A FILM THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY

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

Recommended musical accompaniment to this review.

Obviously, if we're talk about pure, rancid anti-cinematic imbecility, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is Michael Bay's worst movie and will almost certainly remain that way, for it's difficult to imagine a worse film that doesn't reach out and murder the post-production team before they have a chance to complete it. But if you asked me which one I hated the most, which one I would least want to have to see twice - as I now have, thanks to this damn fundraiser and the cruelty of those who would claim to be my friends - I wouldn't take a moment to answer: Pearl Harbor. Revenge of the Fallen is at least about giant robots from space. Pearl Harbor is a reprehensible mangling of history, which isn't inherently a bad thing - many a good film has looked at the annals of historical fact and decided "meh, fuckit", from the earliest days of narrative cinema - though instead of mangling history in the service of some insightful work of dramatic art and character study, it slathers its ahistorical twaddle onto a tepid, wannabe-Titanic love story, under the stewardship of a man whose career has ranged from the emotional depth of an 11-year-old boy all the way up to a 13-year-old boy.

The film is about two best friends from a version of Tennessee that couldn't be any more shamelessly, heart-tuggingly Rockwellian. Maybe if they threw a jumping, slobbery puppy in there, or something. Even before we meet a single human being, we've already heard Hans Zimmer's deeply earnest score, dripping with melancholic evocations of Classic Americana and warm, easy patriotism; we've already seen John Schwartzman's lusciously Malickian sunset photography in all the shades of nostalgia. And no insult meant to either Zimmer or Schwartzman, whose work throughout the film is of the highest caliber; it is hard to imagine anyone improving upon their work, which is plainly no less than what they had asked of them. The problem is not with the cinematography or the music per se, but with the underlying conception driving not just those elements but the whole ethos of the movie.

Simply put, this is what happens when Michael Bay does patriotism, and like everything else in his career, it's awful. Even more awful than when he tries to do smart sci-fi or satire, because Pearl Harbor requires a particularly delicate touch: it's a period film, which is already a minefield that requires either a keen awareness of how people moved and talked 60 years before the film's release, or a particular stylistic intention that justifies modern attitudes and deliberate anachronism, and neither of those apply here. It hardly requires mentioning that the guiding hand of the bombastic crapshow Armageddon wouldn't even be able to daydream about handling World War II with anything but the most stupidly gung-ho adoration for military doodads. And this isn't by any means a scenario that could benefit from Bay's characteristic enthusiasm giant metal cocks with the U.S. flag painted on them: Randall Wallace's screenplay is far more interested on the romantic triangle between good Tennessee boys in the U.S. Army Air Corps (later the Army Air Forces, a change that occurs in the time frame of the movie, though it's not mentioned), Capt. Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Capt. Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), who both fall in love with nurse Lt. Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), Rafe when he meets her in New York in January 1941, Danny at the U.S. Navy base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, after Rafe has left for Europe to fly with the RAF, and has been incorrectly reported dead. He re-enters their lives on 6 December, 1941, just so that the blow-up between them all can mirror in the most shockingly inappropriate way that whole attack thingy that shows up the next morning late afternoon. And things do not repair themselves for months, until Rafe and Danny both sign on for Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle's (Alec Baldwin) famed attack on the Japanese archipelago in April, 1942, when one of the men must make the ultimate sacrificcccccccccccccccccccc sorry, fell asleep on my keyboard.

The miracle of Pearl Harbor lies in the number of different ways that it's totally unacceptable as a work of cinema and a dramatic story. There's the obvious shortcomings the film as an enormous misrepresentation of living history (an apparent specialty of Wallace's - he also wrote Braveheart), ranging from the innocuous (Bay had the colors of the Mitsubishi Zeroes flown by the Japanese changed so they'd look cooler) to the reprehensible (the re-ordering of chronology to change what the military brass knew and when) to the fucking nuts. Fucking nuts isn't enough. This is a film in which President Roosevelt (Jon Voight), in order to make a point about America's determination, stands up out of his goddamn wheelchair.

It's also simply a wreck of storytelling, with its grotesque structural lurches from the love story to a historical wide view, without any rhyme or reason to how it attempts to combine those elements. Hell, the fact that FDR is in the movie at all is as deeply questionable of a choice as then having him turn into some kind of polio-defying superman: Pearl Harbor is a story about a lot of things, and it's muddled about all of them, but the machinations of Washington politics are absolutely not on the list of things that fit comfortably into the rest. It's frankly only just barely a film in which the attack on Pearl Harbor fits: the story climaxes with Rafe and Danny flying in the Doolittle Raid, while in the scheme of things, the attack is more of an inconvenience that redirects the characters' attention without actually changing the stakes at all. And the poor writing isn't limited to form: the film's dialogue is justly infamous for its mixture of tortured verbiage in a weak attempt to ape '40s speech, and its ludicrous, artless bluntness: "I think World War II just started", delivered with forced determination by Hartnett, is right up there with "Come on, Hitler, I'll buy you a glass of lemonade" from 2002's Max in the annals of lines from historical fiction that make the entire medium of cinema a little bit shabbier.

The characters and acting are atrocious: Affleck, Hartnett, and Beckinsale are an unholy trinity of blandness and low-charisma, and while there are a few flashes in the supporting cast of anything resembling humanity - Baldwin makes a good Doolittle, and Mako has the requisite solemnity as Admiral Yamamoto - the great majority of the supporting cast is distinctive more for being curiously terrible than fading into vanilla obscurity like the leads. The way William Fichtner lurches into the movie like a drunk asshole in the 1923 prologue sets a poor standard that the rest of the movie keeps folllowing: when even as magnetic a presence as Michael Shannon comes off like a flailing moron, you know that things are going deeply wrong.

And of course, Bay conducts all of this with maximum bombast and no worries about how much, if any, sense it all makes. His customary beer commercial aesthetic not being suited for a story of people living and dreaming in 1941, he instead goes for the romantic drama version of the same, which is why we get so many eye-searing sunsets and shots of trees and water - cut by the four-man editing team, amusingly enough, with the same whiz-bang madness of the average car chase or gun battle in a Bay picture. It's even more why we get Evelyn and Danny making love in the most overwrought, aggressive scene of impressionistic gentleness ever put to film, with soft focus and gentle lighting and sheets blowing in the wind that are exactly the Bay version of soap opera sex scenes, trite imagery blown up to 11 and screaming at us. There are flourishes that are the worst thing in the whole world: a newsreel photographer gets shot, so the camera falls to the ground and records him dying and we see it in cocked black-and-white, a scene that recalls Saving Private Ryan as filtered through unapologetic assholery.

It is impossible to catalogue all the ways in which Pearl Harbor is tasteless, overblown, or boring; it's not even good as mindless war action, with the 7 December attack itself a messy collage of disconnected scenes that finds Bay's mayhem skills at a low ebb. If there's a single positive element to this movie, I am certain that I cannot name it; it is overstuffed bullshit that enthusiastically mocks real history and the real sacrifices of human beings who lived long enough to respond to the film with acidic dismissal. There's more incompetent filmmaking out there - but not by a terribly huge margin - but there aren't many films that I find more genuinely vile.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: MALE STRIPPERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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PEOPLE COME, PEOPLE GO, NOTHING EVER HAPPENS

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

Reducing any film to the sum of its Oscar trivia is a filthy habit, but it's also fun and I'm good at it, and Grand Hotel has a real whopper of a piece of trivia associated with it. It's the second of three films to win the Best Picture Oscar and no other awards, which it did at the fifth Academy Awards, given for the awkwardly-shaped year of 1 August, 1931 through 31 July, 1932 (The Broadway Melody, Best Picture #2, and Mutiny on the Bounty, #8, are the other two). But the real point of distinction is that it's the one and only Best Picture winner to have been nominated for absolutely no other Oscars. There's no wholly positive way to spin that, but it does feel kind of fitting in a way - this was the time when the award was still called "Outstanding Production", with more of a connotation of "this is the most impressive act of studio willpower" than "this is the most aesthetically complete and admirable movie". And Grand Hotel is nothing if not an outstanding production, something in which every facet of it is less important than the massiveness of its existence. Grand Hotel is not about anything but the fact that MGM wanted to show off the full range of its resources, and in that regard, it absolutely can be the year's most Outstanding Production even without having the best direction, writing, or acting.

Though even that's missing the point a little; frankly, Grand Hotel does have the best of some of those things, or at least good enough to muscle into the not very mindblowing competition for the 1931-'32 Oscars. I won't way that director Edmund Goulding deserved a slot above King Vidor and Josef von Sternberg, but surely William Absalom Drake's adaptation of his play of Vicki Baum's novel would have been as worthy a writing nominee as the stuffy Arrowsmith. Cedric Gibbons's luscious Art Deco art direction, an extravagant showpiece for MGM's storied set builders, was outright robbed. And in a notably weak Best Actress year, Joan Crawford's failure to land a nomination instead of a pair of slumming theater goddesses doing nothing in particular (though Lynn Fontanne is leagues better than winner Helen Hayes) and an out-to-sea Marie Dressler is fucking baffling as all hell. Except that it's not, because nominating any one member of the Grand Hotel would have been almost impossible to get away with. That, you see, is exactly the point of the production's one-of-a-kind outstandingness.

Grand Hotel is a genre-starter, you see. This was the very first All-Star Cast Extravaganza, with several of MGM's most luminous names given more-or-less equal focus in a series of intertwining subplots filling up the bustling anthill of the classiest hotel in Berlin (inevitably, the shadow of that upstart politician Adolf Hitler, who came to international attention several months after the film's premiere, adds a sense of morbid gloom to the film's depiction of corruption and depravity in Germany for any viewer coming to the film later than 1933). The movie's very own opening credits stress the divine glamor of those stars more than the characters they play, or the story they play them in. Greta Garbo! Joan Crawford! John Barrymore! Lionel Barrymore! Wallace Beery! Lewis Stone! Jean Hersholt! Only about half of those names have any currency with a modern audience, but for a film lover in '32, seeing those names in one place would be their version of The Avengers (Hersholt is Hawkeye). It's hella easy to live in the 21st Century and airily proclaim that Crawford picks up the movie and runs away with it - which I take to be very much the contemporary conventional wisdom about it - but picking favorites is at a certain level entirely contrary to the spirit of the thing, which doesn't make you need to pick favorites. You just get all of them all at once. This is, never forget, an Outstanding Production.

The really impressive thing about Grand Hotel is that even if its goals are transparently those of unabashed gimmickry, it holds up superlatively well. There's only one of these "superstar ensemble" pictures that even arguably betters it, to my eyes, the following year's glorious Dinner at Eight (also by MGM, and with four of the same superstars), which has the benefit of George Cukor, a sturdier director than Goulding, and a more concrete reason for all the actors to appear in one place, beyond "hey, lotsa folks show up at a hotel". Still, while the first may not be exactly the best, it has pleasures galore in its cross-cutting of dignified melodrama anchored by a whole host of people doing sterling work - beyond Crawford's early career highlight, Lionel Barrymore is at his most sensitive and internally-directed here, with only a minimal amount of cartoonish hamming (I am not tremendously fond of the great bulk of his work prior to the full-on old man stage of his career), and John Barrymore is stone-cold serious. Garbo is... not great. Insofar as everybody who loves '30s Hollywood has that one diva to whom they give all their most serious affection and loyalty, Garbo is mine. I don't feel any need to make excuse for loving her career above Crawford's, 98% of the time. But she's on autopilot in Grand Hotel, more than in any other role I can think of. Within just a couple of years, her line "I want to be alone" had hit a critical mass of parodies to prove that this was seen as an iconic work almost immediately, and far be it from me to deny the pop culture of the 1930s its rightful obsessions. But this is the same hurt, tragic Garbo of at least a half-dozen other performances, all of which involve her being more invested and nuanced in her depiction of that hurt, and none of which so dubiously miscast her (here, she plays a ballet dancer, a profession that requires a totally different body shape and way of movement than anything within a mile of Garbo's physical performance). And certainly, none of which require her to make love to a telephone.

Outside of its misuse of a disinterested top-billed star, though, Grand Hotel is a perfect demonstration of why the Hollywood star system persisted so long, and why it still gives such vast pleasure to those of us in its cheering section. This is really and truly a film that bets the farm on the absolute charm of its actors - the script can barely be bothered, listlessly plugging in sturdy but ancient narrative shapes including the destitute baron (John Barrymore) who falls in love with his rich, suicidal mark (Garbo), the innocent stenographer (Crawford) who starts to receive the nastiest kind of attention from a thuggish captain of industry (Beery), the dying man (Lionel Barrymore) spending his last pennies on one chance to experience luxury he's never known. These were musty old chestnuts by 1932, and the film doesn't waste any time on pretending that we're there to be dazzled by the complexity of the plots and the way they interleave. We're showing up to see famous people perfectly inhabit those roles in enormous, loving close-ups and gorgeous lifestyle-porn gowns by MGM's legendary costume designer Adrian. And this is something Grand Hotel overs up by the shovelful, with that top-shelf cast breathing richness and vitality into their well-worn roles. Crawford, with her strikingly modernist and knowing expressions, is, again, the clear best in show, always marginally more wary and withholding than her scene partners in ways that make us desperately crave more information about her. But there's not a wrong foot in the movie, from the clipped brutishness of John Barrymore in his unguarded moments to Stone's weary sternness. Even Garbo's not in any way an active detriment, all my moaning about her performance notwithstanding.

Marshaling this parade of egos presented as demigods on the big screen, all Goulding really has to do is keep the spigot of close-ups and two-shots wide open, and in that respect he triumphs. But it's not fair to pretend that Grand Hotel was a director-proof movie just because it actually totally was a director-proof movie. There are some fascinating shots he carries off, such as the way the hotel's switchboards, used as a narrative framing device, are turned into geometric traps that sneakily imply a more rigid set of structures (aesthetic and social) than the script is quite willing to explore, or the occasional sudden cuts where the characters are dropped into tiny relief against the sprawling reality of the hotel that simply doesn't care about their individually pitiable tales. Cinematographer William H. Daniels gets to play around with Expressionist lighting, or at least the closest MGM's glossy house style would permit him to get to Expressionist lighting, guiding the mood more than is immediately obvious through canny manipulations of the focus and shadow in the back of shots.

It is, all told, a tremendously sturdy, thoroughly unimaginative, and massively entrancing sample of the early-'30s Hollywood machine doing everything exactly right in the creation of gratifying entertainment. It's too sober-minded to qualify as escapism, and infinitely too proud of its foregrounded desire to seduce the audience to be mistaken for high art. I cannot call it a perfect studio film; a perfect studio film would have a mechanically flawless screenplay, not a tossed-off basketful of scenarios that it cares about even less than we do. But it is the perfect Grand Hotel, one of classic Hollywood's most elegant truffles. Sure, it's still empty calories, but every gram of it reveals great, methodical craftsmanship.

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YUNNAN MOUNTAIN HIGH

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

Johnnie To is a name that you might know, and you definitely should. He is nothing less than the finest director of action movies and crime thrillers in Hong Kong since that country's action cinema wave golden age started to run out in the early 1990s. Which means, sadly, that he hasn't had the international exposure of a John Woo, for example, though that's the company that he deserves to be named in.

But even a genius cannot live on genre alone, and so it was that some half a decade after his major international breakthrough with 2004's Breaking News and 2005's Election, To took his first break from thrillers in a long time, to make a pair of romances, of all things. 2011's politically invested romcom Don't Go Breaking My Heart was co-directed with Wai Ka-Fai (as was its 2014 sequel), but 2012's Romancing in Thin Air was all To (Wai, however, co-wrote the screenplay, along with Jevons Au Man-Kit and Yau Nan-Hoi, reuniting three-quarters of the team that scripted Don't Go Breaking My Heart). So if you happened to wonder what it would look like if an action film expert decided to take a crack at a melodramatic love story on the '50s model - and the more I linger on that formulation, the more I genuinely can't imagine why somebody wouldn't be interested in knowing what that looks like - there's not really a better vehicle out there to scratch that particular itch.

The caveat being that Romancing in Thin Air doesn't actually do much to nod its head towards its director's more visible career. It is a fully committed romantic drama, nothing ironic or genre-mashing about it. And this is absolutely for the good. It's a better-directed film than Don't Go Breaking My Heart, drawing on more of To's established gifts as a filmmaker but always in service to its needs as a melodrama, and while the earlier film ends up being a stand-out romantic comedy mostly because it doesn't take much effort to achieve that in the 21st Cenury, Romancing in Thin Air is a stand-out romance because it's impressively made and sensitively acted. And it has a perfectly suitable screenplay, which is neither a very enthusiastic compliment nor a complaint, exactly.

It's your basic "two lost souls thrown together" deal, opening with Michael Lau (Louis Koo), beloved film superstar and heartthrob proposing to his girlfriend and co-star (Gao Yuanyuan) on the very stage of the Hong Kong Film Awards, where he has just won Best Actor. A whirlwind montage quickly drags us through time and space - I am not slighting the film, I hope, if I suggest that the elliptical, vague editing and pacing here, blithely commenting on temporality and the devouring nature of celebrity news, is my favorite bit of filmmaking in the whole feature - to their wedding, which finds them interrupted at the last second by her old lover (Wang Baoqiang), who reminds her of their promise years ago to always love each other. More elliptical editing throws Michael into a drunken stupor and thence into a truck, where he accidentally heads from Hong Kong all the way to Yunnan province in mainland China, in the fancifully named county-city of Shangri-La. He comes to - barely - at the Deep Woods Hotel, 3800 meters up the mountains, where he's nursed to health by the hotel's owner, Sau (Sammi Cheng), and taught to breath the rarefied air at that high altitude. She's a relatively new transplant herself, having only come to that area seven years prior; Michael ends up learning the full story one night in bar of how she fell in love a shy fellow named Tian (Li Guangjie), who went missing in the forest and has been lost ever since.

The film's original title - I'm an idiot American and don't know if it's in Mandarin or Cantonese, the two languages spoken in the film - translates as High Altitude Romance II, in full defiance of the fact that there is no High Altitude Romance I. And once we've noted that fact, some splendid possibilities start to unlock themselves. We're basically watching a film that's a sequel to itself, though even what that means is a bit difficult to pin down. It could be that the story of Sau coming to the Deep Woods Hotel, finding love, and thus shape and meaning in her wandering life - which we see in detail, taking up a large percentage of the film's 111 minute running time - is High Altitude Romance, and Michael's step through the same process is High Altitude Romance II. It's at least as possible that the film we're watching for about three-quarters of the total is High Altitude Romance, and the sudden, new thing that the film turns into in its last act is High Altitude Romance II; the one where the characters reclaim the reality they would prefer to be true by harnessing the power of cinema itself to rewrite history (the film's final shot, and the meaning it imparts, is also the final shot & meaning of a different film that exists within the movie, and which the characters watch knowing it to be a movie). Both of which are much more interesting possibilities than the watery play on "vanishing in thin air" that the film has to live with in English.

But my point, anyway: the film is about history repeating itself with variations, about lovers finding solace in one another, though not in exactly the ways that genre demands or that the plot sets you up to expect: it's far more nuanced than "broken people meet on a mountain, fall in love", right down to its beautifully unfilled ending. It is, sure, primarily about the way that falling in love makes people feel a certain stability that allows them to go out and fix the rest of the things going wrong in their lives, and Koo and Cheng - especially Cheng, a pop star ending a four-year movie drought with this role - do exemplary work in sketching out the state of people who are quite happy to feel the warm and fuzzy feelings they've got going on, but too aware of what awful things can come of it to let themselves go all the way. To's direction grounds all of this in fully blocked-out, concrete spaces, turning the melodrama into a lived reality, anchoring the somewhat silly supporting characters in a way that makes them feel like personality types and not character models. For something so full of frosty snowbound cinematography - and set, for chrissake, in Shangri-La - Romancing in Thin Air has an awful lot of physical weight.

The one big flaw with it, and unfortunately it's not a little thing, is that to facilitate the development of all these themes, the screenwriters really have to start piling on the contrivances and just-so plot developments in the second half. Basically, the moment that the extended flashback telling Sau's history wraps up, the film plunges headlong into a series of spectacular coincidences and only borderline-plausible character behaviors. This is redeemed somewhat by the way the final 20 minutes shape it and do something complex with it, but the shift from a delicate place-study centered around people who need to get away from life to nurse themselves back the mental health into a romantic thriller about lost celebrities and other shocking discoveries is one that To can't quite handle, and the actors don't even bother trying to rationalise. There's a lot of loveliness and sweet human drama in it, and it's particularly thoughtful about what romantic movies do for us as viewers and why that's both good and bad. Let us not diminish any of that. But let us also acknowledge that the film has lumps and rough patches the like of which no sweetly humane melodrama should need to cope with.

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EVE OF DESTRUCTION

Joseph L. Mankiewicz is not a bad director. But he's not a truly great one, either; he's not worthy, anyway, of being the second of only two men to have won a pair of back-to-back Best Director Oscars (John Ford was the first). He didn't, in general, do anything unexpected with his camera; he rarely pushed actors to do work beyond their comfort zone, preferring instead to facilitate them being the very best version of their usual selves. His best directorial instinct, in fact, was to provide the cleanest and most unobtrusive possible frame for Joseph L. Mankiewicz, screenwriter; and that Mankiewicz is the absolute best of the best.

Moreover, that Mankiewicz was never, ever better than when he adapted Mary Orr's 1946 story "The Wisdom of Eve" into 1950's All About Eve, a film in which the art of screen invective finds its absolute all-time pinnacle. Is it a disreputable pleasure, to bask in the bitchy vitriol as talented actors hurl elaborate, poetic insults at each other? Maybe, but the important point is that it's pleasure, and the caustic dialogue in All About Eve is some of the best ever committed to celluloid in Hollywood:

"Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men."

"Don't cry. Just score it as an incomplete forward pass."

"To those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself."

"The cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!"

"Does Miss Channing know she ordered domestic gin by mistake?"
"The only thing I ordered by mistake is the guests. They're domestic too, and they don't care what they drink, as long as it burns."

"Everybody has a heart. Except some people."

There's a great deal more to All About Eve than zingers, but I don't think it's unfair to suggest that the dialogue is what makes it truly, deeply special. Lots of movies have great acting. Lots movies have pulpy melodramatic hearts beating vigorously under a veneer of studio shine. Very, very few movies have the facility with language of All About Eve. And it's not just simple pleasure that makes me single out the dialogue, either; for all its florid excess, the dialogue is always insistently functional. This movie is about a cluster of people jockeying for dominance amongst each other; it is a drama of how people assert power, and ultimately - crucially - how they elect not to assert power. The way they speak is intimately linked with all that power struggle, so even if it's utterly beguiling to hear a top-shelf cast spit acidic aphorisms, it's also a sneaky way of constantly pounding on the story's themes.

Having entered the cultural lexicon as a kind of shorthand for greedy protégés targeting aging mentors, I do hope that the basic shape of the thing is familiar: Margo Channing (Bette Davis), 40-year-old goddess of the Broadway stage, has attracted a passionate admirer in the form of 24-year-old Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter). Everybody takes to Eve, from the moment Margo's best friend Karen Richards (Celeste Holm) ushers her into the star's dressing room: Margo's favorite director and boyfriend, Bill Simpson (Gary Merrill), Margo's favorite writer and Karen's husband, Lloyd (Hugh Marlowe), Margo's blustery producer Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff). Only Margo's longtime maid Birdie (Thelma Ritter) takes an instinctive dislike of Eve and her perfectly-formed tale of woe ("What a story. Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end", she grouses in that immaculately grumpy Ritter way); only after taking Eve on as a personal assistant does Margo start to spot the clues that the guileless young woman is, in fact, rather craftier than she seemed, her eagerness to please slowly adopting a sharklike quality.

The film traces two character arcs more or less in tandem: Margo's confrontation with her feelings of self-loathing over getting older, and her eventual realisation that she needs to re-adjust her priorities and be nicer to the people who put up with her; and Eve's insinuation into the world of prestigious theater, aided and guided by the murderously sarcastic newspaper columnist Addison DeWitt (George Sanders). It's reasonably straightforward, as backstage melodramas go; from the moment the film elects to open near its end, with a ceremony giving Eve a tremendously important award while Margo, Karen, Bill, and Lloyd all conspicuously fail to clap for her in a collection of medium shots that perfectly frame the disgust each of those characters feel for her, it's less a matter of wondering what will happen, more wondering how it will happen, and all in the tightly-compressed nine-month frame the film establishes for itself (the only significant misstep in the whole of the writing - it's simply not plausible that Eve could reach the level of national acclaim we're told she enjoys on the strength of only one solitary play that, if we follow the rest of the in film logic, premiered only two or three months earlier).

And here is where I have perhaps been too mean to Mankiewicz the director, who executes the development of that story with a crispness and sophistication that leaves what amounts to a sudsy story of catfighting feeling like the most brainy of psychological dramas. I'm not quite as fond of his directing here as in the previous year's A Letter to Three Wives (for which he won the first of his two consecutive Oscars; Eve, of course, netted him the other - and both resulted in writing Oscars, for good measure), but the casualness and elegance with which he stages scenes and the energy he draws from his unbelievably good cast certainly help the film to be its very best self. Aided with a terrifically airy Alfred Newman Score and some smart, cunningly character-defining costumes by Edith Head and Charles LeMaire, among other talented contributors (there's not anybody involved in the film's creation who isn't doing top-level work), the film is as glamorous as its characters like to think that they are, making the ugliness and snitty sniping and pathos of those characters feel all the more sharp and tense. That mixture between the surface gloss and the psychological brutishness drives the film like a wild horse, and even though, at 138 minutes, it's maddeningly indulgent for a melodrama with so few clearly-defined plot points, my reaction to All About Eve is always surprise when I realise that it's getting ready to wrap up, even though I just started watching it.

The point I was making, anyway, is that there's beautiful clarity to the filmmaking, even if it's not as complex or surgically precise as Sunset Blvd., the film with which it competed for most of its Oscars (and how marvelous and odd is it to think upon one of the most insoluble Oscar battles ever waged - from Best Actress to Art Direction to Picture itself, most of their head-to-head competitions are incredibly difficult to pick a winner - would center on two melodramatic stories about women?). Mankiewicz's style is to first attend to the characters, and let the rest follow, which leads to some phenomenal pieces of subtle filmmaking. There's an early sequence, for example, that finds Eve meeting the rest of the cast; by staging Davis, Holm, and Marlowe in a three-shot that intercuts with Baxter alone in the frame, and shortly thereafter stages the four of them so that Baxter alone is facing the camera, offering a quiet bit of foreshadowing that Eve is somehow, importantly, different than the others; mere minutes later, she expresses her whole sob story in a curiously flat shot as Newman's score cranks itself up into a relentlessly swoony bit of romanticism that feels gaudy compared to everything else in the score, completing the first impression of this young woman as being distinctly, if indefinably, "off".

The focus on characters also means that the film gives a lot of room to its actors, who pay it back fully. That Davis gives one of the great performances of a generation is simply one of those facts everybody knows, and it's hardly worth going into all the little things she does that make it so (but I am especially fond of how matter-of-fact and unapologetic she plays her big "I've realised I was wrong" speech in the back of a car; even at her humblest, Margo is still proud and tough, and Davis isn't about to deny that reality). The quality of her work has tended to overshadow her co-stars, especially Baxter (a co-nominee in Best Actress, but clearly not in the same race to win as Daivs, Gloria Swanson, and eventual victor Judy Holliday). Which is spectacularly unfair; given a more nuanced role, Baxter is very nearly at the same level as her more famous colleague, especially in the opening scenes when the first-time viewer still hasn't quite discovered what's to dislike in the innocent enthusiast. It's nothing short of a miracle that Baxter can play the role to be totally spotless and pure the first time, while also leaving just enough brittle theatricality that you can pick up on it while re-watching; it's such potent stuff that I'm always a little sorry when the film starts to tip its hand that Eve is a nasty little beast, and Baxter starts to retreat into a much simpler - though no less persuasive, portrayal of a deeply self-satisfied cobra, staring with her hard eyes and setting her face like a marble mask. She's a great villain; one of the best of the 1950s.

But really, the best thing about All About Eve is that it doesn't rely on the kind of straightforward morality where "a great villain" even applies. It presents a ruthless, horrible world, where everybody who survives needs to be at least partially a predator (the small, early performance by Marilyn Monroe nails this perfectly; almost nowhere else in her career do we see the calculating menace behind adopting "I'm a busty dumb blonde!" as a strategic weapon. It is some of the best work she ever did, even if it's entirely limited to two scenes). Eve is a symptom, not a cause; and while Margo and friends clearly hate her at the end, they don't actually seem to blame her for being better at playing the game. That's a hell of a lot of cynicism, especially for a 1950s film; thank God, then, for the endless wit that helps the nastiness to go down, and the robust performances that ground it in something human. Because take them all together, and they mean that All About Eve is one of the greatest films of post-WWII Hollywood.

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BDSM WEEK: O NO YOU DIDN'T

Take my hand - or whatever other body part you prefer - and walk with my back to the 1970s, and the Golden Age of Eurosmut. It was a time when the boundary between the glaciated art films developed from the mid-'50s onward and the new world of pornography was as thin and porous as it could be, and filmmakers in Italy, Germany, and especially France dove headfirst into serious, psychologically and culturally-oriented stories of unbelievably gorgeous women wandering around naked as sleazy older men stared at them. They are damn weird pictures to watch, is what I'm saying: plainly exploitative and tawdry, yet with non-erotic and even anti-erotic fixations on story elements that forestall any real sense that this is actually pornographic. It's what happens when you apply intellectualism to sex, basically, only it's not very intellectual, and sometimes, not all that sexy.

The Citizen Kane of this particular genre was 1974's Emmanuelle, which I guess makes 1975's Story of O its approximate equivalent to The Magnificent Ambersons: the director's follow-up, based on a literary classic, even more ambitious and complex than his enthusiastically-received debut, but ultimately compromised and hobbled in ways that leave it somewhat dissatisfying in comparison. The difference is that Orson Welles's first two features both belong in any sensible conversation about the greatest films of all time, and Just Jaeckin's films don't. Not in a sensible conversation, anyway.

But anyway, Story of O. It is an adaptation of the 1954 novel by Pauline Réage (a pen name of Anne Desclos) that served as ground zero for BDSM culture in the latter half of the 20th Century, and arguably the watershed moment in the artistic treatment of explicit sex. As the new representational freedoms started to roll around at the dawn of the '70s, it was a no-brainer pick for adaptation, and Jaeckin was, all things considered, pretty much a no-brainer as well (though he wasn't the first director to sniff around the project). For Jaeckin, he got to solidify his position as the leading light in the Tony Erotica genre that showed no signs of how incredibly short-lived it would turn out to be; for the producers, they got to have the assurance of a filmmaker who had already worked with disreputable fare right in line with Story of O - Emmanuelle ends with something very like a summary of the original novel - without making something in the least ways disreputable.

Sure enough, Story of O is pretty damn classy; about the classiest version of the material that could possibly be summed up. The simple version of things is that a woman identified only as O (Corinne Cléry) has been taken by her lover, René (Udo Kier), to Château Roissy. Unless, as a perplexing alternate opening puts it, a shadowy second man is behind it all. How O finds herself at Roissy is less important than what happens there: it turns out to be a veritable school for sadomasochism, in which gorgeous women are taught obedience and submissiveness to every whim of the males in their lives, the more violent the better. After she's been properly tamed, O meets René's dear friend, almost a brother, Sir Stephen (Anthony Steel), with the apparent intention that René is in fact pawning her off, to make room in his own life for the bisexual blonde model Jacqueline (Li Sellgren). But in order to get at Jacqueline, René must ask O to serve as a honeypot.

That's not much plot, and if your assumption is that Story of O fills up the bulk of its running time with scenes of O's training and subsequently her use as sex slave to René and Stephen, congratulations on being well aware of what kind of experience this intended to be. It is quite a sexed-up movie, much more than Emmanuelle, which found Jaeckin at least as interested in lingering on notions of white Europeans in the third world as on perfectly-formed breasts. The Story of O script, adapted by Sébastien Japrisot, simply doesn't have an interest in any such external topics; it starts with considered interest in how BDSM works, and it stops there as well.

Notionally, the idea of a movie whose entire purpose is to uncritically depict a process by which women are whipped and chained into absolute submission for men's pleasure ought to seem inordinately offensive, but such is not the case with Story of O. It's not because it does a fine job of exploring what O herself gets out of the whole deal, as I gather is true of the novel. In fact, the psychological element of the film is almost totally lacking, thanks to perfectly flat performances by virtually everyone in it - Steel alone seems to have put any effort into expressing what his character feels through his expressions, and Kier manages to be the most wooden, dis-invested of all, which is a bizarre thing to say of an Udo Kier performance - and thanks to a boring screenplay that tells far more than it shows, and even what it tells isn't that useful. The film is addicted to voice-over narration, drily recapping what's going on in the characters' minds without pausing to see if it appears to be matched by their faces.

The result is the absolute worst-case scenario: a film about the effect that being turned into a willing sex slave has on the woman so turned. By all appearances, O is perfectly satisfied with the state of things - the ending in particular emphasises that - but Story of O never manages to dig into why; it blandly rolls through sexual activity without bothering to make things sexy, or making it clear that O, at least, is erotically stimulated by all of this. It's a clinical treatment of its subject, which makes for a boring, repetitive film, one in which the trace of a real plot doesn't show up until almost halfway through. You can only show so many staged scenes of whipping and burning, all shot in mostly the same angles, with mostly the same performances, before they start to blend into each other, no matter how jaw-dropping the physical perfection of the naked women in question (which, to be fair, is a lot of perfection).

Not helping matters is how utterly bland the filmmaking is, dominated by arch-'70s brown and beige and white interiors, and hobbled by an insipid Pierre Bachelet score (he was the only major behind-the-scenes talent other than Jaeckin who logged time on Emmanuelle). While Jaeckin's previous movie boasted some genuinely lovely shots of rooms and lawns, which provided a painterly backdrop for its sexual shenanigans, Story of O has an unyieldingly generic, suburban look, which makes its insufficiently vital sex scenes feel even more rote. Which feels like a tremendous failure for one of the very first films to depict BDSM with such unblinking interest and so little snickering.

In effect it's art-porn that tries so hard to be art that it loses sight of what it means to be porn, while simultaneously lacking the strong writing or well-crafted visuals to succeed at being art. It neither makes its sex seem exciting, nor does it investigate what that sex means to its characters. Basically, it's just a drab failure all around, and a bit of a chore to watch. How that could be true of a film that opens at a dreamlike, Eyes Wide Shut-style sex château is beyond me, but there you have it.

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IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU'RE...

The Costnerssaince just isn't going well, is it?

For the latest from our boy Kevin Costner, we turn to Black or White, a drama about race relations in America whose suffocating earnestness is almost enough of a liability to distract one from the film's clear-eyed assessment of the tenuous state of racial harmony in a world that is not our own, populated by individuals who very well may not be human. The film's lack of commitment to a reality that overlaps with ours in more than the most incidental details is clear long before it even raises the under-articulated questions promised with its title: right about the time that it introduces us to the bedroom of a person that it claims to be a seven-year-old girlchild, despite the set decorators' obstinate insistence that she is actually a pod person raised on Pier 1 Imports catalogs. It has been a long time since I saw a set in a nominally realistic drama that was so blatantly, offensively a set and not a room that somebody might have chosen to design that way because it reflects their personality. Unless the seven-year-olds these days like to kit out their bedrooms with the kind of blankly inspirational wall-mounted plaques that vacantly demand us to "BELIEVE" in a classy gold font on black.

But I digress. Black or White's inauthentic spaces housing inauthentic people are hilarious, but the real crime of the film is its utter impossibility as a parable of racism. It's a film whose central narrative hook - the white maternal grandfather, Elliot (Costner), and African-American paternal grandmother, Rowena (Octavia Spencer), of mixed-race first grader Eloise (Jillian Estell) duel over custody after the sudden death of Elliot's wife Carol (Jennifer Ehle, wasted on a wordless part stretched across few than ten individual shots) - could kickstart Lord knows how many different variations, but writer-director Mike Binder is too certain of the very specific points he wants to arrive at, and he stops at no melodramatic contrivance in order to make certain that the narrative arcs within millimeters of where he has preordained it to go. The result is an increasingly tattered lacework of unnecessary developments and complications that reek of little notecards pinned to a cork board in the writer's office. Elliot has to be an alcoholic, of course, because the film needs to avoid stacking the deck too hard against Rowena's son Reggie (André Holland), Eloise's dad, whom it has already decreed must be a (semi-)recovering crack addict. And he has to be a crack addict, because how else would the film be able to maintain ambiguity about whether Elliot is truly concerned for Eloise's well-being, or if he's just a bigot?

Many, many ways, of course, but some of them would require Black or White to be more thoughtful and reflective and less declamatory and clearly flagged at every level for who is being Reasonable, who is being Stubborn, and who is being Awful, Just Awful. We are told that the best kind of dramatic storytelling sets the characters in motion, and then follows them wherever they will go, building a narrative out of their psychology and behavior. This is surely not what happens in Black or White, which has already decided what kind of decisions all of its characters are going to make, and then constructs them to fit that space. At its best - which isn't much - this approach allows Spencer to give the film's only three-dimensional performance as a woman of stiletto-like insight and dogged self-assurance and willpower, but one who'll tie herself in knots to justify the actions of her absent, dissolute son. At its worst, it leaves us with a vacant hole in the place where Eloise should be, a plot device and lazy symbol from the beginning to the grotesque freeze-frame that the movie elects to end on.

The writing shows itself so openly, and the filmmaking and acting so limply facilitate it (it is overlit and prone to cutting to close-ups as a means of depressingly literal punctuation), and the whole thing is so patently artificial as a result (but not in the good way), that it hardly seems sporting to attack the film's idea of race. Honestly, it hardly seems possible to do so, since even by the rules of its universe-that-is-not-ours, it's hard to say what Black and White actually thinks about racism in 21st Century America. The climax, which finds Elliot given an angry, raspy speech in a courtroom - of course this is one of those "third act courtroom scene" movies, it would just have to be - muddies any of the points the film had previously been making to the point of irrelevance. Black people and white people are different? Aren't? It's all actually about poverty? I don't know what the hell we're meant to take away from any of it, and given how painstakingly the film has been jerry-rigged to make sure that it arrives at exactly that point, it's especially frustrating for the whole thing to collapse into urgent but vague statements along the lines of "Racism! Man, fuck it! And you know what fuck else? Fuck alcoholism, while you're at it". All I can tell is that shaming black drug addicts for being drug addicts but not for being black is, apparently, the film's secret weapon for creating the beatific state where we can all find some kind of way to admit to our own faults and get along.

So the whole thing is confused, shoddily-built, blandly assembled, and acted with a surface-deep emphasis on shouting, snarling, and flaring one's nostrils for effect. Worse films on delicate subjects have been, and will continue to be made, but right now, this is the one we get to deal with. Tuneless and messy, Black and White is not the film America deserves, and it is also not the film America needs. But we got it anyway.

4/10

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BOY OH BOY

There's very little doubt that The Boy Next Door is a terrible movie. But it is so cheerfully overt about it that it offers the very real possibility that everybody involved in making not only knew just how terrible it was, but in fact that they might actually have signed specifically because of that fact. We've all seen the ads, I hope and pray, where a sexually predatory high school student played by Ryan Guzman, (who looks every millisecond of the 26 years he had spent on this earth at the time of filming) leeringly talks about how much he likes "your mom's cookies"; that's not just a snarky laugh line that an in-on-the-joke trailer editor decided to foreground, that's the level that the entire film resides at. Sadly, there are no lines quite as punch-you-in-the-face as that elsewhere in the screenplay, but the overall level of ripe camp promised by that moment? Oh, the film teems with it.

The plot: Claire Peterson (Jennifer Lopez) teaches classic literature to gifted high school students in southern California, and she is in a misery. As related in a flagrantly impossible opening montage that uses confusing mismatches of sound and image in a manner that might be regarded as artistic by a moderately gifted film school freshman, Claire is in the midst of a hell of a marital crisis, precipitated by her husband, Garrett (John Corbett), having an affair with one of the women who works at his company's headquarters up in San Francisco. She smells like cookies, was apparently the line in an accidentally-discovered love letter that pushed Claire over the edge. And by the way, if you end up seeing The Boy Next Door, just accept that the next time you eat cookies, you'll be thinking of vaginas. The film wants it that way, and there's nothing wrong with it.

Throwing the bastard out - but not so far that, months later, they're not cautiously feeling out the shape of possibly reconciling - Claire only has left a 16-year-old son, Kevin (Ian Nelson), and a catty best friend and boss, Vicky (Kristen Chenoweth), whose overly mascaraed face and loud way of talking give the impression that she has a blood alcohol level in the double digits. But life, overall, isn't so terrible, especially when the old cancer-ridden man next door (Jack Wallace) welcomes his nephew into the house for their mutual benefit. This is Noah Sandborn (Guzman), who is in high school, though the film stops itself cold to make sure we completely, absolutely understand that he's of legal age, owing to how he dropped out for a couple of years, in the most anti-dramatic scene about the legal bedrock of an adult/adolescent sexual coupling since the bizarre Romeo & Juliet laws scene from Transfomers: Age of Extinction.

For, you see, as much as Noah is interested in being the mentor and stable male figure in Kevin's life (the film's refusal to capitalise on the avalanche of hints it drops in the early going that Kevin has a crush on Noah is a tragic failure to up the stakes to ever further heights of tawdriness), what he really wants is to make sweet love to Claire, as anyone might, given Lopez's terrifyingly perfect, unaging body and face. And, one night, after some of the most ridiculous innuendo ("Those kinds of shoes are for a woman trying to be sexy. DOT DOT DOT. You don’t need to try." And trust me, you can absolutely hear that "dot dot dot" in Guzman's line delivery), they go right on ahead and make that love, and director Rob Cohen eagerly plunges in, framing it with all nudity-free filthiness - hands in panties, hands on boobs, protracted male butt shots - of the storied height of the erotic thriller in the early 1990s. It's hard to say whether it's more arousingly smutty or unrelentingly silly, but it's a whole lot of both.

Of course, it turns out that Noah is a crazy, sexually obsessed stalker psycho, and he spends the rest of the movie Glenn Closing in on Claire's life, eventually going full-on slasher movie crazy in a finale that takes place in a burning barn. A barn which the film, with only eight real characters to choose from, places under the ownership of Vicky, despite her seeming to be as much of an agriculturalist as the stars of Sex and the City. And in so doing, it also ramps the gore up from "none whatsoever" to "Lucio Fulci", going totally batshit for ten straight minutes before ending almost the exact second that the primary conflict is over. The Boy Next Door has, perhaps, heard of denouements, but it does not give a shit for them.

Cohen has the good sense to direct this all with snazzy pacing and the shameless sense of building dread of a cheap horror film, while writer Barbara Curry feeds all the characters a steady supply of hokey pronouncements to speak as they tromp through her scenario that has already become implausible by the 30 minute mark and keeps getting bigger and bigger from there, including overwrought car crashes and a full-on Se7en-style crazyperson lair before it even hits the third act. Given everything, it's difficult to say what "good acting" might even look like here, though the cast is, at any rate, providing exactly the right kind of action. Lopez flutters and gasps and looks bestruck; Guzman smolders and flairs his pecs and stares with lust and madness poring out of him, totally refusing to contain his hamminess; Corbett is pleasant, boring, and dad-like. As vessels for a very overcooked, very unmodulated set of emotional states, the leads are perfect, and though I can't imagine these parts being challenging for an actor of even the slightest talent, that doesn't mean that one can't do a good job with them, even so.

It's crap, of course: utterly arbitrary (Claire passes by so many chances to shut the whole thing down that one must assume that she secretly likes it), cut with a minimum of cohesiveness in favor of a maximum of startling shots, even when we don't really need to be startled, and it has absolutely no insight into the human condition (unless "teen boys will go to any lengths for sex" is an insight). But it's a blast: entertaining as any trashy thriller could hope to be, and hilarious as any bad movie in a long time. Is it intentional? Maybe. I don't care. I just know that I had a hell of a time watching it, and if this is the kind of movie year we can expect from 2015, I'm all for it.

3/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: COMING TO AMERICA

Marion Cotillard can do anything, anyway. Whatever else one walks away from The Immigrant certain of, one can be certain of that. As the recipient of the first-ever leading female character (co-)written and directed by James Gray, specialist in portraits of New York masculinity in moments of self-doubt, Cotillard has been handed a role with a definite whiff of the worst clichés of women in sinewy, masculine stories. She is a whore, and if I were tasked with deciding what precious metal her heart was made out of, well, I think I might have a good guess. Gray's script, written alongside Ric Menello (who did not live to see the film's 2013 Cannes premiere), adds enough particularising details that Ewa Cybulska, this particular model of that ancient narrative type, isn't quite a stock figure, but there's still a constant danger of the script regressing back towards the mean of Noble Woman of Almost Saintly Mien, Constantly Ground Down by the Cruelty of Men, and it only sometimes manages to avoid this fate.

But throw that character at Cotillard, and sweet Jesus, she will find the rock solid humanity beneath the concepts and the stock behavior, and that is the character you end up getting as you watch the movie. Even as the native French speaker, in her first English leading role, has to adopt a Polish accent on the character's behalf (and to speak a handful of scenes in Polish; I can't vouch for how well she does that, but the accent is spot-on), which surely must have taken a little bit of her attention at all times. The Immigrant is a fine movie in its own right, if a little over-cheered from some quarters (particularly the cinematography, which finds Darius Khondji doing a fine but hardly groundbreaking job copying Gordon Willis's work in the flashback sequences of The Godfather, Part II), satisfying in the tragically inevitable way it moves towards its denouement, handsomely appointed by costume designer Patricia Norris and production designer Happy Massee to resemble a fever dream of the first two and a half decades of 20th Century America. Cotillard, though, pushes it in the direction of greatness; as far as her tour of the 2014 U.S. film landscape, I'm still a Two Days, One Night voter, but good grief, talk about an embarrassment of riches.

The Immigrant opens slight prior to Ewa's arrival at Ellis Island in 1921, and she is already besieged: her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan) is quarantined with a lung disease, and Ewa runs the risk of being deported right back to her war-ravaged home, when her plight catches the eye of Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), a seeming do-gooder who bribes an immigration officer to look the other way while he smuggles her into New York. Here, he sets her up in a pathetic little burlesque show he's running, a front for pimping out all of his "actresses" for the benefit of the seedy clientele. While not prostituting her, Bruno falls in love with the fragile, confused woman, who sneaks out when she can to track down her relatives already in America, to beg them for shelter and help rescuing Magda from whatever holding pen she's stuck in. The relatives end up selling her out to the police, but she manages to make another ally in the form of Emil (Jeremy Renner), something of a rival to Bruno, and one who has the distinct advantage of not lying to the women he's attracted to in the hopes of luring them into a life of whoredom. Ewa falls for him and he for her, and this goes very, very badly when the mercurial, jealous Bruno finds out about it.

There's a lot to be said for melodrama that is open and proud about being melodramatic, and it's nicely clever of The Immigrant to tell a story that could, with only modest censorship, have been filmed in the time period when it takes place. There's also a lot more to be said for melodrama that's really good at being a melodrama, and this is maybe not entirely the case with this film. It's nothing on Gray, who directs with a stately slowness that allows the story to burble up and find its level without any modernist or post-modernist touches, and who collaborates with Khondji on some rather fine compositions that understand the value of deep staging like not nearly enough movies do - it gives it a theatrical staging that pairs well with both the tone of the material and the actual content of the story.

But the film stumbles, rather needlessly, on its characters who aren't Ewa. Phoenix has been the leading man in both of Gray's last two films, so it's no surprise he was conscripted to do that job again here, but he's simply not that great at fleshing out a character who gets more complexity than Ewa, though less time for development. There's a lot of the actor's characteristic fuzzy mumbling and emptiness that don't pay off in this film whatsoever. He and Renner suffer from different specific iterations of almost exactly the same problem: they feel contemporary, too much like 21st Century actors trying to put on 1920s attitudes and speech and behavioral rhythms like a coat that doesn't fit right. Renner's work is more baldly modern, while Phoenix simply misses the mark on using newer acting technique to evoke old-fashioned life. But these are gradations. In both cases, the men are thoroughly outmatched by Cotillard and the script alike, and it harms everything: the reality of the movie suffers, especially since it's predicated on fusty atmospherics that present a stagey kind of life and storytelling; the roiling passion of the melodrama suffers more, since Ewa never apparently occupies the same plane of existence as either of her suitors.

The visuals are too confident, and the rock of Cotillard too immobile, for that kind of shortcoming to turn it into a failed experience. By the same token, The Immigrant is very much the sort of familiar-in-most-ways filmmaking and storytelling that needs everything to fire on all cylinders, so that we can declare that it is the brilliant execution that matters, not the lack of originality. When some of the most important cylinders are jammed up, that defense doesn't work so well. For what it is - a golden-toned melodrama about an innocent being tarnished and then redeemed in the Big City - The Immigrant is a lovely piece of work. But that's all that it is, and with as much of it that goes spectacularly right, it feels like there should be more.

7/10

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THE LIGHTS THAT STOP ME

There is much to be argued for simple things done well. I present for your approval Beyond the Lights, a backstage melodrama and love story that invents nothing, does not surprise, and is still one of the most rewarding films to come out (and then almost immediately vanish) in the waning months of 2014. Blame an tiny distributor without the means to push it hard, blame marketers who are skittish about pushing movies about non-white people for mass consumption, blame the disfavor of audiences towards anything that feels even a little bit like a soap opera. Regardless of who to blame, the film deserves so much more than it's gotten or will ever get: this is not world-changing cinema, but it's satisfying like few movie remember how to be.

The beginning sets the stage for all that follows: Macy Jean (Minnie Driver) is an angry stage mother, and her tween daughter Noni (India Jean-Jacques) is a gifted singer with a retiring and accommodating personality. When we meet the pair of them, it's to learn that Macy has a hard time comprehending this thing that is her daughter: she can't figure out how to do anything with mixed-raced Noni's hair, and practically throws her at a thoroughly unimpressed hairdresser (Deidrie Henry, packing enormous detail and racially-aware backstory into a role that takes up a grand total of two scenes) to solve this problem for her. One second-place finish later, and the tyrant mother vows to her daughter and the heavens that they'll never settle for second-best again.

Skip ahead to the present day, and Noni (now played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is a genuine musical superstar, winning a Billboard award for her collaboration with Kid Culprit (rapper Machine Gun Kelly, credited under his given name of Richard Colson Baker), a musical artist whose leering lyrics and pelvic dancing are like a lab-created experiment in distilling rape culture. And this before she has even released one single solo track. But though she has everything, and her mother is as happy about it as a pig in shit, Noni is miserable with what she does, who she has to be in order to do it, and the hope she has of ever doing anything else. And so she prepares to throw herself off a hotel balcony in Los Angeles. She's saved only by the quick work of Kaz Nicol (Nate Parker), a cop who took a night working the celebrity security detail for some easy money. Having finally met a person who responds to her as a woman in pain, Noni starts to make excuses to see Kaz more often, and soon enough, romance is in the air, or at least far more tender and mutually rewarding sex than she's been used to. Macy is pissed, and Kaz's father (Danny Glover) is even more pissed, since this threatens to derail his son's political aspirations, but you know how it goes with gorgeous young people in movies about secret emotional pain.

It's all thoroughly generic, but writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood, making her third feature in 14 years, commits to her story completely, without either talking down to it, or apologising for it. It's every inch a melodrama, but a melodrama that treats the characters, situations, and emotions with ragged naturalism in the filmmaking and acting alike, not with florid escapism. The result is a film that has all the pleasures of melodrama (sweeping emotions, big moments, hot people making out) without any of the histrionics - even Driver's Macy, a snarling monster of a mother for much of the film, is written and played with one foot in kitchen sink realism, built out of desperation and fear for the future and not just slovenly, trashy greed.

The greatest pleasure, though, is Mbatha-Raw, in her second leading performance of her big debutante year (I haven't yet seen Belle, the first, but based on what she does here, I want to). The woman has a commanding ability to play for the camera, making every moment smaller and smaller, pulling us in and making for a more intimate act of character building: the whole performance is a masterful combination of small glances, little details of body position, carefully chosen stresses in her line deliveries. Prince-Bythewood's script and the tonal balances she achieves are already terrific at exploring topics concerning the sexualisation of women in entertainment, the way that money doesn't buy happiness, the torments of mother-daughter relationships built around a power struggle, and the film could certainly be interesting on those fronts with anybody. But Mbatha-Raw's performance isn't an "anybody" sort of thing: she takes all of the film's concepts and sociology and filters it into the lived experience of one single damaged person trying to determine what she wants her identity to be, who functions beautifully as an individual and an embodiment of The Trouble Facing Women Today. It's a simply terrific performance in every respect, a fully-formed Star Is Born moment as exhilarating as the one Noni receives in the film.

On the back of that performance, Beyond the Lights could be much worse and still work. But the fact of the matter is, it's biggest "problem" is predictability in the general shape of things, and rather than using that as a crutch, the writer-director uses that as a tool to guide us into the emotional truths she wants to depict. It's hard to imagine how this stock material could be treated in a more adult, satisfying manner than it is here. This is sturdy, rather than clever filmmaking and storytelling, but sturdiness is a virtue, especially in service to such a convincing, engaging character study of a young woman in turmoil. The vogue for this kind of well-crafted romantic is by no means at a high ebb, but Beyond the Lights demonstrates with crowd-pleasing earnestness and hard indie film seriousness just how effective and necessary the oft-derided world of chick flicks can be.

8/10

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THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY

Hype is a brutal fucker. Coming to Whiplash cold, it might be entirely possible to find it a fun, nervy little sudser about Type-A personalities clashing with lacerating verbal violence, done up in an appropriately hyper if not terribly innovative style. Coming to it, instead, with the knowledge that it’s pretty much a done deal for an Oscar nomination or five, my response is instead a baffled, almost hostile, Really? That? It’s satisfyingly ragey soap opera for boys (and there’s another whole conversation to be had about the critical reception of certain genres, backstage melodramas, say, when they are focused on males instead of females; especially in the the case of a film where there’s a grand total of one major character who is a woman, a totally generic girlfriend who could be cut out of the film entirely with only minor changes made to the whole. But that is not this conversation), and it has a real barnburner of a performance bringing the antagonist to life, and the setting in the high-stakes world of top-tier New York jazz conservatories is novel, if not inherently grabby. But there’s not much about it that’s terribly special: back in the ‘90s, when style-driven indies were easier to find than they are now, there were a dozen films like this every single year. Though I suppose the fact that it hearkens back to a more robust period in the indie marketplace is something.

Something of a dark parody of the stock inspirational teacher film, Whiplash is the story of Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), New York native, son of a happily unexceptional high school writing teacher (Paul Reiser), and hellbent on becoming the greatest jazz drummer of his generation. To that end, he has managed to enroll in the highly competitive and prestigious Shaffer Conservatory, where his relentless after-hours practicing catches the eye of Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons). Fletcher is the most celebrated instructor in the school, and the band he leads the most sought-after ensemble, but he’s also a verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive taskmaster, who has no mercy, forgives no mistakes, and has a seemingly bottomless well of imaginative cruelty to harass and push his students. Andrew has the terrible misfortune, or the great luck, if you look at it from a certain angle, to show the kind of promise that Fletcher has been hunting for his entire career, and thus the 19-year-old is subjected to the largest quantity of the bandleader’s dictatorial attentions. A bond forms between the two, but it is not an affectionate one; it is savage and relentless.

Points for bluntness of theme: without moralising one way or the other, Whiplash unapologetically claims that most of us are not special snowflakes, and that becoming exceptional takes a terrifying commitment that leaves little room for maintaining your humanity. And that’s a lot more honest and interesting than more of the usual “you can do it! whee!” boilerplate. It’s guilty of over-enunciating this idea, to be sure - it is spelled out explicitly in dialogue twice, once in a scene that works because of Simmons’s offhand delivery, once in a ghastly scene set around a dinner table that’s one of the most archly over-written things on offer in 2014 - and its commitment to not expressing an opinion whether the sacrifice of one’s soul is worth becoming a great artist does, at times, leave it feeling like it lacks a point of view or an overall purpose.

But then, the purpose is to be a corker of a two-hander, with Simmons spitting out the words of writer-director Damien Chazelle’s dialogue like a WWII bomber leveling a European city, and Teller managing just to hold on, which is pretty much all the script permits to the character for the first two-thirds or better. It’s a thriller at heart, which models itself after its protagonist’s frenzied drumming, building up in speed and collapsing and then starting off right where it left off. If the results are somewhat monotonous in tone, it’s not really fair to call that either a shortcoming of the movie, or a mistake: it is about single-minded people pushing themselves harder and harder and harder, so a certain single-mindedness and linear momentum is appropriate. The acting certainly falls in line with that - it is by far the most effective performance I have ever seen Teller give, in large part because it requires only a narrow range of expression - touching on the essential qualities of the characters without muddying them down with too much technique that would only tend to distract from the film’s overall momentum (it’s for this reason not at all Simmons’s best performance - perfect for the role, but a bit mechanical and too much on the surface - though I ‘m not going to begrudge him the Oscar nomination he has locked down for delivering it).

It is a sinewy film, all tensed-up and propulsive and alert, and while Chazelle relies a bit too heavily on close-ups of bloody hands and sweaty faces to put over the psychological cost of all that tension, the film's best moments (virtually all of them related to musical performance) are genuinely impressive filmmaking that suggest the first-time director's potential to do something great, though they're too conspicuous and isolated for me to credit that this is that great thing. The best scene, by far, is the last, which I hesitate to even describe (the entire edifice of the plot would disintegrate without the things it reveals about Andrew's mind, but it also feels anything but inevitable), but it's the one place where the editing, the camera angles, and the sound design - which is wonderful throughout, making the instruments and music active, physical characters alongside the people - are all working to create an excellent piece of physical cinema, hot and frenzied. The slower, more openly character-based scenes are a bit rockier; outside of his core duo, Chazelle has not deigned to give any of his side characters inner life, and this results in some strained, tedious places where Andrew is being fed lines by joylessly functional stick figures, and Teller screws himself up a little too hard to provide two characters' worth of emotion. But the good parts are very good, and the bad parts are unexceptionally mediocre, and even if it's nowhere remotely near the year's ten best films, Whiplash is an enjoyable potboiler with just enough insight into alpha male desire to feel like something slightly deeper.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1955: In which America's greatest era of bourgeois conformity is critiqued from within; and also, In which we weep, like, buckets and buckets of tears

Years of intense critical re-evaluation, from Marxist theorists, feminist theorists, queer theorists, and structuralists, have brought the career of German emigrant Douglas Sirk to a level of respectability and significance that he was not generally accorded in the 1950s, when he was regarded as one of several nobodies churning out "women's pictures", and producing what is now regarded as his most important work. And while those theorists and scholars deserve all our thanks for bringing to light one of the great visual stylists working in America between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s, I think we must be leery losing sight of the fact that, class commentary this and gay coding that aside, Sirk made really fucking good melodramas.

Take, if you will, his 1955 All That Heaven Allows, the film upon which perhaps most of the theory raising him to the level of auteur based itself; I think we can fairly securely call it his signature film (his "best" is another matter, and we don't need to jump down that rabbit hole). It is nonsense, undoubtedly: the director himself acknowledged that Peg Fenwick's script, from a story by Edna L. Lee and Harry Lee, was "impossible", and he had to fix and re-shape it over the course of shooting the movie. But however florid and hokey (that is to say: however melodramatic), there's never a moment where it feels like Sirk wasn't treating the story with absolute commitment on its own terms. The colors, the blocking, the music: all of it builds to legitimise and enrich that impossible story, not to undercut or subvert it.

The action picks up in a small town in New England during the autumn, where we meet widowed Cary Scott (Jane Wyman), mother of two grown children, the young professional Ned (William Reynolds) and the college student Kay (Gloria Talbott). She has a best friend in Sara Warren (Agnes Moorehead), who keeps her abreast of all the gossip with the country club wives who make up the closest thing Cary has to a social circle, but mostly, as far as we can tell, she spends her time in the quiet, alone. That being said, there's no obvious evidence that she has the imagination to realise that she's bored or unfulfilled, until the fateful morning when Sara has to cancel lunch and that leaves Cary with nobody to talk to but the gardener: one Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), who has been pruning her trees for years, and who took over from his late dad, who pruned the trees before him. And it takes very little contact with Ron before Cary starts to have all kinds of funny feelings, both of a heightened, philosophically and emotionally reflective kind, and of the more grubby, sweaty kind as well. Ron, for his part, more than reciprocates, and by the time winter sets in, they're engaged. But this sets Cary against a society in which the appearance of propriety is everything, and widows are expected to wither away of respectability, or at best to only ever have romantic entanglements with miserable tedious assholes of their own social group and age bracket. And so their love is attacked and challenged, in both subtle and raging explicit ways, by very nearly every one of Cary's friends and family members. Ron's friends, meanwhile, are Thoreau-reading bohemians who couldn't give less of a shit.

What's amazing to me is not that at some point in the late '60s or '70s, scholars started to tease out how this could possibly function not just as a tearjerker but also as Sirk's caustic attack on social values of the mid-'50s; it's amazing that it might ever have been read any other way. Make Cary's neighbors space aliens instead of boring white suburbanites, and taa-daa! you have Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a parable for the fetish of conformity that marks the decade in the public consciousness. All That Heaven Allows isn't a parable; it's much too blunt and direct for that word to apply.

But still, melodrama is like sci-fi or horror in that it's privileged to say things in a direct, high-impact way, without the gentility of Respectable, Dignified Drama. It gets to be sharp-toothed and blood red, and the way that the film demonstrates how pointlessly nasty all of the Good People are being in condemning Cary for the crime of having desires and acting on them is merciless and unmissable - every time I watch the film, knowing exactly where it's going, I still get blindsided by how disgusting the Scott children turn out to be in their final appearance, and remain freshly impressed by how Sirk and his invaluable cinematographer Russell Metty foreshadow this development by showcasing Kay's guilt-tripping freakout - the moment above all else that breaks Cary's resolve and self-interest - in a kaleidoscope of gaudy colored lighting that plays like a disconcerting bad dream even in a film where bright color clashes are to be found somewhat often, and in which Kay in particular is often staged against a context of jarring gaudiness, often paired with self-important body language involving taking off her glasses, standing erect and inclining her head in a clear "I'm smarter than you are, so listen to my smartness" gesture. Boy, does Sirk ever enjoy mocking Kay.

Color is always an important signifier in this film, with every scene and damn near every shot doing something very particular and purposeful, especially in contrasting hot colors with cooling ones. In the beginning of the film, Cary is associated with reds and oranges: her clothes, the bright autumnal trees that require pruning by a rugged American man-hunk like Ron (incidentally, I'm not terribly keen on readings of the film that foreground Hudson's homosexuality, even though I do not necessarily disagree with them, for this reason: if we read gay coding into Ron, it deprives Cary of her unambiguously heterosexual blossoming. And it's her movie more than it's Ron's). The first beat of the plot, properly speaking, finds Sara showing up in a blue dress in a blinding robin's egg blue car, violating the frame-filling field of reds, the moments of greatest passion between Cary and Ron, or more properly speaking between Cary and Ron's way of life, are those in which reds, yellows, and oranges are contrasted with the whites, blues, and greys visible through windows and in backgrounds. When she gives in to peer pressure, she's reduced to wearing greys and blues, spotting reds only here and there in the frame. Worst of all is when Cary is presented, against her stated will, with a television, and we see her reflected in its cramped, boxy frame, all the color sucked out until she's just a grey and gold shadow. No sign of post-war affluence has ever looked so hideously squat and threatening and deadening as that TV.

That's dime store visual analysis, of course; any halfwit who just learned that "red = lust" in Western color symbology can watch All That Heaven Allows and come to those conclusions. But that, I'd argue, is exactly what makes the movie great melodrama: it works on such a basic, direct level, it's like being punched in the gut, hard, for 89 minutes. Subtleties that need to be teased out with great labor and attention are wonderful and all, but there's something to be said about something so potently obvious that it just roars over you. These are primal emotions, in melodramas: sex and desire, the awareness of one's own self as distinct from the society that tries as hard as it possibly can to erase the self, especially the self of a woman, especially the self of a middle-aged mother and widow. More than any other Sirk movie - hell, more than any other American film from the '50s that I can think of having seen - All That Heaven Allows is a drama about a woman attempting to claim ownership of her own life despite absolutely everything in her past conspiring to deny her that agency. I haven't seen every movie made between 1953 and 1961, but I'm deeply tempted to call it the most gender-progressive American movie of the Eisenhower era, even if it ends, in a scene that's already a bit leaden for other reasons, with the suggestion that Cary has to be a nurse before she can be a lover.

And like all truly great progressive drama, it succeeds at that because it's not constantly speaking about it. The most persuasive and compelling scenes in All That Heaven Allows are the ones where the story and characters are foregrounded more than social messaging, more even than the film's own second-half indulgence in painting all of the suburbanites as The Will To Conformity, rather than individuals. The most effective, persuasive sequences are the ones where Cary is simply allowed to be happy in a way she's plainly never felt before, with Wyman's face slowly and methodically opening itself into relaxed, joyful pleasure (it's really difficult to put into words just how perfect Wyman is in this role: it gives a great deal of opportunity to her, and she returns the favor by doing everything in exactly the right register of obvious without being broad, vividly emotional without being overwrought). The acting and the warmth of the cinematography showcase that, along with the cozy, beautiful design of all the scenes set in Ron's world (the art direction was by Alexander Golitzen and Eric Orbom), in contrast to the plush but uncomfortably open and non-living rooms of Cary and the country clubbers. The difference, I think, can be best summed up in a scene where Ron's friend Alida (Virginia Grey), hosting a party of all the oddballs and outsiders, gushes with unforced enthusiasm "oh, what a beautiful cake!" to one of her guests' contribution to the dinner, as the camera rushes forth to look at what is most certainly not a beautiful cake, but is probably tastier and more lovingly-made than all the fussy food eaten everywhere else in the film.

This is pleasure / that is cold - everything in the visuals and performances of All That Heaven Allows focuses on creating that one dichotomy, and then watching as the protagonist finds herself traveling between the two halves of that dichotomy for the first time, feeling alive and passionate against all the best efforts of society to prevent her. It's top-shelf cinematic sophistication in service to brute, angry sentiment about how fucked-up society and propriety are, and if it's not the bestest best melodrama that ever could be - frankly, I think at least two other Sirk films are even better - it is, nevertheless, proof that there is artistry and glory in a genre that never had to apologise for itself, not when it was this confident, beautiful, and good.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1955
-Oklahoma! is the first of many deeply unsatisfying Rodgers & Hammerstein musical adaptations released by 20th Century Fox
-James Dean debuts, becomes a superstar, and dies, all in the span of about seven months
-Rock & roll and juvenile delinquency enter the cinematic A-list with MGM's Blackboard Jungle

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1955
-In Denmark, Carl Theodor Dreyer makes Ordet, the most shattering of films about faith and the spirit
-Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali brings Indian cinema to the attention of the whole world
-The Polish Film School movement is ushered in by Andrzej Wajda's A Generation

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