Our two Midnight Screenings, both cult films from the ’70s, come early this week. Enjoy!
It ain’t easy remaking one of the greatest and most influential French films of all time. But after laying down the law (and critiquing it with a stern eye) with The French Connection in 1971 and unexpectedly repopularizing the horror genre with the pre-blockbuster success of The Exorcist, William Friedkin had virtual carte blanche to do just about whatever he wanted, and what the genre-film director and aficionado wanted was to pay homage to one of his heroes, Henri-Georges Clouzot, by remaking one of his most widely respected films: The Wages of Fear. Continue reading
Our two Midnight Screenings, both underappreciated “cult” films from the ’70s, come early this week. Enjoy! 
Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? lies perilously close to Sunset Blvd., so much so that the screenplay by Lukas Heller and the visual style by Robert Aldrich would be shameless repeats if they weren’t so rapturously evocative and explosively effective. You can call it whatever you want: a drug-addled fever dream variation on Sunset, a hysterical nightmare that Sunset had about itself, a corrosive purifying of Sunset so that all the relative cleanliness of the material had been washed away until only the abrasive sandpaper at the core remained. Ultimately, what saves What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is not how it differentiates itself from Sunset, but how it rips into the Sunset aesthetic with such scabrous gusto and full-throated commitment that it exposes the horror cinema trappings of the chiaroscuro noir-speckled visuals and wonderfully garish vulture-like acting of Billy Wilder’s venerable 1950 film, the ultimate Hollywood work on the perils of Hollywood. 
Thrillers are so serious. Grimly, absurdly, stuffily serious from time to time, and, as a matter of interest, Costa-Gavras’ most famous film, 1969’s Z, is a mighty serious affair as well. But it is also a Costa-Gavras film, which means the seriousness is as macabre and sinisterly naughty as humanly possible. Right from the beginning, with an opening credits montage set in a government meeting where the camera cuts around and into the debate, the kaleidoscope of off-kilter, anti-continuity angles instigates the meeting, presenting it as a cohesive jungle of governmental nonsense and anti-sensible incoherence. What they are talking about almost doesn’t matter, and indeed, the point is that no one seems to care or have any idea why they are actually having this conversation. Costa-Gavras is cutting deep, but the scene plays like a demented carnival as well as a serious inquiry. I could not describe it in any way that meaningfully elucidates the humor as anything other than the driest variety, but the sheer dissonance of the shots and the edits, coming when we least expect them and giving us absolutely no sense of what is occurring before us, is brutally funny. Dry and abrasive, but cripplingly funny. 
Billy Wilder was the Hollywood cynic. We all know this. It wasn’t necessarily always the case (Some Like it Hot is one of the most delightfully buoyant screen comedies ever made, despite a dark edge). But he had it in him from the very beginning, and he kept it in him until the very end. If you want scabs though, and I mean pus-filled, oozing, inventing-colors-so-they-don’t-have-to-be-just-black-and-blue scabs, you have to stick with mid-period Wilder, who, with Sunset Boulevard, turned Hollywood against itself like a rabid dog unsure of its target and found that even this wasn’t enough. One year later, unfulfilled and still in need of making the nastiest Hollywood film yet made, he unleashed Ace in the Hole upon the world, and his vengeful edge, his sickly grotesque demeanor and love of exposing the least well-lit regions of human activity, absconded down the churlish rabbit hole. 
Edited
Another little temporary series here. Nothing too fancy – mostly an excuse for me to catch up on some films I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in a while. We’ll be looking at three classical Hollywood filmmakers over time: Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Billy Wilder, visiting each once in the annus mirabilis of classical cinema, 1939, when they were all still (relatively) young, again in the late ’40s and early ’50s at the middle of their careers (and the middle of classical Hollywood’s career), and finally when things were waning for each director and for classical Hollywood in general in the early ’60s, before the new school American New Wave would wreck up the joint. 
Another little temporary series here. Nothing too fancy – mostly an excuse for me to catch up on some films I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in a while. We’ll be looking at three classical Hollywood filmmakers over time: Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Billy Wilder, visiting each once in the annus mirabilis of classical cinema, 1939, when they were all still (relatively) young, again in the late ’40s and early ’50s at the middle of their careers (and the middle of classical Hollywood’s career), and finally when things were waning for each director and for classical Hollywood in general in the early ’60s, before the new school American New Wave would wreck up the joint. 
In honor of the thick, physical, downpouring heat of the August Summer nights upon us, the sorts of nights where (quoting Thelma Ritter) rain doesn’t cool anything down, but simply makes the heat wet, I decided to tackle two films from the all time literary master of making the heat feel so wet you can drown in it: Tennessee Williams. 
In honor of the thick, physical, downpouring heat of the August Summer nights upon us, the sorts of nights where (quoting Thelma Ritter) rain doesn’t cool anything down, but simply makes the heat wet, I decided to tackle two films from the all time literary master of making the heat feel so wet you can drown in it: Tennessee Williams. 
The Long Take 