TERRIBLE? or JUST TERRIBLE?: "The Flaming Urge" dir, Harold Ericson, 1953

If there's one thing I might love more than a great movie, it's a terrible movie.  Of course, terrible movies usually fall on either side of a sometimes thin dividing line that separates the crap-tastic and the torturous.  "Terrible? or, Just Terrible?" is a new review segment that attempts to accurately draw that line, while still recognizing what might be distinctly, even sublimely, awful among the vast reserves of cinematic drek.  The rich well of dreadful movies, no matter what realm of production they rise from, deserves critical appreciation just as much as...well, everything else.  There seems to be a desire recently, as the midnight movie experience has gone through an attempted resurrection, to discover the next Tommy Weisau-esque train wreck.  But, jaw-droppers like Weisau's The Room only come along once in a very long while, and a true cult movie cannot be forced, as Karl and Phillip French note in their seminal book "Cult Movies":

A good many cult pictures have the prime constituent of sad orphans--that of being abandoned and rejected;the problem is, do they retain their status as waifs after being adopted by a large, welcoming family?

It's important to note that the French's weren't just talking about bad movies--their book is mostly filled with great movies, including the likes of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalyspe Now, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, Jean Luc-Godard's Breathless, Fritz Lang's M, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and the list goes on.  Only does "Cult Movies" occasionally dip into the "Terrible," with entries such as Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, Joseph Newman's This Island Earth, and Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls. Of course, The Room is the most current example of a cinematic waif with just the kind of large, welcoming family the French's were talking about.  Also, in the terms I am applying here, The Room is definitely a "Terrible" movie:  displaying a sublime, layered ineptitude; perhaps, giving the impression that the filmmaker is inventing the act of film production as part of their process (see:  Doris Wishman), as well as displaying an agressive, even Dada-esque, contempt for subtlety, refinement, or traditional displays of art/entertainment.

Tommy Weisau, director, writer and star of The Room

The "Just Terrible," is inevitably more soul-crushing than the "Terrible."  If the "Terrible" is a slow, delicious twist of a knife, then the "Just Terrible" is a blunt, inelegant blow to the head.  The "Just Terrible," like the "Terrible," may rise out of any realm of cinema production, but are perhaps more likely to creep up from the darkest corners of commercial or mainstream cinema.  Just from recent movie-going memory, Roland Emmerich's 2012, Jimmy Hayward's Jonah Hex, and Louis Leterrier's remake of Clash of the Titans qualify for inclusion among the "Just Terrible" ranks.  All of these movies have the potential to be successfully campy/laughable/enjoyable examples of their respective genres, but all of them are, in my opinion, far from "Terrible," and ultimately, definitively, "Just Terrible."

Josh Brolin as Jonah Hex

For the purposes of this segment, I would like to stick to movies that are, for the most part, considered to be Bad Movies, and look a bit more closely at what pushes a movie just over that line, and headlong into the "Terrible" sublime.  To be clear, I'm not much of a fan of the slash-and-burn criticism that continues to auto-archive in the bottomless cracks of the internet.  For every one of the movies I have already mentioned there is an IMDB post with the heading "I HATED this movie...", although, like a bad movie, there may be kernels of wisdom buried deep within even the most thoughtless, confused commentary.  I certainly don't pretend to connect to everything they told us was a masterpiece in film class (I find a lot of Antonioni to be a slog, and Hitchcock often fails to thrill me), and I am not trying to simply trash a movie that you might deem "Terrible," "Just Terrible," or just pretty darn good.  As always, it's a matter of perspective.  Watching The Room with a group of actors, or an aspiring filmmaker, or a midnight audience of hipsters will no doubt yield very different emotional and/or physical responses to the film. (I recall one student who, without any experience with the world of Bad Movies, approached me about The Room after class, a bit shaken after having seen it.  A "friend" had recommended it as a movie he should see, and he was obviously still trying to grapple with it psychologically days later.  He wanted answers.)

Kyle Vogt and Greg Sestero in The Room      

In reviewing possible films for this segment, I went through a short list of the number of films I had seen in recent years, mostly with my partner Jen (who probably deserves an apology at this point--you're fearless!), as a way to test this binary.  Some films left no doubt as to their "Terrible" status for us, such as the 1959 Mexican production Santa Claus, in which Santa lives in outer space and, with the help of Merlin the Magician, uses his creepy robotic reindeer and his "Rose to Disappear" to deliver presents to children while battling the Devil.  No shit.  Others were definitely "Just Terrible," as in the 1985 cross-dressing comedy Just One of the Guys, a film which seems to have some promising elements, but features lead performances that not so much get under your skin as they do burrow into your flesh.  Similarly, 1984's (please don't click on this!) Rhinestone, starring Sylvester Stallone and Dolly Parton as country singers, or something, would seem to be a cinematic pairing destined for the timeless "Terrible," but...well, no.

Sylvelster Stallone and (Unidentified Actress) in Rhinestone

Other pics we split on:  Larry Cohen's The Stuff (1985) fell just barely on the "Terrible" side for me, whereas it missed the mark for my partner--just the opposite for 1954's Devil Girl From Mars  (we still have Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case I + II to bring us together!).  Some seem like they might qualify for consideration, but maybe prove too bland/competent/uniquely strange/genuinely enjoyable to even enter the running (Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers and John Chu's Step Up 3, as recent examples...not to mention a fun double bill).  Of course, I am always open to suggestions, and please leave yours in the comments section for future segments!

Up first for consideration, as a kind of compliment to the last INSTANT 3 post on "Closeted Themes," is maybe the most badly closeted movie in cinema history, 1953's The Flaming Urge.  Directed by one-time auteur Harold Ericson, The Flaming Urge follows the troubled young man Tom Smith, played by Harold Lloyd Jr., the son of silent film legend Harold Lloyd.  Tom is having problems adjusting to a new town, a new job, and to make it worse, everything seems to be burning down around him.  Fortunately for Tom, the titular "Urge" that he possesses is fire chasing.  Yes, chasing fires, watching fires, being around firetrucks, firemen, fire dogs, not to mention those slides they use to save people from high rise buildings.

A thrilling, dangerous ride in The Flaming Urge

Tom's urges are so strong that they threaten to jeopardize his standing with Mr. Pender, the manager of his new job at the Tie counter of a local department store.  One day, while drawn away from his duties at the Tie counter by the sweet sound of sirens, Tom befriends a local gentleman named Mr. Chalmers who politely asks "haven't I seen you somewhere before?" and seems to share and understanding of Tom's passion for fire chasing.  Of course, Mr. Chalmers is not just another fire enthusiast.  Unbeknownst to Tom, Mr. Chalmers turns out to be the manager of the very department store where Tom is employed.  Mr. Chalmers advises young Tom that maybe instead of chasing  every fire that comes along he should spread it out a bit, as a way to not make his embarrassing urges so obvious.  Mr. Chalmers then reveals that he too enjoys a good fire, and even allows Tom to slide down the fire pole he had installed as a secret getaway from his office!

Jonathan Hale as Mr. Chalmers and Harold Lloyd Jr. as Tom Smith
in The Flaming Urge

Tom learns gradually to temper his urges, with the help from a young, female psychology student, Charlotte Cruickshank, played by Cathy Downs (most notably, Clementine in John Ford's My Darling Clementine).  Equipped with only the first year of a psychology degree, Cathy's pursuit to help Tom with his issues is paralleled by Tom's struggle with the local fire department's fire dog, a pesky animal that he can't seem to shake.  In another frustrating conflict with Tom's boss Mr. Pender, the dog follows Tom back to the department store, crouching low to pull his body covertly along the base of the Tie counter (an impressive animal acting moment that rivals another canine-based television sensation of the early 50's).  Mysteriously disappearing to chase fires was one thing, but now Tom has to explain why the fire dog is following him back to his place of employment.  Not only that, but Tom's idea to create a giant bow tie display is shot down by Mr. Pender, who calls it out as "too flamboyant."

Tom's "flamboyant" bow tie display in The Flaming Urge

Tom and Fire Dog are confronted by Mr. Pender,
played by Byron Foulger, in The Flaming Urge

The climax of The Flaming Urge involves a mysterious fire breaking out in a men's changing room at the company beach party.  Was Tom the culprit?  Will he ever get his job back, given his nearly pyro-maniacal learnings?  Will he ever shake that dog?  I don't want to spoil the finale of The Flaming Urge...but lets just say, even though it seems that Tom gets married to Cathy Cruickshank, remember that final image of the dog running close behind.  Ultimately, The Flaming Urge reminds us that sometimes desire is a lot like a fire dog that just won't leave you alone.  

Who started the fire?  -  The Flaming Urge

Shot on location in Monroe, Michigan, The Flaming Urge captures all the beauty of a highly combustible locale in the early 50's.  A good movie to watch with someone who has a keen eye for subtext.  With a mercifully brief running time of around 67 minutes, The Flaming Urge is delightfully, flamboyantly "Terrible."

The siren sounds of the Monroe fire engines strike the ears
of young Tom for the first time in The Flaming Urge

Have suggestions for "Terrible? or, Just Terrible?"  

Please let me know, and feel free to comment on any of the films mentioned in this segment in the Comment section.

Thanks to the Neo-Futurists of Chicago who tipped me off to this gem and others through their "It Came From the Neo-Futurarium" series.  Check it out.

 

INSTANT 3: Closeted Themes

One possible reading of the film I addressed in my last post, Bad Company (1972), is one that puts a queer lens to the relationship between Jake (Jeff Bridges) and Drew (Barry Brown), considering that their characters could be read as the romantic coupling at the center of the film.  In one revealing scene, Brown's character is the only one in the gang who refuses to have sex with a female prairie prostitute.  His excuse is that he's "saving it for marriage," but there's definitely other tensions in the air.

Jeff Bridges and Barry Brown
on the set of Bad Company

For this second installment of "Instant 3" I want to recommend three flicks available to watch instantly on your Netflix queue that you won't find in the "Gay and Lesbian" section, though they should probably all share that genre classification.   In the age of the "Bro-mance" (a term I use reluctantly), which are too often just another excuse for naturalizing audiences to homophobic punchlines, it seems necessary to champion films that are presenting complex and under-represented presentations of gender and sexuality.  I am always interested in movies that are dealing with issues of masculinity and male relationships that don't fit into cookie-cutter categories of social expectation (although not available to "Watch Instantly," check out Jerry Schatzberg's Grand Prix Cannes Winner Scarecrow (1973), Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky (1976), Alex and Andrew Smith's The Slaughter Rule (2002), for starters).

David Morse and Ryan Gosling
in The Slaughter Rule

The following recommendations (all pretty male oriented, I'm aware--but, please send me your suggestions for their female counterparts!)  include two regrettably under-seen pictures that rank among the best films of 2008-2009, and a landmark indie film that most have probably seen, but maybe haven't considered as the gayest work of a great director:

1) Bronson (2008) - Tom Hardy has been sadly underused since his tour-de-force performance in Nicolas Winding Refn's portrait of England's most violent and artistic prisoner (most notably breathing a bit of life into Christopher Nolan's overwritten Inception); once you see Bronson you may understand why, since a character like Mikey Peterson, aka Charlie Bronson, only comes along once in a lifetime.  Bronson begins as if it were a typical bio-pic, but succeeds by never acting as if one film could "tell the story" of a life, instead combining a grandiose visual sensibility with a larger-than-life subject to create a biography that is truly an avant-garde example of it's genre.  Bronson is plot-less in the best sense; not a novel, but a painting.  The film alternately uses voice-over, staged sequences, and slightly skewed locations as a way to stay expressively focused on it's complex central character.                                                                 Bronson never quite acts as you suspect it should:  in one moment bombastic, then nearly silent; at times maddeningly masculine, then utterly feminine.  Hardy is at the heart of all of this, giving a performance of remarkable technical skill; a combination of the most refined comedic moments of Buster Keaton and the most intensely frightening moments of Ben Kingsley...but with prison workout muscles.  The character of Bronson is progressively ushered through the film's narrative by an impressively queer supporting cast, including Hugh Ross as Bronson's Uncle Jack, Matt King as his fighting promoter, Paul, and James Lance as his prison art instructor, Phil.  Bronson's relationship with all of these men is physically measured in a curious fashion, contrasting the depiction of his struggles to relate to the women in his life.  Of course, in one sense, it's a prison movie, but one that never uses the sexuality of prison life as a cheap punchline, but explores it in an almost absurdist manner.  For a film that ultimately leaves us with one of the most brutal images of confinement in prison movie history, Bronson is terrifically funny and fantastically colorful at times, as well as easily being the most quotable film of the last ten years (my favorite line being Uncle Jack's assessment of Bronson's facial hair:  "That's an outstanding set of mustaches").  I hope to catch up with Refn's other work soon, including the Pusher trilogy, Fear X with John Turturro, Valhalla Rising (also available to "Watch Instantly" on Netflix), and the upcoming Walter Hill homage, Drive.

Tom Hardy in Bronson

2) Big Fan (2009) - Robert D. Siegel had an impressive couple of years as a screenwriter, first with the Darren Aaronofsky directed The Wrestler (2008), followed closely by his directorial debut, Big Fan.  Featuring a lead dramatic turn by the masterful stand-up comedian/writer Patton Oswalt as NY Giants fan and toll booth attendant Paul Aufiero, the casting is a bit of a gamble, but works perfectly paired with the scruffy desperation of Kevin Corrigan as his best friend Sal, a character who we know dangerously little about other than he lives for Giants football.  If there is another high point to Sal's existence, it's curling up in bed and listening to Paul call in to their favorite late-night sports talk show with his prepared monologues railing against the Philadelphia Eagles.
The film is essentially about the relationship between two men leading a poor working class existence (they can't actually afford tickets to the game, but travel whenever they can to view the game on their portable tube from the stadium parking lot), and Siegel understands that his compassion as a writer/director for these characters is the key to the success of the film.  In contrast, what the current spate of "Bro-mances" miss is that there has to be a romance between the writer and the characters, and every turn of Big Fan shows an all-too-rare affection for the losers at hand.  Paul and Sal's fandom is one that is private and affectionately drawn, as they play out the arguments of an old married couple arguing over which soda to drink.  When they attempt to make their passion public, as in the parking lot scene where they fail at getting a "Here we go Gi-ants!" chant going, wandering through a crowd that they are trying to perform along with but are obviously separate from, they fail.  This separateness of Paul and Sal's fandom stands in contrast to the depiction of the Eagle's lair, which Paul eventually infiltrates.  In the lair, Paul confronts his radio-show nemesis, Philadelphia Phil (Michael Rappaport, perfectly cast), whose booster-ism is portrayed as a communal, public experience, where everyone chants in unison, "Gi-ants SUCK!"  This chant eventually becomes muddled, as the camera focuses in on Paul's shaken reaction to the barrage of noise, now sounding more like "This Guy SUCKS!"  It's this moment that is the character-based climax of the film, but for a film that has been characterized too often as a "dark character study," Big Fan leaves it's characters in a pretty sweet place.
In the same way that Bronson is a prison film that doesn't play by the rules of its genre,  Big Fan is going to disappoint those looking for a typical "sports" movie (or, perhaps, something more along the lines of 1996's The Fan--the triumphant sound cue in Big Fan is less Nine Inch Nails, and more Tanya Tucker), but unfortunately what might be missed is a film that is pretty expansive in its implications.  Big Fan is not a "small" film at all, particularly because it's showing us something about fan culture that feels nearly unprecedented in American film, and doing so in the uncompromising spirit of the early 70's character study.

Patton Oswalt and Kevin Corrigan in Big Fan

3)  Reservoir Dogs (1992) - We know that Quentin Tarantino had a thing for queer readings from his screen time in the rightfully forgotten indie Sleep With Me (1994), which may have been a call to look back at 1992's Reservoir Dogs in the same light.  It's hard to believe that Reservoir Dogs is coming up on a 20 year anniversary, but in retrospect it holds up remarkably well, and unlike a number of pictures that surrounded it and attempted to copy its style (I'm talking to you, Boondock Saints fans), Dogs doesn't feel helplessly locked into the early 90's.  The film has already been unpacked through a queer lens better than I could ever hope to here, so I will spare you the details.  Suffice it to say that if you haven't checked out this picture in a while, or haven't seen it at all, it is definitely worth revisiting for a number of reasons.  Although it has probably come to be considered what I often refer to (in my best faux-macho TBS promo voice) as "Movies for Guys Who Like Movies!!!" fare, it is hard to recall a film that subverted portrayals of masculinity in such a uniquely stylish manner.

Harvey Keitel and Steve Buscemi in Reservoir Dogs

"Bad Company" dir., Robert Benton, 1972

Jeff Bridges in Bad Company

There is a scene in Bad Company where a 23-year old Jeff Bridges, playing Jake Rumsey, the leader of a young gang of thieves who are wandering west from Missouri in a dodge of their being rounded up to fight for the Union, berates his young travelling companions for not knowing how to clean the rabbit they have just haphazardly riddled with pistol fire.  It's still early in their journey, and the goal of their travels is not even a glimmer on the horizon of the story being told.  A moment before, the six boys had lined up, each one holding his pistol in an awkward display of violent posturing, and now they slowly shuffle in around Jake, who has become their father as he moves forward from the pack and hunches over the dead animal while opening his knife.  "How can you not know how to clean a rabbit?" Jake demands, as he begins to display the process, throwing in the occasional bit of narration.  Even though we have seen the rabbit blown apart in graphic detail (a nod to the "rabbit hunt sequence" in Jean Renoir's 1939 The Rules of the Game),  now, as Jake cleans the rabbit, we see only Jake's face as he tears with progressive unease at the flesh.  We hear the skin being torn away and the squish of guts set against a series of close-ups on the members of the young gang who are not only disgusted by the sight, but with themselves.  The scene goes on for a while, pushing the sound of each violent gesture of the process to an unsettling degree, holding steadily on the faces of the boys.  Bridges performance takes over the camera toward the end of the scene, as his instructions become progressively mumbled, and we see the weight of what he's done creep quietly, slowly across his face.  The boys need to eat.  Jake holds up the skinned rabbit, and tosses it back into the dirt.

Jeff Bridges as Jake Rumsey

 Bad Company is a movie that has dropped off the radar a bit, but is definitely worth revisiting, not only as a reflection on the career of Jeff Bridges, who seems to have nearly reached guru-like status over the past few years, but for some indelible scene work, beautifully shot and acted.  The film was impeccably photographed by Gordon Willis, whose credits include two small films that sandwich Bad Company in his filmography, The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather:  Part II (1974), perhaps another reason why Bad Company was lost in the shuffle.  Of course, it may also have something to do with the writer/director of the film, Robert Benton, having previously penned the picture that nearly began the Hollywood Renaissance, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde

For a movie carrying a "PG" rating, Bad Company is every bit as provocative and unsettling as Bonnie and Clyde, (and, another example of a 70's film that would never receive a "PG" rating today) although Bad Company seems to want to masquerade as a "buddy" comedy from time to time, accented uncomfortably in a few scenes by a jaunty, barroom piano score.  It's hard to tell whether or not the contrast of this light-fingered score with a rather horrific massacre scene that happens late in the film was an intentional juxtaposition or a studio attempt to offset the brutal truth of the scene.  In the scene the boys murder an elder gang of character actors (including David Huddleston, Geoffrey Lewis, and Ed Lauter), designed to mirror their own thieving gang in the film.  Lewis even goes to the extent of playing his death comically, slumping over with his arms out like a wind-up doll that's wound down, and Lauter's exclamation of "I'm dead!  The little rat got me!" just before he is gunned down in close-up has the air of a comedic punchline, when, in fact, everything about the scene is cold blooded.  The boys whose stomachs turned over cleaning a rabbit are now murderers, and seem to have come around to the fact that murder is survival in the West.

Joshua Hill Lewis, Barry Brown, Jerry Houser, and Geoffrey Lewis
in Bad Company

Bad Company is a revisionist western that comes after a series of films that used the western genre to reassess morality in the Viet-nam war era.  Another movie that was breaking the rules of film violence alongside Benton's Bonnie and Clyde was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, with its famous opening montage of violence; a scene reminiscent in style of Eisenstein's "Odessa Staircase" sequence in the silent Russian masterwork, Battleship Potempkin, but with less accent on who the "bad guys" might be.  (As a side note, this scene, which was notorious in its time for sending patrons out of the theater vomiting, which was considered so violent for its time that it spawned parody, would routinely strike my film students as "pretty tame").  Bad Company comes at the tail end of an era when the western had collided head on with the counter-culture, from the "spaghetti" westerns of Leone and Corbucci to the pinnacle of the "acid western" with Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970), as well as a number of American westerns that explored the myth of the west through a new lens of alienation, including Monte Hellman's Ride in the Whirlwind (1965) and The Shooting (1968), Peter Fonda's Easy Rider follow-up, The Hired Hand (1971), and, perhaps most notably, Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).

Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo

Maybe Bad Company dropped at a bad time, amid a number of films that possibly overshadowed it's small scale, but there are also problems with the film's characterizations, particularly the central character of Drew Dixon, played by Barry Brown (a young actor who unfortunately committed suicide in the late 70's as a result of severe depression and alcoholism).  The character's arc is not strong enough to sustain the story in a plot-based way, and the performance has alternately false and truthful moments to a frustrating extent.  It seems that Bad Company could have been a classic with real staying power, but was foiled by a few performance, sound, and editing choices.  You see moments of brilliance in all of the actors here (did I mention a young John Savage?--terrific), and the brilliance of the script shines through at every turn, but it's the small choices--how we get from scene to scene, and how that affects the progressive, complicated arc of the main character--that ultimately hinder the film.  Still, Bad Company is worth checking out for the inventive and perfectly drawn ways it refuses the "slick" violence  of so many westerns that came before it .  The gun play is clumsy and hapless, an often startling commentary on the gun play of the John Wayne/John Ford era.  In one scene, Big Joe, the leader of the older gang (Huddlestein, who would go on to play another counter-part to Bridges), twirls his pistol in an attempt to impress the other men.  The gesture is decidedly unimpressive, and made only more uncomfortable by Huddlestein's closing line reading:  "I'll tell ya boys...I'm the oldest whore on the block."

Jeff Bridges and Barry Brown in Bad Company

Aside from the homage to Renoir, there is another interesting reference that returns a couple of times in the film:  Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.  In one scene, Drew reads from the book to the impatient audience of the young gang, but Jake seems to be the only one who is truly interested.  Just before the final moment of the film, the gang torn apart, and the necessity for criminality seemingly second nature at this point, Jake pauses a moment and asks Drew, "Say, how'd that Jane Eyre turn out?"  In one of Brown's best moments in the film, he replies "Oh, fine, fine."  The ending of the film will not surprise fans of Bonnie and Clyde, although only the abruptness is comparable, not the actual events of the final scene.  Bad Company leaves us with some interesting questions, and doesn't simply act as a Viet-nam era allegory, but plays well in relation to both the history of the 1860's and the 1960's.

David Lean's Oliver Twist

Although I wasn't aware of it in my initial viewing, I should also throw in that the film's characters are loosely based on the characters in Oliver Twist--yet another lens through which to revisit this lost gem.  

Robert Benton

Director/writer Robert Benton would go on to write the first Superman movie, and direct Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Places in the Heart (1984), and (with Bridges, again) Nadine (1987).  

INSTANT 3: Documentaries

Keep flipping past the same flicks in your "Watch Instantly" Netflix queue?  The films they have reserved for instant view can be a mixed bag, so here are a few short recommendations for the Documentary category:

1)  Marwencol (2010) -  The less you know about this one going in the better.You might classify it as an "Outsider Artist" picture, along the lines of Jessica Yu's incredible In the Realms of the Unreal, but Marwencol has its own style, featuring some stunning small-scale cinematography.  You may find yourself wanting to freeze the frame from time to time just to savor some of the images, which achieve an expressiveness that is confounding and magical.  Can't say anymore.  Not only  a 

a great documentary about an uncommon artist, but one of the great overlooked
films from last year, period.

Mark Hogancamp in Marwencol

 2)  Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) - Once again, a movie that is better experienced without too much pre-screening information.  Maybe my favorite film of last year (next to the subject of my last post, True Grit).  A great double-bill with Orson Welles' F for Fake (1973), this first film by street/pop artist Banksy upends the documentary form in a similar way, leaving all sorts of questions in it's wake about authorship in art, while simultaneously giving a satisfying overview of the street art movement.

A "Banksy" or a "Brainwash"?

3)   Rivers and Tides:  Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time (2003) - Ok, so all of these Documentary recommendations are films about art and artists, but none of them are as breathtaking as Rivers and Tides. Andy Goldsworthy is a pioneer of earth art, working with natural materials
and landscapes to create astounding works of impermanence, some of them lasting only
a few seconds.  In fact, my favorite scenes from this are of his more brief works: the "Red Waterfall" scene, as well as the final shots of the picture, which subvert our desire for a final display of something "big," instead leaving us with this incredible moment of childlike simplicity and joy.
If you haven't seen this one, it's about time.

A Goldsworthy, for sure

"True Grit" dir., Ethan and Joel Coen, 2010

The latest adaptation of the 1968 Charles Portis novel True Grit is a surprising entry in the filmography of the sibling autuers Joel and Ethan Coen, though not surprising in the ways that we've come to expect from the blatant narrative upsets of recent pictures like No Country For Old Men (2007) and A Serious Man (2009). True Grit opts to follow the rules, all the way through to a couple of climatic moments of self-reflexive joy.  True Grit is, perhaps, the most conventional narrative that the Coen Brothers have ever produced, and even though this seems like it might lead to a film whose outcome has less weight than the aforementioned triumphs, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit

In True Grit the Coens are working in a storytelling mode that is simultaneously faithful to the original text, while effortlessly playing like an evolution of their own unique aesthetic.  As in No Country for Old Men, the confines of the literature they are adapting suits their visual sensibility remarkably well.  Credit needs to go here to one of my cinematic heroes: cinematographer Roger Deakins.  Deakin's carefully negotiates the Texas and New Mexico shooting locations of True Grit in a way that does not need to linger excessively, and captures the landscape with stark precision, while moving us along at a sure clip in the hunt through the Western Arkansas hills of the story.  Surely, True Grit ranks among the most memorable of Deakin's work; with the Coens alone that includes the surreal hallways of Barton Fink, the golden lanes of The Big Lebowski, the white expanses of Fargo, and the black and white perfection of The Man Who Wasn't There.  Solely based on those works, Deakin's achievements would be remarkable enough, but add to it the work he's done with an array of other directors over the last 5 years:  Revolutionary Road and Doubt in 2008, and the film that must have prepped him most significantly for the challenges of True Grit, the gorgeous 2007 western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, just to name a few.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

True Grit is yet again a very different type of western than The Assassination of Jesse James, but would still be considered a "superwestern," as critic/founder of Cahiers du Cinema, Andre Bazin would have it.  Bazin coined the term "superwestern" in the early 70's to address the western that transcended through theme the plot conventions of commercial westerns; a western that, as he put it, "would be ashamed to be just itself." Bazin was addressing the post-WWII superwesterns of King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946), Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952), and George Steven's Shane (1953), but the post-Unforgiven superwesterns that lead to True Grit through the 90's and 00's are important to note as well, including Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995), Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol.2 (2004), Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melquiedes Estrada (2005), John Hillcoat's The Proposition (2005), James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma (2007), and Gore Verbinski's recent surrealist-tinged cinema homage, Rango.  All of these pictures, ironically, seem to contain more actual grit than either version of True Grit.

Rango

In contrast to this collection of modern superwesterns, True Grit is decidedly Sunday matinee fare.  Even in contrast to the Coen Brother's entire filmography, True Grit is probably the least unruly of all of their narratives.  Even O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the film of theirs that sits most closely to True Grit in terms of audience appeal (and likelihood to appear on ABC's Family Channel), is layered in its references and squirrely in its storytelling in a way that makes True Grit seem uncomplicated in comparison.  The storytelling in True Grit is so stalwart and enjoyable that attention is almost drawn away from the subtle ways in which the Coens can't help but frustrate the perfectly calm gallop of young Mattie's quest.  For instance, the Coen's take time to show us Mattie's stern negotiation of the ponies with Col. Stonehill ("I do not entertain hypotheticals...The world itself is vexing enough"), and reveal further aspects of her character through the way in which she body-blocks Cogburn in her first attempt to employ him, all the while rolling his cigarette, and ultimately backing a man twice her size out the door in the opposite direction.  Later in the film, the script strays slightly in a chance meeting with what at first appears to be a brown bear riding a horse, and is revealed to be the reincarnation of Jack Elam (actually, actor Ed Corbin, brother of Northern Exposure and No Country's Barry Corbin), in a scene that  might be considered the True Grit equivalent of the Mika Yanagita scene in Fargo.

Ed Corbin in True Grit

The Coen's often allow us time to get used to the routines and mannerisms of their characters in this same way (think Lebowski), but it's in how they handle the unexpected that we truly come to know them (think A Serious Man).  Rooster and Mattie are cut from the same cloth--the true grit of the title refers every bit as much to her as it does to him, and, as characters, there is not much that alarms them.  Their emotional wells are not deep, and their overall personalities leave something to be desired.  We see each of them work awkwardly toward moments of levity--Rooster's attempt at entertaining Mattie with rambling, growled stories of ex-wives and failed endeavors, and Mattie's attempt at quelling the tension between Cogburn and LaBoeuf by enacting something called "The Midnight Caller"--but never get the sense that they really have it in them.

Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit

I have often suspected that if there is a fatal flaw in the Coen's films it's a somewhat cruel detachment from their characters.  It took No Country For Old Men to reveal this aspect of detachment in Fargo for me, but True Grit's characterizations seem perfectly perched between a realm of pulp western and mythic journey, and in this sense the trappings of the genre and the source material suit the Coens perfectly.  As a genre piece, I found True Grit deeply moving (even the third time around).  In the finale of the film's plot, Rooster takes action beyond the want of Mattie's fees to save Mattie from a snakebite, driving her horse Blackie relentlessly into the night.  In a visual move that seems to me a unique risk within the Coen's films, the skies behind the huddled, wounded pair of protagonists are subtly changed to green screen inserts, estranging the tale ever so slightly from the realistic landscapes to which we've become accustomed, readying us for the final passage of the film, which shows little mercy.

Jeff Bridges in True Grit

Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man

 The Coens like to "gang up" on their characters, so to speak.  There may be no better example of this than the slow, brutal build of punishments they dished out to Larry Gopnick in their last film, 2009's A Serious Man, but their films are full of nearly action-less heroes who do little more than witness the events swirling around them; from Barton Fink to the Dude, Ed Crane to Ed Tom Bell.  Throughout all of these films, the Coens are continually interested in subverting classic character and story archetypes, fueled by an obsession with the comedic rhythms of Preston Sturges, the films of Cornell Wilde, and film noir in general.  True Grit ultimately seems most interested in subverting the expectations of those who are expecting the Coens to "perform" like the Coens again.  If A Serious Man is a meditation on the relationship between our moral actions and their worldly consequences, and an indictment of the idea of narrative meaning within the Jewish faith (and the lyrics of Jefferson Airplane), then True Grit is a straight arrow bible story, unfolding with unflinching morality from the fade away of its opening verse from Proverbs:  "The wicked flee when no man pursueth."  (For David Lynch fans:  True Grit is to A Serious Man what The Straight Story is to Lost Highway, perhaps?)

The finale of A Serious Man

"Fill your hands..."
Rooster Cogburn faces off with Lucky Ned and his men in True Grit

Ultimately, it is the epilogue of True Grit that endows the film with the same weight of questions contained within their previous masterworks.  What we get in those final scenes is Mattie a quarter of a century later, dressed in black as she returns to see Cogburn, who is now a feature in a Wild West Show.  Mattie has now had a part of her body taken away, mirroring Cogburn's condition; this time an arm, in contrast to Cogburn's eye.  It is an uncompromising vision of Mattie that we get in these final scenes.  Her run-in with the ragged Wild West showmen allows us a reassessment of her character, as well as the myth of the "west"-ern, as she turns a quick heel and coldly barks at one of them, "Keep your seat, trash." 

Elizabeth Marvel in True Grit

In those final moments, as we ruminate on the opening verse, are we to read Mattie as a triumphant, transformed hero?  A bitter, maimed spinster?  A quiet rebel, content with her actions and at piece with herself?  A feminist, western icon, or an anti-feminist icon for the religious right?  Will the real Mattie Ross please stand up?

DOUBLE FEATURE: "Baby Doll" dir., Elia Kazan, 1956 + "Sucker Punch" dir., Zach Snyder, 2011

Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams were heating up film audiences and the Catholic church in the mid-50's with a film that holds up extremely well, apart from the tremendous controversy that surrounded it upon release and the landmark it has become in changing the rating system since then.  Baby Doll involves a destitute Southern cotton-gin owner, Archie Lee Meighan, played with perfect, balding, sweaty desperation by Karl Malden, and his soon to be bride, the 18 year-old "baby doll" of this picture, played by Caroll Baker.  Everything is crumbling around Meighan as the picture picks up just days before he can marry his captive bride, and, more importantly to him, consummate the marriage.  Malden's portrayal is perverse in its physicality, and our perception of his perversity is compounded by the structure of the opening scene, which finds Archie Lee peeking a glimpse of Baby Doll through a ragged hole he has made in the already crumbling plaster wall of the decrpit Tiger Tail Mansion.  This is our introduction to Baby Doll, and knowing neither the relationship between her and Archie or why she is sleeping in a baby crib with the slats down (all of their proper furniture has been taken away), this image establishes a rather unsettling tone from the get-go, even for a modern audience.  I can only imagine the ways in which it aroused Cardinal Spellman upon the time of its release.

Francis Cardinal Spellman

From the IMDB:  When the film was released in 1956, it was enormously controversial for its extremely risqué subject matter. The Legion of Decency condemned the film for its "carnal suggestiveness". Francis Cardinal Spellman condemned the film in a stunning attack from the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral two days before the film opened, saying that the film had been "responsibly judged to be evil in concept" and was certain that it would "exert an immoral and corrupting influence on those who see it", and exhorted all Catholics to refrain from patronizing the film "under pain of sin". Cardinal Spellman's condemnation of the film led to the Legion of Decency's first-ever nationwide boycott of an American-made film produced by a major studio. All over the country, almost 20 million Catholics protested the film and picketed theaters that showed it. The Catholic boycott nearly killed the film; it was cancelled by 77% of theaters scheduled to show it, and it only made a meager $600,000 at the box office. The film was also condemned by Time Magazine, which called it the dirtiest American-made motion picture that had ever been legally exhibited. Surprisingly, despite the film's sordid elements, the Production Code Administration gave it a seal of approval, but only after nearly a year of arguments.  After this film, the PCA drifted farther and farther away from its traditional guidelines until it was replaced by the MPAA ratings system in 1968.

Eli Wallach and Caroll Baker in Baby Doll

Make no mistake, Baby Doll is still quite the turn-on.  This is due, in part, to a performer who had mastered Kazan's acting style, who had every twisted, over-heated motivation of his character firmly in his grasp:  Eli Wallach.  Add to that the exceptionally uninhibited reactions of Caroll Baker to Wallach's advances, and the intimate, pressing camera work of Boris Kaufman (who had also worked with Kazan in On the Waterfront), and it's easy to understand why Baby Doll earns its reputation as one of cinema's most memorably erotic pictures. Particularly, Wallach's portrayal of the cotton baron Silva Vacarro is what pulls all of this together.  I imagine there were a lot of options for Kazan in terms of casting, and although Wallach may not leap to mind as the ideal choice, you can't imagine an actor handling this challenging character so well, as he weighs his options of revenge on Meighan, alternately driven by anger and lust as he chases Baby Doll around the abandoned cars, rusty water pump, and rickety swing set of the once prosperous plantation mansion yard.  Having sent Archie on a wild goose chase, the dance of Silva and Baby Doll around that lawn is the true heart of the picture.

Karl Malden in Baby Doll

The climax of Baby Doll falters a bit, as Archie returns and slowly realizes that Silva's seduction has fully taken hold of Baby Doll.  Here is where the picture should really kick into gear--the first third has belonged to Malden and Baker, the second third to Wallach and Baker, and now we get the three leads of the film together, not to mention the creepy, vacant portrayal of Baby Doll's Aunt Rose Comfort by Mildred Dunnock, occasionally getting involved from her kitchen post (in a great bit of business early on in the film where we are introduced to Aunt Rose, we learn that the Meighan's have a telephone, but cannot rely on Aunt Rose to answer it as it tends to frighten her, sending her running about like a frantic bird).  In the final scenes of Baby Doll the film reveals itself most as a farce, climaxing with Archie waving a pistol and chasing Silva outdoors and into the trees.  The film is redeemed with its unsettling and somewhat ambiguous ending, though it is hard to tell what the overall intent tonally was for Baby Doll.  Kazan would go on to make a true masterpiece the next year, a sort of prototype for Sidney Lumet's Network featuring Andy Griffith in the role of his career, 1957's A Face in the Crowd.  Even though all of these pictures share themes that would play off of one another nicely, I can't help but bounce Kazan and William's Baby Doll off of a chance cinematic encounter with a more recent Baby Doll:  Emily Browning in Zach Snyder's meta-cinematic mainstream skull-fuck, Sucker Punch.

Emily Browning in Sucker Punch

It's impossible to talk about a film like Sucker Punch with the same critical language as Baby Doll.  Baby Doll is subversive and sensual and engaging in a way that Sucker Punch is not.  Sucker Punch is deliberately disorienting and engaged in post-modern pastiche in a way that turns Baby Doll into just another obscure footnote.  Although both films are aware of our cultural obsession with dangerously youthful sexuality, Baby Doll roots that obsession in the primary male characters, whereas Sucker Punch is clearly throwing that obsession back at us for analysis, and doing so in a daring narrative manner.

I can't say that I have seen all of Snyder's previous work, or liked any of it, although what I have seen has always contained some successful passages.  In his remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004), featuring a memorable performance by the stellar Sara Polley, he starts off with a bang, but ultimately muddles what makes the original the most successful of Romero social allegories.  And his version of graphic novel purist Alan Moore's The Watchmen was entirely too bloated and wrongheaded in Snyder's choice to maintain the static nature of panel-based imagery, although, like Dawn, you can't deny it has a captivating opening sequence. (I won't get into the number of papers I read on his cartoonish-looking 300, which seemed to be the go-to macho movie for my male film students to write about even years after its release).  Likewise, Sucker Punch thrives most fully on the thrilling shifts of perception that it drags the audience into without warning that exist within the first 40 minutes of the film.  Once we catch on to the narrative trope of how we escape into the fantasy sequences, they lose some of their mystique.

 What then becomes fascinating about the film is the way in which we get to those sequences, and what it suggests about us culturally, particularly the ways in which we avoid serious narratives about violent abuse and exploitation.  Snyder's Baby Doll character is never framed in a realistic manner; in Sucker Punch  we are always in a fictive realm, but the truth the film is trying to uncover always seems to be one pull of a curtain away...just past the Tim Burton movie, or the Gilliam sequence, or the fantasy epic...  Even the opening Warner Brothers logo is layered on a theater curtain that opens to reveal the first "stage" of the film, containing an image of Baby Doll that slowly transitions from a clearly computer generated image into a real actress.  This initial camera movement brings to mind the ideas of the great German Theater maker Bertolt Brecht, and pushes them into the realm of modern screen culture as we literally travel through the 4th wall of a computer animated image, only to have it close behind us, leaving us with flesh and blood.  But Sucker Punch is slippery--even though we are initially flung into what appears to be a dangerous situation of parental abuse, Snyder is always reminding us how removed we are from the very real consequences of that violence, turning the entire incident into a music video, evoking pop nostalgia, fetishizing in slo-mo every move of a revenge fantasy so familiar that we never even question the horror of how easily we go along with it.  Like Brecht, I suspect Snyder wants us to reflect on that aspect of our own mode of spectating, as he continues to jerk the yolk that he so gently dresses us with in the opening passages, leaping from fantasy to fantasy, always hinged upon something truly frightening, and always concealing either an act of exploitation (Baby Doll's hidden dance) or a horrific act of violence (Baby Doll's lobotomy).

John Hamm in Sucker Punch

So, why wasn't this an art-house release instead of an I-MAX release?  I guess because Sucker Punch isn't Sucker Punch if it exists outside of the mainstream.  If it did, it would have to be called something like...Fair Warning.  Ultimately, there are going to be enough critics and audience who will write off Sucker Punch as a misogynistic failure, at worst, or an inept attempt at cheerful exploitation, at best.  I think it's clear why it wasn't so well received as commercial product:  it has a brain.  Not unlike Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009), that brain is firmly wrapped up inside a love of movies, but also takes very seriously the impact that movies have on the attitudes of a culture that is saturated with them.  Snyder even reaches beyond the realm of movies with this work, evoking multiple aspects of mediated cultural experience, particularly video-game culture.  But, enough shots have been taken at "fan boys" and "video game nerds" in critique of this film, shoving the movie off onto them, as if it were their fault.  I think Snyder casts his criticisms beyond that demographic. Sucker Punch is looking back at all of us, lobotomy spike firmly in hand, asking a really good question.