Tag Archives: Cult Film

Saturday Matinee: Three Thousand Years of Longing

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By Katie Carter

Source: Katie at the Movies

Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) inhabits the perfect role in a movie that’s a story about telling stories. She works in the equally fictional-sounding position of narratologist, specializing in myths and legends, and while she resides and teaches in London, at the start of “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” she’s arriving in Istanbul for a conference. Writer and director George Miller based his movie on the title story in A.S. Byatt’s 1994 anthology “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” but it’s apparent early on that “Three Thousand Years of Longing” is as much a personal, affectionate tribute to the power of story as it is a fantasy about the highs and lows of love and desire. When Alithea arrives at her hotel in Istanbul, she’s surprised with a stay in the Agatha Christie suite, where the famed mystery writer reportedly penned her most renowned work, “Murder on the Orient Express.” At a lecture, she and a colleague delve into how comic book superheroes comprise our modern myths, a graphic prominently featuring Superman displayed behind her. And at a curio shop in this ancient city from which stemmed some of the world’s most oft-told tales, Alithea buys a pretty little vase she digs out from beneath a pile of knick-knacks.

It’s after she returns to her hotel room that Alithea becomes a part of those stories that so much of her life seems to revolve around. While scrubbing the dirty bottle, she inadvertently pops its top and unleashes billowing clouds of purple smoke that coalesce into an enormous, human-like being: a djinn (Idris Elba). After the djinn gets situated, quickly catching up on the current culture and language by examining Alithea’s laptop and TV, he informs Alithea that she needs to make three wishes— her heart’s desire, with some limitations— because after he grants them he will finally be free. It’s the sort of opportunity most people would leap at, but Alithea is flummoxed. She, ever practical, has no heart’s desire— at least, she doesn’t think she does. In her narration that opens the film, she states that she is alone (no spouse, no children) and likes it that way. We later discover through her conversations with the Djinn that she was married, once, but that she and her husband grew apart and he eventually left her for another woman, a child lost before it was even born implied to be the impetus for their downward spiral.

But moreover, because she is so well-verses in myths, Alithea knows what the Djinn is capable of, and of what follies can come of indulging in his powers. To catch her up on how he came to be her in possession, the Djinn tells Alithea three stories: three stories of love, and how the actions love spurred him to caused him to end up back inside the bottle every time, spanning from three thousand years ago to the time of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), to palace concubine Gülten (Ece Yüksel) in the time of the Ottoman Prince Mustafa in the 1500s, to the intelligent and fiery Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), a woman thirsty for knowledge and stuck in a passionless marriage to a much older man. Like most anthologies, these extended flashbacks framed as the Djinn telling Alithea stories as they huddle in her room occasionally miss the mark, but it’s difficult not to be drawn in by Miller’s beguiling concoction of fantasy and history, especially when Elba is the storyteller, his low voice conveying the tinges of sadness and regret over his past that provide the emotional beats the narrative sorely needs. The spell-binding visuals don’t hurt either. Some of the computer effects aren’t too convincing, but cinematographer John Seale (who Miller lured out of retirement for 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” and again to work on “Three Thousand Years”) works his magic, whirling the viewer over vast landscapes and elaborate palace interiors and in and out of the Djinn’s perspective. Exhilarating cinema is crafted even from the scenes where the characters are mostly sedentary. He keeps the camera moving even when characters are just sitting in a car, or following Alithea out of the airport. Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife and frequent collaborator, serves as editor and enhances the camerawork even more with her cuts, a series of match cuts in the aforementioned sequence, for example, tracing the wheels of the plane touching down, to the wheels of Alithea’s baggage cart as she disembarks.

It’s when “Three Thousand Years” turns into its overlong fourth act after the stories have been told that it becomes a much more trying affair. Alithea discovers that she does want to make a wish, as much to her surprise as it is to the viewer. Miller’s attempt to end on a big swing for romance is admirable, but the change in Alithea is too abrupt, and the romantic chemistry between Swinton and Elba, talented performers though they are (I mean, who else could play a a woman named Alithea Binnie but Swinton?), is too flat when it ought to sizzle. The issue of the film’s exoticism of people of color, a problem that haunts the otherwise fantastical images Miller conjures in his imaginings of Middle Eastern countries and peoples throughout, takes on an even more troubling edge in this chapter as well. Perhaps being a magical being like a Djinn means he transcends race, but Elba’s character is essentially repressed by a white woman for an extended period of time, existing to serve her but not able to be his own person because of that. Of course, that’s part of the film’s lesson—that love must grow organically and not be forced, so that by the end of the movie the Djinn spends time with Alithea of his own volition— but the casting of a Black man and a white woman in these specific roles automatically casts a problematic shadow over the relationship.

Despite issues that make for an underwhelming experience, I kind of love that “Three Thousand Years Longing” is the movie Miller chose to make in between his acclaimed— and dare I say, revolutionary?— “Fury Road,” and his upcoming prequel to that film, “Furiosa.” Proving over and over throughout his career that he is as adept at creating charming family fare (“Babe,” “Happy Feet”) as he is gritty dystopian action movies, Miller marries the two here for a story that, for all the tragedies it contains, is too in love with love and with the creation and telling of tales to ever feel cynical. And it’s a real family affair as well; in addition to Sixel, Miller collaborated on the screenplay with his daughter, Augusta Gore. That affection that exists in the very fabric of the film’s creation is reflected on screen, because for all its faults, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” above all makes it clear that it is never too late to open up to love.

Watch Three Thousand Years of Longing on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100046863/three-thousand-years-of-longing

Saturday Matinee: Network

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By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

Strange, how Howard Beale, “the mad prophet of the airwaves,” dominates our memories of “Network.” We remember him in his soaking-wet raincoat, hair plastered to his forehead, shouting, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” The phrase has entered into the language.

But Beale (Peter Finch) is the movie’s sideshow. The story centers on Diana Christiansen (Faye Dunaway), the ratings-hungry programming executive who is prepared to do anything for better numbers. The mirror to which she plays is Max Schumacher (William Holden), the middle-age news executive who becomes Diana’s victim and lover, in that order.

The movie has been described as “outrageous satire” (Leonard Maltin) and “messianic farce” (Pauline Kael), and it is both, and more. What is fascinating about Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning screenplay is how smoothly it shifts its gears. The scenes involving Beale and the revolutionary “liberation army” are cheerfully over the top. The scenes involving Diana and Max are quiet, tense, convincing drama. The action at the network executive level aims for behind-the-scenes realism; we may doubt that a Howard Beale could get on the air, but we have no doubt the idea would be discussed as the movie suggests. And then Chayefsky and the director, Sidney Lumet, edge the backstage network material over into satire, too–but subtly, so that in the final late-night meeting where the executives decide what to do about Howard Beale, we have entered the madhouse without noticing.

The movie caused a sensation in 1976. It was nominated for 10 Oscars, won four (Finch, Dunaway, supporting actress Beatrice Straight, Chayefsky), and stirred up much debate about the decaying values of television. Seen a quarter-century later, it is like prophecy. When Chayefsky created Howard Beale, could he have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and the World Wrestling Federation?

Parts of the movie have dated–most noticeably Howard Beale’s first news set, a knotty-pine booth that makes it look like he’s broadcasting from a sauna. Other parts, including the network strategy meetings, remain timeless. And the set that Beale graduates to, featuring soothsayers and gossip columnists on revolving pedestals, nicely captures the feeling of some of the news/entertainment shows, where it’s easier to get air time if you’re a “psychic” than if you have useful information to convey.

Most people remember that Howard Beale got fed up, couldn’t take it anymore and had a meltdown on the air. It wasn’t quite like that. Beale is portrayed as an alcoholic doing such a bad job that he’s fired by his boss (Holden). Then they get drunk together and joke about him committing suicide on the air. The next day, in a farewell broadcast, Beale announces that he will indeed kill himself because of falling ratings. He’s yanked from the air but begs for a chance to say farewell, and that’s when he says, the next day, “Well, I’ll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bull- – – -.” His frankness is great for the ratings, Diana convinces her bosses to overturn Max’s decision to fire him, Howard goes back on the air, and he is apparently deep into madness when he utters his famous line.

Lumet and Chayefsky know just when to pull out all the stops. After Beale orders his viewers to “repeat after me,” they cut to exterior shots of people leaning out of their windows and screaming that they’re mad as hell, too. Unlikely, but great drama, and electrifying in theaters at the time. Beale’s ratings skyrocket (he is fourth after “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “All in the Family” and “Phyllis”), and a new set is constructed on which he rants and raves after his announcer literally introduces him as a “mad prophet.”

Counter to this extravagant satire is the affair between Max and Diana. Dunaway gives a seductive performance as the obsessed programming executive; her eyes sparkle and she moistens her lips when she thinks of higher ratings, and in one sequence she kisses Max while telling him how cheaply she can buy some James Bond reruns. Later, in bed, discussing ratings during sex, she climaxes while gasping about the “Mao Tse Tung Hour.”

That’s her idea for a prime-time show based on the exploits of a group obviously inspired by the Symbionese Liberation Army. In a secluded safe house, she negotiates with its armed leader, has a run-in with a Patty Hearst type, and uses an Angela Davis type as her go-between. This material is less convincing, except as an illustration of the lengths to which she will go.

Much more persuasive is Holden’s performance as a newsman who was trained by Edward R. Murrow, and now sees his beloved news division destroyed by Diana. At the same time, Max is fascinated by her, and deliberately begins an affair. For him, it is intoxication with the devil, and maybe love. For her–it is hard to say what it is, because, as he accurately tells her at the end, “There’s nothing left in you I can live with.”

Beatrice Straight’s role as Max’s wife is small but so powerful it won her the Oscar. It is a convincing portrait of a woman who has put up with an impossible man for so long that, although she feels angry and betrayed, she does not feel surprised. The meaning of Max’s decision to cheat is underlined by the art direction; he and his wife live in a tasteful apartment with book-lined walls, and then he moves into Dunaway’s tacky duplex. It is clear that although she cares how she dresses (costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge), she doesn’t care where she lives, because she is not a homebody; her home is in a boardroom, a corner office or a control booth.

The film is filled with vivid supporting roles. Ned Beatty has a sharp-edged cameo as a TV executive (he’s the one who says the famous line, “It’s because you’re on television, dummy”). Robert Duvall plays an executive who, when murder is suggested, insists he wants to “hear everybody’s thoughts on this.” Wesley Addy is the handsome, gray-haired executive in the network’s display window; he looks good at stockholder meetings. (If you look closely, you can spot a young Tim Robbins as a revolutionary assassin.)

One of Chayefsky’s key insights is that the bosses don’t much care what you say on TV, as long as you don’t threaten their profits. Howard Beale calls for outrage, he advises viewers to turn off their sets, his fans chant about how fed up they are–but he only gets in trouble when he reveals plans to sell the network’s parent company to Saudi Arabians. There’s a parallel here with “The Insider,” a 1999 film about CBS News, where “60 Minutes” can do just about anything it wants to, except materially threaten CBS profits.

Sidney Lumet, born 1924, a product of the golden age of live television, is one of the most consistently intelligent and productive directors of his time. His credits are an honor roll of good films, many of them with a conscience, including “12 Angry Men” (1957), “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962), “Fail-Safe” (1964), “Serpico” (1973), “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), “Prince of the City” (1981), “The Verdict” (1982), “Running on Empty” (1988) and “Q and A” (1990).

Because he works in many different genres and depends on story more than style, he is better known inside the business than out, but few directors are better at finding the right way to tell difficult stories; consider the development of Al Pacino’s famous telephone call in “Dog Day Afternoon.” His book Making Movies (Knopf, 1995) has more common sense in it about how movies are actually made than any other I have read.

In “Network,” which is rarely thought of as a “director’s picture,” it is his unobtrusive skill that allows all those different notes and energy levels to exist within the same film. In other hands, the film might have whirled to pieces. In his, it became a touchstone.

Saturday Matinee: Delicatessen

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Les temps difficiles

By Tim Brayton

Source: Alternate Ending

There is a minor contradiction secreted away in the production history of Delicatessen. The 1991 film exists mostly so that Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro could prove they had what it took to write and direct a feature, and thereby secure financing for the screenplay they really wanted to make, The City of Lost Children. And that’s exactly what they did, using Delicatessen‘s impressive critical, commercial, and awards success to leap into making the far more ambitious, higher-budget movie, with Jeunet continuing on as a solo director to keep it up, sometimes having more resources and sometimes fewer, but never having to return to such a low-scale production as his feature debut. And yet for all this, I’m not sure that any of the films that Delicatessen‘s success enabled are actually as wholly satisfying on their own terms. It really is the perfect version of itself, barring a few errant shots or cuts here and there. Nor I do not think that the lack of resources is entirely coincidental. There are the films like Amélie that get made when a filmmaker has the ability to run wild and indulge himself, and while that can be exhilarating, just as easily it can be exhausting and annoyingly solipsistic. Delicatessen is a perfect demonstration of the idea that great art needs some constraints: everything Jeunet and Caro did in the film, they did deliberately and with focused intent, and the resultant film is just way the hell tighter than anything else the filmmaking team, or Jeunet solus, have ever put their names to.

Generally speaking, Delicatessen is described as “post-apocalyptic”, which I think is a little too cut-and-dry. From a production design standpoint – and everything in the film, up to and especially including the acting, needs to be understood from a production design standpoint (which was, for the record, provided by Caro himself) – the world presented in the film is a polyglot of elements from mid-20th Century France and America, with most of the props having the vague sense of ’60s home goods invested with untold years of decay and corruption (this is a perfect example of the “restraints create art” ethos: many of the objects seen in the film were scavenged on account of the small art direction budget). The sense that results isn’t that we’re watching some hideous future, but rather a nightmarish alternate version of the recent past, where everything went terribly wrong. More than anything, Delicatessen feels like it takes place just across the Channel from the bureaucratic hellhole England of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil a 1985 release set pointedly “somewhere in the 20th Century”.

Which makes sense, given that Gilliam’s work was a state influence on Jeunet and Caro, and Brazil looms particularly large over their body of work: beyond Delicatessen, both The City of Lost Children and Alien Resurrection (Jeunet’s third feature, and first without Caro co-directing) are fairly obvious in their borrowings from Brazil, though neither goes so far with it. Delicatessen doesn’t just share aspects of its design mentality with Gilliam’s film, it shares a very distinctive strategy for cinematography, with wide-angle lenses creating a sense of bug-eyed closeness that manages to avoid the edge distortion typical of wide angles, while exploiting their tendency to make objects in the center of the frame uncannily, uncomfortably present. It’s one of the two most obvious ways that the film visually puts across a feeling of thoroughly unnerving otherness, the other being its tightly constrained color palette – this is an outstandingly yellow movie, introducing its central location emerging from a thick yellow fog like the ruins of a medieval abbey, and never letting us forget about it through all of the shots of locations that appear to be permanently stained in ochre soot. It’s overwhelming and also subtle, but also cunning in its way: the payoff to all that yellow is the film’s solitary use of blue (yellow’s opposite in the RGB color system) is all the way in its final scene, when it is specifically used to counterbalance the diseased feeling of the whole movie up to that point. Among the film’s other points of interest, Delicatessen was the first film of major lasting significance shot by Darius Khondji, and it’s very much in line with his later triumphs: tightly constrained in color, marked with a certain filthy texture to the stock, and instantly effective at creating a very specific atmosphere.

So anyway, all of that visual presence is in service to something, after all, and here’s what that is: wherever and whenever we are, there is a solitary building on the outskirts of what used to be civilsation. On the bottom floor of this building is a delicatessen, run by by a rubbery, fat butcher named Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus); he’s also the landlord for the apartments which occupy all of the upper levels, all of them populated by a visually grotesque menagerie of idiosyncratic characters: such as Marcel Tapioca (Ticky Holgado) and his wife (Anne-Marie Pisani), grubby impoverish sorts; the Interligators, Aurore (Silvie Laguna) and Georges (Jean-François Perrier), she dressed like a ’50s schoolchild’s idea of a society lady and plagued by a voice that only she hears, urging her to commit suicide; the nameless man (Howard Vernon) who lives in a watery dungeon full of snails and frogs, looking a bit slimy and frog-eyed himself; and Clapet’s own estranged daughter Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), a birdlike young woman with a thin face and sharp eyes. We learn pretty damn quickly that this building houses some kind of horrible secret, given that the opening scene features Clapet laughing broadly as he plunges a cleaver into the skull of a terrified man (Pascal Benezech) hiding in a garbage can; it’s no real surprise that the denizens of the building are all in on a conspiracy to entice drifters with the promise of a job, and then murder them for their meat, distributed evenly among all residents. It’s all part of the world of absolute social collapse and near-total privation that the film sketches out; cannibalism, it’s implied, is the only way to get any meat in this place.

The plot, such as it is, begins when ex-clown Louison (Dominique Pinon) takes up Clapet’s job posting, and turns out to be a skilled enough hand that the butcher is reluctant to kill him right away. Worse still, Julie takes pity on Louison, and starts feeding him a powerful soporific tea to keep him asleep and safely in bed at the times that Clapet waits in the stairwell to kill whoever ends up crossing his path. Naturally enough, Julie and Louison fall in love, because as you can no doubt tell from everything I’ve written so far, Delicatessen is first and foremost a romantic comedy. That’s not me being even a tiny bit sarcastic: after the florid design of the thing, which I broadly use to include the peculiar timbre of the cinematography and the physical distortions of the actors, the most notable thing about Delicatessen is its indefinite use of genre. I could not, if you forced me to, state with absolute confidence if this is mostly a horror film that happens to be so quirky and funny that it’s not even a tiny bit scary, or if it’s mostly a comedy that invests so much in violent death and a despairing culture in the midst of collapse that it becomes horrifying. What I can do is to approvingly note of the fact that as it moves towards the end, it abandons either to become a live-action Tex Avery cartoon: the nerve-wracking physical anarchy and use of slapstick as a murder weapon is entirely in the spirit of a Screwy Squirrel short, and the film even gets away with the old “bathroom fills up with water until somebody opens the door” bit at the end, having spent most of its 99 minutes building exactly the kind of demented anything-goes universe where that feels like a perfectly reasonable thing to occur, in between the attack by separatist vegetarians who live in the sewers and the Rube Goldberg suicide machines.

Whatever mode it’s occupying, what dominates Delicatessen is shocking: this is as dewy-eyed and sweet in its outlook as anything in Amélie. Even while indicting them all as willing cannibals, Jeunet and Caro and co-writer Gilles Adrien portray the residents of the apartment with an essential affection and whimsy, using a playful sequence early on (the residents all creating musical interludes to the accompaniment of Clapet having sex with a certain Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard) on squeaky bedsprings) to set up the idea that the apartment is a living organism, an ecosystem in which every emotionally aberrant figure within has their key and necessary role in the proper functioning of the whole. Given how frankly evil they are, and how joyfully the starts knocking them off, it’s a bit surprising and pleasant how much Delicatessen openly loves its cast.

Most of all it loves Louison and Julie, who are the aspect of this film that looks forward the most clearly to Jeunet’s solo projects: childlike innocents playing at a beatified, sexless version of romance, set against things like the circus and tea sets to accentuate just how much they’re too lighthearted for this corrosive place and this corrosive world. It is a bent, weird, ugly, and menacing film in so many ways, but it is entirely driven by the sweet charms of its central pair; in turn, the saccharine sentimentality of that plot (that thing which ruined Amélie for those – I am not one, by any stretch – who consider it to be ruined) is counterbalanced by the savage nastiness of the setting and plot. It’s a perfect balance, and while there’s the odd moment here or there where the directors fluff the timing of scenes or repeat concepts once too often, Delicatessen is something close to a miracle of style and tone and narrative all slashing at each other from odd angles to produce a flawlessly unified whole. Lord knows that this isn’t for everybody, but if we take the idea of a romantic comedy set in the ruins of a dead society and dressed up with cannibal horror seriously at all, it’s hard to see how it could turn out better than this.

Watch Delicatessen on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/308310/delicatessen

Saturday Matinee: Robocop 

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By Seth Harris

Source: Pop Cult

Robocop (1987)
Written by Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner
Directed by Paul Verhoeven

As an adult, I have developed an entirely new appreciation for the work of Paul Verhoeven. He was born in The Netherlands but managed to create a framework for American action movies in the 1980s while simultaneously delivering brutal satire about the United States. Robocop was his second English language film and his first pass at skewering the direction of Reagan’s America. The result is a science fiction classic, a combination of themes from Frankenstein mixed with commentary on the rise in corporatization of the public sphere. It’s not as biting as Starship Troopers, but it is full of brilliant takes on the United States’ ease & comfort with war and violence.

In the future, Detroit is on the verge of collapse. Money is dwindling, and society is overrun with crime. Omni Consumer Products (OCP) now have control of the Detroit PD and have plans to roll out innovations in crime-fighting. They just need a fresh corpse to make that happen. Meanwhile, Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is transferred from the suburbs to a dangerous new precinct in the city’s heart. Murphy and his partner Lewis (Nancy Allen) begin the bonding process. They respond to a call over a bank robbery and pursue the suspect to an abandoned refinery. The officers get separated, and Murphy ends up riddled with bullets when the criminals ambush him. OCP recovers Murphy’s body and rebuilds him into Robocop. Of course, they don’t tell his fellow officers or his family that he’s partially alive. Even Murphy doesn’t remember his past except for a few flashes here and there.

The origins of Robocop lie in a surprising mishmash of influences. Screenwriter Edward Neumeier snuck his way onto the set of Blade Runner and was inspired by the production design of this future world. He imagined a story set in this place about a human turned into a cyborg police officer. He teamed up with aspiring director Michael Miner to collaborate on the script. They drew on their mutual love of comic books and experiences in 1980s corporate culture. They both found it bizarrely fascinating that the Japanese book The Way of the Five Rings was so popular on Wall Street at the time as it was focused around methods of samurai in the 17th century killing more effectively. Corporate types seemed to imagine themselves as these types of brazen warriors while working in finance and marketing. They envisioned a world influenced by this type of violent thinking leading to societal collapse, as we see in the film.

Paul Verhoeven was not the first choice, but he was suggested by a producer when other directors fell out. Verhoeven reportedly read the first page of Robocop, tossed it aside, and proclaimed it “a piece of shit.” It took his wife reading the script and encouraging him to look at the subtext of what was happening to convince the director to accept the project. Because he wasn’t fluent in English at the time, Verhoeven says a lot of the satire went over his head. When Murphy returns to his home, abandoned by his wife and son, the director clicked with the script. 

For someone who didn’t understand the satire fully at the time, you can see the throughline in Verhoeven’s films coming out of Robocop to Total Recall and Starship Troopers. They are hyper-violent films where the villains are fascists. One of the best parts of Robocop are the snippets of news and commercials. They strongly emphasize the twisted psychology of this future world. News anchors smile through reports about apartheid South Africa arming themselves with nuclear weapons and U.S. forces crushing rebellions in Acapulco. Families play board games based around Mutual Assured Destruction. Everyone mindlessly gobbles up inane sitcoms that simply repeat catchphrases. The world feels rotten and hollow. Even as a kid seeing Robocop for the first time, it never felt like a movie where things would get better in the world when the credits rolled.

There’s a constant tension between the “civilized” world and devolution into wanton violence. A boardroom meeting dissolves into a bloodbath when an invention goes awry and kills an executive. Corporate heads employ some of the worst criminals to act as their muscle on the streets. 

Robocop is another subversive action movie that seemed to satiate an American bloodlust while openly mocking the culture. It’s so surprising that so many appear to have been oblivious to what is very obvious satire. Robocop isn’t a traditional hero, and the film certainly doesn’t think the police are some flawless institution. Nothing is happening to remedy the circumstances that have led to the collapse of society; instead, corporate powers seek to create more brutal unfeeling enforcers. It’s sad how close to reality Robocop has become.

Watch Robocop on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/389503/robocop-1987

Saturday Matinee: Altered States

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By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

“Altered States” is one hell of a movie — literally. It hurls its characters headlong back through billions of years to the moment of creation and finds nothing there except an anguished scream of “No!” as the life force protests its moment of birth. And then, through the power of the human ego to insist on its own will even in the face of the implacable indifference of the universe, it turns “No!” into “Yes!” and ends with the basic scene in all drama, the man and the woman falling into each other’s arms.

But hold on just a second here: I’m beginning to sound like the movie’s characters, a band of overwrought pseudo-intellectuals who talk like a cross between Werner Er-hard, Freud, and Tarzan. Some of the movie’s best dialogue passages are deliberately staged with everybody talking at once: It doesn’t matter what they’re saying, only that they’re incredibly serious about it. I can tell myself intellectually that this movie is a fiendishly constructed visual and verbal roller coaster, a movie deliberately intended to overwhelm its audiences with sensual excess. I know all that, and yet I was overwhelmed, I was caught up in its headlong energy.

Is that a worthy accomplishment for a movie? Yes, I suppose it is, if the movie earns it by working as hard as “Altered States” does. This is, at last, the movie that Ken Russell was born to direct the same Ken Russell whose wretched excesses in the past include “The Music Lovers,” “The Devils,” and “Lisztomania.” The formula is now clear. Take Russell’s flair for visual pyrotechnics and apocalyptic sexuality, and channel it through just enough scientific mumbo jumbo to give it form. The result may be totally meaningless, but while you’re watching it you are not concerned.

The movie is based on a Paddy Chayevsky novel, which was, in turn, inspired by the experiments of Dr. John Lilly, the man who placed his human subjects in total immersion tanks floating them in total darkness so that their minds, cut off from all external reality, could play along the frontiers of sanity. In “Altered States,” William Hurt plays a Harvard scientist named Jessup who takes such an experiment one step further, by ingesting a drug made from the sacred hallucinatory mushrooms of a primitive tribe. The strange thing about these mushrooms, Hurt observes in an easily missed line of dialogue in the movie, is that they give everyone who takes them the same hallucinatory vision. Perhaps it is our cellular memory of creation: There is chaos, and then a ball of light, and then the light turns into a crack, and the crack opens onto Nothing, and that is all there was and all there will be, except for life, which has its only existence in the mind.

Got that? It hardly matters. It is a breathtaking concept, but “Altered States” hardly slows down for it. This is the damnedest movie to categorize. Just when it begins to sound like a 1960s psychedelic fantasy, a head trip, it turns into a farce. The scientist immerses himself in his tank for too long, he regresses to a simian state, physically turns into some kind of ape, attacks the campus security guards, is chased by a pack of wild dogs into the local zoo, and kills and eats a sheep for his supper before turning back into the kindly Professor Jessup, the Intellectual Hulk.

The movie splits up into three basic ingredients: The science, the special effects, and the love relationship between the professor and his wife. The science is handled deliciously well. We learn as much as we need to (that is, next to nothing) about total immersion, genetics, and the racial memory. Then come the special effects, in four long passages and a few short bursts. They’re good. They may remind you at times of the sound-and-light extravaganza toward the end of 2001, but they are also supposed to evoke the birth of the universe in a pulsating celestial ovum. In the center of this vision is Dr. Jessup, his body pulsing in and out of an ape shape, his mouth pulled into an anguished “O” as he protests the hell of being born. These scenes are reinforced by the music and are obviously intended to fuel the chemically altered consciousness of the next generation of movie cultists.

But then there is the matter of the love relationship between the professor and his wife (Blair Brown), and it is here that we discover how powerful the attraction of love really is. During the professor’s last experiment, when he is disappearing into a violent whirlpool of light and screams on the laboratory floor, it is his wife who wades into the celestial mists, gets up to her knees in eternity, reaches in, and pulls him out. And this is despite the fact that he has filed for divorce. The last scene is a killer, with the professor turning into the protoplasm of life itself, and his wife turning into a glowing shell of rock-like flesh, with her inner fires glowing through the crevices (the effect is something like an overheated Spiderman). They’re going through the unspeakable hell of reliving the First Moment, and yet as the professor, as Man, bangs on the walls and crawls toward her, and she reaches out, and the universe rocks, the Man within him bursts out of the ape-protoplasm, and the Woman within her explodes back into flesh, and they collapse into each other’s arms, and all the scene really needs at that point is for him to ask, “Was it as good for you as it was for me?”

“Altered States” is a superbly silly movie, a magnificent entertainment, and a clever and brilliant machine for making us feel awe, fear, and humor. That is enough. It’s pure movie and very little meaning. Did I like it? Yeah, I guess I did, but I wouldn’t advise trying to think about it very deeply.

Watch Altered States on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100045145/altered-states

Saturday Matinee: Car Cemetery

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By Stu Willis

Source: Sex Gore Mutants

In an unspecified place, in an unspecified post-war future, the world is divided into two factions: the brutal Government-sponsored police regime, and the punks they hope to quash.

The punks spend their days scavenging the barren, post-Apocalyptic wastelands. Their nights are spent searching for “cemeteries” – secret places where they can hide from the authorities and enjoy a taste of their former lives. Much of the action is set in the titular car cemetery, a junkyard fashioned to house people in, fortress-style. Imagine a cross between STREET TRASH’s scrap-yard and Barter Town from MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME.

The cemetery’s pig-like keeper Milos (Roland Amstutz) welcomes the latest bunch of motley punks into his haven, referring to it as “Babylon”. Through his loudhailer he tells his guests that while they are there they are free to indulge in whatever perversions tickle their fancy. That includes the services of his own prostitute girlfriend, Dila (Juliet Berto).

The young adults retire to their individual car wrecks and get busy with all manner of sexual kinks, which allows director Fernando Arrabal to wallow in some customary carnal images before honing in on 80s fashion victim Tope (Boris Bergman) and his loyal friend.

They, along with everyone else, have heard that a Messiah-like rocker by the name of Emanou (Alain Bashung) is rumoured to be headed for the cemetery. There is a buzz in the air concerning his expected arrival but Tope, who has crossed paths with the new-age Christ figure once before, intimates designs on betraying him.

When Milos demands money from his transient guests for supper, they revolt. Fortunately for all, a riot is avoided by the arrival of the enigmatic Emanou. He is able to take two Big Mac sandwiches and feed the entire flock with them.

Meanwhile, as Emanou’s story is told in flashback by awestruck onlookers and Tope plots against the sultry music man, the cops await orders from their mysterious ruler The Bunker to locate and kill the Messiah.

Ah, I get it! Dila is the whore of Babylon … the cops are the Romans … Emanou walks on water and feeds the, well, around 20-or-so extras. Yes, Arrabal is reworking tales from the Bible through the filters of post-Apocalyptic sci-fi and new wave music.

Arrabal became a prominent figure in the Panic Movement of the 1960s, penning the play FANDO AND LIS – the screen adaptation of which later became the feature film debut of Alexandro Jodorowsky (SANTA SANGRE; EL TOPO). The Spanish surrealist then went on to become a cult filmmaker of his own distinction in the 1970s, with the brilliant VIVA LA MUERTE, the even wilder I WILL WALK LIKE A CRAZY HORSE and his nihilistic epic THE GUERNICA TREE (all three of which can be found in Cult Epics’ superb THE FERNANDO ARRABAL COLLECTION VOLUME 1 box-set).

CAR CEMETERY then, from 1983, comes as something of a disappointment. It’s not overly bad, just not as out-there or creative as its predecessors. The religious allegories have always been rife in Arrabal’s work, but here the blasphemy seems only half-hearted. The anger appears to have dissipated along with the budget for this low-rent REPO MAN relation.

The cast are game. Bashung, a famous singer in his native France up until his death from lung cancer in 2009, has an undeniable presence: he succeeds in the effortless cool of many a rock star. Everyone around him seems overly animated, as if being directed by Andrej Zulawski. But, somehow, it helps to keep the odd atmospherics afloat.

The problem is that the script is horribly ripe. Borrowing liberally from the Bible, this is portentous claptrap even by Arrabal’s standards (I say that with all due respect: I am a fan of the man). It’s true to say that his previous films were stuffed to the brim with surreal religious motifs and visual correlations between sex and death. Nothing has changed here, but everything feels so sedate in comparison. It’s no surprise to learn that this film is based on Arrabal’s play of the same name – and that explains its clunkiness: the limited sets; the dreadfully wooden dialogue; the cheap arthouse pretensions.

Worse still, the whole thing is given a punk rock look that firmly dates the film in the early 1980s – and not in a good way. It’s like Peter Greenaway directing CAFE FLESH with no budget, or the cast of JUBILEE racing through a softcore sci-fi variant of JESUS OF MONTREAL.

Cult Epics’ disc presents the film uncut in anamorphic 1.66:1. The transfer is generally dark and colours look a tad faded. Having said that, this is an obscure and largely unseen film – it’s amazing just to see it on DVD. It’s perfectly watchable, and relatively clean to boot.

The French audio track offered is 2.0 and is a good proposition throughout. Optional English subtitles are easy to read and, for the most part, free from typing errors.

A static main menu page leads into a static scene-selection menu allowing access to CAR CEMETERY via 10 chapters.

The only extras on the disc are trailers for VIVA LA MUERTE, I WILL WALK LIKE A CRAZY HORSE and THE GUERNICA TREE. The first and last of these are equipped with English subtitles, while the HORSE trailer has no dialogue.

The disc is a basic one, but fair when you consider that it’s likely to be the only legitimate standalone release this film is likely to receive. Cult Epics have also released CAR CEMETERY as part of a three-disc box-set – THE FERNANDO ARRABAL COLLECTION VOLUME 2 – which also contains the whimsical family film THE EMPEROR OF PERU (with Mickey Rooney!) and a third disc of documentaries, including the recommended watch FAREWELL BABYLON.

CAR CEMETERY is a hideously dated 80s film that fails to escape from the pratfalls of its stage origins. The fashions, the sets, the allegories – its all rank. But there is something that makes it just-to-say work regardless, be it the occasional inspired image (Dila conversing with a miniature angel; Tope’s fate) or authentic squalor and subversive anti-establishment message that seeps through. Arrabal is a cinematic terrorist of considerable intelligence and even a lesser film such as this demonstrates as much. Just don’t go into it expecting the same levels of polemical art or extremism of his earlier films.

Watch Car Cemetery on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/10605045

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.