tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75710506598340569582024-03-12T20:46:18.347-07:00kirby dotsTristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-52585521419134862442010-07-28T15:52:00.000-07:002010-07-29T08:34:22.081-07:00The Irresistible Lightness of Inception.<div align="justify"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TFC1MuTVMVI/AAAAAAAAA3s/FAN3bbFl2f8/s1600/inception01.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 166px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499094375211544914" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TFC1MuTVMVI/AAAAAAAAA3s/FAN3bbFl2f8/s400/inception01.jpg" /></a> I approached <em>Inception </em>with spectacularly mixed feelings. To say that I was a never a big Chris Nolan fan would probably be putting it mildly. In fairness, I had no particularly strong emotions in either direction regarding his early pictures; it was the Batman movies, and particularly the fanatical and (in my ever humble opinion) wrong-headed canonisation of <em>The Dark Knight</em>, that really soured me against the work of this undeniably ambitious and successful director.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />Then on the other hand, I was pretty impressed with the promotional material for <em>Inception</em>. Those great ominous bass blasts in the trailers really imparted a sense of excitement and occasion, and the lustrous sheen of the images suggested that the Nolan/Wally Pfister partnership had finally transcended the merely polished level of previous efforts. Thematically, <em>Inception</em> seemed more down my street: I've been a big fan of Philip K. Dick/Robert Anton Wilson rug-pullers for years. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />So, despite my misgivings, I was getting excited, and tentatively hopeful, for <em>Inception</em>. A sense of occasion and excitement is something that has been distinctly lacking in 2010, in terms of mainstream Hollywood and American auteurist pictures. Nolan's latest, regardless of how it might pan out in the end, provided this year with the much needed <em>frisson</em> of a must-see ticket, a movie you had to see opening weekend on the biggest screen in town, that you might love or hate, that you knew you would be talking about one way or the other. So I was happy to be caught in the buzz of a must-see picture: buying your ticket in advance, slavishly reading the reviews as they accumulate online, even though you know from experience that a thousand slavering raves could still translate into a movie you hate like cancer. I was enjoying the sensation of not knowing what to expect: I might walk out shaking my fist in an irrelevant fit of curmudgeon rage, or eyeing the world with the glazed and giddy eyes of a new convert.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />As it turned out, neither of these alternatives came to pass; but I was happily surprised that my reaction to <em>Inception</em> was much more in the latter category than the former. To begin this review, I'd like to note certain things about the film that struck me as being in stark contrast both to my own expectations of <em>Inception</em>, and to what a great majority of critics are saying about the film.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />1.) <strong>It isn't particularly difficult to understand</strong>. The most virulent meme surrounding <em>Inception</em> is that it requires some kind of Mensa super-brain to begin to get a handle on the plot. I can't buy into this at all. This movie literally works overtime to be user-friendly - it patiently and explicitly lays out all the rules of the game, all the information you need, in the first half. Fair enough, a couple of little details require a greater degree of alertness than others, but there is no duplicity, no deliberate obscuration of any kind. Nolan knows he is working with some elaborate narrative conceits, and really couldn't have been more obliging in trying to make it a smooth ride for audiences. I think he has been entirely successful in this - I saw <em>Inception</em> first with a really non-cineaste/hipster crowd, and didn't get any impression of confusion after the screening. This meme seems to be entirely in the mind of critics who have either spent too long trying to second guess the intelligence of mass audiences, or have themselves succumbed to the depleted attention span they are constantly ascribing to the movie-going public. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />2.) <strong>It isn't a twisty, tricksy film</strong>. When synopses of <em>Inception</em> first began to leak out, it was immediately apparent that this was a movie whose heart was firmly in the nineties - that strange decade of <em>The Maxtrix</em>, <em>The Truman Show</em>, <em>Groundhog Day</em>, and <em>Vanilla Sky</em>, when suddenly speculation about the illusionary nature of reality became as routine in the omniplex as car cases and rom-coms. It wasn't all good in the nineties, though. This was also a decade in which a peculiar mania developed for narrative tricks and gimmicks - what I like to call the Dark M. Night Shyamalan of the Soul. Considering its reality-bending premise, the big fear with <em>Inception </em>was that it would fall into this category - that it would hinge on some cheap, contrived, manipulative twist. Much to his credit, Nolan has completely eschewed that approach with <em>Inception</em>. Despite a premise with ample potential for trickery, and a degree of ambiguity which I will discuss later, this movie has a strikingly straight-up narrative. There are no big "Aha, it was really <em>this </em>all along" moments; the idea that Cobb may be in limbo from the get-go is an unresolved suggestion that is present from the very beginning, and is at no point hammered down as a hokey last act reveal. I'm not even sure if there is a twist <em>per se</em> in this movie. You're given all the clues and all the elements of Cobb's back story with Mal; whatever revelations follow are entirely logical and by no means streamlined for maximum surprise. Refreshingly, <em>Inception</em>'s story-telling model is classical through and through; it has added a few extra floors to the bank, but the overall structure is still recognisably that of <em>The Asphalt Jungle</em>.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />3.) <strong>It doesn't take itself very seriously. At all.</strong> This was the biggest surprise for me, and is actually the quality that I think most endeared me to the movie. <em>Inception</em> is a blockbuster through and through - a razzle dazzle, experience it in the theatre, race against the clock thriller that has no qualms whatever about what it's primary function is - to entertain. Yes, it certainly aspires to be a much sleeker, hipper, smarter variety of tent-pole that we are routinely saddled with, but it has no overarching ambitions to bludgeon you with philosophical insight or emotional catharsis. It undoubtedly has plenty of smart ideas underpinning the action, but remains at it's core a heist caper, a fun heart-stopper of intricate planning, unexpected complication, and inventively extended, multiple simultaneous cliffhangers. Movies like <em>Avatar </em>and <em>Inception</em> reflect a positive trend toward credible populist directors working on original properties, and both have revived a long dead art-form - the ability to show every penny on the screen, without being crass, vulgar, or dumb.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />This is a point that is worth dwelling on a little, because I think that some of <em>Inception</em>'s more ardent and vocal champions have essentially done the movie a disservice, by placing it within a context that falls way outside it's own scope and and set of goals. During the first wave of critical euphoria that greeted <em>Inception</em>, which was derived largely from from the web-based, geeky film community, Nolan was compared to Stanley Kubrick and David Lean, and the film itself likened to <em>Last Year in Marienbad</em>, <em>8 1/2,</em> and <em>Mulholland Drive</em>. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />This had the effect of saddling the picture with responsibilities and ambitions it had never claimed for itself. Detractors argued that <em>Inception</em> has virtually nothing valuable to say about the nature of dreams, or the dichotomy between dreams and reality. All of which would have been valid criticism, if this was actually what the movie was setting out to do. While it is certainly true that <em>Inception</em> deals to a certain limited extent with creativity and the film-making process, I think that Nolan's primary intention with this film was to have fun with ideas - not to lay out any kind of philosophical treatise or world-view. <em>Inception</em> utilizes dreams mainly to give two film narrative standards - the heist caper, and the noir motif of the protagonist staking out for a happy-ever-after ending on one last job - a new lick of paint, a 21st century freshness in the telling. (Again, I have to give kudos to Nolan this time around for maintaining a degree of classicism in his story-telling. Whereas <em>Memento</em> leaned very heavily on a chronological gimmick to make its story compelling, <em>Inception </em>simply adds extra layers and twists, and leaves the classic structure to stand on its own merits.)</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br /><em>Inception</em> utilizes dreams to invent an extravagantly entertaining game to be enjoyed by both director and audience. It asks <em>"How far can you take a premise?",</em> and proceeds to build its multi-storey narrative as a Byzantine house of cards, or a particularly perilous game of Jenga, from the top down. It asks <em>"How much second-guessing, how much narrative gamesmanship, can you generate by establishing a couple of ground rules or premises (dreams within dreams, implanted ideas)?"</em> It does this largely, I suspect, for the old-fashioned hell of it. <em>Inception</em>'s great virtue lies in its lightness of tone, its lack of pretension, and its unabashed desire to entertain. In stark contrast to the overwrought melodramatics of <em>The Dark Knight</em>, this movie has an exuberance, a playfulness, that is irresistible. David Thompson is a very fine writer of prose whose opinions on the moving image are as often infuriating as they are edifying. However, I think he has nailed the appeal of <em>Inception</em> bang to rights: </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />"So don’t be put off by the way millions are flocking to <em>Inception</em>—just study the ease with which these audiences are floating over the bits of plot they can’t follow, carried along by the witty good nature of the film. And that’s the crucial novelty".</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />"Christopher Nolan has tended to be a little gloomy in the past and that sometimes left him looking solemn. What really works in <em>Inception</em>—and means so much to the future of movies—is its grace, its ease, its happiness in being an entertainment and a game".</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br /><a name="detail_page"></a>"As I go back to it, and we all will, I think this truth will emerge, that amid its stunning visions of Paris folding up like a clever box and cliffs crumbling like abandoned tenements, it has the panache of a comedy. Leonardo and his gang do a great job with their inane task, but it could have been Laurel and Hardy getting a piano up those steps."</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />The closing sequence of <em>Inception </em>is easily my favourite thing Nolan has ever shot. Its one of those seamless, graceful fusions of performance, movement, and music. The astonishment on DiCaprio's face echoes our own shocked realisation that this has been a simple old story all along. After all the labyrinthine twists, the layers and the abrupt transitions, you find yourself in one of the simplest, oldest stories of them all: somebody trying to get home. And my favourite thing, in the whole movie, is the moment where Saito, having been lost for a lifetime in a limbo of illusionary being, takes about a second to orient himself to the complete reversal of his reality and age, and immediately <em>makes the call</em>. Its just pure storytelling; an apotheosis of hokum; the beautiful friendship of <em>Casablanca</em> re-dusted for a very brave new world indeed.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-74121409048840477962010-06-22T14:58:00.000-07:002010-06-22T15:26:01.113-07:00Guilty Pleasure: Oliver Stone's The Doors part 2<div align="justify"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCE0R9dPuGI/AAAAAAAAA3k/A-ShQeI9wOM/s1600/491_1.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 225px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5485723304273623138" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCE0R9dPuGI/AAAAAAAAA3k/A-ShQeI9wOM/s400/491_1.jpg" /></a><br />Oliver Stone cannot really be said to belong in the first rank of great contemporary American film-makers. Although he has continued to pursue a fascinatingly adversarial politics through the medium of documentaries, his directorial career has arguably been hugging the ropes since <em>Alexander</em>. There is no doubt that the courage exhibited on September 11 deserved a uncomplicated cinematic eulogy; yet it seemed somehow deeply disappointing that Stone should be the one to direct it. It was more like Spielberg or Ron Howard territory, and hardly seemed apt for a once energetic maverick who had always railed against the mainstream narrative. <em>W</em>. only compounded the sense of a director who had lost his edge: a film of potentially raw relevance that vanished in the brisk smoke of its own ephemera. His last completed project, a belated sequel to the wonderful eighties mascot <em>Wall Street</em>, looks from this vantage far more like a work of funding convenience than passion.<br /><br />Even at his peak, Stone never quite made the first rank. In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, his work had a frenetic pace, a vividness, that could produce something like the energy and fluidity of Scorsese at his best. (Both men were at different stages of their careers chronic cocaine addicts; it is likely that this drug's particular effects on the nervous system contributed something to the raw, sweaty, jittery intensity that characterizes both film-makers at their most vigorous.) Writing on <em>Natural Born Killers</em> in the <em>New York Times</em>, Janet Maslin nailed the director's signature style: "Mr. Stone's vision is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering." Perhaps overpowering is the operative word. Even at his best, Stone's energy lacked the vital degree of focus and concentration to make him one of America's really great directors. <em>JFK</em> is in many respects an astonishing performance; but in the final analysis there is too much energy, too much persuasion, too much passion in the picture. It overwhelms both its subject and its viewer.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCE0Fzc74QI/AAAAAAAAA3c/JkQdM7RK1h0/s1600/sjff_01_img0248.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 279px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5485723095429538050" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCE0Fzc74QI/AAAAAAAAA3c/JkQdM7RK1h0/s400/sjff_01_img0248.jpg" /></a> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />Yet, for all this, Stone was undoubtedly a vital, fascinating presence in American movies, and he had set for his cinema a grandly ambitious goal: to develop, from picture to picture, a sustained, deeply personal exploration of America's recent history. To this end, he dissected the Vietnam conflict in a trilogy ( <em>Platoon</em>, <em>Born on the Fourth of July,</em> and <em>Heaven and Earth</em>), presented the Kennedy assassination as a richly mythologised fall from grace in <em>JFK</em>, charted the beginnings of the conservative counter-revolution in <em>Nixon</em>, and explored that movement's apotheosis from a lateral perspective in the Reaganomic morality tale <em>Wall Street</em>. 1991's <em>The Doors</em> slots neatly into this tapestry of modern American history. It explores a facet of the sixties youth culture that was fortunate enough to avoid the trauma of Vietnam, but whose imagination was nevertheless distinctly coloured by the first properly interactive, mediated war; a facet of the youth culture whose explosive politics were to a large degree predicated on a brief, foolhardy rejection of the whole political reality and paradigm as it then stood. Stone's impressionistic rumination on the fast life and times of Jim Morrison unabashedly celebrates the hedonistic aspects of the sixties social revolution: his mythologised singer/outlaw undergoes a Dionysian adventure of self-discovery (and self-immolation) which is predicated on the constant transgression of boundaries and limits, and is most certainly not built for longevity. Neither glossing over or explicitly condemning the ravages of excess, <em>The Doors</em> is content to get high off the rough, exhilarating flames as Morrison's ship rises in the swell and goes just as swiftly to ground.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCEzmrSdwyI/AAAAAAAAA3U/7dmE0qpQq_8/s1600/the-doors-1991-kyle-maclachlan-val-kilmer-frank-whaley-kevin-dillon-pic-1.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 173px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5485722560662192930" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCEzmrSdwyI/AAAAAAAAA3U/7dmE0qpQq_8/s400/the-doors-1991-kyle-maclachlan-val-kilmer-frank-whaley-kevin-dillon-pic-1.jpg" /></a><br />Stone's intention is never to explore what made Morrison tick as a person, or to look too deeply at the more prosaic realities lying behind the music, the iconography, and the mythic excesses. <em>The Doors</em> is not merely about printing the legend, but basking in it. After a beautifully lit preface and invocation set during the recording of <em>An American Prayer</em>, the movie begins with the aftermath of the fabled Indian accident in the New Mexican desert in 1949. And Stone plays it as fable - it is depicted as Morrison, and not the rest of his family, publicly recalled the incident. Whether it really happened that way, or was he confabulating, or deliberately embellishing, is unimportant. For Stone, it plays as a super-hero's origin story, and from that moment on, Morrison is Superman - or, at any rate, the kind of cultural superman Stone wants him to be. There are no hurdles to be overcome, no growing pains, no formative experiences - the movie merely cuts directly to the mid-sixties, where Morrison is now a prototypical latter day beatnik, strolling down the highway to met his destiny with a book in hand, and a look of questing curiosity on his face. <em>Riders on the Storm</em> barely misses a beat.<br /><br />Interestingly, this shocking elision of the whole of Morrison's upbringing is in many respects fairly congruent with how Morrison himself lived his life. As soon as he had established himself as the Lizard King with the Doors, he effectively cut off his ties with family, claiming at one point in the press that his parents were dead. Later in the movie, he claims that his birth must have "happened during one of my blackouts", but in reality, Morrison cultivated his mystique carefully by consigning most of his past into a similar oblivion. That Stone should collude with his subject in this kind of personal myth-making bothers a lot of viewers. They see the role of the biographer as one that should <em>demystify</em>, should look at the man behind the screen. But the element of wilful fantasy in <em>The Doors</em> was was what made the movie so appealing to me as a teenager, and to a large degree, it's why I still have a lot of affection for it, despite its many flaws. Rock stardom is built on fantasy - built on the fact that the star himself performs a fantasy, and his fans partake vicariously in the fantasy through the star. And if <em>The Doors</em> is little more than Kilmer playing out his Morrison fantasy - as a proxy both for Stone and the audience - then this nevertheless seems to me to be perfectly congruent with the subject matter. An integral part of how we construct both cinematic fantasies, and fantasies of media stars and icons in general, is through the elision of dead time, through the cutting away of extraneous material, and through a sense of an identity that is carefully constructed, and seems to emerge fully formed when the cameras start to flash. After seeing Morrison on Kerouac's open road, we cut once again to Venice Beach, where a still-mobile Morrison emerges, in Roger Ebert's words, like "a young god from the sea." His subsequent courtship of Pamela (a fairly convincing but out of her depth Meg Ryan) is a total fantasy, which seems to have no antecedent prior to Stone. It is nothing more or less than a reverie of how they might have met one another, inspired by the song <em>Love Street</em> that plays over the soundtrack.<br /><br /><em>The Doors</em> concentrates essentially on three facets of Morrison's <em>persona</em>: on the singer as a narcissistic sex object and celebrity; as a morbid, mystical would-be poet, pursued by peripheral visions of dead Indians, and infatuated with the notion of his own death; and finally as a gargantuan booze hound, self-sabotaging clown, and all-around selfish prick. When the movie jells, it moves with seamless, propulsive momentum. At that point in his career, Stone was very interested in moving away from linear, classical styles of editing that take their cue from the script and the progression of the action or plot. (During post-production on <em>JFK</em>, Stone hired advertising editor Hank Corwin because his "chaotic mind" was "totally alien to the film form.") Like Scorsese, he was tremendously excited by the energy of popular music, by a type of film-making where the music, and the actual editing rhythms themselves, determine how the action progresses, how the movie moves from one scene to the next. <em>The Doors</em> encapsulates these ideas perfectly. Even outside of concert/recording scenes, there's scarcely a moment that isn't scored to song. At its best, the movie utilizes the adrenaline seduction/surrender of popular music to articulate a life cresting a wave of chaotic abandon. The concert scenes themselves are skilfully executed, mixing a strong sense of documentary verisimilitude with an added cinematic quality that captures the drama of each individual performance.<br /><br />All that said, <em>The Doors</em> is far from perfect. Despite Stone's obvious affinity for LA and the sixties counter-culture, there are quite a few moments where the details don't quite ring true. The handling of period is quite variable. Meg Ryan's speech about discovering that everything is beautiful on her maiden LSD voyage is a case in point. Now people certainly did speak that way in the sixties, but it feels almost a little lazy and obvious - like a writer whose only experience of the decade was via a couple of viewings of Woodstock. Similarly, the band's composition of Light My Fire feels rushed and very phony: <em>"F-sharp, A-minor, its Jazz!"</em> Kyle MacLachlan enthuses artificially. The thundering obviousness rears its ugly head again in the Warhol scene, where we are told that <em>"Andy says everybody is going to be famous for fifteen minutes", </em>ONLY THE MOST OBVIOUS FACTOID IMAGINABLE about Warhol.<br /><br />Now the Warhol scene itself opens up a whole kettle of worms. Overall, I quite like the scene - it captures brilliantly the feeling of being a <em>feted </em>rock star, floating around soaking up booze and attention, with the skewered world of fashion firmly at your feet. The camera work is great - you can almost taste the booze, and feel your head going. And I don't really mind that the ambience is a little more like a nineties club inspired by the Factory than the Factory itself. (The Warhol milieu is most effectively evoked in Mary Harron's wonderful low-budget gem<em> I Shot Andy Warhol</em>.) As perhaps an even bigger fan of the Velvet Underground than the Doors, my one major gripe with Stone's movie is its absolutely shameful treatment of Nico.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCEzXPUCpHI/AAAAAAAAA3M/5m6V_VFFTIE/s1600/nico.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5485722295454573682" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCEzXPUCpHI/AAAAAAAAA3M/5m6V_VFFTIE/s400/nico.jpg" /></a><br />Nico was undoubtedly a hot looking woman, but she was as far from the kind of vapid eye-candy Stone conjures up as you could possibly imagine. She had a strong, formidable, intelligent presence that held its own with any of the male rock icons. She wasn't assembly-line, average model type-beautiful, she was <em>striking</em>, in a manner that could be as eerie and austere as her voice. That Stone reduces her to a particularly bimbotic groupie, clad wholly out of character in a short skirt and fishnet tights, is inexplicable and inexcusable.<br />(One last thing on the Warhol scene: has anyone else noticed that when Jim is about to go in to meet Warhol, he appears to met <em>himself</em> on the way out? Its a weird little detail; I can't find a reference to it anywhere else.)<br /><br />Flaws aside, <em>The Doors</em> still has a lot going for it, and much of that comes down to a literally astonishing lead turn from Val Kilmer. The whole cast, for the most part, are excellent, but all the major characters have essentially the same role: the Doors themselves, like Meg Ryan's Pam, are played basically as dutiful boy-scouts who can't tame Morrison and can't quite cut loose of him either, and ultimately can't save him from himself. Among the smaller parts, I love Michael Madsen's surly turn as Jim's drinking buddy and trouble-making hanger-on Tom Baker, and Michael Wincott's appearance and three packs a day voice make his Paul Rothchild an utterly believable creature of the LA music scene. But it's Kilmer's picture through and through. Like Dustin Hoffman's performance as Lenny Bruce, the role required the imitation of a public figure both in his private life and as a stage-performer. Kilmer nails every detail: the alternation of his speech between soft, stoned whisper and gravelly, fire and brimstone baritone; the irresistible energy and narcissism of the "young lion" period gradually giving way to the lack of focus and occasional mean streak of the later years.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCEzMSHaSlI/AAAAAAAAA3E/S1qIiqFJx5E/s1600/491_5.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 225px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5485722107228342866" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCEzMSHaSlI/AAAAAAAAA3E/S1qIiqFJx5E/s400/491_5.jpg" /></a><br />Having lost the run of itself somewhat in the middle, <em>The Doors</em> ends on a strong, surprisingly affecting note. Incongruous in the midst of a children's party, a bemused and contemplative Jim sees a vision of himself as a child. The loss of our own childhood and youth is something we often see externalised in the sad decline of our idols. The American male idol seems particularly prone to these tragic falls from grace and beauty: Brando and Presley, Michael Jackson, Mickey Rourke, and others spring to mind. Morrison's story echoes this rise and fall in fast-forward. Oliver Stone's mediation on his legacy has drawn much criticism for its mythologising approach, but a large part of the attraction of figures like Jim Morrison lies in the fact that their lives were partially mythical anyway, and their identities remain inextricably wedded to the iconic aura they have created around themselves. Ray Manzarek has been particularly critical of the film, but it is arguable that his vision of Morrison - as a sensitive poet destroyed by the rough beast of his own fame - is itself just an other myth of a different stripe. Val Kilmer's unruly, unfettered force of nature feels closer to the Greek inscription on Morrison's tomb - "according to his own daimon" or "true to his own spirit" - and that's why <em>The Doors</em> remains a great rock n' roll movie, a dream spun in the rich darkness of the Californian sun.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCEyv-cbpVI/AAAAAAAAA28/kv-eFPSWi4Y/s1600/800-the-doors-blu-raylarge-the-doors--blu-ray4-792573.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 172px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5485721620911465810" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TCEyv-cbpVI/AAAAAAAAA28/kv-eFPSWi4Y/s400/800-the-doors-blu-raylarge-the-doors--blu-ray4-792573.jpg" /></a><br /><br /></div>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-14005708231361169202010-06-13T09:28:00.000-07:002010-06-13T14:07:07.780-07:00Guilty Pleasure: Oliver Stone's The Doors.<div align="justify"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TBUJVZSmGDI/AAAAAAAAA2w/e5kPtaWApis/s1600/jim-jpeg_sized-bestly.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 242px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5482298384564230194" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TBUJVZSmGDI/AAAAAAAAA2w/e5kPtaWApis/s400/jim-jpeg_sized-bestly.jpg" /></a><br /><strong>Part 1: drinking with number 3.</strong><br /><br />(This part is mostly backround stuff - I'll be discussing the film properly in the next post.)<br /><br />The late sixties gave birth to and defined a new cultural archetype: the rock star. There had been rock and roll stars before that, and a hell of a lot of musicians who behaved like rock stars. But in the later part of the sixties, the concept solidified into a distinct look, a distinct lifestyle, and a new mystique and mythology of heroic, life-threatening self-indulgence. The rock star was an archetype woven out of a variety of historical precedents, including the legacies of the Byronic poet/rebel, the bohemian hipster cliques of the Jazz and Beatnik fifties, and the strange cults of the beautiful, youthful corpse that had flourished in Hollywood around figures such as James Dean and Rudolph Valentino. The possibility of premature death is crucial to the mythos of the rock star; there is an air about it that is similar to the Spanish bullfighter, if you replace fighting a bull with living on a day to day basis with an insatiable appetite for whiskey bottles, blow-jobs, and whatever narcotic happens to float its way within arms reach.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TBUI82-G4gI/AAAAAAAAA2o/vaqUSRBoRsM/s1600/pi_331.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 298px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5482297963034632706" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TBUI82-G4gI/AAAAAAAAA2o/vaqUSRBoRsM/s400/pi_331.jpg" /></a> The rock star idea embodied a distinct look and attitude. It was a mixture of paradoxes: somewhere between an aristocrat and a thug lay the look that Keith Richards aptly labelled "elegantly wasted." Its sexuality was a paradoxical mixture of surly masculine bravado and androgynous high maintenance, a combination that would have gone, by the time of the hair metal bands of the eighties, into the stratosphere of high camp. Psychedelics imbued the rock star with aspirations towards a kind of mystical or mythic aura, but it was all subsumed into the idea of living perpetually on a precipice, into an adolescent fatalism that is well evoked by the chorus of the Blue Oyster Cult's seventies staple <em>(Don't Fear) The Reaper</em>. It was a very Californian, and more specifically a very Los Angeles phenomenon: a nightside mythology for a town whose wellsprings have always been fame and excess, and the liminal territories where sunny wish-fulfilments become tarnished nightmares.<br /><br />If you fed all of these elements into a computer programme, or some kind of Platonic blender, designed to yield up the prototypical rock star, it would probably produce something like Jim Morrison. Morrison grew up as an itinerant military brat, moving with his family from base to base around New Mexico and Southern California. His father was Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who would later command the U.S. Naval forces during the controversial Gulf of Tonkin Incidents which lead to the Vietnam war, making father and son ideal candidates for a zeitgeist-defining Oedipal clash in the latter sixties. As a child, he allegedly witnessed the aftermath of a road accident near an Indian Reservation, an incident Morrison later embellished into a personal mythology of shamanic possession.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TBUIraybtDI/AAAAAAAAA2g/g2qCE3RdbGo/s1600/tumblr_ku6tzn6xry1qzetzno1_400.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 256px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 384px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5482297663411696690" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TBUIraybtDI/AAAAAAAAA2g/g2qCE3RdbGo/s400/tumblr_ku6tzn6xry1qzetzno1_400.jpg" /></a> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />In 1965, Morrison washed up on Venice Beach, and quickly gathered about himself a much homelier looking, but virtuosic group of musicians who formed the Doors. Within a year, the band were playing at the legendary Sunset Strip rock club the Whiskey a Go Go. An early instance of Morrison's unpredictable stage theatrics got then fired, but ultimately immortalized in pop culture history. Peaking on an acid trip during their performance of <em>The End</em>, the singer improvised a succinct and mildly obscene summary of the plot of Sophocles' <em>Oedipus Rex</em>. Like fellow tragic youth icon James Dean before him, Morrison had drawn on his own fraught familial experience to articulate a universal generational conflict. And herein lay much of the potency of the Doors, circa America in 1967: at their best they almost unconsciously recast a ubiquitous sense of social upheaval and chaos into the dream logic of myth and apocalypse. According to Lester Bangs' critical but affectionate summary <em>Jim Morrison: Bozo Dionysus a Decade Later</em>: "In the end, perhaps all the moments like these are his real legacy to us, how he took all the dread and fear and even explosions into seeming freedom of the sixties, and made them first seem even more bizarre, dangerous, and apocalyptic than we already thought they were, then turned everything we were taking so seriously into a big joke midstream."<br /><br />The Doors rapidly became one of the biggest rock groups in America, an unusual cross-over phenomenon that encapsulated both mainstream appeal and something of the darker, underground gravitas of groups like the Velvet Underground. Much of the mass appeal came down to Morrison himself, who had quickly fashioned a template, an image and a persona, that innumerable lead vocalists and <em>poseurs</em> would attempt to tap for generations to come. Physically, Morrison had a remarkably symmetrical, high check-boned visage, framed by a mane of studiously tousled dark hair; it gave him the look of a spoilt, fallen cherub that fitted his Rimbaud/Baudelaire pretensions to perfection. His baritone voice had authority rather than range, and derived its impact more from actorly charisma than musicality. In performance, he lacked most of the basic rudiments of conventional stage-craft, but developed instead an explosive sense of dynamics, a poised, mesmeric slouch before the mike which is now a staple shape in the arsenal of the front man. He was the first of the pioneering rock stars to intuit the true morbid undercurrents of the emerging rock mythos, having provided in <em>The</em> <em>End</em>, <em>When the Music's Over</em>, and <em>Five to One</em> an unintentional preface and commentary on his own eventual demise and canonisation.<br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/cmv6cx-OAug&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cmv6cx-OAug&hl=en_GB&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />The demise, of course, was as swift as the apotheosis. Lester Bangs opined that the band had said everything they had to say on the first record, and were essentially floundering thereafter. This is certainly an overstatement, but once the Doors had fully mined their initial burst of creativity on <em>The Doors</em> and <em>Strange Days</em>, they never again exhibited quite the same degree of purpose and energy. Hunter S. Thompson's "wave speech" from <em>Fear and Loathing</em> eloquently evokes the brilliance and brevity of the sixties counter-culture explosion:<br /><br />"And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum - we were riding on the crest of a high and beautiful wave...."<br /><br />"So now, five years later, you can go out on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back...."<br /><br />After '68, the wave for Morrison was palpably in recession. His drinking had by then thoroughly crossed the crucial line separating youthful, romantic abandon and pure, crippling alcoholism. The on-stage theatrics had descended into a boozy, shambolic ghost of their former selves, and the Doors' latter gigs (and their aftermath in the law courts) played out like a farcical redux of the Square Community's long war of attrition against Lenny Bruce earlier in the Sixties. By the end of the decade, it was clear that not everybody was going to make it out at the other end of the first great Renaissance of the rock star. On September 18, 1970, Jimi Hendrix was found dead in a flat in Notting Hill, London; he was followed 16 days later by Janis Joplin. Morrison took to teasing friends that they "were drinking with Number 3." He gained weight, and grew a thick Manson-like beard. The Doors had recorded <em>LA Woman</em>, their last record with Morrison, in large part a bluesy, battle-weary hymn to the City of Lights, when Jim fled with his long-suffering girlfriend Pam to Paris in March 1971, never to return. His Number 3 joke had been uncannily prescient, as his death in Paris rounded off the mystical 27 Club of sixties rock icons who had all crashed along the road of excess at age 27.<br /><br />After that came endless revivals, and eventually a burgeoning Morrison cult which seems to afflict idealistic young adolescents with a particular intensity. (In 1981, Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman published the first Morrison bio <em>No One Here Gets Out Alive</em>, a work of unabashed idolatry that effectively became the gospel of the cult. For many youngsters, <em>No One Here Gets Out Alive</em> became what <em>On the Road</em> had been to Jim himself - a book that was to be absorbed and imitated, a talismanic field-guide on how life itself should <em>be</em>.) The fact that the Morrison mythos doesn't really survive too much sustained adult scrutiny is, to my mind, hardly the point. For a lot of young kids, including myself when I was growing up, Morrison and the Doors operate as a cultural gateway drug <em>par excellence</em>, a significant stepping stone to harder, more substantial substances. The Doors crystallise an incipient tendency in young people towards bohemian, or poetic, or philosophical pursuits, and provide in Jim an icon, an indelible image, to hinge these aspirations and fantasies on.<br /><br />This kind of iconography, of self-mythologising through the channels of contemporary media, is frequently misunderstood as something shallow or insignificant. In point of fact it remains a very powerful and fascinating cultural currency, a McLuhanesque fusion of medium and message. Personal iconography is an important facet of almost every art-form, but in the realms of movie stardom and popular music, it is virtually the lifeblood. The movie star and the rock star are both entities for whom physicality and personal magnetism are as important a constituent as technical accomplishment. Bob Dylan once said that when he first saw Elvis Presley, he <em>knew </em>that he would never work for anybody, would never have a boss. The reaction was visual - as much as Presley's talent was inspiring, there was also the crucial fact of how he looked, how he carried himself, and how you <em>felt</em> when you saw him. Iconic images have a peculiar power to influence and crystallize our own sense of self, a point expressed eloquently in Patti Smith's recollection of seeing Edie Sedgwick for the first time: "The first time I saw Edie was in <em>Vogue Magazine</em> in 1965. You have to understand where I come from. Living in south Jersey you get connected with the pulse beat of what's going on through magazines.....It was all image.....She was like a thin man in black leotards, white hair and boat-necked sweater. She was such a strong image that I thought, "That's it." It represented everything to me, radiating intelligence, speed, being connected with the moment."<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TBUIbWLBbmI/AAAAAAAAA2Y/P4KWc3WuGBs/s1600/300-edie-sedgwick.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 300px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 300px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5482297387294748258" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TBUIbWLBbmI/AAAAAAAAA2Y/P4KWc3WuGBs/s400/300-edie-sedgwick.jpg" /></a> </div><p align="justify"><br />Oliver Stone's 1991 movie <em>The Doors</em> has drawn extensive criticism, both from critics and the surviving Doors, for its larger-than-life, mythologising approach to the Morrison story. Ironically, for a film that is certainly leaden with flaws, this aspect may actually be its greatest strength - an awareness of the degree to which mythology, image-making, and narcissistic fantasies play such an integral rule in what rock music really is, and how it communicates its message to audiences. Similarly, Stone's fetishistic attraction to Morrison's self-destructive habits - few movies have depicted slugging straight from the bottle with such gusto - is a truthful reflection of the fact that rock heroism, like any outlaw mythos, is largely predicated on our ambivalent fascination with reckless excess and self-destruction. </p><p align="justify">Continued Shortly.</p>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-19279624497848962642010-06-02T18:23:00.000-07:002010-06-02T18:57:50.424-07:00A Strange Kind of Miasma: The Keep (1983)<div align="justify"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TAcFJ3qR5VI/AAAAAAAAA2I/fjZsJHoJokI/s1600/Keep3.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 297px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5478353138837742930" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TAcFJ3qR5VI/AAAAAAAAA2I/fjZsJHoJokI/s400/Keep3.jpg" /></a><br />(I haven't done anything with this blog for ages, so I thought I'd try to get back into it with a quick look at the dizzying highs and lows of Michael Mann's notorious "lost" WW2 horror movie.)</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br />Since all of Michael Mann's films have a strong quality of the subjective and impressionistic about them, it is interesting to speculate how effective his often dreamlike style would be in the context of more non-realist, or fantasy based, genres of film. Similarly, as a director almost unparalleled in the cultivation of atmosphere, and particularly in atmospherics of unease, tension, and looming violence, the horror movie seems like a particularly apt genre to capitalize on Mann's flair for for piling on dense, suffocating cinematic mood.<br /><br />Of course, we already have a Mann fantasy/horror movie, but it comes in the rarely seen, frustrating, and tantalizingly incomplete form of 1983's <em>The Keep</em>. From the perspective of right now, Michael Mann working in the kind of supernatural/magic realist territory we tend to associate with Gulimare del Toro seems like a prodigious anomaly - a freakish blip in the career of a director who has otherwise proven exceptionally focused on pursuing specific modes, milieus, and ideas in his cinema. But back in the early 80's, with only one theatrical feature under his belt, Mann was a sufficiently unknown quantity that his career could have went off in any direction. The direction it did take at that point was leaden with promise - a young director who had really hit the ground running with an assured début, highly respected source material in the shape of F. Paul Wilson's novel, and a dream cast - and yet the result was a financial and critical disaster that almost totally scuppered Mann's career. The studio weren't happy from the get-go, and chopped the movie down, if legend is to be believed, to roughly half the length of Mann's original cut. Critics couldn't resist unleashing the punning potential in the title (<em>Keep away from The Keep!</em> and <em>You can keep The Keep</em>!) and author Wilson decried a work that was "visually intriguing, but otherwise utterly incomprehensible." Mann moved on to one of the most lucrative and zeitgeist-defining phases of his career in television, and The Keep itself seemed to disappear back into the strange, misty miasma from which it had emerged.<br /><br /></div><p><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TAcE5OA7--I/AAAAAAAAA2A/sf4Bf3tk9CM/s1600/keep.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 282px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5478352852780579810" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TAcE5OA7--I/AAAAAAAAA2A/sf4Bf3tk9CM/s400/keep.jpg" /></a> </p><p></p><p align="justify"><br />But not quite. As anybody who has spent an inordinate amount of time watching horror movies of variable quality will tell you, ancient evils are never wholly vanquished. There is always some tremor of vitality, some faint possibility of a resurrection, left in the monster when the credits roll. Though it has yet to be graced with a proper DVD release, <em>The Keep</em> has acquired a small but significant cult following, it's legacy transmitted through faded, relic-like VHS copies from back in the day, a preferred liserdisc edition that preserves the film's often stunning widescreen compositions, and innumerable bootleg and pirated versions.<br /><br /><em>Keep</em> cultists fall into different categories. The movie has a strongly nostalgic aura for a lot of viewers who first imbibed the <em>Keep</em> as youngsters in the eighties. Horror movies were a big mainstay for children of the remarkably less media-savvy VHS era; the horror icons who adorned the video covers, including Freddy, Jason, Pinhead, and god knows how many others, were to a large extent a far more recognisable brand and talking point than actual flesh and blood actors. In some respects, as a creature both stereotypical and atypical of its time, <em>The Keep</em> taps this nostalgic vein brilliantly. It reminds you of a time when the audience's limited awareness of the movie/critical industry, coupled with the vagaries of video distribution, made renting movies from the video store a very unpredictable experience, a little like the grindhouse theatres eulogised by Tarantino and Rodriquez. The horror section indiscriminately mixed up anything from the big Wes Craven Hollywood franchises, to surreal, mind-bending European fare like Argento's <em>Phenomena</em> and Jodorowsky's <em>Santa Sangre</em>, to, well......an incomprehensible and operatic supernatural horror set during the Second World War, and scored to retro-futuristic perfection by Tangerine Dream. <em>The Keep</em> often feels like a hypnagogic fever dream of VHS era signifiers, awash as it is with inchoate memories of offbeat horror movies, the stylistic excesses of music videos, and more lasers than a Jedi street riot.<br /><br /></p><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TAcEfzY2m2I/AAAAAAAAA14/j1uZVSugDjk/s1600/fantastic38.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 296px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5478352416136403810" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/TAcEfzY2m2I/AAAAAAAAA14/j1uZVSugDjk/s400/fantastic38.jpg" /> <p align="justify"></a>Newcomers to the movie fall into three categories. Some dismiss it outright as an embarrassing train-wreak, while others regard it as an undervalued masterwork whose major flaws are most likely a product of aggressive studio mauling. Finally, the third group maintain a little of both perspectives, and enjoy <em>The Keep</em> as a mammoth cult oddity, a cultural artefact of almost otherworldly strangeness. Viewed by any standard cinematic criteria, <em>The Keep</em> is an endlessly intriguing mess, a film that veers unevenly between peak moments of visual and atmospheric brilliance, and troughs of overwrought, campy folly. It has ambition to burn: on a thematic level, it seeks to turn the standard horror dynamics to serve an exploration of weighty issues and more distinctly metaphysical terrors. The horror locked in the Keep (spoiler alert, for what its worth) is the horror that resides submerged in all men's souls, the latent will to power and capacity for evil than can usurp even the most seemingly noble aspirations. </p><p align="justify"></p><p align="justify">On an aesthetic level, the film is bolder still. Interviewed at the time, Mann described his intentions for <em>The Keep</em>: "I'd just done a street movie, <em>Thief</em>. A very stylized movie, but nevertheless stylised realism. You can make it wet, you can make it dry, but you're still on a <em>street</em>. And I had a big need, a big desire, to do something almost similar to Gabriel Gabriel Marquez's <em>One Hundred Years of Solitude</em>, where I could deal with something that was non-realistic and create the reality." Creating an internal dream logic and a heightened, deeply stylised dream reality was thus Mann's primary rationale for the <em>Keep</em>, and the result is a film as studiously artificial and aestheticized as the silent Expressionist horrors of Murnau and Karl Theodor Dreyer. </p><p align="justify"></p><p align="justify">Much of the cult fascination that surrounds <em>The Keep</em> derives from the fact that it does genuinely achieve a unique look and tone. Constructed in a giant stele quarry in Wales, with interiors shot at Shepperton Studios, the film's visuals make bold use of striking, minimalist set designs, a desaturated palette of greys (for the Keep itself) and whites (for the village), all lit by vintage 'Twenties arc lamps that created, in Mann's words, "a kind of Albert Speer-Mussolini monumental quality." Mann threw out all conventional wisdom with regard to period pieces, and scored <em>The Keep</em> with Tangerine Dream at their most mesmeric and ambient, creating at the films heart a weird fusion of German Expressionism and 80's futurism. (The combination of period and modernist ambient music also adds to the compellingly odd vibe of Herzog's <em>Aguirre</em>.) </p><p align="justify">The results of all this are mixed, but quite often hit the mark stylistically. There is more evidence of Mann's budding genius as a visual stylist to be found in <em>The Keep</em> than in the overall vastly superior <em>Thief</em>. The opening is magnificent: a jaw-droppingly long plunge down mist shrouded mountains and trees drops the audience into the middle of a military convey. Mann intercuts the arrival of the German <em>Wehrmacht </em>troops in the village with remarkably sharp, detailed close-ups of Jurgen Prochnow's eye-line, and abstract, eerie compositions of rock faces and skylines. There are many such eye-opening directorial flourishes throughout the movie. When a greedy German soldier burrows into the interior wall of the Keep looking for silver, the camera frames him hunched over a precipice, and then pans slowly back, and back, until he is a tiny speck in the darkness, and the still moving camera gradually traces out a Lovecraftian abyss of staggering proportion. The shot is completely unexpected, and a brilliant flourish of audacity and imagination. Even the <em>Keep</em>'s sex scene, cheesy though it may be, strikes me as having a weird beauty: with its icy electronic soundtrack and detached, precise compositions, Mann plays the scene less as a passionate romantic encounter, and more as weird, austere religious ritual. </p><p align="justify">Yet, as often as it works, <em>The Keep</em> falters and its excesses overwhelm. There are occasional lapses into amateurism, where dialogue is comically stilted and artificial. (The scene between the silver-grabbing soldiers before they are dispatched is a good example of this.) This kind of effect is well known to devotees of poorly dubbed Italian horror movies, but it seems somehow less forgiveable in an English language picture. The cast, overall, are quite variable. Jurgen Prochnow impresses me the most; his sympathetic, regretful Nazi remains believable throughout. Sir Ian McKellen, on the other hand, gives an uncharacteristically shrill and grating performance. Scott Glean is fine in a kind of extraterrestrial David Carradine way; Alberta Watson is likewise perfectly watchable, albeit not with a whole lot to do outside of deducting her truly extraordinary eyes from the special effects budget. Gabriel Byrne is memorable chiefly for his haircut. </p><p align="justify"></p><p align="justify">This brings us to a big question: how much of the <em>Keep</em>'s major flaws are a result of drastic studio cutting? Would an extended director's cut result in a markedly superior film? We can't tell, or course, but I suspect the answer to these questions could very well be in the affirmative. <em>The Keep</em> never adequately fleshes out either the village or the military occupation of the citadel as settings for the action. Similarly, the progression of the action itself feels truncated, unwieldy, and without a proper flow. The basic fact that Molasar is a kind of vampiric entity who is gradually acquiring wholeness through killing the soldiers is presented elliptically at best; I think I had to see the movie a couple of times before I even got that. (At least one Molasar attack seems to have been cut completely.) Most tellingly, Glaeken Trismegestus, who has top billing in the credits, and whom Mann described as the main focus of the film, is almost entirely chopped from the studio cut. His role is essentially reduced to that of otherworldly stud and <em>deus ex machina</em>. </p><p align="justify">With all this material missing, it's difficult to see how the film could have came together successfully, whatever its virtues or vices. A more fleshed out version of <em>The Keep</em>, with its melodramatic excesses placed in greater context, and spaced out by more of the slow-burn atmospherics that distinguish the studio cut, could be a different proposition entirely. Or not. As it stands, <em>The Keep</em> may be a frustratingly speculative experience, but it is an ideal cult film: a slightly hermetic, forgotten guilty pleasure with an utterly unique aesthetic, a sincerely ambitious film that falls somewhere between brilliance and high camp. With the current fascination for eighties electronica and surreal nostalgia prevalent among the hynagogic and hauntological music subcultures, <em>The Keep</em>'s cult gravitas seems more likely to grow than diminish. I would love to see an extended cut, but is seems unlikely to materialize any time soon. Hell, even a decent DVD or Bluray transfer would be nice, but Mann himself has more or less washed his hands of the film, and Paramount seems to have no interest in releasing it in any format. </p>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-10729503258725854462009-07-06T16:43:00.000-07:002009-07-06T17:29:43.818-07:00Dying Breaths: Some Thoughts on Public Enemies.<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SlKMs7rbJVI/AAAAAAAAAYA/Mee9vXyqJJk/s1600-h/34569584.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5355497610458899794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 323px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SlKMs7rbJVI/AAAAAAAAAYA/Mee9vXyqJJk/s400/34569584.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />I ain't gonna marry, I ain't gonna settle down,<br />I ain't gonna marry, I ain't gonna settle down,<br />I'll be around until the police shot me down.<br />Jimmie Rodgers.<br /><br /><div align="justify"><br />The electrifying final segment of Michael Mann's <em>Public Enemies</em> derives much of its charge from our awareness that we are watching John Dillinger's final hours. As in the final sequence of David Chase's <em>The Sopranos</em>, the steady air of impending catastrophe, of precarious mortality, makes a sequence of seemingly mundane events crackle with an electric tension. Our foreknowledge of the folk outlaw's impending doom gives his final acts a unique sense of focus, and the quality of a vivid epiphany. In many respects, however, this quality applies to the movie as a whole. <em>Public Enemies</em>, in essence, is an impressionistic record of the final months of John Dillinger, seen largely through his own eyes. With the stunning immediacy of its constantly roving cameras, the heightened sensitivity of its HD imagery to minute detail and the brilliance of natural light, its noteworthy lack of establishing shots, exposition, or backstory, <em>Public Enemies </em>plays out as a brisk, breathless epiphany of of life lived entirely in the present moment; life lived, as in Clark Gable's crucial dictum from <em>Manhattan Melodrama</em>, “all of a sudden.”</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">Yet, for all its propulsive motion and immediacy, <em>Public Enemies</em> is potentially Michael Mann's most subtle, sombre, and contemplative work. This film is haunted to its core by the bare fact of human mortality, in particular by what happens to the face and body in precisely the second that a person dies. Beginning with Walter Dietrich in the opening prison break, <em>Public Enemies</em> returns again and again to the final look the dying give to their living comrades, to something intense and wholly beyond verbalisation which passes through the eyes during the split second in which the person was there and then is gone forever. Dietrich (James Russo) has been fatally injured in the Crown Point getaway; Dillinger (Depp) holds his hand and he is dragged slowly along as the getaway car begins to pull away. Dietrich smiles with reckless, outlaw gusto, and looks very intensely into Dillinger's eyes. Then, in a transition which occurs almost too briskly to register, the eyes become glazed, and loll back lifelessly; Dillinger lets go, and Dietrich's body falls away into a plume of rising dust. (You need to see the movie more than once to realize how remarkably Russo plays this tiny scene.) <em>Public Enemies</em> follows a recent sequence of American popular art works, including the final episode of <em>The Sopranos</em>, <em>No Country for Old Men</em>, and to a lesser extent <em>The Assassination of Jesse James</em>, which have explored human mortality in stark, subtle, and highly original ways. Quoted in Jeffrey Wells' <em>Hollywood Elsewhere</em>, veteran critic F.X. Feeny argued astutely that “Mann is contemplating mortality in this movie, more directly and philosophically than ever before – and doing so in the Ernest Hemingway sense of action as philosophy.”</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><br /><em>Public Enemies</em> is a re-articulation, in bold twenty-first century technology and cinematic aesthetic, of archetypal American mythic materials. Its basic story follows a classic pattern: a charismatic, much-loved outlaw is finally brought low by a hired gun, by a company man who somehow better exemplifies the spirit of the times to come, where the folk outlaw embodies the receding, mythic past. This is the same deeply resonant pattern we observe in the stories of Billy the Kid and Jesse James: an outlaw who appears an almost supernatural force of nature is finally proven to be mortal, and his killer must live with the knowledge that though he has vanquished the legend, he will always be regarded as so much less than the legend. With this in mind, <em>Public Enemies</em> partakes of the same mythic intuition which informs all the great western elegies: that prior to the arrival of modernity and the corporatised, capitalist way of life, America was once a frontier where people could pursue an adventurous, individualistic path, and larger-than-life characters abounded.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">The western elegy shows the slow, subtle encroachment of modernity onto this mythic frontier, and celebrates the dying breaths of the older, mythic order. In <em>Public Enemies</em>, Johnny Depp's Dillinger is a man who is palpably out of time. As the movie progresses, we begin to see that despite all his courage and indomitable character, he is nevertheless a figure completely at the mercy of larger historical forces, an awkward hindrance to an emerging order in both the spheres of crime and crime prevention. Dillinger is rendered an anachronism both by the development of more sophisticated, scientific methods of crime prevention via J. Edgar Hoover's emergent F.B.I., and the increasing organisation and corporatisation of crime. <em>Public Enemies</em> gives us a fascinating glimpse into a time when all the most basic staples of contemporary crime prevention were extraordinary novelties, and we witness the brilliant initial ingenuity of tracing the location of criminals via the sale of a jacket, and primitive wire-tapping that plays on vinyl records.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">Working in tandem with this, the Chicago Outfit is becoming an increasingly sophisticated and corporate organisation; in one brilliantly succinct scene, Phil D'Andrea (John Oritz) shows Dillinger the future technological face of crime, in the form of backroom in which gambling scores are relayed to bookies before they are announced; all Dillinger sees is “a bunch of telephones.” Mann's conception of Dillinger can summarised in a couple of points. He is, as this scene brilliantly evokes, a figure out of time, but one who nevertheless constantly seeks to elude and escape time, by living so intensely in the present moment. He is a person with a singular relationship to his own myth. I think one of the things that fascinated Mann about the Dillinger story was the complex relationship between real and movie gangsters, the way both eagerly feed off one another, making the line between myth and reality increasingly blurred. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">In the case of Depp's Dillinger, we must infer everything about his inner life via his physicality and facial expressions. Everything he does outwardly is to a large extent the performance of myth. He talks constantly in the cadence of movies; his wooing of Billie Frechette ( Marion Cotilliard) is filled with the stylised, empathic bravado of movie stars, ending as it does with <em>What else you need to know' </em>s and <em>Now, whatta you think of that'</em> s. (This is not to say that Dillinger's constant performance of his own myth is not to a large degree an expression of his inner character. The two are indelibly linked, and this is why the scene in the Biograph is so brilliant, and crucial to an understanding of the character.) Dillinger's passionate self-belief and absorption in his personal myth could easily render him a foolish, blustering figure, but the sheer conviction with which he plays out his role is somehow deeply impressive. This is a career highlight for Depp, and one of the most charismatic, complex, nuanced turns I've seen by any actor in ages. Depp plays Dillinger as a man with an absolute conviction of having a personal destiny, coupled with an awareness that this destiny is not amenable to a long life. Throughout the movie, in a variety of subtle ways, Depp expresses an acceptance of this destiny which is alternately ecstatic and mournful.<br /></div><div align="justify"><br />I think that the final act of <em>Public Enemies</em> is the greatest thing both Mann and Depp have ever done. In the police station and the movie theatre, Dillinger sees two alternative ways of envisioning his life. The wall of the police station records his life from a cold factual, historical perspective. As the deep, mournful blues of Blind Willie Johnson cut in and out of the soundtrack, Dillinger registers that all of the pictures with the exception of his own are stamped Deceased. He knows that he will be joining his friends, sooner rather than later. In the Biograph theatre, watching <em>Manhattan Melodrama</em>, Dillinger sees a record of his life expressed in the language that he has always lived it: the language of myth. It is almost impossible to convey the brilliance of Depp's acting in the close-up shots which show his reactions to the movie: the mixture of deep happiness and pain that accompanies his recognition of Billie Frechette in Myrna Loy; the sense when Clark Gable utters the line about living and dying all of a sudden that Dillinger is serenely satisfied with his life, that living out this myth without compromise has been good enough. (It is important to stress that these are just interpretations; the wonderful thing about the scene is that it is endlessly suggestive, and leaves everything to the audience. The way Mann samples specific scenes from the movie, and raises the volume on lines which are particularly poignant to Dillinger, cut right through me; I don't know anything else that expresses so brilliantly the way movies communicate directly to us, and the way their mythic representations intertwine with our lives.)</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"><em>Public Enemies</em> has received every kind of review under the sun. It has proved equally divisive with audiences, although I suspect a majority have been appalled by its digital aesthetic and bored by its austere, minimalist approach to character. It's not <em>Heat </em>in the thirties, nor is it anything like a return to the more direct form of story-telling that Mann practised in the nineties. If anything, its more like <em>Ali </em>and <em>Miami Vice</em> in the thirties. Like <em>Ali</em>, <em>Public Enemies</em> never presumes to explain its central character, but rather encourages the audience to experience the world of that character through his eyes. Like <em>Miami Vice</em>, <em>Public Enemies</em> utilises state of the art digital video in a confrontational manner, in order to break down the barrier between cinema and direct experience, and to further explore a cinematic aesthetic of pure immediacy. What <em>Public Enemies</em> is is a radical overhaul of how period movies are made; a subtle, haunting rumination on mortality and the relationship of life with art that really takes a couple of viewings to fully absorb; finally, a reckless, fascinating example of deeply personal, arthouse filmmaking undertaken at the level of blockbuster mega-budgeting. It may die a death in the box-office, but it's built to last. What else you need to know? </div>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-61500316371241271092009-06-28T07:17:00.000-07:002009-06-28T07:26:50.178-07:00Summer 2009: The Decepticons are Winning.<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Skd8BT32OZI/AAAAAAAAAX4/TWAHAgP2BNs/s1600-h/michael_bay.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5352383044109351314" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 364px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Skd8BT32OZI/AAAAAAAAAX4/TWAHAgP2BNs/s400/michael_bay.jpg" border="0" /></a> <strong>Michael Bay</strong>: Invading Poland in a Theatre Near You.<br /><div> </div><div align="justify"><br /><em>Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen</em> is doing two things at the moment: filling theatres like nobody's business, and garnering some of the most vehement, passionately antagonistic reviews in living memory. According to Roger Ebert, who has sharp claws when he gets them out, “if you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination”. (One of Ebert's most illustrious pans was dealt to <em>Freddy Got Fingered</em>: “This movie doesn't scrap the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't even below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.”) Peter Travers of <em>Rolling Stone</em> gave <em>ROTF</em> an unprecedented no stars: “Disguised as a human director, Bay is actually a destroyer of dreams. When Hasbro invented these toys, the intention was for kids to use their imaginations about what these bots would morph into. Bay crushes that imagination with his own crude interpretations that seem untouched by human hands and spirit. I know there are still 17 months to go, but I'm thinking <em>Transformers 2</em> has a shot at the title Worst Movie of the Decade.”</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"><br />This critical drubbing is all the more extraordinary in that it comes at time when the bulk of mainstream criticism has, if anything, largely acquiesced to a logic of lowered expectation from Hollywood. The current Bay-hunt cannot be qualified as a politically correct knee-jerk reaction, either; the first <em>Transformers </em>received, by Bay standards, fairly warm critical notices. The overwhelming impression out there is that, this time around, Bay crossed some inalienable line in the sand, a line which had already made considerable allowance for his brand of aesthetic bankruptcy and venal stupidity. <em>ROTF</em> has drawn fire not only for its monumental bone-headedness and narrative incompetence, but for what appears to be a fairly blatant blast of negative racial stereotyping, in the form of charmingly monikered ghetto-bots Skids and Mudflap. This controversy, labelled “Racistbot Gate” in certain quarters, is a tawdry tale in itself. What's interesting is that nobody involved in the film has actually denied that the characters are offensive; instead an undignified game of pass the buck ensued. Writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman pointed the finger vaguely in Bay's direction: “Its really hard for us to sit here and try to justify it. I think that would be foolish, and if someone wants to be offended by it, it's their right. We were very surprised when we saw it, too, and it was a choice that was made.” Meanwhile, the Baylord himself, with whom responsibility for the final product really should lie, made a cowardly and incoherent attempt to pass it off on the voice actor: “We're just putting more personality in. I don't know if its stereotypes – they are robots, by the way. These are the voice actors. This is kind of the direction they were taking the characters and we went with it.” </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"><br /><em>ROTF</em> comes as the motherlode of a summer in which Hollywood has fallen deeper than ever before into a morass of geek-baiting franchises and hack directors. As all the major summer movies, with the exception of <em>Star Trek</em>, have registered massive fan/critical disappointment, the Dream Factory appears moribund, chasing dog tails of increasingly diminishing rewards. Everything is being resurrected, remade, rebooted; as soon a franchise is ailing, or has received the Schumacher kiss of death, the reboot is already in the works. (The logic seems to be to sooner throw away your own mother, than give up a pre-existing idea, or a recognisable brand, which has, at some point in the past, made money.) And<em> ROTF</em> seems like a test case, an experiment to gauge how low the bar can be set, to determine if the taste of mainstream audiences can be acclimatised to accept this absolute zero of vulgarity and inanity. As the box-office receipts and universal pans roll simultaneously in, the experiment seems to have yielded the natural next step after the critic-proof movie: an honest-to-goodness audience-proof movie. Bay's new movie seems like an open declaration of war to cinema lovers and idealists of every stripe. <em>Look at what I can get away with,</em> the Baylord seems to preen, <em>God awful filmmaking, and twenty-first century minstelry!</em></div><div align="justify"><em></em> </div><div align="justify"><br />Of course, summer block-busters are one of the less significant forces at play in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, they have a purpose and a value: they are barometers of mass cultural sensibility; they construct contemporary myths, and should, in an ideal world, inflame the imaginations of children and teenagers. With this in mind, its somehow deeply depressing to think that millions of youngsters this summer will unreflectively flock to <em>ROTF</em>'s noxious brew of militaristic destruction-porn, misogynistic ogling, puerile toilet humour, and border-line racism. The <em>Los Angeles Times</em> reports that as of today, <em>Transformers</em> should have grossed about 190 million, making it the highest ever five day take for a movie opening on a Wednesday. The Decepticons are winning.<br /></div>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-21366401395980249672009-06-23T08:07:00.000-07:002009-06-23T10:39:46.687-07:00Heat Part 2: Emotion and Detachment.<div align="justify"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDyDfB3DYI/AAAAAAAAAXg/MdEddemQf1U/s1600-h/heat_l.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350542498998979970" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 300px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDyDfB3DYI/AAAAAAAAAXg/MdEddemQf1U/s400/heat_l.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />The Opening.<br />One the main pleasures of repeated viewings of <em>Heat </em>is the discovery of a variety of smaller, unobtrusive moments throughout the movie which possess a significance or beauty which was not apparent in an initial viewing. The movie's opening thirty seconds are a good case in point. On the face of it, there's very little to write home about. Eliot Goldenthal's haunting, ambient score wafts in very quietly over the studio title. We see a static shot of an incoming train moving slowly through a smoggy landscape of smoke, neon, and steel. (This is, of course, the same rail system which would provide Tom Cruise with his metaphor for the disconnectedness of LA life in <em>Collateral</em>, and later the scene of his own demise.) Over a black background, the movie's cool, minimalist title card shimmers into view. We are then introduced to DeNiro's character Neil as he alights from the train, both in a long and close shot.<br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDx5bG6-0I/AAAAAAAAAXY/4Nd_ITSMxEw/s1600-h/heat-2-754936.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350542326147775298" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 225px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDx5bG6-0I/AAAAAAAAAXY/4Nd_ITSMxEw/s400/heat-2-754936.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />It doesn't seem like much at all, but in actuality this short passage, by a mixture of composition, design, and scoring, establishes the whole tone of the movie, which might be best described as a mood of precision and detachment, with a deep undercurrent of melancholy and longing playing at its lower frequencies. Instrumental in achieving this effect is Goldenthal's theme: it is a perfect aural expression of a subtle, but no less intense longing for emotional spontaneity and connection in a landscape which is cold, metallic, and geometrically precise.<br /><br /><br />The physical landscape in which <em>Heat </em>takes place is Los Angeles, which Mann and his cinematographer Dante Spinotti evoke with an otherworldly, almost sci-fi ambience recalling <em>Blade Runner</em>. According to Empire's Ian Nathan, “this is an urban milieu almost space-age in its abstract beauty, but emotionally desolate, a blank canvass against which the dispossessed act out their desperate dreams. Nothing anchors people – all the houses are stunningly angular, magnificent architectural vacuums free of personality.” Jean-Baptiste Therot provides a brilliant description of Mann's <em>mise en scene</em> in his essay <em>The Aquarium Syndrome</em>, which is worth quoting at length:<br />“Today, Mann is one of those rare filmmakers whose films succeed in delivering a vision of modern, urban America: those impersonal places, the freeways, suburbs, uninterrupted traffic, the America that Baudrillard calls magnificent and sidereal. This is a world of railway yards, neon signs that flicker night and day, a world that seems resigned to the omnipresence of glass and concrete. Mann renews from film to film, with a rare obstinacy, this cold, blue, geometric aesthetic, although it is sometimes broken up by an usual graininess, or lack of order that creeps into the system. Predominant here is the transformation of spaces into “no-places”: hospitals, hotel rooms, roadside cafes, vacant lots, airports, warehouses, empty apartments, are all subject to a sort of hyper-geometrization of the frame, inherited from the Don Siegel of <em>The Killers</em> (1964) and <em>Dirty Harry</em> (1972), and the formal experiments of Antonioni in <em>Red Desert</em> (1964) and <em>Zabriskie Point</em> (1970).”<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDxkIcQiII/AAAAAAAAAXQ/bt8gRmhdtqY/s1600-h/js13.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350541960359741570" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 314px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDxkIcQiII/AAAAAAAAAXQ/bt8gRmhdtqY/s400/js13.jpg" border="0" /></a> Case Study House 22, Los Angeles, 1960, photograhed by Julius Shulman.<br /><br /><br />To Therot's astute allusions to Baudrillard and Antonioni, you could also add the cold modernist sheen of J.G. Ballard's dystopian novels. With Antonioni and Ballard, Mann shares a deep-rooted attraction/repulsion towards the reflective surfaces and straight lines of contemporary urban architecture; with Baudrillard, a fascination with the contradictory qualities of artificiality and hyperrealism. (Mann's repeated foregrounding of transitory places and channels of conveyance, such as hospitals, hotels, warehouses, etc, reaches a greater extreme in <em>Miami Vice,</em> and is echoed in Olivier Assaya's criminally underrated <em>Boarding Gate</em> (2007), a film I would recommend for enthusiasts of Mann's films.) Later in <em>The Aquarium Syndrome</em>, Therot asks What kind of people live in these places? The answer provided by <em>Heat</em>'s intro is Neil McCauley, and again after repeated viewing you begin to realize how much of Neil's character is already sketched out with remarkable economy in the opening.<br /><br /><br />Alighting from the train, DeNiro's body language expresses the essentials of McCauley's character. We see a figure that is polished, precise, methodical, and interior; a perfectly austere master criminal in the mould of Jean Pierre Melville. (Later we learn that the extent of his spartan fastidiousness; his minimalist apartment is barely furnished.) In this regard, McCauley seems perfectly attuned to the steely, impersonal terrain in which he moves; however, his expression in close-up, accentuated by the soundtrack, suggests a degree of weariness and sorrow. McCauley later describes himself as “alone, but not lonely”, a description which seems, in the light of his courtship of Eady, only partially true. In the course of the movie, Hanna is forced to acknowledge that he cannot lead a meaningful life outside of his work. McCauley, on the other hand, has reached a point where persistent vigilance and personal vocation are no longer meaningful; like Jeff in Melville's <em>Le Samouri</em>, and Cruise's similar assassin in <em>Collateral</em>, he has the air of a weary ghost in the shell.<br /><br /><br />Before leaving the intro, it is worth considering briefly the title itself: <em>heat</em>. Heat refers most explicitly to law enforcement, to the perennial threat around the corner in McCauley's oft quoted credo. But the word also evokes passion, heightened emotion, and the complications of the emotional life; things which, in Mann's noir-tinted world, almost invariably prove as fatal as bullets. Much of <em>Heat</em>'s time is given over to the difficulty of maintaining relationships, or, in McCauley's case, the difficulty of being without one. As Mann puts it, once McCauley encounters Eady, he is “out there with the rest of us, in the realm where emotions become complex and motivation isn't simple.” The empathy between McCauley and Hanna is in part derived from the fact that they have both avoided the messy complications of emotional commitment throughout their lives, McCauley by way of spartan discipline, and Hanna by bulldozing his way through three marriages. Between themselves, they occupy a purely masculine order which eschews emotional complexity and vulnerability, but is nevertheless a cold world, characterised by conflict, fatalism, and dead bodies.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDxPC1K68I/AAAAAAAAAXI/N5PewqNEgkk/s1600-h/heat-3-755083.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350541598076365762" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 225px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDxPC1K68I/AAAAAAAAAXI/N5PewqNEgkk/s400/heat-3-755083.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Choices.<br />Anna Dzenis has called <em>Heat</em> an “epic crime film about two tribes and three couples.” Throughout its duration, <em>Heat</em> explores both the similarities, and conflicting demands, between membership of tribal and familial units. McCauley, for example, shows an interest in tight, cohesive family units when talking to Eady, and exercises a patriarchal role within his crew, being particularly paternal towards Chris (Val Kilmer). Hanna, on the other hand, succeeds in saving his step-daughter from an attempted suicide attempt. It is characteristic of him, however, that his proficiency is in precisely this kind of life-threatening crisis situation, the kind he encounters in work, but not in the everyday domestic activities of fatherhood. His allegiance is tribal, and orientated towards hunting, and the rest, as Diane Verona observes, “is the mess you leave behind as you pass through.”<br /><br /><br />In so far as Mann conceived <em>Heat</em> as a drama rather than a genre piece, its most dramatically significant moments are those in which the characters make choices. Some of the choices made in <em>Heat</em> are long meditated over, and clearly signposted as significant moments; others are brisk, spur of the moment, and not immediately resonant in a first viewing. In the first category, you think immediately of Hanna's decision, effectively the end of his third marriage, to answer the call in the hospital, or the split second pause later on when McCauley looks from Eady to Hanna coming around the corner. (This is the most mythically heightened moment in <em>Heat</em>, when McCauley looks in stunned disbelief at what had been an abstract code become a reality in every detail.) McCauley's real undoing occurs earlier, however, with a different choice. Driving away from the heist scot-free, he is informed by Nate that Waingro is still alive. According to Mann, this is the point where the action moves from probability to determinism. McCauley has his dream within his grasp, but also the opportunity to settle everything neatly, to avenge his crew. The car lurches under a tunnel, and for a split second the whole screen is bathed in a bluish white incandescence. He turns back. (The lighting effect was apparently accidental, but edited brilliantly to capture the lightening speed with which McCauley seals his fate.)<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDwbW6aFXI/AAAAAAAAAW4/A_SOJV8ZyVo/s1600-h/heat-20-755160.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350540710113842546" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 225px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDwbW6aFXI/AAAAAAAAAW4/A_SOJV8ZyVo/s400/heat-20-755160.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />It is also worth noting the choices of some of the secondary characters. The storyline involving driver Donald Breeden (Dennis Haysbert) has significantly less screen time than most of the other characters, but it is movingly evoked and acted. Breeden's relationship, along with McCauley's, is one of the few in the movie which isn't deteriorating, and you really feel for his attempts to build a modest, stable existence away from criminality. Later on, McCauley appears unexpectedly at the diner where he works, and offers him a quick escape from the petty frustrations and small, incremental victories of the “normal-type” life. Once again, a lightning fast decision is made, and a few hours later, Breeden is dead.<br /><br /><br />One of my very favourite of <em>Heat</em>'s smaller, more intimate moments is the last scene between Chris (Val Kilmer) and Charlene (Ashley Judd). At this point, their relationship seems all but over, and Charlene has been put in a position where betraying Chris to the police is an almost unavoidable moral imperative. When the moment comes, however, she finds to her own surprise that she cannot betray whatever tie remains between them. She makes a very slight gesture with her hand to indicate the trap. Kilmer's initial expression of exhilarated happiness becomes clouded and dazed, and without fully seeming to register what has has happened, he becomes, like so many other Mann protagonists, a solitary figure disappearing forever into the far distance. The scene is wonderfully played; the ability of Charlene to communicate something so succinctly with a gesture, and of Chris to respond so quickly and instinctively, tells you everything you need to know about the world they inhabit. It is also the sweetest, most hopeful moment in <em>Heat</em>'s otherwise leaden atmosphere of steadily encroaching doom. <em>Heat</em> is often interpreted as a story of men who eschew emotional commitment to women in favour of masculine camaraderie, and games of skill and prowess which ultimately prove fatal and destructive to all connected with them. However, Chris' assertion “For me, the sun rises and sets with her” is a counter-argument, a rejection, of McCauley's credo of non-attachment: “Do not have anything in your life that you are not prepared to walk away from in thirty seconds flat, if you feel the heat around the corner.” In the end, it seems justified since theirs is the only relationship with any potential “future” after the end of the movie. (Of course, whether they do have a future together or not is rendered academic by the strange magic of cinematic closure. I love the scene precisely because this wordless, ambiguous exchange is the end of their story.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><div><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDwHxDebFI/AAAAAAAAAWw/nQumb0pgVWg/s1600-h/heat-5-755046.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350540373533813842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 225px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SkDwHxDebFI/AAAAAAAAAWw/nQumb0pgVWg/s400/heat-5-755046.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Closing.<br />“<em>Heat</em> is awash with death and a sense of pathos from the very start. It is as if the end is already enacted at the beginning, and the characters are like ghosts that walk through this dream world.”<br />Anna Dzenis.</div><div></div><div><br />One of the things I admire most about <em>Heat</em>, and about Mann's work in general, is its particular sensitivity to mood and tone; its ability to create, by a combination of scoring, <em>mise en scene</em>, dialogue and performance, a very specific filmic world or universe. Anna Dzenis comments on this quality with relation to <em>Heat</em>: “<em>Heat </em>is more than just a crime story. It is a dreamscape – a poetically rendered world.” This remains the most intriguing paradox about Mann's films – the obsession with realism, verisimilitude, and research, as against the sense, particularly in his crime films, that one is in, as Dzenis puts it, “a poetically rendered world.” This is particularly evident in Diane Verona's speech in <em>Heat</em>: “You don't live with me. You live among the remains of dead people. You sift through the detritus. You read the terrain. You search for signs of passing, for the scent of your prey, and then you hunt them down. That's the only thing you're really committed to. The rest is the mess you leave behind as you pass through.” There is little attempt to capture the cadence of actual speech here; rather, the effect is poetic, and almost akin a piece of musical score, in way it contributes to/articulates the tone and mood of the film. </div><div></div><div><br />As much as <em>Heat</em> draws from real events, and specific, concrete things which Mann encountered in research, the movie is also a carefully modulated tone poem, an exploration of the perennial male anxiety with regard to emotional commitment; a noir world in which the heat around the corner is always complex, difficult emotions, and the real danger is perhaps derived from the unavoidable necessity to open one's self up, to become vulnerable, to acquire something in life that you cannot abandon, no matter what the consequences. Thematically and tonally, <em>Heat</em> moves between opposing poles of emotion and detachment, as all of Mann's major characters seem caught between the alternate pull of <em>heat </em>(passion, connection, life-force) and <em>coldness</em> (sterility, conflict, detachment, the dead bodies that haunt Hanna's dreams).</div><div></div><div><br />This dichotomy cuts through the whole of <em>Heat</em>; it is evident in the movie's tendency to view landscape from a wide, abstract vantage, and human faces and bodies in extreme, intimate close-up; in Mann's attitude towards his characters, which is at once one of complete emotional engagement, and cerebral detachment. <em>Heat</em>'s conclusion, heavily redolent in its action of the similar airport chase that concludes Peter Yates' s <em>Bullitt</em>, is no exception. McCauley and Hanna, both unable to attain the more rewarding existence offered by their domestic attachments, are finally drawn to their inevitable duel, to the testing of the principals each expressed earlier in the cafe scene. More than this, they are reabsorbed into the movie's steely, geometric terrain, McCauley back into the landscape from which he emerged at the beginning of the film. As foreshadowed in Diane Verona's speech, he is betrayed by a shadow cast by floodlights, a trace or a “sign of passing” rather than his own person. It is an overwhelmingly hollow victory for Hanna; for him, as for McCauley's crew, the “action <em>is </em>the juice”, the end an abstraction that facilitates the thrill of the chase. As J.A. Lindstrom points out in a fine essay <em>Heat: Work and Genre</em>, the ending of <em>Heat</em> leaves the quintessential Mann dichotomy between work and domesticity without any hope of resolution:<br />“The film's resolution offers us the grim notion that work requires abandoning those we care about; and then it will probably kill us. Choosing not to sacrifice home life will not, however, insulate a relationship from harm. Thus the accommodation to the status quo that the genre film normally offers to its audience is a bitter pill in <em>Heat</em>: work rules fatally, and proclaiming the importance of our personal lives will not rescue us from professional demands.”</div><div></div><div><br />If <em>Heat</em> refuses its audience a neat resolution to its thematic concerns, however, it attains near perfection in terms of aesthetic resolution. The final shot, echoing the first, is wide, equisitely composed shot of Hanna holding Vincent's hand, tempering the potential melodrama of the moment by viewing them from behind, in a pictorial, almost impersonal framing. The brilliant inclusion of Moby's <em>God Moving Over the Face of the Waters</em> feels like a final release of all the emotion that had been pent-up and submerged beneath <em>Heat</em>'s polished and precise exterior; as an ending it is both melancholy and strangely exhilarating, such is its fine balance between emotive outpouring and abstract formal precision.<br /><br /></div><br /></div>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-8882146907046053892009-05-27T17:07:00.001-07:002009-05-27T19:27:39.743-07:00Heat (1995). Part 1: Both Sides of The Law.<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sh3WFFGdSiI/AAAAAAAAAT4/ls4JSxaSbmM/s1600-h/e389592e862974a85f3e88e1abdd05f0.jpeg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 398px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sh3WFFGdSiI/AAAAAAAAAT4/ls4JSxaSbmM/s400/e389592e862974a85f3e88e1abdd05f0.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5340660115888228898" border="0" /></a>While he was directing his debut <span style="font-style: italic;">Thief</span>, and later producing <span style="font-style: italic;">Miami Vice</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Crime Story</span> for television, Michael Mann conducted on-going and in-depth research into the private and professional lives of law enforcement officers and criminals. As he put it himself: "I like to move through a subculture until I feel the colors and patterns and tones and rhythms of the lives of the people and place." Mann's hands on approach brought experienced operators from both sides of the law into the acting fold: Dennis Farina and John Santucci both had small parts in <span style="font-style: italic;">Thief</span>, and larger roles in <span style="font-style: italic;">Crime Story</span>. Farina had been a Chicago cop for eighteen years, and Santucci a skilled jewel thief. It was within this extended fraternization with the law's enforcers and truants that Mann discovered the genesis for <span style="font-style: italic;">Heat</span>. Chuck Adamson, another veteran police officer, was an old friend of Mann whose experiences on the beat formed much of the template for <span style="font-style: italic;">Crime Story</span>. During the sixties, Adamson had shared a coffee with a thief named McCauley; the pair enjoyed one another's company, despite an acute awareness that an encounter under different circumstances could prove fatal for one of the two men. Later on in '63, Adamson was called to the scene of an armed robbery, and shot McCauley six times.<br /><br />This simple enough anecdote, an insight into the shades of grey that inevitably inhere into even the most adversarial relationships, seemed to haunt Mann, and gradually developed in his mind into what is for many people the quintessential Mann narrative: the story of two lonely, driven men who occupy opposing sides of the law, and who, despite extraordinary differences of character and temperament, recognise in one another both a mutual dependence and an essential similitude. Contrary to the interpretation of <span style="font-style: italic;">Heat</span> frequently espoused by the critic David Thompson, the purpose of this dynamic was by no means to suggest an moral equivalence between the two characters, or even to suggest that they are particularly alike in most respects. Rather, as Mann said himself: "I heard that the detective had some kind of rapport with McCauley, and that was the kernel of the movie. It would be trite to say that they were the flip side of the same coin. McCauley and Hanna share a singularity of intelligence and drivennes, but everything else about their lives is different." <span style="font-style: italic;"> Heat</span> was thus about a rapport, an empathy, and a respect between two adversaries, predicated on a shared, perhaps emotionally debilitating commitment to their perspective vocations.<br /><br />Again, as with Frank in <span style="font-style: italic;">Thief</span>, we can read these characters in variety of ways. They share with Frank the same contradictory mixture of intense self-affirmation and self-abnegation and defeat. We can read them as expressions of the perennial American myth of rugged masculine individualism, transposed onto the complex, impersonal urban architecture of the postmodern world. We can see them as cops and robbers proxies for the experience of the artistic vocation, in a manner which explores the inherent alienation of artists and others who possess a particularly intense absorption in their work, and the close proximity of this absorption to forms of obsessive compulsion and autism. Mann has referred to McCauley as a "highly-organized sociopath", and Hanna as "extremely dysfunctional". Their relationship in <span style="font-style: italic;">Heat</span> is a battle of prowess, a cat and mouse game, and, as Sergio Leone described <span style="font-style: italic;">Once Upon a Time in the West, </span>a long and stately "dance of death."<br /><br /><br />Mann is known for working slowly and spending a long time in research, but of all his projects, <span style="font-style: italic;">Heat</span> probably had the longest period of gestation. Some form of the script seems to have existed since 1986. In 1989, Mann shot a compressed version of the script in two weeks as the low budget television movie <span style="font-style: italic;">L.A. Takedown</span>; it was a proposed pilot for an NBC series which never materialised. (I can never bring myself to watch <span style="font-style: italic;">L.A. </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Takedown</span>, since it has been so thoroughly bettered by its later incarnation. The Al Pacino role is played by an actor called Scott Plank, who apparently gives a pretty decent performance, despite possessing the most unfortunate surname imaginable for a thespian.) The precise details of how the script evolved are unknown to me, but by the time it reached the big screen in 1995, <span style="font-style: italic;">Heat</span> had blossomed into arguably Mann's most complex, ambitious, and nuanced script. Working within an elegantly precise three-act structure, Mann had branched out <span style="font-style: italic;">around</span> his two central protagonists, weaving a complex tapestry of secondary characters and domestic sub-plots. While no-one would classify Mann alongside Chekhov as a delineator of psychology, or suggest that his dialogue has quiet the muscular sonorities of a David Mamet, he had nevertheless done a stunning job of fleshing out close to twenty characters, and turning the typical prioritization of genre cinema towards plot mechanics and action on its head. In Mann's script, the characterization, the interaction of the secondary characters, and the languorous, contemplative moments, were as crucial as the action set-pieces, and the final film attains an extraordinary fluidity in the way it moves between alternately romantic, melancholy, and kinetically violent registers.<br /><br />In its journey from NBC to Hollywood, <span style="font-style: italic;">Heat</span> had also acquired an immense ensemble cast, and orchestrated an unprecedented casting coup: the first together on-screen pairing of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. The significance of this was two-fold. For movie lovers, De Niro and Pacino were emblematic, iconic figures of the extraordinary creativity and artistic integrity which had characterised the New Hollywood movement of the seventies. American cinema experienced something truly remarkable in that decade, which each successive generation has only served to render more unprecedented, and more worthy of our rueful nostalgia. Establishing themselves in roughly the same years as Nicholson, Hackman, Hoffman, Beatty, and Warren Oates, De Niro and Pacino had nevetheless carved out the greatest niche in the mythos of naturalistic American movie actors since Brando created the template in the fifties.<br /><br />Pacino was a lean, lanky, cherub-faced kid with an air of street-savvy; back then, he was as comfortable with composure and austerity (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Godfather Part 2)</span> as he was with demonstrative physicality (<span style="font-style: italic;">Dog Day Afternoon</span>). De Niro was harder to pin down. In his early years he appeared as a blank slate whose only common denominator was a certain air of purpose and drivenness in performance. He could do a kind of weedy klutziness very well, and also a quality of power, of suppressed ferocity, with an equal faculty. He combined these contradictory qualities as Travis Bickle in <span style="font-style: italic;">Taxi Driver</span>, in what remains his most shattering performance. As the seventies passed into the eighties, he had gathered about himself a fearsome legend of obsessive dedication, of physical plasticity and protean disappearance into character. His stock-in-trade, as with the young Brando, became playing volatile, insecure, inarticulate men.<br /><br />Also, as De Niro and Pacino possessed a special resonance to American cinema in its last truly robust and artistically rigorous period, they had also developed a mythic stature within the crime genre. A fresh-faced Pacino had played a hipster cop fresh out of the academy in <span style="font-style: italic;">Serpico </span>(1973), and laterly the more wizened, world-weary variety in<span style="font-style: italic;"> Sea of Love</span> (1989). On the other side of the law, he had played Brian de Palma's cartoonish Cuban <span style="font-style: italic;">ubermench</span> Tony Montana in <span style="font-style: italic;">Scarface</span>, and his older, more contemplative and soulful Hispanic cousin in the same director's <span style="font-style: italic;">Carlito's Way</span>. De Niro, unlike the majority of major American movie stars, tended to steer towards flawed, if not pungently unpleasant characters, and thus spent most of his time on the wrong side of the law. In the seventies, his star took flight as the small-time hoodlum and eternal hustler Johnny Boy in <span style="font-style: italic;">Mean Streets</span>; he played a virile, brill-creamed Vito Corleone for Coppola, a paunchy, petulant Al Capone for de Palma, and also took the lead in Scorsese's nineties crime epics <span style="font-style: italic;">Goodfellas</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Casino</span>.<br /><br />For these reasons, it was particularly apt that these two actors should embody Mann's battle of prowess between two aging, obsessive, and preeminent professionals. It added a charge to the eventual encounter in the diner which had a rich resonance outside the drama of the movie. As their characters circle around one throughout <span style="font-style: italic;">Heat</span>, De Niro and Pacino had hovered about one another for years, both in terms of professional stature, and iconic roles in American cops and robbers movies. The eighties and the nineties were to a large degree a twilight of the idols for the seventies auteurs. When De Niro and Pacino made <span style="font-style: italic;">Heat</span>, their titanic stature was still more or less intact, but both, also, were on the slide: Pacino into exaggerated self-parody and the unfortunate status of an in-joke, and De Niro into a perhaps more lamentable condition of sheer disinterest. The sly sparring and defiant expressions of dedication to vocation expressed in the diner scene are thus both "a mythic moment", as David Denby asserted, and a sad reminder of the many years yet to come between these great actors and the height of their prowess.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sh3uNjQaLZI/AAAAAAAAAUA/kGshJDr5JJQ/s1600-h/massive-movie-match-ups--20080402005125600-000.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sh3uNjQaLZI/AAAAAAAAAUA/kGshJDr5JJQ/s400/massive-movie-match-ups--20080402005125600-000.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5340686649701051794" border="0" /></a>To be concluded shortly.<br /><br /></div>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-22252987823549657692009-04-27T19:43:00.000-07:002009-04-27T20:00:00.743-07:00Divorcing the Mob: Gomorrah and the Deglamorisation of Organised Crime.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SfZtqZYUKzI/AAAAAAAAARg/wLa_eDDdmyM/s1600-h/11212_gomorrah.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 257px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SfZtqZYUKzI/AAAAAAAAARg/wLa_eDDdmyM/s400/11212_gomorrah.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5329567784174365490" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Matteo Garrone’s <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city> (2008) is a searing, quietly seething polemic against the toxic influence of the Camorra mob on all sections of society in <st1:city><st1:place>Naples</st1:place></st1:city>.<span style=""> </span>Dating back to at least 1471, the Camorra is the oldest criminal organization in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Italy</st1:place></st1:country-region>, and remains an insidious, all-pervasive presence in <st1:city><st1:place>Naples</st1:place></st1:city>, particularly in the high-rises and slum-areas that <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city><i style=""> </i>concentrates on.<span style=""> </span>Much of its power, and explosive volatility, derives from the fact that it has never been a coherent, centralized organization.<span style=""> </span>Differing from the pyramidal power structure of the Mafia, the Camorra is a loose, horizontally organized confederation of families and mobs.<span style=""> </span>This means that bloody feuds are rifle within the organization, and it remains particularly difficult to combat: according to the testimony of Camorra boss Pasquale Galasso, “<st1:state><st1:place>Campania</st1:place></st1:state> can get worse because you could cut into a Camorra group, but another ten could emerge from it.” </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span><st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city> articulates this pervasive, hydra-like social corrosion of the Camorra through a multi-generational quintet of interrelated narratives, concentrating on the fortunes of a group of low to mid-level players, in a style not dissimilar to that employed by David Simon in <i style="">The Wire</i>.<span style=""> </span>Toto is a thirteen year grocery boy who is just starting out in the gang-fraternity; in a striking initiation sequence, he and a group of youths are shot at close range while wearing bullet-proof vests.<span style=""> </span>Marco and Ciro are a pair of slow-witted, hapless would-be gangsters in their adolescence, whose cartoonish conception of criminality is derived chiefly from de Palma’s <i style="">Scarface</i>.<span style=""> </span>Don Ciro is a terse, timid middle-aged Camorra delivery man who brings money to the families of imprisoned gang-members, dispassionately doing his rounds in the blasted, crumbling housing blocks that form the film’s primary <i style="">milieu</i>.<span style=""> </span>The bosses remain tangential, incidental figures, and in this way Garrone conveys a strong sense of the Camorra as an inescapable net stretched around every facet of Neapolitan society and social life; a contagion or a cancer that dovetails neatly with the plot involving toxic pollution. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>I found <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city> to be a puzzling experience as a viewer and critic.<span style=""> </span>It is undoubtedly commendable as a social document and galvanizing polemic.<span style=""> </span>More than that, it’s a faultlessly directed and acted film.<span style=""> </span>Garrone resolutely avoids glamorizing or excessively egging-on his subject matter; his approach as a film-maker is admirably controlled and clinical, and his utilization of the multi-strand narrative is a model of clarity and cumulative effect, in stark contrast to the convoluted jigsaws of Guillermo Arriaga and his elk.<span style=""> </span>Nevertheless, at the end of the movie, I didn’t feel particularly incensed, or depressed, or inspired to any large degree.<span style=""> </span>Instead, <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city> got me thinking about the strange, contradictory relationship we have maintained with mobsters on the screen, and the competing demands of social responsibility and cinematic art.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>One of the most striking aspects of <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city>, for international audiences at any rate, has been its blunt rejection of the various degrees of romanticism, identification, or ambiguity which have characterized representations of organized criminals in the past.<span style=""> </span>In its opening sequence, a massacre which tellingly takes place in a tanning salon, Garrone indicates that his mobsters will be far more Paulie Walnuts than Michael Corleone. <i style="">Gomorrah</i>’s mobsters, when we encounter them, are for the most part ugly, narcissistic, and resolutely tasteless individuals, who possess none of the august sanguinity of Coppola’s iconic gangsters.<span style=""> </span>And this, of course, is the pivotal part of <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city>’s strategy as a movie: it seeks to document and condemn the consequences of organized crime, and move as far as possible away from the contradictory allure which seems to inhere in other crime cinema.<span style=""> </span>This, naturally enough, became something of a critical by-line for the movie.<span style=""> </span>According to Scot Tobias at the A.V. Club: “Say this for Matteo Garrone’s <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city>: It succeeds in siphoning every ounce of glamour out of gangster life”; and Roger Ebert: “The film is a curative for the romanticism of <i style="">The Godfather</i> and <i style="">Scarface</i>”. <span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>It certainly struck me, while watching <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city>, the extent to which charismatic and sympathetic sociopaths form as innate a part of our cultural heritage as boy meets girl stories.<span style=""> </span>You become very aware of them, by virtue of their absence in Garrone’s movie.<span style=""> </span>The reasons for this abiding fascination are complex and multifaceted.<span style=""> </span>On the one hand, the cinema has always provided us with the opportunity to identify with, or vicariously experience, a variety of activities and choices which we are compelled to eschew and condemn in real life.<span style=""> </span>Wes Craven has often utilized evolutionary psychology to explain the paradoxical appeal of horror cinema.<span style=""> </span>He argues that since aggression was so instrumental in making us an adaptive, successful species, so a small part of our brain remains in that reptilian, amoral, pre-civilized mode, and craves sensations that our societal superego can’t sanction. <span style=""> </span>Tarantino expresses a similar sentiment, with characteristically less eloquence, when he said that violence was deplorable in real life, but “cool” in movies.<span style=""> </span></p> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SfZvBuGbWMI/AAAAAAAAARo/bxEFlgAv74U/s1600-h/godfather.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SfZvBuGbWMI/AAAAAAAAARo/bxEFlgAv74U/s400/godfather.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5329569284385102018" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">On the other hand, I think people are intensely fascinated by contradictions, and contradiction forms the major kernel of our abiding mobster obsession.<span style=""> </span>The ability of gangsters to lead double lives – to be ordinary loving, familial creatures in one situation, and cold-blooded sociopaths in another – persists, from <i style="">The Godfather</i> to <i style="">The Sopranos</i> – as a major component of our popular mythology of the mob.<span style=""> </span>If one traces the representations of organized crime – from the <i style="">Godfather</i> through <i style="">Goodfellas</i>, to contemporary television milestones like <i style="">The Sopranos</i> and <i style="">The Wire</i>, we begin to see that the mob mythology has been constantly evolving, investigating its own assumptions and validity, and moving perhaps inevitably towards a movie<i style=""> </i>like<i style=""> Gomorrah</i>. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>It is important to note that none of <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city>’s significant predecessors unambiguously celebrate or glamorize mafia life.<span style=""> </span><i style="">The Godfather</i>, which we now tend to regard as a highly aestheticized depiction of organized crime, is nevertheless a movie with a strong moral outlook.<span style=""> </span>Viewed as a <i style="">bildungsroman</i> of Michael Corleone, the <i style="">Godfather</i> movies represent an excoriating depiction of the corruptive poison of patriarchal and political power, both in the family unit and American society as a whole.<span style=""> </span>Nevertheless, as a condemnation of crime, the moral shrinks in the face of painterly beauty, Machiavellian intrigue, and Shakespearian, operatic passion.<span style=""> </span>The tragedy of the <i style="">Godfather</i> movies are experienced <i style="">through</i> the Corleones themselves, and not their victims.<span style=""> </span>In this sense, the <i style="">Godfather</i> remains a romanticized experience of the criminal underworld, and this, no doubt, is why real Mafiosi enjoy it so much.<span style=""> </span>(Something very similar happens with anti-war movies like <i style="">Apocalypse Now</i>, which apparently generals and military people adore.)</p> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SfZvsfEyK7I/AAAAAAAAARw/2DYzcLr0Quo/s1600-h/Goodfellas.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 291px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SfZvsfEyK7I/AAAAAAAAARw/2DYzcLr0Quo/s400/Goodfellas.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5329570019086052274" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style="">Goodfellas</i> represented a major move towards greater realism.<span style=""> </span>Narrated in a sprawling, episodic fashion, it couldn’t have been less a Greek/Shakespearian tale of power, corruption, and redemption if it tried.<span style=""> </span>Scorsese’s mobsters, for the most part, were foul-mouthed, hedonistic, and emotionally stunted thugs.<span style=""> </span>Many significant aspects of the <i style="">Sopranos</i>, including the tasteless wardrobes and intellectual paucity of Paulie and Christopher, the messy randomness of the violence, and the prevalent tone of black humor, derive ultimately from <i style="">Goodfellas’</i> considerable contribution to the mob mythos.<span style=""> </span>In stark contrast to the <i style="">Godfather</i>, which stressed the cohesive bond of familial attachments, <i style="">Goodfellas</i> depicted its criminals as wedded ultimately to the adrenaline of committing crime, the luxuries resultant form it, and, in times of stress, concerned strictly with their own self-interest.<span style=""> </span>And yet, while <i style="">Goodfellas</i> does much to deglamorise the mobster in comparison to Coppola’s treatment, the ambiguities not only remain, but become even more pronounced.<span style=""> </span>Everything I’ve just written can be easily <i style="">inferred</i> from <i style="">Goodfellas</i>, but actually experiencing the movie is always more a matter, for both audience and director, of identifying totally with the world of the mobsters, and becoming carried away by the reckless adrenaline rush of their amoral activities.<span style=""> </span>If <i style="">Goodfellas</i> condemns its mobsters by implication, it also derives all of its energy and momentum from them; Scorsese’s attitude seems to be like that of the smart kid in school, who knows the trouble-makers are going nowhere, but can’t help but admire their high-spirited truancy. <span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>The ambitions of David Chase’s <i style="">The Sopranos</i> are difficult to adequately summarize.<span style=""> </span>On the one hand an exploration of the uncertainties and surreality of family life at the postmodern turn of the century, <i style="">The Sopranos</i> is also simultaneously a homage to/commentary on <i style="">The Godfather</i> and <i style="">Goodfellas</i>.<span style=""> </span>As self-consciousness was endemic to postmodern culture/social life, <i style="">The Sopranos</i> was the first major crime saga to depict mobsters who were hyperconscious of their mythic representations on the screen, and the first to contain within itself a hyperconsciousness of the unsettling contradictions and ambiguities in our fondness for mob anti-heroes.<span style=""> </span>Chase never tried to revolve these contradictions, but rather heightened them, and rubbed our noses in them.<span style=""> </span>We were never allowed to attain any degree of comfort or closure in regard to our feelings towards those characters.<span style=""> </span><i style="">The Sopranos</i> expressed a very Faulknerian vision of the world, as a place whose dominant genre or <i style="">mode</i> is never fixed, but constantly shifting between differing registers.<span style=""> </span>In this way, Chase’s mobsters were alternately lovable, tragic, funny, pitiful, and utterly deplorable, in a fashion that never resolved itself, and allowed Chase to imbibe both the mythic grandeur of the <i style="">Godfather</i>, and the deflating black humor of <i style="">Goodfellas</i>.<span style=""> </span>In consequence, his notorious cut-to-black non-ending is a particularly apt conclusion to such a vision of the world in which nothing ever ends, or ever resolves itself to the finality of clarity.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span>It is interesting to note that in <i style="">The Wire</i>, which is most like <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city> in terms of intent, we continue to experience mixed feelings about the criminals.<span style=""> </span>The reasons for this are two-fold.<span style=""> </span>First of all, <i style="">The Wire</i> is similar to <i style="">Goodfellas</i> in that in attempts to view criminality <i style="">entirely</i> from the inside, without any explicit authorial judgment.<span style=""> </span>(It differs in that it also views the other side of the law with similar verisimilitude and detail.)<span style=""> </span>Secondly, <i style="">The Wire</i> operated principally as humanistic journalism, and had a sufficient duration to develop a complex overall societal picture, in which the most contemptible villains are the lawyers, commissioners, and politicians who lack the integrity or courage to change an inherently rigged game.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""> </span><st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city> is also, in essence, a work of righteous indignation and humanistic journalism.<span style=""> </span>Its failure to really impact, to be a truly great film, may lie ultimately in its lack of humanistic detail.<span style=""> </span>The communities in <i style="">The Wire</i>, hard-pressed though they were, were nevertheless alive with the energy of finely delineated character, and of colloquial language and humor.<span style=""> </span>The housing blocks in <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city>, in contrast, are entropic, purgatorial spaces, delineated with all the formal austerity of a John Pierre Melville or an Antonioni.<span style=""> </span>Nevertheless, I think <st1:city><st1:place><i style="">Gomorrah</i></st1:place></st1:city> is film that may rise in my estimation with a second viewing.<span style=""> </span>Gorrone’s technique occasionally yields striking dividends, and certain key sequences, particularly those which bookend each of the significant characters, have an understated, devastating power which grows long after the movie ends.<span style=""> </span>However my estimation of the movie may change, I suspect that it will not supercede the longevity of <i style="">The Godfather </i>and <i style="">Goodfellas </i>as works of art, despite its keener sense of social responsibility; <i style="">Gomorrah</i> may represent the logical conclusion of a long process of demythologizing the mobster, but it will not be the end of our fascination with what <i style="">The Asphalt Jungle</i> called the “left-hand form of human endeavor.” <span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""></span><span style=""> </span><i style=""><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></i></p> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SfZxEo3K7xI/AAAAAAAAAR4/EPV6Ux-XbLE/s1600-h/gomorrah1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 290px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SfZxEo3K7xI/AAAAAAAAAR4/EPV6Ux-XbLE/s400/gomorrah1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5329571533541797650" border="0" /></a>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-26877652657144564212009-04-06T22:02:00.000-07:002009-04-06T22:43:49.231-07:00Legends of the Fall: The Last of the Mohicans.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SdreuVm5pQI/AAAAAAAAAQw/hCRRYI_f3rU/s1600-h/mohicans.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 353px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SdreuVm5pQI/AAAAAAAAAQw/hCRRYI_f3rU/s400/mohicans.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5321810797347316994" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">In one of the best scenes in <i style="">Miami Vice</i>, Sonny and Isabella dance passionately in a night club, unaware that they are being intently observed by John Oritz’s envious and volatile gangster Jose Yero.<span style=""> </span>It’s a big turning point in the movie: the pent-up emotions that have simmered throughout <i style="">Vice</i>’s purposefully sluggish pace suddenly erupt, and the various characters must relinquish their tight-lipped masks of nonchalance, and reveal their true natures.<span style=""> </span>In this sense, Sonny and Isabella’s dance encapsulates the movie’s essential emotion: the kinetic charge, and close proximity, of passion and violence.<span style=""> </span>These are themes that Mann had already essayed in his 1992 feature <i style="">The Last of the Mohicans</i>, an operatic, elegiac song of love and death set against the backdrop of the French and Indian War of 1757.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span><i style="">Mohicans</i> is a historical romance/adventure movie, and as such its setting and ambience make it an anomaly in Mann’s filmography.<span style=""> </span>Outside of <i style="">Mohicans</i>, Mann has worked, roughly speaking, in two specific genres: crime drama and true life/biography.<span style=""> </span>(The forthcoming <i style="">Public Enemies</i> is a combination of both.)<span style=""> </span>What remains a constant in all these movies, both visually and thematically, is an iconic exploration of contemporary life via the omnipresence of modern architectures and technologies.<span style=""> </span>(Even <i style="">Ali</i> feels strikingly modern in its style and execution, including as it does the earliest of Mann’s experimentation with HD digital technology.)<span style=""> </span><i style="">Mohicans</i> is thus an initially puzzling experience for many aficionados of the director’s work; envisioning Mann without synthesisers and sodium streetlights, without the cool modernist sheen which has become so much his signature, is a little like watching a John Ford movie without horses and dust. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">I was myself a little slow in coming to <i style="">Mohicans</i>, largely due to a dislike or suspicion of the modern historical adventure picture.<span style=""> </span>Mel Gibson’s<i style=""> Braveheart</i> and <i style="">The Patriot</i> have always struck me as broad, bombastic exercises in melodrama, dubious history, and outdated celebration of nationalistic fervour.<span style=""> </span>I appreciate that Gibson is a canny and very capable popular filmmaker, but for my money his martyrdom sequence in <i style="">Braveheart</i> is among the comically overblown I have ever seen on film.<span style=""> </span><i style="">Mohicans</i>, needless to say, is an entirely different beast.<span style=""> </span>Its passions are heightened and operatic, but never quite bombastic, and instead of nationalistic rabble-rousing, one finds a subtle rumination on the grand promise and deep tragedy of the American frontier.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SdrfjLTpT3I/AAAAAAAAAQ4/A6XwMChRMPE/s1600-h/vlcsnap1774641gb7.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 173px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SdrfjLTpT3I/AAAAAAAAAQ4/A6XwMChRMPE/s400/vlcsnap1774641gb7.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5321811705115266930" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">In the last essay on <i style="">Manhunter</i>, I was discussing the dichotomy between civilisation and the wilderness in Mann’s movies.<span style=""> </span>Civilisation is contradictory quality in Mann’s world.<span style=""> </span>On the one hand, it offers the potential for stability and domestic happiness, and yet so many of Mann’s protagonists are drawn to a more rugged existence outside of the societal mainstream.<span style=""> </span>Civilisation possesses many perils: the threat of sterility, mendacity, and the kind of corporate dehumanisation that Mann critiques so trenchantly in <i style="">Thief </i>and <i style="">The Insider</i>.<span style=""> </span>Mann’s attitude towards modernity is thus complex and contradictory; his gleaming cityscapes are both extraordinarily beautiful, and deeply sterile and lonely places.<span style=""> </span>The best way to view <i style="">Mohicans</i> in relation to the rest of Mann’s filmograhy is as an evocation of the American frontier as an Edenic wilderness <i style="">prior</i> to the urbanised, corporatized world of Mann’s other films.<span style=""> </span>To put it more precisely, it is an Edenic wilderness which is in process of being civilized, ironically enough, through struggle and violence.<span style=""> </span>The trio of Nathaniel, Chingachgook, and Uncas are clearly presented in the introductory scenes as a prelapsarian ideal of roaming independence, decency, and piety for the natural world.<span style=""> </span>It is part of <i style="">Mohicans</i> tragedy that this ideal is not destined to survive, either for the characters as individuals, or as a prevalent way of life in the future America whose birth pains form the film’s backdrop.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-IE">LOTM</span></i><span style="" lang="EN-IE">’s concern for the making of a future nation is a persistent undercurrent to its primary function as a romantic adventure.<span style=""> </span>This theme is signalled most prominently by the chief obsession which seems to preoccupy most of the main characters: procreation, bloodline, and progeny.<span style=""> </span>As Matt Zoller Seitz points out eloquently in his <a href="http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com/2006/07/stay-alive-no-matter-what-occurs-sex.html">essay</a> “<i style="">Stay alive, no matter what occurs”: sex and survival in The Last of the Mohicans</i>: “In the movie’s political/historical background, Native tribes, white settlers and British and French military forces compete to control the mountains and forests, which they hope will be overrun someday by their descendants.<span style=""> </span><i style="">Mohicans</i> shows that both an individual’s goal to mate and pass on genes and a civilisation’s desire to possess and transform the land issue from the same biological urge.”<span style=""> </span>This idea is expressed in its most extreme form in the figure of Magua, who envisions the ending of Colonel Munroe’s bloodline as the ultimate revenge, and in its most melancholy form in the figure of Chingachgook, whose sorrow that his people will not see and participate in the future forms a keynote for the movie as a whole. <span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">The making of a nation is also signalled by the complex melting pot of combatants who are embroiled in the films central conflict.<span style=""> </span>The French and Indian War is waged between the </span><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Old World</span></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> colonial powers of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">France</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> and </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="" lang="EN-IE">, who in turn form opportunistic alliances with the settler and native populations.<span style=""> </span>Mann presents his </span><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Old World</span></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> characters primarily as a critique of the venal, mercenary, and hypocritical aspects of civilisation.<span style=""> </span>The English and French generals distinguish themselves from the supposed “savagery” of the New World by virtue of a set of high minded ideals of honour and propriety, each of which they are prepared to sacrifice in the name of self-interest.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">In contrast, the frontier settlers are a robust, honest, family-orientated community, who seek a land where they might live a modest, self-sufficient existence.<span style=""> </span>Most tragically in<i style=""> LOTM</i>, the native Indian characters face an intruding enemy which seeks to remake the wilderness in its own image.<span style=""> </span>They face the disruption and extinction of a complex, age-old society and way of life which is intrinsically in tune with the natural world, by the imposition of a </span><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">New World</span></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> which is the order of commerce, urbanization, and modernity.<span style=""> </span>In his speech towards the end of film, Nathaniel encapsulates much of this dark shadow side to the American dream, and the danger for Native Indians of succumbing to the worst vices of their oppressors:<span style=""> </span>“Would Magua use the way of the French and the English?<span style=""> </span>Would the Huron make his brothers foolish with brandy and steal his land to sell for gold to the white man?<span style=""> </span>Would Huron have greed for more land than a man can use?<span style=""> </span>Would Huron sell the furs of all the animals in the forest for beads and strong whiskey?<span style=""> </span>Those are the ways of the English, and the French traders, and their masters in </span><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Europe</span></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> infected with the sickness of greed.<span style=""> </span>Magua’s heart is twisted; he would make himself into what twisted him.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">The sad resonance of this speech derives from our awareness of how much loss of tribal culture, environmental exploitation, and greed would come to pass in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> of the future. In this sense, <i style="">LOTM</i> is a melancholy legend of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="" lang="EN-IE">’s fall into modernity from a prelapsarian ideal of lush, unbounded wilderness, lovingly evoked by Dante Spinotti’s extraordinary cinematography.<span style=""> </span>At the same time, there is much about <i style="">LOTM</i> which is buoyant, celebratory, and romantic.<span style=""> </span>It posits the birth of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> as a time of immense contradiction, promise, energy, and struggle; at one point Cora comments that the whole world is on fire, speaking to the amorous and martial passions which swell and intertwine throughout the film.<span style=""> </span>Contrasting Duncan and Cora, Mann emphasizes two very different methods of interaction between the </span><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Old World</span></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> and the New.<span style=""> </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> envisions the wilderness as a backward colony to be remade in the “higher” values of his own culture; Cora, on the other hand, through her courageous, adventurous character, and her romance with Nathaniel, comes to appreciate the </span><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">New World</span></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> as something that must be engaged with on its own terms.<span style=""> </span>As she tells Nathaniel, the frontier is “more deeply stirring to my blood than any imagining could possibly have been.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sdrg5poC_tI/AAAAAAAAARA/maoPpADFNkw/s1600-h/dvdsc_cora.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 172px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sdrg5poC_tI/AAAAAAAAARA/maoPpADFNkw/s400/dvdsc_cora.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5321813190722649810" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">In this contrast, <i style="">LOTM</i> finds a redemptive note to off-set Chingachgook’s sorrow at the end of the film, where he, Nathaniel, and Cora gaze into the future, into the impossibly distant, transformed world of <i style="">LOTM</i>’s audience.<span style=""> </span>Much of the future </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> will be characterised by the hypocrisy and greed of the </span><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Old World</span></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">, and much of Chingachgook’s world will truly vanish; but the romance of Nathaniel and Cora speaks to the possibility of understanding and integration between individuals of vastly different cultures, and the subtle birth of new cultures via such marriages.<span style=""> </span>Lost in the impersonal drift of history, there is nevertheless Chingachgook’s powerful assertion: <span style=""> </span>“The frontier place is for people like my white son and his woman and their children.<span style=""> </span>And one day there will be no more frontier and men like you will go too, like the Mohicans.<span style=""> </span>And new people will come, work, struggle.<span style=""> </span>Some will make their life.<span style=""> </span>But once, we were here.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">No consideration of<i style=""> LOTM</i> is complete without some reference to its justifiably acclaimed climatic set-piece.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>The hilltop battle sequence, scored so magnificently by Trevor Jones, is a revelatory fusion of music, staging, choreography, acting, and editing.<span style=""> </span>According to Madeline Stowe, “The best directors I’ve worked with have always had a strong sense of music and movement.<span style=""> </span>Those two things are inseparable.<span style=""> </span>And Michael used them so effectively in <i style="">LOTM</i>, particularly during the last ten minutes of the film.<span style=""> </span>Sometimes I’ll turn the channel and there’s the movie, and I can honestly say those last few minutes always fascinate me.<span style=""> </span>Its one of those rare instances when image, music, and drama work effectively.”<span style=""> </span>Clive James once commented that cinema, in essence, is still silent; the final looks exchanged between Jodhi May and Wes Studi are among the best silent cinema of the modern period, and the sequence as a whole is surely one of the purest, grandest pieces of opera in popular American cinema. <span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5SoeDAPj6gg&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5SoeDAPj6gg&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-17797899297112868082009-03-08T21:50:00.000-07:002009-03-08T22:10:31.733-07:00Watchmen.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SbSg34qw2zI/AAAAAAAAAQk/Qpu_-Km6Stg/s1600-h/45377964.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 232px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SbSg34qw2zI/AAAAAAAAAQk/Qpu_-Km6Stg/s400/45377964.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5311046742541654834" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>It’s hard to know where to begin with Zach Snyder’s <i style="">Watchmen.<span style=""> </span></i>This film has nuclear mushroom clouds, Martian landscapes, a shimmering blue Ubermensch in full frontal CGI, and probably the only sex scene you’ll see this year that takes place on board an Owlship.<span style=""> </span>Snyder has a cinematic style that seems fatally dispossessed towards the reptilian brain functions of an adolescent boy, and <i style="">Watchmen</i> is the R-rated <i style="">Citizen Kane</i> of his peculiar sensibility.<span style=""> </span>As an adaptation of an acclaimed comic book, it carries a lot of baggage to the screen, and many reviewers have expressed diametrically opposed perspectives on its relationship to the source material. <span style=""> </span>For some, the movie is a slo-mo drenched dumb-down; to others, a victim of its own slavish fidelity to the </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Moore</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> and Gibbons original.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>First and foremost, I think it needs to be pointed out that <i style="">Watchmen</i> is a pretty close translation, and many of its biggest problems actually stem from Alan Moore’s writing.<span style=""> </span>I read <i style="">Watchmen</i> when I was about 15, and yes, I thought it was absolutely amazing.<span style=""> </span>It’s a wonderful book for precocious kids.<span style=""> </span>However, revisiting it as an adult was a bitter disappointment, and I could barely get past the third issue.<span style=""> </span><i style="">Watchmen</i> displays a knowledge of American history that seems to have been gleaned from looking at a documentary about the sixties and a few <i style="">Time/Life</i> magazine covers.<span style=""> </span>Its politics, while in no way objectionable, are extremely platitudinous and simplistic.<span style=""> </span>Republicans, the Vietnam War, and nuclear genocide, it tells us, are all Very Bad Things.<span style=""> </span>I’m not arguing against any of this, but I think I acquired about as penetrating a grasp of American history and politics via Oliver Stone’s <i style="">The Doors</i> movie.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>Worst of all, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Moore</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">’s characterisation, which <i style="">Rolling Stone</i> bewilderingly called “staggeringly complex”, is a small step above soap opera, and his dialogue is among the most wooden and contrary to human speech I have ever read.<span style=""> </span>(Back in the sixties, Stan Lee wrote more natural sounding dialogue for the Thing than any of <i style="">Watchmen</i>’s plodding soliloquies.)<span style=""> </span>I think that <i style="">Watchmen</i>’s stature as some kind of masterpiece is an inexplicably virulent cultural myth.<span style=""> </span>It’s both denigrating to superhero comics as an art-form, and brazenly hypocritical, to suggest on the one hand that <i style="">Watchmen</i> elevates the super-hero to the status of literature, while at the same time overlooking literary inadequacies in it that simply wouldn’t fly in any medium <i style="">other</i> than superhero comics.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>Anyway, I guess that rant serves to begin this review with a note of sympathy for Snyder.<span style=""> </span>Yes, some of his stylistic excesses mar the tone and intent of </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Moore</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">’s original, but <i style="">Watchmen</i> is nevertheless a very faithful adaptation.<span style=""> </span>Snyder translates </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Moore</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">’s abysmal dialogue directly to the screen, but what else could he do?<span style=""> </span>Had he embellished it, the fanboy purists would no doubt have declared a fatwa, and critics would have had further fuel to accuse him of dumbing </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Moore</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> down.<span style=""> </span>It’s a tough gig for poor Zack, patiently staking a path through the differing tastes of rabid fanboys, general cultural pundits who believe the myth that <i style="">Watchmen</i> is the <i style="">Ulysses </i>of funny books, mainstream critics who are leery of caped crusaders, and studio execs who are even more leery of blue cocks and Fox lawsuits.<span style=""> </span>Give Zack a break - it’s a miracle this strange shambles made it to the screen at all.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>Ok, having given Zack a break, lets move on to the <i style="">Watchmen</i> movie proper.<span style=""> </span>Is Snyder really a hack director?<span style=""> </span>Well, he pretty much is, but in a kind of semi-inspired, Ed Wood kind of way.<span style=""> </span>Only a superhuman hack would score a </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Vietnam</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> scene with <i style="">Ride of the Valkyries</i>.<span style=""> </span>(Snyder has a weird habit with musical cues of either a) picking something completely inexplicable and unexpected, or b) picking the most mind-numbingly obvious thing you could possibly think of.<span style=""> </span>Leonard Cohen’s <i style="">Hallelujah</i> belongs in the former category, <i style="">Valkyries</i> in the latter.)<span style=""> </span>On the subject of music cues, <i style="">Watchmen</i> features more Songs that Should Never be Heard in Movies Again than almost any other soundtrack I’ve ever come across.<span style=""> </span><i style="">All Along the Watchtower</i> doesn’t even belong in a Hendrix bio-pic, at this stage of the game.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>Zack’s biggest Achilles heel, however, is his treatment of action.<span style=""> </span>At the slightest suggestion of physical activity, the adolescent/reptilian brain takes over.<span style=""> </span>Many people were wondering if eighties Cold War paranoia would have any relevance to this generation; ironically, it’s probably less of an anachronism than <i style="">Matrix </i>style bullet-time trickery.<span style=""> </span>Snyder is so fatally addicted to this kind of thing that he actually shots an attempted rape sequence with slo-mo and “awesome” <i style="">whoosh</i> sound effects.<span style=""> </span>The fight scenes in <i style="">Watchmen</i> feel like Adam West’s Batman choreographed by the Wachowski brothers, and are like nothing else on earth.<span style=""> </span>They are so divorced from actual physical combat that the final smackdown between our heroes has the ambience of a 21<sup>st</sup> century reboot of the <i style="">Three Stooges</i>.<span style=""> </span>(Nolan should direct that; he could really make it gritty and “grounded in reality”, by filming it in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Chicago</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">.)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>So what does Snyder do right?<span style=""> </span><i style="">Watchmen</i>’s set designs and digital effects are often quite stunning to look at.<span style=""> </span>I think he actually has a genuine talent for creating eye-popping comic book tableaux.<span style=""> </span>The justly celebrated credit sequence, the first shot of Dr. Manhattan against the Martian landscape, Nite Owl’s dream of embracing Silk Spectre in the shadow of an atomic explosion – these compositions have a surreal, Pop Art majesty that really lifts the movie out of its fog of expository chatter and slo-mo marathons.<span style=""> </span>I thought Tyler Bates’ersatz-period score was a great idea, and I couldn’t get enough of it.<span style=""> </span>(As a Michael Mann fan, I’m probably incapable of disliking ambient, synthesizer-based soundtracks.)<span style=""> </span>Despite the harsh comments earlier, I didn’t really hate <i style="">Watchmen</i>.<span style=""> </span>I don’t think Snyder’s ineptitude is on a par with someone like Bret Ratner or MacG; it’s quirky enough to be endearing and almost interesting.<span style=""> </span>A good case in point is the instantly notorious <i style="">Hallelujah-</i>scored sex scene, easily the most weirdly camp sequence committed to celluloid in god knows how long.<span style=""> </span>I’m almost certain that it’s deliberately played for comedy, but that just makes it all the more incongruous.<span style=""> </span>Amid all the scowling earnestness, it’s like the film suddenly morphs into <i style="">Team America</i> for a scene. <span style=""> </span>Little oddities like that, combined with a sincere and quixotic ambition, accumulate to give <i style="">Watchmen</i> a certain kitsch appeal, and a hell of lot more character than the interminable conveyer of "awesome" <i style="">Iron Man-</i>type movies Hollywood keeps feeding us. <span style=""> </span>And Billy Crudup does some of the best voice acting since HAL in <i style="">2001</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-82461676400200581252009-03-04T17:26:00.000-08:002009-03-04T17:45:52.304-08:00Midnight Movies: Carnival of Souls and Cult Cinema.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sa8qi2x4NaI/AAAAAAAAAPk/2eO_TAivWo4/s1600-h/Candacehilligoss4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 356px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sa8qi2x4NaI/AAAAAAAAAPk/2eO_TAivWo4/s400/Candacehilligoss4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309509264001742242" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Harold “Herk” </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Harvey</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> made only one feature film in his lifetime, and <i style="">Carnival of Souls</i> (1962)<i style=""> </i>may constitute one of the most tragically short-lived American directorial careers this side of Charles Laughton.<span style=""> </span>By now a thoroughly discovered “lost gem”,<i style=""> Carnival</i> followed a fairly archetypal trajectory for a future cult film: shot in just three weeks for an estimated $33,000, it disappeared without a trace on its initial release, and gradually found its audience via late night television and the burgeoning </span><st1:time hour="0" minute="0"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">midnight</span></st1:time><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> movie circuit of the 70’s.<span style=""> </span>In 1989, it received a limited run in art-house cinemas, and in 2000 this once forgotten drive-in curio gained the ultimate stamp of legitimacy: a lavish release on DVD on the Criterion Collection label.<span style=""> </span>Though shorn of some of its obscurity, <i style="">Carnival of Souls</i> is nevertheless one of those rare films which will always feel like a personal discovery.<span style=""> </span>It possesses the requisite mix of kitsch, artiness, and other-worldly strangeness that makes a true cult film.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>Defining cult cinema is an exercise to which you could devote an inordinate amount of time, without attaining anything substantial or conclusive.<span style=""> </span>The reason for this is plain enough: a cult film can be any type of movie that engenders a particularly zealous and devoted following.<span style=""> </span>In this regard, cult doesn’t correspond to any particular genre or overriding aesthetic.<span style=""> </span>The idea that a cult phenomenon comes from somewhere outside of the mainstream, or must experience an initial period of disparagement or obscurity, is no longer really a necessary prerequisite.<span style=""> </span>Comic-book blockbusters like the <i style="">Dark Knight</i> are an example of cinema that possesses within its massive mainstream audience a smaller faction for whom the movie is a cult phenomenon.<span style=""> </span>Similarly, television shows like <i style="">Lost</i> illustrate the degree to which smart popular entertainments can adroitly cater to both more casual and cultish audiences.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>Outside of a strictly literal interpretation of the term, however, cult cinema has a specific ambience and aesthetic, albeit one which remains broad and difficult to define.<span style=""> </span>In many respects, it is legitimately an outsider art-form, which venerates the wilfully individual and the grandiosely eccentric.<span style=""> </span>Cult cinema flourished in genres that fell outside the pale of critical respectability, and derived much of its allure from the idea of discovering hidden gems and sheer oddities out at the fringes of culture.<span style=""> </span>In so far as cult cinema is associated with kitsch, it is less concerned with a simple-minded so-bad-its-good aesthetic, and more with films which somehow manage to completely evade such normally firm qualitative distinctions. <span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Stemming from all these factors, the most salient characteristic of cult cinema is probably an inherent resistance to easy categorization.<span style=""> </span>The best cult films blur the distinction between aspects of cinema which tend to be placed at the furthest remove from one another: between art and exploitation, and critically canonical notions of good taste and bad.<span style=""> </span>This is a characteristic which is common to many great cult film-makers, including David Lynch, Dario Argento, and Seijun Suzuki; it is also to be found in spades in <i style="">Carnival of Souls</i>, a richly atmospheric and evocative B-movie described by Bruce Kawin as “an episode of the <i style="">Twilight Zone</i> directed by Ed Wood and Antonioni.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sa8rJnsoOtI/AAAAAAAAAPs/Ebr0gDpQyIc/s1600-h/campus.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 241px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sa8rJnsoOtI/AAAAAAAAAPs/Ebr0gDpQyIc/s400/campus.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309509929968089810" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Herk Harvey was born in </span><st1:place><st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Windsor</span></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">, </span><st1:state><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Colorado</span></st1:state></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> in 1925.<span style=""> </span>He served in the US Navy during World War 11, and briefly studied chemical engineering before a passion for acting brought him to the </span><st1:place><st1:placetype><span style="" lang="EN-IE">University</span></st1:placetype><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> of </span><st1:placename><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Kansas</span></st1:placename></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> in 1945 to study theatre.<span style=""> </span>Long before he directed <i style="">Carnival</i>, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Harvey</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> was involved with a cinematic sub-genre which would itself become a staple for cult/kitsch enthusiasts of the future: the educational and industrial film industry of the forties and fifties.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">After World War 11, </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> witnessed a massive boom in the production of short, instructive documentary-dramas which dealt with a variety of issues, particularly health, safety, social development, and sociological problems.<span style=""> </span>Unintentionally stilted and melodramatic, these industrial/educational films reflect a prosperous society of many contradictions: one which simultaneously venerated suburban conformity, and dreaded the uniformity of communism; that fetishized youth and independence, and struggled against juvenile delinquency and beatnik unrest.<span style=""> </span>To the post-sixties, post-Watergate culture, these “mental hygiene” shorts became comic, illuminating icons of a vanished age and value-system.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">The </span><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Midwest</span></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> was the </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Hollywood</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> of industrial film-making, with Coronet in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Chicago</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">, Calvin Company in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Kansas City</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">, and the Centron Corporation in </span><st1:place><st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Lawrence</span></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">, </span><st1:state><span style="" lang="EN-IE">KS</span></st1:state></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">.<span style=""> </span>Beginning in 1947 with a one reel sewing lesson called <i style="">Sowing Simple Seams</i>, the Centron Corporation gradually became a giant in the field, memorably lifting the lid on bullies, gossip queens, racial prejudice, and venereal disease.<span style=""> </span>Herk Harvey started out as one of the many </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Lawrence</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> locals who acted for Centron, gradually becoming a producer and director for the company.<span style=""> </span>Here is “What About Juvenile Delinquency?”, which </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Harvey</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> directed for Centron in 1954:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" src="http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf" w3c="true" flashvars="config={"key":"#$b6eb72a0f2f1e29f3d4","playlist":[{"url":"http://www.archive.org/download/WhatAbou1955/format=Thumbnail?.jpg","autoPlay":true,"scaling":"fit"},{"url":"http://www.archive.org/download/WhatAbou1955/WhatAbou1955_512kb.mp4","autoPlay":false,"accelerated":true,"scaling":"fit"}],"clip":{"autoPlay":false,"accelerated":true,"scaling":"fit"},"canvas":{"backgroundColor":"0x000000","backgroundGradient":"none"},"plugins":{"audio":{"url":"http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.audio-3.0.3-dev.swf"},"controls":{"playlist":false,"fullscreen":true,"gloss":"high","backgroundColor":"0x000000","backgroundGradient":"medium","sliderColor":"0x777777","progressColor":"0x777777","timeColor":"0xeeeeee","durationColor":"0x01DAFF","buttonColor":"0x333333","buttonOverColor":"0x505050"}},"contextMenu":[{"Item WhatAbou1955 at archive.org":"function()"},"-","Flowplayer 3.0.5"]}" height="504" width="640"></embed><br /><br /> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><br /><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><o:p></o:p>One day, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Harvey</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> was driving home to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Lawrence</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> from </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Los Angeles</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> when he noticed the ruins of the old Saltair Pavilion on the southern shore of the </span><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Great Salt Lake</span></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">.<span style=""> </span>In existence in a variety of forms since 1893, the Saltair had been conceived by local Mormon and business interests as a pious, family-orientated western equivalent to </span><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Coney Island</span></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">.<span style=""> </span>In 1925 it also acquired a massive dance hall, but a variety of disasters including two major fires and the recession of the lake water, coupled with the gradual emergence of new leisure activities such as movie theatres, drive-ins, and television lead to the Pavilion’s closure in 1958.<span style=""> </span>Struck by the eerie ambience and rotting grandeur of the old Pavilion, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Harvey</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> was inspired to make a film “about dead people dancing in a ballroom on the </span><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Great Salt Lake</span></st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">.”<span style=""> </span>With this simple image as his proviso, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Harvey</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> enlisted best friend John Clifford to write a script, and <i style="">Carnival of Souls</i> was born. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">As well being an engrossing Gothic or supernatural mystery, <i style="">Carnival</i> is a fairly intense study of alienation, psychological detachment, and madness.<span style=""> </span>It begins very abruptly, with two groups of young people engaged in the perennial fifties activity of drag-racing.<span style=""> </span>The cars collide on a bridge, and one of them hurtles into the river.<span style=""> </span>The title sequence establishes immediately that <i style="">Carnival</i> possesses an artistic sensibility that belies its non-professional acting and lo-fi production values: the slanting credits are sharply placed over atmospheric close shots of the river’s banks and eddying waters.<span style=""> </span>One of the girls from the car, Mary Henry, emerges later on the shore in a distracted state, unable to remember how she survived the crash.<span style=""> </span>Henry is somewhat overplayed by Lee Strasburg graduate Candace Hiligoss, who never really registered anywhere else on the cinematic radar.<span style=""> </span>Nevertheless, her physicality is compulsively watchable, and perfect for the role; her large, oval features remind many viewers of fellow ghoul victim Barbara (Judith O’Dea) in Romero’s later <i style="">Night of the Living Dead</i>, and others of Tipi Hedren in Hitchcock’s zombie of the diminutive, feathered variety classic <i style="">The Birds</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">From the outset, Mary’s coldness and detachment is emphasized: she is pictured playing the organ at a factory, dwarfed by its immense and baroque structure.<span style=""> </span>Later the supervisor tells her that she plays intelligently, but without any real soul or feeling.<span style=""> </span>This fundamental dislocation from life is the keynote for Mary’s character throughout the film, and it is left to the audience to decide whether this is as a result of the crash, or simply her disposition all along; whether, in other words, the plot is supernatural in orientation, or hallucinatory and psychological in essence.<span style=""> </span>As Mary travels to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Salt Lake City</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> to work as a church organist, the totality of her estrangement is gradually revealed.<span style=""> </span>She becomes the object of neighbouring boarder Mr. Linden (Sydney Berger)’s tenacious and boorishly articulated lust.<span style=""> </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Linden</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> is a boozy storeroom worker whose appearance somehow suggests a Pee Wee Herman with Marlon Brando’s burly and insinuating physique.<span style=""> </span>While her coldness towards him is understandable, she later reveals to the town doctor that she has never had a relationship with a man, nor feels any inclination towards physical intimacy.</span></p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sa8tDRe9DpI/AAAAAAAAAP0/kaN_U1Yi00k/s1600-h/7.49-crit.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sa8tDRe9DpI/AAAAAAAAAP0/kaN_U1Yi00k/s400/7.49-crit.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309512019949194898" border="0" /></a><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Clifford’s quite intelligent and compressed script also asserts that Mary is as estranged from the spiritual dimension of life as the physical.<span style=""> </span>She regards her work in the church simply as a job, an attitude which seems to unsettle the simple-minded Mr. Linden.<span style=""> </span>Mary’s chief preoccupation in the film is the same as that of the audience: to try to understand herself, and why she is so different.<span style=""> </span>She is pursued by a sardonically grinning ghoul called simply the Man, who is very redolent of something from David Lynch’s feverish imagination.<span style=""> </span>(The Man is played by Herc Harvey himself.)<span style=""> </span>Having seen the Saltair Pavilion on her way to the city, she becomes convinced that it has some kind of profound significance to her condition.<span style=""> </span>The audience, however, like the town doctor, is left to wonder how much of this is only in her imagination.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Though <i style="">Carnival</i> ultimately resolves itself with a supernatural explanation, in many respects </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Harvey</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> and Clifford utilise supernatural conventions to explore extreme states of loneliness, alienation, and mental instability. <span style=""> </span>The movie forces us to experience the world completely through Mary’s perspective.<span style=""> </span>In this sense, it reminds me quite a lot of Polanski’s <i style="">Repulsion</i>; both movies plunge the viewer into an unsettling, hallucinatory, and subjective space, and feature similar underlying themes of sexual neurosis and loneliness.<span style=""> </span>In <i style="">Carnival</i>’s most remarkable and dreamlike sequences, Mary becomes literally invisible to the other townspeople around her.<span style=""> </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Harvey</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> cuts out all the sound, with the exception of Mary’s heightened footsteps.<span style=""> </span>As in the common sensation reported by schizophrenics and manic depressives, Mary looks at the world as though through a barrier, with no ultimate connection to it.<span style=""> </span>The everyday world of shop-keepers, families, and policemen move silently and obliviously about, in a stunning tableau that evokes a marriage of Norman Rockwell, Jean Cocteau, and Edvard Munch.<span style=""> </span>In these scenes, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Harvey</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> achieves a striking subversion of the educational/industrial film, whose ambience flows into <i style="">Carnival</i>.<span style=""> </span>The “mental hygiene” movies were completely entrenched in an ideology of the normative; they venerated an ideal of cohesive community and conformity, and presented the outsider in a light of lurid, sensationalistic abnegation.<span style=""> </span><i style="">Carnival</i> forces the viewer into the perspective of the outsider, consequently imbuing the community, and the daylight world of the ordinary and normative, with an air of dreamlike menace not seen again until the works of David Lynch.<span style=""> </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Harvey</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> achieved extraordinary things with the limited resources available to him, and revealed an innate gift for atmosphere and imagery.<span style=""> </span>Sadly his talent was never developed further, but <i style="">Carnival</i>’s bold mixture of art and schlock would prove widely influential in the subsequent explosion of cult/midnight movies.</span></p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sa8ukjCun-I/AAAAAAAAAP8/D_wbMO0ddRM/s1600-h/81425318.C8CpPAON.1965_Dixie_onBoyd.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 224px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/Sa8ukjCun-I/AAAAAAAAAP8/D_wbMO0ddRM/s400/81425318.C8CpPAON.1965_Dixie_onBoyd.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309513691109957602" border="0" /></a><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-22570608579911811512009-02-23T07:24:00.001-08:002009-02-23T07:31:59.343-08:00Public Enemies Screencaps.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SaLAy8wS4UI/AAAAAAAAAOs/9GSD25bfUAU/s1600-h/pe09.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SaLAy8wS4UI/AAAAAAAAAOs/9GSD25bfUAU/s400/pe09.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5306015292530549058" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SaLAlMjuWDI/AAAAAAAAAOk/NtP-99nnA7M/s1600-h/pe06.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SaLAlMjuWDI/AAAAAAAAAOk/NtP-99nnA7M/s400/pe06.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5306015056254621746" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SaLAVIZw68I/AAAAAAAAAOc/krOgvlQ3XXc/s1600-h/pe03.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SaLAVIZw68I/AAAAAAAAAOc/krOgvlQ3XXc/s400/pe03.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5306014780261198786" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SaLAHAMXYDI/AAAAAAAAAOU/mqF_HKMMqfg/s1600-h/pe05.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SaLAHAMXYDI/AAAAAAAAAOU/mqF_HKMMqfg/s400/pe05.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5306014537539346482" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SaK_69ceLiI/AAAAAAAAAOM/91cs43H9vrE/s1600-h/pe01.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SaK_69ceLiI/AAAAAAAAAOM/91cs43H9vrE/s400/pe01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5306014330643164706" border="0" /></a><br />From last night's oscar clip, via misty ee on imdb.Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-77140005427588647532009-02-19T18:45:00.000-08:002009-02-20T05:33:12.353-08:00Tokyo Reverie: Lost in a Moment.Here's a nice hypnotic one-take short I found on<a href="http://posthumanblues.blogspot.com/"> Posthuman Blues</a>. It's called Lost in a Moment, shot by Dennis Wheatley and Stefan McClean. (NB watch in fullscreen!)<br /><br /><object height="295" width="400"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1297050&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1"><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1297050&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="295" width="400"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://vimeo.com/1297050">lost in a moment</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/saltysea">dennis wheatley</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-35078129384800690902009-02-18T18:27:00.000-08:002009-02-18T18:37:17.775-08:00Meshes of the Afternoon.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZzD3IOaqaI/AAAAAAAAAOE/NKOVOYNSz8E/s1600-h/kudlacek_07_body.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 288px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZzD3IOaqaI/AAAAAAAAAOE/NKOVOYNSz8E/s400/kudlacek_07_body.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304329813003774370" border="0" /></a>Just discovered this wonderful experimental short from 1943, via a discussion of David Lynch on the <a href="http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com/2009/02/conversations-mulholland-dr.html">House Next Door. </a><br /><br /><embed id="VideoPlayback" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=4002812108181388236&hl=en&fs=true" style="width:400px;height:326px" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-31932114719623779872009-02-17T17:49:00.000-08:002009-02-17T23:45:05.094-08:00Civilisation and the Wilderness: Manhunter.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZtptJIVhlI/AAAAAAAAANk/a9nkytNyHoI/s1600-h/graham104.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 246px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZtptJIVhlI/AAAAAAAAANk/a9nkytNyHoI/s400/graham104.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5303949210424804946" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">At an early point in <i style="">Manhunter</i> (1986), FBI investigator Will Graham falls asleep while studying a series of grizzly crime scene photographs.<span style=""> </span>While he dreams of his wife Molly, a little girl seated next to him sees the photographs, and becomes upset.<span style=""> </span>When Graham awakes and frantically gathers the pictures, the child’s mother and an air-stewardess look at him with thinly veiled suspicion and disgust.<span style=""> </span>The scene is effective for two reasons.<span style=""> </span>First of all, in showing Will dreaming ardently of Molly’s love and acceptance, while at the same time fundamentally alienated from the world of families and children, the scene neatly encapsulates the extent to which Graham has come to parallel or merge with his quarry, serial killer Francis Dollarhyde.<span style=""> </span>Secondly, it captures in miniature much of what makes <i style="">Manhunter</i> such a subtly unsettling film, even after it has reached a conclusion, which, at least on the surface, seems almost Spielbergian in its sunny optimism.<span style=""> </span>While most serial killer thrillers, including highly touted examples such as <i style="">Silence of the Lambs</i> and <i style="">Seven</i>, tend to stress the Gothic otherness of the serial murderer, <i style="">Manhunter</i> plunges into an unnerving hinterland between the safe haven of ordinary life and the violent wilderness that threatens it.<span style=""> </span><i style="">Manhunter </i>contrasts the world of safe, happy family life with of that of the psychopathic, covetous outsider, and maintains its unique tension and unease by holding these alternate worlds in such close, fragile proximity.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>As in <i style="">Heat</i> and <i style="">Collateral</i>, <i style="">Manhunter </i>dramatises Mann’s preoccupation with the conflict between antithetical combatants, where the moral agency must frequently absorb some characteristics of its opposite in order to prevail.<span style=""> </span>Mann remains fascinated by oppositional contrasts, and dialectical conflicts whose opposing forces begin to merge with and mirror one-another.<span style=""> </span>In <i style="">Heat</i>, Vincent Hanna’s dedication to his job is predicated on a genuine empathy with the suffering of families who have lost loved ones as a result of violent crime.<span style=""> </span>Ironically, however, it’s his dedication to protecting this domestic sphere which alienates him completely from domesticity in his own life.<span style=""> </span>Consequently, as Roger Ebert put it in his review of <i style="">Heat</i>, Vincent and his quarry “occupy the same space, sealed off from the mainstream of society, defined by its own rules.” <span style=""> </span>In persistently pursuing this irony, Mann’s cinema re-states a perennial, almost mythical theme in American cinema, going back to John Ford’s greatest westerns: what is the ultimate cost of protecting civilisation from the wilderness that constantly encroaches upon it?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>In both <i style="">The Searchers</i> (1956)<i style=""> </i>and <i style="">The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance</i> (1962), Ford evokes John Wayne as a guardian/protector figure who remains fundamentally excluded from the world whose values he defends.<span style=""> </span>In <i style="">The Searchers</i>, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Wayne</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> almost slips completely over into madness in his quest to restore his niece to her family; despite attaining a degree of catharsis and redemption, he nevertheless remains a creature of the wilderness.<span style=""> </span>In <i style="">Liberty Valance</i>, he must recede, unsung, into the antiquated, lawless frontier he helped vanquish.<span style=""> </span>(It is a testament to the continued pervasiveness of these themes in American cinema that Christopher Nolan’s recent <i style="">Dark Knight</i> is in large part a dramatically diminished attempt to grapple with them.)<span style=""> </span>Martin Scorsese’ <i style="">Taxi Driver</i> (1976) recapitulated the themes of <i style="">The Searchers</i> for an era of extraordinary paranoia, in which both masculinity and conservative moral authority lie under a grave suspicion; thus the psychopathology which was implicit in Ethan Edwards comes to the fore, and the heroism becomes increasingly ambiguous and negligible.<span style=""> </span>While <i style="">Manhunter</i>’s protector figure walks a similarly fine line between nobility and madness, Mann’s vision has more in common with Ford’s.<span style=""> </span><i style="">Manhunter</i>, and Mann’s crime movies in general, restore the Western’s eulogy of sacrifice and courage, albeit recast in an entirely modern, urban milieu, and with degree of abstract formalism which owes an equal debt to European cinema. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span><i style="">Manhunter</i> establishes its concern with security and protection with an image which appears very early in the film, and is alluded to again at the conclusion.<span style=""> </span>Working with his son on their </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Florida</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> beachfront home, retired FBI investigator Will Graham builds a reinforced pen in order to protect a hatchery of turtles from predators.<span style=""> </span>As a miniature metaphor, it eludes to both Graham’s larger responsibility as a protector of the familial sanctuary, and to the coiled, fenced-in tension which pervades the entire movie.<span style=""> </span><i style="">Manhunter</i> is set largely within a series of domestic spaces whose cool, geometric architectures alternately evince moods of calm serenity and a deep, sterile foreboding.<span style=""> </span>Graham’s household is established as an almost archetypal expression of sanctuary: an ambient, oceanic sound-design mingles with ethereal synthesisers, and the compositions, both of Graham and Jack, and Jack and Molly, are among <i style="">Manhunter</i>’s most balanced and symmetrical.<span style=""> </span>(The same synthesiser motif recurs in Jack’s dream, which also recapitulates much of the details of Will’s idyllic life in </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Florida</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="" lang="EN-IE">: Molly, the ocean, and his work at the boatyard.<span style=""> </span>It is fitting, in the context of the film’s overall structure, that the </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Florida</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> beach-home should be evoked in such a persistently dreamlike fashion, since it is similar notions of a happy life, refined into archetypes, images, and dreams, which fuel Francis Dollarhyde’s murderous rage.)</span></p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZtrDWJ2H1I/AAAAAAAAANs/SXKzoO0uEMU/s1600-h/graham16.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 270px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZtrDWJ2H1I/AAAAAAAAANs/SXKzoO0uEMU/s400/graham16.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5303950691389546322" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">As in the placid frontier cabin which frequently bookends the western, Graham must abandon the world of civilisation, and descend into a violent, male-dominated wilderness.<span style=""> </span>The question of whether he will be able to fully return hangs over the rest of the film.<span style=""> </span>Graham is called out of retirement because of his special gift: an uncanny ability to get inside the mind of the serial murderers he pursues.<span style=""> </span>His ability is akin to that of an artist or an actor; by retracing the steps of the killer, he gradually assumes the psychotic “mindset”, in a process similar to an actor getting into character.<span style=""> </span>Unlike his colleagues, <span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>Will understands psychopathic crime, in Freudian terms, as an enactment of wish-fulfilment, or an expression of the killer’s most deep-seated dreams.<span style=""> </span>(Interestingly, as in <i style="">Thief</i>, <i style="">Manhunter</i> associates deep longing with images, this time both still photographs and home videos.) <span style=""> </span>His gift for empathy, however, borders on schizophrenia, and he has already crossed over into the deep-end in his pursuit of Hannibal Lecktor.<span style=""> </span>Will’s perilous decision to return to work, as in the case of Vincent Hanna in <i style="">Heat</i>, is largely a matter of self-sacrificial nobility; however, there is also subtle suggestion that he is also drawn to a certain darkness within his own mind.<span style=""> </span>As Lecktor suggests in the brilliantly executed interview sequence, Will has troubling dreams of his own, and may derive his ability for empathy by possessing some essential similitude to his prey.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>The bulk of <i style="">Manhunter</i> then takes place, as I suggested earlier, in a hinterland or liminal zone between the film’s overarching spatial and thematic oppositions: between domestic sanctuaries that dovetail with the antiseptic dread of hospitals and prison cells, and the heightened primary colours and weird lunar landscapes of Francis Dollarhyde’s living area.<span style=""> </span>What is fascinating about <i style="">Manhunter</i> is that it suggests the possibility of traffic in both directions, and establishes Graham and Dollarhyde as neat, inverted mirrors of one another. <span style=""> </span>When the film’s attention transfers midstream to Dollarhyde, and we observe his shy courtship of Reba, there is a genuine, albeit transitory, possibility that he might attain a degree of mental normalcy and happiness.<span style=""> </span>Graham, in contrast, is in danger of going in the opposite direction, and crossing over from empathy into a total identification with the wilderness.<span style=""> </span>With a much greater effectiveness than the deeply overrated <i style="">A History of Violence</i>, <i style="">Manhunter </i>evokes a troubling darkness which threatens the domestic world from both without and within.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>Exploring how <i style="">Manhunter</i> dramatises these oppositions and inversions leads to a consideration of style.<span style=""> </span>Style remains a highly controversial issue in relation to Mann’s filmography, to such an extent that Mann himself appears distinctly uncomfortable, or even defensive, when discussing his films in relation to style.<span style=""> </span>This is perfectly understandable, when one considers that a very lazy critical shorthand has developed around Mann in mainstream film criticism, which basically suggests that Mann made his name with a flashy and stylised television phenomenon in the eighties, and continues to pursue an aesthetic of style over substance in his movies.<span style=""> </span>(As an aside, it is pretty dispiriting to observe the extent to which mainstream newspaper and magazine film journalism has become dependant on lazy critical short-hand and studio press releases.<span style=""> </span>Following the critical fortunes of particular films on web-sites like <i style="">Rotten Tomatoes</i> and <i style="">Metacritic</i>, you begin to suspect that modern films are marketed with a stock of phrases and ideas, which a lot a critics utilise more or less like stencils.) <span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>The whole idea of style over substance is itself largely a false dichotomy, predicated on an negative connation of style as a matter of ostentation and ornamentation.<span style=""> </span>Ostentation and excessive ornament are better understood as a type of <i style="">style</i>, rather than a definition of the word itself.<span style=""> </span>A film-maker’s style is better appreciated in two senses, both as a characteristic methodology which is sustained, and evolved, throughout each of his/her films, and also as the manner in the film-maker utilises the full panoply of formal cinematic devices to express the film’s content.<span style=""> </span>Mann is an eminently stylish film-maker, in that he conceives cinematic form and content in an almost indivisible, holistic fashion.<span style=""> </span>His films blur both foreground and background, and technique and meaning.<span style=""> </span>This is why they are particularly rewarding after multiple-viewing; after the story has been absorbed, you begin to appreciate how composition, architectural milieu, colour, and a variety of other formal/tonal components combine to achieve the overall effect.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZtsWPQmZwI/AAAAAAAAAN0/XxOy2oNAGwY/s1600-h/graham67.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 318px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZtsWPQmZwI/AAAAAAAAAN0/XxOy2oNAGwY/s400/graham67.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5303952115467970306" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Manhunter</span></i><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> is very good example of this holistic approach to film-making, and its continual marriage of form and meaning is extraordinary.<span style=""> </span>In the afore-mentioned interview scene, Mann shots both Graham and Lecktor through the bars of the sparse white cell, gradually bringing them into an identical frame, and increasing the cutting speed from one to the other.<span style=""> </span>This is one of a variety of devices throughout the movie which leads to a mounting sense of disorientation and loss of identity.<span style=""> </span>The tiger sequence with Reba, justly celebrated for its remarkable tactility alone, also manages to refer to Dollarhyde’s obsession with Blake, to the perilous nature of Reba’s relationship with him, and to the potent suppressed violence which seems to co-exist with Graham’s tenderness as a husband and father.<span style=""> </span>On this subject, perhaps most striking of all is the scene where Graham takes his son to a supermarket, in order to discuss his history of mental illness in relation to his work.<span style=""> </span>This juxtaposition, once more combining the quotidian and the sinister, manages to make the arrangement of products on a supermarket shelf both eerily unfamiliar, and faintly absurd. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">In <i style="">Heat</i> and <i style="">Collateral</i>, Vincent and Max attain a degree of empathy and respect for their perspective adversaries, and seem to experience a certain mournfulness upon vanquishing them.<span style=""> </span>For Graham, however, no such sympathy is possible or desirable; he must utterly destroy his doppelganger/opponent, for the stability of the community and his own fragile sense of identity.<span style=""> </span>The conclusion of <i style="">Manhunter</i> is thus one of suitably kinetic violence: Graham crashes through the glass which has been so pervasive as a thin barrier throughout the film, and Dollarhyde attains the wings of the dragon, albeit in a manner which emphasizes his mortality rather than the divinity he aspired to.<span style=""> </span>Unlike Ethan Edwards and the various protector-figures alluded to earlier, Graham gets to return to his domestic idyll, seemingly intact and well.<span style=""> </span>In the final scene, the camera lingers on his scared and weary face just long enough to threaten otherwise, but it’s probably a red-herring.<span style=""> </span>The return to the </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Florida</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> beach house is scored by <i style="">Heartbeat </i>by the Red 7, an absurd, albeit catchy power ballad of unmistakably eighties vintage.<span style=""> </span>Graham is back with Molly, and most of the turtles have survived.<span style=""> </span>It seems, if anything, like an excessively happy ending.<span style=""> </span>However, by closing on a still of the family at the edge of the surf, Mann maintains a certain unease, even in the face of the Red 7’s strident MOR positivism.<span style=""> </span>Throughout the film, photographic images of the happy and carefree family have been associated with desire and wish-fulfilment, and wish-fulfilment with violence; the barriers between <i style="">Manhunter</i>’s alternate poles of sanctuary and wilderness remain uneasily fragile and permeable. <span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZttp4_M4TI/AAAAAAAAAN8/WwM3qpHmuKE/s1600-h/reba19.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZttp4_M4TI/AAAAAAAAAN8/WwM3qpHmuKE/s400/reba19.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5303953552598425906" border="0" /></a>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7571050659834056958.post-47779451262628138512009-02-09T19:04:00.000-08:002009-02-10T17:44:25.291-08:00Thief.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZDvQwxcJ4I/AAAAAAAAAM8/HE3ocNvu2VY/s1600-h/NotFlattened11977.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZDvQwxcJ4I/AAAAAAAAAM8/HE3ocNvu2VY/s400/NotFlattened11977.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5300999832664287106" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">(This summer sees the release of Public Enemies, Michael Mann's tenth theatrical feature. In the run-up I'm hoping to post an essay on each of Mann's films, leaving aside The Jericho Mile and The Keep for the moment.)<br /><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Thief </span></i><span style="" lang="EN-IE">(1981) is Michael Mann’s first theatrical feature.<span style=""> </span>Despite being a very fine film, and featuring easily the most remarkable performance of James Caan’s career, it’s not widely remembered by general audiences today.<span style=""> </span>Viewed from the perspective of Mann’s subsequent work, it seems extraordinarily mature for an opening salvo.<span style=""> </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Thief </span>tentatively stakes out the primary visual milieu of virtually all the directors subsequent work, which in many respects is the quintessential concern of noir cinema: an exploration of the alternatively seductive and dehumanising characteristics of the nocturnal urban environment.<span style=""> </span>it establishes familiar Mann themes which have been so widely discussed as to barely warrant commentary: its principal conflict is waged between the demands of an extreme form of masculine individualism and commitment to personal vocation, as against those of domesticity, emotional security, and the more stable and integrated spectrum of society.<span style=""> </span>As such, all Mann’s subsequent movies can be viewed as increasingly sophisticated additions and variations on the groundwork established with such unusual clarity of intent with this first outing.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>Many critics have tended to place <i style="">Thief</i>, and its close thematic relative <i style="">Heat</i>, within a French tradition of psychologically and existentially sophisticated genre cinema, based around the detailed exposition of a central heist and its messy consequences.<span style=""> </span>This is accurate enough, but it is perhaps better to envision <span style="font-style: italic;">Thief </span>as the culmination of a chain of influence which begins in American popular cinema, flourishes in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">France</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="" lang="EN-IE">, and is subsequently repatriated back to its native soil via Mann’s crime cinema.<span style=""> </span>(The concept of film noir is itself a cross-fertilization between American popular culture and a more cerebral French criticism.)<span style=""> </span>The grand ur-text of the heist movie is John Houston’s classic of hard-boiled poetry <span style="font-style: italic;">The Asphalt Jungle</span> (1950).<span style=""> </span>Perhaps the first great crime procedural, it is the achievement of Huston’s film to perfectly distil the basic narrative form of the heist movie, which can be broken down into a tripartite structure: the period of careful preparation leading up to the heist, the heist itself, and finally, the generally tragic aftermath of the heist, in which everything comes undone.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>The next major innovation in the heist movie came via <i style="">Rififi</i> (1954), a picture made in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">France</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> by the American noir specialist Jules Dassin, who was at that time newly fled from the black-list in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Hollywood</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">.<span style=""> </span>While <i style="">Rififi </i>begins to introduce a subtly Gallic component to the tone of the American model, its chief contribution is stylistic, and comes in the bravura execution of the heist sequence itself: nearly a full half hour of silent, scoreless, meticulously detailed tension.<span style=""> </span>Form <i style="">Rififi</i> onwards, the devil was in the details, and the suggestion of an influence on real-life criminals and robberies would become an intrinsic part of the mystique of the heist movie.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>The greatest marriage of French and American sensibilities comes in the austere and magisterial work of Jean-Pierre Melville.<span style=""> </span>Both John Woo and Quentin Tarantino have cited Melville as a major influence, though neither seem to have imbibed much of the characteristic restraint and understatement of his movies.<span style=""> </span>Melville regarded classical American cinema with a kind of boyish reverence, and fashioned from its basic mythic archetypes and patterns a uniquely sober and iconic style of genre cinema.<span style=""> </span>The French component in the heist movie, in tandem with how French criticism crystallised the concept of film noir generally, was a question simply of highlighting the elements of deterministic, existential pessimism already intrinsic to the world of the American pulps.<span style=""> </span>Few were perhaps as well-equipped in temperament and background to channel such ideas as Melville.<span style=""> </span>His participation in the Resistance provided him with an indelible, first hand experience of a world of meticulous subterfuge, where divided loyalties, betrayal, and a sense of one’s personal mortality, were all-pervasive realities. <span style=""> </span><i style="">Le Cercle Rouge</i> (1970) is the classic French heist movie, outdoing <i style="">Rififi</i>’s seminal centrepiece for duration, suspense, and sheer methodical detail, and refining the tripartite structure of <i style="">The Asphalt Jungle</i> into something as unyieldingly formal and precise as an equation; the red circle of the movie’s title seems to refer the action of the film as a tragic, implacable net of causality in which the characters are hopelessly immeshed.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>In interviews, Mann tends to downplay the influence of other films on his work, stressing instead the importance of research and a knowledge of the real-life milieu of criminals and law-enforcement agencies.<span style=""> </span>Nevertheless, whether the relationship is intentional or otherwise, the works of Huston, Dassin, and Melville form the natural stylistic and thematic precursors to<i style=""> Thief</i> and <i style="">Heat</i>, and provide a model for an intellectually weighty variety of crime drama which Mann builds upon.</span></p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZDxCIYuq8I/AAAAAAAAANE/7nfVT95sUb8/s1600-h/NotFlattened11977-2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_26QJBcCUFjg/SZDxCIYuq8I/AAAAAAAAANE/7nfVT95sUb8/s400/NotFlattened11977-2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5301001780328311746" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Thief</span></i><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> concerns an accomplished safe-cracker and ex-convict named Frank.<span style=""> </span>Working independently with a small crew of trusted friends, Frank is a highly successful jewel thief who operates both a bar and a used-car lot as fronts.<span style=""> </span>In terms of character, Mann develops Frank as a brilliant case study in how people are conditioned and shackled by past experience.<span style=""> </span>Frank has already been traumatised by his childhood, in state-run orphanages, but it is his years in prison which ultimately define his personality.<span style=""> </span>While incarcerated, he developed as a survival technique the ability to attain at will a state of almost Zen-like self-negation; a condition of complete emotional dislocation which divests his life and personality of all meaning, but nevertheless renders him fearless and psychotic enough to survive in a harsh and violent environment.<span style=""> </span>(This is, in many respects, a more extreme version of the austere survival discipline Neil McCauley has adopted in <i style="">Heat</i>: “Do not become attached to anything that you can’t drop in thirty seconds flat, when you see the heat coming around the corner.”)<o:p></o:p></span></div> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>The other chief pivot of Frank’s character, also developed in prison, is the postcard sized photo collage he has made as a symbolical representation of his dream of a better life.<span style=""> </span>Despite his obvious affinities with the world of criminality, and his obsessive dedication to his craft as a thief, Frank longs for a life of domestic tranquillity and security, and his collage depicts all the trappings of this ideal: wife, children, and leafy suburban house and garden.<span style=""><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Frank’s collage encapsulates what is both sympathetic and unnerving about his character, in that it illustrates the sincerity of his desire for a better life, coupled with an almost sociopathic belief that an idea can be pursued in a single-minded fashion, with no recourse to the complexities and contingencies of real life.<span style=""> </span>A fatal aspect of Frank’s individualism is that he sees the world unfailingly as an extension of his own will, and thus when he sets about attaining his domestic ideal, he does so with almost the same degree of mechanical simplicity with which he has assembled the collage.<span style=""> </span>(I suspect that this must refer, in some oblique fashion, to the tendency of particularly obsessive and driven artists to identify with an aesthetic world over which they have complete control.<span style=""> </span>This point shouldn’t be overstated, but I do think that Mann’s protagonists do represent a romanticised, though certainly not uncritical, exploration of aspects of his own psychology.<span style=""> </span>Federico Fellini had a series of wonderful sets built for <i style="">La Dolce Vita</i> which emulated real locations in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Rome</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE">.<span style=""> </span>Wandering through the actual locations in the real world, he was often struck by a desire to exhibit the same degree of control over the real </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Rome</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> as had over its soundstage simulacra.<span style=""> </span>“I should probably discuss this with a psychologist!” he acknowledged gamely.)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>It is worth noting that as much as Mann’s films deal with characters that identify to a compulsive degree with their vocation or career, the characteristic malaise of a Mann protagonist is actually the longing to escape that vocation.<span style=""> </span>In <i style="">Manhunter</i>, Will Graham is a brilliant psychological profiler, whose expertise and ability could save literally dozens of lives.<span style=""> </span>However, he has retired, and is reluctant to return to work, because the process of identifying with killers shatters his sanity and sense of selfhood.<span style=""> </span>He really longs to be with his wife and son, a domestic ideal evoked, in quintessential Mann fashion, by lush, cool shades of blue, and the close proximity of the ocean. <span style=""> </span>In <span style="font-style: italic;">Heat</span>, Neil dreams of escaping to </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Fiji</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> with Eady, but a compulsive desire to leave no loose ends causes him to return to the fray at the last moment, wherein he is forced to put his credo of non-attachment to the test.<span style=""> </span>Finally, in Mann’s most recent movie <i style="">Miami Vice</i>, Crockett’s relationship with Isabella offers a brief, albeit similarly unattainable, potential for escape from the unfulfilling velocity and flux of his work.<span style=""> </span>All of these characters experience a seemingly irresolvable tension between an existential vocation which seems to simultaneously define and dehumanise them, and a longing for emotional and domestic escape, for something akin to the idealized happy ending of movies.<span style=""> </span>Beginning with Frank in <i style="">Thief</i>, they experience<i style=""> time</i>, a magical, mystical quality in Mann’s universe, as slipping irrevocably away from them.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>Frank has been dating a down-to-earth waitress named Jessie, and plans to marry her and have children.<span style=""> </span>He has promised that his criminal career will shortly come to an end, believing himself, in the archetypal style of so many sympathetic criminals in noir thrillers, to be a couple of big scores away from retirement.<span style=""> </span>In his haste to actualise this retirement dream, he reluctantly starts working for a gangster called Leo.<span style=""> </span>The chief momentum of the plot kicks in, predicated on Frank simultaneously setting up a big score for Leo, and organising his future life with Jessie.<span style=""> </span>The problem, however, is that Frank’s life, both domestically and professionally, becomes increasingly and inextricably bound up with Leo.<span style=""> </span>When Frank and Jessie are unable to adopt a child, Leo intervenes and provides a mother who is prepared to sell them her child.<span style=""> </span>Meanwhile, Frank discovers that working for Leo has brought him to the attention of the police, who demand a cut of the take from the robbery.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>In some respects, <i style="">Thief</i> could be read as an extreme parable about the struggle between individualism and society.<span style=""> </span>It’s Frank’s desire to lead an ordinary, family-based life which leads to his Mephistophelian pact with Leo, and the beginning of the complete erosion of his status as an independent, self-governing operator.<span style=""> </span>The deal with Leo is a kind of extreme version of a social contract; Frank gets a home and a family, but with them comes a boss, and a fatal entanglement within a corrupt system of bribes and mutual favours; the system, according to both criminals and cops, of “how things are done.”<span style=""> </span>Leo changes from being a kindly and paternal figure to one of pure malevolence, asserting aggressively that he “owns” Frank.<span style=""> </span>Frank, in turn, realizing finally that he cannot achieve his dream on his own terms, falls back on the mental habits he acquired in prison.<span style=""> </span>He dispassionately disassembles his long cherished dream, piece by piece, in an extraordinary eruption of sustained, cathartic violence.<span style=""> </span>He cuts Jessie and their child completely from his life, sets fire to his businesses, and kills Leo.<span style=""> </span>The question remains, however, after Frank has vanished into the dark horizon of the film’s denouncement, to what extent Mann intends Frank’s complete lack of compromise to represent a heroic apotheosis, or the self-defeating actions of a character that is psychologically damaged by his past.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span>Scored with perhaps the most strident rock music Mann has ever utilised, there is much in <i style="">Thief</i>’s bravura, Peckinpahesque final shoot-out to suggest the former.<span style=""> </span>A frequent criticism labelled against Mann is that his movies represent a more thoughtful, but nevertheless dated and adolescent fantasy of uncompromising machismo struggling to retain its individualism within a complex, corporate, post-feminist society.<span style=""> </span>To read <i style="">Thief</i> in this manner, however, is to ignore the nuanced and ambiguous nature of Mann’s protagonists, and the predominant element of tragedy in his work.<span style=""> </span>I have read a number of commentators who have interpreted Frank in <i style="">Thief</i> and Neil in <i style="">Heat</i> as figures whose tragedy lies in their temporary deviation from their personal and professional codes.<span style=""> </span>The tragedy, it seems to me, lies more in the codes themselves, which prevent these characters from forming permanent and meaningful attachments, and, ultimately, from being happy.<span style=""> </span>The feminine and the domestic sphere represent a genuine ideal, and a possibility of a saner, happier world, in Mann’s movies.<span style=""> </span>It is part of the particularly <i style="">noirish</i> ambience of Mann’s cinematic universe that his characters are only very rarely able to attain this ideal.<span style=""> </span>They are heroic, after a fashion, but in more tragic and nuanced fashion.<span style=""> </span>Frank regains a kind of sovereignty at the end of <i style="">Thief</i>, but he has done so at the cost of destroying a dream <span style=""> </span>which could very well have been salvaged in some fashion, and by first raising, then callously abandoning Jessie’s hopes for a happy future.<span style=""> </span>His actions are at once impressive and sociopathic, both self-assertive and self-defeating.<span style=""> </span>As he strides from Leo’s place into <i style="">Thief</i>’s abrupt cut to black, he does so into a world which corrodes his soul, and for which he longer possesses an imagery of transcendence or redemption. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-IE"><br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="EN-IE">Thief</span></i><span style="" lang="EN-IE"> is something of a lost gem.<span style=""> </span>Michael Mann has made vastly superior pictures, but he has never written a better script; <i style="">Thief</i>’s dialogue possesses an absolute knowledge of its milieu, and a brilliant, street-smart lyricism.<span style=""> </span>James Caan has never acted so well; the café sequence with Tuesday Weld has all the rugged, bruised tenderness and poeticism of Marlon Brando’s scenes with Eva Marie Saint in <i style="">On the Waterfront</i>.<span style=""> </span>He is matched by some brilliant support, particularly from the recently departed Robert Prosky in the role of Leo.<span style=""> </span>For Mann enthusiasts, <i style="">Thief</i>’s chief fascination lies in the presence of all the thematic, and much of the stylistic, hallmarks of the director’s later work.<span style=""> </span>Mann’s recent experimentation with digital cinematography and increased depth of field urban compositions is prefigured in this debut's preoccupation with capturing the ambience of the nocturnal city at its rawest and most three-dimensional.<span style=""> </span>The themes of Mann’s movies, inextricably bound up as they are with the nocturnal architecture of his visual palette, also begin here. <span style=""> </span><i style=""><span style=""> </span></i><o:p></o:p></span></p>Tristan Eldritchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10239386613395519115noreply@blogger.com10