With Ghostbusters ubiquitous in the news over the past week, a review of the original film is in order…
Thirty two years on, the most fascinating elements of Ghostbusters are its stretch marks, the product of capricious juxtapositions between gluttonous, outre blockbuster horror and laconic, taciturn, shaggy-dog comedy. It’s easy to remember the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, a slice of gleeful, madcap absurdism wanting for graham cracker to contain it. But in Ghostbusters, bursts of special effects function as puckered-up contrasts and accoutrements rather than a skeletal framework, as is the fundamental failing of most modern blockbuster comedies. In actuality, Ghostbusters has an inveterate proclivity for jarring tonal vacillation, bumbling from gravid to gallows, from garrulous to stolid. It’s a little bit broken, as a matter of fact. But the ramshackle, barely strapped-together nature of the screenplay by stars Harold Ramis and Dan Akroyd inspires endearment rather than enmity. While so many blockbusters settle into a groove and plant their feet in the ground, Ghostbusters is always fortuitously screwing with us, largely because it’s screwing with itself. Continue reading
Reviewing Goodbye to Language made me realize how criminal it was that I had never, in almost two years of blogging, reviewed a film from perhaps the most important director of the past sixty years. What was I doing with my life?
Reviewing Goodbye to Language made me realize how criminal it was that I had never, in almost two years of blogging, reviewed a film from perhaps the most important director of the past sixty years. What was I doing with my life?
Reviewing Goodbye to Language made me realize how criminal it was that I had never, in almost two years of blogging, reviewed a film from perhaps the most important director of the past sixty years. What was I doing with my life?
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. 
Although they dip into a different well of primal emotion and reflexive response, the best horror films are of a kind with the greatest masterpieces in any genre. At the risk of lacking caginess, all are defined by a duality: first, content is sublimated into the higher level of form and style, and secondly, expression and meaning is only tentatively tied to the nominal diegesis of the narrative. So the greatest horror film of the 1930s, The Bride of Frankenstein, relies on theatrical gesticulations of tone to express notions of disarmingly innocent outsider desire struggling to come to terms with a world suddenly impressing itself onto the mind (in doing so, moving far beyond the more obvious questions of homosexual impulse as one facet of desire and outsider status). 
Flesh for Frankenstein
Bob Rafelson’s television career came to a head with 1968 Head, a wonderfully parentless concoction of off-kilter artifice and cinema verite absurdity from the halcyon days of the New Hollywood and the waning post-mortem of the psychedelic ’60s. Pitched at the intersection of the two decades, Head is a blissful concoction of hyperactive mania belying serious, doleful interrogation, a film that uses avant-garde channel-surfing as a way to embody the existential homelessness of life at the end of the 1960s. Like the apocalyptic fallout from a decade-long acid trip, its anti-continuity editing mechanics pushed the decade’s assertion of living for the moment to consternated heights where any human ability to consider the future was laughed at by the bedlam of a world where simple notions of time and place were rapidly unwinding in front of America’s eyes. Bob Rafelson’s introduction to the film world, still his secret weapon and best film, suggests the death spasm of hippie culture keel-hauled into psychotropic madness. 
The 1980s were like forced, unpaid indefinite leave for the more challenging American directors to emerge out of the 1970s New Hollywood Cinema. Martin Scorsese mostly survived the war on adult-minded cinema. Terrence Malick just up and left, emerging at the tail end of the more independent ’90s in a nominally less hostile climate to his kind. One of the most productive casualties of the ’80s was Robert Altman, a director who pumped out smaller-scale projects like a worker-ant throughout the decade, even if few of them were buttressed by critical or commercial support. 1992’s The Player, a surprising and ceremonious return to commercial and critical success for Altman, was a ribald, scabrous affair but hardly a darling work of formalism to match any number of films Altman directed during the ’70s. Notable though that film may be, its most lasting and important achievement is more utilitarian: it brought Altman back from the nebulous ether, and afforded him the clout to make the far more intellectually provocative, cinematically daring Short Cuts. 
The Long Take 