Death Becomes Her
With 1994’s Forrest Gump, Robert Zemeckis finally succumbed to the primary weakness of his Socrates, Steven Spielberg: trying to cleanse himself in the waters of dramatic absolution, falsely presuming that historical allusion and narrative heft side-winds into genuine complexity. A real artist – something Zemeckis had been, however intermittently, for the decade until that point – knows that art comes in all forms, nimble and dexterous or heavy and tortured. Craft in any form inspires depth; depth doesn’t have to be appended onto a film like a sledgehammer impacting the piece with the self-serious melodrama of a Schindler’s List or a Forrest Gump. Continue reading
Shadow of a Doubt
Carnival of Souls should have befallen a watery grave decades ago, and yet, like its inveterate crash zooms, or the nagging figments of a nightmare or a half-imagined shard of memory, it lodges itself somewhere in the dankest, most indecipherable thickets of the mind. Who knows where it is stored precisely. Probably in the muddy, constantly-slipping-away but always-haunting-you halls next to Eraserhead and you parent’s wedding videos, a duality that very much encompasses the film’s bemusing, off-off-Broadway existence. 
The historical prestige genre, entombed in its ever-lasting leisure, ain’t got nothing on Ken Russell’s The Devils. A power-mad concoction of scorching lecherousness and sacrilegious, anti-social visual brio, it’s a torrid affair, but love is nonetheless the only applicable word for anyone smitten with Russell’s peculiar brand of rattled-with-fever historical spasms. Few directors have ever barreled so gleefully into the dankest regions of their own inner mental faculties with such a cavorting brand of heretical dissidence, a defiance to not only social propriety but filmmaking rule of thumb. Fitting for a work about witches, Russell’s inimitable work feels like cackling witchcraft conjured out of nowhere but his own devilishness. 
Ray lived by night, Godard left us breathless, Penn ignited the New Wave, Altman turned the camera back on thieves like us, and Malick informed us that lands, despite being the crux of majesty in the world, were indeed bad, all prismatically glimpsed from the confines of the same essential story of lovers on the run from the law. Before all of them, though, a German expat, death and national turmoil lingering in his mind and social opprobrium hot on his tongue, took the same story and welcomed it as an opportunity to remind us that innocence, once drained, has no life left to give. A rejoinder to the torrential downpour of Nazism absconding with the ostensible innocence of his old home and a riposte to the dislocation of Depression-era life in his new home (two paths that would cross circa 1939), You Only Live Once sparkles with director Fritz Lang’s inveterate directorial gloaming. It isn’t the destruction-maestro at his most malevolently implacable (M could never be topped). But this mostly unknown film today not only tackled present-day social schism with fractured, sharded filmmaking but also, arguably, served as Lang’s most explicit premonition of the genre he would become most famous for: the noir. 
Fritz Lang’s post-Metropolis rejoinder to his own maximalist desecration of modern German society is a fanciful, feisty kaleidoscope of Berlin bedlam and Weimar-era hedonism untethered from the astringent social critique of Lang’s Mabuse pictures. While Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays a monomaniacal mastermind of pandemonium here, as he did in Dr. Mabuse from six years before, this erratic, erotic, orgiastic display of Lang’s bravura skill shoeshines German Expressionism with pumped-up serial and rubs itself down in a torrid love affair with presentation itself. If the Mabuse films secretly smuggled in a critique of German society, Spies is, relatively speaking, more of a love letter to the temporal high of monomania, even if it is a note written with a poisoned pen. Certainly, Lang was well aware of the horrors of unfettered ’20s capitalism in Berlin and the imminent rise of the Nazi party – three years later, he would direct the ultimate cinematic statement on Nazism without even mentioning the word. But, just this once, and until its startling and corrosive finale, Lang let his monocle down in one of the ultimate cinematic odes to filmmaking as toybox more than toolbox. 
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. 
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. 
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. 
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. 
The Long Take 