film March 12, 2018

The Goon Show

OSTENSIBLY A WILD-EYED, CORROSIVE, CONVULSIVE SATIRE, Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin (2017) comes off like George Orwell’s Animal Farm staged as a Comedy Central roast. Trading scabrous put-downs and obsequious equivocations about Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) and one another are a Who’s Who of grimly cackling reapers: Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), and Georgy Zhukov (Jason Isaacs). This crew of vile ideologues and heartless Communist party hacks jostles for position and power

film February 21, 2018

Meta Man

QUENTIN TARANTINO WAS JUST A TYKE PLAYING DIRTY DOZEN with G.I. Joes in his backyard and “meta” was a mere prefix when English director-writer Mike Hodges’s Pulp (1972) poked its proto-postmodernist nose out a wormhole. This elusive contender for the title of “Curiouser and Curiouser Movie of 1972” then vanished into the footnotes of star and coproducer Michael Caine’s career. Riffing, for starters, on Mickey “I, the Jury” Spillane and Lewis Carroll, Pulp has an inexplicably serene sense of its B-movie preposterousness, and is awash in droll echoes and allusions. A quarter century of hardboiled

film October 16, 2017

Hyde and Seek

PERHAPS MOTHER!, that self-gormandizing envisaging of Roman Polanski’s Stardust Memories as an all-you-can-swallow buffet of metaphysical leftovers and creamed corn à la mode, left you unsatisfied. Then Stephen Frears’s much-maligned and oft-magnificent Mary Reilly (1996) is the perfect Goth-Hitchcock antidote. A subliminally satirical reworking of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tale from Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton, Mary Reilly is a batty extension of their previous Dangerous Liaisons into the overlapping terrain of Victorian manners and sexual horror. The film is a world of

film September 18, 2017

Eight Ball

IF YOU SAW 8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986) via the movie equivalent to Downbeat Magazine’s Blindfold Test—sans credits, prior knowledge, or preconceived context—it could seem like a film that had come unstuck in time. Draping itself in the moody trappings of neo-noir action-romance, it boasts minimal action and its romantic pièce de résistance features a drunken failed seduction that culminates with the femme fatale vomiting down the hero’s pants. Its slouching posture suggests an affinity for Robert Altman’s loser-reverie The Long Goodbye (1973), updated with all the cold accoutrements of mid-’80s

film April 25, 2017

After Darko

RICHARD KELLY’S now-legendary debut, Donnie Darko (2001), forged a bittersweet, nutty-poignant idiom from the pop-culture overload of the writer-director’s late 1980s suburban Virginia youth. (It feels as if Kelly was possessed by Donnie instead of merely being his creator.) Most impudently, the film juxtaposes the grinning title teen (Jake Gyllenhaal, exhibiting a quirky Travis Bickle–as–Boy Scout air) below a movie marquee featuring the dream Halloween team of The Evil Dead and The Last Temptation of Christ.

That combination sums up Donnie Darko as well as anything: a comic-book Passion Play

film December 31, 2016

No Angels

IT’S HIGH TIME to take Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962) and elevate it to its rightful place as a holiday—any holiday—classic. For one thing, its exquisitely paralyzed time-spatial continuum leads straight to Groundhog Day’s looping perpetual déjà vu machine. Buñuel’s inexplicably stranded, upper-encrusted partygoers—prisoners of their own karmic device—are doomed to snipe their looping, arrogant-respectable way through a mazy purgatory of socialized entropy, Catholic hypocrisy, and primal malevolence dressed as good manners. To rephrase a certain beloved yule-riptide airing-of-grievances

film September 28, 2016

On the Road Again

EVERY GENERATION SHOULD HAVE A ROAD HOUSE OF ITS OWN—a gamy little refuge on the outskirts of good taste, reeking of smoke, liquor, cheap music, oiled pecs, pin-up legs, clenched fists, paperback sex, bad blood, and bad hair. The 1948 and 1989 films claiming that title have just been separately but almost simultaneously reissued on disc: Sharing naught but a commitment to period-specific cheese/beefcake and endearing/enduring tawdriness, these lean-to Road Houses represent an all-American continuum. Jim Morrison encapsulated their lowdown philosophies in the Doors’s “Road House Blues” (1970):

film September 09, 2016

Spore Reports

THE BACKWASH OF 1960S shock waves broke down the firewall between serious cinema and genre films. (In the “P” column alone, the mid-’70s had Polanski’s Chinatown, Penn’s Night Moves, and Pakula’s The Parallax View.) Hollywood wrestled—flailing, kicking, and squirming—to assimilate disruption and ambiguity into an updated commercial playbook. Remember that Robert Altman, funky high priest of alternative, independent-minded cinema, got his break with a wacky military-service comedy (MASH), hit his zenith with a poet-junkie-woodpecker western (McCabe and Mrs. Miller) and a shambling private eye

film July 07, 2016

Military Might

KICKING BACK AND CHILLING in an undisclosed concrete-reinforced location, you would be hard pressed to corral two vintage Hollywood comedies separated by a deeper chasm of sensibility than Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). However the gleaming new Blu-ray editions of them disclose certain endearing and disconcerting affinities. With their blatant aerial motifs and cloud-dappled intimations of afterlife (or radioactive half-life), inadvertent themes and stammering anxieties—transferred à la the bomber-refueling ballet

film August 03, 2015

Laundry Days

A KICK IN THE LILY WHITE TEETH to England’s gilt-hedged public imagery back in 1985, My Beautiful Laundrette raised thirty-year-old mixed-race writer Hanif Kureishi from a stymied playwright (“the theater thing hadn’t been working out for me”) to a counterculture hero, established forty-four-year-old vet Stephen Frears as a world-class director, and gave a struggling twenty-eight-year-old aspirant named Daniel Day-Lewis his first Brando-Dean close-up. Kureishi now likens Day-Lewis’s iconic intro under a lamppost to the image of a rent-boy Clint Eastwood; Frears compares his come-hither gaze to

film July 05, 2015

Dinner Sanctum

LOUIS MALLE’S My Dinner with Andre doesn’t fit the usual definition of a great movie, but it has an inexhaustible, omnidirectional confidence. It’s the most subliminal piece of magic realism—expansive, incantatory words jousting with monotonous matter—ever put on film. Playing amusingly distilled, intensified versions of themselves, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn sprang this cantankerous cerebral doubles act—part doleful Vladimir and Estragon, part verbal Laurel and Hardy—on an unsuspecting world in 1981. The oblique eccentricity of this archetypal pair of dissatisfied, failure-haunted “men of

film April 18, 2015

Behind the Music

MGM’S BEST MUSICALS personified Show Business as bipolar cottage industry—miracles of scrambled, collaged, precision-tooled, toe-shoe equilibrium. Star-struck, self-aware, and ruthlessly efficient, these engines of chaste desire merged revels and reveries into the ever-present bottom line. Poised betwixt gee-whiz uncomplication and sophisticated manners, their escapades showcased hyperbolic performers, idealized characters, and dazzling shades of homogeneity. Yet the same storylines also incorporated a cheeky penchant for relaxed displacement and rib-poking irony into otherwise corny affirmations.

film February 16, 2015

Roeg State

NICOLAS ROEG WAS ALMOST FORTY in 1968 when he got his big break. After kicking around the British film industry for ages—shooting dazzling second-unit footage for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), but fired by David Lean from Doctor Zhivago (1965); at last getting a foothold by photographing Julie Christie’s next three films, Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), and Richard Lester’s kook-descending-a-staircase Petulia (1968)—he suddenly was the hottest, hippest London cinematographer around. Elevated to codirector alongside writer–novice filmmaker Donald Cammell to shepherd

film September 19, 2014

Midnight’s Children

IT’S FRIDAY NIGHT, a couple days before the end of 1979. A young woman is driving past a movie theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, going nowhere but away. She argued with a boyfriend while trying to watch an X show at Madame Wong’s: Sick of his macho-crybaby shit, she shoved him into some angry skinheads, jumped in her rusty Datsun, and bolted. On KROQ, Frazier Smith’s following “Search and Destroy” with “Baby’s on Fire”...

It’s almost 12 AM now, though who trusts the clocks in LA? Streets are pretty deserted, but she sees an orderly queue of people lined up at the theater’s box office. MIDNIGHT

film August 22, 2014

Let It Bleed

THE COVER IMAGE of the Criterion booklet for John Cassavetes’s Love Streams (1984) Blu-ray is a doozy. Who is that motherfucker in the goofy hat? (And what’s love got to do with it?) It’s Cassavetes, naturally, but that chintzy gardener’s chapeau makes him look like he’s auditioning for the role of Torgo in a John Huston remake of Manos: The Hands of Fate. It is an awesomely unflattering look—the face moist and sickly (it’s supposed to be rain-soaked, but here it looks like fever sweat on a wax effigy), eyes darting and ever-wary, the full-frontal effect ludicrous, scary, guardedly self-aware,

film July 18, 2014

Face Off

BY THE SPLINTERY MID-1960s, John Wayne was a hotheaded, potbellied anachronism riding the slow trail to extinction. Lee Marvin had emerged as a cagey new breed of movie tough guy, a resourceful, silver-haired nihilist who climbed out of the slough of deadweight heavies, TV cops, and mobster sadists to stardom. Marvin had sparred with the Duke in a few films before he got his late break with the spoofy-squishy Cat Ballou and won a fluke Academy Award in 1965 (a piece of cute stunt casting and almost a parody-in-advance of Wayne’s self-glorifying, self-burlesquing Oscar victory lap in 1969, True

film April 07, 2014

The Hunger Game

AMBIVALENCE IS A HARD CONDITION to pinpoint in a film. Is a movie sending out cross-purposed signals or are you and I simply projecting our own conflicted feelings? Even encountered as a movie-mad kid, Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957) struck me as somehow off—what was supposed to be a carefree, blithe romp felt oddly ponderous and stilted, unlike the beautifully unified song-and-dance-and-comedy stylization of Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953), or even Mark Sandrich’s Top Hat (1935). It presented a bright public face laden (burdened?) with gaiety and

film March 25, 2014

Going My Way

MS. 45 (1981) has to be the most succinct, eye-popping title in movie history. Four point-blank characters—a single abbreviation, and a double-digit number—typed out on the screen to the sound of gunshots and punctuated by a bullet hole! More than a title, it is its own self-generating graphic, instantly telegraphing a cruelly concrete meaning (woman-grabs-a-gun-and-goes-ballistic) together with a cornucopia of suggestiveness: This is NYNY, capital of vice and degradation, city of Mickey Spillane, Weegee, Taxi Driver, Son of Sam, “Street Hassle”–era Lou Reed, Cindy Sherman, Times Square grindhouses,

film February 03, 2014

Kitten Without a Whip

ON FIRST SEEING Paul Schrader’s Cat People in 1982, my reaction was a wave of almost nauseated confusion: What was Schrader up to with this hodgepodge? Why did these voluptuous, neo-gothic jigsaw pieces sometimes feel like they had been soldered together by a blind monk in shop class? Precisely what the fuck was he thinking? I could barely sort out my own responses to what was thrashing around on-screen. It was as though the director, writer, actors, and designers had set out to make a perfectly respectable shocker, overlaying the sex, horror, patriarchal gore, and New Orleans juju with a nice

film November 05, 2013

Best Defense

BY AN INTERESTING COINCIDENCE, Warner Bros. is releasing its new Blu-ray of the 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives at the same time as a box set of all three of James Dean’s films: Rebel Without a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1955), and Giant (1956). Most everyone who is serious about cinema has seen Dean’s movies (Giant maybe not so much), but I can’t help wondering how many people under fifty-five have ever watched The Best Years of Our Lives. It was the sort of picture you’d expect the parents in Rebel Without a Cause to relate to—meticulously designed to speak to the people who lived

Howard Hampton