SECRET MOVIES: THEODORE ROSZAK'S FLICKER

My modest contribution to Bill Ryan's "The Kind of Face You Slash" celebration of horror fiction over at his esteemed blog The Kind of Face You Hate is now online, a brief consideration of Theodore Roszak's 1991 novel Flicker. I never really thought of Flicker as a horror novel in the strictest sense while I was reading it-- the first half reads more like a decadent orgy of movie lore woven expertly into a pleasingly reluctant, expertly teased detective story. But the book certainly qualifies as horror in that it shares the obsessive nature of its protagonist, film historian Jonathan Gates, who follows the decaying nitrate trail of long-forgotten genre filmmaker Max Castle all the way down the rabbit hole, beneath the deceptively tacky first layer of the director's strangely seductive imagery and into a nightmare world of secret movies. Here, bathed in the sinister interplay of shadows and light, where something always seems to be just hidden from view, the hooks of the past are set, dragging the academic, and us, into a present where Castle's subliminal text is developing, with the help of a mysterious religious sect and a newly emerging cult phenomenon by the name of Simon Dunkle, into malignant foreground. Flicker's vampires and creatures of the night may remain locked in tattered celluloid, the remains of Max Castle's oeuvre, but like Castle's mysterious technique, the flicker, Roszak's book gets under your skin, makes you shiver, and makes you think about how elastic the horror genre really can be.

Check out my piece and all the other essays in Bill's month-long horror fiction roundup as October rolls along at The Kind of Face You Hate. 

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COMING SOON TO A HAUNTED CRYPT NEAR YOU

It's a fearsome night on Turner Classic Movies for horror fans, kicking off October in style tonight starting at 5:00 pm PST/8:00 pm EST-- Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), followed by George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), Fritz Lang's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Terence Fisher's Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), and The Wasp Woman (1959), directed by Roger Corman and Jack Hill. 

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From the looks of things around here, you’d never know it’s been a busy month, but it has. Just not in terms of writing, which is reflected in the fact that it’s been exactly a month since I last posted here. (That last post was a long ‘un, though.) It’s been a goodly stretch since the days when I was posting every day, or even every other day—the emerging gray in my beard is testament to the fact that life is different now than it was in 2004, especially as it applies to the energy and inspiration and time I have available to offer Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Even so, this little hobby, which I started nine years ago next month and never realistically expected to last through to a first anniversary, is still high on my list of priorities. What’s changed is the (ridiculous) notion that I could or should ever try to keep up that initial pace or that, regardless of whatever attention it might receive, the profile of the blog would ever be raised beyond the level of “boutique” status. (Over this past summer a friend described SLIFR, quite aptly and charmingly I thought, as “one sincere pumpkin patch of a blog.”) 

It’s clear, too, just how much social media has changed—at least for me—the urgency I used to feel about my blogging. The interactive aspect of SLIFR has long since been supplanted by the more immediate and unmoderated connections Facebook and Twitter provide, relegating the comments column to a status of something akin to letters to the editor delivered by snail mail. (I’m just grateful, when I do get comments, that they remain as civil and constructive and creative as they ever were.)

But I’m still here. And if September was a month of tumbleweeds as far as SLIFR is concerned, then what of October? It’s a month that lends itself to considerations of matters of the horror genre and, if you happen to love that genre, opportunities to focus on personal observations about it that stretch beyond the usual dabblers’ notions racking up lists of “The 100 Best Horror Movies Ever Made” or “My Favorite Slasher Movie Villains.” And here at SLIFR I’m going to take the time to spotlight not only own posts but a couple of others that I think will be enjoyed by anybody who feels like digging a little deeper into the foundational ground of the season.

Anyone interested in a fully rounded appreciation of the Halloween season this month should be keeping their eyes on the Friday columns of Richard Harland Smith over at TCM’s Movie Morlocks. Richard’s writing on horror is just about beyond compare, and he’s already begun to illuminate the musty crypts and desolate graveyards of Halloween like a day-glo screaming skull. Posted today, his terrific "Gimme That Old-Time Scaryiligion!" eschews the tendency toward the gory and instead advocates for drinking in the rich atmospherics of many great Halloween movies that you may have never seen:

“The older I get, the older I want to be. Which is to say that come Halloween I don’t want to be disgusted, I don’t want to disgust others. I want to heighten my senses, not force them into shutdown mode. I want to savor crispness in the air, a hint of woodsmoke on the wind. I want to hear the swirl of autumn leaves and the peal of churchbells from the kirkyard. (Or, barring that, the peal of kirkbells from the churchyard.) I want magic and mystery. I want to be a child again. And when I was a kid, people kept their guts to themselves… At Halloween, I want the cozy. I want to be in for the night, with rain lashing at the eaves, or at least a high wind rattling the shutters. I want the bridge to be out, the authorities unreachable, and several strangers (or at the very least estranged family members) house-bound and vulnerable to attack by the Bat or the Cat or Dracula or the Ghost of something-something.”

Richard is not one to worry about whether his own tastes come off musty to the hardened, grue-encrusted horror fan, and he’s right not to. He’s having too much fun steeping in the mainstream and the marginalia of horror’s history at the movies, and this article proves that he’s off to another strong and spooky start toward concocting a month-long witches’ brew that will be well worth indulging in.

Another cryptkeeper to keep an eye on this month is Bill Ryan, proprietor of The Kind of Face You Hate. Bill is a talented, colloquial writer with a wicked sense of humor and a great and infectious ease with his own voice, and every October he hosts a month-long festival of daily posts on horror fiction, the literary kind. He calls this annual gathering "The Kind of Face You Slash" and it’s usually Bill, keeping very busy, writing the whole month on a whole host of worthy and serious horror writing. But this year he’s doing things a little differently: 

“`The Kind of Face You Slash’ (is) a project that ordinarily finds me writing about horror fiction -- stories and novels and so forth -- every single goddamn day. Ha ha, not that I don't love it! That's going to happen again this year, starting Tuesday, but this year there's a slight twist. For about half of the month, I will be doing what I always do, which is as previously described, but the other half of the month will be filled out with a roster of guest writers. The rotation will be roughly and alternating-days kind of thing, though this part I can't be certain about exactly, but in any case your takeaway should be: half me, half other folks, each of whom I'm very proud to have on board, and whose posts I think you'll greatly enjoy. There'll be bylines and stuff, even.”

Bill starts out with House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (“Stephen King and his son, the horror writer Joe Hill, are described discussing ‘what novel should be considered the Moby-Dick of horror’… The answer they settle on is one of the more curious, both in its impact and in its very existence, horror fiction phenomenons of the last thirty years…”), then gives it over to Andrew Leon Hudson (on John Dies at the End). Bill comes back for Thomas Hinde’s The Day the Call Came and Friday (today) is the domain of Jose Cruz on a collection that sounds fascinating, Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown: A Treasury of Bizarre Tales Old and New edited by Marvin Kaye 

I have no idea what’s on the docket for Saturday—another Bill contribution, as he alternates with his guests all month long—but I do have an inkling about Sunday, as it’ll be my own contribution to the festival, a look at Theodore Roszak’s fascinating, maddening 1991 novel Flicker.

Round these parts, expect to see my review of the long-awaited Curse of Chucky, the sixth installment of the Chucky the Killer Doll franchise (which I celebrating is 25^th anniversary this year), as well as a couple of quizzes—a horror-oriented quiz undertaking straight from the catacombs of SLIFR University, and another visual puzzler based on mysterious screen grabs from horror movies throughout cinema history. It won’t be all horror here, though—I’ve got a massive 800-minute Blu-ray box (and accompanying heavy tome) of The Untold History of the United States, the sprawling and provocative documentary written (with Peter Kuznick) and directed by Oliver Stone, sitting on my desk which will most definitely be worth a look. I’ll also be taking some time to look at writer-director Michael Schlesinger’s acclaimed comedy short It’s a Frame-up!  and even, especially if the postseason continues to go well, a look at a couple of baseball movies you may have missed.

And I have it on good authority that the Horror Dads will be reconvening after a long absence for another of our good-natured discussions on matters of bringing up kids in the ominous moonlight of six lifetimes of horror appreciation.

Thanks for hanging around, even during the quiet times around this here pumpkin patch. We’re not done with the harvest yet.

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COPPOLA AND DE PALMA: BETWIXT PASSIONS

When a director cruises into the late part of his career on the fumes of his past achievements, working and reworking familiar themes and stylistic strategies, mindful, perhaps even baiting the expectations of her or his audience, the result might be described as evidence of a hopeless rut or, perhaps more generously, comfort food for those fans who enjoy seeing the artist (hacks usually don’t bother with things like familiar themes or stylistic strategies) hanging out in places that somehow feel right, feel earned. It’s a long way from Rio Bravo to Rio Lobo, and it seems unlikely that anyone would prefer the latter over the former, but Howard Hawks’ final movie is enjoyable on its own terms just the same, not least of which for the chance it provides to enjoy the company of a master of Hollywood storytelling as he looks back on a long career, perfectly comfortable with the inevitable charges of endlessly repeating himself, fully aware that for the general audience it was never as much about him, the director, so much as it was about the images, the actors who embodied his ideals, and of course the tales spun.

The director who, after establishing himself commercially, begins to experiment with ways of telling stories, with the purpose of telling stories, is a much rarer phenomenon. George Lucas has clucked for years about his true desire to make avant-garde films, to use the phenomenal success of Star Wars to finance finding different ways to employ and interpret cinematic language. But whatever opportunities to fulfill that desire which have arisen have consistently given way to a sort of creative ennui. Lucas has become satisfied with lording over an empire of special effects, forever repackaging, extending or otherwise tinkering with the Star Wars legacy (and the films themselves) rather than channeling even a tiny percentage of his commercial clout toward much more than lip service in the direction of realizing his supposed true heart.

Lucas’ fellow ex-movie brat Francis Ford Coppola, however, has always, however compulsively, however foolishly, bet on technology to help him feel his way toward untested methods of visual and narrative movie magic, with the occasional commercial success funding his continuous courting of folly and perhaps even a breakthrough or two. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the man who made a fortune from The Godfather and then gambled it against movies like Apocalypse Now, One from the Heart and Rumble Fish, who created his own empire, one financed in large part by the Napa Valley grape, in order to spend his autumn years on experimental features like Youth without Youth and Tetro, would continue pursuing that searcher’s impulse, risking derision and obscurity along the way.

(In a recent interview, Coppola spoke of this experimental impulse: “What I was trying to do with those films was to make three student films in order to try and set a new trajectory and try to say, ‘Well, what happens if I have no resources?’ Now, having done that, my new work is going to be much more ambitious and bigger in scope and budget and ambition, but now building on a new confidence or assurance. The three little films were very useful. I'm glad I did it. I hope George Lucas does it, because he has a wonderful personal filmmaking ability that people haven't seen for a while.”)

Coppola has been accused of career complacency, of preferring to drink wine and cook elaborate meals and watch his daughter continue in his footsteps over pursuing further Hollywood success himself. And if it’s true, who really could blame him? But regardless of their uneven quality as art, Coppola’s late films have hardly been complacent. Wherever his muse eventually takes him, in them resides the spirit of a director in his mid ‘70s who continues to fiddle with his mastery of the art form, looking for fertile new ways of expression while approaching that task, often maddeningly, as if he knows nothing. His new movie, Twixt, aligns imperfectly with this spirit.

Strictly speaking, the story inside Twixt is probably the least interesting element in it. It involves Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a near-burnt-out writer of horror fiction on a threadbare book-signing tour who makes a stop in a small Northern California town, where he encounters the somewhat too gregarious sheriff Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern), a serial third-person abuser who would like nothing more than to collaborate with Baltimore on a book about a notorious mass killing that took place in town years ago. It seems that several young orphans were poisoned by a priest who felt it best to murder them in their innocence before their souls could be stolen by a pack of occult-oriented bikers who lived across the lake. According to La Grange, the townspeople believe that the spirits of those orphans have remained adrift, haunting the town’s clock tower, which boasts seven faces, all of them bearing different, incorrect times. La Grange also hopes that Baltimore might help him solve a mysterious set of new murders, the latest victim being the girl with a stake driven through her chest who lies in the walk-in freezer morgue just off the sheriff’s office. La Grange blames those same occult bikers, who apparently still live across the lake, for the recent murders-- the orphan killings would appear to have occurred in the distant past, so why are those damn kids and their hogs and ducktails and rock ‘n’ roll still hanging around?

With one eyebrow cocked and his curiosity peaked, Baltimore shuffles around town, poking about for information, occasionally sitting in his hotel room, Skyping with his impatient editor (David Paymer), who demands a promised outline for a new book, and his impatient ex-wife (Joanne Whalley, Kilmer’s real-life ex), who threatens to sell his prized first edition of Leaves of Grass to pay bills. It’s no wonder the guy can’t sleep, and when he does he encounters none other than the spectral visage of Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin), who engages with him in discussions about the sacrifices necessary to turn hackwork into personal prose, and a mysterious little girl called V (Elle Fanning) who stands out gleaming-white amidst the stylized darkness of a nightmare forest, her golden hair braided and framing a pair of sunken, red-tinged eyes and a mouthful  of braces meant to reign in what look an awful lot like fangs. V reminds Baltimore not only of the town’s awful past but also of his own—at some point he lost a daughter, either emotionally or perhaps even physically, and it’s his attempt to reconnect with her by uncovering the town’s mysteries that keeps him and the movie stoked.

But for as elaborate and strenuous as the description of Twixt’s “plot” may sound, the movie itself has little in the way of traditional narrative urgency, and there are all sorts of clues early on that the story may not have been Coppola’s foremost concern. Why, for example, would Baltimore’s editor secure him a book signing in such a sleepy town, one which doesn’t even have a book shop? (He ends up tucked into the back of a hardware store, surrounded by lawn and gardening supplies.) And there’s far too much emphasis on Baltimore’s isolation—by the time we get to Kilmer improvising impersonations of gay 1960’s basketball players and Brando (doing Kurtz) into the camera, there’s only the most tenuous connection left (it seems) with the bravura visual stylist who captured Martin Sheen breaking down in a hotel room, apparently for real, and built an entire epic around his protagonist’s fragile mental stability.

If I’ve made Twixt sound borderline insufferable, well, for many it is. And much of the setup of the movie suggests a serious flagging of visual imagination on Coppola’s part, often seeming curiously immobile, much like the director himself, who can be seen, in a behind-the-scenes documentary on the DVD (shot and edited by his granddaughter) presiding over the set on a chair from which he rarely rises. But to entirely discount Twixt (as the review linked above does) based on the notion that it doesn’t play like a conventional horror movie should, or the way past Coppola movies have, is to perhaps turn a blind eye to the things that make Twixt worth seeing.

The nightscapes imagined for Twixt invigorate Coppola like nothing else seems to. They are beautifully, sensually false-- Kilmer wandering about in blue-tinged shadows that are cut only by a heartbreaking moon that would have made Méliès smile, among woods which seem soaked in inky, inexplicable sorrow. Much of that sorrow is also supplied by Fanning-- even from the spectral plane through which she glides, she still hides those giant braces from Kilmer like an embarrassed schoolgirl would, and their conversations are strangely touching in ways that I think Coppola often keeps deliberately diffuse. For an extra frisson of disorientation, he photographs Kilmer and Fanning separately, merging her brilliantly lit form with the darkness in which Kilmer moves in such a way that subtly emphasizes her intrusion upon “reality” and keeps the viewer slightly tilted, emotionally speaking. Even the overly literal (and literary) conceit of Baltimore bonding with Poe as his drink-fueled spiritual guide works better than it probably should, because of our awareness of the writer’s unreal occupation of the space he shares in Baltimore’s dreams—Poe here looks like a walking, talking daguerreotype--  but also because their conversations, particularly the ones centered on how one makes literature resonate for the writer and the reader, lead Coppola to his real subject, how one grapples with grief-laden guilt.

I resented Coppola’s attempt to rationalize the narrative (and the very making) of The Godfather Part III by inserting himself into it as a surrogate for Michael Corleone’s painful redemption—it played cynically, like a crucial break in faith with the pact the previous two films made with the audience. But Twixt is a different beast—you can sense Coppola feeling his way around inside the movie as it unfolds, and it has the lumpiness, the occasional highs and the embarrassing lows of a project that hasn’t entirely been worked out ahead of time. His visual experimentation may not redeem the whole of the film, but it informs the basis of the feeling that drives its most affecting moments. By the time the story of what really happened to Baltimore’s daughter is revealed, in another goose bump-inducing visual moment which finds the movie’s two authors, one dead, one alive, at the top of a dreamscape cliff staring down at an event Baltimore has spent years avoiding (it indirectly references a tragedy in Coppola’s own life), it’s easy to forgive Twixt’s many narrative warts in favor of the empathy the director has achieved.

I understand why people won’t like Twixt, and I’m not convinced I would ever need to revisit it myself, but it seems unfairly callous, and willfully ignorant, to simply dismiss it as an inexplicable bomb, a landmark of senility in a once-grand career. Coppola may not have another purely great film in him, but it’s reassuring to know that he’s still out there pushing boundaries, searching for emotion, trying and sometimes failing to reinvent himself and his methods, even if no one seems to care.

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Which brings us to the Strange Case of Brian De Palma. The man who directed masterpieces like Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Carlito’s Way and Casualties of War has always been a polarizing figure in modern cinema, accusations of misogyny, artistic cannibalism and narrative incoherence being among the usual and most relentlessly repeated complaints. The misogyny charges stand only if you can ignore the multitude of great and sympathetic roles there are for women in his films, or if you believe that every instance of pursuit and violation of females in cinema, or the absence of a pedestal upon which women must be constantly placed, counts as misogyny. Those shouting “Copycat!” too easily discount that the history of popular art forms (not just the movies) are filled with innovation and artistic breakthroughs that owe debts of form and content to previous works. And the truly great De Palma movies are incoherent only if one manages to ignore what he can so masterfully show, and the manner in which he shows it, as that visual mastery becomes integrated ever more confidently from 1970 to 1993 with the themes—sex, fear, duplicity, moral outrage, voyeurism, technology, paranoia—that define his work.

That said, I’ve never been what might be described as a blanket De Palma apologist, though I am aware of several people who would vehemently disagree with that self-characterization. I’ve never hidden the reservations I have for movies up and down the De Palma canon, including (but by no means limited to) Phantom of the Paradise, Obsession, The Fury, Scarface, Body Double, The Untouchables, Raising Cain, Snake Eyes and The Black Dahlia. In recent years, in fact, it seems his work has been marked by a sort of indifference that I find especially alarming, a tendency to repeat himself not because the material demands visual articulation in precisely the manner with which only De Palma, when he’s hitting on all cylinders, can bless it, but because, well, these indulgences are expected by audiences (which may now only be comprised largely of sympathetic critics and fans), the hallmarks of what has come to signify A Brian De Palma Film.

In 2006 I wrote this in a long assessment of the director’s critically lambasted adaptation of James Ellroy’s true crime book:

“If anyone could get away with taking perverse pleasure in leaving the general audience behind, along with some fierce acolytes, I would expect it would be De Palma. But I would also expect to feel some of that pleasure myself, the thrill of a director discovering new avenues of expression that truly mean something to him. The Black Dahlia doesn’t seem like work for hire—I don’t think De Palma is capable of hackwork. It does feel like the work of a man who hasn’t quite figured out how to realize those desires to take his filmmaking in a different direction. Ironically, the signature De Palma set piece in The Black Dahlia, a murder that takes place on a vertiginous, three-level staircase, has a musty, indifferent feel to it, as if even the director knows he’s gone to this well once too often, and that he’s doing the sequence because, well, what would a Brian De Palma movie be without it? Matt (Zoller Seitz) even left a comment that expressed concern that The Black Dahlia is being judged in relation to what we expect from De Palma, and that such judgments seem unfair. But when the director undertakes another sequence like this staircase murder, essentially giving the audience what he imagines they want, judging De Palma in relation to his past doesn’t seem unfair because by staging this scene in the manner he does, De Palma invites the comparison himself.” 

 

Passion, De Palma’s latest, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival a year ago but is only now seeing release in the United States, in theaters and on video-on-demand platforms, is most certainly, as Matt Seitz suggested about the earlier film, being judged in relation to what we expect from De Palma. But with this film the polarized currents have been switched—it’s De Palma who’s playing into the expectations again, and not just with an isolated sequence, while the enthusiasm with which the movie is being greeted this time seems irrationally forgiving, not dismissive, as if the suggestion of past glories and a winking familiarity with those allusions is all that is required for the true believers to start issuing hosannas.

The sad reality is that with Passion the director seems to have succumbed to the sort of tone-deaf indifference The Black Dahlia, as awful and misguided as it was, could only hint at. This new movie finds De Palma at his most uninspired and lethargic from the word ”go,” his trademark sensuous camerawork anchored into dull, meaningless patterns, trading probing intelligence for a series of zone-outs and logy stares . It’s not fun to report that this director has finally fully committed what he’s oft been critiqued (and often wrongly) for doing—he’s made a movie that is almost entirely “plot,” at its most nakedly nonsensical, and the visual filigrees which have in the past served to illuminate themes and create tension seem like the bored afterthoughts of a burnt-out artist who can no longer be bothered to adequately prop up his own legacy.

Passion is a remake of a 2010 French thriller called Love Crime, directed by the late Alain Corneau and featuring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier. The movie got respectable reviews (I haven’t seen it), though it has a reputation for being on the trashy side, which is probably what attracted De Palma to the idea of remaking it. After all, as the director has suggested in interviews, "It's very dangerous to remake a classic… Leave it alone." Yet it’s hard to imagine that Corneau’s movie could be anywhere close to as enervated, as hermetically sealed off from the real world and the way real people behave, as De Palma’s version. The once-enfant terrible director spins a tale of interoffice intrigue and backstabbing that betrays an actual infant’s conception of the minutiae of business, to say nothing except in the vaguest of terms about what the business is and what it might have to do with the tale he ostensibly wants to tell. On the most basic level (and there is no other level in this film other than plot), Passion concerns Christine, a sex-obsessed and possibly demented ad executive (Rachel McAdams) who, with a smile on her face and suggestive professions of love, openly steals ideas from Isabelle, her mousy, blank-faced underling (Noomi Rapace), so that she might propel herself out of the Berlin office and into a more desirable position in New York.

(Frankly, if Berlin is as dreary and nondescript as De Palma makes it seem, who wouldn’t want to move? The beleaguered German city might as well be a monotonic Canadian stand-in, for all the missed opportunities to root the film in the sort of haunted social and geographic milieu it would seem to offer. Why even bother to change the locale from the original’s Paris if you’re not going to weave what makes Berlin Berlin into the fabric of the movie?)

But Christine doesn’t count on Isabelle’s own secret duplicities (or does she??), which include siphoning the sexual services of Christine’s sleazy Eurotrash boyfriend Dirk (Paul Anderson, bafflingly bad), who has his own secrets which threaten to undermine Christine’s plans. Those secrets involve an embezzlement scenario  that Christine, after covering up for years, has suddenly decided to quash,  a “little Ponzi scheme” which De Palma’s howler-laden screenplay has Isabelle later shrug off, when a little clarity might be appreciated, as “stealing some money” from the company.

 

The oily Dirk has shot a video of a sexual encounter with Isabelle on his smartphone, which Christine discovers and uses as the foundation for a campaign of private, and then public humiliation against Isabelle. When Isabelle overreacts to Christine’s brandishing of the evidence of her dalliance with Dirk, she naturally crashes her car up in a parking garage, the mechanical breakdown as well as her own nervous collapse all dutifully recorded on the building’s video security system--  about as dutifully and dispassionately, in fact, as De Palma’s own camera sits and surveys the scene.

It all builds to a scene so mind-bogglingly misconceived as to invite suspicions (or hopes, even) that De Palma has decided that knuckleheaded parody is the only way out—Christine gathers her staff for a casual meeting, with champagne and caviar, to chide them for certain office indiscretions observed by that same security camera, the climax of which is, of course, the video of Isabelle bashing up her car and sobbing hysterically while the sprinkler system douses her in an ostensibly photogenic shower. Christine glances her way with mock innocence, absolutely shocked that Isabelle would in any way be hurt by this unprecedented display of vindictiveness and misuse of productive office man-hours. But Isabelle, her mask-like face given over to twitches only slightly less perceptible than those of Clouseau’s Chief Inspector Dreyfus, has the last laugh—literally, when she erupts in a unexpected and ridiculous braying that has Christine questioning Isabelle’s sanity and the audience that of Noomi Rapace.    

And all this is before De Palma attempts to rouse himself from the visual stupor that has smothered the film up to this point. Never before have so many scenes in a De Palma film dribbled on so long and without apparent visual motivation or momentum, each scene seemingly padded at either end with a cushion of dead air that a crackling editor like Paul Hirsch would have massaged and trimmed right out of the picture. Never before has the camera in a De Palma film been so content to be simply a recording device, like the ones on the smartphones the director fetishizes here in his attempts to reconnect with the breezy playfulness that marked his early career. Apparently De Palma storyboarded this film as he has all his others, which seems to signify that his very aloofness and disinterest in his own movie has been, intentionally or not, designed directly into it.

Unfortunately, the design, as De Palma has envisioned it, includes dressing up the remaining plot action with all the recognizable tropes his remaining audience expects from A Brian De Palma Film in the hope of goosing our interest and, I suspect, his own. As the plot limps from humiliation to calculated murder, all the stops get pulled out— images shattered and bisected by multiple points of view; the perfunctory T&A and, of course, girl-on-girl seduction which, unlike it did in Femme Fatale, serves no function in the plot other than titillation; the sonically eclectic and di rigueur Pino Donaggio score, in which Maestro Donaggio comes, during the movie’s climactic escalation into head-spinning absurdity, as close to self-cannibalization as his director does (the brilliant score for Dressed to Kill is left especially ransacked); and of course, a split-screen sequence which by some reports puts the movie’s fans in a blissful state—it’s a desultory, thematically disconnected performance of Afternoon with a Faun juxtaposed with several possible scenarios of murder as the director begins his strategy of visual bait-and-switch, which is actually just another symptom of De Palma’s inability to make his technique resonate meaningfully with the subject at hand. (If he’s suggesting that what we’re seeing on the right side of the screen—Christine and Isabelle sliding in and out of doors and elevators in a distended prelude to death-- is also a sort of ballet, well, all I can say is, whiff!) The only thing missing is a drawn-out slow-motion sequence, which even the director must have realized would have retarded the pace of this already deathly dull movie past the point of recovery.

By the time we get to the series of endless reversals and scenes of people waking up gasping out of dreams into other dreams—or do they???—and scenes of police inspectors trudging up artfully framed stairwells, delivering flowers in the middle of the night as peace offerings to suspects they once believed were guilty but now realize are innocent—or are they???—the movie has disintegrated into a full-fledged disaster, the smoking ruins of which can’t be laid at the feet of anyone but De Palma. Rachel McAdams vamps it up with a modicum of pleasure, but she often looks confused and uncomfortable—she’s perhaps too smart for what De Palma expects her to do, yet you can practically feel her hoping for her big signature De Palma moment, that it’ll all turn out okay in the end. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.)

 

Rapace, on the other hand, is saddled with the emotional end of this tedious dialectic, and De Palma, never the most sensitive of directors when it comes to coaxing subtlety from his performers, is content to let the actress twist in the wind, braying and screaming and crying with no perceptible conviction, photographing her in extreme close-up so that her face looks like one of those emotionless, would-be kinky masks that seem to have been inserted into the story, well, just because. She’s a startlingly inexpressive actress anyway (part of which may be due to having to speak English), but without a director to coax nuance from a role that’s been conceived primarily as a piece in a misshapen puzzle which will never quite fit, she has little chance to look anything but lousy.

In a recent interview on the Web site De Palma a la Mod, the director spends an inordinate amount of time clarifying Passion’s visual strategies and, more importantly, plot points with the interviewer, and while reading the piece it struck me that no movie, especially one directed by Brian De Palma, ought to have to be so dutifully explained afterward. The problem with Passion (one of the many) is that De Palma so completely gives the second half of the movie over to an incoherent, defiantly absurd dream logic which encourages the audience to process events, visual tricks and even line readings not as deliberately disorienting but instead as unintentional howlers, fundamental lapses of narrative faith the detrimental effect of which no amount of “Thank God it was only a dream” backtracking can defuse.

De Palma’s “final girl” rolls over out of the movie’s last cold-sweat nightmare, only to find out that, as the director put it to the interviewer, “her problems are hardly over.” (Where have we seen this before?) What’s sort of new is the smash cut to a title card which reads “The End,” a Kubrickian joke/shocker that inspired spontaneous laughter among the audience I saw it with, not the sort borne of tension, by the way, but instead of disbelief, and perhaps even relief that this banal, juvenile train wreck was finally over. Would it be a tragedy if this were also “the end” of a director’s marking time by slavishly imitating himself, so bound by past glories that he can no longer see past them, no longer look forward, but can only instead continue spinning emptier and emptier variations for the faithful? 

Perhaps there’s something to all the doppelgängers suffusing his filmography after all. In an apparent instance of life imitating art, Passion seems to be the first Brian De Palma movie to have been directed by a body double. And though it may have first seen light in 2012, it’s still the worst movie of the current year.

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THE SAGA OF A BURNING MAN: MANIAC COP 2

 

Maniac Cop 2 (1990; William Lustig) is mostly disposable junk—it has that signature blue steel sheen once fetishized by John Carpenter and James Cameron and a script that, to my tin ears and eyes at least, makes close to no sense. But even though it was partially shot in Los Angeles, it also makes good use of its nighttime New York City locations. It’s like a time capsule glimpse back to a city that no longer exists, at least not in precisely the same way, and it has a pleasurably scuzzy 42^nd Street vibe. How could it not with Robert Davi’s gruff detective skulking around alleyways, investigating the apparent reappearance of the titular imposing figure of menace? (Davi is so tough, he smokes in hospitals!)

Fortunately, there’s also Claudia Christian as Davi’s antagonist, a sympathetic cop psychologist who comes to believe the wild stories about a wronged, killed and resurrected cop who’s out there taking out innocents and baddies alike; Bruce Campbell reprising his role as the lead investigator from the first movie (he doesn’t last quite so long this time); Michael Lerner picking up a (small) check as the corrupt police commissioner; Clarence Williams III finding one good note and playing it into the sunset as a loony death row inmate; and Leo Rossi hamming it up as a bushy-haired serial killer who befriends Cordell, the Maniac Cop, essayed as always (there was a third one, you know) by B-movie stalwart Robert Z’Dar, he of the hulking frame and XXL lantern jaw. Z’Dar sports the worst scary makeup job of all time, but at least he-- or, more accurately, his stuntman-- gets in some top-notch asbestos suit time when he gets set on fire near the end of the picture.

(Asbestos suit stunts are among my favorites, yet another harkening back to a more "innocent" age of filmmaking where if you wanted to show a guy on fire, you couldn’t decorate him with pixels, you had to really set him on fire… and all that protective outerwear still makes a giant like Z’Dar’s Cordell look like going up in flames somehow caused him to instantly gain about 75 pounds.)

Christian-- or, more accurately, her stuntwoman— also gets a rousing action set piece about half an hour in when the Maniac Cop handcuffs her to a steering wheel and sets the car in high-speed motion down a crowded boulevard. It’s easily the highlight of the movie, especially if you don’t stop to think about who’s keeping the car hurtling forward with their foot on the gas. (Answer: no one.) After that it’s pretty much downhill (the movie, not the car—that would’ve explained things) straight toward the rote gory shoot-‘em-up, stab-‘em-up, set’-em-on-fire conclusion, which is topped, as many thought-disabled genre pictures have been since Carrie White and Michael Meyers and Jason Voorhees rose from the dead, by the usual jolt that screams "Sequel!"

Don't get me wrong: Maniac Cop 2 isn’t even close to good, but it’s the most well-paced and acted of the movies in the Cordell saga made so far, and its violence, though ridiculous and once considered on the extreme side, now seems almost period quaint. (Rumors have it that Nicholas Winding Refn may direct a prequel, and if you think he’s gonna stand for "period quaint," well…) You could chuck a dismembered limb or flame-charred skull in any direction and hit a far better movie, but as brainless, gory action-horror hybrids go you could also hit far worse (like Maniac Cop 3, for example). For all its clunky echoes of The Terminator and scores of other superior low-budget action thrillers, Maniac Cop 2 does manage to leave some grimy stains and a not entirely unpleasant aftertaste of its own. It's the B-movie equivalent of a bong shot of Ripple guzzled near a Dumpster behind a strip bar, which at times, by the adjusted standards of the grindhouse anyway, gets within shouting distance of mean, dirty, stupid fun.

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FOR CHARLIE ON HIS 16th BIRTHDAY: THOUGHTS ON A SEANCE AND OTHER CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

 

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I saw, for the very first time, Bryan Forbes’ adaptation of Mark McShane’s novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), and as it was designed to do, it chilled me to the bone. The movie descends like a shroud upon the lives of Myra (Kim Stanley), a would-be psychic who seems at the beginning of the film to be what one might describe as dotty and demanding, and her cowed husband Bill (Richard Attenborough), a milquetoast of a man who seems far too acquiescent to her insistent personality. But Myra is more than just a bit dotty, she’s borderline demented, and she has emotionally pummeled her husband into participating in a bizarre kidnapping plan— they’ll "borrow" the daughter of a wealthy businessman and then achieve fame and riches by helping police to discover her whereabouts. As the crime progresses, Séance reveals itself to be a disturbing, suspenseful movie, built not on whether the young victim will survive, but instead on just how deeply Myra will devolve into her own fantasies of parenthood, and it’s this aspect that made me begin to get a little nervous when I was watching it at home.

We’ve been told that the room in which the young girl is being held was once that of Myra and Bill’s son Arthur, who apparently died while still a young boy, and whose psychic contact with Myra is the basis of her claim to conversancy with the dead. But the real nightmare of the film is sparked when the line between Myra’s self-defensive delusions and a much more pure madness dissolves completely. It’s soon revealed that Myra, who still believes she can speak with Arthur, never actually knew the boy—he was, in fact, stillborn, the room upstairs lying for years in a perfect state of waiting for a child who would never play or sleep in it. And under the pressure of keeping the kidnapping scheme from being discovered, she’s begun to believe that the best thing for Arthur is to send the little girl to the other side—to murder her—so that her precious baby would be lonely no more, and perhaps leave her tortured mind alone in the process.
 

 

Kim Stanley touches plenty of raw nerves depicting Myra’s desperation to connect with the way she envisions the world is supposed to be, but Richard Attenborough is in his own way just as effective, pinpointing the futility of Bill’s balancing act between empathy and comfort and a desire to force his wife (and, of course, himself) to deal with their grief rationally, expressively. But as I descended deeper into the movie, I had to question the wisdom, especially around this time of year, of seeing a movie about a muted, near defeated couple who have been haunted by devastating loss into making the worst decision possible as a means of reintroducing themselves to the world. In many ways I feel like I’ve been hiding out for the past 16 years, trying in my own way, like Bill, to help myself and my wife ride the wake of an event that just can’t be rationalized or explained away with homilies or assurances that everything happens for a reason-- What reason could possibly suffice? For 16 years I’ve been trying to find a place where the grief over my own lost son, Charlie, who was stillborn on this day in 1997, can somehow be grappled with, made sense of, instead of just routinely crushing me like a bug under a boulder.

And frankly, the rather more agnostic turn my life has taken in the shadow of Charlie’s death—a direction it was already headed in, by the way—has been for me more of a comfort than the ostensibly reassuring thought that Charlie is somewhere hanging out in spiritual limbo somewhere, waiting to be reunited with the loved ones God saw fit to deprive him of at literally the last minute before he was to be born. In my mind, it is more strangely comforting to believe that what happened to Charlie was not the design of some sadistic deity who does things for his own self-absorbed reasons without the apparent need to let us poor earthbound bastards in on them. I’d rather just accept that the uterine abruption which resulted in his death occurred simply because it was within the realm of the physically possible for it to have occurred. It was not a proactive referendum on my or my wife’s abilities as parents, and we were not being punished for some presumed, speculative offense, like insufficient fealty and praise to a codependent Creator. So despite the temptation (and, oh, how we have been tempted), guilt has never been a satisfactory option-- at least not for me-- in thinking about all the ways in which things might have turned out differently during that summer 16 years ago. 

But despite all my attempts at setting things at ease rationally, there is still the grief to be understood, and it’s here that I found myself empathizing not with Myra’s actions, but instead her disorientation and panic at not knowing what to do with that grief. If her dogged insistence that on some level it should all make sense is something to which I cannot subscribe, I can at least understand her inability to deal with the power of that grief and its repercussions. At times I wish I did believe, like Myra with her Arthur, that Charlie was constantly by my side, or somehow accessible in his incorporeal state, because it might—might—make life a little easier to live when I start thinking about him a little too deeply, a little too sadly. That comfort is, after all, what memories are for. But there are no memories of a baby boy lost at birth that are not utterly, overwhelmingly sad—even those revolving around the happiness of anticipation are necessarily, unavoidably colored by the pain of what was to come.

And it is no comfort either to think of him separated from us by a mere dimension or two, our reunion to come at a time still to be determined. Yet in the immediate smothering of that grief, oh, how I wanted, just like the shattered, flailing Myra, to believe. A couple of weeks after Patty had returned from the hospital we were, of course, still reeling and trying to find a way to put our hopes and dreams back together. We had gone out to a local mall, and as I sat waiting for my wife to complete some piece of business, a little boy, probably no more than two years old, waddled up to me, looked me right in the eye, said, "Hi, Daddy," and then just as matter-of-factly waddled away.

It took every bit of energy I could muster to keep my composure in this public place and not explode in a thunderstorm of rage and tears, and for years I held on to that strange encounter as evidence of perhaps an actual contact between Charlie’s spirit and my own. I don’t believe that anymore—I can’t believe that anymore, because too many things have accrued in my relatively meager experience, Charlie’s death being but one, to make me call into question beliefs my Catholic/Christian upbringing have insisted I take for granted, on unquestioning faith. But I remembered that experience anew when I saw Séance on a Wet Afternoon and it made me realize that confronting my own experience through this movie wasn’t a thing to be feared after all. My own loss made connecting with the dark insistence on spiritual redemption that fuels Myra’s clearly unacceptable, psychotic actions a little bit easier, a little bit more artistically rewarding, the recognition of a strange bit of empathy directed toward a woman who might seem too far gone for simple understanding.

I still love my boy, and I know I will grieve for him in my own way until my own candle goes out—I can’t, as so many were quick to advise us in the earliest moments when our wounds were still so fresh, just move on. I also know that I don’t need to hang on to hopes of ghostly encounters and heavenly reunions to keep that love alive. But while I never want to wallow in past agonies I don’t want to forget the pain either—it is now and forever a part of what binds our lost child to us. I do believe Charlie knows the peace we’ll all know someday, and that, to me, is a thought which is happy enough. It’s the only one, in fact, that could possibly compete, after being separated from him for 16 years now, with actually knowing that 16-year-old, being his dad in this world, experiencing the love I’ve always felt for him reflected back on me like sunlight. That is a thought I’ll allow myself to dream on occasionally, and I will not feel ashamed for my tears.

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