The Factual Opinion

Great Directors: Robert Altman Punches Himself In The Groin, Therapeutically

Beyond Therapy
Directed by Robert Altman
Screenplay by Robert Altman
Based on the play by Christopher Durang
Released in 1987

If you've ever had to support an acting friend by going to watch them in a "showcase," one of those horrible events where a group of actors combine their hopes and dreams with short scenes from plays and movies in the hopes that they will get an agent, so that they can never again do another showcase, then you already know bits and pieces of Beyond Therapy.  While Christopher Durang is certainly a respectable writer, with a catalog full of delightful plays, his work has also become a cherry-picked wasteland wherein all the good bits have been theatrically destroyed by people who should have learned to do something valuable, like repair air conditioners.  In addition to the list of individuals who have done their level best to ensure that the name of Durang brings up memories of a terrible night out, one individual might be someone you'd recognize--and it is Robert Altman.

The 80's didn't start off well for Altman--besides coming out with Popeye, which is the sort of movie that puts to the lie the myth that Robin Williams only just recently become annoying, he also put out Health, a not-so-bad movie that no one saw, and is nowadays only talked about so that people can say they don't really hate it, as if that is somehow an appetizing feeling to have about a film.  While he was able to get back on the horse, so to say, with Streamers and Secret Honor, the truth about 80's Altman is that he embraced the safety found in adapting successful plays without changing much of what made them successful--as good as Secret Honor is, and yes, it is incredible, much of what Altman did was stay out of the way of what Philip Baker Hall, Arnold Stone and David Freed had already worked out on the stage--the camera work and the choices that Altman made, while exceptional, aren't at all what makes Secret Honor such an excellent film.  The credit for that, as even Altman himself admitted, goes to the writing and the performance. 

If only the same could be said for Beyond Therapy.  Hell, it would be nice if anything positive could be said about Beyond Therapy.  Whether it was a lack of faith in the material, or the rampaging ego of a director on leave from his country of origin, Altman's rewriting of Durang's play is a bewildering act by a man who didn't, in 1987, really have much less to lose.  As even Durang points out, from the first minutes of the film, this is not the story he'd seen such success with on Broadway:   

...the movie lost me when Jeff Goldblum started sucking Julie Hagerty’s toes in the restaurant in the first     five minutes.  Unpleasant, unlikely to do in a restaurant, and the action told you that you were in a fake         world. 

As the quote has already made clear, it wasn't just bad writing that makes Beyond Therapy such a difficult film to watch, much less enjoy--it also suffers from one of those casting choices that makes so little sense that it almost seems relevant to question Robert Altman's sanity.  Julie Fucking Hagerty?  Julie, I'm the woman from fucking Airplane, Hagerty?  Putting her in a leading role in a luncheon meat commercial would make sense, she probably couldn't screw that up, but to throw her into a tightly wound play where her character has to start at intelligent so that the hysterical neuroses of her personality don't ring false?  It's no wonder that the movie falls apart, completely, from the beginning onward.  The viewers are first introduced to her as she tries to exit the subway--and Jules can't even make it up the stairs.  It's not a joke, or a defining moment, or anything else.  She's just so fucking dumb that she can't handle stairs.

After the movie makes it's way out of the immediately tiresome and completely insipid blind date sequence, wherein, yes, Jeff Goldblum sucks on Hagerty's toes, it dives wholesale into scenes of their individual moments with their therapists, and any hopes that the movie can be redeemed become dead on the wire--nothing, not even the tremendous Glenda Jackson, can overcome what's happened to the script.  Whereas part of why Durang's found such success with Therapy was to unify an honest portrayal of what neurotic narcissists talk about in private sessions with therapists they're also sleeping with, Altman ensures that none of this will carry over, by writing the dialog in such a way that everything and anything will be played to the most garish extremes possible.  He treats each and every therapy scene as if, were the film any longer than ninety minutes, clowns would come into the room and eat paper airplanes.  Worser still, every conversation, from this portion of the movie for the next hour operates under the same crescendo, the same arc--it's all quiet statement of weird thing, additional quiet weird response, continue, and then screeching.  Every scene operates like this--it's all the same thematic "volume" for lack of a more descriptive term.  It's a deafening experience that no amount of mugging from Christopher Guest can redeem--not that Guest doesn't try extraordinarily hard, basically latching on to the most typical flamboyant tics that would eventually spawn his turn in Waiting For Guffman.  For all the complaints leveled at the portrayal of homosexual men that Hollywood produces, a film like Beyond Therapy makes Wild Hogs or that Adam Sandler thing look like nuanced studies in gender roles by comparison.

Beyond Therapy, as loud and obnoxious as it is, is also one of the most excruciatingly boring films Robert Altman ever made, and although the climactic scene--a ridiculous, slow-motion sequence where one of the characters pretends to shoot up a restaurant--is nothing like anything else in the movie, not the least of which is because it's in slow-motion and seems to have some actual acts of cinematography being performed, still drags on just as long as the rest of the film has, and any excitement that "maybe this is going to be worth the time it took to watch it" expires as the credits roll, which is also when, bewilderingly, Altman feels the need to pull the camera back enough to clue the viewer in that, while the story is set in New York, they've been in Paris all along!  It doesn't add anything to the story, and it isn't that interesting, so the response ends up eliciting a "Where's my goddamn copy of Mash" through gritted teeth.  

-Tucker Stone, 2008

Who's up next for a two part good movie/bad movie?  Bergman, motherfuckers.  Motherfucking Ingmar Bergman.

Great Directors: Robert Altman Goes Country

Nashville
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Joane Tewkesbury
Released in 1975

When it comes to eerily prescient, Robert Altman's Nashville has a couple of doozies.  None other than the New York Times implied that the film was the inspiration for the assassination of John Lennon, and if you remember Ross Perot at all, the fictional  presidential candidate Hal Philip Walker seems produced out of a time machine.  All things being equal, neither of these are more than footnotes to Altman's classic tour de force.  One of the best American films of the golden age of American cinema from one of the greatest American directors, Nashville is one of those movies that suffers from just about universal acclaim--well, except for some overly sensitive country musicians, who think the "satire" of their art is "too harsh."

While nowadays, Nashville may come across as dated, especially when you see the moon unit costumes that Shelly Duvall wears, it's actually a film that serves best as a superb time capsule of a place, a moment--not just of Tennessee and country music, but of a time period when Hollywood was allowing some incredibly talented filmmakers the money and access to pretty much do whatever they wanted.  Robert Altman had already pulled off one of the first of the decades great films when Mash forced its way out of a tumultuous production, and he'd begun operating at a herculean pace since.  Then, in 1975, out came Nashville--a film with 24 distinct characters, a hushed tones plot loose enough to incorporate them all, a script that allowed and forced improvisation and, of course, songs written and recorded live by the actors themselves. 

There's no way in hell that it should even be watchable.

Instead, it's a masterpiece of both ensemble film making and editing-as-film-construction.  Every character is fully realized, down to their ugliest and most beautiful--whether it's Henry Gibson as the proudly arrogant superstar, or Lily Tomlin's heartrending gospel-singing mother or a womanizing Keith Carradine who's almost dripping in sexual heat.  Even from a purely physical standpoint, none of the actors look like they've ever looked before, nor would they ever look like this again.  On top of that, they can, all of them, fucking sing--hell, Carradine won a justly deserved Oscar for his "I'm Easy."  (Although it must be said that part of the reason "I'm Easy" is so well remembered is in no small part due to the performance of Lily Tomlin, who could've probably cracked the glass on the front of the camera if she'd wanted too.)

The film opens with a somewhat torturous patriotic song by Henry Gibson, a man dressed like a cross between Evel Kenievil and Liberace--but before you notice his outfit, one needs a few minutes to take in his sideburns--they stretch down his face so far that they're probably a sentient being.  From there, Altman begins introducing his characters--Gibson's long-suffering business manager son, a terrible young BBC reporter born with a charmless, cackling laugh in place of any self-awareness or class.  As the camera follows these two into another recording studio, Lily Tomlin is found leading an all-black gospel choir, and   the movie progresses this way throughout--people crossing over into rooms, a political agitprop van traveling the city, Jeff Goldblum in huge glasses, until finally, almost forty-five minutes into the film, all the characters have been given a bit of time to make their presence known.  There's a thru-line leading to the film's climactic political fundraiser, but it's more of a chronological study of the city and its denizens than anything else--there won't be a final insert of anyone saying "and that's why I invited Ned Beatty to the party, because he's my cousin!"  Carradine might run into everybody, he might not--Jeff Goldbum might be more than a carnival magician on a stupid motorcycle, but whether he is, the film doesn't say.  It doesn't need to either--unlike other films with a kaleidoscopic viewpoint, Nashville isn't about inter-connecting relationships, any more than it is about anything in particular.  It's just a city, full of interesting people at interesting moments, on their way towards a tragedy.  Some of them, like Scott Glenn's near-silent Army vet, will be more affected by the climax of the film than others.  Some of them, like Lily Tomlin, will reach their emotional crux a full half hour before the close of the film.  It's not about "bringing them full circle." Nashville isn't a machine of plot, but it's a film cloaked in the texture of real life--the individuals that might make for the most important moments of a person's life are just meaningless bumper cars obstructing the paths of others who know them in the vaguest terms possible.  Near the end of the film, when a distraught husband tries to make clear to his niece that her aunt has passed away, she slips away into the arms of another strange man, one of many that have found in her a willing companion in her short visit to Tennessee.  It's these kinds of intersections that make up an entire film, an entire story--women and men, not desperate for love, but desperate to fulfill their own desires.

When Nashville reaches it's close, a film that is already overstuffed with brilliant performances tops even those, with a brutal, confusing death, and a crowd of people lost in their desires to grieve, while at the same time in staunch refusal to succumb to anything, to anybody, that wants to weaken them.  It is there that Barbara Harris is to be found--ravenous, practically frothing at the mouth, and near lost to her own fantasies (it's easy to imagine she hasn't eaten anything, or slept, since early in the film when she runs from her truck-driving husband.)  Through the accidents of circumstance and tragedy, she ends up with a microphone in her hand, and after a wrenching few moments of confusion, closes the film with a uproarious take on Keith Carradine's "It Don't Worry Me."  It's an almost physical rebuke to the prospect of surrender, and it's one of, if not the, strongest moments in an altogether perfect film.  It's also Robert Altman making clear the mission statement that would carry him throughout his life and career--that regardless of circumstance, funding or an ignoring public, his concern is his art, and nothing will stand in his way for long.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

Next time in Great Directors:  A really bad film by Robert Altman, which, in a total shocker, isn't The Company or the one with Tara Reid and Kate Hudson.

Thief

Written and Directed by Michael Mann
Script based on the Novel by Frank Hohimer
Starring James Caan, Tuesday Weld & Jim Belushi
With Dennis Farina & Willie Nelson
Released in 1981

In these days of the Great Directors, The Factual finally reaches one that isn't actually a bad one.  Had to happen at some point.

Thief is often referred to as Michael Mann's first film--if you go by the standard "shown in a movie theater" definition, then yes, that is the accurate answer.  Prior to Thief, Mann had filmed a critically acclaimed piece called The Jericho Mile for network television.  In length, cinematography, acting and, most of all, preparation, The Jericho Mile could also certainly fill in as his first work.  The effort and artistry of Jericho Mile, and it's subsequent success, was what made it easier for Mann to find financial support for Thief & Manhunter, two films that are now acknowledged as classics, but experienced virtually no public acclaim upon initial release.  It was also the efficiency with which Mann delivered Jericho Mile that made it easier for him to return to television again, albeit with eventual dwindling successes.

Thief is a film made up of a lot of disparate elements, many of which are now dated to the ugly time period in which Mann shoot the picture.  Tangerine Dream, Jim Belushi, Tuesday Weld and hideous typography, Thief is a film that absorbs a lot of awful business into it's dark grip, and they are only tolerable because of the elements that still hold up: the best performance of James Caan's career, including the Godfather, the masterful cinematography of Dante Spinotti, and a director trotting out the plot horses and ideals that will stay with him the length of his career.  Thief is a simple story, and it's one that's been told a hundred times or more before and since the early 80's, but it's that besotted simple story told well. 

The legends surrounding Thief are easily hunted down, in these trivia nut heaven days of the Imdb "Trivia" links and the lengthy Wikipedia pieces:  yes, Mann staffed the film with every cop and criminal he could find, and yes, if you see it on screen, then it works, and it's real.  The gun that Caan carries has seen bodies before it, the saws and slim jims have been used to steal real diamonds, and the actors behind the side characters are men who have either done time or caught those men they're pretending to kill.  If Thief lacks anything, it's not accuracy: if anything, it celebrates it's reality for too long.  It's a film that is as in love with showing what it takes to accomplish the task at hand as it is at showing how starkly emotions have to be ignored to survive the criminal life.  Thief isn't remotely close to being the first film to ever portray an anti-hero as it's protagonist, but it certainly tread new ground in exploring how little a man who flirts with total sociopathy can escape the life he's created for himself.  When Caan's character goes from single man to one with home and family, it's with a cunning simplicity and efficiency that i's rather uncomfortable to experience: it's not that he doesn't deserve it, it's that he quite literally purchases it in a matter of hours--and then proceeds to wholeheartedly embrace the dynamic of his new wife and child so fully.  Caan's performance, and Mann's script, make it abundantly clear that there is no grey area here:  the man is so inexperienced with emotion that he can, in a somewhat insane fashion, go from emotionless to fully in love the second the opportunity allows him too.  Later in the film, when the plot dictates that he must return to a solitary existence, he calmly ends his marriage, burns his home and workplaces to the ground, and executes the men who have betrayed him.   It's a fitting end to the story Mann wishes to tell, and like any decent descent into noir-ish territories, it's the only end that could be acceptable.  While the ambiguous close might be interpreted by a more optimistic audience as a possible renewal, Mann and Caan clearly believe otherwise.  As far as they're concerned, the thief of the title is finished experimenting with social and familial networks, and will return to what he knows to be the acceptable alternative--a barren, emotionless solitude.  While the behaviors and criminal exploration that Mann deals with here are far more entertainingly addressed in his powerhouse crime-thriller Heat, Thief remains an excellent film, one that speaks to the maturity of a filmmaker who seems to have entered the business as a brilliantly professional craftsman.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

Insomnia

Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by Hillary Seitz
Based on the screenplay by Nikolaj Frobenius & Erik Skjoldbjaerg
Released in 2002
Starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams & Hilary Swank

Nolan exerts an exacting, almost hermetic control over his films--although he's a thoroughly British filmmaker, his clean style of directing seems more in line with the men like Michel Haneke & Krzysztof Kieslowski.  However, Haneke & Kieslowski have never dabbled in the thriller field, which has (with one rather large superhero exception) been completely Nolan's purview.  It's arguable, and very easily so, that even Batman Begins falls right into line with Nolan's various male obsessives--Christian Bale's Batman is just as obsessive as either of the leads he plays in the Prestige, as is Hugh Jackman just as consumed by the same addiction to revenge that haunts the memory-deprived Guy Pearce in Nolan's breakout success, Memento.  Even Nolan's quiet debut, Following, is focused on a man who's obsession with identity leads him into the trap of a man obsessed with control.

Insomnia was to be Nolan's breakout mainstream film--a film overstuffed with recent Academy Award winners, an Americanized remake of a Norweigen cult success.  It, as all Nolan's post-Following films, looks superb, has masterful sound editing and is contains some excellent performances from a wide collection of character actors.  All in all, its appearance is that of a Christopher Nolan film.  Yet it's neither as good as the film it is an adaptation of, nor does its quality as a story match up to the pristine appearance that the film itself contains.

Insomnia was a remake of a Norweigen film by a young director named Erik Skjoldbjaerg, a man who's only other notable impact in America was the truncated, and by all reports awful, Cristina Ricca star vehicle Prozac Nation.  Skjoldbjaerg's Insomnia is one of those rare perfect debuts--a film that's part Hitchcock, part Bergman, through the lens of The Seventh Continent.  Starring Stellan Skarsgard and scored by Biosphere, it's a film that is boilingly uncomfortable, with a protagonist that's completely selfish and cruel.  Skarsgard, in what would later become Al Pacino's role, nearly rapes the local hotelier, molests and psychologically tortures a young girl, and it isn't until the close of the film that he decides to actually finish the job he was sent to Norway for in the first place--to catch the killer of a young girl.  The original closes with him, having escaped scot-free in an orgy of suspicion, driving away alone.

As can be expected with a major American remake from a young director, working with a larger studio budget and some extremely big-name actors, Nolan's decisions to excise the more unsettling parts of the original aren't at all surprising.  Studio films in America are never fully separate from the impetus to make money, and the likelihood of a big-budget thriller showcasing Al Pacino sexually manhandle a child solely to get information is nil.  The innkeeper, played by Maura Tierney in Nolan's film, is also, unsurprisingly, turned into one of those classic Hollywood plot devices: she exists so that Al Pacino can have someone to bare his soul too, after all, it wouldn't be Hollywood without some cheap form of moralization for Pacino's various illegalities.  In the original, it's clear that Skarsgard is guilty of some, if not many, forms of malfeasance prior to his arrival in Norway--in Nolan's it's explicitly laid out that Pacino framed a particularly nasty killer.  And therein do our troubles begin. 

Removing rape and molestation isn't the problem with the remake--in all truth, it's rather pleasant to not have to experience it.  After all, it's not these acts that present Skarsgard as such a dark, unsettling character--it's the combination of his almost completely internalized performance and the stark humanness of everyone around him that allows his merest signs of aggression to come across so strongly.  Pacino hasn't given a quiet performance of any merit since the Godfather films--choosing instead to vary his booming vocals and unpredictable behavior, and his best work has been in films that allowed that type of explosive work to shine: the lunatic obsessive Hanna in Heat, the selfish idealist Lowell Bergmann of The Insider are two brilliant films that would be unthinkable without Pacino's brand of male machismo.  Insomnia was a different beast, altogether.  Choosing to play the role as a man who seems constantly on the verge of a coma, he raises his voice rarely in the film, and he never, ever, opens his eyes beyond a half-lidded squint.  While the setting of both films allows for this, being set in the bizarre parts of the world where the sun doesn't set for weeks at a time, Pacino and Nolan's choice to have the lead play the role as if the character is slowly reaching the point where all his scenes would be performed fast asleep is one that clashes, irritatingly so, with Skarsgards performance.  The truth of an insomniac, as it's portrayed in the Norwegian film, is that of a man who can't sleep, yes, but it doesn't make him less of the man that he is--it just shaves off all the self awareness, the censor, the willingness to allow any external force influence his behavior.  Whereas it's always clear in the Norwegian film that Skarsgard is not to be trusted, Pacino's tired stumbling leads the audience to feel a meaningless sympathy for his behavior, knowing that he'll make the right choices, the only drama is whether or not his exhaustion will prevent him from having the chance.  The choice only worsens as the film reaches the introduction of the murderer, played here by Patch Adams hideous Robin Williams. Williams, a man who's choices in acting range from playing idiot man-children to idiot woman-children, is so far removed from what's required in the role that, at his worst moments, the film veers close to some kind of farce.  He's neither intimidating, frightening, or the least bit believable as a man who's loneliness led to obsession, and then had his obsession turn to murder.  His lack of ability even removes from the viewer the chance to see that thruline that exists throughout Nolan's other work: a man willing to sacrifice everything and anything for that which lays beyond his reach.  By the time the remake reaches it's Hollywood conclusion, where Pacino lies dying in the arms of Hilary Swank, extolling to her the virtue of "never losing your way," the film has meandered so far from having a discernible point of view that it's only curiosity, and the excellent cinematography, that maintains the viewers interest.

Nolan hasn't returned to the field of the remake since, and considering the nihilistic behavior of his protagonists in The Prestige, it's likely that whatever gross sentimentality that infected Insomnia has been excised both by the mediocre response it received, and the opportunity to apply it to a film more willing to receive it, that being Batman Begins.  The type of immature bravado displayed in Insomnia makes sense in a comic book film--it is totally undesirable, however, in a film that is meant to appeal to adults.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Dead Zone

Directed by David Cronenberg
Screenplay by Jeffrey Boam
Based on the Novel by Stephen King
Starring Christopher Walken, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lorn & Brooke Adams
Released in 1983
Available in the US on Paramount DVD

Bad movies with great directors continues with this 1983 film.  Neither as creative or as gruesome as Cronenberg's other adaptations, The Dead Zone plays out as a intelligent filmmaker trying to redeem a piece of hack fiction, which it, of course, is.  (The Dead Zone is a Stephen King novel.)  There's some interesting stuff here--Cronenberg's fascination with the intimacy of male/female relationships when circumstances go haywire, Martin Sheen's bizarre marriage of lunacy and powerlust--but the movie is based on such meandering tripe that by the end, it was clear why The Dead Zone is a mildly successful television show (yet also terrible) featuring Anthony Michael Hall. The material just doesn't translate into film well--it's too random to sustain a decent arc.  Somewhere in the movie is three or four short stories, blended together heroically by Cronenberg, but still too incongruent to make for a good movie.  Of course, if the main character (who carries the incredibly stupid and unlikely name of "Johnny Smith") is played by a good enough actor, it might have worked.  And it was--by Christopher Walken.

Except it still didn't, and therein lies the next problem.

1983 was still prior to Walken's first promenade into the hack actor market, the insane "Zorn" in Roger Moore's final turn as James Bond, A View To A Kill, and according to some critics, The Dead Zone is considered one of his "best" performances.  I don't see it that way. As enjoyable as Walken can be now, with his constant Saturday Night Live appearances and Fatboy Slim videos, the man who made Deer Hunter, ceased to exist long ago.  Great actors wasting time (and yet, not energy or talent) in terrible movies isn't anything new, but at least you used to be able to count on them to eventually earn their stripes again--Clint Eastwood may have acted with a bunch of chimpanzees and Loni Anderson, but he also gave us Unforgiven.  De Niro may have jerked off with Eddie Murphy and Ben Stiller, but he tore apart Ronin and Jackie Brown. It's sad to to say it, but hey, Walken--what ha've you done for anybody lately? Watching him try to make some semblance of a human being in The Dead Zone leaves the viewer cold and unhappy.  It's neither a good performance by a relatively unique performer (like Deer Hunter) or is it the Walken who goofed his way through David Spade's Joe Dirt and imitated himself in Pulp Fiction.

That's the problem with The Dead Zone.  It didn't come out in 2005, when i could've pretended it was the sister movie to De Niro's Hide and Seek--a great actor slumming in a shit film for a paycheck.  It was 1983, and it was helmed by a director square in the middle of masterpieces, with Scanners and Videodrome on one side and The Fly and Dead Ringers on the way.  The problem can't all be blamed on the source material--after all, Kubrick was able to make The Shining work just fine.  But Walken--now here was a guy who still had yet to unleash the awfulness of The Prophecy and of course, Balls of Fury.  He doesn't just fail to compel in The Dead Zone--no, it's something worse.  He tries, and yet, still fails.  It's a disappointment to watch.

-Tucker Stone, 2007*

Boudu Sauvé Des Eaux (Boudu Saved From Drowning)

Directed by Jean Renoir
Screenplay by Jean Renoir & Albert Valenin
Based on the Play by Rene Fauchois
Starring Michel Simon, Marcelle Hainia, Charles Granval & Severine Lerczinska
Released in 1932
Available in the US from Criterion

Time hasn't treated the old comic actors that well--whether one likes it or not, and most of their fans don't, Chaplin and Keaton aren't paid much attention to anymore by the masses.  Even Jim Carrey seems to have hung up his rubber-faced shtick, while the current vogue for dry improvisation and a healthy collection of wigs shows no sign of abatement.  That's not for anyone to say that's a good or a bad thing: comedy isn't like drama in a lot of great ways, and while it's sad that most people born today will never check out A Night At The Opera, that shouldn't mean they suffer character assassination at the hands of those who do.  (They should just suffer never getting to see A Night At The Opera.)

Michel Simon played at being a real actor, and he eventually found success at it--and many will tell you he found it in Boudu.  Luckily, those people don't work here.  Like our previous installment in the Great Directors category, this film is just better than a trifle, and far from a masterpiece.  It's early in Renoir's sound days, but for whatever reason, it's quite unlike his later literary adaptations in that there's a lot less of the type of exploration and experimentation.  Instead, Renoir's direction and screenplay play it straight, and the meat of the film lays on the shoulders of Michel Simon, who, unlike his director, chooses to do whatever he feels like with the material he's given.  At the time, Simon's performance was treated with some rapturous response, and although film criticism wasn't dealt with substantially during the early 30's, Simon's work was something acknowledged with a decent recognition for it's uniqueness.  It deserved it--and in a professional, theoretical manner, it still is something quite special.

It's just no longer that entertaining, and it's uniqueness suffers under the weight of the last 70 years--after all, the overweight, ignorant clown has since been done far better.  Watching Boudu's wrecking of the kitchen, or his bizarre seduction of his saviors uptight wife, one automatically begins to compare his work to John Belushi or John Candy, and the comparison leaves Simon's work seeming quite amateurish--and the truth is, that it is rather amateurish.  That's part of it's charm--much like the film itself, it's an interesting diversion, a valiant effort by intelligent men to create art out of a play written for the unwashed.  And therein lies the basic problem--as a worthy piece of exploration into a director who's best work stands among the greatest films of all time, it's not an unpleasant film--no, but all that aside, it's a comedy that just isn't very funny.  The argument has been made, and made again and again, that Boudu is really about an attack on the dishonest sentiment and inherent cruelty of the middle class towards those who refuse to acknowledge it's mores, that's a reading that I refuse to endorse--because that's a reading of Renoir's greater works, and one that Boudu can't support.  Even the vaguest of similarities requires a ridiculous amount of intellectual gamesmanship for this film to stand alongside Rules of the Game in thematical agreement.  Still, it is Renoir--and bad Renoir is going to be far more rewarding than anything else that pops up at the local multiplex for the next...well, let's say 19 years, just to be polite.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Deadly Companions

Directed by Sam Peckinpah
Screenplay by Albert Sidney Fleischman, based upon his novel
Released in 1961
Currently available upon multiple DVD & VHS formats.
Starring Brian Keith & Maureen O'Hara
Also Featuring Strother Marton, Chill Willis & Steve Cochran

Sam Peckinpah's first feature film couldn't exactly be called a trifle, although it's certainly far from a masterpiece.  It's a cheap, mildly formulaic Western film that, excluding a couple of sequences, would seem out of place alongside the other 13 movies he went on to direct.  Still, it was Peckinpah's first foray to the screen, following a routine stint on television shows like Gunsmoke and the ill-fated Westerner, and in that light, it's more of a successful experiment than some of the legendary directors later failures.

Using a cast of regular Western actors, Deadly Companions is a pretty simple narrative--a couple of no-account criminals team up to help a mother take her deceased sons body across dangerous terrain to bury him alongside his long-dead father.  The trips difficulty stems from the fact that Brian Keith, the groups much-loathed leader, is responsible for the death of the boy, and that the remaining criminals have little interest in assisting him in his self-imposed feelings of responsibility.  Sounding a chord that resonates through nearly all of Peckinpah's later work, the producers of Deadly Companions wouldn't allow Peckinpah to explore the potentials of the body itself--which may have formed part of the mans interest in the realitively dull narrative in the first place.  13 years later, when filming the trials and tribulations of Benny and a decaying head in his Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, Peckinpah was finally able to showcase the basic problems inherent in transporting a dead body through the hot desert sun--in Deadly Companions, this is dealt with in a few short lines, and ignored from there on.  Excepting this, Peckinpah was mostly left to his own devices, although many viewers may assume that the shoehorned in love affair was forced upon him, it's really more just a nod to the demands of a cheap genre piece.  (A similar relationship that seems out of place appears in Sam's Major Dundee, when Charlton Heston's crazed title character begins to pause at moments in the film to declare, with a straight face, his feelings for a woman who seems to have appeared solely to hear his bizarre pick-up lines.)  More often than not, Peckinpah was successful at presenting intimate relationships between platonic men far more believably than he was at depicting those that involve men and women.  There are exceptions, like the previously mentioned Alfredo Garcia, and the Ballad of Cable Hogue, but for the most part, Peckinpah seemed unable to capture anything that might be mistaken for a Richard Linklater film.  (Or even John Hughes.)

The only other thing worth mentioning about Deadly Companions is that it's a relatively difficult movie to find if one is interested in seeing it in anything like what it appeared as in 1961.  Although multiple versions of the DVD exists in the US, all are cheap unlicensed properties, with varying aspect ratios and low-grade sound quality.  The highest quality version of the film available comes from a small German company, and that version is only playable on a Region Free DVD player.  While there are some films that are actually worth the expense of importing a foreign DVD, the Deadly Companions is really more for those fans most interested in seeing where Peckinpah got his start--and even those fans, of who this writer is one, will probably be satisfied to pay less than five dollars for the cheap American knock-off.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

Epidemic

1987
Directed by Lars von Trier
Written by Niels Vorsel & Lars von Trier

By all accounts, you don't need to write a letter to the DVD company.  That ever-present title at the top left of the screen, the one that says "Epidemic" in blood red letters?  That's supposed to be there.  Von Trier put it there, even when this movie was in theaters.  Don't ask what it means--hell, while you're at it, don't ask what any of Epidemic means.  You'll never be happy that way.  Just trust him--after all, he's going to tell you, pretty early on in the film, that he plans to stay boring until the movie reaches the 80 minute mark.  (As he puts it to his co-star/writing partner/actual friend, "We have to put drama here.  They will want to walk out, so we give them some drama.")

Epidemic is one of those movies about movies, more exercise than film, and it doesn't serve anyone going into to expect anything more to it.  If Von Trier doesn't interest you, than don't go anywhere near this film--you'll hate it completely.  You may hate it completely even if you like the man's work.  But if you're a fan, then it's required viewing, and you'd be remiss to ignore the hour long FreeDogme film on the special features.  Everybody else should skip it--except for the last ten minutes.  Trust us--you may think you have enough screaming and crying in your life, but until you've made it through Epidemic, you're missing out.

-Tucker Stone, 2007