MON ONCLE (1958)

I keep thinking about the dogs in this film, how Jacques Tati the director makes them the stand-in for Mr. Hulot the character when he’s not around.  They are guileless, curious, carefree things, and they don’t always know the destruction they leave in their wake.  In the opening of Mon Oncle, we follow them from the old quarter to the suburbs, foreshadowing Hulot’s visit there in much the same way the wind blows through the door creating havoc just before he enters the hotel in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953).  There is also a dog at the beginning of that movie, lazily blocking the road leading into the tiny vacation town.  We see Hulot’s hand reach out of his car to pet the dog long before we see his face.  We can’t help, in either film, but connect Hulot’s simple, innocent energy with the sweetness of animals that also depend so much on the kindness of strangers.  There’s a moment in Mon Oncle when Hulot, working for his sister’s husband, Mr. Arpel, at Arpel’s rubber hose factory, lays down flat on the floor to play with a dog that runs away before Arpel rounds the corner, making it seem like Hulot is just lounging there.  Hulot never knows Arpel sees this or that he’s making yet another sour assumption about Hulot’s laziness.  Likewise, when Arpel’s secretary sees footprints in her office that lead to the window overlooking her bathroom, prints that belong to Hulot via wholly innocent means, he never understands why she’s shooing him out so gruffly.  It’s not that Hulot is missing a brain, it’s simply that the world is judging him while he carries an almost determined lack of need to make any sort of impression whatsoever.  His sister says his head is in the clouds, but that’s not fair – his head is right here, observing always, absorbing everything, adjusting things for the better (see him move a window pane to move a ray of sunshine onto a singing bird), but forever finding himself in situations that are in baroque contrast to his easily pleased and happily accommodating disposition.

When we see the extreme contrast of Hulot’s unkempt neighborhood and the ultra-modern home of the Arpels, we know that Mon Oncle is a step forward from his previous movie’s simple scheme of sight gag set up and payoff and toward a particular brand of social commentary (though a long stride behind Playtime’s grandly poetic, intricately choreographed perimortem of urban living).  Hulot’s is a rustic, unchanged world of unwashed buildings, sidewalk cafés, open-air markets, street sweepers, and horse-drawn carts.  Inside Tati’s typically large, deep-focus frame, we see the bustling life of the lower class, stray conversations in the dusty street, haggling over prices – general life, presented as a bubbling ballet of activity.  While across town, in the suburbs, the Arpels proudly boast the newest in everything – home design, gadgets, garage doors, cars, clothes… and fish-shaped fountains.  We’re presented with these differences and left to deduce the bankrupt tedium of modern straight lines, imposed style, and the illusion that the newer way to do something (like boil an egg) is automatically better.  But these trappings of financial success aren’t presented in any malicious or dark way – the Hulot persona won’t let it get that far.  We may sense in Hulot’s bemused reaction to these objects and surroundings a kind of curious distrust of the fancy, and we might take away from his awkwardness that, just maybe, the closer we get to clean and streamlined, the further we get from experience itself.  But it’s never shown, as far as Hulot is concerned.  Where we actually get something closer to pronounced commentary is in the boredom of the Arpels’ young son, Gerard, who, surrounded by the exact opposite of a boy’s ideal playground in this near-empty, soulless home, exhibits a dry, quietly nursing cynicism that takes the form of repeatedly leaning his head onto his palm like a pint-sized Groucho.  Gerard is the nephew implied by the film’s title, and he is given over to Hulot’s care for part of the movie.  It’s only then that we see the boy come to life.  Hulot is essentially the same in all situations, but Gerard changes when released from the confines of his drearily bright and shiny home, making him the film’s truest, if quietest, conduit for the joys of the past, the warmth of nostalgia. 

Hulot is socially fixed in amber, a maladroit throwback, never not halting, and it’s fun watching the Arpels spend time and social capital of their own trying to assimilate him into “normalcy” – Mr. Arpel by setting him up with a decent job at his factory and Mrs. Arpel by setting him up with the woman next door.  The blind date at the Arpels’ front yard dinner party is a major set piece that at once catalogues the many ways polite society can be a quiet sham and illustrates the impossibility of a man like Hulot ever fitting into that world.  He is the epitome of the misfit character: but he’s not possessed by an iconoclastic rage against the system, nor is this a scathing parody of modern life.  The film is neither a send-up nor a take-down.  It falls somewhere in between: Hulot is just a man so naturally unimpressed with the system that any time he’s standing up next to it, his isolated self-sufficiency is a pointed indictment against it.  Hulot could be the past before it ever knew it wanted to be the future. 

But, all of these internal themes aside, if you prefer, you can simply soak up the film’s many external joys, meted out via Tati’s brilliant mastery of composition and use of sound.  In one of my favorite shots, early in the movie, we see the entirety of the front of the three-story building where Hulot lives – a large, flat, diorama-type shot that could be the progenitor of a million Wes Anderson shots – and we watch through windows as he slowly makes his way from the ground floor, up several flights of stairs, across halls, through walkways, until he finally reaches his apartment on the top floor.  By the time we get to this shot, Tati has drawn us well into his way of seeing the world – Hulot’s physical movement, and the behavior of most of the characters in all his films, is an intentional pantomime that invites us to set it apart from reality, and yet his clear enjoyment in showing the character’s unfazed nonchalance at having to take this long course up to his home every day, more than once, infuses the moment with a buoyancy that carries over into the rest of the film.  We know instinctively that Hulot is not the kind who will judge others for choosing a fancier life.  Instead, we sense he carries his love for movement and life and interaction with the world into even those areas he can’t fathom are necessary. 

If there’s a down side to Tati’s style, it’s that his films adhere so rigorously to this outside-looking-in approach, we’re left always the observer, never a participant, so a Hulot film does not generate pathos.  Hulot creates emotions in the characters around him – there are the annoyed hurrumphs of vacationers in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday and the head-shaking disapproval of the Arpels in Mon Oncle – but we, the audience, are at a distance and are not particularly moved beyond knowing chuckles (and sometimes outright laughter).  And yet, I would say Tati has constructed films that are perhaps the apotheosis of the observational film, because outside of the laughter created by watching a man so ill-fitted to the world around him, the greatest effect of watching a Tati movie is the way the submersion into his hyper-stylized point of view makes us, for a time, see our own reality differently.  After a two-hour stay inside one of his movies, you can look out the window, watch a workman park a little truck curbside and change a light in a lamppost… but you can’t do it without newly realizing the fluidity of his movement and the funny beauty inherent in the tableaux of a small human being interacting with his huge environment.  For me, this is Tati’s gift to the world, the gentle imposition of a view of life that is curious about it, aware of its potential to overwhelm, but enchanted by its never-ending poetry.

PRINCE AVALANCHE (2013)

I’m on board with any movie that takes two broad comedy characters, deposits them in a Terrence Malick movie and then asks me to take them as seriously as the lush beauty of the sometimes harsh natural world around them – and succeeds.  David Gordon Green fuses his two-headed career into one mind and creates a tone that greets the receptive viewer with what can best be called gentle broadness.  The film gets started on a questionable note, as we’ve yet to acclimate to Alvin’s (Paul Rudd) quasi-formal speech patterns toward his road crew employee, Lance (Emile Hirsch) – they work together to paint yellow lines on long stretches of newly-restored fire-ravaged roads in 1980s Texas.  Alvin feels like some of the same self-mocking characters we’ve seen from Rudd before, but made especially ironic by his thickly-groomed matte of a mustache, which has a power all its own to destroy our trust in the filmmaker.  But we soon learn that this is who he is – a not-so-pleasant loner attempting to cultivate an air of intelligence possibly beyond his grasp, even if it’s only to fool himself.  He’s cloaked himself in a kind of transcendental, self-reliant, self-indulgent Thoreau-lite, but we learn from his time in the woods that he’s mostly just avoiding his problems – namely his girlfriend, who also happens to be Lance’s sister.  His more-Walden-than-thou façade may have worked to give him a self-regard makeover, but it’s also worked on his charge, whose open-faced acceptance of Alvin’s wisdom is a sweet-souled, near-Lenny-esque take on the empty-headed, 20-something drifter with no plans beyond the next girl he’s going to bed.  Lance is the kind of guy who, while searching for his co-worker among the trees, cries "Alvin!" at the top of his lungs, but is completely unaware of the cultural reference. Together they form an act suitable for a particularly patient southern Vaudeville circuit.

These two are cut from the same cloth that normally gives us Step Brothers, or Year One, or any such not-so-novel vehicle for bodily function jokes and unconvincingly affected, stammering, faux-macho insecurity.  The blunt force of these kinds of movies and the characters that populate them is usually wielded to generate the easy laughter of superiority, if not, for some, genuine dunder-headed identification.   But Green is a smart filmmaker, and despite his recent penchant for pot-head empowerment, or perhaps even in that same vain, just from a different, less-fogged route, he shows here that he’s still as deeply connected to the earth as he was in his first three features (George Washington, All the Real Girls, and Undertow).  And as the plot, thin as it is, if not willfully non-existent, lolls forward along the un-yellow-lined road, these two 2-dimensional constructs are drawn out into their third dimension, depth, by sheer virtue of being slowly imbued by the magical force of their natural surroundings.  It’s far too much to say that what we end up with is a rich and compelling treatise on man in the universe, but it is at least an earnest and engaging revelation of what might make these kinds of guys tick.

The movie has its moments of internal illogic – why aren’t the guys fired for their moment of drunken, yellow-lined road doodles?  They survive that episode in the same way that Sylvester the cat survives dynamite exploding in his face, by a simple cut to the next scene.  But concerns like this are redeemed by the hopeless amount of charm that exudes from their basic nice-guy souls.  We like them, we like the quiet of their surroundings, and we have a latent envy of their relative freedom from supervision, heavy traffic, oppressive schedules, and, save for each other, human beings.  It’s an idyllic life with simple responsibilities and lots of time to think.  It’s nature.  And we miss it when we see it photographed so well.  In the film’s single best sequence, we’re treated to an extended musical montage of Alvin’s weekend alone, while Lance has gone into town, and we see over the course of a few minutes just what the director is up to – flowers, trees, Alvin, clouds, grass, Alvin, wildlife, flowing water, Alvin – the rhythm is calculated to make us view Alvin himself as part of nature, a human creature whose life, and all the complications therein, is just another manifestation of the unpredictable, elemental fabric of the earth.  These are high-falutin’ words, especially since the sequence is also funny: this comical little man in his baggy workman’s overalls, communing with God’s naked earth.  Funny until the sequence ends with Alvin intruding upon an old woman scavenging through the ashes of her home, which was destroyed by wildfire.  The woman’s slow, catatonic groping for lost items is a decidedly downbeat reminder that the bucolic scenery we’ve just been treated to could explode into fury whenever it pleases – and lives can be destroyed.  Later, Alvin finds another abandoned wreck of a home and does an impromptu pantomime of some luckier man’s life, opening invisible doors and talking to various members of an imaginary loving family – a weirdly comic, vaguely poignant interlude that feels at once like the found moment of an improvising film crew and the revelation of this man-child’s most inward need.

Some may say these sorts of detours spoil whatever fun we may be having watching the characters flail inside of their bruised egos, and that it pulls the movie into unnecessary pretension and unearned pathos.  Maybe.  But for me, interludes like this, and there are a few, give the movie the patchwork feel of a docudrama wrapped in a comic dream, and function as a dark parallel to the ultimate lesson these fellows learn, which is that our problems will always be ours, but our humanity is defined by our capacity to help mitigate each others pain – pain that can arrive and destroy so naturally.

BLUE JASMINE (2013)

We love watching people crack up.  Stewart in Vertigo, Deneuve in Repulsion, Nicholson in The Shining, Portman in Black Swan.  There’s something perversely entertaining about seeing someone succumb to the level of frustration or fury or paranoia that results in a total mental disconnect.  But Woody Allen goes further in his new movie – or anyway, allows his lead actress, Cate Blanchett, to take his movie beyond what could have been just a simple entertainment.  His storied distance from actors whom he’s hired, typically avoiding any meaningful communication with them, gives them as much latitude as they can handle, and it’s mostly up to them to deliver the character.  Some fail to connect (often in a cringe-worthy way: Kenneth Branagh, Jason Biggs), while others grab hold, pull themselves up and make themselves indelible (Keaton, Caine, Weist, Davis).  But none do quite what Cate Blanchett does as Jasmine French in Blue Jasmine.  Blanchett takes what is essentially a standard comic premise – the city mouse and the country mouse, or the fish out of water; following a high society woman, sent low by a crooked husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), and now cobbling together a new life in the sticks – and by the naked truth of her manically radiating despair bends the comedy into a tragedy.  This is the two halves of Melinda & Melinda rolled into one.

The basic riches to rags story is decorated with lightly comic moments that get wrenched into drama with the piercing gaze of Blanchett’s thousand-yard stare.  The script has her correct someone by saying that another character didn’t die from choking to death when he hung himself, he died of a snapped neck.  The darkness in the heart of the blankly delivered correction makes the audience chuckle, but the stare, the insistent, bleak fact of the death that’s written into her countenance, makes us stifle the smiles, refocus our attention, and acknowledge her pain.  Later, recounting her memory of taking a job in New York, post-downfall, and having to wait on her old socialite friends, the chutzpah of her belittling a “menial” retail job in front of her minimum wage sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), is funny – until she sits up, looks off and begins shouting bitterly to one of the friends, who is obviously not there (“I saw you, Erica!”), and we recoil at the undiluted psychosis. Again, later, Jasmine receives a phone call from a prospective new date, and it comes on the heels of a frantically funny search for her ringing cell phone.  She takes a deep breath, regains her poise, and we’re content to enjoy watching her desperate effort, until, after hanging up, she suddenly weeps with such a deep brokenness that we want to reach out and comfort her.  These shifts put the tone and intent of the movie on a see-saw.  It’s difficult to discern how Allen feels about her.  While the director busies himself with nurturing the comic wallpaper around her (why is Michael Stuhlbarg’s dentist character named Dr. Flicker, immediately evoking young Alvy’s “universe is expanding” scene from Annie Hall?), Blanchett’s fully-engaged, raging, bewildered performance draws our admiration even as we’re turned off by her character’s super selfish, condescending attitude.  It’s a mixed bag, but you don’t quite notice, or at least don’t mind at first, the strange friction of loose comedy and tight drama because you can’t look away from Blanchett writhing behind her red-rimmed, steel blue eyes.  It’s a diamond performance in a slapdash setting.

Both the comedy and drama are constructed atop class contrast: we only see how far Park Avenue Jasmine’s fallen by the boxing match playing on the TV of her new temporary home and we only know the humble conditions of her new bunkmates by the stoli martini she’s ordering another one of.  The way Allen makes us think about wealth by showing us how it looks against relative poverty is similar to, of all things, Small Time Crooks – which is getting slightly better with time – wherein the streetwise rabble turn their bank robbing front into an accidental springboard to untold wealth only to lose it again.  In both films, Allen’s noblesse oblige deigns that the poor get the last word on what has value in the grander scheme – in Small Time Crooks, Allen’s character rejects the loot he’s stumbled into in favor of the simple life of beer and cheeseburgers; in Blue Jasmine, sister Ginger’s brief grope toward upward mobility, by her standards, is dashed by a harsh reality that drives her back to her rough-necked but loyal boyfriend, Chili (Bobby Cannavale). There’s a constant reshuffling of our allegiances between the haves and the have nots.  When Jasmine orders another stoli as a spite to Chili (and most of the people in the audience), we root for the man as he throws insults at her – but later, as we watch her make a slow but earnest effort to get her footing in her new, un-gilded world, we find a real sympathy for her.  It’s as if Allen enjoys giving us a berth to judge both, but to ultimately come down on the side we’d least expect – the one that doesn’t have an apartment on New York’s Upper East Side.

This is a story about a fable-in-progress that comes to a grinding, life-changing stop.  Like most people, Jasmine sees herself as the author of her own story, in complete control of the next sentence, the next chapter, until, abruptly, violently – she isn’t.  And just like her, we all sweep the less tidy truths of life under our own narrative rug, with a “habit for looking the other way” – but in her case, the swirling storm of criminal deception and marital infidelity was so obvious, any ignorance of it must have been willful, and it finally spills back out and destroys her.  As she flails toward her new life in San Francisco and proceeds to go about the business of recreating something from nothing, she depends on new personal facts spun from whole cloth, sometimes on the spot, and trusts only the new lies she tells to provide the platform for mounting her new push to the penthouse.  She’s in top form as she tells her potential new lover, Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), a couple of whoppers to avoid him knowing the truth, and he falls for the elegant widow she wants him to see.  Following this coup of deception, she provides what is perhaps the key line of the entire movie, “It’s all better… I met someone.  I’m a new person.”

But it’s a testament to Allen’s attention to his entire canvas of characters that, while we’re wagging our finger at Jasmine, we get a fuller sense of Dwight’s shallow motives, too.  A man with an eye on a political future, it’s clear he’s willing to marry for less than love in order to present himself to the state of California as the perfect (married) candidate.  Later, when he happens upon the truth of her past, he seems less furious at the lie than at the fact that the lie means he has to fish for a new trophy wife. And Dwight’s not alone in his soft misogyny.  In fact, for the amount of criticism Allen might receive for creating a female character who completely crumbles at the mere loss of her man and his money, none of the men are blameless, either: Hal is a dead-eyed financial sociopath, Chili is prone to fits of property-damaging rage, Ginger’s ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) is her ex-husband because he beat her, Dwight is a hollow status seeker, Ginger’s potential new-and-improved boyfriend Al (Louis CK) is hurtfully deceptive, and Jasmine’s son Danny (Alden Ehrenreich), perhaps rightfully so, heartlessly crushes Jasmine with a final face-to-face rejection.  Many of these faults are left hovering upstage, sometimes only back story, but they create an implicit world of cruelty and selfishness that at once forces Jasmine’s edge toward total meltdown and justifies the film’s final bleak note – one that, despite the shambling comedy that fills out the edges of Jasmine’s tragedy, fits in perfectly with Allen’s own perennial worldview.  Boiling evenly the primary elements of his latest slew of movies – the tragic morality tales of Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, the broad and breezy characterizations of Scoop and Midnight in Paris, the “short story collection” vibe of Tall Dark Stranger and To Rome With Love, as well as a healthy dollop of 1990s, Judy Davis-brand hysteria in Husbands and Wives and Deconstructing Harry – Blue Jasmine is a familiar kind of fun for the fair-weather Woody Allen fan, but retains the familiar bite for his most foul-weather admirers.

SUPER 8 (2011)

In Woody Allen's little, warm fairy tale of a movie, Midnight In Paris, Owen Wilson takes a trip back through time to visit his literary heroes, who give him notes on how to write his book.  For the blockbuster crowd, released only weeks later, there's also a big budget version.  It's called Super 8, in which J.J. Abrams takes a trip back through time to visit young Steven Spielberg, who gives him notes on how to make his movie.  Both films wallow in nostalgia for those things that influenced them.  Both films also rely on thin character signifiers to bridge us from the sources we know so well to their use in the new context.  Both take the surfaces of former icons (literary personalities and film images, respectively), reconstitute them for a new purpose, and shuffle them together into a new entertainment.  So if both films egregiously bastardize their sources, then mold their plots around cheapened and truncated versions of their former meanings, why is it that I finished Woody Allen's movie light and happy but I finished J.J. Abrams' movie angry unto silence?

Good question, so I did a little bit of soul searching.  And finally a little bit of admitting to myself that I'm simply not as knowledgeable of the warp and woof of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein as I am of the vast catalogue of unforgettable images supplied to my young imagination by Spielberg; so I had less room to be mad at Woody.  But deeper than that, it's clear watching Midnight In Paris that Allen has no desire to unpack the dark side of any of his heroes; it wouldn't serve his greater point to take those personalities more seriously.*  They are there to coax out a self-described "minor insight" in the context of a deliberately whimsical, airy fable.  But when Abrams re-uses Spielberg's icons, he has every intention to bring us to an emotional point similar to the original icon's power.  No, when I see in Super 8 the first shots that are clearly taken directly from the Spielberg songbook -- the bits in friend Charles's bustling kitchen, taken in overlapping activity and tone from the home life in Close Encounters -- I'm not shaken to anger.  I knew from the trailer that this was (as all the advertising was pleased to inform me) as much a Spielberg movie as an Abrams movie.  But by the end, the homages had stacked high, and the weight began to physically hurt.  A few of the many tributes --

• the group of anonymous men in the dark searching with flashlight beams that wave and cross each other in the dust, like the beginning of E.T.
• the camera pushing quietly over hilltop shrubs to view the expanse of a small suburb at night, also like E.T.
• the power company truck rolling in wide shot under a densely starry night sky, like Close Encounters.
• the beleaguered small town Cop-Dad trying to appease angry residents in a town meeting, like in Jaws.
• the mass evacuation of an entire town, people practically trampling over one another, like in Close Encounters.
• Cop-Dad smashing a military man over his head to steal his uniform, like in Raiders.
• the small bit of Cop-Dad's dialogue delivered in silhouette that, because of the last Raiders moment, felt a lot like the "What truck?" moment in that movie.
• the overturned vehicle crawled over by a large beast... and the business with a pane of glass above the children, like in Jurassic Park.

These plus many others meant, on average, a blatant visual rip-off per every ten minutes or so, a barrage that constitutes a kind of affront to anyone who grew up loving those movies, so arbitrarily were they fitted into the plot.  A shot or sequence you recognize and remember loving from a favorite movie, now tossed into a greatest hits salad such as this can only make you recall how much you liked the original movie better.  

But this list could have been absent entirely, and the effect of the final sequence would have still done the trick -- the Joe/Cop-Dad reunion hug in the final sequence, lit and framed to mirror E.T., complete with cutaway to the blonde female in his life (the girl here, the mom in E.T.), followed quickly by a finale that's a near shot-for-shot lift of ship taking off, friends looking up in awe, and dark-haired, wind-whipped, ambiguously resolved, young protagonist staring earnestly at the closing credits coming his way.  The rest of the list could, in comparison to this ultimate example, still be construed as individual moments of innocuous "sampling" inserted at moments of less than key import to the plot.  But to make the end of your movie virtually indistinguishable from its inspirational source, while also expecting the moment to rise to the same emotional pitch as that source, is to ask us to cry bittersweet tears over what, by the overt, shameless manner of its replication, has been rendered a virtual spoof of the moment.

Indeed, the affect of co-opting a movie moment as high-profile as the end of E.T., especially in the service of a movie that is uneven in so many other ways**, reminds me more than a bit of the affect of the attempted humor in deliberate movie spoofs like Scary Movie and Epic Movie, whose visual references have no life of their own outside of their basic ability to make the viewer recall their scenes' original use.  Abrams' movie is clearly much better than that brand of film, but the construction and intent are unsettlingly similar: follow a collection of undeveloped characters across a typical genre plot (in this case, the Spielberg genre), and hang obvious odes onto the construct along the way (in this case, father-son concerns, alien visitation, Hawksian masculinity/romance), each intended to wheedle an enjoyable shock of recognition and, Abrams seems to hope, borrowed depth.

Maybe outrage like mine is overblown.  It's crossed my mind.  It's just a movie.  It's just an homage.  And the movies he's riffing on are far from perfect themselves.  And the filmmaker he's riffing on made his career by quoting the great filmmakers that came before him, most notably David Lean, John Sturges, Howard Hawks, and John Ford.  I'm willing to concede that I've wasted an afternoon breaking down the obvious.  In any case, it will take me awhile before I can watch the end of E.T. (a movie I still very much enjoy) without feeling a jolt of lip-curling disgust over Super 8.  Just thinking out loud here, but an antecedent to this movie could be the Howard Hawks-produced movie The Thing from Another World (1951), the highly regarded science fiction film directed by Hawks's editor Christian Nyby; but for all practical purposes, visually, thematically, and character-wise, actually directed by Hawks.  As producer, Spielberg was surely involved in the creation of this movie as deeply as anecdotal evidence indicates Hawks was involved in The Thing.  So, at least for me, it begs the question, if Spielberg was the one suggesting these ransacked moments, or even if he wasn't, why would he allow them to be used in such a way as to diminish the originals' impact?  The answer can only be that he either has lost touch with his own emotional ownership of that iconography by virtue of time passed, or, in a manner that horrifyingly mirrors his buddy G. Lucas, he just doesn't care.

RAY HARRYHAUSEN (1920-2013)

Ray Harryhausen was my first hero. He goes as far back in my memory as no one besides family and, perhaps, Charles Schulz – my other childhood hero. Every birthday when I was a kid, I had a secret wish that my parents would arrange for Harryhausen to make a surprise visit. My mind would have been blown! Full disclosure: that wish never went away. He’s so deep inside my creative DNA. It may sound silly to most, who only see dumb, herky-jerky monsters with questionable rear-screen projection. For me, he connected me to my imagination in a way like NOBODY ELSE DID, and his art requires zero apology. I could watch certain scenes and entire movies all day today, and might just do that. Some favorites are the Allosaurus attack in “One Million Years B.C.”, the New York rampage of “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”, the Cyclops doing anything at all in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”, and the Talos sequence from “Jason and the Argonauts.” Each one a beautiful marriage of fantasy, adventure, dreamscape, and utter technical mastery.

Harryhausen killed MANY creatures on screen, even seemed to take a morbid joy in giving us the thrill of the kill shot – but more importantly, he NEVER let us get away from the scene before making us feel sorry for the loss. We were always forced to watch the creature take its last breath. That moment is in virtually all of his movies, from the Rhedosaurus succumbing in “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” to Medusa’s decapitation in “Clash of the Titans.” Our excitement at seeing the monster (in whatever form it took) get taken down is, in the hands of such a humane storyteller, replaced by pathos and a real feeling of guilt as we watch the last ebbs of life push their way out, and we are made complicit in the destruction of a living thing. In a strange way, through his hand-crafted, slow-motion art, Harryhausen taught me compassion.

I finally got to see Harryhausen in person, during one of his many sold-out presentations around Los Angeles. This was probably around 2000 or 2001. He was showing off a few of his models at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in North Hollywood – a mere five blocks from my apartment at the time. I carried with me the first book I ever bought with my own money, when I was seven, a book called “From the Land Beyond Beyond”, an in-depth, film-by-film discussion of all of his movies up to “Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger” – and a book that was by then so lovingly handled for so long, it was in four tattered pieces. After the presentation, I was determined to get him to sign that book. But when I saw this gentle, sweet old man engulfed by a swarm of fans, I thought to myself, “It’s enough that this book, Ray Harryhausen, and I are all in the same room together.” I’ll cherish that memory for as long as I live.

UPSTREAM COLOR (2013)

Whiffs of Malick.  Strains of Cronenberg.  Suggestions of Eternal Sunshine and Close Encounters and Wings of Desire.  The movie could almost be called a flip-book of film influences, if it weren’t that the pulse of the movie is the earnest, intelligent, ever-curious Shane Carruth, whose mathematic, probing scripts make everything he borrows his own.  But for a man as deliberate, level-headed and academically inclined as Carruth, Upstream Color is a strange miscalculation. 

I approached the movie positively, my sails still full of hale regard for Carruth’s first feature, Primer, which had me muttering to a friend, “I would sell all I own and follow this man as a disciple.”  Primer pulls the audience in, despite the movie’s sheer indifference to whether we understand the jargon of its lead characters, by providing us with a nifty procedural that we somehow know is leading to something remarkable – and it does.  There are themes in Primer that are imbedded in the situation, and implications branching out from the multiple-timeline structure, especially in the last fifteen minutes, that we’re delighted to draw out in post-viewing roundtables.  The themes are not, however, the meat of virtually every visual we’re fed, as they are in Upstream Color, wherein Carruth trades the fun, head-scratching, conversational mystery of Primer for seemingly deliberate opaqueness – a glut of images that are all symbol, to be decoded, many with almost zero narrative weight.

It is impressionist cinema, to be fair, and not designed to be dependent on dialogue or straightforward plot, rather on images strung together leaning toward meaning.  It’s sometimes successful.  The first ten-minute sequence, in fact, is an engaging exercise in making meaning out of the mostly-unrelated images and characters, until, finally, you behold the somber head of the plot emerging from the swollen river of information.  It’s an exhilarating challenge, to gather up the stray facts running past you, and cobble them together on the fly – before the next one comes along – and construct in your own mind what would, in a usual movie, be offered up on a plastic spoon.  But by the final minutes, the sheer volume of unexplained and half-explained and unsatisfyingly-explained and should-never-have-been-explained elements had piled up, LOST-like, and I couldn’t help thinking the images were as much the product of busy work, and nearly as disposable, as the paper chains crafted by the drugged victims in the story.

Chief among the less satisfying aspects of the film is the manner in which the purely symbolic becomes the hard-grounded fact of our characters’ lives.  That the so-called “Sampler” – whose deific pastime seems to be hanging around the emotionally destroyed among us and gathering up their pain for the purpose of making music to sell in the CD section – is first presented as a Wings Of Desire style entity who can be among people but not seen, until later, together with his porcine menagerie of transplanted souls, they become flesh and blood, killable, lovable.  Whatever meaning I may have missed in the shift from one to the other (I probably missed a lot, as did you) could not have made up for the fact that an hour and half of moodily fractured emotional invention and surprise pays off in the final shot of a woman cuddling a pig.  Cut to credits off of that, and I don’t know any other way to feel but had.

Upstream Color matches the off-the-cuff, loomingly-eerie and unabashedly egg-headed tone of Primer so closely that it effectively hammer-stakes his claim on the combination.  If the Mamet-light delivery of the dialogue, all truncated and revised trippingly in the moment, has you frustrated for its grating affectation, like it did me, then maybe embrace it, like I tried, as just a Carruth stamp – a tick of speech style that is as much his as Whit Stillman’s is his, or Wes Anderson’s is his.  If the salad shooter editing style, seemingly with little intent beyond the thrill of a fast-forward stumble through the ids of a desperate couple, has you wanting just a little bit more of a connection to these poor, broken souls, like it did me, then just sit back, because eventually, you can learn the visual language enough to fall into the rhythm of quasi-controlled mental-visual chaos and come out the other side, if not entertained, then at least with a general impression of having been through something meaningful.  And if you sense that everything I’m saying sounds like a back-handed compliment, then points for reading between the lines, because I am deeply and exactly disappointed by Upstream Color.

TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

Hank Quinlan is a border town cop bloated by secrets swallowed.  Mike Vargas is a Mexican drug enforcement officer riding his career on the momentum of his perceived integrity.  A jazzily meandering tracking shot brings them together in the firelight of an official’s exploded car, and together they play out the universal allegory of good versus evil.

Welles lowers his story into the pulpy darkness of hypocrisy, murder, sex, drugs, desperation, and revenge, and never brings it back up for air.  It is a claustrophobic world, stinking with death, where the liveliest moments come from a pianola played by no one, where a smug, lurid chuckle barely masks the condescension of institutionalized corruption, where “intuition” is as good as justification, and where even the man for whom all the busy police work is set to avenge (the city elder expended in the opening scene) is himself a brazen philanderer estranged from his family.  But Welles does it all with his indelible style, upgrading a B-movie, as he even called it, into that which cannot be ignored for its visual power and its ever-resonating thematic punch. 

The melodrama is as corpulent and sweaty as Quinlan, so thoroughly shot through with dread and dirt, it renders even more disturbing the already blunt dialogue: “An hour ago [he] had this town in his pocket… Now you can strain him through a sieve;” “We don’t like it when innocent people are blown to jelly in our town.”  And running underneath, seething racism, all of it subtle.  Vargas’s newlywed wife, embarking toward an American motel while Vargas diverts back into Mexico to investigate the explosion: “I’m just going to an American motel for comfort… not for safety.”  Quinlan to Vargas: “You people are touchy.”  And Vargas’s own reverse racism, contained quietly in his observation that the idea of peace, in the form of a 1,400 mile border without a single machine gun in place, is “corny” to his American bride, as if American hubris is uncomfortable with the idea of going warless for so long.

But the film is also stilted up by the themes of duty and idealism.  Quinlan, as few scruples as Falstaff, but none of the fun, orders his world of planted evidence upon a simple and good philosophy: “When a murderer’s loose, I’m supposed to catch him.”  And this reasoned exchange with his partner:

MENZIES: You’re a killer.

QUINLAN: I’m a cop…  I don’t call [my job] dirty, look at the record.  All those convictions.

MENZIES: Convictions, sure.  How many did you frame?

QUINLAN: Nobody… nobody that wasn’t guilty.

MENZIES: …Faking evidence –

QUINLAN: Aiding justice, partner.

Evil there, but with good in the balance: the borderline self-righteousness of Vargas.  The slow show of Quinlan’s dark deeds often stirs Vargas into sanctimonious diatribes.  To Quinlan: “In any free country a policeman is supposed to enforce the law, and the law protects the guilty as well as the innocent…  A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.  That’s the whole point, Captain.  Who’s the boss, the cop or the law?”  And to Quinlan’s partner, laying it on thick: “What about all the people [Quinlan] put in the death house.  Save your tears for them.”  In fact, the greatest fault of the film is that it allows Vargas, the mouthpiece for glib, nickel-plated platitudes, to finally elude the moral griminess of the real world.  Though he is touched by evil (or rather, it is his wife who is groped by evil, and he is only threatened by the possibility of being forever associated with evil), he is never fully in its grasp, never made to suffer the crush of evil, the kind of evil that creates the Quinlans of the world.  He even makes his exit before Quinlan’s death plunge, falling into his wife’s exonerated arms, speeding away into marital bliss, so that he doesn’t have to personally bear witness to the final, bloody result of his revenge.

Rising above the grime, and giving the movie its ultimate grace, is the fun it has with being a movie, how Welles never lets us forget that he is loving telling this story:  The first image of the movie, fingers twisting a timer on a homemade bomb, feels akin to someone winding up a toy and watching it go.  Quinlan’s pitiful entrance, attempting to pull himself out of his police vehicle with all his tremendous girth holding him back, is a wonderful counter to Harry Lime’s magnetic, stylized hero’s entrance in The Third Man less than a decade before.  Marlene Dietrich’s small role – and enchanting eyes – provide the perhaps unwanted evidence of Quinlan’s former love life… and a great excuse to use chili as a euphemism for sex.  Uncle Joe Grandi, the comic embodiment of inept local power by birth, manifested as a self-important devil on Quinlan’s shoulder, allows for a scene illustrating Quinlan’s heavy, sweating denial of his own capacity for “making deals,” though that is exactly what he’s doing.  The five-and-a-half minute, one-shot scene in the heart of the movie (inside Sanchez’s one-room apartment) that tracks the emotional movement of characters as beautifully as the opening shot tracks physical movement.  The visceral swamp of images in the Grandi death scene.  And, despite Pauline Kael’s rebuke, the final Quinlan epitaph, remarked by Dietrich at the close of the film: “What does it matter what you say about people” - a negation of one of filmmaking's primary functions, even as the final images plant an urge to want to twist the timer on the clock once more.

There is no escaping the resonance of the film in a post-Iraq world.  A story of a dirty cop planting evidence in an assumed guilty party’s home and behaving with the cavalier assumption that the act is justified based on intuition of guilt is one that seems tailored to rouse an audience trying to live beyond the Administration that authored that war. An interesting, if easily unrecognized thing happens when viewing Touch of Evil today.  The somewhat tacked-on resolution of the Sanchez story (he who blew up the car but maintained his innocence throughout the film) is said to have finally confessed his guilt to Quinlan’s men.  This is presumably meant to layer the end with irony, that all of Quinlan’s hunches were correct, and that planting the evidence (and indeed his very death) was unnecessary.  But in a media environment saturated with debate on the legality and dependability of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a modern audience is left with an even murkier ending, one that calls to question if the confession drawn out of Sanchez under duress can be trusted to be true, or if he just said what was needed to be said to abate the fists.  It is wonderfully, terribly fascinating to consider that, even as often as art influences society, it is also true that society can forever alter the meaning of art.  And in this case, the mystery of meaning can make Touch of Evil, to use Welles’s own words, “just exactly a thousand percent more effective.”