Element of Surprise

Simply put, GET SMART is the best Alan Arkin movie that I’ve seen on my birthday since THE ROCKETEER. Is any greater praise really needed? If it is, then I’ll say that all things considered, it’s easy to imagine this movie turning out much, much worse. Maybe I was just in a good mood, maybe expectations have been lowered these days, but I wound up having a pretty good time with the thing. It gets better as it goes along and even if I wasn’t consistently in hysterics, I did have a grin on my face a good chunk of the time.


I haven’t paid much attention to episodes of the GET SMART series for a long time, but I have a vague recollection of some episodes featuring Maxwell Smart acting like a moron as usual through much of it, then at the end he’s still able to punch out the bad guys regardless. So he wasn’t a total Clouseau-like idiot. These odd tonal issues that I remember meant that the film version could have been all sorts of things. The Bond spoof has been done many times by now, so instead the resulting film directed by Peter Segal and written by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember aims to be a straight spy comedy with lots of action mixed in there. It’s a thin line it has to walk and maybe it doesn’t always succeed—this isn’t a movie about plot, after all—but there are definitely enough laughs to give it a passing grade. At the very least, it’s definitely better than THE NUDE BOMB.


Not that there’s a lot of point in going over the plot, but anyway: Steve Carell’s Maxwell Smart is a CONTROL analyst who wants to be a field agent but Arkin’s Chief insists that he’s too valuable where he is. The secret headquarters of the agency is housed within the Smithsonian, a nice touch. When CONTROL security is breached and the identities of all field agents are compromised, Smart is assigned to investigate with new partner Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), who has recently undergone extensive plastic surgery so she won’t be recognized. Naturally, the hotshot 99 has to put up with Smart's inexperience and clumsiness, as well-meaning as he may be. Dwayne Johnson is hotshot Agent 23, Terence Stamp is Siegfried, BORAT’s Ken Davitian is Siegfried’s second in command and James Caan is the President.


It gets off to a slightly shaky start, particularly in how the attack on CONTROL is handled confusingly, but it picks up soon enough for the simple reason that it actually becomes pretty funny. Not always uproarious, but enough to get by. There’s a stretch in the middle where it actually plays like the basic situations and dialogue could have come from an old episode of the show and it works extremely well at times. Carell doesn’t do a Don Adams impression but you could sense how Adams would have played some of this in his performance. Of course, there’s plenty of action, especially in the climax, but by that point it had built up enough goodwill for me that I was willing to go with it.


The chemistry between Carell and Hathaway is better than expected, particularly considering the lameness of the plastic surgery explanation. By this point it’s no surprise how good a comic actor Carell is but it still has to be mentioned how much he creates a fully-realized character even in this context. Hathaway is enjoyable as well, maybe pulling off the role as well as anyone in her age group could. But most of all in the film I enjoyed how funny Alan Arkin is allowed to be and it was a pleasant surprise that the movie clearly knew enough not to waste his presence. The unexpurgated version of a line he has which has already been featured in all the tv ads was probably the single biggest laugh of the film for me. Terence Stamp doesn’t get that much of an opportunity, though there is something wonderful in how he replies “No,” to Carell in the obligatory “Would you believe…” bit. James Caan really just has an extended cameo as the dimwit President, but I’d like to think that in putting him in a scene with Arkin somebody here got a kick out of reuniting the stars of FREEBIE AND THE BEAN over thirty years later (Now if only we could get a DVD…).


In trying to be a straight action-comedy the film never tries to be too much like the series but there are enough nods here and there that I got the feeling that it regards the show with affection, even if it knew enough not to attempt a slavish recreation. I won’t make too big a thing out of it, but it is an enjoyable summer movie with a handful of big laughs. Truthfully, I don’t even really know why I wrote this. But GET SMART was the right sort of birthday movie for the weekend and it allowed me the treat of once again seeing how funny both Steve Carell and Alan Arkin can be. That's all that needs to be said.

They Call Them Millions

Words cannot express how thrilling the opportunity to see Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME AT THE WEST at the Academy in Beverly Hills really is. Billed as the west coast premiere of the new restoration, the night was made slightly better for me when I walked up to the box office, money in hand, and had a ticket handed to me with no payment required. Maybe someone had an extra that they left behind when they picked up theirs up at will call. Maybe the Academy somehow knew that my birthday was the next day and decided to give me a little present. Anyway, the woman rebuffed my efforts to pay and simply said “Buy somebody a ticket to a movie sometime,” before waving me off. Calling it a bargain doesn’t do it justice.


Large theaters like this one were made to show ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. That has to be said. I’ve seen the epic numerous times already, but watching it unfold this time on such a huge screen with that Techniscope imagery and unrivaled power of the Ennio Morricone score occasionally came close to bringing tears to my eyes. Not necessarily because of the story but because of the immense beauty of all the elements that Leone assembled into this unrivaled piece of art. Claudia Cardinale, that first shot of Henry Fonda, the crevices in Charles Bronson’s face that we see during those super extreme close-ups, Gabriele Ferzetti’s desire to see the Pacific, Jason Robards on top of that train car, Claudia Cardinale. It may only partly be about what “The West” really was but it certainly is about a love for the western, for all films, for Claudia Cardinale, that can’t simply be put into words.


The film was introduced by Barry Allen of Paramount’s Film Preservation and Archival Resources department who explained the nature of this restoration in some detail, making a point to state that this restoration had been done entirely on film, not digital. The version of the film shown on Friday night was essentially, as far as I can tell, the cut that I have been familiar with for several years now and have on DVD, though this print had no Paramount logos at the head or tail. There has been discussion through the years of cuts longer by just a few minutes or considerably more, but that was not the case here. It certainly remains longer than what Paramount released in 1969, but it’s no different from what has been seen and available in the past few years. So in terms of restoration we’re presumably talking about the actual materials, not any footage which has long been unseen. I don’t know if this is the way it should be, but this is the way it is.


Thinking about the nature of the narrative, I found myself paying attention to a sequence of events in the middle section and I know I’m not the first two point out some continuity issues here. When Claudia Cardinale’s Jill is confronted by Henry Fonda’s Frank, his appearance leads into a flashback at a cliff dwelling with him and Gabriele Ferzetti’s Morton. Or is it a flashback? In some ways it has to be, but I’m still not sure. Why this flashback at this point in the story? And exactly when does it flash back to? Before the start of the movie? Why are these characters in this location? Did Leone simply find it and decide that he wanted to film something there? Could this be a case of a scene that has a legitimate reason in the narrative but there is no possible place to put it? And as for the love scene between Jill and Frank that occurs at this point what is going on? Is it consensual? How does it convince her to sell the farm? It’s as if ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST was subject to the sort of narrative jiggling that can happen in the course of a ‘normal’ film around the 70-minute mark, but the issues are amplified here due to the scope of the film in question. At this point in the narrative we need to get from B to C but maybe someone lost track of how we were supposed to get there.


Most curious to me is the long sequence where Cheyenne (Jason Robards) and Harmonica (Charles Bronson) discuss things at the Sweetwater ranch and determine that they need to start building the town. The more times I see it, the more it becomes apparent that it is the most blatant example of pure exposition that occurs in the entire film. The documentaries on the DVD mention that a great number of scenes, even some that had already been shot, were cut from the script in the middle of production and I honestly wonder if this section was the main result of that pruning. Maybe Leone wanted to present this information as elliptically as possible in other scenes drawn out over a longer period but there was just no time for it. And maybe he deliberately laid all this out as blatantly as possible in one specific sequence to give him the option of losing it if it wasn’t needed. Of course, the amount of information given here is unfortunately necessary for us to follow the plot—it seems to be the one time in the film where these characters, especially Harmonica, are actually making statements without being mysterious. Maybe it provides too much clarity for the dream feel Leone was no doubt going for, but sometimes these things need to make a little bit of sense. As scenes containing nothing but exposition go, it’s still pretty good. But it does a surprising amount of clarity considering how elusive everything around it can be.


And during the final section, I found myself really wondering about the dozens of men now working at Sweetwater, building the rails and the town. How much time has passed for this to happen? A day? A week? A month? It’s not clear how long it’s taken for Frank to ride from where we last saw him so I’m not sure any of those answers manage to make sense. And maybe no answer really matters. In some ways, the film is a dream, just as Claudia Cardinale declares at the end of the DVD documentary, “Cinema is a dream.” Getting to see this majestic film in such a theater is a glorious dream.

“I hope you’ll come back someday.”

“Someday.”

On The Wings Of A Demon

A young woman discovers a strange power within herself which ultimately helps in fighting the forces of evil. Yes, that is Argento’s MOTHER OF TEARS but it also could be used to describe John Boorman’s much despised EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC. The two films really aren’t very much alike otherwise but one other thing they do have in common is that fact that they are both pretty much insane. THE HERETIC can be mesmerizing, but it’s also impossible. You can’t ignore the talent behind it (although many have) but there’s no way to ignore the massive miscalculations behind it, both as a sequel to THE EXORCIST and a film on its own.

Released in June 1977, the film became an instant legend upon its release. With audiences showing up expecting two hours of terror, what they got resulted in laughter and boos. With terrible reviews making matters even worse by the end of the second day of release a slightly altered version was already being shown, with the final scene cut off abruptly to roll the credits early. EXORCIST II is a film which shouldn’t have been made, at least not in the way it was. That’s part of what makes it so unique but it can’t be overstated just how wrong some of the film really is. When I read about people trying to defend SPEED RACER I can’t bring myself to get onboard with that praise, but that doesn’t mean I dismiss it. With EXORCIST II, also a Warner Brothers release, there’s a similar thing going on, particularly with the technical innovations which can be found.


Several years after the events of the first film, Father Philip Lamont (Richard Burton) is assigned by the Vatican to investigate the circumstances of the death of Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow). He goes to New York to meet Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair again), now several years older and under the watchful eye of Dr. Gene Tuskin (Lousie Fletcher), a psychiatrist experimenting with forms of hypnosis and, using a “synchronizer”, manages to awaken Regan’s dormant memories of what happened in Washington and the demon Pazuzu. You did know that the demon in the first film was named Pazuzu, didn’t you?


I could go on with the synopsis, but my eyes began to cross at just trying to make sense of the plot, with a script credited to William Goodhart but extensively revised by Boorman and “Creative Associate” Rospo Pallenberg. As a result, I haven’t gone into the extensive excursion Burton makes into Africa in search of Kokumo, the boy possessed by Pazuzu many years ago (the exorcism referenced in the first film). Or how locusts figure into all this. Or the number of times Richard Burton says the word “evil”, which would allow for a pretty decent drinking game. What’s good about EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC is that it sincerely tries to explore the direction humanity could be headed in, along with how science and religion may enter into that. Burton’s character discusses the concept of everyone coming together through mental telepathy to form a kind of “world mind”, an interesting concept which is only ever hinted at. And much of it is genuinely astonishing to look at on a technical level, from its early steadicam use to the extensive shooting on soundstages, forfeiting a “realistic” look in favor of something else entirely. But it all feels wrongheaded and as soon as Louise Fletcher begins to describe the synchronizer to Linda Blair (“Regan, I want to show you something…”) you can feel any sort of drama going off the rails very early on with no tangible believability to hold onto. It’s clearly made by people who not only didn’t like the first film, they seem fully willing to ignore not just its plot but all its thematic preoccupations in favor of what they wanted to explore, which ultimately is shortsighted and not a little arrogant. There’s nothing wrong with an audience member going to an EXORCIST sequel and expecting scares, is there? This film, in never attempting to supply any, almost seems to imply that there is. For anyone who has seen or read THE EXORCIST it stands to reason that the character of Regan McNeil serves no purpose in any sort of sequel. Regan’s story is over, done. You could argue that the entire story is done, just as the Georgetown house shouldn’t be presented as some sort of conduit for supernatural activity. William Friedkin always said that he had no interest in any sequel and I believe that. But if there was going to be one, this just seems like it was the wrong way to go.


Certainly there’s nothing wrong with a director helming a sequel and bringing his own approach to the material—John Frankenheimer’s FRENCH CONNECTION II is certainly different from Friedkin’s original but that film could easily be enjoyed by people who liked the original, even if there isn’t a car chase. But John Boorman who turned down the chance to make THE EXORCIST, always made it clear that he didn’t like the film, something you would think would be a prerequisite for making a sequel. You’d also think that it wouldn’t be too hard to find somebody who liked it. In completely rejecting what people responded to in the first film, it’s hard to imagine how it was thought the movie could succeed.


The fact that MOTHER OF TEARS made the film come to mind also points out how much like one of Dario Argento’s films it really is. With its young female lead, absurd story line, delirium of the visuals and spellbinding Morricone score, you could imagine removing all elements related to THE EXORCIST, adding more horror and a body count and you’d have an Argento film. The main difference in tone is that with Argento’s films it’s like being cornered by a mad intellectual at a party who over multiple glasses of wine involves you in the most fascinating drunken conversation you’ve ever had. With EXORCIST II it’s like a humorless college professor whose clothes, badly in need of a wash, stink of too many cigarettes and he won’t stop shouting at you. It’s a movie where Louise Fletcher says, “The psychological effects of synching with another mind last a long time, it’s very powerful,” in the driest of tones and no one thinks to ask her if she realizes what she just said.


The cast is a problem as well. Ellen Burstyn declined to reprise her role as movie star Chris MacNeil so a line of dialogue simply tells us that she is “on location” (though it’s not explained why she still seems to be in possession of the Georgetown house. Wasn’t she merely renting it while shooting there?). Linda Blair, of course, has a greatly enlarged role this time. She’s cute and seems nice but ultimately seems over her head or perhaps is simply too aware of how the production is spiraling out of control. Richard Burton seems completely somnambulistic as Father Lamont (Jon Voight was once going to play him, which would have worked better) and the droning nature of his performance is a constant problem. If a watermelon crashed to the ground behind him like in AIRPLANE! it’s hard to believe that he would actually notice and there doesn’t seem to be any difference between when the character is in a trance or normal. Pairing him with Louise Fletcher means that there are two actors with icy personas in the leads and even many of the supporting actors have a similarly cool feel to them, making for a detached, humorless film. Before his death Lee J. Cobb was set to reprise his role as Lt Kinderman and it’s difficult to imagine how his persona could have been worked into the tone here. More interesting is Kitty Winn, reprising her role as Sharon and given a much larger role here. She provides an earthiness which the film is otherwise lacking and Boorman seems genuinely interested in her. This was one of the actress’s last appearances before leaving the business. Max Von Sydow appears briefly in various flashbacks, both to how he appeared in the first film and how he looked as a young man (they got lucky with Von Sydow on that point). Ned Beatty from Boorman’s DELIVERANCE gets a big introduction but quickly disappears and we never even get a very good look at his face. Dana Plato appears uncredited as a young autistic girl who Regan unknowingly helps with her powers. At first it’s not a bad scene but, to put it mildly, the actress playing the girl’s mother was probably responsible for a few of those laughs on opening night.


It’s difficult to appreciate over thirty years later just how the movie was received on its release, but a terrific Film Comment article written by Todd McCarthy at the time goes into detail of that period and the series of cuts that occurred over the subsequent weeks (The version with the cut ending used to be found on Warner Home Video, but the DVD is the original version). Boorman is extensively quoted throughout the article but he manages to adequately summarize the shellshock he must have been feeling with the statement “I spent nearly two years on this fucking thing and, uh…” The reputation the movie has is still pretty bad, but whatever happened when the smoke cleared must have been a stepping stone to the studios maintaining more control over such things. After all, this was still several years before the term ‘franchise’ was tossed around so freely (In case anyone cares, the story in the prequels directed by Renny Harlin and Paul Schrader bare no resemblance to what is presented here). Boorman certainly didn’t want to make a bad movie, but he never seems to have taken into account the audience he was making it for. It does have lofty goals, but thematic aspirations and groundbreaking camera work don’t compensate when the narrative is an almost total failure from minute one. When Richard Burton spends half the movie looking for Kokumo (James Earl Jones) only to be treated to a lecture on locusts when he finds him, there’s no way the movie should expect us to stay with it. It’s not playing fair with what would be expected and isn’t giving us an intriguing alternative. Saying the look of the movie isn’t ‘realistic’ is missing the point. What it never does is establish its own reality enough to allow us to enter it. This is something Boorman accomplished on other occasions whether in DELIVERANCE or HOPE AND GLORY so maybe there’s nothing more to say beyond this time he drifted wildly off compass. Interestingly, I vaguely recall reading him refer to Coppola’s DRACULA as “the movie of the decade”. It’s hard to imagine even DRACULA defenders going that far, but the number of things the two films have in common seems significant. Still, it’s hard for me to ever dismiss EXORCIST II, as ludicrous as much of it is. Watching it again, it occurs to me that the delirium of the visuals would work very well while stoned—not that I would know much about that sort of thing. But it is impossible to ignore how stunning the imagery looks even at times when everything else about it is a total failure. And the Ennio Morricone score is at times astounding, if as bizarre as the movie it supports. The delirious track used in the trailer, entitled “Magic and Ecstasy” on the album, is never actually heard, at least not in any version I’ve ever seen. Someone needs to put this in a movie someday.


The movie does certainly have its defenders including Martin Scorsese who only a year after its release was proclaiming how much he admired it. I’ve long since stopped trying to find things in it that link it to THE EXORCIST but maybe Burton’s Father Lamont put it best in his somnambulistic manner which he claims something is “…utterly horrible…and fascinating.” The final shot, one that was cut from the film just after release, is quite exquisitely done in every possible way. Of course, the direction the two characters are walking off into, considering where they are located, is towards nothing, a void, which seems an apt metaphor. And I don’t think Boorman cares. Either way, it’s completely illogical, self-important and ultimately rather maddening. Just like the film.

Someone's Always Getting Rich

In case anyone would want to be reminded of this, today marks the 25th anniversary of the release of SUPERMAN III. Break out the cake and ice cream! I saw it that night when it opened and even as a kid I knew it was no good. All kids knew it was no good. We wanted to see Superman, not a Richard Pryor comedy. And even the stuff in there which was supposed to be in a SUPERMAN movie didn’t thrill us like the Phantom Zone villains did. How was a billionaire who wanted to corner the world coffee crop going to measure up to that? And wasn’t WARGAMES, which just come out, a more enjoyable example of a movie that focused on computers? And, not that it really needs mentioning, the comedy part of it wasn’t any good either. SUPERMAN III lives on, however, as a textbook example of how not to make a sequel to one of these things, but also as a pop-culture punchline, especially in OFFICE SPACE where the embezzling of half-cents gets mentioned by Michael Bolton (memorably played by Dave Herman), referring to it as “a very underrated movie”. Maybe somebody really does think of it as that but I know I don’t. Even so, I find myself watching it every now and then almost because I think that just maybe I can spot the good movie that’s hiding in there somewhere. So far, I’ve failed. I think I always will.


Part of the reason for this nagging feeling is the genuine skill brought to the film by director Richard Lester who is at least smart enough to have an approach to the film he makes. Of course, for this movie it’s the absolute wrong approach. In the footage he shot for SUPERMAN II (another subject entirely) he came close to going too far with some of the gags but here he seems to have been given free reign on that point and as a result he’s ran with it. As a result the tone feels off and confused right from the get-go. The general feeling on the Metropolis slapstick ballet which plays under the opening credits is that it’s funny, but it has no business being in this movie. That’s partly right and the sequence is fairly well-constructed but it’s really only funny in a clinical sense. I get the gags and why they work but I don’t crack a smile at any of it. It’s also sloppy--even as a kid I wondered why Clark Kent was buying a copy of the Daily Planet and Superman never bothers to catch the gun-toting bank robbers who are focused on at one point (we do get an appearance by PINK PANTHER regular Graham Stark in here, however). But while these credits and much of the film for that matter seems to aspire to a Frank Tashlin vibe, there’s nothing particularly likable or charming about any of it. As a matter of fact, much of the film is rather ugly as well. Not in how it’s photographed, but in its approach to the characters. Lester seems to genuinely dislike most of the people onscreen in this film, whether they’re the people work at the Daily Planet, Richard Pryor’s Gus Gorman or simply extras in Metropolis and Smallville. As far as I can tell, the difference in the two places as presented in this film is that city seems to be populated by buffoons, the small town by rubes. It’s kept interesting throughout in the continued emphasis on computers and technology in the mise-en-scène (I wish there was a non-pretentious way to make the point) and it actually makes the film play as a surprising companion piece to Lester’s 1968 masterpiece PETULIA. Feel free to try this double bill sometime. But while in the earlier film there was the feeling of despair at what modern society (or is it American society?) was becoming, here the tone feels like anger at everything in that society. I don’t believe that Lester likes being in these places, I don’t believe that he likes these people. Does Jimmy Olsen have to be no more than a rube who bores Clark Kent with stories about his aunt’s stuffing? Does Superman look down his nose in this way at the people of Earth?


I don’t feel like going over every Richard Pryor-related point to express why his presence doesn’t work. You’ve probably seen this movie before. But even to this day it’s not very clear to me if Gus Gorman is supposed to be a computer savant or a computer genius. The film doesn’t seem to care either and Pryor sure doesn’t seem to. I don’t want to go into the other actors since they seem to be doing the best with what they have—I actually like when Robert Vaughn drops the phone after saying, “I asked you to kill Superman and you’re telling me you couldn’t even do that one simple thing?” Pamela Stephenson doesn’t seem to have a chance, since she’s playing a bimbo who is secretly a genius. After a few brief nods at this joke it’s simply dropped with no payoff and the bits which were left in feel like somebody forgot to remove them. Reeve, no surprise, is the film’s saving grace, but even he can’t always save it. Everyone seems to like the junkyard fight between the good and evil halves of Superman and it is an ok scene but watching it again it made me wonder, why is the bad half represented by Superman and the good half by Clark Kent? What does that have to do with the character of Kal-El, which is who he is anyway? Is it just so the kids in the audience will be able to tell them apart? That confused feeling, along with how the sequence seems to be missing a slam-bang conclusion, makes me think that the junkyard fight isn’t all that it could be. But it is an ok scene. The only stuff in the film that feels genuine on any level is the interplay between Reeve and Annette O’Toole’s Lana Lang in the scenes where there are periodic mix-ups in what the other person is talking about. It’s nicely written and played by the actors, with not too much of a thing being made of it. It never approaches how well Reeve went with Margot Kidder (please allow me Kidder as Lois Lane) but in this film you take what you can get. As for Kidder's few minutes onscreen, there’s very little to say about her small part except that when we hear about her Bermuda vacation at the end of the movie (“I knew I was onto something when the taxi driver kidnapped me!”) it always made me think of the Disney comedy TRENCHCOAT that she starred in shortly before this was released. But no one remembers TRENCHCOAT anymore.


There’s very little else to say about this movie since I don’t have it in me to go over everything that doesn’t work point by point. I’m sure somebody else already has anyway. In addition to the focus on computers there are other jokes which feel like they came from early-80s topicality, but what must have seemed oddly outdated at the time of release is the oil subplot of the second half, probably inspired by the shortage of the seventies. Weirdly, it seems strangely current looking at it now and as one bit player observes, “You can’t tell me there’s no oil. And you can't tell me someone’s not getting rich off this. Someone’s always getting rich.” It just proves that sometimes these things do become topical again. They just don’t get any better.

Hulk Running

Was anybody really asking for a new HULK movie? I know I wasn’t. Were you? It’s as if the studio is saying “We’re going to keep on making HULK movies until you damn well like it and then we’re going to make more of them!” Hollywood logic, I suppose. I guess I’d like to say more good things than I really can about Ang Lee’s HULK. But like most people I just find it too murky, too long and the constant use of telling the story through comic book panels felt more like a clinical dissection of how the form works than somebody expressing their love for the medium. As a result, the whole thing is just not much fun at all. And is there anything wrong with wanting a HULK movie to actually be fun? It may be “interesting” and if forced to I could make a list of things in there that do work (like Jennifer Connelly) but that can only get you so far. So bringing in Louis Leterrier, director of the Jet Li vehicle UNLEASHED (which I remember liking), to direct the reboot entitled THE INCREDIBLE HULK to remind us of a tv show which actually had an interest in the people in front of the camera (giving us fond memories of Susan Sullivan and Mariette Hartley) and presumably deliver all that Hulk Smash everyone wants seems kind of equivalent to RKO firing Orson Welles and putting out stationery reading “Showmanship instead of genius”.


To get somebody who is appropriate for B-level action (which I mean in the best possible way) says something about the aspirations those in charge had for this movie. There’s the impression that under no circumstances were they going to take any chances with this one. The opening credit sequence which functions as a sort of recap to a film we haven’t seen (it certainly doesn’t try to pretend it’s following the Ang Lee version) also conjures up memories of the old tv show with a few small tributes that go by quickly. It’s sort of like the opening credits if SUPERMAN II if the first film didn’t exist. Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, William Hurt and Tim Roth as the man who will become Abomination are among the leads, all pretty much collecting paychecks. The basic plot places the Bruce Banner, General Ross and Betty Ross characters in the positions you’d expect but mostly winds up feeling like it’s The Hulk by way of the BOURNE series, with an pretty good opening section mostly taking place in Rio that culminates in a mad foot chase over rooftops that feels awfully familiar—you can easily imagine the studio notes coming down as the script was being written, urging them to go further in that direction. What we get isn’t as good as one of the BOURNE chases but it’s well-choreographed enough that you can pretty much follow what’s going on and Leterrier definitely directs most of the normal scenes without any sort of hand-held camera nonsense. It’s certainly a good looking movie, it’s just low on actual ambition.


But for a movie that doesn’t have an original idea in its head, I didn’t really mind THE INCREDIBLE HULK. It definitely feels cut down to within an inch of its life to keep it moving all the time. There’s at least one scene spotlighted in the trailer which doesn’t turn up and it’s pretty clear that character stuff is missing. But at least it’s never boring until, that is, the actual Hulk shows up in the form of yet another CGI creation. I’ll admit that there’s some pretty good stuff in all this but ultimately I don’t care. It’s not interesting, it’s not thrilling. The slightly different CGI Hulk in the other film was one of the main things people complained about but that’s something they didn’t change for this one. I guess you can’t stop the digital madness but that doesn’t mean I have to be forced to like it. When the climax comes in the form of a wrestling match between the Hulk and Abomination on a Toronto street unconvincingly trying to pass itself off as New York (125th Street is much, much wider than it is here) I pretty much tuned out. As for the actors, I spent as much time contemplating the mustache on William Hurt’s face as much as anything—is it supposed to make us think he’s Sam Elliott?


It moves fast but in an effort to satisfy everyone who got bored last time out there’s really not much interesting in there. There’s certainly isn’t a lot of compelling drama attempted in this incarnation of Bruce Banner so not much sticks in the brain. A day after seeing it, there’s really very little to say. When the Surprise Guest Star Cameo turns up at the end, in a scene which feels like it was designed to come at the end credits, I found myself thinking ‘now that’s film I want to see’. Which I suppose is what it’s designed to do. It just didn’t make me think of what I’d actually seen with much fondness. It’s fine to sit through but ultimately that’s about it.

What You Cannot See Is Truth

You can read whatever you want into a film, but the validity of what you see can always be open to question. Sitting in the theater viewing Dario Argento’s MOTHER OF TEARS it was tempting to read a great deal into every shot, every line, looking for things that connect to his long career. There’s the wish to proclaim it as some grand artistic summation by the director and yes, certain elements do lend themselves to that theory. But while it does tie in with those other films a great deal, ultimately I got the feeling that Argento just wanted to go out to make a movie with people he knows very well and simply have a nasty good time. There are things I could say about what’s wrong with MOTHER OF TEARS—the expected dreamlike quality feels absent, a lack of appropriate payoff, the expected screwy logic—but I couldn’t help but sit there and enjoy myself thoroughly with a big smile on my face.


Just to make it clear, MOTHER OF TEARS: THE THIRD MOTHER (as it is called on screen) represents the long, long, long-awaited final chapter in the “Three Mothers” trilogy, which began with SUSPIRIA (1977) and INFERNO (1980). The three mothers actually a trio of sisters who are witches, each film focuses on one of them and where they reside and each film demonstrates a variety of the director’s strengths (mood, imagery, gore) and weaknesses (plot, story, which becomes beside the point anyway). SUSPIRIA is sometimes viewed as his masterpiece (it’s not my favorite, but it is the one most people seem to know), INFERNO has some extremely effective passages but seems to resist becoming a fully-fledged storyline right up to the end. So in other words, this is his PHANTOM MENACE, his CRYSTAL SKULL, or maybe most appropriately, his GODFATHER PART III. To have him return to the series and complete it after so long, after so many people had no doubt asked him when he would, it was open to question whether he would attempt to revert to the director he was all those years ago or simply just go full throttle and make what has become, in recent years, a Dario Argento film. He went with the latter but not without some blatant nods to his past. There are definitely moments sprinkled throughout which recall what has come before (not just in the first two films but from throughout his filmography) and there are actors who appear because of what their presence represents than almost any other reason. The film seems determined to not lock itself into its own history, but the past is always there. In some ways, that’s what the film is about as well.


When an ancient urn is discovered in a cemetery outside Rome it is sent by a priest, who seems to suspect what is inside, to the Museum of Ancient Art for study. Once there it is opened by the inquisitive assistant curator Giselle Mares (the beguiling Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) and art restorer Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento, of course). Giselle cuts her finger on the urn while opening it (never a good sign in one of these movies) and after a brief examination of the contents Giselle is rewarded for her curiosity when several mysterious figures (and a monkey) suddenly emerge from the shadows and brutally slaughter her. Sarah escapes, but the opening of the urn has brought the Mother of Tears, Mater Lachrimarum, “the most beautiful of the Three Mothers” back to power. As a wave of witches begin to arrive in Rome from all around the world to celebrate her return, a wave of violence and suicide begins to sweep the city. Meanwhile, Sarah begins to investigate the history of the urn with her boyfriend, museum curator Michael Pierce (Adam James) but as she finds herself being pursued by the diabolical forces Sarah begins to realize that she may be the only one with the power to stop the legendary Mother of Tears.


It’s somewhat surprising that the basic plot doesn’t make an attempt at being more similar to the other two films, such as how they were mostly set in the homes that the witches resided in. Here, that location turns out to be a key to solving the mystery and much of it is set in and around Rome with more of a straight-ahead plot than might have been expected. There are the usual hard-to-swallow beats expected from the director—my favorite is probably how Sarah at one point throws her cell phone away so the witches can’t use it to find her. Putting aside how they’re witches and may not need to trace her phone, the fact that Sarah immediately chooses to go home after doing this, seems to defeat the purpose. And yes, the movie sometimes feels like it needs a slightly bigger budget, such as the montages of chaos in Rome looking too small-scale or the long backstory told using drawings. But the honest truth for me is that the movie has enough moments which sent a charge through me of the sort that I want from an Argento film. All through the film there are moments which could have come from few other directors—Sarah Mandy’s visit to “renowned thinker” Guglielmo De Witt, for one, or an amazing long steadicam shot near the end. One particular section in a bookstore when Sarah is being chased is so absurd, yet at the same time so skillfully done, that it defies stating how good or bad it really is. Ultimately, it’s kind of mesmerizing. The violence goes perhaps farther than even Argento has ever gone—I’m used to this stuff and even I had to shield my eyes a few times. But even where the film seems to step over that line in one scene (those who have seen it will know what I’m talking about) it’s hard to ignore how in that moment the film provides us with one of its most effective grace moments as we get the most chilling impression of the title character the film ever gives us.


Somehow fitting for a movie with the word ‘Mother’ in the title, it is the women who seem continually at the forefront. For all the talk bandied about of how Argento’s films are misogynist I get the impression possibly more than ever before that it’s the women in the film where his main interest lies. The male characters feel little more than functional in the narrative and frankly, I get the feeling that he is more interested in the briefly-seen woman on a bridge who does something horrible to her baby, in an already notorious scene, than he does in a few of the men who actually have substantial roles. As good as Asia Argento is as Sarah Mandy, everything we know about her means that it’s a bit of a reach to buy her as an art restorer who is unaware of her special powers—it’s not too far off from trying to buy Arnold Schwarzenegger as a mere construction worker in TOTAL RECALL. Even so, I can’t imagine anyone else playing the role and while it’s tempting to say that she is allowed few of her expected quirks while on the run through much of the film, but we do get her barking “WHAT??!!” at a curious bystander at one point. As the much-discussed Mater Lachrymarum, Moran Atias certainly look impressive and she does have that one moment I mentioned, but whenever she speaks it all goes out the window. It’s not a voice of power, it’s the voice of a supermodel who wants to know where her latte is. Much more impressive is Jun Ichikawa as another witch whose very screen presence alone is responsible for a few of the most effective moments. Especially interesting is the actress Valeria Cavalli as psychic Marta Colussi who brings an unusual empathic sensuality to her role. Even when given a fairly gratuitous lesbian scene to play, it is at least refreshing to have an actress of that age being presented as a sexual creature. (As for what eventually happens to her, well…) Udo Kier, the one male who really gets to make an impression, comes off as a lunatic in his role as a priest but it’s hard not to get a kick out it considering that he, as another character, provided much of the exposition in SUSPIRIA. Here does a little of the same, with a particularly nice moment when he mentions the name of Suzy Banyon. Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni’s association with Argento goes all the way back to the eighties so it feels important that she is once again being brutally killed off here, and it is an amazing death scene, even if it is a small role. But for me the film which has a large enough role for Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni has yet to be made.


The film is a work of madness and there’s a degree to which it’s hard to take much of any of it seriously. But for me there’s something there, an embracing of that madness for now and all time which is most obvious in the final shot, a closer which recalls the end of SUSPIRIA and seems just right considering everything we’ve just seen. Argento is who he is and maybe what that ending tells us is that we’re just going to have to learn to live with it. In SUSPIRIA the key line was “Magic is all around us.” Here, after the heroine insists at the beginning, “We’re supposed to believe in what we see,” we are later told, “What you see does not exist. What you cannot see is truth.” The lead character goes from believing in what she knows to accepting what she is. Somewhere in that truth and madness is what MOTHER OF TEARS is about and I couldn’t help but get a great deal of demented enjoyment from it. Sometimes that type of delirium is exactly what is needed in the movies we love.

Not To Drink Is To Call Her Ugly

It’s been less than a year since I attended the American Cinematheque screening of Blake Edwards’ THE PARTY at the Aero in Santa Monica and I still haven’t forgotten the thrill of the standing ovation given to the man at the end of the film. I knew it wouldn’t quite be the same to go back for another Edwards appearance but I did it anyway. After all, I’d never seen WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, DADDY? and certainly screenings of it don’t come around very often. That drive all the way out to Santa Monica during rush hour gets worse all the time and no, it wasn’t quite the same. But it was unique and the film was certainly worth it.

Set in 1943 Sicily, the World War II story focuses on Captain Lionel Cash (Dick Shawn) a type-A by-the-book type who is ordered by General Bolt (Carroll O’Connor) to head a company to take the tiny town of Velerno. Cash is assigned a ragtag group led by Lieutenant Christian (James Coburn) and they have little interest in following his orders. Once the company gets to the town, they find the Italian soldiers led by Captain Oppo (Sergio Fantoni) are willing, absolutely happy, to surrender, but not before the annual village festival which is scheduled that night. Reluctantly, Cash is talked by Christian into allowing the festival to proceed and soldiers from both sides freely join in the festivities with wine flowing everywhere. When everyone awakens in the morning hungover, there is a sudden situation involving the mayor’s daughter Gina (Giovanna Ralli) leading Captian Oppo to refuse to surrender. But with headquarters demanding to know what is going on, both sides quickly realize that they have to fake a battle so no one will find out the truth. The real problem develops when what they're doing winds up looking a little too convincing, leading to an unexpected side taking an interest.


Made by Edwards between THE GREAT RACE and GUNN, WHAT DID YOU DO feels more like a romp than an out-and-out comedy, but it still offers many laughs throughout. Within its wartime setting, it never becomes too heavy-handed and the script (story by Maurice Richlin and Edwards, screenplay by William Peter Blatty) is extremely well-constructed with new elements not only continually turning up, but expertly kept in the air and eventually paid off. Edwards’ knack for purely visual gags is greatly on display as well, particularly in the montage displaying the various soldiers the morning after the festival, all passed out in various unexpected places and circumstances. It’s also a terrific example at displaying how good Edwards was with the camera to tell his story--framed through the Scope lens, the town itself becomes another character. Simply put, it’s a very funny, enjoyable film which deserves to be better known.

As for the cast, I’ll freely say that Dick Shawn has never been a favorite of mine. Something about his persona just always seemed too plastic for me to enjoy but it’s safe to say that except for his part in THE PRODUCERS (which certainly wasn’t a lead role) he’s never made me laugh like he does here. The character is consistently played, how he changes makes sense and Shawn becomes one of a number of other Edwards actors who are forced to dress up as a woman at one point and the results are as funny as anything in the movie. James Coburn, in one of another of his sixties iconoclast roles, seems a little like a Hawkeye Pierce prototype here and is just right as his character, consistently funny and unpredictable. Giovanna Ralli is both gorgeous and she has sharp comic timing as Gina and Harry Morgan (speaking of MASH) as Major Pott gets one of the funniest subplots but if you haven’t seen it, no point in my ruining it. WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, DADDY? isn’t quite a hidden Edwards masterpiece, but is an example of just how good he could be at the peak of his abilities and would work extremely well for anyone interested in a more lighthearted war movie in the vein of KELLY’S HEROES—maybe it’s my prejudice for Edwards showing, but I think I like this one better. And, of course, the music is by Henry Mancini which naturally gives it an advantage.


Edwards, who apparently hadn’t seen the film since it was released, was present for the post-film Q&A which I have to say was just about the strangest of these I’ve ever attended. Since the director, who is very weak by now, was obviously unable to go up front for the talk, he stayed at his seat with a microphone while the moderator questioned him from the screen. Edwards’ advanced age, nearing 86, was very obvious as he acted cagey about certain things and not remembering others. When asked about his directing style which includes many long takes that play out without cuts (seen in many of his films) he didn’t seem to say much about it beyond simply “I did what I did,” which of course manages to say nothing and everything at the same time. Soon enough the entire audience was facing and gradually moving towards the back of the theater, which became an odd sight and a slight murmur went through the crowd as people quickly realized that the woman in the baseball cap next to him who was offering him encouragement in his answers was in fact wife Julie Andrews. Once or twice when someone asked something he didn’t seem to appreciate Edwards jokingly (?) offered to take that person outside and beat the crap out of them. Which, in his current state, certainly wasn’t going to happen, but was still very funny. Maybe I should have asked a lousy question, just to say that Blake Edwards threatened to kick my ass. What I’m saying is, it wasn’t a Q&A that I could coherently summarize.

The second film being shown that night was A SHOT IN THE DARK which I didn’t stay for, partly because I’ve seen it many times already (the same reason Edwards gave, incidentally). With many people around them, the couple slowly made there way outside to the car to applause from people in the street, watching them, myself included. Nothing more to say about it except to think about the sight of a pair of entertainment legends, older than we ever think of them being, driven off into the night down a quiet street in Santa Monica. In addition to witnessing that moment, I’m glad I saw WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, DADDY? which served as a reminder of the various reasons why I’m such a fan of the director in the first place and all the special things he has brought to the screen in his long career.

Getting Away With Anything

It’s too bad that there’s not more of a place for the likes of Stuart Gordon in theaters today. The sort of director who can deliver a lean, mean B-movie which takes pride in the label is disappearing fast, if not almost completely gone. I have fond memories of the likes of Gordon’s RE-ANIMATOR and FORTRESS but his new film STUCK, while not science fiction or even technically a horror film, is at heart a B-movie but also remembers to be more than that. It is loosely inspired by a true incident and well aware of the seriousness of what is occurring, yet at the same time very much at heart a genre piece and one that is very, very darkly funny.

As caregiver Brandi Helper (Mena Suvari) learns of a possible promotion at the retirement home she works in, Tom Bardo (Stephen Rea) has reached the end of his rope. Downsized from his job, evicted from his apartment and unable to find work because the computer at the local employment center has no record of him, he must face the fact that he is truly homeless. That night Brandi goes out to celebrate with her drug-dealer boyfriend (Russell Hornsby) at a local bar while at the same time Tom is kicked out of the park where he is trying to sleep. As he walks down the street with his newly acquired shopping cart, Brandi, still high on booze and the pills she’s been popping all night, smashes into him with her car. Only instead of falling back to the road, Tom smashes into and gets wedged in her windshield. Not knowing what to do, Brandi drives home with him trapped there and, scared that she’ll get caught (and, presumably, lose her promotion), parks her car in the garage where she leaves him there, hoping, expecting, that he will die soon enough. Soon Tom, in agonizing pain, begins to realize that help really isn’t coming and has to figure out how to save himself.


In many ways STUCK is a grimy little thriller about grimy people but it’s also about what sort of society causes people to behave this way, especially when no one seems willing to take any sort of responsibility in their situations. “Why are you doing this to me?” Brandi screams at Tom, who is simply trying to escape from her car, refusing to die like she demands that he do. What exactly this represents about society today could be read any number of ways and it becomes pretty explicit, when Brandi’s boyfriend boyfriend, hearing that she has hit a homeless person with her car (and not a ‘real’ person) brushes it off saying, in effect, that these days, “Anybody can do anything to anyone and get away with it. I mean, look who’s in the White House.” The pulp approach to this inherently serious material is refreshing, considering how drab it could have been played and it also would have been interesting to see how someone like Larry Cohen would have approached the basic idea. But considering its deliberately jarring mixture of tones, from the unexpected opening credit sequence Gordon does such a good job it’s hard to want anyone else to have made this film. Hardly a surprise from the man who made RE-ANIMATOR, there is a lot of blood and gore seen in Rea’s predicament and the movie doesn’t shy away from making it seen as agonizing as possible. It says a lot that one of the most grueling of these scenes results in one of the biggest laughs I’ve had in a theater in a long time. Maybe that just means I’m a pretty sick individual as well.


Suvari is excellent, making for a believable party girl working a normal job in an old-folks home. She seems to be neither an exceptionally good or bad person at first—she pops pills and drinks, but is still presented as good at her job-- then thrust into this situation of her own doing takes her to some unexpected places. Though it may sound like Rea has a nothing role from the description, the amount of humanity he brings to the character which could come off as a cipher from a lesser talent can’t be ignored and some of his less-showy moments are the ones that linger even several days after seeing the movie. Long-time Stuart Gordon fans will want to know that the voice of Jeffrey Combs (Dr. Herbert West himself) is heard on a phone at one point.

This sort of scrappy little movie, maybe directed by the likes of Sam Fuller in another era, is almost never made anymore but that it was not only made now, but turned out so effective, is a thrill to see. STUCK is only 85 minutes long, but within that brief running time is a thriller which not only satisfies its own genre conventions but remembers to put some meat on the bones as well. These days it seems that the bigger the movie the more humanity seems to be drained out of it, but here’s a film that for all its blood, is ultimately about trying to remember how to be human in a world where seemingly no one remembers how to be human. And that in itself is a sort of victory.

Quality Is Important In Every Profession

As beautiful redhead Dagmar Lassander lounges in her bathtub smoking a cigarette, she silently thinks to herself, “I’m going to give up cigarettes today. And I’m going to stop drinking. And I’m not going to take any more of those tranquilizers. Anyway, they say it’s bad for you to take them if you drink. That should make Peter happy.” To which I immediately think, hey, don’t feel like you have to stop doing all that because of me! Of course, it’s just the opening of THE FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION, a 1970 giallo directed by Luciano Ercoli. It goes without saying that as the plot proceeds she’s not going to stop smoking. Or drinking. Or taking those pills, either.


With these proclamations made as the film begins the character Minou, played by Lassander, hatches a plan to make husband Peter (Pier Paolo Capponi) jealous. As she goes out that night she is quickly accosted by a threatening man (Simon Andreu) who, though he seems fully ready to assault, abruptly stops and simply mentions her husband saying, “Peter is a fraud. What if I told you he’s a murderer?” before letting her go, implying that he may soon appear again. She confides in her husband about what has happened, but soon becomes suspicious when she learns of the drowning death of one of his colleagues. She also tells her possibly bisexual best friend Dominique (Susan Scott aka Nieves Navarro) about what happened but her friend reassures her (“Try to look on the bright side: You must be bursting with sex appeal…I’d have adored being violated.”) and then Dominique shows off her private stash of photos (“Are they pornographic?” “Yes, but good ones.”) out of which Minou finds one that may contain the face of her attacker. But even this doesn’t help her when he appears again with certain demands. This is followed by one of the characters, any of the characters, having another drink.


I’m not certain if FORBIDDEN PHOTOS qualifies as a giallo (even if the DVD cover refers to it as one) since at the very least it certainly isn’t a body count film. If it wasn’t for some of the seamier plot developments, it frankly wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine the basic set up used in Hollywood in the 40s starring, say, Barbara Stanwyck. But ultimately the plot becomes second to the infectiously sinuous atmosphere on display. The sexual politics at hand are very much of the time and even that probably isn’t much of an excuse when it comes to a few certain plot developments. But even with much talk of being “violated” from that first shot the film makes clear how much it is about how a woman can sublimate herself to please her man and how that ultimately can damage her if she isn’t careful. As Minou, Lassander does a very good job in portraying this desperation. In the opposite role, Susan Scott as Dominique is the most charismatic person here but of course that’s what her character is supposed to be. She seems more omnisexual in her basic persona than anything else and even if it’s never certain whether she can be trusted, the confidence she is allowed to display provides a potent contrast with Lassander’s weaker character. Interestingly, not only do the two women strongly resemble each other—similar facial features and long flowing red hair—but the two male leads have a similarly stoic look and dark hairstyle as well. It’s unclear to me if this is meant to be a comment of the duality of the characters or if there wasn’t much thought to this at all—it certainly never comes into play in the plot, but the mirrored effect does provide some striking contrasts even when some momentary confusion occurs early on.


Even if it can’t be considered a giallo, the film is very much set in the jet-set lifestyle that some of those films are famous for, with apartments that resemble modern art galleries, bizarre fashions on the gorgeous women and bits of business such as a mysterious phone call at two in the morning followed by someone saying, “Now that we’re wide awake, how about a drink?” Best of all is the hypnotically beautiful score by Ennio Morricone which is draped across much of the film like the most luxurious velvet imaginable. One passage involving Lassander simply walking to a location seems to stop the movie just to allow us to let the music and environment soak in. It’s moments like that which draw me back to some of these films again and again. The script by Ernesto Gastaldi is almost deceptively simple, but on second viewing I began to notice much more going on underneath the plotting with more depth to the sexual politics at hand than I first realized. Certainly the look of the film is everything it should be, with some Scope compositions so striking that I found myself sitting up to try and absorb them better.


THE FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION (hey, it's a fun title to type out) doesn’t quite have what I expected it to. There are no stylish murder scenes, the violence which does occur is limited and the plot is fairly free of incident. But the way the film got through to me during its running time as that Morricone music seemed to slink into my brain indicated that it was somehow successful, even if in its own dreamlike, sleazy way. I don’t know if I’ve found a new favorite and this is the sort of thing I probably shouldn't show to some people but I’m sure that I want to watch it again very soon.