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The Gift

Like all right-thinking Americans, I am a Turner Classic Movies (TCM) junkie. It’s the default channel I turn to when the cable box is on. By sheer coincidence, the night I returned from a screening of The Gift, I turned on TCM just in time to catch the beginning of Shadow of a Doubt, the 1943 film that Alfred Hitchcock considered his finest work.

Writer/director/producer/actor Joel Edgerton has clearly studied Hitchcock, and his new film The Gift carries much of Shadow of a Doubt in its DNA. It begins with a young couple Simon (Jason Bateman) and Robyn (Rebecca Hall) buying a Southern California, midcentury modern home. They’re relocating from Chicago because Simon has a prestigious, high-paying new job in “corporate security.”

You just know they’ll soon come to regret those huge windows that blur the lines between outdoors and indoors. They’re shopping at Ikea, when someone recognizes Simon: Gordon “Gordo” Mosley, played by our director Edgerton. Simon grew up in the area before leaving for college and career, and Gordo was a high school friend. Or maybe “friend” is an overstatement. Simon seems pretty reluctant to talk to him, and reveals to Robyn that the kids used to call him “Gordo the Weirdo.”

Writer/director Joel Edgerton stars in The Gift

Edgerton’s portrayal of Gordo is one of the best things about The Gift. He’s an Iraq War veteran, plain-spoken, and down-to-earth, but somehow unsettling. He’s just a little too stare-y, and his simple statements like “Good people deserve good things” seem to carry sinister subtexts. He gives off a weird stalker vibe even before the first unsolicited gift arrives at Simon and Robyn’s house.

But then again, nearly everyone in the film is giving off bad vibes. Robyn’s got major problems. She had a miscarraige back in Chicago and is the only person in the film who doesn’t drink copious amounts of wine, because she’s in recovery for unspecified substance abuse. Employees at Simon’s new company are clearly a bunch of status-obsessed creeps. And Simon is the worst of all. Bateman’s finest work has been as Michael Bluth on Arrested Development. Much of the show’s comedy comes from the fact that the Bluth family is hopelessly entitled and clueless to their own foolishness. Michael is the most sympathetic of the lot, but that’s only by comparison with the other characters. Imagine how annoying Michael Bluth would be if you knew him in real life, and you’ve got a sense of how Bateman’s performance plays out in The Gift.

Gordo makes references to “letting bygones be bygones,” and as his presence in their lives grows more insistent and sinister, Robyn wants to know what kind of history he and Simon have. In Shadow of a Doubt‘s, opening scene, Hitch makes sure the audience knows that Joseph Cotten is not the good-hearted Uncle Charlie his family thinks he is. The simple tension created by the informational asymmetry between the audience and the characters imbues every one of Uncle Charlie’s innocuous actions with a sinister undertone. Edgerton attempts the opposite. He wants you to wonder who is the real bad guy, Gordo The Weirdo, Simon, California start-up culture, or maybe even us, the audience.

The Gift is a tricky film to review, because I think Edgerton has his heart in the right place. He clearly wants to do some classical suspense filmmaking, and his influences are pointing him in the right directions. And yet, this film comes off as less a Hitchcockian thriller than as a low-rent Gone Girl. As with last year’s David Fincher hit, the real fear the film is tapping into is the failing middle class’ economic anxiety. Simon seems to shun Gordo because he’s a reminder of Simon’s working-class past, and Gordo goes to great lengths to fake affluence. But The Gift lacks either Fincher’s talent for dense plotting or Hitchcock’s elegance. Long passages in the middle seem repetitive, as Edgerton leans on jump-scares over and over. And the less said about the ending, the better.

If you’re a fan of suspense, and want to support original material, give The Gift a whirl. Edgerton’s a gifted actor, and shows promise behind the camera. Here’s hoping the pieces come together better in his next outing.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Throwback August: Ran

Ran (1985; dir. Akira Kurosawa)—Kurosawa’s final samurai epic is a furious, inarticulate howl of anguish that builds for nearly three hours until its irrefutable argument is finally given voice by an angry soldier: “Men prefer sorrow over peace. They revel in pain and bloodshed. They celebrate murder.”

Such a truth would hardly be worth thinking about unless the world was worth saving. And it is; there is a great, severe beauty suffusing the hills, meadows and treeless plains where Kurosawa sets his version of King Lear. These serene visions of nature only heighten the tragedy that unfolds when elderly Lord Hidetoro (Tatsuya Nakadai) declares his wish to divide his kingdom and live out the rest of his days in peace. As one of Hidetoro’s sons points out, this dream is incompatible with the kingdom his father forged by spilling “measureless blood.” Yet Hidetoro continues to believe that his delusional dreams will become reality. He will live long enough to see the ramifications of his foolishness.

Nakadai’s barking, wildly expressionist performance as Hidetoro (who grows more gray and spectral as Ran death-marches on) is contrasted with Mieko Harada’s scarily erotic turn as the scheming Lady Kaede, who sees her father-in-law’s dotage as an opportunity to enact her long-simmering revenge. She drops into Ran like a hawk that finally catches its prey in an unguarded moment, yet the only instance of wit in the entire film comes when she squashes a moth during a fake crying jag.

Throwback August: Ran (2)

There are two major battles in Ran, and the first one is worth every fight scene in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a dozen Fury Road sequels. As Hidetoro and his guards are ambushed by two of his three sons, the whirr of insects, the swish of robes and the thunder of horses’ hooves that have dappled the soundtrack so far are silenced. Toro Takemitsu’s score takes over; Kurosawa assembles a montage of blood, dismemberment and devastation punctuated by shots of the sun visible through an ocean of smoke. After nearly six minutes, the sounds of the real world return with a gunshot that uselessly takes another life.

I was fortunate enough to see the 25th anniversary revival of Ran when it played select theaters in 2010. But even if you could see it on a screen wider than the sky, you that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Grade: A+

Throwback August: Ran

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Throwback August: Brazil

This week we’re tackling films from 1985 on Throwback August, which means I get an opportunity to write about one of my favorite films of all times, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

The production of Brazil is one of the most infamous and convoluted stories in all of Hollywood lore. Gilliam, Monty Python’s resident animator, had embarked on a solo directing career as the legendary comedy troupe went their separate ways. With the Python cache and the 1981 sci fi/fantasy hit Time Bandits under his belt, betting on Gilliam’s fevered imagination seemed reasonable to Twentieth Century Fox. It was 1984, so naturally Orwell was in the air. What would be the most successful screen adaptation of Orwell’s dystopian classic was already in production, and Gilliam promised a modernized take on the themes of surveillance and oppression with the trademark Python satirical bent. He delivered all that and more—it’s also a Christmas movie.

Johnathon Pryce as Sam Lowery in one of Brazil’s dream sequences.

Costs ballooned during filming, as Gilliam added elaborate dream sequences and fussed over the details of the production design. The final tally was three times as much as Time Bandits, and when the producers saw Gilliam’s cut, they belatedly remembered the old Broadway saw “satire closes on Saturday night.” The epic pissing match over the the final cut and the release are detailed in the book The Battle Of Brazil, but Gilliam found himself facing every director’s worst nightmare, and not for the last time in his career.

Pryce and Michael Palin as Jack Lint in Brazil‘s climactic torture scene.

The film, hurt by the bad publicity and buried by the petulant studio, lost money on its initial release, but it quickly established a cult audience, and has had an enormous impact on filmmaking for the last 30 years. During a recent screening at the Brooks Museum, the story of daydreaming bureaucratic lackey Sam Lowery’s (Jonathan Pryce) struggle to keep his identity, do the right thing, and find the woman of his dreams still resonates in strongly in 2015. Particularly prescient are the themes of the unnamed society’s information economy as a means of both financial exploitation and social control— a banner in the Ministry Of Information offices reads “Information The Key To Prosperity”.

Gilliam used production design to convey thematic information.

Lowery and the other hero, the mysterious, rogue HVAC repairman Harry Tuttle (an unrecognizable Robert DeNiro), are both tech whizzes disdained and manipulated by the privileged ruling class. A seemingly senseless and endless War on Terror provides the low hum of paranoia that pervades the film’s action and gives gentleman torturer Jack Lint (Python Michael Palin, in his best film role) his wealth and status. Terrorist bombings are just part of the background of life in this dystopian society, like we now routinely make a public show of getting upset about the latest mass shooting but then go on about our business.

Robert DeNiro as revolutionary HVAC repairman Harry Tuttle.

The notion that the terrorist attacks might all be faked as a way to keep the ruling class in power is also present. When truck driver and Lowery’s object of affection Jill Layton (Kim Griest) asks, “How many terrorists have you actually met?”, she could be speaking to us. That, and the scene where Information Retrieval shock troops arrest Sam and Jill in mid-tryst are two of the many direct allusions to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Kim Greist as Jill Layton

But Brazil has bigger fish to fry. In its final act, it becomes a inquiry into the nature of reality itself. Gilliam takes his endgame from the Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 short story “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge”, where much of the action presented as real in the story turns out to be hallucinations of the dying protagonist. It’s one of my most hated fictional gambits, because it’s usually a cheap trick on the part of an author who has written himself into a corner. And yet, Gilliam makes it work in Brazil because it serves his bigger themes: As the elites gain increasing power to work their will on the individual, the mind is the only preserve of freedom we have left. 

Throwback August: Brazil

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Film Features Film/TV

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

It’s been 19 years since Tom Cruise first portrayed Ethan Hunt in an adaptation of the hit spy show Mission: Impossible. That’s longer than the show had been off the air when the Brian De Palma-helmed reboot hit theaters with the now-iconic image of Cruise hanging over a computer terminal, suspended by impossibly thin wires. Since someone born on the first film’s premiere date would be college-aged by now, it’s likely that there are many people in the audience who don’t know the self-destructing message sending spies off on an elaborate and dangerous mission is a callback to the show’s weekly cold opening. But it’s the formula Desilu Productions developed for TV that has allowed the Mission: Impossible franchise to outlive the Cold War. A highly trained team of agents working for a shadowy, quasi-governmental agency undertaking missions so sensitive and difficult that their government will “disavow” all knowledge of their existence if they fail works just as well in the age of terrorism as it did in the days of KGB vs. CIA spy-jinks.

The latest installment, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, is nothing if not formulaic, but the movie is self-aware enough to preemptively ask if it’s still relevant. We first meet returning player William Brandt (Avengers‘ Jeremy Renner) defending the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) before a congressional committee as CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) successfully argues that they are redundant and dangerously out of control. Hunley puts the IMFers, including computer wizard Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), on desk duty, but their first assignment is tracking Hunt, who has once again gone rogue. Hunt thinks he’s on the trail of yet another shadowy, elite force of spies called the Syndicate, but almost no one else believes they exist. Hunley accuses him of making up threats to justify the IMF’s funding with one of the film’s best lines: “Hunt is both arsonist and fireman.”

But since Tom Cruise is both star and producer, we know that the Syndicate is real, and it includes stock characters like the strangely cold, vaguely European mastermind Soloman Lane (Sean Harris), a Russian sadist named the Bone Doctor (Jens Hultén), and British double (or possibly triple) agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). Hunt gets the old team out from behind their desks — and in the case of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), out of retirement — to stop the Syndicate from — well, doing something that’s probably real bad. Details like the bad guy’s motivations and the exact nature of the MacGuffin (It’s a list of agents! No wait, it’s a list of bank accounts! No wait, we’ve got to rescue Benji!) are not Mission: Impossible‘s strong suit.

What Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are all about is crafting high-quality action, and judged by that metric, they succeed. The “gain access to an impossibly secure computer system” sequence is set underwater this time, to spectacular results. But the best part of the film is the second-act set piece in a Vienna opera house that references Hitchcock’s climax to The Man Who Knew Too Much.

While the Daniel Craig/Sam Mendes team has taken James Bond into more serious character territory, Cruise and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company have taken the opposite approach. Rogue Nation plays like a fond memory of Roger Moore-era Bond films such as Live and Let Die, only without the misogyny — or sexiness, for that matter. Even though Ferguson, a British actress making her first foray into the action genre, is captivating onscreen, she and Cruise share only a single extended hug.

Like Adam Sandler, Cruise’s wealth and status remove the usual motivations for doing a movie: He doesn’t need the money, so why bother? In Sandler’s case, the leaked Sony Pictures emails allege his films are little more than ways to get his friends and family free vacations. Cruise, on the other hand, appears to be motivated by the desire to perform increasingly over-the-top stunts. Rogue Nation‘s big moment comes right off the bat, when Hunt, trying to recover a biological weapons cache, clings to the side of an Airbus military transport as it takes off and flies away. At least that’s more fun for the viewer than watching Sandler yuk it up on a waterslide.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Throwback August: Jaws

The dog days of August are upon us, so at some point, you’re going to need to sit inside with your AC blasting and recover from the heat. To help supplement your binge watching, the Memphis Flyer Film/TV/Etc. Blog presents Throwback August. Each week, myself, Addison Engelking, and Eileen Townsend will each examine a film from 40, 30, 20, and 10 years ago. This week, we’ll be talking about films from 1975.

The biggest film of 1975 was also one of the most important films of all times, both from an artistic and historic point of view. When Steven Spielberg signed on to direct an adaptation of the Peter Benchley thriller about a small coastal town that lived in fear of a giant shark, he was a 26-year-old with only one feature film to his name, The Sugarland Express, starring Goldie Hawn, and scored by a little-known composer named John Williams. Once Spielberg fully analyzed the problems involved in filming the novel, he tried to back out of the deal. But producer Richard Zanuck stood firm, and the rest is history. 

Director Steven Spielberg with Bruce, the mechanical shark star of Jaws.

Jaws is widely credited with being the beginning of the summer blockbuster, and there’s some truth to that, but elements of its successful formula were already in the air by the time it hit theaters. The Godfather, for example, had also been an adaptation of a potboiler novel that opened on an unusually large amount of screens in an age where the conventional film business wisdom was to strike as few prints as possible and then tour them relentlessly.

Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw

But Jaws is not a multi-generational family saga about America. It’s a tribute to Hitchcock’s dictum that mediocre books make the best movies. Since I was all of 4 years old when Jaws came out, I had never seen it on a big screen before a recent sold-out anniversary screening at Malco Paradiso mounted by Turner Classic Movies. The unpredictability of the sea caused major problems during the filming, but the one that struck me the most was the lighting. Blown up huge, you can tell how much Spielberg used reflectors to illuminate the actor’s faces during the bright, sunlit outdoor sequences. But the occasional clunky elements exposed by the HD projection only served to underline its general awesomeness. Spielberg’s uncanny talent for framing and deep staging are already there, fully blown, such as in the scene where a drunk Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) and Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) dissect a shark looking for the body parts of a child victim. Scheider and Dreyfuss are both great as the movie’s co-leads, but it’s Robert Shaw as the fisherman Quint who steals the show with the legendary monolog about the doomed crew of the Indianapolis. The delivery of his final words, “Anyway, we delivered The Bomb,” tell all you need to know about the character so haunted by the deaths he has seen and helped cause, so when he is finally swallowed by the shark, it’s the end he knew was inevitable. And that gets to the heart of all horror films. Like all great movie monsters, the shark is just justice delayed for the secret crimes we all commit. 

Throwback August: Jaws

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Addison’s April Film Journal

Battles Without Honor and Humanity (a.k.a The Yakuza Papers, Vol. 1) (1973; dir. Kinji Fukasaku)—The first film in Fukasaku’s pentalogy about organized crime in post-World War II Japan justifies its title almost instantly: the opening fifteen minutes include an atomic bomb detonation, a rape, two dismemberments, an act of yubitsume (“finger shortening”), an assassination, and a prison-cell seppuku with a homemade shiv. The violence never lets up, and as the paybacks and punishments proliferate, it becomes nearly impossible to keep track of who’s killing whom and why—which is probably the point. This much is clear, though: the city streets of 1940s Hiroshima were the meanest streets imaginable, and the desperate venality and violence of the strivers and thugs populating these films makes the tragic nobility given Michael Corleone and company in Francis Ford Coppola’s first two Godfathers look like delusional, naïve playacting.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity is a firestorm of scuffles, showdowns and ambushes that exposes the moral horror to criminal enterprise while mocking the solemn formality of the yakuza clan meetings alluded to via black-and-white photo montages and stentorian voiceovers. No one is safe: Fukasaku often freeze-frames his bad guys and labels them as important figures only to duck behind a car or another hoodlum as they get gunned down moments later, flailing and stumbling to their deaths and coated in liberal daubs of thick, fire-engine red movie blood. Each death is accompanied by a brassy horn blast on the soundtrack that’s part alarm and part wail of despair at the meaninglessness of it all. Closest thing to a credo in the film: “We’ll go back to our original vision of doing whatever we want to do.” Grade: A-

Deadly Fight in Hiroshima (a.k.a. The Yakuza Papers, Vol. 2) (1973; dr. Kinji Fukasaku)—With its streamlined cast and its third-act focus on a single character’s rise and fall, the second entry in The Yakuza Papers is the clearest and most accessible installment of the series. But it’s still an uncomfortable and clinical wallowing about in the underworld mud that’s punctuated by a handful of long, drawn-out and patently unfair confrontations between unsuspecting targets and sweating, frightened criminals who take a little too long to finish the dirty jobs they were sent to do. There are no master killers here—previous bloodshed hasn’t made any of the characters any better at murdering each other than they used to be. The bigger fight scenes resemble clumsy temper tantrums thrown by pretend gangsters who shoot their guns like they’re handling lit roman candles. They stab the barrels of their guns at their targets like preteen boys poking snakes and roadkill. And it’s not often clear who they’re aiming at. Instead of the battle royales crisscrossing the first film, this one relies on intergenerational rivalries, more occasions for dishonor and finger-shortening, and more explicit and overt political commentary in the voiceover narration. Sad personal goal: “Let me fight and die.” Grade: A

Proxy War (a.k.a. The Yakuza Papers, Vol. 3) (1973; dir. Kinji Fukasaku) Because nearly every gangster in the series harbors a pathological obsession with betraying everyone else, and because its many confabs are likely setting up the brawls of the final two films, the third Yakuza Papers is both the least action-packed and the most difficult to follow. It’s populated with official and unofficial meetings and counter-meetings overseen by whimpering businessman-goon types who weep crocodile tears as part of their own schemes for individual advancement. But Proxy Wars is still notable because it’s the one that finally lets scrappy lead dog Hirono Shozo (Bunda Sugawara) off the leash. Lingering in the background throughout the first two, Shozo emerges as a major player here, suffering through meetings like a born hoodlum in his blue pinstripe suit and beating his dumb employees like an unhinged dad. Formal note: if, somehow, you didn’t pay attention to Toshiaki Tsushima’s brooding musical score before, you will now. Its earworm repetitions are perfect for the third consecutive film in the series to end with a funeral and a desecration. Admission of defeat: “Wiping out your rivals doesn’t mean you win the game these days.” Grade: B

La Sapienza (2014; dir. Eugene Green)—And now for something completely different: important thoughts about architecture as spirituality made flesh, urbanization as man’s original fall from grace, wisdom as cosmic illumination and “ridding ourselves of the useless.” Writer-director Green’s stilted, pretentious, intellectually stimulating and frequently quite beautiful-looking story of an estranged middle-aged couple who meets up with a handsome, intensely curious teenage boy and his frail, wraithlike sister shows some necessary self-awareness about its own silliness early on, and it starts to trickle out more audibly once it becomes obvious that the camera and the actors are engaged in a staring contest that neither one is going to back down from. But who needs realism when Ozu is invoked as much as God and Borromini’s architecture (as well as Dardenne brothers regular Fabrizio Rongione) is there to generate some agape? The stiffness and artificiality of the performances don’t hurt the film at all—they actually reinforce the seriousness and importance of the age-old questions about art, buildings, knowledge (the “sapience” of the title) and love they boldly ask each other. It’s artsy as hell but pretty much irresistible. Epigraph: “Science without conscience destroys one’s soul.” Grade: A

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015; dir. Alex Gibney)—The secret workings of the Church of Scientology are no longer secret. Both Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secret Religion and the work of author Lawrence Wright (whose book Going Clear is the chief inspiration for Gibney’s documentary) discuss the finer points of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s origins and inspirations, the popular success of Dianetics, the billion-year Sea Org contracts, the panic over “suppressed persons”, the Bridge to Total Freedom, and the numerous accounts of member intimidation, exploitation and abuse. There are no Scientology surprises anymore; the big surprise will come—if it ever does—on the day the Church defends itself by citing something other than its own in-house websites and publications as proof that they’re innocent of all wrongdoing.

Going Clear mesmerizes anyway because it frames and explains Scientology as both a massively successful faith-based initiative and an All-American success story. Gibney charts Hubbard’s ideas as they evolve from a grab-bag of sci-fi concepts into the backbone of an extraordinarily well-funded and aggressive worldwide organization that used its money and muscle to force the IRS to suspend its investigation, declare Scientology a religion, and never try to collect taxes from it again. The thoughtful interviews with former Scientologists like writer-director Paul Haggis and former bigwig Marty Rathbun provide context and history. But Gibney’s doc also contains tantalizing archival footage of LRH himself—a seductive raconteur whose bad teeth would draw the ire of Mary Baker Eddy but whose undeniable self-confidence and personal charisma clearly continues to inspire super-secretive Scientology leader David Miscavige. HBO Films lawyered up big-time before releasing this one, but that’s more about Scientology’s rage for litigiousness than anything else: Gibney’s work is remarkably fair-minded given the xenophobia and strangeness exhibited by practicing Scientologists in clip after clip after clip. (Tom Cruise in particular does not come off well; wonder if any part of him thought Edge of Tomorrow was a documentary?) So why does Scientology continue to exist and expand? As Wright says, it’s not because its members don’t want to do the right thing: “They’re oftentimes good-hearted people, idealistic, but full of a kind of crushing certainty that eliminates doubt.” Grade: A-

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Film Journal #7


The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974; dir. Tobe Hooper)—I spent last Saturday night in an ill-lit movie theater with a bunch of misfits, longhairs, punks, and a guy in a Leatherface costume. Why? To see the special 40th anniversary restoration of Tobe Hooper’s notorious horror classic, of course. It’s strange to watch a cleaned-up digital print of something that used to look like it had been dredged up from a swamp. But in its shiny new restoration, it’s impossible to miss all the chicken feathers, rotten flesh and furniture made from human bones, and Hooper’s knack for juggling long shots and extreme close-ups benefits from the digital smoothing-out. The film’s many shocks are well and truly sprung, and it’s also I-guess-you-could-call-it-funny in spots; an early scene where a wheelchair-bound weirdo absently chews a sausage is quietly nauseating for anyone who’s seen the movie before. The film’s final 30 minutes, a nightmare of familial derangement and extreme psychic trauma, is overpoweringly loud and uncomfortable, and it’s the key to this absolutely horrifying and sickening experience that, honestly, I never want to see again. Grade: A+


Film Journal #7

Women Aren’t Funny (2014; dir. Bonnie McFarlane)—Last week’s episode of IFC’s Garfunkel & Oates was predicated on the idea that women aren’t funny, a pernicious lie that might be laid to rest after it’s been proven false 700 more times. I looked up this movie on iTunes after I saw director/star/comedian Bonnie McFarlane’s stand-up set ignominiously cut short on The Late Show With David Letterman a month ago. What gives, man? I was hoping for a more legitimate inquiry into a complex, messed-up, industry-wide misconception that persists in spite of the work of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer, the Broad City girls, Morgan Murphy, Jen Kirkman, Maria Bamford, Jenny Johnson, Casey Wilson, Mindy Kaling, etc. etc. etc. Unfortunately, McFarlane is too much of a prankster and a serial ironist to truly and fully confront sexism in comedy. (Relying on Artie Lange doesn’t help.) Still, there are some jokes and some revealing observations here, and wisdom and enlightenment come from two unlikely sources: Sarah Silverman, who’s always welcome in anything, and Todd Glass, who I saw open for Louis C.K. twice and who never made me laugh once. It’s inconceivable to me that McFarlane’s husband, comedian Rich Vos, is a bigger name than she is, but that’s just part of the problem. Women can’t get no respect. What do I know, though? I’m just a sex-positive feminist who’s heading to a Garfunkel & Oates show on Friday night. Grade: B


Film Journal #7 (2)

Pharoah (1965; dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz)—An ancient Egyptian sword-and-sandal epic with real swords, real sandals, real sand, and crowds of real extras, Kawalerowicz’s long, solemn, deliberate film about the rise to power of Ramses XIII contrasts smug, impassive authority figures with scurrilous hustlers and balances regal scrolling tracking shots in the royal chambers with ragged, jagged handheld vignettes in the streets and the desert. One battle scene is shot entirely from the point of view of a footsoldier who doesn’t make it back; another claustrophobic set piece watches a sweat-grimed man slowly lose his way in a labyrinth. There’s betrayal, mysticism, a solar eclipse, and a foxy grey-skinned temptress who feels like she’s been imported from a Mesopotamian skin flick. In other words, it’s another helpful reminder of the rest of the world’s cinematic riches. In addition to being available on DVD, Pharoah is one of the highlights of Martin Scorsese’s “Masterpieces of Polish Cinema,” series, which has screenings in Kansas City and Atlanta later this fall. Grade: A-


Je t’aime Je t’aime (1968; dir. Alain Resnais)—Watching an Alain Resnais movie from the 1960s is one of the more exciting and rewarding cinematic challenges you can set for yourself. They resist easy categorization and they demand your full attention; they’re puzzling and provocative and more or less impossible to take the measure of after just one viewing. These movies take time: once you can trace the through-line of the plot, the rhythms of the editing move to the forefront, and new thematic concatenations begin to emerge from the headspace between shots. Avoid these if structural ingenuity isn’t your thing. Anyway, in this film—which anticipates Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by 35 years—a suicidal author is asked to participate in a time-travelling experiment. So some scientists put him in a contraption that suggests a giant head of garlic and set him loose. Things don’t go smoothly. In the best scene, our hero sits in an office and contemplates his place in the universe. I bet if he looked into a coffee cup just then, he’d probably see the Milky Way in the cream. Grade: A- (but likely to improve after multiple viewings)



He Ran All The Way (1951; dir. John Berry)—After surfacing briefly on TCM.com for a week, this excellent film noir has disappeared into the digital depths on Monday; if you want to see it, you need a multi-zone DVD player and a decent chunk of change. For the casual moviegoer, it’s probably not worth the trouble; for fans of raw domestic melodrama, the cinematography of James Wong Howe, and Marlon Brando’s performance in A Streetcar Named Desire (which was released the same year), it’s probably a must-see. John Garfield, in his final performance, plays an unlucky hoodlum who botches a robbery and hides out from the law by escaping into a public pool. He seduces Shelley Winters while he waits for the heat to lift, and he eventually cons his way back to Winters’ place, where he winds up holding her, her kid brother, and her mom and dad hostage. Garfield lurches around the family’s apartment like an ape and kills time by mocking and terrorizing middle-class rituals—family meals, day jobs, first loves. His volatile anger and flashes of need are inseparable; it’s no wonder that Winters—who, at this stage in her career, played lots of girls with lousy taste in men—is drawn to him. Terse, tense, terrific, and only 78 minutes long. Grade: A

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Film Features Film/TV

Life After Beth

When reliable performers show up in a film that is neither good nor bad, they appear frozen, bored, cut off. In films like these, placeholding paycheck performances don’t sting much, but the latest versions of the old familiar tricks feel like mirages, too.

Such actorly lifelessness eventually conquers the cast of Jeff Baena’s Life After Beth, which isn’t a high-concept horror-romance as much as it is an impressive collection of talent sitting around while some decent ideas about love, humanity, and violence recede into the suburban background.

Baena’s film initially follows brooding young stormcloud Zach (Dane DeHaan) as he tries to recover from the sudden death of his girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza). Zach grieves by spending lots of time with Beth’s shell-shocked parents played by Molly Shannon and John C. Reilly.

Dane DeHaan and Aubrey Plaza star in Life After Beth

One day, Zach stops by Beth’s parents’ house, but they won’t let him in. Later that evening Zach returns. He sneaks around to the back, peers through a window, and, to his surprise, glimpses Beth walking down a hallway. For some reason, she’s come back, and although she is a bit foggy, she seems fine. So Zach and Beth try to rekindle their relationship. What could go wrong?

Life After Beth is kind of about grief and kind of about teenage romance, but it’s mostly about interesting-looking faces. Reilly’s comic-menacing mug is dominated by a strong, tiered brow that buries his eyes so deeply in his head he suggests an overgrown troll who views the world through a speakeasy door slot. DeHaan’s weary, wrinkled newborn’s eyes and motionless shingle of hair offset his quivering childlike mouth; Plaza’s huge, deadish eyes and bulbous head suggest a predatory hipster insect that’s sucked too much blood.

Life After Beath is seldom raw or intense and never truly funny. It is kinky, though. A scene of joyful, broad-daylight necrophilia in the sands of a public park playground contrasts a romantic evening at the beach that explodes into a Kiss Me Deadly holocaust.

A likely future cult classic, this tantalizing, gender-flipped variation of Warm Bodies checks at least one item off its list — there are fewer people standing around doing nothing at the end than there were at the beginning.

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Film Features Film/TV

Outflix Film Festival

The Outflix Film Festival enters its 17th year on a strong note, coming off its most successful edition ever with more and better films portraying the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender perspective. This year’s entries topped 300 films, up more than 50 percent from last year, reflecting the festival’s growing profile. “It’s great for me, because I love to watch films,” says festival director Will Batts.

The annual festival is a fund-raiser for the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center where Batts is executive director. “We have to have a really diverse lineup, because we serve a really diverse community,” he says. “We want to make sure we have women’s films, transgender films, and films with people of color who are leads. We want to make sure that the whole community can see themselves on the screen.”

Outflix was started in 1997 by Brian Pera, an acclaimed Memphis filmmaker. “He started it as a kind of experimental theater project,” Batts says.

Early in its existence, the festival was held on the campus at the University of Memphis before moving briefly to commercial theaters and then lying fallow for a few years. “We started it back up in 2005, which is actually how I got involved in the center,” says Batts.

After one year at the former Memphis Media Co-Op and another at the now-defunct Downtown Muvico theater, the festival found its permanent home at the recently remodeled Malco Ridgeway cinema. “We’ve been there through the transition and the remodel. It’s great. The only bad thing is that there are fewer seats now in the theaters, so we’re seeing more movies sell out.”

Out in the Night

Batts says that during his decade at the festival he has had a front-row seat for the technological transition that has affected every level of the movie industry. “The first couple of years, everything came in on VHS, so we had cases of VHS tapes. But this year, probably 95 percent of the films were digitally submitted. That means that a lot more filmmakers are getting their films in front of us. So we get a lot more variety.”

The weeklong festival begins on Friday,September 5th and runs for one week, screening 19 narrative features and documentaries. This year’s opening night film is Kidnapped For Christ, directed by Kate S. Logan.

“It tells the story of something we deal with at the community center all the time,” Batts Says, “which is this belief that gay and lesbian people are somehow damaged in some way and need to be fixed; parents immersed in this culture that tells them that their kids are bad or wrong or sinful or whatever, and they need to be sent off to some camp in the middle of nowhere to beat the gay out of them. We want to get the message out that this is really harmful, and it continues to this day.”

Among the feature-length movies will be shorts, screening both before the features and as part of a shorts program on Sunday evening. “I especially love short films,” Batts says. “There’s something really powerful about telling an entire story in five minutes. “You can watch some of them on YouTube, but that’s just not the same experience as sitting in a theater full of people watching a really powerful short film.”

Much has changed about film and television’s vision of homosexuality in the 17 years since Outflix started, but there’s still a long way to go. “I think there are more accurate portrayals of LGBT people, but it still hasn’t permeated the mainstream,” Batts says. “We’re moving closer to reality, but we’re not quite there yet. The films we show at Outflix are more real, because they’re made by LGBT filmmakers and they’re about and starring LBGT actors who know the experience. They’re not going to tone it down for an audience who won’t understand them. Some of the films are more open about sexuality, some of them are open about what it means to be transgender or intersexed, so they’re educational in a way. Some of the films are about injustice and intolerance. It’s a much more real portrayal of LGBT people. We don’t get to see ourselves portrayed on the big screen as real people, warts and all. And that’s why Outflix exists.”

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Time Warp Drive-In: Motorcycle Madness

Tonight’s August edition of the Time Warp Drive In, Summer avenue’s biggest summer event, kicks off with a wedding. Kim Stanford and Coley Smith from Tupelo, Mississippi will say their vows at 7 PM, with Mike McCarthy, the Time Warp Drive-In empresario, presiding.

After the nuptials, the evening of motorcycle movies begins with the genre’s biggest classic, Easy Rider. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s transcontinental epic captured the zeitgeist of its era like few films have before or since. But often lost amidst the Baby Boomer nostalgia is the fact that Easy Rider is a fantastic, and hugely influential, movie. Not only did it make a movie star out of Jack Nicholson, but it also has the first, and still greatest, use of “The Weight” in a film.

Time Warp Drive-In: Motorcycle Madness

The second film of the evening is 1953’s The Wild One starring Marlon Brando. Another hugely influential film, The Wild One was made at a time when Brando was one of the hottest properties in Hollywood. The same year he was playing the sensitive juvenile delinquent Johnny Strabler opposite Lee Marvin, he also played Marc Antony in Julius Caesar opposite James Mason and Sir John Gielgud. The film is the iconic template for the motorcycle movie, and nobody ever wore a Perfecto leather jacket better than Brando.

Time Warp Drive-In: Motorcycle Madness (2)

Made three years before Easy Rider, The Wild Angels was Peter Fonda’s first foray into motorcycle movies. Directed by Roger Corman, the film’s high point is a confrontation between biker gang leader Fonda and a judge, which has become one of the most sampled moments in movie history.

Time Warp Drive-In: Motorcycle Madness (3)

The evening closes out with the psychotronic exploitation drive in classic She Devils On Wheels:

Time Warp Drive-In: Motorcycle Madness (4)