The Constant Viewer: Excerpts from an Imaginary Cinema Diary, 1876-Present

December 15, 1994 [Blue, White, Red]

2012-01-24T12:50:00.003-06:00

I managed to catch the final film in Krysztof Kieslowski's "colors" trilogy, Red. The first one was last year--December as well, I think. Each of them seems like winter or autumn movies, some chill creeping in that threatens to turn love into something else: a ghost-double that looks like love but may be nothing but straw and feathers--or something worse, something soft and yielding, still warm, as though it had been alive just before touching it, but gone now.

That's my memory of White earlier this year, last winter. The little Polish man (reminding me of Polanski, maybe in The Tenant right before he goes mad--or is he possessed?) crammed into the stolen trunk, beaten but unbowed, seeming to seek vengeance on the woman he couldn't satisfy--but really it was love, a cold and slick-ice thing sweating and freezing; then calm and cool, trapping her like a fly he will never eat, just visit down there in the web getting dusty from prison silt drifting down on her, his at last.

Blue, though: an act of dedication and liberation, art and love and memory and guilt and fulfillment, a crowded movie with the loved ones dead but the song remains--cupped in her hand, maybe too gently--and taken from her; but that doesn't last, she knows what she owns, and she broke my heart in love for her because she ran away so well, erasing everything--except herself; that she carries with her, and her grieving, living self haunts her until she sees the ghost--so that she can remember, draw the notes on the staff she has erased--another ghost, a melody that makes the both of us cry at the end, but in some kind of joy.

But these two serve as prelude to Red, the one I think I'll hold closest. The peeping-Tom judge hunches down and waits for dark; but the young woman will not let him be--will not let him be alone, that is, and she and the mended dog pry open his secrets and shame, and finally love breaks open like a small box worked and worked in your hands until the catch gives and spills everything out, sinking to the floor like the ferry in the Channel at the end--and who survives? Everyone from the three Colors, while the judge gets to be the last to cry over the fact of love, hard and cold and beautiful and necessary.

I'm not sure if I can watch a love story again--or remember the ones I love, all the way back--without the French flag fluttering away in the background--snapping sometimes, the cold wind leaving splinters of ice along the edge--but, sentimental fool that I am, also bathed in unusual sunlight, the kind of weather you don't expect on the English Channel as the engines smoke and a few lucky survivors blink at news cameras so that we can count them--lucky, I think.

October 20, 1994 [Grave of the Fireflies]

2012-01-10T15:00:00.000-06:00

Seeing the edge-of-town landscape in Grave of the Fireflies so quietly beautiful, so full of promise for any child alone and waiting, I expected a Totoro to show up any moment, one of Miyazaki's round and solemn sweethearts, to take the child's hand so softly nothing but love could be possible.

But the children here are dead--yes, slipping away in the firefly-haunted train, happy at last; but still gone, starved to death after the firebombing, mother dead too--never making it to the comforting hospital, ready for happy visits--and father as well, sunk by the Allies for the Emperor and the rice-paper Empire burning swiftly.

I have seen the newsreels, the documents of bodies--Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Dresden, Pearl Harbor, Bataan. But here in a cartoon the little girl giggles and clutches her older brother---his face toward her bright and willing, firm and decisive--and then he turns away, and he is also a child, not even sure they're starving--not wanting to be sure, why would he? Children are supposed to put up with anything--and maybe they don't know it, but they do, the strongest people in the world, the toughest and most resilient--and the grownups know it, too; why else would we batter at them as though we were hammering gold?--ah, what a lie. We do all this to them because they don't complain, at least not much; instead, they slip away, out there to the hole in the hill where they set up a holiday camp by the water and pee where they like and cram down the rice--until it's gone and the little girl starves, slowly, while her brother watches, and then he gets to burn her up in one more fire and slink away to the train station where he can at last slump over and let go.

The little box he held with no more fruit drops inside but only ashes is tossed out the door and lands in the grass and spills out a few bits, some fireflies gathering to make a very little light.

September 30, 1994 [Ed Wood]

2011-11-15T19:11:00.001-06:00

Before I can think about Ed Wood the movie, I must turn to Phil Hardy's science fiction movie encyclopedia, memorable because he says what must be said about a movie like Plan 9 from Outer Space: "It literally 'says' nothing, it has no characters, no story, no direction, no whatever"--this after frowning at those who "too often celebrate" it as the worst science fiction film ever. But it's the kicker at the end that makes Hardy so smart: "it's a completely unstructured dream produced with no interference from the conscious mind at all."

Did Tim Burton and Johnny Depp read those words before grabbing piles of black & white film to run some light through it? Depp widens his eyes and plugs forward, one terrible shot after another dutifully poured like thin oatmeal into the camera, where it somehow becomes something Ed Wood called a movie. Depp gives Wood a boundless enthusiasm for, even a kind of tender consideration of, the act of movie-making--but without any ability at all, not one little bit. Hardy insists that Plan 9 expresses the "deep-seated fear of being taken over from within" without any artifice--read: ability to structure and shoot and edit and so on a movie--and thus "bizarrely shows how insubstantial such fears are in isolation." Wood does not engage us with his "barely watchable film"--and Hardy knows that it is "fitting" that it should be unwatchable--and Burton's movie refrains from laughing too much at Wood's dream rustling down there, deep deep down there in a camera obscura Wood's conscious mind has never seen. Thanks to Hardy and Burton and Depp, I have come to see my own thoughtlessness in the movies, my own gaping stare, owning nothing, smiling like an idiot at the dim lighting and indistinct movement, or solemn as I stand with the man in the angora sweater by Bela Lugosi's coffin, waiting for the old dopefiend to rise and sneer at Karloff.

July 15, 1994 [Forrest Gump]

2011-11-07T16:48:00.008-06:00

Tom Hanks has been eclipsed as our Beloved Everyman by Forrest Gump--and that's not so much an irony as an inevitability, the trajectory of both his and Forrest Gump's director's careers, a strange brew of sugar and brine, offering throwaway fluff one year and lead-pipe bludgeonings the next. And out pops a movie that makes every heart swell in its final fifteen minutes--but earlier hammers away at the American Dream, a series of victories--on battle- and playing-fields, Great Plains open spaces and Gulf Coast waters--all landing randomly in the lap of a moron.

--And I mean that, as Broadway Danny Rose would say, with all due respect. As Forrest makes his way through the second half of the 20th century, he discovers that everything he lacks is given to him, as long as he's willing to keep running. It's as though Being There had been remade by Harper Lee on a dare: "Betcha can't turn Mortimer Snerd into Childe Rowland." Because Forrest does brave many monsters, turns and turns and forges on--and always the Childe, never growing up all the way, the last finally first.

It's the best fantasy I've seen in years, Epic in an old-fashioned way--especially for the viewer, who changes as the journey goes on, even if Forrest doesn't. Hanks never betrays Gump, never makes him to be less or more than he is. It's a blank performance gently colored with the honest ink of a cartoon character, like Zemeckis' Roger Rabbit and friends, as affable an American as Marty McFly stumbling backwards through unyielding years, bullies and jerks at every turn. I'm starting to think of It's a Wonderful Life, where another innocent is ground almost all the way down, until he figures out he's rich--which is, as Forrest notes, good: "One less thing."

April 24, 1994 [Crumb]

2011-11-03T15:00:00.002-05:00

I like reading and listening to Robert Hughes as much as the next amateur art-lover, but I had to grin--not too mockingly, not without some sympathy--at his confrontation with the piece of information that Robert Crumb masturbates to his own cartoons. Hughes had been doing a good job of placing Crumb in some context, as it were, with much praise--which I understand, given my own (and the general) strong responses to Crumb: a kind of in-joke nostalgia for a gone West Coast inhabited by hipsters but memorialized by nerds. But Hughes seemed suddenly at a loss for words--definitely not his usual state--until he recovered by blurting out something about Picasso doing likewise (a claim that seems as likely for that shrewd Blue Cubist as it does the obsessively cross-hatching Crumb).

I can't blame Hughes: the movie Crumb can be as skin-crawly as some of Crumb's drawings. And it's funny, because Crumb is nearly cute, a winking almost-rascal we forgive as easily as we've turned double-ironic Mr. Natural into pickup mudflaps and snickered at the Cat who likes gettin' it on with the chicks. At this point, Crumb is as old-timey-kooky as Janis Joplin, a brandname we can trust.

--Sort of: Crumb stares pretty long and hard at the weirdness, Crumb's Leon Redbone vibe resembling nothing like a routine, his outsider family barely hanging on to solid ground. But is this such a surprise? Aren't those dense drawings--thick and meaty with thighs and bellies, little nubs and protuberances poking along the surface of too-tight sweaters and baggy trousers--solid reminders that Crumb doesn't want to have anything to do with us? He just wants to keep drawing, whether we dig it or not--even though we do, with some regret (as it should be when one "appreciates" art: It asks for much, and takes without asking the things we try to hold on to).

I have found myself thinking strange thoughts while looking at a Crumb drawing. He finds me where I hide, and crawls in there with me and shows me something he's stolen from his father's dresser drawer. I get it, but for a minute I'm not sure I want it. But he smiles and smiles, not like Fritz but the Chesire Cat, his big square teeth lined up beneath a lounge-lizard mustache that might crawl away any moment. So I look down at what he's brought me, and then promise myself, liar that I am, to look only once more.

December 26, 1993 [Shadowlands]

2011-11-01T12:59:00.002-05:00

Joy and Jack Lewis leave the Shadowlands at last, the uncertain, in-between place--and if not "at last," at least for a moment, there in the Golden Valley come alive from inside the picture that hung on his nursery wall, one childish thing he was smart not to put away; and they kiss like lovers, wet from spring rain while clouds glide across the green like memories hurrying to join the present--and she tells him that the pain later is part of the happiness now--but he turns his head, once more like a little boy, because who wants to hear that? Who wants to suffer?

--Lewis did, once upon a time, as though Narnia didn't stand for anything except an idea: He told the ladies' clubs that suffering is a wonderful gift from God, and we should be thankful that He wants us to grow up, love and be loved. And then of course he's surprised by Joy--not on a hill but in a Valley, with Shadows. And it makes his face screw up like passion--the kind whose release is forsaken death.

--But his student's father says we read to know that we are not alone, so I read that look on Lewis' face and my own follows--and I understand when he says that he prays because he can't help himself, that it changes him, not God, because the change waits, like the pain later--and later, last of all, Lewis tells us that he chooses suffering, that the pain now is part of the happiness then--and saying that, telling it to us directly, he flips time on its head and reminds me of a promise: that "happiness then" may mean that pain does rouse us--as any problem does, any that needs solving. And I surprise those I love by suddenly leaving the typewriter and hugging them up like a goofy bear, foolish tears welling in my eyes as I turn away from them and make a joke and take off, wandering outside just in time to hear a bird rustle in a bush nearby and shake a branch as it shifts to get a better look at me.

December 3, 1993 [Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers]

2011-10-27T10:04:00.002-05:00

From the slight wordplay of the title to the inscrutable deadpan of its penguin villain, The Wrong Trousers felt absolutely right. I mean, my love of cartoons--well, clay-mation, here--has never abated, but this British short about trousers vindicates the sight of a grown man grinning like a kid on Christmas morning while the best film noir in years, maybe decades, rattles along like the model train chase of its climax.

But as good as the movement is, what I love most are the slow takes, the stillness, the flawless shots that work simultaneously as parody and homage. And of course the dialogue--well, monologue, with (again) silent takes as eloquent (or, in the case of the penguin, menacing) as any that Gish or Chaney or Keaton could've managed. I write without undue meanness that that little bird troubled my children--and well he might: he works as a Presence no one wants to encounter--particularly as a bedroom interloper, calmly claiming one's space, silently wallpapering over one's past, one's self.

But of course it's a comedy, right? Still, it noses out our uncertainty, and teases us with the fact that we've been to the movies enough not only to get the joke but also to accept the terror and thrills of molded-clay mayhem, split-second decisions paired with the slow and sliding creep of a sociopathic penguin whose dead eyes size you up and plan your erasure--while intrepid heroes counter with quick reflexes and boundless invention. What more can the movies promise, despite the terrible calculations of a faux chicken?

July 2, 1993 [Le Cercle Rouge]

2011-10-24T15:03:00.002-05:00

Le Cercle Rouge, a twenty-plus-year-old movie by a director gone for twenty even, understands that crime is a profession and an act of self-expression--almost an art. So despite the Inspector's Kafkaesque demeanor--a strangely menacing ghost-presence whose shape holds only because it's so certain of Universal Guilt--the criminals could care less about who deserves what; they simply act, their movements precise, their expressions of self so calm they seem almost disinterested.

But isn't there passion behind their lidded eyes? Aren't they willing to accept the Inspector's judgment without regret because the act is so satisfying, and their refusal to compromise so--I'll say it: honorable, despite the fact that they're thieves? They may not deserve my pity, but they demand my attention. Of course, they get it; they have to, it's the nature of the composition of their art: a smoothly balanced arc ending in a hail of bullets. But, as cliched as it may be, I also admire them for being artists--the most highly regarded French occupation--maybe more une inclination--or better yet, aspiration of every clerk and surgeon, waiter and politician, who also hope that their movements may be precise and their posture relaxed, confident of every gesture despite the necessity of their red circle.

June 14, 1993 [Jurassic Park]

2011-10-18T20:36:00.002-05:00

I'm thinking of George Orwell's comment about the gazelle, how it's an animal that looks good to eat when it's alive, because in my dream I'm running quickly through the sunny jungle behind Laura Dern trapped in Jurassic Park--and she sprints ahead of me like a young athlete, that leggy girl with the pug nose from high school who really turns it on as she heads for the finish line--just like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. And sure, I know Laura's in mortal danger, but even then she looks cute--no matter that real dinosaurs are after her, things so smart and ruthless they scare Sam Neill--things scarier than Richard Attenborough more than twenty years after he lived at 10 Rillington Place, little Mr. Christie hunting down his own females of the species.

--But the dinosaurs, the real ones Spielberg has in his movie, are not merely creatures: Neill does something so many have yearned to do when he hugs that triceratops, Laura cooing and making icky faces; and the brontosauruses--or whatever they call them in the movie (and I don't care: they're brontos, and always will be, just like the little blue plastic ones Pete had in his collection)--stately as they pull at treetops; and the fleeing herd graceful as white herons at full tilt--but yes, also scary, just like monsters when the velociraptors hunt the children in the kitchen, ha-ha, dinner almost served.

--But in the dream it's quiet--I know there are dinosaurs because Laura is still running, and she's gaining speed, leaving me behind. I'm not tired, of course, but I slow and stop in the absolutely quiet darkening trees, and suddenly I'm afraid because it's catching up with me--not the velociraptor, that's one I'm not sure I even knew about before the movie. No, it's the T. Rex, the one you fear with an electric shudder that vibrates its way up the back of your head like a clenching hand from millions of years ago and gives you a good piece of advice--Run!--that you haven't forgotten, ever.

--But I don't run, I stand there and hear the prelude of a growl and wake up. Next to me, Jean makes a little noise as I lie there frozen, and it makes me want to jump out of bed--but the dream's logic is still with me, so instead I fall asleep again and find myself in another dream. I can't remember it, except that my car breaks down on a deserted road that curves through a thick forest, also for the moment silent.

March 14, 1993 [Groundhog Day]

2011-10-15T10:31:00.000-05:00

I was happy watching Bill Murray's Twilight Zone dilemma unfold on Groundhog Day, even with the multiple suicide attempts--until the learning-to-play-piano montage. By the end he's cookin' with gas with the jump-swingers and sporting the requisite sunglasses and that patented Murray smirk--somehow never disdainful of anyone in particular while laying low the ego of everything in general; but all I could think of was the years he'd spent in the time-trap--years long enough to go from wince-inducing scales to chopsticks to finger exercises to bee-bop-a-ree-bob at the Community Center. And that was only a little tiny piece of time with the same day. I suddenly felt as though the theater's air had thinned--or that the walls had inched closer. For a moment, it was the scariest movie I'd seen in a long time, despite--no, in part because of--the happy faces all around.

And then at the end, this fable from "a dimension as vast as space and as timeless asinfinity" recognizes one small desire--no, not small; maybe the only real desire: to wake up next to someone you love and who loves you. Jesus, Disney couldn't have figured it out any more plainly or with such reckless sentimentality. But Phil has earned the right to his one morning of happiness--and suddenly I realize that everyone in the picture deserves something: They have all lived through Phil's Groundhog Millennia, even if they do not realize it; time's erosion must have smoothed them somehow, even if that time seemed one day long. And I imagined that he might get only that one morning, until something mars their happiness, and their lives "fade into the light of common day." But after all those years, maybe Phil will regain his footing as he recalls how long some days can be and how much work it takes to move to a better one.

November 2, 1992 [Tetsuo, the Iron Man, Legend of the Overfiend/Urotsukidoji]

2011-10-06T18:55:00.000-05:00

At work today I had to use something called "Cricket" or "Cricket Graph"--all I know is that I needed to turn some data into graphs. Not my greatest strength--but hey, when you're new, you say Yes to everything. Thank God I had an Apple computer. Scooted things around on a little screen that looked kindly on my common sense and rewarded it by leading me where I had to go--after a few wrong turns, I'll admit, but I'll be generous and blame me, not the Macintosh. Here at home, my Smith-Corona snaps away at these words--while the computer waits at work. Someday, I'll bring one home--the new Performa looks sturdy, almost stocky, like a minor Star Wars robot waiting to help.

--But what if it's a Twonky? The old movie rises up from the 1950s, a Hans Conreid revenge-of-the-machine vehicle about a living TV that takes over his life. Tetsuo, the Iron Man was taught this lesson with a viciousness that makes David Lynch, even those old Andalusian Dogs, Dali and Bunuel, seem kind and serene. The movie literally inserts the machine into one's life--one's body, which cringes and shivers and shrieks in terror and ecstasy, a fetish savage as a circular saw cut loose at maximum speed. It is ugly and hopeless--like Legend of the Overfiend, another Japanese outrage, a bursting rotted stew of blood and tentacles, as though the world had lost all signs of human making and been given over to monsters that chewed everything into a wet, tortured mass.

I'll admit it: I watched both of them, kept going until the end. But I was smart enough to eject the tapes and promise myself to get them back to the video store right away tomorrow morning before I calm my nerves at work with a machine that has a little Cricket inside.

(Editor's Note: Like the Constant Viewer, I'm thankful for the Bug's Life that Steve Jobs promised, and send my sympathies to his family and friends, with a vow always to save before closing.)

August 12, 1992 [Unforgiven]

2011-10-03T16:09:00.003-05:00

When Will Munny finally gets drunk enough in Unforgiven to become Clint Eastwood--cold and determined, certain only of his unmitigated desire to punish--oh, not even that: to not forgive (like the title says, you dope) and to walk through curtains of blood on his way home--when he takes that first step, I wondered if it was shame that drove him, that stopped him from repeating those flat declarative sentences about his dead wife's good influence, and to 'fess up that he had gone along just long enough to get his best friend Ned humiliated and killed by the funny sheriff with the terrible carpentry skills and more-terrible loose hold on his cruel heart forcing Ned to betray his own best friend before letting him die.

A nasty little thing in me muttered, "There he is, Dirty Harry at last--and only there because he has a bellyful of whiskey, all those steely Men With No Names nothing more than mad drunks. And Eastwood wants to kill 'em all, but he knows we'll hate him for it, so he just shames Munny and makes him go away." But was it that simple, was the movie a brutal satire of the Hard West without any laughs? (Aside from Saul Rubinek, who seemed to wander in from another picture, make himself at home, and scribble in history's margins snide little limericks about the quick and the dead.) I'm not sure; maybe Unforgiven simply wants Munny to confront, like a character in an imaginary Shakespeare revenge-play, the limits of his own acceptance of the way things are--and the way he's made them. Everybody keeps yelling and muttering about who's got it coming, until Munny finally notes, "We all got it coming"--and maybe even worse: "Deserve's got nothing to do with it." Eastwood suddenly gets old, his face lined and his neck scrawny--and his eyes lit like Capt. Willard's in Apocalypse Now with one small spark that worries that none of us will escape whipping.

April 6, 1992 [Delicatessen]

2011-09-21T19:43:00.000-05:00

Delicatessen led me down to my basement--a terrible mess, an impenetrable personal archeology that goes back to childhood--and all of it encrusted with dust and rust and cobwebs, as though Delicatessen's prop-master had spent loving weeks down there, floating every dust-mote just so, aesthetically skewing each peeling magazine and long-forgotten student paper--with a mechanical bank and a Magic 8-Ball, a set of surveyor's tools and a tin box for Egyptian cigarettes someone else smoked decades ago--and on and on, mildewed books and bins full of toys and clothes and intimations--not of Wordsworthian immortality but its comforting opposite, the way of all flesh and flotsam.

Because there on the French screen the future stood like a circus clown about to juggle improbabilities--but scary and lost, the poor little handyman--poised somewhere between Emmett Kelly and a small frog (no insult intended)--fattened up for the post-apocalyptic menu. And just like my basement the little man remains, his rhythm as perfect as his lithe frame and pushed-in face--and I remember him as the thug who hated everything in Diva--except now he is the closest thing to love in this hilarious and cruel movie, Chaplinesque without insulting Charlie. Each cartoon bounce and Keystone Cop skitter warmed me against the cold of the world he had to live in--darker than the corner where our first-born's crib stood in neat pieces suitable for kindling and spiders.

March 25, 1992 [Raise the Red Lantern]

2011-09-19T08:54:00.002-05:00

I have a vague childhood memory of hiding underthe bedcovers to weather some household storm--and it must have been abig one because I never fell for that kid cliché--especially when it came tomonsters: How could I plan my escape if I couldn’t see them? But that time I had seen enough, Isuppose, and gave in to the impulse to turn everything into pale thin cloudcover, a blank nothing to keep out Something.

Raise the Red Lantern billows asheet against the world--but it’s the world that’s made safe--or at leastblind, so that the lush slavery and personal politics within can push onwithout a sound, the snow and sun and black night the second set of bedclothes,a double cocoon where beautiful things with short lives and stingers can lie andcrack open and spread wings--not to fly away, but to hover over one another,the concubines circling like queen wasps, too many for the hive.

And off in the distance is the rich man who spitout golden wax and built it all: the closed indulgent empire with its unnaturalrules followed like laws of nature by queens who believe they rule. The young college student we followbeats her wings against the soft walls--and I watch her from my own littlecell, years ago--not so many, I guess, the moment still in my head as I sit andread subtitles and watch beautiful Women in Chains plot and scheme and despair,cons whose pleas of innocence are neither denied nor heard beneath muffled silk.

March 16, 1992 [Howard’s End]

2011-09-16T15:32:00.000-05:00

I don’t need everyone in the movie to keep saying they want to live at Howard’s End: I’m ready to go there, right now, and close the door quietly behind me and watch the dust float. What storms compel me to seek that low-ceilinged shelter--with the slightly mad housekeeper gliding along the periphery, the little rooms peeking into one another, the tame British wilderness crowding its soft shoulder against every eave, ivy and tree branch touching like loving friends against a slight chill outside--the weather welcome, though, because that means a cheery fire and the kettle on? After all, death and shame and greed and stupidity also crowd those little rooms--the sword waiting for just the right flanks to send packing, weak hearts or not.

What else is there, though? They all live there, one time or another, and have to walk where they all walk--and I have to follow them--and it's more than the same old Anglophilia that I jump into feet first, eager to follow the old woman as she moves one more time through the tall grass--mowed at the end of the picture, her ghost as welcome as the rich man’s humbled face, Anthony Hopkins holding his head and clearing it--yes, a little befuddled at the end, no longer a Lion of Commerce (too many losses, too many failed houses); but the sun makes an appearance and the clouds’ shadows seem cheerful as they glide on the field, the alternating light and dark natural and reassuring.

Again, it's more than those reassurances: While the ironies of the novel (at least I think they were ironies) are softened a bit, the new century does its hard work, watches the old class system not merely fade but reinvent itself as a man sitting on the grass and being forgiven by the freer spirits of the twentieth century--to whom Howard’s End is still promised. And while Romantic sunrises never work out, I confess I walk toward them, like poor Leonard Bast, because after all the two families behave as they should, whether we like it or not, with just enough foolishness and fond love to get them and keep them together.

December 28, 1991 [JFK]

2011-08-31T14:14:00.002-05:00

Two kinds of nostalgia run through JFK--one benign, even silly; the other hard and morose, a broad shoulder slowly pushing through a stunned crowd.

For a long time JFK was like one of those big ‘70s movies that enlisted the best (and otherwise) of both big and small screens into dubious service: The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Airplane, Earthquake. There’s Paul Newman! With Barry Sullivan! And George Kennedy! Say, isn’t that Helen Hayes? And Fred Astaire? And Van Heflin? At times these movies seemed like vast cinematic trawlers gathering stars indiscriminately--but there was a sense of almost-clever collage about it, too, tossing old warhorses at up-n-comers, grabbing you by the collar with both hands and yelling into your face, I’m a movie! And we’re ALL ready for our closeup! JFK goes farther, wedging actors into roles where you’d never think they’d fit--Joe Pesci in particular: He arrives in some green gascloud of rotted desire that only hours later reminds me of anything else he’s done. The effect, almost every time an actor showed up on the screen, brought me up short, mostly in admiring surprise.

But thank God for Kevin Costner, cast just as he should be, his accent mild and his demeanor pure downhome Untouchables, impatient that no one has any manners. His long ride “through the looking-glass” leaves him fierce behind schoolmarm spectacles that sometimes actually flash.

--And those eyeglasses cue the other nostalgia--or something like it, in a miserable way: The “brief shining moment” we imagined we had for a few years, neckties thin and creases sharp, white short-sleeved shirts reaching for phones and notepads--like cool-cookie NASA nerds waging their pocket-protector revolution, some kind of heroes--again, for a little while, until I had to look away from JFK’s last home movie, suddenly sick of JFK, wishing it would leave him and me alone. But it keeps coming at me without remorse and spinning its web that ruins everything I wish I could remember--which fades and leaves the smug killers to find new homes in this new decade, letting the past be the past so that we can never hold it again without unease.

August 22, 1991 [Barton Fink]

2011-08-30T11:09:00.000-05:00

When Barton Fink checks in at the Hotel Earle, I thought maybe I was supposed to be thinking of the old Earle in NYC, where two Dylans and Joan Baez and plenty of others--all the way back to the Moderns and all the way up to the Ramones--sat and waited. But that was just a word, “Earle”--the hotel in Barton Fink couldn’t be anything but Hell, papered in sweaty skin, with a chipper imp, the bellhop Chet--oh, where would we be without the happy-Gollum face of Steve Buscemi?--who nudges Barton into his cell.

Barton’s in the Hell of a writer convinced he has Something to say--and that’s his sin: the certainty that Something will come because it’s his fervent right as an artist. So he’s stuck there, his happy stage a continent away, while a wrestling picture stares him down; and all he can do is wish that he could look up and sing like one of his Clifford Odets-ian tenement dwellers and see the stars up there and get things done.

And then I knew why I couldn’t let go of the hotel’s name: It was Roy Earle all those years ago in High Sierra, Bogart glumly hunched down in his own dead end, looking up at his stars like a real artist--but doomed to wait for a crook’s just desserts. And I don’t care what the Coens intended with that hotel, Barton and Roy sat there together on the edge of the blood-soaked bed and waited--while Madman Mundt showed them the last thing they ever wanted. And while Barton emerges to sit on the beach and watch the gull disappear beneath the surface, Roy has to take to high ground--maybe less fortunate than Barton, but clearer as to where he should be. Then again, Barton has the package, just the right size for damnation, the twine snug against the paper--which even on the sunny beach reminds me of the wrinkled walls of Barton’s room at the Earle.

July 5, 1991 [Slacker]

2011-08-29T12:12:00.004-05:00

It’s pretty tough to be in your 20s these days. Just think of the nervous energy needed to get through the ‘70s--and the nerve to take over the ‘80s with steel-reinforced thighs wrapped in lavender leggings, headbands and wristbands tight like Danskins glued with sweat--and the nasal thump of the music cornering you, forcing one more set of reps, one more point of light to flash in that city on a hill, the whole pack of buns packaged snugly--but still bloated, too many goodies in the fridge, too many opportunities to indulge--or bystanders mowed down, some innocent but all unwary, chased by a Big Virus that forces you to let down all your defenses--literally, until you flatline it straight to the end of the decade.

All too much, better to let go of the line a little, to be a Slacker wandering with what’s left: young adults hiding in plain sight, moving just aimlessly enough to be ignored except by each other. And there, on the safer streets of Austin, these alternate-universe Texans turn their backs on the shining city and remake history--or make a new one, a meandering thing like the dream-worlds of the young man giving himself the luxury of a cab ride. He tells the driver--more likely, us in the theater; the driver remains uninvolved, simply patient (then again, that may be us in the audience as well)--that dreams are glimpses into the countless other lives you’re living right now, separate realities based on every other choice you could've made. As he rides to his own promised city, he thinks of Dorothy and the Straw Man in The Wizard of Oz going one way rather than another on the Yellow Brick Road--and there’s a whole other movie out there, the one where they turn left instead of right and never meet the Tin Man and Lion, where maybe even the Wizard and Witch don’t matter. Slacker is a movie about Oz-times-x, shrunk into a little world made, if not cunningly, then circuitously, somehow amiable despite the outer limits its characters inhabit, their strange conspiracies and unexpected claims infinitely less menacing than the plotting plots they’ve been told, stories so horrific, so Reaganesque in their smiles, and smiles, and smiles that you realize you’re being eaten only when the smile clamps down on your own.

No, these Austin kids know better: They lounge in efficiency apartments and hang out in seeming innocence so that the fit-n-trim smile passes on, a Blue Meanie Flying Finger that makes its way to leaner meat tenderized by regular habits and a desert storm.

April 22, 1991 [Mortal Thoughts]

2011-08-29T12:04:00.003-05:00

I can’t decide who was cuter in Ghost last summer: Patrick Swayze or Demi Moore--or maybe Whoopi Goldberg, who just shows up and takes over for a while.

OK: Demi Moore. There’s something about the broad expanse of her square face that encourages me, more or less. It’s not the face of a cheerleader but an athlete, softball, maybe, cute but with a wicked arm. And I’m not sure, but it seems she blinks less than average, and achieves something between a level gaze and a middle-distance rumination. She’s almost bland, but she doesn’t let that stop her. Even as a ghost, one continues to follow her.

--At least I’m willing to. And she and Alan Rudolph reward my wayward affection with Mortal Thoughts. She slathers on that accent and enters a one-sided Rashomon, an entire film dedicated to Cynthia’s ability to tell a story. It’s a good story, and much is invested in telling it--but Rudolph doesn’t care if it’s true: like his earlier picture, Trouble in Mind, it’s what’s inside that counts. Cynthia’s thoughts are so focused on mortality that she wills the movie to see things her way, as veiled--shrouded?--as that may be. And not even Bruce Willis, barreling through the picture somewhere in the vicinity of Jake LaMotta, or Glenne Headly as Willis’ almost-as-tough wife--man, not even Harvey Keitel having the time of his life as an interrogating cop, bearing down with those little x-ray eyes while a piece of gum rolls around in his mouth like the last poor slob he cracked like an eggshell--nobody can rewrite Cynthia’s story. Except maybe Moore herself, who grabs hold of Cynthia’s nape and makes sure she never stops talking into the camera. It’s Scheherazade with only one night left and a mystery at the end: Did we see the truth? Have we even seen the story itself? Whose story was it, anyway, and why does it seem the movie starts again, just to tell us to go home--but to take the blame with us? Bloody handprints are passed along to everyone in the picture until the hand reaches out of the screen like some William Castle scare-gimmick to leave a little smear on my forehead.

January 29, 1991 [The Vanishing (Spoorloos)]

2011-08-16T08:31:00.003-05:00

Pete was not happy with the end of The Vanishing. He argued that even Awakenings, which we’d seen a few weeks ago, had a better ending. Sure, De Niro breaks your heart when he falls back asleep--but he’s supposed to; the point is the time spent awake, the doctor’s love, the two of them living full lives in a short space. Sleep makes sense.

--But this Franco-Dutch death-in-life: where else can it go? The young couple travel through a dark tunnel--the young woman dreaming of being trapped forever in a golden egg--and the dream comes true for the both of them? That’s it? The movie was over before it began, he complained. Nothing they did mattered--especially the young man: not even his search for his vanished love had the passion of an obsession; it was as if he simply picked up a shovel and dug graves for them. He runs to death by running to hers.

I argued with my son, with his young insistence that one should do more than trudge to the dark hole. I suggested that the young man wanted to live in the golden egg with her, and saw no other way than to seek the man who had made her vanish--who had built the egg for her--and who the young man hoped would do the same for him. In a way, it’s a story about love--an almost-Japanese lovers’ suicide pact--this time assisted by meticulous evil.

--And speaking of which, I added hopefully, that was some bad guy, eh? Cool middle-class cucumber testing his own trap, chloroforming himself, trials and errors leading to a tidy set of maneuvers and firmly packed earth. Scary business, yes?

He would have none--well, hardly any--of it. Just another evil accountant, he shrugged; the movie monster of choice these days--the ones that don’t hunt campers and babysitters, that is. I want more than dot-dot-dot at the end, he said; only Hitchcock’s birds get a free pass with this kind of thing.

He’s right, I know--but this is the movies, and some of them do as they, not we, please. I promised him that The Silence of the Lambs next month will not let him down--I’d read the novel, and hope that nobody cheats him out of the occasional victory.

December 17, 1990 [Edward Scissorhands, Santa sangre]

2011-08-15T16:39:00.008-05:00

Vincent Price looked poignantly frail in Edward Scissorhands--while Anthony Michael Hall was big and beefy, all traces of his Sixteen Candles goofy bravado bent into a hulking shape as ready to squash Johnny Depp as Price was eager to love him. And as good as Depp is--and how thoroughly he captures an animate existence somewhere between childhood and a clockwork doll, his eyes always almost-afraid, watchful and waiting for someone to show him where to go; and as perfectly suited is Winona Ryder to her plucky damsel in distress, her golden hair and face drawing toward Depp’s, the two of them in a Tim Burton dream (while Burton himself seems to be dreaming of Edward Gorey’s filigreed Victorianism of dark corners and sudden arrivals--when he’s not fooling with a kind of John Waters ultra-suburbia, so square and plain it becomes dioramic, its own magic in the sharp corners of little houses and neat streets leading to the haunted castle).

--Anyway: as good as all that is, I can’t stop thinking of Vincent Price and Anthony Michael Hall, the two of them utterly changed. They seem the inevitable bookends of a sad story with jolly times in between--and more than that: fairytale love in the oldest sense, a kind of Chivalry both lovers understand, the chaste sacrifice both make, unable to touch.

--And one more image rises up, a recollection of a book one of my children found at a neighbor’s house--good German Lutherans, the father looking and sounding like Kissinger--imperious at dinner, his humor dry while his German Shepherd nosed me under the table. It was a facsimile of old nursery rhymes, Gothic in their cautions against bad behavior; and one was about a man who would go about with scissors in search of thumb-sucking children--and “Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast / That both his thumbs are off at last.” I couldn’t get this out of my head throughout the picture: I knew that some punishment was to come no matter how benignly Edward’s flashing blades might cut.

--And something else: The scissors became knives and it was like the sudden drop in a funhouse coaster, in the dark one moment then plummeting across the open space the next, everyone seeing you with your mouth open until you plunge back into the funhouse—because the knives flew from Santa sangre, a bloody fable of Oedipal delirium and retribution, armless and yearning. The comparison to Psycho is difficult to resist, but this time the son becomes not simply his mother but--what? Peter Lorre in Mad Love, swooning at the keyboard while the statue waits at his back? Or a failed Invisible Man, hoping against hope that when he removes the bandages this time he will at last be gone? Or Adam wrestling with his snake as it curls from inside? Or the Mummy’s slave bidden to vengeance? Or the Zombie Brides rising from their graves? Every old monster lurches forward, Frankenstein’s Creature included: the boy himself, made by his mother--or does he make her, complete her? In the end, Fenix is not Edward, who retreats to the haunted castle: Those sharp blades at the ends of Fenix's arms become hands again and he stretches them out and up to his crimes and to the freedom that comes with surrender.

September 24, 1990 [Goodfellas]

2011-07-30T17:34:00.004-05:00

As monumental as Raging Bull is, Scorsese once more finds the energy for Goodfellas and gathers up all that Italian desperate surrender to brutal old dreams and shapes something like a farce, an hysterical laugh somewhere down the block, maybe a scream, hard to tell--but who's going to go down the dark street to see?

--Scorsese and all of us watching Goodfellas, apparently--and happy to go and check it out, evil tossed off like buddy-buddy rank-outs on the stoop. I was perfectly happy--until Tommy in the nightclub wonders if he's here to amuse Henry, how is he funny, what's so FUCKIN funny about him. And suddenly it was as though every horror film I'd ever seen turned into a Munsters episode, mild-mannered and silly, because that happened to me once at the hands of an Italian tough guy who kept everyone around him off-balance. Like the narrator in Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, he spoke in empty, almost-jeering cliches and grinned and squeezed your shoulder--hard--while he told you what a great guy you were. And when I finally let down my guard and joined in the fun and told him what a crazy sunuvabitch he was he drew up short and flattened his eyes and set his mouth into a thin slot and asked me if I thought there was something wrong with him, if I thought he was crazy. He was, and I could smell the craziness coming out with his breath--and I froze, and I know my face tried not to register any fear, but he saw it and opened his mouth a little like he was going to take a bite out of that fear--and turned up the corners and gave me a smile as friendly as a heat-stroked wolf and laughed and wagged his finger at me, really had me going, gotta learn to take a joke. I let out my breath as slowly and quietly as I could, and kept my distance.

I hadn't seen him in a long time until Joe Pesci brought him up, one of those stories from your past you hope everyone's forgotten--but here it was, and I didn't relax for the rest of the picture, not even after Tommy got it inna-back-a-da-head.

February 26, 1990 [Cinema Paradiso, Amarcord]

2011-07-28T12:34:00.005-05:00

Is it fair to compare Cinema Paradiso with Amarcord? Maybe it's because I've watched Fellini's movie so often that it's begun to feel as though I'm remembering my own, not his, childhood. Or that the fog in Amarcord loses its menace and rolls on me like a blanket in a long-gone bed, the ceiling low and window small, the room cold but not clammy, the early morning light asking me to sleep just a little longer. For all its extravagances, even almost-cynicism, Amarcord plays its little Nino Rota music with calm insistence, urging me to let the big ships pass on and to return to the wedding-party, rain or no rain.

Cinema Paradiso does not have that particular magic, but there are moments that surprised me into chest-thumping yearning. I wanted to be with them in the projection booth as they reflected the movie out of the theater and onto the housefront so that everyone could enjoy--no, be in--the movie, even the angry tenant at the balcony. And I wanted Alfredo to be my father--if only so that I could save him, as did little Toto, and earn that pride and sorrow. And I wanted to do what both movies asked--remember and regret--until I realized I do remember, and I do regret--but try not to stand still and cry like a child, because no hand appears and holds mine to remind me of my address; I have to find my own way home.

January 28, 1990 [War Requiem]

2011-07-26T16:30:00.003-05:00

Sometimes, when I want to remind myself that the Middle Ages echo as though sound had no dying-point, no eventual muffling as the waves crash against one rock, then on to another, without lessening--again, when I want to see those days as clear as a flare at night, I read Wilfred Owen, his alliterative pleas and proclamations as old as the muddy ruts where soldiers have lain forever.

In "The End," he wonders if any wounds will heal after World War I:

Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth,
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?--
Or fill these void veins full again with youth,
And wash, with an immortal water, age?

Of course not:

When I do ask white Age, he saith not so:
"My head hangs weighed with snow."
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
"My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried."

This is necessary--Benjamin Britten thought so when he composed War Requiem--and so does Derek Jarman with his visual music film, respectful and beautiful, but certain that the end is the end, and that nothing remains.

--except the urge to hold a hand against the will to war, the awful certainty that every generation has to take its turn--yes, some more than others; but why, with so few of us princes, are we Machiavellian in our certainty that we must always be thinking of war, preparing for our turn? The first World War is Medieval in its refusal not to die out: Its brutal sloppiness has been repeated over and over, and my heart shrinks like the Earth as we move closer to one another--and not in cozy affection, but like creatures caught in a small space with our breaths hot in each others' faces.

November 21, 1989 [The Little Mermaid]

2011-07-23T20:03:00.002-05:00

I have an old copy of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales, and I’m pretty sure the children have been read “The Little Mermaid”; and somewhere in their heads--forgotten, I think--I hope--lie hidden the sad details, the Mermaid having to watch the prince marry another, the pain like knives in her new legs, the melting into air--where she waits for centuries to go at last to Heaven. What prices Andersen makes her pay, the melodrama exacting its morality.

--all of which is lost amid Disney’s assertion of its old self in a movie as bright as the tunes everyone gets to sing, the victories won, the laughter drowning all temporary sorrow. Disney finds its voice like a puzzle-box easily opened and spilling all kinds of happiness--a talent the studio had for years, despite the huntsman commanded to kill the little girl, the mother dead or chained, the bad little boy braying with his donkey’s voice--Gothic flourishes necessary to make the good times better. And I want to scoff--thinking of Andersen’s mermaid, broken and patient--but Sebastian is so cool, and the Prince is just enough of a goof, and the songs are as good as the Golden Age, wishing upon a star and pink elephants on parade. And the toys, you can’t forget the toys, slipped into Happy Meals and piled under Christmas trees--soon, soon. The Happiest Place on Earth rises up like Atlantis in irresistible primary colors.

October 16, 1989 [Crimes and Misdemeanors]

2011-07-23T19:53:00.004-05:00

We came home from seeing Crimes and Misdemeanors to find life imitating art. We were in the kitchen making some Sanka, and Jean felt a draft and went to the back door, parted the little curtain and saw that the glass on the door was missing. I went out to the back porch--tentatively--the porch light was on, and I was an easy target--and leaning against the house was the missing pane of glass, intact and innocuous, as though it had just slipped away for a moment to catch a smoke in the chilly evening.

We called the police, who wandered around, scribbled a little, left. I improvised a window with aluminum foil and duct tape and pulled out the Smith-Corona to write this.

Martin Landau’s revered physician can’t take Angelica Huston any more and lets Jerry Orbach kill her while Sam Waterston goes blind, his yarmulke still in place. Meanwhile, Woody Allen’s documentarian has to endure a self-absorbed--and more successful--Alan Alda, while Allen’s preferred subject, a professor of philosophy who insists we are the sum of our moral choices and must love in the face of an indifferent universe, commits suicide.

Evil profits--even forgetting its own evil after a while, the profit itself melting into a comfortable life, and Allen’s wit fades to murmurs, and happiness dances in blind melancholy. I’ll never know who so expertly removed the glass from my back door, set it with care against the house for me to find, then left without taking anything. We probably scared him off when we came home; and we have lots of bushes and trees in the back yard where he could have hidden and watched me come out and look down at the pane of glass and peer around for him. I had stood there in silence long enough for both of us to get a good look--although the porchlight’s weak circle of light ended not far from where I stood beneath it.

June 24, 1989 [Batman]

2011-07-23T19:44:00.004-05:00

Michael Keaton as Batman seemed as improbable as John Wayne as Genghis Khan--but there is something about Keaton’s mouth jutting out of the bottom of that Neal Adams-ish mask--the ear-points high, somehow threatening--that erases Mr. Mom and Johnny Dangerously and even Beetlejuice. Keaton and Tim Burton go poking around in Stately Wayne Manor and find Bruce as alone as Charles Foster Kane in front of the big fireplace and brooding like Michael Corleone--but this time over the sins of others, his voice calm, his eyes blank--while those lips purse as he gets ready, his motions as sure and precise as you want them to be--as he is compelled to make them, given the position he’s put himself into: to be a comic book hero without pleasure, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight one step away from Arkham Asylum.

And of course there’s the other casting hurdle: Jack Nicholson as The Joker--but Jack makes it easy for us, willing as he is to be a creep--like his other Jack in The Shining--funny in a horrible kind of way, a real ham, his homicidal voice trailing along in the fadeout, unwilling to give up center stage. Together, they remind us that costumed superheroes look better in our heads than on the page--and climb right up in there, myth-making despite the silly antics and inevitable banter, Batman’s uninflected proclamations as resonant as The Joker’s lookit-me! cackle, surprising me with my own willingness to take them seriously.

Batman had always been my favorite--he’d survived the campy sendup of the TV show, and gave himself plenty of time in the next twenty years to harden his muscles and firm up his jawline. Like the other great bat, Dracula, he lives best by night--and does just fine in a movie that is unembarrassed by grown men in tights.

April 30, 1989 [Little Vera]

2011-07-23T19:02:00.003-05:00

It seems that over in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev accidentally made a movie, Little Vera, that sums up every nasty surprise glasnost could ever spring on him. Vera's been accepted to college, but all she wants to do is party hearty, dress up, and rip-it-up-shake-it-up-go-go with her boyfriend. Their lives are ugly: factories make a clanking din and spew flat oily clouds, the young men fight and drink--and so do the parents, half in a stupor most of the time--when the mother isn't breaking her back at her seemingly endless work. Just like an American teen, Vera lowers her fed-up, sullen eyes and scoffs at the "Good Housekeeping" book her aunt sends her--Vera has more on her mind that cooking and cleaning--which, again, her mother pursues doggedly, endlessly. To call this movie "bleak" misses the point: it is a kind of meltdown, a social Chernobyl ironically fueled by the sludge left over from Stalinist economic blows and exhausting global policies.

But that's politics; Little Vera's apocalypse-now explodes in the cramped kitchen, food boiling away, a knife handy. It was hard work to watch it, a movie that seemed much longer than it was. My only consolation was that I wasn't living in that family--although they weren't far off, just a few slumps away from my own sloppy tendencies. It was the scariest Cold War shot fired by a gun held in unsteady hands that looked familiar, with music that seemed as cheesy as any teen comedy's. The synthesizers buzzed and the machines rattled while the noisy neighbors--right next door, I think--shouted at each other on and on, nothing shutting them up all night.

November 11, 1988 [Hotel Terminus]

2011-07-15T13:23:00.006-05:00

I watched Hotel Terminus, but all I could see was Charles Manson with a swastika carved into his forehead--which must've made Klaus Barbie grin, seeing the poor dupe pretending to be evil--when what you really need to be, Barbie informs us, is cool as a cucumber and willing to keep talking over all protests, cries and whimpers.

Max Ophuls continues to interrogate France and the rest of us--just in time, too, everybody still alive, memories fresh enough to prevaricate--but Ophuls is almost as good as Barbie at making them talk--certainly with less fuss, no need to clean up afterwards. But the closer he got to Barbie, the clearer was Manson's face, "just another sucker on the vine," making Nazis as romantic as Blakean demons fitted out with cool wings and darting tongues, snazzy as an early-'70s album cover--or the side of a van airbrushed with a sexy devil clutching a Frank Frazetta babe, riding rolling thunder and eternal diabolical delight. Meanwhile, the real Nazis hide like embezzling bank clerks, amused at how easy it is to puff up every Manson they need as a prop and fall guy, swindling them with their own self-importance.

It's Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" with a sideshow--but at the end of the interrogation, Ophuls finds in one woman's memory Madame Bontout--a name so remarkable it seems fabricated--who tried to save a little girl from Barbie's grasp. It's the movie's only hope, despite the firm guilty verdict.

The film--is it a film? So long and scattered, so angry and desperate, so cool and thorough? It seems more about Ophuls hoping to reach a conclusion, ready to lay out the sprawling evidence of the French problem of the War, his hand fanning thousands of documents like an impenetrable hand of cards, the game itself still being played all around the world. So maybe it isn't a film but a series of memories and warnings, exhausted and exhausting--while Barbie fades into the jungle down there, calm in his cell like Norman Bates.

October 25, 1988 [Things Change]

2011-07-12T14:37:00.003-05:00

The '80s have been good to Don Ameche--and not just in that corner of showbiz where the Love Boat takes old actors to Fantasy Island, where McCloud and Quincy, M.E. team up to investigate their demise. No, from Trading Places--and just the other month in Coming to America--to the big surprise of Cocoon, Don and his mustache have enjoyed themselves immensely.

But who would've thought that it would take David Mamet and Shel Silverstein to figure out exactly what to do with Don: make him a Don, kind of, a whatsa-matta-for-you Eye-talyen shine-a-da-choose old man escorted around Mametville by the mayor of that strange city, Joe Mantegna, who knows exactly how to deliver a Mamet line: as though such simple words had never been spoken before, so you repeat them sometimes just to make sure they're real--with increased conviction, knowing that the next line waits for the same steady exploration and conquest. Inevitably, Ameche's shoe-shining gentleman reminded me of my father's father, with his cardigan and shirt buttoned up, even without a tie, neat and trim and gentle--but he knew what he knew, and what he knew most is that things change.

With that in mind, it's no surprise that the firmest conclusion is a shrug, the Sicilian heroism--Mamet-ian, too, in a hard-boiled kind of way--that accepts defeat and exile without any fuss, like an old hand at Tahoe betting it all, losing, and smiling through.

August 15, 1988 [The Last Temptation of Christ]

2011-07-11T13:42:00.003-05:00

Sharon, matter-of-fact Catholic that she is, said that the only problem with The Last Temptation of Christ is that it says it's about Christ. Any other name, she insists, would have smelled sweeter.

I understand her point--I can even imagine the movie, a miracle-making, troubled Paracletian fire-starter who balks at martyrdom until he accepts himself and his fate--despite the errors that will be made in his memory, the politics of God smearing the words he'd written in blood on the cup he drank from.

And Mark says it works perfectly well as a metaphor for the life of an artist--Scorsese himself, most likely, a Promethean complaint stretched like wings drying in the desert sun, waiting to fly far from the pain of giving.

But when Willem Dafoe, calling himself "Jesus," is asked in the desert whether he loves humanity, he replies that he feels sorry for us--and is told that may be enough. And the temple split in two, and all that pleading, scowling search for justice fell in a sweeping wall of dust, and Dafoe took his heart out of his chest and held it out in mercy; and that is infinitely--literally infinitely--better than justice, which winds like a quick snake in and out of holes in the sand. Justice is a reward, mercy is a gift. Scorsese does not do justice to Jesus, but he shows more mercy than most have thought necessary, and gives him back to himself, the sorrow of the forsaken mingled with a kind of love I do not understand, but desire.

July 23, 1988 [Midnight Run]

2011-07-11T10:57:00.005-05:00

Exhausted, maybe, from his mighty labors over the previous fifteen years or so--from Johnny Boy to Travis Bickle to young Vito Corleone to Michael hunting deer to Rupert Pupkin to Jake LaMotta--with Satan and Tuttle and Al Capone on the side--De Niro seems ready to settle down a little--a little. I was worried that Midnight Run was just going to be Planes, Trains and Automobiles with guns and cursing--and in some ways it is; but the closer comparison is the hate-love between the leads. Like Steve Martin and John Candy, De Niro and Charles Grodin would seem not just mismatched but out of kilter, non-meshing gears turning and turning. Both pairs know this, though, and use it in such a satisfying way that it was easy to forget how opposed the actors are--because that's the point, of course.

My favorite moment occurs when De Niro's bounty hunter describes on the phone the awful damage he's going to do to Grodin's mob accountant--who's standing right there, aghast. But, even as he snarls into the phone, De Niro pulls a face that reassures Grodin that he means none of it, that all is well. It's funny, but we're only partially relieved: De Niro is, after all, De Niro--he even smokes as though he's the one giving the cigarettes cancer--and he plays with this unease for most of the picture. For his part, Grodin is bland to the verge of smugness--which is his strength, a kind of clueless superiority, an oxymoron he's carried with him since The Heartbreak Kid, his face still wincing over Cybill Shepherd. It seems as though De Niro's Jack Walsh knows this, and is itching to pound the little jerk on sheer principle.

Somehow, though, Grodin is more than a straight-faced pest--and De Niro does much more than take a break from his more excruciating roles--until Midnight Run becomes one of those movies I know some day I'll dream about, find myself out in the desert or bathed in lite-brite Vegas, flummoxed and desperate, wanting to punch someone I'm somehow certain I like.

July 18, 1988 [Die Hard]

2011-07-07T14:31:00.006-05:00

I'd had enough of Bruce Willis long ago in Moonlighting: I couldn't shake the feeling that he was riding on Bill Murray's coattails--the American cool wiseguy jerk, the smug pest you tried your best not to like, the seat-of-his-pants friend/lover improvising as he goes along. Bill I liked; Bruce made me uneasy--maybe it's because Bill winked at us, knew he was playing a self-satisfied frat boy--which skewered the jerk, while Bruce seemed more aggressive, almost daring us to get the joke more than he did.

Or maybe it was just because he was bothering Cybill Shepherd. Knock it off, chief.

But something happened--to me, maybe, but definitely to Bruce. Just like his rock star alter ego Bruno, Willis once more attempts parody in Die Hard, yanking the cool cat action hero's tail, at once rolling his eyes that he's in a big-budget bang-bang-em-up and wincing from how much it hurts to be at the heart of such a movie, all that shattered glass and sudden drops, gun-butts and haymakers to the jaw. The longer the movie went on, the wearier John became, wincing and limping, a wreck barely on his feet--powered, of course, by the jet fuel of a summer blockbuster, but as torn up as the Hulk's wardrobe after he gets angry.

With one movie Willis saves himself from terminal cute and shoulders past the bigger boys--and not just Stallone and Schwarzenegger, but the tough guys of yore, Mitchum and Lancaster, who took a beating but kept their hats on straight--until somehow Willis reaches a popcorn-matinee approximation of Brando in On the Waterfront, who literally loses his shirt before winning. Yes, there's a hint of Rocky Balboa in Bruce's bloody-but-unbowed stance--but in Die Hard there's little at stake inside, just fireballs all around. I'll admit that the postmodern cowboy impatient with European villains and cracking wise every five minutes got on my nerves a little; but I'm willing to turn a deaf ear as long as Bruce admits it hurts to laugh.

June 26, 1988 [Who Framed Roger Rabbit?]

2011-06-28T15:13:00.006-05:00

In a fit of benign negligence, we bundled up baby Vera against the cold of air conditioning and took her with us to see Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. She proved a model modern child: slept like the baby she is through a feature-length Tex Avery-ish atomic mcboing-boing, jammed with more caterwauling cacophony than a sack of bricks and fine china kicked downstairs.

Robert Zemeckis knows how to make old-fashioned movies--Romancing the Stone and especially Back to the Future are nimble maneuvers through the happy heart of movie-going. But there’s also Used Cars, which gave Kurt Russell the opportunity to smoke brown Mores and reconfigure himself as a smirking cad. And that’s the movie I thought of while watching Roger stutter and spray all over Bob Hoskins. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? loves cartoons as much as anything I’ve ever seen (as much as I do, and that’s saying a lot--almost too much, I’ll admit); and part of that love is of course mad--Looney, Merrie and screwy as a squirrel, polymorphous perversity as an Acme anvil banged with one’s own head. There is something inside this movie that’s fun to dig up, but hard to handle--as creepy-crawly as Christopher Lloyd’s Judge unmasked, his eyes-a-poppin, his voice a teakettle scream. But I can’t stop loving them--they’re just drawn that way, as Jessica Rabbit reminds us, and they insist, “Smile, darn ya, smile!” with such evocative joy that I felt my throat catch a little at the end, knowing there’s a town where they still careen like a kid running without looking, keeping their faith in improbable trajectory and the instinct to wait until it’s funny.

June 20, 1987 [Withnail & I]

2011-06-28T13:39:00.003-05:00

Withnail and I reminds me that, sometime in college or during those first years on one’s own, one comes to know--or becomes--either a Withnail, old before one’s time, in despair and drenched in drink and other fuming substances, immense talents drowned in grey rain, or an “I” (Marwood in the movie), drawn along in some fear (and joy), the mild friend whose warning voice, reasonable despite its hint of panic, fades as that rain falls.

But for a while, what fun it was to watch the two of them wander about, their tanks filled with various spirits, the single headlight of their Jaguar--so beat up that it seemed a parody of decrepitude, an emblem of the (hopefully) temporary poverty of youth--sometimes winking conspiratorially--or wincing--always on the verge of getting somewhere, there in 1968--and doesn’t every life have its 1968, no matter the calendar, standing on the end of a paved road, the tools in one’s own hands to keep building that road, but the route uncertain? I find my greatest, albeit most foolish, yearning is to be either ten or twenty again, the full-blown kid or the almost-adult to whom promises have not been made--just the promise of promises. And the poverty at twenty is like the riches of ten years old: nowhere to go, as the Beatles put it, oh that magic feeling.

But Marwood cuts his hair--and I know that moment, saw it just last year: one of my daughters’ friends was graduating; he had reminded me of Kris Kristofferson, right down to the beard and cascading hair and guitar; but a month or so before leaving college, he appeared clean-shaven and almost buttoned-down, ready to be the older man on the move with a new suitcase and a job and so on. Marwood goes through that same ritual, while Withnail stays behind--the better actor, one suspects, quoting Hamlet to open his palm and see the quintessence of dust he’s left to hold, his alone now. And I almost said something to him up there on the screen, almost tried some word of solace--but the rain it raineth every day, and he couldn’t hear me.

April 29, 1987 [Street of Crocodiles]

2011-06-27T14:54:00.003-05:00

Inside of a Joseph Cornell collage box I once spied with my little eye a paper doll--or was it Lauren Bacall, or a parrot, or a constellation at a position in the sky it hasn't held in a thousand years--if ever. And somewhere I saw some of his films, bits of children's parties and elephants hauling logs, scratched images not shabby but well-used, as ancient as Cassiopeia. And so I thought I knew where little Alice went, misty streams flowing into dim shops, pigs and pepper wriggling in her arms.

But these were preludes to the alternate past the Quay brothers build in their animations, a Street of Crocodiles piled with dirt, the camera fluttering like a trapped insect, the violin sawing along a pane of glass where the man is trapped with hollow-headed doll-men, T.S. Eliot suddenly adept at nursery rhymes, not with a bang but a whimper. There is no syntax for their work--although somewhere in Prague a master puppeteer smooths the linen of a marionette's shirt-front and sends it across strange stages, the Quays watching from the back row, thinking about objects somehow beautiful for all their grime and uncertain physiognomy, as though King Kong had been captured by kindly, melancholy surrealists and shrunk and set free in a glass box.

April 3, 1987 [Blue Velvet, Eraserhead]

2011-06-27T14:44:00.004-05:00

Why do I persist in seeing the right movie at the wrong time? A few years ago I found myself more or less watching a Godzilla movie on the TV in our hotel room during a little anniversary getaway. Jean didn’t believe me that I was just running through the channels to pass the time while she was getting dressed, and she still refers to it as “Marital Bliss vs. Godzilla.”

So here we are in Wildwood on her birthday, the boardwalk all but shut down, the skies stormy, the Waikiki Motel cheesy but fun—with, oddly enough, a VCR in the room and down at the desk an actual collection of tapes to choose from. I couldn’t resist, and shuffled through the bunch—and they actually had a copy of Eraserhead, a movie I hadn’t seen in eight or nine years—copies are getting harder and harder to find. But there it was, nestled between a Bruce Lee title and The Amazing Dobermans.

I couldn’t resist—but I promised myself not to put it in the machine, it was Jean’s day, we were going to hazard a walk on the windy beach then eat in a little seafood place nearby—but she fell asleep for a nap and I sat at the edge of the bed and slipped it in and turned down the volume to the barest minimum. But it didn’t matter; the baby woke her up, Henry and Mary’s foaming-pus E.T. thing shrieking like the damned when they know they’re really in hell and have to find a way to get used to it, but can’t—until, exhausted, they fall into the hissing radiator and find themselves in Heaven.

Jean made me turn it off; I’m tempted to steal it, but I don’t want to own it.

Such furtive behavior, such shame-faced sneaking. No wonder Jack Nance draws me in, his nightmare-Chaplin performance as he meanders through the industrial waste-landscape, skittering up and down dirt mounds, around--and in--puddles, and so on. His face, topped with that groundbreaking hairdo, seems plucked straight from a Mack Sennet comedy; I can see him as a hapless truant officer or innocent bystander--oh, if only. But he is not innocent. His fears and desires draw him like water from a dark well, and compel him to look and become what he looks at.

--Like Jeffrey in Blue Velvet last year, another innocent--although not living in an isolated space, deep inside his head, but strolling along the leafy lane, chatting with the really cute blond--Laura Dern’s face something you want to cradle in your hands because you know you’ll gain something important if you do. Still, Jeffrey and Henry end up in the same nightmare, with Dennis Hopper and his gang putting their disease in, leaving them frail but alive, like convalescent-home inmates always feeling a little chilly.

Jean was right: Nothing like this should get near a birthday. But she’s asleep for real now, and I’m thinking that, as midnight approaches and it’s April 4, I might be able to hit PLAY and keep the volume off--doesn’t matter: I know what they’re saying, even though, as in the “vast barn” in Edward Gorey’s The Epiplectic Bicycle, it’s too dark to hear.

February 16, 1987 [Tenebre]

2011-06-27T13:55:00.004-05:00

I want Dario Argento to succeed; I really do. He had carved out pictures like Hitchcock's butcher, the shining cuts laid out on reddening paper, a blood-feast better than anything you could drag from 42nd St.'s clammy dark-rooms--but without the restraints of more respectable movies that look as good as, say, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage or Suspiria. The off-center Italian dubbing and jittery pace--coupled with Argento's unsettling tendency to take his time and make you watch the bad things happen--made for unquiet dreams.

But he colors inside the lines with Tenebre--as good as the title is, as outlandish the red herrings and futurist locales. Tony Franciosa is game--but maybe I saw Tony Musante's shadow from the earlier picture--or wanted the darker palette of Suspiria's dancing-academy/coven. Still, Argento makes sure not to blink and gives us severed limbs and pierced flesh--again the butcher, sliding the package across the counter, insisting we eat it rare. There's a funky morality at work here, almost sad that the madman has to be mad, but happy to let him rip. Sure, Frenzy demands our compliance more fiercely, but Argento would rather make a horror film--the hacked-off hand still grasping, the shattered glass slicing. In the end, though, Tenebre may mean "darkness," but it's more dutiful than gloomy, its deeper suffering--the fetish-object of the Italian thriller, like that high-heeled shoe pushed down the madman's throat--high-pitched but off-key.

February 8, 1987 [Come and See]

2011-06-21T12:03:00.007-05:00

The boy in Come and See looks into the camera--but he isn't looking at me--oh that he would: I'd be happy to be his object of horror, the thing that makes him look like Munch's The Scream--or worse, one of Otto Dix's wounded war-lunatics, the boy's face wrinkled like something ancient, the mouth jagged and trembling and refusing to speak, the eyes saying it all, round and vibrating with the concussive thumps of artillery too close, splattering him with clods of dirt and partisan blood--with a constant sound, as though some huge machine is refusing to break down, no matter how many blows are delivered to its iron skin.

But I can't do anything for him, back there in Belorusse where the Nazis indulged themselves, all restraint cast off like Adam and Eve returning to Eden--now ruled by Satanic pride and appetite, the wolf-headed parents of Flannery O'Connor's Misfit who sees his world and concludes, "It's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness." The flames consume the packed barn, and the children make a high thin sound as they burn. Nothing to do but look and listen, then fall in line and march into the woods--they catch the Nazis and mow them down, but the boy's face doesn't change--the camera knows this, and leaves him to bring up the rear, hoping at the last minute.

November 10, 1986 [The Sacrifice]

2011-06-01T08:43:00.006-05:00

Tarkovsky hypnotized me, somewhere in the last hour of Solaris--was it ten years ago?--and I have been drawn along in almost-levitation, my toes scraping the ground, my head up and eyes open, all those years, to find myself watching The Sacrifice. I think I'm in Sweden--the voices, the cold and open rooms, the wan light; but it may be Japan--the leaning, curving trees, the horizontal-vertical simplicity of the house standing by itself on the plain. The old man with a young son hears the end of the world roar overhead, jet-propelled--and it forces him to confront da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi, buried behind glass--trapping him as well, the man whose relationship with God is "non-existent" until he finds himself inside the dull gold of the painting and has to give away everything to Something he doesn't believe in--but it's his only hope, and he crawls on the floor toward the only kind of gift that matters--the mysterious postman, his files stuffed with photos of ghosts, tells him that it isn't a gift if it isn't a sacrifice.

I couldn't move: the long shots held me, my arms heavy, my chest, my torso, my legs. It wasn't terrible to be held that way--but not pleasant. I was safe, even though I watched the old man with the young son enact his own mystical reversal of Abraham and Isaac--the father, also hypnotized now by love, gives up everything; the son, left with his Japanese tree, solemnly wonders why in the beginning was the Word.

The father becomes Isaac, the one who laughs, as they take him to the loony bin, happy that he has averted the bombs and placated the witch; so he claps his hands to wake me up.

October 15, 1986 [True Stories]

2011-05-20T11:16:00.002-05:00

David Byrne in his movie True Stories--wearing a cowboy hat a little too big for him, driving a car too big for anybody, in a landscape even bigger--seems somewhere in the vicinity of Pee-Wee Herman, with a little Harry Langdon around the eyes--but he's as thin as a skittish lizard, and about as easy to lay your hands on. Everyone's wondering if he's making fun of "people like us who will answer the telephone" and "growing big as a house"--you know, the kind "with the television always on." He sees an invented mysticism in these lives, but he scatters them across a dry-scrub plain, where they land in little barren boxes and call it home. It's a National Enquirer world of the true-but-false, and Byrne blandly displays the Woman Who Never Leaves Her Bed and the Man Who Advertises for a Wife alongside voodoo cures and Puzzling Evidence.

But the music's good, and the performers are more than game--the show all but stolen by a big guy, John Goodman as Louis, with his snazzy outfits and dogged optimism--and that's the kind of thing that wipes the sneer off David's face: the mystery of the everyday--or whatever it is that keeps Louis from feeling foolish. In the end, I don't blame Byrne: I smirk a little at them myself--then feel bad, if only because I go home and the television's on, as usual.

August 11, 1986 [Stand by Me]

2011-05-19T11:24:00.002-05:00

Little Rob in our neighborhood wanders over to any dad--head under the hood, yanking on a lawnmower, smoking on the front lawn with other men. Rob's looking for his father--his own divorced his wife, and Rob lives with her and his grandmother, her Italian better than her English, her hands full with a wired little monkey of a grandson: I've never seen anything climb a tree faster than Rob, especially when a dog barks suddenly--he's a nervous little guy. But I've seen him settle disputes among the kids, the only grownup in the bunch.

He made us a little metal catch-all dish at the park's day camp: smoky turquoise and green and cobalt blue, with little sparks of gold where he'd randomly hammered at it to chart a lopsided starry sky glazed like an archaeological find, a small treasure we keep on the shelf above the kitchen sink and fill with loose buttons and paper clips and spare change and a stray baby tooth. My son admires him, I think: somehow free without a father, and old in his head--but his older brother is a real hoodlum, gone for days sometimes, tolerant of the little kids but a little scary. Not his brother's friend, even though I've heard that the mere mention of his name sends schoolyard bullies packing.

I saw Rob and my son and another boy walking up the street, their arms around each others' shoulders, like the boys in Stand by Me who go over the river and through the woods to see the dead boy, not such a long walk after all to the lonely place where they end up.

December 20, 1985 [Brazil]

2011-05-18T14:59:00.007-05:00

[scroll down for a little music to read by--the Editor]

Where is Brazil? From the bureaucrat-hero's veranda, the buildings swooping in diagonal shadows as De Niro's rogue duct-man sails on his tether, it looks like Wil Eisner's cityscapes in The Spirit, cold and haunted, with secrets in every little yellow square peppered on the leaning blank walls.

At work, Jonathan Pryce's Sam Lowry (a Terry Gilliam fool-your-friends jumping spider if there ever was one, animated stammer in every gangly limb) dives into the past, pneumatic tubes conveying space-age missives, tinny Westerns blazing intermittently on old-timey TVs with magnifiers, the paper flying nowhere--or wrongwise, Orwell's organized chaos.

But this is a Terry Gilliam movie, so if you want to get to the real world you have to dream, as Lowry does, Maxfield Parrish golden clouds rising in soft focus as he rides the sky--or stomps through endless streets, confronting Samurai-terrorists--his efforts to assert quiet strength and sexy rescue bound and gagged as Michael Palin draws on every bad Monty Python impulse to grind things down into sausages, as efficient and Mad as Ian Holm's Kurtzmann, founder of the Usual Gang of Idiots, but evil.

It's a beautiful, hilarious, horrible Brazil--but that tune is still catchy: I can hear it above the forced laughter of the powerful and doomed--who themselves are plugging their ears while Buttles and Tuttles creak behind their leather gags.

June 13, 1986 [Mona Lisa, The Long Good Friday]

2011-05-17T12:18:00.004-05:00

I've seen Bob Hoskins play two types of gangsters, and he pretty much covers all the kinds the movies need. A few years back in The Long Good Friday he was the Kingpin--although still a bit of a blockhead, confident that his holdings--and his chin-thrust bearing--would carry the day. He was this close to being in an American gangster picture--but his New York mafia would-be partners saw in England what Michael Corleone saw in Havana: the unmitigated zeal of revolutionaries, willing to do anything but lose--and they hurried back to the Five Boroughs, leaving Bob's top-o-the-world bully-boy on his own, flummoxed by the IRA so willing to adjust the profit motive to suit larger, more explosive ideals.

As affable, lonely George in Mona Lisa, he still hasn't quite caught up with the conversation--but here at least he's ready to roll with the punches--even though Michael Caine knows how to hit, hard. George thinks he's in love--not the worst assumption, given the high-class charms of the call girl he drives around. But she has lived her own life, and it doesn't include his. As he stands there with his flowers--almost pathetic, just on the verge--he gets a whole lot smarter than his Long Good Friday counterpart and wakes up--or at least settles in--and decides his loneliness is his own after all, not something any slender lady--no matter how much she may need rescuing--has given him, or can take away. I admire the barrel-chested little bull and the way he turns aside just enough to go home.

September 22, 1985 [Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters]

2011-05-16T09:19:00.006-05:00

I fished out of the drawer some haiku that Pete had brought home from school last month or so--a poetic form that children love: as small as they are, and floating like they do toward the hope of completion. But haiku promises that things don't finish, they suspend, taking some shape for a moment. Is there a poet alive who has not tried to pick up something important with this tiny beak that dips below the surface, and hoped to bring up something essential?

--more than one thing: The essential juxtapostion of haiku, a moment of clarity as the one thing meets another. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters feels like this. Mishima's intensely internal life cleaves like a desperate lover to his body, compelling him to sculpt himself on the outside as thoroughly as he has labored on his art. And it drives him to colors so bright and violent--like the ones Paul Schrader uses to illustrate Mishima's stories--that they pass into nothing, like a bird flying over a pond, dashing down to feed and disappearing.

August 12, 1985 [Pee-Wee's Big Adventure]

2011-05-04T10:33:00.003-05:00

Imagine if Fellini had been asked to direct a children's film--no, wait: What if Salvador Dali had been born a middle-class American '50s kid? Or hold on: Doesn't Pee-Wee look like gross-out camp director John Waters? Then again, isn't Pee-Wee his own self, somehow closer to a cheerful sitcom child--Rusty Williams or Opie Taylor or Richie Petrie--or the Crown Prince himself, Beaver Cleaver--oh, the rollicking sound of his name, like all of them somehow miniature adults who will always reject puberty in favor of one more scoot around the block on the best bike ever?

Pee-Wee knows those boys--and grows down to be just like them, except without any last-minute smiling obedience. No, Pee-Wee's life is action-packed, a persona without a performer--Paul Reubens gone for good beneath his ventriloquist's-dummy disguise--an actor acting in a movie in a movie about movies. Director Tim Burton accepts Pee-Wee with alarming openness and allows the little fellow to sputter and sproing with stiff-limbed grace, the audience laughing or not--and Burton and Pee-Wee don't care, they just want enough pepper gum and plastic dinosaurs to keep things moving (Spencer Gifts their apparent corporate sponsor)--and to keep us guessing about this postmodern Little Tramp wearing just about as much makeup as the original--but again, without the aspirations of adulthood. Pee-Wee insists to Dottie, "I like you! LIKE!" and giggles to himself as he beats a hasty retreat, once more deflecting commitment to one side or the other--child/adult, male/female, human/cartoon. He wears a suit but looks good in a dress, plays with toys but is best portrayed by James Brolin--and treats his drive-in celebrity like a Bonomo Turkish Taffy: something to be smacked on the sidewalk and shared with the other kids.

When I saw the video of his comedy club show, I knew that Pee-Wee understood post-World-War-II America in an important way: shaped by educational film strips and cool toys, sustained by wishes and songs everybody knows--and willing to take itself apart without tearing the slightest corner, each tab and slot intact, just in case it needs to be put back together again some day.

April 23, 1985 [The Company of Wolves]

2011-05-03T14:15:00.003-05:00

Watching The Company of Wolves, I was pretty sure I was supposed to be thinking of Bruno Bettelheim and his book The Uses of Enchantment: the Grimm tale as instruction, an opportunity for the child to learn that the evolved Little Pig is safer than his primitive, less reality-principled house-of-straw counterpart. Or better yet: Little Red Riding Hood eager to be eaten up by her wolfish father--who has already obliterated the sexless grandmother, paving a toothy way for Red's own bold consumption of her virginity. This is the movie's pleasures, all laid out, so to speak, in a hairy, gooey splendor worthy of An American Werewolf in London's or The Howling's agonizing prosthetic enlargements.

But I shuffled Bettelheim off to the side: all I could think of was a short story by Shirley Jackson--that mad old suburbanite, raising little demons and rummaging around in the battered box for the unlucky winner of a pile of thrown stones. Thirty or more years ago, I think: "The Witch," about a little boy bored in a train and a nice old man with a cigar who delights the child with a little story of his own, about pinching his sister's head off and tearing her to pieces. The boy's mother steps in and banishes the smiling old devil--always courteous, soft-spoken, matter-of-fact--no dripping, fur-sprouting special effects necessary, just a smile and a story. The little boy understands, though, decides the old man was probably a witch, and promptly resumes his boredom.

I think this is where The Company of Wolves works best, with the grownup willing to tell a story, the grandmother eager to lay it on thick, leaving out no gory detail, delighted she can give her granddaughter the opportunity to eat and be eaten. But in the end I don't believe the not-so-little girl learns anything; the fairy tale is not school but an experience, like a long train ride with witches.

January 21, 1985 [Blood Simple]

2011-05-02T16:25:00.005-05:00

There's something Darwinian about Blood Simple--even the title itself: the more blood you slog through--and the more it's someone else's--the crazier you get. Judicious decisions don't matter any more--it's all instincts--but they're all bad. In fact, everyone in the movie is bad--and while most of them grin and bear it, use it to get what they think they want, like the clueless Ray says, once you shoot at someone, you have to shoot to kill. And in this movie--which feels like something made in the early '50s, one of those pictures set where the sidewalk ends (because that's where the gutter begins)--shooting is just the start of it. The rest is having to dig the grave and get sprayed with blood and listen to the wet wheezing sounds coming out of the other guy. Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom couldn't put it any plainer.

As the double crossers themselves get crossed, and each character fumbles the chance to evolve the hell away from disaster--with Dan Hedaya's Marty and M. Emmet Walsh's private eye leading the pack of fools, each of them in a hell the other one helps to make--Blood Simple dashes all hopes of nature's careful economy. Evolution becomes rushed piecework, the seams of your ape-suit holding just long enough for you to show up at your own funeral--where your sleeves slowly tear off the shoulders as you settle into the cheap lining of the half-hearted coffin thrown together at the last minute.

November 20, 1984 [A Sunday in the Country/Un dimanche à la campagne]

2011-04-29T10:33:00.004-05:00

A Sunday in the Country gently insists--and keeps insisting--that I love my family, and that I begin with the faults, the disappointments, the small lapses, the selfish turns. The French family learns these lessons--well, continues to be taught: the son and father, neither of them the men they wanted to be--for themselves, for each other--the sister who breezes in and wears a mask almost frantic with its own insistence that it's her happy face--while the father's one small attempt to break free, to understand his life as an artist, sits hidden away with his dead wife's scarves and shawls--and in the painting are circus performers filled with honest pride and the efforts of their success, up there on the tightrope--while the audience remains indifferent.

The film's director, Bertrand Tavernier, sets up this drowsy little circus, the performers--some of them gone, others soon to go--all well-trained, a bit sad that they know their places perhaps too well, but still ascending the ladder--stumbling a bit, it's true, with the thought of their losses; but they still climb. And Tavernier directs this like a novelist--complete with a narrative voice, the third person looking at them at the father's country house--but not distantly, as honest as that voice is. No, sympathy sustains the film, the film spills into me, and I'm with my own family, grandparents long gone, cousins absent--but all of us at the little house in the city, smelling the old closets and the inside of the little china cabinet, the unused decanter giving off a whiff of almost-vinegar, the dim tiny cups no one uses, three dusty candy-coated almonds in the corner, pale pink and yellow and white. I see the movie in there, my chin on the shelf, my eyes looking at a pewter plate that almost reflects my face. If I could see it, I'd know where they were now, and whether they've enjoyed their nap after dinner.

October 4, 1984 [Stranger Than Paradise]

2011-04-14T08:32:00.010-05:00

I've seen these guys from Stranger Than Paradise: off to the track every other day, lounging against the storefront or wolfing down a slice of pizza in a corner spot, low-key Daddy-Os, the last men still wearing hats, their pongee shirts a little frayed.

And the lead, John Lurie, knows how to play cool cat--his combo "The Lounge Lizards" has been diggin' that fake jazz for a few years now, and his entire posture in the movie is lank and off-the-cuff, an act Willie's perfected--but it's shot to hell by his Hungarian cousin, an actual kool kitten with her mater-of-fact way of walking, smoking, sizing up the situation--all to the constant accompaniment of Screamin' Jay Hawkins puttin' a spell on you over and over from the tinny depths of a cheap little cassette player. And her cousin hates the sound of it, but Eva knows better: "He's a wild man, so bug off." And to round out these hip Stooges is a perfect Larry Fine, long-faced Eddie, the little guy with the tentative manner, always on the verge of flinching, but following along all the same, waiting for something he can grin at.

Together they sit in the worn-out New York apartment--we see little of the city itself, aside from blank walls and empty streets; it's as though they're waiting to go somewhere, the apartment a kind of way-station with TV dinners and a ratty bed. And then Eva goes off to Cleveland--as run-down as NYC, except with the blank stare of a snow-blind lake--and the other two eventually, aimlessly, follow; and on a whim it's down to Florida, where the clouds roll by unnoticed and the weather seems as chilly as anywhere. And they have some trouble--madcap farce in any other picture, but here it's all oblique and offhand, barely worth worrying over--just another gambler's irony.

And not even the camera wants to get up off its lazy behind and do something about it, watching them blandly, occasionally nodding off--the screen black so long you think that's it, time to go home; then the next scene pops up. Maybe somebody nudged the camera just enough so that it pries its eye open again just to check things out. This goes on for a while until the movie's over. You don't like it, man? Then bug off.

January 26, 1984 [Broadway Danny Rose]

2011-04-11T08:35:00.006-05:00

Talent agent Broadway Danny Rose argues with Tina the Mafia widow--her husband shot in the eyes, which is fatal, Danny realizes, because "the bullets go right through." And she insists--Mia Farrow re-inventing herself, loud and abrupt, made of hairspray and inch-thick fingernail enamel--that you better give it to the other guy before he gives it to you, life's short, step on a neck if you need to. Danny--whose own neck will soon suffer some strain--is appalled. He quotes his dead Uncle Sidney, who believed in "acceptance, forgiveness and love." And Danny himself, who wants to have some laughs, insists you gotta suffer a little too, "because otherwise you miss the whole point of life." And on top of that is guilt, even the guilt of not believing in God. He is trapped by these ideas, and they take every worldly success from him.

Thanksgiving, though, must go on--a stack of TV dinners for his broken-down clientele, blind jugglers and stuttering ventriloquists, balloon-folders (never playing colleges, as he promised, still folding in joints) and dead-bird acts--and he bustles around as he always has, a part of him sick of it, the other eager to accept and forgive and love. And he manages a little piece of that, while the real world moves on without a glance over its shoulder--except one more look from Tina--and a hug and a kiss, the three magic words of Danny's useless version of show business--"star, smile, strong"--tossed on the sidewalk so that he can hold her. Woody Allen, like all comedians, seems to hate us sometimes--the audience clueless and ugly, with the sense of humor of a flat tire, worthy only of his worn-out patter--"how old are you, darling, what's your sign, that's beautiful"; but Danny Rose passes haplessly through this scorn until he gives everyone, even himself, a little mercy.

December 11, 1983 [Scarface]

2011-04-01T09:46:00.008-05:00

Visiting Cuban relatives last summer, we stayed in a hotel on Key Biscayne--pretty swell, but no ocean view; instead, we faced the Key. Had the relatives up in the room for a little party, and my cousin Tomás and I stood on the balcony, the night still hot--August in Miami is a kind of test--and you not only do not want to take it, you don't know what it's for. Hell? I've always thought of it as having a dry heat, like Arizona. Maybe in case you want to live in a sauna, one where you can get a sunburn in the shade.

But the nightlife on Key Biscayne didn't mind the heat. As we stood there, a long line of cop cars streamed south on Crandon, heading for the tip of the Key in a definite hurry to get there. My cousin turned to me. "Drugs," he said--my Spanish is non-existent, his English is on the way. We watched them yell and flash for a while, then went inside and I ate a pastelito de guayaba. Maybe carne. Both are good--you know how you say, "I can still taste it"--whatever "it" was? Well, a pastelito's got that down pat.

Brian DePalma's remake of Scarface made me grimace--I'd seen Miami grow in the '70s--as friend Jim points out, if you want to revitalize an American city or neighborhood, fill it with refugees from a dictatorship. The Cubans in Miami are red-blooded Castro-haters, standing to the bitter end with their ally Nixon (I was down there when he resigned--and promptly flew down to the last friendly territory he'd see for a while)--and they got to Miami by hook or crook--my aunt and uncle on a little boat, my grandmother and her son and family, including Tomás, on a Freedom Flight--and they set up camp, little Havana springing up overnight in the city's Southwest district, Calle Ocho a clamoring Main St., the Versailles restaurant (that's "ber-sigh-yez" if you're asking directions) always filled, tourists getting the same salty-sweet-savory heaven as the locals--although a nicely trimmed black mustache and coppery skin-tone get you more easily into the high-ceiling'd mirrored room.

And then the Mariel boatlift in '80 pulled a fast one: Plenty of willing refugees, but also a dumping-off opportunity for Castro to free up a little space in his prisons. I don't think the boatlift was as bad as the blame Carter had to endure, but there's no doubt things have gotten a little more hysterical in Miami-Dade County. Scarface mirrors that hysteria in every frame, from its white-hot color palette to its rub-your-nose-in-it Freudianisms--Tony Montana a little too much in love with his sister. It reminded me of Sweet Smell of Success--and more than the discomfort of the love story I thought of Burt Lancaster, his performance arch and clipped, extravagant in a strained way.

Pacino disdains any reserve Lancaster may have shown and gives Tony's mad love--of sister Gina, of money and fame, most of all of himself--unbridled freedom. And he remolds himself, from his accent--always sounding like he's eating something up--to his faux-chic moptop haircut to his eyes, round as a silent-movie villain's, bright lumps of coal burning with the promise of success. It's quite a thing to watch, Pacino without restraint--joining DePalma, who happily feeds Tony's pride a mountain of cocaine and one gory challenge after another, Montana's American Dream hellishly dead-on, the world his--just long enough for it to sneak up on him and cut him in half, a wound like Crandon Blvd. opening up to let the bright red flow past.

November 20, 1983 [A Christmas Story]

2011-03-29T14:35:00.010-05:00

Christmas in A Christmas Story at times almost disappears to make room for mishaps, malfeasance, and garden-variety meanness: Flick's tongue gets glued to a flag pole--and it hurts to watch, doesn't it?--and Scut Farkus dishes it out (and takes it), and Randy roots among the cabbages, and a Major Award gets its fifteen minutes of fame, and lug nuts fly like sparks in the night air while profanities roll out, and all of one's hard work results in a decoded "crummy commercial."

But these are welcome diversions, little echoes of Jean Shepherd's canon--Easter ham becoming Christmas turkey, Golden Memories shoveled down Randy's maw like oatmeal--filling out their mock-epic lives until we know they deserve a perfect Christmas morning, the wish granted for once--including of course an eye getting (more or less) shot out, and a decapitated duck somehow a cue that cuts perfectly to a still and glowing and perfectly natural moment before the tree.

It becomes more than whimsy and farce, and more than heartstrings tugged, but an implanted memory, like all lasting family stories, retold so often the tale becomes the truth--read in Ralphie's Hummel-figurine face, at turns beaten down by the adult world--Santa's foot on Ralphie's forehead applying just the right pressure to send him sailing down the Horrendously Happy Slide--and heart-breakingly confident it will all work out. And he is right, after all, and he reminds us that there is something at stake here: simply the rest of his life, triple-dog-dared to remember the best Christmas present either of us ever did or will receive--and it's not his Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle (with a compass in the stock).

October 24, 1983 [The Right Stuff]

2011-03-29T08:24:00.006-05:00

Watching Gus Grissom's miserable face insisting, "The hatch just blew!" in The Right Stuff made me wonder if anybody remembers him and Edward White and Roger Chaffee cooked alive in their Saturn rocket on the launching pad. But we don't even want to go to the Moon anymore, so what's to remember? And even though Kubrick gets the last laugh as the space shuttle Challenger earlier this year went up (two years after Columbia), missing only a Pan Am logo to make it just like a movie, a jumbo jet in outer space, landing on a dime--even with this, our attention wanders.

Meanwhile, in The Right Stuff the locusts descend (you can hear them on the soundtrack whenever photographers crowd around the astronauts or their wives) while the Mercury missions go up, the White House and NASA getting what it wants--but that is incidental. Director Philip Kaufman understands at least a part of Tom Wolfe's book: that the heart of the "space program" is Chuck Yeager and the boys on the salt pan in the Mohave standing on a rise like the ghosts of buffalo hunters, a John Ford Western blasting away down there at the drive-in. They smile at the foolishness, but what else is there? Where else does memory reside? The images move only once--the clouds zipping past, the black and stars hovering--and afterward it's just still pictures a widow might keep, the grown grandchildren finding them after she's gone.

October 14, 1983 [Star 80]

2011-03-24T14:01:00.002-05:00

Bob Fosse is heartless as he photographs Mariel Hemingway in Star 80--and it isn't only Mariel, or even Dorothy Stratton, who suffers that heartlessness. It's me watching the picture, watching her smile--despite the grime of Eric Roberts' Paul Snider--you'd have to invent that name if he hadn't been a real person--or whatever the hell he was, some California dream of desperate self-importance, that rubbery mouth grinning like a drowned corpse lying out there all day among the sunbathers, next to Dorothy--who is also not asleep, but whose own mouth smiles on, lighter than the damned movie deserves.

Something awful is going on here, a condemnation Fosse won't rescind, no matter how much I try not to look at her little smile, the slope of skin that Dorothy shows me before--like Goldilocks out of luck--she's eaten up, and not just by Snider, but Fosse and me, still returning her smile as we dare to touch that gentle slope.

July 17, 1983 [Zelig]

2011-03-17T11:13:00.004-05:00

The camera tricks and meticulous--and often hilarious--recreations/reproductions make Zelig as much an homage to film itself as a crushing blow to our most basic social instincts--no, that sounds too impersonal; Zelig is anything but that, because Woody Allen counts on our instant recognition of "Woody Allen" to make this more than an amusing reflection on insecurity. We know that he is insecure--and wishes he weren't, tries to ignore his hair and glasses and so on to make his move and get what he wants. And this too would simply be funny if I didn't feel myself squirm--the me that adopts the cadences of others' speech, that smiles and nods--oh, just to grease the social wheels, I insist to myself--but I know better; I don't want those wheels to run me over.

Leonard Zelig puts down his chin and looks up (Allen always the silent comedian, little Harry Langdon out on the town) and hopes to be loved--and changes, all the way, so that others don't need to love him, but their own reflections--a narcissism he counts on. Zelig conspires to please, and everyone is willing to do the same, to believe that clever Zelig has read Moby-Dick, that he loves and is loved, while all the while it's the self that wants this--which makes everyone squirm, nervous chameleons working the room.

I watched Leonard the patient become Leonard the doctor, and knew he was on to something: he fends off not only his own illness but the need to be cured. And while in the end he aspires to the old virtue to be one's self, a suspicion remains: What if the real me is a zero? Who will love me then?

April 20, 1983 [Poltergeist, The Evil Dead]

2011-03-14T15:44:00.004-05:00

When have I had this feeling before--sitting in the theater watching Poltergeist and getting jumpy, seeing everyday things turn into Things out to get me?--Oh right: Jaws. And both of these want to be thrill-rides with teeth. Producer Spielberg takes over, it seems, in Poltergeist, making poor ferocious Tobe Hooper work under those gorgeous lights, a Jerry Goldsmith score lush in the background--and is Poltergeist "Spielberg's picture," horning in like Howard Hawks did with The Thing from Another World back in the '50s? Sort of--but I was still spooked--ha ha--the nice house, all safely modern and nicely appointed, eating up the kids and dragging Mom around like Robert Shaw in the shark's mouth--no: like those teens (a million years ago, it seems) hapless chainsaw massacre victims. Hooper had been given someone else's shoes, but he still stood up.

--More or less. For more, I had to fish around in the cellar for The Evil Dead, amused by its own hysterical laugh--but still hysterical, tearing free from all controls--budgetary, aesthetic, and all--darting around like a spoiled brat, taunting us and scaring us to death that it's gonna knock something over, you break it you bought it--with a big lantern-jawed goof--Bruce Campbell--digging in like a cannibal holocaust, his eyes and mouth as round as any silent movie star's, hoping to make a splash.

I mean, I like a good H.P. Lovecraft reference as much as the next over-the-hill nerd, but The Evil Dead takes that old New Englander to the carnival and leaves him there to bite off chickens' heads--not nearly as polite as Poltergeist, which saves everybody from the curse and lets them check in to a nice motel.

March 30, 1983 [Return of the Jedi]

2011-03-14T12:28:00.004-05:00

Have I gone too far to admit I wanted to walk into Return of the Jedi and find out what all that light and movement felt like on my face? I can barely recall the plot, but I wonder if Princess Leia was cold in her metal bikini, and whether Luke felt better when Han jammed him into the dead thing to warm him up. And I wanted to hop on one of those sky-cycles and see if special effects would keep me from hitting a tree while the sky went white with the Empire's rayguns and the green-red-yellow-blue of outer space waited for the next quick leap straight up.

--And one more thing: a kind of melancholy triumph, the last comic book page turned, and there's the hero waving goodbye to loyal readers--not quite Superman's last look at the end of his movie, more like folding shut the big box you pack up before going away to college, hoping no one throws away your stuff, you might need it one night after seeing a movie with toys.

June 27, 1982 [Blade Runner, The Thing]

2011-03-13T09:33:00.004-05:00

After seeing Blade Runner and The Thing, I'm not sure I want to hear the answer to the Shakespearean question, "Am not I your Rosalind?" Philip Kaufman's recent remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers certainly didn't mind asking, had his lovers disguise and conquer as they liked--and his answer was an accusatory screech; but these movies, despite all their crazy-cool extravagances (John Carpenter's perhaps even more so, leading one character to gape and exclaim the same exasperated incredulity of the audience), make the walls of uncertainty close in on us, paranoia not perfect awareness but a maze without an exit.

Ridley Scott makes us side with the replicants--and once we do, we can never turn back, we want everyone to be robots, we want nothing more to do with people. In The Thing we just get cold--the dwindling humanity also sick of each other, ready to see monsters and be done with it. And even though Kurt Russell--wearing the single greatest hat in the history of cinema since Chaplin's--enjoys himself immensely as the closest Thing in the room to John Wayne, he also ends up in the same befuddled heap--although Mac saw it coming before the movie began, always more than willing to admit, "Trust's a tough thing to come by these days."

And of course both movies hammer at this--and leave only one glimmer of what passes here for hope: Life is short. That's as cold as the last few minutes of The Thing, hunkered down for the last nasty shock--but Deckard in Blade Runner (Harrison Ford jumping at the opportunity to do Philip Marlowe, the last decent fellow in the room with a gun) kicks open the door, braces for the chill, and runs.

June 14, 1982 [E.T.: The Extraterrestrial]

2011-03-04T11:42:00.006-06:00

Back from the movies, stepped outside to have a smoke--and in the big black back yard I felt the smell of a skunk against my face, up my nose, as though a rough hand--no, the inside of a big truck tire, that's what skunk-smell always reminds me of, tar-black and muffled, sharp as vulcanized flesh--pressed against me. I took one step forward, my eyes adjusting, and there it was, walking toward me in the yard. I stepped back, nonchalant, and went inside.

And I like the smell of a skunk--but far off, outside the car moving in the pine barrens in the dark, back from the shore and tired--and the smell wakes me up, and makes me think of Nature--you know, the whole tangled mass alive and most often beyond a pane of glass--like Wallace Stevens' jar, "round upon a hill"--and I'm in the jar, and do not "give of bird or bush"--or skunk. But I breathe in, not too deeply, and let it remind me.

But not so close, not fifteen feet away and closing in--might be rabid, why else would it approach rather than retreat from Mr. Man, the boss of it all? But he came at me--OK, ambled--and I went back inside, "like nothing else in Tennessee."

Elliott in E.T. goes outside, too--but Spielberg makes the light magical, a Close Encounter with the stuff at the edge of the yard--but not really like the ravine in Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, where the Lonely One waits. No, E.T. knows he's in a child's tale, and as sad and perilous as things may get, there's candy and teddy bears, moonlit flights and daring rescues--the grownups the monsters, showing up from another movie, unwelcome in the bedroom with the children delighted and whispering their secret.

Still, the smell of the skunk hangs on, and the little wandering gnome--or is it Peter Pan?--goes home, Spielberg sending him once more up in the spaceship, the suburbs fine but not nearly as full of stars as E.T.'s "port in air."

May 1, 1982 [Diva]

2011-01-31T14:31:00.003-06:00

When the latecomer punks and New Wave pop stars finally take over cinema, will every movie feel like Diva? A part of me hopes so, as much as it may wear its post-modern heart on its sleeve--or chip on its shoulder, pleased as punch to cut-up the love story, the cop movie, the show business tale and art film--and spread out a pretty collage of music and color that knows what it wants. It’s almost just style--but in the quiet spaces it asks a real question: Do I own my own voice? The opera singer who never allows her performances to be recorded is betrayed by her moonstruck postman fan--in turn breath-takingly pursued by copyright-scoffing minions and crooked cops and crooks--and there beats the real heart of this movie, the nasty little guy with the earphone, his own tune playing in his head as he mutters how much he hates everything, upstaging just about everyone with his improbably pursed lips and blank-faced malice.

And when he finally gets it, a little café music spills out of the earphone, a tinny requiem for the way they used to make pictures before the French showed ‘em how, just about: with confidence and cool, and a cute Oriental girl like a happy little cat at the corner of the frame confident that her philosophic friend--as infinitely resourceful as any super-spy--will literally hoist the bad guy by his own petard.

March 23, 1982 [Mephisto]

2011-01-25T13:51:00.003-06:00

Wasn't Mephisto already a picture ten years ago called Cabaret? Almost: Both Hendrick and Sally love the idea of success so much that they put on too much makeup and play coy with brutal old history, its drunken pawing in the back seat endured, as long as they're center stage and dazzling when the curtain goes up.

But this is Hendrick's own country he's jazz-dancing on, his Motherland suffering an Oedipal stomping--while the leering son closes his eyes in manufactured pleasure and shuts his ears--like Odysseus getting what he wants, except Hendrick hears the song, and rushes to the rocks. At the end, he insists to us he's just an actor, what do they want from him--and the irony of the movie, laid on with a steam shovel as Mephistopheles the tempter becomes Faust the tempted becomes--what? His own temptation? A self-contained hell-bound machine rolling him through Nazi territory--those most audacious of all actors? Klaus Maria Brandauer works mightily to expose his actor's self-forgiving soul, and gives us one more layer of grime atop Cabaret's gaudy trash-heap.

March 21, 1982 [The King of Comedy]

2011-01-20T10:24:00.003-06:00

Rupert Pupkin woos Rita in The King of Comedy with as much stiff-limbed passion as he brings to his stand-up routine--calculated, yes, but none of the figures come out right. They're in the bar, and he's barreling along, his chin down, his eyes up, that little mustache--a funny little thing, so why does it make me uneasy?--jutting just enough to drive home one scripted point after another, moving with the words that keep coming, all of it unbearably embarrassing.

--And at his back a guy mimics his gestures, amused by the flashy little jerk, not sitting close, but close enough to mock an idiot. But I'm not sure if Rita sees him--and I barely noticed the man--but when I did I thought he was looking at me: he'd seen the camera and was mugging it up just to ruin the shot, an actual customer in a not-actual bar, like those kids in the background as news reporters drone on--except why doesn't Scorsese yell Cut! and have the guy tossed out? How is it that this is even happening, the fake movie with real discomfort all-but-interrupted by a real heckler listening to a scripted performance by a character whose whole life is a script, a set filled with laughter and success?

Do I need the rest of the movie, as appallingly perfect as it is? Isn't this one scene enough to hammer a nail into the forehead of a man whose life, not just name, is often misspelled and mispronounced? Do I need Jerry Lewis, reminding me more of Karloff than Carson? Or Sandra Bernhardt's carnivorous mouth opening to swallow Jerry's head like the last trick of a real trooper lion tamer? Or Liza Minnelli in cardboard--or the Moment itself at the end, Rupert's fifteen minutes of fame as real as anything that ever settled for good in his head, plodding along through one self-loathing observation after another? Isn't he, at the moment in the bar when he tries to correct his life, already deciding to be both king for a night AND schmuck for a lifetime? Yes, and the movie could've been only five excruciating minutes long, and I could've left the thing behind and tried my best to forget my lines and miss my mark and get off the damned stage.

March 8, 1982 [Diner]

2011-01-14T11:30:00.005-06:00

In Breaking Away, Daniel Stern wishes he were a cartoon character--that way, when someone hits you on the head, BOINK, with a frying pan, your skull flattens out in a perfect frying-pan shape, then pops back into place again, SPROING, good as new. That would be cool.

In Diner he's still wishing--only this time it's his record collection, the only thing Shrevie thinks will help him re-shape himself--well, return him to the shape he believes he once was. One 45 out of place, and he explodes at his wife, a little taste of Jack from The Shining as he berates her, "You never ask me what's on the flip side!" He storms out and drives, singing along to the radio with his hands clenched on what may be a life preserver, Clarence "Frogman" Henry telling us he's a lonely boy-girl-frog, aint got a home, aint got a mudder or fadder, nobody.

Diner looks at Shrevie and Boogie and Fenwick and the rest of them with affection--but it doesn't forgive every foolish boyhood yearning of this first generation of Americans--in the early 1960s--encouraged not to grow up, but to see adulthood as a final exam--like the Baltimore Colts test Eddie's fiancée has to take, vastly important for no good reason. Fenwick delivers Diner's motto: "Do you ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we don't know about?" We all get that feeling, boys, and Barry Levinson's movie provides few answers, beyond whatever wisdom lies in a popcorn box or behind Fenwick's lidded eyes.

November 9, 1981 [Time Bandits]

2011-01-11T08:56:00.004-06:00

The map in Time Bandits shows you where the holes are--and you would think that's helpful: fall in a hole in a Terry Gilliam movie and you never know, could be as whoopsy-daisy as Monty Python, a silly walk into a really hilarious nightmare. But the little guys and the kid do the opposite: They jump into the holes--still makes sense: they're in a Terry Gilliam movie, no way out, might as well go in to get out.

And if you follow them, Gilliam gives you a little something to cushion the fall: your own childhood, the wall of your bedroom collapsing and setting you free. Gilliam's parents are grotesque--that's OK: Gilliam doesn't play fair, we've already been warned--so the terrors in the time-holes seem a relief, and the boy follows--well, is often swept along, but he comes in handy once Evil shows up. And God Himself also pops in, knowing he's the Boss but too busy to make a fuss. He just wants the place dusted off and the chairs set aright; Evil is an incidental Thing, the last unwelcome guest. With that assertion, Time Bandits opens its snickering little happy heart, glad to rid the world of awful parents and half-witted consumerism--easy targets, but I'm not complaining, as long as the boy gets to poke around in Gilliam's audacious creation, a world so strange and cunning you can't help sneaking in for a little loot of your own.

October 14, 1981 [My Dinner with Andre]

2011-01-08T10:19:00.003-06:00

In one hand I hold a small, spiral-bound memo pad that I keep with me to jot down notes--walking around, sitting on a bus, at the movies. That's Wally in My Dinner with Andre: the dependable object, a little worn but still out and about. In my other, a sperm whale tooth, purchased at the natural history museum gift shop. That's Andre: "outside over there," as Maurice Sendak's new book puts it, a not-unwelcome but puzzling, sometimes menacing, thing.

And as I watched the movie, listened to his engaging, insistent voice, his earnest face, Andre conspired like a goblin--or Yeats' faeries--to take me to "the waters and the wild," far from the world "full of weeping." But there, too, is something like tears--more of a growing, horrified conviction that, as Andre's friend in one of his stories might say, that little memo pad is a tally sheet for a concentration camp, one we've built ourselves--New York City, an office, a home--and we're proud of it, too proud, and afraid, to escape.

But as Wally takes his taxi ride home, passing objects turning into memories, I go with him, relieved that Andre stays behind--but he doesn't; I'm still in the trance, his voice still calmly detailing more than one post-hypnotic suggestion I must follow before I can return home safely.

August 14, 1981 [An American Werewolf in London, The Howling]

2010-12-28T11:05:00.004-06:00

The happy singing-dancing guy on TV who asks us if we want to be a Pepper is stretched in agony until he becomes a big bad American Werewolf in London. Like those California self-helpers in The Howling a few years ago, English moors vacationer David Naughton just wants to take it easy--but the ghost of Lon Chaney jiggers them all to hell, and even a man who is pure in heart and so on--except now it’s one horrible hair at a time, teeth growing like painful roots up, not down--and somewhere in there Freud shows up, and the wolf gets sexy, firelight dancing in a get-in-touch-with-your-REAL-self woodland bop--or a flickering See You Next Wednesday, the skin flick poor David watches, sort of--distracted as he is by the rotting corpses of his victims--and that porn title stuck in my head, opening a little memory-drawer--and of course: It’s the last words Frank’s parents say to him in 2001, their birthday greeting sent into outer space: “See you next Wednesday”--but, John Landis snarls, it aint happenin, kid--and those Golden Oldies on the soundtrack play him off, dead in the alley, “Blue Moon” doo-wopping away--while in The Howling the nice news lady gets to howl on-camera as a cutely coiffed Thing. Some fun.

June 20, 1981 [Raiders of the Lost Ark, Clash of the Titans]

2010-12-28T10:39:00.004-06:00

Is it too late for a matinee? Both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Clash of the Titans would have been perfectly at home on any Saturday afternoon thirty years ago--the latter picture more so, another Ray Harryhausen animated monster rally, looking just like Jason and the Argonauts or The 7th Voyage of Sinbad--then again, Harryhausen hasn’t ever left us--two “Sinbad” movies in the last decade.

And Spielberg is certainly keeping his eye on Harryhausen’s world--but also on the old serials, not to mention Zorro, Secret of the Incas--Charlton Heston with his own hat--or Valley of the Kings. The list goes on, but that’s not the point. Like Ray Bradbury, Harryhausen and Spielberg refuse to grow up--just look at the hysteria of Raiders’ finale, Nazis getting it with all the glee of boys playing backyard War. Better yet: the chases defying all laws of physics and anatomy, Indy bobbing like a cork on stormy waves.

What’s missing is the sense of menace--mostly sexual--of the old vamp-inspired adventures: Queen of Atlantis, and even Ursula Andress in She. But Spielberg knows that such dangers will not fit into his fearless twelve-chapter recreation--aside from Indy’s whip--and that easy smile Harrison Ford has sculpted, a little something for the ladies.

But I’m not complaining. Both Spielberg and Harryhausen understand that the best magic tricks end with a bang--and Harryhausen adds an almost academic attention to the details of classical mythology, as he has in the past--but here, with odd superstar cameos, the gods of acting--Olivier, Claire Bloom, Maggie Smith--and there she is again, Ursula Andress as, of course, Aphrodite--looking down through their special effects at all-American Harry Hamlin as Perseus, almost shoved off-camera by those stop-action creatures and wonderments, one after another.

And standing behind the curtain is George Lucas, whose Star Wars mind brushes aside adulthood--not thoughtlessly, or in anxious denial; just determined to remake the movies he loves, including his own. Fortunately, there’s great fun to be had--and, I will admit with some relief, a sense that, despite all the stormy New Waves of the past twenty years--anomie and nihilism meeting like fronts, clearing the deck--some little paper boats keep sailing.

April 3, 1980 [Atlantic City]

2010-12-22T10:47:00.003-06:00

It was Jean's birthday today, and we saw Atlantic City--but I wish we were there in that beat-up old town, sitting near Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon in the Knife and Fork, sniffing the wine cork and grinning. It's not too often I can use the word "bittersweet" without cringing, but Louis Malle's fond observance of one wreck and another plays both sides, at once sentimental and severe.

Lancaster carries Malle's tone like he was born to it--and here, at the middle-end of a long career, Burt proves it's true: No one has such a face--handsome and bright, weary and weathered; no one has his bearing, solid and light; and no one has mastered a fall like that old acrobat, his chin up, his eyes hard but goddammit still twinkling. And that voice: still clipped and assertive--and trailing off into a private conversation with itself--oh, I can pile on the oxymoron all night; what matters is that Burt Lancaster has managed to remain a movie star while actually acting, and he takes Atlantic City into Lou's imagined past with calm assurance--"You should've seen the Atlantic Ocean back then," he reminisces. Even geology bends its knee as he passes.

But this performance occurs in a picture that, as Chrissie the spaced-out pregnant sister announces, doesn't "believe in gravity." It ends with a wrecking ball doing its work while Susan Sarandon--lately a real straight trooper in a real bent movie, The Rocky Horror Picture Show--motors off into her own imaginary world, Monaco and "that Kelly girl," two Hollywood fairytale princesses at the casino, their French as perfect as their makeup and hair.

It's sad, but Malle doesn't sneer. He gives everybody the ending we want them to have, and saunters along the boardwalk--which I know so well, from Peanut World and Convention Hall to that big Cutty Sark sign--all that's missing is a jitney chugging along the Monopoly streets, Indiana and Michigan, Atlantic and Pacific--little buses tooling past the casinos without a second glance.

February 21, 1981 [The Last Metro]

2010-12-14T11:09:00.006-06:00

François Truffaut's The Last Metro ends like Blazing Saddles--in reverse: his characters enter the fictional world of the play they have been staging. This is not their fault: Truffaut has not given them a "real" world in which to be characters, but a Casablanca-styled 1940s--a world on the brink of action against tyranny that the occupied French cinema had no chance to film. But Truffaut does, in an almost-un-ironic simulation of Technicolor, Catherine Deneuve as gorgeous as Ingrid Bergman, her two loves vying--while love itself, along with the world, hangs in the balance, a Golden Age movie poster come to self-conscious life. Actual French films during the war had to eviscerate any "Jewishness" and looked to fantasy and melodrama; The Last Metro takes hold of that and re-imagines Anne Frank as a Jewish director hiding in his own theater, ghost-directing a play while converting his life into a performance, "a little life rounded with a sleep"--but, like Casablanca, no sleep yet: They survive, perhaps triumph--still waiting for The End, but confident.

It's this optimism--punctuated by the enthusiastic announcer whose newsreels and historical summaries give the movie a Citizen Kane-like winking gusto--that stays with me, the assertion that life imitates art--while art gives life meaning, two hours at a time. Gérard Depardieu as the lead--in both the film and the play-within-the-film--is charming and passionate, pursuing one woman fruitlessly--she too is acting, even though not an actress--while falling a little for his co-star. His smiles for them and his seething rage against the Nazis fuel that optimism: Anyone can tell good from evil, and should. together, the troupe reminds me that a little thing like a play--a movie--does not need to do more than it should--but that "should" is a real word.

January 17, 1981 [Scanners]

2010-12-08T16:14:00.005-06:00

David Cronenberg must be destroyed.

Scanners rushes along the electric wires of our heads, and the resulting wet BOOM is only fair, given the urge to figure out our own brains in order to do what we want with others’. And Cronenberg shows us what a messy business business is, mind-control SF mumbo-jumbo smoke-screening a sinister Canadian fit, grossing us out by turning the inside outside--a Thalidomide Bride of Frankenstein married to the Psychotronic Man, willing you to die, monster, die.

December 21, 1980 [Raging Bull]

2010-12-08T15:17:00.004-06:00

In Raging Bull, De Niro plants himself square in the middle of the frame, his chin down, his eyes looking at me. “You never got me down, Ray,” he says, and it is a faint sound he makes drowning--his little hands at his side and his sunken chest expanding, bloating, as he runs the microphone along the girl’s dress, his big nose sticking where it shouldn’t--until he is blind in the hole--not an animal, he insists, not that guy, but he drives those little hands into the wall, and he squeals and grunts in the dark half of the screen.

Springsteen sings, “You’re born with nothing, and better off that way; soon as you got something they send someone to try and take it away.” And “nothing is forgotten or forgiven when it’s your last time around. I got stuff running round my head that I just can’t live down”--until you’re “left running burned and blind, chasing something in the night.”

I could quote him all night, listening to those songs, writing down the words, trying to get them to find some purchase under the lid, pry open Raging Bull. But all I can do is take slow and shallow breaths and think of Jake in the mirror, trying to quote stuff himself, insisting he’s the boss, he’s the boss, he’s the boss, he’s the boss--and Springsteen again, singing about that little girl with wrinkles around her eyes sitting on the porch of her daddy’s house, all her pretty dreams torn, staring “off alone into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.”

But I can’t hate Jake, in Scorsese’s beautiful revelation, black and white and full of sound and fury--but Raging Bull signifies something: I was blind, and now I see. What else can I hope for, but to look at myself in the face, try to let go, and be forgiven.

November 19, 1980 [Gates of Heaven, Heaven's Gate]

2010-12-08T12:03:00.005-06:00

For a minute I was confused: Hadn't I already seen Heaven's Gate? Why did it sound familiar?--and then it rose up: Gates of Heaven, the pet cemetery documentary--where did I see it? Did I see it? My memory of it was warped at first, fragments of false bravado and anxious uncertainty, slightly crazy people speaking calmly about rendering dead animals, burying others--but more than that:

At the end of chapter four of The Origin of Species, Darwin brings up the analogy of the tree of life. And my children put together construction-paper family trees in school. My grandmother had a knick-knack, a small silver tree with tiny family photos hanging from the branches, grandparents at the top, their three children lower down. I was happy to see them all lined up, pendant from the tarnished silver. Like Darwin's tree: beautiful and reassuring that certain animals enjoy "a protected station" and thrive like a low, straggling branch that should have withered but lives on.

Gates of Heaven's director, Errol Morris, seems to have watched Andy Warhol, then went further, deeper than the amateur and the accidental, the stumbling, lurching, leering kitsch manufactured in The Factory, where Warhol charted the intersection of the ingenious and the disingenuous along a barely navigable course. Morris, though, holds still his subjects and leaves them be in an isolated space, where all they have is themselves. He frames them in self-consciously centered poses, almost as if they're being booked on suspicion (of being silly or crazy or simply stoned)--or they sit low in the frame, with the sky or a wall of cacti rising above their rock-still hunched forms, unconscious parodies of themselves.

Morris' subjects are not interviewed; instead, they deliver monologues, often uncomfortably prompted to continue speaking by Morris' stubborn silence--a refusal to fill any dead air himself--while the camera relentlessly rolls. And we become co-conspirators in a plot against the movie's subjects--or perhaps, in watching them unreel their sometimes-agonizing attempts to make sense, we become their protectors--or better yet, allies, insisting they be given their due, and even realizing the truth of their convictions, and the extent to which we share the mourners' commitment to making their animals more equal than others. Their love is expressed unselfconsciously, as they memorialize their pets and in the next breath discuss their fur coats and platters of meat ruined by the smells of exhumation and rendering. "A protected station," indeed: Becoming a pet removes one from the struggle for existence in a fundamental way; owning a pet allows for a blissful, albeit partial, ignorance of one's shortcomings, while simultaneously providing an opportunity to generate an ideal in the form of the pet.

I remember a sequence of shots of dog and cat headstones. None of the memorials are dopey or campy or morbid; all of them are simple and unashamed in their affection for the pets. I found myself noticing the birth-death dates; many of the pets lived only two or three years, and yet they are accorded their due. Naturally, this never entirely stops being weird, but in that lingering sequence of shots, Morris seems to acknowledge the honesty of the pet-owners' love; any ironic wink is replaced by a respectful glance toward those little animals at rest.

--But that was not Heaven's Gate. For that I went to New York and caught the premiere, and felt the audience drift away, the golden hours of the film--it shines like a memorial at sunset in every frame--weighing on them. When it was over, they left quickly, as if the movie were asking for a handout.

But I sat and watched the credits, and let Morris' dead pets wander in, both movies memorializing something. Cimino's movie, though, disdains the aesthetics of irony, opting instead for gargantuan headstones for every lost soul--the irony is all in the plot, the immigrants burnt down like a prairie fire, the invention of open range free enterprise brutally effective. And maybe the irony goes further than history but to the movie itself, a Big Picture everyone hates, its leisurely stroll and unblinking gaze almost unendurable--but somehow I loved it, I could feel Hollywood's knees buckling under the weight of it, their own history too much like the range wars on screen to make anyone comfortable, including the audience--not that anyone cared. Then again, neither does the movie: Like Bertolucci's 1900, Heaven's Gate cannot stop growing, delivering under the tree the bitter eulogy that continues long after the last mourner has gone home to a hot meal and a warm bed.

May 29, 1980 [The Shining]

2010-12-07T16:24:00.006-06:00

Fran, my helpful cynic, insists everything that happens in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is straight out of Jack Torrance’s head--and if it isn’t, then it’s not as good a picture as it could’ve been, because who cares about another ghost/possession movie? All right, the excellent The Changeling worked just fine, George C. Scott recoiling in horror from a bouncing ball, the most underrated terror since Oliver Onions’ “The Beckoning Fair One” brushed her ghostly hair in the dark at the beginning of the century. But do we really need any more ghosts? Aren’t the ones that rise from the anguish of failed marriages and loves lost enough?

Kubrick disagrees, sort of--and he may be right, especially when he has Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall (still my favorite imaginary love affair, a post-Mod Maxfield Parrish sprite come to life)--with Scatman Crothers also shining, Chico and the Man somewhere off in the distance, of no help while the snow piles up.

This movie, which refuses so stubbornly to play by the rules, may be Kubrick’s masterpiece--if I can somehow forget 2001. The sheer effort to load every moment with doppelgangers must have been nerve-wracking, from characters to events to colors to sounds, making this movie, along with Murnau’s Nosferatu, an actual “symphony of terror.” I’ve gone back to see it three times already, just to make sure I wasn’t being my usual self, a sucker for the Gothic--and I am, but something else is happening here, the kind of domestic bad craziness that The Amityville Horror fooled around with last year; but The Shining denies its own genre:

When Wendy finally gets to shine, mostly all she sees is cheesy William Castle skeletons and split-skull creepies.

We always know where Jack is--he can sneak up on the other characters, but never us.

The blackouts/title-cards are all anti-climax.

The mood is unbearably tense--but there’s always time for a peanut-butter sandwich or a long conversation.

The woman may be be consumed by terror but she's never helpless.

And while Jack is a monster, as my observant friend Jim pointed out, Jack’s evil is Hannah-Arendt banal, a petulant school teacher following orders. If it weren’t for that fire-ax--and OK, the haunted hotel itself--Jack would be just another loser giving in to bad habits and jokes.

Kubrick takes us all the way to his ubiquitous bathroom where personal stuff is voided in public. Even poor Dave in 2001 has to stand in that bathroom, watching himself become something else in the Ornate Room with porcelain fixtures. And yes, the Monster is us--which means that the corridor of blood (and wasn’t that a Karloff picture?) is something we’ve made, the haunted house we build, and into which we lock everyone we fear has let us down, so that we can “correct” them.

In the end, The Shining leaves us with nothing but a drunk, Nicholson playing Torrance three dirty sheets to the wind through most of the picture, wounded pride and rage and resentment, scared to death and scary as hell--leading to that last moment, the slow approach to the photo from 1929, Torrance grinning with no pleasure--I'm reminded of Wilfred Owens' "Dulce et Decorum Est," the gassed soldier with "his hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin." There it is: the fallen alcoholic whose "higher power" is the drink itself--and it traps him in the maze, with a frozen resolve never to change.

February 19, 1980 [Wise Blood]

2010-12-07T15:48:00.003-06:00

Hazel Motes in Wise Blood is caught putting stones in his shoes and wrapping barbed wire around his chest. His landlady tells him, “It’s not natural,” and he disagrees--so she counters with, “Well, it’s not normal. It’s like one of them gory stories, it’s something people have quit doing--like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats.” But he tells her, “I’m not clean”--and so he keeps on doing it, “into the dark tunnel where he had disappeared.”

John Huston’s movie, a gory story of something people keep doing, burns a clean hole straight through the book, piercing it, opening a way through it--and even though I'm convinced that the movie version of a book--or play, or anything--has no responsibility to the source, thank God that Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes thinks otherwise. We all want to laud him as Billy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but he does something monumental here--I cannot overstate it--as though he had lifted an entire world--O’Connor’s--oh, maybe it’s mine, maybe all of ours--and bears it, keeps it spinning.

Motes is pursued by a Hound of Heaven, and runs blindly into sainthood--that is, he disappears into his own refusal, until it becomes a kind of lust, deadly holy. And Dourif lets us see it, his eyes more than haunted--possessed, as though God had become a devil that needs driving out. And as funny as it gets--and Huston knows O’Connor’s sense of humor--Dourif hunches his skull down into his shoulders and stares us down, quiets our nervous laughter, and wrings unexpected pity from us, watching crazy Hazel blind to the light.

December 23, 1979 [Being There]

2010-12-07T15:12:00.002-06:00

This decade is finally over--a dark mess not even Jimmy Carter's smile can clean--and boy howdy don't we know it, ready to bring in Ronald Reagan to make it all better, an actor whose quiet confidence in 20 Mule Team Borax guarantees an end to these Death Valley days.

Peter Sellers is also quiet in Being There, his Gardener empty where it counts, a clean slate everyone else writes on--but he remains clean--as clean as Borax--no, cleaner, Sellers refusing to laugh at Chance, gentle and deliberate in every movement--especially the last, the one everyone wants to talk about, the walk on the water. But that's incidental: It's the fools I remember, eager to find any brand that's New and Improved to explain everything--with metaphors, please, anything at all; we'll fill in blanks as we go along.

--And once more: Sellers' own blankness ends up beautiful, the only thing I can trust, that "malaise" that Carter pointed out heavy enough to keep me in my seat. Sellers has said that he thought of Stan Laurel as he worked on his character, and that's a great comfort: If we need another fine mess cleaned, I'd rather it were Stan's squeaky tears than anything hauled out of Death Valley.

August 23, 1979 [Apocalypse Now ]

2010-12-06T15:46:00.002-06:00

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is based on Heart of Darkness--and Martin Sheen understands what that means--although his version of Conrad’s Buddha-like Marlow, Capt. Willard, is a bit less serene--but just as watchful, his eyes rising above the bloody-orange waters, the other soldiers understood only as shapes--some in affecting, anguished postures, but in the end simply horrors--the head thrown in Willard’s lap, his screams of no matter.

Just ask Brando, whose Kurtz also understands Conrad’s book, the New Man, serene himself in his crisp uniform, deciding at last to “exterminate the brutes”--I mean, “Drop the bomb.” Because they all become brutes, Charlie and grunts, good guys mashed into a pulp with the bad. But it’s more than moral miasma--Coppola announces it as an apocalypse in the present tense, bringing the war back home--and not the “home” of The Deer Hunter, the Pennsylvania mountains looming over the steel mills, all of it somehow reassuring, no matter how terrible their lives have to be. No, Coppola won’t let us go home--he’s too busy burning it down, boiling it grey, like all that prime rib that chef mourns--just before the tiger, burning bright, reminds him that this is the end, and all that’s left is hysteria driving him back to the boat.

August 3, 1979 [Winstanley]

2010-12-06T15:16:00.004-06:00

Winstanley is filmed like a documentary, but has the feel of an earnest school play--and I write that without condescension. Its actors seem not so much acting as posing, standing just so--but without proclamation, without raised chin and unblinking eye. It's as though they knew they were in history--"Diggers" all, the early Christian communists of England, taking the Gospel at its Word and trying hard to free themselves from the emerging false freedom of free trade. Gerrard Winstanley wandered among the hedgerows and copses, along the treeline and into the dales--and every inch of ground that he saw he knew came from God, and that it was our common home.

It's a shame to think of him as "brave"--does it take courage to know the truth? Is one heroic in the certainty that 2+2=4? Gandhi said that the law of love worked like the law of gravity, "whether we accept it or not." The "True Levellers" also knew their facts, and wanted simply to claim their due, work on it and make something. The movie knows this, too, and time-travels to a black-and-white pageant with the sound of real wind in the microphones and a pale and luminous English light on Winstanley's upturned face.

June 1, 1979 [Alien]

2010-12-06T08:50:00.004-06:00

The trailer for Alien gives us a simple physics lesson: “In space no one can hear you scream.” The sick-green egg throbbed--and yes, screamed--like the quick-cut victims fleeing in strobe-lit panic.

What, though, is Alien? Ask H.R. Giger, he of the twisted bio-mechanics, all grey and black, shining with excretions and posing like a fashion model, cold as Milton’s Hell and cool as an Emerson, Lake & Palmer album cover. His Thing grows in the narrowing corridors of this haunted house in space--while the sex-metaphors work their way down our throats, like that rolled-up magazine wielded by Ian Holm, straight out of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming--the “comedy of menace” tossed into outer space, dead and alone and spinning in his head like thanatos.

The last little Indian, Ripley, is cute in her panties but not just candy: She moves toward the alien to get a better look, ready to do what it takes--like John Wayne staring down some tinhorn--except here it’s glop-dripping mouths inside of mouths--a sexualized version of those ‘50s Things, Black Scorpions and Crab Monsters, an evil Cesarean birth with noise and steam and wet clanking chains symphonic as it approaches.

I’ll stop making much of Alien--but my sister, a grown woman, went with me to see it, and afterwards she insisted I search the car before she got in. I grinned and teased her--still, there I was, poking around in the trunk and a little worried.

May 27, 1979 [Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead]

2010-12-03T16:28:00.003-06:00

I know a young man who thinks about George Romero's zombies all the time. Whenever he enters a room, a little careful part of his brain has him scope out all entrances and exits. He doesn't like to be alone, and facing a door or ground-level window makes things only marginally better. Outdoors isn't so bad, but there needs to be a lot of open space; even then, he keeps in mind that Romero's first victims were in a big cemetery, and could see Doom coming a long way off. When he confessed this fear to me we were talking about movies--not Romero’s, but something in my wide-eyed rush of words about whatever it was I couldn’t stop blathering about provided him an opening to tell me of his fear. One madman to another.

At first, I almost congratulated him. After all, here we are in a time when we've slopped around in every evil, twice, and come up grinning, everybody a smut aficionado--no matter if it’s sex smut or shoot-em-up smut or True Confession smut--a time ripe for Gonzo truths and Freudian fairy-tales, Thompson and Bettelheim staring down the slavering jaws of the Were-Nixon dreaming as it waits for Little Red Riding Hood. You'd assume that nothing could faze anybody under thirty any more. I thought it was good to see a little atavistic fear still tinkling the ivories of someone’s spine. Of course, though, the more that young zombie-phobe talked, the worse I felt for him. This fear dogged him silently in the underbrush of his life, always out of sight but never out of mind.

I have nothing new to say here, except to acknowledge how thoroughly George Romero understands the terror of evil--not just Hannah Arendt’s “banality,” all those wolf’s-head accountants tabulating Jewish ashes, one by one million, but the small dread that grows, the suspicion that everyone’s either dead or back--and wanting you dead. And this dread is in the rooms we sit in and the scenery we move through, and it comes at us, its shambling, E.C. horror comics/Karloff as The Mummy gait laughably slow--but so darn inexorable, like plate tectonics, so that you cannot escape the object of dread: consumption. In Romero's zombie movies, evil may be silly or slimy, but it is always as close as the dinner table or the shopping center, the personal and social feeding grounds. So when that young man admitted he was always thinking of zombies, he was just seeing Romero's version of the Post-Everything Age. In Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood--and I read John Huston is making a movie of that little fallen creature--Hazel Motes founds the "Church Without Christ," where "the blind don't see, the lame can't walk, and the dead stay that way." I wish Romero would convert, and leave that poor young man alone.

February 27, 1979 [The Deer Hunter]

2010-12-03T14:58:00.002-06:00

The Wise Man in Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” tells us right away

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

--And the late-winter wind rushes along the house, The Deer Hunter refusing to leave, De Niro’s eyes wide as he tries to find a way out, the one-shot man insisting, “This is this”--but how could he know that Nicky would leave them, his own eyes seeing something a thousand yards away: a bullet, like the one in the Weber opera, like the old folk tale, magical--no, cursed--veering and circling, the enemy unscathed, the young men dead or broken.

The final scene, the survivors singing “God Bless America”--but John Cazale, whose character stayed at home with his own little gun, did not survive: he’s gone already, the last victim of the ‘70s, this Little Decade That Couldn’t--that final scene will be much discussed, much maligned. But I cried, free at last of false hopes and fears. Who am I to lay on them anything more? The least I can do is leave them alone, let them mourn. I don’t want anything from them, and have little to give myself. They loved each other while the old world, in “the very dead of winter,” passed beneath their hurrying, lost feet. The movie’s horrors are also much discussed, much maligned. But again: Such stuff is what it is: “This is this.” And that is not merely convenient ambiguity, but the lesson of the circuitous journey of that cursed bullet, finding its own mark, no matter which way the gun points.

February 19, 1979 [Quintet]

2010-12-03T13:28:00.004-06:00

The weather was sharp today, as though the air were made of innumerable, microscopic icicles, pricking my face for a millisecond before melting on my cheek--and I took that thin icy skin with me into the theater to see Robert Altman's Quintet, which warmed me up not at all, the science fiction ice age frosting even the lens as it watches Paul Newman step into the end of the world: first a bang, then a whimper.

I'd read that Altman used the old Expo '67 grounds up in Montreal, the decaying hommage to "Man and His World" hosed down until it looks like a sepulcher whited on the inside, the cold as real as the one I'd left outside, the fatal game of Quintet played because there's nothing else to do while waiting for the end.

I sat there and couldn't get out of my head Kobo Abe's novel Inter Ice Age 4. I'd seen the film version of his Woman in the Dunes, but barely knew of him--then about five years ago happened on his SF novel through the Science Fiction Book Club, cheaply made--but cheap enough to risk. And it made Vonnegut look like a calm and sober fellow, its ideas as sharp and dazzling as icicles, its own version of a watery end all ocean, no ice. Altman stays true to his central conceit: Everyone slows down, even Newman, the only hero we can pick, half-befuddled by the indirect suicide of a game he learns like building a fire: a necessity before anything. But Abe's book kept nudging me, knowing we might not make it to Quintet, that our own Inter Ice Age has been going on long enough to warm everything but our hearts. I was almost glad to rejoin the winter outside--but as I sit here, I know where Abe's novel sits on my shelf, its predicting-computer only the start of the last thaw.

December 20, 1978 [Superman]

2010-12-02T15:56:00.004-06:00

The ad campaign promised, “You’ll believe a man can fly!” And that's good enough for Superman--despite the alien appearance of Marlon Brandon as his father, lurching around the dying Krypton like a Pharaoh still alive in his pyramid, perhaps the movie’s most startling special effect--and Gene Hackman somehow fooling everybody into thinking he’s the Lex Luthor we wanted--although Valerie Perrine is certainly the sidekick of the year; but they did not distract me, much, from Christopher Reeve--and the strange irony of his name, with poor George Reeves trapped in his suit in the ‘50s, having to deny invulnerability so he could tear out of it--not to mention Steve Reeves holding up his bearded chin in Italian Hercules pictures--where will this muscled fraternity end?

Anyway: I did believe a man could fly. Reeve captures Superman's charming blandness, with a little self-satisfied smile to let us know he’s enjoying the effects of a yellow sun, doling out the right measure of love for Lois Lane--Margot Kidder also getting it--the gag, that is: letting Lois be just tough enough to plunk herself into a rescue-ready situation. But again: the flying. Finally fun to watch, no squinting needed, the bizarre physics of up-up-and-away as nonchalant as making the whole planet time travel just for Lois’ sake--and go right ahead, pal, spin it like a top, because at the end he flies toward us, and looks right in our eyes, and gives us one of those amused, reassuring smiles all for ourselves--and OK, I smiled back at good old Superman easy in his own skin, devoid of the anguish of a Silver Surfer or puny Peter Parker, just happy to be here.

October 28, 1978 [Halloween]

2010-12-02T11:07:00.004-06:00

How much simpler can Halloween get? A masked murderer--straight out of Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage or Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace--indestructible, impossible to understand, with foolhardy teenagers at the ready.

The director, John Carpenter, shows surprising restraint, considering the treatment such a plot (the term more or less a convenience) has received internationally, drenched in blood, bright and garish, Clockwork Oranges without intellectual distancing. And at the center is one Jamie Lee Curtis, the good suburban girl pursued, her pretty eyes stretched wide open in last-gasp terror, her long frame spilling around the house like the high school athlete her character must certainly be, basketball or track, anything that demands quickness--until the monster, Michael Myers (his name so nicely bland), corners her in the bedroom closet, flimsy slats bursting, hangers rattling, the camera flying around in there--and we all get to run from him, a basic impulse that Carpenter works like a surgeon, anesthesia forgotten but the skills sharp.

And of course the monster, tumbling into the back yard, just goes away--no comforting “The End” for us; it’s too late for that, here at a point in American life when nothing seems to matter as much as the assertion of the self--and Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie is forced to become Tom Wolfe’s Me Generation make-it-happen babe rolling around on the carpet at the est seminar primal-screaming about her hemorrhoids. In his essay, Wolfe writes about “encounter sessions”: “often wild events. Such aggression! such sobs! tears! moans, hysteria, vile recriminations, shocking revelations, such explosions of hostility between husbands and wives, such mud balls of profanity from previously mousy mommies and workadaddies, such red-mad attacks!” He adds, “only physical assault was prohibited.” John Carpenter simply removes that last safety measure, and we get the perfect horror film for our times.

November 11, 1978 [Magic]

2010-12-02T10:23:00.004-06:00

Anthony Hopkins in Magic churns up Karloffian pathos with a whisper-to-hysteria vocal register, like Richard Harris caught midway between this sporting life and Camelot, all to sustain one long nervous in extremis situation: Corky the mad ventriloquist eaten up by his cold, sly double, Fats, his stare-down disdain and squawking rages exhausting Corky, sending him to the bare trees of his hometown where in isolation he can settle into inevitable ruin--the whole goop poured like Creepy Crawlers into a don’t-touch hotplate.

And then there’s Ann-Margret as Peggy Ann Snow, forgodsake: the original kitten with a whip, almost in another movie, looking back with confidence at the fact that she was the prettiest girl in school, all done with Bye-Bye-Birdie teeny-bopper squeals and Tommy’s-Mommy Oedipal wigouts. If movies are dreams, and dreams are wish-fulfillment, this one comes without metaphor, symbol, or sign, just flat-out unfiltered longing. No matter how awkward or foolish the movie became, those scenes of Corky and Peggy in love (despite the homicidal wooden baby-makes-three) reminded me how temporarily soothing a movie can be, even if the real wish is to not-be.

August 3, 1978 [National Lampoon’s Animal House]

2010-12-01T12:00:00.004-06:00

While Saturday Night Live’s cast carries on a grandly grimy tradition--sharp as Mr. Mike spikes inserted into the eyes of Tony Orlando and Dawn--Animal House feels more like the Lampoon’s magazine and radio show--and no wonder, given the overlap of writers, performers, and bits--mostly straight out of their high school yearbook parody.

It’s a rough ride with these folks. They meticulously recreate the past--here, early '60s college culture--simply to take it apart then reassemble it so that the jokes can fit in. It works, of course--especially John Belushi’s silent-comedy expressiveness, his cartoon-physics trajectories--skittering around the cafeteria, boner-propelling from ladders, swashbuckling across the Main St. Armageddon. But the college stuff has a sharper bite: the evil fraternity--“Please sir! (whack!) May I have another!”--the stifling pink and hairspray-encrusted platinum of the sorority, the venal Dean Vernon Wormer intoning, “No more fun of any kind!”--and that’s the real target here, not any socio-political villain--after all, all they want is to work on their golf game and drink. The Delta boys are tomorrow’s privileged class--but before they get there (and the freeze-frame epilogues tell us they certainly will some day, divorces and politics, gynecology and parts unknown) they just want to toe-GAH, toe-GAH, toe-GAH.

Like the magazine, the movie has decided that we’re all assholes; it’s just that some of us know it. In the end, it’s more than a little cynical--but irony is the Lampoon’s constant diet, setting the tone for the American Things to Come, self-awareness not a California-Dreamin’ bliss-in but an opportunity to snicker at lesser breeds. Somewhere in there is a kind of snobbery, but we’re having too much fun to notice.

November 26, 1977 [Close Encounters of the Third Kind]

2010-12-01T08:35:00.004-06:00

Jerry refuses to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind--on principle: He disdains a movie that asks people to search elsewhere for hope and fulfillment, rather than in their own lives. This is also the guy who’d rather listen to Yes than Bruce Springsteen--“Why eat hamburger when I can have a steak?” A nice guy, but suffering from a blind spot: Someone who thinks Siddartha is one of the best books of the 20th century has a funny idea of what makes for a good steak.

Now, I like Yes--went with my Close Encounters-hating friend to see them tell Tales from Topographic Oceans--and have read with great pleasure Hesse’s book about the Buddha--but I also could not take my eyes away from Close Encounters, from that first moment when Spielberg jumpstarts us with a burst of light and music, to the gumball/pinball spaceships, the unfolding mystery in Roy Neary’s head--Richard Dreyfuss once more in deep waters with Spielberg (and this time the boat’s plenty big)--and Melinda Dillon’s panicked mom, and the little boy who runs toward the monster like a kid on Christmas morning bolting down the stairs--and even François Truffaut showing up, the strangest visitor of all, a gentle reminder that Jerry is wrong, that this is a story about finding something in one’s life, down deep where indefinite shapes elude our grasp--unless we’re scary lucky, and they take definite shape, in mashed potatoes or charcoal sketches--or gigantic science fair projects, big papier-mâché mountains in the living room. It was dismaying to see Neary fly away from everyone, little by little, to outer space--the kind of upheaval only reckless hope can fix, with or without special effects.

I won’t argue with my friend; I can only record my own hypnosis, not wanting the picture to end, wanting its humor and terror, joy and wonder to go on for just a little more, just a while longer, like a kid who doesn’t want to go to sleep.

August 13, 1977 [Suspiria]

2010-11-30T15:38:00.004-06:00

I had a few used paper napkins in my hand and pushed them past the little swiveling lid of the kitchen waste-can--and plunged my fingers into something dank and grainy, cold and clinging. I drew out my hand in disgust: coffee grounds was all, but for a moment there it was nothing but corruption, coating my good hand and turning it into something else.

Suspiria is almost a Hitchcock movie, but it's also a big neon mess, bright and shrieking like violins in a wood chipper--or violinists, the whole string section pushed in. The director, Dario Argento, has done this at least one other time: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Tony Musante--pretty good as a TV cop over the last few years--also caught in an Italian-opera/acid-rock thriller, Vertigo without the pretty City by the Bay. But in Suspiria it's a Gothic Happening in a dancing-school run by secret witches with really sharp objects and bugs and one unhinged dog. The plots of both films don't seem to make sense--but is that because they're edited with that chipper, or just because? I was too jangled by all the fog and filth to keep up--just sat there and let the young girls get it, screaming in ultra-cool saturated colors, mostly reds.

It's as if the horror movie has nothing left but nasty shocks and style, like a nice soft glove with something wet inside.

May 30, 1977 [Star Wars]

2010-11-29T14:19:00.004-06:00

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars and E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Skylark blast off, passing Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, skirting the Forbidden Zone where 2001 imperiously spins--and rattle to a landing in Star Wars, irresistible and silly--but a great reward to those who have ridden the spaceways, all the way to Harlan Ellison's New Wave shores, dangerous visions threatening to toss all space operas into that “tall white fixture in a comfort station”--as Kurt Vonnegut calls science fiction.

And I understand the problem--as Vonnegut pointed out, science fiction is a kind of club (a “lodge,” as he put it), where there is safety and endless discussion of itself--but also love. And I have nothing against that love--I’ve felt it myself in the dark burrows of Weird Tales and heard it in the shiny whizbangs of Astounding--and sometimes my favorite, the hybrids of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction having it all, from werewolves to robots--to Vonnegut himself, fifteen years or so ago.

And so I was simply thankful that George Lucas--who put together a “real” SF movie for his first outing, THX 1138--has found both artificial gizmos and real computers--the first to keep the story going, the second to make it happen on the screen. And it may be enough to say that Star Wars just “gets it right”--if “it” is princesses and mechanical men, young upstarts and space pirates, the plot incidental, the relationships juvenile--but still: Isn’t it cool that Han Solo’s spaceship is a wreck, scarred and beat-up, like one of those hot rods in American Graffiti--because man, they go! no matter how dented the bumpers.

Lucas has opened a door that until now has worked only in my head, where I can fill in embarrassing gaps. And he could care less that the gaps are still there, as long as he pleases the guys back at the lodge--and arranges a little Open House for everyone else to take a peek, not into “childhood’s end” but its hyper-driven beginning.

May 20, 1977 [Cria!]

2010-11-28T13:49:00.002-06:00

The little girl from The Spirit of the Beehive is a bit older--but she is still solemn and waiting, her partial understanding giving her the patience to hold on and see. Cria!'s original title, Criá Cuervos, opens the window a bit more, so that we can see the little ravens learning to fly, raised in the quiet house--the dim sounds of Madrid barely a whisper. But in that silence the house also whispers, haunted by childhood. This is the dark flank of the little growing bird, feathered, punctuated by rough cries that sound deeper as the ravens grow, the little girl and her littler sister and her bigger one, the three of them together, from childhood to adolescence to almost-grown--with Geraldine Chaplin as the mother's ghost, still brushing hair, a "beckoning fair one" in the mirror.

When the needle drops and the raucous pop song sends them dreamy-dancing, the middle girl considers the value of poison--a little for each grownup, helping them along. Once more, Shirley Jackson's world asserts itself, way over there in Spain--except now it's merely bicarbonate of soda; death itself comes in by its own door. The only thing that really ends is summer, and the little ravens join the other children at school, the strange glowing glory of childhood fading into common daylight. My own girls also walk alone, stepping on the ledge--not careful, but possessed by their own desires. I don't pretend to understand them, but I can feel their sleek little feathers brush my cheek when I'm asleep as they plot to be free.

April 3, 1977 [Three Women]

2010-11-09T09:05:00.006-06:00

A little more than mid-way through Robert Altman's Three Women, I felt a moment of cinematic déjà vu ("I've seen this movie before") that seemed gray and grainy, something lying in the attic long enough to leave a silhouette in dust when I picked it up--and saw it was a silent film, The Female of the Species, a strange little thing made stranger by my dim recollection of it. I believe it was a tale of survival in the desert, the men dying, the women left to fend for themselves. It may have ended with a dust-storm, the three women--one holding a baby--pushing on, disappearing into a cloud of sand.

--And they finally emerge from the desert, decades later, to change themselves--not only into Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule but also each other, the women swiping and borrowing to piece together their own version of womankind, alone at last in the perfect American wide-open space, hot and dry and safe. Like the women of that silent picture, they have to decide whom they will trust--even if that means denying themselves. But both pictures do not end in dissipation, let alone annihilation--not so unusual in the desert, where the Big Bombs and dry scrub make threats, not promises; no, as they move into the storm, they calm it, claim it--were those earlier three miners' women?--and settle themselves, like real pioneers.

January 26, 1977 [Harlan County U.S.A.]

2010-11-08T15:03:00.002-06:00

Harlan County U.S.A., Barbara Kopple’s documentary of a 1973 miners’ strike in Kentucky, takes us deep into the woods and down into the mines, where good country people do not spread checked tablecloths for covered-dish suppers while breezes sway the willows and cicadas sing, with a county fair in the distance sending up the thin tootle of a calliope--no, that is another country.

Here in Harlan County it’s a long hard push, the United Mine Workers of America trying hard--and they have their own troubles--while the miners themselves stand in the dark, company thugs firing off a round or two to clear the way for scabs.

--And often it’s the women who stand tallest, the miners’ wives keeping things organized, the kind of plain-faced ladies that Flannery O’Connor warned us about, Jesus in their hearts and the Devil in their mouths, packing a little iron themselves, tit for tat. While the film’s discussion of troubles in the union is illuminating, a record that needs setting straight, it’s those women who remain with me, a little self-conscious, playing for the camera a little--but I won’t argue: it’s their show, and I’m just a city boy safe in my air conditioning, watching them sweat--while their husbands, coughing as they always have, wait on a miracle.

January 14, 1977 [Stroszek]

2010-11-08T11:29:00.004-06:00

I watched Stroszek, but I'm not sure what I saw. Was it Werner Herzog's elaborate home movie about relatives who otherwise would never have been remembered? Was it a surreptitious documentary, secretly following a strange man--"Der Bruno Stroszek," "played" by one "Bruno S."--and a prostitute who travel with an old man interested in "animal magnetism"--the literal kind, if that makes sense--all of them tired out from Germany, hoping America is still the New World--but ending up in the worn-down frozen reaches of Wisconsin?--and isn't the country getting rustier, the edges raggedy, the trash always swirling at our ankles? It's as though "Keep America Beautiful" left with Lady Bird Johnson, and all we have left is these sad foreigners holding up the mirror to our threadbare nature--until we're the foreigners, like Valentine Michael Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land--except in reverse: Stroszek and Eva and Scheitz are not famous enough to become pawns, just marbles in a cigar box, tilted one way, then the other.

The movie is almost sad--but something about Stroszek's determination to be himself moves things--I almost wrote the word "transcendent" to describe what happens--but that word, too, is getting worn out these days, its shining teeth and clean breath in need of attention; so I'll forget the bigger world, out there beyond the Wisconsin tundra, and watch Stroszek and his frozen turkey ascend--not, in the end transcend--while dancing chickens and ducks and whatnot frenetically play him off.

December 3, 1976 [Rocky]

2010-11-07T11:19:00.003-06:00

I’ve stood up there at the top of the steps Rocky climbs, the art museum behind him--but he turns his back on it and faces the city, spread out along the Ben Franklin Parkway--and it’s hard to tell if the city is daring him to succeed, or if Rocky is daring the city to try to stop him.

Not since Brando in the ‘50s have I seen a beefy guy so thoroughly bowed down that he has to murmur, so he can blame himself--because no one else is listening. The fact that Rocky’s triumph is not winning but finishing justifies this hunched-over performance, a man humbled by his failures--and inspired by them, in the end reveling in struggle, victory incidental. It’s a completely endearing performance, from that silly hat he wears to his sudden metaphors--he calls the little birds in the pet shop “flying candy”--to his gentle touch, a brawler always trying to make peace.

Among the various nostalgia-crazes the ‘70s has been stirring up--for the Roaring ‘20s, the “Happy Days” of the 1950s, the Old West, even the Depression--Rocky is the strangest entry: It does not re-imagine a historical past, but a cinematic one, reviving Old Hollywood, the endless string of third-act uplifts, the girl who stands by her man, the grizzled mentor, the eccentric sidekick. But Sylvester Stallone drags them into the present, the smoke-and-rain-filled streets of an American city worn out and waiting for a Bicentennial Moment--and he delivers, giving all those South Philly street corners something to doo-wop about.

I admit it: Tears welled in my eyes at the end, Rocky laying on thickly the salve we need, two hundred years later and feeling cheated out of a good time, trying to stand up--and Rocky does it for us, never KO’d, going the distance. For two hours on my birthday I’m given the feeling, like the other Rocky--Marciano--that somebody up there likes me.

November 30, 1976 [Network]

2010-11-07T10:32:00.002-06:00

Some old hands here in Network--especially Sidney Lumet, directing for a long time, all the way back to You Are There and The Alcoa Hour; and William Holden--was he really Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy back in the late '30s, before Sunset Blvd. and Born Yesterday and Stalag 17 and a guest-spot on I Love Lucy, watching her putty nose catch on fire--you can see it on rerun even now--let alone The Wild Bunch, reminding us not only of the long-gone West but of his own past? He's doing that again in Network, making us see what's been lost as he kneads Faye Dunaway's white white skin and makes more mistakes any way he can.

As a satire of TV, the movie doesn't push any further than Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat--except for the almost-SF alternate-universe programming decisions--but they're only slightly more cynical than The Price Is Right or Hee Haw in their estimation of their audience. Even Peter Finch's pop-eyed impression of Charlton Heston's Moses, as monumental as it is, pales before the simple sight of Holden broke in two like a stale loaf of bread, the last pleasant memory of our friend the TV gutted by folks who helped build it, then hated themselves later--oh, they'll tell us it's TV they hate, but the violence of Network turns inward, no matter the incursions of actuality, the on-camera snuff-outs, the fatal seizures.

And in the end, it's just business, so who's to complain? Well, the gadflies nip and goad, but the big dumb junk-wagon horse just flicks its tail and shivers its flank and clip-clops along, kids following it up and down the street.

September 28, 1976 [The Spirit of the Beehive]

2010-11-05T10:07:00.003-05:00

The weather’s cooler now--but I saw a sluggish bee float by, as though the air had become viscous, a transparent, thin syrup--or maybe the bee had been hypnotized, and had not yet emerged from the trance. The glass beehive in The Spirit of the Beehive crawls with them, mesmerized, buzzing; it sits in the room, a tunnel boring through the window so the bees can pass, as if René Magritte had designed the house. Maybe in another room a pair of bare feet rests in a corner, above the ankles melting into boot-tops, the living and the made things meeting.

--Which is the little girl’s occupation: She sees Frankenstein and her older sister tells her a story, just enough for the girl to look for Karloff as though he were an Answer to some dim question, something hiding behind her solemn, beautiful face--and she takes me on the search, the two of us wandering on the open Spanish plain, the light lasting long but dying anyway.

And in the dark, by the water, the Monster appears, extends his hand, and takes her into her own dream, out there behind the desolate barn, asleep and safe--despite the false deaths (and a real one, the little drops of blood remaining for her to see). The Monster moves briefly into a little pool of light, then rises and fades, like the movie itself, into the little girl’s head, where she walks to the empty theater--not a chair, not a person, not anything but the little screen waiting with us for the show to start.

June 15, 1976 [The Tenant]

2010-10-12T14:47:00.006-05:00

Roman Polanski’s The Tenant is a surrealist sick-comic remake of Rear Window in which the guy watches himself--Polanski also stars, so the director can also watch himself go mad in an apartment building whose inward-turning, everybody’s-watching courtyard provides the best opening-title sequence I’ve ever seen, a serene implosion that's at once tense and melancholy.

Like Taxi Driver, it’s a movie about a smallish man who stops for death--but Travis Bickle turns the pain of isolation outward, while Trelkovsky ingests it, dresses it up to escape it, to turn it into another person--a different kind, a woman; but he chooses unwisely, since the woman is already dead, the two of them losing their teeth as rapidly as their minds. Then again, Trelkovsky’s contacts with the living provide their own madness: Isabelle Adjani’s Stella a disheveled sexy mess, those lips waiting for him, but in the end of no real use--like his friends from work, who bully him--but it’s nothing compared to what he does to himself--or is it done to him, his neighbors plotting like the witches in Rosemary’s Baby? It’s hard to tell; the story works its way out from inside Trelkovsky’s head--and every minute it gets tougher to trust him.

--And also like Taxi Driver, it’s a young man’s nightmare, his uncertainties regarding where he stands, who he is, worrying at him until he makes a choice--a really bad one--and he shaves off his hair or puts on a wig. Again, though, Bickle walks away from the mirror and aims and shoots, while Trelkovsky drags himself over the edge into the shattering glass, twice, to get himself all the way through, an Alice-mummy small and trapped, waiting for himself to show up to let her know how thoroughly he's succeeded--and how deep the failure, the camera plunging into her dying mouth, seeing him only when it’s dark.

February 12, 1976 [Taxi Driver]

2010-10-12T14:05:00.004-05:00

I don’t know if the stink of Taxi Driver will ever leave my nostrils--and I’m afraid it’ll spread, the greasy filth of New York City smeared all the way to the Pacific; and it sticks to the President’s cuffs, and splashes a little on the street drummer, his eyes raised up, as blind as the other taxi drivers hanging out with Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle, shootin’ the shit in the coffee shop, not quite hearing everything the little guy says--so the little guy goes home, and takes stock of his loneliness, and stocks up, and cuts a deep trench for the black-and-red-stained apocalypse to flow into the gutter, where his cab hunches under the punishment of Bernard Hermann’s score.

Paul Schrader’s screenplay engraves this evil scripture in wet stone--but Martin Scorsese’s direction jangles the story, jumping and sliding his camera as though it’s being forced to watch, to keep a record no one wants. And the help he gets is remarkable: Jodie Foster as the child prostitute, her smile easy, just waiting for the right tornado to blow her back to Kansas, Mr. and Mrs. Steensma relieved at last; and Harvey Keitel the pimp, posing just so, the tough cookie who thinks he’s figured out his end of the deal; and Cybill Shepherd, the Wellesley girl getting out of the way just in time, her own smile easy--too easy, maybe; and Peter Boyle, the clueless Wizard, rocking back on his heels and lucky he doesn’t have to stick around; and Albert Brooks stuck in there like the only survivor of a catastrophe he didn’t know is cutting loose right at his shoulder. And once more, New York itself, its hair a wreck, its suit rumpled--no, shabby, clotted with whatever mess it had slept in the night before, standing at the counter and eating like a pig, ripe for Travis’ alien appreciation of its neck stretched out, waiting for his knife. And yes, it’s lookin’ at him, all right, and he looks back.

December 19, 1975 [The Man Who Would Be King]

2010-10-08T14:44:00.009-05:00

John Huston makes Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King--and lucky that he waited twenty-five years, just in time for Sean Connery and Michael Caine to grow up and stride with false but irresistible bravado across a fairy-tale so immense that I had to double-check to make sure that the source was a short story, not a novel. From teeming train stations to stretching plains to snowbound peaks, from fakirs to fakers, hidden kingdoms and gold-stuffed palaces--and every variety of human one can imagine, even Kipling himself popping in, the only sane man in an Empire built by martinets and mercenary dreamers, the whole lot of them surging forward with a snap in their step but making it up as they go along, trying hard to be--well, I'm reminded of Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," in which the "young and ill-educated" Orwell finds himself having to shoot an elephant that had killed a man--and he surely didn't want to shoot it, but at his back is a crowd of about 2000 Burmese--and, as he puts it, "I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly." It's an essay on the tyranny imposed by Empires--but it's the white man who is enslaved, who "becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib." As Orwell observes with bland horror, "He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it"--all "to avoid looking like a fool."

In The Man Who Would Be King, Peachy and Daniel set themselves up first as civilized conquerors, then--at least on Daniel's part--as gods. And these "hollow, posing dummies" rule as tyrants--better than their predecessors, to be sure, but still nothing more than robbers. Huston grants us the luxury of loving these cast-off Tommies--and he does not punish us for this; no, he punishes them, Peachy and Daniel having to "brass it out" and let those Post-Colonial mountains fall on their heads--Daniel's crown still intact, but more of a portable grave-marker than a symbol of rule. It began with Alexander the Great but ends in a mad Cockney whisper, with the last Masonic King wrapped in dirty linen and staring, like Orwell's elephant, with the "enormous senility" that overcomes when a shot hits home.

November 23, 1975 [One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chinatown]

2010-10-06T15:41:00.007-05:00

Jack Nicholson staggers out of the grave of his ACLU lawyer in Easy Rider, chopped in the neck and buried by the roadside--the guy who mourned the loss of freedom, and didn’t live to see how right he was: The 1960s really are gone--and maybe he helped.

As private eye J.J. Gittes (wearing a kind of mask because he's a nosy guy, kitty-kat) in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown--a movie put together like a faded-gold novel--Nicholson lets us in on a secret: the Depression started it, dealt a knockout blow that we’re still reeling from. And it all plays out in Lost Ang-a-leez, where the inbreeding leaves them sobbing in the street, both millionaires and rumpled-suit gumshoes, stunned by gaping wounds.

Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest helps to dispose of the body, the movie a rough sketch of the victim, cold and raw--except for brief respites: the imaginary World Series, a little bit of fishin’ and grinnin’. Randall Patrick McMurphy, head of the bull-goose loonies, is now the center of attention, while the big Indian--who'd "been away a long time"--in the movie is handy as a metaphor but silent as a narrator. In any case, the authorities have definitely been alerted, and Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched--a name straight out of Dickens--folds her hands and bears down, hard.

And both end with innocents slaughtered, the counter-culture a shill for squares. So maybe we already knew it was all gone when the kids in The Brady Bunch flashed a peace sign; it’s just that Nicholson twists it home with more charm.