Sein und Zeit (5/14/99)

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Leafing through Time magazine at the checkout counter the other night, I was stunned and saddened to discover that Pamela Anderson has officially retired her breast implants and intends hereafter to revert to a natural look. Say it ain’t so.

In the meantime Austin Powers won’t be back for a month or two, the Phantom Menace won’t be unveiled for a couple of weeks, the Mummy won’t rise from his tomb for a few more days, and the latest from Cronenberg may never make that critical ontological transition from Being-there-in-New-York to Being-here-by-the-popcorn-machine. But [his battle fatigue notwithstanding] your itinerant critic soldiers on:


The Vengeance Of She. [Cliff Owen, 1967.]

A spate of Hammer rereleases resurrects this obscure effort at a sequel to the classic Ursula Andress portrayal of Haggard’s Ayesha, deathless queen of the city lost within the Caves of Kor. For some reasons the studio masterminds determined to forge ahead with the project despite the unavailability of Ms. Andress, or for that matter Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee; a decision which seems baffling in retrospect, though [to give their talentscouts credit] they did manage to turn up the remarkably pneumatic Olinka Berova as a standin. — Sheesh, what a costume. If only there were a plot.


Mill Of The Stone Women. [Giorgio Ferroni, 1960.]

A Dutch variation on the classic wax-museum motif: an art student staying in the windmill/studio of an eccentric sculptor falls for a mysterious babe who either is or is not the sculptor’s daughter, is or is not in love with him, and is or is not one of the living dead, and finds out the hard way just what happened to the models who posed for the lifelike figures on display in the lower story.


Chinese Box. [Wayne Wang, 1997]

The Chinese-American auteur’s not-particularly-inscrutable meditation on the fate of Hong Kong, with Jeremy Irons [a foreign journalist who has conveniently picked 1997 to die of leukemia] as, uh, British imperialism, Gong Li as the Hong Kong beloved by the foreign devil, and Maggie Cheung [made up with a colorful scar and a pretty line of bullshit] as the Hong Kong that loves the foreign devil back. The love story is silly, the metaphor labored, and the location underemployed; but Hong Kong indifferently photographed toward a foolish purpose, like Maggie made up with a scar in an indifferent story, is still exotic, fascinating, and impossibly alluring.


Entrapment. [Jon Amiel, 1999.]

Insurance investigator Catherine Zeta-Jones baits a trap for legendary catburglar Sean Connery with a stolen Rembrandt, a golden Chinese mask, and her sweet young gymnast’s body. Or so it seems at first; as one might expect, the plot manages a few twists while the story is moving from New York to London to the Scottish moors to [no kidding] Malaysia. — Great locations and respectable action sequences [and Connery and Zeta-Jones, of course], but basically just another billion-dollar heist.

Actually, that ought to be on a double bill with:

The General. [John Boorman, 1998]

Boorman’s complex and fascinating tribute to the Irish criminal mastermind Martin Cahill, who carried off sixty million in swag [and filched a gold record from Boorman himself], fathered eight children by two sisters in polygamous marriage, and outfoxed the police at every turn before he made one turn too many, became embroiled in the politics of the Troubles, and got whacked by the IRA. — I was applauding Boorman’s audacity in shooting the story in black and white right up to the museum robbery; at which point, in truth, I was a trifle disappointed not to be able to see the Vermeer in color. — With Jon Voight as the cop and Brendan Gleeson as the robber.


Lewis & Clark & George. [Rod McCall, 1996.]

A jailbreak and a zoo robbery introduce two guys, a girl, and a poisonous snake, who take to the road to look for a lost gold mine in the wilds of New Mexico. After a really great lipsynched version of Where The Boys Are and a number of interesting reflections on gun control, tourism, the decline of literacy, and the problem of how to drink a frozen beer, they find it. — Would you shoot a fat guy for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? — With Salvator Xuereb, Dan Gunther, Rose McGowan, and cameos by James Brolin and Paul Bartel.


Smoke Signals. [Chris Ayre, from a screenplay by Sherman Alexie; 1998.]

Sundance Institute political correctness aside, this is, in fact, a fascinating idea: a road movie that takes a couple of American Indians off the reservation and out into America, rather than one that [in due course] brings America around to visit them. Occasionally thin, but on balance extraordinary.


Landmarks Of Early Film Volume Two: The Magic Of Méliès.

A documentary on the film pioneer’s career with an attached anthology of fifteen short subjects, featuring the first trick-photographic effects on record and some amusing gags involving fat ladies and the police that antedate even Mack Sennett. The real marvel, however, is a twenty-minute epic entitled Le Voyage A Travers L’Impossible, a sort of simultaneous homage to Jules Verne and Cyrano de Bergerac which I don’t seem to be able to summarize without exclamation marks: A party of adventurers set out to circumnavigate the globe! Their customized train careens through the Swiss Alps! On an automobile with a gigantic horn they hurtle through an Alpine landscape at three hundred miles an hour! A crash! A lengthy hospitalization! Again by train to the summit of the Jungfrau! Hurtling off into space! Flying, buoyed up by dirigible balloons! They crashland on the Sun! Exploring the solar landscape, they are overcome by heat! Fortunately they’ve brought along a gigantic icebox! Unfortunately it’s too cold, and they’re frozen into a block of ice! But it thaws. They make their escape in a submarine boat! which falls from the Sun to the Earth through interplanetary space supported by a parachute. They land in the ocean! They explore the ocean floor! They see a giant octopus! The sub’s engines blow up and fling the fragments of the machine into the air! They all land safely at a nearby port! and survive to give a report to the Geographical Society. — All this is handtinted in a color process unequalled in quality for at least another thirty years. — An enduring tribute to one of the most remarkable imaginations of the Twentieth century; check this out before we lurch into the Twenty-first.


Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels. [Guy Ritchie, 1998.]

An essay in the style of Tarantino in the now-familiar genre defined by Trainspotting and The Full Monty: four workingclass British lads make a play for the big enchilada which backfires, leaving them half a million in debt to some ugly customers; after a ludicrous series of complications involving a couple of antique shotguns, a warehouse full of ganja, a heist upon another heist, and the successive introductions of an astonishingly various assortment of Really Mean Guys, they break even, or nearly, but not before a couple of apocalyptic shootouts that wipe out half the population of London. Fresh, energetic, and unfailingly hilarious: the spectacle of a hapless debtor being bludgeoned to death with a rubber dildo is in itself worth the price of admission. Check this out.


Trailer: The Blair Witch Project.

I hadn’t expected to see this on the big screen any time soon, but apparently it was a big hit at Sundance and got a distribution deal. The premise is simple: a trio of student filmmakers are supposed to have gone off into the Maryland woods in 1994 to film a documentary on the legend of the Blair Witch and disappeared; after a year their audiovisual records have been discovered, and, these are they. What is startling and original about the film is that [rather in the spirit of one of those Sixties radical-theater exercises in improvisation Andre Gregory described to Wally Shawn] this is exactly how it was made: the principals were handed the cameras and sent on a monthlong camping trip; the director and crew showed up occasionally to hand out programmatic shooting instructions and some guidelines around which the action and dialogue were improvised &$151; and, moreover, pulled unscheduled tricks which really did scare the hell out of the actors. The result, apparently, is a sort of cinema verite horror movie, a waking nightmare perhaps reminiscent of The Shining, that is extraordinarily frightening without the slightest hint of slash or splatter. — Watch for it. Coming this summer.

The Story Of Adele H. [Francois Truffaut, 1975.]

Isabelle Adjani depicts the deranged daughter of Victor Hugo, who followed an English officer across the Atlantic and died the victim of romantic obsession. Posterity does not record whether she saved a blue dress.


Teorema. [Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968.]

Don’t ask what possessed me to try to relive the leftwing bombast of the Sixties through the vehicle of this incoherent denunciation of the bourgeois; I’m still trying to figure that out myself.


The Tenth Victim. [Elio Petri, 1965.]

Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress play kiss kiss bang bang about the seven hills of the Eternal City. From a story by the great science fiction humorist Robert Sheckley; am I the only one who remembers him?


Camille 2000. [Radley Metzger, 1969.]

What can I tell you, it was one of those weeks in which some long-dormant inner voice seemed to surface and cry out for badly dubbed dialogue and babes with big hair. — Another penetrating expose of loose living among the Roman upper classes, with littleknown starlet Daniele Gaubert in the Anita Ekberg role and the eminently forgettable Nino Castelnuovo flopping around in the shoes of Marcello Mastroianni. — Why Ms. Gaubert should have remained obscure is baffling, though her untimely death could not have helped; compared to flatchested notalents like Jane Fonda she fairly bursts off the screen. I look forward to those Frankensteinian advances in CGI that will permit the synthesis of a virtual Ms. Gaubert from the dead reels of the filmic record and allow her to be cast in remakes of Barbarella, Barb Wire, and Bad Girls From Mars.


Stranger On the Third Floor. [Boris Ingster, 1940.]

Reporter John McGuire testifies against Elisha Cook, Jr. at a murder trial, securing a conviction at the expense of unease of conscience; doubt persists in the minds of the audience until we stumble across Peter Lorre skulking in the alleyway, at which point it becomes clear just how all will end well. Sometimes regarded as the first film noir, mainly by virtue of a remarkable expressionistic dream sequence.


Goodbye Lover. [Roland Joffé, 1998.]

From the opening moments, in which we discover femme fatale Patricia Arquette waking to the strains of The Sound Of Music and parroting the monologue on the selfactualization cassette she stuffs into the player in her car, we fear the worst; these fears are only confirmed when we find that she sells real estate and is fucking Don Johnson in the loft of the church. And it is indeed destined that she will destroy everyone who comes within her orbit [with one cometary exception]; albeit not without meteoric incident and hyberbolic plot twist. A guy falls off a balcony into a pool; a Senator gets blown by a transvestite; a BMW motorcycle goes over a cliff and explodes. With Dermot Mulroney as a drunken spin doctor, Andre Gregory as a minister, Vincent Gallo as a hitman, and Ellen DeGeneres as a cop who can’t stop eating. Silly but amusing, and anyway there’s lots of shopping. Check it out.


El Mariachi/Desperado. [Robert Rodriguez, 1993/1995.]

A new combined edition of these two has appeared on disc, with extensive commentary by the author explaining just how he managed to make an action movie good enough to snow the audience at Sundance and jumpstart his directing career for seven thousand dollars; and then how he spent the seven million Columbia gave him for the sequel. Just in case you wondered: he shot both movies in a small town in Mexico; to ensure positive coverage in the local media he cast the news leads from the television station in El Mariachi [and didn’t kill them off]; almost all of El Mariachi was shot in a couple of blocks around the male lead’s house, because they had to go back there to reload the camera; the footage counter on the [borrowed] camera didn’t work properly, so he made up a dream sequence to use up the random snippets left over at the end of every reel; the dialogue was postsynched, meaning that every time a character’s mouth went out of step with his voice he had to cut away while editing; thus the novel freneticism of the montage, which many admired, was actually a product of necessity; he did all his tracking shots from a wheelchair [a la Godard/Coutard in Breathless]; the squibs for the gunshot wounds were made with homemade fake blood squirted out of condoms; some of the guns were real [borrowed from the local police], the rest were just squirtguns; nearly everyone in the cast turned out to be related to everyone else, even if he didn’t realize it at first; the bad guys keep getting smaller throughout the movie because he killed off the most likely looking gangsters in the first half and had to make due with the talent available in the second; and every time anyone flashes a wad of cash in the film Rodriguez had to borrow it from one of the actors because he didn’t have any himself. — As for Desperado, the studio insisted the [Mexican!] female lead should be played by a blonde until he battered them about the head and body with Salma Hayek’s screentest; presumably they also wanted Bruce Willis rather than Antonio Banderas, but it is better not to know. — An invaluable guide to guerilla filmmaking, and a muchneeded reassurance that, at least once in a while, talent will out.


The Tragicall Historie of Doctor Faustus. [Leonardo Garbonzo, 1999]

Brainy geek Johannes, the smartest kid at Wittenberg High, wearies of the ceaseless quest for knowledge that never seems to get him any babes and hacks into a necromantic server, conjuring up legendary Goth Mephisto, who offers him twentyfour days of popularity in exchange for his soul. Transformed into an epitome of cool, Johannes scores with the cutest chick in school, Helena, and plays many pranks upon the administration before his bargain becomes due at midnight the day of the Prom, when his soul is sent gibbering to eternal detention and his mindless body is condemned to remain in high school forever. With Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a truckload of kids from Dawson’s Creek. — The producers promise us forthcoming remakes of Volpone, The School For Scandal, and The Seven Against Thebes. And there are those who still wonder why we need to keep our nuclear deterrent.

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Too many notes (4/14/99)

Kor values.