Lessons of Darkness

Oscar’s Increasing Irrelevance

This morning’s Academy Award nominations held only a few surprises – no Best Picture or Director noms for the pedestrian Walk the Line, no Supporting Actress recognition for A History of Violence’s superlative Maria Bello, and zip, zero, nada for my newly beloved Jeff Daniels for his bravura turn in The Squid and the Whale. As was expected, the announcement of this year’s Golden Boy Statuette contenders merely confirmed that the Best Picture contest is between Brokeback Mountain and Crash (neither of which strikes me as remotely worthy, but I’ll be pulling for the former by default), that it’s Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Best Actor race to lose, and that there were few female performances worthy of a Best Actress prize.

Oh, and it also proved that the Oscars are now just a hair’s breadth away from being an utterly worthless barometer of celluloid greatness.

I know such a sentiment is not novel, and that the awards are best (only?) enjoyed as simply a frivolous showcase for Hollywood glitz and glamour. But the almost total absence of nominations for Terrence Malick’s The New World (which only scored a Best Cinematography nod) nonetheless signals the Academy’s dispiriting inability to recognize an honest-to-goodness masterpiece when it’s in their midst. Not just one of last year’s top five films, but one of the decade’s most extraordinary movies, Malick’s Jamestown saga – whether one is discussing the original 150-minute version or the trimmed-down 135-minute cut – is an unqualified event, a truly unique artistic achievement that, to put it mildly, dwarfs the decidedly mediocre Best Picture challengers offered up by the Academy. Yes, the Oscars have a long, storied history of honoring average, disposable prestige pictures in favor of truly great films. And yes, Malick’s is not a film likely to make many waves at the box office or with the general populace. But to even suggest that Crash or Capote are, in any conceivable way, superior to Malick’s latest is, in my humble opinion, to have little clue about what constitutes cinematic magnificence.

Whew! Well, with that rant out of the way, stay tuned for my forthcoming thoughts on the sleeker, shorter version of The New World. Which, did I mention, is indisputably, incontrovertibly, undeniably 2005’s best film?

God Told Me To (1976): B

An off-the-wall alien abduction saga that skewers mankind’s fundamental behavioral and belief systems, Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To never quite lives up to its bravura opening, in which detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) investigates a series of random slayings perpetrated by ordinary people (including a young Andy Kaufman as a crazed cop) who all claim, on their death beds, that they were carrying out the will of God. Such assertions hit home for Nicholas, a devout Catholic who attends church every morning and, though involved with a serious girlfriend, maintains a relationship with the estranged wife (Sandy Dennis) his faith won’t allow him to divorce. As Nicholas pries deeper into the mysterious crimes, what he uncovers is a secret cabal of corporate bigwigs working at the behest of a glowing hermaphroditic deity named Bernard (Richard Lynch) who seems to have been the product of an artificially inseminated virgin birth orchestrated by space invaders – an origin shared by none other than Nicholas himself! As usual, Cohen’s grittily shot, continuity-challenged film is beset by roiling social tensions, with the masses so gripped by a disgust for the devout, the elderly, and hippies – as well as for the unborn, in a theme reminiscent of It’s Alive – that they hardly seems to need divine guidance to enact violence. Yet disappointingly, his intriguing but exasperatingly uneven film loses cohesiveness at the moment it should be congealing, proving partly unsure of how to fluidly synthesis its Christian symbolism, jumbled socio-religious critique, and X-Files-ish conspiracy theories about extraterrestrial Almighties.

When a Stranger Calls (1979): C

Fred Walton’s urban legend-inspired When a Stranger Calls began life as a short film, only to be expanded past the twenty-minute mark once Halloween unearthed a box-office market for serial killer thrillers. The problem with such a profit-driven plan, however, was that Walton’s short – which functions as the feature film’s famous first segment, in which babysitter Carol Kane discovers that a threatening prank caller is telephoning her from inside the house! – was a one-scare device, and didn’t necessitate any of the subsequent filler concerning Charles Durning’s private investigator searching for Tony Beckley’s on-the-loose fiend with the help of Colleen Dewhurst’s prickly boozehound. With virtually no character development and a cast of typically solid actors employing an affected technique whereby long, tortured pauses accompany (and interrupt) every line of dialogue, the film is, outside of its reasonably taut intro and an effectively overblown score by Dana Kaproff, aggravatingly devoid of suspense. But then, it’s probably foolish to hope for competent scares from a thriller that thinks it wise to stage multiple on-foot chase sequences involving the plump Durning.

The Puppet Masters (1994): C

Robert A. Heinlein may have written The Puppet Masters five years before 1956’s classic Cold War allegory Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but that does little to diminish the been-there, done-that vibe of Stuart Orme’s 1994 adaptation of Heinlein’s novel, about a secret government agency’s efforts to combat slug-like aliens who control humans by latching onto their backs. His thirst for fighting extraterrestrials apparently unquenched by his starring role in 1978’s superb Body Snatchers remake, Donald Sutherland headlines this thriller as Andrew Nivens, the leader of the Office of Scientific Investigation, a covert outfit – which also includes Nivens’ bland agent son Sam (Eric Thal) and exobiologist Mary (Tommy Boy’s Julie Sefton) – that’s tasked with preventing the rapidly reproducing invaders from spreading from a small Iowa community into the country proper. In the hands of director Orme, unfortunately, humanity’s suspense-free quest to stop the tentacled creatures is about as nerve-wracking – and profound – as a warm bath. That everyone, heroes included, get to temporarily experience the aliens’ string-pulling powers is a nice touch; the fact that their emotionless personalities while possessed are no more flat and robotic than their regular demeanors, however, is emblematic of this supernatural adventure’s pervasive dullness.

Weekly Roundup

For those who've already checked out my recent coverage of Larry Cohen's It's Alive trilogy (found below), I bring you five new reviews, including my thoughts on this weekend's military/boxing bore Annapolis.

This Weekend:
Annapolis (Slant magazine)

The Future:
C.S.A.: Confederate States of America (Slant magazine)
Through the Fire: The Sebastian Telfair Story (Slant magazine)
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Slant magazine)
Trudell (Slant magazine)

And keep an eye out for my take on Terrence Malick's newly trimmed version of The New World, which will be up early next week once I return from seeing the Celtics take on the Ron Artest-ized Kings in Boston.

It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987): B-

It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive finishes the series’ natural allegorical evolution, finally turning the aberrant “It” tykes into a nationwide scourge that – after an opening court room scene presided over by Days of Our Lives paterfamilias Macdonald Carey regarding the “humanity” of small-time actor Stephen Jarvis’ (Michael Moriarty) offspring – is dealt with by relegating the throat-slashing buggers to an undisclosed, uninhabited island. Such a solution, however, doesn’t stop Jarvis from being shunned by his ex-wife Ellen (Karen Black), nor does it prevent him from being spurned by a potential one-night stand who, upon learning that Jarvis fathered one of the monsters, treats him (in the film’s canniest new twist) with a brand of “don’t touch me” prejudice reminiscent of early, erroneous phobias about HIV. Five years after exiling the “babies” to the middle of nowhere, Jarvis and some scientists journey to the creatures’ home to find that they’ve not only grown into full-fledged adults but have also reproduced, and Cohen’s film – more visually polished than its forerunners – is most vibrant while immersed in the lush jungle where the mutants now dwell. Yet while a hammy Moriarty brings a slouched, miserable verve to the wacko proceedings, and the happy-grandparents finale has a deviously amusing hopefulness, it’s hard to shake the gnawing feeling that the It’s Alive films exhausted their conceit’s symbolic potential with 1978's It Lives Again.

It Lives Again (1978): B+

With It Lives Again, Larry Cohen shifts his horror series’ focus from the realm of the personal to that of the communal, positing a situation in which the childbirth aberration suffered by It’s Alive’s Davis family has mutated into a bourgeoning epidemic. A few years after his own infant ordeal, notorious monster daddy Frank Davis (John P. Ryan) crashes the baby shower of Eugene (Frederic Forrest) and Jody Scott (Kathleen Lloyd) in order to notify them that they’re destined to spawn a lil’ “It.” After rescuing them from a hospital planning (with the help of the police) to kill the child upon its entry into the world, Frank shuttles them off to a secret compound where Dr. Perry (Bone’s Andrew Duggan) is committed to protecting their, as well as two other similar, creatures from the militant factions which seek their destruction. Decidedly slower and less menacing than the original, Cohen’s film also boasts a more supple social critique that allows for myriad interpretations – abortion, homosexuality, and prenatal genetic conditions are merely three of the film’s many potential allegorical readings. And though Bernard Hermann’s musical presence is sorely missed and Rick Baker’s effects work isn’t up to his usual standards – the quick glimpses of the rubbery “babies” remain the trilogy’s weakest element – It Lives Again still proves poised in its balancing of humor, terror and tragedy.

It’s Alive (1974): A

Its title a nod to Dr. Frankenstein’s triumphant cry in James Whale’s 1931 classic, Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive may be the most discomforting filmic depiction of childbirth anxiety, parental responsibility and unconditional love I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the all-time underrated horror movies, a deeply terrifying portrait of child-parent relationships and intolerant fears of “otherness” defined as much by its sociological sharpness as its gore. Proving to be Cohen’s first mainstream success, this tale of biological processes-gone-awry focuses on middle-class couple Frank (John P. Ryan) and Lenore Davis (Sharon Farrell), whose second child exits his mother’s body a mutated monster with murder on his mind. A physical manifestation both of its parents’ corrosive hang-ups (specifically Frank’s selfish careerism and feelings of being “trapped” by kids) and public failings (environmental pollution, over-prescription of drugs), the “baby” immediately slays the attending doctors and nurses before fleeing into the neighborhood, where it becomes hunted by the police and Frank, the latter of whom loathes the notion that the thing shares with him common DNA. Crafted with superbly controlled widescreen compositions that, in the early hospital scenes, exhibit a distorted, fish lens-like surrealism, Cohen’s film – menacingly scored by Bernard Hermann – playfully (and discreetly) trades in infant/motherhood imagery, from the lactating milk truck attacked by the creature to the finale’s womb-like underground L.A. sewer system. Yet what ultimately elevates It’s Alive above being a piece of B-grade schlock (a designation unjustly used to define most of Cohen’s work) isn’t simply the writer/director/producer’s assured juggling of terror, comedy and social commentary; it’s also Ryan’s superbly bottled-up performance as the supernatural newborn’s distraught, disgusted and ultimately devoted daddy.

The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988): C

Ugly stereotypes, anorexic socio-political allegory, scant scares, and Bill Pullman – that’s The Serpent and the Rainbow in a nutshell. Based on Wade Davis’ novel, Wes Craven’s lame documentary-flavored horror story follows anthropologist Dennis Alan (Pullman) as he searches revolutionary Haiti for a mystery drug that reportedly raises the dead. With the help of a local psychiatric institution doctor (Mona Lisa’s Cathy Tyson), Alan undergoes a crash coarse in the island’s history, discovering a culture where 110 percent of the population practices voodoo, including an evil political leader (Zakes Mokae) who’s using zombifying white powder as a means of silencing opponents. Imagery of people being buried alive is the film’s calling card, and Craven handles his suffocating coffin-encased dream sequences with sufficient skill. Yet in every other respect, the film is either offensive or incompetent, from the sight of blacks behaving like superstitious witch doctors or the dance floor-gyrating possessed, to Pullman’s unbearably overwrought performance as the altruistic Alan, to the persistently aggravating narration, which wants to function as helpful connective tissue between scenes but instead only provides a wealth of superfluous information that neither complements nor amplifies the already dull, pointless action.

My Own Private Idaho (1991): B

A lyrical portrait of aimless youth painted with touches of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is cold and uninvolving, which isn’t to say that it’s wholly unsuccessful. Rather, if one can look past the filmmaker’s affected Bard adaptation – which has the raggedy, improvisational feel of a community theater production – and his insipid romanticizing of gay street hustlers into icons of grungy, sexy coolness, there exists a quite stark, poetic rumination on the unyielding desire for home. Narcoleptic Mike (River Phoenix) lives life in a fugue state between sleep and consciousness, and his days in the Pacific Northwest are spent whoring himself out to johns and hanging out with his Prince Hal-ish cohort Scott (Keanu Reeves), an heir to political power and wealth slumming it as a male prostitute. Their episodic journey from Portland to Idaho to Italy and back in search of Mike’s mom puts them in contact with an assortment of strange characters – including the Falstafian Bob Pigeon (William Richert) and a German auto parts salesman (Udo Kier) – but Van Sant’s film never assumes a straightforward narrative, instead using primary-colored intertitle cards, symbolic insert shots, and an elliptical structure to foster a dreamlike atmosphere that, like his Bela Tarr-inspired trilogy of recent years, strives to situate viewers in a distinct time and space. Such an endeavor is all-too-often undermined by his clunky Shakespearean conceit and his quickly wearisome habit of cinematographically drooling over the posing Reeves and Phoenix. But if My Own Private Idaho is never truly moving (save for Mike’s heartbreaking campfire admission of love to Scott), it’s nonetheless bathed in a somewhat marvelously vagabond mood of elegiac longing.