Lessons of Darkness

Mutant Memorial Day

It appears the mutants have taken over, as Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand has reportedly enjoyed the most profitable opening weekend of the year. Which doesn't, however, change the fact that it's by far the weakest entry in the Marvel Comics-based franchise.

X-Men: The Last Stand (Slant magazine)

For more positive reviews, check below, where you'll find my latest Abel Ferrara review, my takes on a couple of classic film noirs, and my thoughts on Robert Altman's upcoming A Prairie Home Companion.

The Funeral (1996): B

With The Funeral, Abel Ferrara revisits many of his trademark obsessions – madness, honor, duty, loyalty, sexual dysfunction, and Catholic guilt and repentance – via the flashback-heavy story of the funeral of communist gangster Johnny Tempio (Vincent Gallo) at the house of his mob boss brother Ray (Christopher Walken). It’s a psychologically strung-out tale stuffed full of ideas and inspired moments, the best of which is a torturously powerful scene in which Ray, at the moment of truth, struggles mightily with the justness of avenging Johnny’s murderer. Yet despite its trio of superb lead performances – the finest of which is Chris Penn’s explosively coiled turn as semi-insane third bro Chez – the film (written by long-time Ferrara collaborator Nicholas St. John) often finds itself too preoccupied for its own good, choosing to ruminatively free-flow from one theme to another rather than taking the time to incisively explore some of its more intriguing topics (such as the brothers’ interactions with Benicio Del Toro’s union-busting crime bigwig Gaspare). And Ferrara largely short-shrifts his actresses, giving them little to do but either deliver inelegant moral-imparting speeches (Annabella Sciorra and Isabella Rossellini) or sit around in the background and look blankly attractive (Gretchen Mol).

A Prairie Home Companion (2006): B+

Even a minor Robert Altman effort is superior to most current moviemakers’ finest works, a fact confirmed by A Prairie Home Companion, the director’s touching (if a tad slight) musical-comedy tale of the (fictional) final performance of NPR stalwart Garrison Keillor’s titular stagebound radio show. Like Keillor, Altman is a born storyteller with a fundamental interest in community, and his portrait of the on-and-off-stage shenanigans surrounding Keillor’s last broadcast before home station WLT becomes part of an impersonal corporation is, first and foremost, a film about family. Beginning with a twilight image of a radio tower as its transmissions emanate out into the atmosphere (the intermingled sounds of different programs mirroring Altman’s trademark overlapping dialogue), Altman’s latest radiates warm intimacy, its patient, inquiring cinematography – full of gliding swoops and zooms around its cast of characters as well as Keillor’s out-on-the-front-porch stage set – imparting a sense of unity and of things (art and life, love and death, happiness and sadness) hopelessly, symbiotically intertwined. Keillor and company’s down-home ditties and heartland tales augment this harmonious mood, touching upon country, romance, hard work and rhubarb pie while also, in the case of cowboy comedy team Dusty (John C. Reilly) and Lefty (Woody Harrelson), delivering a smattering of bawdy, scatological bad jokes.

The film’s spirit of inclusiveness is, at times, a bit too generous, with Kevin Kline’s slapsticky ‘40s-era security chief Guy Noir coming across as the primary (though not only) somewhat clunky, superfluous contrivance. Nonetheless, as each performer grapples with the show’s (and by extension their tight-knit mini-society’s) impending demise, the theme of mortality increasingly comes to hover over Altman’s latest like a melancholic pall, so much so that an angel of death (the ethereal Virginia Madsen) eventually appears to stalk the backstage environs. A tone of wistful sorrow is ever-present, from the disappointment of Yolanda Johnson (a mannered Meryl Streep) – one-half of a singing duo with sister Rhonda (Lilly Tomlin) – over the end of her relationship with Keillor, to her sad song intros about her dead mother, to her daughter Lola’s (Lindsay Lohan) suicide-obsessed poems, to the unexpected passing away of one of the show’s regulars. This prevailing focus on inevitable finality seems to subtly recast the proceedings as the iconic 81-year-old auteur’s own attempt at confronting both his advancing age and his legacy. Yet despite a pervasive feeling of things coming to an end, A Prairie Home Companion is equally defined by its hopeful air of reconciliation and renewal, embodied by Maya Rudolph’s pregnant assistant and epitomized, ultimately, by Yolanda’s oft-stated belief that “one door closes, another opens.”

The Killer is Loose (1956): B+

War vet Leon “Foggy” Poole (Wendell Corey, masking malevolence underneath meekness) plans a bank heist that goes awry; during the ensuing attempt to arrest him, detective Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotton) accidentally kills Poole’s wife. Years later, Poole escapes prison, intent on exacting tit-for-tat revenge by killing Wagner’s spouse (Rhonda Fleming). Budd Boetticher’s The Killer is Loose plays out like some sort of slow-motion fever dream, its wiry, economical camerawork amplifying its anxiously suspenseful atmosphere. The director draws savvy links between his hero and villain, blurring moral distinctions between each man’s devotion to loved ones while also largely preventing pesky plot contrivances – such as Mrs. Wagner stupidly putting herself in harm’s way – from ruining the proficiently paced, shot-on-location action. Most entrancing, however, is the climactic sidewalk showdown between cop, killer and stalked woman, in which Wagner willfully puts work first and wife second and the mild-mannered Poole, a look of psychopathic derangement on his bifocal-adorned face, engages in a bit of devious cross-dressing.

Crime Wave (1954): B+

His plans for a straight-and-narrow life undone by three escaped convicts (including Charles Bronson, né Charles Buchinsky) who appear on his doorstep in need of a hideout, ex-con Steve Lacy (Gene Nelson) finds himself at the center of a tug-of-war between his former criminal compadres and Sterling Hayden’s determined detective in André De Toth’s neorealist noir gem Crime Wave (aka The City is Dark). The film’s highlight arrives early, during a scintillating tableau of police station plaintiffs and potential crooks that hints at the titular illicit flood, though de Toth’s no-nonsense direction also gives the subsequent action – in which Lacey is roped into his pals’ plans for a bank heist and airplane getaway to Mexico – a hard-boiled poeticism. Regardless of its mildly cynical edge, the upbeat ending doesn’t completely agree with the film’s preceding pessimistic outlook on the viability of positive transformation (Lacey seemingly doomed by his desire to change his stripes). Such a false final note, however, isn’t enough to sully Hayden’s vigorous turn as a no-nonsense cop, nor De Toth’s heart-pounding portrait of moral confliction.

Da Vinci Dreck

Despite being destined to make a gazillion dollars, The Da Vinci Code sucks - no surprise for anyone who's read Dan Brown's lousy novel or seen any of Ron Howard's lame movies. Too bad that this weekend's other films range from so-so (Over the Hedge) to predictably embarrassing (See No Evil).

Out Today:
The Da Vinci Code (Slant magazine)
Over the Hedge (Slant magazine)
See No Evil (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
The War Tapes (Slant magazine)

Another B Noir Capsule:
The Phenix City Story (Slant magazine)

And for posterity's sake, I once again urge everyone in the NYC area to get to Film Forum for their B Noir series. I've been spending days at a time catching up on old classics (some are reviewed below; other reviews are on their way), and can confirm that it's the best thing currently taking place in a movie theater.

Dangerous Game (1993): B+

Flippantly derided upon its initial release as an indulgent failure, Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game (aka Snake Eyes) is the director’s most overtly Godard-ian effort, an examination of filmmaking and family – and their intrinsic relationship – that self-consciously revels in ambiguity, contradiction and artifice. It’s also, one might add, one of his most rewardingly challenging works. Eddie Israel (Harvey Keitel) leaves his comfortable (but latently tense) NYC domestic confines for L.A., where he’s directing Mother of Mirrors, a movie starring TV actress Sarah Jennings (Madonna) and method thespian Francis Burns (James Russo) about a woman who, after finding God, rejects the hedonistic lifestyle she created with her husband. The contentious on-screen action and difficult behind-the-scenes rapport shared by the two actors parallels the disintegration of Israel’s marriage. Ferrara, however, disallows any tidy 1+1=2 equations from developing, his film an irreconcilably tangled web of reality and make-believe in which any given moment could be part of a fictional Dangerous Game scene, a non-fiction portrait of the making of Dangerous Game, or a scene from Mother of Mirrors. If inferior to Keitel’s magnetic portrait of artistic honesty-run-amok, Madonna’s uneven performance is nonetheless more tolerable than Russo’s “actorly” turn. Unsurprisingly, though, the film’s true star is Ferrara himself, who mines emotional landmine-laden terrain through both intimately scuzzy violence and canny manipulations of perspective.

My Name is Julia Ross (1945): B+

Joseph H. Lewis delivers Hitchcockian suspense and some menacing Gothic ambiance with My Name is Julia Ross, a paranoia-drenched tale of conspiratorial deceit and madness set in an ominous seaside mansion. Nina Foch’s titular out-of-work heroine, having seemingly missed her opportunity for a life of comfort and leisure when she allowed engaged housemate Dennis (Roland Varno) to escape her clutches, gets a job working as the secretary for wealthy old Mrs. Hughes (Dame May Whitty) – or so she believes until she wakes up in a remote manor where everyone acts like she’s the crazy wife of Mrs. Hughes’ son Ralph (George Macready). It’s a murder-suicide cover-up plot of the most devious kind, and in the hands of Lewis (Gun Crazy), it’s a grand excuse to employ every trick in the Val Lewton handbook, from mysterious black cats and chiaroscuro lighting to an effectively eerie shadow of a hand creeping up Ross’ nighttime bed. Were it any more protracted, the supremely stylish film might lose some of its pulse-pounding steam; at a brisk 65 minutes, however, it’s a sterling example of noir thriller efficiency.

The Dark Past (1948): C

Tediously trudging through Oedipal territory, Rudolph Maté’s The Dark Past is yet another of the era’s barely tolerable advertisements for Freudian psychoanalysis that's undone by a heaping of dramatically inert exposition. Escaped convict Al Walker (William Holden) takes a family hostage, only to discover that the man of the house, Dr. Andrew Collins (Lee J. Cobb), is also a police psychiatrist whose specialty is rehabilitating criminals via therapy and dream analysis. It’s not long before repressed childhood traumas are revealed to be the cause of Walker’s violent tendencies – as well as the reason his fingers are paralyzed in a Spider-Man web-slinging position – but there’s nothing revelatory about Maté’s stilted staging, a speech-heavy script, and by-the-numbers performances from a wild-eyed Holden and pensive Cobb. The latter, in particular, is painfully miscast, so much so that whenever he’s forced to patiently listen to Walker recount his nightmares, Cobb’s Collins looks less like a compassionate counselor and more like a man using every last ounce of strength to keep from beating the living hell out of his whiny, mamma’s boy captor.

Uncle Sam (1997): B+

Recycling Maniac Cop’s slasher flick formula for anti-war satire, director William Lustig and screenwriter Larry Cohen unearth the grotesque underbelly of Fourth of July jingoism with Uncle Sam. The corpse of chopper pilot Sam Harper – burnt to a crisp during the first Gulf War – is returned home to small town U.S.A, where the deceased military man’s wimpy nephew Jody (Christopher Ogden) dreams of being G.I. Joe until Isaac Hayes’ one-legged vet explains to the kid that war is hell and that his beloved uncle was really a violent, misogynistic psycho. Such claims are soon confirmed by Sam himself once he rises from his casket (purple heart stuck to his blackened chest) to kill un-American idiots, a group that includes teenage punks who enjoy burning the Stars and Stripes, Timothy Bottoms’ cowardly draft-dodger, and a stilts-utilizing peeping tom decked out in an Uncle Sam costume that the undead soldier assumes as his primary disguise. The money-shot killings are, unfortunately, nothing to write home about, and though Lustig and Cohen are generous enough to take potshots at everyone along the political spectrum, one pines for a somewhat more finely tuned lampoon of the fervently flag-saluting. Still, between Cohen’s wicked sense of humor (such as his employment of a wheelchair-bound psychic kid who was crippled by Independence Day fireworks) and Lustig’s creepy widescreen portraits of Norman Rockwell-ish Middle America, Uncle Sam is the best kind of B-movie, one that reinvigorates stale horror clichés via both tongue-in-cheek social commentary and an unironic, unbridled love for blood-and-guts mayhem.