Whatever may or may not be true about the demise of the New Hollywood in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the story practically writes itself, and it certainly helps spice up the films. Michael Cimino’s oneiric Heaven’s Gate, Francis Ford Coppola’s dementedly luxuriant Apocalypse Now and his heartfelt, slovenly One from the Heart, and, of course Robert Altman’s own Quintet and Popeye all went grossly over-budget and wear their exaggerated passions on their sleeves. But, unlike the others, Popeye was nominally intended as populist entertainment! And it is as thoroughly scatter-brained and bedeviling and dumbfounding as any last one of them, a truly suis generis slice of creative hack-work, as perplexing as the crystal Mrs. Miller looks at, searching for an impossible answer to America’s riddles at the end of Altman’s masterpiece McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Much like Coppola’s One from the Heart, it is fundamentally about Great Depression popular cultural, and like One form the Heart, it is absolutely deranged. As with Coppola’s film, it went colossally over-budget producing a set that it could not possibly justify (and yet does!) that was constructed, in Altman’s case, on location seemingly with the intent of evoking a soundstage. Or to serve as Altman’s backdrop for a production-length coke party. From Shelley Duvall’s note-perfect, almost impossibly serendipitous performance as Olive Oyl, to Robin William’s dangerously committed, deliberately alienating turn as the titular outsider who genuinely seems to occupy a different world from everyone else in the film – and because the film is so thoroughly estranging, therefore the same world – this is an absolutely uncompromising dispatch from another cinematic world. It is so feverishly committed to its own disturbed wavelength that it feels like it could have been directed by John Boorman, although probably without the Sean Connery nut-slings.

Still, it’s an Altman film, through and through. Many of Altman’s films were, in one way or another, a dissection of how America related to its own visual and aural iconography, finding (at times accidental) truth in fiction. Popeye, at the time chastised as Altman selling out to the pop cultural lexicon he so often dissected, explicitly tackles a recycled consumer property by name, and under the belly of the Hollywood studio system. Opening on a shot of the animated Popeye, black-and-white, speaking directly to the camera, informing us that he’s “in the wrong movie,” the film smash-cuts to a stormy seaside town as “A Robert Altman Film” appears overhead, usurping the titular character’s authority with a decidedly different breed of central figure. Popeye initiates itself by dissociating itself from the fiction audiences might expect, already foregrounding disharmony and hinting at the difficulty, even the incomprehensibility and delirious idiocy, of making a live-action adaptation of E.C. Segar’s comic franchise and the Fleischer Studios animated cartoons at the end of the 1970s. The introduction is a direct descendant of Altman’s Brewster McCloud, where the iconographic MGM lion roars with the audio replaced by René Auberjonois’s “I forgot the opening line,” another confrontational fiction-breaking abnormality and a promise on Altman’s behalf that the story we expect has been distorted and defanged.

Rumble Fish is plainly the product of a director who had been bruised and humbled. After producing at least four genuine cinematic classics during the 1970s, the near-death experience of making Apocalypse Now, an exercise in cinematic self-flagellation that wanted nothing less than to both channel and contest the very warp and woof of the world,did nothing to quiet Coppola’s ego, which went on to just barely stabilize the remarkable, unfeasible, impossible flop One from the Heart. Reigned in but not daunted, Coppola looked to the aspirations and dreams of his children to make a pair of S.E. Hinton adaptation The Outsiders, which certainly conjured images of his own youthful days. The evocative but nonetheless straightforward The Outsiders was Coppola on guard, proof that he could – for the moment – play ball. But Rumble Fish, his second Hinton adaptation in the span of a few months, was something else entirely. Forced to domesticate himself, to play house with the corporations, he became a termite, gnawing away at the wood from the inside. Working as a director-for-hire turned into a secret, sideways passion project, a buckling of the man’s Ahab-like desire to conquer the cinematic machine becoming a quieter rebellion, a tacit conspiracy with the machine itself. Rumble Fish reaffirms that art, even swallowed by the very belly of the beast it once tried to destroy, cannot be killed.

The famous opening of Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ visualizes auteurism – the notion that a director is an Olympian artist singularly responsible for their film – as a psychic and cosmic trap, a road to nowhere as everyone around watches you suffocate. They’re immobile, unhelpful figures in a dreamlike haze trapped in the Gorgon’s glare. Of course, as the film finally reminds us, if Medusa is a metaphor for the world’s horrors (as Siegfried Krakauer famously notes in his 1960 text Theory of Film, just a few years before Fellini’s film) and art is Perseus’s shield allowing us to glimpse the horror and move beyond it. But Fellini insists that art itself can also immobilize. In 8 ½, it is the director himself who won’t let the world and its people move. They can’t help him because he isn’t receptive to their energies. That the film itself amounts to both a validation and an excoriation of its own inability to heed those energies is, depending on your view, its central failing or its greatest success. 8 ½ is a masterful work, no doubt, but it’s also a grand-standing testament to artistic mastery as a form of artistic limitation. Personal responses may vary. 

The auteur in question is Guido Anselmi (Marcelo Mastroianni), who we meet in the middle of a bout of director’s block on a film that has already had a rocket-ship of money poured into it, but has no screenplay. Guido is both an aspirational portrait of a director as ringmaster and channeler of the world’s energies and a tacit admission of guilt on Fellini’s part. He remains too caught up in his own ego to, as it were, release, too lost in his thoughts to let the film really feel. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to make us spend 140 minutes, and to stake your directorial reputation, on an elaborate metaphor for erectile dysfunction.

At the beginning of Head, Monkees’ drummer Micky Dolenz runs away from a legion of fans and dives off a bridge into a body of water. If this is too-obviously following in the footsteps of its prankish predecessor, A Hard Day’s Night, where the Beatles suffered a similar crowd-sourced fate, it also blows it to smithereens. Rather than canonizing the ‘60s, Head offers a comeuppance, jumps into the deep end of the next decade, dissolving into an aqueous, collective, diffuse space called the early ‘70s.

 Soon enough, the band performs the phenomenal, acid-stained rocker “Circle Sky,” a mission statement of the band’s newly serious attitude toward their music that ultimately unweaves itself in the very act of coming into being. If the song promises progress, a band achieving new heights of self-worth and self-ownership, the lyrics offer a vision of eternal return that culminates in fans rushing the stage only for the band to be crumble as mannequins, material constructs of composite parts, all image and no flesh. Rather than personal authenticity, the film explodes into gleeful mediation, a promise that ostensible freedom only masks new modes of control, that genuine originality is only one more mask. Head marked the band announcing their recovery of their own catalogue as an exercise in self-becoming, and in doing so they paradoxically destroy themselves. We’re off to the race in the opening minutes, in other words, but we’re also lost in an abyss. In the band’s go-for-broke stylistic tour-de-force, they go beyond playful monkeying around and instead monkey wrench the nuts and bolts of the machine that made them.

Charlie Chaplin was one of Hollywood’s earliest and largest stars, a filmmaking polymath who performed, directed, composed, produced, and wrote all of his films, a one-man brand who in Modern Times subjects himself to a possibly fatal question: whether he can escape being branded by the hot iron of capital. A British socialist who grew increasingly frustrated with American capitalism and Hollywood business practices throughout his career, he eventually left Hollywood and returned to his native England. Like many silent filmmakers, many of his earlier films explore questions of new technology and skeptically arouse the possibilities of modernization, thinking-through the relationship between new technological forms – both industrial and cinematic – and asking how one navigates modernity. Of course, many of his anxieties about industrial technology were also motivated by his own issues and frustrations with the rapidly growing Hollywood industry, exposing parallels between industry on-screen and industry in Hollywood that seem more prevalent in Modern Times than in any Chaplin film before or since. This is the film in which the personal will displayed in The Kid – where his Tramp character strategically manipulated capitalist products for new purposes with his mental ingenuity – seems to have been finally overpowered by capitalism’s singular ability to manipulate his body as the ultimate tool to its own ends.

Chaplin’s most famous character – the Tramp – was easily identifiable to most Americans, brandishing his top-hat and cane and what would be called the Chaplin mustache. The style of his earlier films tended to emphasize the homeless Tramp as an unmoored figure who had no place in society and had to creatively adapt to survive, refashioning everyday objects from their normal purposes in the swirling, fluctuating world of modern capitalism where, as Karl Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air”. His most famous silent comic rival Buster Keaton tended to fashion his films as linear trajectories, placing his character on train-tracks, moving forward on the way to modernity – locomotives shooting into a technological future – depicting characters who struggled to control these modern-day technologies. Keaton fashioned comic parodies of success narratives in the American tradition, mocking the idea of individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Chaplin’s Tramp, comparatively, has no bootstraps, and as an iconic vision of working-class resourcefulness, did not traverse space linearly or pull himself up; his comic movement was much more unstable, much more slippery, much more uncertain. He fashions capitalism as something which requires comic creativity to survive. This is why Chaplin’s definitive visual symbol is the circle, his characters frequently forced to run around and around with no end, suggesting that capitalism was not a pathway toward future opportunity but a centrifugal and chaotic uncertainty. Continue reading →

Until 2007 when they unchained No Country for Old Men on unwitting audiences, Blood Simple was the black sheep of the Coen Brothers family. Their second feature Raising Arizona is, on the surface, its diametric opposite, a harried, maniacal fracas of disheveled lunacy and Southwestern loneliness. That latter film has, more or less, paved the way for many of the Coen Brothers’ more famous features, inaugurating their reputation as the pied pipers of modern artful screwball. But Arizona shares two central components with its predecessor despite Blood Simple’s reputation as the wild card in their canon. Tones aside, both films are mordant, fiendishly cunning grasps of dour, melancholic tragedy, both comedies-of-loneliness. And both are acid-washed images of people in need of an escape hatch. The sheer surfeit of mood aside, Blood Simple frequently feels like a premonition of the Coen Brothers’ entire career. Considering Blood Simple reveals the crestfallen image of a destitute US and stunted, criminally miscommunicating people that skulks, almost subterraneanly, within the notionally-chipper heart of many of their later films. Continue reading →

I’ve been away for so long … Here’s a holiday classic to re-inaugurate the site. 

Fifty two years later, Bill Melendez’s first television special adaptation of Charles Schultz’ Peanuts comic strip remains not only the most unshakably apprehensive, despondent animation in the entire series but the most unmediated, direct transmission from Schultz’ famously depressing comics so palpably informed by middle-age anti-nostalgia. Critics are extremely fond of slippery-slopes about “adult” Christmas cinema. They turn every minute flicker of violence or filigree of naughty language into a claim that their favored Christmas adaptation is the one that truly harbors darker thoughts about the holiday spirit lurking around the corners of its thought. They defend everything form Die Hard to Gremlins to Lethal Weapon – seemingly every circumstantially-Christmas-set film released in the ‘80s – as emblematic of a more perverse Christmas sensibility of merry travesty. This curdled, nasty sentiment that uses Christmas as a victim to beat with its own candy canes has since blossomed further into a typically cringe-inducing glut known as Christmas horror cinema and more overtly bad-tempered lumps of coal like Bad Santa. Continue reading →

An astonishingly hopeless anti-myth odorized with the stench of failure and bloodstained with the tattered remains of hope, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? twists the idiom of dance away from its usual home in restless fantasy, treating human gyrations as the small-scale reverberations of a slowly-tilting edifice ready to crumble to the ground. For Sydney Pollock’s film, dance movements are first particles of movement that exist not to fling us into a hopeful future but to topple us from below, subsuming us to the movement of our feet that seem no longer tied to our minds or our personal agencies. Our bodies are no longer uncertain adventurers carving out a bold future but frantic chasers of a dream deferred, hoping to catch up to the scraps of nothingness thrown our way. They Shoot Horses is a parable of America as a collection of lost souls wandering into dancehall marathons – brandishing hopes and dreams of Grace Kelly and Fred Astaire, or the Charleston – and succumbing to the barren, unforgiving economic destitution that undergird and consume the romantic aspirations that nominally lacquer the surface of these activities. As Pollock sees it, bone-dragging, fall-out-of-bed-and-stumble-upwards days are the only ones America had in the ‘30s, and maybe ever again. Continue reading →

The wide-ranging berth of writer-director Jia Zhangeke’s multipartite, all-across-China film, A Touch of Sin, cannot deny its impeccable eye for the specificity and complication of even the least of its individual tales. A Touch of Sin is obviously the story of a society; its nature is polyphonic, paralleling four individual tales and hinting at many others, asking us to look at a wider portrait of the world, even one in which many souls feel atomized and alienated. But, despite the length and size of this film, it never feels like a belabored or overly-grandiose obelisk, a sky-high statement that attempts to encompass all of China. Its rhythms are minute and intimate, its portrait of modern-day China finding its genesis not in any declamatory, macro-level statements but in the tight minutiae of four tales playing out on canvases of inward regret, internal dissolution, and people yearning for other selves. Continue reading →