IT'S ABOUT TIME

A third review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing yet again to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Personal anecdotes aren't criticism, of course, but in this case the anecdote shall lead us to criticism, I promise. The thing is, when I was a wee cinephile, I was quite addicted to George Pal's 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. It was almost certainly the most violent and gory movie I had encountered at that point: one of the green-skinned subterranean humanoid monsters, the Morlocks, gushed blood out of its mouth when it died! Another one was shown onscreen decaying over the course of years rushed through in time-lapse, in extremely vivid detail! Its eye popped out! Basically, The Time Machine completely fucked me up, in the way that seven-year-olds crave being fucked up. I hadn't watched the film in fully two decades before seeing it for this review, but I could accurately remember some scenes right down to the editing. What I did not remember is that the sequence that so powerfully affected me is a mere blip in the overall movie; it's more than an hour into its 103 minutes before we even hear about the Morlocks, let alone see them, and they're not an active threat for more than 15 minutes or so.

Now the memoir turns back into a review, for what my experience teaches us is that you can't beat a great monster. Pal, an animator turned producer turned producer/director, knew from making a big impression with some good state of the art spectacle, and this time he went right off the edge of the map. Forget the staggering impact the film had on my 7-year-old self; as a fully-functioning thirtysomething, I'm still pretty well blown away by the film's violence. This is basically a silly matinee picture and it looks like it: one doesn't expect to run into gore effects that are as explicit as Hollywood in 1960 would have dared to try to sneak past the censors. Especially on MGM's dime, of all studios. It's legitimately shocking, even a half of a century after the specific effects that The Time Machine shows off have long since been surpassed. And it certainly tends to skew one's impression of what the film is and where its strengths lie, because the other thing I really really didn't remember is that the Morlock sequences are easily the worst part of the movie, despite all of Pal's bravura.

The movie starts on 5 January, 1900, which is dumb as hell, because it immediately flashes back to New Year's Eve just six days earlier, on the cusp of a new century. Here we find the greatly dissatisfied H. George Wells (Rod Taylor), a London inventor who thinks that humanity is the absolute goddamn worst. To get away from the miserable state of civilisation, George has perfected a time machine, or so he proclaims to his friends Philip Hillyer (Sebastian Cabot), Anthony Bridewell (Tom Helmore), Walter Kemp (Whit Bissell), and David Filby (Alan Young), the last of whom is the only one to even pretend that George hasn't gone completely around the bend. George doesn't care much about his friends' mockery, though; he's already built his machine, which allows him to travel any direction chronologically while staying in one place relative to the Earth's surface, and he hopes to use it to leave the ugly, amoral England of the Boer War to find a time when humanity has finally evolved beyond violence. His attempts dash all the optimism right out of him: he first lands in 1917, where he meets Filby's adult son James (still Young), and learns that his friend has dies in the Great War. George's second jump is even less successful: he stumbles right into an air raid during the Blitz of 1940. His luck takes an even worse turn when his third try lands him in 1966, just minutes before a nuclear strike that triggers a volcanic explosion. George has just enough time to enter his time bubble before he and his machine are covered with lava, and he has no choice but to move forward until the natural process of erosion reveals the outside world again.

That takes him all the way to 12 October, 802,701. Here, he finds a race of humans calling themselves the Eloi, according to Weena (Yvette Mimieux), a young woman who speaks pretty terrific English and looks pretty conventionally attractive for somebody with hundreds of thousands of cultural and physical evolution under her belt. George is eager to learn more about this apparently utopian future, but his inquiries reveal the Eloi to be massively incurious and almost dysfunctionally idiotic. It's the Morlocks, George starts to determine, who are the actual brains of this future society: they and the Eloi are two disparate branches of post-homo sapiens evolution, and the hideous underground dwellers are keeping the moronic surface dwellers as food stock. At any rate, they're smart enough to have stolen the time machine, and that means that George has to fight them off, all by himself, since the cow-like Eloi aren't going to put up any kind of resistance.

David Duncan's script leaves the plot of Wells's novel mostly in place, while denuding it of much of its detail and depth, but to be honest, I can't say that it's noticed. The movie is too busy being splendid to look at, frequently in ways that offer the illusion that it's brainier that it is, which was pretty much Pal's entire career as a producer of feature films. The biggest part of it is the setting: by virtue of setting its roots in Victorian London, The Time Machine attains an instantaneous level of seriousness, classiness, and literary prestige, and something about it just feels more weighty than if George was starting his forward journey from 1959 (if nothing else, the sequence in 1966, probably the most nuanced part of the movie - the way it makes a mere 6 years in the future seem dangerously alien is the sharpest piece of commentary Duncan and Pal line up - requires a Victorian time traveler to make any sense at all). And the movie does an absolutely extraordinary job setting up the reality of Victorian London right from the earliest moments, where a beautiful street set and some exquisite matte paintings establish the physical nature of the place as something that feels real but mediated, like it's a moving, living version of an aged photograph.

Then again, the effects work throughout the film is truly special (the film won an especially well-earned Oscar for them), starting with that matte and moving on to its groundbreaking use of time-lapse photography to visually depict time travel. It's too straightforward and unfaked for it not to have aged well, which makes this one of the only effects-driven films I can name that looks every inch as good after the passage of decades as it must have done when it was new (though the fact that its signature technique has become a mainstay of advertising and music videos means that it has lost absolutely all of its novelty), but eye candy isn't what matters. It's the way that the effects, as well as the design - particularly the design of the time machine itself, something like a sled with a giant spinning dish on the back of it that looks exactly like something a middle-class Victorian bachelor would assemble in his back yard as a hobby - casually establish the film's plausible reality in a way that isn't particular dazzling or spectacular: for the most part, the effects are just kind of there, hanging around over Taylor's shoulder, in the background. The showy parts are at least a little clever, not just dazzling: the film's justly celebrated use of a storefront mannequin and the change in fashions that occur over 40 years is a bravura moment, but also one that serves very specific story moments.

Generally, the steadiness and sensibility of the opening of the film - everything up to the lava explosion, itself a pretty marvelous effects sequence - is so confident and so very unlike the normal stylistic gyrations of sci-fi in that period that it's honestly disappointing to me when it stops, and the A-plot starts. The fable of the Eloi and the Morlocks simply isn't as successful visually: imagining a post-apocalyptic future was apparently harder than recreating Victorian England, or maybe the budget ran out, but really, everything in 802,701 looks a bit threadbare. I am powerfully reminded of the most ambitious episodes of Star Trek, to be specific, and it doesn't help that the story feels so much like something that could have showed up there - nor, for that matter, that Mimieux's performance is so shallow and blandly flirtatious, though in her defense, that's exactly what the role asks for.

Parts of it work, beyond a shadow of a doubt: the Eloi boneyard is good and spooky, and there are moments in which the Morlocks, standing in the shadows, can be made out only as a pair of glowing eyes that have a great tension and dreadfulness about them (and not just because the slightly shabby make-up can't be seen). It's just a bit shlocky in the execution, and given that The Time Machine is at best an example of really savvy, gifted execution of impressive sci-fi visuals, this is the worst possible sort of weakness to infect it at any point. Still, even in its weakest moments, the film benefits from being graded on a curve: in its production design, its historical orientation, and the scale of its production, this runs rings around nearly any other sci-fi film in its generational cohort. Eight years down the line, and this would look utterly primitive, but on its own merits, it's damned impressive stuff, and there's just enough esoteric concepts dancing through the screenplay to make it feel more intellectual than the usual sci-fi action-adventure. Between the handsome production and the nerdy writing, this offers an unusually smart, sophisticated aura for what amounts to an expensive B-movie. There's better sci-fi, undoubtedly, but not in 1960, particularly not with the sort of glossy studio polish that makes this such a treat to watch.

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A TALE OF TWO SISTERS

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

The broadly-defined genre of Prestige Picture Adaptations of Unassailable Literary Classics is terrifically old and terrifically durable, though it has had specific high and low points over the years. The most recent high, in the English-speaking world, covered most of the 1990s, when the successes of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in 1989 and Merchant-Ivory's Howards End in 1992 (itself a delayed capitalisation on the same team's A Room with a View, released in 1986) proved enough to trigger a mania for well-heeled adaptations and variations of the things you read in high school, or a least in a freshman year college English class. As with any movie fad, some of the individual efforts were strong and some were clinkers (the hit-to-miss ratio of major Shakespeare adaptations over the decade is fairly dire), but all in all, I'd be inclined to say that it remains my own favorite period of Literary Classics movies ever. And the best film of the bunch is probably the 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, directed by Ang Lee from a script by Emma Thompson.

By all means, putting a talent like Lee in place already gave the film a huge leg up: the director's fist wholly English-language film was superficially an enormous shift from his contemporary-set studies of Taiwanese family life, but his brilliance was in figuring out how the story was basically just an extension in different clothing of the same kind of interpersonal dynamics he'd already made his specialty (and would continue to do going forward, ultimately resulting in the scandal of making a pensive family drama out of Hulk). What separates the great costume drama literary adaptations from the drearily mediocre ones is, in most cases, their emotional accessibility: the films that clearly demonstrate how people alive decades or centuries ago were feeling, fleshy people like ourselves are brilliant, whereas the ones that are arch fashion shows set in authentic but sterile re-creations of old locations tend to be the most boring, stultifying movies on God's green earth. Lee was uniquely well-suited to make a film on the right side of that gap.

But while Lee's contribution to the film's success is impossible to diminish, it's hard not to think of this as Emma Thompson's achievement overall. As an actress, she's the best part, or the only genuinely good part, or surely one of the highlights, of virtually every film she was involved in throughout the half-decade preceding this movie, but that's not the real tell. The real tell is that the four movies she acted in under Branagh's direction during their marriage are generally terrific or at least fascinating in their miscalculations, and they are best in some of the same ways that Sense and Sensibility is at its best. He hasn't made anything nearly as good since their divorce, which just so happens to have been finalised about two months before Sense and Sensibility came out. Am I saying that Emma Thompson was the secret genius behind Branagh's best work? No, that's scurrilous gossip-mongering. I am heavily implying it. The really sad thing is that after doing whatever wonderful magical voodoo she did to make this such a great work - in the process, becoming the only person to win both a writing and acting Oscar (she had the latter from Howards End) - Thompson's career basically swan-dived into oblivion.* For this, I feel sad on Thompson's behalf, but even sadder on behalf of myself and everyone else who'd like to know what she might have had up her sleeve next.

The plot of Austen's 1811 isn't as ubiquitous as her 1813 follow-up, Pride and Prejudice, but I pray it's not that unfamiliar (especially since I prefer the earlier book). The ingredients, anyway, are pretty basic: the second wife (Gemma Jones) of the late Mr. Dashwood (Tom Wilkinson), and her three daughters Miss Elinor Dashwood (Thompson), Marianne (Kate Winslet), and Margaret (Emilie François) are horrified to learn that Dashwood's son by a first marriage, John (James Fleet), has been persuaded by his harpyish wife Fanny (Harriet Walter) to ignore the dying man's request and leave the second family penniless. They are able find temporary housing with one of Mrs. Dashwood's cousins, and set themselves to the task of surviving, which for a family of women in the late 18th Century can only mean making suitable marriages. For Elinor, who is stiffly pragmatic ("Sense"), this does not mean the handsomely awkward Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), Fanny Dashwood's brother, for though they strike up a warm relationship, the threat of his disinheritance hangs over his every action. For Marianne, who is ready to burst with passionate, intense emotions ("Sensibility"), this does not mean the boring Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), no matter how smart a match he'd make; she's much more interested in the charming, obviously roguish John Willoughby (Greg Wise). Things play out with Sense and Sensibility becoming more like each other, to the hard-won benefit of virtually all.

As a work of adaptation, Sense and Sensibility is mostly a matter of streamlining Austen's original, giving Ferrars and Brandon a bit more to do, and finding a way to indicate to moderns what the hell all of this is about without it feeling pandering. That goes beyond the simple matter of contextualising a vastly different set of cultural norms about gender roles: Sense and Sensibility is a very financially-obsessed story, even more interested in the economic role of women in Georgian England than with their social roles. And the first triumph of the film is in the way it lays all of this out in neat little moments that feel organically woven into the story, occurring naturally rather than feeling like the movie has to come to a stop to lecture us. For one thing Sense and Sensibility never feels like, is a lecture. In fact, given its basic seriousness, a not-insignificant 131-minute running time, and overwhelming costume and production design (the former by Jenny Beavan and John Bright, the latter by Luciana Arrighi), one of the more impressive things about the movie is that it's quite a lot of fun to watch.

Credit due there to Thompson, to Lee, to damn near everybody. This is as lively as costume dramas get, thanks in large part to an exceptional cast: only Grant feels like a let-down of the major characters, and that's more because his "I'm so hapless and awkward, but unbearably cute" shtick was already wearing thin by the time this movie came out, rather than because it's a bad fit for the character. In fact, he's perfectly fine in the role. But "perfectly fine" doesn't help one to stand-out in this crowd. The best of the lot are unmistakably and necessarily Thompson and Winslet (though I am also much partial to Imelda Staunton in a modestly-sized role), whose huge age gap helps to fuel the gulf of understanding between two sisters who love each other very much and still can't fathom how the other lives. Winslet impresses me more, mostly because of context unavailable at the time (this was only her third movie role): she's a great actress but not an infallible one, and her future career tends to show that her biggest liability is when she's playing period roles. She tends to choke off her natural prickly energy and tendency to dart in unexpected directions in favor of playing dully literal notions of old-fashioned attitudes. That's exactly what she's not doing her: her Marianne is a tricky, mercurial person, not a prop for dresses, not a desperate attempt to hide a modern way of building character underneath a one-note stiffness (two shortcomings obviously present in her Titanic performance). Not that Thompson is a slouch; she's just not a revelation. Still, her emotional striptease in allowing us to see with exquisite slowness and deliberation what Sense has cost her character is impressive and important, and if the film's narrative works largely because of her smart excisions and clarifications, its emotional arc depends to a great degree on her gradations of feeling.

The aesthetic framework for these characters is crisp and unshowy: in terms of visuals, Lee and cinematographer Michael Coulter are mostly interested in drawing us into the film's reality by treating it with invisible naturalism, and for a film of such plush design, it's surprisingly casual in its style. The most dramatic thing that happens is the subtle way that the two sisters are framed: Elinor appears within boxes and against straight lines, while Marianne is likely to show up in open frames with more lighting and messiness in the set decoration. That's lovely as a grace note, but it's not something the film actively insists we notice; part of Lee's mechanism of bringing the material to life in a highly accessible way is to avoid putting any kind of spin on it - the contrast between this and his later period film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with its painterly images and self-conscious grandeur, to match its bold-strokes emotions and stylised narrative, is immediately obvious. Sense and Sensibility is much more about fine details, and the quiet style Lee brings to it is exactly what's needed for those details to catch our attention in their own time and not because the film wants to assault us. Though it is ultimately a tribute to Sensibility, it's a movie made with much good Sense, and that's exactly why it's so much more effective than almost all of the other films of its type and of its time.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SILENT HORROR - IN THIS LABYRINTH, WHERE NIGHT IS BLIND

The 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera is two things. One of these is the best of the small population of pure horror films made in the United States during the silent era. The other is a thorny mess to talk about, so we need to have some history. The short version of the story is all we need, which is that in 1929, Universal shot a large amount of new footage and heavily revised the movie for a 1930 re-release including sound passages, chopping a huge portion of its running time off in the process, and requiring the frame rate bumped up to 24 frames per second, sufficiently faster than the 20 frames per second at which the film was shot that it obvious that it's moving too fast. This 1930 cut has been the basis for almost all subsequent editions of the film, given that it has been preserved (not quite in a complete form) in 35mm, while the 1925 cut now exists only in 16mm home copies that look pretty beaten and battered. Thankfully, the film has been one of the best-served of all silents on high-def video, and there is an edition collecting the 35mm print in both 24 fps and 20 fps, running to 78 and 92 minutes, respectively, as well as the 16mm original at 114 minutes. This review is primarily in response to the 114-minute 1925 cut, though I've also checked in with the quite spectacularly different 92-minute edition of the 1930 cut (enough of the footage is new to that version, and the plot sufficiently different, that I'd argue it should be thought of as a different film entirely). And now the housekeeping is done and we can go on with the actual movie review.

And how glad I am to do that! The Phantom of the Opera, in any cut, is one of the great classic horror masterworks, for reasons that are hardly limited to its most famous element - I refer to the make-up designed by actor Lon Chaney for his performance as the Phantom, among the most iconic images in all of silent cinema, and perhaps the most famous make-up design in the entire history of screen horror. I don't want to diminish anything: Chaney's Phantom design is glorious, and it deserves every molecule of its fame. But there's a great deal of movie above and beyond that design, even beyond that character, and much of it is pretty unreservedly terrific.

Not all of it. It's certainly the case that none of of the other performers in the movie are on the same level as Chaney, which isn't a surprise - I can't name a single one of his films where he isn't giving the most interesting performance. But one particular cast member isn't really any good at all, Mary Philbin, and that's rough, since she's playing the character with the most screen time. Philbin certainly was capable of more than this - she's very good, if hardly one for the ages, in the wonderful 1928 costume drama The Man Who Laughs. Here, though, she's flat and disaffected. It's the exact opposite of the stereotypical problem of silent film acting, which is not so hard to find in 1925 (in fact, not so hard to find in this very film), with wild gesticulations and huge facial expressions: she's subdued to a truly remarkable degree for a silent performance, enough that it slips from "naturalistic acting a decade ahead of schedule" into "leaves no trace of her personality" (she is, to be fair, notably better in the footage shot in 1929). Her scenes with Chaney are easily the best; hard to say if that's the value of having a strong scene partner, or the value of having more interesting situations to play than the dewy, virginal ingénue.

But even with a rocky lead, and a best-in-show performer who doesn't show up until the second quarter of the movie, there's barely a moment of The Phantom of the Opera that doesn't just work at the highest level a genre picture made before its genre had even manifested itself could manage to. This is a seriously impressive horror movie, possibly the only classic of the nascent form from the '20s and '30s that gets at the general feeling of German Expressionism (where cinematic horror as we now think of it was largely invented in the first half of the '20s) without specifically copying the technique of Expressionism. It's a stretch to call it "scary" all these years later - even Chaney's uncanny make-up is more freakish and creepy than scary, partially owing to its cultural ubiquity - but it has a doom-soaked mood of claustrophobic interiors and silhouettes flittering away out of corners, and a staging of a hanged man's shadow that's one of the boldest pieces of lighting you could want from a horror movie.

The focus on decrepitude, night terrors of the unknown, and the crawling sense of dread surrounding this mysterious man who controls Box 5 of the Paris Opera House and has been giving anonymous lessons to the chorine Christine Daaé (Philbin), understudy to the florid prima donna Carlotta (Virginia Pearson - in the most significant narrative change between the two cuts, Pearson plays Carlotta's mother in the 1930 version, which is kind of a nasty trick). A lot of the material that doesn't take place in the catacombs and sewers beneath the Opera, where the Phantom dwells, can run the risk of seeming insubstantial, as generally happened in the other important "straight" adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel, Universal's 1943 color epic (which largely gutted the material and transformed it into a solid if frequently weird attempt at an MGM-style melodrama on a budget). Here, though, director Rupert Julian - who had the film taken away and largely reshot by director Edward Sedgwick, only for virtually all of Sedgwick's footage to be discarded after terrible test screenings - does such a good job at layering a constant sense of danger to the beautifully spooky sets, and keeping our attention focused on the Phantom even in the long stretches of the film where he's not present, that even the most unexceptional moments of straightforward character business have a menacing aura that dashes any possibility of this presenting itself as a romantic drama (the approach taken by the famous and infamous Andrew Lloyd Webber musical from 1986, itself adapted into a 2004 movie).

The Phantom himself helps with that, of course: once we finally see him, even before the immaculately-staged reveal of his grotesque face, Chaney makes damn sure that we never stop thinking about the character. There's such stateliness and largeness to Chaney's posture and movement, never shading into self-parodying silent film histrionics: his Phantom has unimaginable, crushing screen presence, whether he's dominating the frame, appearing in a small niche, or standing behind title cards in one of the most stylistically brash cards the film has up its sleeve. Chaney's career is full of tremendously high-impact work and a one-of-a-kind ability to demand the camera's attention, and this is still a good contender for the best performance he ever gave. Then we see the make-up, transforming his features into a repellent distortion of a human face with a death rictus, and there's no contest. This is the role he's known for, and it's the role he absolutely deserves to be known for.

Chaney's terrifying grotesque, domineering and threatening and yet very, very sad; the tense feeling to the camerawork and staging of the sets; the thick and heavy lighting; for all these things, The Phantom of the Opera is an absolutely triumph of sustained mood, one that does, yes, deserve to be called "operatic"; it insists on strong emotional responses to potent cues, and not all of those are what we would now call horror. The longer it goes, the more that Raoul and Christine's romance does become a strong factor in the story and the atmosphere of the film, even if the actors don't manage to sell any kind of real attraction between them. There's a certain kind of desperation to the way the love story plays out, something that feels genuinely fragile and threatened by the sheer scale of the Phantom's menace. It's all oddly weighted, but then, horror had no rules at this point, at least not in America. That leads to freshness and lack of predictable beats; uniquely for a classic horror film, it's really hard to get ahead of the tonal swerves the film takes on the way to its climactic face-offs. This is a landmark movie for any number of reasons, not least of which is that the genre it helped shape so quickly moved away from it that it doesn't feel constrained by that genre; it makes horror a tool rather than an end point, and that results in a very unique kind of energy that makes this one of the most essential horror films made prior to 1968.

Body Count: 3, plus who knows how many innocent opera-goers crushed to death by a falling chandelier.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SILENT HORROR - IT'S ALIVE

To begin with, define "horror" in a way that makes everybody happy; then solve the intractable mysteries of cinema history prior to 1920. And once you have done these two things, you can authoritatively state, "this is the first American horror film". But until we reach that point of pure intellectual fulfillment, the best we can do is to make our best approximation. So it's more a matter of convenience than rock-solid history that leads me to anoint as that first American horror film a certain adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's frequently strip-mined Frankenstein, produced in 1910 by the Edison Company. And here's what we do know: we do know that this was the very first American Frankenstein. So close enough for government work, is what I'm saying.

It holds another distinction, too: it was the first screen Frankenstein that adapted Shelley to the screen primarily by means of ignoring her completely. Part of that is the inevitability of condensing even a novel as moderate in its size as Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus to the duration of a one-reel motion picture - that duration being a bit difficult to pin down. Online sources all land on 16 minutes, but the version I have seen (which does not seem to be projected at too high a framerate) is less than 13. Either way, that leaves time for only a very harried version of Shelley's story, or a rebuild of the whole thing using only the basic ingredient common to all movie Frankensteins: a medical student named Frankenstein (Augustus Phillips) decides to take it on himself to create live, and the thing he gives life to (Charles Ogle) proves to be a ghastly perversion. Though even in the most reduced form, writer-director J. Searle Dawley's adaptation plays loose with the material: while Shelley famously kept the details fuzzy, the basic notion of all versions of the story is that Frankenstein desired to bring dead flesh to life; this Frankenstein of 1910 is actually creating life out of nothing, more explicitly in the fashion of God even than usual.

In fact, this film's embrace of the "Frankenstein wants to be God" metaphor is so extreme that the monster turns out to be, literally, an extension of the creator's thought. The basic description of events - which you can easily follow for yourself, the public domain film is easily found on the internet (though on YouTube, at least, you can have either good resolution or properly tinted colors, but not both) - finds Frankenstein leaving for school, becoming consumed with thoughts of life and death, forming his creature, realising too late that his evil, unholy impulses had imprinted upon the being, turning it into a wrathful monster. It follows him as he returns home and to the arms of his fiancée (Mary Fuller), harassing them both, and causing Frankenstein to admit to the wickedness of his deeds. And this is where things get openly metaphysical, as the monster apparently ceases to exist except as an incorporeal projection of Frankenstein's mind, which even then dissolves into nothingness as he redeems himself from his impure ways.

It sure as hell ain't Shelley, though most of the film is derived from the book (Frankenstein in school, Frankenstein making the monster, and the monster assaulting Frankenstein's wife on her wedding night, all the significant plot points in the movie, are all Shelley's). But even if it deviates from the source material, it's still an enormously gratifying adaptation, intelligently grappling with its basic themes in a form that better suits the scale and palette available to a filmmaker of 1910, when scenes were still all but universally communicated in theatrical wide shots with limited cutting, and what we'd now call feature-length films only barely existed. Dawley, who liked to (overweeningly) call himself the first motion picture director, was more concerned than anyone else working at that time with dramatic cohesion, character reality, and the function of acting in films, so it fits that his Frankenstein would be a primarily psychological one; and his treatment of the monster as closer to an Edward Hyde-esque manifestation of Frankenstein's broken soul than a rampaging corpse is impressively achieved, all the more for being in such an unfamiliar idiom, both in terms of the stagey framing and the extravagantly broad acting.

But I brought us all together for a very specific reason, and I haven't even touched on it: how is Frankenstein '10 as horror, anyway? Astonishingly great, in fact, especially since horror as a codified genre in American cinema was still 20 years away from finally coalescing (thanks, in part, to that other and better-known Frankenstein). Like most adaptations of the novel, its most striking scene is the creation of the monster, and I will frankly declare that, adjusting for the steep technological curve of the years following, this particular movie has one of the very best versions of that scene ever. It's more of an alchemical process than the biological one favored by most later movies: Frankenstein tosses some stuff into a vat locked into a metal chamber, and the monster forms, almost of its own will. The technique is obvious and simple: Dawley set a model on fire, and burned it into ashes, while waggling one of its arms, and then he ran the footage backwards. It's as primitive as any trick in the cinematic toolkit, but it works enormously well here: watching a humanoid form extrude from the very air is uncanny as hell even without the distressing floppiness of that dead arm, no matter how much the smoke moving downward gives away the game. It's a terrific scene in every detail: the cuts back to an increasingly nervous Frankenstein, the refusal to show the fully-realised monster at first, even the skeleton hanging out in the corner of one frame, implying a chamber of horrrors just off camera that we can only imagine.

As for the monster itself, it's a freaky bit of make-up, designed by Ogle himself, and looking more like a wild man-ape than a grotesque animated corpse. Ogle certainly gives the most interesting performance, too, slinking around erratically and using his big grand gestures as ways of stressing his alien nature, while Phillips and Fuller make those same gestures simply because that's how you do, in 1910. Watching him lope and shuffle around the sets is horror of the most genuine sort: an intrusion of something incomprehensible and wrong into a sedate, even boringly normal space. It's too much to ask that a 105-year-old movie should still be even marginally "scary", but with this monster creeping around these places, Frankenstein is still impressively able to be unsettling and creepy. The film is a relic of an almost unrecognisably earlier period in the medium's development, but it's as broadly accessible as anything from the same filmmaking style that I can name. It's kind of the perfect "my first early narrative cinema" experience, with the comforting familiarity of genre helping to bridge the archaic presentation with the far more immediate emotions it evokes. American horror couldn't ask for a sturdier, more confident opening act than this.

Body Count: 0 or 1, depending on exactly how metaphysical you want the monster to end up being.

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RIPLEY AND ME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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YOU NEVER OPEN YOUR MOUTH UNTIL YOU KNOW WHAT THE SHOT IS

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

Here's something of a paradox: David Mamet doesn't know shit about directing films, if we're to judge from his 1991 book On Directing Films (as pristine an example I can name of the bizarre fixation that many theater professionals apparently have on cinema as good for only the most ascetic kind of realism), and yet he is absolutely the best director of David Mamet films that has ever been. This is possibly because the viciously lean aesthetic he preaches and practices is so uniquely well-suited to showing off the tightly machined, rhythmic dialogue upon which his entire career has been based. At any rate, nobody does Mamet like Mamet, and the other attempts to do so have been all over the map, quality-wise.

But we have the good fortune to now train our attention on maybe the best of all Mamet movies directed by somebody else, the 1992 adaptation of his 1984 Pulitzer-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross, as directed by James Foley.* In latter days, Foley has found his niche as a prolific director of episodes of House of Cards, and this speaks directly to his primary qualification for adapting an enormously popular play: he is a great facilitator who doesn't try to get in the way of material with his own personalising stamp. In the case of Glengarry, this means (on the good side of the ledger) that maximum attention is drawn to the words being spoken and the actors speaking them, and quite a spectacular marriage that proves to be; it also means (on the bad side) that the film is a bit stilted as a film: there some visual ideas that play and some that don't, but mostly there aren't really ideas at all, just a choppy series of close-ups where we might prefer a longer wide shot to allow the actors to throw lines and pacing back and forth, rather than have editor Howard Smith do all the work for them.

As an expression of a great fucking script, though, Glengarry really can't be beat. The piece itself is a modern classic: Mamet's revisiting of the themes of Death of a Salesman with the added disillusionment of the 1980s and enough profanity to choke a motherfucker. In a crappy little dive office in The Big City (played by New York, but not inherently required to be there), four men sweat and hustle and try to bilk middle class marks out of their retirement money with shady real estate deals: Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) is the current star of the office, though it takes very little effort to outsell George Aaronow (Alan Arkin), Dave Moss (Ed Harris), and especially Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon), an old-timer who lost his game and blusters around in a haze of tart-tongued flop sweat. We meet them on a dank, rainy night when a fire has been lit under their collective asses: Mitch and Murray, the owners of the office, have called in a motivational speaker (Alec Baldwin) - "Blake", he's called in the credits, but I don't believe he gets named onscreen - who has come with a sales contest: first place is a Cadillac El Dorado, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you're fired. And with slimy little office manager John Williamson (Kevin Spacey) holding a precious set of promising sales leads away from everybody, the mood in the office is grim as a funeral while the salesmen try to scrape some money out of people with nothing better to do than listen to oily flim-flam on the phone.

Mamet re-wrote the play himself, adding the scene with Baldwin's character, and shifting around some scenes in the first half, and in the process made Glengarry Glen Ross, the screenplay, an even stronger piece of drama than the awfully good original. Much of that resides in the Baldwin scene, a fire-and-brimstone sermon from the depths of capitalism at its most merciless. "My name is fuck you" he snarls at one point, and it's a good laugh-line, well-delivered (in a cast that's strong across the board, it's no controversial opinion to propose that Baldwin is the clear stand-out). But it's also kind of true. This is indeed Fuck You, the embodied spirit of the American Dream at its most aggressive and savage, a tyrannical belief that winning is the only thing, and if you can only win by ripping your morality and humanity out at the roots in order to more effectively rape your way across the countryside, than all that says is that morality and humanity weren't things you needed in the first place. It's a caustic tirade that flawlessly sets the scene for all to follow: a bile-soaked depiction of white American men so deep in the toxic atmosphere of brutal economic competition that decades of post-War affluence have built up as the shining ideal of white American masculinity that they can't imagine anything outside of it.

The story has no heroes: when the pathetic achieve a measure of success, they only become the exact same profane bullies they had previously bemoaned, and when the pathetic continue to fail, they simply retrench into an ever more self-effacing space of servile diminishment. It's a scorched-earth approach to satire, but it works perfectly: if there is a less apologetic and more thorough dismantling of the basic precepts of American capitalism - work hard and you'll be rewarded, making the most money makes you the best person, success is manly and admirable - to have been filmed in the last 25 years, I cannot name it. And it's all enacted by the best cast you could imagine. As the most dynamic character and the one who most fully lives out the whole range of themes explored in the writing, Lemmon gave his best performance in the 32 years since The Apartment, which inevitably echoes here: one generation of the American Dream gone sour informing another in the body of a pleasant-looking old man with an ingratiating voice who lashes out like a wounded animal in humiliated anger that's visceral and unpleasant to watch. And even with all that, he's not clearly "better" than anybody else: the clenched guts and bitter line deliveries and sweaty tension delivered by Harris and Arkin, the calm masking a deep well of rage that marks one of Pacino's last great performances, and the clammy, unimpressed, small meanness of a pre-fame Spacey are all absolutely terrific, breathing life into Mamet's blackhearted fable and flawlessly dancing with his words.

And for enabling all of this, it's absolutely impossible to find fault with this Glengarry, which above all else does nothing wrong. In the first hour, in particular, it even does a lot right, in capturing the bright, gaudy lighting of the Chinese restaurant where the men do most of their hustling - a neon symbol of excessive, kitschy Americana that's omnipresent without being labored - and the claustrophobia of a horrid, wet night, the kind that's chilly outside and humid inside. But the film's sense of place is undone by Foley's highly segmented way of assembling it; this is a film that favors the individual line and close-up shot at the expense of the flow of the whole. It doesn't feel conventionally stagebound in the least: it's almost not stagebound enough, in fact, since the biggest liaibility the film has is failing to include multiple characters in the same frame at the same time. None of this comes even close to making Glengarry Glen Ross a poor experience: the material is brilliant and the actors will never be bettered. And it even passes my private "would this be every bit as good as a radio play?" test - the use of color and lighting are generally strong, and the sense of damp in the first half pervasive. It's not a masterpiece of cinema, though - a masterpiece of drama presented in a cinematic matrix, but not a masterpiece of cinema. And that is, however slightly, a disappointment.

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THE DEVIL'S MUSIC

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

By 1974, Brian De Palma had seven features under his belt, with the seventh, 1973's Sisters, having kicked off his legendary run of Hitchcock riffs. So we cannot possibly call Phantom of the Paradise, the director's eighth feature, made when he was 33, the work of a fresh and untried voice. But that's kind of exactly the way it feels: like an explosive volley from the id of some mad, unfocused genius who wanted to puke up some kind of incredibly personal and idiosyncratic new cinema onto the screen without formal training or any sense what he could and couldn't get away with. When that kind of untrammeled creativity meets with the relative classicism and polish of someone with De Palma's professional background, the results are formidable indeed: it's one of those miraculous "only in the '70s" movies that required the full faith and backing of a major studio despite how transparently the massively strange product was going to be a flop. Which it was, everywhere, except for the city of Winnipeg.

The title clues us in that this is to be, at some level, a dressed-up adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera; it's also clear within minutes of the film's start that it's going to combine that story with the evergreen Faust legend (and this is does fairly well, though there's a stretch in the second act where the Phantom elements feel rather indifferently tacked-on). We are told in an opening narration by none other than Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone fame that the music world, circa 1974, is totally dominated by the machinations of Swan (Paul Williams), a genius label owner and manager with the power to create or destroy any music artist he wants. His current favorites are the immensely popular '50s throwback boy band the Juicy Fruits, whom he plans to use as the main act at the opening of his extraordinary new club, the Paradise. And one day after a Juicy Fruits rehearsal, he hears exactly the piece of music he wants them to play at that most august event: an ambitious cantata adapting the Faust legend into the modern day, written by earnest nerd Winslow Leach (William Finley). Swan has his hatchet man, Philbin (George Memmoli) promise a recording contract to Winslow, in order to acquire the music, but this is a fake-out; when Winslow shows up demanding an audience with Swan, he's framed as a drug dealer and sent to Sing Sing.

Eventually he escapes, and in an attempt to disrupt Swan's plans, he falls afoul of a record press, mangling his face and vocal cords. This doesn't slow down his attempts to stop the Paradise from opening; he steals a costume and skulks around, sabotaging whatever he can from the shadows. Swan quickly assumes it's easier to join forces than fight this phantom, and offers Winslow a contract, larded up with curiously Satanic passages about the ownership of souls. Given the chance to regain control of his Faust, Winslow leaps for it, and also uses it as an opportunity to give the pretty back-up singer Phoenix (Jessica Harper) a chance to have her wonderful voice give life to his music. But Swan, being the Devil, has plenty of double-crosses left to play, and the opening of the Paradise will still be on his terms, no matter what control Winslow thinks he has.

Recasting Phantom - or at least the 1943 Universal pictures adaptation of the book - as a satire of the 1970s music industry is already a bit batty, and it's the most levelheaded thing that De Palma's film ever does. Phantom of the Paradise is equal parts compendium of the director's interests as a cinephile - Touch of Evil and (naturally) Psycho are among the classics to be explicitly referenced - and showcase for the young Turk's visual flair. That same Touch of Evil homage doubles-down on Orson Welles by including two long tracking shots, presented side-by-side in split-screen, and occasionally showing the same action from different angles; it's the moment that most expressly looks forward to the De Palma of the future in a film that otherwise feels more like some unimaginable combination of Ken Russell and Peter Bogdanovich. Throughout, the director and cinematographer Larry Pizer favor extravagantly wide lenses, giving even the most innocuous moments a bulbous exaggeration that leaves the whole thing feeling utterly demented.

It doesn't take camera trickery to make Phantom of the Paradise look demented, though; the film's design is, as a whole, thoroughly crazed, creating a world of weird interior spaces that have one foot in reality and one foot in an acid trip, populated by some dazzlingly colorful make-up and costume designs slapped onto the game actors. And some of the actors don't even need that: in the central roles, Finley and Williams look like caricatures come to life, with the former's wild-eyed expressions and the latter's compact build and scrunched-up facial features (not to mention his snake-baby voice) making instant, profound impressions even before the plot kicks in.

The oddball imagery fits perfectly with the loopy sense of humor that De Palma uses to bring his unclassifiable hybrid of horror, parody, satire, and head comedy to life. It's probably not fair to say that Phantom of the Paradise is as-such funny; the closest it comes to outright jokes are the songs generously scattered throughout it, all of them written by Williams in a series of pastiches on '50s dead boyfriend anthems, surf rock tributes to cars, theatrical glam rock, and moony singer-songwriter ballads (and then there's the matter of the end-credits tune, "The Hell of It", a menacing combination of acerbic character assassination and jaunty piano riffs from out of the Old West) - a delightful soundtrack all told, one that's proudly campy and sly.

But I was about to talk about the comedy in the film, or anyway the lack of it. Phantom of the Paradise isn't really comic; but it's unstintingly absurd, far too random and lighthearted to function as any sort of horror, no matter how hard the images and plot nudge us in that direction. It's impossible to pin it down to genre, so even as the plot clicks out in exactly the way you assume it will (until it goes Surrealist in the last third), there's never a chance to get out ahead of the film. It always darts in its own direction, and watching it is a constant effort to keep up with its inventive insanity.

It's bravura cinematic spectacle with just enough literary antecedent and social commentary that it doesn't come across as shallow as the word "spectacle" implies. But the spectacle is still pretty wonderful: it's as wild and yet consistent in its aesthetics as anything I've seen of De Palma's (which is, to be fair, not very much), and certainly more exhilarating than some of his more iconic but also more containable efforts. It is silly and stylish in exactly the right measures, a hugely fun exercise in demented excess that launches acidic critiques at everything it can, without ever feeling the slightest bit sour. If it sometimes allows its twitchy weirdness to serve as its own justification, well, it works hard to earn that weirdness, and it's enormously satisfying to watch it sprawl out over the film's unrelenting 92 minutes.

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THE LOVE OF GOD

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

To begin with, it's a biopic - and does any genre so reliably connote "this is a well-polished and achingly handsome lump of Serious Art that's not terribly artistic and even less entertaining" than the biopic? And not just any biopic - it's part of maybe the most diabolically prestigious and inert subgenre, the biopic of an important classical musician, which has produced such ever-forgettable lead weights as The Great Waltz (Johann Strauss) and A Song to Remember (Frédéric Chopin), and has stretched all the way into the 21st Century with the likes of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. Besides, it's a powerfully murky biopic: the incredibly famous title character isn't actually the subject or the protagonist, but in deference to his fame, the movie keeps ceding huge chunks of attention to him that leave it damned confusing what the actual story is that the filmmakers aimed to tell.

And yet, Amadeus is one of the best American films of the 1980s. So it just goes to show, never prejudge.

The 1984 film is based on the 1979 play by Peter Shaffer, who did a rather thorough job of re-imagining the material for its journey into cinemas, but either way, the core is the same: the relationship of composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) and Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), between Mozart's 1781 arrival in Vienna, where Salieri served as artistic director for the Italian operas of the Hapsburg court, and the former's death in that city in 1791, at the age of 35. It is an enormously fictionalised version of that story, though it should be pointed out that the single biggest lie that Amadeus has popularised - that a jealous Salieri murdered Mozart with poison - is one that the film very specifically and as a key element of its plot doesn't depict (it also doesn't, technically, indicate that Salieri was a mediocre hack, only that he perceived himself as such relative to Mozart. And so these two unfair characterisations of Salieri - the talentless murderer - are the film's great popular legacies through no fault of its own).

So disinterested is Shaffer in actual sober history, in fact, that to call Amadeus a biography, in either medium, is something of an inaccuracy. It's more of a psychological fable told using real historical figures to give it an imposing weight; that, and to celebrate in front of the widest available audience the peerless sophistication and beauty of Mozart's music, lengthy passages of which are played all throughout the rather long movie as Shaffer hands enormous blocks of dialogue to Abraham to elucidate using only somewhat dumbed-down musicology exactly what it is about Mozart that should cause all of us to regard him as one of the half-dozen greatest composers of music in the history of European culture.

And that's a great and worthy goal, one that Amadeus only slightly muffs by handing off all of its music cues to the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, as conducted by Sir Neville Marriner, who generally leans on an annoying tendency to rush through the music like he's terrified of losing his dinner reservation. But ultimately, "provide a showcase for Mozart's Greatest Hits" isn't remotely the reason that Amadeus is great drama and great cinema (many a tepid workaday biopic has also been a splendid Greatest Hits showcase).

For that, we turn instead to the excellent performances and cutting characterisations in the script, as well as the vivid and fleshy production overseen by director Miloš Forman, in what I will happily identify as his best work in English. The film is not the first nor the last, but among the most successful of all attempts to revivify a culture dead for 200 years using sharp contemporary style; the vast majority of costume dramas have a marked tendency to look poised, stuffed, and mounted, but in the hands of Forman, who came of age in the raw, direct naturalism of the Czech New Wave, 18th Century Vienna is full of sarcasm and ass-kissing and bitterness and flustered movement just like the contemporary world. It's a period film that was shot as though it took place in modern-day Los Angeles; Forman and cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček (who'd worked with the director, on and off, from the beginning of both their careers) don't both with painterly lighting or compositions, in some desperate attempt to ape Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (which perfected that style and has never been remotely equaled); they dive right in and capture the color, line, and texture of the dressed-up Prague locations, and of Theodor Pištěk's costumes (rather more fanciful than accurate) with the same intention to find the blunt reality of things that served them as young Czechs attempting to tear holes in the fabric of Communism.

This unsentimental way of film interiors and exteriors alike with a kind of blank-faced present-ness is perfectly matched by the two most important performances, Abraham's and Hulce's - the cast as a whole is wildly inconsistent, ranging from Jeffrey Jones's marvelously and perfectly unfocused Emperor Joseph II, to Elizabeth Berridge's whingey, breathy take on Mozart's wife, but it's essentially a two-hander with a lot of people standing on the sidelines cheering. It's not always subtle acting that's going on: theater actor Hulce's only meaningfully visible film role to that point was in the low-brow comedy Animal House, and he brings a lot of that exact energy to his manic, filthy Mozart, with an unavoidably irritating laugh. Abraham is a bit more nuanced, mostly because the character he's playing is a facile liar, who does his level best to seem pleasant when he is scheming and wrathful. What matters about both of them, mostly, is their resolute modernism: the very conscious layering of psychology and the small physical gestures (Abraham's performance as an old man recounting the story to an increasingly horrified priest is full of some absurdly wonderful facial expressions and gestures - his inward-looking smugness on "Everybody liked me. I liked myself" is my favorite beat in the entire film) that speak to fussy stage-trained acting, and that fills this very old-fashioned mise en scène with very hard contemporary attitude that goes beyond such things as the evocation of punk rockers in Hulce's wigs. It is a study of 20th Century attitudes towards jealousy and faith that places 20th Century men, incongruously but effectively, into 1780s Vienna and does not comment on it.

But in that very lack of commentary, Amadeus comes alive. It's not the kind costume drama that brings a long-dead place back to life; while the film's Vienna is persuasive, and Twyla Tharp's staging of several Mozart operas winningly looks back the poshest stagecraft of a long-dead era, and the film-long obsession with food of the Viennese upper classes (which serves more as a character detail for Salieri than a piece of world-building) is lavish, if not always totally appetizing, it would be difficult to argue for Amadeus the merit of scrupulous historical accuracy. The dialogue doesn't support that; the general indifference to verifiable facts in the matter of its subjects' lives certainly doesn't support that. The film triumphs above all things as a character study, played by two remarkably fine actors in peak form, providing a chance for its very modern audience to reflect on very recognisable feelings of envy towards people we know damn good and well to be more capable than ourselves, "fairness" be damned; the period trappings are, as much as they are anything, a way of heightening those feelings by making them seem weird and fresh.

Or even more simply: the thing Amadeus primarily depicts, biopically-speaking, is the writing of operas - a dramatic form in which strong emotions are presented in a heavily artificial matrix of absurd plot and florid singing. And because of that artifice, the emotions are more immediately accessible. And that's basically the exact same thing Amadeus is doing: the mechanism of the artifice is different, but the intensity, lack of subtlety, and thus the accessibility, they're all the same. It's a prose opera. Form and content meet and seamlessly blend. Terrific stuff.

N.B. I: To prove that I can be at least a little bit critical, take a gander at that tagline. "The man... The music... The madness... The murder... The motion picture". Is that not literally the worst copy in the history of film advertising?

N.B. II: There exists a director's cut; it is far easier to see the film in that format now than its original theatrical version. I prefer the older, shorter cut; the extended version overexplains things that were perfectly clear without being laboriously spelled out, and it badly affects the flow of a 160-minute film that starts to feel puffy at three hours. One might say, of the theatrical cut, "Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall".

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IF YOU ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU'VE ALWAYS DONE

Talking about Predestination without confidently, fearlessly giving away plot points that shouldn't be given away is enormously hard. The best thing would be to go in totally cold, not even knowing what short story it's based on (having read the story - it is not at all obscure, though calling it "well-known" might be a stretch - I was unfortunately able to get ahead of the movie pretty early on when I recognised it, which was kind of disappointing), so if you trust me, please go find it; it's crawling across the U.S. right now, and also can be found VOD. If you only trust me a little, how about this to sweeten the pot: no matter what you end up thinking about it, it's worth seeing because in it, you will find Sarah Snook giving an immaculate, wholly-formed Star Is Born performance of the first order. Gimmickry, raging sentiment, immensely subtleties of facial expression and gesture, showy vocal work; whatever you thinking Great Acting is, she's got some of it for you. The role won the Australian Academy Award for Best Actress against some weighty contenders, and boy, it's not the half of what she deserved.

So I'll assume you either have seen the movie, or don't care (but no worries, I'll keep spoilers firmly limited to the first third). Predestination is, to begin with, a film by Australian filmmaking brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, whose last film, 2009's "what if?" vampire story Daybreakers, felt like a peerless example of a once-in-a-lifetime concept that simply didn't have enough done with it in the execution. No such hedging applies to Predestination, which has an equally hearty concept, but sees it through to its conclusion in a way the previous film didn't. That's partially because it's an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies-", one of those mid-century science fiction short stories that seems to exist primarily so that the author could show all his steps in solving a problem and disingenuously calling it a narrative; all the Spierigs had to do was minutely copy the story and just like that, full-realised narrative. And that is, in fact, mostly what they've done, even when it leaves their movie snagged on ideas that work as asides in a short story and feel like conspicuous dropped threads in a movie. The biggest change is to add a bit of a "stop the terrorist" thriller spine that extends the plot far enough beyond the "taa-daa, I've revealed everything" gesture that it feels like an actual story with actual stakes and themes. Which makes it, whatever else it is, one of the too-rare movies to have thoroughly improved upon its source material in the act of adaptation.

The plot, meanwhile, is designed with a few confusing fake-outs along the way (it opens with the kind of in medias res scenes that annoyingly telegraphs that we'll see bits of it again later, and then it will make sense; a gimmick that I have long grown tired of), but in its basic for, it goes like this: a man (Ethan Hawke, the lead in Daybreakers), who has just received a new face after being badly burned, has for uncertain reasons set himself up as a bartender in New York in the early 1970s. One night, another man comes in, and after some fencing that could be seen as basic bartender chitchat but feels like goading, this second man offers to tell the most amazing story that the bartender has ever heard, betting a fresh bottle of booze that it will knock his ass off. And then begins his story, of the time when he was a young woman named Jane (Snook), who grew up an orphan with a distinct sense of being Not Like Other Girls; at a certain point, to make ends meet while traveling into space, she attempts to get a job as one of the space-courtesans serving the astronauts growing lonely and horny on year-long missions (it's details like these where scrupulous fidelity trips up the movie a bit). This doesn't pan out, she gets involved with a man who leaves her pregnant, and the birth results in a shocking discovery: Jane is of biologically indeterminate gender, and to save her life after this turns out to have made giving birth a near-fatal ordeal, the doctors have elected to turn her into a man.

It's right about then that it all clicked for me: not that Jane was the man in the bar (that's made clear so early that it's unfair to call it a twist), but that Snook had been playing him all along. Prior to that, the odd vocal cadences and carriage that went into the performance seemed just like part of the pile-up of mysteries that Predestination was indulging in during its opening act; it literally didn't occur to me that it was a woman playing a man until the slow progression of make-up joining the two end points (the film boasts some stellare make-up effects) made it impossible to miss. Snook is that good at playing the chameleon, figuring how the personality of a depressed man in 1970 is different from a brittle, whip-smart woman in the early 1960s, and exploring those registers so fully that it seems like she's playing two entirely different characters; and yet, the evolution between the two of them feels totally natural and correct.

And that's just at the level of the central gimmick: at all points in her performance of both iterations of Jane/John, Snook's carefulness in letting the right emotions slip out at the right time is so flawless in such a sustained way that even if this was the most sedate, genre-free kind of story, her performance would be hardly any less exemplary. There's nothing about any moment she's onscreen that isn't mesmerising; even Hawke seems dumbfounded, happily handing her each and every scene they share together - and it goes into some place where they share some really weird scenes together - without compromising his own rather nuanced and tricky performance, but also without showboating.

The two leads are so faultless in their performances, and Snook is so commanding in every scene, whether as a worn-out man or a fierce woman, that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Predestination isn't actually a character study at heart; it's a carefully laid-out exercise in narrative mechanics, which asks multiple times, to varying degrees of explicitness, "are our actions the result of choice, or are they (wait for it) predestined? And if a certain choice is immoral, does the fact that it is predestined obviate our need to resist making it?" A bit dry and theoretical, sure; this does have its roots in '50s literary sci-fi, and dry theory never found a genre and a period that suited it better.

And, indeed, the dryness of it does tend to diminish the film's impact as more than a precisely-described puzzle with really urgent thematic questions that are more fun to think about then they are to apply to one's own life. The Spierigs do yeoman's work keeping the film's narrative clear and visually connected to itself, and the confidence of the filmmaking helps to keep things purring along any time the more logically-inclined viewers might start to feel the need to tug at the film's central impossibility. But it's very arid, in a lot of ways: impeccable but sterile, and only the fact that Snook and Hawke are in there, insisting on the warm, sloppy humanity of their characters allows Predestination to feel like a relatable story and not just an extraordinarily well-framed exercise.

But then, this is a movie, and movies do have actors, and maybe that was the point all along: take Heinlein's clinical chilliness, and make it into a rich human story by throwing some rich humans at it. I'm not sure it's quite enough to make Predestination an actual great piece of cinema, but it's absolutely enough to make it terrifically compelling viewing: a film with ideas and feelings that are inseparable from each other is nothing to discard lightly, even when it feels like it might be, at some level, a giant put-on.

8/10

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GRIN AND BEAR IT

The word that primarily suggests itself in respect to Paddington, roughly muscling out all other possibilities, is "charming". A word which could certainly be employed with a certain level of condescension, sure, but not really in this case. For it is an earned charm, in Paddington; the screenplay by director Paul King, from a story he and Hamish McColl adapted from Michael Bond's series of children's books, reeks with lighthearted affection for its characters, its settings, and its gentle depiction of a colorful, warmhearted England that never was. Even in it hardest-edged details - a crisply sardonic sense of humor with a healthy level of family-friendly misery, and an unremittingly cruel villain - the film never moves very far into darkness. Unpleasant things happen, yes, and they are played for laughs; but the only reason those laughs work, in this form, is because we're never persuaded that the unpleasantness is actually going to stick, or that anything genuinely bad might ever really happen to the characters.

The film takes its first cues from Pixar's Up, setting its stage with an old newsreel of a British explorer, Montgomery Clyde (Tim Downie), leading the first-ever expedition to Darkest Peru (the best example I can give of where the film's sense of humor lies is to point out the unblinking way that no character ever, ever refers to the country as just "Peru", anywhere in the film). Here he finds an unknown species of hyper-intelligent bear, able to form human speech and use tools, and he's so impressed that he leaves them totally unmolested, along with an invitation to find him in London if they ever wish to cross the Atlantic. Many years later, those same bears, Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton) and Pastuzo (Michael Gambon) are raising their orphaned nephew (Ben Whishaw), enjoying peace, tranquility, and an endless supply of homemade marmalade. After a terrible storm destroys their home, the young bear finds it necessary to make his way in the world, hopping a boat to England, where he encounter the Brown family, who name him "Paddington" after the station where he's found. Two very basic plots play out after this: Mr. Brown (Hugh Bonneville), a risk analyst, is horrified at the thought of having a bear in the house, but Mrs. Brown (Sally Hawkins) is too kind and caring to throw Paddington out, and the bear's gentle, bumbling ways eventually bring a new kind of life to the stilted Brown household, with children Judy (Madeleine Harris) and Jonathan (Samuel Joslin), and housekeeper Mrs. Bird (Julie Walters), quickly coming over to Mrs. Brown's side, while her husband behaves obstinately British. That whole thing, the one that's been done several dozen times.

The other plot centers on deranged museum taxidermist Millicent (Nicole Kidman) learning of Paddington and setting her sights on taking the bear down to be the prize of her career, with the help of the crusty, unpleasant Mr. Curry (Peter Capaldi), the Browns' neighbor. Which in the abstract isn't terribly fresh either, though the taxidermy angle is appealingly morbid.

What makes Paddington lovely, then, surely isn't its creativity, unpredictability, or its insight into human behavior. It's simply that this ancient, well-worn form is done with such a light touch, enlivened by the absolutely terrific cast - Jim Broadbent is somewhere in there, too - assembled by producer David Heyman in a fine impression of his decade-long work making sure that every actor born in the British Isles found work somewhere in the Harry Potter octology. The role of a stuffy, overly-protective dad doesn't strain Bonneville any more than playing a warm-hearted soul with a steel spine exerts Hawkins, or the wise, tart-tongued housekeeper finds Walters rummaging around in the deepest recesses of her bag of acting tricks. But then, Paddington isn't an acting showcase: it's a sweet, low-impact script that needs a lot of rich but non-fussy performances to keep things steady and free from too much syrup on the one side, or insincerity on the other. And that's exactly what everybody provides, from the enthusiastically amazed Whishaw on down (all apologies to Colin Firth, but it's an obvious good that he ended up dropping out of the role).

The only exception is Kidman, whose performance actually does stand out as a bit of a virtuoso turn; it's a basic hammy bad guy performance, but it offers one of the rare chances for that actor to have any real apparent fun, biting into her part and gnawing on it, while the cinematography and costumes and hairstyling all pitch in to make her look as porcelain an bleached-out and harsh as possible. It's especially gratifying to see Kidman well-used as the merciless villain in a literary adaptation for children, seven years after The Golden Compass so frustratingly refused to capitalise on her visual presence, and what she's up to here makes her one of the finest kids' movie villains of recent years.

That's one of the obvious hooks the film has for an adult viewer (assuming that "it has a gentle, forgiving, and amiable soul" isn't a hook, which sadly, I imagine to be the case); another is that the film is rather snugly made and handsome to look at. Particularly the production design by Gary Williamson, which has the richly stuffed texture of a Wes Anderson film, only scaled back to a more cozily domestic sphere (the Brown house is imagined as a literal doll house at times, and the intricate detailing of every room plays that up well). One location calls to mind the elaborate, dazzling interiors of the Harry Potter films without feeling out of place or breaking things; the rest of the movie presents a comfortable and clean London, recalling the obviously set-bound Mary Poppins both in its stagey artifice and its appropriate softness.

Paddington's unending niceness is its best and defining characteristic, though it's not without some meat on its bones: without arguing so hard that it knocks things out of balance, it serves as a durable parable about how England is strengthened by diversity and immigration (which doesn't quite extend to offering nonwhite faces actual parts to play, but it's hard to imagine which role would specifically benefit from such a choice). And there's also that wry, snappish sense of humor to pull things back from being so soft and cushy that the whole thing is insubstantial. The whole package is simple and not very showy (the CGI Paddington is hardly a cutting-edge piece of effects work and animation, though it gets the job done), but the whole thing is satisfying enough that if it turned out to hang around as a minor classic of contemporary children's filmmaking, I'd not be bothered by that in the slightest.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2007: In which cinema rejuvenates a long-exhausted television staple

Conventional wisdom holds that the eighth season of the undying television juggernaut The Simpsons was the last that regularly hit the highest peaks that the series was capable of summiting. And while I don't know that conventional wisdom has necessarily decided which season exactly was the last one where the show was still predominately good, the eleventh seems to be a widely agreed-upon cut-off point. The eight season ended in 1997, the eleventh in 2000, and it wasn't until the summer of 2007 that The Simpsons Movie finally sashayed its way into theaters, by which point the 18-season-old show had fallen into the status of that thing fans watched out of habit and momentum rather than any sort of pleasure. The promise of a feature-length theatrical release based on the series had gone from being generally thought of with enthusiasm, to generally dreaded, to generally looked on with yawning disinterest. And then along came 20th Century Fox's crackerjack marketing team to blast away with nostalgic appeals and The Event You've Been Waiting for trumpets, and sure enough, almost a decade after its sell-by date, The Simpsons Movie turned into a for-real cultural event.

It helped that the feature was at a generally higher level of quality than the bulk of the episodes in the seasons immediately preceding it. There are, sure, the expected stretch marks and wobbly decisions that proudly declare the writers - all eleven of them! - veterans of 22-minute stories rather than even such a brief feature as the 87 minutes of The Simpsons Movie. Like most great television comedy, one of the strengths of the show is a fleet pace, pushing everything through quickly enough that its surrealist excesses can fly by without being distractions, and so that the rhythm of gags never lets up. The Simpsons Movie cannot claim that as a gag: its plot is not meaningfully more complicated or bigger in scale than a TV show could handle in a single bite, and the two main threads of the story basically repeat plots that had been featured on the parent series, many times already.

Still, the relatively leisurely pace that the narrative operates under in its stretched-out form has its own compensations. The whole thing feels a bit more lived-in and comfortable, to begin with; and while I have no idea what sort of reception the film has had among fans vs. non-fans of the show (or even if, throughout its life, it has been seen by enough non-fans for that to represent a meaningful audience segment - for the record, I consider myself someone who enjoys golden age Simpsons just fine when it's playing in front of me, and who has seen an enormous number of episodes from the first 14 seasons, but doesn't meet the definition of a "fan"), but it strikes me that this probably makes The Simpsons Movie a bit friendlier to a newbie than any random episode from that era might: it slows down to study the character relationships more and is more fully "about" its domestic drama than a single episode of television gets to be on its own. Moreover, having a slacker pace is at least partially to credit for the obvious superiority of the movie to the television episodes produced around the same time: it gets to stretch and relax a bit more, and not have to be so manic and unflagging, and that leaves to a great deal less forced zaniness. If that cuts back on the comic inventiveness, or sense of fearlessness... well, it does cut back on those things. But the film is still funny, if slightly too gentle (the attempts at political satire, for one, fall completely flat). And while the jokes are, for the most part, akin to the kind that show up on the TV series (absurdist one-offs, or examples of the characters being themselves), the enlarged palette allows room for a bit more interleaving and call-backs than the series ever tended to rely on in quite the same way. And there's a bit more crudeness: an inspired nudity gag in the early going that plays with and then against expectations with beautiful timing, a wee bit harder language than family-hour television gets to exploit, but nothing that seriously stretches the boundaries of PG-13.

Mostly, though, the extended running time doesn't show up in any kind of expanded ambition. This is still animated sitcom humor based around the well-established natures of characters that the terrific voice cast (Matt Groenig's shows have always been kind to traditional voice actors) is as comfortable with as a second skin, and the happenings are pitched at the level they had been pitched at for eighteen years. Fat incompetent Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) still manages to do tremendously stupid things that earns him the enmity of the whole town of Springfield and threatens his marriage to Marge (Julie Kavner); their son Bart (Nancy Cartwright) still has unexpressed pain that flashes out as antisocial JD behavior. Daughter Lisa (Yeardley Smith), easily the most ill-served of the Simpson family in the film, still passionately chases down progressive causes that nobody around her gives a shit about. The specifics hardly matter; it's not the first "the town is almost destroyed" plot in the franchise canon, nor the last, and not even the first time that Albert Brooks played a smooth-talking villain. It's just that it all takes a little bit longer to play out.

With the jokes mostly purring around smoothly, and the cast taking care of itself - though it's a bit surprising that the well-stocked universe of Simpsons side characters aren't more present - the only thing that really overtly sets The Simpsons Movie apartment from its parent is the greater scope and ambition of its visuals. Oh, how much the animators, both in the United States and South Korea, thrive on the expanded budget and screen! It's not a particularly great work of animation - especially with Pixar's exquisite Ratatouille having opened less than one month earlier - but in the innumerable computer-aided pans and tilts and craning shots through busy crowd scenes, the whole film buzzes with an obvious sense of freedom to do bigger and more sprawling things than a TV show, with a TV budget and a TV production schedule, could daydream about. The colors and shading are richer, the effects are more detailed. It is certainly the most beautiful-looking piece of work in Simpsons history, though not also the most eager to explore the extreme possibilities of animation.

At any rate, it works as a solid comedy and an effective piece of fanservice that doesn't bog itself down too much to alienate a more general audience. One would hope, perhaps, that the filmmaking team would have a bigger idea for making the jump from television to the enlarged palette of cinema than "why not?", and even at its best, The Simpsons Movie never quite manages to argue that it has grander concerns than making some money off its brand name (it even guiltily admits something like this in an opening meta-joke about paying for something you can see at home for free), though even just seven years ago, the American film industry wasn't as suffocatingly besotted with brand recognition as it is now. Anyway, even if the film hardly exploits its new medium, working without commercial breaks and time limits freed up the creative team to make something lighter, fresher, and more affectionate towards the characters than they'd been for a long time. Given how obviously financial concerns weighed in the film's instigation and production, the fact that you can feel some kind of inspiration wafting of the screen is a legitimate, even unexpected triumph.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2007
-The jagged editing and frenzied camerawork in The Bourne Ultimatum uncontroversially delights everyone, leading to a new action movie aesthetic that remains fresh and appealing years later
-Diablo Cody invents a new English-adjacent language for the snappy teen comedy Juno
-In There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis drinks Paul Dano's milkshake

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2007
-Roy Andersson's You, the Living reaches new heights of deadpan Scandinavian black comedy
-Hou Hsiao-Hsien travels to France and gives Juliette Binoche one of her best roles ever in Flight of the Red Balloon
-Guy Maddin turns his hometown into a blur of frozen horses and surreal soap operas with My Winnipeg

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