Father Time, Mother Night (1/22/00)

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Bill Warren in his encyclopedic history of movie science fiction, Keep Watching The Skies, quotes a prominent critic’s analysis of the films of Roger Corman: ““At this juncture in Corman’s work, women begin to operate on four different levels. Beside their basic dramatic function as companions for men, they carry meaning on the level of sociology, in their assumption or rejection of female roles, at the level of myth, in that they represent the renewal of life and thus the running down of Time, and on the level of psychoanalysis, as the anima.’” Warren notes dryly: “This appears over a picture of Lori Nelson being carried off by the three-eyed mutant from The Day The World Ended.”

A picture which [incidentally] I’d never seen until a couple of weeks ago; and on which I plan extended commentary, as soon as I can come up with another two or three levels of interpretation for the feminine principle and then finish the rewrite in the appropriately Heideggerian German. — It would probably also help if I could turn up a few of the still-missing ancillary sources: Lust For Frankenstein; The Killer Barbies; Bimbo Cheerleaders From Outer Space.

Items I have managed to turn up:


The Mistress Of Atlantis. [G.W. Pabst, 1932. From the novel L’Atlantide, by Pierre Benoit.]

When you open on a couple of Legionnaires smoking pensively and staring out over the enigmatic vastness of the Sahara, you know that within moments one of them is going to sigh, stub his butt out in an ashtray, and with the words “It was on such a night as this that Malebranche and I first caught sight of the Mountains of the Moon...” commence a tale in flashback of the discovery of the lost continent of Atlantis, buried beneath the shifting desert sands; and of a mysterious and terrible Queen of indeterminate age and immortal beauty who breaks the hearts and spirits of European adventurers for her own cruel sport. — But you gotta love it. — With Brigitte Helm [the heroine/robot in Lang’s Metropolis] as the fell Antinea, real camels, real leopards, and the real desert [in Hollywood in 1932 they would certainly have faked all this on a soundstage], and not a single nickel in royalties for the estate of H. Rider Haggard.


Supercop 2. [Stanley Tong, 1993.]

After being dumped by her boyfriend, angstridden policewoman Michelle Yeoh kicks butt all over Hong Kong; assisted, intermittently, by the supporting cast from Jackie Chan’s Police Story series. — Jackie himself makes an appearance midway through the feature in drag, recycles all the dumb jokes that Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis did for Billy Wilder, runs down a fugitive in traffic [bounding over cars, etc.] while wearing stiletto heels, and then disappears from the story; probably just as well, though Michelle is as always spectacular. — Sheesh. Somebody get this girl a plot.


New Rose Hotel. [Abel Ferrara, 1998; screenplay by Ferrara and Christ Zois, from the story by William Gibson.]

A tale of twentyfirst century industrial espionage: cyberpunk corporate headhunters Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe form a plan to pluck scientific megastar Yoshitaka Amano from the clutches of one multinational and deliver him into the clutches of another; a scheme which [it is immediately apparent] must revolve around the seductive person of Asia Argento [daughter of the famed Italian horror auteur], upon whom Dafoe develops a very unprofessional fixation that dissipates his focus and saps his precious bodily fluids. When the caper goes south, he is left to brood over its failure in that stack of human storage bins the New Rose Hotel. — Alas, it’s all too obvious just who betrayed them and how; moreover, the empty repetition of the last act suggests strongly that the principals lost their funding midway through the shoot and had to resort to recycling their footage to get a movie in the can. — Given the starcrossed history of the project, which seems to have lingered in development hell for most of the decade [it antedated Johnny Mnemonic, and was originally attached to Kathryn Bigelow], this can hardly be surprising. — Not to say the flick isn’t interesting: it has a nice postmodern-video look to it, the cellphone/palmpilots display motion pictures [though I still await that long-anticipated Killer App, videophone sex], and even if most of the action seems to revolve around three people hanging out in a hotel room, the three people are Dafoe, Walken, and the spectacular Ms. Argento [a sort of Italian Uma; and, incidentally, already a director herself.] — The titles run simultaneously in German, Japanese, and English: how perfectly Gibsonian.


The Big Carnival. [Aka Ace In The Hole. Billy Wilder, 1952.]

Wilder’s personal favorite among his films, a brilliant anticipation of the Age of Geraldo: onetime big-city newspaperman Kirk Douglas, having parlayed a taste for whiskey and a gift for insubordination into a one-way ticket to Palookaville, casts about desperately for the big story that will buy him his ticket back out of the Arizona outback to the bright lights of Broadway; seizing on the predicament of a trapped miner as the needed opportunity for shameless selfpromotion, he conjures up an exploitative media circus [the carnival of the title] that corrupts everyone drawn into its vortex. — Though this story proved too dark for his audience and was a commercial failure, and the author was rebuked for his cynicism, measured against the realities with which we’ve lately become acquainted it now seems a naive piece of moralizing: Wilder shows Douglas at the last racked by conscience and destined for an ugly alcoholic end; now, of course, he would rocket forward into a wildly successful career in television.


Pushing Tin. [Mike Newell, 1999. Written by Glen Charles and Les Charles. Based on an article written by Darcy Frey.]

Air traffic controllers John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton push their competitive rivalry to the limits of the envelope, burning one another’s fingers, busting one another’s chops, and fucking one another’s wives, despite the annoying distraction presented by the occasional necessity of keeping airplanes full of people from running into one another. — Somebody ought to nominate the guy who cut the trailer for this turkey for an Academy award; somehow he managed to make it look like it would be mildly interesting and at least occasionally funny.


End Of Days. [Peter Hyams, 1999. Written by Andrew W. Marlowe.]

Yes, it’s New Year’s Eve in Times Square ... and Satan is crashing the party! — Indeed, as every Hollywood producer knows from flipping through to the end of the Bible to find out how it comes out, the Prince of Darkness [here portrayed by the redoubtable Gabriel Byrne] awakens every thousand years, and [naturally] the first thing on his mind is getting laid. Nor will any ordinary bimbo do, for the mother of the Antichrist; in fact [unfortunately] only Patricia Arquette will really do, but since she wasn’t available Robin Tunney is pressed into service as the prospective Babe of the Black Mass. Naturally against so dire a threat to universal order only one guy can be called upon to save the world from chaos and the endless night; and, give him credit, Arnold does his best, though you have to wonder whether that unshaven-alcoholic look is really part of his character or whether it’s just something that happened after he read the script.

A few questions:

— Can the Devil be a character? In Dante, certainly, he’s only a part of the production design; in the Faust legends [and by derivation then in Goethe] he’s a Mephistophelean prankster; in Milton he’s the prototype of the Romantic hero; in Dostoevsky he’s the voice of doubt, in Thomas Mann a critic. But somehow The Exorcist erased all this progress, and we’re back to a medieval bogeyman. — On reflection [and I’m entirely serious], after having now variously admired Nicholson, De Niro, Byrne, and Billy Crystal in the role, on balance I think the best depiction of Satan that I’ve seen in recent motion pictures was the one in South Park: certainly it was silly, but it had the overriding virtue of originality.

— Isn’t it strange that Vatican councils are now always shot just like the equivalent scenes in The Godfather? as if the Pope were Don Corleone. Is it just the part where they kiss the ring?

— At one point the authors explain that the number of the Beast is actually 999, since in the original Greek they wrote numerals upside-down. Didn’t it occur to them that the decimal notation hadn’t been invented when the New Testament was written?

[Incidentally 666 is 1010011010 in binary: a conjugate palindrome. Coincidence? Or...the work of Satan?]

In sum: if Arnold is really thinking about going into politics [and why should he not], this might be a good moment to make the move. Another turkey like this can only, shall we say, endanger his legacy.

As for the black-mass genre, unless Polanski wants to stage a comeback, you can stick a pitchfork in it. — Happy New Year 11111010000.


The Messenger. [Luc Besson, 1999. Written by Besson and Andrew Birkin.]

The not-exactly-unfamiliar story of Joan of Arc, which parses just like the Oppenheimer case: act one, she sees visions; act two, she wins battles; act three, a grateful nation burns her at the stake. As one must expect of the brilliant visual stylist Besson, this is an extraordinarily beautiful film, and for that reason alone probably the definitive medieval war epic; though of course it owes a lot to Terry Gilliam [and indeed a few of the recurring characters seem to have been transplanted with only minor variation from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.] — I have no idea whether Milla Jovovich can act or not, but she certainly makes a very photogenic Maid; John Malkovich plays the smirking Dauphin, Faye Dunaway his scheming mother-in-law, and Dustin Hoffman the voice-of-conscience/Grand Inquisitor invented by that noted Schoolman Fyodor Dostoevsky.


La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. [Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928.]

Any cinematic treatment of the story of Joan must bear implicit comparison with this, one of the legendary masterpieces of the silent cinema; though it was thought for fifty years that [the original negative having been, ironically, lost in a fire] no complete copy survived. Then, incredibly, in 1981 a release print in salvageable condition was discovered tucked away in a closet in a Norwegian mental hospital; after prodigious labors on the part of the film scholars of the Cinémathèque Française, a restored version believed to be a close approximation to Dreyer’s original cut was completed in 1985 and may now be viewed on DVD. — And it is stunning. The story is very carefully confined to Besson’s third act, the trial: the compositions are claustrophobic, the angles, deviant, the shots mainly huge tight closeups of Joan [Maria Falconetti] and her inquisitors, projected against a featureless white background; that the stark spare Scandinavian rigor of this single film must have had a definitive influence upon Bergman, for example, seems obvious in retrospect. — For the soundtrack of this new video release use has been made of the remarkable oratorio composed by Richard Einhorn, which was directly inspired by the film. [His curiosity piqued by a still he chanced upon while browsing one day at MOMA, he ordered up a screening; and, dumbstruck with admiration, set at once to work.] The French and Latin libretto was assembled from writings of medieval female mystics, a few of the more inflammatory passages from the Book of Daniel [in the Vulgate], and excerpts from the letters of Joan herself.

Still forthcoming, incidentally: yet another Joan, this one written and directed by Ronald Maxwell and featuring Jacqueline Bisset, Albert Finney, Derek Jacobi, and Mira Sorvino as the Maid. There must be something in the water,


Sherlock Jr. [Buster Keaton, 1924.]

Motion-picture projectionist and wouldbe detective Keaton, thwarted in his courtship of best girl Kathryn McGuire by the local Sheik, retreats to his projection booth, dozes off, and is transported in a dream into the melodrama playing on the screen [“Hearts and Pearls, Or, The Lounge Lizard’s Lost Love”][“In Five Parts”] — where, as the dashing detective Sherlock Jr., he confounds his rival and wins his ladylove; though not, of course, without remarkable pratfalls and a wildly inventive chase. — Thus obviously the original of The Purple Rose Of Cairo, The Last Action Hero, etc. — though rather more: Keaton’s opening sequence of gags is based on the idea that his hero is trying to integrate himself not into a smoothly-flowing stream of reality, but into a carefully-edited representation of the flow of events; when he tries to sit down on a chair, for instance, the film cuts away to a city street and he falls over backwards. I don’t recall ever seeing a similar progression of ideas [save possibly in a channelsurfing passage in Amazon Women On The Moon] in any other film; which certainly says something interesting about cinematic depictions of the cinematic depiction of reality. — But at this point Wittgenstein would be telling me to shut up and watch the fucking movie. — Good idea.


La Sentinelle. [Arnaud Desplechin, 1992; written by Desplechin, Pascale Ferran, Noëmie Lvovsky, and Emmanuel Salinger.]

Returning to France after decades in Germany, medical student Emmanuel Salinger is interrogated with inexplicable violence by parties representing themselves as border guards; upon his arrival in Paris to take up an internship in forensic medicine, he finds that during the altercation somebody slipped a severed head into his baggage. He discovers presently that the border guards were phonies and that the head may have been that of a Russian scientist; but who wants him to figure out who it was and where it came from, and what has this to do with the end of the Cold War? in which his father, the sentinel of the title, was a spook haunting the no-man’s-land of the East German border. — Wonderfully complex, as one would expect from the phenomenal director of My Sex Life. — And how is it these Parisians [even doctors] get to chainsmoke like it was still the Sixties?


The Woman In The Window. [Fritz Lang, 1944; screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, from a novel by J. H. Wallis.]

Retiring academic Edward G. Robinson is struck by a portrait of Joan Bennett in a store window on the way to dinner at his club; after a pleasant evening with his friends, joking among themselves about what stale old unadventurous farts they’ve all become, he dozes off before the fire and is awakened at a late hour. Walking home and pausing at the same shop-window, as he is admiring the portrait again the girl herself [as a looking-glass girl should] appears in reflection superimposed upon the painting; he turns, astounded, to regard her, and they strike up a conversation. Naturally, this cannot end well: returning to her apartment to view her other portraits [erotic etchings and Rolling Stones records were still far in the future in 1944], he tosses back a few too many and, when her evil rich boyfriend shows up and starts slapping her around, gets entangled in the kind of wrestling match that can only end when the babe hands him a pair of scissors and he stabs the dude to death in self-defense. Obviously they can’t call the police; and after he hauls the body out into the woods and dumps it and tidies up the apartment and swears the girl to secrecy it’s clear that every plan will go awry, every strategem will backfire, and every attempt to escape will only tighten the noose around his neck. — Fortunately, just as he is about to be swallowed by the moral quicksands that this incredible contrivance of a plot has conjured up to consume him, he snaps awake in his armchair and [I am not making this up] realizes he’s been dozing after dinner all the while, and It Was All Only A Dream. — An interesting illustration of the evolution of narrative conventions; for it is, after all, remarkable that the great Fritz Lang could film such a story with a straight face — one to which only a few short decades later even Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker surely would not stoop to parody.


Body And Soul. [Robert Rossen, 1947; written by Abraham Polonsky.]

Child of the slums John Garfield seizes on a career as a boxer as his ticket up and out of poverty, but is exploited and corrupted by the puppetmasters of the underworld who rule the world of the ring. Very influential, not simply by virtue of the story but also in the fight choreography and the cinema-verite fight footage [the work of the great cinematographer James Wong Howe]; cf. the later variations on the same themes by Stallone, Scorsese, and Tarantino. — After writing this unsparing expose Abraham Polonsky wrote and directed the classic film noir Force Of Evil [1949], a wonderfully-drawn portrait of the numbers syndicate; and then, thanks to the timely intervention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, was exposed as a subversive and forced into early retirement. Else motion pictures might sooner have been corrupted by art.


The Undead. [Roger Corman, 1957. Written by Charles Griffith and Mark Hanna.]

A couple of mad psychiatrists with a thirst for forbidden knowledge grab a prostitute off the streets, hypnotize her, and project her astral body back into a past life in which she is accused of witchcraft and doomed to be burned at the stake. Uncertain what consequences may follow if they allow her to die on the couch, one of them injects himself into the experiment, with appalling consequences. — Shot for next to nothing on a cheap soundstage in black and white; the principal expenditure sees to have been for a fog machine. But very, very creepy, with a really spooky black mass and a Satan far more convincing than any you’ll see on the big screen this year: Corman could do more than Peter Hyams with less than Arnold tips at lunch. — With Pamela Duncan as the good girl, Allison Hayes [the celebrated Fifty-Foot Woman] as the bad girl, and Richard Garland as the hunk.


From Dusk Till Dawn Two: Texas Blood Money. [Scott Spiegel, 1999. Written by Spiegel and Boaz Yakin.]

True, this is only a lamentable turkey I stumbled across while channelsurfing. But there must be some deep sociological significance in the opening scene, in which a couple of scumbag lawyers trapped in an elevator are attacked by a swarm of bloodsucking bats: what ever happened to professional courtesy?


Sleepy Hollow. [Tim Burton; screenplay by Kevin Yagher, after the story by Washington Irving.]

In the eighteenth-century Hudson Valley a weird little village surrounded by a haunted forest is menaced by a mysterious Rider from Hell who, apparently headless himself, seems under some demonic compulsion not merely to kill selected members of the citizenry but to whack their heads off and keep them for trophies; emissary of rationalism Johnny Depp is dispatched from the big city to find some explanation for this behavior, and, with the aid of Christina Ricci, Occam’s Razor, and a bewildering assortment of alchemical concoctions and Gothic scientific apparatus, solves the mystery and ensures the triumph of the new magic of the Age of Reason over the old magic of wood, wind, blood, and water. — Sherlock Holmes meets Edward Scissorhands: if you like Burton you’ll love this; if you don’t, you won’t. — With assorted members of the Burton repertory company in supporting roles, including Lisa Marie as Johnny’s flashback mother and Martin Landau as the First Victim. — And you can just guess whose head the horseman finally screws back on.


The World Is Not Enough. [Michael Apted; written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Bruce Feirstein.]

After a rendezvous with a Swiss banker to collect funds due a British oilman ends in a doublecross, Double-Oh-Seven makes a daring escape by leaping out a window and rappelling several stories to the street! and returns with three million in cash to report to M in London. Taking the proferred congratulatory drink, he notes a curious fizzing as the ice contacts his fingers! a contaminant! He races down the hallways of MI6 to try to stop the recipient from opening the briefcase! A boobytrap! The briefcase explodes! A hole is blown in the side of the building! A [female] sniper takes aim at him from a boat on the Thames without! He leaps into a handy speedboat [to the annoyance of Q] and rockets away in pursuit! A race down the river! Explosions! Gunfire! As Bond finally gets the drop on her and fires his torpedoes, she runs her boat aground and hijacks a balloon! He runs his boat onto the shore and leaps off into the air, grabbing a trailing rope! As he hangs from the escaping balloon, she refuses his offer of protection! and blows herself and the balloon to bits! Bond plummets to the earth, landing atop a huge domed structure! which I think I should have recognized. — And then, incredibly — for this was mere prologue — the credits commence: naked liquid-metal-Terminator women, writhing sinuously in synch with a surrealistic field of derricks pumping oil. — I stand in awe. — As for the rest of it: stolen nuclear weapons, the Russian mob, an oil pipeline through Turkey, a chase on skis pursued by parawinged commandos, a shootout in a missile silo, an escape from a sunken submarine, and a fat guy drowning in caviar. — As happens when the formula is working correctly, the flow of invention is sufficient that even the most preposterous interpolations — Bond outrunning an explosion down a tunnel, or Denise Richards pretending to be a nuclear physicist — come off as deft jokes tongue-in-cheek. — And all this while wearing those tractionless city-slicker flats. God knows what the man might accomplish if they’d get him a pair of Nikes. — With Sophie Marceau as the Bad Girl, John Cleese as Q’s apprentice, and Robert Carlyle as the evil genius. Who says Christmas comes but once a year?


Some notes on attractions, coming and going:

Things I do not need to see: Chris O’Donnell trying to pretend he’s Buster Keaton in a remake of Seven Chances; any Kevin Costner weepie; Richard and Julia; Adam Sandler, ever again.

Most baffling project: the Andy Kaufman biopic, Man On The Moon. I can accept Carrey in the role, but have to wonder, what is the point? Admittedly I’m fond of the song, but can that justify a two-hour music video? — Compare [I suppose] Denzel Washington as Hurricane Carter: great casting, but doesn’t this come a little late? where was Hollywood while Hurricane was still in the joint?

Reiterated prediction: I still expect that Kevin Williamson will bring the apparently-executed film geek back from the dead and reveal him to be the mastermind behind all the carnage in the forthcoming Scream Three [to be directed again by Wes Craven]; how else than by pinning everything on his alter ego can he let drop the punchline that The Writer Did It?

Trend I’m willing to accept: NASA may not be able to land anything on Mars, but Hollywood certainly can; both John Carpenter and Brian De Palma plan expeditions in the year to come. Sign me up.


Finally:


South Beach Sorority Ninja Carwash: The Defenestration. [Leonardo Garbonzo, 1999.]

On a covert mission deep within enemy territory the commandos of Delta Force pause at a carwash to get their humvees hosed off by some sudsy babes in bikinis and are caught with their pants down by a blackgarbed company of terrorists who take them hostage and chain them to Cybex machines in the loathsome dungeons of a beach volleyball school. Back at CIA headquarters consternation reigns, and messengers are dispatched to the four corners of the globe to find retired superagent Elizabeth Kaitan; who is discovered, presently, teaching a seminar on exploitation cinema to a tribe of African gorillas under the auspices of the Peace Corps. With the beasts of the field arrayed about her, she spurns the proffered mission, pleading a higher allegiance to the defense of the natural world against the Satanic incursions of Man and Machine. As the baffled supplicants from Langley ponder their next move, henchmen of the Ninja King kidnap Kaitan and spirit her away to the Caribbean Alps, necessitating a rescue by the daring dudes of the JetSki Patrol [led by Corey Feldman] just in time for a winner-take-all volleyball match against the tattooed Men in Black. — With cameos by Ron Jeremy, Gerhard ’t Hooft, and Trent [Bubba] Lott. — Perhaps I’ve been watching too many of these things.

Later.

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Sleepless (12/7/99)