A review apropos of nothing in particular…

The resurgence of Full Metal Jacket in Stanley Kubrick’s inimitable oeuvre arises, perhaps necessarily, in similitude with society eschewing Kubrick more generally. As the cryptic, obstreperous director wanes, his forgotten films wax. With this shift, valuable discoveries abound in a film that was largely manhandled and left for the scrap heap upon its initial release. But just because a film leaves breadcrumbs for the picking doesn’t mean it is a full feast. Valuate Full Metal Jacket, cinematic minds ought to. But it should not be sacrosanct. A simple comparison to the films released on either side of it reveals Full Metal Jacket to be a wanting trough in between two peaks of modern Western cinema. Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is an incisive film, but hardly the singular competition-vanquishing achievement that many now proclaim it to be. Continue reading →

With Triple Nine looking all vaguely neo-noirish and me having already reviewed director John Hillcoat’s notable films, I’ve decided to look at a handful of films from the last heyday of the neo-noir: the 1990s. And of course David Lynch … 

David Lynch’s Lost Highway begins with a paragon of the untrammeled cinematic id. As the pulpy, pop-fried credits announce themselves on the screen like pugnacious fighting words from the darkest bowels of Lynch’s gut, the camera hurtles on a forward trajectory to hell itself, a slithery, avant-garde David Bowie melody doing violence to the darkness of the screen before us. This is the noir expunged of propriety, excised from the surface level world and headed straight to the dustbin of male inadequacy. Continue reading →

With Triple Nine looking all vaguely neo-noirish and me having already reviewed director John Hillcoat’s notable films, I’ve decided to look at a handful of films from the last heyday of the neo-noir: the 1990s. I  wish I hadn’t already reviewed Seven, because then I could really pull a “seven, eight, nine” joke right about now. Oh well. 

Paul Thomas Anderson loves him some Robert Altman, and he damn sure wants you to know it. Boogie Nights is his Nashville, Magnolia his Short Cuts, There Will Be Blood his McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Inherent Vice his The Long Goodbye. Both directors are united in their attenuation to social ennui and their sweltering pop fantasia takes on the perils of American fiction and everyday life propelled on the back of scorching camera motions (Magnolia’s most famous sequence plays like a cocaine nightmare version of Altman’s prodigious love of zooming his camera into every nook and cranny of the Earth he could overturn). Continue reading →

With Triple Nine looking all vaguely neo-noirish and me having already reviewed director John Hillcoat’s notable films, I’ve decided to look at a handful of films from the last heyday of the neo-noir: the 1990s. Of course, because it is the 1990s, we must begin with two Nicolas Cage vehicles, as you do. 

Red Rock West

John Dahl’s minimalist Norman Rockwell fetish is nourished with a gleefully off-hand, almost accidental energy in the duplicitous Red Rock West, a film that stars Nicolas Cage, Lara Flynn Boyle, and Dennis Hopper and fittingly recalls by turn the giddy Americana of Raising Arizona, the scathing post-modernism of Twin Peaks, and the anti-social inside-out small-town throat-grab of Blue Velvet.

When Cage’s character saunters into a Wyoming town in search of a job that just won’t coalesce, fortune turns against him and the decrepit rot and turpitude of rural American bite back. After all, in the type of town where everyone knows everyone, you can’t really hide. In this perverted Western landscape, the very idea of “heading out West” is upended and downtuned, besieged by more than a modicum of deceit and turmoil chiffonading the American Dream into enough mincemeat to fill Monument Valley itself. For a sepulcher to forgotten dreams, it’s a hoot, and the cemetery of a forest that engulfs the town of Red Rock at night ain’t half bad either.

Admittedly, Dahl doesn’t strike a chord as a natural born genius, but he’s a sharp enough tack and a journeyman of palpable suspense and playful subtext, most notably when he undoes the largesse-laden Texas drawl of Cage’s character at the seams. This laconic, pulpy film coils like a writhing king snake but it manages to accrue nervous energy without the accompanying nosebleed of solemnity or self-imposed meaning. In fact, Dahl’s wry comedic edge delights in letting us know how precipitous the film is, how rough-around-the-edges its denim-clad drifter of a yarn may be; it’s as if it’s being constructed before our very noses. Rather archly, it contorts the noir tradition of chance begetting bad habits by finding the light for Cage’s character in chance itself. Luck enjoins the story into motion, and luck concludes it. Cage is just wandering through, writing notes that no one believes and sliding into easy lies that everyone does.

Score: 8/10

Kiss of Death

One of the strangest films to ever appear at the Cannes film festival, Kiss of Death is a neo-noir that isn’t quite dressed to kill, but it at least has one pant-leg on, even when it’s tripping over it. Lead man David Caruso is a wet blanket, Helen Hunt is waddling around in neutral, and the screenplay is less a movie than a murderer’s row of fascinating scenes loosely tethered together in the same room. But, accident or not, Kiss of Death stumbles into its fair share of oddball menace and mendacity.

Barbet Schroeder is a capable stylist but no auteur, and viewed through the lens of 1995 with heavy-hitters like Seven, Devil in a Blue Dress, and Fargo rattling or skulking into theaters on either side of it, Kiss of Death definitely feels outclassed amidst the competition. But with vociferous neo-noirs less thick-on-the-ground these days, one can appreciate Kiss of Death’s more modest pleasures, some of which relate to Schroeder’s agreeably strangulating tone and acrid arctic blue chills. The film doesn’t really coagulate the neo-noir atmosphere it so clearly pines for; the bizarrely over-lit hues accrue a pop-fried thriller sensibility instead, which is somewhere between a lateral trade and a slight step-down. Puckering up the piece with zest and zing are molotov cocktails hurled by a motor-mouthed Michael Rapaport, a slithering Stanley Tucci, and a weathered but hectoring Samuel Jackson. There’s a whole menagerie of incandescent, peppery energy twirling around the edges here.

Plus, Kiss of Death boasts an injection by an inspiringly cocaine-addled Nicolas Cage on the eve of winning an Oscar and diving headfirst into leading man status that would quickly turn his entire career into a toxic cloud of vacillating insufferable and endearing inanity of the first order. Excise Cage’s scenes for your own film a you can see a twinkle in Werner Herzog’s eye, fulfilled a decade and a half later with the vastly underrated Bad Lieutenant sequel.

Score: 6/10

Having finally caught up with Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth, I decided to take a look at the cinematic version it owes itself most readily to. 

The appeal of Roman Polanski’s earliest films is much the same appeal of Emily Dickinson’s lust-stabbed poetry: sheer, giddy brokenness. Like Dickinson’s disturbed capriciousness and orgasmic hyphens that sever the natural rhythm and flow of normal meter and sane minds, Roman Polanski’s early films come to us spastically, errantly strewn about as bits and morsels and shattered carcasses stricken across the land. The corrective tissues appear almost nonexistent, the cartilage lost to time and unstitched. His early films are cinema without forebears, with ’70s grotto smashed into the theatrical slabs of pre-modern cinema Polanski adored quietly but no less vociferously than the haute couture modernism en vogue during his era. Watching Cul-de-Sac or Knife in the Water is like watching an uneasy mind of clamorously clashing style and unfixed pre, post, and midsexual urges vacillating all about over the canvas without inhibition. Continue reading →

With the release of The Witch imminent, let us look back at another famous horror film to rely on witches, however indirectly, to go bump in the night.

Cutting to the chase: Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski’s cinematic breakthrough into the limelight, isn’t a patch on three of his four prior films. In this 1968 effort, his American debut, absent is the wire-suspension tension of Knife in the Water and Repulsion or the beguiling black comic stylings of Cul-de-sac, both of which have been replaced with a slowly simmering psychosexual milieu of modern New York malaise and maladjusted, endlessly percolating desolation. For the most part, the trade is a lateral one rather than a vertiginous rise or a demonic fall, but a little flab cakes in around the middle of this lengthy film, making it somewhat lesser than any of Polanski’s previous films. At some point, letting us bask in the distress and withheld-desire sours into not trusting the audience to come to terms with the screenplay’s layered  paranoia and its commentary on the brutalistic power dynamics of gender in the modern era. In other words, the film spends a little too much time underlining its themes.  Continue reading →

With the imminent release of The Witch upon us, let us look back at another famous movie with a villainous witch.

Probably no film has been loved and embraced by humankind more than The Wizard of Oz, but something about actually discussing the film almost feels heretical in an environment where blind belief in its charms has encumbered any and all serious consideration of the film as art. That’s not entirely a negative; a magisterial work of childlike ambition like the 1939 Wizard seems to tap into a font of innocent emotion with its blaring cacophony of primary-colors and elegantly simple, almost subconscious color contrasts. So much does the film take us beyond the pale of adulthood that it feels disingenuous to deny its transportative effect that functions on an almost pre-cognitive level.

Continue reading →

With the release of Hail, Caesar!, a look back on some of the Coens’ previous comedies is in order. 

Hot on the heels of their coming-of-age with Fargo, the Coen Brothers’ follow-up The Big Lebowski strides along on its own whims like an earned, lackadaisical victory lap more than another full-throttle day at the races. Yet the primarily offhand, ramshackle discombobulation of the episodic narrative – always threatening to run off the hinges and yet divining its own musings on chaos and order that never fall off the rails – becomes a layered glimpse into the sturm and drang of the Coens’ cinematic worldview. Dominated by dastardly, disgruntled otherworldly forces, the Coens delight in chiffonading those who harbor delusions of grandeur, dousing them with the fires of unthinking, all-seeing cosmic disregard. The dulcet tones of Sam Elliott which begin the film suggest a fable, as so many of the Coens’ films do, and in this case, The Big Lebowski is a fable about the entropy lurking within the default modes of polite society. Continue reading →

With the release of Hail, Caesar!, a look back on some of the Coens’ previous comedies is in order. 

Had the Coen Brothers not entered into the directorial world with the sublimely unremitting, cold-blooded grit and sinew of the Southern blood hound Blood Simple, it would be an easy gesture to write their sophomore feature Raising Arizona off as a sloppy-seconds slump of easy-going Americana by an adolescent, nascent talent still waiting to fill in its own shoes. It is true that better things would await the world’s favorite two-headed director within a few short years; Raising Arizona has none of the snidely, combustible genre exegesis of Miller’s Crossing or the frenzied philosophizing of Barton Fink. In light of the hurtling digressions of the films surrounding it, Raising Arizona’s reputation as the red-headed step child of the pre-2000 Coen canon seems justified. Continue reading →