It's alright! It's alright! It's all been approved! I'm an American!
The Revenge of the 68 Comeback Special
David Cairns, the lucky (though deserving) sod, is enjoying the Telluride film festival with his brilliant new doc Natan but he hasn't neglected his responsibilities. He's served up a fine piece on Miloš Forman's terrific The Firemen's Ball over at Shadowplay. Head on over and take a look!
The '68 Comback Special: Anna Karenina or The Living Dead Of The Moscow Aristocracy
David Cairns is quite simply one of the finest and most entertaining film writers there is. I've never met him in person (an ocean tragically separates us. Betcha can't guess which one!) but I consider him a friend all the same and lucky to have encountered his many talents and his graciousness as a human being. I've spent many trainrides scanning the back issues of his remarkable blog, Shadowplay. Our love of the odd, the uncanny and the specific (not to mention the British) in film connects us. He's also a dynamite filmmaker, but you must surely have known that! Last week he kicked off a joint project we're undertaking - an alternating investigation of the films due to play at the ill-fated 1968 Cannes Film Festival. His first piece features not just an incredibly incisive written commentary, but a rich video essay he made with the help of Timo Langer. Next week he'll pick up the gauntlet I throw down here and on we'll go until we've left our brand on every film meant to sweep audiences off their feet that year. The story of the festival has more or less usurped the historical importance of any work scheduled, which is a sad thing indeed. We're aiming to shed a little more light (I've already done a little) on these landmark works and maybe pick some winners just for fun. This next film and I have something of a history...
Orson would have fit nicely into the film, come to think of it...
In my sophomore year at Emerson College in Boston, I lived a solitary life in a grungy apartment in Lechmere, or as its known locally, that part of town where nobody goes. My days were pretty routine: go to class, eat, go to the Boston Public Library and rent ten DVDs from their basement - naturally they put the foreign films where sunlight couldn't touch them or the creeps who wanted them. I discovered not one but two films that played the 1968 Cannes Film Festival while I was a regular there. The first was Miklós Jancsó's The Red & The White, a film that I recognized right away as a masterpiece. It perplexed me that something that dripped with greatness in the way this did could possibly be left off most canonical lists I'd encountered, but also entirely off my film school curriculum. Maybe the loss at the festival had kept it off that many more radars? Likely as not it wouldn't have made much of a difference. After all, when's the last time anyone talked about Chronicles of the Years of Fire or The Hireling? The other competition entry I found was Alexsandr Zarkhi's Anna Karenina, which kicked my brain's ass.
I'd picked it up because I'd recognized Tatyana Samoylova on the DVD box. I still had a mad crush on the feisty revolutionary bride from Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying and figured this would be as good a showcase as any for her. I quickly lost myself in the plot, thinking the movie was just a little too kind to the Tolstoy and subsequently had no cinematic fire in its guts. And the way they'd dressed and presented Samoylova just seemed so...wrong. Her expressions seemed to be a series of lies. Anyone who's seen The Cranes Are Flying knows what truth looks like when it burns across someone's determined face. It was a joyless watch, and in my state (hungry, cold, miserable, living with only insects in a filthy apartment no one ever visited) was too much for me to handle. A second viewing explained that that was indeed the point. The most successful adaptations of Karenina have to accept this up front and find a way through it or find a way around it. Joe Wright's version might be my favourite, not because it's revolutionary in the telling, but because he and Tom Stoppard made its heroes actors and boorish theatre patrons for the audience/aristocracy (audienstocracy? I'll work on that) to gawk at. The story has been told so many times that you've got to supercharge your grammar. Zarkhi's choice - to go right up to the edge of horror and pull back at the last moment - is a good one but it doesn't let an audience breathe or find anything resembling hope within the already very sad story.
Zarkhi frames everyone who isn't one of our four or five leads as if they were the living dead. Across the Croisette, Dominique Delouche was trying much the same thing with his version of 24 Hours In the Life of a Woman but his mode is different. If Delouche was in the realm of Carnival of Souls or the later Daughters of Darkness then Anna Karenina is clearly at a ball thrown by Hammer Studios. The make-up sits nicely between vampire and zombie and wasn't the ghastly pallor of the filthy rich practically the British studio's greatest weapon after Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing? Rodion Shchedrin's music is so overpowering it seems like some of James Bernard's more insistent brass. What's fascinating is that it also anticipates the direction the studio would take. The colour scheme and montage that would fit comfortably in Demons of the Mind or Hands of the Ripper. Everything here spells fright and cruelty, from red-and-blue-tinted erotic nightmares, dances that turn into churning maelstroms and people failed by man and beast with disastrous consequences. And certainly the ending is about as subtle as anything in Rasputin, The Mad Monk, but we can't entirely blame our director for that, rampaging music and psychological lighting notwithstanding.
But of course the horror we're meant to notice is that of the stifling life Anna is doomed to if she doesn't flee. Zarkhi overplays his hand a touch here. Anyone who didn't know how it ends will have guessed by the time Anna boards the coach to Oblonsky's house. Everyone around her is dead. The production design, make-up and mise-en-scene make it perfectly clear where she's headed. Zarkhi essentially treats her near-death disease as her entry into purgatory and from then on she looks as though she's just missed the train to hell. Complimenting or criticising this movie is a little tricky because it clearly accomplishes its goals, but in so doing have made a sort of horrific living wax museum drama. Zarkhi had been making films for forty years when he made Karenina and his hand is steady, to say the least. The cinematography is showy but engrossing. Between the constant woozy motion around drawing rooms, theatres and gardens and the fact that the film appears to be flickering as if through a candle-powered projector, it looks and acts like almost no other film. It's sort of Barry Lyndon but capable of running at speeds up to Ken Russell. There are some truly unforgettable images and scenes here like the single breath-taking shot where a character decides to take his own life. What makes that more miraculous is that it's followed closely by the film's most lighthearted moment: Kitty and Levin struggling with their ring fingers, which looks too perfect to have been planned. Those graceful acceptances of human behavior made this deliberately heavy film seem worth its terrors.
"They can fix this shit on Elysium..." or "Come Comrades We Rally!"
Whenever I'm about to start filming, my assistant director/cinematographer/good friend Tucker Johnson and I usually watch something new to stir our creativity. A few years ago we watched Super 8 on the first day of our shoot, last winter we watched The Innkeepers at 1 in the morning the day before we started and thank god I made a trip to go see Elysium before I embark on my own sci-fi film, my first. I was wary. Blockbuster season has been remarkably unkind. Pacific Rim, World War Z and Iron Man 3 gave me passing, momentary pleasures that saved them from total blandness or outright embarrassment. I didn't get out of my house to see The Wolverine, After Earth, Man of Steel or The Lone Ranger. I'm sure a few of them are fine, but I'm burnt out. That's what led me to think that Elysium would be merely passably entertaining, despite my trust in Neill Blomkamp. District 9, his feature length debut, managed to prove the size of its heart even as it murdered dozens of innocent bystanders on the way to the finish line. Here was the heir to Richard Stanley taking gleeful pleasure in burning up Peter Jackson's money and giving us a horrifically funny vision of the past rendered in new code.
Blomkamp may not be going out of his way to earn the legacy of the best of African filmmakers (Elysium isn't precisely Yeelen, even if I think the two have undeniable similarities) but I see enough of a kinship in his ragged grammar. Technical mistakes or shortcomings add to the feel of this being a film made for the people from the bottom up, even with the millions of dollars behind its every shot. There's something much more majestic about the sweeping, impressive shots of outer space habitats coming from the mind of a young South African. For some reason Gavin Hood has never inspired that same sense of awe... The shakycam may at first seem a little pointless and it certainly isn't endearing at this late in the game but it doesn't get in the way of the multi-layered compositions that give this film its grounding. Shots of Matt Damon staring out at the dust-and-blood covered new Los Angeles like a diseased monument or Sharlto Copley's villain ominously approaching in different guises may adequately represent the heart of the movie but they don't usurp its cumulative effect, in the way the few great moments of Pacific Rim do. Elysium works moment to moment but it adds up to something engaging and relevant, rare these days when the budget passes big on its way to ultra. Now, in fairness I have a few predilections that made this film impossible for me to resist, much in the same way Lords of Salem seemed like it was a pagan idol cut out of an old, haunted tree just for me. And much like, say, Nic Winding Refn's Bronson, it also retcons old ideas I once didn't care for into a new shape that I do. If Bronson was a version of A Clockwork Orange that I could finally get behind, then Elysium is a Total Recall I can not only sit through but love.
The year is 2154 (I wish filmmakers would stop telling us when their dystopias take place. Like Blade Runner, a clear influence, there's gonna be a day when we pop in the dvd and realize it was set yesterday) and the rich have fled Earth for an orbiting gated community called Elysium. Matt Damon plays Max, a paroled convict with big dreams who's stuck on Earth, specifically a hellacious Los Angeles that's become what many cops believe it's going to turn into: a wasteland populated by Latinos. Global warming's hit this town as hard as drugs and gang violence. It never seems like it's ever actually night thanks to the burnt up atmosphere. Max works a shit job and gets hassled regularly by robot cops just for having a record and being a wiseass, but things take a turn for the "you've got to be fucking kidding me" when he has an accident at work and suffers a mammoth dose of radiation poisoning. He decides it's time to jump the line to Elysium where they have in-home sick bays that cure anything you can catch.
There's loads more plot, but watching it unfold without knowing exactly the turns it'll take is part of the fun. It does eventually come to pass that our hero is put through a battery of harsh physical trials on his way to Elysium that structurally, err, recalls Total Recall. Like that film's Quaid, Max is a sort of blue-collar everyman who figures out he might be meant for greater things and in the process gets caught between two sides of a political conflict. There are plastic similarities too: the mercenary henchman working for a murderous bureaucrat, the robot at the parolee department looks like Total's cabdriver, the gore effects race past graphic to emphatic, and the third act is kicked off by rebellion during surgery. Both are about curing a political agenda and giving "the people" back something they need and deserve. The crucial difference in every case is that Elysium is the more hopeful of the two films, it actually feels like it cares about the humans doing the running around and getting killed. Total Recall is a movie made exclusively on dark, very 80s-feeling sets so consequently you spend the whole film feeling like you're in a dirty basement. Which is certainly thematically appropriate but it makes for dour viewing. Then of course there's the script. Both resort to the hamfisted, but Elysium does only that: resorts. Everyone is trying to maintain a facade of normality, even if they're up to something else; the craziness has to crack the surface first. Total Recall puts Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusset's script through the mouths of character actors too crazy to sell any of the dialogue as anything other than tonedeaf satire. Remember Alien? That too started as one of their screenplays. The difference is believing it. Ridley Scott calmed down and made the characters adults. Paul Verhoeven had no such interest; never has. That's not his style. But between his fetishizing Arnold Schwarzenegger (who is many things but there isn't a blue-collar bone in his body) as a kind of fascist superhero who uses civilians as shields against bullets, the cartoonish delivery of all dialogue, the paper-thin characterization, the neon claustrophobia and the hugely unpleasant ratcheting up of gore effects, the 1990 Total Recall has never been a film I've felt the urge to revisit. And the less said about Len Wiseman (in any capacity, really) and his remake, the better.
Elysium's production design has a built-in edge on Total Recall. They actually went out and shot on real streets and indeed made the sun a dogged characteristic of the early act. It's what threatens to expose Max to his would-be captors when things start going wrong. It's what comes to separate Earth from Elysium; artificial night has fallen when Max finally lands and the bulk of the action is set in the comparatively sleek harddrive of the big space station. Blomkamp makes us feel the difference and that the core of Elysium has none of the character of the earth-bound streets we've left behind. A perfect little detail: when Max and Sharlto Copley's fantastically sadistic Kruger have their final meeting, there's a potted plant on a railing nearby as a reminder to people who work here what the real world looked like. Everyone misses the outside world, even the 'villains'. In fact it's what separates the redeemable from the irredeemable. William Fichtner, who is and is clearly having a ton of fun as the film's third tier villain, hilariously despises every second he spends in the polluted atmosphere of Earth. Though by outward appearances your garden variety corporate villain, Fichtner's actually doing something fantastic with his character: he's playing a grown-up trustfund kid. I'm sure while visiting his kids at college he got to see the worst kind of shitty behavior that the children of the rich indulge in and added twenty years of never hearing "no". Like so much of the film, it's kind of perfect.
Fichtner's unfeeling bureaucrat is luckily the rule, rather than the exception: the performances in Elysium are better than good, they're memorably weird. Matt Damon is more casually profane than we've seen him before, which does sell his criminality more than I thought it would. The minute he says "I'm just fuckin' with ya, there's nothin' in the fuckin' bag" I was sort of shocked by his candor considering he usually plays responsible or naive. Sharlto Copley is great, as usual. He was recently in the excellent lo-fi Sci-fi mock-doc (I'm being paid by the hyphen) Europa Report doing a hell of a job being a square jawed American astronaut with the dearth of engaging personality you'd expect. People have called this a flaw...they're wrong. Elysium captures the flipside of his evidently unlimited range. He was so good at being an average American (and I mean flawless) that watching him be a completely unhinged South African was somehow the most exciting thing in the film. When he vanishes in the middle of the third act, there is a genuinely terrifying sense of menace as we wait for him to turn up. That bloke's like to do anything! A lot of critics have been trying to geolocate Jodie Foster's accent, and have ventured France and South Africa, but the real charm is that it's so tough to place. Copley's henchman have that deranged Toecutter feel that I so love in villains. Wagner Moura's fidgety Spider is clearly kind of a selfish prick, but his good intentions, which have driven his criminal activity, rise to the surface when he realizes the thing he's been looking for is right in front of him. He's a combination of the two scientists from Pacific Rim, complete with cane, except I never wanted to strangle him until he stopped talking. Diego Luna, faced with a fairly thankless role, gives his character the zaniest pigtails his hair would allow. Things like that let you know that this a community who've gotten used to their lives. The sole normal performance in the whole film is Alice Braga, grounding things, as she does, alternately by being so adorable you could see anyone martyring themselves for her, and bringing enough gravity to keep the film from being too crazy. She's the human face of the people forgotten by the rich. And that there is crucial.
I like the way Blomkamp directs action (frenetic and bloody, every punch hurts) and certainly there are moments of genius in his handling of the film's more horrific touches: The employment of a rail gun leads to one spectacularly gruesome shootout and there's some facial surgery that ranks as among the most excellently sick effect shots I've ever seen. So why was I ok with the violence in this film but not in Total Recall? It's a matter of intention, certainly. Verhoeven has long played the role of a cinematic trickster god, pushing people into corners and getting them to like it and think it was their idea to be there. He's just as manipulative as Lars Von Trier or Michael Haneke, though I think he's got a sense of humour that's a little more mainstream-friendly. I don't think Blomkamp takes as much glee in killing people as Verhoeven and when he does murder characters the huge bloodshed doesn't feel like extremity for its own sake - it feels like he's trying to make audiences understand just how horrible it is when someone is killed. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit but I'm happy to do it. He's from a wartorn country in a continent full of them, so from me he gets the benefit of the doubt. More than that and more than just because Braga and Damon make for incredibly solid leads, this is a film that's honest about political conviction. Max's motivation until very late in the game is that he just doesn't want to die. Compelling, but more importantly realistic. He never even really buy into Spider's utopian political vision and frankly that is a sort of power-drunk conquest that has as much to do with pissing on the leg of the rich who scorn him and kill his people. The film doesn't ask us to believe that Spider or Max have bone-deep Marxist conviction, but it still gets to eat its socialist cake. The revolution may be almost accidental but Max (and Blomkamp) recognize that it's more important than the plight of one man. So while universal healthcare may be the end goal, it's more about giving up the individual for the sake of the greater good. The action and drama has an internal life. It makes every second of the character's struggle work as more than just a well-paced sci-fi thriller with awesome spectacle. Maybe that's too simple for a lot of people, but if you need me I'll be over here with my fist in the air singing this film's praises to the tune of the "L'Internationale"
The year is 2154 (I wish filmmakers would stop telling us when their dystopias take place. Like Blade Runner, a clear influence, there's gonna be a day when we pop in the dvd and realize it was set yesterday) and the rich have fled Earth for an orbiting gated community called Elysium. Matt Damon plays Max, a paroled convict with big dreams who's stuck on Earth, specifically a hellacious Los Angeles that's become what many cops believe it's going to turn into: a wasteland populated by Latinos. Global warming's hit this town as hard as drugs and gang violence. It never seems like it's ever actually night thanks to the burnt up atmosphere. Max works a shit job and gets hassled regularly by robot cops just for having a record and being a wiseass, but things take a turn for the "you've got to be fucking kidding me" when he has an accident at work and suffers a mammoth dose of radiation poisoning. He decides it's time to jump the line to Elysium where they have in-home sick bays that cure anything you can catch.
There's loads more plot, but watching it unfold without knowing exactly the turns it'll take is part of the fun. It does eventually come to pass that our hero is put through a battery of harsh physical trials on his way to Elysium that structurally, err, recalls Total Recall. Like that film's Quaid, Max is a sort of blue-collar everyman who figures out he might be meant for greater things and in the process gets caught between two sides of a political conflict. There are plastic similarities too: the mercenary henchman working for a murderous bureaucrat, the robot at the parolee department looks like Total's cabdriver, the gore effects race past graphic to emphatic, and the third act is kicked off by rebellion during surgery. Both are about curing a political agenda and giving "the people" back something they need and deserve. The crucial difference in every case is that Elysium is the more hopeful of the two films, it actually feels like it cares about the humans doing the running around and getting killed. Total Recall is a movie made exclusively on dark, very 80s-feeling sets so consequently you spend the whole film feeling like you're in a dirty basement. Which is certainly thematically appropriate but it makes for dour viewing. Then of course there's the script. Both resort to the hamfisted, but Elysium does only that: resorts. Everyone is trying to maintain a facade of normality, even if they're up to something else; the craziness has to crack the surface first. Total Recall puts Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusset's script through the mouths of character actors too crazy to sell any of the dialogue as anything other than tonedeaf satire. Remember Alien? That too started as one of their screenplays. The difference is believing it. Ridley Scott calmed down and made the characters adults. Paul Verhoeven had no such interest; never has. That's not his style. But between his fetishizing Arnold Schwarzenegger (who is many things but there isn't a blue-collar bone in his body) as a kind of fascist superhero who uses civilians as shields against bullets, the cartoonish delivery of all dialogue, the paper-thin characterization, the neon claustrophobia and the hugely unpleasant ratcheting up of gore effects, the 1990 Total Recall has never been a film I've felt the urge to revisit. And the less said about Len Wiseman (in any capacity, really) and his remake, the better.
Elysium's production design has a built-in edge on Total Recall. They actually went out and shot on real streets and indeed made the sun a dogged characteristic of the early act. It's what threatens to expose Max to his would-be captors when things start going wrong. It's what comes to separate Earth from Elysium; artificial night has fallen when Max finally lands and the bulk of the action is set in the comparatively sleek harddrive of the big space station. Blomkamp makes us feel the difference and that the core of Elysium has none of the character of the earth-bound streets we've left behind. A perfect little detail: when Max and Sharlto Copley's fantastically sadistic Kruger have their final meeting, there's a potted plant on a railing nearby as a reminder to people who work here what the real world looked like. Everyone misses the outside world, even the 'villains'. In fact it's what separates the redeemable from the irredeemable. William Fichtner, who is and is clearly having a ton of fun as the film's third tier villain, hilariously despises every second he spends in the polluted atmosphere of Earth. Though by outward appearances your garden variety corporate villain, Fichtner's actually doing something fantastic with his character: he's playing a grown-up trustfund kid. I'm sure while visiting his kids at college he got to see the worst kind of shitty behavior that the children of the rich indulge in and added twenty years of never hearing "no". Like so much of the film, it's kind of perfect.
Fichtner's unfeeling bureaucrat is luckily the rule, rather than the exception: the performances in Elysium are better than good, they're memorably weird. Matt Damon is more casually profane than we've seen him before, which does sell his criminality more than I thought it would. The minute he says "I'm just fuckin' with ya, there's nothin' in the fuckin' bag" I was sort of shocked by his candor considering he usually plays responsible or naive. Sharlto Copley is great, as usual. He was recently in the excellent lo-fi Sci-fi mock-doc (I'm being paid by the hyphen) Europa Report doing a hell of a job being a square jawed American astronaut with the dearth of engaging personality you'd expect. People have called this a flaw...they're wrong. Elysium captures the flipside of his evidently unlimited range. He was so good at being an average American (and I mean flawless) that watching him be a completely unhinged South African was somehow the most exciting thing in the film. When he vanishes in the middle of the third act, there is a genuinely terrifying sense of menace as we wait for him to turn up. That bloke's like to do anything! A lot of critics have been trying to geolocate Jodie Foster's accent, and have ventured France and South Africa, but the real charm is that it's so tough to place. Copley's henchman have that deranged Toecutter feel that I so love in villains. Wagner Moura's fidgety Spider is clearly kind of a selfish prick, but his good intentions, which have driven his criminal activity, rise to the surface when he realizes the thing he's been looking for is right in front of him. He's a combination of the two scientists from Pacific Rim, complete with cane, except I never wanted to strangle him until he stopped talking. Diego Luna, faced with a fairly thankless role, gives his character the zaniest pigtails his hair would allow. Things like that let you know that this a community who've gotten used to their lives. The sole normal performance in the whole film is Alice Braga, grounding things, as she does, alternately by being so adorable you could see anyone martyring themselves for her, and bringing enough gravity to keep the film from being too crazy. She's the human face of the people forgotten by the rich. And that there is crucial.
I like the way Blomkamp directs action (frenetic and bloody, every punch hurts) and certainly there are moments of genius in his handling of the film's more horrific touches: The employment of a rail gun leads to one spectacularly gruesome shootout and there's some facial surgery that ranks as among the most excellently sick effect shots I've ever seen. So why was I ok with the violence in this film but not in Total Recall? It's a matter of intention, certainly. Verhoeven has long played the role of a cinematic trickster god, pushing people into corners and getting them to like it and think it was their idea to be there. He's just as manipulative as Lars Von Trier or Michael Haneke, though I think he's got a sense of humour that's a little more mainstream-friendly. I don't think Blomkamp takes as much glee in killing people as Verhoeven and when he does murder characters the huge bloodshed doesn't feel like extremity for its own sake - it feels like he's trying to make audiences understand just how horrible it is when someone is killed. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit but I'm happy to do it. He's from a wartorn country in a continent full of them, so from me he gets the benefit of the doubt. More than that and more than just because Braga and Damon make for incredibly solid leads, this is a film that's honest about political conviction. Max's motivation until very late in the game is that he just doesn't want to die. Compelling, but more importantly realistic. He never even really buy into Spider's utopian political vision and frankly that is a sort of power-drunk conquest that has as much to do with pissing on the leg of the rich who scorn him and kill his people. The film doesn't ask us to believe that Spider or Max have bone-deep Marxist conviction, but it still gets to eat its socialist cake. The revolution may be almost accidental but Max (and Blomkamp) recognize that it's more important than the plight of one man. So while universal healthcare may be the end goal, it's more about giving up the individual for the sake of the greater good. The action and drama has an internal life. It makes every second of the character's struggle work as more than just a well-paced sci-fi thriller with awesome spectacle. Maybe that's too simple for a lot of people, but if you need me I'll be over here with my fist in the air singing this film's praises to the tune of the "L'Internationale"
"No man shall ever penetrate me...with sword or self." Hundra and the search for compatibility
Even if we discount the somewhat shaky lead performance by Laurene Landon, so great in ...All The Marbles, yet not fully committed to the period or style affected, Hundra has many advantages over a long list of Conan also-rans. It possesses one of the simplest and most effective scores Ennio Morricone ever wrote, a script both funny and touching, and a galvanizing spirit of feminine liberation that makes everyone of Hundra's punches hit twice as hard. This starts early when our hero leads the men who killed her family on a day-long horseback chase to tire them out until she finds suitable ground to fight and when she does she makes short work of them. It's an incredible build-up and release; the film is full of them. Hundra dispenses with foes mightily throughout, but perhaps never so fantastically as when she meets her first potential suitor. She encounters a man by the sea with many wives and tries joining them. The man's method of courtship consists largely of getting wasted and beating Hundra into submission. She puts up with as much as she can take before kicking him between his legs at which point Morricone's war theme starts up on the soundtrack, I think scientifically the most satisfying groin kick in history. She'd do anything to make sure her tribe won't die with her, but she won't do that. She experiences the high and lows of masculinity and never lowers her standards, nor for that matter does the man of her dreams simply surrender when he sees her. It's one of the most even-handed film about dating I've ever seen. Y'all can keep your John Hughes and Rob Reiner movies, this is the only 80s romcom I need. Why this isn't required viewing at sleepovers I don't know.
The Rosenbaum Test: The Greatest Living Narrative Filmmakers
A little while ago Jonathan Rosenbaum, in whose direction myself and most other critics genuflect, reposted an article of his on the master director Michelangelo Antonioni he wrote in the early 90s. The interesting thing is that he starts his article with a quick list of who he thinks might be the 12 greatest living narrative filmmakers, and of course the director of Red Desert and The Passenger made the cut. He'd have made mine too at the time. This got me and many others thinking about how to answer that question today. Kevin B. Lee got a discussion going and Richard Brody posted his own list with a complete set of guidelines. I cribbed a bit from those guidelines and tried to make my own list, which proved sensationally difficult. I love a lot of directors, but are they "the greatest"? Can their work never be equaled? Could anyone else even pretend to their style? It took some incredible concentration to get it down just to 16. Never one to suffer alone, I asked everyone else to throw their two cents in and here's what we came up with.
Scout Tafoya
1. Marco Bellocchio
2. Terence Davies
3. Claire Denis
4. Philippe Grandrieux
5. Terrence Malick
6. Chantal Akerman
7. Tsai Ming-Liang
8. Agnès Varda
9. Wes Anderson
10. Alain Resnais
11. Francis Ford Coppola
12. PT Anderson
Honorable Mentions: Manoel De Oliveira (who'd be in my top 12 but I don't want to jinx him - I want him to live forever), Léos Carax, Tomas Alfredson, Catherine Breillat, Dan Sallitt, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Matteo Garrone, Paolo Sorrentino, Takashi Miike, Richard Lester, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Terry Gilliam, Volker Schlöndorff, William Klein, Roman Polanski, Sofia Coppola, & Gene Wilder.
Noah Lyons
1. David Lynch
2. Jean-Luc Godard
3. Lars von Trier
4. Michel Haneke
5. Woody Allen
6. Werner Herzog
7. Roman Polanski
8. Alejandro Jodorowsky
9. PT Anderson
10. Steven Soderbergh
11. Yorgos Lanthimos
Dan Khan
1. Steven Soderbergh
2. P.T. Anderson
3. Lars Von Trier
4. Agnès Varda
5. Jim Jarmusch
6. Mike Leigh
7. Wong Kar-Wai
8. Terrence Mallick
9. Jean-Luc Godard
10. David Cronenberg
11. Michael Mann
12. Alejandro Jodorowsky
Gifford Elliott
1. Lars Von Trier
2. Wong Kar-Wai
3. PT Anderson
4. Jean Luc-Godard
5. Werner Herzog
6. Woody Allen
7. Roman Polanski
8. Martin Scorsese
9. Jane Campion
10. The Coen Brothers
11. Wes Anderson
12. Alfonso Cuarón
Honorable Mentions: Mel Brooks, Sofia Coppola, Terrence Malick, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, Hayao Miyazaki, David Cronenberg, Francis Ford Coppola & Agnès Varda.
Tim Earle
1. Pedro Almodóvar
2. Park Chan Wook
3. Hayao Miyazaki
4. Steven Soderberg
5. Wes Anderson
6. Terence Malick
7. Joel and Ethan Coen
8. Steven Spielberg
9. Martin Scorsese
10. Terry Gilliam
11. Edgar Wright
12. Tomas Alfredson
Fox Johnson
1. David Fincher
2. PT Anderson
3. Joel & Ethan Coen
4. David Cronenberg
5. Ridley Scott
6. Martin Scorsese
7. Michael Mann
8. Steven Spielberg
9. Terrence Malick
10. Wes Anderson
11. Roman Polanski
12. Steven Soderbergh
Scout Tafoya
1. Marco Bellocchio
2. Terence Davies
3. Claire Denis
4. Philippe Grandrieux
5. Terrence Malick
6. Chantal Akerman
7. Tsai Ming-Liang
8. Agnès Varda
9. Wes Anderson
10. Alain Resnais
11. Francis Ford Coppola
12. PT Anderson
Honorable Mentions: Manoel De Oliveira (who'd be in my top 12 but I don't want to jinx him - I want him to live forever), Léos Carax, Tomas Alfredson, Catherine Breillat, Dan Sallitt, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Matteo Garrone, Paolo Sorrentino, Takashi Miike, Richard Lester, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Terry Gilliam, Volker Schlöndorff, William Klein, Roman Polanski, Sofia Coppola, & Gene Wilder.
Noah Lyons
1. David Lynch
2. Jean-Luc Godard
3. Lars von Trier
4. Michel Haneke
5. Woody Allen
6. Werner Herzog
7. Roman Polanski
8. Alejandro Jodorowsky
9. PT Anderson
10. Steven Soderbergh
11. Yorgos Lanthimos
Dan Khan
1. Steven Soderbergh
2. P.T. Anderson
3. Lars Von Trier
4. Agnès Varda
5. Jim Jarmusch
6. Mike Leigh
7. Wong Kar-Wai
8. Terrence Mallick
9. Jean-Luc Godard
10. David Cronenberg
11. Michael Mann
12. Alejandro Jodorowsky
Gifford Elliott
1. Lars Von Trier
2. Wong Kar-Wai
3. PT Anderson
4. Jean Luc-Godard
5. Werner Herzog
6. Woody Allen
7. Roman Polanski
8. Martin Scorsese
9. Jane Campion
10. The Coen Brothers
11. Wes Anderson
12. Alfonso Cuarón
Honorable Mentions: Mel Brooks, Sofia Coppola, Terrence Malick, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, Hayao Miyazaki, David Cronenberg, Francis Ford Coppola & Agnès Varda.
Tim Earle
1. Pedro Almodóvar
2. Park Chan Wook
3. Hayao Miyazaki
4. Steven Soderberg
5. Wes Anderson
6. Terence Malick
7. Joel and Ethan Coen
8. Steven Spielberg
9. Martin Scorsese
10. Terry Gilliam
11. Edgar Wright
12. Tomas Alfredson
Fox Johnson
1. David Fincher
2. PT Anderson
3. Joel & Ethan Coen
4. David Cronenberg
5. Ridley Scott
6. Martin Scorsese
7. Michael Mann
8. Steven Spielberg
9. Terrence Malick
10. Wes Anderson
11. Roman Polanski
12. Steven Soderbergh
Brief thoughts on The Last Movie
The Last Movie
If Easy Rider has endured as the flagship film of the counterculture it's because of its accessibility and its freedom of images and symbols. Everything one needs to know about the times is right there in the open, pinned to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda's bodies. It has precious little on its mind. The Last Movie, by contrast, had too much on its mind for the comfort of American studios and audiences. It died at the box office and its distributor buried it sending Hopper underground for a lotta years. Long just a legend, The Last Movie the quintessential internet age discovery. Whether as a full VHS rip or in 10 parts on youtube, it's proof that, thanks to a tireless online cinephilia, truth will out. Hopper, in only his third appearance as a leading man after The Glory Stompers and Curtis Harrington's beautiful Night Tide, directs himself as a cowboy consultant on a western being shot in Mexico (it's tempting to think they're making Ulzana's Raid even if that is Sam Fuller behind the camera instead of Robert Aldrich). When the crew packs it in, the locals are left without a center of gravity and turn to Hopper for answers he can't give them. Emulating his hero James Dean, Hopper is a mix of hurt sensitivity and confused desire, a continuation of his stellar work in Night Tide. Behind the camera he's more an orchestrator, the foreman of a too-ambitious construction project, than just a director. The chaos can be overwhelming, but if, like Hopper and sidekick Dean Stockwell, you're willing to pan for gold, you'll fill your pockets. Here is what a first-rate mind immersed in every aspect of filmmaking thinks about when high on every drug imaginable, the most potent of which was success. Here is a portrait of an artist, a community, and an era imploding on itself. The Last Movie inspired Pauline Kael's famed remark about watching an artist slashing his canvas. More specifically, it's watching a filmmaker take his own movie away from himself; the beautiful dream and the harsh reality of Hollywood in one hazy jaunt to Mexico.
by Dennis Hopper
If Easy Rider has endured as the flagship film of the counterculture it's because of its accessibility and its freedom of images and symbols. Everything one needs to know about the times is right there in the open, pinned to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda's bodies. It has precious little on its mind. The Last Movie, by contrast, had too much on its mind for the comfort of American studios and audiences. It died at the box office and its distributor buried it sending Hopper underground for a lotta years. Long just a legend, The Last Movie the quintessential internet age discovery. Whether as a full VHS rip or in 10 parts on youtube, it's proof that, thanks to a tireless online cinephilia, truth will out. Hopper, in only his third appearance as a leading man after The Glory Stompers and Curtis Harrington's beautiful Night Tide, directs himself as a cowboy consultant on a western being shot in Mexico (it's tempting to think they're making Ulzana's Raid even if that is Sam Fuller behind the camera instead of Robert Aldrich). When the crew packs it in, the locals are left without a center of gravity and turn to Hopper for answers he can't give them. Emulating his hero James Dean, Hopper is a mix of hurt sensitivity and confused desire, a continuation of his stellar work in Night Tide. Behind the camera he's more an orchestrator, the foreman of a too-ambitious construction project, than just a director. The chaos can be overwhelming, but if, like Hopper and sidekick Dean Stockwell, you're willing to pan for gold, you'll fill your pockets. Here is what a first-rate mind immersed in every aspect of filmmaking thinks about when high on every drug imaginable, the most potent of which was success. Here is a portrait of an artist, a community, and an era imploding on itself. The Last Movie inspired Pauline Kael's famed remark about watching an artist slashing his canvas. More specifically, it's watching a filmmaker take his own movie away from himself; the beautiful dream and the harsh reality of Hollywood in one hazy jaunt to Mexico.
The Thing(s) In The Lake: Discussing Larry Fessenden's latest off-beat horror opus
Scout Tafoya
Larry Fessenden's first film was a Super 8 remake of Spielberg's Jaws which included a pretty accurate miniature representation of the vessel The Orca. It's half parody, half-tribute, all proof that Fessenden was someone who got the details right and has his own way of doing things. When he started making horror films they felt real, every inch of them. They were horrific long before the monster showed up because he got the details of anxiety and aggressive behavior just right. The real villain of his film Wendigo isn't the violent and nightmarish forest-dwelling spirit at all. On top of being a unique director, Larry's also a singular presence on camera and of course one of the best indie film producers who's ever lived, so naturally when he took a break from directing I was fine with it because he was using his time admirably. That said I was more than a little thrilled to hear he'd once again directed a horror film and the more I learned about it, the more it became clear that he was returning to that little homemade Jaws parody with a bigger budget and a real monster. And that would have been enough, but Fess' is too interesting a filmmaker to leave it at that.
Lucas Mangum I'm glad you brought up character. I liked the issues the characters had with each other because it definitely helped make the film so much more than just a mere monster movie. Fessenden showed real competence by not limiting the conflict to two or three characters. Each person has some kind of secret beef with the other people on the boat and the tension escalates perfectly. I'd say it demands patience from the viewer, but the fact that they were also being attacked by a monster kept things moving right along for those of us with short attention spans. And what a monster it was! I got really excited the first time it appeared on screen. It definitely conjured that enthusiasm I had as a ten-year-old seeing the shark in Jaws for the first time, or the squid in Disney's 20,000 Leagues. Did you have any issues with the film?
Scout Well, in hindsight they don't seem like issues and seem more like purposely thorny edges. For instance, the fact that the female character who we spend the most time with has slept with everyone on the boat (with one exception) would seem like misogyny, but it's clearly Fessenden turning up the cliches to 11. What got me in the end was the way the film treats her character in the final act - without spoiling anything, I was disappointed, even if it was essential to sort out the fate of another character. I guess my concern was whether there was a way to get to the ending he wanted without taking the approach he did (I apologize for the maddening vagueries, but I do want viewers going in with a clean slate). The treatment of women isn't misogyny so much as a general misanthropy, which while perhaps purposely directed at a generation that won't have been old enough to have made the mistakes they're accused of making, it works because of the parodic look at the genre, but also because there are so many ways for people to be vicious these days. One thing Fessenden rightly acknowledges is that everything gets filmed these days, whether through cameras or cell phones, which means no one can hide their behavior anymore. The lake serves as a nifty little metaphor for their forced exposure to each other. They have nowhere to swim to - they're stuck with the truth and the people it pits against them. Beyond that I suppose I couldn't help feeling it was a deliberately slight affair (the patient attitude of the monster drains a little tension from the precedings, even if that's probably how it'd go down - more reality hemming in on tropes). Wendigo, Habit and Last Winter have real gravity to them that this wants. Perhaps it's the character sketching but it's hard to bet on anyone because they keep infuriating each other. I liked them all, which is rare, but didn't love anyone so my stake in the ending was minimized. But of course there's so much to latch onto here (it strikes me as a most European approach to horror writing) that it hardly matters that there could have been a little more. Next to Maniac, The ABCs of Death and American Mary this still emerges as among the most thoughtful genre films of the year and certainly among the best American horror films for quite awhile. As with Fessenden's other films, Beneath was certainly made with care.
Lucas
All excellent points. My gripes: I felt like the Johnny character was handled poorly. We were led several different ways on what his fate would be, and without giving away too much, the way he ended up wasn't what I expected. Not in the 'pleasantly surprised' way either, more along the lines of feeling lied to by the screenplay. Also, I am a bit burned out on, without sounding too judgmental, films where everyone is a bad person. Of course, I fully acknowledge that it served this story well, but I wanted someone to root for. Night of the Living Dead explores the same concept of people's ugliness coming out in a crisis, but we still had Ben as our character to follow and identify with. Now the tension is handled so well and the film is so damn strange (in that wonderful Cabin Fever kind of way; it actually reminded me a lot of Eli Roth's debut), it was very easy for me to look past all of that. I think, and I can't believe we're already far enough into the year to consider this, but I think Beneath is gonna be on a lot of top ten lists this year. It will almost certainly make mine.
Scout As far as horror, yeah...this'll be on that list. No question. Even if we got ten great horror films between now and then, I'd still include it because it does so much so differently and there's too much right for me to get totally down on the few missteps. (I agree about Johnny, by the way, even if I had to admire the gumption of the script for treating his arc that way. Not satisfying, but twistedly believable, like so much of the film).
Lucas Oh yes, I have to give it props for not being afraid to be its own thing. It doesn't fit comfortably with any of the stuff that's come out in the last 5-10 years, and in my eyes that's a triumph. I mean there are pieces here and there like it's partly a found footage film, and the characters are your naughty kids in the woods (if three-dimensional) but even so it fiercely stands out.
The joys of his latest, Beneath, are tactile. You can see the monster and the characters really touch it. That was a satisfaction I thought long gone from mainstream horror: CGI means you can have any creature you can dream up attacking your characters, you just can't prove it's there. If all this film's budget went into the mutant in the lake, then it was money well spent. But that sense of reality, of being able to reach out and put your hand on everything is also in the character design. At the start these people are shades away from cardboard cutouts (this is on purpose) but as soon as the first victim's blood fills the boat, they become real people with wicked survival instincts. If getting off the boat means everyone else has to die, then that's how they're going to play it. But it takes goading before the characters who seem primed to be the 'villain' take matters into their own hands. And characters who seemed fated to be heroic slowly prove they're less than meets the eye. It's a sort of slow-burner waiting to see who's going to snap and do something out of self-preservation. Their dialogue also has that weird, half-improvised feel of nervous people trying to seem imposing. It's just weird enough to be totally believable. And of course the film's best joke is that the characters can see the shore the whole time and the monster is kind of cute if you look at it the right way. They're only trapped because they keep damning themselves. I loved its old fashioned approach to the monster and loved the completely contemporary approach to the human dynamic.
What'd you make of it? Did you want them all dead or were you rooting for someone to make it back to shore?
Lucas Mangum I'm glad you brought up character. I liked the issues the characters had with each other because it definitely helped make the film so much more than just a mere monster movie. Fessenden showed real competence by not limiting the conflict to two or three characters. Each person has some kind of secret beef with the other people on the boat and the tension escalates perfectly. I'd say it demands patience from the viewer, but the fact that they were also being attacked by a monster kept things moving right along for those of us with short attention spans. And what a monster it was! I got really excited the first time it appeared on screen. It definitely conjured that enthusiasm I had as a ten-year-old seeing the shark in Jaws for the first time, or the squid in Disney's 20,000 Leagues. Did you have any issues with the film?
Scout Well, in hindsight they don't seem like issues and seem more like purposely thorny edges. For instance, the fact that the female character who we spend the most time with has slept with everyone on the boat (with one exception) would seem like misogyny, but it's clearly Fessenden turning up the cliches to 11. What got me in the end was the way the film treats her character in the final act - without spoiling anything, I was disappointed, even if it was essential to sort out the fate of another character. I guess my concern was whether there was a way to get to the ending he wanted without taking the approach he did (I apologize for the maddening vagueries, but I do want viewers going in with a clean slate). The treatment of women isn't misogyny so much as a general misanthropy, which while perhaps purposely directed at a generation that won't have been old enough to have made the mistakes they're accused of making, it works because of the parodic look at the genre, but also because there are so many ways for people to be vicious these days. One thing Fessenden rightly acknowledges is that everything gets filmed these days, whether through cameras or cell phones, which means no one can hide their behavior anymore. The lake serves as a nifty little metaphor for their forced exposure to each other. They have nowhere to swim to - they're stuck with the truth and the people it pits against them. Beyond that I suppose I couldn't help feeling it was a deliberately slight affair (the patient attitude of the monster drains a little tension from the precedings, even if that's probably how it'd go down - more reality hemming in on tropes). Wendigo, Habit and Last Winter have real gravity to them that this wants. Perhaps it's the character sketching but it's hard to bet on anyone because they keep infuriating each other. I liked them all, which is rare, but didn't love anyone so my stake in the ending was minimized. But of course there's so much to latch onto here (it strikes me as a most European approach to horror writing) that it hardly matters that there could have been a little more. Next to Maniac, The ABCs of Death and American Mary this still emerges as among the most thoughtful genre films of the year and certainly among the best American horror films for quite awhile. As with Fessenden's other films, Beneath was certainly made with care.
Scout As far as horror, yeah...this'll be on that list. No question. Even if we got ten great horror films between now and then, I'd still include it because it does so much so differently and there's too much right for me to get totally down on the few missteps. (I agree about Johnny, by the way, even if I had to admire the gumption of the script for treating his arc that way. Not satisfying, but twistedly believable, like so much of the film).
Lucas Oh yes, I have to give it props for not being afraid to be its own thing. It doesn't fit comfortably with any of the stuff that's come out in the last 5-10 years, and in my eyes that's a triumph. I mean there are pieces here and there like it's partly a found footage film, and the characters are your naughty kids in the woods (if three-dimensional) but even so it fiercely stands out.
Essential Rhythms (for Nick Smerkanich)
The video below is at once an exploration of uncanny coincidence hidden in the rhtyhms of western music and dance and just a fun diversion for those of you who are fans of Fred & Ginger conversing through dance. It's also a gift to my friend Nick, who has long maintained that Fred Astaire is a better dancer than Gene Kelly, something I fight him on, mostly because I love having that argument with him. But I guess it's tough watching Fred divorced of his original music and still keeping time to argue that the man (and of course Ginger, too) had uncommon, timeless grace. This is a celebration of that grace.
Only Jod Forgives
I'll start with a confession - the bad reviews for Only God Forgives were a challenge I was hoping to overcome. They always are, in a way. This one was a little different of course. It's Nic Winding Refn, whose every movie I either strongly like (the Pusher films, Bleeder, Fear X) or outright love (Bronson, Valhalla Rising, Drive). Bad reviews like this were a taunt I was more than happy to rise to. Y'all hate it? Well I'm gonna be the only friend this film has. Foolishness, of course, but I'm only human - also, as you all must know by now, stubborn. So of course I dove in and realized that everyone was more or less right. If it's a failure, it's at least interesting, if it's a success, it's not by any traditional rubric. It's charms are in its tableaux, I'll give it that. Ryan Gosling sitting, bathed in neon, his mother, Kristen Scott-Thomas smoking, the walls leaking light on the backs and sides of heads, illuminating eyes, a woman disrobing and handing her dress over, a bunch of sleepy Thai cops watching karaoke as if waiting for a vision to arrive, a room full of women who will not open their eyes, as if dreaming to avoid knowing what goes on in front of them. As narrative it's got too little to offer and no catharsis worthy of the name. A detective kills Gosling's brother out of a sense of cosmic justice, then Gosling's mother wants revenge, which he's none too worried or thrilled about actually getting. It's got nowhere worth going and it's in no particularly hurry to get there.
The problem I think is that he refined the areas least interesting to even most of his fans. Refn let loose is a lot of director in a little space. Look at Fear X (if you're not scared by its legendary bad reviews). It was the first film to show off what we can now call the Refn style. The slow pans and dollies, the intense lighting in eternally dark corridors, the color-coating of locations based around their relative safety, the dream-like slow-mo, the patiently observing action from a safe distance behind the fourth wall. Many of the hallmarks he'd sharpen in Bronson, Valhalla, Drive and Only God Forgives start at Fear X: the carefully textured surfaces and walls, the doom-laden soundscapes, the lonely man protagonist fighting a world he can't control, the third act freakouts where another medium is used to showcase the inside of its hero's brain. Being both fair and a little cruel Fear X looks like Stanley Kubrick doing a tour of a David Lynch set, throwing John Turturro in front of spaces that would soon be occupied by the denizens of Lost Highway, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. Larry Smith, the last DP on a Kubrick film, became Refn's go-to camera man with Fear X, when he could afford him (its fiscal failure shook his security and made him go back underground in Denmark again), which meant that his films could for all intents and purposes, look like Kubrick's. A dream come true. The problem is the story doesn't support the stylistic 180 he pulled and there's nothing remotely satisfying about the ending - and I don't mean that in a Kafka's The Trial kinda way either. It sort of fizzles, like Refn remembered he had forgotten an ending long after they'd finished shooting.
Those problems are back in Only God Forgives, and if anything they're amplified because he doesn't even have a Hubert Selby Jr. screenplay to work from as he did on Fear X. All he's got are ideas he hadn't entirely thought through. The reason that Refn's previous three efforts in his chosen style work so well is that he's got something else to work with, or rather, against. Bronson is a remake of A Clockwork Orange, but based in fact. That's two different sources to work from; it was a matter of applying one to the other. For what it's worth, I think Bronson is the better film. Valhalla Rising is a viking adventure film. That's something real, something concrete, that he can look at with those laser-like eyes of his until he burns it into the shape he wants. Drive is an LA action film, so he just needed to hit all the beats and that's a job well done. That he made it one of the slickest, most penetrating looks at genre and the idea of a hero since the mid-80s is all the better. But the point is those films have stories built in. Only God Forgives is...what? Refn calls it Noir and mentions cowboys, but there's nothing here that you'd recognize as traditional. If it's noir, which template? There's no mystery and the revenge is half-hearted at best. Hardly Act of Violence. If it's a western the closest thing on tap is something like Johnny Guitar or Bad Day At Black Rock, but the same problem exists. Those films had through-lines - revenge. Gosling doesn't want revenge. We don't know what he wants. But he bums around, only partially committing to anything, and almost never for himself. And what exactly does the end mean? If the opening fantasy sequence is to be believed, he wants his own hands removed, making him even more passive and powerless, but that was before he knew about his dead brother...
Tempting though it is to start there, I haven't been able to successfully define it in light of what it's not (Western, noir, sci-fi, martial arts film, etc.). What are we left with, then? A hero caught between mammoth opposing forces he's equally in thrall to. A sort of mad glimpse into wonderland where Alice has no choice but to put up with Mad tea parties and foul mouthed red queens and a sword-wielding Jabberwocky? A sort of inverted riff on The Shining, perhaps, with the mother acting as the dormant madness in her son? A sequel to Drive? Nothing quite gels. On top of that there are technical problems. The editing can feel totally arbitrary. The sound design can go quickly from sublime (a scene of Gosling serenely watching the object of his lust and beating a man for disrespecting her) to unbearably cheesy (anytime the detective pulls his sword I cringe. The Shaw Brothers would have shaken their heads at those noises). And why mute one of the karaoke scenes if they're so important? Cliff Martinez's score work as often as it doesn't. And the worst of it: shooting on digital Larry Smith and Refn have found that peculiar mix of weightless action and ironic distance that so ruins Barry Lyndon, Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket for me. At their worst, these people don't seem real at all; they're like marionettes being dangled on a well-lit stage. It's the quickest way to draw me out of a film, even if I bet Refn was elated when he discovered he'd achieved the effect. Look for it when the detective nails a man to a sofa, then does a victory promenade. Or when Gosling fights the detective. He looks like a special effect. Or that mid-film gun fight? Hideous. It's like a video game. And that's without the troubling fear of women on display, but somehow that seems less offensive, because, perhaps sadly, I expect that in a film like this.
Here's why, even as I actively disliked so much about Only God Forgives, I look on it with fondness. Most films don't exist in grey areas anymore because there are no more grey areas. Talk to the right people and anything's a masterpiece, anything's a failure. Vastness of subjectivity has rendered taste-making moot. Even disasters like John Carter or Anonymous have people like me saying they're wounded masterpieces of the popular form. Nothing is ever a complete failure, unless it is (see: the works of Adam Sandler, auteur). But there's no argument there. The only argument is about shades of totality. But it appears that Only God Forgives is just too weird to be loved today. And furthermore I disagree with the good reviews. I think they're making apologies for crimes it wasn't charged with and so don't understand it any better than the haters. It quite clearly doesn't belong in this time. Years from now our kids will stumble on it and go "What the fuck was this about?" and they'll be beguiled because how could the star of The Notebook (aside: a lot of people have hammered Gosling for this performance. I disagree. This took fearlessness.) and The English Patient ever make a film with eye-gouging and the phrase "Cum Dumpster." I believe he tried when he made Bronson and Valhalla, but those were too good and interesting to work as purely underground films and furthermore he was building his confidence with each new frame. But here's he found the balance of the uncanny, the beautiful, the stupidly profane and the pointedly nonsensical. He was confident enough to fail on purpose. Nic Refn is ensuring that the future is as weird as the past was for him. If it doesn't make sense, well, good. It's for the next generation of thrill seekers to deal with. The hint is the dedication. He gave Drive to Alejandro Jodorowsky, but that was a success: he won best director at Cannes and I was sure they'd give him an Oscar nod. Can't lay that at the maker of El Topo's doorstep now can you? No, no, no. This is what you give to Jodorowsky. One more 'For Alejandro...' won't hurt his feelings, I dare say. He had to earn the man's company by making something unexplainably fucked up. A true midnight movie. Something that plays like a dare to each new audience member. And he's certainly done that. Hey, people once hated The Holy Mountain, right? Maybe one day they'll love this too. Or maybe not. (Oh hey, maybe it's a remake of Santa Sangre? ...no.) The point is I'm happy it exists and I hope films like Only God Forgives will always exist. Life would be far less interesting without them.
Below The Belt
Don't be fooled by the subject matter, by the shooting date in the mid 70s, or the release date in the early 80s. It predates Rocky, but missed the boat on being the first true proletariat, underdog sports film. Even in the midst of a decade rife with gritty human comedies like Fat City, The Landlord, Cockfighter and Peckinpah's one-two punch The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner, Below The Belt feels too honest. Information on the film is scarce and you'd be hard pressed to find a decent copy anywhere (DVD, streaming, illegally, whatever, it's basically gone). I saw the film late night on TCM in a double feature with Robert Aldrich's tough-as-nails swansong ...All The Marbles (aside: all the best films have ellipses). Both films are linked by their narratives about unappreciated female wrestlers. It's the shading that separates them. Aldrich's film is among its director's finest works and colours inside the lines with abandon. Peter Falk and his two hotheaded charges lie, cheat and steal their way to the top of a very small heap. It's a joy watching them squabble in and out of the ring. Below The Belt is a much more low-key match. And not that Marbles doesn't ring true, but Below The Belt has a sense of diving headfirst into the pathetic and bleeding from the impact; you can't, or wouldn't care to, make this up. It's too painful, but in that pain is a beautiful truth. It's as real as documentary and director Robert Fowler went out of his way to make it so. Real wrestling footage is mixed with the drama, the combatants seem to mean it and the pros play themselves. The lead characters navigate these elements with the kind of wide-eyed trepidation you'd expect them to. They'd be just like us if they weren't perfectly, bracingly themselves.
Regina Baff plays Rosa Rubinsky, a waitress at an all-purpose arena near somewhere near New York City. The night we join her a wrestling league has commandeered the space, but it's just another night for her. She still has to fend off the same leery regulars and their well-rehearsed come-ons. In fact one of them goes a little too far and Rosa responds in kind by kicking his ass gently enough to avoid being fired. She happens to do this in front of wrestling promoter Bobby Fox (John C. Becher) who offers her a job. She's flattered but only half-heartedly commits. Her shock-jock boyfriend is only too happy to remind her that she's been down this road before but no matter what fad she decides to get into she always winds up back at square one. One gets the feeling he was more supportive the first few times, when she tried out macrame and french cooking, but like everyone else in Rosa's life he's too exhausted to do much more than politely put up with her decision. Of course his apathy seals the deal and days later she's at a gym learning the ropes. A few bumps in the road later and she's on a bus to the midwest to try her hand at the big leagues. In the process of getting ready she makes an enemy of veteran ass-kicker Terrible Tommy (Jane O'Brien), who doesn't much like playing by the rules and regulations. If Tommy wants to eat Rosa alive, she's going to do it for real. Rosa's going to need more than can-do spirit to beat her.
Now, let's talk about those bumps in the road for this is where the film excels. First though it's worth pointing out that Regina Baff could not be more suited to the part. She seems too alternately too big and too small for her body, she never knows what to do with her hands, and her adorably porcine nose constantly reminds her she isn't a traditionally good-looking woman, which puts a "yeah, I know" expression on her face for most of the film which codes her as the underdog before the script has a chance to. Fittingly, Rosa's romantic life is exceptionally awkward. She and her boyfriend are so clearly settling for each other from the minute you see them interacting. They communicate this just through the tenor of sighs, the fact that they sort of look past each other, and their posture. While training for inclusion in the league, Rosa meets and becomes good friends with an amateur wrestler named Lee who calls herself the The Beautiful Boomerang. Both have had serious troubles with men in the past and they seem like the right kind of weird to be great friends. Watching them train together, getting the hang of both the form and the showmanship involved in pro wrestling is a delight. Some of the film's biggest joys are watching them have fun getting used to stage combat. "Look mean!" says Annie McGreevy's Lee, almost breaking into laughter. Their laughter is the real thing. And reality, or more pointedly, 'realness' is so much a part of the narrative. Terrible Tommy fights hard, erasing the idea that wrestling is safe which is the opposite of the fun we see Fox's women having training with each other. Conversely Rosa's boyfriend is the first of many people to tell Rosa that they think wrestling's fake or staged. "No, It's not fake. It's magic. It's a show." She says with a frown and the ice around my heart melts. There's nothing fake about wrestling to her, and there's certainly nothing fake about Rosa.
One day Lee goes a little too far and suggests that they be more than friends. Here was where the movie had my full attention. Rosa loves this girl as a friend and it breaks her heart to have to turn down her advances, but she's clearly been fucked around too many times to ever be dishonest about her feelings again. Lee and Rosa want the best for each other and can't lie. There's real sadness watching Rosa first stop Lee's hand caressing her face (she's clearly never been hit on by a woman, let alone someone she's so close with) and then when she leaves both her home and her boyfriend behind when she heads out west. Below The Belt isn't at all about wrestling, of course, but I was wondering how it was going to sustain the mood minus this most interesting dynamic. The film finds its feet once we meet the other women under Bobby Fox's tutelage. The four women she joins up with come in (something like literally) every shape and size, and could have handily rounded out the cast of Desperate Living. They're all awesome characters but Shirley Stoler, looking a shade away from Divine, takes the cake as plus-sized, gun-toting Trish. When these girls take Rosa in we know she's in capable hands for the first time in quite a while. Below The Belt settles into a calmingly staccato groove observing these girls on the road, telling jokes, terrorizing gas station attendants and getting into wrecks. It's here that Rosa realizes she can take control of her life and start pursuing a man worth her time, someone who appreciates her, who is just as realistically observed and reserved a character as she is.
Robert Fowler never directed another movie and I don't know a thing about him except that if he'd kept going I have little doubt he'd have been as important a voice as Hal Ashby, Michael Ritchie or Bob Rafelson; he definitely had a more coherent vision than Dennis Hopper or Henry Jaglom. He ably captures a world that seems to demand to be anonymous, shining a spotlight on characters that other directors wouldn't touch. Even the women in Aldrich's film are striking blondes. It's only when the girls in Below The Belt put their costumes on that they become worthy of conventional attention, but we've known that all along. They become part of a show and resist the personalization Fowler has already dressed them in. They almost look wrong in their leotards and accessories. Wrestling is a sport of outsized heroes and villains and Fowler had to contend not only with that, but the disgraceful history of the culture of women wrestlers. Look at a movie like Racket Girls, which is propelled by a grotesque fetishization and possesses production values and a level of craft a step below pornography. It gives women's wrestling a bad name and it wasn't exactly the world cup to begin with. Fowler couldn't have picked a sport culture that interested American audiences less, despite it being among the most american phenomena I've ever seen. Not only does he make the sport work on its own terms, he was among the first filmmakers to make you root for a win in the big climactic match in New Hollywood grammar. He takes the same approach to his characters. He treats even the craziest, surliest side characters with the utmost respect. I haven't even mentioned the subplot about the domestic trouble facing Verne Vavoom (Sierra Pecheur) and her husband Joe, a fellow wrestler, which is splendidly tragic and gets one of the most amazing payoffs I've ever seen. The film would be worth it to hear Verne scream as her husband threatens to drive off without her. If what they have isn't love I don't know what is. Tellingly, his last words to her are "It's been real." They talk about home a fair amount, but the only definition they can come up with is that it's wherever they can be alone. Their love. That's real and the rest is fake. After that moment Rosa has to find out what's real for her.
In sheerly aesthetic terms there isn't a big shift between the world of waitressing and that of tossing people around a mat in front of hundreds of people. Unlike most films about wrestling, boxing or really any sport, the outfits and settings don't get progressively more glamorous. Fowler has to rely exclusively on the nuts and bolts of living the dream. Rosa has nothing but the roar of the crowd and a gut feeling to prove she's a winner and Fowler has to find inventive ways of rendering her slowly developing self-respect. You grow with her and if you want her to achieve her goal, it's got nothing to do with the thought of beating Terrible Tommy and everything to do with self-worth. Watching Rosa step into the ring by herself hours before the big fight, imagining the audience cheering for her in the empty arena, we know she's found herself. Below the Belt invites you into an ugly, harsh world (and boy oh boy it doesn't get uglier than the soundtrack to this film) and makes you appreciate what it means to be a beautiful person; nothing to do with the win and everything to do with how you feel about it.
Razorback - The Monster That Ate Monster Movies
I thought I'd try to write up each of the film in my best of the 80s list. I've already done John Carpenter's masterpiece, The Thing, so I'm moving onto Russell Mulcahy's Razorback. This is adapted and updated from an earlier piece I wrote about the film, which coincided with the release of Bait, a film Mulcahy wrote and produced.
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The story of Razorback, is far less important than the way it's told. With the help of a grizzled hunter named Jake Cullen, an american named Carl Winters scours a piece of Australian desert to avenge the death of his pregnant wife Beth after she's killed by a giant warthog. It's clear from the first seconds of Razorback that this is a superior film - something wilder, more angular and stylish than nearly anyone in the genre game was attempting at the time of its release. Interrupting the first few credits is the image and sound of a windmill working at impossible intensity. The image is a familiar one - no one would be shocked to learn of Mulcahy's pedigree shooting music videos. Indeed he sort of coined the form when he shot the piece for "Video Killed The Radio Star" by the Buggles. The windmill's sound is huge; deliberately overpowering. Then we see the outback, we know that's where we are because of the kangaroo in the foreground - we're less sure about the red skies that corrupt the rest of the frame. Not even The Road Warrior himself rode under skies this gorgeously oppressive. Then we pan behind the figure of Bill Kerr's soon-to-be-disgruntled hunter, Jake Cullen. The orange sky and the motion of the camera strongly suggest Apocalypse Now - the synth score does too. Moments later Kerr puts his grandson to bed and starts hearing the sounds. Grunting, squealing, but the music tells us there's menace in these otherwise innocuous sounds. He steps outside and the thing that drew his attention, the boar, breaks through his paremeter fence then tusks the man's leg, destroys his house and carries off his baby grandson into the night. The boar is obviously an effect, footage of a proper animal shot in perspective mixed with an unmoving prop shuttled through the set on wheels. This is deliberate. When they gave Steven Spielberg a shark that didn't work, he hid it. When they gave the same thing to Mulcahy, the young punk made its fakeness an asset, sending it hurtling through his set at top speeds. It's not real, clearly, but that doesn't stop it from destroying a house and eating a baby. The lighting and sound design sell it even as we're more than aware that it shouldn't work. Kerr's reaction helps in no small part. When he discovers his lost charge, he wanders into the yard and falls to his knees screaming in agony to the heavens when the titles eat the rest of the frame. Whatever else is true of the film, I can bet that you've never seen anything quite like this. This is the monster movie to end all monster movies and unsurprisingly the genre didn't recover from its rampage for many years.
The editing is relentless, somewhere between Eisenstein, Dawn of the Dead's apartment seige and Richard Lester. The compositions and camera movements reference seemingly every monster/horror film that had come before it, not to mention most major australian productions; Mulcahy's entre into the world of big budget filmmaking was by all means a hopeless assignment, so he takes down the likes of The Race For the Yankee Zephyr, Mad Max, Gallipoli Wake In Fright, Patrick, The Last Wave, The Survivor, Walkabout, Stone and Long Weekend while he was at it. It's an upstart move, saying in essence "You loved all this shit, so, I'm sorry, but you're just going to have to endure this movie." He also anticipated The Coca-Cola Kid, but I'd believe that was a coincidence if anyone told me otherwise. If the powers that be wanted him to play in the mud like Brian Trenchard-Smith and Rod Hardy, then he was going to outdo everyone in the game. All the visual cues you recognize from those movies? That's Mulcahy saying "Yes, everything you've ever been told about this bloody country is 100% true. Animals roam freely in our houses, homeless natives hang out nearby, we drink constantly, murder those we don't care for, hunt kangaroos, tell off-color jokes, drive Road Warrior trucks and those who can't afford them ride camels." As if that weren't enough, he was also going to take the various styles shown off in Next of Kin, Patrick and Picnic at Hanging Rock and outdo them all! No shot would be wasted, no lighting set-up half-assed, no sound cue unaltered. He was going to out-stylize Richard Franklin, Peter Weir, Colin Eggleston and George Miller in one go.
And at the risk of deifying a man who has yet to live up to the promise of his debut, I say he more than achieves this feat. He may never have put all his energy to good use again but then how could anyone hope to recreate the success of a film like this? It shouldn't work (and as evinced by Highlander, it wouldn't under any other circumstances), as he appears to try literally every flourish and trick that he was ever taught, but it absolutely does. Frankly any gimmicky approach you tried but a straight-forward one could only elevate the material (is there a sillier premise for a horror film, even in Australia where no premise was too outlandish, than a giant pig eating people?) so when Mulcahy decides that every single object would have a big-ass stadium light illuminating it, that every single scene would contain something completely unreal and/or nightmarish, that every single character would be a stereotype that he was deconstructing as rapidly as he was building, he was making a judgment call - love or hate the film but you would never forget it once you saw it. Just look at his version of New York that we glimpse for seven seconds; it's the same city that Jonathan Demme would capture in Something Wild two years later: Outsized and silly. Who in their right mind would choose to show a black man with a ghetto blaster on a street corner rife with old-fashioned taxis instead of just the goddamn Empire state building? It's the most recognizable landmark in the world and it certainly would have been in keeping with his purposely-tourist's eye view of the outback - kangaroos, aborigines, drinking. But he was after caricature. And though much of the film is stereotypical in microcosm, he frames and presents them so that you aren't ever sure what you've just seen. "Was that a guy with a ghetto blaster? Was that a car hanging from a baobab tree?" His goal is to both toe the line of Australia as a hellhole as propagated by most accounts of the place in pop culture (not to mention shoe-horning wombats, pigs, camels and other animals into as many shots as possible) and then make it seem far, far worse. This film was his ticket out of the outback and he's never gone back (except, hilariously enough, to remake the nearly perfect, but geographically/culturally inaccurate On The Beach for TV with Armand Assante taking over for Gregory Peck). He's also never made a film as good.
Mulcahy is exclusively the reason the movie works as well as it does. Obviously the edit helps him greatly, but without his compositions, his bug-eyed imagery and the way he handles the creature, the film would simply not work. Despite being, like Ted Kotcheff before him, an expat, scriptwriter Everett De Roche was the Outback's answer to Dardano Sacchetti and had written a handful of the country's most beloved grindhouse films; there was almost nothing he didn't try at some point. Watching Mark Hartley's fantastic documentary Not Quite Hollywood! you could get the impression that unless Peter Weir was in town, De Roche was in some way responsible for any given Aussie horror film. That's not true, but I will say it's a damn good thing he got directors as game and skilled as Richard Franklin and Mulcahy because his insane ideas would have destroyed less capable and fearless hands. I'm not even sure that George Miller, no slouch, but with no distinct visual style from film to film, would have survived a De Roche genre exercise. In the B-picture game Franklin was Mulcahy's only serious stylistic competition until he made Psycho II and discovered his wacky sense of humour which put him in closer proximity to Philippe Mora and Trenchard-Smith. Watch Link sometime to see why he never quite made it to the big leagues. But between the breathtaking highs of Patrick and Road Games you can see a fantastic talent stealing bits of Hitchcock to craft taught, unnerving thrillers from laughable De Roche premises. Arch Nicholson, Mulcahy's second unit director, comes a close second with Fortress and Dark Age proving almost as grim and stunning as Razorback. Nicholson died shortly after completing Dark Age so we'll never know if he would prove capable of sustaining his vision. In that time and in the studio system everyone seemed to be clamouring to be part of, chances are slim. Mulcahy sure couldn't. But for one film he was king of the fucking world. Even if no one knew it.
Understandably what producers seized on was Mulcahy's ability to capture mood and so a stream of truly horrible action films like the first two Highlander movies, The Shadow, Silent Trigger, Blue Ice, Ricochet, The Real McCoy, The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior and Resident Evil: Extinction, a film which utilized none of his strengths, were in his future whenever he wasn't collecting money directing music videos and TV. Rarely has a director with such a thorough understanding of cinematic convention, not to mention technique, squandered his gifts quite so splendidly. Not until Greg Mclean would Australia see a talent as cunning and ferocious arrive sui generis to reinvent the possible in the midst of an over-saturated generic landscape whose well had run completely dry. Mclean's Wolf Creek had just as much as style and beauty as Razorback, despite being twice as bleak. His follow-up, Rogue, is the Eaten Alive to Wolf Creek's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it still gives me far more hope for Mclean's future than if he'd made Highlander. Rogue and Wolf Creek are just as knowing as Razorback and between them capture the earlier film's sensibility, but even Mclean doesn't have the Godardian sense of deconstruction and anarchy that Mulcahy favored. Razorback is a film completely alone in its use of popular style and convention; a horror film about horror films. The images and individual sequences are first-rate, unmatchable. The film's centrepiece is also its high-point: Carl's trek through the desert. The attack on petpak during the finale has been compared in the past to Alien, and I'd add Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blood and Black Lace and Blade Runner to that and it certainly is both thrilling and mesmerizing. But the desert trek is Mulcahy painting with his camera. Every new tableau Carl wanders into is distinct from the last, some looking like the hyberborian wastes of Conan the Barbarian (by way of John Milius or Frank Frazetta), others like Salvador Dali. In one he wanders under a blaring red sun and just to his right is a crack in the earth that looks like the edge of a film strip. The peculiar fuzziness these shots acquire in VHS format makes them seem even stranger, like they were spliced in by accident. Their progression only makes them even more post-modern and strange: Winters passes a dead horse arranged like a scarecrow then walks for most of a day, then suddenly he's back at the horse. As he crafts shoes out of scraps of his clothing, the horse breaks out of the ground to attack him. When he runs away, it's back where we first saw it, except now its nodding and laughing at him like a jack-in-the-box. The film's best scare and one of its most indelible images is clear evidence that Razorback is about the genre as much as anything. After waking from his walkabout in Sarah Cameron's guest bed, he sees her sitting on the edge of the bed. He gingerly lifts one hand to tap her shoulder and when she turns around, her face is replaced with that of an angry looking pig, squealing maniacally. We've all seen this scare before. How many times did Freddie Kruger or some other bogeyman or demon hide behind something ordinary. This is Razorback's version of the bathroom mirror scare or of Jason Voorhees/Carrie White's dream sequence coups de grâce. Again, it shouldn't work: is anyone frightened on paper of a warthog? Well first of all it's some kind of grotesque halloween mask, exaggerated and covered in hair. Second of all, it's so sudden that it could have been anything and worked. Then you have a moment where you realize you were frightened by a pig. This is his game. He will get you afraid or repulsed by his monster if its the last thing he does. Killing Beth Winters the way he does is pretty genius. Suddenly there's the whole fucking thing staring at her just outside her car window. Then it yanks the door off and begins eating her feet. Like the rest of the film, it'd be preposterous if it weren't so horrifying.
Now the plot mechanics, I suppose, can only be attributed to De Roche and the source novel he drew from (which...doesn't this sound like great literature?). But I'm going to give credit to Mulcahy for playing up the dynamics he does so well. Thanks to Jake Cullen's stoic single-minded pursuit of the beast, and Carl Winters' pregnant wife backstory, Razorback is both a pastiche/homage to Jaws, the film that started the mother nature's revenge film cycle once more and made it personal rather than epidemic, The White Buffalo, the most peculiar of Dino De Laurentiis' Moby Dick/Jaws riffs, and Orca, the Dino's Jaws rip-off that gave its antagonist not just a backstory but human emotions as well. Now the pig in Razorback's only real breaks from reality are its existence, its laying low between attacks and its only ever killing plot-specific characters; No Alex Kintner is sacrificed to this monster. He's not greedy. He just wants to set forth the chain of events that will lead to his demise. Fatalistic in a way that not even de Laurentiis' tragic orca whale managed. He doesn't have emotions and Mulcahy frames him like a phantom, almost like Michael Myers. The moments where we glimpse him in profile on the horizon are fucking priceless. His existence is never less than galling, but it's never played for laughs. If any other actor but Bill Kerr dropped to his knees and screamed to the heavens (three separate times, no fucking less), as action heroes always seem to, it wouldn't work, but Mulcahy knows that it will. Every convention is in play and delivered with a straight face - you accept it in literally every other situation, so why not a giant warthog? After all far more care went into this monster than anything in Frogs or Day of the Animals. This is fourth wall breaking of the highest order; so good that its seamless. And the pace makes it impossible to stop and ask questions. Everyone on screen buys it and so, too, do you by the end.
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The story of Razorback, is far less important than the way it's told. With the help of a grizzled hunter named Jake Cullen, an american named Carl Winters scours a piece of Australian desert to avenge the death of his pregnant wife Beth after she's killed by a giant warthog. It's clear from the first seconds of Razorback that this is a superior film - something wilder, more angular and stylish than nearly anyone in the genre game was attempting at the time of its release. Interrupting the first few credits is the image and sound of a windmill working at impossible intensity. The image is a familiar one - no one would be shocked to learn of Mulcahy's pedigree shooting music videos. Indeed he sort of coined the form when he shot the piece for "Video Killed The Radio Star" by the Buggles. The windmill's sound is huge; deliberately overpowering. Then we see the outback, we know that's where we are because of the kangaroo in the foreground - we're less sure about the red skies that corrupt the rest of the frame. Not even The Road Warrior himself rode under skies this gorgeously oppressive. Then we pan behind the figure of Bill Kerr's soon-to-be-disgruntled hunter, Jake Cullen. The orange sky and the motion of the camera strongly suggest Apocalypse Now - the synth score does too. Moments later Kerr puts his grandson to bed and starts hearing the sounds. Grunting, squealing, but the music tells us there's menace in these otherwise innocuous sounds. He steps outside and the thing that drew his attention, the boar, breaks through his paremeter fence then tusks the man's leg, destroys his house and carries off his baby grandson into the night. The boar is obviously an effect, footage of a proper animal shot in perspective mixed with an unmoving prop shuttled through the set on wheels. This is deliberate. When they gave Steven Spielberg a shark that didn't work, he hid it. When they gave the same thing to Mulcahy, the young punk made its fakeness an asset, sending it hurtling through his set at top speeds. It's not real, clearly, but that doesn't stop it from destroying a house and eating a baby. The lighting and sound design sell it even as we're more than aware that it shouldn't work. Kerr's reaction helps in no small part. When he discovers his lost charge, he wanders into the yard and falls to his knees screaming in agony to the heavens when the titles eat the rest of the frame. Whatever else is true of the film, I can bet that you've never seen anything quite like this. This is the monster movie to end all monster movies and unsurprisingly the genre didn't recover from its rampage for many years.
The editing is relentless, somewhere between Eisenstein, Dawn of the Dead's apartment seige and Richard Lester. The compositions and camera movements reference seemingly every monster/horror film that had come before it, not to mention most major australian productions; Mulcahy's entre into the world of big budget filmmaking was by all means a hopeless assignment, so he takes down the likes of The Race For the Yankee Zephyr, Mad Max, Gallipoli Wake In Fright, Patrick, The Last Wave, The Survivor, Walkabout, Stone and Long Weekend while he was at it. It's an upstart move, saying in essence "You loved all this shit, so, I'm sorry, but you're just going to have to endure this movie." He also anticipated The Coca-Cola Kid, but I'd believe that was a coincidence if anyone told me otherwise. If the powers that be wanted him to play in the mud like Brian Trenchard-Smith and Rod Hardy, then he was going to outdo everyone in the game. All the visual cues you recognize from those movies? That's Mulcahy saying "Yes, everything you've ever been told about this bloody country is 100% true. Animals roam freely in our houses, homeless natives hang out nearby, we drink constantly, murder those we don't care for, hunt kangaroos, tell off-color jokes, drive Road Warrior trucks and those who can't afford them ride camels." As if that weren't enough, he was also going to take the various styles shown off in Next of Kin, Patrick and Picnic at Hanging Rock and outdo them all! No shot would be wasted, no lighting set-up half-assed, no sound cue unaltered. He was going to out-stylize Richard Franklin, Peter Weir, Colin Eggleston and George Miller in one go.
And at the risk of deifying a man who has yet to live up to the promise of his debut, I say he more than achieves this feat. He may never have put all his energy to good use again but then how could anyone hope to recreate the success of a film like this? It shouldn't work (and as evinced by Highlander, it wouldn't under any other circumstances), as he appears to try literally every flourish and trick that he was ever taught, but it absolutely does. Frankly any gimmicky approach you tried but a straight-forward one could only elevate the material (is there a sillier premise for a horror film, even in Australia where no premise was too outlandish, than a giant pig eating people?) so when Mulcahy decides that every single object would have a big-ass stadium light illuminating it, that every single scene would contain something completely unreal and/or nightmarish, that every single character would be a stereotype that he was deconstructing as rapidly as he was building, he was making a judgment call - love or hate the film but you would never forget it once you saw it. Just look at his version of New York that we glimpse for seven seconds; it's the same city that Jonathan Demme would capture in Something Wild two years later: Outsized and silly. Who in their right mind would choose to show a black man with a ghetto blaster on a street corner rife with old-fashioned taxis instead of just the goddamn Empire state building? It's the most recognizable landmark in the world and it certainly would have been in keeping with his purposely-tourist's eye view of the outback - kangaroos, aborigines, drinking. But he was after caricature. And though much of the film is stereotypical in microcosm, he frames and presents them so that you aren't ever sure what you've just seen. "Was that a guy with a ghetto blaster? Was that a car hanging from a baobab tree?" His goal is to both toe the line of Australia as a hellhole as propagated by most accounts of the place in pop culture (not to mention shoe-horning wombats, pigs, camels and other animals into as many shots as possible) and then make it seem far, far worse. This film was his ticket out of the outback and he's never gone back (except, hilariously enough, to remake the nearly perfect, but geographically/culturally inaccurate On The Beach for TV with Armand Assante taking over for Gregory Peck). He's also never made a film as good.
Mulcahy is exclusively the reason the movie works as well as it does. Obviously the edit helps him greatly, but without his compositions, his bug-eyed imagery and the way he handles the creature, the film would simply not work. Despite being, like Ted Kotcheff before him, an expat, scriptwriter Everett De Roche was the Outback's answer to Dardano Sacchetti and had written a handful of the country's most beloved grindhouse films; there was almost nothing he didn't try at some point. Watching Mark Hartley's fantastic documentary Not Quite Hollywood! you could get the impression that unless Peter Weir was in town, De Roche was in some way responsible for any given Aussie horror film. That's not true, but I will say it's a damn good thing he got directors as game and skilled as Richard Franklin and Mulcahy because his insane ideas would have destroyed less capable and fearless hands. I'm not even sure that George Miller, no slouch, but with no distinct visual style from film to film, would have survived a De Roche genre exercise. In the B-picture game Franklin was Mulcahy's only serious stylistic competition until he made Psycho II and discovered his wacky sense of humour which put him in closer proximity to Philippe Mora and Trenchard-Smith. Watch Link sometime to see why he never quite made it to the big leagues. But between the breathtaking highs of Patrick and Road Games you can see a fantastic talent stealing bits of Hitchcock to craft taught, unnerving thrillers from laughable De Roche premises. Arch Nicholson, Mulcahy's second unit director, comes a close second with Fortress and Dark Age proving almost as grim and stunning as Razorback. Nicholson died shortly after completing Dark Age so we'll never know if he would prove capable of sustaining his vision. In that time and in the studio system everyone seemed to be clamouring to be part of, chances are slim. Mulcahy sure couldn't. But for one film he was king of the fucking world. Even if no one knew it.
Understandably what producers seized on was Mulcahy's ability to capture mood and so a stream of truly horrible action films like the first two Highlander movies, The Shadow, Silent Trigger, Blue Ice, Ricochet, The Real McCoy, The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior and Resident Evil: Extinction, a film which utilized none of his strengths, were in his future whenever he wasn't collecting money directing music videos and TV. Rarely has a director with such a thorough understanding of cinematic convention, not to mention technique, squandered his gifts quite so splendidly. Not until Greg Mclean would Australia see a talent as cunning and ferocious arrive sui generis to reinvent the possible in the midst of an over-saturated generic landscape whose well had run completely dry. Mclean's Wolf Creek had just as much as style and beauty as Razorback, despite being twice as bleak. His follow-up, Rogue, is the Eaten Alive to Wolf Creek's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it still gives me far more hope for Mclean's future than if he'd made Highlander. Rogue and Wolf Creek are just as knowing as Razorback and between them capture the earlier film's sensibility, but even Mclean doesn't have the Godardian sense of deconstruction and anarchy that Mulcahy favored. Razorback is a film completely alone in its use of popular style and convention; a horror film about horror films. The images and individual sequences are first-rate, unmatchable. The film's centrepiece is also its high-point: Carl's trek through the desert. The attack on petpak during the finale has been compared in the past to Alien, and I'd add Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blood and Black Lace and Blade Runner to that and it certainly is both thrilling and mesmerizing. But the desert trek is Mulcahy painting with his camera. Every new tableau Carl wanders into is distinct from the last, some looking like the hyberborian wastes of Conan the Barbarian (by way of John Milius or Frank Frazetta), others like Salvador Dali. In one he wanders under a blaring red sun and just to his right is a crack in the earth that looks like the edge of a film strip. The peculiar fuzziness these shots acquire in VHS format makes them seem even stranger, like they were spliced in by accident. Their progression only makes them even more post-modern and strange: Winters passes a dead horse arranged like a scarecrow then walks for most of a day, then suddenly he's back at the horse. As he crafts shoes out of scraps of his clothing, the horse breaks out of the ground to attack him. When he runs away, it's back where we first saw it, except now its nodding and laughing at him like a jack-in-the-box. The film's best scare and one of its most indelible images is clear evidence that Razorback is about the genre as much as anything. After waking from his walkabout in Sarah Cameron's guest bed, he sees her sitting on the edge of the bed. He gingerly lifts one hand to tap her shoulder and when she turns around, her face is replaced with that of an angry looking pig, squealing maniacally. We've all seen this scare before. How many times did Freddie Kruger or some other bogeyman or demon hide behind something ordinary. This is Razorback's version of the bathroom mirror scare or of Jason Voorhees/Carrie White's dream sequence coups de grâce. Again, it shouldn't work: is anyone frightened on paper of a warthog? Well first of all it's some kind of grotesque halloween mask, exaggerated and covered in hair. Second of all, it's so sudden that it could have been anything and worked. Then you have a moment where you realize you were frightened by a pig. This is his game. He will get you afraid or repulsed by his monster if its the last thing he does. Killing Beth Winters the way he does is pretty genius. Suddenly there's the whole fucking thing staring at her just outside her car window. Then it yanks the door off and begins eating her feet. Like the rest of the film, it'd be preposterous if it weren't so horrifying.
Now the plot mechanics, I suppose, can only be attributed to De Roche and the source novel he drew from (which...doesn't this sound like great literature?). But I'm going to give credit to Mulcahy for playing up the dynamics he does so well. Thanks to Jake Cullen's stoic single-minded pursuit of the beast, and Carl Winters' pregnant wife backstory, Razorback is both a pastiche/homage to Jaws, the film that started the mother nature's revenge film cycle once more and made it personal rather than epidemic, The White Buffalo, the most peculiar of Dino De Laurentiis' Moby Dick/Jaws riffs, and Orca, the Dino's Jaws rip-off that gave its antagonist not just a backstory but human emotions as well. Now the pig in Razorback's only real breaks from reality are its existence, its laying low between attacks and its only ever killing plot-specific characters; No Alex Kintner is sacrificed to this monster. He's not greedy. He just wants to set forth the chain of events that will lead to his demise. Fatalistic in a way that not even de Laurentiis' tragic orca whale managed. He doesn't have emotions and Mulcahy frames him like a phantom, almost like Michael Myers. The moments where we glimpse him in profile on the horizon are fucking priceless. His existence is never less than galling, but it's never played for laughs. If any other actor but Bill Kerr dropped to his knees and screamed to the heavens (three separate times, no fucking less), as action heroes always seem to, it wouldn't work, but Mulcahy knows that it will. Every convention is in play and delivered with a straight face - you accept it in literally every other situation, so why not a giant warthog? After all far more care went into this monster than anything in Frogs or Day of the Animals. This is fourth wall breaking of the highest order; so good that its seamless. And the pace makes it impossible to stop and ask questions. Everyone on screen buys it and so, too, do you by the end.
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