Friday, November 30, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL (1969)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Werner Herzog
Cinematography by Thomas Mauch
Original Music by Florian Fricke
Film Editing by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus

Starring
Helmut Doring 
Paul Glauer
Gisela Hertwig
Hertel Minkner
Gertrud Piccini
Marianne Saar
Brigitte Saar
Gerd Gickel
Erna Gschwendtner
Gerhard Maerz
Alfredo Piccini
Erna Smollarz
Lajos Zsarnoczay
Pepi Hermine

Review by William D. Tucker. 

In a bleak land, a man in a suit barricades himself into his office. The man in the suit ties another man to a chair as a hostage. The hostage just snickers to himself  as though he's playing some prank. Outside the gated  building which contains the office, a group of seven or eight people demand the release of the hostage. One woman demands that she get her shoe back which, I guess, she left inside the gated building. I get the impression that she lost it in some kind of rush to leave the building, but I'm not sure. The protesters throw stuff at the building and jeer and make jokes. The man in the suit threatens that he'll do something terrible to the hostage. The overall impression is that this is some sort of institution for the insane, maybe the criminally insane, but it's never entirely clear. One is left with a "lunatics running the asylum" vibe, but things become even stranger.

For one thing, the place isn't portrayed as being in any particular geographical locale. It's a German language film, yes, but no references are made to German cities or history or society or politics. The movie seems to take place in some desolate region where the institution is the only human outpost for miles and miles. No clear reasons are given for the uprising (if that's what's going on) of the inmates (if they are in fact inmates).

The institution is possibly meant to be self-sufficient. There's a barn with chickens, pigs, and animal feed. There are also plants, possibly a garden. The institution is surrounded by a barren, rocky landscape with only a few dead, twisted trees sticking up out of the ground. The institution seems to be isolated from any kind of larger civilization. However, there is a road running by the place, and at one point a woman driver stops to ask for directions. Maybe the institution isn't some isolated human outpost in a desolate world at all. Maybe it's just the people at the institution who've come to see themselves as apart from the world.

The rebellious inmates tease each other, have food fights, and torment a pair of stick-sword wielding blind men. The two blind men even duel each other with their wooden swords. It made me think of the blind swordsman Zatoichi--and then it hit me: did Zatoichi ever fight another swordsman who was blind? I still need to find the answer to that.

At one point, the inmates try to journey across the rocky wasteland, but they seem discouraged, and go back to the institution.

Potted flowers are lit on fire. A car is made to move in an endless circle with no driver at the wheel. Chickens and pigs are killed for fun and not for food. The inmates threaten to burn down the gated building, the barn, the whole place.

The climax of the film comes when one of the characters decides to just run away from the institution, until they encounter a dead, twisted tree. This character confronts the tree, accusing it of pointing rudely, and refuses to budge from the standoff until the tree stops pointing. I was left with the impression that this character and that tree were going to be in some sort of stalemate for all time if that's what it takes.

To say that Even Dwarfs Started Small depicts a world gone mad is not helpful. Yes, I had those words on my mind throughout the movie, but what happens on screen also seems to suggest that certain kinds of  conflict, by their very nature, demand the consent of all parties. If someone decides they no longer believe in the overall situation, then they might just be able to leave, to run off into the horizon. But you would probably have to be insane to do that.

All of the actors in the movie are dwarfs. The world of the movie seems too large for the people who inhabit it. It's as though all the people who were bigger than the dwarfs died and left them with a world filled with buildings and technology built at a scale beyond convenient use. It's a scale with a certain kind of cruelty involved, and maybe that's the source of the madness which engulfs everyone.

Even Dwarfs Started Small begins with an interrogation scene which suggests that, at some point, a larger authority of some kind eventually intervened and squashed the inmates' rebellion. But the movie never returns to this opening scene. We are left with a framing device where part of the frame has been obliterated. It's as though the madness of the inmates has even reached back through time, to the beginning of the movie, and obliterated the intervention of the authorities. Madness confounds all cause and effect. There's no reinstatement of the status quo, and one is left with feelings both exciting and unsettling.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: FRAGILE MACHINE (2005)

Produced by Aoineko 

Art, Animation, Direction, and Music by Ben Steele
Story by Ben Steele, Darren Dugan,Cliff Hockersmith, John Pickney
Music by John Banks, John Hockersmith,Cliff Hockersmith, Ben Steele, Jay Steinberg

Voice Cast:
Xi as Leda Nea
Molly Pickney as Goho/Mary Nea


...

"If a technological feat is possible, man will do it. Almost as if it's wired into the core of our being."
                  ---Major Motoko Kusanagi in the movie Ghost in the Shell (1995)   

" Only her soul is real."
                  ---narrator in the movie Fragile Machine (2005)

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 



There's a cyborg woman, alone in her high tech apartment. She looks like a cyborg, that doll-like appearance familiar to anyone who's ever seen the anime Ghost in the Shell, but it's kind of hard to tell. This is a computer graphics movie, and so all of the human characters look like she does: cyborg dolls, simplified, stylized, maybe even mass-produced. Are they products or people or both? This woman is named Leda Nea, and she sits up in bed, and contemplates the futuristic metropolis she is part of--once again, similar to Motoko Kusanagi, the Major, from Ghost in the Shell. There are some children's toys in the apartment, and this is a departure from Ghost in the Shell: the Major was a committed loner, a hyper-individualist who wanted to transcend her own being, confound the categories of male and female biology and gender identity, slip the bonds of collectivist military/corporate/bureaucratic culture, and explore the new depths and new heights of a transhumanist existence. Leda Nea has children's toys but no child. The implication is that she is quite alone and, in another difference from the Major, not by choice. She once had a little daughter, but now she's gone.


We see a shimmering ultimate dream city built out of computer graphics and  photographic references of cities from the real world (looks a bit like Los Angeles, maybe some shots from Tokyo and Seoul)--a mixture of the real and the digital inhabited by doll-like video game avatar-people. The city has been constructed by the impenetrably named Göln Remedios corporation as a combination city state/executive headquarters/work site/massively scaled social engineering experiment. Göln Remedios built the city to be one with the company, and all who work there are both citizens and employees. Göln Remedios's main business concerns seem to be robotics and AI, but now they have embarked on a new venture: the merger of artificial and biological systems. The virtual people who live in this city seem to already be cyborgs in the sense of being humans whose lives are dependent upon high technology, and their uniform, doll-like appearance may even be meant to suggest some kind of assembly line/vat grown origin for the city state's population as a whole. The company has everyone under intense surveillance: visual, audio, biometrics--every man, woman, and child has been rigorously quantified down to the ATCG units of their genetic makeup. GR has an entire population as a pool for experimentation, and it wants to take robotics, cybernetics, and AI to the next level. They want to locate the human soul, in situ, extract it, and insert it into an artificial robot body. The company wants to achieve the impossible synthesis of science and spirituality, magic and technology, and, in the process, give birth to a new being and a new conception of nature. To that end, they choose an experimental subject: Leda Nea, who is revealed to be a scientist working on something called Project Zero for GR.

Leda Nea receives a new dictate from the company. She will report to a laboratory facility, sign a legal release form (in a mostly digital, heavily cyborged future, you know something sinister is afoot when your bosses have you sign an actual piece of paper . . .), and be subjected to bizarre and horrific experiments which will rip the soul from her biological body and put it into a robot body.

The process by which the company plans to remove her soul is rather vague: do they mean the soul as a poetic way of referring to the central nervous system? Or is the company actually trying to capture the irreducible spirit that is spoken of in religious and metaphysical traditions? Is it both? Is a "soul" electricity, chemistry, fluids, neurons in unique configurations? Or is there something more, something transcendent, transpersonal, some spark of divine mojo-substance? Maybe it's none of these things, just a fantasy. We're talking about a movie, after all. But the movie insists on its own reality, and that fictional reality seems to posit the soul as all of the above: CNS, spirit, nerves, brain, blood, electricity, chemistry all bound up together in a fantastic braid of consciousness, spirit, and being.

GR, in the grand tradition of such sinister megacorporations as Yoyodyne, Soylent Corporation, Umbrella Pharmaceuticals, Tyrell Corp, Weyland-Yutani, Cyberdyne, and Omni Consumer Products is about to unleash a disaster of biblical proportions. What, exactly, is the business plan here? Oh, that's right, they're going to spearhead new markets in soulular extraction processes. Gotcha. Gonna make bulk cheddar in that arena, no doubt. But then again, is GR's plan really so insane when measured against the cancerous infinite growth fantasies of predatory real world corporations?Why not soul extraction? A soul deserves better than such an imperfect vessel as the human body. In fact, you could say that putting a soul inside a custom-designed robotic body is doing God's work by building a more perfect temple for the spirit. And, now that I think about it, once the process itself is perfected and passes into the public domain, you'll probably see the birth of "organic" and "indie" soul extractors and "artisan" and "hand-crafted" robot body boutiques. I'm already looking forward to this future!

The dark arts of soul extraction, as portrayed in the movie, resemble some kind of Frankenstein meets Torquemada by way of Bush/Cheney Era torture policy and Jack Bauer kind of torture: stripped naked, Leda Nea is hooked up to wires and tubes and violently shocked. Leda flails about a padded cell (visual reference to the chamber where the Eva Unit goes berserk in Neon Genesis Evangelion), unable to dash her brains out, and thereby end her suffering, she has no choice but to have her soul removed and loaded into a robot body that's strongly reminiscent of  the sex bots from that Bjork video All Is Full of Love.

Leda Nea, in her new robot body, is isolated in an Edenic garden prison where she tries to escape and is pursued and killed by sentry robots only to be reborn as a vengeful spirit complete with Tetsuo-esque psionic powers of mass destruction. Leda Nea obliterates the city but, in an intriguing twist, she does not annihilate the technological basis of GR's city state. Rather, she seemingly heralds a new kind of life-form: bizarro serpent-angels stitched together out of robot body parts and powered by sparks of the divine essence.

Or something like that. Fragile Machine takes a turn for the apocalyptic, but instead of total destruction of the techno-order, it's more like a synthesis of spirit and robo-technology. The surreal imagery of the gravity-defying  robotic serpent-angels is something to behold as they twist their way through the clear skies above the drowned city which is now being reconstituted as a new civilization at movie's end.

Fragile Machine is a spiritual science fiction apocalypse--a fantasy of how a corrupt world ends, and a new world is born from the heart of a transcendent savior entity. The corrupt world is identified with mindless conformity, rule by transnational megacorporations, and the ruthless quantification of and experiments upon human life. Like many apocalyptic mythologies, it sets up a number of dualistic conflicts: Leda Nea is a rebellious woman opposed to the cold, oppressive masculinity of the GR scientists and their drone sentries; a lone individual battles the colonial corporate citizen; plants and animals are at war with robots and technological infrastructure; and, most importantly, the irreducible soul or spirit is portrayed as being in conflict with the pitiless, Orwellian systems of surveillance, quantification, and corporate-capitalist processes of standardization, mass production, and profit driven economies of scale.

These are all familiar themes found in many science fiction films, TV shows, comic books, animation, and literary works. What's interesting is how Fragile Machine uses these dualistic oppositions to portray a new synthesis of technology and spirit. After all, this is a computer generated movie. Although the production is quite small and independent minded, it still uses hardware and software developed by large scale corporate entities, so it is interesting that the movie's thematic progression reflects the physical means of production: a synthesis of independent moviemaking vision and corporation-derived tools results in a movie which suggests the monstrous edifice of GR may only be redeemed if it is put at the disposal of a single, autonomous soul with a transcendent vision. It's an intriguing mixture of the religious motif of apocalypse with stock elements of dystopian science fiction.

 You can also think of it as a mash-up of different tropes and visuals from different strains of science fiction: cyberpunk, dystopia, transhumanism, Asimov's Laws of Robotics, stories of robots becoming sentient, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, and various anime and live action works such as Ghost in the Shell, Akira, The Matrix, Robocop, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dark CityNeon Genesis Evangelion, and, of course, Metropolis and Blade Runner. The movie wears its influences on its chest, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is the kind of movie where the more you get the influences behind it the more you can get out of it, I would say. This is appropriate to the spiritual dimension of the work, as well. Think of this movie as a sermon in the church of cinema, a kind of theological commentary on various themes in the "sacred texts" of science fiction movies, TV shows, literature, comic books, and animation.

 It also incorporates the aesthetic values of CG videogames and cinema--Final Fantasy, Parasite Eve, Resident Evil, and even Xenogears all come to mind. Fragile Machine is the cinema of people who grew up with immersive videogaming experiences--people who fully recognize the artistic qualities of videogames, and derive as much satisfaction and influence from gaming narrative products as more traditionally minded filmmakers would from Kurosawa, Bergman, Ozu, Resnais, Imamura, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut, Antonioni, Leone, Kubrick, early Coppola, Scorsese, Carpenter, and/or Romero.

Fragile Machine is definitely a visual spectacle, incorporating destruction and violence, but it does not wallow in the mayhem like some movies and games do. It's digging for something deeper by attempting to articulate a spiritual/metaphysical vision that, paradoxically, seems to grow out of the advancement of seemingly non-spiritual, non-supernatural information, engineering, cybernetics, AI, and robotics technologies. The movie seems to portray the infusion of spirit into technology which results in a being which is both spiritual and technological in nature.

As a skeptic, I resist Fragile Machine's dive into the supernatural, but on a purely aesthetic level, I admired the eclectic mix of science fiction and apocalypse. I don't think the movie is meant to push some sort of religious agenda. It's a movie first and foremost, at most a sermon in the Chruch of Cinema, and a dazzling make believe story. But I would be intrigued to see Aoineko and collaborators tackle more of a hard sci-fi story that doesn't lean on the supernatural elements as much.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: SIGNS OF LIFE (1968)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Werner Herzog
Cinematography by Thomas Mauch
Music by Stavros Xarchakos
Edited by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus and Maxi Mainka

Starring
Peter Brogle
Wolfgang Reichmann
Athina Zacharopoulou
Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Sometime during World War II, three German soldiers recovering from injuries are assigned to light duty guarding an ancient fortress on a Greek island. The ancient fortress is full of stone faces. The trio of soldiers finds themselves with nothing of consequence to do. One of them is a scholar of ancient Greek, and spends his days deciphering the writing inscribed on old stones. Another one amuses himself with trying to exterminate all the cockroaches infesting the island. And the third, Stroszek, decides to get married to a local Greek woman. The three soldiers and the Greek woman create among themselves a wonderful little community. You wouldn't even know this was a WWII picture if it weren't for the military uniforms. These four spend their time loafing, drinking, eating, and idly fantasizing about insignificant things. Nothing much seems to happen until Stroszek loses his mind.

Stroszek goes mad when he is confronted with a vista of windmills while on patrol duty assigned to him as busy work. Maybe he is possessed by the ghost of Don Quixote. Stroszek decides to seize the ancient fortress and threaten to blow up an ammunition storage house located on the grounds. The German army, shocked and confused by all this, tries to figure out how to contain the situation.

Signs of Life is the strangest World War II movie I have ever seen. But maybe it's not really a World War II movie as I usually think of it. On the DVD commentary track, director Werner Herzog says that he wanted to make a film featuring Germans who served in World War II not because they believed in the Nazi ideology, but because they faced execution if they did not serve. Removed from the situation of having to fight for Germany, the three soldiers behave in much the way anyone would if they were tourists on vacation in the Greek islands or some other breathtakingly beautiful place.


So why does Stroszek go mad? Maybe it's something to do with how the war has already worked its way inside him, into his soul. This madness of war has perhaps combined with his resentment, shame, and anger towards the state of his native Germany, and so he seizes the fort and puts himself in opposition to his own army. Like Don Quixote, he becomes a man without any particular national identification, but rather someone who seeks to go beyond the limits of an oppressive social structure, and to seek unlimited adventure free of the restraints of reason and reality. Madness liberates Stroszek even if his rebellion is ultimately doomed to failure. For a little while, at least, he is totally free to be the master of his own vision of life and heroic struggle.

Signs of Life is one of those movies that you could call deceptively simple. It's not very long, just barely an hour and a half, and it seems to tell a very strange story in a straightforward way. Stroszek's madness is the most dramatic thing that happens, but many of the early scenes of the movie show the idle good times of the three Germans and the Greek woman as they live on the fortress grounds. These early scenes invite the viewer into the lazy, enchanted rhythms of their lives in a way that reminded me of the beach interlude in the Japanese gangster film Sonatine.

In Sonatine, yakuza seeking to escape the fallout of a violent gang war take refuge on a little used stretch of beach where they begin to relax and play childish games and stage silly dances. The hardened thieves and killers seem to shed their old lives and revert to a more innocent state. The old ways reassert themselves when an assassin shows up to kill one of their number.

Signs of Life also involves a similar disruption of an idyllic state. Three men and one woman thought they could, maybe, escape the harsh realities of a world convulsed with mass slaughter. Maybe they could have, but then one of them woke up to a strange spirit of rebellion, and the idyll was no more.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: HUNGER (2008)

Directed by Steve McQueen
Written by Enda Walsh and Steve McQueen
Director of Photography Sean Bobbitt, B.S.C.
Film Editor Joe Walker
Production Designer Tom McCullough
Sound Designer Paul Davies
Original Music by David Holmes with Leo Abrahams
Produced by Laura Hastings-Smith and Robin Gutch

Starring 
Michael Fassbender
Liam Cunningham


Review by William D. Tucker. 


1981. Maze Prison, Northern Ireland.

Night: there's a protest in the streets, people banging the asphalt with pot lids.

Later: morning: there's a middle-aged man in a house on a quaint little street in Ireland. His dutiful wife makes him a heart attack breakfast, and then he goes out to his car, gets down like he's doing push-ups, but, no, he's just checking under his car for a bomb. No bomb. He looks up and down the street. Presumably, he sees nothing. He gets in his car, drives to work.

This middle-aged man is a cop of some rank. We see excerpts from his day having to do with his job which mostly involves beating imprisoned Irish Republican Army soldiers with his bare knuckles, but we don't see much of the actual beatings until later. The man's knuckles are bloody, raw. He stands outside in the snow, sucking down cigarette smoke, his uniform shirt showing visible sweat stains. He seems to be carrying a terrible anxiety within him that could break out at any moment. Maybe that anxiety fuels his violence.

When you're angry, you don't feel anxious. But what about those moments where there's no one to beat? What happens when you're alone with your anxiety, maybe even your guilt? He's less a cop, and more of a prison guard/torturer. But this man is no villain, no fascist pig, no incarnation of evil. He is a human who is being worn down by his job, by the ongoing stress of being a violent agent of state power. He is, in the bold moral perspective of the film Hunger, just as degraded by the oppressive tactics of the British government as the imprisoned Irish Republicans using their piss and shit as tools of protest inside their cells.

This is all a set-up, in a sense, to dramatize the hunger strike of Bobby Sands, but it is more than that.

Yes, this movie is on the side of the men in the cells, but it also shows how state violence degrades its agents and perpetrators, and how murder is unleashed on both sides of a bitter, intractable conflict.

That middle-aged man? Well, (SPOILER WARNING) he gets a bullet in the brain from an IRA assassin. His violent death is not presented as a victory. This man, prior to his death, was shown as a torturer, as someone who did horrible things to helpless human beings. But he was also shown to have a wife, an aging mother, and inexpressible guilt, fear, and anxiety feeding into borderline paranoia. This character is not sanitized, nor is his death presented as something to be cheered by a safe, comfortable audience in a theatre, or sitting before a laptop or flatscreen TV. His death is portrayed as cruel and irrevocable.

When you watch Hunger, you will most likely come away from it profoundly impressed by the level of violence and filth, and by the rawness of actor Michael Fassbender's performance as hunger striker Bobby Sands, a historical figure I was totally ignorant of before watching this movie. Bobby Sands, in conventional storytelling terms, is arguably the protagonist of the story, and yet he does not appear onscreen for almost a half hour. This isn't a long movie, either. It's 96 minutes, so that's basically an hour and a half of movie plus the end credit roll.

During that first half hour, the Maze Prison is established as a hell on earth, except it is a hell created by human beings, not gods and devils. The guards and police officials supply the violence, torture, and interrogation, and the prisoners cover the walls of their tiny cells--two men to a cell--with layers of shit. They eat only a little bit of the food provided for them, and then they throw the rest in a corner to rot. The prisoners sculpt their mashed potatoes into funnels to channel jug-loads of piss back out onto the floor where the guards patrol. As an audience, we are treated to these tactics of protest, but we are also shown the other side, the clean-up. Some poor bastard has to put on disposable protective gear, splash cleaning fluid all up and down the piss-flooded hallway floor, and then mop it. Every now and again, maybe once a month, the prisoners are dragged out of their cells, deloused, given new clothes, and a guy with a pressure-washer has to go into each cell and spray that shit off the walls.

My absolute favorite scene was the one where the policeman on pressure-wash duty goes into a cell and sees a repugnant, yet sublime, shit spiral on the wall, and, before he starts to clean it off, he actually lifts up his safety visor to behold the thing with his own eyes. In that moment, I felt bad for that guy. It didn't matter that he was on the side of the oppressor. Here was a human being forced to do a terrible job. A human being who doesn't make much money, and would probably rather be with his wife or girlfriend or his friends at the pub. But instead he has to pressure-wash layers of human feces from the walls of a hellish prison.

But in that moment, too, there is some kind of weird communication of an artistic vision. Because it's not just a wall smeared with shit in that moment. This poor, confined soul took the time to make a terrifying spiral out of his own shit. The prisoner transformed his gesture of defiance into art. The police on clean-up duty sees that, when he lifts his safety visor. It's just one of those things that has to be seen with the naked eyeballs. I'll bet the smell got inside his helmet, too. This was an aesthetic experience that could never be had in any gallery.

When Bobby Sands is introduced into the story, he is portrayed as a fighter, and the movie goes to great lengths to show that his hunger strike is a conscious, tactical, and strategic decision. His logic is that if he is willing to show both sides of the conflict his willingness to die that this will galvanize the Irish Republican resistance fighters, and force the Thatcherite British government to recognize the IRA as a political entity, and not just a criminal organization.

 His strike is taken up by others within the prison. So he's not alone in laying his life on the line. The movie doesn't shy away from asserting that Bobby Sands's decision to give up his life also results in the willing deaths of other hunger strikers. Bobby knows this, and acknowledges that he believes in the necessity of having men die to pursue the ultimate political ends of the IRA.

Bobby is challenged by a compassionate priest who visits him, gives him cigarettes, and valiantly tries to talk him out of his protest. This scene, this confrontation between Bobby and a priest (played by Liam Cunningham) is masterfully staged and acted in a way which I will not reveal. It represents a jarring departure from what has gone before, but you just have to see it for yourself. I admired director Steve McQueen's choice in how he stages this confrontation.

The technical side of this production is masterful throughout. Notice how there's almost no conventional musical scoring on the soundtrack. Rather, McQueen and his collaborators use realistic sounds pared down to their essence to create the visceral reality of each scene, whether it is a brutal beating of naked prisoners by a gang of armored cops, or a lonely cop taking a smoke break in the snow. In one key scene, the only soundtrack is the insistent back and forth of human voices in a large, empty room. Naturalism is the key to every element of the technical design of this movie. Even the hallucinations of a human mind breaking down from starvation are rooted in grim, physiological reality.

Bobby Sands is the protagonist of this movie, but he isn't presented as a Hollywood historical hero like El Cid or William Wallace. Sands's death is not portrayed as a transcendent sacrifice. There is no stirring music, nor propaganda montages of the people rising up to throw off the yoke of the oppressor. It is a realistic, and horrifying portrayal of what happens to a starving human body. But it is contextualized by the overall brutality of the Maze Prison, where inmates and guards alike are dehumanized on the front lines of a tragic, and drawn-out struggle.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: THE THING (1982)

Directed by John Carpenter
Screenplay by Bill Lancaster, adapted from the short story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell
Cinematography by Dean Cundey
Edited by Todd C. Ramsay
Special Makeup Effects by Rob Bottin (with an assist from Stan Winston)
Special Visual Effects by Albert Whitlock
Music by Ennio Morricone, John Carpenter
Produced by David Foster, Lawrence Turman, Wilbur Stark, Stuart Cohen

Starring
Kurt Russell
A. Wilford Brimley
Keith David
Donald Moffat
Charles Hallahan
Richard Masur
David Clennon
T.K. Carter
Joel Polis
Richard Dysart
Thomas G. Waites
Peter Maloney


...

"When a man bleeds, it's just tissue. But blood from one of you Things won't obey. It's a newly formed individual with a built-in desire to protect its own life. When attacked, your blood will try and survive--and crawl away from a hot needle, say."
--Macready (played by Kurt Russell) in the movie The Thing.

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

150,000 years ago an alien craft crash lands somewhere in Antarctica.

Cut to: 1982. An American research station somewhere in Antarctica. A Norwegian man with an assault rifle chases a dog into the middle of the American facility, firing like mad. He seems to want to kill the dog. One of the Americans is wounded. The gunman rants and raves in a language none of the Americans can understand. In self-defense, the captain of the station fires a .357 round through the mad gunman's eye.

It's determined that the Norwegian came from a nearby research station established by the Kingdom of Norway. Did the Norwegian camp go stark raving mad? Were they cooking some bad drugs over there? Did they go stir crazy or what? Why would anyone want to kill a harmless dog?

Maybe that dog isn't so harmless.

In fact, it harbors a predatory life-form from another world. Something that can take on any shape--once it has consumed it and replicated it via its icky, but sophisticated, biology. This . . . thing has come from distant worlds, and has absorbed all sorts of lifeforms in its journeys, or so it would seem. It has now started to absorb human and canine life forms. It has no interest in communication. Only in absorbing forms, knowledge, and getting the hell out of Antarctica. Maybe it'll imitate a bird, and fly right the Christ outta there.

Soon the Americans are wondering: who's human? Who's the thing? How do you tell a perfect imitation apart from its original?

The answer, it would seem, is in the blood.

Unless, of course, the thing has perfectly imitated human blood. Then what?

What if its goal is to absorb and replicate itself across the whole surface of the earth? How do you contain such an enemy? The thing seems to operate like a bacteria or a virus--some kind of infectious agent for sure. The thing is some kind of plague threatening to wipe out humanity.

Or is it? Maybe when it perfectly imitates you it perfectly re-assembles you, and it only manifests aggression if it feels threatened. Maybe we need to cool down, and not start breaking out all the guns and flamethrowers and so forth.

But what if this thing really is looking to assert total control? We can't just let this thing go. We gotta find out who is human, and who's the thing.

Two enemies, human and the thing, wage a war in Antarctica to see who survives and who dies. Who gets to rule the planet, and who gets reduced to ashes. The only language that both sides seem to understand seems to be a pidgin mixture of aggression, cunning, violence, and manipulation--war, in other words. Prisoners are taken. Harsh interrogations conducted. No one can be trusted. Subtle personal resentments float to the surface: Am I dropping the hammer on this guy because I think he's an alien imitation, or because I think he's kind of an asshole? Remember, these guys have been cooped up in this research station for a long time.

Maybe there is no Thing. Maybe the only contagion brought into the American camp was the virus of fear. Fear takes root, and you see whatever you want to see. Weapons are drawn, fingers pointed, sides chosen. Humans have been doing this to each other since our primal beginnings with no end in sight. Do we really need some ooga-booga make believe alien bullshit to set us against each other to the knife? People abuse and kill each other over invisible things all the time--politics, ideology, nationalism, religion, economics, jealousy, racism, homophobia, misogyny--maybe the Thing is just one more flake-o notion that has entered the heads of human beings in their ongoing quest to find novel reasons to oppress and slaughter each other.

And what if The Thing is real? Well, we can't truly say it's evil if we're objective about it. It just wants to survive. It's a being from another world. Or maybe a colonial aggregation of beings from across the cosmos. Who the fuck knows? In any case, if the Thing is real, I find it impossible to judge its actions in moralistic terms. The Thing wants to survive. So do the humans. They cannot communicate in civil fashion, and so it's gotta be total war. Too bad. A tragedy, really, when you get right down to it. What could have been a stirring saga of First Contact becomes Intergalactic War I, with, I'm sure, many sequels to follow.

But it makes for one hell of a show.

John Carpenter's The Thing . . . After this movie, Carpenter was only competing with himself. Artistically, I mean. Which is all that really interests me, here. Sure, it was a box office disappointment at the time of its release, and Carpenter himself has expressed disappointment that this movie didn't go over as well as he had hoped at the time--but that's all in the past. Without question, The Thing found a long, sinister afterlife on VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, and now, I assume,  Blu-Ray.

And on broadcast television, too, albeit in a heavily censored bullshit version, but many great filmmakers have had to endure the indignity of having their movies chopped, edited, and violated at every level to conform to the bogus morality of regularly scheduled network programming.

 I watched The Thing in a censored version and I could not take my eyes off the screen. I was riveted. I wasn't scared, exactly, I've only ever really been afraid of being abducted by aliens, to be perfectly blunt with you, but I felt like I was watching, I dunno, 12 Angry Men, or Glengarry Glen Ross, or something. It was clearly a science fiction/horror genre picture, but it wasn't schlock. It wasn't played for camp or splatter moments or breast shots. It was about a group of pissed-off humans, all male, trying to root out an insidious alien invader with the power of masquerading as homo sapiens.

 One of these humans(?) has a flamethrower and  several bundles of dynamite and is not taking any shit from anybody. He's forcing the other men, at flamethrower-point, to submit to an improvised medical test that resembles some kind of cult-like, ritual initiation rite. Each man must slice his thumb, let his blood flow into a Petri dish, and then the man with the flame thrower will hold a length of wire in the ignition fire and then, once the wire has been heated up, it will be pressed against the blood samples. If the blood samples just burn and sizzle, it's all good. But if something else happens . . . and what would that something be, exactly? Part of the interest of this scene lies in its deep uncertainty. Just because the guy with all the weapons has dreamed up some test that he thinks is gonna proves who's human and who's the thing doesn't mean the test will actually fucking work. And what if Mr. Blood Inquisitor sees a positive result that's nothing of the kind? Innocent people are gonna burn, for sure . . .

I'm talking about the blood test scene which anyone who has seen The Thing knows about. This was the very first scene I ever saw from The Thing. Or maybe it wasn't quite the very first thing I saw of The Thing. I think, maybe, I had been flipping channels, and noticed this unusual movie about a research team in Antarctica dealing with some kind of alien invasion situation--intense, bearded dudes in winter-wear speaking in low, strident tones about evil doings, Kurt Russell talking into a tape recorder about how no one can trust anyone anymore, Wilford Brimley losing his shit and going all James Cagney on people with a snubnose .38, but I didn't pay too close attention. I skipped around the TV, and, at some point, I came back to the movie at its most intense moment: the blood test scene.

I don't remember what, exactly, compelled me to stop and watch the movie from that point onward. But I think it was the seriousness of the performances. The actors were behaving as though they were actually frightened and angered by their situation. They seemed to have fear, rage, and paranoia playing across their faces at different moments. They didn't act like the kinds of morons you'd expect to populate a typical body count picture. I think it was the seriousness of the actors' performances that drew me in more than anything, but who knows? Whatever it was, I was hooked. I watched the movie 'til its end. And, at that time, the 1990s, I hated watching movies that had been censored for broadcast television. What was the point? If a movie is unacceptable to the networks, then don't show it, I say. TV stations could come up with their own crappy shows to fill timeslots, and probably get more reliable advertiser participation, too.

Think about it. Non-controversial, braindead situation comedies and cop-worship shows are pretty much a sure thing if you want the average television viewer to achieve brand identification with whatever lame product you're pushing. Well, I guess that was true in the 1990s. Now, it would be the increasingly Orwellian depravity of Reality TV, but let's not go there.

The Thing was compelling cinema even in a heavily compromised form. John Carpenter's film was so well-crafted, that it wasn't totally ruined by censorship. Now that is movie-making power right there. But where does the power emanate from? Craftsmanship. Carpenter's deepest game, in my estimation, is his commitment to the basics of storytelling: script, actors' performances, shot composition, soundtrack including both score and sound effects (the "soundscape" if you will), special effects, editing--the whole engine of cinema is geared towards expressing a dramatic situation with utmost clarity. Even the ambiguities and ironies present in Carpenter's movies are expressed with utmost clarity.

Theme is important, too. I think Carpenter's one of the more interesting thematic filmmakers in how he approaches doing horror and science-fiction scenarios. In Assault on Precinct 13 the theme had to do with decent, competent people from both sides of the law caught in the middle of a violent revolutionary struggle between insurgents and an oppressive police state: how do you survive and protect those who depend on you in an impossible situation? Halloween was about how a blind force of destruction manifests in human form in the midst of an anodyne suburban community, and the terror that grows out of normal people's obliviousness to the presence of such an evil force. The Fog was about the sins of the past manifesting to punish future generations. In the Mouth of Madness follows out the idea of what it would be like if the usual laws of mundane reality were displaced by the operating logic of a horror novelist's imagination gone completely berserk. Ghosts of Mars was an interesting blend of Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog: an amorphous spirit of homicide asserts itself as a ghostly insurgency to punish a future human settlement on the red planet. In all of these movies, the horrific idea at the center is illustrated in specific, concretely realized terms. As the viewer, you don't see quite as much as you think you do in terms of mayhem and gore, but the nature of the threat becomes clear, as do the struggles of the humans trying to survive the onslaught. Carpenter's movies apply logic and rationality to irrational, supernatural forces and the results are pleasingly outrageous, but comprehensible.

The Thing takes on the theme of paranoia. Broadly speaking, it uses two contrasting approaches to illustrate this theme: economy and excess. Which is appropriate if you think about it. Paranoia itself is both economical and excessive. Paranoia focuses your mind like a laser even while it takes aim at the entire world which has turned murderously against you. Keep your guns loaded, the eyes in back of your head peeled, and keep a tight routine, because the hit could come from anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Using simple logic, the paranoiac can cook up whole cosmologies that definitively prove the whole world is aligned against him or herself in a grand conspiracy to ruin your day, your era, your lifetime, and maybe even subsequent lifetimes depending on the nature of the Enemy. The paranoiac pursues simple solutions to complex problems.

Remember Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver? Just get some guns, do some push-ups, and shoot some people and everything will be okay in the end. You might even get a date with Cybil Shepherd in the end. And if that doesn't work, well, you can blast the girl away, too, with your .44 Magnum. Hey, your personality may be defective, but your weapons usually work like physics. No big thing. They all had it coming.

The Thing isn't quite the same as Taxi Driver, but it does explore similar terrain of paranoia-induced violence, and the terror that grows out of the failure of communication, civilization, and hope itself.

In terms of technique, The Thing hinges on using economical shot set-ups within a widescreen frame that are filled with agitated human faces in close-up, suspicious humans pointing fingers and making accusations, and then all of this is overtaken by gooey excess when the wriggling alien horror of The Thing makes its presence known. All pretense to civilization goes out the window, and those that are human desperately maneuver to muster a defense against the alien invader. It's a visceral realization of the sci-fi trope of humanity forging a coalition against an extraterrestrial entity for survival purposes that touches on the longstanding tribal tendencies of human beings.

We don't think of ourselves as tribes in the 21st century. We use other titles for our typical groupings: nations, political parties, sexuality, gender, subculture, religion, race, job title, student, townie--all are categories used by the powers that be to divide us into in-groups and out-groups. If you're in the in-group you're supposed to be opposed to the out-group(s). And, of course, the out-group isn't an out-group to those who are in it--they're another in-group from their perspective.

The same could be said for the alien whatsit in The Thing: from its perspective its just trying to survive. The fact that it kills and absorbs people is just tough shit for the humans. Maybe if there was some way for the alien and the humans to communicate they could arrive at some sort of understanding. Instead of unlimited violence climaxing in total destruction, this could've been a story of First Contact and not Apocalypse. A truce could be called with truth and reconciliation between human and extraterrestrial.

(Now think how differently Taxi Driver would've played out if Bickle had gotten some counseling, if he'd had a single friend to confide in (aside from his doofus colleague masterfully played by Peter Boyle), maybe get some anti-depressant meds, get some therapy for his shellshock, find a way to work through his deeply imprinted combat stress--Travis Bickle could've turned his shit around. Sure, he'd maybe have some conservative tendencies, some social awkwardness, but he could've gotten over things. He could've been empowered to move on with his life. And Taxi Driver would've been a terrible film. There's a reason why Taxi Driver is a classic and no one gives a shit about Awakenings.)

Unfortunately, civilized approaches to healing and reconciliation do not make for compelling cinema. Madness, paranoia, conflict, death, and destruction make for powerful storytelling. Nothing is more compelling than watching a situation go from bad to worse and beyond. It's what Poe was getting at when he defined the spirit of perversity in "The Black Cat." We have a will towards escalation, towards conflict which is driven by our desire for total power, total control over all uncertainty in existence. Whatever it is that frightens us--a thief, a murderer, a political ideology, an ethnic group, an animal, a culture, a nation, a language, a religion, a philosophy, an outlook, a disagreement about fashion or policy or economics--our impulse is to shun the thing which upsets us.

 And if we can't avoid it, we denigrate it, try to find like-minded people to join us in condemning the hated thing, and, if things go far enough, we will try to destroy whatever it is we hate and fear. Right and wrong don't have to enter into it. Just think about all the genocides, ethnic cleansing, and no limits civilian slaughtering bombing campaigns, and random assholes with assault rifles and body armor popping off in schools and movie theaters--the spirit of perversity, the will to lash out with violence at whoever and whatever happens to be handy, never mind whether or not such targets have any actual culpability for the perpetrator's troubles--they're convenient, they will therefore become blood sacrifices to the murderer's fear, hatred, and paranoia--whatever dark gods sit inside the star chamber of his twisted heart. Even if the perpetrator has some sense that what they are doing is a doomed course of action, just as the narrators in "The Black Cat" or "The Tell-Tale Heart" have a premonition of their own destruction, they are compelled to walk the path of annihilation and jump into the fire themselves in the end.

Or maybe they lash out, get a little dinged-up, spend some time in the hospital, and then are up and about again as a ticking time-bomb with a brand new timer . . . kind of a spoiler for a movie I shall not mention by name.

The Thing invokes the self-immolating spirit of perverseness, of paranoia, from Poe, but combines it with the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. John Carpenter has stated that Lovecraft is an important influence on his work. Lovecraft's central idea is that human beings are completely at the mercy of cosmic forces beyond their comprehension, much more ancient, powerful, and deadly than any human civilization, even one with fanatic ideology and nuclear weapons (ex. USA, USSR, China, Russia, etc.).

After all, anyone who has read Lovecraft's 1931 masterpiece At the Mountains of Madness knows that the Great Old Ones(a name Lovecraft uses to refer to those terrible, cosmic powers of darkness) had atomic weapons long before homo sapiens wormed its way out of the muck across billions of years of cosmic evolution, and split the atom. At the Mountains of Madness tells the story of a group of human explorers who journey to Antarctica and discover a vast, cyclopean city gone to ruin, within which they uncover a strange hieroglyphic language which reveals the secret origins of humanity and the Great Old Ones.

The Thing echoes some of the ideas from At the Mountains of Madness, even though it is more directly adapted from John W. Campbell's 1938 short story "Who Goes There?" Lovecraft's novella was published in 1931 and Campbell's short story came along in 1938, so I wonder if Campbell had absorbed any Lovecraftian influences . . . I have no idea. But I feel pretty confident in saying that John Carpenter, consciously or not, crafted his movie  in a way which blends Poe, Lovecraft, and Campbell's literary themes and combines them with some of the techniques of his previous movies such as Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and The Fog.

Earlier in this review I put forward the possibility that maybe the Thing is just in the minds of the humans. Maybe there is no Thing. I don't think this is what Carpenter intends for his movie to be, but it is an intriguing idea to me. As I watched the movie again this past weekend, I couldn't help but wonder if these guys are all losing their minds due to isolation, stress, sexual frustration, loneliness, and simmering resentments over slights both real and perceived. It's an all male group. Some of them seem to be veterans, ex-military people--could combat stress be a factor here? Are these people just more inclined to go looking for an enemy when feeling threatened? Like I said, I think Carpenter means for his movie to be taken on its own terms, but I tend to want to go overboard in interpreting movies I've seen dozens of times, so maybe I'm the one losing perspective here. This is a movie which skews more towards Lovecraftian cosmic horror than Poe-style psychological horror.

The cast is excellent. Kurt Russel is billed as the star, but it's really an ensemble piece. All of the actors take the job seriously, and none of them play for camp or self-parody. Probably the most disturbing performance comes from Wilford Brimley. Watching this guy, with his unflappable outer shell, finally start to lose his shit is a kind of mini-saga of horror and madness all its own buried within the larger movie.

The cinematography, an element of economy, by Dean Cundey is perfect, each frame composed for both clarity of what's going on within a given scene and also to give a sense of growing unease. Watch this movie with the sound off, and just take note of how the color scheme changes and evolves as it goes on, and how one shot is cut with another one. The editing is subtle and unobtrusive even when the Thing makes its wriggling, consuming, chaotic self known within that precise widescreen framing.

Which brings me to the element of excess: the disgusting and horrifying creature effects by Rob Bottin with an assist from Stan Winston. I don't even want to talk about it. You should just see for yourself with no prior knowledge. The Thing bursts out, like some avatar of Lovecraft's Azathoth, the idiot god of chaos and destruction--or maybe not. Maybe I'm just reaching for shit here . . .

Back to economy: Albert Whitlock's outer space visual effects provide a quietly menacing introduction for the idea of alien horror from another world in the title sequence.

Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter both throw down for a sneaky, suspenseful original score that doesn't overstay its welcome. You would think if a director could get Morricone for the soundtrack he would want to squeeze another one of those lush, Sergio Leone scores out of him--and that would be a mistake. The Thing doesn't need leitmotifs and wall-to-wall bombast. It needs a defter touch. Note the mournful, but suspicious, quality of the piece which underscores the investigation of the Norwegian camp. I find it unexpectedly moving. The movie is cruel and relentless, but that bit of music suggests a kind of sadness inherent in the waste left by violent all-out conflict.

Maybe The Thing isn't a horror movie in the usual sense. More and more, I think of it as a kind of tragedy about two sophisticated life forms forced to meet under dire circumstances, and the war that results from an inability to communicate or understand one another. Definitely not another braindead body count picture.

Friday, October 19, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: THE FOG (1980)

Music/Direction by John Carpenter
Written by Debra Hill and John Carpenter
Cinematography by Dean Cundey
Edited by Charles Bornstein and Tommy Lee Wallace
Produced by Debra Hill, Charles B. Bloch, Barry Bernardi, and Pegi Brotman

Starring
Hal Holbrook
Adrienne Barbeau
Jamie Lee Curtis
Tom Atkins
Janet Leigh
Nancy Loomis
John Houseman
Charles Cyphers
Darwin Joston


Review by William D. Tucker. 


The Fog. Here's another John Carpenter movie that I didn't get the first time around. Once again, it was a victim of my own narrow tastes the first time I saw it.

 I've never really liked ghost stories. Ghosts aren't scary to me. Why? Ghosts, like all things supernatural, do not exist. But even if they do exist, what's the most that they could do? Move the furniture around? Muck up the walls and ceiling with some ecto-plasm? Put up a wailing racket? Ghosts, even if they did exist, are harmless, lame, laughable, and boring. Movies about ghosts, with some exceptions (like Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters 2, Kwaidan, Hausu, Poltergeist, the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Frighteners, and The Exorcist--and yeah I consider Pazuzu to just be a particularly aggressive ghost), are not interesting or scary to me. Why fear that which has never been real and never will be real? Hard to suspend disbelief over stuff like that.

You know what's scary to me? An asshole with an assault rifle and a massively distorted sense of entitlement. Ebola. Nuclear weapons. Cancer. A country that would let George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and all their crew have another four years. Torture. A country buffet on a Sunday afternoon. Prisons. My fellow human beings. You know, things from real life.

If you want to make an interesting ghost story, then you gotta have some kind of compelling reason for the dead to come back to life. Because once you're dead, that's it. You only get one shot, and then it's all over. No Konami code in this life, people. One shot, make it count. If you're gonna be breaking the rules, and rising from the dead and all that nonsense, you must have a fire of some kind inside your rotting mind. Some unfinished business. A grudge that won't quit. Can't be any petty bullshit. Gotta be for real if you're gonna be violating the laws of nature and all that.

And what about the living? How do they respond to the intrusion of the supernatural into material reality?

The Fog basically consists of decent, average human beings living in a California coastal town under assault by a ruthless supernatural force. But it takes its time. It sets up the environment of the coastal town, and offers a representative sampling of the population there under threat of destruction, and then slowly unleashes its ghostly terrors. For me, when I first saw it, it was way too slow.

At the time (I was a teenager) I was into Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Dawn of the Dead, Hong Kong action movies, The Evil Dead, Aliens, The Thing--I wanted anger, and blood, and heavy weapons firing nonstop. I wanted braindead macho motherfuckers getting 86ed and taking the whole world with them in a welter of blood and bullets. I wanted the red meat alien carnage of Aliens and John Carpenter's merciless masterpiece The Thing. I got off on the notion of shopping mall assholes turned into zombie bullet-catchers like in Dawn of the Dead. Measured against all this, The Fog was a Thornton Wilder play. Our Town with ghost pirates.

Watching it again, I find that I was just too uncivilized in my adolescence to appreciate the fine craftsmanship of The Fog. Now, I kind of get it.

Like I said, it takes its time. Carpenter uses the first half hour or so to put his widescreen framing to subtle, effective use by cutting from one location of a quiet, kind of lonely California coastal town to another, while weird things happen. Windows shatter. Electric and electronic devices go haywire. An old-timer played by John Houseman does a deadly serious recitation of a ghost story to a group of kids. A whiskey priest played by the one and only Hal Holbrook discovers a dark secret within the walls of his church. Adrienne Barbeau's radio DJ ties all these scenes together with her husky, welcoming voice. Other characters are introduced, and Carpenter takes his time to set up all the players in this drama.

When I was a teenager, I failed to appreciate this more measured approach to telling a story. No flashy, self-conscious displays of verbal wit. No gunfights in slow motion shown from numerous camera angles. No torsos bursting with extraterrestrial hunger. Just a mood of quiet doom slowly creeping through a small town in the dead of night.

When the horror finally does manifest itself, it's much like the Shape in Halloween. You don't see nearly as much as you think you do even when the killing starts. One important difference between the supernatural agents in The Fog from the Shape is that here we have a rational motive for their actions. The Shape is just a force of blind destruction sans emotions sans logic sans survival instinct. If you wanna get Lovecraftian about it, you could say that the Shape was a manifestation of Azathoth, the blind idiot god of total destruction, whereas the entities within the fog are agents of retribution taking up a cause out of the past. They are a manifestation of an irrational, supernatural force that actually has a rational motivation for its actions--a nifty paradox to find in a horror flick.

 Another interesting contrast: The Fog, like Assault on Precinct 13, takes up the the theme of vengeance. But there is a difference between The Fog and Precinct 13. The Fog is about vengeance for sins in the distant past, and Assault on Precinct 13 is about sins of the present. And, also, Assault on Precinct 13 is about human beings using non-supernatural methods--assault weapons, fanatic ideology, teamwork--whereas The Fog is about a supernatural entity with a somewhat limited ability to disrupt material reality to achieve its ends. The entities within the fog can disrupt electrical generators, cause windows to shatter, and can destroy telecom systems, and, when they get close in to their human targets, they can manifest humanoid forms armed with sickles, spikes, knives, swords, and very powerful strangler's hands. It's a hydra-headed force of destruction that is similar in its tactics and strategy to the enemies found in Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars. 

I really dig The Fog, now. I've grown up enough to appreciate it. It has a slow build to a terrific climax, and a strong cast: Hal Holbrook, Andrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Nancy Loomis, Janet Leigh, John Houseman, Charles Cyphers, and Darwin Joston. It emphasizes character, mood, and suspense over blood and gore. Watching it is more like reading a story by Poe or Lovecraft, or maybe something by Stephen King. It's good fun.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: HALLOWEEN (1978)

Music/Direction by John Carpenter
Written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
Cinematography by Dean Cundey
Editing by Charles Bornstein and Tommy Lee Wallace
Produced by John Carpenter, Debra Hill, Kool Lusby, Irwin Yablans, Moustapha Akkad

Starring
Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis
Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie
Nancy Loomis as Annie
Nick Castle as The Shape


WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS. IF YOU'VE NEVER SEEN THE MOVIE HALLOWEEN (1978) DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW. HALLOWEEN IS A WORTHWHILE MOVIE, ESPECIALLY IF YOU LIKE HORROR MOVIES, AND IT IS BEST WATCHED WITH ZERO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT HAPPENS IN IT AND WHY. READING A REVIEW OF A MOVIE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR WATCHING A MOVIE AND FORMING YOUR OWN OPINION. 

OR NOT. 

MAYBE WATCHING MOVIES IS A HUGE WASTE OF TIME NO MATTER WHAT. WE COULD BE SPENDING ALL THE TIME WE USE WATCHING MOVIES ON TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLOW DOWN THE EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING, OR SPENDING TIME HAVING SUBSTANTIAL  CONVERSATIONS WITH OUR LOVED ONES. 

I SUPPOSE IT'S JUST MUCH EASIER TO STARE INTO A SCREEN OF SOME KIND AND NOT CARE ABOUT THINGS. BETTER TO CONSUME STORIES MADE UP BY OTHER PEOPLE THAN MAKE UP OUR OWN STORIES.

 COMING UP WITH THINGS--THAT'S HARD WORK. 

YEAH, I'M KINDA CONFLICTED ABOUT STUFF.

Review by William D. Tucker. 

When I first saw Halloween, I didn't like it. I thought it was tedious and anti-climatic. So there's this masked guy with a knife ambling around acting like a fucking creep who's supposed to be some kind of pyscho-killer-embodiment-of-pure-evil, but barely does any killing. The movie sets Mike Myers up like he's some kind of anti-christ, but the dude acts more like he's got brain damage than some kind of murderous intent.

 I felt bad for Mike Myers. Here was a guy inhabited by a spirit of darkness, has all kinds of homicidal designs, and he can barely get it up. What's his problem? Is it the drugs, Mike? They got you on some bogus meds down at the mental ward, bro? Don't tell me you started partying with the cocaine, son, that shit will fuck you up. Is it alcohol? Did you go through some kind of a divorce, or just a rough patch with the old lady? Feeling trapped by your own talents? Let's work this out, my man. To me, Mike Myers came across like 21st century Charlie Sheen: a man with so much self-loathing for his own talents that he revels in not putting them to worthwhile use.

Maybe I should set this up a bit: Mike Myers is a silent weirdo who killed his sister when he was a  six year old kid. He's been locked up in a state mental institution all his life. An intense, pistol-packing psychiatrist named Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) comes to the state mental ward to drive Mike to a court hearing of some kind but finds that Mike has busted out of the joint. Dr. Loomis goes looking for Mike in the psycho's hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois. The idea is that Mike has some kind of fixation on returning to the house where he murdered his sister. Along the way Mike starts to target some teenagers for slaughter, and it all takes place on Halloween night--rather convenient that. Makes for a great title, and a ready-to-go marketing campaign.

Most of the movie is from the perspective of a young woman named Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis). Laurie and her friends are in high school and they're picking up some spending dough babysitting kids on Halloween night. Laurie and her friends talk about boys, babysitting, and other mundane adolescent things. They are largely oblivious to the macabre history of the abandoned Myers house in the middle of their neighborhood, and they continue to remain oblivious even when Mike shows up and starts stalking them. Like I said, mostly Mike just comes off as a creep, some kind of perv who wants to harass young women.

Dr. Loomis decides to post it up in the old Myers household, a .44 Bulldog in his trench coat pocket. (I guess the doc is channeling his inner Dave Berkowitz) He figures Mike'll show up, and he'll give him two in the chest, save the tax payers the cost of another court hearing. What kind of  goddamn psychiatrist is this guy? Shouldn't he be dispensing meds, not slugs?

Early on Dr. Loomis describes, with all his psychiatric authority, that Mike Myers is "pure evil." Pure evil? What kind of medievalist bullshit is that? Mike needs serious help, doc! And you're writing him off with a bunch of superstitious mumbling moralistic mojo?! No wonder Mike is so fucked up. If I had some baldy-headed gun nut telling me I was pure evil since the age of six, I'd want to put on a mask and go stabbing people, too, give the guy what he wants, maybe shut 'em the fuck up. You want evil, Doc, here's some evil for your cueball ass!

Yeah, I know, I know: the movie shows Mike's murderous mask-wearing tendencies even before Dr. Loomis got his hooks into the kid. But maybe that opening scene is just how Mike remembers things after years of indoctrination from the good doctor. Lots of ambiguity in this movie when you really dig into it.

Anyways, Dr. Loomis is supposed to be some kind of hero, a kind of dragonslayer in a trench coat, but mostly he's inert, sidelined. He just stays in the old Myers house while Mike stalks teenagers, kills a few, and then shows up at the end to showboat with his big gun. The cruel irony is that he empties his six-shooter into Mike's chest, sends that sick, slasher fuck tumbling over a balcony, and then . . . Mike just disappears. Not only did Dr. Loomis not save anybody with all his pretentious huffery-puffery about pure evil and all the rest, but his big ol' gun with its bad ol' slugs didn't even slow Mike down.

Up yours, Dr. Loomis. Game, set, match goes to Mike Myers.

Maybe Dr. Loomis needs a post-game talking to: "Listen up, cueball: maybe you should try a little compassion and understanding with your patients next time, instead of powertripping on gunslinger/dragonslayer fantasies. Maybe the reason why Mike Myers stopped talking is because you never listened in the first place ya' chatty bastard. You ever consider that? Now, I want you to do six thousand push-ups, three hundred laps around the track, and maybe you can hook me up with some Vicodin next time you swing by the office. Okay? Sounds good."

Okay, okay, I admit it: I did like the ending when I first saw it. If I'm really honest, it was only mildly anti-climatic. In fact, I loved the fact that Mike Myers wasn't stopped with .44 magnum slugs, and that Dr. Loomis was shown up for the empty set of clothes that he was from the beginning . . . and I say this as a fan of Donald Pleasance. Nothing against the actor, it was a silly character to begin with, and Pleasance played it to the best of his abilities.

But I didn't get the movie as a whole. Why was Mike wandering around Haddonfield like he was unsure about what he was there to do? Was part of his game to torment Laurie and her friends, not just kill them? What did Mike have against Laurie and the other teenagers? They had no connection to his past. They never did him wrong. He was just lashing out at them randomly, no logic to his violence. I suppose one could say he was some kind of sex-murderer, that the knife was Mike's way of raping his victims as he murdered them, but Mike never really came off as a sexual predator when I watched it. And I didn't like the fact that Mike's crimes were so random. It didn't scan with me when I saw it as a teenager.

A lot of people have said that Halloween has some kind of sexual sadism going on, that the masked man can't stand that young people are enjoying having sex and so he has to show up with his knife and kill the joy. That rationale never really rang true with me. For one thing, Mike's murders are fairly indiscriminate, and all-too-efficient. He comes across as more of an assassin than a rapist. He sticks you with his knife not to violate you, but to end you. He's the Shape, after all, a cutout serving a force of pure destruction. His homicide is robotic, not domination oriented. There really isn't any sophisticated psychology or twisted desire going on under that mask. Just a will to destruction. If the military could mass produce this guy they wouldn't need recruits. Need to get Umbrella Corp working on that project.

(Imagine that: a whole army of Mike Myers duplicates, marching on whatever country is our enemy of the moment. Maybe that's what those Resident Evil games were suggesting with those bulky trench-coated mutants with the chain guns . . . hmmm . . .)

No, I really didn't get Halloween the first time I saw it. And I wasn't inclined to give it a second chance. John Carpenter had already made other movies that I liked a whole lot better. Like The Thing.

No, it didn't help that I had already seen John Carpenter's The Thing before I saw Halloween. In fact, watching The Thing at an early age has not been terribly helpful to most horror movies I've seen during my lifetime, even other movies directed by John Carpenter. Once you've grokked the best, it's hard to go back. The Thing is probably one of my all time favorite movie experiences. In fact, The Thing is so good that I loved it even though the first time I watched it  was in a heavily censored broadcast TV version. The Thing, even in a compromised form, was an exquisite fictional expression of the theme of paranoia. Now that's film making: your craft is so strong that it can't be weakened by the pinhead moral guardians running prime time television.

The Thing had it all: a strong, committed cast, precise widescreen compositions, dead-on editing, a sublime Ennio Morricone soundtrack, outrageous monster and gore effects, and clever dialogue. The Thing was a masterful balance of two contradictory approaches: economy and excess. The plot, characterizations, and thematic elements are all there in just the right proportion until the alien horror claws its way into the widescreen frame violating all sense of scale, proportion, hope . . . be not deceived, people. The Thing is Carpenter's masterpiece. Halloween was just an exercise, albeit a very popular, long-lived one.

But after watching Halloween again recently I must confess to actually admiring it, now. It is a subtle piece of work, maybe Carpenter's most subtle film in his whole portfolio as an artist. If The Thing is Carpenter's definitive expression of the theme of paranoia, then Halloween is something like a statement on how everyday people can be totally oblivious to the invasive presence of supernatural evil. Mike Myers isn't really Mike Myers, when you break it down. Nor is he anti-christ, Satan, Pazuzu, Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, or some murderous agent of the state--he's beyond all these things. He doesn't need a name, or a sexual urge, or a God, or a Devil, or an ideology to commit his crimes. He is homicide incarnate. He's the Shape, a superflat killing machine whose humanity switch got shifted into the off position by some unnameable, Lovecraftian force of of darkness when he was six years old. You can't negotiate with him, you can't kill him, you can't touch a heart of darkness with appeals to mercy or common decency. Really, it's not even a heart of darkness. There's no heart to be found. Rather, it's a pure void trying to manifest itself as best it can. First it uses its bare hands to break a neck. Next, it acquires a knife to pierce a beating heart . . . follow out the logic on that one if you dare.

So, yes, I've come to appreciate the thematic richness of Carpenter's movie.

But let's look at the nuts-and-bolts craftsmanship, maybe the area where Carpenter has brought his deepest, most consistent game as a filmmaker. The widescreen compositions in Halloween are his most subtle of all his movies. They manage to be both mundane and menacing in the same instant. He imbues an autumnal suburban setting with both realism and amplified dread. It's hard for me to pin it down in words, but here's an exercise: watch the movie with both the lights and the sound off, and just take a look at how Carpenter frames his shots. The blend of the everyday and the scary-weird is uncanny. The editing is also sharp. Although this is a slasher flick, he doesn't go for the cheap shock. He goes for seamless, relentless momentum, setting you up for a trap you can't escape.

The acting is strong, too. Jamie Lee Curtis and Nancy Loomis as the two main teenage protagonists are  credible, unforced.They handle the dialogue well, and, most importantly, they are totally oblivious to the horror invading their lives until it's too late. Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis isn't so much a great psychiatrist as he is a man obsessed with eradicating a great evil that he has no chance against. Yes, I mock the character above, but when you break it down, Dr. Loomis has seemingly lost his marbles, too. Spending all those years in the presence of the Shape must've drove him over the edge . . . Pleasence is one of those actors who is always worth watching. Even in his bad movies. The man cannot hide his inherent intelligence and charisma. So it's especially cruel that such an appealing actor is pitted against an unbeatable foe.

The Thing is still my favorite Carpenter movie, but I have now gained a true appreciation of Halloween as an exercise in a more measured, disquieting approach to telling a horror story. I'm pretty bloodthirsty as an audience member when it comes to horror, but I have no patience for braindead slasher bullshit or tedious, substance free torture porn grandstanding. I think part of the mojo of Carpenter's approach as a director is that, in his best movies, he sticks close to his characters even as they face off against outrageous monsters and weather storms of reality-shattering lunacy. A class act.

MOVIE REVIEW: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976)

Music/Screenplay/Editing/Direction by John Carpenter
Produced by J.S. Kaplan
Cinematography by Douglas Knapp

Starring
Austin Stoker as Bishop
Darwin Joston as Napoleon Wilson
Laurie Zimmer as Leigh
Tony Burton as Wells
Nancy Loomis as Julie


...
"There are no heroes anymore, Bishop. Just men who follow orders."
--dialogue from the movie Assault on Precinct 13

Once upon a time in the west, there was the system.
The system was corrupt and oppressive.
Within it lay the seeds of its own destruction:
The discontent of outlaws, hustlers, street entrepreneurs, and poor young men
Full of anger, in love with guns, in love with dying on their feet.
The system forced the outlaws to band together,
Brothers in blood.
This is a story
Of the war
Between the system and the blood brothers.
--a poem I wrote in tribute to Assault on Precinct 13 sometime in 2005
...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

We begin in an urban labyrinth with a multi-ethnic crew of gangbangers looking to procure some arms, sneaking through alleyways and passages. A cop voice commands them to freeze. They bolt. The cops fire their shotguns until they're out of shells. Justice is a pile of corpses.

Welcome to Anderson, a ghetto somewhere in the wastelands of Los Angeles sometime in the late 1970s. Here, the cops shoot first and don't even bother to ask questions later. The cops seem to think they can just shoot poor gangbangers with nothing to lose and not have to pay a price later. These police have been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies.

The various ethnic street gangs--blacks, Latinos, Asians, whites--have decided that they aren't gonna put up with the bullshit anymore. Instead of killing each other over dead-end racial hatreds they are gonna team up to obliterate the system with a wave of no limits violence. The warlords of the different ethnic factions gather in someone's living room, slice their arms, and mingle their blood in a single glass. There are no more racial distinctions, no more hatred based on skin color, no more factions, no more barriers. In this scene we see the advent of a true brotherhood of blood, one which is necessary to catalyze the auto-destruct destiny of a society corrupted by greed, wars of empire, and racism. The system seeks to oppress the poor and turn them against one another in deadly combat for economic opportunities legal and illegal. The blood brothers are going to kill the system or die trying.

The blood brothers have knocked over an armory. Now they got the same kind of arms as the National Guard. Now, they can shoot back.

And any innocent or good-hearted people that get put down in the crossfire, well, that's just an overdose of reality for some people, isn't it?

The blood brothers decide that the first target of their aborning insurgency will be an ice cream man. No particular reason. It's more about inspiring terror through random acts of violence. The ensuing mayhem draws in another combatant who kills one of the blood brothers and then seeks asylum at a police station which is about to be closed down due to budget cuts. The blood brothers decide to lay siege to the decaying police post that has just been zeroed out of the municipal budget at Precinct 9, Division 13. Yes, that's right, it's actually called Precinct 9, not 13. But I guess the idea is that the legend of this fateful night will be remembered as Precinct 13. Assault on Precinct 9--nah, that just doesn't work. Doesn't sound as cool.

Precinct 9 is to be closed come sun-up. A competent, honest policeman named Bishop (Austin Stoker) is sent to supervise the precinct in its final hours before the moving vans show up to clear out the last of the decrepit file cabinets and old contraband lockers. Bishop is the real deal: a police with heart, spine, and guts. And a sense of humor. No pork to be found on this man. He's the kind of guy you would want to serve under. He's the kind of guy who will never rise in the system. Early on he's in radio contact with his superior officer and the captain asks Bishop if he wants to be a hero on his first day out. Bishop says, "Yes, sir!" and means it. The captain tells Bishop that there are no heroes, only men who follow orders. The system has no need for heroes, or humanity, or justice, or even plain old competence and decency. The system requires only continuity, stability, and expansion of its dominion where possible.

The blood brothers require only fast trigger fingers, good aim, a willingness to kill, and an eagerness to die.

The system and the blood brothers are about to collide.

Right before the all-out attack, a bus carrying prisoners bound for death row pulls into Precinct 9. One of the   prisoners has a tubercular hacking cough, and the state policeman in charge of the convicts wants to use the telephone at Precinct 9 to call a doctor. But the phone lines are dead. The telecom must've disconnected services already. Or maybe the wires were cut . . .

Soon, cops and prisoners will have to depend on each other to survive a tsunami of bullets generated by the army of the blood brothers who are determined to annihilate Precinct 9 and all who reside within as their declaration of total war against the system.

Assault on Precinct 13 is a tense, effective thriller exploring what happens when decent people get caught up in the conflict of a corrupt system and a seriously pissed-off revolutionary force seeking to destroy that corrupt system. There's no indication that the blood brothers have a new regime in mind to replace the system; rather they are acting out of a deep, abiding rage at the injustice of their society. They are possessed by this rage, yet they do not go around yelling slogans or making speeches. They do not speak. Some of them yell in pain when shot to death, but that's about it. Even their weapons have been silenced. They have transformed themselves from narco-entrepreneurs into a force of death, a hydra-headed grim reaper that refuses to negotiate with a terrorist police state. That they have become terrorists themselves is not so much an irony as an inevitability. Push people to the limit and maybe they break. Or they might become monsters who fight back with everything they've got.

Inside Precinct 9 you have the capable Bishop and two secretaries: Leigh (Laurie Zimmer) and Julie (Nancy Loomis). They are joined by two convicts bound for death row: Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) and Wells (Tony Burton). Most of the rest of  the people on board the prison transport bus are killed in the first attack by the blood brothers. It's just down to five people--one cop, two secretaries, and two convicted murderers.

A question arises: can the three straight citizens inside the precinct trust the two condemned convicts? The answer, considering the larger situation, is weirdly inspiring: yes, they can.

Or, maybe, it's more like: yes, they don't have a choice.

The siege intensifies. Bullets tear through the lower floor in a never-ending barrage of lead. Suicide street soldiers burst through windows and doors only to be obliterated by shotgun blasts from Bishop and Napoleon. The gangbangers have been compared in other reviews of Assault on Precinct 13 to the zombies of Night of the Living Dead, but I would say they're more like the Shape in Halloween: superflat killing machines who've willed their humanity into the off position. The system wanted monsters to practice its police state brutality upon, and the system always gets what it wants. This is the war that everybody wanted.

Except for the five people inside Precinct 9. Except for most people in the world who haven't given up their humanity, whether they're cops or cons or secretaries or the good, the bad, and the ugly. That's where the drama of this movie comes from: seeing people with integrity fighting to survive against a disaster created by a system that went off the rails a long time ago.

Bishop brings his humor and optimism to the war. He's always looking for a way out, a way to survive. He's played with confidence and understated wit by Austin Stoker.

Napoleon Wilson is probably the character most people remember, he has all the best lines, and is played with ironic nobility by Darwin Joston. He was on his way to certain death early that morning. Now, at least, he'll get to die fighting.

Once the lead starts to fly, Leigh has to channel her inner gunslinger. Laurie Zimmer brings a strange toughness and sense of trauma to her character. She's not really indestructible. But, once the war is on, if you lay a hand on her she will shoot you in the fucking chest.

Tony Burton plays Wells as a man cursed. He rails against his own bad luck, and fights his selfish urges to do the right thing. But what's the right thing in a situation of moral insanity? Who's gonna care if a condemned man decides to stand on principle?

Nancy Loomis has kind of a thankless role as Julie. Julie's the person who cracks up, and so she isn't given as much to do as the rest of the main cast. Loomis would later go on to a significant role in Halloween, but here she's the character that a lot of audience members will probably find testing their patience. The audience is kind of like the system and the blood brothers in that sense: show weakness and they'll cut you down . . .

John Carpenter directs the action in widescreen format giving an old time western movie feel to the action, but he also keeps it brisk and gritty. Unlike those old John Wayne movies, nice people get killed in horrible ways once the madness of war is unleashed. Carpenter, as screenwriter, supplies a lot of clever dialogue, some of it cribbed from Rio Bravo and Once Upon a Time in the West, but that's just stealing from the best, isn't it? The movie doesn't dig for any kind of profound political statements but just shows how one situation piles on another until it reaches a boiling point. Carpenter's film stays close to the main characters inside the police station. His focus is on how these people fight against a tide of  (to them) incomprehensible violence. They don't have time to analyze and make policy recommendations. They fight to survive.

The blood brothers are a shadowy army of the night, one part of their force sniping from a distance with assault rifles, and another part charging in as a suicide squad to breech the precinct. Although the movie is very low budget, and not 100% realistic, it is weirdly convincing in the moment. The long pauses in the action are clearly there to facilitate character scenes among the characters inside the precinct, but the uncertainty of what exactly the attackers are doing outside during these lulls (gathering ammo? taking a yoga break? dropping into a Starbucks to use the wifi?) adds to the creepy intensity of the action. Are the blood brothers just toying with their victims? Are they wondering what the precinct's defenders are doing? In a weird way it reminded me of the stealthy, warring vessels in Run Silent, Run Deep, although there are no submarines in Carpenter's movie, obviously.

The blood brothers are the first manifestation of that amorphous, destructive darkness which Carpenter would invoke in different forms in later movies: the Shape with his butcher knife in Halloween; the vengeful army of ghosts in The Fog; the gruesome, metamorphosing alien invader in The Thing; the goopy anti-God infected zombies of Prince of Darkness; the undercover Space Reaganites from They Live;  the wave of murderous lunacy in In the Mouth of Madness; the predatory bloodsuckers in Vampires; the insurgent Barsoomian spirits in Ghosts of Mars. What I find interesting to note here is that in Assault on Precinct 13 this amorphous spirit of homicide finds root in a real world situation of poverty, police state oppression, and undiluted rage. It's horror born of stark reality. No aliens or ghosts or anti-God slime or demons necessary.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: FOR ALL MANKIND (1989)

Directed by Al Reinert

Music by Brian Eno

Edited by Susan Korda

Produced by Betsy Broyles Breier, Al Reinert, Ben Young Mason, Fred Miller


For All Mankind is a cinematic blend of all the different facets of the Apollo Program which put the first human beings on the moon. It isn't about any one Apollo odyssey, nor does it focus on individual astronauts, scientists, or ground control operators. Rather it is a synthesis in sound and images of what the Apollo Program means to the human species as a whole. Or maybe I should say it's what the filmmakers think the Apollo Program means to humankind as a whole, although I found it pretty convincing as well. I wanted to believe the grand mythology that director Al Reinert had crafted out of hours of footage shot on board the spacecraft by the astronauts themselves and the soundtrack rendered from a blend of Brian Eno's subtle musical score and  one-on-one audio interviews with various astronauts from different Apollo missions. Visually, the movie appears to track one roundtrip journey to the moon and back, but this journey is pieced together out of elements of various Apollo missions, including some perilous moments from the abortive but heroic Apollo 13 mission (Hollywood director Ron Howard's megahit Apollo 13 does a pretty good job of dramatizing that mission). The result is a kind of Ultimate Apollo Mission where any obstacle or malfunction can be overcome by the combined talents of astronauts and ground control operators working in near-mystical synchronization.

So For All Mankind isn't exactly an objective portrayal of the Apollo Program as a whole, nor does it depict any one mission in any great chronological and/or technical detail. It doesn't ask any hard policy questions about why America should've spent so much money on the project, or its value as a propaganda weapon against our grand Cold War nemesis the Soviet Union. The movie is more of an essay about the spirit of the Apollo Program, the dream, the myth. The filmmakers, led by director Reinert, want to convince you of the deeper, possibly even spiritual, value of humanity's journey into space. When I say spiritual, I don't mean to suggest that the movie is advocating any sort of religion or body of spiritual practice or some kind of a New Age thing, but rather the notion that people, as individuals, families, societies, nations, can put themselves in the service of some larger principle and derive a benefit from that service. It's a vision of collective action that would no doubt be shouted down as "Socialism" by many Americans in elected office today. But then again, about half, maybe more, of our elected officials do not believe in evolution or birth control or free speech or reason or logic so we don't have to pay attention to those people.

Or maybe we do.

Reinert begins with President John F. Kennedy's famous speech laying down the challenge of getting to the moon within the decade, and the discovery of new rights, new frontiers, new vistas, for all humankind. JFK offers up the space program, and the quest to land on the moon by the end of the 1960s, as a kind of national program of self-improvement, a dream to strive for that will shake Americans up, get them to aim high. I am not usually moved by the words of politicians, and JFK lived and died before I was ever conceived, but I found myself wanting to believe the words. Hard to believe that this is the same man who was pretty eager to rain fire on Vietnam (along with Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, Kissinger, McNamara, Westmoreland, the Democrats, the Republicans, and many others, so, no, I'm not just picking on JFK here). JFK, from what I've seen of him, had a way with words, strong symmetrical facial features, and his speech seems to conflate humanity's adventure into space with the struggle for universal human rights as embodied at the time by the African-American struggle for Civil Rights. It's a noble vision later picked up on by Star Trek in its various incarnations: all of the cultural and ethnic flavors of humanity united as one Federation in the pursuit of a more perfect intergalactic union--a worthy dream that humanity is still struggling to attain.

The movie goes from Kennedy's speech directly into the preparations for launch: spacesuit diagnostics, checklists, tense men chain smoking and guzzling coffee in the control room, then blast off--and we are well into the journey. The words of politicians cannot compare with the experiential majesty of riding a rocket to the moon, floating in space while tethered to a vehicle moving at 25,000 mph, skipping along like children on the barren surface of the moon--and I think that's what gives For All Mankind it's peculiar power, for all of its surface myth-making. That raw experience that transforms humans who dare to leave the Earth. And how these first adventurers open up possibilities for all who would follow. It's also that raw experience which imbues the astronauts, and this movie, with that spirit I've already spoken of: one's life, mind, and  perspective on the Earth and the universe are all transformed once you see the homeworld hanging in the sublime dark of outer space.

Each stage of a trip from the Earth to the moon is depicted, with a great deal of humor and humanity, which caught me off guard. I expected it to be more of a technical exposition, but director Reinert takes the material in a poetic direction, and also brings in a lot of warmth and humor by his choice of footage: astronauts bouncing around their spaceship listening to Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Frank Sinatra; the ecstasy of the aforementioned tethered space walk; the childlike skipping and hopping of astronauts bouncing around the moon; and joyriding about the magnificent wastes in the lunar rover. I was left with the impression from both the film that the astronauts shot while out in space, and from the interview voice overs that these guys really loved what they were doing. A lot of times, I think astronauts come off as squares, as people so heavily trained and indoctrinated in the technical aspects of space flight (and it is enormously technical), and the individual personas of astronauts are so stage managed by NASA and other space agencies, that they end up unintentionally making the whole adventure of humanity into space seem dull, routine, just another job--maybe even the ultimate exercise in conformity conditioning. But the truth is that these guys have to be rigorously trained to get it right, to survive in the pitiless void of space. And in America at the time of the Apollo Program any taxpayer funded venture has to present a conservative, straight-laced front to get the money it needs. Deep down these astronauts have a lot of passion, and a lot of balls, then and now, and I've always secretly admired the men and women, from space programs all over the world, who have a desire to travel into space. Yes, I admire these people, even though I am also certain I would not get along with many of them, personally, especially the old guys still around from the Apollo Program. But that's all right. We don't have to get along, or know each other personally, just as long as people keep going into space.

The dream of the Apollo Program, JFK's noble speech--were such things ever really said or done in America? Watching this movie, reflecting on what I've read in history books, and thinking about the small stretch of American history I've observed during my relatively brief adulthood I found myself disbelieving what I was seeing and hearing. This movie struck me as much of a piece of science fiction as a Lensman novel or something by Heinlein, Asimov, or Clarke. I can't imagine America today, with its partisan gridlock, rampant anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, and contempt for true community and collective endeavor ever attaining the stars. But maybe it's not fair to just trash America, in this respect. Factions and wars and bigotries and  fatal bitterness of all kinds engulf many parts of the world as we speak. I've said it before, I'll say it again: I'm a pessimist. I do not believe humanity has the right stuff. I do not think we'll make it to the stars. But watching this movie made me want to believe.

 For All Mankind, I repeat, is an exercise in mythmaking that borders on propaganda. But it's not propaganda for some self-serving political faction, or an ambitious individual, or any one nation state, or even necessarily for the Apollo Program astronauts or NASA itself. It is propaganda in service to a dream of infinite adventure and enlightenment for the human species.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW: MY DINNER WITH ANDRE(1981)


Starring/Written by Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory

Also starring Jean Lenauer as the Waiter

Music by Allen Shawn 

Edited by Suzanne Baron

Cinematography by Jeri Sopanen

Directed by Louis Malle

Review by William D. Tucker. 


My Dinner With Andre consists almost entirely of a meandering conversation between two friends, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, who haven't seen each other in awhile and meet up at a nice restaurant. At least that's how it's supposed to come off. It is thematically focused and precise in how it explores two men who find themselves facing personal and professional challenges in their lives, but it is crafted in just such a way as to give the illusion of a long, free-form conversation between two friends catching up on recent events. It's similar to a play that has been directly adapted for screen with only minimal modifications to conform to cinematic values.

Except . . . it isn't quite like that. Basic techniques involving cutaway shots of the waiter's ambiguously irritated face (maybe he's just tired, maybe he just always has that expression on his face), and the realistic soundscape of a restaurant with its tinkling glasses, and subdued hush of conversation punctuated by an occasional laugh or raised voice give it a strange near-documentary feel. The two friends speak as though they are actually in a restaurant. The acting style is not theatrically elevated, and the audience is invited to listen in on things through Wallace Shawn's first person narration in the opening scenes as he makes his way down cold New York streets to meet his friend.

Wallace Shawn is a playwright and actor who finds himself short on work in both areas. He is supported by his wife who works as a secretary. Andre Gregory is a theatrical director who has spent a number of his recent years having unusual artistic experiences and spiritual journeys with people like Jerzy Grotowski and a Buddhist monk. Shawn has bills and debts. Gregory has a trust fund, perhaps, and never seems to worry about money. They are playing versions of themselves. That is to say, if you've never heard of either of these guys, Wallace Shawn is playing Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory is playing Andre Gregory, but I suspect there is some degree of fictionalization going on, but I couldn't, on a first viewing, tell you in what areas of the story, and to what degree.

Not that it's essential to know what's biography and what's fiction, but it is interesting to note that part of what Shawn and Gregory are wrestling with in their conversation has to do with how a person within a technological society can have a genuine experience of reality, and part of what I, as an audience member, was wondering was, "How much of this script is based on real life events, and how much made up?" Shawn and Gregory also talk about how people often times perform themselves in everyday life, how they take on roles, and here these two are playing themselves on screen. But they don't come across as characters in the usual sense. They actually seem quite candid and ordinary even when they are grappling with weighty philosophical and existential issues or describing bizarre adventures. The very fact that they are playing versions of themselves within a movie actually, in this case, seems to kind of tone down and distill who they might be in their everyday private lives, or in the course of their careers in the theatre. No grand declamations or sudden reversals, no cutting accusations, and no transformations into mythic beasts or thundering robots, although Gregory details at length some wild visions which seem right out of a Hayao Miyazaki film.

There is a kind of basic philosophic conflict between these two friends, although it is grappled with in a civilized fashion. Shawn is a skeptic, a believer in scientific knowledge and the joys and comforts of daily, domestic existence. Gregory is a mystic, seeing patterns and hidden connections where Shawn sees only coincidence and superstition. Gregory is concerned that the advance of high tech capitalism is creating a kind of hallucinatory hell on earth of hyper-consumption, alienation, dehumanization, and wage slavery that constitutes a new, insidious form of totalitarianism in which artistic elites such as himself are the new Albert Speers, holding the lower classes in deadly contempt. Shawn is sympathetic to Gregory's concerns, but cannot buy into mysticism, and sees no way of returning to a pre-rational point of view. The way these two men hash out their differences is a model of how people can agree to disagree and not shut each other out or retreat into ideological posturing or dogma. In this sense, My Dinner With Andre is, perhaps unintentionally, a moral film. Watching it, I felt like I wanted to try to be more humane towards the people I know in my life, even towards those I would consider enemies or fools. Shawn and Gregory model this kind of humanity and civility, once again probably unintentionally, for the audience.

These two guys need to get back together and hash out what has gone on in the world since 1981. I'd love to listen in . . .