Two for Tuesday
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Author Archives: Reid Mukai
Saturday Matinee: The Third Man
The Trouble with Harry Lime
By David H. Schleicher
Source: The Schleicher Spin
I initially felt a fool for not having seen The Third Man earlier. However, in retrospect, having now read most of Graham Greene’s major works, and having received some keen insight into the back-story of producer Alexander Korda through Kati Marton’s book The Great Escape, I feel I was able to enjoy The Third Man even more for the staggering masterpiece that it is.
As a European/American co-production bankrolled by two legendary hands-on producers, David O. Selznick and Alexander Korda, The Third Man was masterfully crafted by director Carol Reed from a screenplay by British novelist Graham Greene. The film served as a pinnacle of the film noir movement and is a prime example of master filmmakers working with an iconic writer and utilizing an amazing cast and crew to create a masterwork representing professionals across the field operating at the top of their game.
Fans of Greene’s novels need not be disappointed as the screenplay crackles with all that signature cynicism and sharp witted dialogue. Carol Reed’s crooked camera angles, moody use of shadowing and external locations (Vienna, partially bombed out, wet and Gothic, never looked more looming and haunting) and crisp editing are the perfect visual realizations of Greene’s provocative wordplay and often saturnine view of the world. Reed’s brief opening montage and voice-over introducing us to the black market in Vienna is also shockingly modern, as it is that energetic quick-cut editing that has influenced directors like Scorsese to film entire motion pictures in just such a style. Also making the film decidedly timeless is the zither music score of Anton Karas, a bizarre accompaniment to the dark story that serves as a brilliant contradiction to what is being seen on screen.
The story of The Third Man slides along like smooth gin down the back of one’s throat as characters, plot and mood meander and brood along cobblestone streets and slither down dark alleys in an intoxicated state. Heavy drinking hack writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten, doing an excellent Americanized riff on Graham Greene himself) arrives in post WWII occupied Vienna to meet up with his old pal Harry Lime (Orson Welles) only to find that Lime is reportedly dead, the police (headed by a perfectly cold Trevor Howard) don’t seem to care, and Lime’s charming broken-hearted mistress (Alida Valli, perfect as another Greene archetype) has been left behind. Of course, Martins can’t leave well enough alone as conspiracy, murder, unrequited romance, and political intrigue ensue. Welles benefits greatly from being talked about for most of the film and appearing mostly in shadows spare for two scenes: the famous ferris wheel speech, and a climatic chase beneath the streets of Vienna through Gothic sewers. His top hap, dark suit, and crooked smile are the stuff of film legend.
The side characters, however, are what make The Third Man such a rich, rewarding experience. We’re treated to small glimpses into the mindsets of varying people ranging from a British officer obsessed with American Western dime-store novels (of which Martins claims his fame) to an Austrian landlady eternally wrapped in a quilt going on and on in her foreign tongue as international police constantly raid her building and harass her tenants. The brilliance is that one needs no subtitles to understand her frustration. These added layers of character and thoughtful detail, hallmarks of Greene, set The Third Man in a class above the rest of film noir from the late 1940’s era.
Make no mistake, The Third Man is arguably one of the most finely crafted films ever made. One’s preference towards noir and Greene’s world-view will shape how much one actually enjoys the film. For the sheer fact it has held up so well over the decades and has clearly influenced so many great films that came after it, its repeated rankings as one of the greatest motion pictures ever made can not be denied. With a good stiff drink in hand, and Graham Greene’s collection dog-eared on my bookshelf, The Third Man is undoubtedly now one of my favorite films. Reed’s closing shot of a tree-lined street along a cemetery and Joseph Cotten leaning against a car smoking a cigarette while Alida Valli walks right past him with that zither music score playing is one that has left an indelible mark on my memory and enriched my love of film as art.
Watch The Third Man on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/the-third-man-joseph-cotten/18085476
Varieties of Painful Experiences
When I first arrived at neuro ICU my body felt mostly numb from strong meds and also inflammation from the injury. In the relatively short time I was there I began to sense the changes as the inflammation gradually decreased and sensations of pain emerged.
I experienced the frequency of muscle spasms incrementally increase as arm and shoulder muscles tightened. Little did I know this would continue as a chronic baseline pain to this day. Sometimes it can be temporarily alleviated with medication or other modalities, but the pain is always there.
Also during my stay at neuro ICU, a mild soreness in my throat gradually intensified to the point of finding it difficult to swallow. At the time I didn’t need to swallow often since I took in water and nutrients through tubes and phlegm could be removed with the suction tube. Fortunately that particular pain was permanently relieved about a month later when the feed tube was removed from my nose and throat.
Being unable to move makes one acutely aware of how discomfort and pain exist on a continuum. Without a way to easily relieve oneself of mildly sore muscles, I would sometimes wait it out until it escalated to legitimate pain. In such cases my only option at the time would be to trigger a nurse call light to request a dose of oxycodone.
Sometimes I’d still feel pain after the effects of the oxy wore off. Since I wasn’t allowed to take more than one dose of it within six hours I had no choice but to live with the pain, which was an experience I’ve never had to endure prior to my injury. Like most people, I’d always find some way to block, alleviate, or easily distract attention away from the pain with activities. In some cases the sustained pain became a new baseline and seemed to lose intensity over time on its own.
Being less able to completely avoid pain forced me to examine it and think of ways to ameliorate it as much as possible in my mind. I had previously noticed how emotional pain sometimes diminished with the onset of more immediate physical pain, or how a lower intensity pain would fade in the background as more acute and alarming pain emerged, highlighting the connection between pain and attention.
Another pain management strategy was one I practiced while conditioning myself to be able to sit on a wheelchair for extended periods. In conjunction with binaural beats, I visualized my soul or astral body disassociating from my physical body and floating away, usually orbiting above earth. This imagery happens to be similar to thumbnail and video art often accompanying binaural beats on YouTube. The sound and visuals seem to go together naturally and I found it to be effective for the type of pain I went through.
As if to foreshadow what was in store for my future, just a few days after being admitted to neuro ICU I was visited by Aaron, a research coordinator for a University of Washington study on hypnosis as a pain management therapy for spinal cord injury patients. He was scouting for volunteers for his study which would require a series of one hour sessions throughout my stay at Harborview (and a few months after) compensated for by a small gift card stipend and access to the hypnosis recordings.
Though still in relatively less pain at the time, I volunteered to see if hypnosis could diminish the pain I was starting to feel and to hopefully provide useful data for therapists and patients. Volunteers were split into study and control groups. Those in the study would receive the hypnotherapy while the control group was interviewed about experiences and attitudes regarding pain.
Unfortunately I ended up in the control group, but was allowed access to hypnotherapy recordings after the conclusion of the study and the interviews provided much food for thought about the nature of pain. It also helped mentally prepare me for the increasing pain to come. As it turned out, the hypnosis sessions I listened to didn’t seem to alleviate my pain, though the effectiveness may have been hindered by my mental state and/or setting.
I may give hypnotherapy another try in the future, but in the meantime I’ve found therapeutic massage, acupuncture, electrical stimulation therapy, and CBD, CBN, and CBG cannabinoids to be more effective alternative treatments.
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: The Zero Theorem
Short Takes: The Zero Theorem
By Laura Kern
Source: Film Comment
The futureworld of The Zero Theorem is so chaotic, gaudy, aggressively high-tech, and lonely—and not much of a stretch from where we’re heading—that it’s no wonder Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz) wants to stay indoors permanently. The Gollum-like Qohen (that’s Co-hen)—all neuroses and no hair, and even prone to referring to himself as “we”—is a corporate number cruncher so skilled that he is granted permission to work from home, a cavernous former church he shares with pigeons, rats, and many layers of dust, tasked with solving the unsolvable title equation, pertaining to the meaning of life.
But, as it turns out, there’s not much peace to be had in Qohen’s hideaway either. This empty, socially inept man’s world—both real and virtual—is regularly disrupted by a collection of amusing weirdos, including, most notably, his weaselly superior (David Thewlis) and the big boss’s obnoxious yet ultra-likeable genius teenage son (Lucas Hedges) who’s sent in to assist Qohen. (The considerable screen chemistry between Waltz and Hedges makes for some of the film’s best scenes.) The women, however, don’t fare quite so well: Mélanie Thierry as the “love interest” is relegated to looking like a human sex doll, while Tilda Swinton, playing “odd” yet again, is cringe-worthy as Qohen’s invasive digital psychiatrist.
The Zero Theorem is very much a Terry Gilliam film: fantastical, kooky, occasionally sloppy, but with a big brain and a beating heart. And like most of his work, it won’t appeal to all, but its unmistakable passion makes it well worth the while.
Watch The Zero Theorem on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/653313/the-zero-theorem
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: Starman
The Complete Carpenter: Starman (1984)
By Ryan Harvey
Source: Black Gate
It’s taken me exactly a year to go from Dark Star to Starman in my survey of John Carpenter’s career. At this rate, I’ll be at Escape From L.A. by this time in 2018. The timing works out on this one, however. There’s no “winter holiday” Carpenter movie — no, The Thing doesn’t count, that’s a “winter” movie — but Starman is as cheerful and uplifting a science-fiction tale as Carpenter has ever turned out, so it feels right for December.
Starman has quite the long history behind it. The script was in development at Columbia back in 1980 and went through a round-robin of writers. Columbia had the opportunity to do the Spielberg project that would eventually turn into E.T., but turned it down in favor of Starman — a decision the studio would come to regret when E.T. became the highest-grossing movie in history during the Summer of 1982 (when it squashed a certain other alien visitor movie).
The mega success of E.T. caused director John Badham to abandon Starman because he thought it was too similar to Spielberg’s movie. (Badham went on to direct WarGames, so that worked out.) Many other directors were on the film at one time or another — Adrian Lynne, Mark Rydell, Tony Scott, Peter Hyams — but John Carpenter had the pitch that stood out: film it as a love story/road movie in the classic Hollywood vein. Like It Happened One Night, but with an alien. Carpenter wanted to show he had the directing chops to tackle a different type of material. He was also still wounded over the poor reception of The Thing and wanted to deliver a hit for a big studio.
And thus we have a John Carpenter film for the whole family! Which is odd enough on its own.
The Story
Advanced extraterrestrials discover space probe Voyager II and choose to answer humanity’s invitation to “come and see us sometime,” as inscribed on the probe’s audio-visual disc. An alien observation ship heads to Earth, but the U.S. Air Force knocks it from its planned course so it crashes in rural Wisconsin. The disembodied alien aboard takes on the human shape of Scott Hayden (Jeff Bridges), the recently deceased husband of lonely Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen), by using DNA from a lock of Scott’s hair.
Jenny’s reaction to the physical resurrection of her husband with an extraterrestrial’s mind is… complex. She agrees to drive Starman-Scott to Arizona for a rendezvous with a ship from his homeworld. At first she acts out of fear, but later because she’s genuinely falling in love with the being in Scott’s shape — and she knows his body will die unless he makes the rendezvous. Their cross-country trip must stay ahead of pursuit by the police, a curious SETI scientist (Charles Martin Smith), and an aggressive National Security Agency director (Richard Jaeckel) who isn’t interested in giving the alien the “friendly reception” promised on Voyager 2’s golden disc.
The Positives
Starman is a sweet, lyrical movie that has aged beautifully. It’s Carpenter’s most humanist film, the opposite of the invasion paranoia and frigid horror of The Thing. But Starman isn’t Carpenter attempting to do a karaoke E.T. or imitate Spielberg, even considering the background of the project. No one else could’ve made Starman the way Carpenter did. E.T. is a science-fiction fable about childhood. Starman is a science-fiction fable about adulthood, realized as a road movie. It’s also a beautiful and complex romance about love rediscovered and hope overcoming morbidity and the human tendency to cynicism. Yes, overcoming cynicism in a John Carpenter film!
In short, this is probably the only John Carpenter film you can show to your Great Aunt Betty. Or to any other relatives who just don’t get out to movies that often. It’s a four-quadrant film — the only one in the director’s career.
It’s astonishing/aggravating how the 1980s shrugged off the brilliance of Jeff Bridges. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the entertainment world stopped taking him for granted as merely a handsome actor who had an almost proverbial trouble landing roles in hit movies. Starman is a perfect case of this: although he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor that year, Bridges not only didn’t win, he didn’t experience a major career boost from the nomination. Starman was only a moderate success in 1984, which didn’t help, and people seem to have forgotten Bridges was even nominated for the movie.
Bridges’s Best Actor nomination is the only time any Carpenter film got an Oscar nod. (“What, The Thing wasn’t nominated for special effects?” you’re shouting. Nope, it wasn’t. Don’t shoot the messenger.) Bridges lost to F. Murray Abraham for Amadeus. I can’t complain much about this because Jeff Bridges eventually won an Oscar for Crazy Heart in 2009, Abraham was superb in Amadeus, and Bridges has never been anything but thankful for the career he’s had. (“I couldn’t of dreamed it being any cooler than it is,” he said in a 2009 interview.) But given all that, if I were an Academy voter in 1984, I’d definitely cast my vote for Jeff Bridges. Because he’s just amazing in Starman.
Bridges as Starman-Scott is immediately impressive for the unusual physicality the actor invests in the part. Viewers are continually reminded through even the smallest gestures (oh, that nutty smile!) that this is an alien creature trying to figure out the most basic workings of the human body and human communication. Just watching Starman attempt to navigate eating Dutch apple pie feels like a full acting course. There’s also tons of great humor from the character quirks, with gags that Terminator 2: Judgment Day would later recycle as Starman-Scott fumbles with colloquialisms and gestures like “Take it easy,” and “Up yours.” My favorite of these comedy bits is when Starman-Scott nearly gets him and Jenny killed on a railroad track because he learned the wrong lesson about driving from watching her: “Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast.”
But what Bridges achieves with the role is bigger than odd tics and a physical sense of the alien. He shows Starman-Scott evolve over a few days from an entity that terrifies Jenny into a person she loves deeply, and not only because he resembles her deceased husband. Starman is an alien moving toward human — but also toward something better than human and better than his species, as he indicates his and Jenny’s son will be. His wordless resurrection of Jenny inside the trailer is a powerhouse moment for Bridges where he shows the key point of alien and human merging. (He never tells Jenny that he brought her back from death, a subtle but wonderful addition to the character.)
It takes two to make a romance story work, of course. Thankfully, Karen Allen delivers her career-best performance as Jenny Hayden. (Sorry, Raiders of the Lost Ark.) Starman-Scott may be the flashiest part, but Jenny is the main character who goes through the change from a woman burnt-out early in life by the loss of a loved one to a woman reborn with hope for the future. The role is an incredibly challenging one, putting the strain of a constant tug-of-war of emotions on Allen as she reacts to the bizarre actions and potential danger from an alien wearing the form of the recently deceased love of her life. That’s plenty for an actor to unpack in each scene, and Allen goes on an incredible emotional road trip along with the physical one. Trying to explain the meaning of love to Starman-Scott in the diner, right as she’s making another plan to escape from him, is one of the tear-jerking highlights. But it’s the scene aboard the train, where Starman-Scott tells her she will have his baby, that contains Allen’s finest moments. It’s also the best scene in the film, lovingly crafted in a way I’d wager most people in Hollywood would never have expected from John Carpenter.
Although still missing photographer Dean Cundey (Donald M. Morgan repeats from Christine), Carpenter lenses some amazing outdoor sequences using the open spaces of Middle America as a canvas. It’s the most visually wide-open film he ever shot. I’m used to complimenting Carpenter and his cinematographers for doing impressive work with the widescreen format in enclosed and dark spaces. Here’s the opposite: Carpenter having the opportunity to shoot a movie like a John Ford epic Western. He even gets to use Monument Valley!
Starman is my pick for the best score to a John Carpenter film not composed or co-composed by John Carpenter. Producer Michael Douglas convinced Carpenter to let Jack Nitzsche score the film, based on Douglas’s previous work with Nitzsche on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nitzsche’s all-electronic score has some striking similarities to Carpenter’s own work (I think he paid close attention to the director’s musical style) but it develops enough of a separate identity. The main theme, a soaring love piece, is an exemplar of how mid-1980s composers were discovering ways to create vast electronic soundscapes. (See also: Vangelis.)
The only Carpenter Acting Company regular to pop up is Buck Flower, who plays a short-order cook who gives Starman-Scott a ride after the alien feels he’s putting Jenny in too much danger. It’s one of the funniest scenes, as the cook finds its surprisingly easy to chat with Starman-Scott’s odd handling of conversations:
Cook: What’s your line?
Starman-Scott: Line?
Cook: Work. Whaddya do when you’re not hitching rides?
Starman-Scott: Oh, I make maps.
Cook: Make any money?
Starman-Scott: [pause] I make maps.
Cook: Well, you don’t get rich cookin’ either!
At one hour and fifty-five minutes, Starman is John Carpenter’s longest movie. Think about that: nineteen movies on his resumé and none even reached the two-hour mark. That’s incredible, and it says plenty about what an efficient filmmaker and tight storyteller Carpenter is.
The Negatives
I don’t have much to say against Starman. As a gentle science-fiction romance, it’s nearly perfect. Yet … it’s never my first choice when I’m looking to rewatch a John Carpenter film. There’s so much to love about it, but it doesn’t engage me on the same level that even some ostensibly lesser entries in the Carpenter filmography do.
As I talked about above, this isn’t a sell-out movie or Carpenter trying to imitate a recent hit. This is no work-for-hire paycheck gig like Memoirs of an Invisible Man. But it feels like something Carpenter needed to do at least once so he could get back to the suspense, cynicism, and violent weirdness that are his specialty; the films of his that are endlessly rewatchable. Starman is an interesting detour for Carpenter, as well as a good film to share with non-fans and family members who don’t want to watch gang members murder a little girl, an “action adventure comedy Kung-Fu ghost story monster movie,” or a satirical/political allegory about alien invaders that also contains a prolonged wrestling scene. Just writing those descriptions explains a lot about why I love John Carpenter’s movies — and why I feel a touch removed from Starman.
One actual criticism I have is that the government/science sections of the story with scientist Mark Shermin and military blowhard George Fox are less developed than the road trip romance sections. The seamless split between these similar halves of the narrative that Spielberg achieved in Close Encounters of the Third Kind with Roy Neary’s collapsing family on one side and Lacombe’s quest on the other doesn’t occur here. The movie loses a bit of its momentum whenever it shifts away from its central couple.
Charles Martin Smith gives Mark Shermin personality, but there’s not much to the character on the page and his impact on events is minimal. The trimming down of the military, political, and SF aspects of the story to center more on the romance only really inflict damage to the movie in this case: it seems as if Shermin should have a larger role and much more to say about who and what the alien visitor is. His only encounter with Starman-Scott is a short one; I would’ve enjoyed a few additional minutes of exchange between them to learn more about Starman’s view of humanity and what drives Shermin.
The Pessimistic Carpenter Ending
Not applicable! This is as optimistic as Carpenter films come, leaving Jenny Hayden on Earth with her life renewed and the gift of a child from both her husband and the Starman — a child who shall become a teacher. You won’t find as optimistic a quote in the Carpenter canon as Starman’s observation on humanity: “Shall I tell you what I find beautiful about you? You are at your very best when things are worst.”
After the Crash 