Notes from the Trenches

Relatively light screening week this last week coupled with my not having a Tuesday night speaking gig at the Denver Public Library for the first time in a month left me with a little spare time to head out for a discussion of Vertigo at the Starz Filmcenter, facilitated by my friend Tom Delapa of the Boulder Weekly and the Denver Art Museum. Found the experience to be mostly frustrating, I have to admit, with a lot of folks testing the waters for the first time and liking the temperature, to be sure, but resetting the conversation at the beginning, I fear. I like, lately, to think of Vertigo as three problems with Midge: the problem of her glasses, the problem of her order, and the problem of her painting. I think if you look close enough at that Barbara Bel Geddes girl Friday, you hold in your hands the keys to one of Hitchcock’s most enigmatic works. This week is Psycho. I think I’m going to stay home. It’s not that there isn’t still profit from tapping that vein – just that public discussions of Hitchcock seem to me now to be a little retrograde if I’m not moderating them. (Not suggesting that my discussions are less basic, just that when I’m talking, I’m doing something.) All things being equal, though, better to have an opportunity like this in a central location in our little two horse town than not. Starting my Ghost Story series with Jack Clayton’s The Innocents this coming Saturday at 1:00pm at the Gilpin County Public Library: it’s free with free coffee, pop, and popcorn; just 45 minutes outside of downtown.

I did see Capote, however, at an industry-only screening, and found myself sort of fascinated by the way that P.S. Hoffman seems trapped in his body the same way that Capote was trapped in his persona. There’s a real live boy in there and, a lot like Charles Laughton from a film generation or two ago, he’s leading man material crammed into the body and mug of a character actor. I’ve read him bristling a few times at being described as “chubby” – I think it hurts him more than you’d think to be thought of as an “ugly” guy when it seems clear that he’s gifted enough (unlike, say, Paul Giamatti who I still don’t get), to be something really special. When Capote makes a speech (a manipulative one) in the film that people often judge him by his appearance and come to the wrong conclusions – I had a hard time separating the actor from the ghost. Ditto his brief (too brief) turn as sainted critic Lester Bangs: dealing with similar identity/appearance issues. We talk a lot in “chick flicks” about the appearance of women (the gorgeous Toni Collette has made a cottage industry out of being “ugly” in them), but we don’t spend enough time I think with the extent that the male ego is attached to attractivity. It’s certainly not as important for a man to be gorgeous as, say, rich and influential – but I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t a moment in Ocean’s 11 where I didn’t look at Pitt and Clooney in their awesome suits and have a neon-hued reminder of just how cruel – and sharp – is the ol’ pecking order. Anyway – there’s a lot of pain in P.S. Hoffman’s performance and I think I’m leaning towards a positive review of Capote because of it. The film itself is suspect from the start.

Progress on my DVD queue involves me crawling through old “X-Files” episodes at a pace so slow that I fear my aversion is showing. It’s not just straight seasons of the hoary old show, but Chris Carter’s new “Mythology” box sets that cut out the good stuff to focus on the stuff that just doesn’t make any goddamn sense. “Colonization,” “Black Oil” – the very things that turned people off the thing – that have made the show the one-term cautionary tale applied to stuff like “Lost” (and after three episodes of Season Two, I’ve made a vow not to go back to the island until the gala series finale) – is making the going rougher still. I remember as a kid making up dramas a lot like this: breathless, lying on my side with a jump-rope as a climbing cord, imagining all manner of intrigue and illogical scenarios while invisible girls wept pitiful tears at my plight and my awful courage. Nothing wrong with prepubescent passion plays. Nothing, that is, until they become the overarching master-plot of a beloved television series. All would be well if its failure were the end of it – but here come these box sets that give it another go. Frustrating and bordering on offensive that Carter would even try to pull this shit again.

Screening this week, too, of Martin Campbell’s The Legend of Zorro - a sequel to a film that I honestly can’t remember anything about except that there might have been a scene where Antonio Banderas semi-undresses Catherine Zeta Jones with a sword. Watching the new one unfold, it comes clear that it's everything that you’d expect a PG-rated action film to be, complete with oodles and oodles of slow-motion “consequence” shots where the bad guys are shown to be all right despite terrible falls from great heights or calamitous explosions. (I refer to them as "A-Team" shots, to put not too fine a point on it.) All the mayhem, none of the violent loss of life and grieving families – that is until the conclusion where a pair of villains are dispatched in extraordinarily gruesome ways and an entire battalion of Confederate soldiers is dispatched by a guy with a bottle of nitro in his pants. This doesn’t appear to count, of course, and the audience responded to the sadism with brio and bonhomie. A trio of good guys who are killed in cold blood by the baddies early on which I guess excuses the sociopathic actions of the heroes in the final reel. The whole thing, hate to say, seems to be a remake of Once Upon a Time in the West. Can’t say I hated the flick, though, because I think that “already weary of it, sight unseen” is the more accurate term.

Also took in Joe Wright’s surprisingly good Pride and Prejudice (which is also sort of surprisingly cruel, and again with no real consequences, but then when did I become the old maid?) – and saw Charlize Theron and Niki Caro’s North Country which is just not very good. Full of mixed signals and the kind of happy horseshit that passes as activism nowadays, who knew that Norma Rae was so good? The best part is how the same kind of macho bullshit that torments our heroic girl miners is used against an evil witness for the defense, begging the question of when it is, exactly, that being a bully and questioning someone’s sexuality is good, and when is it bad. It takes a complicated issue and makes it the martyrdom of St. Theron (her character has no flaws, as far as I can tell, making this “woman’s” film about the redemption of four men)– people who play in Oscar pools, here are two shoo-ins for Best Actress nominations (Theron and Knightley, the latter of whom has already gotten Roger Ebert’s magic thumb) this year – as well as another two strong contenders for Best Picture consideration. Mind you, I’m not saying they deserve it, just that they smell like the kind of film that gets attention this time of year. It’s a movie directed by a woman from a book by two women – but the screenplay adaptation was written by a dude. Better than the directed by, written by, adapted from a book by dudes ratio of women’s pic The Hours, but no great shakes in any event. What movies this year were directed by American women, anyway?
Watched Jan Svankmajer’s astonishing Alice back-to-back with the Dennis Potter-scripted Dreamchild - the former only available in a full-frame, dubbed DVD and the latter out of print in any format – played in conjunction (Henson’s Creature Shop provided beasties for Dreamchild) the two form a grand double bill. Svankmajer, Czech stop-motion animator extraordinaire (the inspiration for the work of The Brothers Quay amongst others), fashions from Carrol’s twisted tale a surreal exercise over-interested in scissors and writing desks. My dreams afterwards were dark, grotesque things. Really an amazing film and required viewing especially now that we’ve been primed by Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit. It goes places, does Alice, that you wish it wouldn’t. A prime example of what happens when archetype is accessed through an intimate understanding of source material and the perverse machinations of the lizard brain. A sequence with the caterpillar imagined as a room full of holes created by ravenously burrowing, phallic worms – and our Alice carefully taking off her shoes before entering – is nightmare territory and one of the only true evocations of the displacing surreality of Carroll’s prose and prosody. Dreamchild on the other hand, is a wonderful portal to Potter’s own pop surrealism that finds the nostalgia in Carroll’s pedophilic reveries. What is pedophilia on one level but an appreciation of ephemera? There’s menace in Dreamchild’s pitch black whimsy – the script, it goes without saying, is above reproach. Ian Holm, by the way, is the perfect Dodgson.
I’m interested as hell in Wes Craven’s announced adaptation of the terrifying Alice computer game – anyone hip to the progress of the project?

Caught a dollar-theater showing of The Dukes of Hazzard, I thought I’d mention apropos to nothing. It’s just about as good or bad as you’d expect but, surprisingly, it didn’t herald to me the end of human civilization – just another shot across the bow at white southern males. Again, the key emotion while I was watching it was an almost total disinterest coupled with no little impatience. Sort of like getting caught in a conversation with someone with whom you have no interest in having a conversation. Meant to go out and catch a civilian show of The Fog 2005, but by the end of the weekend, realized that if I just waited another week, I could probably catch it for $2.00 down the street.

Finished reading Pete Dexter’s fabulous Train - one of the best of its kind that I’ve read since James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential - a dark, gritty, patios-filthy noir that sings of dirty-Faulkner and the only good book Walter Moseley ever wrote. A line: “She was pitiful in a way, but not in a way that Norah pitied.” captures a lot of the joy of the novel. It’s written from the point of view of an African-American caddy with a green thumb and a friend in a punch-drunk, blind boxer named Plural – taken under the care for a time by an enigmatic cop named Packard and his new wife Norah. Deceptively simple and without anything like a plot, the book is instead a startling piece of historical sociology and by its open-ended ending, I was left with this feeling that I’d been somewhere. I was sorry to see it end. On my bedside table now, Joe R. Lansdale’s The Bottoms.

Here’s this week’s (week 4) mystery capture - it's a relatively easy one so hurry, hurry:

(The contest so far embroiled in a four way tie between Ian, The Captain, Asokan, and Earnest)

On the shuffle:

Afghan Whigs - If I Were Going
Buzzcocks - Ever Fallen In Love
Talking Heads - Psycho Killer
Cat Stevens - Here Comes My Baby
Ruby - Hoops
The Fiery Furnaces - Bird Brain
Ani DiFranco - Untouchable Face
Sidney Bechet - Blue Horizon
The Smiths - There is a Light that Never Goes Out
Broken Social Scene - Our Faces Split the Coast in Half
Sonic Youth - Stalker
Cat Power - Back of Your Head
Sparklehorse - Sea of Teeth
Beck - Cold Brains
Simon & Garfunkel - America
Tanya Donelly - Life Is But A Dream
Cocteau Twins - Cherry-Coloured Funk
Kronos Quartet - Already It Is Dark
Stevie Wonder - Blame it on the Sun
Bad Religion - No Control
Tom Waits - Yesterday Is Here
The Cure - Fascination Street

New reviews:
Dario Argento's Trauma and The Card Player
Hellraiser: Hellbound, Boogeyman (1980), Return of the Boogeyman, The Fallen Ones
Stay and Doom
Dreamer
North Country
Capote