Category Archives: Film

Saturday Matinee: Urgh! A Music War

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By Rob Gonsalves

Source: Rob’s Movie Vault

I loved every second of Urgh! A Music War, even when I was baffled. Perhaps especially when I was baffled. How else does one respond to such only-in-the-early-’80s acts as Invisible Sex, who appear onstage in makeshift hazmat suits, or the late Klaus Nomi with his futuro-bizarro getup and his soaring falsetto, or the Surf Punks with their punk-nerd outfits and the simulated sex in an onstage beach shack? Dear God, what a strange and wondrous time for alternative music. This was an era in which the Go-Gos could be sandwiched between the roughhouse punk acts Athletico Spizz 80 and Dead Kennedys and somehow not seem out of place. (Belinda Carlisle, in the Urgh! footage, may be bouncy and happy, but she’s got the prerequisite short punk ‘do.)

Urgh! was filmed in 1980 at a variety of locations (New York, London, France, Los Angeles) as a somewhat scattershot attempt to capture some of the emerging New Wave and punk acts of the day. It can be seen today as an accidental Woodstock, as musically important in its way as Michael Wadleigh’s Oscar-winning documentary was. It catches, for instance, one of XTC’s last live performances (a ripsnorting “Respectable Street,” easily one of the film’s highlights) before Andy Partridge got allergic to the stage life and announced that XTC would no longer do concerts. At the end, when the Police do “Roxanne” (a great performance — man, they kicked ass in concert back in the day) and then “So Lonely,” they invite various groups we’ve seen in the movie: UB40, Skafish, the ivory-tickling Jools Holland, and others; it’s a semi-historic jam.

When the camera moves in on one attractive woman or another in the crowd (which is somewhat often), you can tell that at the time the camera crew was just filming whatever caught their eye (and pants), but seen today it’s a cultural document: It’s fun to see how young women were dressing to go see X or Pere Ubu. From this movie, you might also conclude that the Lollapalooza generation didn’t invent pogo-ing, moshing, and stage-diving; you see it all here (most amusingly, I thought, during sets by the Go-Gos and Oingo Boingo). Urgh! also captures a deadpan-antagonistic time in rock. Many of the punk and New Wave acts here don’t seem to give a fuck whether you like them or not, yet they come to play and they play hard. When Lux Interior of the Cramps sticks his mike in his mouth and staggers around grunting as it hangs out, it’s a primal moment to rival Pete Townshend’s guitar-smashing; it comes from the same basic impulse, anyway.

You notice, too, the high level of joy in these performances. Many of the arrogant young (mostly) men onstage may have been in it to entertain themselves, but they keep things moving. The gyrations here couldn’t be further from the frozen-faced growling of today’s “alternative” rock. Dead Kennedys’ frontman Jello Biafra, spitting out “Bleed for Me,” exhorts the crowd to enjoy the freedom to hear punk rock — while it lasts (the punk rock and the freedom). Biafra has a corrosive staccato gaiety that matches Johnny Rotten at his most splenetic. Kenneth Spiers, lead shouter of Athletico Spizz 80 (doing their novelty hit “Where’s Captain Kirk?”), jumps around spraying the audience, fellow band members, and himself with silly string, then tosses the empty can over his shoulder, not caring if it hits any of his bandmates. Jim Skafish bends himself into art-rock pretzels during “Sign of the Cross,” a nerd’s idea of punk (a lot of the music here is a nerd’s idea of punk, including Devo, represented here with the relentless “Uncontrollable Urge”). Steel Pulse illustrate their song “Ku Klux Klan” with a (black) band member capering onstage in a KKK outfit. Howard Devoto of Magazine — the former Buzzcocks member who bears an uncanny resemblance to Chuck & Buck‘s Mike White — strolls around the stage as if waiting for a bus, a sly inversion of punk flailing that has its own quiet punk wit. In comparison with the carefree showmanship seen in Urgh!, many of today’s acts seem stoic, almost monastic, and far more self-involved and nihilistic than the most insular New Wave warbler.

Half of these groups didn’t seem to go anywhere after 1981, but it’s a treat to go back in time and catch the ones that did make it. Two elder statesmen of film-soundtrack composition, Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo and Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo, come off here like the sweaty madmen they were back then. Joan Jett (doing an electrifying “Bad Reputation”) looks appealingly almost-chubby, before the label presumably told her to slim down for MTV; the same is true of Belinda Carlisle. Exene Cervenka nonchalantly commands the stage on X’s “Beyond and Back,” as does Gary Numan (tooling around in a little car) on “Down in the Park.” The one-hit wonders and no-hit wonders are equally alluring. I was charmed by Toyah Willcox’s jubilant hopping about, trying to be cool but too happy to pull it off. It’s a shame the exuberant Chelsea weren’t better known. Wall of Voodoo, whose lead singer Stan Ridgway resembles a crank-addled Griffin Dunne, pumps up the defiant “Back in Flesh” (no, not “Mexican Radio” — that would be too obvious). The movie is heavily male, but the female singers — Willcox, Carlisle, Jett — distinguish themselves by their clarity. Joan Jett screams as fiercely as anyone, but you can understand everything she’s saying, whereas many of the male singers rant unintelligibly (which can be its own kind of hostile fuck-you lyricism). The viewer/listener comes away thinking that Jett and the other women have fought too hard to be on that stage to waste the opportunity to be heard; the men, accustomed to being heard, let their words clatter and fall every which way.

Jonathan Demme is thanked in the credits, and much of Urgh! shares the concert-film aesthetic he pioneered in Stop Making Sense and continued in Storefront Hitchcock. Director Derek Burbidge, who made rock videos back then (including “Cars” for Gary Numan and pretty much all the Police’s early MTV highlights), is into simplicity, not flash (a useful approach when catching thirty-odd bands on the fly in three different countries). The bands are given space to work up their own rhythm — the editing doesn’t do it for them. Burbidge is as fond of the mammoth close-up as Sergio Leone ever was, and half of “Roxanne” seems to explore Sting’s nostrils from previously unseen angles. Performers like Lux Interior and Jello Biafra seem to be dripping sweat right onto you. The effect is to take you into the front row.

Urgh! doesn’t (and can’t possibly) have the cohesive brilliance or musical momentum of Stop Making Sense — the styles are simply too varied, throwing you from catatonic New Wave to thrashing punk in an eyeblink. Still, as a record of a moment and a sound, it ranks up there with the best you’ve seen and heard.

Saturday Matinee: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

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Why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Remains Unforgettable

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Source: RogerEbert.com

Despite its gently bummed-out vibe, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a sneakily powerful film. It’s so affecting, in fact, that I get a little sad just thinking about the story and characters. Even though I saw “Eternal Sunshine” twice in a theater when it came out and put it on my 2004 Top 10 list, I only revisited it once more after that (to be interviewed for a video essay that, as far as I know, is no longer available online) and haven’t watched it since. It’s not just the story itself that’s piercing; it’s the film’s visualization of memories being destroyed, which hits harder now after seeing so many older friends and relatives (including my mother) succumb to Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a truly great film that can be endlessly appreciated and analyzed for what it’s actually about even while it acquires secondary meanings.

“Eternal Sunshine” is the most perfect film ever made from a Charlie Kaufman screenplay, although Kaufman’s self-written directorial debut “Synecdoche, New York” is an altogether greater, or at least more grandly ambitious, work. Michel Gondry’s decision to shoot almost the entire film in a handheld, quasi-documentary style and have all the special effects appear to have been accomplished in-camera (i.e. through trickery on the set itself, in the manner of a filmed stage production) even when they were digitally assisted doesn’t just sell the idea that everything in the story is “really happening” even when it’s a memory: it blurs the line between what’s real and what’s remembered, an integral aspect of Kaufman’s script that informs every line and scene. The “spotlight” effects created by swinging flashlights on dark streets and in unlit interiors are especially disturbing. When the characters run or hide in those sorts of compositions in sequences, the film boldfaces its otherwise subtly acknowledged identity as a science fiction movie. Past and present (and possible future) lovers Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) might as well be rebels in a Terminator film, scampering through bombed-out panoramas and trying not to get zapped by a machine.

Star Jim Carrey was no stranger to dramatic roles by that point in his career, having starred in the media satire “The Truman Show,” the Andy Kaufman biography “Man on the Moon,” and the 1950s-set romantic thriller “The Majestic” (by “The Shawshank Redemption” director Frank Darabont, largely forgotten but worth a look). But his performance as Joel Barish (rhymes with perish) stands apart from everything else he’s done because of its staunchly life-sized approach. It’s a performance as a regular guy that’s entirely free of movie star egocentrism, unflatteringly (or perhaps just unselfconsciously) depicted from start to finish. It’s not easy to forget all the classic Carrey slapstick gyrations that preceded it, and that made him one of the most bankable stars of the 1990s, but somehow you do. He even looks different in the face, somehow. If I’d gone into it not knowing it was him, I might’ve thought, “Who is that actor? He’s excellent, and he looks kinda like Jim Carrey.”

Kate Winslet, who became an international star with Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures” and a superstar with “Titanic,” established herself as a bona fide character actress in this film. She inhabited Clementine so completely that she unknowingly perfected a type: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, as per Nathan Rabin’s wonderful phrase describing a woman who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” I don’t think that’s an entirely accurate description of Clementine as a person; with a bit of distance, she seems more like somebody with undiagnosed mental illness, and Joel is probably right there with her. But it does describe how the role echoed throughout time and through other films and TV shows (including “Elizabethtown,” the film Rabin was reviewing when he coined the phrase, and that happens to costar “Eternal Sunshine” cast-member Kirsten Dunst). There’s no denying the effect the performance had on future movies, which served up endless variations on Clementine.

Gondry’s style creates an analogy for what happens when a person’s memories begin to disintegrate or disappear, in the all-over, “global” sense (Alzheimer’s), as well as for the fleeting universal experience of struggling to remember a name, or some aspect of a dream, and somehow managing to grasp a sliver of it, only to see it slip away and vanish. 

The movie also somehow captures that awful knowledge that the personal dramas which consume us go unnoticed by almost everyone else. When it came out, the movie felt so immediate that it was as if you were seeing something that was actually happening, out in the physical world. It still feels like something that could happen because of how it’s lit and filmed. The action seems to have been captured entirely in real locations even when the actors are on sets. The locations tend to be unglamorous, with the notable exception of the beach at Montauk where Joel and Clementine first met (there’s no way to make a beach seem anything less than majestic). The ordinary magic that constantly happens inside each of us – the staggeringly complicated interplay between present-tense observation and interactions; the stabbing intrusions of memory, fantasy, and trauma – contrasts against boringly regular urban and suburban settings that seem to have been chosen because they are the human equivalent of the featureless mazes where rodents of science reside. When Joel and Clementine race through memory spaces where Joel has hidden memories of Clementine to prevent their erasure, they scamper and stop, twist and change direction. They’re people in a mouse-maze.

There’s also a fascinating matter-of-factness to the way the film presents the interactions of Joel and Clementine and the (largely unseen) team of memory-erasers (headed by Tom Wilkinson, and including Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, and Elijah Wood; what a cast!), as well as the way the film un-peels the layers of casual corruption surrounding the process by which memories are destroyed. When you have access to a memory erasing machine and no legal or ethical oversight, the tech is bound to be abused. Is there even an ethical way to use it? Is it right to simply erase something traumatic from a person’s brain? Is it better than teaching the person how to process, understand, and transcend trauma?

There’s a scene at the end of 1981’s “Superman II” where Superman erases Lois Lane’s memory with a super-kiss to protect his secret identity as Clark Kent. The moment was viewed by most audiences at the time as a fairy tale flourish, along the lines of Superman turning back time to save Lois at the end of the first movie. Today it would be considered a non-consensual mental assault, like a roofie. “Eternal Sunshine” sometimes plays like a speculative drama about what would happen if it were possible to replicate Superman’s kiss and turn it into a service that people could pay for. No good could come from such a thing, which is a sure sign that some company out there is hard at work inventing it while its CEO chases billions in startup money from venture capitalists.

A crude version of the necessary technology has existed for decades. The indiscriminate electroshock therapy that was so common in mental hospitals in the middle part of the 20th century, and that often reduced patients to blankly smiling shells of their former selves, became more precisely targeted, to the point where the procedure is now considered an ordinary part of treatment. Ten years ago, scientists figured out by studying mice how to identify the places in the brain where traumatic or negative memories are kept, and “eradicate” them and/or associate them with pleasure. “In essence,” summed up a piece about the process in The Guardian, “the mice’s memory of what was pleasant and what was unpleasant had been reversed.”

The structure of the film is a rich object for study in itself. The very essence of “Eternal Sunshine” is analogous to the unstable process of remembering: remembering the order of events in a story, or the events in one’s own life. Or struggling to remember what happened. Or which thing happened first. And which thing happened after that? Did another thing happen third, or fourth, tenth? Did any of it happen, period? Are you superimposing your fantasies about who was at fault, and who did what to whom, onto events that were factual, and that could be proved or disproved in an objective record, had anyone thought to keep one? The record-keepers records might be faulty, too, or invested in lying or omitting. The movie is kaleidoscopic in its account of how things are remembered, misremembered and forgotten. The opening of the film could also be its ending, and its ending feels like a new beginning. The mouse remains stuck in the maze. When walls and corridors are deleted, and only blank space remains, the mouse struggles to remember the maze.

Saturday Matinee: Anti-Clock

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By Triskel Christchurch

Source: The Journal of Music

A complex and fascinating experimental exploration of time and identity, ANTI-CLOCK is a film of authentic, startling originality. Brilliantly mixing film and video techniques, Arden and Bond’s paranoid, psychological surveillance study of a career gambler turned clairvoyant unstuck in time captures onscreen the anxieties that have infiltrated the consciousness of so many in Western society.

Jane Arden was a leading figure in experimental British theatre and cinema, and an important radical feminist voice of the 1960s and ‘70s. With her work increasingly informed by her politics, the beginning of a personal and professional relationship with director Jack Bond facilitated the move to cinema, and the creation of a small but remarkable body of film work which is becoming increasingly celebrated. Following her tragic and sudden death in 1982, Bond withdrew these often strongly autobiographical films from circulation, only relenting decades later. Arden’s work is raw, perceptive, disturbing, vital, and beautiful.

Watch Anti-Clock on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100029255/anti-clock

Saturday Matinee: Mulholland Drive

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By Seth Harris

Source: Pop Cult

I’ve mentioned on the blog before how I discovered David Lynch as an eight-year-old who was somehow allowed to watch Twin Peaks. For a long time, I knew him as “the guy who made Twin Peaks.” Even in college, as I began to explore his greater body of work, I was like most people; I just didn’t understand the abstractness of it all. What shifted my understanding was reading Lynch on Lynch, a book of interviews with the director focusing on his work in chronological order up to Mulholland Drive. Through this text, I came to understand the source of Lynch’s creativity – from deep inside his subconscious and expressed through images without any implied context – and how intuitive his work is. This happened around the same time I was taking Literary Theory & Criticism, which was probably the most influential academic experience I’ve ever had.

Mulholland Drive begins with a woman (Laura Harring) being driven to a party on the titular road. However, she was never going to arrive at the party. Her driver turns on her, and before they can assassinate the woman, the limousine is hit by a car of rowdy young people. The woman stumbles down a hillside and eventually hides in an apartment whose owner has a department for a long trip. This is the home of Betty’s (Naomi Watts) aunt, where the young woman has come to stay while she auditions in the hopes of becoming a movie star. She immediately feels empathy for the amnesiac woman and vows to help her. Her unexpected guest takes the name Rita after seeing a movie poster of Rita Hayworth in the apartment.

The two women begin investigating the few threads they have about Rita’s past. Meanwhile, a film production grinds to a halt as its lead actress has been let go. The director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), is put through the gauntlet, having the worst day of his life as recasting her, and is placed in the hands of more powerful people. He arrives home to find his wife cheating on him with the pool boy. And then, while bedding down at a flea-bitten motel, Adam discovers his assets have been frozen. How does this relate to Betty and Rita? Well, they weave in and out of his story along with other elements that seem detached. By the end, the truth comes out in a strange place called Club Silencio, which holds the key to understanding it all.

I am going to talk about Mulholland Drive in more depth now, so if you haven’t seen the film I wouldn’t recommend reading any further.

The story of Betty & Rita is a dream. Lynch often has his character’s waking mind and dreaming subconscious collide, and it is very literal here. Betty is, in reality, Diane, a waitress at a coffee shop with aspirations of being an actress. She even has a small part in a production, which is where she met Camilla. Camilla is bisexual and did enjoy her time with Diane. However, the director of the picture, Adam, has taken a liking to his star. She’s more than happy to go along with it, but that leaves Diane reeling as she comes to understand her love was not reciprocated. 

A plan is hatched. Diane pays a guy she knows to have Camilla killed, but the guilt of what she has done causes Diane’s mind to splinter. A dream forms, which is where the film begins, and it sees Camilla escaping her fate. And who does her hero end up being? Well, it’s Diane’s dream self of Betty. Diane imagines herself as far more innocent, caring, and talented than in real life. She also imagines that Camilla, as Rita, is wholly dependent on her. In her dream, Adam gets sent through the wringer, too. But the truth begins seeping in, little details here and there. It culminates at Club Silencio, where Diane’s conscious mind reminds her that what is playing out before her eyes is an illusion. This, in turn, forces her to wake up, and we finally see the horrifying truth of Diane’s life. 

Lynch delivers a noir film that captures every element you would expect from such a story while still feeling wholly original and fitting into his body of work. It has the dream logic of a Lynch film, yet it is his most accessible picture. The pieces are all there on screen; he’s just not going to spoon-feed you. To engage with the work, consider what is said and the connections between images. Remember, Lynch is first a visual artist before a storyteller, so you can understand what is happening. This was the film that brought Roger Ebert around to finally appreciating Lynch after two decades of turning his nose up at the work. 

But even more significant than Diane’s story is a reflection by Lynch on the nature of Hollywood as an American institution. He is an artist who didn’t start out interested in making movies. He wanted to paint. His experience on Eraserhead caused him to both love making movies and hate them at the same time. It would be Dune that helped calcify the idea of making the films he wanted to make without interest in whether they were going to be financially successful for his backers. He’s never made a movie he didn’t want to since then. 

Twin Peaks is what made him famous on a whole other level, and once again, he was forced to walk amongst the Hollywood machine again. It should be noted that Mulholland Drive originated as a TV series about Audrey Horne going off to become a movie star and getting embroiled in noir storylines. It seems evident that this idea centered around how young women are especially forced to compromise and do things that give up their power to a man to make it. This makes sense and continues Lynch’s exploration of the abuse of women in the United States, which is the thematic centerpiece of Twin Peaks. He’s not a direct storyteller, so you’re expected to find these ideas; he trusts your intelligence to do that.

Club Silencio is a comment not just on Diane’s dream over her actions but on the dreams of so many to come to Hollywood and be “discovered.” Years ago, I read Hollywood Babylon, a collection of sordid industry gossip by former child star Kenneth Anger. It was quite a harrowing read. Things like the Fatty Arbuckle trial are relatively well-known, but there was so much more. There are hundreds of people you’ll probably never hear about who were murdered or committed murder or helped cover it up within the film industry. It didn’t necessarily involve big stars but people who worked in various capacities. There was a lot of money changing hands, and people were desperate to escape poverty. These circumstances often cause people to do terrible things.

Lynch’s work always seems focused on dismantling mythologies. Blue Velvet was about the myth of the friendly, quiet small town. Twin Peaks continued that but focused even more on the myth of the happy nuclear family with a mountain of abuse hidden just beneath the surface. It makes sense because the director is fascinated with the subconscious mind. He is a big proponent of transcendental meditation, which is all about engaging with those layers of our consciousness that we mostly avoid or ignore. Lynch doesn’t see dreams as a well of chaos but as a place where profound coherence can be discovered. The language of dreams is not the same as the waking world and it is in our inability to translate that our problems arise.

It should also be pointed out that Mulholland Drive’s construction acts as a Mobius strip. There is no beginning or end, just one continuous loop. Betty and Rita find Diane’s body rotting away in her apartment in the dream. The old couple that terrorizes Diane is the same couple that ushers Betty into the fantasy version of Hollywood. They have brought her there. What we are experiencing is a sort of Hell where Betty/Diane is forced to relive the torment of delusion & revelation over and over and over and over… In this way, I consider it one of Lynch’s most horrific films.

Watch Mulholland Drive on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/385509/mulholland-drive

Saturday Matinee: Ran

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By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

One of the early reviews of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran” said that he could not possibly have directed it at an earlier age. My first impulse was to question that act of critical omnipotence. Who is to say Kurosawa couldn’t have made this film at 50 or 60, instead of at 75, as he has?

But then I thought longer about “Ran,” which is based on Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and on a similar medieval samurai legend. And I thought about Laurence Oliver’s “Lear” on TV last year, and about the “Lear” I saw starring Douglas Campbell a few weeks ago here in Chicago, and I realized that age probably is a prerequisite to fully understand this character. Dustin Hoffman might be able to play Willy Loman by aging himself with makeup, but he will have to wait another 20 years to play Lear.

The character contains great paradoxes, but they are not the paradoxes of youth; they spring from long habit. Lear has the arrogance of great power, long held. He has wide knowledge of the world. Yet he is curiously innocent when it comes to his own children; he thinks they can do no wrong, can be trusted to carry out his plans. At the end, when his dreams have been broken, the character has the touching quality of a childlike innocence that can see breath on lips that are forever sealed, and can dream of an existence beyond the cruelties of man. Playing Lear is not a technical exercise. I wonder if a man can do it who has not had great disappointments and long dark nights of the soul.

Kurosawa has lived through those bad times. Here is one of the greatest directors of all time, out of fashion in his own country, suffering from depression, nearly blind. He prepared this film for 10 years, drawing hundreds of sketches showing every shot, hardly expecting that the money ever would be found to allow him to make the film. But a deal was finally put together by Serge Silberman, the old French producer who backed the later films of Luis Bunuel (who also could have given us a distinctive Lear). Silberman risked his own money; this is the most expensive Japanese film ever made, and, yes, perhaps Kurosawa could not have made it until he was 75.

The story is familiar. An old lord decides to retire from daily control of his kingdom, yet still keep all the trappings of his power. He will divide his kingdom in three parts among his children. In “Ran” they are sons, not daughters. First, he requires a ritual statement of love. The youngest son cannot abide the hypocrisy, and stays silent. And so on. The Japanese legend Kurosawa draws upon contains a famous illustration in which the old lord takes three arrows and demonstrates that when they are bundled, they cannot be broken, but taken one at a time, they are weak. He wishes his sons to remain allies, so they will be strong, but of course they begin to fight, and civil war breaks out as the old lord begins his forlorn journey from one castle to another, gradually being stripped of his soldiers, his pride, his sanity. Nobody can film an epic battle scene like Kurosawa. He already has demonstrated that abundantly in “The Seven Samurai,” in “Yojimbo,” in “Kagemusha.” In “Ran,” the great bloody battles are counterpointed with scenes of a chamber quality, as deep hatreds and lusts are seen to grow behind the castle walls.

“King Lear” is a play that centers obsessively around words expressing negatives. “Nothing? Nothing will come to nothing!” “Never, never, never.” “No, no, no, no, no.” They express in deep anguish the king’s realization that what has been taken apart never will be put together again, that his beloved child is dead and will breathe no more, that his pride and folly have put an end to his happiness. Kurosawa’s film expresses that despair perhaps more deeply than a Western film might; the samurai costumes, the makeup inspired by Noh drama, give the story a freshness that removes it from all our earlier associations.

“Ran” is a great, glorious achievement. Kurosawa often must have associated himself with the old lord as he tried to put this film together, but in the end he has triumphed, and the image I have of him, at 75, is of three arrows bundled together.

Watch Ran on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/11677948

Saturday Matinee: The Thing

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John Carpenter’s The Thing Had An Icy Critical Reception

John Carpenter’s The Thing received terrible reviews when it was released in 1982. Critics were wrong about this frozen horror masterpiece.

By Ryan Lambie

Source: Den of Geek

It’s the summer of 1982, and director John Carpenter is on the cusp of releasing his latest movie, The Thing. For the 34-year-old filmmaker, the release marks the end of a major undertaking: the culmination of months of shooting on freezing cold sets and snowy British Columbia locations, not to mention the execution of complex and time-consuming practical effects scenes.

Carpenter was understandably proud of the results: after such independent hits as Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween, and Escape From New York, this was his first studio movie (for Universal) and also his most expensive to date, with a budget of around $15m. And while The Thing had appeared in cinemas before (in the guise of Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby’s 1951 sci-fi shocker, The Thing From Another World) Carpenter’s movie was a fresh adaptation of John W. Campbell’s novella, Who Goes There? – a story Carpenter had long prized.

The Nyby-Hawks adaptation took the skeleton of Campbell’s story, about scientists discovering an alien life form in Antarctica, and made it into a monster movie chiller with James Arness as the hulking creature from outer space. Carpenter’s The Thing, on the other hand, went back to the original story’s most compelling idea: that of a creature which can transform itself into perfect imitations of the people around it.

With the help of Rob Bottin’s groundbreaking effects work, Carpenter’s movie would bring this creature “out into the light” and he was understandably satisfied with the unholy amalgam of suspense and outright horror he’d brought to the screen.

THE ICY CRITICAL RECEPTION

Yet when The Thing opened in US cinemas on the 25th June 1982, the critical reception was almost as aggressive and seething as the movie’s title monster.

Writing for The New York Times, noted movie critic Vincent Canby described the movie as “foolish, depressing” with its actors “used merely as props to be hacked, slashed, disembowelled and decapitated, finally to be eaten and then regurgitated […] it is too phony to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.”

Time magazine dismissed The Thing as “an exercise in abstract art,” while Roger Ebert, in a slightly less aggressive review, described it as “a great barf-bag movie”, but maintained that, “the men are just setups for an attack by The Thing.”

Even reviewers outside the mainstream were hostile towards The Thing. The magazine Cinefantastique ran a cover which asked, “Is this the most hated movie of all time?”

In science fiction magazine Starlog, critic Alan Spencer wrote, “John Carpenter’s The Thing smells, and smells pretty bad. It has no pace, sloppy continuity, zero humor, bland characters on top of being totally devoid of either warmth or humanity […] It’s my contention that John Carpenter was never meant to direct a science-fiction horror movie. Here’s some things he’d be better suited to direct: traffic accidents, train wrecks and public floggings.”

Carpenter was left reeling from the critical reaction. “I was pretty stunned by it,” he later said. “I made a really gruelling, dark movie, but I [thought] audiences in 1982 wanted to see that.”

In terms of its theatrical performance, Carpenter’s dark vision didn’t exactly go down as either he or Universal had perhaps expected. A major summer release, The Thing scraped in at number eight at the US box office, and while it was by no means a flop – its lifetime gross amounted to just under $20 million according to Box Office Mojo – neither was it considered a hit.

THE CRUEL SUMMER

The issue of Starlog in which Alan Spencer’s review of The Thing appeared provides several clues as to why the critical reaction to the movie was so extreme. First, there’s the cover: published in November 1982, issue 64 of Starlog features the benevolent, childlike face of E.T.

Steven Spielberg’s family blockbuster E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial had, unfortunately for Carpenter, appeared in American cinemas just two weeks before The Thing came out on the 25th June, and that movie’s warm, gentle view of extraterrestrial life was diametrically opposed to the nightmarish excess of Carpenter’s, and moviegoers were still eagerly lining up to see it 14 days later. The Thing, it seemed, simply ran counter to the mood of the times. Neither critics nor audiences were prepared for the intensity or chilly nihilism of The Thing, particularly in the heat of the summer season.

The actor Kenneth Tobey, who played Captain Hendry in The Thing From Another World, summed up the general consensus after a screening of Carpenter’s movie. “The effects were so explicit that they actually destroyed how you were supposed to feel about the characters,” Tobey said. “They became almost a movie in themselves, and were a little too horrifying.”

Its gory excess when compared to the sheer cuddliness of E.T. wasn’t The Thing‘s only problem, either. As that November issue of Starlog proves, 1982 was a crowded year for science fiction, fantasy and horror. Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, and Poltergeist opened on the same day – the 4th June. Disney’s hugely expensive sci-fi adventure Tron came out a little over a month later, on the 9th July.

Then there was Blade Runner, 20th Century Fox’s expensive sci-fi gamble, which, like The Thing, opened on the 25th June and was initially regarded as a financial and critical disappointment.

The Thing was therefore unfortunate to appear in a bumper summer for genre films, and it was doubly hobbled by its R-rating; had its release date been moved to the winter and away from its more family-friendly competitors (even Poltergeist somehow garnered a PG certificate), it’s possible that it could have found a wider audience in cinemas, despite all those savage reviews.

THE AFTERMATH

Bruised by the reaction to The Thing, Carpenter continued to make movies (he made Christine in 1983 and Starman the year after) but lost considerable confidence from the experience, and took some time before he’d talk openly about the earlier movie’s box office disappointment. Perhaps ironically, one of the outlets Carpenter first opened up to was Starlog.

“I was called ‘a pornographer of violence’,” Carpenter said in 1985. “I had no idea it would be received that way […] The Thing was just too strong for that time. I knew it was going to be strong, but I didn’t think it would be too strong […] I didn’t take the public’s taste into consideration.”

It was on video – and later television – that the perception of The Thing began to change. The initial shock and repulsion which greeted it in the summer of 1982 began to ebb, as the full extent of what Carpenter, and his filmmakers  – among them writer Bill Lancaster, cinematographer Dean Cundey, composer Ennio Morricone and effects artist Rob Bottin (aided in certain scenes by Stan Winston) had managed to achieve.

With the growing passage of time, it becomes easier to see the criticisms aimed at The Thing as being among its most positive attributes. The characters aren’t “merely props” but distinct individuals whose traits are introduced subtly and cleverly – a brief line here, a quirky facial expression there.

That Kurt Russell’s MacReady is slow and even reluctant to emerge as the group’s leader adds to the movie’s unpredictability. The terse dialogue and frosty tone heightens the sense of paranoia and suspicion – this is a cold war horror about the very human emotions of fear and distrust, where the Thing could lurk anywhere, perhaps even within MacReady himself.

The Thing‘s apocalyptic tone was such that, when it came to filming the conclusion, even Carpenter wondered whether he’d gone a little too far. But editor Todd Ramsay coaxed him on, encouraging to remain true to his own bleak vision. “You have to embrace the darkness,” Ramsay told Carpenter. “That’s where this movie is. In the darkness.”

THE ENDURING CLASSIC

It has been more than 30 years since The Thing first appeared in that crowded summer of 1982, and it has long since shaken off its “instant junk” stigma. Repeat viewings have exposed the rich depths beneath Rob Bottin’s spectacular mutations: to this day, there are fan sites, such as Outpost 31, dedicated to detailing the minutiae of the movie’s production and story details.

Speculation still rages over exactly when Blair (played by Wilford Brimley) was first imitated by the shape-shifting monster, or whether the victims of the Thing know whether they’ve been replaced, or whether the two survivors at the end of the movie are even human anymore. It’s the ambiguity of Carpenter’s filmmaking, as well as its obvious technical brilliance, that has allowed The Thing to endure, despite the slings and arrows of its critics.

Back in 1982, Roger Ebert wrote, “there’s no need to see this version unless you are interested in what the Thing might look like while starting from anonymous greasy organs extruding giant crab legs and transmuting itself into a dog. Amazingly, I’ll bet that thousands, if not millions, of moviegoers are interested in seeing just that.”

On that latter point, Ebert was precisely right: thousands, even millions of movie fans are interested in The Thing. It’s just taken them a little while to realize that fact.

Saturday Matinee: The Worst Person in the World

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By Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen

Source: I’m Jeffrey Rex

Directed by Joachim Trier — Screenplay by Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier.

At the end of last month, I turned thirty years old. In the build-up to that turning of a corner, I must admit that I was feeling some kind of quarter-life crisis. Turning thirty reminded me that I should probably rewatch (and finally review) Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (Norwegian Title: Verdens Verste Menneske), for reasons that will be obvious to those who are familiar with it, but if you aren’t, then please read on and I’ll elaborate. In any case, The Worst Person In the World is the much-lauded third film in Joachim Trier’s acclaimed Oslo Trilogy, the first two films of which — Reprise and Oslo 31. August — I reviewed just last year. As I pressed play and rewatched the Danish-born Norwegian director’s Oscar-nominated hit, I’ll admit that it hit me harder than it had on my first viewing. It is yet another example of the kind of intelligent filmmaker that Trier is, and I suspect it will carve its own place as a true classic for how it speaks to the quarter-life crisis.

Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World follows a soon-to-be-thirty-year-old medical student in Oslo named Julie (played by Renate Reinsve). Julie is facing feelings of self-doubt about the track she is on in life. It occurred to her that she originally only went to medical school because her grades were good enough for it, and so she now, on said whim, suddenly decides to pursue other careers like photography. At that same time, she also encounters a comic book artist fifteen years her senior named Aksel (played by Anders Danielsen Lie). Julie and Aksel hit it off, and he gives her something she thinks she desires — a feeling of life, or perhaps adulthood, having finally started for her. And yet, she has misgivings about the whole ordeal once she meets his friends. She’s not ready for children. She feels infantilized by his friends. Soon she, again on a whim, finds herself at a private wedding house party at which she knows no one. Here she encounters someone named Eivind (played by Herbert Nordrum) who, she feels, matches her energy more, and, even though they are both in a relationship, this encounter inspires her to once again question all that she knows to be safe and comfortable. Because what does she really want? Does she know?

The Worst Person in the World is a rich, deep text about someone who feels lost in early adulthood as the passage of time at study has sent them into something akin to being astray. Here we find a person who made a decision about her life out of esteem and practicality but not passion several years before we meet her. Now she feels like she’s ready for life to begin. She’s ready for a pattern of adulthood, comfortability, sense of belonging, forward momentum, and creative energy that people in their 20s and 30s crave at some point or another. But she wants it on her own terms (at her own pace), and she’s, frankly, not sure how to make that happen with everything that happens around her. There is something so innately timely and human about it that it is tough to put your finger on how exactly all of it has been so carefully baked into the film with such skill and insightfulness. Through it all, Trier’s leading lady Renate Reinsve delivers an energetic and modern performance with no false notes.

On the surface, it may sound like a fairly simple coming-of-age dramedy for someone in their late 20s, but, as it always is, ultimately what is important is how a film is about something. At one point, there is a truly glorious sequence in which our main character runs through the streets while time has stopped entirely so that she can imagine herself escaping her mundane relationship and instead rekindle her intimate romance with Eivind. This is such an effective way of showcasing desire and infatuation moments before dissolving everything safe that she knows. There is an inventive, odd, and explicit sequence showcasing Julie’s doubts about time, her body, and her relationship with her father, which pairs well with an earlier montage sequence in which we are guided through her family lineage at that age. Though significant portions of the film are shown through handheld camerawork, there is a moment with a noticeably shaky camera movement during an increasingly intense argument between Julie and Aksel (when she is seated and he calls her behavior pathetic) that effectively breaks the spell of the relationship, in a way that I thought was fascinating — it may have been a (happy) accident, but it works for the scene because of how real and messy a break up on-screen should be depicted. It’s also a film that is split neatly into 12 chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue, and which, on top of it all, also features sporadic narration from a female voice (an unspecified individual). It is jam-packed with the kind of light but evocative everyday wisdom through which the filmmakers cast a wide net with which its audience is properly enmeshed and affected. And, as a whole, I think it is an expressive rumination of what it means to be human and to become oneself under the pressure of modernity.

Vogt and Trier — both born in 1974 — were obviously in their forties when they made this film, and yet it feels so current and so much like these two individuals have their fingers on the pulse of generations that are younger than them. Obviously, they’ve been through a similar quarter-life crisis, and they also manage to include a character in the film that speaks to the kind of mid-life depression that they may feel hits them from time to time with Anders Danielsen Lie’s Aksel. Anders Danielsen Lie is fantastic as Aksel, and I think the scene in which he is negotiating the future of his doomed relationship with Julie shows the kind of elegant actor that he is. He is phenomenal at showing the pains of being at that point in your life and having to start over romantically, and he is soul-crushingly good in the scene in which Aksel reveals how he feels the world is leaving him behind 

From top to bottom, Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is a work of art that possesses infectious feelings of excitement at the beginning of new love, but, at the same time, it is a complex film in that it is also so much more than just a romantic drama — it is thoughtful about turning thirty, i.e. turning a corner in life, and what that means in our time with unending options at our fingertips. Trier’s film has these playful visual techniques — and moments of magical realism — to give us key insight into the inner workings of his protagonist, but it is also more than just a mastery of visual artistry, he and co-writer Eskil Vogt once again showcase that they are perceptive filmmakers who can eloquently touch your heart. It is a deeply relatable film that I suspect speaks to so many of us in part because of how perfectly and accurately it captures generational feelings of ennui and aimlessness in a way that is in conversation with Trier’s previous films. Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt’s 2021 film captures the zeitgeist in a way that isn’t merely superficial. It is keenly aware of the way we feel insufficient and unaccomplished because of both this unshakable yet unspecific feeling that the world is somehow constantly on the brink of something terrible, but also because of how we struggle to build on what past generations did for us and for themselves. One of the first masterpieces of the 2020s, it is heart-achingly sweet in its portrayal of newfound love before a crossroads, it is crushingly haunting in how it shows the effects of major life decisions, and it is made with the kind of penetrative precision that manages to speak to the human experience. 

10 out of 10

Watch The Worst Person in the World on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100040298/the-worst-person-in-the-world

Saturday Matinee: Red Hot + Blue

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Source: RedHot.org

OVERVIEW

Red Hot + Blue is the first in the series of compilation albums from the Red Hot Organization. It features contemporary pop performers reinterpreting the music of Cole Porter, one of the great American songwriters of the early 20th century. It was one of the first successful tribute albums and a landmark multimedia project, with contributions from filmmakers, artists and designers in addition to musicians.
The money raised went to several groundbreaking AIDS organizations, notably ACT UP and Treatment Action Group (TAG), which were responsible for forcing the government and pharmaceutical companies to release the drugs that now allow people to live with HIV.

FACTS /
ORAL HISTORY

  • Filmmakers who made videos for the project included: Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Jonathan Demme, Alex Cox, Jean Baptiste Mondino, Percy Adlon and Neil Jordan
  • Artists and designers who contributed included: Jean Paul Gaultier, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, Sue Coe, Barbara Kruger, Gran Fury and Jenny Holzer
  • The TV show was seen in over 30 countries around the world. ABC in the US demanded a different edit of the show with hosts who included Richard Gere, Whoopie Goldberg and several others. Gere’s introduction was one of the first mentions of the word ‘condom’ on network US television, outside of news programming
  • Pedro Almodovar wrote a treatment and was scheduled to make the video for “Don’t Fence Me In”, but couldn’t at the last minute and David Byrne directed a video himself
  • Most regrettable combination that didn’t, but almost happened: Lou Reed doing “I Get A Kick Out of You” directed by Martin Scorsese. The track was eventually done by The Jungle Brothers with a video by Mark Pellington
  • Neneh Cherry’s rap in “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” was one of the first times AIDS was described and talked about directly in popular culture

PRESS

Bella Online

The Red Hot + Blue movement was started in the early 90s’ by John Carlin. John had been working as an art critic and teacher and witnessed how AIDS was destroying his community. John got established music artists to come on board to record the songs of Cole Porter. Several Red, Hot & Blue compilation CD’s were released during the 90’s.

LONG ISLAND PRESS

One of the greatest CD compilations of all time, 1990’s RH + B was inspired, eclectic collection of songs by top artists of the time rendering Cole Porter songs– all to benefit AIDS research. As with the CD, the DVD collection of videos is sexy, provocative and most importantly, timeless. The music weathers the years well, and the videos add an extra intensity. 

arkansas gazette

This astounding collection of contemporary pop performers reinterpreting the songs of Cole Porter came out in 1990, first as an album and then as a television special consisting of music videos, many by famous directors and openly portraying the effects of AIDS on society. The album sold more than a million copies worldwide and was one of the music industry’s first major AIDS benefits. 

CREDITS

Produced and Directed By: Leigh Blake + John Carlin Created By: Leigh Blake, John Carlin + F. Richard Pappas Supervising Musical Producer: Steve Lillywhite