Movie Diary 11/2/2009

Catching up on a weekend of movies.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov, 2009). George Clooney in a few hilarious wigs, Jeff Bridges Dude-ing out, the movie not quite hitting its Strangelovian possibilities. (full review 11/6)

The Messenger (Oren Moverman, 2009). Ben Foster, heretofore a somewhat spastically ornate actor, must play it straight as an Iraq War vet now stateside and forced into serving as a deliverer of death notifications to next-of-kin. It generates a hothouse mood; Moverman’s had his name on a bunch of interesting projects. (full review 11/20)

The Children (Max Kalmanowicz, 1980). Godawful thing about a nuclear accident turning kids into glassy-eyed killers. Happily, the audience at the Rotten party last Thursday night was well-lubricated and into the spirit of participation.

We Live in Public (Ondi Timoner, 2009). Thorough enough portrait of super-creepy Internet pioneer Josh Harris, who turned his technical skills on an exhibitionistic wallow in his own life. (full review 11/13)

The Hills Run Red (Dave Parker, 2009). Straight-to-DVD job sent for review by Amazon, about a batch of young cineastes hunting for an elusive lost horror picture. Clever set-up, though it falls into some awfully familiar patterns.

Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968). Brilliant. Ever notice how quickly this thing moves along, even though it doesn’t seem to rush?

Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958). Tati executing gags mostly in a clean modern house and its front yard; nice flow of jokes from one faulty gizmo to the next.

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008). I’m not entirely sure what this movie is about, but it sure shimmies along in memorable fashion – and what a collection of faces. (full review 11/6)

A Christmas Carol (Robert Zemeckis, 2009). Incredible digital dazzle from Zemeckis, and Jim Carrey isn’t about to let the technology get him down – he (or whatever is left of him in the motion-capture process) is terrific. I think Zemeckis likes terror more than redemption. (full review 11/6)

1922 Ten Best Movies

F.W. Murnau scores three films in this year’s list, which says something about A) how many 1922 movies are available to be seen, and B) how deep this filmmaker’s talent was. The Number One is Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Most silent films have vanished because of indifference and the vagaries of film preservation; Nosferatu was supposed to be destroyed because of legal proceedings from the Stoker estate. Fortunately, a few rogue prints survived, and Murnau’s utterly eerie film – indeed a symphony of horrors – still lives.

The other two films display, to a lesser but still evocative degree, the ability of Murnau to deepen the field of the movie frame, to create a world that extends out through the back of the screen. Forget the flat proscenium of the live theater; Murnau blows that out.

The second-best film is also from Germany: Fritz Lang’s crime epic, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, a stupendously intricate portrait of a society under the spell of a master string-puller. Of all the sinister messages emanating from 1920s Germany, none delivers the dire prognosis quite as completely as this one. Next to these top two titles, the other films look positively relaxed. With the proviso that there are undoubtedly films of this year that deserve to be mentioned that are outside the reach of see-ability right now, here are the best of 1922:

1. Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau)

2. Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Fritz Lang)

3. Cops (Buster Keaton, Edward F. Cline)

4. Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim)

5. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty)

6. Grandma’s Boy (Fred C. Newmeyer)

7. Phantom (F.W. Murnau)

8. Pay Day (Charlie Chaplin)

9. The Burning Soil (F.W. Murnau)

10. Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (Benjamin Christensen)

The three big comedians are all represented with classic stuff (Grandma’s Boy is a Harold Lloyd picture), to the exclusion of star vehicles for Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford – but sorry, that’s how I roll. Nanook, Flaherty’s famed film of Inuit life, still has shivery moments, and a way of seeing the world that is just as strong as Erich von Stroheim’s orchestrated decadence. Not that there’s anything wrong with orchestrated decadence.

Culture Notes: Whit Bissell Centenary

The centenary celebrations for Whit Bissell are winding down by now; you’re probably tired of hearing the endless tributes and thinkpieces paying tribute to the actor, born October 25, 1909. Of course I’m kidding: nobody pays elaborate, passionate tribute to Whit Bissell, and if people know his name it’s because of its humorous quality, an internal rhyme contained within a tiny, meek-sounding series of syllables – a name for a soda jerk or a vacuum cleaner salesman.

Still, a tribute. Whit Bissell might have been the first actor I could recognize as a character actor, a guy who turned up everywhere but rarely played leads. He has almost 300 credits listed on the Internet Movie Database, yet his actual total is surely higher than that when you factor in his ubiquitous TV appearances and uncredited movie work. But character actors are supposed to be colorful in some way: zany or grotesque, not cut out to be heroes but carrying some distinctive quality. Whit Bissell was like his name: he tended to white himself out. Even other people on screen looked bored by him sometimes.

A compact fellow, evidently prematurely white-haired, Bissell had a slightly severe face and a forceful voice, and thus played a lot of doctors and professors and figures of authority. I must have first known him as the military supervisor on The Time Tunnel, where (as he so often did) he fretted and crunched numbers and supplied a drag on the proceedings. He was on all the TV shows in the 1960s and 70s, including the “Trouble with Tribbles” episode of Star Trek, and stayed in movies, too, so often turning up for his one good scene or tiny fragment of story: The Magnificent Seven, The Manchurian Candidate, Hud.

Before he switched to TV-mostly work, Bissell did lots of differents parts, and it would be wrong to suggest that he always played the same drab, officious role, even if a lot of his stuff blends together; especially early on, he got to play neurotics, and his pinched face made his authority figures available to be untrustworthy at times. Good roles in Brute Force, Raw Deal, and He Walked by Night put him in the noir world as a sometimes sweaty, nervous type; he could bring on the badness, as in Riot in Cell Block 11. When it came time to essay a member of the crazed Frankenstein family tree, in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, he turned in a typically professional, steady performance, perhaps the least histrionic Dr. Frankenstein ever (despite the florid plot turns and dialogue).

He was repeating his duties there, more or less, from I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and he did a lot of genre work during that era, which is another reason I came to know him so well when I was an adolescent: Creature from the Black Lagoon and Monster on the Campus are among the best of those. And when a framing story had to be added to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to re-assure the audience that the alien takeover wasn’t really coming to their town, of course it was Whit Bissell cast as the authority figure calming down Kevin McCarthy. I always enjoyed seeing him during this time, but my affection increased after I realized his name was Whit Bissell, that funny moniker that might have come from Mark Twain. How can you not like a guy named Whit Bissell?

People like him make movies go. You say, “Ah, there’s Whit Bissell,” and then he’s gone, off to pop up in something else in a few minutes on a different channel, then bound for some retro-TV station showing Wagon Train or Perry Mason or Mannix. In a hundred more years, he’ll still be doing that. Even the quietest character actor makes his permanent place.

This is Beeswax on the Rocks (Weekly Links)

None of your beeswax: the Hatcher sisters.

Reviews I wrote for the Herald this week.

Michael Jackson’s This is It. “Debunks the theory that Jackson was working on a dud.”

Chelsea on the Rocks. “Sloppy and meandering and completely enamored of its shabby-chic subject.”

Irene in Time. “In Jaglom’s movies, it never seems to occur to an actor that silence and under-emphasis might qualify as human behavior.”

Beeswax. “The appreciation of unusual people.”

Act of God. “How to make sense of a bolt-from-the-blue occurrence.”

Movie Diary 10/28/2009

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009). It’s hard to know what exactly is happening with this movie, but relatively easy to dig it. Nic Cage, we like you untethered, and Herzog is just the man to throw away the leash. (full review 11/25)

Beeswax (Andrew Bujalski, 2009). Maybe you don’t like the idea of Mumblecore, or young people navel-gazing, or whatever it is you don’t like about these kinds of movies. I submit that making a movie around a pair of non-acting siblings is justified if they are expressive and interesting enough to light up the screen, as Tilly and Maggie Hatcher are in this film. Good enough. (full review 10/30)

Movie Diary 10/27/2009

This is It (Kenny Ortega, 2009). Okay, better than anticipated. Dude may have been a freak, but at the end he had it together physically and creatively, and you can’t argue with his sense of theater. (full review 10/30)

The Horse Boy (Michel O. Scott, 2009). Doc about an autistic child, carried by his try-anything parents to the steppes of Mongolia. Raises a few questions about various kinds of responsibility in making a nonfiction film, but an interesting trip. (full review 11/6)

Skin (Anthony Fabian, 2009). Sophie Okonedo, with her refreshing quietness, plays a character from a bizarre true story of apartheid South Africa. She’ll get the Oscar push, which takes something away from a nicely-stated turn. (full review 11/6)

Act of God (Jennifer Baichwal, 2009). True tales of people hit by lightning, and the ways folks try to make sense of such random events. It’s got some gorgeous weather in it, and the different testimonials are tied together by Paul Auster’s memoir of being caught in a deadly lightning storm at age 14. (full review 10/30)

Movie Diary 10/26/2009

Irene in Time (Henry Jaglom, 2009). Jaglom’s still going at it, these days with his latest protegee, Tanna Frederick, who makes a point of not leaving any emotion unexpressed – but then it’s a Henry Jaglom movie, what would you expect? This time out the nattering women are talking about their fathers, the men are on the make. Makes you want to slap people. (full review 10/30)

Chelsea on the Rocks (Abel Ferrara, 2009). The legendary Manhattan landmark, given a kind of first-person oral history by denizens past and present. You just know off-camera interlocutor Ferrara is going to get himself onscreen eventually, and he doesn’t disappoint. (full review 10/30)

1983 Ten Best Movies

Recently I was on KUOW radio for one of my (once weekly, now intermittent) appearances, and I talked at some length about Local Hero, Bill Forsyth’s enchanted Scottish fable. (That show is archived here.) About the very earned magic of that film, and how it once led me on a detour in Scotland to find the seaside town where much of the movie was shot. I got a bunch of emails after the show aired, from people whose imaginations had been similarly fired by this beautiful film, a response that should not have surprised me at all. It’s that kind of movie: funny without being cute, sweet without being cloying, in touch with something authentic about (to borrow the title of a subsequent Bill Forsyth movie) being human. Watch it on a double bill with I Know Where I’m Going! and you may find yourself checking the train schedules for the Highlands.

What happened to Bill Forsyth? Evidently he became disenchanted with moviemaking, though rumors exist about a return. Let us hope. Local Hero, meanwhile, is the best movie of 1983, the year I began reviewing films regularly for a daily newspaper. Had a good debut week: The Right Stuff and Under Fire (a now forgotten, but rather potent movie) opened the same October day. Here are the ten best of 1983:

1. Local Hero (Bill Forsyth)

2. L’Argent (Robert Bresson)

3. Pauline at the Beach (Eric Rohmer)

4. The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese)

5. The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman)

6. Man of Flowers (Paul Cox)

7. Videodrome (David Cronenberg)

8. Tender Mercies (Bruce Beresford)

9. Valley Girl (Martha Coolidge)

10. Entre Nous (Diane Kurys)

King of Comedy is maybe one of Scorsese’s three best movies, and possibly the last time De Niro pushed himself into something truly adventurous and energetic. Some of those other movies seem neglected now, which is a shame: Man of Flowers is a superb meditation on Art ‘n Life from a director whose interesting career is generally underappreciated, Tender Mercies (which gets half its rating from Robert Duvall’s performance) was highly regarded at the time, and Kurys seems to have fallen off the international map.

Just missing the list, some big-time directors with not-quite-their-best movies (Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia and Imamura’s Ballad of Narayama), plus Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, a wonderful film I’m afraid I haven’t seen since 1983. Next in line: one of Mike Nichols’ earthiest pictures, Silkwood, and the ingenious Harold Pinter backward-melodrama, Betrayal. I also really like some messed-up movies, especially Jim McBride’s often exhilarating Breathless and Francis Coppola’s Rumble Fish; and as official success stories go, you could do worse than Terms of Endearment and The Big Chill as your representatives. Squeeze in a nod for Woody Allen’s Zelig and the peppy conclusion to the Star Wars trilogy, and you’ve got yourself a decent little year. Especially for the Eighties.

Addendum: I can’t believe I posted this without mentioning Strange Brew, that landmark of Canadian cinema – nay, of Canadian culture. Beauty, eh?

Movie Diary 10/24/2009

You’ll Find Out (David Butler, 1940). When people review the new Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics box set, this is one of the titles that causes eye-rolling and excuse-making; although Karloff and Lugosi are both in the cast, the movie isn’t horror, and if the movie is a vehicle for anybody, it’s for radio cut-up Kay Kyser and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge. (Complete with Ish Kabbible, a thoroughly 1930s-40s figure who fascinated me in the 1970s.) Horror it certainly is not – although a couple of floating heads in a seance sequence summon up unexpected gooseflesh - but the movie fits neatly into the tradition of haunted-house comedies, and it’s really very spiffy on its own terms. Plus, K & L are joined by Peter Lorre, for an early summit-meeting feel.

Zombies on Broadway (Gordon Douglas, 1945). The other groaner on the Karloff/Lugosi set, this one with Bela spoofing his White Zombie role as a Caribbean zombie-maker. A cheap knockoff of an Abbott and Costello picture, starring that immortal comedy duo Wally Brown and Alan Carney, the movie is a revelation as a straightforward parody of a recent picture from the same studio, RKO’s I Walked with a Zombie. Calypso troubador Sir Lancelot and looming zombie Darby Jones both return from that film. Brown and Carney aren’t all that funny, but the movie isn’t awful, and the reliable Gordon Douglas keeps it trundling right along. Also, at one point a monkey does a zombie walk.

Five (Arch Oboler, 1951). Key post-atomic-apocalypse film, five survivors of the cataclysm, lots of pre-Rod-Serling bits of humanism and poetry. Plus a few real surprises.

Crude du Freak: The Headless Amelia (Weekly Links)

Kneel before Jaa

Movies I reviewed for the Herald this week.

The Headless Woman. “A Hitchcock movie watched through a smoked glass window.”

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. “Fails on all counts.”

Amelia. “Even the voice of the newsreel reporter isn’t convincing.”

Ong Bak 2: The Beginning. “Jaa displays the fiendish focus of his idol, Bruce Lee.”

Crude. “Berlinger may need to return to this story.”

And don’t forget: next Thursday night brings a Rotten Halloween party, celebrating the zombie-Western comic book, complete with booze and a secret, freaked-out movie. Details here.