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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE SPIRIT (2008)

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DIRECTED BY: Frank Miller

FEATURING: Gabriel Macht, Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Sarah Paulson, , Jaime King, Dan Lauria, Stana Katic

PLOT: When the villainous Octopus terrorizes Central City in pursuit of an ancient elixir that will give him godlike powers, The Spirit–heroic guardian of the city–is there to foil his plans.

Still from The Spirit (2008)

COMMENTS: In the opening scenes of The Spirit, the central character delivers a monologue about his mission as he vaults through the city, a black silhouette swinging and somersaulting off the tops of the buildings, with only a pair of titanium white-soled Chuck Taylors and a rippling vermilion necktie to distinguish him. Here is that monologue in full:

“My city. She’s always there for me. Every lonely night, she’s there for me. She’s not some tarted-up fraud, all dressed up like a piece of jailbait. No, she’s an old city, old and proud of her every pock and crack and wrinkle. She’s my sweetheart, my plaything. She doesn’t hide what she is, what she’s made of: sweat, muscle, blood of generations. She sleeps, after midnight and until dawn, only shadows move in the silence. (checks his watch) Damn, I’ve got no time for this. My city screams! She needs me. She is my love. She is my life. And I am her spirit.”

This is but the first of at least half-a-dozen similar monologues scattered throughout the film, because writer/director Frank Miller wants to emulate the narration boxes found in the comic books that are his primary medium. This is not an unworthy goal, but the fact is that those words play better on the page than they do said aloud during a moment of action. And while it’s certainly possible that there’s an actor out there who could pull off reciting dialogue like this, it poses a tremendous challenge, considering that the prose might be best described as “too purple for Prince.” 

Suffice to say, future “Suit” Gabriel Macht is not the person to overcome the limitations of such dialogue. His every effort is labored, trying and failing to weave in elements as disparate as Superman’s moral purity, Batman’s righteous vengeance, Philip Marlowe’s world-weariness, and even a little bit of Han Solo’s roguish charm. But in fairness, with so many styles to play, Macht has the hardest job. The well-pedigreed performers surrounding him only have one style to ape, although they must contend with the same stilted dialogue. Consider Samuel L. Jackson, who is given leave to go full maniacal-laughter bad guy but isn’t given anything to be particularly evil about. (There’s some lip service paid to something about blood found on the Golden Fleece conferring godhood, but far more time is lavished on his role in The Spirit’s origin story, which honestly makes very little sense.) Miller’s screenplay provides little context for the rivalry between Spirit and Octopus, so we’re mainly riding on our goodwill toward Jackson doing his thing, lending some comedy to what would otherwise be gratuitously baroque.   

This problem is particularly acute for the ensemble of actresses whom Miller prizes for their beauty, and gives just enough characterization to get them off his back. Paulson is the stalwart and sexless love interest, Mendes is voluptuous and obsessed with jewels (the genuinely charming Seychelle Gabriel fares better as Mendes’ teenaged past), Vega is all tease and violence, and Katic provides gum-smacking 40s patois. And then there’s Johansson, whose presence here is baffling. She hints at a mercenary soul in a world of true believers, but mainly seems to be here exclusively so Miller can clothe her and Jackson in Nazi uniforms for no reason whatsoever. Characters don’t just lack an arc; they barely even bend.

Miller seems to have drawn the wrong conclusions from his earlier outing, Sin City, where co-director Robert Rodriguez adhered religiously to the stark contrasts and sparse coloring of Miller’s original book. Miller holds no such reverence for his forebears, trading the vibrant and varied colors of Will Eisner for his own tinted monochrome and applying the same grittification that made his name in the Batman re-think “The Dark Knight Returns.” It feels like a bad match. The result is sometimes visually intriguing, but never compelling as a story.

The Spirit is finally a vanity project, Miller using his new-found access to moviemaking as a platform for his style. But while he bends film to his needs, he hasn’t let the demands of the medium bend him at all. So determined to make a movie look like one of his comic books, he’s made one where the story is convoluted, the characters are two-dimensional, the comedy is leaden, and the dialogue is obtuse. I hate to break it to him, but I have no time for this. My city screams.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Frank Miller’s The Spirit is far more than just merely bad. Like the most infamous movie disaster of all, Ed Wood’s Plan Nine From Outer Space, it veers wildly from stunning weirdness to unintentional hilarity, interspersed with frequent stretches of insufferable boredom. But what truly lands The Spirit among the rarified company of true cinematic crimes against humanity is that it is the insane and unhinged product of a uniquely obsessed auteur mind… The Octopus is a mad scientist conducting all sorts of medical atrocities in the name of mutating himself to godlike powers. He deems one of his misfired experiments as ‘just plain damn weird,’ a phrase apropos of the movie itself.” – Chad Ossman, Thinking Out Loud

(This movie was nominated for review by Motyka. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

The Spirit ( Blu-ray+ Digital HD)

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (1959)

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DIRECTED BY: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

FEATURING: Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Katharine Hepburn

PLOT: A brain surgeon examines the case of Catherine, a young woman who has been in a terrible state ever since the death of her poet cousin, inquiring into a mysterious incident in Europe.

Still from suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

COMMENTS: By the time Suddenly, Last Summer hit Broadway as part of a double-bill of one-act plays, was well-established as the pre-eminent voice – alongside Arthur Miller – of the American theater. With two Pulitzers, a pair of Oscar nominations, and at least three certifiable classics in his oeuvre, he was nearing the end of that imperial phase where almost anything he wrote could be staged and then adapted to the screen. The mere presence of his name on the bill was a commercial guarantee… even if his subject was a manipulative gay man whose indiscretions cause a group of feral youths to assault and eat him.

This is where “weird” comes into the discussion. You could easily place this alongside Williams’ most familiar works – the smothering maternal figure of The Glass Menagerie, the mental instability of A Streetcar Named Desire, the web of familial lies of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – without a moment’s hesitation. The acting is juicily overwrought, the battle between the tight lips of Southern propriety and the sweaty brows of unexpressed emotions is pitched high. It’s just another Southern Gothic drama, until you get to Elizabeth Taylor’s climactic monologue and she finally tells everyone just what happened to her cousin Sebastian. That irrevocably alters everything that has come before.

In some respects, Suddenly, Last Summer could only have happened at the precise moment it did. Homosexuality was still an unmentionable curse (the filmmakers only got it through the Production Code by emphasizing that Sebastian pays for his sins with his life), and neither it nor any other transgressions – the Venable women procuring young boys to feed Sebastian’s sexual appetites, the cannibalism – are called out explicitly. But Williams and screenwriter Gore Vidal clearly felt empowered to pull the curtain back on these immoralities. The whole saying-without-saying approach would be nigh unthinkable a decade later. This was the precise moment where such subjects could be talked about, but only if they were talked around.

Talking is all there is left, and Suddenly, Last Summer indulges in it. Vidal does little to open up Williams’ play for the screen, with most of its running time spent in either Catherine’s hospital room or Violet’s decadent New Orleans mansion and elaborate garden. Whenever the movie feels stagebound, the actors chomp on the scenery; Taylor knows she’s got a scrumptious part, with monologues that are by turns defiant and distraught. Hepburn, meanwhile, delights in deploying a mannered cruelty, from her wonderfully theatrical entrance descending in an elevator right up until the moment Taylor shatters her illusions of her beloved son. (Clift, in their presence, is unavoidably vacant. He is reduced to establishing exposition). Yet it’s in the moments when the story leaves the soundstages and pulls away from acting showcases that it starts to go to some truly strange places. Catherine’s forays into the depths of the mental asylum need no words as she comes face-to-face with souls far more damaged than hers. Her account of her trip to the island of Cabeza de Lobo (Wolf’s Head) is presented as a mute play, with phantasmagoric images of the swarthy locals, the blazing sun, and her own revealing swimsuit. Throughout, Sebastian is never given a face, reinforcing his complete unknowability. The twist of his horrific end only gains power from what we almost see.

Variety’s original review dubbed Suddenly, Last Summer “the most bizarre motion picture ever made by a major American company.” Time has dulled the impact of the film’s content, but there’s still something off-kilter about the way it delivers its surprises. It’s almost like a horror film pretending to be a Tennessee Williams play, rather than Williams dabbling in the grotesque. Like its title, it reflects a moment that ends everything we thought we knew, and leaves us reflecting upon it long after.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Mankiewicz] has turned out a polished film, and one that deals boldly with the ugly theme, but he has certainly not wasted any subtlety on the job…. this bizarre homosexual nightmare becomes the one artistically persuasive section in an otherwise coldly fabricated melodrama.” – Robert Hatch, The Nation (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by blibo. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE KEEP (1983)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Mann

FEATURING: Scott Glenn, Ian McKellen, Alberta Watson, Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT: A Nazi regiment unwisely establishes a base inside the keep of a Romanian castle where an otherworldly beast has been imprisoned for the safety of humanity.

Still from The Keep (1983)

COMMENTS: Wanting to cleanse my palette after my last encounter with Nazis, I figured it would be fun to watch them get slaughtered by a supernatural force even more evil than themselves. What I forgot to reckon with was Michael Mann, a man who walks eagerly into grey spaces. To be clear, dead Nazis haven’t lost their appeal. It’s just that no one comes out of The Keep smelling like a rose. 

Mann has always been interested in the bad things that decent people do in defense of some greater good, usually accompanied by moody visuals and moodier music. In that sense, The Keep fits right into his CV. We’ve got pure bad guys in the form of a Nazi platoon that sets up camp in a Carpathian castle, but the forces aligned against them are a disparate bunch: Molasar, an ancient demon trapped behind silver crosses and a talisman; the amazingly named Glaeken Trismegestus, a kind of knight-errant tasked with ensuring Molasar never emerges from this dark prison; and Dr. Cuza, a Jewish academic sprung from a concentration camp to help the Nazis translate ancient languages, who decides that freeing Molasar will save his people. So our bad guys are plenty bad, but the enemy of our enemy might not be our friend.

The stage is set for a real philosophical showdown, but  Paramount was looking for a horror-thriller, and when the production went way over budget, the studio declined to provide additional funds. To complicate things further, the visual effects supervisor died two weeks into post-production, leaving behind no instruction and no means of accomplishing the effects-heavy finale Mann intended. Finally, Mann turned in a cut nearly three and a half hours long, promptly getting himself thrown off the project. The studio hacked off about ninety minutes and, following a terrible preview, applied classic Hollywood logic and shaved off another thirty. The final product is, predictably, disjointed and open-ended, with characters appearing and disappearing randomly, a significantly truncated romance, and the entire thing wrapping up in a flurry of anticlimax. (Amusingly, an entire battalion of Nazis is wiped out while we’re watching their commander in another room.) It’s hard to argue that a horror film the length of The Godfather Part II is a good idea, but the shortened version is sorely lacking in some of the most critical areas, such as suspense, or clear linear progression.

The elements that work best in The Keep are the ones that go gleefully beyond the pale. Electronica pioneers Tangerine Dream provide a wonderfully anachronistic score that works despite itself. The production design by John Box and the art direction of Alan Tomkins and Herbert Westbrook are suitably evocative and foreboding. And best of all, the acting is top-notch baroque insanity. Byrne is relentlessly nasty in classic Nazi fashion, positioned opposite the war-weary pragmatism that Prochnow brings over undiluted from Das Boot (1981). McKellen uses the full power of his stage-acting experience, bellowing in a bizarre American accent (reportedly at Mann’s instigation) that eventually becomes a John Huston impression. Watson makes no impression at all. And then, in the role of the enigmatic stranger who is engaged in a millennia-old battle against evil, there’s affable everyman Scott Glenn. He’s horribly miscast, but somehow he gets far entirely on the basis of the asynchrony. The story may not make sense, but at least everyone goes for it.

The best thing that The Keep has going for it is its spectacle, and that suffers from being visibly undercut, far from the poetic grandeur its auteur intended. It’s hard to say if the film Mann had in mind–a blend of arty philosophy and purple grandiosity –would have worked. But it’s clear from what remains that it would have lacked for neither.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Keep is a weird movie and I mean that in the best possible way. On the negative end of the spectrum, there are too many characters and the film is often muddled and slow-moving. However, if you stick with it, you will be rewarded with some rather fine monster-mashing and other assorted general nonsense.” Mitch Lovell, The Video Vacuum

(This movie was nominated for review by purplefig. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

The Keep

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Capsules

CAPSULE: GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT (1972)

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DIRECTED BY: Brian De Palma

FEATURING: Tom Smothers, John Astin, Katharine Ross, Orson Welles

PLOT: At his wit’s end in the fast-paced business world, a dissatisfied middle manager chucks his job to become a traveling tap-dancing magician.

Still from Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972)

COMMENTS: The passing of Tom Smothers brought many recollections of the genuinely transgressive variety show he and his brother Dick assembled to ride the waves of the counterculture and tweak the humorless establishment. It’s part of the legend that the stuffed shirts at CBS seized upon the first opportunity to cancel the show and presumably serve the whim of newly inaugurated paranoiac president Richard Nixon. Smothers would go down in history as a First Amendment martyr, and although the brothers would eventually resume their successful career as comedians and folk-performance parodists (your reviewer still cherishes catching their act as an adolescent and meeting Tom after the show), they never again saw the lofty heights they reached when they were tweaking censors and highlighting America’s distaste for the Vietnam War.

That fall from fame was not for lack of trying. About a year after “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” got yanked off the schedule, Tom decided to take a stab at movie stardom. Get To Know Your Rabbit looks like an ideal vehicle: a satire on the numbing effect of American corporate culture. The leading role seems tailor-made to take advantage of Smothers’ carefully developed stage persona as overwhelmed and bewildered by the world, as well as his offstage passion for justice. The producers also saw an opportunity to provide a Hollywood debut for Brian De Palma, who had made a name for himself with a pair of subversive comedies, Greetings and Hi, Mom! (Our Alfred Eaker would describe De Palma’s work here as “blatantly avant-garde”.) Add in a small part for Katharine Ross (hot off the success of The Graduate) and a key role for one of De Palma’s heroes, Orson Welles (who, as we’ve already seen, was apparently willing to do any film that would let him perform some magic), and this thing can’t possibly miss.

It missed, and badly. The shoot was evidently a misery; Smothers, a controlling figure on his TV show, disapproved of many of De Palma’s choices and eventually refused to turn up for re-takes. Welles also disappointed the young filmmaker, refusing to learn his lines. Eventually, Warner Bros. fired De Palma and recut the film using discarded footage and new scenes, including a much milder ending than the one the ousted director preferred. Finally, they sat on the film for two years, throwing it into theaters for a quickie release to be rid of the thing. (An alternate strategy for the studio was still decades away at the time.) Smothers would head back to the stage, while De Palma would mostly abandon both comedy and the major studios in favor of ian thrillers and suspenseful horror shows. (De Palma avoided Warner Bros. in particular, returning only after two decades to direct The Bonfire of the Vanities, which did Continue reading CAPSULE: GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT (1972) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE LOVED ONE (1965)

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DIRECTED BY: Tony Richardson

FEATURING: Robert Morse, Jonathan Winters, , ,, Paul Williams, Milton Berle, , , Lionel Stander

PLOT: A young expatriate Englishman arrives in Los Angeles and stumbles into the funeral business, where he develops an affection for an earnest young post-mortem aesthetician.

Still from The Loved One (1965)

COMMENTS: Funerary practices are perennially strange, probably owing to the contradictory problems they seek to address: desiring to establish the memory of the departed as something that will live forever, while needing to immediately get rid of the earthly vessel left behind. So emotionally unsettling is the prospect of saying final goodbyes to a beloved family member that the standard for what is “normal” changes frequently. Today, cremation is the most common practice in America, but it was in-ground interment only a few years back, and can we honestly say either of those are less bizarre than mummification, sky burial, or post-mortem portraiture?

The Loved One has many sacred cows to skewer, but the American funeral industry and the particularly weird strain of it found in southern California are its leading targets. Although the screenplay by renowned satirist Terry Southern and Berlin Stories scribe Christopher Isherwood is based on a novel by Evelyn Waugh (of “Brideshead Revisited” fame), it owes just as much to “The American Way of Death,” Jessica Mitford’s nonfiction exposé published only two years prior. The Loved One has much to say about how obsessions with money, class, and God-given righteousness find their way into our view of the afterlife. In particular, the film’s Whispering Glades cemetery is a dead ringer for the real Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, complete with its courts of statuary, well-manicured gardens, and objectification of beauty in remembrance.

The problem with death, as The Loved One sees it, is the living. They’re always making it about them somehow. When renowned artist Francis Hinsley (a woefully dignified Gielgud) hangs himself after being summarily dismissed by a Hollywood studio after decades of service, his fellow British expatriates insist on a grand ceremony, not just to honor the dead but to highlight their own superiority to the land in which they’ve settled. (Notably, we learn that the cemetery is off-limits to Blacks and Jews, because even in the Great Beyond, there’s always someone to look down on.) The mortuary’s employees are committed to a theme park’s sense of last rites, with all the young women dressed in identical black lace shifts and veils. The sales associates (including one played by Liberace, in perhaps the most understated moment of his entire life) upsell every element, including caskets and mourning attire. The embalmer-in-chief Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE LOVED ONE (1965) →