we like to watch

There are plenty of worthy movies out there, and there are plenty that fit comfortably in the “enjoyable crap” category. But more and more, I find myself appreciating movies that fail — often in a big way — but have something important going for them. These are not truly great movies, with a minor flaw in them. They are fundamentally flawed, but somewhere within them there is a germ of a good idea, or just one fine scene, one performance, one moment that rescues it from obscurity and makes it compelling. There was an earlier thread of movies we are ashamed we had not watched or had not enjoyed. Here is a category of movie to be ashamed that one liked, but to still see something worthwhile in the whole enterprise.

So my first candidate is Falling Down, with Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Tuesday Weld, and Frederic Forrest. It’s a crude vigilante movie that asks us to applaud a domestic terrorist, that tugs shamelessly at our heartstrings, that gives us explosions as well as a child’s tears, that caricatures the people “D-Fens” kills (or causes to die). Worthless. Exploitative. And yet… I just watched it again on HBO and it captures something about middle class alienation that we rarely see. There are a handful of scenes that, for me, rescue the movie. The Douglas character sitting in traffic at the beginning (the heat and insect buzzing remind me of the train station scene in Once Upon A Time in America), the black character holding up the handwritten sign saying he is “not economically viable”, Douglas watching home movies of his ex-wife and child and seeing his own anger and the fear in their faces, Duvall’s early tender scenes on the phone with Weld. There are too many wrong decisions to make it a decent movie, but enough good ones to make it memorable.

So–as the month proceeds, I’m committed to seeing some horror films. The following three sort of fit the generic bill, but alas while most clearly intra-genre two of the films also failed to bring the noise.

1408 is well-shot and lovingly attuned to genre tradition. It’s also about as much fun as staying in a hotel room. A jaded hack writer kicking out quasi-travelogues of the supernatural (John Cusack, using his sad and grim faces mostly, instead of his other two options–the blank or the smiley) goes into one “evil fucking room” and haunting ensues. In the story by Stephen King, it’s pretty stripped down; I don’t recall a backstory which gives a rationale (sort of) for the writer’s jadedness (this is NOT a spoiler–the requisite dead kid) which did give the film its small bit of emotional juice but also drained out what remained of my pleasure in the film. Why didn’t this work? Again, I liked the turn to the traditional–no torture scenes, just ghosts and evil spaces. But I was never spooked in the least, and mostly I was bored. I kind of blame Cusack… and maybe it’s unfair, but damn he seemed more impassive than jaded. Everything seemed tamped down, controlled.

Black Sheep wants to be uncontrolled, the opposite of tamped down–revved up, Peter-Jackson-crazed with gore and the slapstick potential of extreme horror. But the film suffers from a very similar ailment as the above: while utterly loony in its premise (genetic sheep turned killer, also somehow able to transfer sheep-ness into humans bitten so that we get a few transformations), and in love with endless shots of sheep munching happily on piles of innards or grabbing and stretching bits of rubbery flesh farther than you ever thought biologically possible, the film was also boring. It was so utterly conventional in its enactment of its strange premise that the helium seeped out and instead we get a pretty tedious straightforward horror film, saved only slightly by a relative competence in its execution, a lack of pretension, and some decent enough acting. I enjoyed the trailer more than the film, though.

Black Book probably deserves another thread. I thought about sticking it under our thread on Soderbergh’s Good German, because this film seems a far more effective embodiment of classic war-time Hollywood narrative married to a bleaker, more cynical critique of those films’ romanticism. I watched, and quite enjoyed–Paul Verhoeven updates this WWII melodrama, infusing it with a vicious sense of human nature (and occasional flashes of ironic situational humor) and an intriguing willingness to play the horrors of that war (somewhat explicitly addressed) as fodder for thrilling suspense. I was very taken by the lead Carice van Houten, who is fearless and enthralling in her performance–capturing exactly that sense of the ’40s heroine in her semi-hardboiled yet earnest attitude. Sebastian Koch (from Lives of Others) is also quite good. I guess what drew me in, besides the strong acting and excellent pacing and suspenseful story, is that I kept thinking that it seemed a rather glib way to tell the story, and the film seemed self-conscious of its own glib repression or exploitation. . . and yet it’s not ironic or winking in form (which we might say of Soderbergh’s film). Not really horror, but occasionally horrifying, and–like many reviewers I cautiously toss this word out–entertaining.

Yeah. Since we’re talking politics in the ‘seventies threads, here’s a fine little piece of genre entertainment with its tongue in cheek, heart on sleeve, and hand on Mao’s little red book, from 1971. Opening with a quote from the Chairman about the necessity of violence in a revolution, Duck plays sincerely and with silly abandon (often at the same time) with the mythologies of the bandit and the revolutionary. Continue reading Duck, You Sucker

This one doesn’t need a lot of interpretation. It is exactly what you expect: a well executed action thriller that hits every button a Hollywood movie with pretensions to semi-seriousness has to hit. We have: lots of children, often conducting themselves bravely after the loss of a parent; plenty of bonding across religious and national lines; expert American investigators able to solve crimes with just a few fibers and access to the Internet; the requisite cowardly top American officials, more interested in politics than solving crimes and saving lives. Continue reading The Kingdom

A short film–linked by one character, and I hear a prequel(ish) to the upcoming Darjeeling Limited–is available for free at iTunes, for a short time. I grabbed it, but wanted to let people know if they wanted to see it….

Two quick reactions, one very effusive.

A couple weeks ago I saw Away From Her, the directoral debut of Sarah Polley, adapting a short story by Alice Munro about a woman drifting into Alzheimer’s, grappling with the loss, while her husband does, too. Julie Christie gives an amazing, subtle central performance, as does Gordon Pinsent. It’s got a careful, slow rhythm, is edited with a non-linear precision that echoes the confusions of this disease, and is so utterly, perfectly crafted that it felt (alas) like a room impeccably designed and then hermetically sealed. Nary an emotion crept into my viewing.

I’m being rough–and I hadn’t posted on it to avoid this kind of easy slam. ‘Cause it is a good film, a “good” film, a good for you film, and all that. But tonight I watched a film with similar ambitions–written with a delicate precision, acted with great intensity–yet this film in large part succeeded, often quite astonishingly. The Secret Life of Words stars Sarah Polley, Continue reading Writers writing, actors acting

Interesting, enjoyable, with some wonderful moments, but something of a letdown after ‘History of Violence.’ Whereas HoV is full of quiet menace, here the menace is right in your face, on the surface of the film. Cronenberg revels in the blood, from an opening assassination, through a bloody birth, to a remarkable scene in a public steambath which features a naked, tattooed Viggo Mortensen sliding in pools of blood. Whereas the transformation of the Mortensen character in HoV takes us by surprise, here he glowers and exudes power from the first moment we see him.

Some nice performances, especially Armin Mueller-Stahl, Naomi Watts, and Mortensen, when he lets his face crease and his hair flop a little. But I couldn’t help feeling that Cronenberg bought into the allure of the Russian mob a little too much. Oddly enough, this made me think fondly of a much earlier Mortensen film, ‘American Yakuza’: a true B-movie, but one that played with betrayal and honors in a mafia setting in ways that I found more satisfying than ‘Eastern Promises.’ [SPOILER] Continue reading Eastern Promises