Professor Jennings's students avert their eyes from his intense, slightly bloodshot stare as he demands yet another answer to the Milton-Free, Universe Expanding Holiday Midterm. (SLIFR readers may recognize the kid the front row with the blue sweater as none other than frequent commenter and best-friend-to-the-blog-host, none other than Blaaagh himself!)
As for taking this test, whose idea was this? I'm tired already...
1) What was the last movie you saw, either in a theater or on DVD, and why?
Gee, there was a period about two weeks when, if I’d answered this question then, I might have looked a lot more like a cinephile instead of a yahoo who gets dragged to the arthouse occasionally by his wife. But timing is, if not everything, then just as revealing as anything else when it comes to these questions, so here are my true confessions:
The last movie I saw in the theater: Just got back from seeing Stephen Frears’ The Queen with my dear wife. Why? Because we both hoped we’d see some good acting. And it was a rare occasion for us both to go out together, sans beautiful girls, especially on a weeknight, to catch something we both have wanted to see for some time. Though I struggled to stay awake during the last half hour, I can’t blame that on the film, which was a marvel of empathy that still manages, as my wife observes, to never let anyone wriggle entirely off the hook—not Tony Blair, not Elizabeth, not even Diana. I haven’t decided whether I would vote for her myself or not, but I cannot imagine anyone else but Helen Mirren walking out of the Kodak Theater this February with that Best Actress statuette. And now I’d really like to get ahold of The Deal, a 2003 film Frears made with The Queen screenwriter Peter Morgan, also starring Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, which, to hear tell, serves as a sort of a groundwork-laying part one to 2006’s Oscar-friendly consideration of the relevance of British royalty in the modern U.K.
Last Friday night, I undertook the annual present wrapping chore as I usually do, in front of a movie or two. My perennial favorite for the past six or seven years has been Cabin Boy, but I decided to give this undisputed classic a rest this year, and as there was a ridiculous amount of wrapping to do I undertook a double feature. The first, Lucky Number Slevin, was a lukewarm, too-clever-by-half post-Tarantino bash that I saw mainly on the strength of the good notices I remember reading regarding Lucy Liu’s performance. She’s a beauty, and very appealing as a coroner who befriends the oddly placid Slevin (Josh Hartnett), a guy with a broken nose misidentified by two rival gangsters as someone who owes them a whole lot of money and who doesn’t seem to mind much this potentially lethal bit of mistaken identity. But Lucy Liu’s charms couldn’t, for me, keep this thriller afloat long enough to save it from drowning in its own lack of urgency. It’s one of those movie where, as each level of deception is revealed, as each person’s true identity is revealed, all the air keeps getting pushed out in favor of that vacuum-sealed quality (all the better to keep out believability) so prized by the screenwriter Jason Smilovic, who clearly worships too fervently at the altar of The Usual Suspects.
However, the second feature, which was the last movie I saw on DVD:, saved Wrap Night from being a total bummer. Its name? Beerfest. Why Beerfest? Well, I had a free rental coupon and figured that it was possible the movie might be moderately amusing, based on the enthsiasm of some of the reviews I remember reading last August. But I would have never guessed at the high quality, as well as the high quantity, of dumb (but never mean-spirited) laughs to be found in this paean to gross overindulgence in all things brewski. It takes a while to get into gear, but once the Wolfhouse brothers (propreitors of Shitzengiggles, a stateside bar and grill) end up in Germany for Oktoberfest and discover an underground society built around a hard-core beer-drinking competition, the laughs flow like a tawny ale from a giant keg with only the occasional air bubble. Once the leader of the evil German squad of quaffers, who will taunt our boys right into the final competition, is revealed to be Jurgen Prochnow, and the ultimate test of man and liver to be slugging down a half-gallon of suds out of a calf-and-foot-shaped container called (of course) Das Boot, I knew I was squarely on the movie’s side and reasonably sure it wouldn’t betray the good will it had earned. It didn’t, and it just got funnier, with stellar cameos from Cloris Leachman, revisiting Frau Blucher territory as the boys’ slightly demented grandmother, and Monique as the nurse hired to care for her who turns out to have a very naughty secret. Beerfest is silly comedy of a high order; I only wish I hadn’t missed it on that double bill with Jackass Number Two at the drive-in earlier this year.
The last movie I saw on the job: Over the past week I’ve had to sit through Turistas, that frothy Hostel-light confection currently leaving theaters with its tail snugly between its legs, three times. That is exactly three times too many. Why did I see this movie, which even as a unapologetic horror fan I avoided on the big screen, not once but three times? Because I was paid to. A group of typically beautiful tourists, casually exploitive and smug foreigners from the U.S.A. and the U.K. making their way through South America, dawdle around for a full hour of screen time, slowly allowing themselves,
through arroagnce and plain stupidity, to get in a position to be eviscerated by a Brazilian surgeon who plans to give their organs to his poor countrymen, the ones inevitably passed in line in favor of rich gringos in need of healthy kidneys and livers. Of course, the intent is to find this doctor’s scheme, with its patina of moral outrage, horrifying. But by the time the first of these idiots finds themselves under the knife, all that first hour has done (besides bore us to tears and thwart any suspicion that this might turn out to be an actual horror movie, or at least a film with any sense of mounting dread) is get us squarely on the doctor’s side, as far as this cast is concerned, anyway. Gut ‘em all and get it over with, we’re thinking. At least then something will finally happen.
However, the movie’s director, John Stockwell (Blue Crush, Into The Blue) erases that ugly sense of identification and tips his hand right at the start of the big, gory set piece—that first liver removal— when we get a very tight close-up of a surgical blade tracing a line over the very tight abs, and around the very sexy pierced belly button, of the female victim. Even though she’s been relentlessly obnoxious for the entire film, and she’s the purveyor of one of it’s dumbest lines (“Anybody here mind if I go topless?”), that’s hardly an excuse to sexualize her needlesly long, agonizingly drawn-out evisceration. And as the doctor purrs his outraged bedside manner in her ear (yes, she’s conscious) and explains his raison d’etre, I found myself squirming and thinking two things: 1) I’m really pissed off that Stockwell staged this horrific violation like a indifferent seduction— I doubt he would have done so if the first victim had been the barmy Brit, an obnoxious male; and 2) even though this doctor has stated that he only has 12 hours to steal the kidneys and livers of all six of his unfortunate house guests, am I suppose to accept that he takes this much time to blah-blah about his righteous anger and motivation to everyone from whom he cherry-picks vital organs?
The movie, vacant and dull up to this point, trades up from the gruesomely offensive to the incoherently staged action of its final 20 minutes, even managing a stab at the kind of claustrophobic senstaion that The Descent wove so tightly into its grand scheme. In Turistas, however, the claustrophobia is just pointless. The staging of the climax in a maze of underwater caves serves only to make it harder to keep track of who’s skewering who as everything mercifully comes to an end, until you realize, as I did, that you’d long since stopped caring. Hostel at least managed to conjure a crescendo of dread underneath the hedonistic revelry of its ugly-Americans-in-Eastern-Europe setup, even if that abattoir the characters eventually found themselves in really was a narrative dead end. Turistas, however, is so cynical and indifferently constructed, its characters merely meat with mobility and certainly no minds to speak of, or to mourn, that it really does deserve the overused description “torture porn.”
2) Name the cinematographer whose work you most look forward to seeing, and an example of one of his/her finest achievements.
The first names that came to mind were Robby Muller (The State of Things, Repo Man, They All Laughed, Dead Man) and Freddie Francis (Room at the Top, The Innocents, The Elephant Man, Dune, Return to Oz). But then I remembered the name of the first cinematographer whose name used to (still does) get me excited when I hear his name attached to a project-- Peter Suschitzky. Suschitzky replaced Mark Irwin as David Cronenberg’s cinematographer of choice with the icy, muted tones of Dead Ringers (1988), and has shot every one of the director’s features since (Naked Lunch, M.Butterfly, Crash, eXistenZ, Spider, A History of Violence). Suschtzky also lent his eye to the candy-colored cacophony of Mars Attacks!, John Boorman’s woefully underrated, emotionally charged Where the Heart Is and the garish visual pallete of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
But I’ll always remember Suschitzky for two films in particular: the silky, lurid intensity he lent to the fevered and absurd pop fantasia of Ken Russell’s Lisztomania...
and Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back-- the insinuatingly tactile sheen of Darth Vader’s helmet; the rich, vivid, velvety dark blues and reds in front of which Luke and Vader played out their Oedipal duel; the crisp lines and seemingly endless depth-of-focus of the landscapes on the snow planet. This is the one episode of George Lucas’s space opera in which the grand emotions, the sweeping mythology and the pulp origins of its pastiche vision all get full visual realiziation, from frame one to the last, courtesy of Suschitzky’s all-seeing eye.
3) Joe Don Baker or Bo Svenson?
Bo Svenson will always have a place in my heart for the borderline psychosis he brought to pro football player Joe Bob Priddy in North Dallas Forty. But he was merely a pretender as Buford Pusser, even though he got two movies and a brief TV series out of swinging that Walking Tall club. Joe Don Baker, however, also has Mitchell (MST3K and non-MST3K versions) under his Schlitz-loving beer belly-sized belt, as well as the hall-of-fame villain Molly in Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick. And he’s named Joe Don. Unless we get another hulking star with a similarly ambivalent grin, booming good-old-boy voice and general physical imposition of this order whose name is Joe Bob, Mr. Baker will continue to be the man.
4) Name a moment from a movie that made you gasp (in horror, surprise, revelation…)
The most recent example of an uncontrollable gasp (this one in horror) I let out during a movie is one I will try to allude to without giving away any specifics. It’s the moment during The Descent when a measure of fatal violence is doled out by a character who has been made to distrust someone based on eye-witness, but totally misinterpreted, information. For me, it’s the moment in the movie when true horror is sealed and made inescapable, no matter the presence of daylight or a familiar (ambivalent?) image of a lost love returning yet again before the end credits roll…
If you missed The Descent in a theater, put that Best Buy gift card you’re going to get for Christmas to good use and pick up a wide-screen copy of it when it comes out on December 26.
5) Your favorite movie about the movies.
A free rotation between (in alphabetical order) Hollywood Boulevard (the fun and the sleaze), Sherlock Jr. (the laughs and the undiluted magic), The Stunt Man (the excitement, megalomania and paranoia) and Sunset Boulevard (the sadness, morbidity and the tainted glory).
6) Your Favorite Fritz Lang movie.
It’s gotta be M, with the bitter shock of The Big Heat a very close second, and the loopy wonder of Rancho Notorious a none-too-distant third. Many have made mention here of Woman in the Window-- I have not yet seen this one, but it sounds like I ought to remedy that in a right hasty fashion.
7) Describe the first time you ever recognized yourself in a movie.
In a character: squirrely little Kevin Corcoran had me all sewed up as Arliss Coates, who can’t understand why Old Yeller suddenly ain’t friendly no more, and as the titular runaway who fulfills a fairly universal fantasy of boys my age in Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus.
In an actual movie: a relatively skinny, uncomfortable version of myself in National Lampoon’s Animal House.
8) Carole Bouquet or Angela Molina?
I’m tempted to say both, as they are inseparable, after all. But I’ll give the edge to Bouquet for Bertrand Blier’s Too Beautiful for You. (By the way, the rumor swirling about Bouquet being a transsexual arose during her participation in For Your Eyes Only and was just a rumor. But it was a rumor based in truth. Caroline Cossey, who began life as Barry, was among a bevy of bathing beauties glimpsed poolside during one brief sequence in the film. I remember seeing a National Enquirer headline around the time the movie was released that shouted something like “Bond Girl Really a Man!” It’s proclamations like these that probably got grocery-line readers assuming the all the shouting must be in reference to Bouquet, since she was the main Bond girl of that film. If they’d let go of the cart long enough to page through the paper, however, they might have discovered that the Enquirer, in a rare instance of truthful reportage, held the real details inside.
9) Name a movie that redeems the notion of nostalgia as something more than a bankable commodity.
Dazed and Confused, for my money not only a perfect disillation of the experience of high school and the uncertainty of the future held by graduating students in 1976, but maybe the best movie about growing up in a small town I’ve ever seen. And in Amarcord, Fellini conjured a world based on memory that as indelible and remarkable as anything I’ve ever seen in a movie.
10) Favorite appearance by an athlete in an acting role.
Ray Nitschke, Head, The Longest Yard…
though if my thunder hadn’t been stolen, I probably would have mentioned Kurt Thomas in Gymkhata…
11) Favorite Hal Ashby movie.
Ashby is a mixed bag for me. I still have never seen The Landlord, I find Harold and Maude alternately amusing and too precious by half, and Coming Home just doesn’t seem to work for me anymore. Shampoo and The Last Detail are worthy candidates, to be sure, but if I go purely by how many times I’ve seen an Ashby movie, the winner—based on numbers and artistic worth, as it turns out—is Being There (“I like to watch, Ben.”), followed by Eight Million Ways to Die, which I missed in theaters but became moderately obsessed by when it began its seemingly endless loop on HBO about a year later.
12) Name the first double feature you’d program for opening night of your own revival theater.
I think I’d have to go with Buster Keaton’s The General and Jackie Chan’s Project A Part 2-- the master and the student, both at the height of their physical grace and imagination.
I also like the idea put forward here earlier Lawrence of Arabia and Once Upon a Time In the West-- give ‘em their money’s worth!
In that vein, how about an opening night dusk-to-dawn butt-buster? The Dollars Trilogy plus Eastwood and director Ted Post’s underrated attempt to bring the spaghetti back to the American west in Hang ‘Em High?
And I’m thinking of the future when I imagine double-features like these:
The Confederate States of America plus co-hit The Second Civil War
Fellini Roma plus co-hit The Italian Job
Weekend plus co-hit Bananas
Boy, Jim, you may have really started something…
13) What’s the name of your revival theater?
I can see in up in neon already: The Cardinale
14) Humphrey Bogart or Elliot Gould?
As Marlowe, Gould…
As a movie star, Bogart (Gould could never pull off In A Lonely Place)…
15) Favorite Robert Stevenson movie.
Again, that old free-floating rotation: the cartoon metaphysics of The Love Bug (dig Tennesee Steinmetz’s version of Herbie’s origin story), followed by the wrenching emotions of Old Yeller, the giddy slapstick of Son of Flubber (The Absent-minded Professor’s looser, goosier sequel) and the ultra-low-tech pleasures of The Island at the Top of the World, an adventure movie I was probably much too old to be as crazy about as I was when it came out. (I was 14.) I know this is heresy, especially around my house, but Mary Poppins is just a spoonful of sugar (or ten) too much for my taste—let’s just say I am not a fan of Julie Andrews.
16) Describe your favorite moment in a movie that is memorable because of its use of sound.
The symphony of squeaks and hisses and drips that comprise the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West
Honorable mention:
*** The first time we hear what turns out to be a far-away electrical generator in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As a group of kids approach a house that sits in the midst of an open plain, we’re already squirming, primed by the movie’s title and our own spider-sense of impending doom, sure as hell that generator noise must be a saw idling. When it turns out not to be, the relief is welcome, but short-lived. A boy approaches the house and enters the front door. There’s a small foyer at the base of some stairs, and further back underneath them a large metal door. Soon there is the shocking rattle of that door sliding open, the pinging of sledgehammer connecting with skull, the screaming-- the victim’s and that of Leatherface—and the sudden rattling slide of that door back into place. After which, all is suddenly, horribly silent once again.
*** The typewriter keys hitting paper in macro close-up, All the President’s Men
17) Pink Flamingos-- yes or no?
Yes. And to second David’s notion of seeing it with someone who has never seen it before, I have a little story. One evening, while caring for a cousin who was laid out on my apartment couch with the flu, I decided to watch Pink Flamingoes while she slept. I turned the lights down low and put on my headphones, lest any of the movie’s strange sounds (“Eggs! I want eggs!”) disturb her feverish slumber. I flopped in a beanbag chair on the floor beside the couch and fired the movie up, chortling along my merry way through all manner of demented behavior playing out on my TV.
(Image courtesy of (stolen from) Filmbrain and Francis Ford Coppola. Thank you both, gentlemen.)
