The Visitor

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The Visitor made in 2007, released in 2008, written and directed by Tom McCarthy, starring Richard Jenkins.

Jenkins is one of those actors who has a long history of bit parts, supporting roles – accountants, businessmen, police detectives, lawyers, executives. Tall, balding, glasses, white. Here at last he gets a chance to star in a role with changes and some depth, and he does a good job and got an oscar nomination for it.

Story involves a Yale poli-sci professor whose life is stagnant. His wife died some years ago, his only son is living in London. He pretends he is working on a new book on globalization but in fact does nothing about it. He is a cold, mechanical, by-the-numbers professor. He puts his name on scholarly papers written by colleagues, as coauthor. He tries to take piano lessons (his wife was a gifted pianist) but he fires the teachers after one lesson … then some time later he takes another lesson with another teacher. He is closed off and repressed and has no joy.

Then he must go to New York to deliver a paper he supposedly coauthored, because the true author is sick. He protests and says he doesn’t want to go, but his department head says he has to.

Once in New York, he goes into his apartment there – the apartment he has owned for 25 years, but almost never visits anymore. He is shocked to find somebody is there – a black woman taking a bath; an Arab who comes and grabs him.

It’s a tense moment. But it turns out that this couple knows an ‘Ivan’ who claimed to own the apartment and sublet it to them. They leave, and the professor sits alone, and watches them through the window.

Finding they had left something behind, he takes it out to them – they are on the sidewalk phoning friends, trying to find someplace to stay that night. The professor in his cold stumbling manner invites them to stay in the apartment, at least for one night.

By day, the professor goes to his conference; by night, he sees the couple still in his apartment. She is from Senegal, he is from Syria; she makes jewelry, knitted bands and such, and sells them on the street in a small market where many such vendors set up tables. The Syrian is a drummer with a jazz band at a nightclub.

One day the professor comes home early and finds the guy practicing drumming. He tells him he can go on practicing, he won’t bother him. Another day the professor comes home and finds the drum there, and plays it a bit himself. The drummer finds him, and begins to teach him how to drum. Significantly, the drummer gives him his first two lessons as: ‘Don’t think’ and ‘Forget classical fourths, this is an African drum, you play in thirds.’ So this effectively wipes out the past, everything the man had built, everything that is holding him back.

Though the Senegalese woman never warms to the professor, the Syrian, who’s a very warm person, plays with him, takes him to drum circles in the park, invites him to come hear him play in night clubs. They are getting along very well. The professor delivers his paper at the conference, not very well, but it’s over, and yet he remains in New York, ignoring his classes. He and the drummer see a man playing a string instrument in the subway station, the drummer says he always wished he had the nerve to do that; maybe they should do it together and split the tips.

Then everything changes.

Trying to get the drums through the subway turnstile one day, the Syrian is challenged by the subway police. He paid, he insists he did pay, but they still notice his accent, and see the big bag he’s carrying (it holds his drum) and put him up against the wall. They look at his ID and take him in. The professor tries to protest, and they tell him if he doesn’t back off and shut up they will arrest him too.

As it turns out, both the Senegalese and the Syrian are illegals. He is taken to a detention center. She can’t visit him for fear they will detain her. Only the professor can go. So he visits the drummer every day. He gets a lawyer, who tries to help, but it’s all a maze of red tape and incomprehensible laws.

Then the Syrian’s mother shows up from Michigan. She too fears to go to visit her son. The professor is drawn into their problems more and more. He feels responsible, because the son was helping him to get through the turnstile when the subway police noticed him. Also he likes the kid. So he asks the mother to stay at the apartment in the son’s room.

The mother meets the girl from Senegal, and they warm to each other. But the lawyer seems not to be able to help. The son went to his hearing, but he never received the deportation notice, some official letter that he had to get before he could be legally deported. He never got it, and the mother swears also it never came. The lawyer tells them that if there was a mixup so the letter was not sent, they might have a chance; but if the letter was sent, there’s nothing anyone can do.

Meanwhile the professor is getting calls from Yale, asking him why he isn’t back teaching his class. He puts them off a couple times, then he must go. He goes back to his old life, which is meaningless. He faces this and acts. He goes on sabbatical, he sells his dead wife’s piano, and he gets new glasses. Then he goes back to New York.

He visits the boy again, but the boy is changed. Being in prison is having a bad effect on him. He’s short-tempered, frustrated, near breaking down. As it happens, the boy’s father was put in jail in Syria for articles he wrote for the newspaper. He spent 7 years in jail, then was released when he was very sick and died 2 months later. This is the great fear haunting the mother; the son notices that people in the detention center are disappearing. One or two at a time, they are gone in the morning and nobody knows where they are. They might be sent out of the country, they might be sent to another center. Even worse is the prospect of not leaving; the son knows one guy who has been in the center for 5 years.

For himself, and to cheer up the mother, the professor takes her to the theater, to see Phantom of the Opera whose music she loves and knows by heart. It is a wonderful evening for them both. The next morning the professor is awakened by a phone call from the son, they are taking him from the center but he doesn’t know why or where to.

Mother and professor rush to the detention center. The son is gone. Nobody knows where exactly he is but the word is that he has been deported. There is no way to reach him.

They go to tell the girl from Senegal. She is heartbroken over it.

Back at the apartment, the mother tells the professor she must go back to Syria for her son. Even though it means she herself will never be able to come back, she must go to be with him as soon as possible. And she confesses to the professor that in fact the deportation letter did arrive, it came to Michigan three years ago when she was living with her son, but she tore it up and threw it away, and never told her son. And as time went on she began to think that nothing would come of it. Now something has come of it.

The professor sees the mother off at the airport. Now he has nothing.

But he takes his drum and goes to the subway, and he plays the drum in the subway just as he and the boy spoke about. The final shot shows the professor, no jacket, no tie, playing the drum with abandon in the subway as half a dozen people stand by waiting for their trains.

It is well shot indie-style, New York style. Nothing spectacular, just trying to hold the composition and keep things in focus with low light in cramped apartments and on the street. Performances are restrained. The script is quite Hollywood though it would protest it’s nothing of the sort; all the same the contrast with Louis Malle’s films is striking. Here indeed we see the classical ‘man with a problem’ structure, and the solution is that he learns how to open up and live from the strangers in his apartment, but the price to them is that the couple is broken apart, and the boy and his mother are both back in Syria where, presumably, the government is hostile to them for the writings of the father. It almost seems callous, cruel, to see the professor liberated and enjoying his life at the end, when it has come at such a cost.

Many digs are aimed squarely at the immigration officials and the whole establishment and their incomprehensible laws. The secondary function of the movie is thus to introduce the American audience to what immigration feels like from ‘the other side.’ Indeed that might be the primary function of the film, but then in showing it around, in development, whatever – they brought the professor forward and decided to at least make his story reach a happier end.

A parallel is drawn between the state of the immigrants, without official permission in the country, and their state as we first find them, without official permission in the professor’s apartment. And he kicks them out – but after reflection he lets them stay, and learns from them, and grows from knowing them. Putting this parallel back around, we would then expect that the country would learn and grow had it only allowed them to stay.

The last shot didn’t feel cruel and callous when I was watching it, and so that’s the prime test. But in looking back at it and describing it to you, it feels that way to me now. I almost hate the professor for his liberation. Weird huh?

(13 March 2009)

Viridiana

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana.

It’s really 2 stories, or felt like it. The first story has young novice Viridiana, a few days from her final vows, being required to go visit her uncle, a rich landowner who has paid for her education. She hardly knows him, though, and doesn’t really want to go.

But the uncle is struck by V’s resemblance to his dead wife. It turns out she died on their wedding night, in her bridal gown, and it deeply affected the uncle. Now he becomes obsessed by V, and wants her to marry him. He does get her to agree to wear her aunt’s bridal gown.

V is deeply religious and innocent. She is shocked by her uncle’s proposal, repulsed, disgusted, and the old man only gets her to calm down by giving her drugged coffee. He then takes her to his bedroom, locks the door, and begins to undress her...

Next morning he begs her to stay. He tells her that he raped her while she was drugged, and so there’s no point in her going back to the convent now…

This only makes V more upset, which disturbs her uncle so that he begs the housemaid to talk to V. Tell her the truth, he asks, tell her that I meant to rape her, but I didn’t go through with it … she’s still pure. But the housekeeper is reluctant, so the Uncle talks again to V. V doesn’t know whether to believe him or not – I don’t know which of his stories to believe – and leaves for town still totally upset. When she is ready to board the bus back to the convent, she is halted by the police: her Uncle has hanged himself with the housekeeper’s daughter’s jump rope.

This ends the first story, which is much like the gothic melodramas Bunuel was doing in Mexico during the 50s. But then in this – his first film back in his native Spain – he goes on to spin a second story, one that looks forward to the social satires he would do in Paris during the 60s.

Viridiana goes back to the estate. When her Mother Superior visits her, V tells her she can’t go back to the convent now … she has changed too much. Instead she plans on pursuing private charity work.

To this end, V gathers a dozen or so cripples and beggars from the town, and gives them a home in the outbuildings of the estate. She gives them new clothes and work to keep them exercised and active. The beggars take this charity, but they are neither entirely evil, nor do their hearts shine with gold, they are crude and cynical, and you can see where it will end, because V is too naive and innocent to deal with the likes of them.

Meanwhile, a new character enters the tale: Jorge, the Uncle’s bastard son shows up with his girlfriend. The uncle left at least part of the estate to Jorge, and he is set to modernize it, tear the weeds from the fields and sow new crops, prune the orchards, bring electricity to the mansion. He’s a tough, aggressive, macho man, and he is rather interested in the beautiful blonde Viridiana – more than she would like.

Soon enough Jorge’s girlfriend, bored and jealous, leaves, and Jorge is fucking the housekeeper (we are left wondering whether the housekeeper performed similar services for the Uncle, and whether her little girl might be another of the Uncle’s bastards). He’s still after V though.

Everything comes to a climax one day when Jorge, V, and the housekeeper and her daughter go into town for a couple of days. The housekeeper’s daughter has a toothache and must see a dentist; Jorge and V have an appointment with the lawyer, probably to see to the closing of the Uncle’s will.

The beggars see their chance. They break into the big house and stage a riotous, drunken party. They smash furniture, plates, glasses. They spill wine over the expensive table linens. They fuck on the floor and pose in a blasphemous tableau mocking the Last Supper.

Jorge and V come home that night and surprise them. The beggars for the most part leave quietly, but two of them attack Jorge and tie him up, then proceed to rape Viridiana. Jorge manages to bribe one into murdering the other, then he frees himself and chases the last one off.

In the final scenes, a day or so later, V contemplates cutting off her beautiful blonde hair in grief and penitence, but decides not to. Instead she goes to her cousin. He sits her down with the housekeeper, and proceeds to teach them how to play cards. ‘After all,’ he says, ‘all cats are gray in the dark.’

The end.

The movie was banned in Spain, which might have contributed to sending Bunuel to France for the rest of his career. Certainly the church would have objected to the Last Supper scene, and the general sarcastic view of the young convent trained girl’s innocence. But a bigger factor might have been Franco.

The movie could be taken as an allegory of Spain’s history. The Church is seduced and almost won over by the landed aristocracy from whom she has sprung; then the Communists briefly take over, and turn everything upside-down; then the dictator comes in and incites murder between comrades (civil war) then proceeds to screw over both the working class and the church.

Bunuel’s time in Mexico showed how he could deliver popular entertainment that still served his purposes. The gothic melodrama and family soap opera only needs to be exaggerated a little to approach absurdity, and its strong reliance on symbols helps the dreamlike, surrealist images. Bunuel here uses some striking images to suggest this: the uncle fishes a bee out of a water cask, Viridiana sleepwalks and dumps ashes on her uncle’s bed; the uncle fetishistically wears articles of his dead bride’s gown; the crown of thorns in Viridiana’s possessions is tossed by the housekeeper’s daughter into a fire, then hooked out and dropped on the earth where it burns on; the jump rope the Uncle gives the little girl he uses to hang himself, then is taken as a belt by the beggar who rapes V. Little touches like this prove unforgettable, adding dimensions to the movie.

(Sunday 15 March 2009)

Equinox Flower

Hi, Aki,

Tonight we watched autumn equinox by Ozu. The funny thing about this movie is that I’m still not sure whether he meant it as a comedy, social commentary, or drama. Unfortunately, I had a terrible headache when I watched it – this might explain some of my confusion.

The story involves the usual terrain that Ozu moved through in his later movies: conflict between generations, and arranging for a daughter’s marriage and departure. The beginning sets up Papa as a man who understands the drawbacks of arranged marriages as well as the yearning of young love. Unhappily, Papa seems to forget all his well-meaning understanding when it comes to his own daughter and her fate. He is seeking suitable candidates for her hand without consulting her, as was the traditional approach his parents used when he got married. Meanwhile – though he doesn’t know it yet – his daughter has her heart set on a young man, and yet she refuses to be drawn out by Papa when he asks her if she is interested in any young man.

The two butt heads after the girl’s boyfriend shows up unexpectedly in Papa’s office and without warning or the use of the customary intermediary asks for her hand. Papa is nonplussed and says he’ll have to think about it. Once he gets home he angrily confronts his daughter who, instead of sweet talking him, simply declares that she intends to marry the young man whether her father and mother like it or not. This backs Papa into a corner, and he tells the girl she’s not allowed to leave the house and that he definitely opposes the marriage.

Two subplots bring Papa into considering his own situation through other people’s stories. One of his old middle school friends has lost his own daughter in exactly the same way – the girl has defied him, he has forbidden her marriage, and she has abandoned him to take up with her boyfriend (although it’s not clear whether the girl is married or not). There is also the rather silly proprietress of a country Inn whose daughter is determined to select her own husband, and appeals to family friend Papa for support against her mother’s choice of marriage candidates. Of course, in both these situations, Papa is most reasonable and flexible and ends up giving advice that contradicts his behavior in his own family situation.

In the end however Papa is maneuvered and manipulated into not only allowing the marriage of his daughter to go forward, but also attending the ceremony and finally going to visit his daughter and her new husband in Osaka to reassure them that he wishes them only the best.

What struck me in considering this movie was how rich a study Ozu is for all prospective screen writers and filmmakers. For production students, his absolute clarity and attention to composition is amazing. For screenwriters, his approach is to build up by accretion the general understanding and emotional position of his audience. In Hollywood movies, character is announced their plans and proceed to try to implement them. In this movie, the first third or half of the film unspools before we learn about the daughter’s boyfriend. It feels a bit random and meandering compared to Hollywood movies, and the audience has to be more tuned in to nuance and subtlety and remember everyone and everything that is going on in order to fully enjoy and comprehend the story. Each scene is a small fragment which makes us understand something and feel something, and the total effect of all these fragments allows us to feel only one way about the situation by the time the movie ends.

An Ozu movie is like a jigsaw puzzle. In a Hollywood movie, each scene arises from the previous scene and leads into the subsequent film (or it should). Ozu's scenes connect to three or four other scenes, and the mosaic thus built up is only appreciated when you can hold all the scenes in your head – or rather in your heart.

Ozu and his screenwriter would come up with a long list of scenes and fragments of scenes having to do with the basic situation – in this case, they would be three lists – one for each of the two subplots and the main story line. The fragments would be arranged and rearranged into the order that made emotional sense, by which I mean an order that would position us viewers into feeling the way Ozu intends us to feel. This would then involve the calculus of interpolating the three storylines – so that each fragment from the subplot would also affect us in the way we think about and feel about the main story line.

That makes me believe that it would be good practice to reverse the method by which Ozu and his screenwriter constructed the screenplay. List all of the scenes of an Ozu movie and put them on index cards and then tried to re-order them in a way that gives a better effect – or a different effect than the one in the movie.

(15 March 2009)

Trapped in Paradise

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched a pan and scanned version of Trapped in Paradise, a pretty stupid comedy. I’m sure it got greenlit after Dumb and Dumber was such a hit, and the other Jim Carrey movies. Unfortunately the writer/director here doesn’t have the genius of the farelly brothers, and the stars – Nicolas Cage, Jon Lovitz, and Dana Carvey – can’t match Carrey here.

There were a few laughs and good tech job generally, but I’m sure they spent way too much money here too, with that cast.

This was pretty universally panned and it’s not great but it’s not terrible. Fox lost a lot of money on it too. I wonder if the director ever got another shot. [Update: writer-director George Gallo did get other directing gigs, but not for another 7 years. Luckily he was an established writer, so he stayed in he game writing until he managed another shot in the directing chair.]

One of the main problems is overacting. it’s as if they know the material isn’t funny and have to boost it. But then, Dumb and Dumber was a real exagerrated cartoon, and that’s what they were aiming at.

(written around 29 February 2009)

The Mask of Dimitrios

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched The Mask of Dimitrios a 1944 Warners pic directed by Jean Negulesco. Negulesco was one of the house directors at Warners in the 40s, I don’t know anything more about him than that.

Story, adapted from the Eric Ambler novel, takes place in several countries in Europe in 1938 (i.e., prewar period) with flashbacks from as early as 1918.

In Istanbul, some young people playing along the beach discover a corpse washed ashore. In the lining of the suit is the man’s name: Dimitrios Makropoulis. In the official session of the Military Police, Colonel Haki announces that the case of Dimitrios Makropoulis is officially closed. Reporters want to ask questions, but the colonel dismisses them all. That night the colonel goes to a party given by a society dame. A Dutch writer (played by Peter Lorre) is vacationing in Istanbul when he meets the colonel, who turns out to be a fan of Lorre’s detective novels. He takes him out on the veranda to escape the nonsense of the women, and begins to tell him about Dimitrios – smuggler, spy, assassin, thief. He tells him the first and only case he was personally involved in, and a flashback shows us 1918 when Dimitrios, a young poor fig-packer, is desperate to leave Turkey, but needs money. He persuades his partner to go steal money from a local fence. Dimitrios murders the fence and finds the hidden cash-box. The partner is shocked at the killing, but he takes his share and proceeds to live it up. This sudden wealth arouses the suspicions of the police, who take him in and get him to confess to robbing the fence. ‘But I didn’t kill him, that was all Dimitrios!’ ‘Dimitrios? Where is this Dimitrios?’ But Dimitrios has left the country, and the partner is just as guilty of the killing as if he had done it himself.

Lorre talks the colonel into letting him see the body – ‘I have never seen a dead man before, and this Dimitrios fascinates me’ – and so they go to the morgue and Lorre gets to see the body (of course we don’t see the face).

Meanwhile a fat man is checking into a hotel in Istanbul, and wonders whether a certain ‘Constantine Gollis’ has checked in. No, and there is no record he ever stayed there. The fat man (played by Sydney Greenstreet) proceeds to the morgue himself, and tries to see the body, but he is too late – it has been ‘disposed of’ already.

In Colonel Haki’s office, Lorre learns more about the notorious career of Dimitrios, the countries he was in, the crimes he committed. There is not one photograph of the man on file, nobody knows what he looked like before they found his corpse. Lorre, yielding to his obsession with the diabolically clever man, determines to follow his trail and learn more about him.

First stop is Athens, where Dimitrios operated under the name of Talat. In the hall of records Lorre reads the file – it has few details other than birth date and ‘fig-packer’ as profession, enough to identify ‘Talat’ definitely as Dimitrios – but we see Greenstreet in the background – also there, we presume, to learn about Dimitrios. But Greenstreet leaves before Lorre meets him.

Lorre travels by train to Sofia, next stop in Colonel Haki’s summary. Greenstreet shares his sleeper, but doesn’t let Lorre know he too is interested in Dimitrios. In Sofia, Lorre interviews a local shady lady who runs a low-class bar and brothel. She tells how in 1921 she met a ragged, poor Dimitrios, and his dirty dealings: he gets money by blackmailing a rich man who is her lover; he becomes her lover himself, though he also frightens her with his cold-bloodedness, and he goes on to take a job to assassinate the country’s premier. He then takes money from her to make his getaway, and forces her to provide him with an alibi to the police.

When Lorre returns to his hotel room he finds it has been searched and there is Greenstreet holding a gun on him! After a talk, Greenstreet announces that he knows some things, and Lorre knows ‘one fact’ and if the bits are put together, they will mean a million french francs for them to split.

Greenstreet sends Lorre on to Geneva where, with an intro by Greenstreet, Lorre learns from a man named Groder about the espionage, gambling, blackmail and double-cross Dimitrios pulled in Belgrade in the late 20s.

Lorre goes on to Paris to meet Greenstreet as they arranged. Now Greenstreet hands Lorre a photograph and Lorre says it’s Dimitrios. But the photograph is of Constantine Gollis, not Dimitrios. Greenstreet, Gollis, and others were part of a French smuggling ring Dimitrios organized, and then betrayed – so he could take all their loot for himself. When they got out of prison, Gollis swore to kill Dimitrios and tracked him to Istanbul – but Dimitrios got to him first.

Now Greenstreet has his blackmail operation all planned: he will blackmail Dimitrios for a million francs, and he and Lorre will split it. Lorre is needed, because he has seen the dead man in Istanbul, and can swear to it that the corpse was really Gollis and not Dimitrios. Lorre wants to meet Dimitrios at last, but he wants nothing to do with blackmail or the money. Greenstreet is delighted with this arrangement, it means he gets all the money.

They work the blackmail on Dimitrios, now running the Asian Credit Trust bank, and a very wealthy man. Though Dimitrios tries to put killers onto them, Greenstreet outsmarts them. They get the money and go to Greenstreet’s place, where Greenstreet revels in the 1,000-sheet pile of mille-franc notes. But they notice an elegant hat on a chair…

Dimitrios is there with a gun. He had double, double-crossed them, and now he shoots Greenstreet. Lorre, driven to unusual fury at this, attacks Dimitrios, and the gun falls to the floor. The two men struggle, and Greenstreet, only wounded, manages to get hold of the gun. He holds Dimitrios at bay and tells Lorre to get out. Lorre goes out the apartment and half down the stairs. He hears three shots – but who shot whom? He goes back to see, and meets Greenstreet. Dimitrios at last is really dead. The police arrive, and Greenstreet happily goes to prison, after achieving his revenge. He tells Lorre to write a book about Dimitrios and send him a copy. ‘Where I’m going, I’ll have plenty of time for reading,’ he says.

The end.

The print was muddy, and not restored. It is hard then to say whether the lighting is all that good. The shadows are deep and rich but I suspect there are black areas that would in the original release have shown up as visible penetrable grays.

The chief appeal to the production is the re-teaming of Lorre and Greenstreet, who were first together in The Maltese Falcon and had been teamed in some other films at Warners where they were under contract. They make a good pair, the nervous little Lorre and the big, florid Greenstreet. In this case, two near-stars make for one full star, I suppose – it is a lot of fun to watch the two of them together.

The production has to recreate lots of European cities. It isn’t entirely convincing, what we get is sort of Hollywood-generic Europe rather than anything specific to Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, France. But the writers and Negulesco make every witness different, a character in his own right, along the way. They use a lot of map animations to convince us that the places are changing, and to help us understand where we are.

Maps are not used today; instead there is only a title superimposed on an image, say, ‘Belgrade.’ But the maps, with the animations of moving from Sofia to Geneva, really let us orient ourselves in space, and are a much more forceful and comprehensible way of indicating a big change in locale. Especially when the production doesn’t ever leave the Warners back lot or European street exteriors in Burbank.

Unfortunately for the production, Lorre is not empathetic enough, or Negulesco doesn’t treat him in a sufficiently empathetic manner. When all is said and done, we get an interesting tale that is put together like a jigsaw puzzle of flashbacks. Zachary Scott plays Dimitrios, and he is only fair – he lacks the grand flair of a true movie villain, and doesn’t exactly inspire us with awe for his brilliance or dread of his knavery.

(written around 12 March 2009)

FLOW – For Love of Water

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched a doc on the global water crisis called FLOW: For Love of Water. This was an excellent doc in the advocacy genre. It does its job by giving us some very pretty (probably stock) shots, with interviews of passionate witnesses, from many countries, with snippets of stories of the water problems we face around the world – especially the problems that arise from privatization of the world’s water supplies.

First it makes you scared. Then it makes you mad – darned mad. Then it gives you hope. And it gives you some models of people who succeeded in defying the corporations, who here are cast as the villains.

No balance is offered: this movie was made by people who are mad and interested in action, now, before it’s too late.

(written around 12 March 2009)

The Unsuspected

Hi Aki,

Today I watched The Unsuspected a terrific movie from 1947 directed at Warners by Michael Curtiz. He must have struck a great deal with Warners, because he actually got copyright on the movie – which seems almost unheard of back then. Curtiz was not that famous of a director, either, though he was really competent.

Story involves radio host and writer of creepy stories of murder Victor Grandison, played by Claude Rains (the biggest star name in the cast). We see him commit a murder in the opening sequence, although mostly we only see his shadow – his gloved hands – his hat and ominous silhouette – and one very-brief shot of his face reflected upside-down on the mirrored surface of a table. This shot is so brief that I suspect Curtiz meant for us to go on guessing; he’s playing with us, did we really see that nice Claude Rains as the killer? (To be honest, Rains had played killers and madmen as well as nice guys; he first hit the big time in Hollywood with The Invisible Man and he played the Phantom of the Opera in a movie just around this time. He had also played very nice psychologists and lovers in Now, Voyager a Bette Davis tearjerker and other great movie from Warners.)

Then we go on to see Rains deliver his radio show, an episode he calls, ‘The Unsuspected.’ It is a murder case where the killer is unknown, but Rains claims he knows – and it could be anybody! As Rains delivers these lines, we see a lineup of the cast of characters at a party – a clever device to introduce everybody. It turns out this party is a birthday party for Rains himself, at his home (which turns out not to be his home after all, but the estate of his ward, Mathilda – only she perished a few weeks earlier in the sinking of a ship.

To this party a stranger comes: an unknown, handsome, and rather hostile young man, who announces that he is Mathilda’s husband. They married just before she went on the ship, and he was himself called into service abroad in the weeks since, and has just returned. They all doubt him, of course – the man who should have married Mathilda only he broke her heart and married Rains’s niece instead; Rains’s niece herself, a tart-tongued little harpy played by Audrey Totter in a role that seems clearly written for Bette Davis; Rains; and Rains’s friend the chief of homicide division. But the young man assures them all he is as rich as Mathilda, and doesn’t want any claim on her fortune; he only wants her portrait to remember her by. This portrait dominates the drawing-room of the mansion in a tip of the hat (or a swipe of the pen) to Laura the earlier murder mystery and huge success by Otto Preminger.

The story is brimming with twists: next thing we know, Mathilda is not dead – then she meets her husband at the airport and doesn’t know him – but he produces witnesses to their wedding, including the Judge who married them. She still doesn’t remember, and Rains suspects the young man has some ulterior motive and is lying. The tart-tongued niece is all over the young man, because her husband (the one who jilted Mathilda, though he loved her and she loved him) is now a worthless drunk, drinking to forget the bad bargain he made when he broke Mathilda’s heart and took up with the niece. There is also the ‘unsuspected’ himself, the murderer mentioned by Rains in his broadcast – apparently Rains has tracked him down, confronted him with his guilt, solved the crime – and lets him go free, with the notion of using him later, in a scene that surely cements our trust that Rains is the killer, and not the nice guy he pretends to be.

Everything ends happily of course. Though along the way Rains must commit two more murders, and make every effort to murder the young man and Mathilda herself. These last two attempts fail, and as Rains is delivering his radio broadcast that evening, in walk Mathilda and the young man (soon they will be husband and wife for real) and a host of cops. Seeing it’s all over for him, Rains then confesses on air in ‘a broadcast without precedent in the history of radio … I told you about the Unsuspected. Now I will tell you that the Unsuspected is I … I am the Unsuspected … your genial host … Victor Grandison.’

A final bravura shot shows two cops escorting Rains down a yard into prison, ominous shadows everywhere.

These shadows are the key to what is great about this movie. Not only is the production design top-notch, they did a great job mixing stage scenes with scenes in real locations. Woody Bredell is the chief DP, and Robert Burks handles special effects cinematography. And they do an amazing job. The biggest letdown in the movie is the cast – again and again I found myself wondering how engaging the movie might have been had it had real stars in the roles. Rains is very good, the rest of the cast is adequate, Constance Bennet is her usual Eve Arden style wit machine, but the two lovers, the young man and Mathilda, are not up to the task.

But I was just loving every shot – how it was lit and designed. There are two very awkward cuts, evidence probably of post-release shortening. I imagine the film, which must have had a very big budget, did not make money, and was shortened for second releases and later television releases. It has not been restored, though the print as usual from Ted Turner’s collections, is beautifully done and digitized.

(written around 11 March 2009)

Lacombe Lucien

Hi Aki,

Tonight it was Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien. This was I think his most acclaimed film, though he had many such – heck, he was hired the day he graduated from film school to direct the film of a Jacques Cousteau expedition, and he and Cousteau won an Oscar for it!

So the story: it’s 1944 and we are in the southwest corner of France, in the countryside near the spanish border. Young Lucien is a janitor at a hospice. He doesn’t talk much. And he has a sort of callousness about him, established by his gratuitous slingshot killing of a small bird singing on a branch outside the hospice ward window.

He goes home to the family farm when he has a few days off, only to find a bunch of strangers staying there. His mother is sleeping with a guy while his father is off fighting with degaulle or in jail, I didn’t catch which. Lucien is only happy when he’s out in the fields shooting rabbits.

He goes to his old schoolteacher to join the resistance. But the schoolteacher tells him he’s too young, and they have too many young kids like him. Lucien says he doesn’t want to go back to cleaning bedpans, but it’s no good.

He bicycles back to town to the hospice, but gets a flat on the way. This brings him into town after curfew, and he’s dragged into the local hotel where the collaborators, the French ‘German police’ are headquartered. But they take a liking to him, get him drunk, get him talking, and he tells them all about his schoolteacher.

Next thing he knows the schoolteacher is brought in to be tortured, and Lucien is a member of the German police.

They lead a fine life. Lucien is just a punk really, a young thug with not much conscience, no principles, not a thought in his head.

One thing the film does very well is play off silences, pauses when people don’t say anything, and we have to fill in what’s going on in their heads ourselves.

Lucien along the way meets a jewish tailor in hiding in town, and his lovely daughter. Lucien wants this girl bad, but she’s cultured and refined from Paris, and he’s a country bumpkin and a punk. Nevertheless they become lovers, and she begs him to help her father get across the border to spain.

Finally the father, outraged at this punk fucking his daughter, acts foolishly and gets arrested. The daughter blames Lucien. The way Lucien understands it, it was the father’s own fault – but Lucien really doesn’t understand anything. This is a constant source of irritation in watching the movie, that we are so much smarter than Lucien, and wonder what the hell he is thinking, can he really be so dumb?

Later on the Germans come to arrest the daughter and her grandmother, and Lucien goes along to show the Germans where to find them. Lucien takes back a gold watch he had given the father, but the German soldier takes it from him. Lucien then shoots the German soldier and flees with his girl and her granny. And we can’t be sure if in the end he shot the German soldier to help his girl, or just to get the watch – which is the first thing he does after he shoots the soldier.

They drive into the mountains toward the border, but the car overheats. They they must go on foot, but granny is not going to be able to climb the mountains.

Finding an abandoned farmhouse along the way, they move in. Lucien is back in his true element. He catches birds and rabbits. Granny plays solitaire like always. The girl plays with Lucien, sleeps with him, thinks about killing him in his sleep. (She’s another one with long silences during which we wonder exactly what is going on in her mind).

The peaceful idyll ends abruptly – not with German soldiers like we all expect, but with the credits. As Lucien lies in the cool grass, dozing, and his girl watches him from the pool where she’s been bathing, titles appear on the screen telling us he was arrested on October 12 1944, sentenced to death, and executed.

We aren’t told anything about the girl or granny.

The end.

The story is told with fragments, scenes, gradually filling in the portrait of the young punk. Once he hooks up with the girl, most of the scenes are concerned with his relations to that family, his awkward wooing, alternating with threats against the father and attempts to make nice. These scenes have a ghastly hilarity – they might give rise to nervous laughter, and I think some are intended to be funny; my dad and I didn’t laugh, though I chuckled once.

The actor who plays the tailor father gives the best performance. it’s quite good. Lucien is played by a young actor who looks right, and almost looks young enough; but he’s not a subtle actor, so Malle can only have him look rather blankly on. I wonder if whether this actor had been more accomplished, we would not have had to be guessing so much at what’s on his mind. On the other hand Malle might have been frustrated himself with this character, and this type of character. Maybe in the end he doesn’t know why such a character joins the German police other than the obvious reasons.

The German police are typified as semi-losers, quite banal, ordinary. They act more like gangsters low-caliber gangsters, than representatives of any government. It’s an interesting glimpse into what society is like when it breaks down like that.

Did I like it? Parts of it. In the end I feel frustrated, and I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it again.

(written around 10 March 2009)

Soufle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart)

Hi Aki,

Tonight it was another Louis Malle movie, Soufle au Coeur or Murmur of the Heart – the term for an arrhythmic heart condition which the boy seems to have.

Another coming of age film. Another look back, this time post-war, 1954 in Dijon, France. The French are fighting, and losing, in Vietnam. Young Laurent is a rich kid, spoiled, and the baby. He has two older brothers who are even bigger brats than he is. He is at least smart in school. At least with literature and philosophy. Like the kid in Au Revoir les Enfants he goes to private Catholic school.

Like the other Malle films, this one has a very loose structure, not Hollywood in any sense. A great many small scenes, fragmentary, add up to a portrait of this kid. There is no real structure, but the illusion of a structure is provided by the ‘climax scene.’ This is the scene that when you look back on it, the whole movie has been moving towards – it just didn’t move that way in the Hollywood sense.

In Hollywood all this movement would be on the surface. The hero would say, ‘I want this and I’m going to get it’ and they others would say, ‘You’ll never get it while we’re around’ and then they would struggle and fight over it until the hero either gets it or fails definitively.

OK, so to set this up, let’s look at it backwards the way Malle must have ended up doing: this is the story of a 14 year old boy whose first full sexual experience is with his mother.

So the structure has two sides: the long build up to the incest scene, and the much shorter aftermath.

Malle wants to say, ‘Yes it happened, but it didn’t cripple the kid, it wasn’t bad, it didn’t leave him fixated on his mother.’

So the aftermath scene has the mother telling the kid, ‘It was a beautiful tender moment and nothing to regard with any shame or disgust, it was love, and it will never happen again. It will be our secret, and we will treasure it.’ After this, the same night, the mother falls asleep, the kid gets dressed and goes to the room of a girl he’s been wooing (they are at a spa to take the waters, as part of the treatment for the soufle au coeur (which of course has a double meaning) – isolating mother and son in this vacation setting is part of the strategy to push them into a heightened extraordinary intimacy). He tries to attack helene, but she repulses him. He shrugs. ‘What room is Daphne in?’ he asks, and goes to her, and Daphne does not repulse him. These two scenes tell us that the kid is still interested in girls his own age and not fixated on mom. In the morning he goes back to the room he shares with his mom, and finds his brothers and father have come to visit.

Caught red-handed sneaking back after not being in his room all night, the kid doesn’t know what to do. The father seems mad at first, but his brothers just laugh, and then the father laughs, and the kid laughs, and the mother laughs, and the whole family laughs together. This tells us that the family is not going to be split apart by this secret but they can go on. Indeed, this is the only moment when the whole family seems to be enjoying one another and not fighting – it is as if the tension of the boy’s being a virgin has now left, and that ghost is removed; but I doubt Malle wanted to say, ‘A little incest helps a family’ rather just ‘It didn’t ruin anybody.’

The long buildup involves many many scenes, and they get a little tiresome, as Malle is really pushing it – he shows Laurent and both his brothers as real spoiled rich bastards, and I can’t say I liked any of them or enjoyed their hijinks, though maybe teenagers would enjoy the fantasy of being a brat like that.

The older boys (who are only about 17 and 18 themselves) take young Laurent to a brothel to have his first sex experience, but just as Laurent is on top of the very nice young whore the madam has chosen for him, and he’s going along nicely, in come his drunk brothers and drag him off! So he doesn’t climax, and only counts himself half a virgin at this point.

Then he is after some other girls, but is rather a bashful fellow, just not saying anything then leaping on a girl. But he’s regarded as cute by all the girls, so they don’t get too mad at him.

An interesting strategy Malle uses is to make the mother foreign (Italian), as though he couldn’t imagine a bourgeois French mother going along with it. But I think an American could imagine a French mother doing it, so I think that the strategy works, kind of: the mother being a bit of a free spirit, rather young (35) and Italian kind of makes it ‘all right’ the way we can accept fantasy when it is set in a foreign country or the past.

There was no doubt a lot of discussion and negotiation over how to handle the incest scene. As usual with Malle, the dramatic moments – sex with the mother and then with Daphne afterward – are not what he wants to focus on, so he cuts past both of them. You’ve been in writing groups, you know what showing the script around is like. I’ll bet that the mother was in earlier drafts accepting of the son’s advances on that fatal night. But people reacted in shock and disbelief. The version might even have made it through preproduction into production, and the actress balked, and Malle had to negotiate with her.

So it happens on the night of Bastille Day, and mother is very drunk. Not quite passed out, she responds and kisses her son passionately, many kisses on his head and cheeks before we cut away to the aftermath. But her eyes are closed, she has just broken up with her boyfriend (yes she was having an affair, and son and mother discuss the affair and breakup in a scene that is used to advance the tension between them and bring them more intimacy as one of the final stages of the buildup to the incest scene) – and so we can’t be sure she is even totally aware of what she is doing, does she know who she is with, is she completely in control of her actions? This tends to exculpate her in the eyes of the audience who would otherwise condemn her.

Malle knows he’s dealing with dynamite here, a shocking taboo, and so he has to handle the buildup very carefully.

The movie thus is a good one to study to watch several times if you are interested in the strategies Malle used to try to make this most-shocking, taboo act come off as natural and acceptable and even beautiful.

One final note of interest is the credit given to a co-director. The final credit is ‘written and directed by Louis Malle’ but a few title screens before that there is acknowledgment of the ‘co-metteur en scene’ and I don’t really know what that means, but it is a woman’s name. Maybe she helped with the child actors, which is what I guessed when I saw the title, but at the end now I’m wondering if she was not trying to give the woman’s point of view, and the mother’s point of view. Malle provides the personal recollection or fantasy (I don’t know how autobiographical this might be, but the kid in Au Revoir Les Enfants also had a young, very beautiful mother to whom he was overly attached, and a distant indeed never-seen, father) of the boy.

The whole film is dubbed, which gives it an odd feeling of performances being a little off; but again I was reading subtitles and not seeing the faces too much. The main kid actor can’t act too well, like the kids in Malle’s other films, and so we get the blank looks all too often – they were kind of annoying me in this one. It just seemed like bad acting, bad directing.

The old Hollywood movies when they had child stars, they had kids who could act, but only in the hammy, fake Hollywood style. Malle comes after the Method school changes everything, as well as the new wave, so when he casts kids he’s mostly condemned to amateurs and about the most he can manage is to get a kid who looks right, and then hope that the mosaic of the scenes in the screenplay will add up to a sense of the character that the actor can’t provide.

(written around 10 March 2009)

Johnny Eager

Hi Aki,

Johnny Eager is a gangster movie from MGM and director Mervyn LeRoy who did the original Little Caesar and did a ton of gangsters for warners in the early 30s.

JE is from 1942 and the story as you’ll see could go comedy or drama:

Johnny Eager is an ex-con out on parole, who works as a cabdriver. He tries to stay legal, though he has to support his mom and his neice. Meanwhile a society coed, studying sociology, gets interested in his case – she’s doing a term paper on convicts on parole.

What nobody knows is that Johnny is really just as big a gambler and gangster as ever; that he only goes to see his ma and neice when he gets a tip that the parole officers are paying him a ‘surprise’ visit at home.

The scene at his ‘home’ is really funny. Played strictly for laughs, it gives you a good idea what the movie might have been had it been a comedy out and out, like several Warners mid-30s post-gangster movies like Brother Orchid.

But Leroy plays this one straight for drama. there’s a good deal of incipient freudian analysis going on, though not so open and explicit as postwar movies would engage in.

Johnny is a thorough rat. The society girl (Lana Turner, age 22 and hotter than in any other movie I’ve ever seen her in) falls in love with him even though her stepfather is the tough special prosecutor keeping Johnny’s dog track from opening. So Johnny plays a gag on the girl: a gangster comes in to attack Johnny, they fight in front of the girl, and to save Johnny she shoots the gangster in the back and kills him.

Johnny then uses this to blackmail the prosecutor into giving the OK to the dog track, and he’s rolling in money.

Of course the gangster wasn’t shot at all. But the girl doesn’t know it, she’s broken hearted.

Meanwhile Johnny’s ‘associates’ are as usual trying to pull a double-cross on him, and he has to kill a few to stay on top.

He has a buddy, a drunken sidekick who uses big words (Van Heflin, in a show-stealing role that won an Oscar) who represents his conscience. He has a dog, a broken down greyhound who had a couple world records years ago, but whose legs are shot so he can’t race anymore.

Johnny all the way through shows no pity to anybody. People who do he calls ‘suckers’ until he finally begins to see the light, play with his dog, and goes to tell the society girl the truth, that it was all a gag, the guy she killed isn’t hurt at all. But she doesn’t believe him, she thinks he’s lying to spare her feelings.

So Johnny arranges for the girl and her ex-boyfriend to come to the seedy side of town to see the guy, who has betrayed Johnny. Johnny intends to show him to the girl and then kill him, and send the girl off with her ex to have a good life. And it all goes OK, except he doesn’t kill the guy with the first shot, and others come to help the guy, and Johnny gets killed too.

Robert Taylor plays Johnny in a sweet role where he gets to act tough, do comedy, play a nice guy, cry, – the works.

The movie is an excellent example of the best of the golden age, a genre picture that expertly uses its stars, is beautifully shot with great production values, and helps make stars out of Lana Turner and Van Heflin.

Leroy is listed as ‘director’ and there’s another guy who gets ‘producer’ credit, but right under the main title it says, ‘A Mervyn leRoy Production’ so I imagine the truth is that leroy got to do whatever he wanted. (within the strict control of the front office, of course) and he gave the studio choice product in return.

(written around 9 March 2009)

Our Man in Havana

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Our Man in Havana another Carol Reed movie, from the Graham Greene novel and screenplay. Satire of cold war made in late 1950s – by the time they made it, the Cuban revolution had come, so they had to add a disclaimer before the titles.

Cuba, late 50s: Alec Guiness is a vacuum salesman who doesn’t make enough money to give his teenage daughter the rich life he wants for her. His wife has left them long ago.

He is offered the job of being a spy in Cuba for extra money, and for the sake of his daughter he agrees, only after his friend tells him he can just invent all the reports and agents who are supplying him with information.

At first it’s a big joke, and he enjoys it. The service pays his entry into the country club, his daughter gets a horse, and he’s on top of the world. But then he takes things a bit too far, drawing ‘secret military installations’ based on parts of his vacuum cleaners.

British intelligence takes this serious, and sends him a secretary, radioman, they want photos of the installations, etc. The Other Side also are spying on him, and they believe all this too, because british intelligence does. Before he knows it people are getting killed, and his own life is in danger. Somehow he must get out of it. He makes a clean confession to his secretary (with whom he’s fallen in love) and avenges the death of his friend, before being expelled from Cuba.

Upon returning to London, expecting a long prison term for treason, he is shocked to find himself promoted, given an official decoration, and the whole thing hushed up – nobody wants to admit they were fooled by a vacuum cleaner salesman. He sends his daughter to Switzerland finishing school, and goes off to marry his secretary.

It’s cute, but the best moments are the scenes where he goes to avenge his friend. Carol Reed shows himself far more sure of himself in directing suspense than comedy. The comedy itself is typically british, rather dry, restrained, no Jim Carrey-style broad slapstick, no fart jokes, no cursing, no pratfalls.

Shot in Cinemascope in black and white on soundstages with some exteriors done in what looks like a Caribbean country. The dvd unfortunately doesn’t capture the black and white correctly, scenes shift from bluish to beige-ish, which is distracting.

Guiness is good as always but it’s Ernie Kovacs as the hated ‘red butcher’ police captain who steals the picture.

It’s odd but 20 years or so later Alec Guiness would star in a series of television series as George Smiley, the master spy of John Lecarre.

She left them because she’s fed up with poverty?

It’s very strange – and written by an obviously older man, no younger man or woman would have written it this way. Guiness has been left by his wife, years ago, for no good reason that we learn. And secretary’s husband left her years ago for no good reason too. So they are both abandoned but still married with no idea where their spouses are. And at the end of the story they walk off hand in hand.

(written around 9 March 2009)

10,000 BC

Hi Aki,

So I watched 10,000 BC and liked it a lot more than I expected to. In fact, I did actually like it!

Omar Shariff does the narration. I have always liked him and he’s been in a few movies I love, so it’s just so nice to hear his voice. There are moments when his age shows in the voice, which is too bad, but other moments when his pleasure in just telling the story is powerful.

The cast is mostly unknown to me. This is good. Distracting to see Brad Pitt as Achilles in Troy, but here there was no ‘that’s a movie star in a loin cloth!’ objection.

Another good thing about the cast is that there were so many different ethnicities (no Asians, alas, even though it takes place in Asia, I guess – but central Asia from Siberia down to say Iraq or Egypt). This gave it an exotic look that helped to transport me into its foreign world.

There were lots of surprises in the movie. The central story is a quest: raiders take slaves from a small tribe far in the snowy north, including a girl beloved by the hero. So he and a couple friends go to rescue her. Every 15 minutes the landscape changes completely from snowy mountains to jungle, to savannah, to desert, to arid plain. And each new tribe/culture the rescuers meet is a different kind and level of civilization, mostly getting more and more sophistication until they run into the descendents of Atlantis – or are they aliens landed on earth?

This means it’s not easy to get bored. If you don’t like one setting, hold on – it will change.

Of course a movie like this is impossible without massive budgets and digital effects, and the digital stuff looked very good at least on a television.

There was not much to recommend the acting. A Roland Emmerich movie is not written to give the actors much emotions to emote, it’s mostly action. Only the narrator got to really go to town, and one old lady from the siberian tribes, their wise woman, who accompanied the rescuers through visions, helping when she could in a semi-mystical way.

The ending is cheesy of course, because it’s Roland Emmerich! And it’s for kids! And there are multiple problems if you try to think, and consider it as actually representing any past epoch on earth. The Siberians hunt wooly mammoths and yet believe it’s impossible to leave their valley – but the mammoths come and go? Men ride horses thousands of years before horses were bred big enough to support a man. Men from the far north are wandering across deep desert in equatorial regions without even getting sunburned. And so on.

But this is a kids’ movie, and you have to just put aside your brain when you go in the theater and let it take you wherever it wants to go, and enjoy it for what it is.

In North America the movie was ill-served by the ad campaign, which just went for cheap thrills without communicating the unfolding sense of wonder the film gives. They showed some of the different cultures in a way that just looked like a stew of random elements thrown together in the commercial; but in the movie, Emmerich takes us carefully from one place to a slightly-different place, to one even more different, so it seems more organic.

Quest For Fire is an obvious inspiration, and this movie just can’t compare to that one – quest is a masterpiece compared to this. Quest was also a serious effort to depict what it might have been like before agriculture, at the end of the last ice age. This one is trashy fun, and for what it is, it’s very good.

(written around 8 March 2009)

Elmer Gantry

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Richard Brooks’s only great film, Elmer Gantry. Wow it was good though I do have some quibbles – at times the production can’t quite give the sense of scale necessary, and the back-lot, stage-bound large sets were a bit of a problem. John Alton, one of the greatest black and white DPs, shot, and color wasn’t his big thing, alas.

Story is from Sinclair Lewis’s novel about revivalism and touring preachers in the early nineteen-twenties. Elmer Gantry, a traveling salesman, falls in love from afar with Sister Sharon Falconer, a headlining preacher, and finagles and cons his way into the organization. With Elmer’s help, Sister Sharon really hits the big time.

There are complications along the way, and much is given over to questions of faith, and tent revivalism, a form of show business, as opposed to real churches. The movie has a lot to say about today’s evangelical movement which has its roots in these revivals, and about today’s megachurches, which are the heirs of Sister Sharon and her kind. I believe that Lewis based his sister Sharon character on Aimee Semple Mcpherson, a famous preacher in California who disappeared under strange circumstances – I don’t know the details.

The movie, made in 1960, was nominated for many Oscars. Burt Lancaster stars as Gantry, Jean Simmons as Sister Sharon, Arthur Kennedy as the cynical newspaperman, and in supporting role and best actress winner, Shirley Jones – gosh she was cute and sexy in this picture.

Richard Brooks was a screenwriter who went on to be writer/director, but his movies are usually a bit preachy, and as a director he rarely did more than shoot his scripts. This was about the best he did, though some might prefer The Professionals, a western he made about 7 years later.

Generally I find his movies bad and self-important, preachy, and not well done. This one though really does get me. The performances are really good, and I guess the novel had some great lines and scenes, because they show up here much better than Brooks usually can manage.

(written around 8 March 2009)

Fog of War

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched ‘fog of war’ a doc by Errol Morris about Robert Macnamara who was Sec. of Defense during the Vietnam war. it’s very interesting how much Morris can get to the ‘opposing argument’ when he only interviews Macnamara, and includes some archival footage. He doesn’t interview Macnamara’s critics, or other experts – just Macnamara. And yet I did get the sense of an alternative viewpoint.

Morris is famous for sitting the subject in a chair, facing the camera, asking him one question, and after the subject answers, staying quiet. The subject feels the pressure of the silence, and he assumes his answer was not satisfying, so he says something else on the topic. And some more. Morris stays quiet, and the subject begins to ramble, ramble, talking more and more, and eventually, Morris hopes, he says something crazy – something that reveals the inner heart, not the public face the subject wishes to show us.

Usually Morris had done this with a fixed camera. Morris places himself right next to the lens so when the subject looks at Morris, it seems that he is looking at us, in the audience. This time Macnamara seems still to be looking at us, but the camera shifts a little, gets closer, pushes Macnamara’s face screen left, then screen right. It’s a bit offputting, but more varied and bearable than the same composition for an hour and a half.

Macnamara was the statistician attached to the unit that fire-bombed Japan in the war. He tells something I had not realized, just how extensive and brutal the fire-bombing campaign was. The first night of it, in a raid on Tokyo, they killed 100,000 Japanese civilians. One night! Macnamara goes on to talk about percentage of cities destroyed. A lot. His final estimate is between 50 and 90 percent of over 60 Japanese cities was destroyed in those campaigns – all before the atomic bombs were dropped.

And he adds, that he and General Lemay, the man in charge of that unit, both realized that if the us had lost the war, they would both have been charged and convicted of committing war crimes.

He also asks rhetorically, ‘Why does an act become a war crime if you do it and you lose, but not a war crime if you do it and you win?’

But on Vietnam he’s less honest. All the same, it’s clear that he tells us one big lesson there: he, and the presidents, did not know what was going on in the minds of the Vietnamese; the Vietnamese didn’t know what was in the minds of the Americans. The Vietnamese were quite certain that the Americans had simply replaced the French and were trying to subjugate Vietnam as a colonial extension; the Vietnamese were fighting for independence and unification. Macnamara was quite certain the Vietnamese were wrong, were only tools of the Chinese and Russians.

But I think that all those American wars had elements of imperialism to them, even if it was not in the minds of the commanders. it’s just that ‘imperialism’ as Macnamara was thinking of it lay in terms of the British Empire, rather than selling Coca-Cola, and Firestone Tires getting rubber plantations, and the like. But Ho Chi Minh saw Coca-Cola and Firestone as arms of imperialism; he saw how American imperialism was different from the british model.

(written around 7 March 2009)

Juno

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched ‘Juno.’

Hmm.

I can’t deny that it choked me up and engaged me. So, I must’ve liked it.

But I was trying not to like it almost from the start – certainly from the convenience store clerk’s overwritten dialogue, and all the slang.

Here’s the story, though I bet you’ve seen it.

16 year old Juno discovers she is pregnant. She is a geeky girl, a nerd outcast of sorts, though her dad and stepmom both support and like her.

At first she goes to have an abortion, but something about the clinic setting freaks her out and she can’t go through with that so she finds a childless couple who seem the perfect couple, and they say they will pay for her medical expenses, and she says she will give them the child.

Her pregnancy follows, including her awkward relationship with the kid who is the father, but they are not really dating; her friendship with the cheerleader, the discomfort of being heavy. But most of the scenes revolve around her growing relationships with the adopting couple. The husband seems to be relaxed and able to relate to Juno on her level, talking about rock bands and music and horror movies. The mother though is a corporate worker bee, and too tightly wound, wanting the child too much, too anxious, too eager, too desperate.

But the twist comes when the father adopter is afraid to be a father, he initiates divorce proceedings against his wife, and moves out.

This precipitates the crisis, the second curtain; Juno doesn’t know what to do, and we get a series of short scenes in which clues for the resolution are given to us, but not the full answer. (this is rather a cheat but it leads to a more satisfactory ending because it prolongs the suspense for us).

She reconciles with her boyfriend and they become truly boyfriend and girlfriend. She has the child, and it’s almost the usual giving-birth sequence of scenes. And she doesn’t see the child after delivery, because she considers it to be the adopting mother’s in reality.

Adopting mother, alone, not alone, gets to hug and hold her baby.

Juno and her boyfriend get to go back to practicing for their rock band, kissing, happy together.

There are points about it that bugged me, though.

The witty repartee strikes me as over the top – it fits a stylized movie world but not this indie/naturalistic world.

Best moments were the quiet ones where the witty repartee stopped.

For this reason, perhaps, Jen Garner steals the picture for me. She has the highest ration of silent to talky scenes, and she almost never has a witty banter line. Almost all (or even all) of her lines are straightforward, sincere, honest, never trying to conceal her emotions under witty banter or pop culture references.

Camera moves were clichés all the way. So much they annoyed me, but then those moves that annoyed me were subtle and so common that most viewers probably would not even notice them.

Lighting was good, production design good, costumes good, focus was rarely a problem. Technically, this is top notch for an indie, though I don’t know if i’d call it an indie really, outside of the script.

I think it’s a bit too girl-power as a subject to grab me all the way, and that’s probably a big part of my resisting it.

I had a great fear lest Juno and Bleeker wed and raise the kid themselves. The script and direction successfully pushed me in the direction of that fear (I suppose it would be ‘hope’ for many in the audience but it was ‘fear’ to me because it would have been too neat by half). I was so happy they fooled me. Though I should have remembered the note would pay off, and how else could it pay off? With a shot of Jen Garner sobbing and alone and miserable over a note saying ‘the kid is mine, you don’t deserve a child’? That wouldn’t have been very nice, and then the picture wouldn’t have had the boxoffice legs it did, and I knew it did have those legs, and would arrive at a very satisfying ending for bourgeois Americans over a very controversial subject, you know?).

(written around 6 March 2009)

Gossip Postmortem

Hi Aki,

Hi Aki,

Your answers here are funny. Still you are responding to characters as I describe what they do. If you saw the movie, you would also respond to the characters as played by the actors. Maybe you like the Derrick actor, maybe you don’t like the way he looks. That colors how we respond a lot.

But if I go by the way the movie sets things up, I think the filmmakers want us to like Derrick, be charmed by him in the beginning, but still have some doubts about him.

First scene, which I didn’t describe, because it’s not plot, more about positioning our responses to the characters: we see Jones studying in library, and hear her voiceover for the next scenes. This is bad, but it’s supposed to get us to identify with her from the start.

In the books she is reading are post-it notes on different pages, like ‘Why are you studying when you could be drinking with us?’ from Derrick.

Next scene Jones goes to the hip, trendy, too-fabulous bar. She joins Travis and Derrick at the bar. They are drinking, and Travis notices a cute girl, but he’s too shy to approach her. Jones and Derrick both encourage him, saying he’s cute himself, an artist, talented, and what girl would reject him? So Travis steels himself and goes to talk to the girl. We see him and the girl from Jones’s and derrek’s pov. It doesn’t seem to be going too well.

The bartender at this point butts in and calls Travis pathetic. Jones and Derrick look shocked and angry, but it’s Derrick who responds. At first he agrees with the bartender and even goes farther in insulting Travis over there. But then he says, ‘the reason is…’ and starts an elaborate lie about Travis being the son of a famous musician, and he’s shy because he can’t tell anybody who he really is, and that’s the problem.

So the bartender starts to try to guess what rock star is the father, and Derrick and Jones both say, ‘well, we can’t really say…’

When Travis gets back, very sad, to the bar, the bartender gives them free drinks on the house. And the people up and down the bar, who have listened in to Derrick’s lies, are now looking at Travis in different way. They are impressed and curious.

So outside the bar, on the way back home, Jones expresses some doubts about the morality of lying that way, and Derrick answers, ‘we got free drinks, didn’t we? And who really got hurt?’

So right off the bat we see that Derrick is a charming, impulsive liar. And that the theme of rumors and gossip is born. And that Jones is the one with a conscience, and Travis is the hanger-on, and not so great with girls.

This sequence is meant to position us towards the characters:

Jones is our main POV character, and the moral one, the studious one.

Derrick is charming, handsome, but at the same time…maybe he’s not so good or admirable. And he seems to have no conscience, so we wonder maybe, just how far would he go?

Travis is the hanger on, the third wheel here, less important. (later we will see what he does for visualizations of the gossip project, and it’s really impressive, and we get first-hand confirmation of Jones’s opinion that Travis is a really talented artist, maybe a genius.)

Then finally they are all back at the fabulous loft apartment and it’s further established that Derrick is the rich one, that Jones and Travis get to stay there rent-free, that they are not so rich. So again Derrick is attractive (because he’s not only handsome, clever, but he’s rich too) and yet we like Jones and Travis a bit more because they are not so rich, and more like us.

Derrick goes on to Naomi’s. He forces his way in, and they talk about the past. He finally says, ‘You ruined my life, with that lie, and now we’re even, because I ruined yours. I was there in the bathroom and I saw you and Beau and nothing happened, but I told everybody that he raped you, now your life is ruined like mine was.’

Her life is ruined? She didn’t rape anyone, though. I think they should have made her a rapist!!

Yes, this ‘I ruined your life’ doesn’t make total sense. When everybody thinks you raped a girl, and your family won’t talk to you, that’s almost ruining your life. When you think some guy raped you, and you have to go to the police to press charges, and so on, it’s very humiliating and hard, and you are subject to much gossip, and some people pity you, and Beau’s friends hate you (we don’t actually see any of this though) – then it’s not the same thing, though it is certainly not the sort of life at school anybody would want.

Plus we later learn that Derrick did in fact have sex with Naomi when she got scared in high school and asked him to stop. He did rape her. So if his life was ruined, he did it himself. And it wasn’t as bad as it should have been, because it was all hushed up by his family, and he didn’t have to go to jail, and he got his trust fund riches anyway.

*…next day Derrick and Jones start to reconcile. ‘Why should I let Naomi ruin my life?’ asks Jones. But then Travis comes in. He tells them Naomi is dead – she took pills or something and killed herself last night.

OH, and it’s another rumor??

Hey, you got it right away! I don’t think we’re supposed to guess right away, but I suspected it, and I bet a lot of the audience did too.

>

…who did it? Can you guess correctly? Can I guess?

Jones was in love with Naomi. But she found out that Naomi was actually a man. Feeling betrayed, Jones killed Naomi.

Come on! Play fair!

The entire story could be some experiment set by someone. Nobody gets hurt after all, they find out, maybe?

Well now you know the truth.

(written around 5 March 2009)

Charlie Varrick- the Last of the Independents

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched a pan and scan version of Charlie Varrick. Directed by Don Siegel in the last years of his life, it’s a straight up gangster film, with the twist of having comic actor Walter Matthau as small time bank robber (and cropduster pilot) Charlie Varrick ‘the last of the independents.’

He robs a little bank in a little town in New Mexico. But it all goes wrong, and his wife who is driving the getaway car is shot and killed. Charlie is left with a half-crazy partner and a couple bags with more money than a bank like that ought to have. Charlie guesses correctly that the bank is just a front for the mob who uses it to drop money to launder it going in and out of the country. So now Charlie has the FBI after him as well as the mafia, and the mafia are worse. Mostly the movie details Charlie’s efforts to get away from the mafia with his life.

He does this by being clever, one step ahead of them. No violence on his part.

And he does succeed.

Siegel shot in Panavision, so I only saw half the frame at any one time. It’s in color, nicely shot but nothing special. Siegel was not a pictorial director, he liked shooting fast and dirty and liked to have his frame a little ragged and messy and more like life, so his sets and locations have a ‘just drove by and found this’ look to them. I’m sure a lot of work went into making the locations look like no work was done on them though.

Lalo Schiffrin did the score, and it’s annoying. Probably not so much back then, but right now it seems so utterly 70s – Schiffrin was incredibly prolific and he might be more responsible than anybody for creating that particular crappy tv-copshow, 70s score sound.

The biggest miscue in the movie comes with sex. Back then you had to have some violence and some sex. Your hero was no hero unless he bedded at least one woman. So we have the unfortunate scene of Charlie, who otherwise through the rest of the picture is all business, ‘no such thing as being too careful’ going to bed with the private secretary of the top mafia guy we see, who is herself portrayed through the rest of the movie as no-nonsense, all business, and somebody who knows what’s going on behind the scene at the ‘western bank’ – so it’s totally out of character for him to want to fool around when his wife got shot to death 3 days ago and he’s desperately trying to save his own life; it’s totally out of character for her to want to fuck this middle-aged, tired nobody who her boss has to order killed – him and everybody who might help him.

Other than that the story is clean and straight, and sometimes I was trying to see if Clint Eastwood could have delivered the lines and been Charlie, and he could, but at that time (just after Dirty Harry) Clint seemed too young. Clint would’ve been more believable bedding the secretary, but he wouldn’t be so believable as the old pilot who has turned to robbing banks only because there aren’t any other jobs to do. In fact Eastwood was plenty old enough to have done that, it’s just that he looked a lot younger and sexier than the part calls for.

Matthau is perfect as the clever, experienced, wiser, older Charlie. But it’s oddly lacking in passion, this film. Part of that is just the breezy way Siegel puts together films, he was never one to go deep into wallowing emotions. Thus we have a sort of fantasy, wish-fulfillment film, but Matthau is not the screen presence that invites us to want him to be our wish-fulfillment alter ego.

But ‘the last of the independents’ was no doubt the way Siegel liked to think of himself, so we can read a lot into Charlie’s fallen state as a mataphor for Siegel himself and other one-time independent directors who now can do the job better than any of the kids, but times have moved past them, and there’s nothing really worthy for them to do anymore.

(written around 4 March 2009)

Gossip Concluded

Hi Aki,

The ending to Gossip – we only missed maybe 5 minutes, and the ending was disappointing.

Things were looking bad for Derrick, so he got his passport and packed a bag and was about to flee the country. Meanwhile Jones is kicked out and drinking coffee down the street. She sees Travis buy a guy from some people, looking crazy. She goes to the apartment.

But Derrick is slipping out through the roof exit and there Travis is waiting, blaming him, pulls the gun and forces Derrick down into the loft. Jones bursts in, telling Derrick that Travis is crazy and has a gun – then she sees Travis there holding the gun on Derrick. She tries to talk Travis into putting the gun down. He wavers, looks away–

–that’s when Derrick jumps him, grabs the gun. There is the usual struggle and the gun goes off. Derrick and Travis react in shock, we are not sure for a few moments, did Derrick get shot, or did Travis. Then Travis looks, and we cut to Jones, who has blood on her blouse, and she is sinking down.

Derrick clutches her but she is shaking, going pale and weak. Derrick tells Travis to call 911. Travis does, but then he remembers that the police are downstairs looking for him, they must have heard the shot, he must go tell them. Derrick tells him to wait, they have to get ‘the story straight’ and at all costs Travis must say it’s an accident, that he had the gun.

Travis and Derrick argue over this, and at last Derrick bursts out, ‘Why do you keep talking about Naomi? I raped the bitch but I never killed anybody!’

Behind him we see him on a monitor and just after this the monitor replays him saying the line.

Jones stands up. Travis opens the door and the communications professor is there. Through another door we see the policemen and down the stairs from the roof walk Naomi and Beau. It has all been a plot cooked up by them; even the ‘cops’ are just hirelings of Naomi’s family, not real cops at all. The ‘liar’ Derrick is caught at last.

Jones walks out and turns back to say to Derrick, ‘at last I lied better than you.’

The End.

It was disappointing.

(written around 4 March 2009)

Gossip Part 1

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Gossip from a few years ago. I recorded it off cable. But something, well, more on that later.

Story has three obnoxious college students in New York at some ritzy college having fun and drinking. They share a course in communications or sociology or media studies or something, and they have to to a paper, so they decide to do one together. Since in class that day there was a discussion of the difference between gossip and news, they decide to start a rumor, which is entirely false, and then tell a couple people, and watch it spread across campus to see what it becomes.

Okay, here are our three heroes:

• Cute charming guy who can lie really really well, and is very very rich: Derrick.
• Studious not so rich girl who is beautiful but she has dark hair and wears glasses, so we know she is smart: Jones.

• Artistic guy, who is not so self-assured, somewhat shy: Travis.

These three have become friends somehow, and Derrick lets Jones and Travis live in his million-dollar loft apartment which is so trendy and great it made me sick. Think Beverly Hills 90210 territory, that’s kind of the image they are promoting here. Or Cruel Intentions – though Cruel Intentions was ten times better than Gossip on every level.

The movie is well cast and well shot and quite pretty, but since I hate rich kids like that, well, I was never empathizing with any of our three heroes.

Back to the story: that night Jones and Derrick go to a party. Jones is bumped by rich girl Naomi, and kind of dislikes her, though she doesn’t really know her. Then later at the bar Jones is told a rumor by a girl she knows, who’s friends with Naomi, that Jones is sleeping with the handsome (also obnoxious) media/sociolog/communications professor. Somehow Jones get the impression that Naomi is the source of this rumor, and so she get mad at Naomi.

Later in the party, Derrick is making out with a girl, and they go up to the bathroom upstairs in this fabulous loft apartment of whoever it is who’s throwing the party. They are making out, then the girl starts wanting to puke because she’s had so much to drink. Derrick guides her to the toilet to puke, and goes to get a wet tissue to cool her head and wipe her mouth. But when he steps back out to get the tissue, he sees campus hotshot Beau making out with Naomi on the bed.

Now, Naomi has the reputation of being a virgin who’s ‘afraid of sex’ (another rumor, more gossip – see where all this is heading yet?) but she’s clearly turned on by Beau, but she’s also drunk, and she’s saying, ‘I’m drunk, no, stop.’ Then–

Then the girl in the toilet makes a sound. Beau looks up. Derrick ducks back into the shower and hides. Beau comes looking, and finds only the sick girl sitting on the floor by the toilet, half out of it. He goes back to Naomi, who is now passed out on the bed.

Derrick comes out of the shower to watch what they do. We don’t see what he sees.

Next we see Beau coming back downstairs. He passes his buddy who says something like, ‘I saw you with Naomi, did you get any?’ And he smiles like they had sex.

On the way back from the party, Jones and Derrick and Travis (who’s almost passing out) decide to make the rumor about Beau and Naomi. Actually it’s just Derrick and Jones who decide this, as Travis has in fact passed out on the sidewalk, and they have to drag him back to the loft.

The next day they start the rumor, making it small: Beau and Naomi had sex in the bedroom where the party was.

For awhile it seems fun as the rumor grows wilder and bigger and stranger, and the three chart its course. But when it gets back in horrible form to Naomi herself, she is shocked, and she goes to the police, and says that she’s sure that Beau raped her while she was passed out from being drunk.

Now it’s serious, and Jones (the girl, just to remind you – Derrick and Travis are both guys) says they ought to tell what they know. That Derrick ought to tell what he knows; he saw that nothing happened, after all, and that was the whole point of the project, that the original rumor was not true.

Only now Derrick says he’s not so sure nothing happened at the party that night. He didn’t see everything, he says, and it might have happened, and if Naomi is sure, he doesn’t want to call her a liar.

So they do nothing. ‘it’s just words, it won’t hurt anyone,’ Derrick assures Jones. But since Naomi’s family are very rich and powerful, there is pressure, and the police charge Beau with rape.

Jones goes to the police, after unsuccessfully trying to get Derrick to tell the truth, but the police only think that Jones is in love with Beau and trying to protect him. In truth Jones doesn’t even know Beau, but Derrick has planted this lie/rumor/gossip to make sure even if Jones goes to the cops they don’t believe her – which they don’t.

So Jones goes to Naomi to tell her the truth. Only she does it in roundabout way, asking Naomi, ‘are you sure what you said is true?’ ‘I’m sure,’ Naomi answers. They talk a bit and Naomi doesn’t seem like such a bitch, as Jones at first thought. Then Jones says she is living as flatmate with Derrick, and Naomi screams, ‘what is this some kind of sick joke? Get out of here! Out!’

Jones, shaken, goes to Derrick to confront him. He swears that he never knew Naomi, they might have gone to high school together the way Naomi said, but he didn’t know her. He starts kissing Jones, and she at last succumbs to his handsome charm, and they have sex.

But the next day Jones still can’t get it out of her head, so she takes a taxi to danbury connecticut to the private prep school where Derrick and Naomi attended. She finds the old yearbooks and in there are photos of Derrick and Naomi together. She also speaks with a woman who works in the school office, who tells her that Derrick raped Naomi when they were in high school together, but it was all hushed up, she didn’t press charges.

Jones confronts Derrick with the information, and he admits yes he dated Naomi, they were in love, and one night they almost did it, but she suddenly pulled back and pushed him away. After that the rumors/gossip/lies started circulating that he had raped her, and this ruined his life – he was almost kicked out of school, lost his friends, his family just left him with a trust fund but won’t speak to him anymore.

After this Beau is arrested for rape. Again Jones makes efforts to get the truth out, to no avail. She even calls Naomi again to try to get at the full truth, but Naomi just hangs up on her.

One night Derrick goes to see Naomi. He meets Beau along the way, now out on bail. Beau starts beating Derrick because he has heard that Derrick raped Naomi in high school. ‘well did you rape her?’ Derrick counters. ‘we are both in the same place Naomi is crazy, she told a lie about you, she told a lie about me.’ Beau is confused, seems to believe Derrick. Then Derrick hits Beau, kicks him, beats him up.

Derrick goes on to Naomi’s. He forces his way in, and they talk about the past. He finally says, ‘you ruined my life, with that lie, and now We’re even, because I ruined yours. I was there in the bathroom and I saw you and Beau and nothing happened, but I told everybody that he raped you, now your life is ruined like mine was.’

Naomi freaks out, attacks Derrick, scratches him. He takes a picture of her from high school and leaves. As he goes, Travis is there watching outside the dorm building, though Derrick doesn’t see him.

Next day Derrick and Jones start to reconcile. ‘why should I let Naomi ruin my life?’ asks Jones. But then Travis comes in. he tells them Naomi is dead – she took pills or something and killed herself last night.

Now the police come and see Derrick when he’s alone in the apartment. Derrick lies and says that while he knew Naomi from high school, he didn’t go to her dorm room. ‘Beau says he saw you going into her dorm last night.’ ‘Well Beau has been charged with raping her, and he will say anything.’

Derrick later persuades Travis to lie for him, and to say that he took the picture of Naomi from her room and that she was still alive, after Derrick left. Travis seems to agree.

With no one else to listen to her, Jones goes to the communications professor and tells him the whole story. The next class, the professor lays out the whole story and accuses Derrick. Derrick defends himself. When the other students call him a ‘murderer’ for spreading the rumors, he answers that they all spread the rumor more than he did, they are really responsible, not him. He leaves.

At the apartment Derrick finds the cops, with a warrant, searching everywhere. Derrick asks Jones what she told them. She says she told them he went to Naomi’s dorm room, and if he had told the truth, it wouldn’t matter what she said.

Frustrated, Derrick shows the cops Travis’s room where there are pictures of Naomi all over the wall. Throughout all this time, Travis has been taking pictures of Naomi and blowing them up, to make a visualization of the gossip/rumor campaign for their project. Now Derrick tries to convince the cops that these pictures prove that Travis is unstable, a psycho, and more likely to be the killer. Travis runs out of the apartment.

But the detective says, ‘We will find Travis and ask him about all this. But meantime we have a dead girl with skin under her fingernails and I bet the hair on your hairbrush will match dna with that skin, and your fingerprints are all over the dorm room, and we found this picture of Naomi in your sock drawer, so don’t leave town. I can’t take you in without a warrant, but I don’t think that will be hard to get, so I’ll be back.’

The detectives leave and then –

– and then –

– and then the recording stops, because the time scheduled on hbo was a mistake!

So I didn’t get to see how it turned out.

The film is also broadcast tomorrow though so I have it set to record that, and I’ll report later, but in the meantime:

Who did it? Can you guess correctly? Can I guess?

I don’t think it was Jones, she is the nice one. But it would be a big big shocking twist if it turned out to be her all along.

It could be Travis, maybe he got obsessed with Naomi with all these pictures, what was he doing outside her dorm thenight Derrick was there and she died?

It could be Derrick, but that’s the way it’s all heading, so I doubt that, but maybe?

It could also be Beau – he was there outside the dorm that night also, after all.

And finally, the detectives have not said conclusively that it was murder. it’s rather vague. She was drinking that night, and had pills. It might have been suicide, or it might have been accidental overdose.

– or –

– or maybe Naomi isn’t dead after all, maybe this is just a game she is playing to turn the tables and get back at Derrick for the rumor? We didn’t see her body or anything, we don’t even know these ‘cops’ are real cops, and even if they are, we know Naomi’s family has political pull, and might just be pushing the cops to do this to teach Derrick a lesson and learn the truth about whether Beau really raped Naomi and if anything happened that night.

(Of course, medical evidence is never mentioned, because that would spoil it. Naomi is said to be – another rumor, no more than that – a girl who’s a virgin, afraid to have sex. So if she was raped in high school, there would be evidence of that. If that rape never happened, there would be evidence if Beau had raped her. But that is skipped over in the movie, because the point is that ‘you can never tell the truth of what happened’ where rumors, gossip, are concerned. What do you really know, and how do you know it?)

So – what is your theory?

I lean toward Naomi being behind it.

Number two after that would be Travis.

And I think Derrick will end up dead, or in jail, and we won’t feel sorry for him, because he has been such a lying bastard through the whole movie. But all the same the charges against him will be false. He will be the victim of lies and rumors and gossip – a fitting end.

Oh yes, here is the cast, as that can give you some clues as it does me:

• Derrick is James Marsden.
• Jones is Lena Headey
• Travis is Norman Reedus
• Beau is Joshua Jackson

• Naomi is Kate Hudson.

The movie was made in 2000.

Naomi as Kate Hudson is the odd one. Kate was a bigger star than any of these others, as far as I can see. Her part was smaller, and she doesn’t even get a juicy death scene? that’s one reason I lean toward thinking she is not dead and is pulling the strings, maybe using Travis, maybe not, but she is manipulating all these rumors to get the cops after Derrick.

But what’s your conclusion?

I’ll tell you what I find out tomorrow after I see the end.

(written around 3 March 2009)

Man on Fire

Hi Aki,

Tonight was Man on Fire. Directed by Tony Scott in the most annoying manner possible. Almost unwatchable. Guaranteed to give you a headache!

Denzel Washington plays a former assassin for US special forces, now a drunk, washed-up, who is in Mexico. He takes a job as bodyguard for a cute little girl and she gets through to him in the usual Hollywood manner, so he learns to love life again. Then she is kidnapped. He is shot in the course of the kidnapping. There is ransom but the payment goes wrong and the girl is killed.

Denzel vows to find everyone responsible and kill them all. He does so in revolting and violent ways, each one different, so we can enjoy them all.

The trail leads right to the girl’s father who set it up with his lawyer to be able to collect the insurance money and then steal the ransom.

The twist is that the girl is alive after all. Denzel rescues her but must give himself to the kidnappers in exchange. But since he’s been shot about 44 times anyway and has been bleeding to death through the 5 days of his killing rampage, it’s okay, because he’s dead anyway.

Tony Scott also directed Natural Born Killers and he has mounted this one in much the same manner.

Ugh.

Mickey Rourke had a small part as a lawyer and when I saw him I knew immediately that the basic problem is that Denzel is miscast. Should be Mickey Rourke. A better actor, and one look at his face and you know this guy has seen better days. Plus with Denzel and blonde wife, blonde girl, there is a lot of racial objections. Denzel is like Sam Bojangle Robinson to Shirley temple here, just uncle tom. And he is the ‘good black man’ who dies to save the white folks. Even the ‘brown’ mexican husband must be revealed as crooked and bad and must die. The only survivors are the blonde Americans!

What crap huh?

I wonder really why Denzel chose the part. My guess is that

1. he got a lot of money and

2. another movie he would rather have done got delayed or put back into development, and this was the first thing to come up.

(written around 3 March 2009)