internal POV; we’re watching Alice intently, but we simply do not know what she experiences. Since this broadly describes the experience of watching a loved one declining from Alzheimer’s, that kind of unknowable objectivity works in something like Away from Her, where the mindset of the person watching is the focus. With Still Alice, we instead find ourselves confronted with an exquisitely worked-out and luminously acted piece of disease porn.

This is even more of a pity than it seems, because studded throughout Glatzer & Westmoreland’s screenplay, adapting Lisa Genova’s novel, there are clear-headed, stirring ideas about these characters and their world that could be turned into something really special if the film wanted to grapple with them instead of just include them as plot points in its litany of the Horrors of Alzheimer’s. Its depiction of the way that people of a very certain economic and educational background cope with sickness, denying it, trying to outthink, feeling awfully confused why something so capriciously awful could happen to people who’ve so consciously made all the right choices, could easily have a bit more sting if the movie was, itself, any more aware that its characters existed in that rarefied class. Making Alice a professor of the way that the brain processes and stores information is rather glibly on-the-nose, but it opens up a tragic dimension of the way that people who live entirely inside their own head react when their head is suddenly revealed as a dangerous battleground (at one point, the idea is floated that the very well-educated can be harder to diagnose, since they have an arsenal of intellectual tricks to subconsciously outflank the early symptoms - the film could do with more stopovers in that territory). Once the rest of the cast has generally sunk into the background, and the film can focus on Alice’s relationship with her youngest and black-sleepiest child, Lydia, it gets into some rather sharp, insightful territory about how family tragedies can be used, and even usurped, in the process of airing out and overcoming old grievances, and the ways that some bonds are tried by suffering while others are intensified and strengthened. That Stewart, perhaps unexpectedly, gives the film’s clear second-best performance only makes this all the stronger; it also makes it all the more annoying that the film dithers through an hour where the family drama is just kind of sitting there, flatly and obviously, like an animal carcass on the highway. But, like, a really handsomely middlebrow animal carcass.

So, all in all, there’s a much stronger movie right inside the kind of dodgy, thematically directionless one we get. It’s impressive but oh-so-limited, and the filmmaking limits it even more: a tremendously bland visual style married to a hectoring, bossy score by Ilan Eshkeri, which overstresses all the darker moments and makes the thing feel like there’s a campy Still Alice looking for a way out, just like there’s a more serious, thoughtful engagement with the emotional and psychological effects of Alzeimer’s and not just the symptomology of it. I certainly would have preferred the second of these theoretically possible Still Alices to the first, but either one of them would have been a great deal more lively and memorable than what does really amount to watching an enormously talented woman march through a checklist of increasingly haunting, depressing developments, while around her, the supporting cast can barely keep themselves from applauding her effort and gratefully allow themselves to serve as props for her to react to and measure herself against. But Moore is really quite terrific, and through sheer presence and unerring focus, she manages to manhandle Still Alice into having things to say about the physical and familial conditions it depicts, even if frankly doesn’t want to.

6/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: THIS CAMBODIAN LIFE

If I may risk being pithy about the gravest subject in the wide world, we’re living through a golden age of documentaries about mass killings in southeast Asia. Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary, extraordinarily crushing dyad of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, with their historiographical study of the murder of accused Communists in Indonesia in 1965, are already legendary among the sorts of people who would be inclined to seek such things out; coming right in between the two them, having made the festival rounds in the second half of 2013, we turn to Cambodia from 1975-’79, the period of the notorious and cruel Khmer Rouge, a regime under the leadership of dictator Pol Pot that attempted to turn the country Communist by the expedient of massacring Cambodian citizens by the tens of thousands and leaving tens of thousands more to die from the miserable conditions that took root in the country as a result of the Khmer Rouge’s mismanagement of everything that could possibly be mismanaged.

Among those who managed to endure this four-year hell was teenaged Rithy Panh, the sole survivor of his family. Many decades later, Panh devoted himself to constructing a documentary mixing political history with personal memoir, and thus we arrive at The Missing Picture, winner of the 2013 Un Certain Regard award at Cannes, nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film award at the Oscars, and all around, one of the most daunting and important works of non-fiction cinema of the 2010s. The film’s title refers to the blank patch left in the historical record by the regime: all of the images of suffering, death, and casual evil that Panh recalls from his experience living through it, but which were either destroyed by the Khmer Rouge or never physically captured on film, either as motion pictures or stills. The Missing Image sets itself to the goal of rebuilding those images and recording them, giving visual testimony to the terrible events perpetrated against Cambodia from within, reclaiming Panh’s memories and giving them a tangible form that the totalitarian Communist regime worked to prevent during its brief, brutal time in power.

It is, in fact, something of a reversal of The Act of Killing, which explored the nature of mass killings by providing the aging perpetrators of those killings with a forum to express their memories through cinema, and thereby condemn themselves through their own words. The Missing Image instead gives voice to a victim, and is much more straightforward in the way it recounts history and then indicts its villains, though this is the only way in which it is more straightforward than anything. In order to stage his memories, Panh didn’t film re-enactments; he instead opted to stage his personal history as a series of elaborate three-dimensional tableaux, populated by small clay figures sculpted by Sarith Mang, while the history of the Khmer Rouge and Panh’s experience of it is recounted by a narrator (Randal Douc in the original French version, Jean-Baptiste Phou in the English dub, which is how I saw it). As movies go, this one is full of a great many still life subjects, but Panh and cinematographer Prum Mésa use the camera to probe through the richly colored, oddly playful sets, bringing the staged events to life with surprising vigor, considering how we’re basically watching a bunch of posed dolls.

It’s not just pregnant, kinetic camerawork that blasts life into the sculptures, though; Mang’s deliberately crude designs have individual personalities and shifting emotions that should hardly be conceivable for modeling clay figurines produced in the quantities this film requires. The childish nature of the technique and aesthetic constantly and uncomfortably reinforce the reality that Panh was himself barely out of childhood when he lived through the events he relates. Between the primitivist style and outstandingly expressive poses and faces, the figures in the film load it up with emotional resonance that ends up walloping us hard, and repeatedly, giving added wait to what are already dreadfully powerful stories put across in blunt, declarative statements that neither sensationalise the events nor beg for our pity and sympathy.

When, as happens somewhat often, Panh incorporates actual footage sanctioned by the Khmer Rouge, the contrast between the badly-aged black and white film and the colorful, hand-made figures appearing to watch or even interact with the film footage pushes and already bold and unique film into some kind of new place altogether, with the director uniting his decades-old memories with the scraps of extant documentary material to produce impressive conflations of past and present, personal and institutional. Throughout its running time, The Missing Image is as much a study of the persistence of memories as it is a history of the Khmer Rouge, and it is in these moments that those two threads draw closest together, combining with exceptional emotional force and intellectual thorniness in a film that has plenty of both of those things to start with.

Like most films about mass death, The Missing Picture is relentlessly, even oppressively unpleasant. As it should be and has to be, really. But even more than such essential works of pure human misery like The Act of Killing, this argues strongly for its essential nature by basing itself around the idea that we must never forget events such as these and human capacity for doing ill. It is, explicitly, an attempt to catalogue and present memories before they have been forgotten, something like a one-man Cambodian version of Shoah. If we do not grapple with films like this, we risk losing the memories and record of the events they depict, and thus make it easier as a specifies to repeat such events: you don’t walk out of The Missing Picture having “liked” it, but even so, I can’t name a single film released in 2014 in the United States that I’d be more eager to encourage people so seek out and sit through and process it in all of its difficult, disturbing complexity. It is both great cinema and important journalism, a rare and privileged combination.

10/10

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TANKS FOR NOTHING

War is violent. Did you know? Was this something that you might have guessed at, even in your most wild fantasies? Because the new World War II movie Fury seems to have run out of ideas above and beyond "war is violent", though it makes up for that by suggesting that war was really really fucking violent, and showing that violence in all the wide-eyed amazement that can possibly be scrounged up. And then filtering it through cinematography by Roman Vasyanov that runs the gamut of colors from steel blue to slate grey.

In other words: Fury is a grim, dark, extravagantly depressing piece of cinema, in which the world is divided only into that which is violent, and that which is dead. The perfect WWII movie for writer-director David Ayer, whose work to date has shown an implacable fascination with all the ways that men can damage other men. And men it very much is: Ayer's other career-spanning fascination is with the way that violent jobs - LAPD officer, DEA agent, and now soldier - offer studies in masculine behavior under pressure. And I think, from the way the movies talk and structure themselves, that the point the filmmaker thinks he's making is that all men are capable of being pushed into violent extremes by circumstances that make them compromise their moral codes, but the effect has always been, to my mind, "Ooh, look at that animalistic thug of a man who has sacrificed all the things that make him a stable human! He's so cool!"

Fury compounds that issue by making the bad guys Nazis; and what movie is possibly going amble along and be all, like, "don't kill Nazis. Killing Nazis is bad"? They're the all-time ultimate Acceptable Movie Cannon Fodder. And Fury knows this in its heart of hearts, which is why it so unpersuasively moves from a scene in the middle, where the Innocent New Kid begs and weeps and screams to be permitted not to execute a German prisoner (a moment that anyway feels less like "killing is always wrong, in wartime or otherwise", nor "killing a prisoner of war is wrong", and more like "killing would make me feel icky", but I think that's an issue of acting more than anything), and which the film positions as though it wants to make us understand the enormous cost of being a human to knowingly take the life of another human, regardless of the circumstances, over to a climax in which the entire population of Germany is seemingly killed by our rag-tag group of heroes in a thunderous action sequence that unambiguously, joyfully looks forward to the next wave of dead Nazi scum. Simply put, the film is too excited about its gruesome, frequent stop-overs with brutal violence (which begin in the very first scene, with an evocatively squelchy-sounding knife to the throat) to actually believe in the "violence does terrible things to men's souls" message it mouths throughout.

But philosophical shortcomings are at best a second-order problem with the film, which suffers from a far greater sin, cinematically-speaking: it's long, boring, and has unconvincing stock characters in place of people. It's about the crew of an M4 Sherman tank, named "Fury" and so-identified on the gun barrel, under the leadership of Sgt. Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt). The zesty caricatures inhabiting the tank are Bible-Thumping Southerner Boyd "Bible" Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Unbalanced Hothead Grady "Coon-Ass" Travis (Jon Bernthal), Lazy (Possibly Stoned?) Latino Trini "Gordo" Garcia (Michael Peña), and the aforementioned guileless newbie untouched by the horrors of war, and the only one of these people to have a single personality trait that doesn't directly follow from their one-line description, Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman). To judge from the amount of time Ayer spends watching these five men doing absolutely nothing but interacting in the close confines of the tank, he apparently regards them as rich, vibrant personalities and not a collection of ancient stereotypes. And oh, my, the amount of time we spend sitting watching them is just endless. But not as endless as a scene with a couple of local German women (Annamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittberg), where the threat of rape hangs over the proceedings like a haze of cigarette smoke and at least two of the five characters are turned into such petty-minded savages that nothing could possibly redeem them enough to make them likable again by the time the film needs us to be rooting for this precious band of brothers. It goes on for fucking ages. Halfway through the scene, I began to openly wonder if I was watching a film about a tank that had a luncheon scene with German women, or a film about German women hosting a luncheon that had, at one point, included a tank.

When Fury finally decides that it's done dicking around with moral questions it doesn't want to answer and just turns into a full-on tank-based action film (this happens well beyond the midway point of the 134-minute picture), it actually manages to turn into something worth watching. For tank movies are, when you think about it, vanishingly rare; perhaps because they are hard to shoot in and too lumbering to choreograph. But Fury's too big tank-based setpieces are far and away its most accomplished moments, where Ayer the poor director of actors steps aside to let Ayer the really great director of high-energy action take over (Ayer, the director of lingering, pornographic violence shows up every now and then, but not enough to ruin things). The action is hectic and terrifying, the sound mix roars and shakes you down to your bones, the bullets fire like laser beams from a sci-fi movie. Which never stops being distracting, but it's the weakest link in they otherwise splendid action.

It's not clear to me at all that "there's some really great action in the last hour, and in tanks! How novel!" is enough to compensate for the disastrously stereotypical and underplayed characters (the parts don't have the complexity for anything better, though only Lerman seems to be actively making things worse; LaBeouf, surprisingly, seems to putting the most effort into it and turning out the most distinctly-etched character as a result) and the wildly unpleasant love of violence disguised as as a saddened hatred of violence. Certainly, nothing at all could compensate for the fact that the movie is every second of 45 minutes too long. But if you get stuck watching it for whatever reason, at least it has the decency to back-load all of its best material, so it just gets better as it goes along.

5/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: THE LOOK OF SILENCE (JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER, DENMARK / INDONESIA / NORWAY / FINLAND / UK)

Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/20
World premiere: 28 August, 2014, Venice International Film Festival

The Look of Silence is unmistakably a great film, though it is not a singular one. For one thing, it isn't an object totally complete unto itself, like director Joshua Oppenheimer's previous work, The Act of Killing: it is a sequel to that film, or perhaps we might call it a follow-up, a companion piece, or an addendum (yes, addendum, I think that's the one I like the best), and it's absolutely aware of that fact. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer and the camera were able to vanish, recording the men whose testimonies and self-directed re-enactments made up the film from an invisible vantage point, and this was key to what the thing was: a chance for unrepentant murderers - why should they repent, their government and countrymen regard them as heroes for their role in the mass killings of over one million people in Indonesia in 1965, on the grounds that they were (or were accused of being) Communists - to comfortably and freely indict themselves on the full, limitless horror of what they did, expressed with braggadocio and zeal. But with The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer can't disappear; here is a film in which the subjects are aware of the first movie, and one of the key repeated images used to anchor the progression of the story is the sight of one man, Adi, watching footage of the men responsible for killing his elder brother Ramli, before he was ever born. Far from standing as a blank slate to receive their self-aggrandising, self-damning narratives, the old killers in this film have begun to figure out that the European with the camera isn't actually on their side: many interviews start to crumble with someone's agitated declaration that they're not interested in talking about this with "Josh" anymore.

It's also certainly true that The Look of Silence is more conventional in its goals and its construction, the almost inevitable side-effect of its re-focused attention. The Act of Killing was a film about the minds of people who had committed violence on an enormous scale, and it is appropriately florid and grotesque. The Look of Silence is instead about one single family of victims, and it is necessarily more subdued and intimate: it is not, after all, being filtered through the imagination of madmen. It has no chance to be as expressive and unprecedented. That's certainly no slight against the film, for it is still extraordinarily powerful and potent; maybe even more so, given that it can engage with sorrow and loss more directly. Certainly, I haven't seen a film in 2014 that left me feeling so hollowed-out and anguished - I mean, how many films are there that actually leave you feeling anguished? - and it seems unlikely that this shall not remain the case.

The concept is straightforward and feels distinctly like something executive producer Werner Herzog might do in one of his own films: in 2012, Oppenheimer showed Adi, a 44-year-old ophthalmologist, footage that was shot in 2003, of the people who perpetrated the Snake River massacre, an event at which Ramli was killed in a distinctive and disturbing manner even by the standards of the 1965 mass killings, which were marked perhaps especially by the prevalence of excessively cruel and brutal violence. And then, Oppenheimer took Adi to interview those same men, in the hopes of finding some spark of regret or guilt or just apology from these people (the possibly belabored "the eye doctor hopes to make these people 'see' the effects of their actions" metaphor is thankfully only trotted out once).

What results from all this is harrowing, soul-aching footage. What emerges is less the sense of killers realising that they need to atone for their crimes than killers being confronted, in no small amount of confusion, with the idea that decent people might actually think they did something horrible. What happens, time and time again (and even described in words close to this), is the ripping off of ancient scabs, leaving history raw and fresh and oozing. Indonesia, we find, is not a country that has taken ownership of its sins of made peace with them, but simply stuffed them down at the bottom of the drawer to fester, and in The Look of Silence, we see what happens when that is questioned, and when one person forces another person to reckon with the past.

It is ugly and painful, of course. The film contains an exceptional number of scenes that aren't just depressing, but are acutely uncomfortable to watch on top of it. One woman sitting next to her doddering father for what she plainly expects to be just a game of "let's reminisce" is shattered to learn that he, like many of the killers, drank the blood of his victims to stave off feelings of insanity from the knowledge of his actions (and really, isn't "if we don't drink this human blood, we might go crazy!" just the most perfectly horrifying window into how the minds of these killers?). In something like real-time, we get to watch as she begins reconstructing her worldview to decide that this information is something to be rejected or diminished. And that's not nearly the most cringe-inducing moment in a film where Adi learns that his mother's brother was involved in the system of killings, thinking himself free from guilt since he didn't, personally, take any lives; or a meeting with the family of a man who died sometime after Oppenheimer's 2003 interviews, furiously and passionately and repeatedly trying to deny that the things the director has immediate, firsthand proof of being true could possibly have ever happened.

None of this is, as such, "surprising". While The Act of Killing was a peek in to the minds of the insane, The Look of Silence is about the sane, and it's easier for us to follow along, and suppose, "well yes, that is how I would expect that person to feel about what's going on right now". But simply the lack of being revelatory isn't sufficient to cheapen what The Look of Silence is or what it does. It's no less powerful or important than the first film, using the particular case of one man's death in one period of chaos as a prism through which we can view and ponder the whole business of humans being cruel to other humans and not repenting, and yet never losing sight of the very specific true story being recorded for future historians. The film's consistent rerun to Adi and Ramli's parents, centenarians whose lifetime of suffering is worn visibly on their body (and here, my one big caveat: Adi's 109-year-old father is both mostly blind and mostly deaf, and just on the film's own terms, it's not clear that he could have given his informed consent to be involved in a film that obsessively shows him to be a desiccated man-skeleton being washed and tended for by his patient, loving family), is its best tool in making sure that, whatever universal meaning is easily plucked from the film, we never get to separate it from the specific history that has been almost totally scrubbed from history. Oppenheimer's project - which is probably done now, as he's indicated in interviews that he doesn't think it will be safe for him to return to Indonesia moving forward - is as important historically as cinematically, and if The Look of Silence feels like it needs that justification just a slight touch more than The Act of Killing, the fact remains that we now, in 2014, have a grand total of two important films about the Indonesia mass killings, and it would be irresponsible to pretend that their historical importance isn't a significant part of their legacy. It's wonderful indeed that they are both so powerful, intelligent, and beautifully made on top of it: this is painful and devastating stuff to watch, but so emphatically and movingly human that it's not possible to regret the experience

10/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE MERRY WORLD OF FRANK MILLER

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: in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, we return to the charming world of Basin City, where men are brutal nihilists and women are slutty slutwhores and buildings are CGI. All this was a little fresher last time around.

There's such a huge gap between the experience of watching Sin City when it was new in 2005, and the experience of watching it almost a full decade later, it feels like two entirely different movies, damn near. Thus it is with films which were at one point on the technological bleeding edge - and oh, how very bloody that edge was in the case of Sin City when it was new. It's almost quaint to think of it now, but there was a time when a "live-action" movie that took place almost entirely in CGI environments was enormously radical. Prior to Sin City, there had been the half-steps of George Lucas's Star Wars prequels, both of which (in those glory days, there was merely a "both", and we could still hold out hope that he'd right things) involved extensive use of CGI set-building; and in 2004, Kerry Conran wrote and directed Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the first American film with 100% digitally-created backdrops for its human actors to interact with; or rather, not to. And in the same year, the French Immortel and the Japanese Casshern were released, both of which also featured only synthetic sets.

But the Star Warses were unpleasantly eager to declare themselves tech demos with terrible narratives and insipid characters reluctantly tacked on, Sky Captain married truly exquisite, imaginative world building to a story that barely exists, and the foreign films made nary a ripple in the States, incapable of proving to Hollywood that an extraordinary new tool for making whole worlds without the tedious labor of making whole worlds now existed, and thus creating the rather dubious world in which we now live. That honor fell to Sin City, the first film of the lot to use this all-digital set creation because it served the greater purposes of the movie, rather than as an end in and of itself. Now that every single mainstream movie from the enormous effects-driven tentpoles to the modest character stories comes in with a sheen of computer-generated Vaseline over everything, it's easy to forget how astonishing this felt at the time; that a movie could and should create a completely synthetic world to provide the right environment for its story to thrive.

In the particular case of Sin City, that environment and that story (stories, rather) can be described in the same way: an amped-up exaggeration of the style, world, and moral ethos of film noir. It's asking far too much to suggest that the film is a parody of the genre, for Frank Miller, author and artist of the comic book series from which the film has been slavishly adapted, would not appear to have nearly enough of a sense of humor to write such a thing as a parody. But it is an exaggeration to the most absurd extremities, a kind of apotheosis of the curdled nihilism, violence, sexism, and urban rot that make up noir. The enormous stylisation - also slavishly adapted from the comics, which functionally serve as the movie's storyboards - is, likewise, an intensified version of the Expressionist photography that turned realistic urban settings into hellish, almost surreal spaces, rendered as little more than black and white lines and shapes with absolutely no room in between for shading, or for human habitation. Individual elements of color, mostly reds with some yellow, blue, and rarely green here or there, serve to provide some minute measure of respite from the savage black and white, a flicker of life whether in the form of love, death, or terror, anything that's not the sheer grinding agony of life in Basin City.

The film's overriding problem - assuming that the whole "ultra-nihilistic extreme expression of film noir style and morality" isn't a problem for you, as it is not for me (and making allowances for how the film watches in 2005 as opposed to 2014, I'm still quite a big fan of the movie) - is that it's so indebted to the comic books, adding nothing but motion and the various textures of the performances. The nominal director, Robert Rodriguez, does very little to the film other than facilitate it; the honorary directorial credit he gave to Miller (without which we would maybe not have Miller's putrid 2008 film of The Spirit, a film that blindly copies Sin City's aesthetic with an incomparably worst script and performances) admits as much, and the fact that the one scene "guest-directed" by Quentin Tarantino is indistinguishable from the rest of the film other than having a slightly looser performance from Benicio Del Toro speaks to how little personality the movie actually possesses that it didn't borrow from Miller.

And as we kind of knew in 2005, and know to an absolute dread certainty in 2014, borrowing personality from Frank Miller is a rather dubious thing to do. This shows in Sin City itself, which is good and bad almost entirely as a function of the quality of the original comic stories it's adapting: it's based on the first, third, and fourth "Sin City yarns", as Miller referred to them during the book's original run in the 1990s, apparently recognising that the word "stories" implies more structure and discipline than his feverish lashings of urban nightmare rage possessed. The first and third - "The Hard Goodbye" and "The Big Fat Kill" - are possibly the best of all seven Sin City miniarcs, in the tightness of their construction and the effectiveness of how Miller's art (which is literally re-created onscreen) works within the mood created by that story. The fourth - "That Yellow Bastard" - is, I would argue, the exact moment when you can watch the early Frank Miller who was largely good if thoroughly retrograde in some of his opinions about vigilante justice, women, and government, starts to turn into the sour-minded crank Frank Miller, who'd fully emerge in the final Sin City yarn, "Hell and Back", and would be responsible for the ghastly The Dark Knight Strikes Again and Holy Terror and the angry, unfunny pastiche All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder. And that plays off in the movie, as well, which somewhat awkwardly welds the three units into one film that presumably was meant to have the structural payoffs of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, but doesn't get there. The first two segments (following two prologues), centering around Mickey Rourke's big menacing thug with a heart of gold Marv, and Clive Owen's hitman-in-hiding Dwight, are both delightful, nasty-minded wallows in excess, misanthropy, style. The third, with Bruce Willis as Hartigan, a disgraced cop sent to prison for taking down the psychopathic son of a powerful senator, only to emerge years later to protect the demure, almost fully-clothed stripper, Nancy (Jessica Alba) that he'd rescued as a girl, from the yellowish gnome-man (Nick Stahl) trying to kill them both... that part's just bleak and miserable and gross.

Of course, all of it's a little bleak and miserable and gross. There's a whole cannibalism subplot. But there's a difference between the grubbiness of the third sequence and the arch, even self-parodying way that it's depicted in the first two segments, with their geysers of white blood silhouetted against black, their armies of militant prostitutes (led by an absolutely terrific Rosario Dawson), their curt dialogue that suggests what happens when you take hard-boiled tough-guy slang and let it sit on the fire for another hour or two (Owen, grim and staring, never flexing his chin at all, is terrific at delivering this). Two-thirds of Sin City comes from a place of love and enthusiasm for the overblown possibilities of guttural, pitch-black noir, and that's the part that matter most, the part that especially benefits from the film's prideful creation of elaborate, wholly unpersuasive digital sets. When it's working, Sin City primarily resembles people giddily play-acting at being film noir toughies, everybody going as bad-ass as they can manage to top the actors that, in many cases, they weren't even performing against. It's extremeness and artifice take on an energy that's surprisingly playful, given how pitch-black everything is: so hyper-dramatic that even the most horrifying elements play as a sort of quiet camp rather than bland torture porn. The years have, alas! dulled it somewhat. But the bad-boy naughtiness still works, and if the film has suffered, it's only a victim of its own success.

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CHASING CARS

There's something especially annoying about a movie that veers between mostly good and very good for its entire running time, only to complete puke itself apart in the last few minutes. I present to you The Rover, writer-director David Michôd's sophomore feature after his impressive but in many ways frustratingly commonplace crime thriller Animal Kingdom. Two times isn't enough to make a tradition, but that's twice now that Michôd has almost succeeded in making a real genre classic, but just couldn't quite make it happen, and if it happens a third time, someone will have to give him a stern talking-to about the right things to do with one's obvious talent.

In the case of The Rover is that old chestnut, the Post-Apocalyptic Australian Movie About Desert Wanderers and Their Cars. It's not quite right to call the movie a knock-off of, or homage to Max Max and its series, so much as a distillation of themes, tropes, and iconography from across the gamut of post-apocalypse storytelling: the film Mad Max, the book The Road, the video game Fallout. Wisely, the film does not try to be about the fall (which it alludes to elliptically in an opening card, white on black: "Australia, ten years after the collapse"), nor the state of society after the fall; it takes for granted our ability to quickly tease out the general shape and scale of how much things have gone to shit, and uses that as the basis for a kind of character study. And I say "kind of" rather advisedly, for that's really the whole trick of the thing: it's actually more of an anti-character study, dedicating itself not to the explication of how one man's personality functions, but to the explication of how and why one man would cease to have a personality. It's a character study set in a world where character has become a liability, and our protagonist as succeeded in eradicating his.

That protagonist is very clearly and persistently never given a name: we can think of him as the rover of the title, though the end credits call him Eric, in a clear-cut case of bullshit. In any case, he's played fantastically by Guy Pearce, in the sort of performance that doesn't announce itself as "acting" in any conventional sense: Pearce doesn't do much with his line deliveries, since he only speaks in curt bursts of words; and he doesn't do much with his face, which is grimy, bearded, and mostly inflexible. It's his coiled-up body language that impresses: tension that speaks to a history of survival and violence, animalistic in the sense that human beings are animals, and the world the film depicts is one in which we're not much else.

At its best - and it really does spend a lot of time at its best, for something that left me feeling so itchily unsatisfied - The Rover plays like a fable of hopelessness, depicting a world where the state of mind that defines every character is the degree to which they remain optimistic that something like order and reason still exists. The rover is at one extreme end of that: he exists for nothing, seemingly, but the individual moment, having concluded that no future moment is likely to be so different from any other that it's worth bothering about any of them. He is a nihilist in an unusually exquisite and pure form: not your teenage nihilist, who just hates, and not your cynical nihilist, who uses it to secretly assume superiority. He is a nihilist because there's nothing not to be nihilistic about: he lives in a laweless, amoral world, nothing he does again will ever matter, and nobody will ever care. The film's plot occurs when three men - Henry (Scoot McNairy), Caleb (Tawanda Manyimo), and Archie (David Field) - steal his car from the little shithole in the middle of nowhere where he... lives? Is temporarily resting? It doesn't really matter. The point is, the three are in a frenzy, having recently fucked up a robbery that left Henry's brother dead, and have managed to crash their truck. The see a car just sitting there outside a little shack, and they steal it; the owner of that car manages to see it just too late to catch them, though he's able to get their truck started to follow them. Along the way, he finds that Henry's brother Rey (Robert Pattinson) isn't so dead as all that, and he grabs the young man of apparently limited mental capacity, first to help him track the fleeing robbers, then because he latches onto Rey as a companion in need of help and care. But that comes very late.

For the great bulk of its running time, The Rover appears to be a very simple, direct, feverishly focused depiction of a man who exists in such a rundown, stateless place of being that matters of motivation are simply pointless: his car was stolen, it is his car, he will retrieve his car. It's as brutal, bleak and nasty as you could please, while also being one of the most intelligent, unromantic, serious attempts to grapple with what actual post-collapse life might function like that I can call to mind. It suggests, rather cruelly, that we're on track to our own meaningless non-society, and demands that we ponder for at least the film's running time what it might feel like to live that way, to actually have no hope and no hope of hope. Until the end. I won't give away what happens; there's a protracted ending sequence that I didn't much care for, but was willing to concede that endings are hard, and sometimes the thing that seems right is to give the viewer the raucous payoff that the rest of the film has so rigidly avoided, even if it wasn't all that right. But the last, literally, 30 or 60 seconds of the film, are just fucking dumb - we find out that the rover had a motivation all along in a twist that completely shifts everything that has played out for the entire movie, but not to such interesting effect that it was worth having lied about it the whole time. I still like the movie in my head better, but the movie explained by the twist would be just fine, if it had explained itself early enough to inform the experience of watching the movie. But coming as it does, it's just a tedious "fuck you" - not even a fun "fuck you", the kind of "fuck you" that reinforces the film's nihilistic themes. It's a mean "fuck you" that exists only because, what the hell, twists are a thing you can end movies with. So why not end 'em that way.

And the twist having so completely broken the movie's spell, it becomes a lot easier to start carping on all the things that movie had been doing wrong the whole time, the scenes that don't play, the concepts that are bonkers in the wrong way, the flares-ups of melodrama and trite theme-explaining that were tolerable when the thing was a savage beast of driving momentum, and end up feeling like a gifted but undisciplined writing student doing a really swell Cormac McCarthy impersonation without McCarthy's cosmic gravity.

Now, parts of the movie still work no matter what: Pearce is brilliant, and Pattinson is at his career-best, playing a man who looks, at first, like an undistinguished Faulknerian man-child before he slowly reveals himself to be a dreamer, a moral thinker, an innocent who would have fit better in the pre-collapse world he apparently has some unfocused nostalgia for. Given all the ways the performance could have been annoying, it's pretty great that Pattinson turns his character's puppy-like craving for someone to guide him into an interesting, moving performance. The thing is also blessed by some breathtaking cinematography by Natasha Braier, which is by no stretch of the imagination "attractive", but presents the sand-blasted Outback in which the film takes place with amazing potency, stressing the vacantness, the far horizon, and the monochromatic dustiness. It's an amazing vision of the end of the world.

Basically, The Rover is a film I would have slightly adored if it had ended 10 minutes earlier, liked if it had ended one minute earlier and can't quite tolerate the way it is. Does that make it a failure? I don't know that I've quite worked that one out yet. It makes it hellaciously frustrating, that's for goddamn sure, and not the kind of frustrating that still ends up feeling rewarding, somehow.

6/10

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STANLEY KUBRICK: A BIT OF THE OLD ULTRAVIOLENCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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