Zardoz (1974)

I’m pretty sure I think John Boorman is obnoxious. Zardoz is definitely obnoxious. I found it outrageously unfocused and wildly sexist. Strangest of all, perhaps, is that even though Sean Connery wears an outrageous red speedo for the entirety of the film, Zardoz just isn’t that much fun, despite being a sci-fi adventure film.

Point Blank

If you are interested in an absolutely perfect gangster picture from 1967, John Boorman's Point Blank is for you. This movie is tight, gripping, and haunting. It's filmed, in many ways, like a John Schlesinger film, and it seems to predict much of what he would do with Midnight Cowboy vis-à-vis flashback and slow motion. It's also a very obvious inspiration for Pulp Fiction, although Boorman is doing something other than Tarantino entirely. This is a real gangster picture that winds up being, fundamentally, about what it means to seek revenge, and what the ethics of killing are. The respect among the real guns is my favorite thing about this, but the ending is exquisite, and every bit of it is riveting.

Point Blank is also very violent and in surprising ways. At one point Lee Marvin actually throws a naked man off of a roof! This was, of course, while the PCA was still in power, and so this film must clearly be grouped with those films – The Killing, Bonnie and Clyde – that contributed to the end of the production code. For this we should all be grateful.

One of the coolest things this movie does is recreate the style of a film noir in color. In other words, it uses shadow and the kind of disappearing/reappearing tactics that the noir filmmakers used, even though this is a color film.

And keep a look out for the gay couple that helps Lee Marvin sneak into the apartment complex in act two.

But more than anything, Point Blank just needs to be watched as a brilliant piece of crime cinema. It's perfect.

Early Tarantino: '93 and '94

How long has it been since you watched yourself some early Tarantino?

I'm not a die-hard fan or anything, but I am currently writing a little something that involves Pulp Fiction, and while I have seen that film multiple times, I had never before seen two of Tarantino's early films, True Romance and Natural Born Killers, both of which he wrote (although QT told Rolling Stone back in 1994 that NBK had basically been rewritten by Oliver Stone, who directed). In any case, I watched both of these movies recently, and then I rewatched Pulp Fiction after reading an entire host of scholarly and critical readings of these films. I can't say that I totally enjoyed myself while doing this, but I offer some things I noticed while revisiting the early 1990s.

True Romance is a fun throwback to crime capers of old like Gun Crazy, except that this film was not made under the PCA. True Romance has a lot of great things about it, honestly, and I rather enjoyed myself.

Although everybody makes a big deal about Vincent Vega being in the bathroom for so many scenes in PF – Sharon Willis, for example, offers (and I don't totally disagree with her) that "the bathroom anchors a dense nexus that connects blood and violence to anal eroticism and smearing, that permits delicate intersections of aggressive soiling impulses with tense efforts to consolidate, to clean" – Tarantino uses exactly this same scenario in the final shootout in True Romance, in which Clarence White is in the bathroom talking to his mentor–Elvis when the Sicilians, the police, and the drug dealers all shoot each other. Indeed, Alabama kills James Gandolfini in the bathroom of the motel where they’re staying. The bathroom, to be sure, is not a standard location for crime films or for the well-made play (although there is at least one key scene in a bathroom in Point Blank), but the bathroom shows up rather a lot in Tarantino’s version of the gangster flick.

This film has just as much pop culture pastiche in it as the rest of them. The characters in TR cathect through pop culture. They fall in love by talking about movies, form relationships by discussing Elvis fandom (as Clarence does with a total stranger at one of the many burger joints he visits), and characters establish trust by trashing movies they both hate. The characters fall in love while talking about Sonny Chiba. They connect with one another not because they are particular people – we really know nothing about who Alabama is (except that she is from Tallahassee and is a call-girl) except that we know or think we know that she likes specific pop-culture products. In truth, I wouldn't even remember anymore which pop-culture products these characters liked unless I had made notes. I remember Sonny Chiba, of course, because he comes up again and again in QT's work, but the thing is that it doesn't much matter which objects these characters like; it's arbitrary.

* * *

Natural Born Killers is almost nothing like a Tarantino movie. It’s an enormous satire on television media. What is, perhaps, ironic about this is that, although this movie got pulverized for being some kind of indication of the way movies have just gone too far vis-à-vis violence, the film is, in fact, about television. It cites Married… with Children and those true crime shows explicitly.

This film is also vaguely Lynchian. It is like a fever dream half the time, and there is an entire subplot with Tom Sizemore that feels insane and as though Lynch himself might have directed it. (The function of this subplot is to establish that the cops are just as fucked up and perverse as the criminals, and it is worth noting that Tom Sizemore appears in both this movie and as a cop in True Romance.)

There is one similarity between NBK and PF – the phony backgrounds through which the cars drive. In both movies, it is obvious that the backgrounds are movie screens. This is, I would say, without thinking much about it, a kind of internal reference within the film, to the fact that the characters themselves understand themselves as stars of the films of their lives, to the way they make sense of their own worlds through movie-culture. These are characters who believe themselves to be characters.

Otherwise it is rather hard to believe that Tarantino even wrote this thing. It really has very few of his themes and (to my mind) showcases few of his obsessions. As much as NBK appears to be in on its own ironic jokes, I don't think it actually is. The irony all feels pretty forced here. It's as though someone who takes himself very seriously (Oliver Stone) is trying to loosen up a little.

I mostly hated this.

Oooo. But I liked Tommy Lee Jones. He was over-the-top and very funny.

* * *

I've seen PF a bunch of times, and I am actually writing about it for something that I want published, so I won't say too much here, but, two things:

Some critics have said that Vincent is really killed because he doesn't wash his hands. (We know he doesn't wash his hands because we "watc[h] [him] wash them" at Jimmie's house and he still turns the towel into a bloody mess.) If he had just washed his hands after using the bathroom at Butch's place, he would've given Butch time to get away, and the toaster pastries would have popped up earlier and wouldn't have surprised Butch. But as much as I agree that Vincent really should wash his hands, I think way too much has been made about Vincent in the bathroom. As I said above, the bathroom appears a lot in QT movies: Jules uses the bathroom as soon as they get to the bar in the prologue (which allows for Butch and Vincent to be alone together, and for Vincent to insult Butch by calling him Palooka) and Fabienne and Butch have an entire conversation in the bathroom – him in the shower, Fabienne brushing her teeth. And she brushes her teeth (and spits in the bathroom) again in the morning. Honey Bunny, too, announces that she needs to pee. None of these bathroom uses has to do with Vincent and his death. The bathroom is just a place that QT finds interesting for gangsters. Even professional criminals have to poop, it turns out. (If you want to think about how revolutionary this is, by the way, take a minute and imagine your favorite movie gangster pooping: James Cagney? Edward G. Robinson? Alain Delon? Jean-Paul Belmondo? Marcello Mastroianni? I'm having a hard time doing it.)

QT uses his someone-in-the-bathroom-while-a-shootout-is-happening thing twice in PF. It happens in True Romance, it happens at the house where Jules and Vincent kill the three boys, and then it happens again when Honey Bunny and Pumpkin hold up the Denny's or Spires or whatever it is.

"Let's go."

The women-with-bare-feet thing has not been given enough attention. Do you know about this? Mia wears no shoes for a majority of her scenes in the film, including during the dance. And the camera lingers directly on her feet before they go to Jackrabbit Slim’s while they're still at the apartment. But also there's this painting on the wall that QT commissioned especially for the movie with Uma Thurman as Mia on a sofa with her bare feet prominently displayed. And QT did interviews where he talked about her sexy feet. (Indeed, her feet are on display again in Kill Bill.) I've read about this in various places, but it isn't only Uma's feet that the camera loves in Pulp Fiction. Esmeralda Villalobos drives the cab with bare feet, and Fabienne is in bare feet for basically the whole film even though they are in a rather seedy-looking motel. So: I know that it is standard in film theory to spend all of our time talking about phalluses and castration, and that's all good and well. And it's also true that some other critics have tried to invert this by focusing on the film's economy of anality – Captain Koons hiding the watch up his ass, the rape in the pawn shop, Vincent taking a shit (twice), Jules's talk about Brett trying to "fuck" Marsellus – this is where all the bathroom talk starts actually to look quite important. But it seems to me that the film is much more interested in women's feet than either phalluses or anuses. (And yes I do know that a fetish is supposed to be a substitute for the phallus in Freudian thinking. I'm just noting that it's the fetish that has currency here and not the phallus itself.) Film theorists haven't spent a lot of time thinking about how a katana or a Louisville Slugger or a shotgun might signify a woman's foot – they're too busy seeing phalluses everywhere they look – but perhaps it's high time we started.

For me, Pulp Fiction mostly holds up – it's been 22 years since it came out! I still like the "Gold Watch" section the best, and the stuff with Samuel L. Jackson continues to be a highlight. But I also continue to be bored by the Mia Wallace section. I find that whole section so phony. Not that any of the dialogue seems natural because it doesn't, but the Mia Wallace section seems especially writerly or contrived or arch to me. I find that entire sequence to be bloated.

Related:
On The Hateful Eight.
On Django Unchained.

Lone Survivor

I've been told by Dayne that this is "a very drunk post", and I did write it after drinking half a bottle of rosé, so be forewarned.

Here's the thing: when you title your film Lone Survivor and you show the audience who that survivor is in the film's first five minutes, it becomes difficult to maintain the tension a survival film needs.

As far as I am concerned, Peter Berg was in trouble as soon as we started. If I was invested in the four men who go on this mission to kill a random dude (and I was invested in them), I also knew – again, from the film's first few minutes – that they were all going to die except for the, ahem, lone survivor, played by Mark Wahlberg.

I'm actually sort of baffled by the way this film was made, because it really is a high-quality thing for much of its running time. The sound is awesome. The makeup is awesome. The photography is top-notch. The acting is great (I love me some Mark Wahlberg, as you probably know I see everything he does, and I absolutely fucking adore Ben Foster – who is as fantastic in this as he is in everything else). Better yet, this could've been a pretty great survival movie. And who doesn't love a survival movie? Deliverance is very good, but 2012's totally fantastic The Grey by Joe Carnahan is totally worth your time.

Lone Survivor just isn't that, though. Instead it is a picture about four guys who go out to kill some random Arabs about whom we know absolutely nothing. So they go off to do this and then people start shooting at them and stuff. And, well, I sort of understood why people were shooting at them. And I still don't know what we're doing in Afghanistan. And the word Taliban is used a lot, but I am not really sure what that means anymore, and in the context of Lone Survivor it only means "bad".

Mr. Foster, Mr. Hirsch, and  Mr. Wahlberg: not doing so hot.

This isn't to say that I didn't like these guys. They were great guys – funny, charming, interesting. I'd probably have a great time having a beer with any of them. But their deaths were inevitable from the film's first frame, and the deaths of the dozens and dozens of Afghanis also seemed inevitable.

I find all of this killing troubling, as you might imagine, but I also find it troubling that the film is fundamentally not interested in interrogating questions about who deserves to live and who deserves to die. There is a long-ish Deliverance-inspired conversation at the beginning of act two about precisely this question, but the arguments never even reach the level of intelligence of Burt Reynolds' monologue in Boorman's film. We remain well entrenched in clichés. And the possibility of being on CNN as the next Lynndie England is more important to these men than moral obligations or ethical decisions.

I was not unmoved by Lone Survivor. Ben Foster, when he dies, talks about his wife and brotherhood and the Navy, and I really responded to that. But Lone Survivor wears out its welcome. It's twenty minutes too long, and it never manages to justify all of the killing it puts on display. As for the lone survivor himself, he's intense and never boring to watch as a performer. The film he's in, however, had me checking my watch. When do we get to the end – which, I may remind you, we've already seen at the film's opening?  

Are we there yet?

(Sober) Addendum

I forgot to say, too, that I was just stunned by the amount of U.S. military firepower that is mobilized at the end of the film. This is something that Lone Survivor has in common with Captain Phillips. In both films, it is as if the U.S. military is a kind of sleeping giant that doesn't enact its full power unless truly angered. In other words, instead of U.S. military tactics subtending the entire action of these films, both Lone Survivor and Captain Phillips behave as though USAmerican agents act on their own (in Phillips, an unarmed naval crew, in Survivor a heavily armed but isolated foursome) and are not actually supported, trained, funded, protected, and armed by the U.S. military. But once the men get into trouble in both films, the (apparently) full might of the United States descends onto the small number of men who have dared to test this sleeping giant. In both films, the military acts as a kind of exercitus ex machina, triumphantly, impossibly, and with unimaginable power, sweeping in and saving the day.

But this is all a trick – a trick of narrative that serves a specific ideological function. The U.S. military has caused everything in Lone Survivor. The men get sent onto this mountain as a military directive. They get abandoned on the mountain because the military is stretched too thin in Afghanistan. They are there, in fact, to kill the man who then fights back and attempts to kill them. And then when the Navy's four foot-soldiers do not succeed in killing the two men that it has all-along planned to kill, the Navy sends in a large number of helicopters and guns down everyone in sight. Why it didn't do this in the first place and why it allowed all of the soldiers who died to die is the Navy's business, of course, but the film pretends as though it isn't. Lone Survivor pretends that all along the four SEALs are fighting against an army much bigger than them. With its army-from-the-machine narrative device, however, Lone Survivor exposes the lie at its center: all of these deaths – the three SEALs, the rescue troupe, the Afghan fighters – have been, if not carefully, at least deliberately, orchestrated by U.S. military policy in Afghanistan.

Kon-Tiki vs. Life of Pi

Apparently, I liked Life of Pi when I first saw it, and I guess I should stick with that opinion because I have no intention of re-watching the film. But last evening I sat down and watched Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's Kon-Tiki and all I could do was compare it to Ang Lee's beloved film from last year.

First off, Kon-Tiki, unlike Life of Pi, is not a kids' film, and it doesn't have the kind of storytelling frame that Pi has, where the story is told to us by an unreliable narrator.

More importantly, Kon-Tiki is a true story, an actual historical event that took place in the late 1940s. Kon-Tiki is the tale of a group of six men who sailed from South America to the Polynesian islands – in other words: five thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean – on a raft. Kon-Tiki, though, always seems real. And I am sure that some of the film was done using CGI. I have no doubt of it, in fact, but it never looked fake. These guys are sailing the ocean on a raft and they look like they are in the ocean on a raft. (I don't know if you remember Life of Pi, but what with the fake tiger and the flying fish and the fake sunsets and the fake water and the fake animals, I never felt like I was in the real world at all.)

Kon-Tiki is an adventure/journey story, rather in the mode of Deliverance, The Way Back, or The Grey: so it is really a movie about testing the mettle of a group of men who are alone in the wild with no one to help them but their own ingenuity and a bunch of blind luck. It is gorgeously made, with impressive and immaculate costume design and a group of actors doing fine work, and I have to say I found most of it rather gripping.

Rønning and Sandberg's movie has its share of clichéd scenes – the terrified and useless Ned Beatty character from Deliverance is embodied in this case by a tubby refrigerator salesman played by Anders Baasmo Christiansen – but it also has a few filled with extraordinary tension. There is a sequence where the men literally grab a shark out of the ocean and eviscerate it on the raft that left me with my mouth gaping.

All in all, Kon-Tiki is something like Life of Pi for grown-ups. Kon-Tiki doesn't take the (child's) point of view that the world is magical; it looks at the Earth, thinks about it scientifically, and still finds the world wonderful.

Two Movies in Rapid Succession

I reluctantly watched Paul Haggis's war drama In the Valley of Elah the other day, since it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor. I don't like Paul Haggis as a rule. He doesn't like his characters enough for me to really appreciate him: kind of like the Neil LaBute of cinema (well, not as bad as LaBute, but you get what I mean). The last film of his I watched (The Last Kiss) I found completely infuriating, since it was based on a really good film. Haggis's version, made all the characters unlikeable.

In the Valley of Elah follows this mold, but is also a really poorly crafted film. The set up of Elah is that Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon's son goes AWOL somewhere in Texas. He disappears from the base and Jones goes down to the base to find him. He meets with opposition from the Army and so he recruits Charlize Theron, who is a local cop, to help him find his kid. The kid turns out murdered and chopped up into pieces. And then it loses steam, because the movie isn't really about anything. There is not really a plot except the act of figuring out what happened to the kid. And what happened to the kid is really underwhelming. Worse yet, what happened to the kid is revealed to the audience piecemeal, like evidence gradually being discovered in an episode of "Law & Order." There is no real detective work in the film, instead evidence just keeps dropping into the audience's lap. It's an un-artful way to script a mystery film, and In the Valley of Elah never works.

I also finally watched Deliverance, John Boorman's film of James Dickey's novel. I am writing about this movie obliquely for my thesis, so I thought it was important to watch it, at least for the scene of male rape that occurs about halfway through the film. Deliverance is a weird picture. It is centered around an act of male rape, but the movie is really an adventure picture with a tiny plot. I liked it, I suppose, but I didn't really get the film. It's a strange story to want to tell and it's told in a strange way. Eh.

Hope and Glory

John Boorman's 1987 film Hope and Glory is a fabulous movie that I enjoyed from start to finish. It's about a young British boy who is left to his own devices during the summer in World War II when Hitler was carpet bombing England. It's full of whimsical explorations and serious musings about life, patriotism and war. A lot of it is tongue-in-cheek and yet so much of it is grave and powerful. It's really a movie of two minds, but it's a special, child's view of war that is never treacly or irritating (like Life Is Beautiful) and the rewards of the film are great. Boorman is able to capture the essence of family: all the fighting and difficulty though fierce bonds exist and the magic that is present in everyday life, even in difficult circumstances. Hope and Glory is thoroughly charming and boasts some wonderful performances.

This seeing-things-through-the-eyes-of-a-young-boy theme was very prevalent in 1987 when Hope and Glory came out. I was just looking at a list: Empire of the Sun, The Last Emperor, Radio Days, Au Revoir les Enfants and My Life as a Dog all came out that year. I know tons of other stuff came out that year, too: Moonstruck and Full Metal Jacket and RoboCop and The Untouchables and all that, but I think it's worth mentioning that six films about looking at things as children came out in 1987. Some kind of universal consciousness thing.

At any rate, as much as I love those other films, I think Hope and Glory is different from them in significant and interesting ways. I think it finds something rarely seen in cinema: magic in everyday existence and the fleeting nature of happiness (and pain) in a life absolutely chock-full of events worth remembering. Highly recommended.