Shame and eternal shame, nothing but shame!

THE RED SHOES

PEEPING TOM

That's Shakespeare, ya philistines!

So while I was writing my post on Phantasm last night (another wild Friday night for Owen!), it dawned on me that, of the films I'd watched recently, the one I was writing about was a goofy, low-budget, late-'70s supernatural horror movie, rather than, respectively, one of the most beautiful and moving films I've ever seen and a groundbreaking, chilling, thematically complex and brilliant thriller. A profound sense of cinephilic shame came over me, and I knew I must do something to make amends. So here goes.

The Red Shoes (trailer) is a masterpiece in every conceivable way. It tells the story of Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), a beautiful, young ballerina who, as she herself says, lives to dance. She's taken on by Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), the imperious head of an esteemed ballet company, who sees her potential to become one of the great dancers in the history of ballet, given the right training and motivation. But she soon meets Julian Craster (Marius Goring), the company's young and ambitious composer, and they fall in love; this enrages Lermontov, who fears that love will distract Page and hold her back creatively. Buffeted by ultimatums from Lermontov and Craster, Page finds herself in a love triangle, forced to choose between her life and her art.

First off, the film is breath-taking visually, Technicolor at its finest and most spectacular. The colors are luminous and crisp, and Shearer's bright red hair looks like it was made to be filmed with that particular process. The whole film is a visual wonder to behold, but this element becomes truly transcendent during the main ballet sequence, the performance of the ballet The Red Shoes, based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale. Much like in Black Swan, the performance breaks the bonds of mere reality, as Page glides, leaps, and (literally) flies through a boundless environment of fantasy and pure emotion. Not to sound hyperbolic, but to me the ballet sequence is one of the greatest sequences committed to film, period.

Of course, the visuals aren't the only respect in which The Red Shoes is a triumph. The performances are uniformly excellent (assuming you don't have a problem with often melodramatic acting in a film about ballet), the drama is dynamic and stirring throughout, and its themes—above all the tragic strain of mutually exclusive but irresistable demands in one's life, in this case artistic creativity and romantic fulfilment—are profound and universal. I simply cannot recommend The Red Shoes enough. If you haven't seen it, see it immediately; if you have seen it, see it again.

Once I'd decompressed a bit from my viewing of The Red Shoes, I saw that the night was still young and thought I'd see what else Netflix Watch Instantly had to offer. I decided on Peeping Tom (trailer), having heard about it somewhere recently, but not realizing until it started that it's actually by the same director as The Red Shoes, Michael Powell. Turns out Powell and his frequent collaborator, Emeric Pressburger, were more or less the twin titans of 1940s British cinema, turning in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, A Matter of Life and Death, and Black Narcissus, in addition to The Red Shoes. However, Powell was working solo by the time he made Peeping Tom, a film starkly different from The Red Shoes in virtually every respect but their quality and their theme of irresistable, tragic compulsion.

Mark (Carl Boehm) is a shy young film technician who always carries a hand-held camera and has an extensive filmmaking lab, screening apparatus, and collection of reels in his home. He's also a serial killer. His M.O. is murdering women with a blade attached to his camera's tripod leg, filming them while he does so and watching the films later. He becomes attached to Helen (Anna Massey), the young lady who lodges in Mark's house with her blind mother (Maxine Audley), but their budding relationship doesn't lessen his desperate need for voyeuristic violence, nor does the growing danger posed by the police investigation into his murders. (In fact, Mark displays the now-cliché behavior of the killer taking greater and greater risks out of apparent desire to be caught.)

While The Red Shoes revels in uplifting beauty and passion, Peeping Tom is sordid, unpleasant, and disturbing, especially for its time. (It apparently showed the first bare breast in mainstream British cinema.) Speaking of its time, it was released the same year, 1960, as another film by a British director about a psychologically disturbed but sympathetic serial killer of women, Psycho. While Psycho is more suspenseful and a greater overall filmmaking achievement than Peeping Tom is, the latter film is considerably more daring in how it depicts its killer. In Psycho, we think Norman is merely a dutiful son protecting his murderous mother until the climactic reveal, and the focus is usually on characters other than him (Marion, Sam, Lila, Arbogast). In Peeping Tom, however, we know from the beginning that Mark is the murderer, and he's in all but one or two scenes; the audience spends virtually the entire film following someone they know to be a serial killer.

Thematically, Peeping Tom obviously has a lot to say, beginning with Mark's symbolically loaded, if cumbersome, murder weapon. (No simple kitchen knife for Mark!) In addition to filming his victims, Mark mounts a mirror on his camera so that they see their own reflections as he kills them. So, in the darkened, quiet seclusion of his home theater (very much like a public theater), he watches these women watching themselves being murdered. And, of course, we both watch him watching them (adding another layer to the onion) and join him in watching them ourselves as though we're sitting there with him (making the audience an accomplice in his voyeurism, if not his violence directly). The role of Mark's camera is a pretty straightforward embodiment of the guilty thrill of witnessing violence (mediated and thereby dissociated from either danger to the viewer or real sympathy for the victim; "It's not real, it's just a movie"), but the role of the mirror is more complex and problematic. Mark explains that he's trying to capture the most perfect fear, the fear not of the violence itself but of their own fear, of the fear they see in their own reflections. Perhaps this is a comment on the filmmaker's manipulation of his audience in order to provoke emotional response and involvement, or on the audience's identification with what and who they see on film, or perhaps is a reiteration of the theme of the audience's reflexive involvement in, and thus partial responsibility for, what they see. (Probably all three, and even more that I didn't think of.) I think Scorsese was onto something when he said that the two essential films about filmmaking are 8 1/2 and Peeping Tom, Fellini exploring the exhuberant, life-affirming aspects of the art and Powell the sinister, transgressive, invasive aspects.

Another major element of Peeping Tom, and another it shares with Psycho, is male violence against women. Ever since these two "proto-slashers," women have been the primary victims of cinematic serial killers, and sex has been a major component. In Psycho, "Mrs. Bates" kills women to whom "Norman" is sexually attracted (attraction evidenced by his own "peeping tom" scene watching Marion throught a peep hole); in Peeping Tom, not only are all of Mark's victims women, but in the first scene he murders a prostitute, and in addition to his film-crew job he moonlights as a pornographic photographer. In one respect, this is just a reflection of the history, as old as humanity itself, of sexually motivated violence by men against women. Even relatively normal and sympathetic killers (in comparison to the more monstrous likes of Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Leatherface) like Mark and Norman are depicted as socially isolated and emotionally stunted, with little romantic or sexual experience; desire becomes mingled with frustration and shame, and finds an outlet in violence against the objects of desire. Indeed, in Peeping Tom the themes of the dark sides of filmmaking and sexuality are both expressed in the word "object": Just as the camera creates a distance between filmer (and audience) and filmed, between subject and object, a distance and detachment necessary to kill a helpless, pleading victim, so too can sexual desire on the part of an emotionally immature (essentially adolescent) desirer result in seeing the desired simply as a thing to be selfishly enjoyed rather than as a fellow-person with her own life, wants, and fears. Both violence and pure sexual desire (that is, divorced from emotional involvement or empathy) involve a great deal of objectification, an effect essential to the mediating role of the camera.

Whew. I told you there was a lot going on in that film. I'll wrap this up by simply saying that I'd honestly never heard or been aware of Michael Powell prior to watching these two films, but that they were more than enough definitely to spur me to check out more of his and Pressburger's work in the future.

The Mustard-blood Must Flow

PHANTASM

Having just watched it for the first time, I must say I've seen few films that combine the good, the bad, the derivative, and the head-scratchingly bizarre in such equal measures as Phantasm (trailer).

The low-budget 1979 "classic" horror film concerns restless small-town heartthrob Jody (Bill Thornbury) and his little sister Mike (A. Michael Baldwin), whom Jody's been raising since their parents' deaths. After the mysterious death-by-cemetery-sex of Jody's friend at the hands of a homely trollop (Kathy Lester), Mike grows suspicious of the town's eerie mortician (the awesomely named Angus Scrimm)—generally referred to as "the Tall Man," but to me he's Captain Underbite. Eventually Mike convinces Jody and their friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister), a creepy, guitar-playing, pony-tailed ice cream man, of the otherworldly danger posed by the funeral home and its mysterious owner.

First, the good. Phantasm is no mere slasher. The characters aren't just cannon fodder waiting to be murdered, but people whom the film takes the trouble to spend time with and explore outside of the context of the threat. You really buy the bond between Jody and Mike, Jody's longing to get away and start his life, and Mike's fear of losing the last remaining member of her family. Of course, Phantasm isn't really a family drama but a horror film, and the horror aspects are generally executed pretty well too. I can't help but think its $300,000 budget was a blessing in disguise, as it made sure that most of the tension and scares would come from what the audience can't see, creepy sounds and dark woods and hallways. I found that it was when I could actually see what was going on that the scares were less effective and often downright laughable, as with—Phantasm fans are going to hate me for this—the iconic flying chrome face-drilling, blood-spurting sphere-thing. (Here's a suggestion to writer and director Don Coscarelli: Just because something was scary in a dream you had doesn't necessarily mean it'll be scary on film.)

While some elements of the film, like the aforementioned sphere-thing and the labyrinthine halls of the funeral home, are quite unusual, a shockingly high number are very derivative, if not outright rip-offs. The biggest single victim of this is Dune (hence the post's title, along with the fact that all the creatures have thick, yellow, mustard-like slime for blood). Not only is the murder-sphere suspiciously similar (in function if not appearance) to a hunter-seeker, but while visiting a fortune teller Mike basically undergoes the "humanity test" administered to Paul, putting her hand in a box and undergoing extreme pain until she shows mental self-mastery. To top it all off, the fortune teller's granddaughter practically quotes the Litany against Fear when she tells Mike, "Fear is the killer." (The scene at the fortune teller's serves no narrative purpose but to convey Mike's anxiety about her brother's leaving and her need to conquer fear, both of which could've been conveyed without introducing extraneous characters and apparently genuine magic.)

The overall setting and tone seem like they could be straight out of any number of Stephen King novels: a small town, a contemporary setting (i.e., the '70s), a supernatural threat that's either unknown to or disbelieved by the general populace. (As I've said before, I've never actually read a King novel, but I've seen enough of the film adaptations to know to stay out of small-town Maine.) In addition, Phantasm features a homicidal, apparently driverless car (a hearse, naturally) à la Christine. Captain Underbite's horde of three-foot-tall zombies in hooded brown robes look just like Jawas. (Though Coscarelli gets points for making them more like the "genuine" zombies of Haitian voodoo, reanimated corpses obeying another's will, than the all-too-prevalent Romero-style zombies.) And the theme song is strongly reminiscent of those of The Exorcist, Suspiria, and Halloween, though, to be fair, that probably has more to do with '70s horror's affinity for repetitive piano-plinking than with Phantasm ripping anyone off.

As the previous paragraphs no doubt indicate, Phantasm is a pretty weird film, and its weirdness reaches a dizzying crescendo as the end draws near . . .

— SPOILERS AHEAD, BOY! —

So Jody and Mike (independently) infiltrate Captain Underbite's funeral home, where they run into Reggie, previously thought dead, who's already released some of Captain Underbite's still-living prisoners, who then ran off "like scared rabbits." The three proceed into the Hall of Purple Plastic Drums—it's a white room lined with stacks of . . . purple plastic drums (containers, I mean, not instruments)—where Mike is sucked into some kind of portal and sees a long line of Jawa-zombies doing something amidst a red-skied, wind-swept landscape. Jody and Reggie manage to pull her back, and Mike then explains that Captain Underbite is reanimating corpses to use them as slave labor on another planet, and that they're so short on account of the planet's greater gravity and heat. (How she learnt all this, I have not a clue.) The lights in the Hall of Purple Plastic Drums then go out, and Mike is attacked by Jawas. The next we see of them, Reggie is alone in the Hall of Purple Plastic Drums, while Jody and Mike are now inexplicably outside the funeral home, separated. There they are stalked by the knife-wielding homely trollop, who's actually Captain Underbite in another form. (In which case, the fact that she (he?) murdered Jody's friend at the beginning was an act of kindness of sorts; I can't imagine he'd want to go on after finding out he'd just banged Angus Scrimm in a cemetery.) Just then, though, Reggie (who, as a musician, knows all about tuning forks) touches two tuning-fork-like bars in the Hall of Purple Plastic Drums, causing them to stop vibrating (or at least humming). This harms or weakens the homely trollop in some way. While Jody and Mike are still wandering around outside looking for each other, Reggie escapes from the Hall of Purple Plastic Drums, runs out of the funeral home, and sees the homely trollop lying on the ground; he goes over to help, and she promptly stabs him to death and transforms back into Captain Underbite. Jody finds Mike, tells her that Reggie's dead (which he can apparently diagnose from some distance away, at night), and they escape back to their house, where they promptly split up (brilliant!). Captain Underbite shows up and chases after Mike, but she manages to conquer her fear and follow her brother's overly complex plan of luring Captain Underbite out into the woods, tricking him into falling down a thousand-foot abandoned mine shaft, and rolling a boulder onto it to block it up. Safe at last . . .

Except that it was all a dream! Mike wakes up to a fate worse than death where Jody was killed in a car accident and she's being raised by Reggie, the—just to reiterate—creepy, guitar-playing, pony-tailed ice cream man. (You better get Child Protective Services on speed-dial, kid.) After a little cuddle by the fire with Reggie, Mike goes to her room . . . only to find Captain Underbite there, who pulls her into a mirror! Roll credits.

Phantasm was clearly a labor of love for Coscarelli and the rest of those involved. It was produced on a shoe-string (it's really remarkable how polished and professional it looks, considering), was filmed on week-ends over the course of about a year, and once completed was threatened with an X rating before the M.P.A.A. relented. (Hey, Phantasm and Blue Valentine have something in common!) As with a lot of low-budget independent films, the passion and personal vision are almost tangible. Though to a great extent I'm impressed with its uniqueness—and especially the crew's ability to bring that uniqueness to life as well as they did for what's chump change in the film industry—I also think its greatest weakness is that uniqueness, that personal vision. To anyone accustomed to how stories have been told for the past few tens of thousands of years, the plot of Phantasm makes no sense. A murderous, shape-shifting, superhumanly strong mortician/alien/demon/monster/whatever? Three-foot-tall hooded zombies as interplanetary slaves? A chrome sphere that flies around a funeral home killing people? A severed finger that bleeds mustard and turns into a giant flying beetle? A magical fortune teller for no apparent reason? An heroic ice cream man? It was all a dream? Coscarelli clearly had a lot of story to tell (the original version would've run three hours) and a lot of ideas for both the drama and the horror, many of which sound interesting individually, but which don't really cohere in any rational way. Phantasm is probably among those instances **cough** Star Wars prequels **cough** Southland Tales **cough** where a well-meaning filmmaker exerting total creative control over a film wasn't ideal for the final product. Nevertheless, I can't help but recommend it for anyone interested in genuine scares, suspense, and a crazy, one-of-a-kind cinematic trip.

2010: The Year We Got Lots of Free Junior Frosties at Wendy's

Here we are, on the de-facto first day of 2011. (If there were ever a day that should count as a mulligan, it's New Year's.) Since we haven't posted here in a while, this seems as good a time as any to catch up on the end of the year's cinematic goings-on, reflect on 2010 in general, and look ahead to the new year in film.

As the tally in the sidebar shows, I've seen a fair number of films since I posted on Black Swan about a month ago, and a fair number of good ones at that. (Just because a film isn't posted on doesn't mean it didn't make an impression.) Foremost of these is, naturally, True Grit. Any new Coen Brothers movie is an event to me, especially one that has them teaming back up with El Duderino and Llewelyn Moss to tell a classic story imbued with Coenesque themes of revenge and redemption, and in a setting reminiscent of Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Fargo (though a bit less snow), and No Country. Their newest film isn't thematically delving in the way Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, No Country, or A Serious Man was, but a film doesn't have to be profound to be hugely entertaining, with a bevy of terrific performances and a simple story masterfully told.

Two other upper-tier films I saw in the past month were 127 Hours and The King's Speech. The former counts as one more notch on Danny Boyle's already impressive cinematic belt, imbuing a single person stuck in one place for days on end, unable to see more than a few feet around him besides up, with more drama than a hundred TV police procedurals and more energy than a hundred music videos. The latter deserves better than to be dismissed as stuffy Oscar bait; though I didn't exactly find the story exciting or compelling (believe me, I'm as surprised as anyone, given my interest in history and royalty), the subtle and touching performances that Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, and ol' Clau-Clau-Claudius himself, Sir Derek Jacobi, turn in are easily worth the ticket price.

We finished the year off with another good film hasn't gotten the credit it deserves, 2010: The Year We Make Contact. (Though not exactly imaginative, ending 2010 with 2010 just seemed too appropriate to deny, especially after having failed to do the same in 1900, 1984, or 1999.) I'd say the main reason 2010 is scarcely remembered nowadays is its bad luck in being a sequel to one of the greatest motion pictures ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Hélas, there are still some out there who have to take my word on that assessment of the original.) On its own merits, though, 2010 has an exciting and intriguing story that ties in well thematically with the original (like it, ending with a new beginning); fine performances by the late Roy Scheider, Helen Mirren, John Lithgow, and Bob Balaban (with the original's Keir Dullea and Douglas Rain reprising their iconic roles as Dave Bowman and HAL 9000); and, most memorably, dazzling and gorgeous special effects (except for a mulligan or two in blending the Leonov to the space background) reminiscent of the similarly breathtaking effects in the original, Close Encounters, and Blade Runner. (Those three films had effects by the great Douglas Trumbull, and though he didn't work on 2010 himself, his effects house did, and they all certainly bear the same visual-effects stamp.) The best way I can summarize 2010 is by saying that it's not so much like 2001 the film as it's like 2001 the novel (having read about ten pages back in high school); it may not transcend character and story the way Kubrick's film does, but it nails those elements nonetheless.

Speaking of Blade Runner—probably my favorite film back in high school; as I've said, I'm a sucker for a pretty movie—it's my sad duty to acknowledge 2010 as the year that I gave up on one of my former favorite filmmakers, and all but gave up on another of my former favorites. I was raised on Tim Burton; Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Batman are some of the staples of my childhood, and I've counted myself a fan of his even as recently as Sweeney Todd. But his Alice in Wonderland was so predictable, so idiotic, so mediocrely and unimaginitively executed, so insulting to anyone who's seen Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, or Big Fish, that, as much as it pains me, I can't help but write him off as nothing more than a hack working his own "dark," "gothy," "quirky" niche in the studio assembly line.

As for Ridley Scott, 2010 didn't see him fall as far in my eyes as Burton did, but Robin Hood certainly didn't help. That film is exibit A that both his historical-epic well and his Russell-Crowe well have run dry, and that it's time to make in a new direction. (That should, God willing, free Crowe up to make another Master and Commander film, thereby also fishing Paul Bettany out of the cinematic ghetto in which he's found himself. Also, he should tell his brother Tony to release Denzel Washington from whatever signed-in-blood, deal-with-the-devil thirty-picture contract he's trapped him with.) That's certainly not to say that I'm at all pleased with his plans to return to the now-moribund Alien franchise, with, of all things, a prequel (for those for whom a sequel risks too great a danger for creativity; this way you know where it will end) giving the origin of one of the great unexplained, enigmatic mysteries of Xenomorphia, the "space jockey" briefly seen in his 1979 classic. Maybe next he'll dispel the remaining mystery surrounding the later life of Féraud from The Duellists or Batty's reference to Tannhäuser Gate from Blade Runner. You're in your seventies, Mr. Scott; stop wasting your great ability and little remaining time on mediocrity.

So 2010 had a couple major cinematic disappointments for me, and not a lot of truly great work to counterbalance them. Black Swan, Inception, True Grit, The Social Network, and Scott Pilgrim were all great, of course, but 2010 didn't see a film on the level of No Country, There Will Be Blood, The Fountain, Brokeback Mountain, Eternal Sunshine, or Adaptation. Oh well, maybe next year. And speaking of next year, what's 2011 got in store for us cinephiles? (Other than more installments in the Transformers, Pirates, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and Big Momma's House franchises, that is.) Well, Terrence Malick will be giving us The Tree of Life, after working at break-neck speed to release a film only six years after his last. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) If you haven't seen the trailer yet, prepare to be blown away. Spielberg and Jackson will be launching their ambitious motion-capture Tintin trilogy in December. Another childhood-adventure franchise will be wrapping up with the second part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The summer will see two more Marvel films, Thor in May and Captain America in July, setting the (rather crowded) stage for The Avengers the following summer; meanwhile, DC is getting in on the act with Green Lantern. Genres will mash in Cowboys & Aliens and Your Highness. The X-Men, Planet of the Apes, and The Thing will get the prequel treatment. Not exactly a line-up that has me tingling with anticipation—this will be an off-year for the Coens, Nolan, Aronofsky, and Edgar Wright, who all just released films, and P.T. Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Judd Apatow, Spike Jonze, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, Guillermo del Toro, and Charlie Kaufman don't have any new films in the immediate future either—but still my film-loving fingers are crossed that 2011 won't turn out to be a cinematic dead zone (or dark territory, if you prefer).