Two horror masterclasses from 1963 on Midnight Screenings.
At the apex of his commercial and artistic powers in 1963, Alfred Hitchcock was a cinematic god with a devil’s temper and an imp’s sense of cackling humor, both of which are fastened ruthlessly to The Birds. No other director could have masterminded the insurrectionist Psycho and survived on the A-list, but even Psycho, released three years before The Birds, had its condolences to the audience, markers of forgiveness that The Birds has no earthly investment in.
Let’s pair it with the otherwise rambunctious Psycho for contraposition and awareness of Hitch’s renewed confidence in The Birds. The final scene of Pyscho, a superior film overall, is ice water on the film’s lusty, libidinal fire, thawing everything out before our eyes by pushing his inexplicable film through the throngs of explication in a final, miserable scene. The greasy sense of sweat-soaked temptation, the morbid shattered-psyche suggestion of the images, and the jittery, frayed spark of the brutal filmmaking and psychosexual implication unravel before our eyes in the great cinematic cop-out ending, where Hitch dredges up a psychiatrist to explain away the terror of male desire and modernist aimlessness by diagnosing it with a name. The ever droll The Birds, however, has no salve for its fatalistic rapture. It saunters in like a volcano ready to erupt, hangs around, and although you may leave, this mordant thresher disfiguring the human species isn’t about to gift us an explanation or an excuse for itself. This late in his career, Hitch didn’t need one. Continue reading
Two horror masterclasses from 1963 on Midnight Screenings.
The 1955 short story Body Snatchers, by Jack Finney, supports a general reading of society but not an iron-clad exegesis. It plays out in broad strokes, not particularities or specificities. This isn’t a problem; the endless adaptability of the original text’s vagueness is part and parcel with its malleability. Always retaining blank spaces in the fable-like texture in order to cull any version a director or writer wants or any meaning a time period beckons, that vagueness demands to be filled with contemporary detail that stimulates an understanding of that adaptations’ place in the world. The text by Jack Finney is a placeholder, an easel to be massaged into a filmmaker’s, and a time period’s, own fresco. 
Of the cultural royalty ‘80s comedies handed down like comfortable, used clothing over the decades, not even Ghostbusters can go toe to toe with The Blues Brothers’ brand of schizophrenia. The defining feature of Ghostbusters, indeed the source of its disenchanted, abrasive energy, was copied, and somewhat reduced, almost wholesale from the template discovered by The Blues Brothers: boisterous Big Cinema energy fragmented by a nonchalant, almost skeletal cast vividly underplaying the lunacy around them so that they either seem hostile to the film they’re in (in Bill Murray’s case) or vaguely indifferent to the shenanigans around them. That astringent concoction of insoluble elements – bellicose bravura sequences and wizened anti-comedy – stimulated something akin to characters viewing the sudden-onset entropy of the Tex Avery cartoon logic around them as just another part of the day. With all due respect to that epochal 1984 blockbuster required reading though, The Blues Brothers probably introduced the style (although that’s questionable), but it undeniably perfected it. 
Camp is a gas pedal for a gas of a film, but it doesn’t go the philosophical distance to explaining Mommie Dearest, a sincere expression of the personal trauma of a performative lifestyle refracted through a film where performance and life are visually and tonally so inextricably intertwined that cop-out compartments like camp and drama only continue to falsify dichotomies where they ought not exist. Is this adaptation of Christina Crawford’s tell-all of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother, Hollywood mega-star Joan Crawford, actually campy? Only if we consider camp as drama in the first place, not as a leper to be embraced only through the lens of irony but as a style that simultaneously acclimatizes us to its own lenses and resigns others, namely the naturalist lens, to the garbage heap. 
A sidewinding chase of sorts is the initial diagnosis in Hell or High Water, but Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay simmers everything way down with an atmosphere of squalid, ruined disenchantment. Two bank robbers – Toby (Chris Pine) and brother Tanner (Ben Foster) – are on the warpath, and Marshall Marcus (Jeff Bridges) is in pursuit. But Sheridan and director David MacKenzie are anything but acolytes of the placeless rip-roaring we might expect. When the film opens, we’re expecting a coiled king snake, and for a little while we’re on a locomotive to the inferno suggested by Sheridan’s previous screenplay for Sicario. But look again and the snake is actually roughened snakeskin, a bitter remnant of a venomous past life orphaned on the roadside, and if the train passes by too fast, we’ll gloss over the faded glory of that emblem of a once-living soul. 
Horror is, on balance, too often event without mood, murder without mayhem, slashing bodies without slashing the cinematic edifice, and In the Mouth of Madness’ round dismissal upon release in 1995 suggests only that audiences and even critics aren’t always ready for a film that prefers the latter(s) over the former(s). The “murders” in this film are largely structural, formal, visual rather than diegetic to the narrative. Bodies don’t fling from hooks or fall from trees; the film’s victims are, instead, classical Hollywood constructs like continuity editing and linear narrative, both ideologies the film disposes in the garbage on its path to visual pandemonium. 
The Coen Brothers embark to, and dust off, their old lighthouses with Burn After Reading, and they shine a flickering light flickeringly. By which I mean the film and the characters are flickering lights, prone to momentary inanity and batty flights of self-destroying fancy, and that the film itself is only capable of glimmers of mastery in channeling its own insanity and evoking the modern-day screwball the two-headed director so effortlessly massaged earlier in their career. That, and the film is frankly blinded ever so slightly by the fluorescent rays of No Country For Old Men right in its rear-view mirror, lights which simultaneously shine too brightly and leave such a fractured, gloomy overcast ion storm in their wake for Burn After Reading’s spirited but sort of flaccid light to lead the way through the treacherous waters of expectation. There be monsters here, but they’re barracudas compared to No Country’s shark swimming circles around them. 
Most animated films are diversions, a word that can reflect insurmountable heights or pitiful nadirs depending upon the film’s free-wheeling, impish willingness to let their own inner-ids loose in the world and kindle “diversion” into a kind of liberation-incarnate. The lion’s share of these films, however, opt for a mere ephemeral surface of id camouflaging a hollow core of narrative conformity. They’ve massaged wishy-washy energy into a corporate sweet science, inlaying just enough momentary energy to achieve a slick, corporate sheen of pleasure without actually over-stimulating the momentous kinesis to the point where it approaches a threat to the status quo. 
Rough-hewn and reticent, Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special might inspire expected memories of Steven Spielberg’s and John Carpenter’s late ‘70s, early ‘80s science fiction films, but only if they were caught on the branches of a David Gordon Green feature. Evoking rustic pastoralism and never erring from Nichols’ customary Southern expanses, the feints toward the supernatural hardly suggest genre sell-out for a director who continues to mutate and evolve his perennial cinematic acts of high-tailing from urban (and suburban) civilization. Exploring the out-of-the-way places Nichols calls home, Midnight Special’s variant of “alien civilization” isn’t found in outer-space or the far-flung future but right in American backyards. If you know where you’re looking of course, and, say what you will about Nichols, but he not only knows the spots, but he’s got an eye on him. 
The Long Take 