Wim Wenders's UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (director's cut)

 

A filmmaker realizing their "dream" project, like the one that is so very long in the making, can sometimes be a dicey proposition (of course there are exceptions like the ones that Scorsese eventually brings to fruition, but other times if a director has a "I've wanted to make this for 15-20 years it's more like, I dunno, Levinson's Toys or something). With Wenders got the core idea of Until the End of the World in 1977, before it was called that as the U2 song wasn't even a song (the band may not have even been a band yet), and inspired by being in Australia and what sort of concept could come from dreams being realized. By the time the film came to fruition, it wasn't released as he wanted at first - a mere piddling 158 minutes what he called the "Readers Digest" cut - and it wasn't till decades after that his full directors cut came to DVD and blu ray via Criterion. And lo and behold, its.... a helluva vision that's often quite arresting and absorbing and... good!

It's always an invigorating feeling to see a director completely in control of their creative faculties and using all of the collaborators at his side - Robby Muller in camera the number one (it may be one of his two or three greatest achievements, finding colors and compositions that can only come when one can, for lack of a better word, indulge in an epic scope and vision of cities and worlds and environments, including inside ourselves ultimately), but also actors like William Hurt and Max Von Sydow and Jeanne Moreau and Dommartin, who it's really her story ultimately (more on her in a bit), not to mention a returning face like Vogler or a new one like Sam Neill (also on narration and more on that too shortly), and more importantly than most other aspects, even the compelling production design and Just-Enough Futurish designs, is the music from Graeme Revell (getting to shine most past uh hour three) and the soundtrack from REM and Robby Robertson et al - and to follow this vision to allow it not only room to breathe but to evolve and take shapes one can't expect from a plot summary. There are times of course this feels long. Would I tell Wenders exactly where to cut? Would I dare? Um...

Once a creator is on a trek like this to make such a mammoth adventure cum Detective cum film noir cum "Road" cum science fiction apocalyptic story, it really takes on the qualities of a novel more than your traditional film. Indeed if it reminded me of anything it was how like Bergman indulged in some of his super long films (albeit it is not in the camp of capital M masterpiece like Fanny and Alexander I'd hope Wenders would take the compliment how rich and thick a text he's made in that similar vein), or Tarkovsky who was one of Wenders heroes.

And indeed Neill, as there's been in other films of this director's work, is a writer and takes the time of the Maybe This is the End Time to write his book once in Australia and settled into the world of the Dr Farber lab and the aborigines and their connections. How we construct a story takes time and the details matter, and I respect not just how much detail and time is given here but how moods can develop, like the music that the people end up making and collaborating on in this camp as it strikes a chord for the theme of what brings people together (those scenes may seem goofy considering they're right alongside serious Medical Experiment deep dives of the literal minds eye, but the juxtaposition isn't an accident either).

I think there's a part of me that wants to love this so wholeheartedly as it reveals more of the soul and spirit of a poet than a traditional storyteller always so concerned with plot; it's also great to see a filmmaker, unlike say Christopher Nolan, who can embrace showing us so much and allowing moments and character beats to breathe than for exposition to rule the day. But there are times when a performance will fall flat, likr I know he's supposed to be from another Wenders film and all but Allan Garfield in that car lot is just off even for this movie, or actually the background closest thing to uh "conflict" in a more mainstream sense that the government is after what the Farbers are doing with this innovative technology, is maybe raised once or twice (Ie oh no they're following Sam again and what's up with that raid and the guns drawn here and there), but it feels more like an after thought and the movie maybe could have worked more strongly without it.

The most hit and miss aspect that lowers my rating is the Narration. Neill isn't bad at it persay, but there's too much of it at some key points, in particular once things settle into that lab in Australia and he's writing the book, and where it actually feels right early on when it's more of a Hopping from Place to Place narrative it cuts in intrusively in parts later on when Wenders should trust more in the wild images (like those digital video animations that are disturbing and trippy and almost alluring in how warped they are, as if the Jupiter sequence from 2001 were on a computer not too far off from now in our consciousness). It's a hard thing because I know why it's there as it's adding to the novelist intent, but there's a fine line between adding to the moment and taking away from the dramatic portent or explaining what is already so clear and emotional.

But there is so much to this film that is so unique that I was very happy once it ended, even with reservations. It's is a major work that manages to explore like twenty or more things that I'm sure I'm not getting all into here. It explores obsession, addiction and grief with such delicacy and a rigor I'm not sure I've seen elsewhere from this director before or since, and yet the overriding issue connects with the idea at the heart of all this, which is what will bring us together as human beings and what will break us apart. Of course love and family and all that is paramount, with Moreau's mother a cornerstone of that, but I really liked where he takes the Von Sydow character as this brilliant but tragic figure, in some ways a classic Mad Movie Scientist but also a loving father and husband with a lot of baggage with his family.

And as for Dommartin, she grew on me as it went on reaching her highest points emotionally in the final half hour; I'd be lying if I said I was on board with all of her performance early on, but maybe it depended on what she had to work with in the scenes and I think the more serious things got and consequential she brought more of what she could do to the role. And Hurt is.... Hurt, and my God is he great in the scenes with Ozu regular Ryu. I could go on about this film, but the bottom line here is this is nearly 5 hours long, and it's.... a lot. 

But it's not crafted by a director who, indulging as much as he is in what he loves to see, doesn't lose the pathos. It's not one of my very favorites on the level of Paris Texas, but it's remarkable all on its own and was most ahead of its time on how people become totally ensconced in image(s), when the word shouldn't be taken for granted... not that all images are condemned, as this is a gorgeous film to look at, more that... the medium is the message sort of thing. 

Jason Reitman's Sony's GHOST-BUSTERS AFTERLIFE

"This is weird."

I wish. Sigh.

You know, Mythology has been around for millennia and for good reason, because certain stories (not to get all Campbell on your asses but just for a moment) have this incredible metaphorical weight that is carried down through different cultures and yet at the heart of it all these stories with heroes and villains and conflicts and dangers and temptations a-plenty carry power over time. We have archetypes for good reason because they're reliable and they work. Of course few pieces of pop culture really took hold of Campbell and his 1000 hero faces material more (forgive this pun swear not intended) forcefully than George Lucas with Star Wars, and for better or worse (not mostly better) he continued on with that in the prequels.

Then he left and we got Force Awakens, Last Jedi and that other movie that I can't remember and it doesn't exist so that's cool ok. What that movie and Abrams and all those Indie Darlings at Disney and Lucasfilm did was actually not too bad of an idea for that story, to continue another generation ahead with some new characters and the acknowledged-aged return of others, as the hero Mythology and the ideas of lineage and what is the past and breaking it or holding on to it or finding out that there were some ... flaws that were abound but it wasn't without some real heart and so on, all of this got explored to pretty interesting degrees by the filmmakers (up till the point when they... didnt), and it worked in the context of this entire large space-set world. In short, The Force Awakens was good and the idea to do what it did was fine, all New Hope Redone things considered.... what it was horrible for though was the industry looking to extend shit by LEGACY degrees, and it's here that we go on to this movie, Ghostbusters Afterlife (and I'm only surprised they resisted the urge to name it The Trap Awakens or some shit... that's actually a bit dirtier than I intended, but let's move on).

I'm not inherently opposed to the idea that we are following the kid/grandkids of one of the characters of Ghostbusters 84 and 89 (not that this wants to acknowledge the latter much, but I'll come back to that), and even that there's this tortured backstory involving one of the characters breaking off from the group like Egon and going Strange Old Hermit on these characters and causing fractions - isn't even a bad or worthless or unworkable idea. 

I even flashed to of all the things Casper (yes the 1995 movie look it up, you goons) as that managed to be a decent kids movie with a family coming to an old run down house and discovering things and getting into adventures. And referencing the first one or two movies I'm sure comes with the territory. And, to give some praise here, McKenna Grace, Carrie Coon, to an extend Stranger Things are inhabiting these roles believably and bringing some pathos when they can, not to mention Paul Rudd as a likeable comic presence (though not incessantly so, we get that with "Podcast" Grr argh).

But the two largest issues here are that the movie takes hits off the reference pipe like Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans (and nothing lucky about this shit pipe), and it mistakes using the supernatural elements from the first film as if it's an unbreakable code.

 You remember Ivo Shandor? He's here... literally! (But what, no Tobin if Tobin's Spirit Guide? Harumph)

 You remember Stay Puft Marshmallows, which was all part of a (extremely funny) gag with Ray trying to think of the thing to *him* that couldn't possibly be a Destructor Form? They get set pieces like they're would-be Gremlins, or Gremlins 2 for that matter (nah fuck that that's too good to reference here, sorry Joe).

 You remember the Gatekeeper and Keymaster, the former being the first sexually-charged visual for me and an entire generation of millennials via Weaver? She's here and Keymaster are back, briefly, as is Gozer (though unlike a certain missing actor, spoiler, don't care, they didn't recast that obscure European model I can't remember). Don't forget:

- Symmetrical bookstacking

- "Who you gonna call?"

- Card guessing game (Post credits)

- That pole (uh... huh)

- Revelation 6:12 .... wait, wasn't that 7:12? Don't go trying to change your goof reference but still put it there, you jerks

I'm sure there are many many other "Easter eggs" here, and it all draws attention to the fact that now what used to be just funny stuff that Ackroyd was somewhat serious about in-between joint hits and Ramis was sending up as writers is now LORE in all caps, and yet there aren't any NEW ideas here for what could be scary or inventive, things involving the supernatural that might have not been present in 1984 but would be there in what appears to be the nexus point of supernatural activity in the middle of nowhere. 

At the same time as my mind wandered at points in the movie (and it's a little long so I had time), I started to nitpick mayhap but realized these were legit logic gaps; why would a near apocalyptic supernatural event be basically forgotten thirty-five some odd years later, or... ever? Why is the ad for the Ghostbusters commercial sitting at a measly 100k views on YouTube? Is Carrie Coon old enough to not have been born to whoever her mother is (who we never hear about at least I don't don't so) and even if little Phoebe - a character who's intellectual curiosity is charming and cool, despite that her arc is not really pronounced or rather she doesn't need to *learns* she's a genius - was never told about him Stranger Things never asked either? It all points to this Spengler-as-deranged-but-Secretly-Genius-Hermit works as a story device unto itself, maybe, but not with all this other stuff around it and certainly not this seriously.

Now, a lot of at least the first half and even into like two-thirds of Afterlife is actually.... fine, believe it or not. I miss the Jason Reitman of his first four films, where he managed to make a mark for himself as a real talent with his own satirical bent and excellent control with dark comedy and his (even better) casts, and I know there's a good chance we may never get that guy again (his previous two films, Tully and Front Runner, were also not terrible but either pale shadows or too heavily flawed to stack alongside his early work), and I can't know for sure if he had to take this on to honor his dad or the studio or begged him or maybe he just needed to get out of his own head, but he actually manages to set the table for some amiable scenes and interactions between the characters, types or (in the case of Coon) underwritten as they may be, and Grace in particular on a performance level helps to keep things on some fun-grounded level. 

Ironically, she manages to be a 1000% more of a believable Ghostbuster than the ones in that 2016 misfire (which was bad for different reasons, and I won't litigate that here go watch the Mr Plinkett review). I even kind of enjoyed the staging and action of that one scene with Fatter Sadder Slimer (do we still call it Slimer I dunno).

But then something kind of sinks in, maybe around that Stay Puft scene or earlier, and it really digs its heels into delivering all of this so seriously and it becomes lame and irritating and kind of insufferable with wasted side characters (as an aside what a waste of a talent like Bokeem Woodbine of all people, and his daughter as the slightly sassy but mostly blank daughter who gets interested in Strange Woolfhard or whoever).

 And I know once she calls Ray it reveals it's cards even more fully into Force Awakens territory, and I knew that we'd get all three surviving members... uh oh woops we have #4 here in uncanny CGI (but it's OK because he's a trimmer Ramis than he was later in life derp) and it becomes treacle central even as it has to do the thing of upping the stakes and visuals to an extent that I couldn't anymore. It's not that the rest of the movie doesn't have these issues sprinkled around, but by the time we have to settle into that last section and two of our adults become Gatekeeper and Keymaster (though much less horny it seems), it's all over.

I think to end this rant-view I want to center on something with this that I think is an example of what the issue is here, and again it's a different one than what Paul Feig had with his Ghostbusters (or one of them): the musical score. Elmer Bernstein may not be as known as a household name as like John Williams (again the grandeur and leitmotifs of Star Wars is fitting he came back again for TFW and so on) or Bernard Herrmann or that Bear McCreary fella (you're saying who forget it I'm rolling), but he was exceptional in his field and did a lot of different scores for a variety of genres. 

When he came to Ghostbusters he had become the "comedy" guy for a number of years and maybe resented it, but in a way he was perfect for the film because he came at it in the way of "this theme will sound like Peter Venkman ambling around and kind of grouchy but not a bad guy" or the epic high points for when things get scary have those high strings and even the ambivalence of rounding a corner of a bookshelf is there in the music. It's a score that is loaded with character and reflects the world its in.

This Aftermath score has times when it has its own beats and personality (and as another praise I enjoy the needle drops here, semi obscure 60s rock that kind of fits and I can't explain why yet), but 80% of the time are all the Elmer Bernstein themes, maybe with a little potential twinge but not really, and eventually it (pun again) gives up the ghost and just says fuck it and does all the themes we've heard before. You know it could be something really interesting if it tried, but it settles into the familiar like a junkie in a stupor, and makes a grave mistake for it digging into a literal mine of Mythology for dramatic depth. That's what this is.

Ok, one more nice thing... Phoebe's science jokes were amusing.

Papa Mike's Video #27: Leos Carax's MAUVAIS SANG (1986)

 (Aka "Bad Blood") 

"Let's listen and let our feelings flow as they will."

I mean, if the STBO doesn't get them, the cigarettes will?

A film intoxicated by cinema and the more it goes on the more that dizzying, playful but extremely tender hearted it reveals itself (or tenderly extreme, maybe both), and yet while the technical bravura and the confidence to believe with such iron clad conviction not that it even will work on a narrative level but that it works so profoundly on that tactile, ethereal plane that cinema can be, is impressive, and the theme of a lack of real love manifested as this infection is a provocative one, it's Binoche and Levant together that makes this sing.

Like Breathless, the movie sets one io for a seemingly straightforward crime story, and then Carax has these two kids hanging out for a long time and they can really get to know each other and we can sink in to their knowing yet wholly emotional bonding (and a little radio play, Bowie and shaving cream hijinks far from don't hurt). In particular I realized once Binoche entered the film and that parachute scene - wIhere she has two men, Alex and Marc, telling her to jump and not jump and then she goes and faints and Alex has to jump after her - it elevates to another level.

I don't mean to suggest that Alex and Levant aren't electrifying or captivating as character and performer respectively (and together), though like Belmondo in Breathless you need someone like Seberg he can play off of or else he is just going around turning over Volkswagen beetles (that was a moment I laughed out loud as the kids say), and Binoche is that great person to be with and play off. It's a dynamic where she loves the older man (after, all as she basically states with that spark in her eye, she likes tall men and men 20-30 years older... or younger, quixotic phrase that fits this splendidly), and yet he has fallen totally head over heels with her... while Lise, the Julie Delpy character, still loves Alex very intensely following their early-in-the-story lovemaking, which by the way is beautifully shot briefly and to focus on faces, and yet this also calls into question if he or she have this uncanny STD that affects the loveless, even if it's one-sided.

But with Binoche there's this sincerity to how she listens and speaks and has to say very little really to convey this intensity and More Than Ennui. Carax and his DP and the camera love her, and I think she brings out even more from Levant than he shows earlier in the film when it takes a moment or two to get into the rhythms of Carax's editing and post modern approach to telling a story like we are plopped into the middle.  And by the time we are in the last twenty minutes?  The close-ups are no longer startling and instead feel... right. 

 It takes a moment to find one's bearings, but once one does Mauvais Sang has this great sensation of "Hey, why not?" And it's not that as an artist he wants to give the shove to all conventions, rather the way characters act and behave and look on screen embraces while subverting the expectations because... what else is cinema to do except to take risks?

So the men plotting the Big Job to steal steal vaccine are shirtless like 90% of the time? Why not? Explosive moments of violence are shot without any adherence to traditional geography for shots? If it can still click emotionally and you get that stunning push in on Binoche's face as this old and young man fight in front of her? Why not? All those close ups? Go for it! That one theme from the score of Caligula as a musical tone for when someone calls Alex and the answering machine goes off? Par for the course, man, that becomes minor. I don't know if all the basic parts of this story are wholly original- how a young man has such resentments and pent up energy against some people and such strong love and equal indifference to other young women depending on the scene or woman, a heist gone south- but the execution is.

Carax isn't stumbling to find his voice, rather the voice is the exuberance of cinema as well as the harrowing nature in drama and tragedy (all those whispering voices and tones). The brilliance of it doesn't hit you all at once but rather as this slow rising wave that keeps crashing; it's like the cinematic equivalent of going for a swim off the beach. And what a joy that he has such game performers ready to run and jump and punch and cry and do everything that cinema can show with such poetic force.

Leos Carax & Sparks: ANNETTE (2021)

 

The first thing that can't help but jump out in the front of my brain through much of Annette, the return for Leos Carax to features since Holy Motors and the first original filmed musical by Sparks (Ron and Russell Mael), is film trivia; specifically, there's the tidbit in the story (wish it was longer told but what can you do) about the brothers in the Edgar Wright documentary that for a time they tried to get a movie musical made with the famed comic director Jacques Tati but for a number of reasons not expounded on it wasn't to be.  

What came back to me was that the brothers may have had the wrong Jacques in mind all along and should have rung up Demy instead: clearly films like Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Young Girls of Rochefort had to be kicking around somewhere in them when they concocted a sung-through tragic love saga involving an angelic opera singer, her volatile and drunk stand up(?) Comic husband, and the baby they have together who happens to look oddly enough like a marionette (ohhh I get it now: Ann, Cotillard, meets ette... damn I'm dumb). 

It may not be fair to compare how Carax does a sung thru musical to the standard bearer high-water mark that Demy had with those musicals, but there is an example there that Carax and the Maels should have kept in mind: if you're going to follow two people in love, tragic or otherwise, it shouldn't have such a (to use a word Henry McHenry the Driver character says here) abysmal personality at the center of it, and perhaps there could be a little more variety or (sad to say with the Sparks connection) wit or lightness to what is essentially an opera in several acts - I dare say more than three but maybe less than six, who can keep count - where it may mean to be about the surfaces and plasticity and obviousness of fame and glory and how lacking in real emotions those provides but comes up short when it means to depict from early on (as the genuinely exquisite melody goes) two people who love each other so much.  

In other words, Annette is too long, too unwieldy, and probably when I look back on it all a failure.  I wonder wonder I should direct the worst vitriol to something like this that aims pretty high and has some mesmerizing and genuinely clever set pieces, such as the two main comedy scenes where we see Henry at his height and then at his low (Vegas, right), with his audiences like a staggering Greek chorus singing right back at him as he offends and rambles and cajoled on stage, or the puppet of Annette herself which I assume is an animatronic or a real marionette with the strings cgid out, or the interesting supporting performance of Helberg as the "Accompanist" who had more of a past with Ann than he first let on and speaks through his feelings in a scene where he conducts an orchestra in a sweeping series of 360 shots that feels like Carax is more in his element than in other parts of the story (at his worst, he imposes his style on some scenes where it doesn't work).

But for all that does impress, it isn't very good on the whole because the (anti) hero at the center is one of those total bores of a toxic masculine caricature, and while most of this is a sung-thru operatic film there are a few points people just talk and it could've been a good thing to see, you know, Henry and Ann having a simple conversation (the most we get outside of admittedly sexy lovemaking is a tickle scene, which has its own connotations of control in the face of enjoyment and Henry's seeming thrill of that I wish the film had explored more).  

And Driver, dog bless him, is carrying so much of the film on his shoulders that it at times looks like it could collapse under him (thank goodness he has those glorious tree trunks for limbs, to paraphrase John Oliver's running gag, but I digress). He is certainly putting his all into this, and Cotillard brings genuine pathos especially in those little scenes with Annette, but she is wasted in the grand scheme of the story, which is... a whole lot and yet not a lot at the same time.  

That's the thing about the movie: it has this stunning sense of presenting its world throughout, as Carax loves cinema so much that it seeps, as Holy Motors was, into and about its own aesthetic if that makes sense.  Of course it's not a yacht on a real ocean or a real cliff and of course it's not a "real" baby and of course it isn't how babies are born.  That charm can only work so far as the material, and it's too much of a "and then this and then this and then this," so it's never not compelling or captivating and yet at the same time it kind of just ambles - not least of which, especially because, the music itself is singing through exposition without it being more clever. 

Maybe to go back to Demy again, it's all about the tone and how we do or don't relate to the people on screen: if it's deep down a very dark story, that's fine, but you should then even occasionally make it less distanced via this aesthetic of the fantastical.... or not try to make this insufferable douche Henry a seemingly tragic figure.  

I don't know. I sound more like I didn't like this, and ultimately I can't recommend it for the creators falling flat on their faces in a story of fame that is ultimately too familiar.  But Annette is with all of its issues a work of art made by people who aimed for a spectacular experience, and I'd still be happy to pay to see something like this over, oh (looks at AMC app), GI Joe Origins or Jungle Cruise or some shit.  It could even become someone's favorite film, and more power to you if it does.   Or, if it doesn't sound like your cup of baby or Driver or musical where Driver makes a baby a superstar because hey that's how the world works, maybe stay away too.  

PS: Sometimes with a long movie I can't tell exactly what to cut out... here there is absolutely one scene that needed to go to the cutting room floor, which is the number about the six women accusing Henry of harassment. Like okay but if you're going there actually go there, and they never come back to it (it may even be a dream scene). This dude is bad enough without a #metoo sequence dating the movie.

Humphrey Bogart & Ava Gardner in THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA (1954)

The Barefoot Contessa is all about how men perceive a woman, who they indeed put on a pedestal and all but say she brings it on herself because, darn it, it's Ava Gardner after all, to the point where the writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz breaks up much of the structure of the film between three men who see her in the rise and not so much fall but disillusionment of the so-called fairy tale that has been laid out for her life. I've read some criticism that it being all from men, that we don't get her perspective or anywhere near the narration from Maria, makes the film dated and even perhaps sexist, that a woman filmmaker would have done more.

They may be right on the last score, but I would put to the former point that Mankiewicz means for this to be exactly about how all the men she encounters in her life (save perhaps for her father who, oh the ultimate irony, killed Maria's mother because... the radio got broken I guess, but hey she argues in his favor and he gets off, part of the fairy tale part of her life in an uncanny respect), and the controls put on her, except maybe by the director played by Bogart himself, are like this prism that she has to act or behave a certain way to be acceptable.

That is, until she can't because she finds love - or what she that this light seems to be the thing that will kick her out of the blasted darkness that other men, not least of which two competing uber-wealthy douchebags (one of which inspired by Howard Hughes) have kept her in since she was discovered as a dancer... and naturally the men who sought her out didn't even see what she could do as a dancer!

I think what I mean to get at here is The Barefoot Contess is extremely satisfying cynical Hollywood entertainment carrying some context from the fact that it comes from Mankiewicz post All About Eve and Bogart post In a Lonely Place. This isn't quite as biting or masterful as the former film (and I'll get to my one major issue soon), and I can see why Bogart took this role on even after he already played perhaps his most devastating/pitch-black tragic character in Lonely Place; this man has been broken down a peg or two by the industry, but where he's at when he meets Maria is a place where he's trying to be not as low down and of what his reputation precedes him as. What kinds of films he makes don't matter, just how he lifts Maria's sense of herself up (that comment he gives her about "the moon is your key light" is one of the best lines about cinema as beauty I've ever heard) and that as he sees her at key moments of her life in ascension and bewilderment and peace and sadness as this Mega Star.

While Bogart as Harry Dawes is, what else, world-weary cool but unflinching in honesty damn Bogart in the part, only a little more compelling at listening as an actor than he is delivering the juicy Mankiewicz monologues, Gardner has the toughest part to play here to show some inner life and joys and conflicts as this seemingly perfect image of a movie star, and it's a really strong performance that she can hold her own (of course there's more one could get to about a white actress playing Latino, but I'll leave those with more authority to go there, such as Karina Longworth in her book Seduction where she writes about this film and the connections to Hughes and stars in his orbit and directors he controlled, but I digress kind of).

As for the other perspectives aside from Dawes? This is where we see this filmmaker's strengths and mastery with language, this wonderful sense that the best of the Golden Age Hollywood writers could have in displaying fierce intelligence both intellectually and emotionally, as well as where he stumbles. Edmond O'Brian as Oscar, in an Oscar winning turn (nache), is the PR attack dog for the Not Hughes super millionaire who talks too much and that too is by design; he's he's sweaty mess of a man who can talk his way in a room to where one can tell the others have clearly heard it all before (ie when he finds out the news about Maria's parents criminal tragedy is a dark comic winner), except with Bogie he's met his match in a sense - he knows the BS Hollywood pushes just as much as him, and how a star's image can't be controlled or really dictated entirely as much as he might try... it just happens.

Less successful for me is the Italian count and his perspective, played by Brazzi. It's not that the actor is all bad in the part, he fills the suit and persona with some demur sense that befits a Count, and I love the scene where he watches Maria dance and the two connect. But he's given a lot of narration and monologues where he explains a lot, maybe too much, where less could have been more. It makes sense the Hollywood people and even the I'm The Best of the Best rich bastards talk and explain their lives and livelihoods where it become about the act of explication, but the actor isn't as believable or maybe the pouring out of the mind, heart and soul from the Count Fabrizi takes the movie into an area I'm not sure Mankiewicz makes as believable. Of course it goes in the climax into total melodrama, and then he more or less is fine (though with Gardner she is the emotional weight in *that* moment where he reveals his... physical problems to be a full lover).

But this isn't too much for me to take away calling Barefoot Contessa a pretty remarkable achievement, even something close to a flawed masterpiece. It's all down to that script which, by and large (like 90% of the time) presents a strikingly perceptive look for this or any time about what the all-engulfing machine of Capitalist Patriarchy can do to people, not just the women but the men too; of course it's also glamorous and beautifully shot (thank you much Jack Cardiff), and yet the filmmaker doesn't hide at all his to put it lightly mixed emotions about the industry he's playing in, where an empty husk "producer" can't be told how empty he is and how image constructs everyone around them.

(Screened on 35mm from a restoration via Fimm Forum NYC)

PS: it's extra fascinating that the Howard Hughes connection is in line with Gardner herself as an actor who had a relationship with Hughes (and holy crap how did I forget that aside from the Longworth book which I loved but from The Aviator as well). Maria Vargas comes from Rita Hayworth of coursr.

John Waters's MONDO TRASHO (1969)

 

Welp... this is definitely John Waters's first feature-length film!

It's almost unfair in my mind to give this a specific star rating because Mondo Trasho most reminds me of a student film. Of course that's not exactly the case as Waters was purely an independent filmmaker always meaning his art to be underground, that something like this or Multiple Maniacs or Eat Your Makeup might not play in a traditional theater and so what a church or local Cafe would do just as well. That it's all so No budget and shot like a hazy drug fueled nightmare adds to the appeal for a certain audience.

But also because I can relate - when I was college I made films not quite like this (there's nothing quite like Mondo Trasho anywhere else) but similar that I had no money, only friends and random people and a light or two (if I was lucky) to work with and I was still trying to figure out what I was interested in and with influences coursing through my veins like amphetamines. I know if I revisited them today I'd be embarrassed, and Waters has said more than once that he finds Mondo Trasho in retrospect to be too long and should have been a short film.

And while he may be right, and that there isn't so much a story as it's a very ragged outline to follow with a young woman (Pearce) getting her feet sucked (and LOVES it) by a foot fetishist and then hit by a car via Divine who brings her along town and winds up captured by workers at an insane asylum who sit there and watch a, uh, nude dancer I guess before everyone breaks out and Divine finally takes her to a doctor (oh good old David Lochary, but he's wearing a mask and you should be too) who proceeds to saw off Pearce's feet and attach those of a chicken, and then the movie just wanders a bit more with Dorothy in Oz heel clicking to end up in another part of low-end Baltimore and concluding with two broads (in one of the few times they have people talking in the audio) spewing a stream of "oh look at that speed freak etc etc"... I kept watching this because I wanted to see where this would go next.

For all of its (over) length the fact that there is a car accident in this lends itself to the style- you want to keep watching because of the crazy turns it will go to and how insane Waters fills the frame with his people acting like there's never been a top high enough to go over. And all put to that soundtrack!

The two most prominent 'children' so to speak of Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising when it comes to using music, often in wall-to-wall style, were clearly Martin Scorsese and John Waters, but for the latter there was also Andy Warhol and that is what makes Mondo Trasho so engaging even as (or despite) there not being a whole lot going on at times or scenes being stretched past their limits. There is a conflict in approach though as Warhol was very much about elongation and making the audience feel bored because being bored is good for you and Zzzzz. Waters didn't work like that even from early on as he was an outsider who wore his Freak Flag proud and wanted to get a rise out of the then easily shockable audience.

So a scene where we are watching Pearce wait for a bus for five minutes has a fascination to it - Waters once said this is what hitchhiking was really like, waiting around till one gave up (incidentally an Anger book is being read by Pearce on the bus) - but it isn't very engaging, even with the uh Graduation music put to it. Or the foot sucking scene, which has a great lead up with the fetishist sneaking around and looking like a would be Manson Family fucker, goes on past the point where there's even the laughter over how long it is (and are those cutaway shots to her fantasies while being pleasured? Search me). Or the dance in the asylum is another scene that goes on for so long that it becomes boring, and it shouldn't be because Waters is a natural entertainer. So it's at times frustrating to take as a film and not viewed as an early experiment by a guy trying to figure his shit out.

But what's interesting further is that it feels like Waters is growing as a director while the movie goes on - by the time we get to the Doctor's office, there's more of an energy and a filthy comic spirit to the edits and the song choices get even wilder. It's not that the movie before doesn't have these moments, a few pretty funny, where Waters gets his groove as a shameless provocateur, but till this set piece it's in fits and starts. I can't stress enough how unique the soundtrack here is, that it's a bit more eclectic than straight rock and roll (though there's lots of that) as Wagner and the Wizard of Oz soundtrack get time alongside Motown and Link Wray.

Mondo Trasho should be unclassifiable, a largely meant to be silent film (no sync sound, that came later) but also a Jukebox musical about a desperate lady in a convertible in Divine and the poor car crash victim and the Maniacs and bastards and bitches they meet along the way... but it's ultimately a John Waters/Dreamland Studios movie. I'm glad I saw it, even though I'm not sure I'd sit through it again any time soon.

Kathleen Turner in John Waters's SERIAL MOM (1994)

 

Among lines that haven't aged well, "I just love Bill Cosby pictures" is among the most haggard and bone-chilling.

Anyway, Serial Mom is a fabulous, 50 story flaming apple pie of a movie as John Waters brilliantly in a giant cartoon fresco merges ideas and themes from at least two of his previous works, most specifically (and this may be because I've been going through his oeuvre piece by piece the past few weeks) the inverse of both Female Trouble and Polyester, where the tough but damaged heroine of the former gets transmogrified by trash people into a mad killer who ultimately (spoiler) is sent to death at the chair and the downtrodden and gobsmacked housewife with an awful husband and useless couple of units (err children) has to reckon with her life and what's become of it - here we have a woman (Kathleen Turner, who should have in any just world won the Nobel peace prize nevermind the Osvar for this) who is loony tunes all on her own yet in a fine contradiction totally within her faculties, an absolutely equally terrible yet totally delightful force of nature who's husband is a simmering coward (Sam Waterston, who you've never seen like this before and wouldn't again) and who's kids are lovable dolts obsessed with pop culture and being adored (ie Ricky Lake and the various men she oggles- and likewise, in a great running gag). And as the bodies pile up, well... can you really blame her??

This is consistently hilarious work, full of perfectly executed scenes where the actors get to behave I'm the biggest and broadest strokes and dialog that constantly catches you off guard - especially because you should (or really I should) know by now with Waters what he'll put in the script to get the biggest laughs from the lowest blows. And yet what I admire so much when I ponder more on it is that Waters isn't punching down necessarily; this is upper middle class (white AF) suburbia where everyone has it pretty darn good, Beverly included as the housewife of a (I guess successful) dentist, the other wives and various supporting characters are self-absorbed nitwit people or just suck, and it's almost like Beverly cum Serial Mom is strangely enough a breath of fresh air for "Normal" society. If he's mocking anything in particular, and this is certainly a consistent throughline through all his movies, it's how tasteless and pathetic most people are, while it's all emaculately designed by Vincent Peranio for all this gonzo satire to spring from.

And of course the punching up also extends to the legal system and the media circuses that turn killers into All Star People, whether they intend to or not (and usually they do, or did back when that was more a thing). By the time Serial Mom becomes a recognized figure, she (one thing certainly akin to the Dawn character in Female Trouble) has to keep feeding the beast and loves the attention - though through that entire bonkers courtroom series of scenes the thing that's most clear is that as Beverly is finding all the ways to make herself lovable and a great scoundrel, she is still clearly not hinged (white heels after Labor Day? Nope!) In other words, as Waters keeps this rightfully ridiculous comic spectacle gaining in momentum, leading up to that big final day with the church, the Annie set piece (maybe the funniest of the murders which is saying a lot), the Camel Lips concert and then into the court, it's like the only way this could work is it it becomes about how this is ALL spectacle, everyone knows it, and maybe we're all the better for accepting it... or no that's not right word, acknowledging it, there.

I hope I made clear that Turner is phenomenal here, because she is, but extra shout outs to Mink Stole, the other end of the prank phone calls (::chefs kiss:: to all those all around), a young but totally game Matthew Lillard, Patty Hearst and Traci Lords's minor roles, and even the guy as Andy from Child's Play 3 gets a wild set piece involving an epic masturbation session to a Russ Meyer movie. And the other important things to know are this: this is directed just right, to be slick and colorful but never forgetting the (sometimes extreme) comic pacing needed for so many of these scenes, and yet it doesn't become so stylized to the point that it overshadows the performances, which brings me to the other movie this made me think of (also 94), Natural Born Killers.

That as well tackled the milieu of Serial Killers as Celebrities and how toxic the media can get in making it less about lives lost than about who can get the best book or movie deal, but Stone's film has aged a lot more poorly to me when compared to something like Waters film. Both films mean to show an extravagant, uber-even-monolithically satirical examination of what kinds of people are Serial killers and how they're seen as figures for mass Capitalist production, but Stone lathers the cinematic style on it so thick that it takes over from whats there on screen, and the people already in it should be strong enough (the characters as well as the performances) to say it all. 

Waters doesn't have that problem because he keeps things relatively simple visually - not to say he can't move the camera sharply or acutely or even in an amusing fashion or find clever editing - so we can focus on how bugfuck the material is on its own. Your mileage may vary, but decades down the line Setial Mom seems to have more to say on a substantive level about what a Suburban life does to people like Beverly, it doesn't bother explaining why she is this way, and the the silliness and violence is nearly invigorating. As the saying is: go big or go home!

So once again, anyway, Serial Mom is one of the underrated American films of the mid 90s, and up there with Waters most important (and fucking just funniest) films for me as far as the Mel Brooksian Rising Below Vulgarity thing.

Divine in John Waters' FEMALE TROUBLE (1974)

Tonight on Sick Sad World...

Few things are as wild as seeing the Warner Brothers logo before the start of this movie. If they can do it for this and it's part of Criterion, they can do it for The Devils. Also, a much better Cruella movie than we got, that's a given (would Disney have anything close to someone like the iconic Aunt Ida in one of their giant franchise IPs? I think not!)

"If they're smart, they're Queer - and if they're stupid, they're straight!"

Female Trouble is a 97 minute epic satirical scorcher of a treatise on how not just to smash the Patriarchal Hetero Capitalist bullshit American machine, but how to sick Divine on it, preferably with a chair. Waters is rapturously in tune with one of the truths of life or trying to live in a relentlessly hopelessly state, that the status quo being taken down several thousand pegs is a moral imperative.

And yet for all the rigorous critique of bastard men and brutal moms and dads and other authority figures and those who want or are in the Fine Life, the warped but all too appealing ideals of Beauty and glamour, from those absent Christmas cha-chas to that event halfway through the film, it's all so staggering. And apparently the liquid eyeliner was real.. holy shit.

The insanity and violence just keeps mounting - and what else is Waters supposed to do, slow down? You can't stop a car when the engine is a cavalcade of filthy humans overloaded with psychological turmoil, bruised egos, and good evidence for why dicks should've been outlawed ages ago.

As a film, it's better shot than Pink Flamingos, though it's never missing the gritty, practically stolen run-and-gun sheen of all of the early Waters movies (this time with more locked-down shots were Peranio's lavishly decrepit sets can shine). It's at times so funny it hurt (Mink Stole as Taffy, or at least that gold dress, should be in the Smithsonian), yet rancor and high voltage melodrama is on cue every fifteen or so minutes in the script. 

That is, I should qualify, until it gets to that finale where Dawn goes on stage and it goes into a whole other level. And did I mention that as a movie written for Divine she takes it for all its worth and then goes over the line into another level of reality?

This is all to say this is really really good. If you got to do a "villain" origin story, don't kid the audience. Waters implicates us in ways that the filmmakers doing the secretly safe "Origin" stories of today don't get to (at best they might be fun if not confrontational ala Birds of Prey, and at worst you get....Joker and again Cruella) - what it lacks in budget or polish it makes up in honesty about how, deep down, so many of us are creeps, or hollow hypocrites (re that courtroom scene). Or are straight and boring. 

Anyway, Female Trouble is not always easy to watch, but it's endlessly compelling all-American exploitation.

Sugar Cookies (1973) Starring Mary Woronov and Lynn Lowery

 

Like a prototype Vertigo remake (before De Palma gave it his old college try), only with a prototype Basic Instinct kind of icy (no pun intended) kick to it on a tenth of the budget of each. It's a story where a personal obsession leads this antiheroine Camila (Mary Woronov) to take a new woman who she is "casting" for an adult film, and the woman just happens to looks like the spitting image of her dead ex lover, a different adult star Alta, with Lynn Lowery as both the woman who dies in the first scene and this new woman, Julie Kent, who Camila befriends/beds/grooms for revenge. So, yeah, imagine if Scotty in Vertigo was not just shaping New Madeline into the Old Madeline, but getting her ready to enact revenge against Gavin Elster for fucking with him so bad.

Not an exact analogy, and ultimately there's a reason for that. Sugar Cookies lacks much of the moral and psychological ambiguity and the sheer weight of cinematic expression and grammar on the process of becoming infatuated and what that does to a person, which is what makes Vertigo the monumental or simply memorable film it still is - that Hitchcock could see through desire and idealized images while doing just that - and as far as the Basic Instinct comparison that comes down to really the lead being so Stone Cold Set in what she's about, though this film lacks the verve and humor that carried. Not that this doesn't try for humor, but arguably it comes from what I imagine was co writer Lloyd Kaufman finding the Gus character simply hilarious (and good God is it distracting how much that guy is like a young Jonah Hill teleported back in time, but digress).

If Sugar Cookies doesn't aim so high or achieve too much in the way of creating psychological depth between these two women, one who knows all and another who doesn't, then at least for one thing the filmmakers understand that there's this dominant-submissive angle that isn't expressed in sex so much (though they do get intimate, at least eventually) as it is in behavior and overall control, and the director cast Woronov, a force of nature who prior to this was largely one of the Factory Girls with Warhol, and Lynn Lowery, so well, in particular with a lot of trust put on the latter in a dual role as the heart of the film (in her debut) and allowed them the space to make these women emotionally complex and rich... to a degree.

One small example with Woronov comes to mind with how good she is here: there's a scene where Camila is getting Lowery into bed for a sort of role-play, naked (as she is for more or less half the film), and becomez shall we say very intimately familiar with her body via a small handgun, and the allusions of course to the former Alta, who Julie is now well aware of (at least on film and by reputation) leads to a brief struggle and fight to stop. Woronov does the whole "fine get out they were just blanks etc" thing, and then moves on the bed to make Julie guilty. One can say she is still manipulating her, but look at the pleasure and smiling Woronov is doing after all this, as if she knows this is all so silly (hey, they were just blanks). This is where we get some uncertainty in a good way about the character and it's driven by her performance; is she still playing her Instrument of Revenge, or is she getting emotionally closer to her in a genuine way? Or both? It's one of those times with an actor boosts the writing.

It is unadalterated sexploitation, and the Shannon performance is fairly one note (though he has a great look) as one of those master manipulative men of the adult film world - not that I can't believe men didn't exist like that then and still do, just that the actor plays it in a way that is icy but not on the same level as Woronov - and there's plenty of draggy time between the ladies in the middle where it feels like the script just said "They run around and go frolicking in a field" or some shit, and that one comic (barely a) subplot is nonsense. But there is something going on as far as a sordid, almost Neo-Noir tale of performative mindgames via a righteous Femme Fatale leading to the conclusion one can guess a mile away, and it shows that Lloyd Kaufman started out with something to say as a writer. If it falls short of what it reminds us of, it at least tried.

Gerald Kargl's ANGST (aka Fear) (1983)

 A  eat dog world, right?

Angst sets out to do something that is remarkable simply because the director makes it work: use the grammar of Cinema to get into a psychotic killer's headspace. More to the point, how Gerald Kargl and the cinematographer Rybczynski and this crew shoot much of the film, from this overhead I assume on a dolly track perspective, has in my limited perception (I'm sure scholars and critics can be more perceptive than me on this I mean) the tact of a God's eye point of view. 

If this was shot at all in any kind of standard Shot-Reverse-Shot manner it wouldn't stick or could become stale fast. But actually this is not true either; the script, which is thoroughly, vividly and rigorously from the point of view of this character, doesn't give us anything like conventional scenes for the most part - matter of fact I can't recall if he has a single conversation in the entire runtime with another person - so it's all just pure running and stalking and killing in sometimes sloppy/stupid/efficient physicality, and voiceover.

So we gave these staggering shots looking over what's going on, mostly with him there and sometimes with things like the family coming to the house that he's broken into, and there's also very stark and wild POV shots that at times seem to be with the camera strapped to the actor (I'm reminded of that one shot of a drunk Keitel in Mean Streets, or like 20% of Requiem for a Dream), and this is also when he is doing what he thinks he has to do to enact his elaborate and destined to fail plan involving whatever it is to make this family suffer. Angst in other words is as much of an experiment in terror as it is a story of a killer. So many times we've seen stories about mass murdering fuckwads. There are only so many times the filmmakers bother to try and grapple and reckon with what it means to SHOW it in a visceral style.

In other words, Angst is one of those movies, the notorious ones like Man Bites Dog or Cannibal Holocaust, where it isn't about trying to play headgames through subtlety or a director thinking they're too clever for the audience. On the contrary, I'm not so surprised this was even banned by some countries - though it shouldn't have been to be clear - as it is so In Your Face that it goes up to the edge or even just is exploitation, in this case of an actual murder that happened (and according to what one can find online about it, the movie actually softens what happened, as in hours more torture of the young woman by the demented bastard).

It builds up this anxious head of steam with how the director is showing us this man, played with this nervous and uncontainable energy by Erwin Leder (reminding one of a German Caleb Landry Jones) roaming around post prison release, abhorrently devouring a sausage (oh the power of the closeup, if only you could've known Mr Griffith), failing to release his homicidal urges on a cab driver, and then coming upon this house that he breaks into and then chaos ensues. 

On paper the story seems so pat, but the director does such a harrowing job of doing on a cinematic level what Stephen King often wrote about (or at least he did that one time in that introduction to the Dark Tower or one of those books), which is to fill the spaces with detail: this is staggering not because of the list of events but because of how we see the sweat pour out, how that dog barks, how the mother does *that* onto the wall, the image of the crippled man going up the steps, and finally that one murder that feels truthful even if it wasn't quite the truth of the real case: this is brutal and awful and... this is how it happens.

If it has a drawback, at least on a first viewing at home, it's that the last section right before the ending (which is great and brings things in a staggering way full circle almost like out of a nightmare ala Clockwork Orange) drags a little as the killer is doing in step by step detail what he thinks he needs to to get all the bodies together and clean up. It's not that the film stops dead or lacks any of the prior energy, very far from it, just that by now the film has led up to and done its one thing eith exceptional precision, and now we still have more to go. Again, this could be a first time watch sort of thing, and it is still riveting to experience, merely the minor drop before the last hurrah, so to speak.

This really does merit it's BEWARE stickers and parental advisory notices. I feel a little bad for Kargl in the short film in that it didn't get the recognition at the time and only gained cult status many years later (albeit my wife informed me after some research he's had a swimming career in commercials and Educational films - ironically near the end of this he makes an unintentional PSA for distracted driving). But he achieved his goal: tell the truth through a particular GIANT even bigger than life cinematic intensity through how the we see, from above or very close and in tumultuous compositions, what happens and gets taken for granted in the litany of True Crime stories and documentaries. To see it this way makes it... horrible.

Edgar Wright's THE SPARKS BROTHERS

 First of all... now this is an album cover! 

This is an comprehensive, long, completely enlightening, compulsively interesting, often very funny and most importantly as a sometimes creative person inspiring to a degree that is difficult to put into words. The output of Sparks on the surface seems remarkable until one understands that they're that thing that often gets eye rolls except when it's true, they're artists first and commercial product makers second.

They have less in common with the bands that I'm sure cribbed (consciously or not) from their work like the glam bands of the mid 70s or the electronic dance pop acts of the 80s (and BTW holy fuck did Pet Shop Boys steal their shit but I digress) than they do one of the subjects of their latter (opera?) Albums, Ingmar Bergman, or as I also thought of once or twice a Woody Allen or something. Here are guys who... it's not right to say they don't care about the audience because they clearly want to engage and communicate and open their off kilter little hearts to people, but they don't partake in trends because they want to cash out, or have any sense that This is What We Should Do Now.

The constant thread is "we just finished this, now it's on to the next thing" and why wait when you can follow what matters to you. In the Maels brothers case it's being funny, and not taking their subject matter for granted (ie their songs on loneliness and dejection are a piece with a lot of good pop music). They something new, but at the same time with a vibrancy and tone in their voices that we know - and to conclude this comparison, if they land a Serpent's Egg or Jade Scorpion, move on to what's next! If their work meets the times they're in its either by coincidence or just that they like folks like Giorgio Moroder or Franz Ferdinand or the GoGos lady.

On the one hand this is lacking the thing that many music documentaries have which is some major drama or setbacks. There is that period where they could so to speak barely get arrested much less a record deal (and good God I am curious more on why that Tim Burton anime adaptation fell apart, albeit if it meant it gave us Ed Wood then insert Larry David torn gif here, again digress, damn I should stop that), and that a shame.

But this is like 95% a celebration of the joy and *work* that goes into being in something like Sparks - another creative comparative that is hard not to go-to, the Coen brothers, think on it for a few minutes - and how they reached so many without catering to them specifically, except in the sense of being natural and even quixotic and beguiling storytellers and finding weird and exciting ways to go about stuff taken for granted like album covers (the one with them tied up in poses and then one brother reaching for the phone is magnificent). In a way it's kind of refreshing to have it be so drama free, even if by the end the wrap up goes on a little longer than one might expect.

Ultimately, these are two chill dudes from California who on first listen (at least to the minor breakthrough "This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us") sound like some bizarre German art project, are fun to listen to and their collaborators give us a sense that their can be soul to what dances the Edge between genuinely provocative pop and novelty dance stuff. And last but not least this serves as like a giant generous gift on the part of Edgar Wright.

 For a time when I heard this was coming out and saw the trailer I felt kind of guilty, like how could I have not heard of these two before? But the thing Wright means to make here really is that so many have a point of entry into their work, and even if it's this documentary now you're here and you can enjoy and dig deep into what they do (or dance or look puzzled or whatever).

PS: Ohhhhh that's who he looks like! All this movie, until near the end, Ron Mael looked so familiar or like someone and then it hit me: Robert Crumb. Look at the two of them and tell me you don't see a slightly more uncanny and flamboyantly nerdy fellow on that keyboard/dancing like no one's watching. Digress again? Nah, I'm fine with this point.

(*a reference to two of their songs)