A dark comic fantasy about a suicide victim awakening to life in a seemingly idyllic city that may actually be nothing more than an alluring dystopia, Norwegian director Jens Liens’ The Bothersome Man is visionary, provocative and occasionally hilarious.
Lonely and despondent, Andreas (Trond Fausa Aurvaag) leaps in front of a speeding train to end it all, but it’s only the beginning for his sensitive, tortured soul. He enters some sort of new realm in a beautiful if banal city where people spend far more time thinking about flawless interior design than messy emotions. Andreas reports to a new job that pays well and demands little. It leaves him plenty of time for eating bland food at dinner parties and having all the perfunctory sex he wants with his gorgeous new girlfriend (Petronella Barker) and the hot blond mistress (Birgitte Larsen) nobody cares he’s seeing. But Andreas is a man of passion and cool perfection is as much a burden to him as the cruel world that led to his blood on the tracks.
Making matters more complicated is that the doomed man finds a small fissure in the wall of a basement that may be a portal that can transport him back to a world of bright colors, pungent odors and complicated feelings. But no matter where it leads Andreas, it will likely lead to no good, since his utter humanness makes it hard for him to be satisfied with what he’s got, no matter what that happens to be.•
Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard look longingly at one another. Noel Coward adapted the screenplay from his one-act 1936 stage drama, "Still Life."
One of film’s most beautiful and bittersweet romances, Brief Encounter is an adaptation of a Noel Coward stage play about the unconsummated affair between a married doctor and a bored housewife, both of whom feel an indescribable lack in their lives. A taut film by David Lean with none of the director’s late-career trademark sweep, this drama proves you don’t have to go very far to travel great distances.
Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), a suburban British housewife with a dependable husband and two handsome children, has a chance meeting with married doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) in a railroad tea shop. After another chance meeting, they begin to realize that they fill an emotional void in each other’s life, one that they had only suspected existed before they met. The couple spends several Thursdays together, enjoying lunch, seeing movies and running through the shadowy rail station to catch their trains so that their spouses won’t suspect their dalliance. But the warm glow of their “affair” soon turns dark. Down deep they realize that it’s not only their trains–but their lives–that are heading in opposite directions.
Lean is better known for his epics about great men trying to conquer the world, most notably Lawrence of Arabia. But if Brief Encounter doesn’t have T.E. Lawrence raging against every grain of sand in the desert, it has has a pair of mere mortals who rage just the same and their failure to change their own little worlds feels no less shattering. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
To learn about the current Broadway stage production of Brief Encounter,read the review by my former colleague, the excellent New York Post theater critic Elisabeth Vincentelli.
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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films:Police Beat. (2004)
Sterling Hayden's final role was in the 1982 Civil War TV miniseries, "The Blue and the Gray."
Stanley Kubrick’s first great film, The Killing is a 1956 horse-track heist caper that the director co-wrote with pulp legend Jim Thompson. While it has all the earmarks of a hard-boiled tale of grifters, there is also a devious sense of humor that would be one of the common threads in the filmmaker’s amazingly rangy, genre-jumping career.
Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) has just done five long years in prison for petty theft and the only lesson he has seemingly learned is to steal larger quantities of cash. He organizes a group of track employees, cops and others, all of whom have personal motivations for a bold theft that could net them hundreds of thousands of dollars each. But the elaborate plan has to go off without a hitch or it’ll be jail all around, And the crew may also have to deal with a few gun-toting opportunists who’ve been tipped off about the job.
One of the best performances is turned in by Timothy Carey, a great character actor and one of the oddest people in Hollywood history. Carey plays Nikki Arcane, a whacked-out, menacing sharpshooter recruited by Hayden to off a horse in the middle of a race. Nikki is a talented, off-kilter professional who truly relishes the sinister side of his work–which was also an appropriate description of Kubrick. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
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Strange, Small & Forgotten Films: Police Beat. (2004)
The French anti-fashion designer Isabel Marant is all the rage this year, and while I’m in no position to judge her work, I do know a really cheeky quote machine when I hear one. I came across a recent article about her on the Huffington Post, which reprinted her comment about the legendary late French film star and singer Serge Gainsbourg, who was also a crazy drunk.
Marant, whose mother was a model and father a businessman, has combined both her parents’ passions into a large and still-blooming career. She also says lots of contradictory, hypocritical and highly amusing things. (When I was collecting info about her, I also came across this announcement regarding her New York store that opened earlier this year; it was written by Leslie Price, a very bright former colleague who always seemed to know a million things about a million things.) Here’s an excerpt from an entertaining article about Marant in Britishfashion magazine Love:
“‘I like the way that in 1985 you decided, inspired by a teenage crush on Malcolm McLaren, to start making clothes out of dishcloths, and I like the way that you say ‘but the dishcloths are really nice in France’ as if that makes a difference…I like that way you say, ‘Big breasts and lips. No! I hate those girls. I hate famous women. My ideal woman is Serge Gainsbourg. Not that he was a woman.'”
"Police Beat" is Pape Sidy Niang's only film credit.
One of the stranger and more beautiful films of the past decade, director Robinson Devor’s Police Beat is a tale of a West African immigrant trying to focus on his job as a Seattle bicycle cop while pining for his girlfriend who is away on a camping trip with a male friend. The misdemeanors and felonies he attends to are odd and disquieting, but perhaps no more than his attempts to understand the nature of love in his new country.
If everything seems surreal to two-wheeled rookie cop “Z” (Pape Sidy Niang), you can hardly blame him. Looking at humanity at its lowest is enough to make anyone think the world’s gone mad–and that’s what Z looks at for a living as he pedals across greater Seattle responding to calls. From bird murderers to struggling pimps to sexual adventurers who take the party too far, Z is in almost constant contact with a motley collection of crazed characters. He’s also having a hard time staying connected with his American girlfriend Rachel (Anna Oxygen), who he believes may be rekindling an old romance in a remote location.
Devor and co-writer Charles Mudede penned a brisk script, with understated narration by their leading man, who tries to talk himself into what may be a unrequited understanding with his girlfriend. But in between the battles in his own heart, Z must deal with the befuddling public. When he responds to a call from a woman who says that she’s been struck on the head by an unknown assailant outside her home, he quickly realizes that it was a branch from a tree in her yard that bloodied her. “Your tree is dead,” Z explains, “and if it’s not chopped down it will continue to harm and disturb the living.” But tree or no tree, it’s clear the living will have more moments in which they’re harmed and disturbed, Z included. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
"You don’t gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens." (Image by Colin Swan.)
In case you missed David Itzkoff’s September 14 New York TimesQ&A with Woody Allen in conjunction with the release of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, here’s an excerpt of the 74-year-old director’s unsurprisingly bleak view of his golden years:
“Q. How do you feel about the aging process?
A. Well, I’m against it. [laughs] I think it has nothing to recommend it. You don’t gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you’d trade all of that for being 35 again. I’ve experienced that thing where you wake up in the middle of the night and you start to think about your own mortality and envision it, and it gives you a little shiver. That’s what happens to Anthony Hopkins at the beginning of the movie, and from then on in, he did not want to hear from his more realistic wife, ‘Oh, you can’t keep doing that — you’re not young anymore.’ Yes, she’s right, but nobody wants to hear that.
Q. Has getting older changed your work in any way? Do you see a certain wistfulness emerging in your later films?
A. No, it’s too hit or miss. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything that I do. It’s whatever seems right at the time. I’ve never once in my life seen any film of mine after I put it out. Ever. I haven’t seen Take the Money and Run since 1968. I haven’t seenAnnie Hall or Manhattan or any film I’ve made afterward. If I’m on the treadmill and I’m scooting through the channels, and I come across one of them, I go right past it instantly, because I feel it could only depress me. I would only feel, ‘Oh God, this is so awful, if I could only do that again.'”
The puppets and puppeteers located at Italy’s insane nexus of tawdry television and political power get the wry treatment they deserve in Erik Gardini’s suitably strange 2009 documentary, Videocracy. While most filmmakers would have kept the focus on Italian President and TV magnate Silvio Berlusconi–who’s part Rupert Murdoch, part Joe Francis, but worse than both–Gardini spends plenty of time leering at the overlords and underdogs who strive for money and fame in the wet dream that is the nation’s idiot box.
Considering that Italian TV is mostly filled with regular people who will do anything for a shot at fame, it’s not surprising that Gardini’s “stars” are a motley crew. One is a mechanic who aspires to be a cross between Jean Claude Van Damme and Ricky Martin. Another is powerful talent scout Lele Mora, an idolmaker and Mussolini fan who can create a star overnight owing to his close friendship with the President. Mora’s erstwhile protege, Fabrizio Corona, is a sour-faced paparazzo who takes embarrassing photos of celebs. After a stint in prison for dubious business practices, Corona emerges as a star himself, replete with a T-shirt line and a full datebook of personal appearances. Amusingly enough, none of the women who jiggle in underwear and less for ratings are profiled. That’s fitting since the first rule for female models on Italian television is that they’re not allowed to talk.
Berlusconi, who owns ninety percent of the country’s TV holdings, has used the medium to gain political power, building his appeal by broadcasting self-aggrandizing propaganda and by giving the masses all the titillation they desire. But he’s obviously not the film’s only raging ego. Gardini uses simple devices–color schemes, odd camera angles, slo-mo–to lend the film an eerie impressionistic feel, one that applies a sickening gloss to these desperate faces. As the sleazeball Corona says: “Having a super powerful personality pays off in this country ruled by television.”•
Auspicious and pretentious, Antonio Campos’ 2008 drama Afterschoolis about as impressively unsettling a debut as any filmmaker could hope to make. The writer-director was only 24 when he turned out this assured feature about the seamy underbelly of a prep school in the age of YouTube.
Blank-faced and nearly catatonic, Rob (Ezra Miller) is an unpopular underclassmen at a New York boarding school. He spends as much time as possible in the unhealthy glow of his computer, devouring bite-size samples of stupid pet tricks and degrading porn. Forced to choose an extracurricular activity, Rob opts for the video club and has camera in hand when twin sisters who are seniors at the school die after overdosing on cocaine. He and his classmates seem almost as interested in preserving the moment for posterity with cameras as they do in getting help. The troubled student is subsequently assigned to make a tribute video for the deceased students, which only serves to sink him further into a moral morass.
Afterschool isn’t wholly original; Gus Van Sant’s Elephant is only the most recent influence. But Campos, perhaps because of his young age as well as his abundant talent, is able to use what he’s learned from other directors to tap into the disquieting side of growing up in this voyeuristic age like no other filmmaker thus far has. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
Marc Hayashi, far left in baseball cap, later played a doctor on one 1984 episode of Falcon Crest. (Photo by Nancy Wong.)
Wayne Wang’s black-and-white indie comedy is as much a shaggy dog story about the frustrating quest for authentic ethnic identity as it is a mystery that follows two Chinese-American cabbies searching for a man who has mysteriously absconded with their $4000. The title is a play on the name of the Charlie Chan character and the type of stereotypes that are missing from this charming if choppy film.
Jo (Wood Moy) and Steve (Marc Hayashi) are more curious than furious when an elderly man named Chan disappears with their hard-earned cash. They resolve to find him and begin pounding the San Francisco pavement, politely asking questions and following leads. But the pair can’t get anywhere because everyone they talk to has a different take on who the mystery man is: He may be a simpleton who can’t get out of his own way or a genius who invented the Chinese word-processing system. Or maybe he’s something else entirely. As they forge ahead with diminishing hope of seeing their money returned, Chinatown is gradually revealed in its many and surprising complexities.
In one scene, fast-talking Steve jokingly refers to himself as being like both Richard Pryor and Charlie Chan’s Number One Son. He’s come to realize that the missing man isn’t the only one who’s too complicated to easily define. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
From working as an abstract expressionist painter to directing episodes of Charlie’s Angels,Allen Baronhas done pretty much everything you can do in the world of visual arts. But what he did best of all was to write, direct and star in the classic 1961 noir, Blast of Silence. The drama smartly uses bold yet low-budget symbolism as it follows a veteran mob assassin who may be doomed by a crisis of conscience.
An orphan and a loner, Cleveland hitman “Baby Boy” Frank Bono (Baron) has survived into middle age by making sure other people didn’t get the same opportunity. He’s been paid to come to New York to use a mid-level mobster for target practice, just the latest body he’ll add to his count. Against the backdrop of marvelous street scenes in Harlem and Greenwich Village, Bono pursues his quarry with steely determination until a chance encounter with a childhood friend makes “Baby Boy” rethink his grown-up existence–and perhaps imperils his life.
The movie has a nearly omnipresent hard-boiled narration (performed by Lionel Stander and penned by blacklisted writer Waldo Salt) that judges, evaluates and almost mocks Bono each crooked step of the way. But the scenes that are most memorable are the ones that occur in between the narration. Especially golden are the passages in which Bono squares off with a corpulent gun dealer (Larry Tucker), who lives in a dump with cages of pet rats. They’re a pair of predators looking to turn each other into prey. When the men tussle and overturned cages allow the rats to scurry free, it’s hard to tell the actual vermin from the human kind. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
Yes, she is the granddaughter of director Elia Kazan.
A slack yet lovely film, Bradley Rust Gray’s minimalist movie follows a college student named Ivy (Zoe Kazan) as she arrives at her mother’s Brooklyn home for spring break. The work is slyly titled, referring to the epileptic Ivy’s ever-present threat of convulsions, but it’s also an ironic label for a young woman so given to a pensive stillness.
Very little action occurs in The Exploding Girl: Ivy visits her doctor, teaches a dance class for grade schoolers and half-heartedly goes to parties. Her boyfriend from college can’t join her at the last minute, and their halting phone conversations and missed connections don’t bode well for the relationship. Ivy’s timid childhood friend Al (Mark Rendall) is without a place to stay over the break, so he sleeps on her couch, and the two slowly fumble closer together.
Gray’s muted romantic drama has more in common with the alienated hush of a lot of contemporary Asian cinema than it does with tribal loquaciousness of Mumblecore. Kazan has received a good deal of credit for the film’s appeal, and rightly so: She fills nearly every frame with a contemplative center, makes every pause evocative. But director Gray’s contributions shouldn’t be undervalued. When a movie this slight, this tenuous ends up cohering, it isn’t by accident or providence. (Available via Netflix and other outlets.)
The 1970 Western El Topo is probably Alejandro Jodorowsky’s best-known film, the familiar genre lending it an accessibility despite its whacked-out story and psychedelic imagery. But that movie’s follow-up, Holy Mountain, even more twisted and surreal, is easily the Chilean director’s best work. A savage and wantonly sacrilegious indictment of organized religion (among other things), Jodorowsky provides an almost nonstop series of insane visuals, contorting and distorting nearly every iconic religious image with his cracked fun-house mirror.
In a disgusting parallel to the Christ story, a thin, bearded figure known as the Thief (Horácio Salinas) is reincarnated after lying covered in flies and his own urine. Almost immediately a band of profiteers gets him soused, pours plaster on him and makes replicas of his form to sell to the masses. The Thief falls under the sway of the Alchemist (Jodorowsky), who impresses the reborn man by converting his feces into gold. The Alchemist then enlists the Thief in some sort of fuzzy plan to attain power and immortality. What happens as the film unfolds is so unique, so odd and so otherworldly it’s hard to describe. But there are naked blond twins who get their heads shaved bald, a frog-centric reenactment of Spain conquering Mexico and the so-called savior eating a replica of his own head that’s made of bread. And that doesn’t even begin to explain the parade of oddness. That it doesn’t all make sense hardly matters.
Jodorowsky uses his every visual gift he possesses to not only skewer religion but also consumerism, government and, ultimately, the medium of film itself. Jodorowsky wanted to blow up all false, misleading images, cinematic ones as much as religious ones, and encourage people to focus on reality instead of fantasy. But when he’s just spent two hours blowing minds and popping eyes, such lectures seem like false prophecy.•
Matthew Ogens’ creepy, fascinating documentary, Confessions of a Superhero, works incredibly well as an extreme psychological portrait of four misfits rattling around on the lonely, desperate edges of the Hollywood margins. The quartet is essentially a flock of panhandlers who dress as superheroes and pose for photos with tourists in exchange for small donations. It’s a grim, disturbing picture of our obsession with celebrity–difficult to watch but just as tough to look away.
The “stars” of the movie are gangly ex-meth addict Christopher Dennis, who dons a sweat-stained Superman costume and claims to be the hushed-up illegitimate son of the late actress Sandy Dennis; curvy former Tennessee prom queen Jennifer Wenger, who forces her assets into a Wonder Woman costume when she’s not busy making awful life decisions; rage-filled Batman impersonator Maxwell Allen, who has a passing resemblance to George Clooney and puts the “Dark” back into the Dark Knight; and scrawny, depressed Joe McQueen, who transforms himself into the Incredible Hulk with the aid of green, plastic muscles.
They all dream of being celebrities making 20 mil a picture, and in each case they have a stunning level of self-deception. But their delusions, which sustain them, are discomfiting because they remind us of how we are all capable of kidding ourselves, even if on a much smaller scale. Also really captivating are the parallels between these troubled souls and the characters they impersonate. Sad as he is, Dennis really has a noble Clark Kent streak that makes him the unofficial mayor of this glitzy skid row. McQueen, who was homeless for years, dreams of hulking up and avenging that bully known as life. It’s not always easy to tell if these sad-sacks gravitated to a particular guise because they related to the character’s personality traits or if the roles they play gradually begin to shape their behavior. In some cases, the clothes seem to make the man and the Wonder Woman.•
Faux rock had four heroes and they were known collectively as the Monkees. A pre-fab Fab Four knockoff, the Monkees were formed as a commercial entity, via cattle call, and Mickey Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork and Davy Jones weren’t exactly selected for their musical talent. The group’s peppy TV show made them humongous teen idols and money movers made sure the best songwriters and studio musicians of the day kept them atop the charts. Then the show got cancelled and the hits didn’t keep on coming. The boys had been tired for some time of being marketing tools and wanted to create their own music and identity, something that spoke to the turbulent times. They hoped to prove they weren’t just children’s entertainers selling Coca-Cola but also the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.
Enter director Bob Rafelson and screenwriter Jack Nicholson. Rafelson had cut his teeth directing the Monkees silly show and Nicholson was then still more of a writer than an actor. Both were headed for gigantic careers, but at this point their assignment was to create a surreal, plotless movie full of trippy, musical scenes that would explode and recreate the Monkees, with the lads gleefully making the kind of contributions that heretofore had not been allowed. Head pretty much accomplishes the task at hand, even if the surrealism isn’t of the Buñuel or Jodorowsky calibre.
There is, however, Frank Zappa and a talking cow, fearsome heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston beating the snot out of the elfin Englishman Jones and soda machines (selling Coca-Cola, of course) sitting incongruously in the middle of the desert. The band didn’t last much longer than the Head premiere party, so this prelude to their new identity was actually the main act. Imperfect as it is, the film remains a fascinating oddity, a rare moment when the center of pop culture gleefully ran headlong into the cutting edge.•
Jessica Harper's career-best role in Dario Argento's "Suspiria" was released the year after "Inserts."
Most people watch Sunset Blvd., Billy Wilder’s brilliant tale of madness and degradation in Hollywood, and think it sufficiently dark. Writer-director John Byrum apparently watched that 1950 classic and thought that it was far too sunny. Byrum’s Inserts, a five-person period piece about the seamy side of Hollywood during the advent of Talkies, while not close to being on par with Wilder’s work, all but completely turns out the lights on that town.
The Wonder Boy (Richard Dreyfuss) was the genius director of the Silent Era, but by the 1930s he’s an alcoholic, agoraphobic, impotent wreck. He makes stag films in his decrepit mansion for Big Mac (Bob Hoskins), a creepy gangster and fledgling fast-food hamburger kingpin. A young actor named Clark Gable wants the erstwhile golden boy to direct him in a picture, but the auteur’s been down too long to rise to the occasion. When he’s not urinating in the swimming pool or dodging bill collectors, the Wonder Boy coaxes erotic performances from his strung-out girlfriend Harlene (Veronica Cartwright) and her leading man, a vile meathead known as Rex, the Wonder Dog (Stephen Davies). When Harlene ODs, Mac and Rex exit to dump the body, leaving the filmmaker alone with the gangster’s girlfriend, Cathy Cake (Jessica Harper).
The aspiring actress Cake talks the director into using her to film inserts, or complementary shots, that can pad the movie, which was a few scenes shy of completion when the leading lady died. While Cake is the one who’s literally naked during the shooting, it’s the Wonder Boy who really gets undressed as the duo insult, coax and seduce one another. Despite its heavy themes, the film is essentially a dark comedy that even slyly offers a glimmer of hope. Byrum wasn’t in complete command at every moment of what he wanted to say and not all of his dialogue works, but the final line is one of the funniest finishes a film could hope for. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
Futuristic films are almost always more about the era in which they’re made than the one in which they’re set, and Michael Anderson’s 1976 sci-fi adventure Logan’s Run is no exception. A Me Decade parable about the obsession with youth culture and the pleasure principle to the exclusion of all else, the movie sets itself up as a vehicle for scathing satire but detours into more of a joyride.
Life in the 23rd century doesn’t seem so bad at first blush. Sure, the world outside the domed cities where everyone lives is apparently despoiled and uninhabitable, but it’s pretty great inside the bubble. Everyone is young and beautiful and sexual delight is there for the taking at the Arcade, which is equal parts shopping mall, disco and Plato’s Retreat. There is one catch, however: When people reach the age of 30, they must endure a fiery process in which they will either die or be reborn. A few folks can distract themselves from the orgies long enough to realize that no one is actually ever reincarnated. Logan (Michael York), a so-called Sandman, hunts down those who run when they realize they’re headed for certain doom. But Logan eventually becomes a runner himself with the aid of rebellious Jessica (Jenny Agutter). Together they try to escape the dome and find sanctuary amid the ruins.
Logan’s Run is a rich film, though its special effects, acting and plotting all career from great to ghastly depending on the scene. The movie is really more an action film than proper satire, and despite its themes, it has a greater concern for its appearance than any deep thinking. In that sense, it truly is emblematic of the ’70s. •
The bathroom habits of well-to-do people was a recurring theme in Luis Buñuel's work.
Utter financial freedom can sometimes be a dangerous thing for an artist, especially one as aggressively experimental as Luis Buñuel, but the capital the director had at his disposal after the commercial triumph of 1972’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie wasn’t wasted on the admittedly uneven but often brilliant The Phantom of Liberty. The film is a series of glancingly connected, mind-fucking, taboo-busting vignettes that look at humanity and see only meanness, coarseness and hypocrisy.
Among the movie’s best sequences are a scene in which a group of refined people arrive at a well-appointed home, ostensibly for a dinner party, but are seated on toilet bowls that have been arranged around a dining room table. They engage in polite conversation as they relieve themselves. The partiers subsequently repair individually to a bathroom-sized room to eat meals, taking their nourishment in private, so as not to disgust each other with the repulsive smell of food. Another well-executed passage has parents frantic about the shocking disappearance of their young daughter, who happens to be standing right in front of them the whole time.
Not each of the pieces works as well as these two segments, but Buñuel’s disgust with our attempts to cover up our primal baseness with propriety hovers over the entire film. He knew that our ability to pretend we’re polite creatures often allows us to commit the most impolite acts. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
A success in Japan, "The Face of Another" was a critical and commercial flop in the U.S.
The Face of Another isn’t director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s greatest film–that’s Woman in the Dunes–but it may have more great things stuffed into it than any of his other works. Existential, grotesque and stunningly bizarre, the movie uses some of the best set design in the history of cinema to tell its story about a horribly scarred Japanese man who gets a new face–and a raft of new identity issues.
Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai) was horribly burned about his face in a work-related fire and hides his angry visage behind a mummy’s roll of bandages. His appearance makes society and even his own wife recoil, and he wishes he could become invisible. But his unorthodox psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira) has an idea: He will meticulously design a mask for Okuyama and the injured man will have a fresh beginning. The mask is ultimately incredibly lifelike and the burned man is able to pass in society, but Okuyama is bothered by looking like a third person that isn’t his old self or even the scarred one. And the shrink is something of a Doctor Frankenstein, caring more for his creation than his patient’s well-being.
The director is asking a host of questions about identity and whether all knowledge–even self-knowledge–is more relational than inherent. Some of the probing is trite, but there are numerous thorny questions to digest long after the film is over, especially in a world where people routinely alter their appearance with plastic surgery and face transplants actually exist. But what makes the movie incredible is the way Teshigahara utilizes design to communicate. For instance, the doctor’s office (which is the work of architect Arata Isozaki) is a mixture of baroque and modernist touches that speaks directly to the outré world Okuyama has walked into. And the psychiatrist who works in that office is less a doctor than an artist obsessed with the way the mind works–much like Teshigahara himself. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
Roger Greenberg is probably the least likable character that Ben Stiller has played since 1998's "Your Friends & Neighbors."
Mumblecore for the middle-aged set, Noah Baumbach’s conversation-driven, relentlessly unsentimental romantic drama, Greenberg, completes a trilogy of films by the director (along with The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding) that is fueled by mid-life disaffection. The earlier movies feature bitterly disappointed adults flailing every which way, but none of them possess the anomie displayed by the character of 40-year-old New York carpenter Roger Greenberg.
Greenberg (Ben Stiller) exits a mental hospital in which he was recovering from a nervous breakdown and enters his brother’s home in Southern California, where he is to do house-sitting duty for his well-to-do, vacationing sibling. He may be in sunny Los Angeles, but Greenberg’s off the grid emotionally. And returning to the site of his youth, where he damaged numerous relationships and ruined his rock band’s one chance for success fifteen years earlier, seems to bring out the worst in him. And his almost constant drinking doesn’t help.
Despite Greenberg’s misery, he begins a fumbling relationship with his brother’s young assistant Florence (Greta Gerwig), a rudderless, compliant woman who talks about her moonlight singing gigs in hushed tones. She sees possibilities in Greenberg, but he isn’t the kind of stray who wants to be rescued, and he answers her kindness with cruelty.
It’s difficult to fathom at first why Florence puts up with this treatment, but as the accusations and denials between the couple escalate, you realize that she’s just as wounded as he is, even if her hurt is self-directed. Ultimately, they and all their friends have reasons, if not answers, for their questionable behavior. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
This role was Elliott Gould's final hurrah in the '70s.
In a decade that seemed to have an endless supply of great thrillers, Daryl Duke’s excellent 1978 tale of brutal gamesmanship, The Silent Partner, is one of the era’s most unfairly forgotten genre pictures. Duke is probably best known for directing the soapy Thorn Birds TV miniseries, but he turned out a pair of first-rate pictures during the ’70s: Payday, his drama about a dissolute country singer, and this tense thriller, which is blessed with a taut screenplay by a young Curtis Hanson, who would, of course, go on to co-write and direct L.A. Confidential.
Meek Toronto bank teller Miles Cullen (Elliott Gould) loves tropical fish and chess, but the world doesn’t love (or respect) him. The co-worker he adores (Susannah York) thinks he’s a wet rag and is sleeping with their married boss. But the mild-mannered teller has an epiphany when he accidentally discovers that a mall Santa Claus (Christopher Plummer) is going to rob his branch. Knowing what’s heading his way, Cullen hatches a plan to divert most of the funds to his waiting briefcase, hand over a small sum to the robber and use the loot to start his life all over again somewhere else. The scheme goes off without a hitch, save one–the thief is a sadistic maniac who figures out what’s happened and will stop at nothing to get the money back from the mousey banker. But Cullen is the mouse that roared, and he engages in a high-stakes game of wits with his murderous rival.
This movie is bursting with talent, featuring everything from Gould in the sweet spot of his career to a small supporting turn from John Candy to a score composed by jazz great Oscar Peterson. But perhaps most memorable of all is Plummer. Incredibly wicked and wearing heavy eye make-up, he looks like a mannequin come to life with homicidal rage. Even the tropical fish should be very afraid.
Greaves was a screen and stage actor when he moved to Canada to study filmmaking.
William Greaves’ art film, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, was made in 1968 when patience with the Vietnam War was growing thin and the credibility gap of military and political leaders was ever widening. The director wanted to meditate on the revolt against authority that was in the air, so he wrote a purposely lousy, pseudo-Albee scene about a bickering husband and wife, hired a few pairs of unwitting actors to perform the parts in Central Park and turned on his camera. Oh, and he also had a second camera crew document the first and a third document the first and second. Then he waited for combustion.
Frustratingly, the actors were too professional to turn on their director, even when he had one pair sing the ridiculous lines to each another. But luckily the crew, which wasn’t in on the setup, was not quite as polite. They stealthily met offset and filmed their bitch session, in which they labeled Greaves a bad director, writer and actor, as they inched ever closer to mutiny. A couple of alert crew members did question whether Greaves was purposely playing the fool. They were, of course, on to something.
Toward the end of the film (a mix of narrative and documentary, often shown side by side in split-screen), the crew comes across a real-life homeless artist who has taken to sleeping in the park. He sums up the heart of the project without knowing anything about it. “It’s a movie,” the man says, “so who’s moving whom?” Like any other auteur (or leader), Greaves is ultimately doing the moving, but, unlike most, he’s open to examining the rectitude of that arrangement. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)
A nattily attired Bruce Lee does a screen test in 1964 for The Green Hornet. The physical part of the audition begins about three-and-a-half minutes into the footage. Thanks to Marginal Revolution for pointing me toward the video.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing for Robert De Niro in Brian De Palma's "Hi, Mom!"
Travis Bickle wasn’t the first volatile Vietnam veteran that Robert De Niro portrayed. Years before the blistering violence of Taxi Driver, the great actor twice played Jon Rubin, a Peeping Tom/former soldier trying to make his way in a New York City that had gone to seed. De Niro handled the role in a pair of dark comedies for Brian De Palma: 1968’s Greetings, which was largely forgettable, and 1970’s Hi, Mom!, a raucous if scattershot machine gun of a satire that fired at everything from urban decay to the sexual revolution to guerilla theater to Black Power to white liberals.
Rubin, a demolitions expert in Vietnam, is discharged into a crappy, crime-ridden New York during the start of the city’s slide into economic malaise. After renting a rat trap for forty bucks a month from a disgusting landlord (Charles Durning), the peeper tries to parlay his voyeuristic tendencies into a career as an erotic filmmaker. Rubin talks a blowhard porn producer (Allen Garfield) into giving him two grand so that he can record the sexual exploits of his neighbors using a telescopic lens. When the residents across the way turn out to be bores, the auteur tries to spice things up by seducing his comely neighbor Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt). But a camera malfunction messes up the big scene, and the veteran decides to turn his attention to an extreme guerrilla theater company that hopes to expose the Caucasian silent majority to Black Power. The film really takes off at this point, not only mocking the excesses of the theater troupe but sort of sympathizing with them.
“You know, tragedy is a funny thing,” Rubin says at one point, and sometimes it is in this intentionally crude movie that matched the madness of its time and place with a craziness all its own.•
Robert Morley gives one of his trademark brilliant supporting turns opposite Humphrey Bogart.
Not just content to be a huge flop at the box office, John Huston’s quasi-farce Beat the Devil was the kind of huge flop that annoyed people. That’s because the screenplay, which Huston co-wrote with Truman Capote, played with the conventions of genre film at a time when you didn’t do that sort of thing, especially with a huge, bankable star like Humphrey Bogart. The way the film plays with form might seem subtle today, but it was jarring in 1953.
Billy Dannreuther (Bogart) is a grifter with a heart of gold, hoping to strike it rich with a dubious land deal in Africa. He’s briefly stranded in Italy with his eccentric wife (Gina Lollobrigida) and a quartet of cutthroat rogues. Before he and his crew can find a sober ship captain to take them on their voyage, Billy becomes acquainted with a charming British couple (Jennifer Jones and Edward Underdown), who may or may not be landed gentry. The seemingly innocent pair complicate Dannreuther’s life in ways he can’t anticipate.
Huston and company aren’t shy about letting you know that the plot–something about acquiring acreage rich with uranium–isn’t exactly their greatest concern. The director would rather focus on sharp dialogue and comic turns from his amazing supporting cast (Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Ivor Bernard, Marco Tulli), who are hilariously pathetic even at their most menacing. Beat the Devil isn’t a great film, but it’s an interesting one to see because it’s the prototype of the kind of movie that the Coen brothers would ultimately perfect. (Available through Netflix and other outlets.)
It was in 1968, though it seems a million lifetimes ago that Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate wed in London. He dressed in mod fashion and she in a wedding dress miniskirt. Michael Caine, Candice Bergen and Joan Collins were guests. It was the year before Tate was murdered in Los Angeles by the Manson family and about a decade before Polanski’s fall from grace. British Pathé was on the scene to make a newsreel about the nuptials. View it here.
