Charly (1968)

Charly is a 1968 film based on the story Flowers for Algernon, and it's a very 1960s film. It does these split-screen double shots seemingly for no reason at all other than because it can, and when it should use them near the end for emotional payoff, it chooses not to. It's also sometimes filmed rather like a horror film – or perhaps I should say rather like a Frank Perry film. This definitely has the vibe of a film made by the Perrys – constantly telling a story that isn't scary as if it's terrifying. Charly's ethics, too, are suspect, and it approaches its central character with a gaze I found frequently hostile. Charly won Best Actor in 1969 for Cliff Robertson, and this was the very last of the 1968 Oscar nominees I needed to see. Well, I've seen it now. Meh.

The Swimmer

For me, The Swimmer doesn't work. I really wish I had read the John Cheever story before watching this movie, but it was leaving Criterion in 3 days and I was on a time crunch. But here's the thing: The Swimmer is a Frank Perry movie, and the Perrys make horror movies. All of their movies are horror movies, even though none of them is actually in the genre: they're just made like horror movies. Mommie Dearest is actually a superb example. There's no reason for the film to be made in the way it is, but instead the camera lingers in weird ways, focuses on strange things, watches Joan Crawford walk eerily up the stairs. 

In any case, the trouble with the Perrys' version of The Swimmer is that we know something is off from the very beginning of this movie, even though it would have worked much, much better if we didn't perceive something as being wrong until much later when the main character himself starts to realize something is wrong.

This is John Cheever's Willy Loman, but we shouldn't start seeing ghosts in scene one.

Lancaster is expertly cast here, though. He's the perfect actor for middle-class unraveling as he has proven in many other films.

Last Summer (1969)

Fucking Frank and Eleanor Perry and their horror films that aren't horror films at all. Have you ever noticed that they film every story they have to tell into a horror film, even when the movie is something like David and Lisa or Diary of a Mad Housewife? (Obviously Mommie Dearest is the most glaring example.) Well, Last Summer is one of these, and it's, frankly, a terrifying portrait of rich white youth. 

Barbara Hershey and Richard Thomas are really excellent in this, if reprehensible, and Catherine Burns is phenomenal. The plot of the movie, though, is quite disturbing, and Perry's gaze doesn't help. He seems most interested, after all, not in the people who have been harmed by the three reprehensible young people at the film's center but in the so-called best of the three, the one who might have had the chance to be a human. This is an odd place to land one's gaze, to my mind, but it is definitely where the Perrys' film finds itself. 

Oh! There is this very strange little gay scene in which Barbara Hershey and Bruce Davison are spying on two people kissing on the beach and they look like a man and a woman but then one of them rolls over and it turns out to be two men. Davison's character wants to leave, but Hershey's character declares that she wants to stay and watch. It is, I suppose, a hint of things to come, as the movie moves further and further into territory where Hershey's character wants to watch worse things.

P.S. Now that I've seen The Battle of Neretva, The Happy Ending, and Last Summer I've seen all the films that were nominated for Oscars in 1970. (There actually aren't very many years before 1995 when I have seen all of them.) It's sometimes really hard to find these old movies to finish out the list. I found The Happy Ending and The Battle of Neretva on YouTube. For Last Summer I had to acquire a bootleg copy.

David and Lisa

I think the Perrys are good filmmakers, but I hated David and Lisa. Its subject matter is juvenile, its ideas about psychology are facile, its treatment of disability is offensive. Furthermore, it's a character study obsessed with plot instead of character, and the two main characters are truly and annoyingly unwatchable.

Two in Neon

Neon Bull (Boi Neon) is one of the most unexpected films I've seen this year. The film follows a group of characters who work for a kind of Brazilian rodeo in which the tails of the bulls are grabbed by a kind of vaquero and the bull is flipped by his own energy so that he falls. As the film continues we see this happen several times. Each time it is compelling and unsettling.

Gabriel Mascaro's film follows one of these workers, Iremar, as he works with these animals, and a girl named Cacá whose mother works with the rodeo. Iremar is actually a fashion designer or wants to be, and he designs costumes for Cacá's mother when she dances in a cabaret. Cacá mostly just hangs around. But what she really wants is a horse.

The film unfolds slowly (totally my speed), allowing for our relationships with these characters to settle. We can observe and identify, slowly noticing patterns and studying these characters. The film takes a decidedly odd turn midway through, however, when Iremar and one of his companions attempt to steal some horse semen from an (apparently) valuable animal. I won't say any more than this – do I even need to? – but Mascaro's film kept surprising me from this point on.

Abigail Pereira and Juliano Cazarré

Neon Bull is visually stunning and some of its image are downright jaw-dropping. And as the film continues it meditates on our relationships with animals, on lives lived in relationship with animals, on the ways we make money off of our manipulation of animals. This means, of course, that Neon Bull is fundamentally about the question of the human. In what ways are we different from animals? In what ways are we animals? Mascaro's film thinks through these questions via the topic of sex, and Neon Bull is therefore a very sexy film in addition to being excellent.

This film made me think very deeply, and I don't think I loved it while I was watching. I was more astounded by this movie; my reaction was rather one of simple and consistent surprise. But once Neon Bull was over, I couldn't shake it. In fact, it's been three weeks since I saw this movie and I still keep thinking about it, its images, its ideas, its carefully drawn characters and their fascinating relationships. If I didn't love this movie three weeks ago, I'm positive I do now. It's not going to be for everyone – its explicit sex sequences (one involving an animal) and slow pace will turn off quite a few viewers – but this movie is great.

* * *

And then there's The Neon Demon, the new film by Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed the awesome Drive and then followed that up with the ridiculously boring Only God Forgives.

Neon Demon takes place in an odd, haunted Los Angeles that has almost no correspondence with reality. This is a Lynchian fever-dream of a film and knows that's what it is. In fact, there is literally no way that anyone who doesn't like Lynch will like The Neon Demon. 

What this movie is is actually a campy, surreal, mostly silly horror movie with models for main characters and cannibalism as its subject matter. It even includes that staple of this B-movie genre: lesbian desire and girl-on-girl sex scenes.

Nicolas Winding Refn, however, doesn't seem to think he's directed a gimmicky, B-movie, fantasy flick. He think he's made A Clockwork Orange or Barry Lyndon or Blue Velvet. He most certainly has not. He's hidden his silly-but-possibly-clever little horror film, which should have lasted about 75 minutes, inside a bloated, pretentious, and (worst of all) boring 120-minute film. The Neon Demon is awful. 

The Neon Demon's Opening Shot

And it isn't just the world of the film that seems totally detached from reality. Even the film's central assumption – that Elle Fanning possess an extraordinary (yet completely natural) beauty that none of the other gorgeous models in the film possesses – only makes sense because the film keeps telling us it does. I couldn't tell the difference between one model and the next, and I fail to see how Refn or anyone in his film is supposed to be able to do so. The film's main argument is actually that these models are a fungible quantity, easily replaceable, and yet we are supposed to believe that one of them is not that: that she is special in some kind of magical, clearly noticeable way? And then The Neon Demon itself replaces Fanning! In act three she is no longer the central character of the film. Someone else, in fact, takes the place of this irreplaceable, unique beauty, and we find that, of course, we can do without her quite well.

Oh, Who Cares?

For my part I could have done without this film in its entirety, but it is not completely without redeeming qualities. Karl Glusman is good in a small, thankless part, and Erin Benach's costumes are pretty great. The makeup, too, is really really excellent. Keanu Reeves, it should also be noted, gives a performance that is much better than this film.

There are a few stunning images, too, especially notable is a very brief sequence in which an intruder gets into Elle Fanning's apartment.

If only Refn took himself a little less seriously. I recommend that the director of The Neon Demon and Only God Forgives watch a few John Waters films and admit his silliness to himself. Refn seems to think he's doing Lynch or Kubrick, but what he's doing is what Frank Perry used to do – making very serious films that turn out to be exercises in camp.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1970

Frank Perry's filmmaking style sort of freaks me out, to be honest; all of his films seem like they're made as though they're horror films. This is a really strong movie, though, and Carrie Snodgress is excellent as the eponymous housewife. There is an odd moment at the end of the movie that sort of needs analysis for which I don't have time: the man with whom Carrie Snodgress has been having an affair for most of the movie, a man with whom she has (apparently) great sex, is played by Frank Langella. At the end of the picture, his sadistic treatment of her becomes a bit too much like her husband's sadistic treatment of her and she's had enough. But then she has some sort of epiphany about the masculinity his sadism is intended to bolster and she tells him to his face that he is doing all of that because he "is really a fag". And I think the film believes this to be true. Homosexuality was sure understood differently in 1970 than it is now. He's "really" a fag, but he's been having sex with a woman – in secret, no less; no one knows they're having sex – but he's having sex with this woman in secret because he's really a homosexual? Perhaps Sue Kaufman's original novel explains this a bit better. There is, further, an odd bit of foreshadowing in regard to this "fag" moment, in which after one session of lovemaking, Carrie refers to Marcel's love for Albertine in Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Frank laughs and says that Proust was a homosexual and Albertine was a boy. Carrie resents being laughed at, but in the next sequence she is re-reading – presumably – Time Regained, a section of the novel (for what it's worth) in which Albertine does not appear.

Three More Movies

Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is a story about an old man who has a nearly irreparable relationship with his son. To fix his relationship with his son, he decides to travel from Japan to China to film something for his son: something that his son has wanted to see for a very long time. The film is about technology and human relations—the technology sometimes intervenes, sometimes cannot help at all. It's an interesting movie about communication and translation and finding the ability to be clear about emotions without the help of media. It's Zhang Yimou, too, so that means that the movie looks gorgeous. This is a far cry from Yimou's wide, sweeping costume dramas that are usually more about style than substance (Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flower). This, rather, is a simple story about human connection. I liked it okay, but I found it to be a bit of a retread of old material. I suppose I'm a bit tired of crusty old men finding new joy and new reasons for living in the eyes of children. It's an old story, after all.

Mommie Dearest is a fucking classic. I hadn't seen it until now. Faye Dunaway gives a performance that is sheer brilliance and the little girl who plays Christina Crawford, Mara Hobel, is extraordinary. Faye's transformation is, in itself, extraordinary. She tears into the role and it's absolutely delicious to watch. I loved every minute of it. It's campy, sure, and it's a horror movie, of course—a genre not traditionally taken seriously by anyone—but this is a great movie. (P.S. We also watched some of the John Waters commentary. That man is a genius.)

Today's movie was John Huston's film noir piece The Asphalt Jungle, which I loved. The ending is too 1950s for my taste, but it's still a great noir picture, easily one of the best I've seen.