Carnival of the Animals

ANIMAL KINGDOM

(Because there's never a bad time or too tenuous an excuse to throw in a little reference to the great Saint-Saëns, hence the post title.)

There are plenty of films out there that center on crime—crime dramas, crime thrillers, even "crime epics." (A very good example of the last category would be last year's terrific two-part biopic Mesrine (trailer) starring Vincent Cassel, epically spanning decades and continents.) This is only natural; the tension and danger simply make for good storytelling, and the transgressiveness of it is exactly what most people would love to experience vicariously. The centerpieces of such films are usually the crimes themselves—the heists, the hits, etc. Rare is the crime movie that doesn't give the audience that adrenaline rush, that payoff, but instead focuses on the criminals when they're past their prime, when the main concern isn't the next score but simply staying out of prison or even staying alive. That's the kind of film Animal Kingdom (trailer) is, an outstanding little downer of a crime film from Australia that's one of the best films of last year.

The film centers around J (James Frecheville), a laconic (indeed, seemingly emotionless) seventeen-year-old boy whose mother OD's on heroin and is taken in by his grandmother and uncles, a band of notorious armed robbers. There's the hyperactive, drug-dealing Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), Darren (Luke Ford), barely older than J and not showing much stomach for the work, and their relatively level-headed friend and parter Baz (Joel Edgerton, very much reminding me of an Australian Prince Colwyn from Krull); rather than playing the "Ma Barker" role, J's grandmother Janine (Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver), as J puts it, "just wanted to be where the boys were" (though her role changes as matters become more desperate). Rounding out the crew is J's third uncle, the volatile Andrew, called "Pope" (Ben Mendelsohn), who's been in hiding from the Melbourne Police's increasingly ruthless armed-robbery unit. We never really see them in action, but instead watch as growing police pressure causes them to push back as much as they can against the authorities and to lash out against one another.

All this is seen through the eyes of young J, whose initial position as an outsider with relation to his family makes him an ideal window through which the audience can be introduced to them and their way of life. As the story goes on, however, we see him transition from a Nick-Carraway-like passive observer to the story's principal mover.

Though he's been making short films for the past several years, Animal Kingdom is director David Michôd's first feature-length effort, and with that in mind it's extraordinary in its confidence, grace, and expert command of both narrative and performances. (In that respect, I'm reminded of another of the best directorial débuts of the last few years, Tom Ford's A Single Man, reviewed here.) Speaking of performances, while every one is solid, there are a few that particularly stand out for recognition: Frecheville's J, a shell-shocked young man trying just to get along amidst the growing danger in which he finds himself, before being forced to take matters into his own hands; Weaver's Janine, a seamless blend of motherly affection when she can afford it and ruthless determination when she can't; and Guy Pearce's understated performance as Sgt. Leckie, a police detective who's both determined to do his job the right way and is possibly the only person genuinely concerned about J's welfare.

However, a discussion of the film's performances would be incompete without mentioning Mendelsohn as Uncle Pope. He simply steals every scene he's in, with a pervasive air of menace that's a blend of brutal thuggishness and manipulative cunning. His bestial nature (pun intended) is only accentuated by Mendelsohn's almost simian appearance, with his slouched posture, sloping forehead, heavy brow, wide mouth, and weak chin. (I hate to sound like some nineteenth-century criminal phrenologist here—"You have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter!"—but his looks really do add to how sinister and threatening his character seems.) In a film full of terrific performances, Mendelsohn is the acting MVP.

There's a particular scene—what I call "the 'All Out of Love' scene"—that not only showcases the best of Michôd's technique as a filmmaker in a film full of terrific cinematic craft, but also is guaranteed to change the way anyone who watches it feels about Air Supply's classic syrupy ballad. I don't want to give it away by describing it too much, but it's just such an incredibly effective marriage of photography, sound (both the song itself and the low, eerie hum playing over it), editing, and performance, with Uncle Pope at his most terrifying without needing to do more than just sit and stare. It's easily one of last year's most arresting, effective examples of filmmaking technique to be found in a single scene, alongside the crew race from The Social Network (showy, yes; superfluous, no), the dream-dance that begins Black Swan, Aron's severing his arm in 127 Hours, or any one of the food-preparation or -consumption scenes in the foodie porn flick that is I Am Love. (Admittedly, 2010 wasn't a great year, but there were a few memorable moments.)

As a matter of fact, the "All Out of Love" scene reminded me simultaneously of the work of not one but two of the greatest living filmmakers, Scorsese and Lynch. Scorsese is known for his visionary use of popular music, from "Layla" in Goodfellas to "Be My Baby" and "Please Mr. Postman" in Mean Streets, all the way back to the eponymous song in his under-seen début, Who's That Knocking at My Door. Though I'd hesitate to call it Scorsesian, the use of pop music in Animal Kingdom certainly is imaginative and effective, from the aforementioned Air Supply to Jimmy Cliff's "Sitting in Limbo" playing as the family leasurely walks down the sidewalk before being abruptly cut off as the film cuts to the next scene. As for Lynch, Michôd often creates a haunting, threatening, dreamlike atmosphere that could be straight out of Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, or Mulholland Drive; he does this using slow, steady, elegant camerawork, careful use of focus, and a low, ominous soundtrack that gives a great sense of the tension and fear in which J and the others live. While Michôd's obviously not the first to use such filmmaking tools, it's clear that he knows how to use them well, as that scene perfectly demonstrates.

Though Animal Kingdom certainly qualifies as a "crime thriller," someone expecting it to follow the more standard narrative course of that genre will be disappointed (or pleasantly surprised, one would hope). This is no Heat, no The Town. It takes the focus off of the thrilling, fast-paced, often glamorous crimes themselves and puts it on the consequences, as they start to catch up with our "heroes" and push them to do worse, more desperate things to those closest to them. And this story is told with more grace, passion, and tension through its whole running time than most films manage for a scene at a time. If Animal Kingdom is any indication, we can expect David Michôd to become one of the great new directors of the years to come.

(And as a reward for reading this far, here is the sublime "The Swan," from Saint-Saëns's "The Carnival of the Animals," performed by Yo-Yo Ma. Enjoy, you earned it.)

12 Monkeyhog Day

SOURCE CODE

Last week, some colleagues and I got an early look at Source Code (trailers), the sophomore effort from friend of the blog Duncan "Zowie Bowie" Jones, as well as an all-too-brief look at the man himself. First, the Jones appearance. Like a small, English Bigfoot caught in a grainy home movie out in the woods, he seemed to pass in front of our field of vision only long enough for us to wonder if what we were seeing was the real thing before he strode back behind the treeline. During the sighting, he seemed to be trying to lower expectations a bit among the Moon fans like us in the audience (sadly, too few in the free screening), telling us not to expect his second film to be all that similar to his terrific first. (Whether he meant in terms of its subject matter or its quality, he didn't specify.) After maybe forty-five seconds at the mic, Jones hurried off, leaving the lights to fall and his film to speak for itself.

Though Source Code certainly is different from Moon, and not as good, neither it nor Jones has anything to be ashamed of for what it is, which is a gripping, engaging, well-above-average action movie. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) abruptly comes to on a commuter train headed for Chicago, his last memory being piloting an Army helicopter in Afghanistan; he doesn't know where he is, what he's doing there, or why the stranger sitting across from him, Christina (Michelle Monaghan), seems to know him. After eight minutes, an explosion destroys the train, and Colter is now isolated in a small, dark room with few features other than a screen on which a militarily attired woman, Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), anxiously questions him about what he just saw. It's soon revealed to Colter that, using a technology called "the Source Code," his consciousness is being thrown into an alternate reality based on the last eight minutes of the life of one of the train passangers before he, Christina, and the other passangers were killed in a bombing, but an alternate reality that he can fully explore and affect. His involuntary mission is to discover who was behind the bombing in order to prevent other attacks predicted to follow; but he can only do this eight minutes at a time, reliving the last moments of a dead man's life over and over until he finds the truth.

The obvious point of comparison for Source Code is as an action/thriller Groundhog Day, but with our hero forced to relive the same eight minutes in order to prevent terrorist attacks, instead of forced to relive the same minor holiday in order to become a better person and get the girl. However, the film I was most reminded of was 12 Monkeys, in which a man from the near future is forced by a mysterious authority to travel back in time to gain intelligence about a past, seemingly inevitable catastrophe. (Hence the mangled compromise of this post's title.) Though Jones didn't write Source Code, it shares with Moon (which he did write) a ready willingness to borrow what it needs from other films, but with its own spin. (I already noted the influences of Silent Running, Solaris, Blade Runner, and 2001, to name a few, on Moon.) It uses a high-tech narrative device and action-movie setting to examine, like Ramis's and Gilliam's respective films, how inevitable or open-ended life actually is, whether we're in the driver's seat or the future is set in stone. Surprisingly heady stuff for a springtime actioner full of pretty faces.

Jones has openly described Source Code as a "one for them" film. (I believe the term he used was "director for hire.") But really, the only actual negativity I can direct at the film is relative, in comparison to the "one for me" Moon. Sure, Gyllenhaal, Monaghan, or Farmiga doesn't turn in anything like Sam Rockwell's extraordinary performance, possibly the best of his career; but everyone delivers solid work, especially Gyllenhaal with his character's blend of military professionalism and understandable frustration with the situation into which he's been forced. The story doesn't have the same surprises and thematic challenges, but it's still one of the most intelligent and compelling films of its kind that we've gotten in a while, and one that interweaves its intelligence with the action and suspence quite well, in both conception and execution. If this is Jones's "one for them" film, we should be so lucky as to have more like it during the rest of his career.

Gettin' Hitched

THE 39 STEPS

I've been trying the past couple years to broaden my acquaintance with the filmography of Alfred Hitchcock beyond just watching Psycho over and over again. I've seen Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds, and Notorious, and they, along with Psycho, are some of the best films I've ever seen in every respect: storytelling, technique, performances, suspense, and, let's not forget, humor. There's always some kind of comic aspect to be found somewhere in his films, from the matronly patron fretting over humane pesticide in Psycho to the rarely seen newlyweds in Rear Window. Not only does it provide some much-needed lightening of the mood and balancing of the tone, but it goes a long way toward humanizing the characters, making us care about them more, and thus fear for them more. But no film of his that I've seen has showcased Hitchcock's comedic side as much as The 39 Steps.

We're introduced to our dashing young Canadian hero, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), in a London music hall where patrons test the encyclopedic knowledge of "Mr. Memory" with often absurd questions (including the old man who keeps trying to ask his question even after shots are fired and the audience stampedes). He finds himself with a beautiful spy calling herself "Annabella Smith" (Lucie Mannheim), who claims to be trying to keep aeronautical secrets from being passed to a foreign power. (Structurally the film mirrors itself, beginning with a music hall followed by Hannay in the company of a woman, and ending with Hanny in the company of a woman followed by a music hall.) Annabella is soon murdered, but not before telling Hannay cryptically of "the Thirty-nine Steps" (perhaps the MacGuffiniest of all MacGuffins) and a man whom she was supposed to meet in Scotland. Now wanted for Annabella's murder, Hannay travels to Scotland to try to get to the bottom of the conspiracy and thereby clear his own name.

One great way that Hitchcock maintains the suspense is by constantly shifting Hannay's environment and whom he's with: from the music hall to his apartment, to the train to Scotland, to the cottage of the pious crofter (definitely a Calvinist, he) and his long-suffering young Glaswegian wife—and sorry to nitpick, but it would take a wee bit more than an afternoon's hike to get from the Forth Bridge to what's clearly supposed to be the Highlands—to Ard-na-Shelloch, and so on. He—and the audience with him—remains uncertain where he'll find himself next, and who he can trust there. I also liked how Hitch upset expectations; the foreign-accented femme fatale who freely admits her mercenary outlook is trustworthy, while plenty of respectable-seeming natives turn out to be traitorous foreign agents or their unsuspecting pawns.

There are also some great little filmmaking techniques and tricks sprinkled throughout, like the first shots of Hannay at the music hall where we don't see his face, the scream of the woman discovering Annabella's body blended with the whistle of the train Hannay's riding as he makes his escape, or the camera going from looking in the window of a moving car to suddenly stopping and watching the car drive off. They don't necessarily make the film more suspenseful, but they definitely make it more interesting and fun to watch.

As I mentioned before, The 39 Steps is shot through with humor; in fact, it's easily as much a comedy as a thriller. In that respect, I have to say the film it reminds me of the most is Pineapple Express; Dale and Saul are similarly on the run from a murderous conspiracy, but there are so many laughs that you almost forget the mortal danger they're in. In The 39 Steps, there's the aforementioned scene at the music hall, then Hannay's interaction with the milk man, the "unmentionables" salesmen and the old vicar on the train, and the (comedically ingenious) scene at the election rally. Then, when Hannay meets up (again) with the bizarrely appareled Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), the film becomes a quasi-screwball comedy, with much sexual-tension-infused witty bickering between an attractive young man and woman who can't help but find themselves in one zany situation after another. Though humor and romantic relationships are staples of Hitchcock's thrillers, The 39 Steps is the only one I've seen in which they're so central (except maybe the romantic aspects of Vertigo and Notorious, but there isn't nearly as much comedy in those).

I'm reminded of a story someone (I don't remember who) told about sharing an elevator with Hitchcock. The two of them were alone in the elevator; then, when more people started getting on, Hitchcock started into the middle of describing a gruesome murder scene with great detail and relish. Soon the elevator stopped, the doors opened, and the eavesdropping fellow-passengers hesitated a moment before leaving, not wanting to miss the end of his lurid tale. When Hitchcock and the storyteller were again alone in the elevator, the latter anxiously asked what happened next; but, as Hitch explained, nothing happened next, he just made it up on the spot to amuse himself with everyone else's reactions. Hitchcock clearly saw a natural link between humor and fear, between comedy and tragedy, and so was never afraid to infuse some humor into his thrillers, which only improved them. That's nowhere more evident than in The 39 Steps.

Continuing this blog's steady decline into becoming a movie-news-aggregating site.

Or, if we're being honest, a CHUD-(and-occasionally-Badass-Digest)-news-aggregating site. But I'm sorry, if I see something sufficiently cool at some other movie site, I feel it's my duty to post about it here in order to bring the news to a wider audience. (That's a joke, it case you were wondering.)

Anyway, the helpful movie folks at CHUD recently wrote a piece about the site If We Don't, Remember Me, which features a slew of fantastic-looking film-related .gifs. Their selections range from the intuitive (Lawrence of Arabia, The Royal Tenenbaums, Blade Runner, The Holy Mountain) to the inspired (The Shining, Young Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove, Eraserhead) to the, well, let's just say "counterintuitive" (Gentlemen Broncos). They're all worth a look, but be forewarned of the hypnotic power of an ever-repeating Jack Torrance, Travis Bickle, or Amélie Poulain.

And if that doesn't satisfy your .gif-grubbing goûts, check out one of the cornerstones of the CHUD Message Board, the thread ".gif it all you've got!" There you'll find a veritable cornucopia of brief, silent, low-resolution video-file goodness to amuse and disturb you, most but not all of it film-related. (Besides, any thread that starts off with an hommage to that underappreciated masterpiece (and, as you can see, kid-kill extravaganza), Postal, is doing something right.) Enjoy.

Blimey, guvna! They's some cracking pictures, they is!

Imagine me saying the line above in my worst attempt at Dick Van Dyke doing his worst attempt at cockney in Mary Poppins, and you'll get what I was going for.

Coming off my recent Powellpalooza, Time Out London has compiled a list of the hundred best British films of all time. (As usual, many thanks to CHUD for bring it to my attention.) This ambitious endeavor was accomplished by polling one hundred fifty people—filmmakers, actors, critics, and others, of many nationalities—on their favorite British films and compiling the list from their choices.

(However, as a side note, what qualifies as a "British film" remains somewhat unclear. The Third Man (number 2) was directed by a Briton and was partially filmed in England, but was mostly filmed on location in Vienna, and its two lead actors were American. The Offence (number 79) had British actors and was filmed in England, but its director, Sidney Lumet, and studio, United Artists, were both American. Stanley Kubrick (Barry Lyndon (number 19), A Clockwork Orange (number 34), and 2001 (number 57)) and Terry Gilliam (Brazil (number 24) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (number 54)) both were born in the United States and moved to Britain in adulthood. (But we Yanks know that you can take the American out of America, but you can't take America out of the American, so they should still count as ours, damn it!) Repulsion (number 45) was directed by a Pole, Roman Polanski, and Blow-Up (number 47) by an Italian, Michelangelo Antonioni, though both were filmed and take place in London. Brazil was filmed in England, but was produced and distributed by American companies. Walkabout (number 61) was filmed entirely in Australia, and The Bridge on the River Kwai (number 86) entirely on Sri Lanka (though the former is a Commonwealth dominion, and the latter was at the time, so maybe that's a gray area). I guess the main criterion they used is whether the director's British. I didn't mean to get as sidetracked as I now have on this question, but it's an important one if we're assigning films a particular nationality. Are The Bourne Supremacy and United 93 "British films" because Greengrass is British? Is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone American and The Prisoner of Azkaban Mexican because of their respective directors' nationalities?)

Still reading? Sorry about the derail. Back to Time Out London's list. Sadly, it's lists like this one, compiled by truly learned and astute filmlovers (as opposed to people whose cinematic memory reaches no further back than Star Wars), that make me realize how far I still have to go as an appreciator and student of film. I've only seen twenty-one of the films on the list (though six more are presently in my Netflix queue, for whatever that's worth), and only three—The Third Man, The Red Shoes (number 5), and Trainspotting (number 10)—among the top ten. I've never even heard of the number-one film (though I just saw another film by the same director). I don't even have the (bad) excuse of not wanting to read subtitles (though I've seen some British films that really could use them). I guess I've still got a lot of cinematic work ahead of me.

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).

Metamorphoses

BLACK SWAN

As the screen completed its slow fade to white, and the words "Directed by Darren Aronofsky" appeared to start the closing credits, I was breathless, my mouth agape, my eyes as big as saucers, my heart racing. The previous hundred ten minutes—and particularly the last twenty or so—had been one of the most thrilling, moving, transcendent experiences I'd ever had watching a film. After having seen thousands of films in my life, I found myself astounded anew at what this medium is capable of achieving.

(And I'm not just talking about Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis's "scene together." Though that was certainly memorable in its own right.)

Black Swan (trailer) is the story of Nina (Portman), a talented ballerina in a New York ballet company, whose greatness is impaired by an almost childlike meekness and inexperience. However, the company's director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), sees potential—and perhaps something else as well—in her, and chooses her for the lead in Swan Lake, requiring her to play both the pure, innocent heroine and her dark, seductive doppelgänger, the "black swan." The tremendous physical, mental, and artistic pressures that the role imposes as she prepares are compounded by the people around her: her encouraging but dominating and manipulative mother (Barbara Hershey), a ballerina herself before Nina's unexpected birth required her to give up her career; the retiring prima ballerina Beth (Winona Ryder), bitter over her seemingly premature sunset and the way the company—and Thomas in particular—used and then discarded her; and above all Lily (Kunis), a new arrival to the company whose uninhibited and passionate nature is exactly what Nina's "black swan" lacks, possibly both the key to getting Nina out of her artistic and personal shell and a ruthless rival trying to sabotage her big break. The strain of all this on the already fragile Nina takes a growing toll on her psyche, dragging her into paranoia, hallucination, and self-destruction.

Aronofsky's execution of this is fantastic. Portman's stunning performance is the best of her career. Her Nina begins seemingly in control, but only because never before seriously challenged; under her role's demands and Lily's influence, her brittleness becomes more and more apparent and threatens to shatter instead of strengthen her. (The role is funny because, like Nina, it is often said of Portman that, while very talented and attractive, she comes off as too sweet, delicate, and innocent to be really sexy, like a modern-day Audrey Hepburn. She's said that one reason she took the role was to try to shed some of that sweet-little-girl image and to be seen as more of a serious, adult actress.) Though pulling Nina in opposite directions, Kunis (whose performance won her the Mastroianni Award at Venice) and Hershey both nail the ambiguity their respective characters require, offering Nina comfort (in the latter's case) or liberation (in the former's) one minute and smilingly threatening her the next. Cassel has turned out to be one of my favorite actors this year, coming off his revelatory (to me, anyway) lead performance in the two-part crime-epic biopic Mesrine (trailer); here he not so much straddles the line between demanding mentor and exploitative scumbag as embraces both aspects of his character, accepting and exploring how they complement each other.

In addition to the cast, another aspect that stands out is the sound, and I don't just mean the Tchaikovsky. The incredibly demanding physicality of ballet is conveyed compellingly with the sounds of toes grinding on the floor like dull drills and clothes stretching and compressing as the dancers contort. Given that all this is usually drowned out by music during performances, actually hearing it during practice and rehearsals—no doubt accentuated for cinematic effect—gives an understanding of the great physical strain their bodies experience, while making visible and audible Nina's own psychological strain.

And speaking of physicality, Black Swan features enough cringe-inducing body horror to make Cronenberg proud. Not just the more fantastical transformations that Nina undergoes (of which the trailer offers a glimpse), but also the bodily damage resulting from the physical rigors of ballet and Nina's own increasingly high-strung nature: accidents from cutting finger- and toe-nails with scissors (which makes me uncomfortable regardless of the context), toe-nails breaking from pressure, nervous scratching and pulling at the skin around finger-nails. Though sometimes taken to gruesome extremes, this damage obviously results in far less harm or blood than your average horror film or thriller, but watching it did far more to ratchet up my tension, discomfort, and anxiety than most stabbings, gun shots, or beatings could. Though we never see much blood or gore, this film is not for the squeamish.

Regardless of its many art-house elements, Black Swan is, by genre, a thriller, like Aronofsky's debut, Pi; but it hews much more closely to the common themes and tropes of that genre, making it a more "thrillerish" thriller. The threats to Nina, even the ones only in her mind, are much more concrete than intellectual obsession; she comes to fear that people and forces are actually threatening her career and herself. This is where my only real criticisms of the film lie. (No, despite what all the praise above might suggest, I didn't think it was perfect.) Its faithfulness to familiar thriller tropes makes certain plot elements rather predictable: Of course the talented newcomer is going to be a rival and a threat to our heroine; of course the fading star whom she's replacing is going to be bitter and vindictive; of course the lights are going to go out and some blurred shape is going to rush past the end of the hall accompanied by a sudden, discordant crash on the score. I can't help but think the film could've forgone some of these "bump in the dark" moments and just let the tension come from Nina's more natural fears and disorientation; but this is a minor complaint for a film that does such a good job building a sense of threat, uncertainty, and loss of control. (Needless to say, it's handily unseated Argento's Suspiria (trailer) as the premier ballet-themed thriller featuring supernatural elements.)

Besides the film's artistic qualities, it also featured some core themes I found intriguing as well. One—probably the principal theme—is the idea of artistic creation through self-destruction. In order to play the "black swan" part of her role convincingly, Nina realizes that she must discard a good deal of who she is, the young, shy, inexperienced "white swan" who lives with her mother and has a bedroom full of stuffed animals. To achieve what the role demands, this butterfly must break out of her cocoon; but the process turns out to be a dangerous one, over which she has very incomplete control. She eventually begins to see positive results as her "black swan" performance improves, but what'll be left of her by the end as she lets go of her old life is uncertain. Before her stands the example—as both object of admiration and cautionary tale—of her predecessor as prima ballerina, Beth, whose great artistic highs went hand in hand with devastating personal lows. How far down Beth's road Nina will need to go is both a core element of the film's drama and a challenging question it poses about the creative process in general.

Another theme is that of the unreliable narrator. Though Nina doesn't literally narrate, we see the entire film through her eyes (I don't think there's a single scene without her), including her apparent hallucinations as her psyche breaks down. The subjectivity and unreliability of what we see is an obvious outcome of her psychological instability, but Aronofsky plays with this in interesting ways. For instance, Nina's hallucinations don't steadily become more dramatic and obvious; instead, obvious hallucinations are followed by events that seem plausible but on which doubt is later cast. ——— SPOILERS ——— For instance, obvious hallucinations like Nina's seeing her own face on a stranger, her mother's paintings screaming at her, and her growing wings during her "black swan" performance are interspersed with events like her sleeping with Lily, Beth's stabbing herself with her nail file, and Nina's killing Lily, which seem very real at the time but are later shown to be impossible or at least ambiguous. (Lily denies sleeping with Nina; Nina finds Beth's bloody nail file in her own hand after running away; and Lily turns up alive and well after Nina supposedly killed her.) ——— END SPOILERS ——— As a result, we begin to doubt (at least on first viewing) whether anything we're seeing, however plausible, is really happening or is merely in Nina's increasingly deranged mind.

Wow. There's so much more I could go on about: the captivating opening scene; Clint Mansell's haunting, operatic score; the grainy, heldheld-style photography (very like The Wrestler's) and its interesting contrast with the classical score and fantastical imagery; the camera's balletic movements around the actors. But I think I've written enough for now, to get my thoughts down while the experience is still fresh. Though not perfect—I'd have to rank it a little below The Fountain in Aronofsky's filmography, if only because a gorgeous time-skipping love story is a lot more pleasant to watch than Natalie Portman pulling at her cuticle until she tears it halfway down her finger—Black Swan is a gripping, intense, expertly crafted experience throughout, and in its conclusion rises to a beautiful, exhilirating euphoria rarely achieved by even the best. Perhaps it's just a matter of Aronofsky again shamelessly taking advantage of my well known weakness for pretty and emotive movies; even if so, he's done cinema a service in the process, and I couldn't be more grateful for it. You've triumphed again, Mr. Aronofsky.

P.S. — "I was perfect" is this year's "I think this just might be my masterpiece." Discuss amongst yourselves.