THAT DIZZY FEELING

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

One doesn't get too many chances to write about the reigning Best Movie Ever Made, as 1958's Vertigo was anointed by the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, the closest thing we have to the official definition of that title. And it's all the more daunting when one comes within a few notches of agreeing with that assessment. But we're all here now, so let's just dive right into the most complex film made by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most terrifyingly gifted men to ever direct a movie.

Vertigo being the kind of film that plainly invites superlatives and hyperbole, let me give you some more of it: it is perhaps the single film in existence that most interestingly uses subjectivity. For it is a profoundly subjective movie, as it should be given its role in the auteur's career: this is closest that Hitchcock ever came to a personal confession of his sins on celluloid. Those sins being an obsession with blondes and a tyrannical disposition towards abusing them emotionally and, every so often, physically, in order to get them to be exactly what he demanded to make his movies as perfectly as possible (one of the cruelest of those abuses took place in the filming of this very movie: he forced lead actress Kim Novak to jump into the freezing San Francisco Bay for take after take, to no genuine purpose).

And it's not just that Vertigo is subjective; it uses that subjectivity to fuck with us. Which of course it would, being a Hitchcock picture - eight years earlier, he'd directed Stage Fright, a movie whose entire purpose in life was to smack the viewer around a little bit for daring to assume that movies always take place in the third person, and for much of the following decade, his films were all about finding ways to use the audience's expectations about how movies worked against us, causing us untold torments (this would, of course, culminate in his dauntingly modernist Psycho two years after Vertigo). Like a great many people, the first time I saw Vertigo, I was baffled by its odd decision to reveal its twist ending at the three-quarter mark, apparently robbing it of an entire act's worth of tricks and surprises (there are indications that Hitchcock himself had misgivings about including the reveal, and was overruled by producers). The director's famous image of a bomb exploding under a table in his interview with François Truffaut - shock is blowing up the bomb, suspense is showing the audience the bomb and then having people converse for ten minutes while they sit at the table - explains one reason for placing the reveal where it is, but it only leads to a deeper wrinkle. For the suspense we feel isn't on behalf of the protagonist we've been following for an hour and a half, but on the character hiding a secret from him, who has been totally deprived of any interiority for that same hour and a half. What's really unsettling about the Vertigo plot reveal isn't simply that it confounds our expectations for how thrillers should be structured, but that it spontaneously breaks the thread of absolute subjectivity that the film has, till that point, thrived on. From that point onward, in fact, Vertigo becomes a tug-of-war between two POVs, putting us inside the mind of the controlling erotically obsessed antihero while also letting us look at the dreadful impact of his obsession on the object of his desire. It's some of the most psychologically acute cinema I am aware of, and it's entirely situated within the realm of polished Hollywood genre fare. Not a bad trick.

But since there is a full three-quarters of a movie leading to that point, and not everybody has seen Vertigo, let me back up. The situation: Det. John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) has retired from the San Francisco police department following an unfortunate incident where a sudden flare-up of his previously unsuspected acrophobia leaves him incapacitated while another cop falls off a roof to his death. Looking to toss him some work, an old college friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) offers him a curious job: Gavin's wife Madeleine (Novak) has been wandering around town every day in an apparent trance, and Gavin is convinced that she's being possessed by a ghost. But he needs someone to track her movements before he can do anything to help her, either through parapsychological or psychiatric means. And so Scottie follows Madeleine, eventually discovering that she's grown obsessed with the portrait and legend of Carlotta Valdes, a woman who killed herself after her child was stolen away from her about a century prior. Scottie's urge to save Madeleine from the influence of the past quickly goes beyond professional courtesy; he's falling desperately in love with her, in fact, and it's doing a real number on his ability to do his job objectively.

It's a fine story - novelists Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac wrote their D'entre les morts primarily so that Hitchcock would be able to adapt it into a movie, after he lost the chance to make Les diaboliques to Henri-Georges Clouzot - but not in and of itself the stuff of Best Movie Ever Made territory. Really, what it is it but a paranormal riff on the film noir classic Laura? But on this fine, not tremendously unique story, Hitchcock and his immensely gifted crew hang some of the most portent visuals ever committed. Vertigo is, among other things, one of the cleverest color films ever made: the director, costume designer Edith Head, and art directors Henry Bumstead and Hal Pereira (with an enormous assist from cinematographer Robert Burks) rely on a controlled color palette to do a stunning amount of work for them. It's not as simple as color-coding the film, as Hitchcock would do six years later in Marnie (where, by all means, it works wonderfully). It's a much subtler way of using color in a relative way: what matters is not, inherently, that this scene is red and that scene is green, but that this scene is redder than the scene preceding it, that scene is greener. The film idles in a very plain, moderately saturated mode, with Scottie's world - especially the apartment of his best friend and solitary anchor, Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes) - decked out in calm browns and greys, with the colors that show up having that soft, pastel look of '50s color film stock. But when he first encounters Madeleine, she drags in a whole range of aggressive colors: lush red walls bright blue sky, harsh pink flowers, vibrant blonde hair, shiny green cars, and the orange grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Color, in Vertigo is clearly linked to dream states, whether they're actual, literal dreams (Scottie's nightmare at the three-quarter mark is triggered by garish filters bathing the whole image in solid sheets of color), or simply the dazed state that following Madeleine for the first time puts him in. Their first encounter is one of Vertigo's signature gestures for a lot of reasons, in fact: besides representing only the second time (following the blue-soaked opening scene) that the film has boasted rich, vividly saturated colors, it also does away with dialogue for almost ten straight minutes, in favor of Bernard Herrmann's gorgeous score, circle round and round on the soundtrack. It's mesmerising and dreamy itself, the most subjective sequence in the whole enormously subjective feature, keying us in to Scottie's dazzled mind by means of deliberately leeching all the realism from the filmmaking and replacing it with intense, heightened style.

And yet, through all of this, Madeleine herself is the most emphatically grey thing in the movie, thanks to the suit that Head provided for her, on the logic that it boasted a particular shade of grey that no blonde woman would ever wear. I can't speak to that, but there's no denying that centering all of the lavish, luscious color around a woman in grey feels distinctly "off", and the way Novak wears the uniform stiffly, moving in studied, inorganic lines ends up serving as the best kind of foreshadowing, since it doesn't feel like foreshadowing - it's easy to read the color and movement as signs of Madeleine's mental detachment, since our understanding is connected to Scottie's limited, obsessed appreciation of her.

The first three-quarters of Vertigo do an extraordinary job of portraying that obsessive state through everything from Stewart's fearless performance - the most uncharacteristic of his career, full of sweat and dagger-like stares and feverish line deliveries - to its constantly limited camera angles to its unspoken emphasis on the titular state. The word "vertigo" is stated only once - acrophobia gives Scottie vertigo, and the vertigo is what makes hims cease to function, as he explains to Midge in the film's second scene - but a vertiginous state saturates the movie, right from its opening credits, with their iconic spiral shapes devised by John Whitney, Sr. Much of the aesthetic of Vertigo is centered on spirals, on going round and round in circles: Madeleine's characteristic whorl of hair, spiral staircases, the twists and turns and ups and downs of San Francisco itself. Herrmann's score keeps looping around into itself, presenting a swoony state that could be read as Romanticism - his music owes a clear debt to the "love and death" themes in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which the score openly quotes at points - but could just as easily identify the increasingly insular, mad mental state of the main character.

Everything that goes into making the first three-quarters of Vertigo such an excellent marriage of our perspective to that of the increasingly frazzled lead makes it that much more startling when it breaks from it: every time that Midge asserts herself and lets us see the inner life of the woman who could be all the stable, sane, pleasant things Scottie is willfully and needlessly rejecting (Bel Geddes is truly amazing with not much screentime, portraying a good friend and smart sparring partner who is aware of the hopelessness of her own erotic fixations and willing to give up on them when necessary, thus making her the healthy counterpoint to Scottie, while being an interesting character in her own right: her sadly upbeat reading of "I don't think Mozart's going to help at all", her final line, edges out Stewart's angry, self-lacerating "You shouldn't have been that sentimental" as my favorite line reading in the movie), for example, or of course when it enters its final quarter and becomes a totally different movie. There's an easy Vertigo to imagine, in which the blunt-talking brunette Judy Barton (Novak), with her clunky outfits and garish eyebrows, is just the accidental victim of Scottie's fixations, but the Vertigo we get is far more interesting, since it gives us a whole new film's worth of character details in Judy's relationship to her terrible, immoral behavior, and allows us a much more complex counterpoint to Scottie's descent into mad desire than the simply decent Midge. The enormous shift in focus precipitated by the unexpected twist pre-ending makes Vertigo not a film about one man going nuts from obsession; it makes it into a much more challenging, interesting film about different ways of being broken by desire, of trying to ignore one's mistakes or committing to them so fully that they no longer even register as behavior (Midge, who owns her mistakes, is indifferently ushered out of the movie - there's no room for decent people in Vertigo's final half-hour).

In short, there is a Vertigo that's a great psychological thriller about obsession, and for the most part, that's how we like to talk about the Vertigo that exists. But really, Vertigo is more complicated and slippery than that, demanding far more of us as viewers than any other Hitchcock film, more than any other Hollywood film broadly located in the realm of genre. This is, undoubtedly, why it limped through the box office in 1958 while receiving detached, unhappy reviews. He is a great and endlessly important filmmaker, but Hitchcock was still primarily an entertainer; Vertigo is less of a simple entertainment than anything else he directed. That's not the reason it's also his best film, but it's only because he was willing to do something challenging and upsetting that he could reach the depth and subtlety which does make Vertigo a masterpiece among masterpieces.

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FURIOUSER AND FURIOUSER

Those of us who love the Fast & Furious franchise for its gonzo refusal to commit to any kind of rational naming convention have a new reason to be happy: the follow-up to the film officially titled Fast & Furious 6, but identified Furious 6 onscreen, has been advertised as Furious 7, but in the movie, we find it called FuriousSeven, complete with the not-at-all incidental lack of a space between the words.

Those of use who love the Fast & Furious franchise for all the other things have reason to be happy as well: it's pretty great. Or at least, it's pretty much exactly the movie it should be, even with all its lumps and missteps. There's nothing in it that can compete with the "dragging the bank vault" scene from Fast Five or the "endless runway" scene from FF6, and it commits one of the worst structural sins that an action movie can: its most enthralling, well-constructed, and original setpiece comes early on, leaving more than half of the runtime devoted to many perfectly fine action sequences that can't help but feel a little anticlimactic. Even the actual climax, in which the whole ensemble drives through the entirety of downtown Los Angeles while being chased by a helicopter and a missile-launching drone. It's got scale, and it's got duration, and it's got a host of individual character beats that are perfectly timed (allowing that in a movie like Furious 7, car tricks and gunplay qualify as "character beats"). But it's missing the, forgive me, the furiousness of that wonderful central sequence that begins by tossing five cars out of an airplane (without CGI!) and proceeds to raise the stakes from there.

The franchise already having transformed from a rather crummy if high-spirited series of racing crime movies into a series of globe-trotting heist picture with the (itself rather crummy) Fast & Furious (the fourth one, from 2009), Furious 7 commits to the shift started in FF6 of turning into, basically, Mission: Impossible with cars (down to a setpiece taking place on a giant skyscraper in the UAE). The basic situation: after Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his beloved polyglot extended family defeated mercenary terrorist Owen Shaw (Luke Evans, appearing here in a wordless, one-shot cameo), they were all set to retire to quiet lives, with their criminal records having been expunged. But Shaw's older, meaner brother Deckard (Jason Statham) - Deckard Shaw! when was the last time we had an action movie bad guy with such a perfect action movie bad guy name? - comes hunting to get revenge, first sending DSS agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to the hospital while stealing the files identifying Dom's crew. Then it's off to Tokyo, to kill the unseen Han, and alerting Dom to his presence via a snotty phone call that Dom interprets as a death threat just quickly enough to save himself, his sister Mia O'Conner (Jordana Brewster), and Mia's husband Brian (Paul Walker) from a bomb sent to the Toretto homestead in Los Angeles. Fighting a world-class murder genius like Shaw seems hopeless, until his first head-to-head meeting with Dom is interrupted by the shadowy black ops forces of a smiling older man calling himself Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell). He comes with a deal: if Dom and crew can help him to steal a stolen surveillance program back from an African druglord named Mose Jakande (Djimon Hounsou), he'll let them use his organisation's resources to find and stop Shaw. And thus begins a trek that leads to Eurasia and Abu Dhabi before rounding back to Los Angeles, while Shaw and Jakande combine forces to stop our plucky heroes.

Of course it's convoluted and stupid; just enough to be playful, I'd say. The Fast & Furious movies have had an enormously weird relationship to tone, with the straight-faced, tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the over-elaborate plots of the last couple of movies being goofy enough to support the outlandish, cartoon action sequences, while the greatly sincere treatment of the characters by the filmmakers and the actors who very clearly believe in these roles with all of their generally limited talent ends up being enough to make us care about the stakes in spite of how utterly loopy and implausible the events are. That's particularly important for Furious 7, which was only around halfway through production when Walker died in an unrelated car accident. The film entirely shifts its last minutes to stop functioning as a narrative and instead act as a big, gooey straight guy tearjerker that lets the cast, the characters, and the audience all say goodbye to Walker, and by God, it works: Diesel has almost nothing but liabilities as an actor, and he's best when he's playing a kind of sluggish, threatening sarcasm, but the quavering in his voice as he delivers his closing monologue is legitimately tender and sad and sweet.

The slowed-down character beats end up devouring quite a lot of the film's much too generous 137-minute running time, and particularly in its first half, Furious 7 seems to be missing the boat on its promise to provide a non-stop explosion of automotive spectacle. Because, sincerity is nice and all, but these aren't the most nuanced dramatic actors in the world, and the plot can veer towards the utterly hokey - everything surrounding Dom's girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and her amnesia groans under the weight of how very much Chris Morgan's screenplay believes in it - and there's only so many ways Diesel can purr the same emphatic statements about the importance of family. So it's a relief when we get things like Russell's splendidly robust supporting turn, giving a vital blast of comic energy (he perfectly delivers the film's best visual joke, a bit of product placement so on-the-nose that it goes ridiculous), or the presentation of the menacingly implacable Shaw (Statham can do this kind of snappish outrage in his sleep, but it's still fun) in terms that suggest a slasher movie killer, appearing and disappearing at will. It leavens the thick, syrupy human drama without actually cheapening it.

Obviously, the draw of these films is the action, vehicular and otherwise, and Furious 7 has plenty of both once it finally discards character beats for momentum, though it suffers a bit from new director James Wan and his four editors, who tend to chop up all the fist fights more than they deserve. There are no points where the action necessarily becomes impossible to follow, but in a scene like the Johnson/Statham fight that mostly kicks things off, it would be gratifying to have a little bit less speed and a little bit more physical context. The car scenes are all immensely well-choreographed, though, and even in the most generic setpieces there are grace notes like Wan's tendency to flip the camera on its head along with the fighters, or the opening of the Diesel/Statham fight near the end, which composer Brian Tyler cheekily scores with a dramatic, operatic chant. If the spacing of the action isn't quite perfect, and the film spends its whole second half failing to match the extraordinary blend of creativity and technical elegance of its central sequence, involving aerial practical effects, wholly invisible CGI, a combination of driving action, gunplay, and fist fights, and the welcome presence of the otherwise under-used Tony Jaa (one of the great martial artists in film today, who deserved better for his American debut); well, that's a lot to live up to. The Abu Dhabi sequence is almost as inventive and cut better, while also feeling more oriented around the characters' personalities than their skills. And the L.A. finale... it's kind of too sprawling, actually, and it's one of the few places in the film where the effects let it down. But it's pace beautifully for something that goes on so long, and it at least gives Johnson, who till then seems to have been largely resigned to a brief cameo plenty of fun, ridiculous scenes to play.

There's no discipline to any of this: the film jerks along, the links between scene don't always make sense, and it includes a weird insertion that does nothing but re-incorporate the franchise's third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, into continuity, and confirm that its star, Lucas Black, remains charmless. But its messiness feels so off a piece with the larking attitude that the cast exudes - for them, it's clearly a chance to hang out and goof around, and that radiates out of the film. It's the key difference between the noisy addle-minded nonsense of Furious 7 and the nonsense of the Transformers franchise, say; the sense that everybody involved loves what they're doing and is grateful to have the chance, instead of grimly marching through the steps needed to cash a big paycheck. Sincerity cuts all ways, and for all its flying cars, corny situations, and hypertrophic musclemen whaling on each other with wrenches, Furious 7 is never, for a single frame, any less than 100% sincere.

7/10

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SANTA ON THE BEACH

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

Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny isn't an inexplicable movie. Hell, I'm about to explicate it here in just a moment. But it's exactly the kind of movie that feels inexplicable, colliding random nonsense in a matrix that we're obliged to call a narrative more out of habit than accuracy. The plot more resembles a transcription of a bad peyote experience than a motion picture, and its execution is at places so determinedly bereft of even the most limited, accidental filmmaking talent that it doesn't seem right to call the resultant object an actual work of cinema.

So with that to whet your appetite, let's go into the thing in proper chronological order, which naturally begins with the world of Florida roadside attractions. Here, we find among many such places an amusement park, Pirates World of Dania, near the southern tip of the Florida peninsula. The place opened in 1967, apparently built largely out of bits and pieces bought on the cheap from other parks that had picked up nicer, newer toys; some rides were salvaged from the wreck of the underperforming 1964-'65 New York World's Fair. It was, naturally enough, themed to piracy, with its signature ride a cruise on a full-scale pirate ship, but among its themed lands was a fairy tale exhibit.

Cursory research - undoubtedly there is such a thing as deep research full of footnotes and recovered historical documents, but there's also such a thing as wasting your goddamn time on a surreally terrible kids' movie - has not revealed to me who made the decision or when, but there came a point when the Pirates World powers that be decided to promote their park with a series of movies. Three of these came out in 1970: the documentary Musical Mutiny, about a concert held at the park, and the fantasies Jack and the Beanstalk and Thumbelina, all directed by Barry Mahon, who spent the '60s cranking out nudie flicks by the handful in the burgeoning Florida exploitation scene; his only film prior to his trilogy for Pirates World that wasn't smut was 1969's The Wonderful Land of Oz. Meanwhile, his Wikipedia page, at the time of this writing, almost exclusively focuses on his World War II record. Barry Mahon is a fascinating and slippery enigma, I mean to say.

Jack and Thumbelina were both aimed squarely at the kiddie matinee marketplace, and I do not know how well they did - cursory research, folks - but by the end of 1971, Pirates World had more to worry about than residuals from the cheap-ass films shot on their properties as a bit of feature-length advertising. For in October of that year, the Walt Disney Company cut the ribbon on Walt Disney World in Orlando, some 200 miles north of Dania, and the nature of Florida tourism was irrevocably changed forever. With the beefiest tourist trap ever devised by man or some dark angel serving as a black hole in the middle of the state, sucking in all the visitors to the state, a rinky-dink little amusement park had virtually no chance of surviving, and Pirates World didn't - its holding company declared bankruptcy in 1973 and the park was gone by the end of 1975. Before that happened, though, the Pirates World folks rolled the dice on one more movie. It visibly bears the scars of a production that had no budget for resources: got a cheap Santa suit and a hideous Easter Bunny costume? Then you have a movie starring Santa and the Easter Ice Cream Bunny, whatever the actual fuck an ice cream bunny is. Not one that gives out ice cream, that's for sure. And in the time-honored tradition of chiseling film producers throughout history, the minds behind Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny figured that you could surely save some money if, instead of building a whole feature from scratch, you take a feature that's already just sitting there and add crap to it. Which is why almost two-thirds of the alleged Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny is composed of the entirety of Mahon's 62-minute Thumbelina, presented so uncut that it even includes its original opening and closing credits, with a little more than a half hour of new movie directed by the shadowy R. Winer, apparently working without benefit of cinematographers, editors, or any other credited crew.

In the beginning of the movie, though, we know none of this. All we get is the in medias res spectacle of a workshop full of North Pole elves busying themselves while waiting for Santa to return from parts unknown. It takes, I'm not exaggerating in the slightest, less than 15 seconds to determine just how impossible Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is going to be. For that gives us enough time to gawk in dismal amazement at R. Winer's complete inability to do, like anything right: by that point, the camera has already visibly wobbled on its tripod, and the cluster of child actors playing the elves have sung enough of their shrill jingle that we can tell how none of them were rehearsed, or possibly even given a full set of lyrics. The most salient aspect of their song, in the early going, is that they're not all singing in time, or the same key, and it's nigh impossible to make out what the hell it is they're trying to communicate. Which is just as well, because as it becomes more audible, we find those lyrics consist of vile passages like:

Tra-la-la-la-la, oh where is Santa Claus?
Tra-la-la-la-la, Santa isn't here
Tra-la-la-la-la, we'll just have to work some more
Tra-la-la-la-la, Santa's never been late before

Complete with the inconsistent rhyme scheme and burst of arrhythmia in the last line, all shouted out to a gratingly tuneless melody. It's like beat poetry as improvised by preteens. Who are, incidentally, credited as "Kids" from Ruth Foreman's Pied Piper Playhouse, with "Kids" in exactly those scare quotes, and so I start to thinking, if they're not really "kids", then what the fuck are they? Eventually, one of the girl-elves peeks out the front door to see stock footage of caribou, and deduces from this that Santa's reindeer came back to the North Pole before. Where is Santa? Santa's nev'r been late b'fore! The film has not yet celebrated its 60th second at this point, but it has already mounted a compelling argument that it's the worst thing ever made with a motion picture camera.

Santa, anyway, got stuck on a beach in Florida. It's a few days before Christmas, and he was touring the States on his last-minute "Naughty or Nice" check, when something happened to I don't know what. But it left him without reindeer, and his sleigh mired intractably in the sand. Like, centimeters of sand. Since it is clearly impossible for the powers of a demigod to fight such a monstrous fate, Santa uses telepathic powers to summon local suburban children to his aid, and this is depicted with a vibrato post-production effect that makes him sound like the leader of a death cult. Oh, but before that happens, he gets a little song about how lonely, scared, and hot he is. And the outside footage was filmed without synchronised sound, so Jay Clark, in the role of Santa, isn't actually singing, he's just pantomiming. And, seemingly not pantomiming to the actual song, but just assured by R. Winer that he should wave his hands around like he's dancing, or conducting an orchestra of ghosts, and they'd make it work. They didn't make it work. Clark jerks his hands around without being more than incidentally in time with the music, while his or somebody else's voice floats above the film. If the idea was to communicate that Santa is about to drop dead from heat stroke, then mission accomplished.

So the kids - beg pardon, the "kids" arrive to be given their instructions from this terrifying beast with the hollow voice emanating from underneath a fake beard that was not even a little bit up to the demands of south Florida humidity, and looks like Clark was carrying it around in his pocket before gluing it to his face. Those instructions involve rounding up animals to serve as surrogate reindeer, and for something like seven or eight hours we get to watch as Santa demands that the kids try to back the animals up to his sleigh to be hooked up, only to be stymied by the fact that most quadrupeds are not terribly keen on being forced to back up. So it doesn't even get as far as "Ho ho ho! This sheep can't fly!" (yes, sheep, the favored house pet of all suburban Florida children), because we're too busy watching Santa trying to bully animals and saying condescending things to kids while he just stands there like doing nothing at all. Also, the first animal is a gorilla, in a remarkably stupid misjudgment of comic pacing: you do a couple of more or less normal animals first, then you trot out the dude in the gorilla suit, as an absurd twist. But you sure as shit don't lead with the gorilla, because that promises zaniness, and the endless minutes that follow are the closest thing I can imagine to the polar opposite of zany.

Watching all of this unfold are none other than Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, classic boy heroes of Mark Twain's beloved novels. Tom at one point has a raccoon on a raft with him, and boy, I guarantee you've never seen an animal in a movie as monumentally freaked the fuck out as that raccoon is to be on that raft, getting thrown around by some idiot kid. Tom and Huck never interact with the rest of the characters, and eventually sort of drift away; I gather that they are the inspiration for the silent, Christ-like Watcher in Kieślowski's Dekalog.

Eventually, Santa gives up, gathers his clan around him, and decides to cheer them up by telling a story. Or by letting them get a peek at the foot-long patch of sweat blackening the seat of his pants, proudly showcased in a shot that R. Winer actually permitted to be included in his film. I get that films like this are shot fast and without a chance for re-takes, but seriously. If you accidentally get a shot of Santa gushing sweat out of his ass crack, you find way to fix it, even if it means that you don't have time for all 19 inserts of grass during his mopey song from earlier.

But anyway, storytime. And guess what, it's Thumbelina! Which we see in its entirety for the next hour, and I have to say, it's an enormous relief. By any imaginable yardstick, it's terrible, but it has this in its favor: the actors move their mouths and sound comes out in a way that generally matches their lips. And Shay Garner, playing Thumbelina, is a stilted, unnatural performer, but when she's not talking, she's actually in possession of a commanding screen presence. So anyway, Thumbelina takes place in Pirates World, at the Hans Christian Andersen hut, or whatever, where a teen girl (Garner) wanders around looking at dioramas while listening to Andersen's fairy tale being related over loudspeakers by a narrator (Dorothy Brown Green) who turns out to be playing a character in the story. And as she does this, the girl visualises herself as the tiny little human girl who was kidnapped from her home and almost raped by frogs before being almost shamed into marriage to an elderly mole.

Though he wasn't going around trying to burn the very notion of the cinema down to the ground, like R. Winer would two years later, Mahon directs the movie pretty much exactly the way that you'd expect from a pornographer in his second year making children's films. There's an awkward, tableau-like staging everywhere you turn, and the plot beats are all coaxed out with the same dull, unsurprised energy of a woman who accidentally just took a shower while the TV repairman was in her apartment. The sets could not possibly resemble plaster over a wire frame more than they do, except for the mole's tunnel, which looks like an enormous birth canal made out of plastic and the broken dreams of children. The costumes, at least, are a bit fancy, with all kinds of articulating parts, but they're at least a bit nightmare-inducing; the moles have long beak-shaped faces that make them look like a cross between a rat, a raven, and that one dream where the shadow men were chasing you through the cemetery in the forest.

But you know what? It's functional. Ugly, cheap, blandly-staged, and tone-deaf. But functional. The way scenes are cut together indicates some understanding of how we process visual relationships in cinema. This praise cannot be extended to the framing narrative of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, which frequently jams in cutaways to nothing at all, while finding a way to make the physical position of a bunch of kids sitting still in front of an unmoving sleigh difficult to parse. And it always, always calls the most attention to how much Santa's voice has nothing to do with Santa's staring, unmoving face.

After a blissful hour of boring, unattractive kiddie crap, Thumbelina spits its girl back out into the wonderful land of Pirates World, full of fun rides and exciting adventures, and Santa stops narrating whatever the hell he's narrating - I get that it would have taken, like, an extra day to cut out all the parts of Thumbelina that suggest the whole thing takes place in a room full of dioramas in a threadbare theme park, but surely they could have spared one day? - to resign himself to the fate of dying in the hot Florida sun, and he chases all the kids away. There's a long passage in which he talks about removing his coat, and then removes it. But just in time, Santa's very good friend the Ice Cream Bunny shows up, riding his... vintage fire truck... through Pirates World. In something like real time - oh my, the nice, long attention paid to the Ice Cream Bunny's path through a wooded road and to the beach! Now you start caring about continuity, eh R. Winer? There's a shot of Santa just sitting there, waiting like he's just sat there waiting for everything in the whole movie, watching as the Ice Cream Bunny, and his truck full of children, drive in from all the way back on the Z-axis. As a study in the slowness of movement and the gradual development of time, it is the rival of Oleg Yankovsky carrying a lit candle from one of a pool to the other and back in Nostalghia.

Eventually, the Ice Cream Bunny arrives, and it is an eldritch abomination; there's a long shot of a dog jumping and barking at it frantically, and I think we're meant to take it as "oh, the happy dog, it wants to jump up and lick the Ice Cream Bunny!", but anyone who knows dogs will immediately understand it as the natural response of canine fury to something horrifying and wrong that needs to barked all the way back to hell. And it's not just the freaky design of the thing, though its coal-black eyes, the right one of which sags in a sorry approximation of a wink, would cause any dog or man to feel the chill grip of the abyss. Even worse, in a film that has to this point only evinced a rough relationship with the basics of editing, things collapse complete when the Ice Cream Bunny shows up; it's a flurry of dissociated shots hacked together in a rough arrhythmia that resembles a freak-out scene in a psychedelic movie. But Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is no head film. It's a bad enough trip while totally sober. There's nothing in it that makes any kind of linear sense, with its plot - such as it is - lazily meandering forward while the images only occasionally tie into that plot, and all of it frequently erupting in moments of the most repellent attempt to appeal to children with a sweaty, rumpled Santa and a Cthulhic humanoid rabbit.

Anyway, it's on YouTube, so I leave you now to your best judgment.

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HE'S MAKING A LIST, AND CHECKING IT TWICE

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

High Fidelity is a movie that sounds on paper like it should be an obnoxious slog in the company of obnoxious men whose sense of sexual entitlement is treated with the utmost admiration and gravity, and I will confess that, having not seen it almost since it was brand new in 2000, my memory is that it was just that. But it's in fact closer to exactly the opposite. This is perhaps the genius of novelist Nick Hornby, whose book served as the film's basis (with a trans-Atlantic transplant to Chicago), and whose special gift lies in describing the behavior of undermatured men, allowing them full range to speak their mind, and thereby show off what shallow assholes they're capable of being. If I end up slightly preferring 2002's About a Boy, another Hornby adaptation that maybe wouldn't have existed without this one, that's mostly because there's something about his arch irony that feels a bit more organic when it comes with a British accent attached. Though High Fidelity isn't without its British bona fides: it was directed by Stephen Frears, a rather terrific chronicler of everyday urban life in England, though he's spent most of the years since High Fidelity trying to scuttle his reputation. At any rate, Frears brings to the project a certain brusqueness that serves it immodestly well, while capturing the lovingly over-detailed Chicago locations with the clear-headed non-romanticism of an outsider with a flair for depicting the feel of a place.

That place ends up being a non-incidental component of what makes High Fidelity work: the star, co-producer, and co-writer, John Cusack, native of the Chicago suburbs, obviously sank a lot of energy into making sure the film was a love letter to the city as much as it was anything else. Or rather, while it's only specifically about Chicago because of the immodest glut of locations called out by name, it's still very particularly about the physical environment that its main male characters wrap around themselves: the streets, the storefronts, the decor. High Fidelity is a very set-intensive movie, though aggressively naturalistic about it: the film is, at heart, about the kind of person who lets his identity by an outgrowth of his collection of Stuff, and it follows that closely observing the way he arranges and lives within his Stuff is one of the most important aspects of the film. Rob Gordon's (Cusack) Stuff is vinyl records, which carries with it a lot of very specific cultural baggage; but as a single man of about the same age with my own very exhaustive wall of Stuff in the form of DVDs and Blu-rays, I will enthusiastically attest to the accuracy with which the design team captured the way that such a person foregrounds his collection at home and, far more importantly to the film's narrative, the music store he owns.

Rob, early in the film, has just ended the latest in a long string of flared-out relationships, with Laura (Iben Hjejle), and has decided to go about the task of soul-searching in the only way that a pop culture obsessive knows how: he makes a list of his most traumatising break-ups and re-lives them, including revisiting the women in question, anatomising himself like an article in a magazine. That's about half of the film. The other half involves us simply watching as he and his employees/sole apparent social circle, Barry (Jack Black) and Dick (Todd Louiso) fuck around in their privileged little world of self-consciously arcane musical tastes and commodity fetishisation. Both halves feed into each other to contribute to the character sketch that the movie cares about infinitely more than it wants to chase down drama: this is a portrait of who Rob is and why that makes him such an impeccable turn-off to women and, more to the point, why he's so effortlessly good at rejecting the women who make it inside his blast radius.

I think the biggest reason that I didn't care for the film when I saw it in 2000 was that I hadn't, at that point, clocked what made Cusack an interesting actor: it's not the sweet guy charisma of his breakthrough in Say Anything... or his later straight romantic comedies, it's his amazing ability, when he sets his mind to it, to bend that charisma into a nasty prickliness. In Cusack's hands, Rob isn't a terribly likable figure: he's a peremptory, arrogant brat, given to loudly declaiming his intentions of rigorous self-analysis but always finding a way to let himself off after having begged for pity, and reliably willing to put even us, his confidants - the film's most overt stylistic gesture is to let Rob narrate his thoughts directly to the camera - in the role of the idiots that he lords his superiority over. He is, in fact, a thorough jackass, and this makes High Fidelity not a film about a fella finally getting lucky in love, but a film about a fella figuring out that he needs to stop being a raging dick and maybe he'll actually be worthy of the women who keep entering his orbit.

The film is at its best when it depicts the kind of hothouse environment in which this kind of egotism grows: the alienating, obsessive world that happens when a bunch of guys with the same interests all start to compete with each other to prove who is the most deeply entrenched in that world - Cusack's itchy, borderline angry performance is great, and so is Black's loud, snotty enthusiasm for being the most cynical and savvy in the room. Its depiction of pop culture obsessives, always quick with a reference, a game, a list-making exercise, is flawless, punched up with comedy that keeps it from being too bleak as it identifies with laser focus why these guys are stalled in one place. Where it stumbles is in its attempts to sell its romantic plot thread: partially because it does such a great job of convincing us that Rob has issues and is hard to be around that it's weird that Laura keeps not avoiding him, old habit or no. And it's also hampered by Hjejle's rather addled performance, which partially answers my other complaint: the reason she keeps letting him back into her life is because she's a flake. At any rate, a film that offers cameos to Lili Taylor and Catherine Zeta-Jones as some of Rob's most prominent exes needed to hunt a little harder for a romantic lead who could hold down the women's side of this film that's so dominated by the insular behavior of man-children.

That lack of a strong counterbalance hardly scuttles the movie - honestly, the romantic half of the film is present more to flesh out its depiction of Rob's bad behavior and desire to change than it's there to do anything in its own right. But it does leave the film a bit more hollow in patches than it could be. There is a sturdier High Fidelity out there. There is not, however, apt to be a funnier one, and probably not one that does a better job of capturing the ways that a certain brand of masculinity finds ways to turn its most glaring weaknesses into supposed strengths. It's not perfect, but boy, is it ever accurate and insightful.

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TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW

Over that the Film Experience this evening, I reviewed the newly-on-VOD short film World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeldt. Spoiler alert: I adored it and think it's essential viewing irrespective of one's interest in Hertzfeldt, animation, or science-fiction. Check out the review, and then watch the movie - it's the best $3.99 you'll spend all week!

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BEST SHOT: MOMMIE DEAREST

Nathaniel's pick for this very special April Fool's Day edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot is none other than the legendary camp disasterpiece Mommie Dearest, the infamous Joan Crawford biopic from 1981, a film that I had never seen before, and one that plunged me into a deep personal crisis.

Basically, it goes something like this: for a while now, I've begun to be terrified that I overindulged on camp at a young age, and have inoculated myself against. Crazy deranged badness just doesn't strike me the way it used to; instead of pointing and gawking and being delighted at the sheer madness of it, I find myself more and more thinking about it analytically, and dear God help me, looking for the good even in bad movies. And so when I finally sat down with this most infamous misfire, a career-killing miscalculation for Faye Dunaway, and I found it to be...

Fine.

It's not a good movie, Lord knows. The performances of anybody and everybody besides Dunaway are unforgivably flat, and the script has a dreadful sense of chronology, especially in its second hour. But even as it rolled around to the famed "Tina! Bring me the axe!" scene, and the notorious "No wire hangers!" scene, all I could think of was how entirely not ridiculous I was finding everything. Are these big, sprawling moments that are hysterical in the most old-fashioned, sexist sense of the word? Sure they are. But the movie kind of actually earns them. Or anyway, Dunaway does. She's basically playing Joan Crawford as Norma Desmond: an actress gone to seed and dealing with her never-distant awareness that she's old and faintly laughable by lashing out with unhinged anger. It's a good performance: not good because it's so outlandish and insane and florid, good because Dunaway does a spectacular job of portraying a woman who spends all of her time and energy being constantly On, a hammy performer even in her own private home, because she is mortally terrified to stop being The Iconic Joan Crawford long enough to discover what it means to be just plain Joan.

You know what I think the movie's big sin is? Being a straight-up melodrama on the back side of the New Hollywood; being a total throw-back of a "woman's picture" using the raging aesthetic roughness of a decade of films by boys, about boys, for boys. Not a good melodrama, of course, which is its small sin. We're miles from Douglas Sirk here, and I think director Frank Perry is surely guilty of having no clue how to manage tone on a scene-by-scene, or even shot-by-shot basis. But I don't know. It's proficient. It is a proficient biopic. As a work of cinematic storytelling, I'd unironically watch it any day of the week before I turned my attention back to A Beautiful Mind or The Imitation Game. And I've spent the whole afternoon sick to my stomach and terrified that I just can't do camp anymore. Because if you watched Mommie Dearest sincerely and didn't hate it, what hope can there be for you?

Eventually, I was able to get myself aligned to the film's campy wavelength, after it's burned off all of its most famous scenes and aged up little Christina Crawford from the bland child actor Mara Hobel to the openly helpless Diana Scarwid: she fumbles everything that comes her way and plays up her hidden glaring and portentous line deliveries so much that it seems like Joan might have been the victim of her bad seed daughter all along. And that's good for some silly laughs. Still I found myself disappointingly non-outraged, so much so that for my best shot, I didn't even pick one of the outlandish moments of High Melodrama, Dunaway caked in kabuki-white face cream like a monster from a bedtime story or the like. It is, in fact, not a goofy shot in any way.

This comes early on, at Christina's birthday party, but the moment is All About Joan; it is, in fact, more or less the first time that we start to figure out that Mommie Dearest is an abusive, self-centered tyrant. And more to the point, a self-centered tyrant who is deeply invested in presenting a carefully polished image of herself to the world. A baby in one hand, four of Our Boys ready to go Serve Their Country in World War II, and a smile that couldn't possibly be any more warmer or welcoming or matronly; for it to be any more wholesome, familial and All-American, it would have to involve a bald eagle eating an apple pie and shitting baseballs. And it's fake as hell, a calculated pose for those cameras that cuts off right at the edge of the frame.

Mommie Dearest is all about the gap between the images that are presented and the things that are true: Joan Crawford, glamorous actress, was an abusive monster; Christina Crawford, earnest truth-teller, comes across as a schemer and whiny pill; a prestige adaptation of a major book starring one of the preceding decade's key actresses is appreciated today solely for being tacky and low rent. And that's what drove me to this shot: it embodies everything about that. It is a carefully manipulated moment designed to bid for sympathy and love, but we see the reality, not the canned photograph. Of course, Mommie Dearest is itself one more manipulation; but it is not a careful one. It is sloppy and the seams show all over. And that is perhaps the best part of its charm, ironically or otherwise.

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WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE

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

Out of the Past is not the best film noir ever made, nor does it necessarily include everything that makes the genre its beautifully toxic best self (there's a distinct lack of urban rot, which I myself tend to associate with the noir-est noirs). But it might very well be the most quintessential and typical of all films noirs, the one that I'd want to hand to somebody just learning about the form, and promise them that it's all in there: this is the tone, this is the cultural context, this is the violence, this is the hard chiaroscuro beauty of black and white set against each other like jewels in the handle of a dagger. It's ridiculous to say "if you only ever watch one film noir" in the first place, and doubly so to end that sentence with anything other than "make it Double Indemnity", but I'll tell you what, Out of the Past puts in a good bid for that kind of breathless hyperbole. When people like me talk about '40s Hollywood filmmaking as some of the best in history, this is precisely what we have in mind.

It's all right there in the title, changed from the original Build My Gallows High of Geoffrey Homes's novel (a pseudonym of Daniel Mainwaring, under which he also wrote the film's screenplay). The past isn't done with us, as they say: you can try to keep away from it but pieces of it will always come crawling after you to pull you back into whatever swamp you were trying two escape. That's the heart and soul of noir: a fatalism born not out of random bad luck but personal culpability - noir heroes and antiheroes are always ultimately plagued by that one wrong choice they made to kick off the plot, which haunts them until they (usually) die. And so it is with Jeff Bailey né Markham (Robert Mitchum), who only wanted to retire to a tiny town, meet a swell girl, Ann (Virginia Huston) and run a filling station. To live the promised American Dream, one that was being packaged with bright shiny ribbons in the years after World War II ended - Out of the Past came out in 1947 - as the United States finally had a chance to feel mostly good about itself for the first time in over 15 years. But one day, from out of... I don't know, out of someplace, Jeff gets a visitor in the form of Joe Stefanos (Paul Valentine), who wants him to pay a visit to Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). I would not spoil the pleasure of hearing the explanation of who Sterling is and how he connects to Jeff's past given in Mitchum's weathered, weary voice, nor the details of who this Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) is that came between them. All that needs saying is that Jeff's protestations that he wants to be left alone, please, don't prevent him from diving right back into a viper's nest of untrustworthy friends and openly venomous but magnificently sexy women.

It's easy to get caught up in the moral universe Out of the Past depicts, which is perfectly typical of the genre: only a could of characters who are purposefully keep to the sidelines can possibly be thought of as "good" to any meaningful degree (the sweetly sexless Ann, a cop played by Richard Webb who's jealous of Jeff, and a deaf-mute teen boy played by Dickie Moore, because sometimes you just go right for the most melodramatic symbolic embodiment of the Pure Fool that you can get your paws on), and the hero is a better person than his antagonists for almost no other reason than because, unlike them, he at least wants to be something besides toxic human garbage. And in its manichean division of its women between the pleasant but fixedly impersonal blonde Ann and the sexually charged, gleefully unscrupulous brunette Kathie, the film has what could easily be the clearest-cut example of noir's celebrated, derided conception of the attractive, destructive power of untrammeled femininity that I've seen - though even despite Greer's perfectly on-target performance, Kathie perhaps isn't one of the top-tier femmes fatales, if only because Out of the Past is more interested in the cold psychological gamesmanship between Jeff and Sterling (though Greer has markedly more screentime than Douglas). I don't know if there's a word for the negatively charged homo-anti-eroticism that passes between Mitchum and Douglas - two males drawn together by their electrifying, unspoken hatred for each other - but this film alone is enough to prove that there should be. Roger Ebert described the film as a series of scenes in which the two actors angrily smoke at each other to assert dominance, and that's no less than true: this is the smokingest of all classic Hollywood films, and no actor ever got more mileage out of the limitless character-building possibilities provided by having a cigarette to fiddle with and smoke to exhale than Mitchum in this movie. And certainly, a lot of that goes towards creating a very clear relationship between the film's two central men that requires no words, only postures, expressions, and tone of voice: Douglas's insinuating whine and Mitchum's forceful baritone matter more, on balance, than any of the actual thoughts they communicate with them.

I have abandoned my train of thought, though, which was going something like this: it's so easy to latch onto Out of the Past in terms of its merciless way of grinding up its characters for their sins - and it doesn't hold back from judging everyone who commits even the slightest infraction, harsh towards its protagonist even by film noir standards, but at least as important is the film's visual scheme for drawing us into its moral universe. It surely did not invent the visual language of noir, which entered Hollywood through the 1930s horror films made by recent German immigrants and had been first matched to crime pictures at least as far back as Fritz Lang's 1937 You Only Live Once, but Out of the Past even more than The Postman Always Rings Twice (the definitive post-war noir), perfected the marriage of the neo-Expressionist noir style with the sunshiny open spaces of southern California. Everything preceding the long flashback where Jeff relates his history of violence to Ann is basically that: cloudless sky and severely clear daytime images that present a pleasant small-town idyll with a coiled-up tension lying in wait, whether it's the church that lingers deep in the frame at the end of the road, silently commenting on the intrusion of Joe the devil into this quiet place, or the way that the sun reflecting off of a beautiful river tends to make the image feel harsh instead of relaxing. I will confess that, for as much as I deeply admire the film's late drift to the standard hard-edged lighting and claustrophobic shadows of its genre, I'm never more impressed than I am with that opening act, which is far more unique in its intentions and its effect.

Out of the Past was one of the most important post-war A-pictures made by RKO, a studio that was not by its nature very much invested in making A-pictures, and it was handed off to one of their most reliable director/cinematographer duos, Jacques Tourneur and Nicholas Musuraca, and that's pretty much already explained what we need to know about how and why the images turned out the way they did. This was the same pair of filmmakers that had invented and perfected the famed Val Lewton horror film aesthetic with Cat People, the first and best of that producer's legendary run of horror movies in the 1940s (which also shared with Out of the Past the low-key art direction of Albert S. D'Agostino, who here does a great job presenting worn-out Americana). Already, the blend of Tourneur's French-tinged poetics with the overtly Germanic idiom of Universal horror and its knock-offs marked Cat People as a special sort of mongrel, a particularly American, urban visual polyglot that could never have been set in Europe, though it has a certain musty tinge of Old World fatigue. Out of the Past took that mixture and re-directed it; while Cat People is no slouch as a work depicting psychology, it still uses its visuals primarily to express atmosphere. Out of the Past is much more directly psychological in its lighting and its heavily subjective frames; it not only makes us share Jeff's general perspective, it positions itself inside his attitude, alert and wiry and increasingly bitter and grim.

Now, the usual caveat that we have to apply to all films noirs certainly comes into play here: the mentality that Out of the Past so flawlessly evokes is a caustic one, its tired cynicism about its characters offering little in the way of joy or sympathy. For I understand that there are many people who find noir much too bleak to get any pleasure out of it, though I'm baffled by them. This is, truly, a perfect encapsulation of the mindset and aesthetic of noir, but not everyone is going to hold that as a compliment. For myself, the film's unyielding potency is all the justification it needs; this is a brutally beautiful indictment of a simply brutal world, and Mitchum's performance is one of the highlights of the entire genre. It is unsparing in the most acute, insightful, and artful way, essential viewing for the noir fan and the kind of movie that could make a neutral third party into a noir fan in the first place.

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