The incorporeal spirit of his dueling godfathers, Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, haunt Clint Eastwood’s second directorial effort, which also invites the tenebrous psychosis of Eastwood’s debut Play Misty for Me to the party. From Leone, Eastwood attunes to the primordial, baroque expanse of the Western as a dreamscape or an amoral vetting ground rather than a physical place. As a counterbalance, Eastwood matches the florid poetry of Leone to Siegel’s terse brutality to concoct a Western as comfortable with surreptitiously shooting you in the back as it is with orchestrating the social theater of the high noon showdown. Continue reading →

Deliverance is driven by nihilistic impulses that subsume all sense of morality under the unremitting decay of primal, masculine gruesomeness. The story of four Atlanta businessmen trapped and hunted in rural Northern Georgia, John Boorman’s tone poem to nature as implacable object abstains from ever empathizing with the four men. Excepting Ronny Cox’s Drew, the only primary player who even considers the value of rural natives in an eerie yet oddly touching banjo duel, by far the most famous scene from the film to this day, none of the characters fare well as moral specimens. Arriving in a village hewn out of the earth and continually threatened by it, Ned Beatty’s Bobby bellows about the place, and when redressed for potentially annoying the people of the town, his retort, “People?”, suggests his ignorance about the location he now inhabits. Continue reading →

It’s hard to deny that a palpable misogyny suffuses The Brood, and director David Cronenberg’s post-divorce fractured attitude toward main character Nola (Samantha Egger) does malignantly spread throughout the film. But as the nexus between Cronenberg’s bodily, corporeal grindhouse films from the ’70s and his more cerebral psychoanalytic studies, The Brood is a more troubled affair. For one, this tale of marital fallout is calibrated for a tenebrous blamelessness, with Cronenberg’s austere style vacillating between perspectives to reform our preconceptions of which parent is truly justified in this atomic deconstruction of the essentially self-sabotaging nature of the nuclear family. Continue reading →

It’s a double-edged sword that Rebel Without a Cause is simultaneously the raison d’ etre for many a cinephile’s knowledge of director Nicholas Ray at all, and that it is, simultaneously, a black hole suffocating energy and consideration from Ray’s cinematic canon elsewhere. Not to mention, for most people, the name associated with Rebel is not Ray, the underdog of American film in the ’50s and perhaps the missing link between the classical Hollywood melodrama and the angry young hooligans like Godard and Cassavetes of the ’60s. Instead, the claim to fame of Rebel is the hot-headed bundle of nerves that was James Dean, arguably the pop culture icon of the ’50s as well as an embodiment of the very spirit Nicholas Ray epitomized as a filmmaker: pulpy but passionate, lean but expressively sensitive, expressionistic but timid, and above all trembling with the unspeakable, implacable throb of constantly spinning out of control. Continue reading →

Proposed to producers as a hippie-dippie psychedelic fallout shelter for the grooving ’60s to escape to in case of mass assault by the impending cynicism of the ’70s, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s vituperative Performance is, instead, a sulfurous and fluorescent molotov cocktail thrown straight into the decade-long party the ’60s had been having with itself. Announcing itself with the foreboding funk of a hearse-like car careening across the countryside, the cryptic seizure of the film’s editing then immediately interjects with an explicit sexual tryst that sours into a fiery throttling match between fleshy shapes that soon enough barely even resemble the human form. We’re a minute in and we already cower in fear for the sadomasochistic holocaust the co-directors are about to unfurl upon us. Continue reading →

Oliver Stone’s cinema is always at its best when it is most explicitly akin to the art form it most closely mimics: propaganda. That’s not a put-down; all cinema is subjective, and while most films strive for the diaphanous lie of objectivity, a live-wire polemical of spitfire bias isn’t something to shun. Objectivity, anyway, is often a pacifying gesture for films without an authorial personality or a humbling vision of their own camera’s perspective – a clinical, balanced approach only squares off the edges of the audience-camera dialectic and hides the essence of all cinema as a perspective, a vision, an embodiment of an idea or a view. Objectivity is nothing more than a cemetery where films without a pulse, without an identity of their own, go to lay their heads down to rest.

Stone’s style isn’t unique, but it is a boldface and brio-filled reflection of a cocaine-addled decade that boldly foregrounds the instability of its own aesthetic, one equal parts Pontecorvo indignation and Peckinpah insolence. Released in the same year as Stone’s career-making in-the-trenches Platoon, the grotto of Salvador is a superior film through and through. While Platoon slightly pacified its deranged anger with baroque visual gestures out of a byzantine opera more than the heart of darkness swamps of Southeast Asia, Salvador keeps things low-to-the-ground. If Platoon was equal parts Aerosmith-grit and Boston-histrionics, Salvador is the snarling Iggy-Pop-fronting-Stooges of war pictures. Continue reading →

Watership Down begins with an iridescent slab of primal, irradiated cartoon psychosis, a deceptively primitive work of mythological animation as welcome in the Disney canon as it would be adorning Ancient Greek pottery. Regaling us with the oil-and-syrup concoction that is the mythological fable of rabbit-kind, we’re informed how the fecund species was blessed with fleet feet and cursed with a menagerie of predators. The simultaneously timid and trepidatious imagery of crayon-infused characters backed by an illuminated white hell evokes a cautionary tale most bold. Animation in 1978 was at something of a nadir as up-and-comers were rabidly chasing down the cadaverous corpse of Disney and looking to impose new styles all their own, and in this light the intro of Watership Down feels particularly prescient. Watching the introduction of Watership Down, it’s as if the film chose to begin with a despairing version of the classical American cartoon style – all curvaceous, simple lines and expressively elegant crayon-scrawl – to pay homage to the old before casting about with the new. Continue reading →

Flesh for Frankenstein

Written and directed by Paul Morrissey with Andy Warhol’s usual protean aesthetics, warping from Gothic decay to pop-art satire in the span of seconds, Flesh for Frankenstein is an altogether bedeviling concoction. With a screenplay that unearths the corpse of Mary Shelley only to desecrate (and defecate) all over it (the film received uncredited help from Tonino Guerra, on sabbatical from writing films for Antonioni and Fellini of all people), the film makes Hammer Horror, cascading into blissful nothingness around this time, look positively jejune by comparison. It’s all sorts of lunacy as a script and even more slithering and content to make mincemeat out of social mores as a visual product. It’s no surprise that it turned Warhol into a pariah of sorts – it has no interest in conforming to social propriety – but it remains a relative highlight of his short but intoxicatingly warped career as a producer of verboten feature films. Continue reading →

Writer-director Joe Dante is pop culture dead weight today, but in the mid ’80s he was the zeitgeist. A progenitor to the highfalutin sub-horror irony of Scream and a cornucopia of too-scared-to-admit-they-are-horror films in the intensely glib world of ’00s horror, Dante’s brand of irony was much less prone to the fraudulence of incessant hedging. His earliest films, Piranha and The Howling, upend horror tradition without fecklessly resorting to ingratiating pleadings of blasé, sycophantic self-superiority. They rib and tickle, but they’re also honest-to-god horror films, as marinated in tenebrous cinematography and bone-rattling sound as any films of their time. They tease us, but they do not trick us: they mean what they say, and they bite.  Continue reading →

Blazing Saddles

The more time that passes by and the more the comic world is besieged by laughter of both more incisive and more vulgar textures, the more that Mel Brooks’ brand of comedy seems like a product of a bygone era. Even its maladroit moments (the malodorous flatulence scene in the otherwise shockingly pointed miscreant that is Brooks’ best film Blazing Saddles) feel like innocuous nuggets of convivial atmosphere, currents from Mel Brooks’ sheer need to satiate his funny bone, and ours. The Borscht Beltier segments are as hokey and antiquated today as many of the establishment beacons Brooks was rebelling against. But Brooks is a munificent man, and his spirit shines through. His films amuse almost unilaterally on the back of the aching grin you can feel on Brooks’ face in every shot and with every line, or hook, or sinker. But Blazing Saddles is probably the only Brooks film that does more than amuse, the only one that doesn’t merely feel like Brooks pleasing himself. Saddles cuts right to the heart of an American genre, reflecting not simply a caricature of genre but a total collapse of it.  Continue reading →