Cess Pool Cinema:
1. Body of Evidence (1993) Dir. Uli Edel - US
The Banal, the Blah, the Banausic:
1. Management (2008) Dir. Stephen Belber - US
2. Audrey Rose (1977) Dir. Robert Wise - US
3. Castle Freak (1995) Dir. Stuart Gordon - US
4. The Greek Labyrinth (1993) Dir. Rafael Alcazar - Spain
Astounding Cinema:
5. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock - US
4. Slightly Scarlet (1956) Dir. Allan Dwan - US
3. Blonde Ice (1948) Dir. Jack Bernhard - US
2. Puffball: The Devil's Eyeball (2007) Dir. Nicolas Roeg - UK
1. Bitter Moon (1992) Dir. Roman Polanski - UK/France
Theatrical Releases:
3. Death Bell (2008) Dir. Chang - South Korea 4/10
2. Amreeka (2009) Dir. Cherien Dabis - US 10/10
1. Where the Wild Things Are (2009) Dir. Spike Jonze - US 10/10
Rewatched Goodies:
1. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) Dir. Robert Aldrich - US
Oh, Madonna. I was much too young to see anything as tantalizingly titillating as Body Of Evidence (1993) upon its release, an almost blatant attempt to capitalize on the success of sex sleaze neo noir Basic Instinct (1992). Madonna headlines as a woman named Rebecca Carlson, who owns her own art museum. Now, I just have to include this description from Netflix: "Rebecca Carlson, a powerful, intelligent, successful, and breathtakingly beautiful woman (Madonna)...." Now, I'm typical to my gay nature in several ways, and one of those ways is generally enjoying Madonna's output as a musical, ermm, artist, for lack of a better word. Her portrayal as Ms. Carlson fits none of those slightly comical signifiers. In fact, I can't believe how awful I thought she looked, resembling a reptilian version of Courtney Love in several scenes where she gyrated, flung herself about, poured hot wax all over scary looking Willem Dafoe in a not very appealing sex scene, finger herself with spittle, and then monotonously make her way through the rest of the feature. A prototype, perhaps, for Elizabeth Berkley's characterization in Showgirls (1995), Body of Evidence is watered down sex propaganda masquerading in a noirish wolf's costume. Is it the worst thing I've ever seen? No, but it is most certainly not engaging. For a highlight, my favorite redhead Julianne Moore pops up in a few scenes as Dafoe's wife, and she tries her best not to be chewing the scenery. As you can imagine, Ms. Moore doesn't bring this film up very often. Oh yes, the plot! Madonna fucks her filthy rich boyfriend to death and the DA (Joe Mantegna) is convinced she did this on purpose, using her ripe, sexual body as a deadly weapon. Dafoe is her lawyer and Jurgen Prochnow pops up to add the Euro-trash element. And just when you thought you'd never hear from director Uli Edel again, keep in mind he directed The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), nominated for Best Foreign Language Film last year.
You know, when I saw the preview for Management (2008), I didn't think it looked half bad. I don't utterly despise Jennifer Aniston, and I rather enjoy Steve Zahn. In a romantic comedy together? Where Zahn works for his parents (Margo Martindale and Fred Ward) in their roadside motel that Aniston, a saleswoman of corporate art, happens to stay one night? And Woody Harrelson as her ex, an ex-punk named Jango, attempting to woo her with security even though she feels nothing for him, yet the only tension we feel is her wishy-washy shilly shally between Harrelson and Zahn? Oh, and her hair looks AWFUL! The film does win an award for least aptly named feature of 2008. Beyond that, you'll forget what happens before the credits roll.
Audrey Rose (1977) was another of those horror films dealing with themes that drive Christians up the wall - reincarnation. Needless to say, this was on that unsaid banned list my parents had when I was a child, and I never had the opportunity to sneak watch it. It's too bad, it would have cured a sleepless night or two. Sporting one of my favorite directors (Robert Wise), Anthony Hopkins, and Marsha Mason (one of those 70's era vintage actresses with a plethora of sterling work a new generation of filmgoers seem ignorant about, see also Jill Clayburgh and Glenda Jackson) it seems Audrey Rose had the proper amount of talent to keep it afloat. The plot is basically a creepy Hopkins following around Mason's kid. Alarming Mason and her husband, he tells them that their daughter is the reincarnation of his own dead progeny that died 11 years ago. And right about then, the little girl starts going apeshit all the time as she dreams about burning to death in a car. While this sounds like it would be entertaining, it's not, which is certainly not helped by one of the homeliest little girls I've ever seen on screen, an actress named Susan Swift. Her career never really took off.
I am happy to see the resurgence of the very talented Stuart Gordon in recent years (what with the excellent Edmond, 2005, and Stuck, 2007) but I agree with some of the criticism that for many a film project he was attempting to relive the uber success of Re-animator (1985). With his 1995 feature, Castle Freak, I have to agree. Starring his two usual leads, Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton (both solid leads), they are given nothing to do but be completely unlikable couple in this direct to video feature. Years ago, Combs, an alcoholic, killed his son and blinded his daughter in an auto accident. Crampton has never forgiven him, seemingly only staying married to him to torture him. With blind daughter in tow, they follow Combs to Italy where he has just inherited a castle that contains an evil secret (if you can't guess, it's a creepy, deformed man). While filmed in an actual, old creepy castle, the film can't keep the tight amount of atmosphere, which Gordon tries to build but just can't hold in this film. It's not awful, and is at times entertaining, but it just can't rear its head above the mediocre mark.
Don't you love how a bit player in your feature film may, years later, resurrect interest in what would be your otherwise forgotten film? Rafael Alcazar's 1993 feature, The Greek Labyrinth has just that going for it in the guise of a young Penelope Cruz. The dull plot concerns a Spanish woman, eager to find her lover that abandoned her with whom she had resided in Paris. Hearing he's in Barcelona, she takes her gay confidante with her and hires a PI. The PI is our narrator (and Cruz is his daughter, with whom he has issues with due to the fact that she keeps sleeping with men older than him. Aye Caramba!) Well, her lover, the Greek, proves difficult to find. It seems, also, that this Greek was a bisexual heroin addict. That spells lots of trouble. However, this labyrinth ends up being a dead end. It's interesting to see the poster art, however, that certainly makes use of Cruz's name, which is prominently above all others.
This week happened to contain some EXCELLENT cinema, however, that I am very excited to talk about. Rounding out the list is Hitchcock's remake of his own film, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), which was originally a Peter Lorre vehicle (1934), and which I have yet to see. The remake stars James Stewart and Doris Day (whose signature song, 'Que Sera Sera," is from this film) as an All-American couple (don't they just OOZE that?) in Morocco, whose child is kidnapped when they accidentally become involved in an assassination plot of a political figure in London. Sounds a little busy? Well, it is, but it's entertaining because it's Hitchcock. Though not my favorite, it's a departure for the likes of Day and still worthy of appreciation.
Infamous for several reasons, but mostly because it's one of the only film noirs to be filmed in color (which kind of doesn't fit the definition of noir, but okay) is an excellent little golden oldie called Slightly Scarlet, a B production from 1956. The male lead is John Payne, a mob underling who is hired to find dirt on a chaste mayoral candidate before he's elected and ruins the crime syndicate. Well, Payne rather likes the candidate and kind of happens to back stab his mob boss, while falling in love with the mayor's secretary, June (Rhonda Fleming). But everything heats up when "dynamite dame" Dorothy, June's sister enters the picture. Dorothy has just been released from prison, apparently suffering from acute kleptomania, amongst other things, and is played vivaciously by Arlene Dahl (mother of Lorenzo Llamas). It's Dahl's performance that really gets my rocks off in Slightly Scarlet, which was filmed in Superscope, seemingly, to take advantage of both the actresses' fire-red hair (and when standing together look eerily similar). Fleming, by the way, was known as the Queen of Technicolor. The sisters play beautifully off each other as good girl vs. bad girl, but in the end, even this may not be so black and white. While the plot may meander a bit, the film does have the stamp of its author, none other than James M. Cain, the man who wrote three of the best film noirs ever made: Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).
And another B noir from the 40's concerning a power hungry newspaper reporter who turns into a serial killer to meet her voracious money needs (think of an evil version of His Girl Friday, 1940) that also notably makes use of its femme fatale's hair color, is Blonde Ice (1948), which sports an excellent tagline: "Her veins were filled with ice. Her heart was filled with icicles." I love the noirs that center on the bad bitches (when they aren't just there to lure 'good men' astray) and Leslie Brooks playing Claire Cummings, is one bad bitch (I was strongly reminded of Nicole Kidman's performance in To Die For, 1995). While things might end badly for her, it's a fun little ride on the way and is one of the only features where the lovely Brooks gets the lead.
Universally panned upon its release was auteur Nicolas Roeg's first film feature in almost 11 years, Puffball: The Devil's Eyeball (2007). Though not an entirely incomprehensible film, it is difficult and at times, hard to decipher what the director is trying to say. I LOVED IT. Roeg's classics from the 70's represent such a cornerstone of cinematic culture they are virtually impenetrable to criticism. And films like Don't Look Now (1973) or Walkabout (1972) are difficult texts to ruminate about. The same goes for his last feature, starring Miranda Richardson (one of my favorite actresses), Kelly Reilly, Rita Tushingham and Donald Sutherland. The narrative concerns a young architect (Reilly) and her husband moving to the remote Irish countryside to fix up a cottage house they've purchased. However, when she becomes pregnant, her neighbors go a little apeshit and turn out to be, well, witches. Richardson has three girls, and in her 40's, is desperate for a boy child, so much so that she's convinced Reilly's bun in the oven was stolen from her. What ensues is a highly sexually charged plot of an impenetrable strangeness of the mundane. Shots of a penis and semen in the vagina, used condoms, rocks with holes, a penis shaped mushroom, all lend a foreboding atmosphere to the film. And that's exactly what I loved about it. A film should be like a good novel, a text you want to keep returning to, turning over in your head, remembering strange scenes later and perhaps they make more or even less sense. Puffball (named for the giant toad stools that look like big white pregnant tummies and colloquially known as the Devil's Eyeball) is just that film. It's confusing, weird, and creepy. Watching it made me reminisce about the oogy delight I felt reading Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home for the first time (which was subsequently made into a TV movie starring Bette Davis that didn't quite cut the mustard). Those not afraid of a challenge should see Puffball. My guess is that those critics that didn't understand this Roeg film most likely reserve their real opinions for his classic work as well so as not to appear sacrilegious to cinema. I truly hope that Roeg gets funding for his next project, an adaptation of the Martin Amis novel, Night Train, so far set to star Sigourney Weaver.
And this week's top pick is Roman Polanski's 1992 psychodrama comedy, Bitter Moon. The first half hour of the film made me intensely uncomfortable, mostly due to an incredibly creepy performance from a grotesque Peter Coyote (who always reminded me of Eric Roberts). A framed story set on a cruise ship, Hugh Grant and Kristen Scott Thomas star as a bland, rather estranged couple married for seven years and on their way to India as an anniversary present. Grant is attracted to a lusty woman on board, Emmanuelle Seigner (Polanski's wife, whom he scandalously married at a young age after meeting on the set of Frantic, 1988, and who always reminds me of the sexualized, European sex pot version of Brooke Shields) who is married to Coyote, a creepy old coot in a wheel chair. Coyote draws us into the framed narrative by telling Grant about his highly sexual and neurotic/abusive relationship with Seigner. Grant listens, titillated by the creepy, erotic, in depth sexual details from Coyote's narrative, which are more disturbing than any of the flashback imagery. Basically, their relationship was based only on intense sex, and when that peaked, Coyote became abusive and cruel, but the tables have eventually turned, and now, like a burst tumor, they're poison is leeching out to victims like Grant and Scott Thomas. Grant thinks he is falling in love with her. But a final 15 minutes of film will either drop your jaw, or at the very least, make you wrinkle your nose. Gross, complex, psychotic, I love Bitter Moon, a throwback to adult cinema that Polanski started out with when filming movies like Knife in the Water (1962), Repulsion (1965), Cul-De-Sac (1966), and my all time favorite, Death and the Maiden (1994).
1. Body of Evidence (1993) Dir. Uli Edel - US
The Banal, the Blah, the Banausic:
1. Management (2008) Dir. Stephen Belber - US
2. Audrey Rose (1977) Dir. Robert Wise - US
3. Castle Freak (1995) Dir. Stuart Gordon - US
4. The Greek Labyrinth (1993) Dir. Rafael Alcazar - Spain
Astounding Cinema:
5. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock - US
4. Slightly Scarlet (1956) Dir. Allan Dwan - US
3. Blonde Ice (1948) Dir. Jack Bernhard - US
2. Puffball: The Devil's Eyeball (2007) Dir. Nicolas Roeg - UK
1. Bitter Moon (1992) Dir. Roman Polanski - UK/France
Theatrical Releases:
3. Death Bell (2008) Dir. Chang - South Korea 4/10
2. Amreeka (2009) Dir. Cherien Dabis - US 10/10
1. Where the Wild Things Are (2009) Dir. Spike Jonze - US 10/10
Rewatched Goodies:
1. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) Dir. Robert Aldrich - US
Oh, Madonna. I was much too young to see anything as tantalizingly titillating as Body Of Evidence (1993) upon its release, an almost blatant attempt to capitalize on the success of sex sleaze neo noir Basic Instinct (1992). Madonna headlines as a woman named Rebecca Carlson, who owns her own art museum. Now, I just have to include this description from Netflix: "Rebecca Carlson, a powerful, intelligent, successful, and breathtakingly beautiful woman (Madonna)...." Now, I'm typical to my gay nature in several ways, and one of those ways is generally enjoying Madonna's output as a musical, ermm, artist, for lack of a better word. Her portrayal as Ms. Carlson fits none of those slightly comical signifiers. In fact, I can't believe how awful I thought she looked, resembling a reptilian version of Courtney Love in several scenes where she gyrated, flung herself about, poured hot wax all over scary looking Willem Dafoe in a not very appealing sex scene, finger herself with spittle, and then monotonously make her way through the rest of the feature. A prototype, perhaps, for Elizabeth Berkley's characterization in Showgirls (1995), Body of Evidence is watered down sex propaganda masquerading in a noirish wolf's costume. Is it the worst thing I've ever seen? No, but it is most certainly not engaging. For a highlight, my favorite redhead Julianne Moore pops up in a few scenes as Dafoe's wife, and she tries her best not to be chewing the scenery. As you can imagine, Ms. Moore doesn't bring this film up very often. Oh yes, the plot! Madonna fucks her filthy rich boyfriend to death and the DA (Joe Mantegna) is convinced she did this on purpose, using her ripe, sexual body as a deadly weapon. Dafoe is her lawyer and Jurgen Prochnow pops up to add the Euro-trash element. And just when you thought you'd never hear from director Uli Edel again, keep in mind he directed The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), nominated for Best Foreign Language Film last year.
You know, when I saw the preview for Management (2008), I didn't think it looked half bad. I don't utterly despise Jennifer Aniston, and I rather enjoy Steve Zahn. In a romantic comedy together? Where Zahn works for his parents (Margo Martindale and Fred Ward) in their roadside motel that Aniston, a saleswoman of corporate art, happens to stay one night? And Woody Harrelson as her ex, an ex-punk named Jango, attempting to woo her with security even though she feels nothing for him, yet the only tension we feel is her wishy-washy shilly shally between Harrelson and Zahn? Oh, and her hair looks AWFUL! The film does win an award for least aptly named feature of 2008. Beyond that, you'll forget what happens before the credits roll.
Audrey Rose (1977) was another of those horror films dealing with themes that drive Christians up the wall - reincarnation. Needless to say, this was on that unsaid banned list my parents had when I was a child, and I never had the opportunity to sneak watch it. It's too bad, it would have cured a sleepless night or two. Sporting one of my favorite directors (Robert Wise), Anthony Hopkins, and Marsha Mason (one of those 70's era vintage actresses with a plethora of sterling work a new generation of filmgoers seem ignorant about, see also Jill Clayburgh and Glenda Jackson) it seems Audrey Rose had the proper amount of talent to keep it afloat. The plot is basically a creepy Hopkins following around Mason's kid. Alarming Mason and her husband, he tells them that their daughter is the reincarnation of his own dead progeny that died 11 years ago. And right about then, the little girl starts going apeshit all the time as she dreams about burning to death in a car. While this sounds like it would be entertaining, it's not, which is certainly not helped by one of the homeliest little girls I've ever seen on screen, an actress named Susan Swift. Her career never really took off.
I am happy to see the resurgence of the very talented Stuart Gordon in recent years (what with the excellent Edmond, 2005, and Stuck, 2007) but I agree with some of the criticism that for many a film project he was attempting to relive the uber success of Re-animator (1985). With his 1995 feature, Castle Freak, I have to agree. Starring his two usual leads, Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton (both solid leads), they are given nothing to do but be completely unlikable couple in this direct to video feature. Years ago, Combs, an alcoholic, killed his son and blinded his daughter in an auto accident. Crampton has never forgiven him, seemingly only staying married to him to torture him. With blind daughter in tow, they follow Combs to Italy where he has just inherited a castle that contains an evil secret (if you can't guess, it's a creepy, deformed man). While filmed in an actual, old creepy castle, the film can't keep the tight amount of atmosphere, which Gordon tries to build but just can't hold in this film. It's not awful, and is at times entertaining, but it just can't rear its head above the mediocre mark.
Don't you love how a bit player in your feature film may, years later, resurrect interest in what would be your otherwise forgotten film? Rafael Alcazar's 1993 feature, The Greek Labyrinth has just that going for it in the guise of a young Penelope Cruz. The dull plot concerns a Spanish woman, eager to find her lover that abandoned her with whom she had resided in Paris. Hearing he's in Barcelona, she takes her gay confidante with her and hires a PI. The PI is our narrator (and Cruz is his daughter, with whom he has issues with due to the fact that she keeps sleeping with men older than him. Aye Caramba!) Well, her lover, the Greek, proves difficult to find. It seems, also, that this Greek was a bisexual heroin addict. That spells lots of trouble. However, this labyrinth ends up being a dead end. It's interesting to see the poster art, however, that certainly makes use of Cruz's name, which is prominently above all others.
This week happened to contain some EXCELLENT cinema, however, that I am very excited to talk about. Rounding out the list is Hitchcock's remake of his own film, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), which was originally a Peter Lorre vehicle (1934), and which I have yet to see. The remake stars James Stewart and Doris Day (whose signature song, 'Que Sera Sera," is from this film) as an All-American couple (don't they just OOZE that?) in Morocco, whose child is kidnapped when they accidentally become involved in an assassination plot of a political figure in London. Sounds a little busy? Well, it is, but it's entertaining because it's Hitchcock. Though not my favorite, it's a departure for the likes of Day and still worthy of appreciation.
Infamous for several reasons, but mostly because it's one of the only film noirs to be filmed in color (which kind of doesn't fit the definition of noir, but okay) is an excellent little golden oldie called Slightly Scarlet, a B production from 1956. The male lead is John Payne, a mob underling who is hired to find dirt on a chaste mayoral candidate before he's elected and ruins the crime syndicate. Well, Payne rather likes the candidate and kind of happens to back stab his mob boss, while falling in love with the mayor's secretary, June (Rhonda Fleming). But everything heats up when "dynamite dame" Dorothy, June's sister enters the picture. Dorothy has just been released from prison, apparently suffering from acute kleptomania, amongst other things, and is played vivaciously by Arlene Dahl (mother of Lorenzo Llamas). It's Dahl's performance that really gets my rocks off in Slightly Scarlet, which was filmed in Superscope, seemingly, to take advantage of both the actresses' fire-red hair (and when standing together look eerily similar). Fleming, by the way, was known as the Queen of Technicolor. The sisters play beautifully off each other as good girl vs. bad girl, but in the end, even this may not be so black and white. While the plot may meander a bit, the film does have the stamp of its author, none other than James M. Cain, the man who wrote three of the best film noirs ever made: Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).
And another B noir from the 40's concerning a power hungry newspaper reporter who turns into a serial killer to meet her voracious money needs (think of an evil version of His Girl Friday, 1940) that also notably makes use of its femme fatale's hair color, is Blonde Ice (1948), which sports an excellent tagline: "Her veins were filled with ice. Her heart was filled with icicles." I love the noirs that center on the bad bitches (when they aren't just there to lure 'good men' astray) and Leslie Brooks playing Claire Cummings, is one bad bitch (I was strongly reminded of Nicole Kidman's performance in To Die For, 1995). While things might end badly for her, it's a fun little ride on the way and is one of the only features where the lovely Brooks gets the lead.
Universally panned upon its release was auteur Nicolas Roeg's first film feature in almost 11 years, Puffball: The Devil's Eyeball (2007). Though not an entirely incomprehensible film, it is difficult and at times, hard to decipher what the director is trying to say. I LOVED IT. Roeg's classics from the 70's represent such a cornerstone of cinematic culture they are virtually impenetrable to criticism. And films like Don't Look Now (1973) or Walkabout (1972) are difficult texts to ruminate about. The same goes for his last feature, starring Miranda Richardson (one of my favorite actresses), Kelly Reilly, Rita Tushingham and Donald Sutherland. The narrative concerns a young architect (Reilly) and her husband moving to the remote Irish countryside to fix up a cottage house they've purchased. However, when she becomes pregnant, her neighbors go a little apeshit and turn out to be, well, witches. Richardson has three girls, and in her 40's, is desperate for a boy child, so much so that she's convinced Reilly's bun in the oven was stolen from her. What ensues is a highly sexually charged plot of an impenetrable strangeness of the mundane. Shots of a penis and semen in the vagina, used condoms, rocks with holes, a penis shaped mushroom, all lend a foreboding atmosphere to the film. And that's exactly what I loved about it. A film should be like a good novel, a text you want to keep returning to, turning over in your head, remembering strange scenes later and perhaps they make more or even less sense. Puffball (named for the giant toad stools that look like big white pregnant tummies and colloquially known as the Devil's Eyeball) is just that film. It's confusing, weird, and creepy. Watching it made me reminisce about the oogy delight I felt reading Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home for the first time (which was subsequently made into a TV movie starring Bette Davis that didn't quite cut the mustard). Those not afraid of a challenge should see Puffball. My guess is that those critics that didn't understand this Roeg film most likely reserve their real opinions for his classic work as well so as not to appear sacrilegious to cinema. I truly hope that Roeg gets funding for his next project, an adaptation of the Martin Amis novel, Night Train, so far set to star Sigourney Weaver.
And this week's top pick is Roman Polanski's 1992 psychodrama comedy, Bitter Moon. The first half hour of the film made me intensely uncomfortable, mostly due to an incredibly creepy performance from a grotesque Peter Coyote (who always reminded me of Eric Roberts). A framed story set on a cruise ship, Hugh Grant and Kristen Scott Thomas star as a bland, rather estranged couple married for seven years and on their way to India as an anniversary present. Grant is attracted to a lusty woman on board, Emmanuelle Seigner (Polanski's wife, whom he scandalously married at a young age after meeting on the set of Frantic, 1988, and who always reminds me of the sexualized, European sex pot version of Brooke Shields) who is married to Coyote, a creepy old coot in a wheel chair. Coyote draws us into the framed narrative by telling Grant about his highly sexual and neurotic/abusive relationship with Seigner. Grant listens, titillated by the creepy, erotic, in depth sexual details from Coyote's narrative, which are more disturbing than any of the flashback imagery. Basically, their relationship was based only on intense sex, and when that peaked, Coyote became abusive and cruel, but the tables have eventually turned, and now, like a burst tumor, they're poison is leeching out to victims like Grant and Scott Thomas. Grant thinks he is falling in love with her. But a final 15 minutes of film will either drop your jaw, or at the very least, make you wrinkle your nose. Gross, complex, psychotic, I love Bitter Moon, a throwback to adult cinema that Polanski started out with when filming movies like Knife in the Water (1962), Repulsion (1965), Cul-De-Sac (1966), and my all time favorite, Death and the Maiden (1994).
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