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Cassandra’s Dream (2008)

Monday, June 30th, 2008

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It has been a few weeks since I watched Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream, and I didn’t take notes, so please forgive me if I forget which esteemed thinkers were dropped in the name of self-justification; in the service of apologizing for a continued interest in B-movie tropes (Match Point made an in-joke of this tendency). I have a continued interest in B-movie tropes myself, and I probably even share with Allen a certain shame of this preoccupation, but one either has to embrace one’s loves or move on-something we thought Allen had grappled with thirty years ago. Allen’s frequent world, a Godless, corrupt place where amorality reigns and love is illusory, used to be an exhilarating tonic to the false, sun-up platitudes of most mainstream pictures. Woody Allen used to be bracing and frank; he used to be one of sharpest, most virtuosic, just simply funny, deflators of pretense working in the cinema.

Then Allen decided he was supposed to grow (and visually he has), and he, for the most part, became embarrassed of his wild-id. Match Point was heralded as a comeback, and it has a force-but it’s a remake of a not bad but rigged picture that hasn’t held up that well (Crimes and Misdemeanors). Match Point is a more successful picture than Crimes and Misdemeanors, because Allen’s head was at least partially in his crotch while making it, but it’s, thematically, the same-indulging in Allen fashion parade cynicism. Match Point is still novel though-it’s shockingly erotic (Allen again playing your preconceptions of his films against you), with a clever, nasty twist-ending. The performances vary somewhat, but Jonathan Rhys-Myers and Mathew Goode are terrific-shifty, funny, entitled, and greedy, with hair-trigger timing. Match Point is, above everything-a good time, a black exhilaration; Woody Allen perhaps acknowledging his sour-puss predictability and having a little fun with it-indulging his inner Fatal Attraction (without that movie’s loathsome cowardice).

Cassandra’s Dream is consciously similar to Match Point. There’s the same inevitable fatalism, the same fixation on rot in high places, the same noir trappings. But the juice has been dried out-Cassandra’s Dream could be Match Point as jerky. The dialogue is plastic and expository (Myers and Goode covered that up in Match Point, though Johansson had less luck), and the scenes that one expects in these type of films, the scenes that carry the primary dramatic thrust (the murder scenes), have been pointedly omitted. This is not a failure of Allen’s, but clearly part of the design. Cassandra’s Dream isn’t interested in “thrilling” but in reveling in the same state of twitchy, blossoming guilt that faced Martin Landau in Misdemeanors.

The problem is that Allen would appear to have nothing interesting left to say about guilt-he’s returned to the territory, not out of throbbing concern, but out of neurotic habit. (Guilt is to Allen what The Sorrow and the Pity was to Alvy Singer.) And there’s nothing at stake-Allen’s pessimism tips us off and numbs us from the start-there’s no shock-no slow-dawning horror. (This picture plays like a reaction to Match Point in more ways than one-one can’t help but feel that Allen thought he got his hands too dirty in that picture. It wasn’t high-brow and clean enough for him. Too many dirty thrills-the violence is too immediate and personal-too sickening.) The crime here is a proposition made by a corrupt uncle to his two nephews; that, if carried out, will bail all three of them out of their potential financial ruin. The uncle is Tom Wilkinson; the nephews are Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor. The casting is the reason to see the movie.

Farrell and McGregor aren’t given roles here as substantial as Myers and Goode, but they are nearly as effective, and Allen, wisely, casts counter to our instincts. This gimmick is about the only thing going on in the movie. Farrell is the brother crippled by guilt: he senses their souls’ erosion as they buy into Wilkinson’s chilling self-serving rational. Farrell’s suffering here plays as the other side of his work in In Bruges. Farrell, stranded in most pictures prior to 2008, is beginning to find roles that exploit his contradictory-cocksure-inner-fire. Prior movies couldn’t get past Farrell’s looks-they tried to elevate him to Movie God, only to largely render themselves (and him) forgettable. These new roles also take into account the fact that Farrell is not a very large man, and poignantly exploit that. Farrell twitches and bends and moves franticly back and forth-conveying the weight of something pushing him further and further in. Farrell tests McGregor’s character here, tempting McGregor to consider a direction he didn’t think he had in him, and Farrell’s vulnerability lends the film a hint of that sickening horror that Allen seems desperate to avoid. Farrell makes McGregor, who’s also as good as I’ve seen in years, even better.

Allen’s approach isn’t entirely bogus-the flip, offhand presentation of the murder-for-hire is chilling, and puts us on McGregor’s business-just-business wavelength. The picture’s contrary, elusive stubbornness does have a certain pull-the ending is also a major intentional anti-climax, and, while you feel cheated, there’s a certain random forgettable they-were-just-two-more-guys-with-a-plan hopelessness to it that authentically haunts. But how many times are we supposed to enjoy drinking from this well? Has Allen totally forgotten the happy surprise of the finale of Hannah and Her Sisters? Or, more recently, the wounded, delicate Sweet and Lowdown, the best picture Allen’s made in the last ten years? Cassandra’s Dream is another faux-tragedy, but the real tragedy is watching a Master filmmaker underrate himself.

★★½

Posted in 2008, Drama, Reviews | 10 Comments »

WALL-E (2008)

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

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WALL-E is probably what most movie lovers pictured (and hoped for) when Steven Spielberg announced he was going to take on Stanley Kubrick’s long gestating Artificial Intelligence. The possibility of Kubrick’s controlled-chilly-distrustful sensibility mingling with Spielberg’s pop-genius-empathy was too rich for it to be anything other than troubled and disappointing. A.I. is a fascinating picture, and a powerful one-but that power comes partially from the friction of watching a misguided picture try to take hold. A.I. lacked Spielberg’s flair and confidence-it’s yet another of his apologies for being entertaining and profitable for so long; and also, less surprisingly, lacked Kubrick’s dry-comic ambiguity, that charge that comes from his elitist scold-his mastery of the triviality of the damned. A.I. was, in short, a summation of two master filmmakers’ weaknesses. What many of us wanted from A.I., whether it was C.C. (Cinephilically Correct) or not, was for Spielberg to return to the blissful wish-fulfillment fantasies of the late 1970s-early 1980s, to the pictures that had a sense of mystery and fullness-his pop miracles.

WALL-E promises, and just may be, that sort of pop wonder. The picture’s beginning gives us Earth hundreds of years in the future-an Earth that has finally succumbed to our distinctly American self-absorption-magic-bullet-quick-fix-pass-the-buck-supersize-my-fries entitlement. (WALL-E doesn’t acknowledge other national ideologies; this is a purely in-house reaction.) Earth is a tattered shambles: a ruined, still oddly beautiful series of cities of garbage; hopelessly tended to by one remaining robot, Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), an achingly small little contraption who clearly doesn’t grasp the impossibility of his aim. Wall-E, a love-child of E.T. and Johnny Five, scoops trash up into his belly, cubes it like a miniature crushed car, and spits it out-adding it to a column that will eventually yield yet another skyscraper of debris.

Summer films have become so hectic, so joyless, so overstuffed with incident and McGuffin, that you may find yourself quietly floored by WALL-E, particularly the beginning. The film’s resemblance to Kubrick, even counting the satire of the later acts, is superficial-a few jokes here and there and little more. WALL-E is a lotta Spielberg, a little Chaplin, a little Tati, but I’m shocked, and pleased, to write that the picture most clearly recalls the delicacy, patience and wit of Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedies, particularly The Shop Around the Corner (remade, awfully, as You’ve Got Mail).

This picture approaches the romance that develops between Wall-E and Eve, (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a robot monitoring Earth’s progress towards inhabitability (she looks like a storm-trooper crossed with a Mac computer), with a Lubitschian grace and interest in minute gestures that speak volumes. The robots, one a labored little scuttle-bug hundreds of years in age, the other a sleek, armed new thing, play out a variation of the classic situation where a man is hopelessly enthralled with someone leagues above him. Eve, initially thinking Wall-E a menace, fires lasers at him until his gentleness, and complete lack of pretense, win her.

Robots in love. It sounds like kitsch, and could be, and, I’m sure, has been. Director Andrew Stanton understands the strength of the premise though, which is that you can go elemental. Robots aren’t human (obviously), and don’t have humans’ quirks and intangible hang-ups, so they can be allowed to stand for pure love without seeming mawkish. (The picture is remarkably, with only a few exceptions, un-cute.) With robots we can believe what we always want to believe in human romances without talking ourselves out of it and breaking the spell. The robots simply are, and that plain subtext-free way of being is allowed to be poetic here. There’s a scene early in Wall-E and Eve’s courtship where Wall-E shows her the various gadgets that he’s kept from the rubbish, unable to let go. We’ve already seen Wall-E’s collection, and his idea of what these objects are, but Eve, of greater power and knowledge, actually understands the use of the some of the knickknacks. She holds a lighter and produces fire; she holds Wall-E’s light bulb and produces light. This is among the most moving scenes in the film, because Stanton and the Pixar team have found, in pop-movie terms, an analogy for how we hope to discover ourselves in our lovers. The opening half of WALL-E is a lean, classical, melancholy daydream-a parable of finding something wonderful amidst an unrelentingly banal nightmare. Wall-E is, really, when it comes down to it, an indomitable working class stiff.

Then the picture takes us to space and to the future humans, who’ve become a surprisingly disgusting parody of our current ravenous addiction to techno-consumerism. At this point, around the halfway mark, WALL-E becomes considerably more conventional-it’s sharp and funny and sprightly, but that first half haunts the second half in a way that isn’t entirely beneficial. The picture is preaching against the ravages of Earth, but you find yourself ironically missing the ravaged Earth (this is somewhat intentional)-and missing the romance that was beautifully unencumbered by plot mechanics. Pixar breaks through in the opening passages, achieving the quiet, nearly existential power they’ve been flirting with for some time (most memorably, until now, in Toy Story 2).

The second half is simply a damn good Pixar movie (I’m risking ingratitude) and perhaps that opening isn’t possible to sustain, but I’m not so sure. There are still many moments even here that come through though: a kiss, a “dance” in space, as well as the humans’ discovery of fleeting, fleshy pleasures. Jeff Garlin eventually turns up as a Captain, and sketches an unexpectedly moving characterization of befuddled loss. And there’s the ending. The ending is a pure, authentic, cleansing, stunner. Wall-E and Eve remind one of the myth of the bumblebee: an insect that isn’t supposed to be able to fly, but, well, does anyway. Wall-E and Eve aren’t supposed to yearn, to care, to crave, but someone-thankfully-forgot to tell them.

★★★½

Posted in 2008, Fantasy, Reviews | 10 Comments »

Be Kind Rewind (2008)

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

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Making movies is one of our society’s real, tangible magics (assuming magic can be real and tangible and still be magic-that might actually completely contradict the definition of the word). For that, everyone, regardless of their level of devotion to the medium, is incapable of not participating in a movie if given the chance. To be in a movie, whether it’s an MGM musical or a handmade backyard epic; is to draw for a golden straw. Be Kind Rewind (taking off, I assume, from the true story of several children who spent their formative years remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot; it was released in some theatres as Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation) is a tribute to our need for something otherworldly, and undeniably ours, as we face a society that continues to sink deeper into cooperate-sanctioned-group-fuck. Be Kind Rewind is, yes, a tribute to the imagination, a genre that has a habit of being the least imaginative on the block.

The picture was written and directed by Michel Gondry, of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep and many startling music videos. Your reaction to Gondry’s name is a fair indicator of how far you’ll buy into Be Kind Rewind. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a powerful pop-existential-sci-fi head trip, in part because it wedded Gondry’s inventive, playful, sometimes downright ghostly imagery to something that was authentically wounded and real-the picture was screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s working out of his intellectualized-book-movie-television-influenced view of the battle of the sexes. If two people can’t ever, truly, penetrate one other, give themselves over to one another, trust one another, then how are we not doomed to loneliness? The answer, poignantly, was to drop all pretenses and fencing and scoop those messy tingly things up and hug them and go running down the beach screaming full-tilt like a lunatic. Live; as opposed to cowardly rationalizing your pleasure away. This sounds like “seize the day” treacle, and it easily could have been, but Kaufman’s exploration was moving and human, in part, because he doesn’t play the part of lecturer or even the part of the “great artist”; he’s not hovering above it all, he’s right there in the bar with a drink with the rest of us. (It’s a young Woody Allen-sci-fi movie.)

I go on about Kaufman because, without Kaufman, Gondry is a bit of a problem. Watching The Science of Sleep (and portions of Be Kind Rewind) is akin to being trapped in one of Jim Carrey’s more nightmarish childhood episodes in Eternal. Trapped is most certainly the word. Gondry’s visuals can be wizardly, and they’ve been celebrated as so, but can we also admit that the effects also have a habit of being suffocating and ugly: all self-conscious whimsy with little in the way of human current? Gondry is a clever, intelligent man, and he most likely recognizes his shortcomings as a writer-because he builds those handicaps into his stories. Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind are supposed to be chaotic and amateurish and insufferable! It’s empathy you see.

I just about hated Science of Sleep, primarily because I couldn’t forgive that one, final, dash of kinda reality (it’s really hypocrisy). The ending is a bit like watching a Skinamax movie that suddenly, just as you’re getting to the reason you’ve suffered through the “exposition”, blacks out and morphs into one those sermons they televise on Sunday mornings. I can tell what some of you are thinking: that Science of Sleep’s ending was “uncompromising”. It’s also a cheat. The picture builds and builds towards a great bursting leap of imagination, a romance amongst the construction papered stars, only to reveal the lead to be even more of a self-absorbed, fanatical prick than we suspected. The ending is effective, but it’s also canned, cruel emotion; and the picture preceding that ending isn’t strong enough to support it.

Be Kind Rewind doesn’t cheat us like that-this one is more amiable and plays fair-it’s a mildly better movie that’s much more enjoyable. The picture has its neat, homemade effects, and it has some very likable actors clowning around and that’s about it. The first act is a chore: the cast talks over one another in an effort to establish a screwball tone that never gels, and instead achieves a mild incoherence. Then Jack Black gets magnetized (in a funny bit) and erases all the videotapes of a small mom-and-pop video store in the process, which sends him and video clerk Mos Def scurrying to replace the tapes before the owner, played by Danny Glover, returns.

Unable to replace the tapes (no one, with the exception of the store’s three or four customers, uses them anymore) Mos Def and Jack Black go about remaking the pictures using whatever they have at their disposal. These moments of recreation (or “sweding”), which include Robocop, Ghostbusters, and Driving Miss Daisy, are dizzy and magical; tapping right in, gracefully; to that sense of giddy-play we felt when we first fell for the movies. Be Kind Rewind, in general, has a sense of folksy-silent-1980s movie camaraderie that’s bullshit (it reminded me a little of Spielberg’s Twilight Zone: The Movie segment) but comforting. Gondry (thankfully) ultimately doesn’t have Spielberg’s 1980s heavy-hand here though; his legitimate enchantment with the in-camera effects and gadgets dries that out. Gondry’s inability to stick with a story bails him out too; he’s too preoccupied to get too bogged down in the mechanics of the clichés he’s reveling in. A Ghostbusters alum turns up late inning to halt the homemade movies (which are becoming profitable) and, sighing, I thought, “Oh no, this thing’s going to court.” It doesn’t, because Gondry doesn’t care anymore about that than you do.

You should probably see the picture once. Beyond the sporadic movie scenes, there is also the charming cast. Jack Black and Mos Def are an able team, and not nearly as sentimental as you may be expecting (racial tension is acknowledged). Def and Black have a sing-song give and take, the cool and collected versus the deranged id, they click-it feels right. Melonie Diaz, as a laundry girl the guys recruit, is spunky and sexy, with an off-kilter looniness that’s unforced-this is the girl you wish for in expensive fascist romances. She has a scene with Def, that I won’t ruin, that suggests the flakey-romance we hoped for in Science of Sleep. Mia Farrow also appears in a few scenes (she looks terrific) and reminds us of The Purple Rose of Cairo, which could have very well been another of Gondry’s influences here. Farrow’s voice has gotten even softer and slyer (or maybe I just miss her) and her largely long absence from the movies (she was scarier in The Omen remake than the movie deserved) is a far more effective reminder of the movies’ increasing calculated plasticity than Gondry’s more overt protests. Danny Glover functions as a similarly stirring found object here, though I didn’t much care for his stacked-deck past musician subplot.

Be Kind Rewind is one of those mixed-frustrating pictures that, perhaps unintentionally (though I’m not sure), inspires a guilt-trip. Everything about the picture’s theme is inarguable (maybe too inarguable) so, as a movie fan, you’re going to feel a little hesitant about not enjoying it more. The 1980s kid-movie nostalgia. The anti-cooperate fill in the blank. The love of creation. We’re all in favor of all of those things. But Gondry appears to be conflicted-and insecure. Gondry trusted his inventions too much in Science of Sleep; he doesn’t trust them enough in Be Kind Rewind. This new picture is shapeless and sloppy, sort of boring, it’s a restless unwieldy thing that has little to do in between the movie-making set pieces, so why not devote the film to those set pieces? They illustrate Gondry’s tribute, his point. The rest is just the filler that Def and Black would immediately scrap upon remaking.

★★½

Posted in 2008, Comedy, Reviews | 8 Comments »

Payday (1973)

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

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Payday is one of those pictures that might play better now than it did in 1973; as a retort to the continued wave of movies that pretend to be about various music stars, or the generic life of a star, but are actually about indulging in our personal wishes to be rich and famous. Payday is the perfect, the only, title for this picture; an acknowledgment of an undercurrent we (or I) nearly always imagine as we (or I) digest all the usual encouragement clichés of most musical movies. Almost Famous, Ray and Walk the Line are a few such movies; downplaying drugged, pilled, boozed-up milieus as utopias of self-actualization, while managing to keep in mind what the screenwriters’ manuals say about “likeable heroes”. The creation of art amidst these inner-outer chaotic lifestyles, or the possibility of achieving some sort of personal redemption with this art, is nearly always left unexplored. And that can nag.

The conflict is that I, to varying degrees, like most of these movies. Almost Famous floats on a wishful thinking cloud. Director Cameron Crowe seems to be acknowledging that, yes, he lived those years with the Allmans and Zeppelin, but what he really always sought was to disappear into a Billy Wilder or Francois Truffaut movie with a girl of his dreams who got him. There’s an unintended heartbreak to that subtext, and Almost Famous has beautiful passages, but it breaks Lester Bangs’ rules, voiced in the movie, to remain “merciless”; and that is both the best and the worst thing about the movie. Ray and Walk the Line are star-vehicles, and the various stars are terrific in an immediate-hold-the-screen kind of way, though a major faux pas remains: that Ray Charles and Johnny Cash somehow managed to inspire the same damn movie. Even Walk Hard, an attempted parody of these pictures, is funny, but just as hypocritical-too in love with its subjects to get to anything else.

Payday is the anything else, and this, alone, justifies its de rigueur for the 1970s glass-half-empty outlook. We need a picture that’s as confidently black as others are white. Don Carpenter, the writer, and Daryl Duke, the director, have an ambivalence towards their characters that packs a genuine force. Little subtle-haunting flourishes of observation bubble up throughout the picture on the sidelines, and they slowly accumulate to something casually devastating. Rip Torn stars as Maury Dan, a wannabe country legend who’s courting success from the fringe. People recognize Maury, and he can get laid just about whenever he wants, but he’s not yet an icon-more like an uncle you really liked at a barbeque once but can’t quite remember. Carpenter and Duke patiently dole out Dan’s nature and identity bit by bit and, about seventy minutes in, we realize that our natural-bred tendency to revere those who stand in the spotlight has been played against us-those bits revealed to be something quite foul.

Rip Torn is intuitive, confident and amazing, lacking any trace of actor editorializing. Torn finds the pleasure, the entitlement, the buzzy, self-hating damage, and still manages to make the bastard likeable and sexy without canceling any of the other shadows out. (Most actors have to compromise in some department somewhere.) This is a musical picture that recognizes that the music springs from the same place as the damage, and that they are undividable-a paradox of creation. Torn’s multi-tiered performance has another effect too: it humanizes the supporting characters (Torn is so effective, so contradictory, that we understand why the others fall for it).

The picture opens on Torn singing a song (“She’s Only a Country Girl”) during a gig, and the free-wheeling camera allows us to find him for ourselves as we also sift through the various band members, fans, hangers-on, and ladies, all destined to remain on the periphery. In a few largely dialogue-free minutes, the film establishes the world completely and organically (in league with some Altman). The dialogue, to echo the Melvin and Howard post, occasionally strives for poetry, but it’s the poetry of the cynical (the poetry of the people who hold a drink with a cigarette butt floating in it) and it works without compromising the airy, natural vibe of the picture. Trying to get a girl in bed, one of the guys exclaims, “Girl, you came here on purpose, and this here is the purpose!”

The picture isn’t a civics lesson. The encounters in Payday, even at their worst, are staged with vitality and humor. Power-plays are made over Dr. Peppers and sandwiches with or without mayo. Leagues of disgust are revealed in how hastily someone discards a piece of bubblegum. Some of the episodes (in a disc jockey’s office, or, over a dog, or, later, a woman, who is abandoned for exploding into inconvenient hurt) have that occasionally-out-of-nowhere strange tang of the real. Everyone in the cast registers. Ahna Capri, as the blonde woman left on the road, is allowed a simultaneous pain and hypocrisy: you’re repulsed by and for her in equal measures. Cliff Emmich’s disquietingly obliging driver, Michael C. Gwynne’s manager, who treats a murder as just another misstep to be sidestepped, etc., etc. By the end, Maury Dan and crew have attained something that few of these types of pictures manage: a true untidy-monster-grace.

Posted in 1973, Classics, Reviews | 5 Comments »

George Carlin.

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

George Carlin was one of those people who inspired you to wonder “If we just listened to a little of what this guy’s saying….” Nah, I guess the world’s meant to end either way. I’m tired of reading legends’ obituaries every week.

Posted in Bits & Pieces | No Comments »

Melvin and Howard (1980)

Friday, June 20th, 2008

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Capturing impotence is tricky business in the movies; as to do so is to court unintended flaccidity of narrative. Ask the overrated Carnal Knowledge or the underrated The Weather Man. There’s the issue of getting tied up in something overtly schematic; of choking the life out of your picture with a can’t-win-against-the-big-guy thesis that, regardless of validity, feels rigged and self-pitying. Melvin and Howard, director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Bo Goldman’s film of a middling man stuck in indentured servitude to the myth of the “American Dream”, trumps the poor man card with repetition. Melvin Dummar’s (Paul Le Mat) failure isn’t the climax or a shock or a tragedy, it’s a constant, dependable, infuriating, comforting, given; a diaper this baby, truly, doesn’t want to outgrow. Melvin fails so often that it becomes a source of low-electric comedy; we get used to it, accept it, and move on to something of greater interest: the nature-the necessity-the ironic heroism-the sheer adventure-of delusion, specifically the very American delusion that we’re all going to one day “make it”. (We’re a country of Don Quixotes.) Melvin and Howard attains an uncompromised, compassionate, softly-melancholic-screwball tone; yet another picture that revels in Demme’s equal opportunity humanity; his belief in a flake’s unalienable right to be a flake.

The picture has a fixed lottery ending, the “American Dream” revealed yet again to be a piece of cheese that keeps the hamster’s wheel perpetually turning, but, unlike most pictures, Demme earns his pathos because he doesn’t try too hard. The warm lighting and shooting of the picture contributes, gracefully, to the energy of the characters’ defeat. (Demme favors a particular kind of loving dolly in on the characters that probably inspired certain shots in Boogie Nights.) The picture’s matter of factitude about Melvin’s eventual understanding that the courts will never accept Howard Hughes’ (Jason Robards) will is heartbreaking. Melvin, the puffy man-boy who squanders every opportunity he gets in the continued effort to quench various immediate thirsts sprung from feelings of inadequacy, grows up (kinda maybe) at the end of Melvin and Howard. Melvin drives off; appreciating his elusive night ride with the eccentric, near mythical Hughes for what it was and opting, one hopes, to move on and live his life.

Paul Le Mat is one of many actors that I wish we could’ve seen more from. Maybe it’s because his persona is so specific, so effective in certain molds, that unimaginative studio executives felt little could be done with him. Le Mat’s turn in American Graffiti is broad and sort of magical (how director George Lucas, with Le Mat, Richard Dreyfuss, Wolfman Jack, Candy Clarke, Charles Martin Smith, etc, manages to keep cutting to the aggressively boring Cindy Williams-Ron Howard pairing is beyond me, but that’s for another day). Le Mat brings that same blobby lack of definition to Melvin and Howard, but, again as in American Graffiti, he keeps surprising you, with sharp, off-kilter timing that keeps his character from slipping into the maudlin. Watch Melvin watch his favorite game show, bragging that he always picks the right door; this could easily too openly telegraph his pathetic disposition, too aggressively tug at the heart strings, but Le Mat dials down, without making a show of even dialing down. Le Mat appears to be, and maybe was, a found object.

Le Mat and Demme’s visions of this picture’s ungainly comedy of need are simpatico; and Mary Steenburgen is right there too; she’s, in my memory, never been better. Steenburgen, as Melvin’s eventual ex-wife, answers the phone in the middle of the night when Melvin calls to tell her of the inheritance, we see another man in the dark, his arm over her, but her face, in seconds, conjures that love that probably now itches like a phantom limb. Watch Steenburgen, a little girl who plays at being a sex kitten in a strip club, say (as if it requires no further explanation) that she likes to dance. Steenburgen is also given the dialogue that most consciously strives for poetry, and she assures that it reaches it. Fed up with Melvin (again), she says something to him in French as she leaves (again). Melvin asks about it, she says she always dreamed of being a French interpreter; he reminds her that she doesn’t speak French, she replies, through near tears, “That’s why it’s a dream.”

It’s a given that Jason Robards must disappear early on in Melvin and Howard, but his alienation haunts the picture. Robards exudes that specialty of his, a gruff disconnected man’s man intelligence that masks a surprisingly deep well of vulnerability. Melvin picks Howard up from the desert, where Howard has been sleeping after crashing his bike for an unspecified amount of time, and Melvin needles haggard, homeless-looking Howard into singing a song with him. Howard’s gradual, tentative opening up to this new, strange man is convincing and wonderful; an ideal movie fantasy of transcendent friendship and kindness. Demme confidently sells something here that’s harder to buy than a dinosaur reborn; or flying people, or whatever the physics compromise de jour may be: that we’re in this together.

Posted in 1980, Classics, Reviews | 2 Comments »

Stan Winston.

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

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This is an intangible-inner-thing nearly escaping debate: if you are a movie-child of the 1980s, you love Stan Winston. It may have taken you awhile to put it together, but you eventually (as you grew into recognizing that certain memorable films bore certain similar end credits) realized that the majority of your commanding, iconic film nightmares could be blamed on the same man. Winston worked with directors both promising and already legendary to bring to the screen many of the definitive creatures of the 1980s and 1990s. Like Ray Harryhausen, Winston wasn’t satisfied with creations that merely scared, his creatures had an internal logic, a heart that was theirs and theirs alone; a heart that was respected and allowed to remain somewhat mysterious to the audience.

Winston worked with James Cameron on The Terminator, Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The first two are extraordinary achievements; both having a primal-familial-pull that anchors their stories in more than smoke and mirrors (T2 has moments, it moves, but it’s essentially a flabbier remake of the first picture). The families of these pictures, partially thanks to Winston, aren’t strictly human-his other beings have personality. I first saw The Terminator, in a double bill with Robocop, one Friday night at the age of nine, unaware of the general scenario. I thought Arnold Schwarzenegger was some sort of thug-assassin (partially true). The reveal of the true menace: a skeleton hand-dipped in chromium with glowing red beads for eyes and memorably awkward gait (a light Frankenstein monster on stilts); retains its power to horrify: unrelenting, unstoppable, hellishly impersonal technology at its monster zenith.

Stan Winston’s greatest contribution to Aliens is, of course, the Queen: a larger variation of the original H.R. Giger creation that elaborates on the insectile logic of the monster’s design and deepens the implication of an eerily human range of emotions. The alien of Alien was the boogey man-an unstoppable cipher; Michael Myers in space with more personality. The Queen of Aliens is the dark belly of Ripley’s maternal rage, prone to jealousy and vengeance. The Queen steals Ripley’s surrogate daughter and Ripley responds, in the picture’s true climax, by murdering dozens of the creature’s children and soldiers in front of her. Ripley caps it all by blowing the Queen’s reproductive organs to pieces-permanently “fixing” her. The Queen’s shrill, enraged scream is the finest moment of this picture-and a moment that many F/X maestros couldn’t have, especially seemingly nowadays, been burdened to help dream of.

Winston’s work on the calculating, ruthless hunter of John McTiernan’s Predator (the film is “The Most Dangerous Game” with an alien) is similarly unshakable. Clothed, the creature is the predictable next evolutionary step of Jason Voorhees: hulking, masked and appropriately Schwarzeneggerian in prideful macho swagger. Unmasked, the creature is subversively, disarmingly, feminine (disappointing this ten-year-old at the time) a spurned, intergalactic killer-mutant near-vagina; perhaps a canny joke of Winston’s on the genre that had been good to him, and that largely caters to male audiences around the world. Or maybe it’s just a neat movie monster.

One could go on. Winston’s filmography is rich with character and accomplishment. There are the obviously stunning achievements: the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, the protagonist of Edward Scissorhands, the lost robots of A.I, the penguins of Batman Returns. There’s also the neglected creations, such as the ghastly, squishy thing of Leviathan that suggests what a bunch of humans thrown in a working blender might look like if the mess could walk, stalk, and eat you (and, most ghastly of all, forcing you to join it). There’s also the deranged frogs of Tobe Hooper’s Invaders from Mars remake; the galloping dinosaur-thing of The Relic (which was sort of a Leviathan knock-off anyway, which itself, was probably a rehash of Carpenter’s The Thing, with which Winston also had some involvement). Two more favorites: the lobster aliens of the underrated pop masterwork Galaxy Quest (these baddies manage the near impossible feat of authentic, simultaneous satiric-menace); as well as the covers of the old Universal favorites in the otherwise not-that-great The Monster Squad. The Monster Squad should be noted though for admirably dotting one age-old question mark: no, nothing, other than silver, will vanquish the Wolf Man.

Winston also directed two pictures: Pumpkinhead and A Gnome Named Gnorm. The second picture remains unseen by me, but Pumpkinhead, despite having an uncharacteristically weak monster that’s a clear retread of the Alien design (probably due to budget) is a memorable, bizarre, atmospheric, slow shocker with an intense Lance Henriksen performance. See Pumpkinhead in a double-bill with Kathryn Bigelow’s superb Near Dark and try to explain to me what Henriksen’s doing reduced to appearing in crap like AVP. Pumpkinhead is a relatively obscure picture, particularly when compared to the films that Winston generally worked on, but it exudes Winston’s primary gift: the ability to find the humanity in the inhuman. Winston passed away yesterday at the age of 62. He earned the right to drink bourbon on the rocks and coast on his past achievements for the next three decades. He had just completed work on Iron Man and was gearing up for yet another Terminator instead. As the movies grow increasingly skittish, mindless, and corporately group thunk, Stan Winston was a valuable reminder of what the fantasy pictures were and could still be. Winston was one of the few that understood that awesome begins with awe.

Posted in Special Features | 6 Comments »

Boarding Gate (2008)

Monday, June 16th, 2008

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Boarding Gate is an Olivier Assayas picture; which probably means that it’s some sort of experimentation of genre and pretty girl. Watching the picture, I wondered what Assayas would have done with that icon of all icons: Marilyn Monroe. Assayas has a view, and curiosity of, the opposite sex that’s part school-boy-giddy-titter and part legitimate, searching, empathy. Assayas, at his best (Clean, Late August, Early September), pares away the layers of preoccupation that tend to greet both his beautiful women and his genres to reveal something spare and honest. If you want your hand held, re-watch The Visitor.

Boarding Gate is, like demonlover, an Assayas cover of the erotic thriller. demonlover was a failure that mistook elusion and redundancy for mystery. Boarding Gate has a similar frustrating reluctance to capitalize on the dirty pleasures of the genre; working for and against itself in alternating shifts. Assayas apparently doesn’t quite grasp that a little conventionality, particularly in the third act-would actually heighten the exhilaratingly free form passages that have preceded it. Boarding Gate is a more successful picture than demonlover, but it still feels like an intelligent filmmaker’s over-considered parlor game. Self-shame can mar any picture, but it’s least welcome in something that should be quick, juicy, lurid-bad for you.

Assayas is actually looking to mate the erotic thriller with a more grounded portrait of an attractive, adventurous-at-her-own-peril woman who seeks to define herself apart from the men in her life, bosses and lovers, who have a habit of being one and the same. If we wish to be cute, the picture could be said to be Clean crossed with demonlover, and, for about an hour, Assayas succeeds. The first half of the picture is a chamber play, a two character one-act where a woman confronts one of her simultaneous boss/ex-lovers over past hurts that clearly still pack quite a bit of heat for both of them. The casting intentionally sounds more Showtime than Assayas: Asia Argento, that snarling, self-consciously weird object of male lust turned on its head, and Michael Madsen, the shoulda had a stronger career phantom of Robert Mitchum.

Both actors bring a B-movie survivor baggage to their roles that’s surprising and a little poignant. Assayas coaxes out the vulnerability that lurks behind tough guy and femme fatale archetypes; recognizing that, nowadays at least, every tough guy began as a kid watching other tough guys on TV. Madsen’s familiar rasp sounds nearly undead here, and it signals a lost inner pain that the actor manages, miraculously, to steer away from pretension. Madsen’s Miles is a vague businessman, a drinker of bourbon, and a wearer of stylishly disheveled shirts that represent a reformed badass’s impression of “respectability”. He lets Sandra (Argento) cuff him up as he laughs uncontrollably, tickled by his continued failure to be surprised.

Argento, full bosomed, lithe, with the familiar tattoos (that have always too consciously announced her bad girl credentials), is an ideal woman for Assayas interpretation. Hitchcock once said (something along the lines of) that Monroe was too obvious, too eager to please, to be a sex symbol of interest to him. There was no contradiction between appearance and desire, no subtext. That’s a problem for many of our sirens these days, including Scarlett Johansson (oh, how one wishes Kate Winslet had taken Match Point) and especially Angelina Jolie and Argento. These women have no inner, no private elusive thing that baits the audience. Self-consciousness and self-congratulation are a no-no for the true movie Goddesses. Assayas, that constant tinkerer of surfaces, recognizes this in Argento and acknowledges that fun-drug-killer-girl thing as facade. This is the most interesting Asia Argento performance that I’ve seen (slim competition) because there’s more to Argento here than that confident body-the confidence is turned in on itself and redefined as vulnerable mystery. Asia plays with that vicious-kitty voice of hers, slipping in shades of doubt and contempt, and she’s fascinating (or closer than usual to it), particularly when sparring with the increasingly self-cocooned Miles.

The first hour between Miles and Sandra is slow, druggy, and hypnotic. Sandra gets herself in trouble near the half-way mark, and one expects and hopes that the forebode of the first half will slide into something unhinged and violent, something that purges Sandra of her doubt and pain while seamlessly giving us our genre jollies. That never happens, but it’s not for lack of trying. Assayas isn’t elitist exactly; it’s that he just doesn’t appear to have the authentic instinct to go for the throat. His best pictures show a cleansing compassion, and that has a habit of being in direct conflict with the sort of thriller he’s attempting here. He likes Sandra too much. I liked Sandra too, to an extent, which is why some real danger would’ve actually felt dangerous, a rarity these days. Assayas fails to dramatize a second half that, on paper, sounds promising. Sandra gets herself into yet another love triangle (including a vivid Kelly Lin) but Boarding Gate never drives it through with any force. The kidnappings and shootings lack bite, revealing Assayas to be in territory every bit as alien as his heroes.

Boarding Gate still has an imperfect pull, and it rouses itself to a wonderful open ending that alludes to possible hope (again recalling Clean). I love the globe-trotting, multiple language inclusiveness of Assayas’ pictures; they point, effortlessly, toward an in-it-together, all-fucked-on-the-same-page humanity that a Haggis or a Visitor seems unable to comprehend. Boarding Gate is a character study disguised as an erotic thriller that should’ve been a real McCoy on both counts; it’s a picture as confused as its protagonists, but you gravitate toward it-and wonder what this not quite successful experiment might yield next time.

★★★

Posted in 2008, Action, Reviews | 3 Comments »

The Visitor (2008)

Friday, June 13th, 2008

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There may be, over the summer, people who ask about The Visitor at parties. These people will ask if I’ve seen it, and I’ll say I have, and I’ll voice some hesitance about the picture. These people may respond with a slightly deflated look that may, temporarily, spiritually reduce my height by a few feet. (It’s happened before.) The Visitor is a modest human story that currently populates a few theatres amidst countless stories of monsters destroying cities. The monster pictures generally teach us, and seek to teach us, nothing. The human stories normally have a lesson to impart or at least work out. About half-way through The Visitor, just as the picture is really settling into its social services groove, I thought, as I tend to during these sorts of pictures-Why can’t a human story seek to teach us nothing? Few films are truly profound; and the uncluttered exploration of day to day existence is a truer, more reliable, port to profundity anyway. The little pictures, in their way, tend to suffer from the same preoccupation as the summer monster movies: more, more, more.

The Visitor is a blend of two increasingly shopworn subgenres; both stemming from a certain privileged-white-man’s guilt: the why can’t I, for once, be the good guy to a race besides my own (?) factor. When, and how, can I shed this inherited guilt and injustice (like a snake’s skin) and be copasetic with the rest of the world? Without any true change or sacrifice, of course, that would be yucky and kinda hard. (These films always go to great pains to establish that the white guy in question’s pocketbook won’t suffer, whatever may happen, his quasi-retirement will remain unperturbed.) The first genre is the genre that Paul Haggis has recently trademarked: the several-races-thrown-into-the-same-mix-over-a-common-glaring-injustice-watch-how-everyone-learns-to-eat-their-own-porridge film. The second is the lonely-bitter-old-man-reaches-out-again film.

I have no use for the Paul Haggis type picture, and we’ve discussed that in the past, so let’s push that to the corner and leave it alone, I’m sure there’s many other posts that are happy to get into yet it again. I’m a sucker for the lonely-old-man film: it’s a set of clichés that rarely fails to stir me. The notion of crossing normally unfathomable gaps such as age or race to arrive at something resembling grace is just too irresistible. Alexander Payne made a hell of a run with it a few years ago with About Schmidt (it was a canny reworking-he avoided many of the pitfalls by keeping the youthful rejuvenator of emotions off-screen). Sofia Coppola made a fine film of it with Lost in Translation-which was a crossbreed too, a blend of the old man film and the Brief Encounter abbreviated love picture. Andrew Wagner botched the genre, and wasted a lovely Frank Langella performance, with the bullying Starting Out in the Evening.

The Visitor is, thankfully, much better than Starting Out in the Evening or the Paul Haggis type movies. Writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent) is also an actor, and he shows a courtesy for his characters that wrings a certain quality out of even the most unconvincing scenes. The opening act-in which we primarily follow Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) as he goes about a life that strives for dignity at the expense of everything else-is actually rather beautiful in a typically indie dialed down way. Make no mistake, McCarthy is manipulative, and his touch, really, isn’t much lighter than that of a director of big-budget tearjerkers. McCarthy plays that card that many directors self-conscious of the clichés of the life affirming picture play: they underplay. Every scene is turned half a notch lower than you’d expect; to strive for greater “reality”, to disguise that most of the scenes have a very un-spontaneous, “worked out” feel. McCarthy is checking his list like anyone else: dead wife; unfinished, useless job; fear of intimacy, unbelievably open new friends, etc.

But McCarthy does something early on that moved me, and had me rooting for his picture. Vale has a conference to attend in New York City (he lives in Connecticut) and he returns to his apartment that he’s owned for many years without actually occupying. Vale discovers two squatters: Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), who have been living in his apartment, based on a misunderstanding (maybe), for a few months. It quickly becomes evident that they have nowhere to go. The couple apologizes and leaves. Walter considers, and follows them down to the street corner. He asks if they have a place to stay, they assure him, half-heartedly, that they do. Walter looks them over and considers again…and the picture cuts directly to the couple returning to stay in apartment. McCarthy omits Walter’s inviting the couple to return. This may have been an accident, for all we know that bit of film was damaged, but this simple device exudes an incredible generosity. Walter, a shy, painfully self-conscious man, wouldn’t want to be seen asking these two people to stay. And so McCarthy spares him that.

I wish that McCarthy had been satisfied with his story of a man bonding with a family of illegal immigrants and learning to play their drums (a reaction to his deceased wife, which is also handled gracefully). I wish that McCarthy had been satisfied with his story of Walter falling for Tarek’s mother (Hiam Abbass). But no, the picture has to ensure that we understand it’s a reaction to 9/11, and the subsequent immigration paranoia that has followed. We already knew that, and we already understood the stakes, but McCarthy has to have his hero throw a tantrum at an officer just to further ensure that we miss nothing. That Walter would never do that, of course, means nothing. The thesis governs all, I’m afraid.

I still don’t want to try too hard to dissuade you from seeing The Visitor though. Jenkins is wonderful, full, and it’s a charge to see a great character actor treated with such reverence. Jenkins imbues The Visitor with subtlety and observation: watch how he leans up from the drum as if being caught mid-masturbation, watch how he buttons and unbuttons his jacket when threatened, like an adult safety blanket. Watch his tentative chemistry with Abbass, who is also beautiful and moving. Watch how they lie in bed together, their fingers clasping in a specific, true, earned, way. These moments are the true civics lesson, the unifier, perhaps our only probable hope. The literal civics lesson is just a distraction.

★★½

Posted in 2008, Drama, Reviews | 13 Comments »

Married to the Mob (1988)

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

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Jonathan Demme said, if I recall, that the intention of his The Truth About Charlie was to remake Charade in the vein of the French New Wave, which had reached full bloom at around the time of the original Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn film’s release. That is a fine idea, only sporadically successful at best (though I confess to not remembering the picture too well) but the real problem with Charlie may have been that Demme had already made his French New Wave pictures. Something Wild, a tonally disorienting tight-rope walk of a screwball comedy punctuated with violence that counts, plays like an American approximation of some of the French New Wave’s experiments with genre flexibility. Married to the Mob, while lacking a bit of the classic Something Wild’s pulse, is of the same key, and underappreciated.

There are few things more exhilarating in the movies than a picture impressing us with its creator’s amusement. I don’t mean glib post-modernism. I mean, as with some of Joe Dante’s pictures, a film that projects a sense of a talented, assured movie-maker recognizing the clichés and limitations of certain genres and casting them aside like the shackles they are, and racing for the moon of his id instead. If we had to continue to belabor the French New Wave comparison, Demme would probably be most in line with Truffaut, a director with an encyclopedic knowledge and love of movies who also happens to be a major humanist.

Something Wild is certainly a major film, a nearly peerless working of a good-bad-rowdy-party-boy-wish-fulfillment tone with three classic performances. Married to the Mob isn’t as much of a surprise; the most obvious reason being that Something Wild came first, so we were on to what Demme was up to by this point. Married to the Mob is also broader than Something Wild, riffing, as the title suggests, on the familiar Italian sitcom clichés. The broadness is part of the joke though-part of the picture’s absurdist surreality; and Demme is always aware of what his story could possibly devolve into. The redemptive factor of Married to the Mob is that it is legitimately gonzo kooky, a flakey comedy thriller that, occasionally, suggests the irreverent screwball wit and spirit of a picture that you might watch during the day on Turner Classic Movies with Ralph Bellamy or Don Ameche mated with something more undeniably in tune with the me-me-me-1980s.

Married to the Mob opens brilliantly. Two men, dressed in dowdy Wall Street-ish business apparel, wait for someone at a station as the train rolls in. We are consciously led to believe that this third man is a co-worker, a fellow cog in the traditional day to day tedium that is our working stiff lives. This third man, looking a bit like an upright egg on two legs, catches the train at just the right minute, and the two other men board behind him. The train passes through a tunnel, and one of the men shoots the egg man in the back of the head. In a typical bebop tonal corkscrew, an inappropriately romantic-somber song begins to play on the soundtrack-New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”.

The two men close the egg man’s eyes, wiping a bit of blood away, allowing him to appear to be just another morning traveler, exhausted with ennui, facing the next day of caged banality. The two men, who we can now confidently call hit-men (one of which is played by Alec Baldwin) wonder how anyone can do that to themselves day in day out, squished like sardines. The idiocy/cowardice of the modern working drone is voiced in nearly every crime movie we’ve seen, but it’s a testament to the scary-sad-funny power of this opening, that, for once, you think the hoods just might be on to something.

Demme never plays with his material this masterfully in Married to the Mob again, but there are many pleasures to be had-the first hour in particular radiates that Demme specialty-a hum of life and eccentric good humor that’s propelled by a self-consciously strange, fantastic, throbbing soundtrack. The “plot”, such as it is, doesn’t really intrude until the too busy, not-as-flip-as-it-thinks-it-is climax. The “plot” is an old standby. The Alec Baldwin character, called “Cucumber” Frank de Marco, returns home to his wife, Angela (Michelle Pfeiffer), who is clearly just as exhausted with her lifestyle as the train passengers in the opening moments. Angela is first glimpsed in a hair salon, getting her beautiful-intimidating red-brunette curls touched up (by the always welcome, familiar to Demme, Charles Napier), as the New Order song concludes. Angela’s a heroine with a traditional to the movies problem: she’s a siren oblivious to her powers, clouded by a feeling of claustrophobia. Her obligatory girlfriends hate her, perhaps because they rightly sense that Angela has checked out long ago (and secretly recognize that Angela is much more beautiful).

Something happens, and Angela finds herself getting what she wished for: freedom for herself and her young son from the mafia. The head of this picture’s mob, Tony “The Tiger” Russo (Dean Stockwell), has sexual designs on Angela, of course, and won’t let Angela stay as gone as she’d like. The FBI, represented, primarily, in this picture, by Mike (Mathew Modine) and Oliver Platt, believe Angela to be sleeping with Tony and follow her-hoping to implicate Tony in a murder. Tony’s wife, played by Mercedes Ruehl in the part that most actively courts cliché, is convinced that Tony and Angela are sleeping together too, and follows along as well.

Married to the Mob isn’t as labored as the above would lead you to believe, few Demme pictures are. The picture revels in incidental, possibly ad-libbed, moments of humanity, danger and high comedy: Tony nearly dying because his henchman forgets his onion rings; Platt and Mike’s exchanging of a high-five; Angela and Mike’s meet cute inside of a cramped elevator, with Mike pinned under Angela’s new street bought chair; Angela’s pleading for a job in a hair salon; Angela and Mike’s making out, after spending the platonic night together, the following morning. Angela and Mike don’t kiss in the boringly photogenic fashion of most movies, its full-bodied, hungry, emotionally needy and naked; and considerably more moving.

The performances are on par with Something Wild. Michelle Pfeiffer, having now committed the Hollywood sin of passing her fifth decade of existence on this planet, is now playing villains in films that I’ve mostly skipped. But Pfeiffer, in the 1980s and early 1990s, was one of our very strongest, most beautiful, most vulnerable, most interesting movie stars. Pfeiffer has a gift: otherworldly looks that can still somehow exude a feeling of Earthbound need: she sells you the familiar to the movies pabulum of her needing to be saved by a man without you feeling too guilty about it in the morning. It has something to do with Pfeiffer’s eyes; they’re stunning, but also just a bit bigger than they should be, a little not quite right. It’s fitting that Pfeiffer has worked with Tim Burton in probably the best female performance to grace his oeuvre; as her eyes conjure an image of a crazy Burtonian little girl frying ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass. This wonderful, stylized, broad, movie-powered presence is ideal for a part such as Angela, which is a pure confection of genre anyway. Pfeiffer is a lead actress you feel you could actually successfully buy a drink, and that, in and of itself, would nearly be enough.

Mathew Modine appears to be on a different planet here, and that’s to the picture’s benefit. Modine’s Mike is an oddball, one who clearly also resents his job (the notion of discarding past things runs through the entire picture-though it never intrudes) and finds strange ways of his voicing his malcontent. Mike’s flip, usually intentionally unfunny remarks are occasionally allowed a greater edge than one would expect, and Modine seizes on the character’s wobbly mood swings; his line readings are appealingly helium contemptuous-he gets the manic tone of the entire picture. There’s a moment, mid-way, when Ruehl bursts in on Mike and Angela’s first date, expecting to find Angela with Tony. Ruehl asks Mike whose husband he is, and, Mike, not missing a beat, says, in perfect planet Jupiter-faux-good-humor “I don’t know, whose husband were you looking for?”

And there’s Dean Stockwell, a routinely wonderful character actor (he had the best moment in Blue Velvet, which is saying something). Ray Liotta was the heavy in Something Wild, and it’s among his strongest performances, but Stockwell, in his way, has an even more daunting assignment. Tony, the mafia chief, is the picture’s villain, but he’s also Mob’s comedic poker. The trick is to play the dangerous and the funny without canceling one or the other or both out and winding up with a performance of barely calibrated, miscalculated goo. Stockwell leans on his fey-menacing-macho qualities (Blue Velvet brought this out too) with the invention and dexterity of both a good actor and a natural comedian. Stockwell murders someone early in the picture, and tells them “You disappointed the shit out of me”, this line could’ve been a throwaway, but, in this picture, it’s the throwaways that linger and sting and tickle.

Married to the Mob isn’t without problems. One wishes that Demme had scaled back on the hyperbole of the violence. Something Wild became Something More, because the violence truly intruded on a genre with which it didn’t belong (few films manage this effectively). Married to the Mob never gathers that kind of surprising weight beyond isolated episodes, and it threatens to evaporate altogether before the end credits. The climax is well-staged but unrewarding; Demme not quite managing to totally elude the shackles of the genre after all. But Married to the Mob is still an unruly, loosey-goosey gem, a picture with spark and personality that feels authentically nourishing and good for you in a way that pure entertainments rarely do. And, of course, we lost Demme, as it seems we must usually lose our great filmmakers, to the boring Oscar machine-the ultimate train to conformity. Perhaps someone should stage a spiritual hit, or at least find a way to pipe “Bizarre Love Triangle” into Demme’s office. But that’s only the movies. Nothing in real life seems to trump change, our need in real life to move on from something already perfectly wonderful.

★★★

Posted in 1988, Comedy, Reviews | 9 Comments »

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