tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23247270952946956672024-02-19T02:52:26.267-04:00Soliloquies of the English CloisterMaltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.comBlogger210125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-7349273374959914872019-04-28T08:32:00.000-04:002019-04-28T08:32:00.760-04:00Freddy Krueger Has Risen from the Grave<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm taking some time at the moment to rewatch some of the horror films of my misspent teens and twenties. First and foremost: the <i>Nightmare on Elm Street</i> series. I've seen and adored the <b><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087800/">1984 original</a></b> a good number of times over the years, but I haven't watched the sequels since boarding school, back in 2003-4, on DVD with a friend. (I remember being thrilled by cherry coke and microwave popcorn, which didn't exist in my parents' sensible household.) We gave up after <b><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097981/"><i>The Dream Child</i></a></b>, if memory serves at all right, which from what I've read seems both sensible (in the light of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101917"><b><i>Freddy's Dead</i></b></a>) and regrettable (I missed out on <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111686"><b><i>Wes Craven's New Nightmare</i></b></a>). The point is, it's been a while.<br />
<br />
Back in the day I enjoyed <b><i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089686">A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge</a></i></b> (1985), but the reviews I've read since haven't been kind. And yet the film really holds up. <i>Freddy's Revenge </i>has problems, sure; a lot of them if you're exacting, but none to my mind film-breaking. And at the same time it's really bold and experimental and subversive (within the limits of the extremely rigid slasher genre, you understand). That's partly by accident - slasher aficionados have given the genre far more thought than the people who made most of these films ever did - but it's real nonetheless.<br />
<br />
We open on a school bus in Springwood, Ohio, where an awkward-looking teenage boy, Jesse (Mark Patton) sits alone, while groups of cool kids giggle among themselves. But what seems like a normal ride to school turns to terror when the bus driver, a burnt-looking man with a knife-glove, drives the bus off the road and into the desert (!?), where shenanigans ensue - until Jesse wakes up, soaked in sweat and screaming, in his bed.<br />
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It turns out that awful nightmares have been a regular feature of Jesse's life since his family moved to 1428 Elm Street, the house where Nancy Thompson lived in the first film. Jesse has trouble fitting in at school, spending time only with his girlfriend, Lisa (Kim Myers). The nightmares grow worse: Jesse finds himself walking into the boiler room in the basement and keeps running into the fedora-clad bus driver from his nightmares, one Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). Freddy explains that he wants Jesse to 'kill for him' so that he can take over his body and return to the real world. Before long the bodies start to pile up, each followed by Jesse waking up with Freddy's glove on his hand...<br />
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The plot isn't just not a rehash of the original, it inverts it: where in <i>A Nightmare on Elm Street</i> Nancy was trying to pull Freddy into the real world to defeat him, in <i>Freddy's Revenge</i> it's Freddy himself who's trying to punch through the looking glass, while the heroes are trying to keep him down. What I like best, though (<b><i>SPOILERS</i></b>), is that the role of protagonist shifts from Jesse to Lisa at the end of the second act. As Jesse becomes ever more stressed and sleep-deprived, he's increasingly incapable of dealing with the situation; eventually, Freddy takes over his body entirely, so that Jesse, inasmuch as he exists any more, is now the antagonist. Lisa takes over as Final Girl and resolves the plot, so that the happy ending is her freeing him from captivity. The standard slasher structure is definitely there, but twisted for a more interesting take.<br />
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Here's what makes this messier, alas: <i>Freddy's Revenge</i> doesn't follow the franchise rulebook for what Freddy can and can't do. While he's still yelling about how he wants to return to the real world, he's already doing things <i>in the real world</i> that he shouldn't be able to. Specifically, a lot of stupid poltergeist crap that's more baffling than scary, like setting the family toaster on fire ('It wasn't even plugged in!' <i>dunh dunh dunh</i>) or the film's abiding moment of shame: Freddy possessing the family parakeet. Oh noes, the bird is swooping down on the family in tremendously goofy POV angles, <i>giving Jesse's dad a minor cut on the cheek!</i> Shock horror, Jesse's dad broke the lamp trying to hit the bird! Followed by the <i>pièce de résistance</i>: the bird bursts into flames and blows up, showering the family with feathers, like it swallowed a stick of dynamite in a forties cartoon.<br />
<br />
But then again, <i>A Nightmare on Elm Street</i> didn't do it by the book either: Freddy levitates Tina off the bed, in one of that film's best scenes, in a way he absolutely shouldn't be able to do according to what we think of as the franchise rules. The ending, of course, is famously obscure and totally blurs the line between dream and real world: you tell me who's alive and who's dead at the end of the first film, since I can't (<i>Freddy's Revenge</i> clears that up in a bit of exposition), whether Glen and Nancy's mum were in fact dragged off bodily to the underworld or not and so on. Really, <i>Freddy's Revenge</i> is breaking rules that didn't exist yet when it was made, so I'm happy to give it a pass.<br />
<br />
Then there's the issue of what, if you didn't know the meaning of words, you might call the film's 'homoerotic subtext'. Jesse is gay. It's just barely possible to read the film in other ways, since no-one ever says so in so many words; but really everything that's right there in the finished product insists on it. A small part of this is only due to Patton's performance (his palpable discomfort at Lisa's attempts at seduction, for instance), but <i>pace </i>writer David Chaskin, Jesse's visit to a fetish club or Coach Schneider's naked shower death are all in the writing and pretty hard to misinterpret. What's more, this can't be separated from the plot. Jesse's uncertainty about his own identity and inability to open up to his girlfriend create the insecurity that makes him a perfect victim for Freddy. 'The gay issue' isn't extraneous, it's central to the plot.<br />
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The dream sequences are much better than I remembered, though not a patch on <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093629"><b><i>Dream Warriors</i></b></a>; the performances are fine, i.e. not Heather Langenkamp, but not <i>Friday the 13th</i> Expendable Meat either.<b><i> </i></b>Freddy is still a skulking shadow-dweller, but he does talk more this time around, since he has to explain the plot. He's definitely not yet the killer clown he'd later become, though. Witness this exchange towards the end of the film:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
TERRIFIED PARTYGOER: Just tell us what you want, all right? I'm here to help you.
FREDDY: <b>Help yourself, fucker!</b> <i>*kills him*</i></blockquote>
Not exactly a zinger, is it?<br />
<br />
<i>Dream Warriors</i> would bring back Heather Langenkamp and take the franchise in a totally different, initially delightful direction. That means <i>Freddy's Revenge</i> is a dead end, a road not taken. Does it have flaws? Yes, definitely. But it's still very much worth it: besides being a decent way to spend an hour and a half, it's one of the strangest slashers of the eighties.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-32850554779580142562015-11-18T13:45:00.001-04:002015-11-18T13:45:24.924-04:00Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/%3Ca%20href=%22http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080684/%22%3E"><b><i>The Empire Strikes Back</i></b></a> (1980) started a Star Wars tradition of confusing and alienating audiences that has become pretty much synonymous with the franchise over the years. For despite being advertised by just that four-word title ahead of release (see the poster), the film's opening crawl instead referred to it as <i>Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back</i>. A science-fiction franchise had suddenly become a humongous 'saga' that had apparently and inexplicably begun on its fourth installment. The course had been set for a bright future of crippling continuity errors and, eventually, a leaden prequel trilogy - a curious achievement for what is clearly and unequivocally the best film in the series.<br />
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This doesn't quite seem to have been the intention right at the start: some of the most distinctive plot elements of <i>Empire </i>(<b>SPOILERS</b>) were only introduced by George Lucas after he was disappointed by a first draft, written by veteran space opera and planetary romance writer Leigh Brackett in the final stages of her battle with cancer. In reworking the script Lucas came up with the film's darker direction and the no-longer-stunning plot twist that Darth Vader is (well, claims to be, as far as <i>Empire</i> is concerned) Luke Skywalker's father. This in turn led to a backstory expansion in which Anakin Skywalker was Obi-Wan Kenobi's apprentice before being seduced by the Emperor (now a user of the dark side of the Force and no longer a mere politician, though not yet Ian McDiarmid), opening the possibility of a prequel trilogy. This newer, bigger story also retroactively turned Obi-Wan into a liar who manipulated Luke into helping him and attempting to blow up his own father along with the Death Star, but really, in the continuity mess of even the core <i>Star Wars</i> canon that's small change.<br />
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The story: forces of the Rebel Alliance, including all the surviving
heroes of the previous film, have constructed a base on the inhospitable
ice world of Hoth. Before long, though, they're discovered by the
Imperial fleet of Darth Vader. The rebels manage to hold off the
Imperial ground assault long enough to pull off a successful withdrawal
but Han Solo and Leia Organa (Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher) fail to
get away from the Imperials because of the Millennium Falcon's broken
hyperdrive. Hiding first in a deadly asteroid field and then fleeing to
Cloud City, where Han's old frenemy Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee
Williams) runs a mining operation, they're hunted by Vader's fleet as
well as a bunch of bounty hunters.<br />
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Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) follows a vision of his one-time mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi to the swamp world of Dagobah. There, Obi-Wan's own teacher, the diminutive and ancient Jedi master Yoda (Frank Oz), instructs him in the ways of the Force, teaching him to become a Jedi knight himself. Before he can complete his training, though, Luke has a premonition of his friends in danger. Worried by Yoda's warnings but ultimately unable to ignore Han and Leia's suffering, Luke races off to Cloud City, his training unfinished, to save his friends from Vader's clutches.<br />
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The final script, written by Lawrence Kasdan based on Lucas's second
draft, is fantastic: it zips by, the necessary exposition is handled
supremely well (for a film that expands the story so much, there are
very few scenes of character simply sitting down and talking), and the
dialogue is much punchier and more contemporary than Lucas's
self-conscious throwback pulp stylings in <i>Star Wars</i>. Those work too, and having lavished praise on Lucas's script I'm not about to change my mind. But what worked for <i>Star Wars</i> wouldn't work for <i>Empire</i>:
where the first film was all about roughly sketching a world of
intergalactic adventure and a stark battle between good and evil, the
second installment fleshes out that world and develops its characters
from old-school sci-fi archetypes into, well, people.<br />
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(Even so, let's not beat about the bush: the timeline of <i>Empire</i> is pretty much impossible (which isn't to say <i>Star Wars</i>
fans haven't made up elaborate excuses for the film). In the time that
Han and Leia take to run from Hoth to Bespin, the Empire hot on their
heels (a few standard days at most), Luke goes to Dagobah, meets Yoda
and gets a significant chunk of Jedi training done (weeks at least).
Impossible in terms of realism, to be sure. But in story terms, it
works: Luke's less action-packed, more contemplative and philosophical
scenes alternate effectively with scenes of danger involving Han and
Leia. Time has always moved at the speed of plot in Star Wars, and I'm
happy to give the film a pass here.)<br />
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The new and improved dialogue does a lot for the characters, and it's a much better fit for some of the actors. Carrie Fisher's Leia is even more acerbic this time around, and Kasdan gives her a couple of fantastic zingers: 'Would it help if I got out and pushed?' when Han's rust bucket won't get going, or the wondrous 'You don't have to do this to impress me' as he heads into an asteroid field. That brings us neatly to the problem of Leia in <i>Empire</i>: she's reduced from the aristocratic leader of <i>Star Wars</i> to playing the straight man to Han Solo's antics. Which is enjoyable, but leaves the character a little thin. Ford is freer and looser this time around (thanks, no doubt, to a more cooperative director), and Hamill is - well, I like him less in <i>Empire </i>than in either <i>Star Wars</i> or <i>Jedi</i>, but his final scenes in the film are terrific, no doubt about it.<br />
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In the smaller roles there's so much goodness: I'm a particular fan of
all the pitiable Imperial officers who must achieve impossible
objectives, or be murdered by Vader. (There is, in general, a lot of
excellent bleak humour in the scenes aboard the <i>Executor</i>). An
easy favourite is Kenneth Colley's put-upon Admiral Piett, a man who
through long practice has become really good at ignoring people being
force-choked right next to him, and actually makes it out of <i>Empire </i>alive.
But Julian Glover's General Veers, a man who clearly enjoys nothing
more than (a) sneering and (b) stomping on infantry with his enormous
armoured tank, is a wonderful mini-villain too. On the other side, I'm a
big fan of Bruce Boa's General Rieekan, who radiates a slightly gruff
but likeable authority on Hoth.<br />
<br />
That's all well and good, but let's get to the best character in <i>Empire</i>, shall we? Because Yoda is that. I still love the reveal that the cackling imp who rummages through Luke's equipment is, in fact, a powerful Jedi master. He's a perfect embodiment of the film's thesis that the Force as a mystical ally can help the weak triumph over the strong, that it makes the underdog's victory over all the Empire's might a real possibility. He injects a warm sense of wonder about the Force, a humanist love of people over cold military power ('luminous beings are we, not this crude matter') and a yearning for peace ('wars not make one great'). And he does it all with humour (Frank Oz's outraged delivery of 'Mudhole? Slimy? My home this is!' cracks me up every time), dignity, and real authority. I understand that for Hamill weeks of sharing the scene with a puppet weren't too much fun, but the result is spellbinding.<br />
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(You know who sucks in <i>Empire</i>, though? Obi-Wan Kenobi. He does nothing but deliver some exposition and whinge about stuff. And Alec McGuinness, whose wry self-amusement worked wonders in <i>Star Wars</i>, is really phoning it in this time around. It's a waste.)<br />
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Lucas didn't do much to polish <i>Empire </i>in the special editions and home video releases. The major exception - one <i>Star Wars</i> fans don't object to, curiously - is Ian McDiarmid portraying the emperor (instead of Elaine Baker with digitally inserted chimpanzee eyes and Clive Revill doing the voice). Even better is that you don't need the despecialized edition to appreciate the special effects, which Lucas, despite his reputation, has only ever tweaked to remove errors. And they're <i>wonderful</i>. Terrifying stop-motion AT-ATs marching mercilessly across the frozen landscape while seemingly mosquito-sized rebel snowspeeders flit around them, a city floating above the clouds, a star destroyer adrift after a hit from the ion cannon. My absolute favourite, though, is the tauntauns. The puppet work in close-ups is very good, but I adore the stop-motion used in wide shots even more. The creatures move in an alien yet believable way, and they've got an almost Harryhausenesque amount of personality. (Plus great sound design, but in <i>Star Wars</i> that goes without saying.)<br />
<br />
In the hands of Irvin Kershner <i>Empire </i>is a bit more life-sized than <i>Star Wars</i>, its characters just as mythical but a little less archetypal. By the second film, the series was starting to fill out its world, developing its characters (who are starting to feel like people we know and like instead of The Naive Young Hero, The Rogue, The Damsel, The Mentor, &c.) and breaking free from its '30s forebears. Put another way, <i>Empire </i>feels much less like <i>Flash Gordon</i> fan-fiction and much more like the work of people who suspected that more than just paying homage to them, <i>Star Wars</i> would utterly displace the pulp serials of yore in the public imagination. With a compelling story involving great characters, terrific setpieces and top-notch craftsmanship, <i>Empire </i>provides a good argument that <i>Star Wars'</i> place as a pop culture juggernaut is fully and legitimately earned. Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-21750868032679803502015-10-03T13:54:00.002-04:002015-10-23T07:41:15.121-04:00Hokey religions and ancient weapons<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/"><b><i>Star Wars</i></b></a> is the first blockbuster franchise I loved. Whether it was for lack of interest or because I preferred books, I didn't watch a lot of films when I was a kid. <i>Star Wars</i> blew me away. It opened up my imagination to a whole world of pulp science fantasy and started me off on a geeky obsession that has never gone away, attested to by shelves of tattered, treasured Expanded Universe novels.<br />
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Admittedly the <i>Star Wars</i> film I'm talking about was <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120915"><b><i>The Phantom Menace</i></b></a>, and I only caught up with the first film in the series on VHS a few months later. I loved them both - I suppose I wasn't the most discriminating eleven-year-old. With time I learnt that fandom orthodoxy frowned on <i>The Phantom Menace</i> but loved <i>Episode IV: A New Hope</i>, as Lucas retitled the 1977 film on its re-release. And at least as far as Episode IV is concerned, the fandom is right. The film is ace: a total matinee delight that may not be the same technical marvel it appeared in 1977, but holds up just about perfectly all the same.<br />
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(A quick note: the basis for this review is the <a href="http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WARS-Despecialized-Edition-HD-V25-MKV-IS-OUT-NOW/topic/12713/"><b><i>Despecialized Edition</i></b></a> of <i>Star Wars</i>, a fan-made high-definition version of the original trilogy that attempts to restore the films as they originally appeared in cinemas, instead of the 1997 'special editions' (plus subsequent additions and changes) that modern Blu-ray copies are based on - fan-made because Lucas infamously wouldn't release anything except his new and allegedly improved versions in high-definition.<br />
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The thing is, the special editions are how I first experienced <i>Star Wars</i>, and I imagine it's the same for a lot of people who weren't around in the seventies and early eighties. But because of all the criticism the special editions get in fan circles - Han shot first <i>et cetera ad nauseam</i> - I was aware of most of the changes. They're pretty minor, by and large: CGI critters instead of practical effects, mostly, and a weird floating Jabba who pops in to utter the exact same threats Greedo did hardly five minutes earlier. But there's one exception: a scene near the end, in which Luke meets his old Tattooine mate Biggs Darklighter on Yavin 4, which ended up on the cutting room floor in the original release but was restored for the special editions. And considering the banter between the pilots during the Death Star attack is damn weird without that scene - they're talking as if they've known each other all their lives, which isn't indicated in anything we've seen before - restoring it was clearly the right decision.)<br />
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The story: Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), a nineteen-year-old living on the backwater planet of Tatooine, longs to be released from his tedious life on his uncle's moisture farm and go off to become a starfighter pilot. Tasked with cleaning two new droids his uncle has bought (Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker), Luke discovers they're carrying a message of vital importance from Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), which they're tasked with relaying to a retired general and current hermit Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness). Obi-Wan reveals to Luke that just like himself, Luke's father was a Jedi Knight, a fighter for good drawing on the mystical Force killed by the evil Darth Vader (David Prowse, voiced by James Earl Jones), and perhaps Luke would like to accompany him to leave Tatooine and join Princess Leia in their rebellion against the evil Galactic Empire?<br />
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This is understandably too much for Luke to take in straight away, but his decision is made for him: Imperial stormtroopers attack his home, massacring his aunt and uncle and forcing Luke, Obi-Wan and the droids to flee. In the seedy spaceport of Mos Eisley, they hire smuggler Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his towering alien sidekick Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), who are themselves in a lot of trouble with some unsavoury elements. Together, this motley crew head to Leia's homeworld of Alderaan, only to find the whole planet obliterated by something that decidedly isn't any moon...<br />
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Everyone knows that story, but it's perhaps worth pointing out the ways in which the plot of the 1977 film isn't the story of the <i>Star Wars</i> franchise that developed after it, simply because George Lucas and his collaborators hadn't settled on those things yet. Certain family relationships don't yet exist; Obi-Wan unambiguously hates Vader's guts; the Jedi are treated as a myth of the ancient past and the existence of the Force is explicitly denied by several characters, although in the course of the film it seems to become the official creed of the Rebel Alliance; the emperor is a distant, unseen figure; Vader is only one of the empire's henchmen and Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) orders him around, while others openly insult his religious beliefs.<br />
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It's so simple and archetypal (little wonder, since Lucas was heavily influenced by Campbell's <i>Hero with a Thousand Faces</i>): a wide-eyed audience stand-in who dreams of seeing something of the world, be a hero and rescue a beautiful princess; a wise old mentor, not long for this world; a charming rogue who learns to value friendship over money; a dastardly villain; and a character who, yes, is at this point still kind of an old-school damsel in distress, but at least has her own mind, some justifiable complaints about her ill-planned rescue, and ideas for how to do a better job. But it takes skill to do this stuff well, and <i>Star Wars</i> does it extremely well.<br />
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The script isn't usually given the amount of credit it's due, but it's among the reasons for the success of <i>Star Wars</i> and its immediate ability to capture the imagination. Lucas wrote the thing more than once, never happy with the results, and when <i>Star Wars</i> started filming in Tunisia the screenplay was still unfinished. The process of often sharply critical feedback over several years from Hollywood insiders and Lucas's wife, as well as uncredited dialogue rewrites by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, somehow produced a particular alchemy.<br />
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The result is glorious high pulp, instantly quotable and wonderful: "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy"; "I find your lack of faith disturbing"; "Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid"; "Evacuate? In our moment of triumph?"; "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers", and so on. None of this is remotely how real people talk, but it gives the film an outsized air of adventure and wonder that helps it hit all the high notes.<br />
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Then there are the performances. The role of Luke Skywalker at this point is still something of a generic person, but Mark Hamill gets that right: we like and empathise with Luke, and that's what the film needs. The others are allowed to do more, and they're terrific. Alec Guinness forever seems gently amused at being asked to deliver dialogue about Jedi knights and disturbances in the Force, which results in a winning, light performance. Peter Cushing, veteran Hammer Horror vampire hunter, makes for a marvellously icy and authoritative warlord with drive, determination and cruelty to spare.<br />
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To me, there are three standouts: Harrison Ford's natural charisma causes him to make the role his own so much that he essentially spun it off into another franchise, as Indiana Jones. Anthony Daniels portrays C-3PO as a self-pitying but fundamentally decent comic foil who gets some of the film's biggest laughs ("Listen to them, they're dying, R2! Curse my metal body, I wasn't fast enough, it's all my fault!") And lastly, David Prowse's physical acting has always been overshadowed by James Earl Jones's voice, but his performance inside the Darth Vader suit is perfect: authoritative and menacing, but very far from emotionless. I adore the scene in which he pauses as he senses Obi-Wan for the first time; it's subtle but all kinds of wonderful.<br />
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<i>Star Wars</i> wouldn't be <i>Star Wars </i>without the lovely production design, though: it's chock-full of amazing ideas brilliantly executed. And unlike the second and third prequels, which are full of stuff happening in the background, the first film has the sense to actually briefly focus on the terrific alien suits, grime-covered droids and fossils bleached by the Tatooine suns, giving them each the dignity and two seconds of glory they deserve. (My favourite is and remains the tiny droid skittering away from Chewbacca on the Death Star, beeping in fear.) The film's used-future aesthetic - which belongs exclusively to the good and neutral characters, while the Empire is exquisitely glossy - is wonderfully and consistently realised.<br />
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The special effects are extremely good: they look dated, yes, but virtually never unconvincing. The real star is Ben Burtt's sound design, though. From all the mechanical whirring and hissing to Chewbacca's voice and Vader's breathing, the sounds of <i>Star Wars</i> remain instantly recognisable. There's so much high-class craftsmanship here, it really makes you appreciate the often-forgotten art of sound design (and miss it in all the projects that neglect to go beyond mere competence).<br />
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So what doesn't hold up? Despite everything, the final film is a bit slight; it zips past having established fairly little of its world beyond rough outlines, and selling some of its character development more through conviction than storytelling logic (Luke's attachment to Obi-Wan, in particular, feels dodgy after so short an acquaintance, especially since he immediately forgets about the people who raised him). The film offers a world of adventure so appealing, it's not surprising people wanted sequels and an enormous expanded universe. But it also feels a little like <i>Star Wars</i> needed those things to round it out, and like, had nothing else ever followed, the film would feel roughly sketched. But if the worst thing I can say about a film is that I want more of its world and characters than it can possibly provide in two hours, well...Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-57727291158980664072015-06-24T16:38:00.000-04:002015-06-24T16:38:04.005-04:00Every chapter I stole from somewhere else<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In Chapter 18 of <i>Dracula</i>, Bram Stoker offers a <a href="http://literature.org/authors/stoker-bram/dracula/chapter-18.html"><b>brief summary</b></a> of the villain's identity: 'He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man, for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the "land beyond the forest".'<br />
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The vagueness allows Stoker to gloss over a detail: Vlad III was the Voivode of Wallachia, a mostly lowland principality to the north of the Danube in present-day southern Romania. Transylvania, where Stoker's count has his home, is an entirely different (albeit neighbouring) region, a part of medieval Hungary. Stoker rightly thought the legend of Vlad the Impaler was too good to pass up, so he fudged his history a bit. And we don't mind because he did it in the service of a novel that presents, despite awkward, overheated prose and reactionary politics, a good story.<br />
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You know what's pretty much the opposite of a good story, though? <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0829150/"><i><b>Dracula Untold</b></i></a>. Seriously.<br />
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In the fifteenth century, Vlad Dracula (Luke Evans) rules the principality of Transylvania [sic] as a vassal of the Turkish Empire. When the Turkish envoy Hamza Bey (Ferdinand Kingsley) demands that 1,000 Transylvanian boys - including Vlad's own son (Art Parkinson) - be turned over to the Turks for training as Janissary soldiers, as Vlad himself was, the Prince is distraught. After his attempt to plead personally with Sultan Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper) fails, Vlad refuses to budge, killing the Ottoman party tasked with bringing back the hostages and plunging Transylvania into war.<br />
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Realising he lacks the strength to fight off the Turkish army, Vlad visits the monstrous denizen of a mountain cave (Charles Dance), who lends him his vampiric powers. If Vlad manages to resist the craving for human blood for three days, he will return to his normal human self. If he gives in, however, he will become an immortal bloodsucking fiend forever. Realising he has little choice if he is to save his people, Vlad accepts the wager and turns into a superpowered, if increasingly sinister version of himself.<br />
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It would be difficult to argue that Dracula was exactly crying out for an origin story. (Not impossible: I for one would love to see a historical fantasy series set in the fifteenth-century Balkans on TV.) But dredging up the making of a hero has been the fashionable way to rekindle audience interest in washed-up properties since <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372784/"><b><i>Batman Begins</i></b></a> in 2005 (Sam Raimi's 2002 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145487/"><b><i>Spider-Man</i></b></a> was an origin story too, but saw no need to go on about it). Christopher Nolan's <i>Batman </i>films also gifted us the flawed, introspective hero that's spread like measles throughout corporate filmmaking. It's an approach that works fantastically for Batman, but for other characters - like, it turns out, Dracula - it's potentially lethal.<br />
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Combine a cookie-cutter origin story, a dark and brooding protagonist and the burden that <i>Dracula Untold</i> is the first film in the Marvel-aping rebooted Universal Monsters cinematic universe, and you have a recipe for disaster. The franchise angle forces the film to end on a bizarre and awful modern-day scene, while its slavish paint-by-numbers approach causes <i>Dracula Untold</i> to run into a serious problem: namely, that Dracula's appeal isn't as a hero, glum or otherwise. <i>What people pay for when going to see a Dracula film is a charismatic immortal villain.</i> Attempting to tell the story of how a virtuous aristocrat became an undead monster isn't impossible. But it would at the very least require the courage to make your protagonist, you know, <i>evil </i>by the end of the film. Instead Evans's Dracula stubbornly remains the same reasonably decent concerned dad, whether he's celebrating Easter with his adoring subjects or slaking his thirst on the blood of thousands of mooks. Worrying about audience sympathies causes writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless to simply give up on character development entirely.<br />
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But then, <i>Dracula Untold</i> isn't trying to tell the story of how a monster came to be because, apart from the most cursory of nods, it isn't a horror film. It's a superhero picture, if the shameless and uninspired cribbing from the conventions of the DC and Marvel films of the last decade didn't give that away, and a particularly asinine example of the form: cardboard villains, tedious powers and an adherence to formula so rigid that it chokes whatever life should be there right out of the film. There's even a scene in which silver fills in for kryptonite. In the face of so much formula, who could blame first-time director Gary Shore for falling asleep at the helm?<br />
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The film borrows extensively from what has come before. The opening scene, for example - in which voiceover narration explains to us scenes of boys being put through gruelling military training that includes a lot of whipping - is a bafflingly close retelling of the start of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416449/"><i><b>300</b></i></a>. Frank Miller's anti-Persian tirade provides the backbone for much of what follows, although <i>Dracula Untold </i>lacks the earlier film's full-throated fascist propagandising. Its Turks are mostly uninspired generic baddies, although the ominous crescents on their tents and repeated references to their menace to the capitals of Christian Europe are quite enough, in the age of Anders Behring Breivik, to qualify as grossly irresponsible. The film is, not to put too fine a point on it, racist trash, its obvious brainlessness aggravating rather than lessening its offensive pandering to fashionable prejudice.<br />
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Then there's Vlad's leading of the Transylvanian people to the safety of a monastery in the mountains, borrowed among other antecedents from <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167261/"><i><b>The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers</b></i></a>. It's indicative of the film's gross lack of any sense of scale: the whole of Transylvania seems to consist of at most a couple of hundred people located in a single castle, and the entire war between Vlad and the Ottoman Empire is over in the required three days (in the real world, meanwhile, a medieval army would take well over a month to cover the distance between Istanbul and Vlad's historical capital of Târgoviște).<br />
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Nothing in <i>Dracula Untold</i>, in short, feels like it takes place in a plausible approximation of the real world. It looks fake, too: I left the film convinced its backgrounds were entirely computer-generated only to find out it was shot on location in Northern Ireland - a popular filming location in the age of <i>Game of Thrones</i> though not, alas, one famed for its scenic mountain ranges. The cold metallic colour palette chosen by cinematographer John Schwartzman seems an odd fit, too, for the backwoods medievalism the story would seem to require.<br />
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It's tired hackwork, is what it is, and the utterly uninspired performances reflect this. Evans tries, but he has literally nothing to work with; of all the people onscreen, only Charles Dance manages to have some fun with a scenery-chewing, genuinely effective performance. Say what you will about corporate filmmaking, but it guarantees at least a certain professionalism. <i>Dracula Untold</i>, alas, has literally nothing to offer beyond that base amount of competence. It's a product so soulless that it's difficult to be upset no-one involved in it managed to care. Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-40154851720263971922015-06-20T11:55:00.000-04:002015-06-20T11:55:22.152-04:00The courtship of Mr Dracula<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc7Jo0sr4ixksSSjZUyxoiFXGYC72Qb26GzX1QAl5KGLfKkp3lRg-b7ppblE6D8ezUUIqftPmHVoYu_TeQ_9YqpWwNA2A70dMmTBs3SS5xzpXmktR0bU9gTGEYfhufzV9-ov7VKeM6bsI/s1600/Bram+Stokers+Dracula.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc7Jo0sr4ixksSSjZUyxoiFXGYC72Qb26GzX1QAl5KGLfKkp3lRg-b7ppblE6D8ezUUIqftPmHVoYu_TeQ_9YqpWwNA2A70dMmTBs3SS5xzpXmktR0bU9gTGEYfhufzV9-ov7VKeM6bsI/s400/Bram+Stokers+Dracula.png" width="283" /></a>I don't know Francis Ford Coppola, obviously. But <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103874/?ref_=nm_flmg_prd_47"><b><i>Bram Stoker's Dracula</i></b></a> (1992) suggests something about the director behind the project: namely that, stung by the middling reviews and accusations of cash-grab filmmaking that dogged him in the wake of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099674/?ref_=nm_flmg_prd_49"><b><i>The Godfather Part III</i></b></a>, Coppola decided to make the most spectacular, overtly 'artistic' picture he could. And if the result was a film that would inspire devotion from some and bile from others, so much the better, for no-one could accuse him of playing it safe for guaranteed box-office returns.<br />
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Obviously, that may just be a fiction. But it would explain some of the eccentricities in <i>Bram Stoker's Dracula</i>, a film so chock-full of odd choices that it barely resembles a coherent narrative at all. An undead love story invented from scratch, perching precariously atop an almost slavishly orthodox retelling of Stoker's novel; milquetoast, bland performances right next to unfettered scenery-chewing; out-there visuals that never cohere as an aesthetic - <i>Dracula </i>has it all, and then some. It's a film of a thousand ideas, many of them clashing with each other in what could not possibly be classified as a success, but rather an endlessly watchable, legitimately fascinating failure.<br />
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The plot: in the fifteenth century, Prince Vlad of Wallachia (Gary Oldman) fights the invading Ottoman Empire. While he is gone, his wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) receives a false report of his death and kills herself in despair. Overcome with rage and grief upon his return, Vlad curses God, drives out his priests and becomes an immortal bloodsucking fiend.<br />
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In 1897, Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) travels to Transylvania to seal a real estate deal with Count Dracula (Oldman). Arriving at Castle Dracula after an unsettling journey, he soon finds the count a strange host: besides being the only person Harker ever sees, Dracula also appears oddly obsessed with blood and medieval history and nurses a worrying hatred of mirrors. Harker soon realises that he has become the count's prisoner. His purchase of Carfax Abbey in London completed, Dracula departs the castle for England...<br />
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... where the psychiatrist Dr Jack Seward (Richard E. Grant) is troubled by his patient Renfield (Tom Waits), who rambles about 'the master' and has taken to devouring spiders and small insects. Meanwhile, wealthy socialite Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost) has become engaged to Arthur Holmwood (Cary Elwes), despite also being courted by Seward and Holmwood's friend, Texan Quincey Morris (Billy Campbell). Lucy becomes ill after being found wandering outside at night by her friend, and fiancée to Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), who happens to look exactly like Elizabeta. Lucy's strange case leads Seward to consult his mentor Abraham van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins). Meanwhile Mina's seemingly chance acquaintance with a recently arrived Transylvanian prince turns into a mutual obsession...<br />
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There are too many <i>Dracula </i>adaptations out there to claim that <i>Bram Stoker's Dracula</i> is the most faithful of the lot, but it undoubtedly hews far, far closer to the text than other well-known film versions. The film does actually reproduce the whole of Stoker's novel from beginning to end, missing virtually none of its beats (and if this seems like nothing special for an adaptation, please consult the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021814/"><b>1931</b></a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051554/"><b>1958</b></a> films). In places this is faithfulness for faithfulness' sake: the character of Quincey Morris remains exactly as inessential as he is in the novel and could easily be merged with Arthur Holmwood, but Coppola chooses to keep him in there. The devotion to the source material extends to seemingly trivial details earlier versions saw fit to dispense with.<br />
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And yet! The narrative structure of the novel is presented pretty much unchanged, but the <i>story </i>is completely different. Where Stoker wrote a Gothic horror novel about a sworn group of men fighting the vampiric villain who targets 'their' virtuous women, Coppola's is a tale of irresistible love/lust between an immortal lover and the reincarnation of his true love. The novel is terrified of female sexuality (Lucy's attempts to attack Holmwood are one with her amorous advances, forcibly interrupted by Van Helsing in his dual role of vampire hunter and chaperone), but the film's Lucy acts downright shockingly liberated (to put it politely) to begin with. Meanwhile, the overtly physical love between Dracula and Mina does not bring the latter to perdition, but helps the former renounce evil.<br />
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Adopting the novel's structure but repudiating its reactionary ideas does not, to me, work particularly well: it turns the film's heroes into fools for at least the film's third act, when they're supposedly racing against time to stop evil. It also forces Oldman to portray two totally different characters: a hammy centuries-old monster liberally quoting Bela Lugosi's performance in the role (literally: his line readings of "I am Dracula. Welcome to my home" and "... What music they make" blow Lugosi's right out of the water, besides being a lot of fun for the actor), and a sensitive romantic lead. Both are fairly compelling, but they're impossible to reconcile as a single figure.<br />
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That decision also amplifies the tendency of the other performances to feel like they're from totally different films: Keanu Reeves's bland presence is frequently criticised, but his <i>is </i>a thin straight man part in which he acquits himself reasonably, mind-bogglingly horrible 'English' accent aside; Grant's twitchy Seward, a theoretically rational scientist who runs a nightmarish Bedlam while addled on then-newfangled drugs; Hopkins's Van Helsing, insane on a level that's occasionally amusing but clashes so badly with the other performances that several scenes he's in just fall apart; Elwes, a little unsure if his performance is an homage to or a parody of Errol Flynn. Ryder is, I think, the standout: her accent, too, is weak, but she never ceases to be convincing as the story's heart. <br />
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The film's enormous problems with its tone extend to the visuals, which are proudly overblown and lush but incoherent, throwing around idea after idea just to see what sticks. Some are fantastic: Castle Dracula, looking like a sinister enthroned figure against the backdrop of the Carpathians; vampire Lucy in her gorgeous and terrible shroud; the count suddenly dissolving into a mass of rats. Others are much less successful (Dracula's costume and makeup in his initial appearance are strikingly different from the usual 'You'll know I'm a vampire because I wear a cape' interpretations, but they're somewhat awful on their own merits).<br />
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It all adds up to a film that has a thousand things on its mind: being an homage to earlier iterations of the material (Coppola quotes without restraint from the genre's classics); half-baked explorations of <i>fin-de-siècle</i> signifiers like the cinematograph and absinthe-fuelled decadence; a young-and-sexy updating of Dracula for the MTV generation; a visual playground for an undoubtedly creative team; occasional questionable forays into horror-comedy (there's a particularly tasteless cut - you'll know it when you see it) -<br />
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- and, somewhere in there, an honest-to-God vampire picture that disregards an ossified cinematic tradition around Dracula to arrive at a totally new look at the count. Coppola foregrounds the beastly, feral nature of Dracula, his menacing presence - tinged with temptation - outside civilisation's hall and its hearth-fire in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. It feels at times as if Coppola is adapting not Stoker, but a take Angela Carter might have devised on <i>Dracula</i>.The result is a film that's unlike any other bloodsucker film out there. Unfortunately, its extravagant ambition never coheres. It's not boring for a second but, alas, that doesn't mean it's any good.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-32111882316153223902014-12-21T17:01:00.001-04:002014-12-22T07:10:44.695-04:00Battle of the Five Hours<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2310332/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><b><i>The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies</i></b></a> is apparently the shortest of Peter Jackson's <i>Hobbit </i>series, but had you told me it was twice as long as any of the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> films I might well have believed you. <i>The Battle of the Five Armies</i> is, above all, an earnest plea for the importance of structure. It's a film that - after a prologue that feels tacked on from the preceding film - is just an enormous slog, without notable turns, shifts, pauses or high points. It's noisy and epic in its ambitions, while at the same time being utterly inert and tedious.<br />
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I should say first, perhaps, that I haven't seen either of the two preceding films. (The release of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903624/"><b><i>An Unexpected Journey</i></b></a> inspired me to re-read the book, at least.) But if watching the first two installments is necessary to enjoy <i>Battle of the Five Armies</i>, that hardly improves things: Each film in a trilogy, you'd hope, should have a satisfying arc of its own and be enjoyable watched in isolation, especially since they're being released a year apart. This is something, incidentally, that Jackson's own <i>Lord of the Rings </i>trilogy achieves in adapting a single novel that was split into three volumes at the insistence of Tolkien's publisher, even if the writers have to strain mightily to make it happen (especially in <i>The Two Towers</i>, where as a consequence the seams are most obvious). For <i>The Hobbit</i>, Jackson didn't even try. <br />
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The plot, what there is of it: The company of dwarves having finally reached the Lonely Mountain, their 'burglar', hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), steals the Arkenstone from Smaug the dragon (Benedict Cumberbatch). Angered, Smaug flies off to Lake-town and burns it to the ground, but is slain by Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) in the process. Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), suddenly freed from the headache of how to get rid of Smaug, refounds the dwarven kingdom of Erebor and, increasingly overcome by the allure of gold, has his followers fortify the entrance before others stake a claim. As indeed they do: Bard arrives with the people of Lake-town to demand the share of the treasure Thorin promised, to help rebuild the town; he is soon joined by the army of King Thranduil of the wood-elves (Lee Pace), who is incensed at Thorin deceiving and escaping him. Thorin's pig-headed refusal to negotiate is backed up when his cousin Dáin Ironfoot (Billy Connolly) arrives with an army of dwarves. Before the sides come to blows, however, a horde of orcs led by Azog the Defiler (Manu Bennett) shows up and much mayhem ensues.<br />
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There's also a subplot involving Gandalf and some characters you may remember from the <i>Rings</i> films fighting the necromancer in Dol Guldur, but that takes up all of five minutes.<br />
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<i>The Battle of the Five Armies</i> is pretty to look at, no doubt: the wintry surrounds of the Lonely Mountain are a triumph of landscape photography, set design and cinematography. Set in cold northern wastes the <i>Rings </i>films never touched on, <i>The Battle of the Five Armies</i> serves up new, interesting environs. And there are some genuine thrills there, too: Dáin's dwarven phalanx in action is a sight to see, even if the <i>Warhammer</i>-esque blockiness of the dwarf design, which I've never been a fan of, still spoils the view somewhat.<br />
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On the downside there are the terrible CGI-enhanced baddies. The <i>Rings </i>films, for all the criticism rightly levelled at them, were heaven for fans of practical effects. The design of the orcs, using masks, prosthetics and make-up, gave the creatures a gross physicality that lined up with the spittle, body odour and vile dietary habits that defined them as fictional versions of the working-class people of Tolkien's patrician nightmares. CGI allows the creation of wonders that old-school effects have never been able to achieve, but the trade-off is still often a lack of heft and weight.<br />
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There is no reality and thus no threat to these orcs, snarl as they might. Compare the magnificant fight between Aragorn and Lurtz in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120737/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><i><b>The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring </b></i></a>(2001) to Thorin's endless, mind-numbingly boring battle against Azog in this one, and despair. (A similar scene, in which Legolas leaps along a collapsing walkway like Super Mario, caused peals of laughter to ring around the auditorium.) With the <i>Hobbit </i>films (let's just boldly assume this problem affects the previous two films as well), Jackson has gone full-on <i>Phantom Menace</i>.<br />
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The film is hopelessly dragged down is its sheer length, forced by the mercenary decision to turn <i>The Hobbit</i> not into one, nor two, but three feature-length films. Reverse that decision, and this entire film could be wrapped up in the 45 minutes the material merits; the enormous structural problem would disappear; the fact that the nominal protagonist has nothing to do would be much less noticeable. Lengthy, pointless scenes involving cowardly Alfrid (Ryan Gage), in which jokes about such humorous subjects as men wearing women's clothes are expected to provide comic relief, could be cut, as could a bizarre psychedelic sequence involving Thorin among Smaug's gold that shows us Jackson using the freedom granted by a near-total absence of plot to baffling effect.<br />
<br />
But the film's length isn't its only problem: indeed some fairly important aspects of the book are passed over in downright indecent haste (the arrival of Beorn and the eagles), while threads are left dangling in other places (we're left to assume, for example, that Dáin and the elves defeated the orc army after its leaders are killed elsewhere, but the film doesn't see the need to spell out <i>the outcome of the titular battle</i>). There's the film's uninspiring visual language too: where <i>Rings </i>had stunning images, even if they were often an homage to greater works, <i>The Battle of the Five Armies</i> offers little to look at, as if Jackson was overcompensating for his tendency to gawk at his sets.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I'm glad this new trilogy is over, and sort of pleased Jackson doesn't have the rights to any more of Tolkien's works.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-16958050550140075342013-07-24T18:11:00.001-04:002013-08-08T19:37:53.695-04:00Retracing the wounds of the martyrs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/The-House-with-Laughing-Windows.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/The-House-with-Laughing-Windows.jpg" width="272" /></a></div>
For an Italian horror film released in 1976, Pupi Avati's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074287/"><b><i>The House with Laughing Windows</i></b></a> (<i>La casa dalle finestre che ridono</i>) is a little weird. Old-fashioned, in a sense: in the second half of the seventies, the <i>giallo </i>was in decline, wandering into the dustbin of obsolescence just like the Gothic horror genre it had replaced. The trend towards <i>outré </i>gory exploitation was already clear, even if most of the zombie and cannibal films that would exemplify this tendency hadn't been released yet.<br />
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In comes <i>The House with Laughing Windows</i>, and it's at once a throwback to chaster times - no series of elaborate murders here - and a weirdly experimental thing: a post-<i>giallo</i>, perhaps, both chronologically and thematically. It's a coincidence - Avati could hardly know that the time he finally moved from his earlier Gothic horror-comedies to the <i>giallo </i>would be an age of transition - but it's an interesting one. It's an exercise in deconstruction: Avati explores the spaces between the traditional beats of the <i>giallo </i>and discovers new loci of terror.<br />
<br />
The film is set in a small marshland town in Emilia-Romagna. Struggling artist Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) has been commissioned by the diminutive mayor, Solmi (Bob Tonnelli), to restore a fresco of St Sebastian by an infamously morbid, long-dead artist that's recently been discovered at the parish church. Stefano also rents a room at the villa of a bed-ridden old woman, Laura (Pina Borione), begins a relationship with a young teacher, Francesca (Francesca Marciano), and is increasingly freaked out by the painting and the town's many strange residents.<br />
<br />
That's really it. There's a death early in the film, but where in most <i>gialli </i>that would trigger Stefano's investigation (with the requisite crucial bit of detail buried in his memory), it mostly sets off an hour of thickening atmosphere here. It's a broody mood piece, largely free of outrageous murders and, to the shock of every <i>giallo </i>aficionado, entirely bereft of trenchcoat-wearing black-gloved killers. Instead of progressive plot movement, we get foreboding galore and a sudden rush towards a final twist that doesn't win any sense-making competitions.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMwSFVRus4MjvbZZQYMzp2Ab8A2gpuGDcWdd3sInjbRJ0Ju2j3-aTCJ80gtdgw_GU3nhdAkUWCsbzkwIX5Ez8aQL9igP1TmYUhYgvByz4ifha1Todl3Yl0Q4bRRnRjTHdsMALtXxPdsDI/s1600/La+casa+dalle+finestre+che+ridono.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMwSFVRus4MjvbZZQYMzp2Ab8A2gpuGDcWdd3sInjbRJ0Ju2j3-aTCJ80gtdgw_GU3nhdAkUWCsbzkwIX5Ez8aQL9igP1TmYUhYgvByz4ifha1Todl3Yl0Q4bRRnRjTHdsMALtXxPdsDI/s640/La+casa+dalle+finestre+che+ridono.png" width="580" /></a></div>
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Not that <i>The House with Laughing Windows</i> is tastefully free of violence. The film opens with the dead artist Legnani's insane, bloodthirsty ramblings playing over footage of a murder, and the ending is in a similar vein. For all that the <i>giallo </i>is violent, it tends not to reduce the human body to meat to the extent that <i>The House with Laughing Windows</i> does in crucial sequences; despite being extraordinarily invested in Italian particularity in every other respect, here the film feels like the horror films coming out of the United States at the same time, or indeed the cannibal film that was about to consume the Italian horror industry. What I'm saying, I guess, is that Avati's uncredited work on the screenplay of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073650/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom</i></b></a> (1975) doesn't seem entirely out of character.<br />
<br />
The film boasts a strong cast, beginning with a compelling central performance by Capolicchio. A classic <i>giallo </i>protagonist in the sense of being an outsider having to navigate an alien place and community, Capolicchio nevertheless remains opaque himself instead of being an easy audience stand-in. And this is the right choice: by only allowing us a loose and tentative anchor, Avati increases the sense of unease. Marciano is similarly great; but if I had to nominate a best-in-show it would be Borione's wonderful, unsettling weirdness.<br />
<br />
The connection between sexual transgression and murderous violence is well-established in the <i>giallo</i>, even if it never became codified into the rigid sex-equals-death moralism of the slasher film. Avati takes those lingering shots of lacerated flesh and pushes them further, into a film that connects, spoiler, wickedness to gender-bending. Its sexual politics is now more obviously problematic, but hasn't lost all the potency it held in the seventies. And that goes for <i>The House with Laughing Windows</i> as a whole: in deviating from the conventional structure of the <i>giallo</i>, it's perhaps the most chilling film in the genre this side of Bava or Argento.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-49817574710102888122013-07-03T18:00:00.001-04:002013-07-03T18:00:05.806-04:00Why'd it have to be snakes?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4b/Raiders.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4b/Raiders.jpg" width="257" /></a></div>
Some things I enjoy now were acquired tastes. Horror, for example, I mostly disliked throughout my formative years. But I've loved globe-trotting adventures since I was little. I grew up reading Verne, Stevenson, May and Haggard, even though I didn't realise the horrid colonial subtext at the time. So when I first watched the <i>Indiana Jones</i> films - late: around the time the retroactively reviled <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367882/?ref_=sr_3"><b><i>Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</i></b></a> came out - I enjoyed them tremendously.<br />
<br />
So I was pretty delighted when <a href="http://www.broadway.org.uk/"><b>the local semi-arthouse cinema</b></a> did a one-off screening of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082971/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i></b></a> (1981). The first of the Lucas-Spielberg films involving Harrison Ford's adventurer archaeologist had been the one I enjoyed least (except for that belated fourth film, which nobody seems to count): I knew it was good, but the earlier incarnation of the franchise couldn't quite match the finely honed machine of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097576/?ref_=sr_2"><b><i>Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade</i></b></a> (1989). So I watched it again, had an enormous amount of fun and left with a furrowed brow over all the problematic stuff in it.<br />
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Set in 1936, the film opens as Dr Henry 'Indiana' Jones (Harrison Ford) is exploring an ancient site somewhere in South America. Improvising his way around wicked traps, Indy manages to snag a golden idol despite the treachery of a local hired hand (Alfred Molina). He promptly finds himself relieved of his prize by his rival, the ruthless French archaeologist Belloq (Paul Freeman), barely escaping with his life. Back in the States, Indy is given a new mission by the secret service. It seems that the Nazis are digging in Egypt, having tasked Belloq with finding the Ark of the Covenant. To reveal its exact location, though, they need the Staff of Ra, which is in the possession of Indy's old patron Abner Ravenwood, last known location...<br />
<br />
... Nepal, where after Abner's death his daughter Marion (Karen Allen) keeps the headpiece of the staff. The problem: Marion is none too keen on Indy after he broke her heart ten years previously. Fighting for their lives against goons led by giggling Nazi sadist Major Toht (Ronald Lacey), though, does something to repair the lost trust, and the pair make it to Egypt with the staff. There, they link up with local digger Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) to infiltrate the Nazi excavation, and hopefully locate the Ark before the Führer's men do.<br />
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What struck me as a tiresome flaw during a recent viewing of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1408101/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Star Trek Into Darkness</i></b></a> is a virtue here: <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> is gloriously propulsive, barely letting up from start to finish. Even exposition tends to be loaded with background action: take the dinner at Sallah's, where Spielberg and Lucas throw poisoned dates into an already fun dialogue scene. After the US-bound table-setting the film does not slow down until the <i>dénouement</i>, although Lawrence Kasdan - he of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080684/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1"><b><i>The Empire Strikes Back</i></b></a> - is a smart enough writer that by the time the relentless action scenes finally get a little wearying, he switches to a lower gear so that the film's climax is heavy on tension but light on fisticuffs.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xjCDt1xX6BE/UdSJsrekArI/AAAAAAAABEE/vVIuwVDEgP4/s1366/Raiders+of+the+Lost+Ark.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="245" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xjCDt1xX6BE/UdSJsrekArI/AAAAAAAABEE/vVIuwVDEgP4/s640/Raiders+of+the+Lost+Ark.png" width="580" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The film's idea of appropriate race relations.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
The cast is uniformly great. Harrison's perpetually exasperated adventurer archaeologist is of course iconic, played here perhaps with a little more meanness than in subsequent offerings; Denholm Elliott's Marcus Brody is such a delight that it's no surprise <i>Last Crusade</i> expanded his role. I must admit I have a massive fictional-character crush on Allen's Marion, and I hope my judgment is not too terribly clouded by that, but: what a fantastic character! When introduced, at least: Marion drinking a local under the table, then holding her own in a battle against Toht's henchmen is pretty awesome. Unfortunately, Kasdan's screenplay proceeds to defang her. Being put into dresses, in fact, becomes a plot point, and she's an increasingly distressed damsel relying on Indy for rescue and basic common sense.<br />
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That's the real problem with <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i>: based on 1930s adventure serials, the film somehow sees fit to just bring in all the racism and misogyny of that period instead of challenging it. Marion's demotion is the least of it, alas. The film's racism is ugly and pervasive. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087469/?ref_=sr_3"><b><i>Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom</i></b></a> takes a lot of flak for racism, and deservedly so; but its predecessor is no better by any real yardstick. Its non-white people, to be sure, are not crazed murdering cultists: they are mostly childlike innocents requiring the kind guidance of the white man. A narrative in which white people are masters and Egyptians mere labourers is never seriously challenged (see the image above). Worse, the ambiguous South Americans are treacherous, lazy and cowardly and, in the case of the indigenous warriors Belloq has allied himself with, primitive and superstitious. It's totally unnecessary and leaves a terrible aftertaste.<br />
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Despite that, too, being mostly associated with its immediate successor, <i>Raiders </i>is pretty brutal, featuring multiple unpleasant deaths, mostly bloodless though they may be (and in one infamous scene involving a Nazi bare-knuckle boxer and an aeroplane propeller, it's decidedly <i>not </i>bloodless). There's violence against animals as well, including a whole mess of snakes being doused with petrol and set on fire, and an unfortunate monkey. It's better than an Italian cannibal film inasmuch as it's not real, I suppose, but far from pleasant or called for. Like <i>Tintin in the Congo</i>, <i>Raiders</i> presents the killing of animals is harmless entertainment, and the thought that it might be something else never crosses the film's mind.<br />
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If that doesn't sour your appreciation, though, <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> is overflowing with joys. Norman Reynolds's production design is just wonderful: the Ark marries an ancient feel with art-déco chic in just the right way, while the South American temple is a laundry list of wonderfully executed tropes. (Who doesn't love ancient traps?) More than anything, it shows what the people involved were best at: Spielberg, at being the greatest blockbuster director of his generation; Kasdan, at marrying drama and action-comedy; and Lucas, at taking a step back and using his genius for production without directing himself, a lesson he sadly did not heed in later years (see also: Jackson, Peter).<br />
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It's such a delightful film that its less savoury aspects are a whole lot easier to overlook than they might be. With the double-whammy of <i>Empire </i>and <i>Raiders</i>, Kasdan clearly had a winning streak in the first half of the eighties (even <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086190/?ref_=sr_2"><b><i>Return of the Jedi</i></b></a>, weighed down by merchandise-friendly teddy bears and material rehashed from <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/?ref_=sr_3"><b><i>Star Wars</i></b></a>, is ultimately well-written, devastatingly so in some scenes). <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i>
is tremendously good fun: populist but not stupid, hilarious without
being tasteless, and action-packed without directing that violence at
the audience in the manner of twenty-first-century action films.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-64418625426776236412013-06-28T18:34:00.000-04:002013-06-28T18:35:53.141-04:00All the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-Ahp9jZ55XsbfDDuE7BPPl1tPjUjErR7zOxmk4EVZK3y3rDV45uCvvmab5r76FvMP-6kHoPqv9Z-0N8yGUXYD_fA6HPdG9cwRpoT6l2NHBPfVMQu7mskhewK9PyVMQdd0YZsMcvnufyg/s1600/Thunder+Road.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-Ahp9jZ55XsbfDDuE7BPPl1tPjUjErR7zOxmk4EVZK3y3rDV45uCvvmab5r76FvMP-6kHoPqv9Z-0N8yGUXYD_fA6HPdG9cwRpoT6l2NHBPfVMQu7mskhewK9PyVMQdd0YZsMcvnufyg/s400/Thunder+Road.png" width="261" /></a></div>
There's probably no better testament to the iconic status of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052293/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Thunder Road</i></b></a> (1958) than the Bruce S<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">pringsteen song of the same name. Not because 'Thunder Road' and <i>Thunder Road</i> have anything to do with each other: one's a proto-carsploitation thriller about moonshiners, the other a lament of lost youth tied to 'one last chance to make it real'. What matters is that Springsteen saw the poster to <i>Thunder Road</i> when the film was making the rounds on the drive-in and grindhouse scene, and was so inspired that he wrote a signature song without even watching the whole thing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The other bit of trivia I'll pretend to know about before watching <i>Thunder Road</i>: Robert Mitchum wanted Elvis Presley to play the role of his character's younger brother. '</span></span>Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch,' Ian Johnston drily <a href="http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/"><b>notes</b></a> of their meeting. Nothing came of it, since Elvis's notorious manager demanded a sum of money that would have exceeded the film's entire budget. And thus did the world come to enjoy the spectacle of Mitchum's son pretending to be his brother.<br />
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World War II veteran Lucas Doolin (Robert Mitchum) has returned to the East Tennessee holler where he grew up. There, he is the best driver in the dangerous business of evading the FBI while running moonshine from the mountains to Memphis. A gangster from the city, Carl Kogan (Jacques Aubuchon), attempts to muscle in and bring the moonshiners, including Luke's father (Trevor Bardette), under his thumb. After he refuses to be swayed by Kogan's offers, Luke is in increasing danger, while also trying to keep his mechanic younger brother Robin (James Mitchum) from joining in his life of crime.<br />
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Mitchum's assured movie star performance helps sell all this, and the film works hard to make him the epitome of cool. It works, in a very fifties way: Mitchum strikes matches on the soles of his boots, wears leather jackets, and humiliates his enemies by repeatedly crushing their hats. There are not one but two women madly in love with him, femme fatale singer Francie Wymore (Keely Smith) and wholesome girl next door Roxanna Ledbetter (Sandra Knight). But since dialogue bluntly establishes Roxanna is all of eighteen years old, her unrequited longing also points to a central problem: Mitchum was plainly about a decade too old for the role, and casting his son as Luke's fool brother makes it worse.<br />
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On the plus side, though, <i>Thunder Road</i> is jolly entertaining. The story of working-class underdogs facing down a wealthy bully is hardly original, although the fact that all parties involved are criminals gives it an edge. The younger Mitchum's performance is no great shakes, and that causes undeniable problems in the film's last act; but his father's swagger holds it all together. What really makes the film click, though, is the action. Largely eschewing the rear projection that still dominated driving scenes in the fifties, <i>Thunder Road</i> has some outstanding car chase scenes that prefigure the carsploitation mania of the seventies, complete with terrific stunt driving and excellent fluid camera work from director Arthur Ripley.<br />
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It's a perfectly good low-key crime thriller, and it's no wonder it became a staple of grindhouses in later decades. Its outsized legacy elevates <i>Thunder Road</i> to a status it doesn't necessarily earn. Without this film, it's hard to imagine about half the oeuvre of the Drive-By Truckers, or the <a href="http://www.savingcountrymusic.com/album-review-carolina-stills-the-color-of-rust"><b>current deluge of country-rock bands with 'whiskey' or 'still' in their name</b></a>. Mitchum's obsession with the project may not have paid off financially or critically, at least not in the short run. But it proved, in case that needed proving, the enduring appeal of cool.<br />
<div style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
Elvis
brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at:
http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf</div>
<div style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
Elvis
brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at:
http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf</div>
<div style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
Elvis
brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at:
http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf</div>
<div style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
Elvis
brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at:
http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf</div>
Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-19734209057831139472013-05-21T19:43:00.000-04:002013-05-21T19:43:48.614-04:00And there was no longer any sea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/Into_the_Blue_poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/Into_the_Blue_poster.jpg" width="267" /></a></div>
Watching <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1905041/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Fast & Furious 6</i></b></a> with friends a couple of nights ago inspired me to write up an earlier Paul Walker film that offers similarly base pleasures. Really, all <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0378109/"><b><i>Into the Blue</i></b></a> (2005) ever seeks to accomplish is in that damnable poster: people in skimpy swimwear, with maybe a plot in there somewhere if you're the kind of snob who likes that sort of thing. By that extremely modest standard I suppose <i>Into the Blue</i> succeeds, inasmuch as it stars Jessica Alba and Paul Walker, both of whom are attractive and don't wear a lot of clothes. Congratulations.<br />
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But <i>Into the Blue</i> was hardly conceived as an experimental documentary on people displaying skin within the constraints of the PG-13 rating, a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085809/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Koyaanisqatsi</i></b></a> of late capitalist standards of beauty. That's where not-very-prolific screenwriter Matt Johnson came in, churning out a script in a couple of hours while doing something else (or so I assume). Considering <i>Into the Blue</i> was a sizeable flop (it made $18.8 million domestically on a budget of $50 million), that didn't really pay off.<br />
<br />
This blog has something of a tradition of outlining a film's plot, and I'll stick with that even when the story is a wispy, ethereal thing. Anyway: we're in the Bahamas, where Jared (Paul Walker) and his girlfriend Sam (Jessica Alba) go scuba-diving with Jared's visiting friend Bryce (Scott Caan), a lawyer with a heart of gold buried beneath many, many levels of jerkishness, and Bryce's girlfriend Amanda (Ashley Scott). As luck would have it, during the very same trip they discover both the <i>Zephyr</i>, a treasure-laden ship that's been at the bottom of the sea since 1861, and a plane chock full of cocaine.<br />
<br />
That causes something of a dilemma: if our heroes report the massive amount of drugs, the DEA (who apparently have jurisdiction in the Bahamas, if <i>Into the Blue</i>'s grasp of police work is any better than its understanding of history) will discover the wreck too, thus depriving Walker & Co. of their stab at treasure. Lacking the funds to mount a proper operation, however, they have to make do with bringing the wreck up piece by piece - despite Bryce's idea of making money by selling some of the cocaine. Meanwhile, they're starting to arouse the suspicions of Reyes (James Frain), the drug lord who owns the plane, as well as Bates (Josh Brolin), an unscrupulous treasure hunter.<br />
<br />
Built on the astonishing contrivance of a shipwreck and an aeroplane full of drugs being found in the exact same spot, <i>Into the Blue</i> mostly refuses to embrace the utter ridiculousness of its concept and sort of just shuffles along, occasionally throwing a half-hearted twist at the wall in the hope that something will stick, and then ends. The script is curiously uninterested in itself, alternately being obvious and not explaining what's going on. (One character's loyalties change without any explanation whatsoever, unless I fell asleep at an inopportune moment.) The intellectual laziness of conflating centuries of Caribbean history, of course, is something of a given in this genre.<br />
<br />
Both leads are, I suppose, better known for their looks than their acting ability, but even so Alba is distinctly better than the totally blank Walker, and more than once her despair is palpable. 'I believe in you more than in the prospect of any treasure,' the script makes her say; she tries mightily to sell that line and does not go gentle into that good night. Opposite her Walker frowns slightly, trying to remember what human emotions are and which of them he's supposed to be mimicking. So much for the leads, but there is real joy to be found in the supporting cast. Caan's smarmy frenemy is pretty good, but the standout is Brolin, then stuck in his wilderness years and committing fully to a gloriously unhinged performance that threatens to elevate <i>Into the Blue</i> to the level of genuine entertainment more than once.<br />
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What's worst is that the film looks terrible: its underwater world is an entirely flat sandy seabed, and cinematographer Shane Hurlbut and director John Stockwell conspire to shoot it like a modest documentary. For all its $50 million budget, the diving scenes look about as good as if they'd just dunked the actors' heads into a paddling pool. (Perhaps all the cocaine is genuine - it would explain where the money went.) In terms of the nuts-and-bolts craftsmanship that's the real glory of many a B-movie, <i>Into the Blue</i> is a massive disappointment. Even Jessica Alba at the peak of her pin-up days can't restore any joy to a film that looks and feels like a direct-to-video sequel that somehow found its way into cinemas.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-36344904666867680942013-05-14T23:01:00.001-04:002013-05-14T23:01:28.302-04:00My castle is in the hills above the village<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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After <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051554/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Dracula</i></b></a> made boatloads of cash in 1958, a sequel was a foregone conclusion. Initially, it was to be strictly formula. Both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were approached to reprise their roles, but Lee declined, and the screenwriting team (Jimmy Sangster of <i>Dracula</i>, helped out by Peter Bryan, Edward Percy and producer Anthony Hinds) had to cobble together a new script. The result, released in 1960, is a thoroughly good Gothic horror film, but boy, do the seams ever show.<br />
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Some of that, of course, is just a marketing ploy: naming a film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053677/"><b><i>The Brides of Dracula</i></b></a> (with the poster advertising 'the most evil, blood-lusting Dracula of all!', no less) when the prologue immediately explains that Dracula is (still) dead is at least a tiny bit cynical. Sexing up the property by using a premise designed to have lithe young women wander around in nightgowns is as shameless, but it's not like vampire fiction was ever particularly wholesome.<br />
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A young schoolteacher, Marianne Danielle (Yvonne Monlaur), is on her way to a new job at a girls' boarding school in Transylvania when, through shenanigans inexplicable and foreboding, her coach driver abandons her. She accepts the offer of a seemingly lonely aristocrat, Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt), to spend the night at her château. (Note to self: refuse any invitation that begins with, "My castle is in the hills above the village...") <br />
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At Château Meinster, Marianne discovers that the baroness is not quite alone: she keeps her son (David Peel) chained up in one part of the castle, ostensibly because he is mad. During the night, though, Marianne frees the baron after he tells her his mother has locked him away to keep his land and titles for herself. To nobody's surprise, this is a terrible idea. Although Marianne does not understand it yet, the younger Meinster is in fact a vampire, kept confined for years and fed a steady diet of young women by his mother, who could bear neither to let him loose nor to dispatch him. Now that he <i>is </i>loose, he quickly takes off with the aid of his nanny, Greta (Freda Jackson).<br />
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The following day, Doctor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) finds a traumatised but otherwise unhurt Marianne in the woods. He asks her detailed questions about her experience, but fails to tell her what's going on. After dropping Marianne off at the girls' school, Van Helsing investigates the Château Meinster. There he encounters the baroness, who has been turned into a vampire by her son against her will. Van Helsing stakes her in her sleep, but finds the young baron's coffin missing. That the threat isn't over becomes obvious when a young girl in the village nearby dies from a neck bite. And soon, Marianne is engaged to be married...<br />
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The plot of <i>The Brides of Dracula</i> starts strong, but descends into a frustrating muddle by the second act before hurtling towards an outright nonsensical conclusion. If Van Helsing had told anybody except the village priest (Fred Johnson) about the vampiric goings-on lives might have been saved, but I'd forgive that contrivance if <i>The Brides of Dracula</i> didn't also feel like two separate stories stitched together: one about a lonely mother who keeps her vampire son locked up, the second about a hypnotic vampire who draws young women into his coven. Most frustrating are the half-developed characters. Freda Jackson (from Nottingham! fist bump) turns in an outstanding performance as Greta, whose sour-faced demeanour hides a fanatical devotion to Baron Meinster. She's rewarded with a terrific soliloquy early on; thereafter, the script decides she'll be a cackling goon, and she is eventually killed off in a decidedly underwhelming fashion.<br />
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Jackson is splendid, but she's far from a lone standout. Hunt's Baroness Meinster is as impressive, all austere aristocratic dignity covering desperate love for and fear of her monstrous son. Cushing turns in another excellent performance, settling into the role and beginning to hone his characterisation of Abraham Van Helsing, battling the forces of evil with <i>science</i>! Yvonne Monlaur, drop-dead gorgeous in a very sixties way and working an adorable French accent, hits all the right notes; it may not be a performance for the ages, but it's enough to regret Monlaur retired from acting only a few years later. The problem, really, is the villain: Peel is good as a brash young baron but never develops a take on monstrous bloodsucking, and he absolutely lacks the astonishing physical presence of Christopher Lee. Where <i>Dracula </i>was a terrifying battle against evil, its sequel just has me rooting for Cushing to beat up a blue-blooded punk.<br />
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The lack of a compelling villain means <i>The Brides of Dracula</i> is ultimately a notch below its predecessor, but in other ways it surpasses that film. Take the production design. Where Bernard Robinson's work in <i>Dracula </i>was a little musty he goes gloriously over the top here, sticking dragons and gargoyles all over the already impressive Neo-Gothic architecture of Oakley Court; and since in Gothic horror 'crazier' almost always means 'better', this is a very good choice indeed. There's more action too, awkward in places though it is; and we get the most rocking Peter Cushing moment yet, in which he neutralises the effect of a vampire bite by cauterising his own neck wound.<br />
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Despite being a bigger, sexier and more action-packed sequel <i>The Brides of Dracula</i> also makes some significant adjustments to the series mythology: shapeshifting, explicitly ruled out in the 1958 film, enters the series here, with a not-terrible giant bat effect. Vampires now need human servants to watch over them during the day (they learnt from what befell Dracula's original bride, I presume). Elsewhere, what was hinted at in <i>Dracula </i>is more fully developed, first and foremost the notion of vampirism as 'the cult of the undead', 'a survival of one of the ancient pagan religions and their struggle against Christianity'.<br />
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Certainly, Baron Meinster's coven has the character of an extremely patriarchal religious community, and in portraying it as supernaturally wicked <i>The Brides of Dracula</i> inadvertently ends up critiquing patriarchy even while exploiting it to pander to the audience. It's a good film, is what I'm saying in a roundabout way: it doesn't blow the roof off the horror film, but it's a very fine example of the developing Hammer template.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-7560104392506855732013-05-11T23:38:00.000-04:002013-05-12T00:21:27.420-04:00Horror... from beyond the grave!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Faced with the mythic stature of Hammer Film Productions in British pop culture, it's amusing to consider how little the company's rise had to do with stodgy English reserve. Hammer's first real horror film, 1955's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049646/"><b><i>The Quatermass Xperiment</i></b></a>, was so named to cash in on the X certificate, and that was a sign of things to come: for the next two decades Hammer churned out lurid low-budget films that aimed to titillate as well as terrify. The closest analogue is the Italian film industry of the same period, which has a similar track record of sleazy horror films made quickly using the same actors again and again, to tremendous profits.<br />
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But where the Italian horror industry - at least in retrospect - was centred on directors, Hammer Horror is most firmly associated with its stars: and no stars more famous than Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, first working together in 1957's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050280/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1"><b><i>The Curse of Frankenstein</i></b></a> (as Victor Frankenstein and the creature, respectively) and teamed up again in the following year's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051554/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Dracula</i></b></a>, because that's how Hammer did things.<br />
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That intro may not sound like <i>Dracula </i>is a great work of art, but it is: as a B-movie and as a film <i>qua </i>films it runs laps around the tedious and overpraised <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021814/?ref_=sr_5"><b>Lugosi film</b></a>, which it absolutely refuses to be shackled by. As such, Jimmy Sangster's screenplay ad<b>a</b>pts Bram Stoker even more freely than the reworked-for-the-stage approach behind the 1931 film, into something that shares some names with Stoker's novel but little in the way of locale or plot.<br />
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Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) arrives at the castle of Count Dracula (Christopher Lee) in Transylvania. Ostensibly tasked with reorganising the count's library, Harker is on a secret mission to destroy the vampires. He succeeds in staking Dracula's bride (Valerie Gaunt) but is overpowered and turned by the count. Anxious about the fate of his confederate, Abraham Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) just walks into Castle Dracula during the daytime (in this film, everybody hangs out at Castle Dracula like it's a popular stop for a picnic during a Sunday afternoon stroll) and dispatches the newly vampiric Harker, but finds Dracula himself gone.<br />
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Meanwhile in Germany (or, you know, somewhere: see below), Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough) and his wife Mina (Melissa Stribling) worry about the worsening health of Arthur's sister Lucy (Carol Marsh). The well-meaning but inept Doctor Seward (Charles Lloyd Pack) is unable to determine the cause of her ailment. Van Helsing arrives to tell the family of the death of Lucy's fiancé Jonathan Harker, but stays to look after Lucy. When his cryptic instructions are ignored, Lucy dies and is buried, but it isn't long before the revenant begins preying on her niece Tania (Janina Faye).<br />
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Having been told what's going on, Arthur joins Van Helsing in hunting Lucy down, but rejects the professor's suggestion of using his sister to find Dracula. (Arthur's conflict - let his sister's wretched undeath go on and endanger others in the hope of catching Dracula, or put her to rest at once? - is played to the hilt; it's a terrific plot element invented wholecloth by Sangster.) Instead, Lucy is staked. But it isn't long before the count has selected his next victim - Mina - and Arthur and Van Helsing are engaged in a desperate race against time to track down the count and take him out once and for all.<br />
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That's quite a lot of changes: some characters disappear (poor Quincey Morris, forever cut out until Francis Ford Coppola had a heart in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103874/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1"><b><i>Bram Stoker's Dracula</i></b></a>). Others are changed radically and relationships restructured (Seward as a GP, Harker as a vampire hunter, Arthur Holmwood as Mina's husband rather than Lucy's fiancé). The geography of the film is likewise different; none of it takes place in England, but where it <i>is </i>set is not quite clear. Given all the border business the Holmwoods presumably live somewhere in southern Germany; but it's best to
assume that the whole story takes place somewhere in the composite Europe of the British imagination, a land full of medieval castles and superstitious peasants. Certainly, considering all the locals
speak in clipped British stage accents despite being (a) peasants and
(b) German, it's not easy to pin down.<br />
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Cushing, too, doesn't bother pretending to be Dutch. But it's a great performance: driven and professional, he is far more scientist than crazed medicine man. And if his talk of biology (it's an exposition-heavy film, with Cushing's scenes doing the heavy lifting of explaining the series mythology) weren't enough, there's hardly a clearer indication of Van Helsing as the champion of scientific modernism than the fact that the film assigns him Dr Seward's phonograph. Carol Marsh's Lucy is another very good performance, but Lee of course is the standout, despite the fact that he doesn't even appear very much. But director Terence Fisher makes his scenes count. From an iconic gallery entrance quoted by George Lucas in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121766/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1"><b><i>Revenge of the Sith</i></b></a> to a latex-heavy disintegration scene, he's an all-round terrific villain: a real monster only incidentally inhabiting a human body, instead of Lugosi's aristocratic twit.<br />
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<i>Dracula </i>isn't perfect. The relatively grounded production design can't keep up with the terrific matte paintings and surreal castle interior of the 1931 film: all things considered, the film looks a little bit too much like a 1950s postcard of rustic holidays on the continent. If those holidays occasionally ended in a bloodbath, that is: <i>Dracula </i>thoroughly earns its notoriety with fairly gut-churning violence. Ultimately, what Fisher does with the limited resources at his disposal is impressive. Fifties horror films, let's be honest, tend not to be all that scary to us enlightened moderns. But the combination of Lee's animal menace, Fisher's fantastic horror direction and James Bernard's awe-inspiring score turns Dracula into a genuinely terrifying experience. Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-72358866376012258262013-04-21T16:22:00.000-04:002013-04-21T16:22:14.508-04:00To serve and give his life as a ransom for many<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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By 1964 the historical epic was on its way out. In the United States <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056937/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Cleopatra</i></b></a>, doomed by its stupendous cost and the scandal surrounding its leads, had hastened the demise of the genre. In Italy <i>pepla </i>could always be cheaply made, but audiences were beginning to desert sword-and-sandal adventures in favour of the new kids on the block, the <i>giallo </i>and the spaghetti western. With the ancient epic as a whole went the colossal Bible adaptations of the fifties and early sixties, like <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049833/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>The Ten Commandments</i></b></a> (1956) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055047/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>King of Kings</i></b></a> (1961).<br />
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Curiously, though, the dying years of the biblical epic were in fact well suited to serious public explorations of religion. The papacy of John XXIII, culminating in the Second Vatican Council, marked an opening of the Catholic Church towards the world, a qualified departure from its previous defensive stance <i>vis-à-vis</i> modernity and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Subsistit_in%22_in_Lumen_Gentium"><b><i>possibly</i></b></a> an ecclesiological revolution. As part of that, the Church became more willing to engage art produced by non-Catholics.<br />
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The non-Catholic that interests us here is Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italian novelist, director, poet, intellectual and pretty much every other cultural profession under the sun. An open atheist and communist, Pasolini was also followed by (well-founded) rumours of homosexuality in the tabloid press. He was, in short, precisely the sort of person the Syllabus of Errors of a more combative papacy was directed against. And yet Pasolini's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058715/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>The Gospel According to St. Matthew</i></b></a> (<i>Il vangelo secondo Matteo</i>) - dedicated to the memory of John XXIII - is a stunning success, a far more interesting religious work than the often musty epics Hollywood had churned out. Armed with an unimpressive budget, Pasolini succeeds in making the most ubiquitous story in Western culture strange again.<br />
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He does this, first, by adapting only the Gospel of Matthew, shunning the usual approach of harmonising the gospels or filling in gaps in one with bits from the other. <i>That </i>approach often leads to ridiculousness in adaptation (witness talkative crucified Jesus in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335345/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>The Passion of the Christ</i></b></a>) as well as cognitive dissonance, since we're taught not to realise that Matthew and Luke tell different and incompatible nativity stories. By sticking solely to Matthew, the film does not feature the birth of John the Baptist, the census and journey to Bethlehem (like Matthew's gospel, Pasolini implies Joseph and Mary are <i>from </i>Bethlehem), the birth of Jesus in a stable, the shepherds - and that's the nativity alone; later, we're not given the 'I am' statements, the woman caught in adultery, the wedding at Cana, Jesus and Zacchaeus, the parable of the Good Samaritan, doubting Thomas, and so on. By missing all these familiar elements, the narrative feels startling and strange; we see its shape, but it is not the shape of the gospel we think we know.<br />
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Instead, Pasolini - faithful to Matthew, I think - presents the story mostly as an escalating conflict between Jesus and the Jewish civil and religious authorities. He emphasises Herod's massacre of the innocent at Bethlehem, repeatedly stressing the violence of the authorities. We see Jesus react tearfully to the murder of John the Baptist, but determined to continue his mission. Under pressure in Jerusalem, he retreats into the company of the Twelve, with whom he eats a final supper at a safe house before being betrayed, arrested and executed, and rising again on Sunday.<br />
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At the heart of Pasolini's gospel story is Jesus (and, before him, John the Baptist) challenging the institutions and representatives of Israel to accept him as Messiah. Rejected, he begins forming an alternative Israel consisting of the poor, the disreputable and the sick - an upside-down kingdom that pointedly confronts the authorities. The victory of established Israel - capturing, convicting and executing Jesus - proves an illusion, as he rises and commissions his followers to extend his kingdom to the whole earth. Because the old Israel rejected Jesus, it has now been rejected by God.<br />
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That storyline, of course, is why Matthew's gospel is often accused of antisemitism - a charge that seems basically accurate, although anti-Jewish rhetoric from a precarious first-century Messianic sect is undoubtedly different from the modern-day scourge. Pasolini avoids that problem by de-contextualising Matthew's Jesus-against-the-Jews story through the deliberate use of anachronism. Herod's soldiers are dressed like medieval warriors and Spanish conquistadors, and the film uses the Romanesque and Gothic churches of Basilicata and Apulia for sets. The soundtrack features well-known pieces of religious music from Händel to Blind Willie Johnson's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH4metotdRk"><b>"Dark Was the Night"</b></a>. By mixing symbols from two thousand years of Christian history, Pasolini's film is at once about first-century Palestine and the hope of a whole crushed humanity in Jesus. First-century events are thus imbued with an eschatological dimension.<br />
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At the same time, Pasolini undercuts folk orthodoxy at several points. Salome, whose dance before Herod II leads to the execution of John the Baptist, is portrayed as a nervous teenage girl under the thrall of her mother, not the lascivious temptress of tradition. Jesus, meanwhile, is not the serenely smiling figure of religious art; Spanish student Enrique Irazoqui portrays him as angry, driven, and ultimately inscrutable. The other actors, local amateurs all, predictably give flat, affectless performances - which, given Pasolini's copious use of the Brechtian <i>Verfremdungseffekt</i>, is as it should be.<br />
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<i>The Gospel According to St. Matthew</i> is not the plain Marxist allegory Pasolini was expected to produce. Pasolini's Jesus is, instead, the Christ of liberation theology: in his ministry God's kingdom - inaugurated by his death at empire's hands - and the embrace of the oppressed are inextricably bound up. The audience, though, is not put in a comfortable position of solidarity. Pasolini films the trial of Jesus over the shoulders of the jeering crowd, implicating the viewer in the rejection of Jesus. His Jesus is not reducible to a single lesson or pat truth. The suffering of mankind bound up in him, he remains mysterious - but endlessly fascinating.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-14976020184691574082013-03-23T21:00:00.001-04:002013-03-23T21:07:56.022-04:00Family business<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Whatever his loftier ambitions (and they are <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/walter-hill,54594/"><b>many</b></a>), Walter Hill has always excelled as a nuts-and-bolts craftsman, using the often limited resources at his disposal to create finely honed genre pieces. Hill's real masterpiece in that mode may be 1981's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083111/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Southern Comfort</i></b></a>, but <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081071/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>The Long Riders</i></b></a>, released the previous year, is also a force worth reckoning with. A flawed force, to be sure, and occasionally a frustrating one; but its joys are substantial enough.<br />
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The film's fame rests mostly on a gimmick. Hill cast four actual sets of brothers for the film's clans: James and Stacy Keach as Jesse and Frank James; David, Keith and and Robert Carradine as Cole, Jim and Bob Younger; Randy and a ridiculously young, barely recognisable Dennis Quaid as Clell and Ed Miller; and Christopher and Nicholas Guest as Charlie and Bob Ford. It pays off, in expected as well as unexpected ways.<br />
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Our setting is Missouri 'after the Civil War': <i>The Long Riders</i> does not use dates, giving the impression that the action is far more compressed than the ten or so years the film's events took in real life. The James-Younger gang, composed of former Confederate bushwhackers, rob banks and trains, and while they're good at it there's tension too. During the film's opening robbery, Ed Miller needlessly shoots a cashier, leading to his expulsion from the gang. The outlaws pursue their own aims - Cole Younger's abusive infatuation with Belle Starr (Pamela Reed), Jesse's marriage to Zee (Savannah Smith) - while they are increasingly hunted by Pinkerton agents. Eventually, they embark on an ambitious bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota.<br />
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The film does, in all honesty, take a while to get going: the first half-hour is mostly dedicated to exposition and talky plot developments, and it isn't until the Pinkertons arrive at the James farm that <i>The Long Riders</i> snaps out of its stupor. That scene - in which Mrs. Samuel, the James boys' mother, laments the injustice of upstanding citizens being harassed by Yankee hirelings - is played to the hilt by Fran Ryan, and it's followed almost immediately by brilliantly staged confrontations between gang members and Pinkerton agents in which innocent bystanders, including the Youngers' cousin John (Kevin Brophy) and Jesse James's younger brother Archie (R.B. Thrift) are killed. Thereafter, the film keeps our interest, but half an hour of tedium is a hell of a long stretch in a hundred-minute feature.<br />
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The climactic Northfield sequence is an homage to the robbery and shootout that opens <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065214/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>The Wild Bunch</i></b></a> (1969) - I'd call it a rip-off, except that Hill makes no attempt to hide the influence of Sam Peckinpah. The copious use of slow-motion means it's a little overbaked in places and the sequence is probably too long. But all in all, the bloody realism is tremendously effective, and some parts are genuinely breathtaking: a gang member is shot off his horse but dragged along in slow motion because his foot is caught in the stirrup, while Cole Younger is shot almost a dozen times and still carries on (historically accurate, that).<br />
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If <i>The Long Riders</i> is a post-<i>Wild Bunch</i> western in almost all respects, the casting stands out. By and large, it does not seem forced at all, but brings a lot of benefits. Physically, only the Guests resemble each other very much at all, while the Keaches, Carradines and Quaids might as well be unrelated. But their real-life kinship gives them an easy rapport, especially in the case of James and Stacy Keach, who believably convey brothers who've been through a lot together. (An aside: I wondered where I'd seen Stacy Keach before, realised it was <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077945/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>The Mountain of the Cannibal God</i></b></a>, and hung my head in shame.) The result is a slew of fantastic performances from everyone involved - not least James Keach, who portrays Jesse James as an almost shy man masquerading as a cold sociopath, without the sadism-as-control that Brad Pitt brought to the role in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443680/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford</i></b></a> (2007).<br /><br />
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And yet. The post-Northfield epilogue abbreviated to the point of being unintelligible, a six-year time skip swept under the rug as we practically fast-forward through Jesse's assassination by the Ford brothers. I'd make some bold claim that the telegrammic compression is deliberate, but I doubt it: it smacks of editorial interference, all the less understandable in a film that is hardly long. Hill's insistence on the laconic works against him here, as it does in his cursory treatment of the Civil War. Cole's statement that 'I spent four years in the army. Eleven trying to get out of it' is an excellent nugget of writing, but it only hints at the Confederate-Unionist divide that tore Missouri apart both during and after the war.<br />
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As a staunch partisan of T.J. Stiles's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Jesse-James-Last-Rebel-Civil/dp/0375705589/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364085154&sr=8-1&keywords=T.J.+Stiles+jesse+james"><i><b>Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War</b></i></a> I may be biased on this point, of course. To my mind, the social context of Reconstruction and the failed reintegration of bushwhackers into peacetime society is at least as important as the ties of kinship that Hill stresses. His framing places a lot of emphasis on Keith Carradine's Jim, and it pays off: Carradine handled himself well enough to recommend himself for <i>Southern Comfort</i> the following year. But I can't help feeling that in going for concision rather than epic scope, <i>The Long Riders</i> misses its chance at greatness.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-49831237963304701602013-03-06T15:15:00.001-04:002013-03-20T19:29:06.090-04:00A taste of evil<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Yes, it's lazy to just plunder a film's tagline for my title. You expect better: you expect execrable puns. But exploitation films often boast <i>terrific </i>marketing. Much like I could never hope to better a <i>giallo </i>title, I'll never match the tagline of a Russ Meyer film. Best, I think, to admit that and bow to the anonymous genius who came up with that gem.<br />
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Not that 1965's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059477/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1"><b><i>Mudhoney</i></b></a> actually lives up to that wonderfully Puritan slogan. Instead, it's pretty positive towards romance and sex, which it treats with an almost reverent tenderness. Well, excepting the vivacious denizens of the whorehouse next door who occasionally wander through the frame. But that's neither here nor there, and how did I get wrapped up in meandering sentences in just two paragraphs?<br />
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Anyway, it's a fact that while I'd never run out of online resources on Russ Meyer's most famous work, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059170/?ref_=sr_3"><b><i>Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!</i></b></a>, <i>Mudhoney </i>is less well known, and discussions of the film are mostly found in academic literature and the director's fervent but not exactly large fandom. Which is my excuse as to why I've seen the film but am not exactly flush with production details or historical observations.<br />
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Such as, for example, whether the film was actually shot where it's set, that being Missouri: it sure <i>looks </i>like an egregious case of <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CaliforniaDoubling"><b>California Doubling</b></a>, but what do I know? Anyway, it's the Depression era (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT1EbMTqYek"><b>God's word declared it would be so!</b></a>) and Calif McKinney (John Furlong) is walking through rural Missouri in search of work. He meets Maggie Marie (Princess Livingston) and her buxom daughters, deaf-mute Eula (Rena Horten) and lascivious Clara Belle (Lorna Maitland), who inform him that the folks at the nearby Wade farm are looking for a farmhand. Calif is almost immediately hired by old Lute Wade (Stuart Lancaster) and his niece Hannah (Antoinette Cristiani), but is continually menaced by Hannah's husband, Sidney Brenshaw (Hal Hopper), who is prone to alcoholic rages.<br />
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The perpetually broke Sidney is looking forward his father-in-law's death, since Hannah will inherit the old man's farm and money. But his plans are complicated as romance blossoms between Hannah and Calif, who is now seeking to protect her against Sidney's frequent violence. When Lute changes his will to make Calif his sole heir, Sidney feigns religious conversion and teams up with local fire-and-brimstone preacher Brother Hansen (Frank Bolger). Together, the violent alcoholic and the good reverend 'investigate' Hannah's alleged adultery with a view to organising a lynch mob.<br />
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Plotwise, <i>Mudhoney </i>is uncommonly down to earth for the Myers oeuvre, yet oddly disjointed. Maggie Marie's Brothel of Exposition is hermetically sealed from the rest of the film, except for two important functions: it's where <i>Mudhoney</i>'s men go to canoodle with nubile young plot details, while Eula and Clara Belle provide the film's titillation. Apart from that, it's a freakish mash-up of <i>Frankenstein </i>and <i>Of Mice and Men</i>, if either of those works featured more large-breasted women with an aversion to clothing.<br />
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I realise I've made the film sound bad, so let me clarify: <i>Mudhoney </i>is an absolute blast, the most purely entertaining picture I've seen in months. Lancaster, Bolger and Hopper all give brilliant over-the-top performances, but Hopper shines most brightly. Despite being the villain, he is far and away the most complex character and focus of the film, especially compared to the bland Calif. As a character drama about greed, hypocrisy and authoritarianism, <i>Mudhoney </i>is almost as successful as it is as high camp.<br />
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And heck, there's a whole lot of message here. Meyer critiques rape within marriage at a time when that was legal and still sometimes seen as normal, and treats a romance that is adultery on paper with a dignity and respect one wouldn't expect of the 'king of the nudies'. Then there's the film's status as a left-wing attack on the intolerance bred by destitution in the Depression-era Midwest, and a criminal justice system that breaks a man's spirit in prison for accidentally killing a scab.<br />
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Stylistically, <i>Mudhoney </i>has a whole lot going for it. The most iconic sequence is the opening, where Meyer's camera does not show us anyone's face, but conveys the action by focusing on people's boots - snazzy boots at that, but let's not get into my mad lust for <i>Mudhoney</i>'s footwear. It's a film of exaggerated angles, plenty of face close-ups, and some cartoonish anatomy; in the first two respects at least, Meyer is far more Italian than American. In the Italian genre cinema of 1965, he could likely have enjoyed a healthy career, but he continued labouring in grindhouse obscurity until he struck gold a few years later. And we'll get to that.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-82604537738683450382013-02-25T07:13:00.000-04:002013-02-25T07:13:01.753-04:00Andalusia, Arizona<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The spaghetti western exploded onto the American market in 1967, when Sergio Leone's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058461/?ref_=sr_4"><b><i>Dollars </i>films</b></a> were released stateside in quick succession. But even before that, the genre had acquired a reputation for reinvigorating careers. When Clint Eastwood advised his friend Burt Reynolds to take the lead in a new Italian project, Reynolds - then fresh off a three-year stint on <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047736/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Gunsmoke</i></b></a> and keen to make his transition to the big screen - said yes.<br />
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Unfortunately for the actor, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061587/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Navajo Joe</i></b></a> (1966) was produced by legendary B-movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis in his first foray into the western genre. By the time Reynolds realised that the film was to be directed by Sergio Corbucci, not Leone as he had been led to believe, he could no longer back out of his contract. So Reynolds had to grit his teeth and bear his season of indentured servitude on location in Almería before fleeing back to the States.<br />
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Released to the withering reviews American critics enjoyed lavishing on Italian genre films in the sixties, <i>Navajo Joe</i> has never quite been rehabilitated in the way of Corbucci's other pictures. Reynolds regularly refers to the production as his worst experience in the business: true, no doubt, although the feelings of the star of such latter-day masterpieces as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460780/?ref_=sr_2"><b><i>In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale</i></b></a> shouldn't be mistaken for critical judgment. Because <i>Navajo Joe</i> isn't just decent: it's a damn great spaghetti western, and far from Corbucci's least.<br />
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A band of peaceful Navajos (who live in tepees in the film's imagination) are massacred and scalped by bounty hunters led by Duncan (Aldo Sambrell). Pursued by a lone Indian warrior (Burt Reynolds), the killers make it to the nearest town, where they are informed that the state will no longer sanction their murder of Navajos. (This does not work out for the local sheriff, who is shot by Duncan in cold blood.) An alternative source of income opens up for the bandits, however, when Dr Chester Lynne (Pierre Cressoy) hires them to intercept a train carrying the sum of a million dollars to the small town of Esperanza.<br />
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The robbery goes to plan at first, but the Navajo warrior manages to steal the train Duncan's men have secured from under their noses and take it to Esperanza, whose citizens he offers his help in fending off Duncan. The townsfolk, however, prefer to trust in sending the secretly treacherous Dr Lynne for help. Joe sticks around, meanwhile, for revenge and to help Estella (Nicoletta Machiavelli), Mrs Lynne's half-indigenous servant.<br />
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<i>Pace</i> some critics, the plot seems rather good to me: straightforward but with clear stakes, and kicked off with the effective trope of a man seeking revenge for the murder of his family. The problem, really, is the characters. Machiavelli's Estella is awfully underdeveloped, and her importance to the plot seems to fluctuate wildly from scene to scene. Worse, Sambrell's Duncan has little in the way of clear motivation. He hates both Indians and white people because as a 'half-breed' he was ostracised by both - well and good; but that motive only appears here and there, and for much of the film he behaves villainously because it's expected of him. We don't come to spaghetti westerns for characters with a compelling inner life, but a little more wouldn't hurt.
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That would matter less if Reynolds's performance was better. A gruelling shoot can translate into compelling cinema - see <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Apocalypse Now</i></b></a>, or every Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski collaboration - but here Reynolds's misery just shows in every scene. And the wisdom of casting him as a Native American could certainly be questioned, part-Cherokee or no: at a time when blackface had thankfully been consigned to the past, a white person with copious fake tan and an awkward wig was still thought a good enough approximation of a Native American. (Case in point: the even more Aryan Machiavelli.) Of course, given structural racism in the industry there weren't exactly many high-profile indigenous actors, but <i>someone</i> had to break that vicious cycle.<br />
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At the level of script and acting, then, <i>Navajo Joe</i> is certainly not above reproach. But hell, Corbucci's direction is another thing entirely. Full of terrific compositions and stark angles, <i>Navajo Joe</i> is even more aggressively stylised than <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060315/?ref_=sr_2"><b><i>Django</i></b></a>, achieving a rough-hewn poetry that was not surpassed until Leone's <i><b><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064116/?ref_=sr_2">Once Upon A Time in the West</i></b></a> two years later (and which, arguably, Corbucci himself never achieved again). Occasionally the flourishes threaten to tip the film into ridiculousness, but all in all Corbucci manages the balance.<br />
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Even inventive direction can't stop the film from sagging a little in its third act, but for most of its running time <i>Navajo Joe</i> is basically perfect by spaghetti western criteria: amazing visuals, taciturn badasses, and nihilistic violence. Oh, right: this film is <i>brutal</i> by the standards of the sixties. Corbucci just about has the decorum to turn away during the scalpings, but the gruesome trophies themselves are waved about gleefully, and bleached skulls make frequent appearances. It may be a coincidence that Ruggero Deodato, whose infamous <i><b><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078935/?ref_=sr_1">Cannibal Holocaust</i></b></a> (1980) reduced the human body to bloody pieces, worked as Corbucci's assistant director on this film; but it certainly feels as if there should be a connection.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-2425284189468318052013-02-24T18:29:00.000-04:002013-02-24T22:37:37.388-04:00The old songs that you taught me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2JnazuSEYgzeZF_QtxJhueIBhOKUf5Tm8fnDDqhMHvkVbz9nHFAKUPP_Ex1mRRBSH_C5kvui6VysDqrXkhXKZymFD3iLJdCXnt2Xps00w-1hbt_DQcYWL1Ljzjw4nmi1e3LbB9tmsY7Y/s1600/Heartworn+Highways.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2JnazuSEYgzeZF_QtxJhueIBhOKUf5Tm8fnDDqhMHvkVbz9nHFAKUPP_Ex1mRRBSH_C5kvui6VysDqrXkhXKZymFD3iLJdCXnt2Xps00w-1hbt_DQcYWL1Ljzjw4nmi1e3LbB9tmsY7Y/s400/Heartworn+Highways.png" width="270" /></a></div>
While living in New York City in the early seventies, fine art student turned filmmaker <a href="http://twcampbell.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/james-szalapski-film-maker-interview/"><b>James Szalapski</b></a> had a roommate called 'Skinny' Dennis Sanchez, a bass player. When Sanchez went to Nashville to visit Guy Clark, a Texan songwriter and luthier who had returned to the South after being disillusioned by Los Angeles, he was enthralled by the circle of musicians who gathered regularly at Clark's house. Sanchez' stories intrigued Szalapski, who was then looking for his next project.<br />
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With thirty-five thousand dollars from a single sponsor, Szalapski assembled a small crew and followed Clark and the singer-songwriters he met through him from Nashville to Austin, Texas during 1975 and early 1976. The resulting film - expanded from a planned hour-long television documentary - made the rounds at festivals, but due to bad luck and limited commercial appeal it was not released theatrically until 1981. By that time the original title, <i>New Country</i>, had been discarded in favour of the more poetic <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405963/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1"><b><i>Heartworn Highways</i></b></a>.<br />
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Using loose association rather than a single narrative thread, the film presents a number of singer-songwriters and others across Tennessee and Texas. We're shown the painstaking precision work of recording Larry Jon Wilson's 'Ohoopee River Bottomland'. Townes Van Zandt shows the camera crew around his dilapidated trailer in Austin. David Allan Coe drives to a concert at the Tennessee State Prison. Guy Clark repairs guitars, and at his house a group including Steve Young, Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle (the latter two only in their twenties) hang out, drink and share songs.<br />
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<i>Heartworn Highways</i> exists for the music, and Szalapski gives the performances plenty of room to breathe. Guy Clark opens the film with a stunning rendition of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPUMthAXJ-o"><b>'L.A. Freeway'</b></a> (Clark is more self-critical: 'A little loose,' he complains), and David Allan Coe provides its emotional heart with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnMEBVGcYEI"><b>'I Still Sing the Old Songs'</b></a>, an elegy that caused me to properly admire Coe's songwriting for the first time ('I still sing the old song that you taught me/And I still pray to Jesus
now and then/And just like you I wish that he would save me/To see the
day the South will rise again'). Then there's Steve Young's heartbreaking <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEQp1xDamaE"><b>'Alabama Highway'</b></a>, which accompanies Coe's drive through the Southern rain.<br />
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Those songs centre the film on Szalapski's fascination with a group of Southern songwriters who had travelled north or to California but found themselves drifting back home, drawn by something they couldn't leave behind. Not necessarily something <i>positive</i>, mind you: these songs are full of misery, poverty and longing for escape, more haunting evocations of Southern life than the celebration found in mainstream country. Szalapski's camera lingers on the ephemera of Tennessee roads: car
transporters, overturned meat transports, and cars stuck in traffic. These men are rooted yet itinerant, rambling between states and - in Townes Van Zandt's case - occasionally actually homeless, searching for a Dixieland that keeps slipping through their fingers.<br />
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The lengthy sequence at Townes Van Zandt's place in Austin both reinforces and undermines that narrative. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKF9bem-NE4"><b>According to Steve Earle</b></a>, the Nashville singer-songwriters deliberately sent Szalapski to Austin in the expectation that Van Zandt would clown around instead of providing footage of the world's greatest songwriter at work. And in a sense that's just what Townes does, introducing his girlfriend and his dog and leading the crew on a pointless but highly entertaining tour around the run-down property. (Because the film doesn't use narration, there's no-one to point out Townes was the son of an oil baron, not the hillbilly he pretends to be here.) <br />
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But instead of being a waste of time, the Austin scenes introduce us to Townes's neighbour, seventy-nine-year-old 'Uncle' Seymour Washington, a former blacksmith who explains his approach to horses (being gentle and friendly) and whiskey (God meant for us to enjoy it, but drink in moderation). In a film intended for a privileged white audience, it's virtually impossible for people of colour to be portrayed as just human beings rather than Magical Negroes dispensing homespun wisdom. Such qualms sour these scenes a bit, but they can't overwhelm the easy chemistry between Washington and Van Zandt. Their banter leads into the best performance in the film, Townes Van Zandt's sublime rendition of 'Waitin' Around to Die'.<br />
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Like 'Waitin' Around to Die', the prevailing mood in <i>Heartworn Highways</i> is elegiac. The boot-stomping rebellion associated with a term like 'outlaw country' isn't entirely absent: witness Coe's foul-mouthed tirades in front of prison inmates while wearing an awful rhinestone suit that screams <i>1975!</i> like little else on display here. But all in all it's a subdued, unassuming documentary, quiet to the point of being boring at times. It requires patience and more than a little passion for this style of music. (I have the latter, at least.)<br />
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As the junior generation to the more established outlaw stars of the day (Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, etc.), most of these musicians never made it out of the country music underground. The exceptions - Townes Van Zandt, whose <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/01/the-highly-authentic-ghost-of-townes-van-zandt"><b>'highly authentic ghost'</b></a> now belongs to everyone, and Steve Earle, popular with a far larger roots rock crowd - transcended rather than abandoned their origin. In hindsight, <i>Heartworn Highways</i> presents not the outlaw movement <i>per se</i>, much less the birth of Americana, but the gnarled roots of today's Texas country scene. It is, in any case, a surprisingly meditative look at a musical subculture whose critique of Nashville is as valid now as it was forty years ago.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-8916349255906357242013-02-16T15:48:00.002-04:002013-02-16T15:48:25.635-04:00Cardboard Appalachia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As an art form the miniseries is arguably well past its prime, at least in the United States (it's alive and well in Britain, as shown by innumerable BBC costume dramas). The gold standard for the American miniseries, to my mind at least, is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088583/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>North and South </i></b></a>(1985), which despite thick layers of cheese had star power and soapy drama enough to satisfy. Last year's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1985443/?ref_=tt_ov_inf"><b><i>Hatfields & McCoys</i></b></a> aims for similar territory, but it's hamstrung by its own incuriosity and excessive reverence. <br />
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During the American Civil War 'Devil' Anse Hatfield (Kevin Costner) and Randall McCoy (Bill Paxton) fight for the Confederacy together, but a rift develops between the men when Hatfield, recognising the futility of the fight, deserts and returns to West Virginia. He increases his wealth by buying up and logging woodland, while McCoy returns to Kentucky a broken man after years in captivity. His resentment increases when Harmon McCoy (Chad Hugghins) is found murdered, with 'Devil' Anse's uncle Jim Vance (Tom Berenger) the prime suspect.<br />
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The hostility between the families worsens when Johnse Hatfield (Matt Barr) falls in love with Roseanna McCoy (Lindsay Pulsipher). Roseanna is thrown out by Randall, and 'Devil' Anse reluctantly allows her to stay with the Hatfields but will not allow Johnse to marry her. Johnse chooses loyalty to his family over the pregnant Roseanna, who is sent away to live with an elderly relative. Shortly after, three of McCoy's sons murder Ellison Hatfield (Damian O'Hare), and are in turn captured and executed by the Hatfields. The bloodiest phase of the feud begins when McCoy and his lawyer kinsman Perry Cline (Ronan Vibert) hire ex-Pinkerton bounty hunter 'Bad' Frank Phillips (Andrew Howard) to lead a posse into West Virginia and hunt down the Hatfields, who have withdrawn into the mountains.<br />
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<i>Hatfields & McCoys</i> boasts glorious production design: the costumes alone are worth the price of admission. It's generally well directed by Costner's longstanding collaborator Kevin Reynolds, with the noticeable exception of the fairly embarrassing Battle of Grapevine in the final episode. The editing is fluid, but Arthur Reinhart's cinematography - pointlessly pretty where the film <i>should </i>get right down in the mud with its protagonists - lets the project down a bit. Still, that would add up to a pass. It's the writing that really undermines the whole affair.<br />
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This is how producer Leslie Greif describes the <a href="http://www.hitfix.com/the-fien-print/interview-producer-leslie-greif-talks-historys-hatfields-mccoys"><b>theme of the miniseries</b></a>: 'I felt that the story was bigger than just the Hatfield and McCoys. It
talked about the tragic cycle of violence that's been throughout all of
man's history, whether it's feuding with your neighbo[u]rs over the height
of trees or the Crips and the Bloods or the PLO or the IRA or just a
bully where both people are picking sides.' That's the problem: for the sake of 'all of man's history', Greif ignores the specificity that would have given her story shape. All that time and money could have been used to chronicle the feud before a backdrop of identity, honour and social
change in late-nineteenth-century Appalachia. Instead, <i>Hatfields & McCoys</i> dispenses with a sense of place, giving us cardboard cutouts, a cliché-storm plot and unending tedium in front of a vast nothingness.<br />
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It's all stock characters wandering about, occasionally shooting each other. 'Greetings, fellow symbol of the human condition! I am angry. I am sad,' they might as well say in the worst Hollywood Southern writers Ted Mann and Ronald Parker can muster. Female characters fall into a Madonna-whore pattern so rigid it would have been considered unseemly in the silent film
days. (Roseanna is good and pure, while her cousin Nancy is sexually rapacious and wicked. And so it goes.) Johnse Hatfield obeys his father without fail, then whinges about the injury done to his precious conscience: I sure do hate him, but I the script doesn't indicate whether I'm supposed to. The closest <i>Hatfields & McCoys</i> has to narrative arcs is that the 'good' patriarch - the austere, puritanical Randall McCoy - becomes an embittered alcoholic, while his mercenary counterpart is eventually redeemed.<br />
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All of that sinks the miniseries and most actors sink with it, delivering wooden, one-note performances. But there are exceptions, and the series' <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfields_%26_McCoys_%28miniseries%29#Accolades"><b>Emmy wins</b></a> are right on the money. Tom Berenger, a grossly underrated character actor, is an absolute delight: impious and deadly yet jovial, his Jim Vance is a mesmerising old-school badass. Ronan Vibert is amazingly smarmy, while Andrew Howard's hammy villainy is almost infinitely enjoyable. It's Costner, though, that surprised me the most. The man's made a career of a certain brand of amiable dullness, but here he does great work as a cold and calculating man who nevertheless loves his family enough to know when the time has come to end the feud. They're worth watching, those guys. I just wish they weren't stuck in such a rote, joyless exercise.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-56310280309309077462013-02-15T23:14:00.001-04:002013-02-16T15:08:25.719-04:00Mark Driscoll tells some lies about science, and they're not even entertaining lies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Idly clicking through YouTube links last night, I happened upon this marvellous sermon by Mark Driscoll. It's part of the <i>Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe</i> series, the Mars Hill equivalent of an Alpha Course or <i>Christianity Explored</i> in the UK. I expected to disagree with Driscoll. What I didn't see coming, though, was his casual use of gross distortions and unequivocally false statements - what seemed, frankly, like barefaced lies.<br />
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Criticising Driscoll, of course, is shooting fish in a barrel. I'm more interested in the ways some of these arguments permeate evangelical culture in general, even outside the creationist minority. I've never been taught creationism, but the ideas of people like William Paley (he of the watchmaker analogy) and superficially more respectable varieties of creationism like the intelligent design of Michael Behe and William Dembski float around the subculture and inform the views of non-creationist evangelicals. Behind that is a desire to render the theory of evolution friendlier to an evangelical understanding of the Bible.<br />
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Driscoll, for example, says that it's acceptable for Christians to disagree on the subject of creation and evolution. He believes in a form of old-earth creationism in which God made the earth billions of years ago, but created human beings in six literal days about ten thousand years before the present. To argue for that perspective, Driscoll isn't entirely honest. Here are just some of the lyin' highlights of the 59-minute talk - by no means all, since like Driscoll himself I'm not keen on prattling on for twenty-five hours. Nor am I likely to notice all as a non-scientist; this was just the stuff I as an interested layman immediately picked up on:<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TijgcEFD2M#t=23m49s"><b>23:49-26:00</b></a> Driscoll argues that while the earth may be old, human life on it is young<b>. </b><i>Homo sapiens</i>, he says, is defined by agriculture and living in villages. Conflating the Neolithic Revolution (when humans who had previously been hunter-gatherers began to farm) and the rise of <i>Homo sapiens</i> allows him to claim that science and his reading of the Bible agree: humankind is about 10,000 years old. This, of course, is desperately false. In reality anatomically modern humans appear in the fossil record <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fossil-reanalysis-pushes"><b>as early as</b></a> <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7027/full/nature03258.html"><b>195,000 years ago</b></a>. Other species in the genus <i>Homo </i>go back further still, to a total of 2.3-2.4 million years before present. What does Driscoll propose to do with those guys - reclassify them as apes, as old-school creationists do, or perhaps as slightly weird-looking people? Either way, pretending they don't exist won't wash.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TijgcEFD2M#t=28m31s"><b>28:31-29:13</b></a> Driscoll cites the full title of Darwin's seminal book, <i>On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life</i>. That 'races' bit, he says, refers to Darwin's belief that 'whites had out-evolved blacks and were superior'. And he gives a little smirk. Two points, then:<br />
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(a) The full text of the first edition is of course <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/origin.html"><b>online</b></a>. And hey, turns out that as you would expect in nineteenth-century usage, by 'race' Darwin means a variety within a species, not exclusively or even primarily human races in the sense of scientific racism. ('How many of those birds and insects
in North America and Europe, which differ very slightly from each other, have been ranked by one eminent naturalist as undoubted
species, and by another as varieties, or, as they are often called, as geographical races!... Several most experienced ornithologists consider our British red grouse as only a strongly-marked race of a Norwegian species, whereas the greater number rank it as an undoubted species <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/origin/chapter2.html"><b>peculiar to Great Britain</b></a>.')<br />
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(b) The notion of 'whites... out-evolv[ing] blacks' simply makes no sense in a Darwinian framework. Evolution is not a teleological progression, as if an individual dutifully crossed evolutionary stages off a checklist on its way out of the primordial soup. You can't be 'more' or 'less' evolved in the abstract, only better or worse adapted to a particular environment - and that, too is a product of random mutation that may, if an individual is lucky, result in an improved chance of doing well in the environment. At times, mutations that render an individual bigger, more intelligent or faster may be advantageous; at other times - cold environments where there is little sustenance, say - being smaller, less intelligent and slower may prove favourable. Yes, we all enjoyed <a href="http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Genesis_%28episode%29"><b>that episode of <i>Star Trek: The Next Generation</i></b></a>, but evolution does not work that way.</div>
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TijgcEFD2M#t=29m50s"><b>29:50-30:09</b></a> Christians, Driscoll says, reject not science but naturalism. The distinction relies on conflating philosophical naturalism (which declares there are no supernatural causes) and methodological naturalism (which ignores supernatural causes in the pursuit of science, because they are untestable). Christians can agree with the latter but generally not the former.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TijgcEFD2M#t=30m28s"><b>30:28-39:10</b></a> Driscoll identifies ten problems with 'atheistic evolution' (i.e. an account of the history of the universe that does not posit a supernatural creator). The scientific points are various kinds of hogwash, and I'll skip most of them<b> </b>as I don't want to be here forever.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TijgcEFD2M#t=33m52s"><b>33:52-34:28</b></a> This, though, I'll pick on. It's the standard creationist claim that there are no transitional forms in the fossil record. <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html"><b>It just isn't true. </b></a>Creationists, of course, will move the goalposts whenever a transitional fossil is discovered and set up ever more stringent criteria.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TijgcEFD2M#t=34m35s"><b>34:35-36:13</b></a> 'Atheistic evolution assumes that the earth is eternal', so evolution contradicts the Big Bang. I don't even know what to do with that. Evolutionary biologists, atheist or otherwise, do not assume that the earth is eternal (scientists agree it is roughly 4.5 billion years old, and that life on earth originated about 3.7 billion years ago), and I have no idea where Driscoll got this claim from. It's simply bizarre.</div>
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TijgcEFD2M#t=42m20s"><b>42:20-48:42</b></a> Here Driscoll lays out the dangerous alternative to biblical creation: pagan 'one-ism', the belief that everything is ultimately of one substance. This he blames explicitly for the LGBTQ movement, which he argues is about creating one gender rather than respecting distinctions inherent in creation. Driscoll has something of an obsession with pagan nature-worship, which he has <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cI5GxM4f50"><b>previously detected in <i>Avatar</i></b></a>. As someone who's done postgraduate work on the medieval Christian theology of paganism, this is quite fascinating to me, but it doesn't make Driscoll's thoughts any less nonsensical. In queer theory the dissolution of the gender binary leads not to a single unified gender but to <i>n </i>genders. Similarly, I barely understand Driscoll's point about 'one religion', which I don't see anyone particularly striving for: isn't the trend, rather, away from Christian hegemony towards pluralism?<br />
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All in all, that's quite a lot of blatantly false statements from a man who, as a successful pastor, church planter and author, is clearly not stupid. Are we to assume Driscoll is simply lazy or ignorant, or is he lying? If these are good old-fashioned lies, they're feeble examples of the form. A visit to Wikipedia will disabuse anyone of most of Driscoll's notions. I'm not a scientist, but I've known several of the facts Driscoll gets wrong since I was about ten years old. How can he hope to convince <i>adults</i>?<br />
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But perhaps Driscoll isn't trying to tell carefully crafted lies. Early in the sermon, Driscoll 'explains' the fact that we have a two-day weekend instead of the Old Testament's single day of rest: '[W]hen it came to our nation's founding, they couldn't decide between the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday and the Christian Sabbath of Sunday..., so they gave you both.' I don't know if this myth is popular in the United States, but it's plainly untrue given union struggles for a shorter work week <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/91aug/rybczynski-p2.htm"><b>well into the twentieth century</b></a>.<br />
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Why, then, does Driscoll get it wrong? Why does he speak <i>ex cathedra</i> on something he is plainly ignorant of, a mere footnote to his argument? Unless Driscoll <i>enjoys </i>deception, a lie is quite useless here. More likely he simply doesn't care, and opts not to do his research. Whether he's right on this point or not doesn't matter to him, or at least it matters far less than affecting an air of authority and bluffing his way through. He prefers making stuff up to the bother of reading up. And that seems to be the case for much of the sermon.<br />
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Driscoll fits Harry Frankfurt's definition of a <a href="https://athens.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf"><b>bullshitter</b></a>: 'He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.' Driscoll casually says things he knows are probably not true because he sees the big picture: exuding confidence, knowledge and love for 'biblical truth' to sell a form of Christianity constructed specifically <i>against </i>other faiths and liberation movements. Research isn't really necessary, and facts can be hammered into shape or simply made up to fit that goal.<br />
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There is of course a particular irony to this. Driscoll is one of those evangelicals who forever insist on objective standards and denounce the 'undermining' of truth by a legion of foes (relativism, postmodernism, modernism, 'atheistic evolution', inclusivism, etc.). But here we see that Driscoll is not even doing the truth the courtesy of lying, which would at least be making an effort. He's just ignoring it, content with poorly researched, logically flawed, often flat-out false claims. What does it matter, right?<br />
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Driscoll's embrace of bullshit, then, shows that far from standing against the collapse of metanarratives he is actually profoundly influenced by it. As is evangelical culture as a whole: 'One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of <i>correctness </i>to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of <i>sincerity</i>' (Frankfurt, emphasis in original). Sincerity as the next best thing to being right, the defence of one's views with appeals not to evidence but to the strength of one's belief: that helps explain a plethora of counterfactual narratives peddled by evangelicals. So Driscoll's fabrications are at least useful in understanding something of the subculture. But we don't need to let people like him claim they're 'standing up for truth'.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-87987372623011152982013-02-09T22:43:00.002-04:002013-02-12T00:13:56.719-04:00And these signs shall follow them that believe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In 1966-67, then-twentysomething filmmaker Peter Adair and his crew spent a year with a Pentecostal Holiness congregation in rural Scrabble Creek, West Virginia. Shot on a shoestring budget, the resulting 53-minute documentary <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0270992/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2"><b><i>Holy Ghost People</i></b></a> (1967) was not released to cinemas* but made some critical waves and survived on the rental market. (Today it's in the <a href="http://archive.org/details/HolyGhostPeople"><b>public domain</b></a>, so you are without excuse.)<br />
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Adair went on to carve out a career far from the mainstream with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0199143/"><b><i>Word Is Out</i></b></a> (1977),<i><b> </b></i>the first significant documentary to present LGBTQ people on their own terms. His later films, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0305172/"><b><i>The AIDS Show: Artists Involved in Death and Survival</i></b></a> (1986) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101266/"><b><i>Absolutely Positive</i></b></a> (1991), chronicled the impact of the disease on the gay community, as well as Adair's own life under the shadow of being HIV-positive. He died in 1996, aged fifty-two.<br />
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<i>Holy Ghost People</i> opens with decontextualised snapshots of a Pentecostal service: music is played, a girl dances frantically, someone holds a serpent, an old woman looks at the camera, a Bible reading is cut off mid-sentence by the editing. It's not too bold, I think, to call it a critique of the sort of sensationalist reporting on extreme religious phenomena that leaves us understanding less, not more. The rest of the film is a careful examination of the forces shaping the church's practices, an aetiology of Pentecostal worship in Appalachia as much as it is a record.<br />
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The film steps back, and Adair's narration sets the scene over footage of the area around Scrabble Creek shot from a moving car. The poverty of rural West Virginia in the sixties is frankly shocking: in the heart of the world's richest nation, these communities look more like the villages I've seen in the backwoods of Bolivia and Paraguay. Adair explains that while the church's raucous, unstructured worship practices are legal in West Virginia (but not in neighbouring states), adherents are often ostracised by their own communities. He stresses that snakebite, though common, is not usually fatal.<br />
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Most of the film is taken up by a lengthy service that unites the Scrabble Creek congregation with fellow believers who have travelled over sixty miles from Virginia. Adair starts us off slowly, showing most of the worship leader's somewhat rambling notices - tributes to those in attendance, prayer requests, and remarks on the film crew in attendance. (In classic <i>cinéma vérité</i> style, Adair draws attention to the presence of the camera.) From there, the service gradually escalates from singing and testimonies to wild dancing, speaking in tongues, convulsions, falling over ('being slain in the Spirit') and eventually snake-handling.<br />
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A key part of the film comes just before that, though, in the form of individual interviews with four congregants. One man first spoke in tongues at the age of thirteen, but grew up to be 'a very mean fellow' and spent a year praying in vain for the return of the gift after his release from prison, before finally receiving tongues again during a service. Another was dissatisfied with the evangelical churches he attended, and eventually found 'the Holiness way' through his father-in-law's influence and the powerful experience of a supernatural wind sweeping through his body at night. A woman talks about the happiness brought by the Holy Spirit, and her first experience drinking strychnine during a worship meeting. The last interviewee is a middle-aged woman who is wracked by convulsions and breaks into glossolalia in the middle of sentences she shouts with a preacher's cadence and inflection, rendering her all but incoherent.<br />
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Letting these people explain themselves in their own words, without interruption or cuts, is indispensable in setting out the background against which their worship takes place. It turns them from an incomprehensible - and, given their practices, possibly terrifying - Other into ordinary, sympathetic protagonists. As anthropologist Margaret Mead, who invited Adair to introduce the film to her students at Columbia, <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1968.70.3.02a01160/pdf"><b>writes</b></a>: 'The people in the film are work-worn and show the marks of malnutrition, poverty, and poor medical care, and yet, on a recent showing to a very sophisticated audience, someone on my right exclaimed: "What beautiful people!"' That's a privileged perspective, of course. But it reflects Adair's success in breaking through the liberal sneer at rural people preferred by the light entertainment that passes for public discourse.<br />
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In the face of their small number, legal trouble and hostility from neighbours, adherents resist by appealing to authenticity: the free, unfettered flow of God's spirit. In worship at least, the myriad hierarchies and restrictions on their lives disappear. In his testimony, one congregant lambastes people who 'think it's a disgrace to touch a serpent'. He is unashamed because 'I don't want to be highly
esteemed among men. I gotta be just what I am, glory be to God.'<br />
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While Adair emphasises that serpent-handling only occurs when adherents feel led by the Spirit and far more time is dedicated to prayer and other charismatic manifestations, the congregation eventually do pick up venomous snakes, lifting them in the air, throwing them across the room and dancing with them. It's unsurprising that this requires hype, but it's still an astonishing display of faith (at least quantitatively). Near the end of the meeting the worship leader is bitten by a copperhead on camera. While he cleans the blood from his hand with a borrowed handkerchief he calmly declares: 'If I die with this snakebite, it's still God's word,
just the same. God's word is just the same... Whether we die by it or
live by it, it's still God's word.' Is that an impressive reliance on God's grace - whatever the folly of deliberately provoking venomous snakes - or a deeply problematic flirting with death?<br />
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Shot on the cheapest 16mm film stock known to man, <i>Holy Ghost People</i>'s rough and ready look reinforces its down-to-earth setting. (The poor lighting and sound recording is inevitable in a low-budget documentary, but the awful digitisation isn't - what is this 'file size' you speak of?) Structured carefully and without sensationalism, <i>Holy Ghost People</i> nonetheless transports the wild atmosphere and sense of real danger to the screen (I challenge you not to squirm during the snake-handling scenes.)<br />
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The first charismatic service I went to ended with an altar call to come forward and receive the Holy Spirit. I stayed in my seat, not just because I was a firmer cessationist then than I am now but because I was frankly intimidated by the manifestations I'd just witnessed. Yes, they could easily be explained by appeal to religious euphoria, but it wasn't just implausibility. Charismatic worship requires an abandonment of self-control that is pretty alien to the bourgeois ideal of the individual (which is why it appeals to so many people). <i>Holy Ghost People</i> lays bare both why I find the charismatic movement fascinating and why it isn't for me.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*So far as I know, at least; I've been able to find woefully little information on the film online. Anyone who knows more, don't hesitate to pitch in.</span>Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-45279921247935211042013-02-07T20:59:00.001-04:002013-02-07T20:59:12.819-04:00I've got that old time religion in my hoard<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068924/"><b><i>Marjoe</i></b></a> (1972) may have won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, but Cinema 5 did their damnedest to release the film as stealthily as possible, and all but buried it afterwards. There was a 1983 VHS release, but the film itself was thought lost until the negative was rediscovered in a vault, restored, screened and released on DVD in the 2000s. Which is obviously to the good: you won't watch a documentary like <i>Marjoe </i>this side of glory, so it'd be a shame if it was lost forever.<br />
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It's hardly surprising, though, that the distributor feared a backlash and virtually declined to release the film in the Bible Belt. Featuring an entirely faithless evangelist raking in the cash from Pentecostal congregations and casually sharing the tricks of the trade, <i>Marjoe </i>was sure to infuriate both the duped and the protagonist's, er, colleagues. But <i>Marjoe</i> wouldn't be very interesting if it was only an <i>exposé</i>. Its power comes from the real questions it asks about faith, showmanship, suffering and ethics.<br />
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Marjoe Gortner began preaching in tent revival meetings at the age of four, after his ambitious evangelist parents discovered his flair for the dramatic and confidence in front of crowds. Billed as 'the youngest ordained minister in history' and ruthlessly drilled in money-making tricks by his parents, Marjoe travelled the revival circuit and appeared on television until his mid-teens. When his father absconded with the family's money, a disillusioned Gortner drifted to the West Coast and immersed himself in hippie culture for several years. Lacking the education or formal training for a 'normal' job, in the mid-sixties Gortner went back to what he did best: he began working as a preacher again.<br />
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This time, though, he kept the money himself, and was able to work just six months a year thanks to donations and the sale of prayer cloths and other paraphernalia. It was a living, but Gortner was tired of it, and hoped to change careers to acting. So when he travelled the American South preaching, prophesying, and healing the sick one last time in 1971 he allowed a team of documentary filmmakers to follow him around, constantly sharing the tricks of the trade behind the scenes - unbeknownst to congregations, other preachers and even Gortner's own father, all of whom were given the impression of a straight documentary.<br />
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Certainly, <i>Marjoe</i>'s greatest asset is its morally ambiguous protagonist. Gortner's transformation from his 'real self' to screaming revival preacher - complete with a totally different cadence and inflection - is astonishing. By showing off his acting chops and everyday persona, <i>Marjoe </i>doubles as an audition tape for Gortner's anticipated career in showbiz (his record, for which he exploited his renewed post-<i>Marjoe </i>fame, flopped but he was able to carve out a moderately successful career in genre films and television). So there's real doubt, I think, as to whether such an expert self-publicist ever lets us see the 'real' Gortner. But he's so darn likeable it hardly matters.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ow_rZPoxrzA/URQ33ETbDvI/AAAAAAAAA4Y/Ug7pQ7_48JQ/s1600/Marjoe+2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ow_rZPoxrzA/URQ33ETbDvI/AAAAAAAAA4Y/Ug7pQ7_48JQ/s320/Marjoe+2.png" width="320" /></a>Gortner cheerfully admits that even as a child he never believed in God, but enjoyed the attention and did as he was told. (He still uses the story of his prophetic calling made up by his parents in later meetings.) Like many people who aren't required to subscribe to doctrinal statements, Gortner holds pretty vague beliefs in reality: he'd like people to love and forgive each other. He'd even be content to preach Jesus, he says, if he didn't have to go on about hell. He doesn't think he's a particularly moral person, but not actively malevolent either: 'I'm bad, but not evil'.<br />
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There's no denying, though, that Gortner is essentially a fraud, using mass psychology and carefully engineered religious ecstasy to persuade people to open their wallets. Asked point-blank if he is a conman late in the film, Gortner's girlfriend gets a little embarrassed. It's not just Marjoe who is living a double life, though. His preacher colleagues may genuinely believe in Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but they also know the importance of a well-executed meeting to their bottom line. I prefer Gortner's open lack of faith, in fact: after all, it's not the cold that Jesus warns, it's the <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%203:15-16&version=NIV"><b>lukewarm</b></a>.<br />
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Fred Clark <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/01/24/the-conflicting-agendas-of-hucksters-and-true-believers/"><b>distinguishes</b></a> between two types of Christian conservatives: true believers, who sincerely believe in the amalgamation of Christianity and conservatism peddled by the Religious Right, and hucksters, who are in it for the money and the power. <i>Marjoe </i>suggests a third type: the semi-true believer, who has faith in the work of the Holy Spirit but also in the power of emotional manipulation to fill the pews and his coffers. This type, surely, is found everywhere in modern evangelicalism and is the <i>raison d'être</i> of the church growth movement.<br />
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In <i>Marjoe</i>, itinerant preachers emerge as a community resembling magicians, sharing tricks of the trade. There's a lot of fascinating stuff. For example, Gortner mentions creating the illusion of a glowing cross on his forehead by smearing his skin with transparent dye that would react with his perspiration during the sermon. Then there are the movements he's adapted from Mick Jagger and his strategic use of repetition, shouting and surprise to induce religious trance and falling over ('being slain in the Spirit') when he lays hands on people coming up during the altar call. Similar tricks are in use <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2013/02/demons-glitter-and-a-guy-on-the-floor-my-experience-with-an-apostolic-prayer-group.html"><b>today</b></a>.<br />
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I've only been to a couple of charismatic worship services and they
freaked me out, so, being unadventurous, I returned to what I liked
best: silently judging people in a traditional
church setting. There's no denying, though, that Gortner's servies fulfil real needs: joy, peace and healing, even if it is only for a few hours, for people who are otherwise downtrodden and sick. (Another preacher gives a nauseous sermon in which he thanks God for his brand-new Cadillac - go prosperity gospel!)<br />
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In that sense, perhaps Gortner can't be considered a fraud at all: don't attendees get the exact same experience with him as they would with a more sincere preacher? (And, theologically speaking, is not God's spirit quite independent of human machinations, and hardly frustrated in his work by a fraud?) Preying on people in the vulnerable state induced by religious ecstasy - however legitimate, even beneficial that experience may be in itself - is not improved morally by the sincerity of practitioners. Give me an honest fraud like Marjoe Gortner over a semi-true believer any day.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-33067403136919700602013-01-26T19:41:00.001-04:002013-01-26T19:41:49.091-04:00Expecto rubbish<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Hey, remember when ensemble romantic comedies were all the rage? Okay, that's a bit misleading. First, it was more a trickle than a flood: you could probably count the subgenre's films on the fingers of one hand even if you'd suffered a moderately gruesome circular saw accident. And second, it wasn't exactly a long time ago. The fad's progenitor, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1001508/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>He's Just Not That Into You</i></b></a>, graced theatres in 2009, and the last gasp came in late 2011, with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598822/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>New Year's Eve</i></b></a>.<br />
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Which means that last year's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1586265/"><b><i>What to Expect When You're Expecting</i></b></a> was late to the party, explaining both the film's unimpressive box office - a $41 million North American gross on a $40 million budget - and the general warmed-over feeling of the whole thing, as if everybody involved was just trying to get it over with so they could go home, or move on to less embarrassing projects. Which I get - excepting the over-the-hill stars, <i>What to Expect When You're Expecting </i>wastes a great deal of talent that could be more fruitfully employed elsewhere.<br />
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As per the genre, <i>What to Expect</i> has not one plot but half a dozen, plus assorted minor characters and cameos. The entire thing is connected only tentatively, and by 'tentatively' I mean that dialogue occasionally points out these people know each other, but they virtually never meet. So, we have the following elements:<br />
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- Photographer Holly (Jennifer Lopez) and her husband Alex (Rodrigo Santoro), unable to conceive, decide to adopt a baby from Africa, but Alex is fearful about parenthood.<br />
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- Food truck chef Rosie (Anna Kendrick) becomes pregnant after a one-night stand with friendly competitor Marco (Chace Crawford), but miscarries. Can they mend their strained relationship?<br />
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- Fitness guru and reality TV star Jules (Cameron Díaz) and star dancer Evan (Matthew Morrison) are about to have a baby, but they seem unable to agree on anything.<br />
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- Baby-book author and shop owner Wendy (Elizabeth Banks) finds pregnancy more stressful than she expected, while her husband Gary (Ben Falcone) feels constantly upstaged by his race car driver father (Dennis Quaid) and disturbingly young stepmother (Brooklyn Decker).<br />
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-In addition to this, there are smaller supporting roles for the likes of Chris Rock, and pointless cameos that include Cheryl Cole.<br />
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It's a hell of a lot of plot, or at least a lot of moving parts; and I appreciate that getting it all to intersect in some way isn't easy, but hermetically sealing the strands off from each other really isn't helping the film. But, though uninspired it might be, I can't in good conscience call it rote or derivative. You see, <i>What to Expect When You're Expecting</i> does away entirely with the time-honoured tradition of arcs. The film's storylines have no setup or payoff, they sort of just trudge along, and what conflict there is is not so much resolved as waved away at the ninety-minute mark: 'Hey look, they have a baby now! That makes all problems disappear forever!' Which is probably not something to expect when you're expecting. But I don't have any children, so what do I know?<br />
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The death-knell for the film, though, is that it just isn't funny - and not in the manner of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0832266/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>Definitely, Maybe</i></b></a>, which included next to no jokes despite nominally being a romantic comedy. Rather, <i>What to Expect When You're Expecting</i> fancies itself hilarious but ends up merely loud and obnoxious. The only bits that got a chuckle out of me revolved around Davis (Joe Manganiello), and I know it must be the writing because Manganiello is much worse here than he's ever been on <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0844441/?ref_=sr_1"><b><i>True Blood</i></b></a>.<br />
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I can't blame writers Shauna Cross and Heather Hach for the strange cultural disconnect over the bizarrely prominent circumcision storyline, but it's undoubtedly their mess of a screenplay that undoes <i>What to Expect When You're Expecting</i>. While neither author is a veteran, Cross wrote the fantastic <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1172233/"><b><i>Whip It</i></b></a> (2009), so it's fair to view this as a disappointment rather than a predictable failure. It isn't, anyway, much to do with the rest of the production, which is the straightforward point-and-shoot affair one expects in this genre. Kirk Jones, the man doing the pointin' and the shootin', does his best to stay out of everyone's way, and the editing mostly sighs and does the best it can with what it's given.<br />
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With this script it's unfair to condemn a slew of bad performances, but it's probably worth stressing the one <i>good </i>performance: Anna Kendrick, whom I've never really liked in anything before (she tends to get saddled with unflattering scripts), creates the one fully likeable character and sells the film's single emotional scene that manages to connect. But then again, acting next to the vacuum that is Chace Crawford might make more than one actor seem like a great thespian.<br />
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For a film premised on the fact that women <i>really </i>want children and their men indulge them, <i>What to Expect When You're Expecting</i> is not as sexist as might have been supposed: full of offensive and deeply unfunny gender stereotyping, yes, but it does portray active fathers in a positive light, and allows two women out of four a more complex reaction than sheer exuberance at the news that they are pregnant. So, you know, that's something. But it's still thoroughly unnecessary, mostly ineffective fluff, and I want the hours of my life that I wasted on it back.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-19493199094057073092013-01-24T19:20:00.000-04:002013-01-25T05:16:15.392-04:00Adapt or batten down the hatches? Recent shifts in evangelicalism<center>
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In biology, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium"><b>punctuated equilibrium</b></a> is the idea that a species can change little to not at all for a long time, then suddenly develop rapidly once a tipping point is reached. It's a useful concept in a number of fields (social history one of them). And I'd argue that it's a good way of understanding what's been happening in evangelicalism on both sides of the pond in the last couple of years. The relatively stable evangelical culture I was part of as a young Christian is shifting rapidly - because its mechanisms for suppressing or exiling dissent no longer work.<br />
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Go back, if you will, to the long-gone days of early 2011, when Rob Bell's alleged universalism (Bell's <i>Love Wins</i> had not been released yet) inspired an infamous <a href="https://twitter.com/JohnPiper/status/41590656421863424"><b>three-word tweet from John Piper</b></a>. That anathema from the man they call the Calvinist pope formed part of a by now pretty well-rehearsed script: declare someone 'controversial' for transgressing doctrinal boundaries, declare they're no longer an evangelical, and tell your flock to boycott their works. It's how the evangelical aristocracy excommunicates its discontents, <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2012/09/evangelical-inquisitions/"><b>and they've developed a taste for it</b></a>.<br />
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But<b> </b>that strategy of marginalising dissent no longer works. Certainly, <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/05/31/the-evangelical-bubble-cannot-be-sustained-part-2/"><b>technological change</b></a> plays a part in that, but there's another factor: increasingly, those evangelical leaders try to push out push back. They find allies. They get published. And they refuse to stop calling themselves evangelicals.<br />
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No-one illustrates this better than <a href="http://rachelheldevans.com/"><b>Rachel Held Evans</b></a>. Growing up in the Bible Belt, Held Evans is no outsider to evangelicalism, and her writing is full of love for and commitment to the evangelical tradition. But she's also an <a href="http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/4-common-misconceptions-egalitarianism"><b>egalitarian</b></a> who rejects <a href="http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/biblicism-christian-smith-bible-impossible"><b>biblicism</b></a>. In opening her blog to a huge variety of voices of different faith traditions, she applies a radical inclusiveness that conservative evangelicals find suspicious. And then there's the fact that she's a woman, so conservative leaders consider her unsuited to teaching and have to overcome scruples to engage with her at all.<br />
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But attempts to expel her from the evangelical fold have been unsuccessful. <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/october/50-women-you-should-know.html"><b><i>Christianity Today</i></b></a>, the closest American evangelicalism has to a central publication, put her on their list of '50 Women You Should Know'<i><b> </b></i>(much to the chagrin of <a href="http://www.dennyburk.com/christianity-todays-50-women-to-watch/"><b>Denny Burk</b></a>). Conservatives attacking her during the 2012 <b><a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/phoenixandolivebranch/2012/07/doug-wilson-gospel-coalition-christian-patriarchy-sex-rape-pregnancy-slavery/">Imbroglio of the Two Wilsons</a></b> ended up with egg on their faces - like Douglas Wilson's daughter Bekah, who <a href="http://www.feminagirls.com/2012/07/18/thems-figthin-words/"><b>described</b></a> Held Evans as being in 'a fever of feminist fury', having 'transitioned into her squeaky voice, and we all know what happens when a woman gets squeaky' and 'stamping her little foot over there on her blog'.<b> </b>Bizarre, that, as Rachel Held Evans is gracious and level-headed in her writings.<br />
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She's representative of a much larger trend of openness and honesty. Singer Jennifer Knapp <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/aprilweb-only/jenniferknapp-apr10.html"><b>came out of the closet</b></a> in a <i>Christianity Today interview</i> in 2010<b> </b>(followed by a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xDWc7SvBOA"><b>debate with a conservative pastor</b></a> on national television). Justin Lee, founder of the Gay Christian Network - which unites LGBTQ Christians both celibate and in relationships - and author of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Torn-Rescuing-Gospel-Gays-vs--Christians/dp/1455514306/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359065641&sr=8-1"><b><i>Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate</i></b></a>, is a prominent figure in the emergence of <a href="http://maisonneuve.org/pressroom/article/2012/sep/10/our-fall-2012-issue/"><b>openly gay evangelicals</b></a>. Writers<b> </b>like <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pete-enns/adam-evolution-and-evangelicals_b_1219124.html"><b>Pete Enns on evolution</b></a> and <a href="http://frankviola.org/2012/02/15/christiansmith/"><b>Christian Smith on biblicism</b></a> are challenging other evangelical shibboleths from within the tradition.<br />
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This opening up, along with wider cultural shifts on social issues, has created room for senior evangelical leaders to be honest about their own position even where it conflicts with dogma. Evangelicalism in Britain, the Christian subculture I'm a part of, may be tiny compared to its North American counterpart, but Steve Chalke's <a href="http://www.christianitymagazine.co.uk/sexuality/stevechalke.aspx"><b>recent affirmation of LGBTQ couples in churches</b></a> made waves on both sides of the pond. It's the bigger picture that fascinates me, though. Chalke's thoughtful and gracious article was published by <i>Christianity</i>, a far from liberal evangelical magazine, and the responses from conservatives were far more muted and respectful than one is used to.<br />
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<a href="http://www.eauk.org/church/stories/the-bible-and-homosexuality.cfm"><b>Steve Clifford of the Evangelical Alliance</b></a> disagreed with Chalke amid familiar phraseology of 'sadness and disappointment', but reminded Christians they should 'disagree without being disagreeable [and] listen honestly and carefully to one another'. Steve Holmes (battle of the Steves!) <a href="http://www.eauk.org/church/stories/homosexuality-and-hermeneutics.cfm"><b>critiqued Chalke's hermeneutic</b></a>, but entirely without the warnings of 'caving in to secular dogma' and the flames of hell<b> </b>that have tended to mark evangelicals' responses to dissent. It's an <i>actual debate</i> (which wouldn't have happened five or ten years ago), and I'm incredibly hopeful about it (please don't dash those hopes, guys).<br />
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In this new environment evangelical leaders, who used to judge the people - the gatekeepers, as <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/11/15/how-evangelical-tribal-gatekeepers-operate-i-want-you-to-go-after-campolo/"><b>Fred Clark</b></a> aptly calls them -, are faced with a dilemma: engage change and perhaps change yourself or batten down the hatches and retreat into what Michael Clawson calls <a href="http://brandanrobertson.com/blog1/2012/12/27/the-spectrum-of-protestantism-in-2013-part-1.html"><b>'neo-fundamentalism'</b></a>.<b> </b>The current paradigm shift in evangelical Christianity seems to be accelerating existing trends, leading to noticeable radicalisation.<br />
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That's certainly the case with John Piper, who is becoming more conservative as he's nearing retirement. In the above video, he argues that complementarianism - the soft patriarchy in which men and women are equal but 'gloriously suited' to different roles: that is, men should command ('biblical headship'), women should obey ('submission') - is a first-order, quasi-gospel issue. Traditionally, evangelicals treat it as a second-order issue like infant baptism, eschatology or spiritual gifts, i.e. something we can agree to disagree on - a privileged perspective, as women can't just walk away agreeing to disagree about their rights.<br />
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In <a href="https://soundcloud.com/askpastorjohn/john-piper-historical-adam"><b>recent podcasts</b></a>, he seems to endorse young-earth creationism on the grounds that not accepting Adam or his descendants as historical would be to reject the Bible, and he's becoming more vocal about his <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495R870xEIE"><b>anti-abortion activism</b></a>. He's also begun to address criticism (which evangelical leaders tend to ignore) with <a href="http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/clarifying-words-on-wife-abuse"><b>an ill-advised follow-up post</b></a> to a rightly criticised video on domestic violence. Culture warriors like Al Mohler are following similar trajectories.<br />
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The other possible response, of course, would be for evangelicals to reassess their position. Alas, so far it's mostly lip service of the 'I can't be racist because I have black friends' variety: quite literally, as when Rick Warren defended himself against accusations of homophobia by <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/rick-warren-im-not-a-homophobe_n_2205402.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay%20Voices"><b>saying</b></a> that 'I have many, many gay friends'. (Cue <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/swanson-having-gay-friends-making-friends-serial-killers"><b>backlash from the Religious Right</b></a>, who disapprove of being friends with gay people.)<b> </b>Tim Keller often appears more open than Piper or a shock jock like Mark Driscoll, yet there he sits with Piper and D.A. Carson, arguing that egalitarians pick and choose from their Bibles.<br />
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Fundamentalism is predicated on the hopeless proposition that you can fix a set of acceptable beliefs, social relations and behaviour once and for all, occasionally kicking out the discontents. But the evangelical tradition is much broader than that. It has welcomed change, realising that the man from Galilee is a living saviour, and that serving him in real, historical contexts means living in those contexts, in all the wonder, complexity and yes, uncertainty of real life. My hope is that evangelicals will test change, and hold on to what is good.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-75239100095786356762013-01-18T20:35:00.001-04:002013-01-18T20:35:59.280-04:00Don't go against a friend of the friends<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In case recent reviews of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060315/"><b><i>Django</i></b></a> (1966) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063293/"><b><i>Il mercenario</i></b></a> (1968) didn't make it sufficiently clear, this blog likes Franco Nero quite a lot. So the realisation - which, granted, I made roughly a year after every other spaghetti western fan on this earth - that Nero is in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853728/"><b><i>Django Unchained</i></b></a> was met with great rejoicing. And here we come to an odd intersection. For by sheer coincidence I've recently blogged my way through the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068646/"><b><i>Godfather</i></b></a> series, and left eager to watch far more gangster films than any sane person should. And guess who starred in a number of Italian Mafia pictures?<br />
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Like many Italian directors of his generation Damiano Damiani was a workhorse, directing films from documentaries and serious dramas to spaghetti westerns.While he continued genre-hopping throughout his career, in the late sixties Damiani hit his stride with a series of Mafia films starring Nero. It's the first of these, 1968's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063010/"><b><i>Il giorno della civetta</i></b></a> - titled <i>Mafia </i>during its 1970 theatrical run in the United States, but since then generally known as <i>The Day of the Owl</i> - to which we now turn.<br />
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One morning in the Sicilian countryside, a contractor is ambushed by a hitman. The wounded man flees towards the nearest house, but is shot again and killed. The scene is witnessed by the owner of the house, a man called Nicolosi - who, by the time the contractor's body is discovered, has gone missing too. Police Captain Bellodi (Franco Nero), a hotshot Northerner, attempts to trace the murder back to the local Mafia boss, Don Mariano Arena (Lee J. Cobb), who he suspects had the contractor killed because he refused to participate in his racket of awarding construction contracts to his friends. But the investigation is hindered by the fact that none of the locals, not even police informer Parrinieddu (Serge Reggiani), is willing to testify against Don Mariano - least of all Rosa Nicolosi (Claudia Cardinale), whose husband is still missing and suspected murdered.<br />
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The film is largely constructed as a game of chess between Don Mariano and Captain Bellodi, whose office is just across the city square from the Mafia boss's residence. The men regularly observe each other through binoculars (hence the film's title) while talking shop with their subordinates - who are largely dimwitted thugs in Don Mariano's case, while Bellodi's men, being more experienced than their practically foreign superior, lack his optimism about taking down the Mafia. Nero, a fantastic fit as the nihilistic, self-amused gunslinger Django, is less natural here as a brash, overconfident white knight, although his embrace of deceit and corruption in the pursuit of justice makes for an interesting protagonist.<br />
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Regarding Cobb's Don Mariano, then: if you thought, quite naturally, that casting an American character actor as a Sicilian crimelord might cause some problems, you haven't seen either Cobb's work or the great Italian facility with overdubbing. His Mariano is ruthless and brutal without once getting his hands dirty. A man who makes his friends rich and is feared by the community, he has a veneer of Christian respectability that he knows doesn't need to be convincing. He's mesmerising to watch without even a hint of the fatherly charm that Marlon Brando brought to the role, and I rather like the prosaic reality of his operations: receiving public contracts and handling them cheaply to the cost of the community, in exactly the way the Camorra does with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camorra#Garbage_crisis"><b>waste disposal</b></a>. <br />
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As presented by <i>The Day of the Owl</i>, the Sicilian Mafia's strength comes from silence. Throughout the film, the locals keep quiet and look the other way. Who could blame them? Bellodi offers them appeals to principle, when what they need is protection from Mafia vengeance. Cardinale, billed above Nero and theoretically the film's protagonist despite the fact that her storyline never quite gels with the rest of the film, has the information that could see Don Mariano convicted - but she fears for her daughter's life, knowing that her husband may well have been murdered. In one of the film's strongest scenes, she attends a lunch with the local caporegimes, who praise her for her good judgment. She storms off, disgusted by her reliance on the men responsible for so much evil - but she can't go against them armed only with sentiment.<br />
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As a procedural <i>The Day of the Owl</i> is shot in a far more down-to-earth style than much Italian genre cinema of its time, but Damiani is not above fancy direction, including a penchant for using fisheye lenses to focus on and distort the faces of Mafia elders. Among the film's signature scenes is the opening murder and a late showdown between Bellodi and Don Mariano, in which the former finally believes himself triumphant. The score by Giovanni Fusco (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052893/"><b><i>Hiroshima, mon amour</i></b></a>) relies heavily on strings, going to the same well of Sicilian folk music that Nino Rota would mine so successfully for <i>The Godfather</i>. It's a rare romantic flourish in a film that, as is characteristic of the Mafia films from Italy <i>vis-à-vis</i> their American counterparts, is hard-nosed and nasty - but still jolly entertaining.Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2324727095294695667.post-82965963918518585902013-01-16T20:02:00.001-04:002013-01-16T20:02:07.630-04:00'Do you know what Strontium-90 is, and what it does?'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The story behind Peter Watkins's 1965 docu-drama <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059894/"><b><i>The War Game</i></b></a> is gnarled and contentious. Funded by £10,000 from a reluctant BBC at a time of power struggle inside the Corporation, the final 48-minute film made higher-ups profoundly uncomfortable. After privately screening <i>The War Game</i> for representatives of several government departments (including the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Post Office), the BBC decided not to broadcast the film.*<br />
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The resulting imbroglio is detailed in <a href="http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/warGame.htm"><b>Watkins's account</b></a>, which makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the <i>raison d'état</i> of the rump British Empire in the sixties. The BBC tried to shake off accusations of political censorship by screening the film to select elite audiences - specifically excluding film critics -, but scrupulously avoided showing it to a wider public. As Watkins stresses, the print media overwhelmingly backed the BBC's line (some choice quotes there).<br />
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The film's rehabilitation began when a limited theatrical run resulted in <i>The War Game</i> winning Best Documentary Feature during the 1966 Academy Awards. The BBC, which had previously claimed that it was only Watkins's artistic failings that had led them to suppress the film - as we all know, the Corporation cares deeply about our delicate artistic sensibilities, which is why <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear_%282002_TV_series%29"><b><i>Top Gear</i></b> </a>exists - finally broadcast <i>The War Game</i> in 1985, as part of the forty-year anniversary coverage of the bombing of Hiroshima. For his part, Watkins has continued as a stridently left-wing and anti-war documentary filmmaker, falling foul of censorship as often as he's won awards.<br />
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<i>The War Game</i> falls into three kinds of footage, mixed within the film. First, there are short interviews with a random sample of passers-by ('Do you know what Strontium-90 is, and what it does?') which reveal the British public as woefully underinformed on the horrors of nuclear war. Interspersed, there are monologues based on real recorded statements by authority figures in government, military and church, which tend towards the utterly insane presented with a certain cheer ('The Aztecs on their feast days would sacrifice 20,000 men to their gods in the belief that this would keep the universe on its proper course. We feel superior to them.')<br />
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The meat of the film and the source of most controversy, though, is a merciless recreation of the horrors of a Soviet nuclear strike on Kent, presented in the style of a documentary. A Chinese ground invasion of South Vietnam leads to the US authorising the use of tactical nuclear weapons - first in Indochina, then, as tensions escalate between the blocs, in Germany. This is followed by Soviet massive retaliation on targets in western Europe, including the UK. Apart from the millions killed instantaneously, much of British society collapses in the following months as radiation disease, starvation and post-traumatic stress overwhelm a totally inadequate civil defence system.<br />
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Filming around Tonsbridge, Gravesend, Chatham and Dover, Watkins uses almost entirely non-professional actors (ironically considering the director's left-wing stance, this caused him some trouble with actors' unions). He achieves a sense of extraordinary immediacy by using a lot of shaky handheld camerawork (old hat in 2012, revolutionary then), realistically imperfect dialogue, and seemingly unscripted moments. Among a talented crew, Lilian Munro's make-up work stands out for its unflinching recreation of injuries (severe burns, poisoning), skin covered in soot, and other misery.<br />
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All of which sounds a bit technical, so let me be clear, in the manner of the Prime Minister: <i>The War Game</i> is among the most horrifying films I've ever seen. I don't say that lightly or frivolously. In the many, many hours I've misspent watching exploitation films, only <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072271/"><b><i>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</i></b></a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078935/"><b><i>Cannibal Holocaust</i></b></a> have sickened me to my very soul to the same extent as <i>The War Game</i>. That's not because it's particularly explicit (much of the film works by suggestion), but because what is portrayed is just so much more gut-churningly awful than what even the most depraved horror directors tend to dream up: newly blind children covering their faces after the brightness of a thousand suns has burnt their retinas, people dying from carbon monoxide poisoning, others beaten to death by starving mobs.<br />
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In all that, Watkins is keen to stress that what he's portraying is not speculative but merely a dramatisation of existing scientific predictions. 'It's been estimated that...', begins sentence after sentence of horrifying statistics that imbue the film with a sense of inexorability. Reviewers were of course right to call <i>The War Game</i> totally one-sided: but who could imagine a 'balanced' film on this subject? A documentary that detailed the horrors of atomic fallout before enumerating the many wonderful upsides of nuclear weapons would surely be more repulsive than <i>The War Game</i>, not less.<br />
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There is, then, a disgusting hypocrisy in the official response to <i>The War Game</i>. According to the defence and media establishment, planning the murder of millions upon millions of civilians is quite all right just so long as one uses the correct euphemisms; the moral transgression apparently lies in spelling out the reality. <a href="https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm"><b>As Orwell said</b></a>, the genocidal reality of modern power 'can indeed be defended,
but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which
do not square with the professed aims of the political parties'. Hence the need for obfuscating language and misinformation - which, as Watkins points out, is precisely likely to increase casualties in the eventuality of war.<br />
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A mere calm listing of the inevitable horrors of all-out atomic war would refute any case for nuclear weapons, but that's not all Watkins does. By focusing on the darker aspects of Allied conduct in the Second World War, he critiques the justifying ideologies of British power. Again and again, the narrator stresses that the scenario is merely an extrapolation of what happened to Hamburg, Darmstadt, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: and who dropped those bombs? When the firestorm created by a one-megaton bomb destroys Rochester, 'the oxygen is being consumed in every cellar and every ground floor room'. Which is how 42,000 civilians died during <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_War_II#Battle_of_Hamburg"><b>Operation Gomorrah</b></a>, after Bomber Command developed the proper scientific combination of incendiary and explosive bombs to create a firestorm. After the initial Soviet attack, Watkins describes British bombers on their way to retaliation. 'Their target: people like this.'<br />
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It's really no surprise, then, that <i>The War Game</i> was thought excessively subversive, and its suppression on explicitly political grounds defended in the press. '[T]he only possible effect of showing it to the British public at large would be ... to raise more unilateral disarmament recruits', the <i>Evening News</i> insisted.** The entirely correct accusation against Watkins was thus one succinctly expressed in the hideous German word <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrkraftzersetzung"><i>Wehrkraftzersetzung</i></a>, literally 'sapping of defensive strength': the danger of showing the film would be to incline the British people against any possibility of a war they'd been systematically misinformed about.<br />
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All of which might be interesting historically, but unfortunately the BBC is still at it. Acting as the mouthpiece of the government in the run-up to the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-310061/BBC-board-slams-Iraq-war-coverage.html"><b>conquest of Iraq</b></a>, refusing to broadcast humanitarian appeals when the aggressor happens to be a<b> </b>is a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jan/26/bbc-gaza-appeal-row-timeline"><b>British ally</b></a>, shutting down commentators who wouldn't fall in line during <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzDQCT0AJcw"><b>the riots</b></a>: more than ever, the BBC has a reputation for being regime media - <a href="http://www.leninology.com/2012/12/what-is-it-about-bbc.html"><b>structurally, not just incidentally</b></a>. All the more reason to hold up <i>The War Game</i> as the little docu-drama all the Corporation's horses and all the Corporation's men couldn't bury.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*The BBC officially denies this screening ever happened.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">**According to Watkins's website.</span>Maltehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04162595103855533887noreply@blogger.com0