Category: Rapid Response

Rapid Response: Slap Shot

George Roy Hill’s “Slap Shot” is a much smarter and interesting film than its cult status gives it credit for.

As far as cult comedies about hockey go, they don’t get any better, funnier, likeable or thought provoking than “Slap Shot.”

I say that non-existent comparison because for a cult comedy about hockey, “Slap Shot” is hardly as low brow as its scenario suggests. Director George Roy Hill (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting,”) inserts more ideas into the opening moments of “Slap Shot” than a similar film would dare shake a hockey stick at.

The title credits role in front of a ratty American flag hanging in a gymnasium as a chintzy band plays The National Anthem in the background. Before long, the social commentary, not the hockey or violence, is brought to the forefront as blue-collar Americans are losing jobs and housewives are on the brink of snapping.

Somehow, Paul Newman is perfectly cast as the aging hero, a man whose face in the late ’70s was the embodiment of a worn American everyman rather than the distinguished, old age movie star he would become. He’s thrown into a world where everyone wears their hatefulness and vulgarity on their sleeve. The movie is unabashedly despicable in these early moments, i.e. a little taboo and a little racist, and it only proceeds to get worse as the mentally challenged goons employed as cheap team ringers end up abusing every player on the ice. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Slap Shot”

Rapid Response: Billy Jack

The ’70s cult film Billy Jack operates on a strange double standard of violence and a progressive hippie mentality. This brief analysis touches on why the movie can’t have it both ways.

I find it odd that a movie can claim to have been a precursor to both cinema verité and the “Death Wish” franchise. “Billy Jack” was a cult film from 1971 that spawned a number of sequels thanks to its gun-slinging, hapkido expert title hero as well as its progressive agenda. And yet the uber-violence that comes from characters who otherwise claim to be pacifists is a bizarre double standard the movie doesn’t really account for.

It’s a good example of how even an interesting film the ’70s has proved to be more problematic, dated and poorly emblematic of the time period than something from an older generation. The movie foregrounds racial persecution with your typical assortment of one-dimensional hicks who are casually hateful of minorities and have fun with it (there’s an absurd scene inside an ice cream parlor where a white teenager pulls a ladle of flour from thin air and proceeds to pour it on the heads of the Native Americans in the store), but it also stinks of the obstinate hippie type who seem to be posing more problems than they are mending. A teenage girl at the film’s center is brought home from Haight-Ashbury to inform her father that she has hepatitis, a rotted tooth, has not eaten in two days and is six weeks pregnant from an unknown father and has the nerve to be snarky about it.

“Billy Jack” struggles with its tone because its writer, director and star, Tom Laughlin, has an equally disjointed approach to his filmmaking. The dialogue before an equally clumsy fight scene reminds of campy, vigilante B-movies and other token badassery, while the scenes inside the progressive school or at a town hall hearing rely on candid, fly on the wall storytelling to a fault. The cinema verité approach is so transparently obvious here that it in fact takes away from the characters’ profundity and reality. They’re archetypes plucked from documentaries shouting late ’60s talking points and causes from off microphone, not fleshed out characters who we would accept in the hands of someone else.

The movie advocates that in the end, a rifle may be more powerful and effective than the law in the pursuit of justice, which is a troubling thought on its own, but “Billy Jack” certainly can’t have it both ways.

 

Rapid Response: Torn Curtain

“Torn Curtain” finds Hitchcock dipping his toes into a pool he never has before: politics. It’s one of Hitchcock’s more disappointing films.

I don’t think I ever thought this day would come: the day that I would find an Alfred Hitchcock movie I didn’t like.

They say that Hitchcock’s last perfect film was “The Birds” in 1963, and from then on he struggled with old age and a changing of the guard in Hollywood to more jarring, violent and hyper kinetic films. Although I’m still very keen on “Frenzy,” with something like “Torn Curtain,” how is Hitchcock really supposed to compete when the rest of the world is looking to James Bond for their suspense?

“Torn Curtain” struggles because it finds Hitch trying to adapt to New Hollywood and the surrounding culture, but in completely the wrong way. With “Frenzy,” Hitch would embrace the despicable sexual instincts of his murderers and what they would be realistically likely to do to his blonde-bombshell victims. Here, Hitchcock tried to make his film as tied to the Cold War as the 007 movies, and he dips his toe into a pool he never had before: politics. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Torn Curtain”

Rapid Response: Persona

Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” is like a lucid dream: beyond description, but impossible to forget.

Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” is like a lucid dream; the images are so vivid long after you’ve left it, but it feels impossible to describe even as it’s happening. It’s a shocking, intense masterpiece that I am not yet fully equipped to write about.

Bergman’s films always connect on a gut, spiritual level. His early masterpieces “Wild Strawberries” and “The Seventh Seal” are both deeply religious and symbolic works of art, and his later masterpiece “Fanny and Alexander” is a more down to Earth art house feature, one that is tender and disturbing at once.

“Persona” is rooted deeply in both approaches, and yet its starkly avant-garde styling and free-form, utterly pretentious story and editing makes it an extremely perplexing watch. Somehow though, Bergman is a talented enough director to overcome the idea that his film is pretentious at all. “Persona” is raw and deeply emotional, an extremely gut wrenching story that embodies the naked existence of man and of art. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Persona”

Rapid Response: Z

Costa-Gavras’s Greek film “Z” was one of the first films to prove that a vigorous procedural thriller could be inexorably linked with politics. It announces up front that, “Any similarities to real persons is not coincidental. It is intentional.” In this way it is an angry docudrama of social unrest while carrying a snide sense of humor and biting critique to the right-wing Greek politics of the day.

“Z” was such a vital, timely movie in 1969, one that was inseparable from all the riots that had been so common and tumultuous throughout the ’60s in America and around the globe. It became one of the highest grossing films of the year in France, was nominated for Best Picture and was subsequently banned in Greece, along with the film’s director, writer, female lead and of course the letter “Z” itself, which in Greece was originally graffiti that stood for “He lives!”

To consider the way in which it bluntly recreated the assassination of the pacifist liberal activist Gregorios Lambrakis back in 1963 is to understand how tied this film was to the times. The film works tirelessly to expose the blatant cover up of this “accident” and is shockingly quick to the punch in recognizing that all the work done would be erased in an instant when the right wing party did finally take control again in Greece.

It first follows the leftist leader himself, Z (Yves Montand), as he tries to arrange a political rally. The police have moved the event to the center of town where hundreds have gathered to hear him speak and to riot in protest. Police stand idly by as rioters rush to attack Z caught vulnerable in the open. This extended sequence is remarkable, accomplished through long tracking shots through the enormous crowd, but providing enough space to show how vulnerable they are, as well as staccato editing to create pulsating intensity and an unholy blend of perspectives. It comes to a climax when a car cascades through the crowd and a passenger lands a fatal blow to Z’s skull.

The attack is deemed an accident caused by drunk drivers, and a federal magistrate (“Amour’s” Jean-Louis Trintignant) is brought in to confirm the details of the police’s coverup. The magistrate will remain nameless because he’s completely neutral in this case. “Z” works wonderfully well because although it is politically charged, it ultimately has no allegiances. The numerous details that veer us in different directions of the truth, despite us always knowing precisely what happened, are presented as though a cover up is simply routine, not malicious. Snappy interrogation scenes and other attacks on those about to testify are staged as guerrilla filmmaking, not as set pieces.

Even the film’s score, a percussive and upbeat blend of world music that almost seems to inspire something like Jonny Greenwood’s score for “The Master” or the zither theme from “The Third Man,” grants “Z” a tone that feels vital, but snide, clever and self-aware. There’s a great scene where the magistrate traps one of the suspects into confessing he’s part of an anti-Communist party by accusing him of being a Communist, and it’s a great example of how the film is cold, calculated and rigid, but also sharp-nosed and in your face.

Many at the time of it’s release felt “Z” was anti-American, and I’ve already explained what the Greek’s thought of it. But the movie’s unique tone shows that it’s critical, but smart enough of the whole situation to be above all the petty party lines. As a film intended for it’s time, “Z” endures because it’s not loyal to any one event or group. It’s its own symbol of freedom.

Rapid Response: Diabolique

 

How dangerous it is to be a little devil. We all want to be precocious tykes getting into trouble for so long, but it comes back to bite us in the form of guilt and punishment.

“Diabolique” is a French thriller that makes us afraid of the dark, of ghosts and of taking baths all without being about any of those things. It’s essentially the story of an immature child who has done wrong and will drive herself insane trying to cover up her lie.

The star Vera Clouzot, the wife of “Diabolique’s” director Henri-Georges Clouzot, plays Christina, a delicate school teacher in a boarding school for boys. She’s the wealthy owner of the school, but it’s run with an iron fist by her vicious husband Michel (Paul Meurisse). She hesitantly hatches a murder scheme with a fellow teacher, Michel’s former mistress Nicole (Simone Signoret). The two are well aware of their rivalry, but they’ve been united in hatred of Michel and his abusive ways.

They intend to run off together over the school’s break, lure Michel there, drug him and drown him in a bathtub. They’ll sneak him back to school and dump him in the school’s pool to make it look like a suicide or accident. But the pool’s scummy water makes him go undiscovered for days, and when the pool is finally drained, the body has vanished.

It’s a wonderfully Hitchcockian, psychological caper, and had Clouzot not bought the rights to the novel first, Hitchcock was in fact next in line. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Diabolique”

Rapid Response: Day for Night

We come to expect certain things when we watch a movie. If a big introductory shot shows a lot of people, it eventually lingers and picks out the handsome guy in the crowd who will quickly become our focus for the next two hours. But in “Day for Night,” the camera plays a trick on us, diverting our attention several times over before coming back to that first man.

But even that’s a trick, because it’s all a part of one big scene in a movie, and the take needs to be done again. We’ve seen intros like this so many times, but few directors have ever asked us to look twice.

Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night” is one of the great movies about the movies. It’s a funny, ironic ode to cinema that simultaneously celebrates the realism of film while scoffing at the phoniness of big studio productions. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Day for Night”

Rapid Response: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Anyone who is a fan of Roger Ebert’s work might scratch their head when they finally come across his screenplay credit for “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”

“You mean the Russ Meyer movie? The guy infatuated with enormous breasts? That Russ Meyer?”

Yes, that Russ Meyer. He worked with him on three movies, starting with “Dolls,” and for a while I looked at their low IMDB grades and wondered if this was a part of Ebert’s career he was trying to erase.

But having just finished reading Ebert’s memoir “Life Itself” (a brilliant, moving book by the way), you begin to fully understand why Ebert would come to have such a mutual bond with Russ Meyer and how “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” could really be no different than the absolutely batshit crazy sexploitation film that it is. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”

Rapid Response: All Quiet On the Western Front (1930)

Critics always said the advent of the talkies set cinematography and the movies back years, if not decades. The art of the silent film had reached an apex with the utterly dreamlike “Sunrise,” but it would be years before the camera would be liberated again to float and glide in the way it once did.

And yet in 1930, “All Quiet On the Western Front” defines itself as the first great war movie with sound, even setting the stage for modern war movies to come. The director Lewis Milestone came to be known as the American Eisenstein, allowing his fluid camera to dominate over the content in most of his movies later in his career.

But “All Quiet on the Western Front,” his first great talkie and second Academy Award after “Two Arabian Nights” shows the harsh reality of war on screen for the first time. The kinetic intensity of the war scenes combined with the film’s bleak beauty and even surreal chills makes the film a unique installment in the genre worthy of being remembered today. Continue reading “Rapid Response: All Quiet On the Western Front (1930)”

Rapid Response: All the President's Men

“All the President’s Men” is the finest movie ever made about journalism. It’s probably the only journalism movie that’s really about the thing that its about, and yet the movie stops just short of the moment when the hunch reporting that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were doing became an actual story, and then a scandal. The last shots of the movie are steely cold moments that echo the equally frigid, typewriter opening. The words quickly thunder onto the page at this point as Woodstein is left nearly eclipsed in the background.

Rather, this story of journalism isn’t about a valorous effort to snuff out corruption, a personal vendetta, about two people working together, an effort to prove oneself against all odds or to show that journalism can still matter. It’s about finding the needle in the haystack, about the speculation and possibility that arises from complete uncertainty. Almost like this year’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” it’s a movie about seeing in the dark. Continue reading “Rapid Response: All the President's Men”