Tuesday, October 5, 2021 The Adjuster (1991) at October 05, 2021

 

Directed by Atom Egoyan

Starring Elias Koteas, Arsinee Khanjian, Maury Chaykin, Gabrielle Rose, David Hemblen and Jennifer Dale

Here is a review that I struggled mightily coming up with a place to start.  I absorbed the entire 100+ minutes of the film and had no idea how to accurately depict how I felt about it.  This involved an exhaustive research regimen by yours truly where I went online and read a bunch of reviews...none of which seemed especially lengthy.  I even looked up the Roger Ebert review, a modestly positive three-star appraisal that went into the absolute bare bones of what it was about and nothing more.  It was one of the most sparse Ebert summaries I've EVER read, and I think that's telling.  My theory?  There just isn't a whole lot IN The Adjuster, and waxing about it for longer than a couple paragraphs feels like masturbation for masturbation's sake.  Since I'm a masochist who likes punishing people, none of that will stop me from delivering my standard eight paragraphs of (maybe) fun material.

The director in question this time around is Atom Egoyan.  I'm familiar with the name, and in going through his filmography I had seen two of his previous efforts.  1994's Exotica is a pretty damn good experiment in voyeurism and the people involved in the voyeurism trade, helped by a fantastic performance from certified hottie Mia Kirshner.  The 1999 thriller Felicia's Journey is one of the best (and more accurate) depictions of a serial killer I've seen in cinema, with a seemingly nurturing psychopath played by Bob Hoskins who befriends and eventually murders young women.  Spoiler alert on that film.  The point is that I've enjoyed other films I've seen by this guy.  When you follow a film-maker's career trajectory, you can see growth, and since The Adjuster was an early effort from Egoyan I can only conclude that he got better with time.  This 1991 arthouse film left me cold in every way that a film can leave a person cold.  Why?  Read up and find out.

The title character of the film is Noah (Elias Koteas), insurance adjuster for an unnamed agency who shows up to assist clients whose houses have just burned down.  The film takes great pains to show just how much Noah cares about his clients, especially the good-looking women.  He nobly sleeps with all of them, mostly at the dingy hotel where he chooses to house them.  He constantly repeats the mantra of his company, dictating the news to his clients about their always oustanding claims with a sort of calm detachment.  The film's poster promises a heaping helping of eroticism, a recurring theme in Egoyan's work, and the one sex scene in the film between Noah and a client who has just lost her home is done in a way that takes the hotness completely out of the act as they discuss the mundane details of her claim.  In a way, the character serves as a modern stand-in for Robin Hood, which is driven into the audience's skull with his penchant for shooting arrows at a real estate sign located near his home.

The other lead is Hera (Arsinee Khanjian), Noah's wife who works as a censor of pornographic films.  While Koteas does his best with the limited dialogue he is given (and his status in my mind as the forever Casey Jones), I found Khanjian's performance to be very limited, her face going from one level of mild concern to another level of mild concern.  It's really a shame, because there is the potential in this character for some really gripping stuff.  She secretly videotapes the movies that her job requires her to watch and is implied to be turned on by them, no doubt a commentary on the hypocrisy of small boards of people who arbitrarily decide what is suitable for public consumption.  These days, we celebrate these folks and call them corporations.  While watching, I couldn't help but think that a film entirely about this character (with perhaps Jennifer Dale, the actress who played Noah's sex scene recipient, in the lead role) with the satire pumped up to 11 could have been electric.

The film is a three-legged table of story structure, and said third leg comes to us in the form of sex pervert ex-footballer Bubba (Maury Chaykin) and his wife (Gabriella Rose).  They like to act out their fantasies in public, and we get one of the more bizarre scenes I've seen in the project thus far where Rose pretends to be a cheerleader for the high school football team.  You haven't lived until you've seen a 36-year-old woman cavorting around for horny teenagers.  If you want to imagine the exploits of these characters, they're essentially a darker version of this:

The one saving grace of The Adjuster occurs in the film-making aspects rather than the screenplay and story structure.  From a visual standpoint, Egoyan does a good job making everything look stark and gray, granting a decent representation to the humdrum existence of this group of wholly unlikable people.  In addition to Koteas, Maury Chaykin is also aces in his role as the sex pervert.  He has one soliloquy during the film that might be the movie's single best scene; it occurs after the character of Bubba has scouted Noah's house as the location for his next project, and it is one of those scenes that lets you know everything about a character without telling you every single aspect of his past.

No matter what praise I throw at The Adjuster, it is about a group of people that I would never, ever want to know.  I CAN like stories where there are no traditional protagonists; Barry Lyndon from this very project comes to mind.  That film, however, was very entertaining and unfolded in a way that made you want to see what happened next.  I did not care, in the least bit, what happened to any of these people.  The script seems to hold a great deal of regard for Noah, viewing him as an idealistic man who does everything he can to help people through difficult situations, but the execution shows us simply a man who seems to be bored in everything he does.  Every time the movie picks up steam, such as the late scene where a rookie censor comes on to Hera during a film viewing, it pulls back, reverting to each character's default status as a depression factory.

The Adjuster is a maddening film, one that actually does have a lot of potential to be something great in my own mind despite every negative thing I've said about it thus far.  The problem is that it is so uneven and unfocused.  It contains three different stories - an insurance adjuster who sleeps with his clients, a censor who secretly enjoys what she is supposed to decry, and a depraved couple who will do anything for sexual thrills - and muddles them together into a mess that never quite gels.  A movie about any ONE of these three stories has the potential to be something very special, especially the censorship angle.  As it stands, the movie is a black hole of substance.  It tries to say so many things that it winds up essentially saying nothing.

Rating time: * out of ****.  Atom Egoyan would go on to do things that I enjoyed a great deal, but this one...ehhhh.  Call it the Dark Star that would eventually give us Halloween.

Monday, October 4, 2021 Mystery Train (1989) at October 04, 2021

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Directed by Jim Jarmusch

Starring Youki Kudoh, Masatoshi Nagase, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Cinque Lee, Nicoletta Braschi, Elizabeth Bracco, Rick Aviles, Joe Strummer and Steve Buscemi

In the summer of 2018, I took a road trip to Memphis.  It was a vacation that I had envisioned in my head for years before actually doing it, owing to my huge early rock n' roll fandom and general Elvis Presley obsession.  I finally decided to take the plunge for a few different reasons; it took place right after I turned 35, and it actually marked the end of my first blog.  I enjoyed everything on the trip, from Graceland to Beale Street, but the thing that I arguably liked the most was sitting in the hotel lobby at night, in a location that seemed far, far away from my small Midwestern hometown watching the traffic go by on the streets below.

This was undoubtedly a very different kind of Memphis than the one depicted in this film.  It's also a very different kind of America than the one that usually gets shown in cinema.  However, it's different in a wonderful way.  I LOVED Mystery Train, one of the early films from director Jim Jarmusch and the first one to be given any kind of significant budget - in this case a little under $3 million, most of which came from JVC electronics.  Based on what I saw, I really need to check out more films by Jarmusch, because he shows a level of invention with a still-very-limited budget and an ear for dialogue that I'll never have.  It's also an anthology film of sorts, telling three different stories with three different groups of characters that all converge in the end, so keep that in mind as we go about expounding on the story.

The first characters we meet are Jun (Masatoshi Nagase) and his girlfriend Mitsuko (Youki Kudoh), teenage tourists from Japan who are out to see all of the standard sights in Memphis as a title card reading "Far From Yokohama" appears on the screen.  A running gag with these characters involves Mitsuko's obsession with Elvis Presley and Jun's insistence that Carl Perkins is the superior performer, an assurance that somehow sneaks up on you at just the right moments.  Early on in this film, we gleam just how REAL the interactions between the characters seem, even when the characters themselves are just a little off and unrealistic.

Story #2 is called, fittingly, "A Ghost."  Italian widow Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi) is stuck in Memphis overnight while transporting her husband's body back to Rome.  She encounters a trio of interesting characters on her night: an unscrupulous magazine salesman, a creepy restaurant patron (played by the always awesome Tom Noonan), and finally down-on-her-luck Deedee (Elizabeth Bracco).  There's one particular bit of dialogue between Luisa and Deedee, with the latter going on and on and on about her life situation and how her boyfriend never talks that hits EXACTLY right, followed by a guest appearance from the man who watches over this entire film like the specter that he is.

Everything comes together in the third story, "Lost in Space," featuring Steve Buscemi as a barber who gets sucked in to a violent crime and its awkward aftermath.  We also become well-acquainted with Deedee's boyfriend Johnny (Joe Strummer), who goes by the nickname of Elvis much to his own chagrin, and their mutual friend Will Robinson (Rick "The Rat Man" Aviles).  One guess as to how this story got its name.  While buying a couple bottles of liquor, Johnny does something incredibly stupid that forces the trio to seek shelter at the run-down Arcade hotel and ride out the storm.

Mystery Train has an excellent framing device that never gets old no matter how many times we come back to it.  The Arcade hotel is actually where ALL of our groups of characters wind up, with a few events being repeated in every story.  There's also some excellent humor provided by the hotel's employees: the very flamboyantly-dressed night clerk portrayed by Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Cinque Lee's suffering bellhop.  The fun in a film like this generally comes from piecing together what we're given in each new story and wondering how the characters will eventually converge.  This film actually makes a bold leap of NOT having them all meet in a grand chance despite the grand chance of them all showing up at the same hotel on the same night; its finale is satisfying in every way, with the characters remaining separate and facing their own future.

Slight peak behind the curtain: while I watched most of the movies in this marathon in chronological order, I actually skipped ahead and watched this one right after Godzilla to give myself something to look forward to after a film I was dreading.  The move paid off, big time, as Mystery Train is a movie that fires on every cylinder.  Jarmusch's direction is fantastic, showing a desolate, almost ghost-town version of Memphis that seems to welcome each new inhabitant in with the hospitality of an Old West saloon.  The music becomes a character in and of itself, with Elvis' version of "Blue Moon" being one of the repeated motifs that every group of characters encounter on their long night in the city.

A low-budget movie based heavily around dialogue is a dicey proposition for many viewers; it's also a dicey proposition for me, admittedly.  But this is a movie that makes you want to keep watching, engaging you with a stable of characters that come across as quirky without ever veering into the pretentious.  Hell, EVERY main character in this movie is likable.  We leave this movie not knowing where they wind up after leaving Memphis but grateful for the time that we got to spend with them, being allowed a voyeuristic look into their lives.  Now who's sounding pretentious?

Rating time: The Memphis Train is rolling...**** out of ****.  How much did I enjoy this movie?  I ordered the Blu-ray immediately after watching.  Now THAT'S a recommendation!  Oh, and here's Screamin' Jay doing what he does best.

Sunday, October 3, 2021 Five Corners (1987) at October 03, 2021

 

Directed by Tony Bill

Starring Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins, Todd Graff, Elizabeth Berridge and John Turturro

Time for a little inside baseball on the 30 Flicks project.  I initially selected the 1982 film Eating Raoul as one of the films to be viewed.  It was a movie that I knew about for a long time and had been putting off watching it for reasons that I'm not entirely unsure of.  But as time went on and the writing of this here blog ticked by, I became aware that the films that I've liked the best (Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock) fit a similar description.  And True Stories?  As mentioned, I'm a huge Talking Heads fan and had a pretty good idea that I would enjoy it.  Thus, I decided to roll the dice and pick a film that was also in my Criterion Channel watchlist - one that I never even knew existed until August of 2021.

When doing my initial browse through the Criterion Channel, Five Corners seemed like an interesting proposition for several reasons.  It definitely doesn't hurt to have Jodie Foster on your marquee; nobody plays the relatable, likable girl-next-door better than Ms. Foster, even in movies where she is supposed to be a badass feminist.  The description also seemed intriguing, as an anthology film taking place in a small neighborhood is generally a safe bet.  Tonally, the movie is VERY different from what I expected, for better or worse.  Surprise is a good thing.  Five Corners mixes emotionally fulfilling surprises with a somewhat messy story, ultimately converging into a fairly middle-of-the-road experience.  My milquetoast criticism has reached its apex with that previous sentence.  Onto the movie!

Film critics often like films with unconventional structure.  This must be clear to any unfortunate soul who may or may not have read this blog thus far.  On some level, I understand this, as a person whose job description is to see as many movies as possible must get bored with seeing the typical three-act beats over and over again and will grow to appreciate movies that try to break the mold.  Five Corners is one of those films that seems tailor-made for critics.  It essentially tells two very different stories with two different groups of characters, smash cutting between them with the finesse of a penguin on roller skates.  Two events set the stories in motion: the release of lifelong criminal and attempted rapist Heinz (the always awesome John Turturro) from prison, and the murder of a dickhead algebra teacher via bow and arrow.  Points for the accurate movie poster.

Let's talk about Movie A first, since it is by far the more interesting of the two plots.  The film takes place in the Bronx of 1964 in a neighborhood where Heinz has just returned after serving his prison sentence.  He is initially a likable character, more in line with the path that I anticipated the movie would take as a parable of rehabilitation and redemption.  Spoiler alert: it isn't.  His alleged rape victim was Linda (Jodie Foster), tough-yet-sensitive girl who works in a pet store and is still dating the man who tried to stop her attack.  Said man now also walks with a slightly humorous gait due to his ineffectual heroism.  The guy who REALLY saved her ass is Harry (Tim Robbins), who has since recanted his violent ways and is dedicating himself to pacifism and the rising non-violent black rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King.

Without a doubt, the character of Harry is the best thing about the film.  There is a stunningly well-done sequence where he meets with two activists in a diner, offering his services to go to Mississippi and essentially get beat up (and possibly killed) for his cause.  He relays the story of how his policeman father died a hero, and when asked if the killer was black, he states that he doesn't remember.  Great, great stuff that tells us a LOT about this guy without spending five minutes giving the audience boring exposition.  There is a nice little arc that Harry goes through as well, given credence from an early great performance from Robbins.  As much of a condescending douche as I've always thought this guy is in real life, I can't deny that I really enjoy him as an actor.  Separating the art from the artist and all that.

Do I have to talk about Movie B?  Alas, I must.  It begins with the aforementioned teacher taking an arrow to the back, and then Random Greaser Guy driving around at night with two girls in the back seat getting high.  No longer wanting to look at their faces (really), he offers two random high school passer-bys five bucks to take them off of his hands.  Thus begins a day of weird adventures where they share wholly uninteresting conversations, go bowling, and talk some more.  There's also an endless bit in an elevator shaft.  The only other thing worth mentioning about this group of characters is that one of the girls is played by Elizabeth Berridge of Amadeus fame, who has some of the most unreal natural assets that any actress could ask for.  See her in Tobe Hooper's classic slasher flick The Funhouse if you want to know what I mean.

Five Corners is a very uneven film.  The two main stories could not possibly be any more different in terms of tone, made all the more jarring by the film's editing which often smash cuts between them with the finesse of a buffalo on roller skates.  Worst metaphor ever?  Possibly.  The audience generally expects a movie that unfolds in this manner to gradually bring the two stories together, but they never really do.  I mean, they ultimately DO in a rather ham-fisted way in the film's climax, but we never really get that conflagration of events that CLICK.  Also, the third act of the film is shockingly simplistic, turning from a story about people to a rather conventional chase, fight and shootout movie.  Maybe if 30+ years hadn't passed and I hadn't become so bored of chases, fights and shootouts that I could shoot someone myself this wouldn't bother me, but it does.

I went back and forth about my overall enjoyment of this film.  Ultimately, I DID enjoy watching it because the movie has some amazing scenes and performances.  Every time either Turturro or Robbins are onscreen, the movie takes on a whole new life, although the former does eventually become a cartoon character by the end.  Foster is also great, despite her (and several other cast members, in all fairness) horrible Bronx accent.  Director Tony Bill also does a great job evoking the overall mood of life in the 1964 Bronx, painting everything with grays, blacks and muted colors meant to convey the overall grind of daily humdrum existence that gets interrupted by some very unexpected events.  And you've also got to give it to any movie that features a character scooping up an elderly woman and gingerly throwing her out of a window.  Double spoiler alert.

Rating time: Five Corners gets *** out of ****.  It's just enough for a Roger Ebert thumbs-up recommendation.  Still, those shifts man...

Saturday, October 2, 2021 True Stories (1986) at October 02, 2021

 

Directed by David Byrne

Starring John Goodman, Annie McEnroe, Swoosie Kurtz, Spalding Gray, Pop Staples, Tito Larriva, Jo Harvey Allen, John Ingle and David Byrne

Sometimes, an artist or piece of art comes along at exactly the right time in your life.  Such was the case with my discovery of the Talking Heads a scant two years ago.  I certainly knew OF them and had their highlights in my iTunes library.  But when I decided to take the plunge and sample the whole catalogue...I was blown away.  Have you ever had an emotional experience with music?  Songs like "Houses in Motion," "Slippery People" and "Once in a Lifetime" seemed to be speaking directly to me as a late-'30s loser who spends 99% of his free time alone and has no prospects of changing that any time soon.  Make of that what you will.  To cut the superlatives short, these guys (and gals) are incredible, and one of my top five bands ever.

The movie poster was somehow burned into my memory; there's no doubt that I passed by that VHS tape countless times in the various video stores that I frequented over the years.  But I never put the two and two together until I started reading up on the Talking Heads albums via the ever-accurate Wikipedia.  True Stories is the brainchild of the Heads' dynamo frontman David Byrne.  He had total creative control over this project as a result of the success of the 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense and, man, did he let that creativity run wild.  The film is a little depressing in that regard; we will never get anything like this again from a big studio, where everything is micromanaged down to the fractional amounts of each ethnic group required in a new project.  The result is a film that was in and out of theaters in nary a month back in 1986, but one that has gained favor from critics and audiences ever since and is now a bona fide cult classic.

To say that this movie is one of a kind is an understatement.  It defies any sort of traditional narrative structure, instead conveying what it wants to convey via a series of very loosely-connected vignettes.  It does have a couple of framing devices: (1) the town of Virgil, Texas, that the entire movie takes place within, and (2) an unnamed visitor to the town who also narrates the film, played by Byrne himself, who makes pithy and witty remarks about the town and its residents all the while.  If you've listened to much Talking Heads music, you know that he has a great ear for humor, and it really shines through in this film.  I have something to say about the difference between American and European cities. But I've forgotten what it is. I have it written down at home somewhere.  Those last three sentences?  Actual lines from the film.

I think that writing a review of this movie actually requires a bit of understanding of the thought process that went into it.  Writer Stephen Tobolowsky (Ned Ryerson himself from Groundhog Day) and his girlfriend once visited David Byrne and saw tabloid headlines taped to the guy's walls.  Byrne asked them how crazy it would be if all these stories turned out to be true.  Eureka moment, this movie was born.  The writers combined it with an idea about a movie set in Texas' real-life upcoming 150th anniversary celebration.  This melding of two different ideas gives us a movie us a funhouse mirror version of small-town living, populating Virgil with some of the weirdest people you'll ever see as they prepare for the town's "Celebration of Specialness."

The closest thing that the film has to a conventional arc comes in the character of Louis Fyne (John Goodman), one of the workers at the town's Varicorp computer factory who longs to find a wife and has designs on being a singer in his spare time.  You would think that those two particular character traits are a pretty slim basis for your protagonist, and you would be right, but the movie stretches the limited confines of this character for all it's worth thanks in no small part to a tour-de-force performance from Goodman.  I don't think I've ever disliked this guy in anything he's in; even in some Coen brothers projects that I'm not a huge fan of, when Goodman shows up, you can be guaranteed that he's going to bring the goods.  Louis' hero's journey, as it were, concludes in the finale of the film where he...what else?...sings a song.

True Stories is jam-packed with a whole heap of memorable characters.  The town's serial liar (Jo Harvey Allen) is a superficial woman who goes off on repeated tirades about the amazing events of her fictional life to anyone who will listen.  These soliloquies are a virtual framing device in and of themselves and never cease to entertain.  There is also preacher (John Ingle) who gives us...some conspiracy theories that don't sound so crazy these days.  His scene also leads to the movie's single best musical sequence for the song "Puzzlin' Evidence."  Lastly, there is a woman who won't get out of bed (Swoosie Kurtz).  She's not sick, she just has enough money that she doesn't have to.  Wouldn't you do the same thing?  Again, actual dialogue from the film.  Amazingly, she still has the presence of mind to get her hair immaculately coiffed despite never leaving the room.

Time to touch on the musical elements in the film, being that this is a movie directed by the lead singer of the Talking Heads.  I already owned the soundtrack to this film.  I didn't consider the True Stories album to be among their best work, but seeing the songs put in motion the way they are in this film gave me a deeper appreciation for them.  The lyrics are usually (but not always) delivered by the characters that populate the landscape rather than Byrne himself, with each one touching on a different aspect of life in Virgil.  In addition to the aforementioned "Puzzlin' Evidence," there's "Dream Operator," accompanied by the strangest fashion show you've ever seen; "Love for Sale," which has a really strong commercial parody montage; and "Radio Head," where an ancillary character talks about how he is able to receive "tones" from people.  It's great stuff, very well-performed and well-staged.

Byrne also works plenty of satire into the film.  His narrator character repeatedly speaks about the various ways that the American small town has changed over the years, with the stretching city limits cutting into the countryside, the shopping mall that serves as the town hub, and the beauty-free modern architecture of all the new buildings.  Now, I don't live in exactly a small town, but it's smallish enough for me to know that it's essentially all true, if not exaggerated.  But hell, everything is exaggerated in a movie called True Stories.  Get it, people?  Irony.  Amazingly, though, Byrne never comes across as mean-spirited with any of it, viewing his people and buildings with a sort of loving voyeurism.  And when the narrator drives off into the distance and puts Virgil behind him, his final lines of the film give the bizarre characters an entirely new meaning.

Rating time: **** out of ****.  I've done my best to explain the appeal of this film, but really, this is one you just have to see to to understand.  Check it out.  Classic scene after classic scene and quotable dialogue for DAYS.

Friday, October 1, 2021 Blood Simple (1984) at October 01, 2021

 

 

1984

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Starring John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, Samm-Art Williams and M. Emmet Walsh

I've got a long, bloody history with the Coen brothers.  Just as long and bloody as a lot of their films.  There are segments of each one that I've seen that I absolutely love, but most of them seem to have a way of ending in a way that leaves me very cold.  No doubt this is by design, as the theme in a lot of their work seems to be how simple events can set off a wave of murder, robbery and crime, and these situations rarely wrap themselves up in a neat little bow.  Sometimes, it can work out great, as it does with Fargo and the remake of True Grit.  Sometimes it's The Big Lebowski and its cult status that I've never understood or No Country for Old Men, which had me walking out of the theater royally pissed off.

So where does Blood Simple fall on this spectrum?  Well, as the first in what would be a long, storied filmography, it does pretty damn well.  Amazingly this was another film that I remember reading about in Roger Ebert's "13 for Halloween" list, which is yet more proof that this guy did not have the greatest taste when it came to horror movies.  I mean, Halloween?  Seriously?  All of that aside, this is a neo-noir crime film - a genre that I'm not exactly fond of - at its finest.  While it's far from perfect, it does a lot of things right and hits its various story points with occasional laser-like precision.

The movie opens up and immediately establishes the dark mood that will permeate the whole 96-minute running time.  In the pouring rain, bartender Ray (John Getz) is driving Abby (Frances McDormand in her big screen debut) home.  Abby is married to Marty (Dan Hedaya), the owner of the bar that Ray works at.  Suffice to say, the marriage is going through some very rocky times.  So rocky, in fact, that Abby is driven into Ray's metaphorical arms on this drive home and the couple wind up going to a hotel to paw each other.  However, seemy private detective Louis Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) has been hired by Marty to follow them and takes photos of their love-making session.

While Ray and Abby are the characters who get much of the screen time in this film, it's the film's darker characters who really drive the plot forward.  Marty isn't able to accept his wife leaving him so easily, and he decides to hire Visser to kill Ray and Abby.  It turns out to be a mistake that Marty eventually pays for in the most excruciating fashion, as the extremely snakey Visser stages the murders of Ray and Abby before shooting Marty in the chest, planting a gun that he stole from Abby on the scene to frame her for the killing.

The best stuff in the whole movie ensues as Ray arrives at Marty's bar and finds the dead body, believing that his lover was the one who pulled the trigger and hastily cleaning up the crime scene.  It's gut-wrenchingly tense, containing some great acting by Getz in the farthest possible thing from the Stathis Borans character that he would eventually be best-known for in David Cronenberg's The Fly.  We see the close calls at the bar itself as Ray removes Marty from the scene...and then that immortal highway sequence that begins when Ray finds out that Marty isn't quite dead yet.  

The script becomes a little contrived from this point on.  The third act of Blood Simple is based largely around a series of misunderstandings. Like, Three's Company level of misunderstanding, the kind of thing that could have been solved by either Ray or Abby asking one more question of the other.  I'm also a little hazy on why Visser didn't think to look for his doctored photos immediately after shooting Marty; maybe some well-meaning reader can inform me, maybe I missed something, maybe I'm a moron, it's all up in the air.

Alright, so, what works about this film?  It was the launching point for the Coen brothers for a reason, because their execution of this simple setup - an unhappily married woman shacking up with a well-meaning guy - is pretty damn good.  I've completely left out one detail of this movie so far, and that is the Texas setting.  A Coen trademark is amplifying the stereotypes of the locals of whatever film they make, and this is no different, with accents so thick that I actually had to turn on the subtitles.  The mood, atmosphere and even music of the film all amplify that setting, with the oppressive Texas heat, honky tonk bars and back country houses trapping the characters in a vice.  Oh, and M. Emmet Walsh?  What a performance.  This guy is sleazy in the best possible way in this movie, and I love it.

Those strengths are indeed so strong that I can overlook the weaknesses.  Those weaknesses would be the AFOREMENTIONED occasional illogical plot points and a third act that kind of drags before its epic climax.  By the way, said climax isn't shocking if you've seen other Coen brothers movies; I'm sure that it was in 1984, but these siblings made a career out of doing unexpected things.  Thus, unpredictability is often predictable in the Coen brothers canon.  Nevertheless, the final bit of cat-and-mouse contained within Blood Simple is fantastic.

Rating time: *** 1/2 out of ****.  It made GREAT watching on a hot summer night.  But it's the last freakin' thing I would ever dream of popping in on Halloween.  For a true Coen Brothers masterpiece, look no further:

Thursday, September 30, 2021 Blow Out (1981) at September 30, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Directed by Brian De Palma

Starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow and Dennis Franz

I have a lot of precious movie memories.  One of the best is undoubtedly watching Pulp Fiction for the first time.  I read all about this flick in one of the Ebert companions, knew all of the secrets, almost every plot twist and even a few key sequences of dialogue by heart.  The film did not disappoint, due in no small part due to leading man John Travolta's layered, greasy-cool performance as assassin/philosopher Vincent Vega.  This is the guy who first came to prominence on a dumb TV show, and since then we've seen him rise and fall...rise and fall...fall further, and then somehow rise again!  How could he survive The Fanatic?  He's not human, I tell ya!

One of the joys of the cinephile life is noticing which acting crew tends to pop up with certain directors.  This was Travolta's second collaboration with director Brian De Palma, a man who has directed two of my favorite horror films of all time with Carrie and Dressed to Kill, the latter of which was released a scant year before this one.  He has also been behind some films that I'm not particularly fond of, first and foremost being Scarface, primarily because I'm not a huge punker for gangster movies in general and secondarily because Pacino had the worst fake accent in the history of cinema in it.  Some things just can't be unheard.  Coming into this film, I knew that he undoubtedly had a huge hard-on for Alfred Hitchcock as seen in the camera-circling prom dance scene in Carrie and almost the entire running time of Dressed to Kill.  Here, he introduces political intrigue and Giallo influence into the mix.  The result is a film with fascinating parts, but the sum of its parts is a mess when it comes to structure and execution.

No matter what else I'll say about this film, it has an amazing opening sequence - a long, Halloween-style POV tracking shot as a killer stalks a female dormitory, complete with every trope in the book in this time period when slasher movies ruled cinemas.  The scene turns out to be a movie within a movie and out introduction to Jack Terry (John Travolta), movie sound effects expert who is told by the director of the generic horror film to find better wind sounds.  Jack heads out into the Philadelphia night, and much like many a hero in a Dario Argento Giallo film, his sound equipment catches the explosion of a car tire just before a car careens off a nearby road into the river below.  Jack dives in, spotting a dead male occupant and rescuing a live female.

The car wreck is the linchpin event that sets the story in motion.  The script introduces some higher stakes with the identity of the guy who didn't survive the plunge - the Governor of Pennsylvania and the man who almost certainly would have been the next President.  The girl is Sally Bedina, played by frequent De Palma leading lady and his real-life wife Nancy Allen.  The film gets its title from the sounds that Jack recorded that fateful night, with a gunshot coming just a split-second before the tire blow out that caused the car to spiral toward its doom.  In this way, the movie definitely shows its Giallo influence; in many Italian thrillers, we get a the man who works in an artistic field witnessing a murder and summarily becoming obsessed with solving it.  This movie is De Palma's version of that story.  You can definitely rip off worse things than Dario Argento.

The film does not have the singular focus of an Argento film.  Instead, it begins throwing paranoia in every direction.  Paranoia is the word in Blow Out, as characters ranging from police officers to politicians to unscrupulous photographers (one of whom is a classic weasel played by Dennis Franz) show up connected to the death.  We do get elements of characterization for both Jack and Sally as both have past actions that they are not exactly proud of.  There is a long flashback sequence involving Jack in a previous job working to bring down police corruption where he inadvertently causes the death of a co-worker.  Sally, meanwhile, is slowly revealed to be one of the conspirators, and her presence in the car was no coincidence.

The entire movie has this layer of deprecating, almost bitter cynicism toward everyone in authority.  Like Chinatown, it is an enjoyable and refreshing idea in these days of being told to just appreciate our overlords and accept authority at face value.  However, it can get tiresome when we're given no motive, no suspects, no reason to believe the bad guys are beatable.  That's what the real world is for.  In the world of Blow Out, the villains are wraiths, with one exception - Burke (John Lithgow), the assassin whose job is to snuff out all of the loose ends that Jack is keeping out there with his off-the-record investigation.  Lithgow, as always, is awesome in his role, but I just believe that we need more of an onscreen threat than one man.  As the film nears its appropriately bleak ending, I found myself invested, but not particularly surprised at the way things turned out.  There was no hope in the previous 100 minutes, so why should the last five be any different?

The central motif of the film is cinema itself.  To the end that the movie's protagonist works in the film industry, De Palma once again throws out all the stops when it comes to visual techniques.  One scene in particular is very impressive.  It occurs when Jack arrives at his apartment after Burke has just erased all of his sound recordings.  The camera rotates around the room in kaleidoscope fashion as a frantic Jack begins throwing tape after tape in his machine, panicking that his life's work is gone.  The movie also contains fantastic use of night-time footage, a conscientious decision that no doubt contributes to the film's overall pessimism.  However, there is also one bit that is much too showy for its own good, a murder scene in a construction area filmed with loud, distracting musical stingers that would have been much more effective in near silence.  Less is more, people.

I enjoyed Blow Out for its technical elements and for Travolta's turn as the tortured hero, but I did not find it as enjoyable as the other De Palma films that I mentioned.  The overall negative tone of the movie cannot be blamed for this; Carrie ends on a downer, but it contains moments of absolution for its central characters and is as emotionally satisfying as a film gets.  Ditto Dressed to Kill.  This film lacks those moments for its main characters. It is negative just for the sake of being negative.  Lastly...I have to say that I found Nancy Allen's performance as Sally to be pretty bad.  The character should be the emotional heart of the film, but she comes across as a one-note ditz.  I like Allen as an actress - she's great as the meanest of the mean girls in Carrie and the hooker with the heart of gold in Dressed to Kill.  This role, though, was a misfire.  You can't win 'em all.

Rating time: ** 1/2 out of ****.  The fantastic visuals and references contained in Blow Out definitely lend to its credence as a cult favorite.  I just feel that there are movies that fall in within its various genres that are far better.  Seek some of those out.  #DarioArgentoIsGod

Wednesday, September 29, 2021 The Brood (1979) at September 29, 2021

 

Directed by David Cronenberg

Starring Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle and Cindy Hinds

Here we go - an honest-to-goodness horror movie!  This is my wheelhouse.  I've loved this genre ever since my grade school days when I checked out the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books over and over from my grade school library, which led to me discovering Stephen King later on and a lifelong obsession that continues to this day.  To date, I own 426 horror films on physical media and still watch 2-3 horror films a week, regardless of whether I've seen them or not.  Suffice to say, if you never read my previous blog (and let's face it - 99.999999999999% of the world didn't), I'm always more than ready for a good creepy time and a smorgasbord of stage blood.

Thus, I'm a little disappointed to report that The Brood - the one horror film that I selected for 30 Flicks - failed to impress the fuck out of me.  It bums me out, because I was extremely jacked to see it.  The director is David Cronenberg, who gave us one of the two best remakes in cinema history with 1986's The Fly, along with Videodrome and A History of Violence.  This is a trio of movies that I'm very familiar with and have seen multiple times, and I know his reputation as a guy who makes bizarre movies with plenty of balls.  "Killer kid" movies are an entire subgenre of horror, and a film of this nature with Cronenberg at the helm seems like a can't-miss proposition.

The movie isn't exactly Village of the Damned, for better or worse.  For much of the running time, this is actually a very conventional horror story, which was the exact opposite of what I expected.  The story presented in The Brood serves as an extended metaphor for the dissolution of a nuclear family built around three principal characters.  There is Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar), the severely disturbed wife and mother under the care of a shock psychiatrist.  There is her husband Frank (Art Hindle), a fairly colorless guy who essentially serves to move the plot forward at the audience's convenience.  And there is their daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds), girl of few words who thankfully doesn't play into the trope of movie children who have insight and dialogue skills way over what their abilities should be.

The star of the show, however, is Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), the man overseeing the recovery of Nola after a breakdown that may or may not have been caused by her estrangement from Frank.  I was more than familiar with Reed before this movie.  He is a veteran of many classic Hammer horror films and was always fantastic in the dashing beefcake role.  Here, he gets to go way over the top and have fun.  He has good material to work with in this regard, as Dr. Raglan is a fringe psych expert who specializes in something called "psychoplasmics."  To demonstrate, the first scene of the film shows Raglan berating one of his male patients and acting like a paternal figure, causing the poor guy to disrobe and reveal welts and sores all over his body.  The general idea is that he causes physical changes in his subjects to get them to face their demons.  Admittedly, it's an out-there and somewhat unbelievable concept, but no more than Split.  It can be forgiven.

The story arc of The Brood consists of a series of slow burns leading to kill scenes.  If you've seen John Carpenter's Halloween, you've seen this movie when it comes to the slicing and dicing.  Various people in the film who have done real or perceived wrong to Nola are the targets, with her abusive mother and neglectful father being the initial targets.  The people doing the killing are also a subject of interest, deformed dwarves who vaguely resemble Candice.  Gradually, we learn that these creatures are a sort of asexual clone, lacking the sign of placental birth.  Who, and what, are they?  This becomes the question of the movie at roughly the two-thirds mark, and it's a good thing, because there are a LOT of scenes featuring Frank walking around asking people questions that barely kept my attention.

As far as horror climaxes go, you can definitely do worse than The Brood.  We get all of the answers we're looking for and an effective showdown/chase sequence.  The ending contains one moment in particular that got a legitimate "oh shit" reaction out of yours truly, followed by some stomach-churning stuff that will stick with me for a while.  I don't know what it is, but visuals in films that deal directly with childbirth always get under my skin.  I can watch Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers slice people up into pastrami with machetes without blinking an eye, but show a birth sac and I have to turn my eyes.

The biggest flaw that I noticed while watching the film is that it focuses most of its attention on the Frank character.  With the right screenplay and the right actor, this character could be very compelling.  As it is, he's just kind of a boring schlub, who isn't helped at all by a performance from Hindle whose one default expression is mild concern.  Perhaps it wouldn't stand out so much if it wasn't opposite the great turns from not only Reed as Dr. Raglan but also Eggar as the wife.  The script is ambiguous when it comes to just what led to her being in Raglan's care; was it something in the marriage, or something from her traumatic childhood?  We never find out.  Nola Carveth is a character that we want to spend more time with.  Her scenes with Raglan are electric - just two people talking, but chock full of emotion and resonance.

My biggest complaint with The Brood is that I did not find it to be an effective horror film.  It is certainly an interesting film from a psychological standpoint, but it lacks the flair that a John Carpenter or Wes Craven would give to their subjects.  Those words are surprising for me to type, considering how much memorable, sick stuff was present in The Fly.  The death scenes are choppily edited and uninspired, and our hero character doesn't give us the sympathetic punch that you typically need in the final act.  I remember reading in the past that Cronenberg had actually just went through a bitter divorce of his own before writing this film.  Keeping that in mind gives the movie a bit more weight while also making it simultaneously funny on a certain level.  This has got to be the most fucked-up way of dealing with a breakup ever put on film.

Rating time: ** 1/2 out of ****.   The ending serves as a good payoff to a pedestrian build-up, but most of this movie just didn't grab me.  Chalk it up to being a jaded horror fan.