Month: June 2009

Denis Johnson wrote a goddamn movie

Based it on Jim Thompson’s _A Swell-Looking Babe_. Elias Koteas chews up the scenery, and he’s pretty much a kick to watch. Philip Baker Hall wanders in and out of a few scenes bigfooting it as Tacoma’s crime king Mr. Ish. It’s too long, and a little too strangely stylized (like its art designers all came off work on “The Red Shoe Diaries”), and it has an absolute aggravation in the form of a) a mentally-handicapped brother for Koteas’ sad-schlump protagonist and (I hate that kind of bullshit plot device, especially when) b) the actor playing the role is flat lousy. But then every few lines there’s some strange bit of Johnsonian absurdity, like William Blake drank a lot of Mad Dog and watched 34 hours of Looney Tunes and bam: I enjoyed it. Hit Me.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

I almost tossed this into a comment on the Bronson/Majestyk post, as this is another gritty, casually-paced exemplar of a ’70s crime film. However, while that film certainly works, this film carefully, slyly sneaks into classic territory. You may think its depiction of a few subplots of Boston hoodlum subculture is simply on the same back-alley route, attentive to the grime and tough talk, en route to a few bang-up chases or gunfights. But we’re thrown into events, never given the narrative road-map: it’s like we’ve plopped down into a few late-fall, slate-grey days in the life of a shitty little cul-de-sac of criminal subculture in Boston, 1973. Everybody here seems to be nursing a hangover, the action is rarely overt (and even during a couple of heists, the emphasis is on unease rather than suspense), and all the violence is sublimated in dialogue that pops and pisses and moans and snarls without really ever taking the easy path to patter.

And the performances…. damn. Robert Mitchum is the heart of the film, but his Eddie Coyle–a sad sack tagged for a booze-truck heist, looking to avoid leaving his family for even that short stretch–is wandering around, doing a job here, having a drink there, unsure what’s what. Richard Jordan plays a slimy, sort of self-satisfied Treasury agent running a few informants; Peter Boyle is a barkeep hooked deeply into the crowd; the many lowlifes circling around are each perfect, particularly Alex Rocco and Steven Keats.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll note that the film ends with a short, opaque bit of dialogue–ostensibly some kind of philosophy-of-crime analogy that only sort of makes sense, but serves the purpose of all the conversations in the film: each guy wants something from the other guy, and they talk as if they’re really exchanging and transacting, even as they each carefully try to avoid giving anything away, grasping to get as much as they can. It’s a helluva good film.

Meats the eye

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the dumbest yet most insanely self-confident 12-year-old you ever knew. This kid has Attention Deficit Disorder and an uncomfortable repertoire of cheap ethnic “gags.” For the first 30 minutes or so, I was willing to say: hey, at least it’s outrageously excessive in every dimension. For the next hour, I was willing to say: hey, it’s excessive. In the last 31 hours of its run-time, I kept asking Max if he had to go to the bathroom, just so I could take a break. I don’t hate this film–I *wish* it really had something like outrage on its mind. But, like 12-year-olds, it will scribble or mutter something “bad” then run around and bug the shit out of you, able to annoy but rarely breaking the skin, intent on its “intensity” but its effect is more to numb than to arouse. Even with its leering (12-year-old) attention to its skinny young vixens it is the opposite of arousing. But, verily, shit did explode.

In Treatment

This came up as a stray comment on some other post, but HBO’s In Treatment is a fine, fine show — the premise is that each season (I’m just about done with Season 1, and 2 is on now) follows one therapist (the excellent Gabriel Byrne) week by week in his sessions with four different patients (and in his own session with his therapist, the quite good Dianne Wiest). Listen, it’s therapy — if you find the psychoanalytic tedious, then the show may grate, as it can be a bit schematic in the long-run structure of these separate treatments’ story arcs. But the acting, oh lord, the moment-by-moment fascination and allure of such great conversation, such subtle and sharp attention to how people LISTEN to one another… it’s great. And we just watched an episode, late in season 1, where the father of one of Byrne’s patients comes in, and it is about the finest acting I’ve seen in some time. Glynn Turman plays the father, and some of us will recall him as The Wire‘s first outsized corrupt fox of a mayor Royce…. It would be impossible, I suppose, to just rent disc 8 and watch this show, but if you commit to the season, which is itself worth the time, this episode will astound you.

Jean-Jacques Beineix

Back in the bad ol’ early ‘eighties, as I slowly began sampling further afield than the big-Hollywood classics frequently shown on basic-cable superstations and the crazed range of sleazy D-movies sprinkled in between the new releases at the local video shop, the first art-house theater opened in Rochester. Taken by an ambitious French teacher to see Le Dernier Combat–ironically, a film with almost no spoken dialogue, somewhat defeating the purpose the teacher had in mind–I was taken by the movie posters and started going back. Somewhere in there I saw Betty Blue.

Betty wasn’t the first French film I saw–I think my friends and I had done the new enthusiasts’ obligatory scouting over Truffaut and Godard, what little we could find–but it was the first to blow me away, one of the first films I saw that I felt confident engaging with as a filmlover, and like that great band no one knows or that obscure novelist who is yours and yours alone, I felt like Beineix’s crazed, lush, outsized Tragic comic Romance was *mine* in a way that those other French auteurs’ work hadn’t been.

Continue reading Jean-Jacques Beineix

Melons, mayhem, Majestyk

About as perfect as a ’70s B-movie thriller could be, Mr. Majestyk is nothing fancy but gets the job done. Charles Bronson is a tough, reasonably (but, in the Bronson manner, enormously understated) smart-ass melon farmer with a history and a deep anti-authoritative streak. He ends up tangling with mob hitman Frank Renda (the absurdly-inflated and -mustachioed Al Lettieri). He is cool. He says a little of this, but not too much. He takes a while to throw a punch, warns you it’s coming, and when it comes it’s over fast. The action is exciting, but the film is paced casually. It’s well-shot. Richard Fleischer directed. And Elmore Leonard wrote the script, so it’s smart and shorn of fat and silly exposition. I saw at least part of this on television some years ago, but worth the repeat showing. Good stuff.

Interestingly, imdb says Lettieri died in ’75, but then appeared in a few films/shows up ’til ’85. I will have to take a looksee at how undead Lettieri compares.

Speaking of International Banking Conspiracies…

Tom Tykwer has been so assuredly devious in his direction, across the five very distinct films I’ve seen, that you almost want to do a spit-take when his name comes up at film’s end, as credits roll. Whaaaa? This plodding porridge of overheated performances, long (long, long, long) expository conversations, and hamfisted visual echoes of Pakula and Hitchcock was directed by the playful pomo trickster of Lola Rennt, the oblique moral visionary of Heaven, the perverse aesthete of the less-effective but ambitious Perfume? Even a fairly fun sequence shooting the shit out of the Guggenheim doesn’t really make the film worth renting. Bleccch.