Category: Rapid Response

Rapid Response: Carrie

I’ve been unkind to Brian De Palma before.

But I was quickly informed that my blanket statement about De Palma’s lack of style in regards to “The Untouchables” doesn’t apply to his more well regarded masterpieces like “Carrie” and “Blow-Out.” Surely if I saw those I would be likely to change my mind.

Well no, I’m still wishy-washy about “Carrie,” De Palma’s early cult-horror classic starring Sissy Spacek as an abused teen with the power of telekinesis.

De Palma’s approach strikes me less as homage to genre filmmaking and more as him wallowing in overdone ideas without a distinct style of his own. He accentuates soothing facial features of certain women and teachers with delicate, foggy filter close-ups and wide shots and then amplifies the doom and gloom of religious persecution with ominous low angle shots and intensified soundtrack cues. The screeching violins of the “Psycho” score are incorporated not as a nod to Hitchcock but as a crutch every time Carrie uses her powers. He elicits a monumental performance from Piper Laurie as Carrie’s mom but bludgeons you with her presence due to its screechy, insane, sanctimonious tone, making for a truly delusional depiction of extreme Christianity.

What’s more, his way of building suspense is to just make a movie completely different from the one the movie will end up as. It’s all a manufactured element of surprise, one that’s been deadened and aged over time. He draws out the maudlin splendor and beauty of Carrie being showered with applause as the prom queen endlessly, only for it to transform into an avant-garde psycho-horror movie. It suddenly incorporates split-screen and deafening sound mixing to completely shift the movie’s trajectory, not gradually take you into the moment.

But the bigger problem I think stems from the fact that Carrie has no personality. She is so berated at school and by her mother that we know nothing of her interests, her quirks, her dreams or her desires. We feel only pity for her, and clearly so does the Robert Plant clone who ends up asking her to the dance. He doesn’t love her, but he genuinely has fun and wants her to have a good time, but little else.

He’s the one redeemable character in the film, and the remainder of the time is spent too heavily on the bitchy teenage girls and John Travolta going to parties and working out during gym class. It’s a hateful film right to the end when we read the graffiti label on the site of Carrie’s burial ground. We only care for Carrie because the rest of the characters are so exaggeratedly awful and because the pacing and tone is so melodramatic and maudlin that the movie is capable of surprising us with her range and power.

And yet when she unleashes all hell on her classmates, Carrie at that moment stops being a human whom we can sympathize with and becomes a demon. Her battle with her mother is an unfortunate epilogue.

“Carrie” is not the cult masterpiece I was expecting it to be. It continues to place me in a minority and forces me to take a staunchly contrarian stand on an otherwise respected director, but so be it.

Rapid Response: Breakfast at Tiffany’s

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” may just be the singular, classic girl movie. It may even be the first. Back in 1961 when this was released, Old Hollywood was still marketing movies to everyone, not just men or women. It also existed in a time when being chic and stylish was coveted no matter your gender.

But today ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s” the film, I can’t really speak for Truman Capote’s novel, has attained a new sensibility. Holly Golightly’s party animal sex appeal and looseness, her free-spirit conviction and her cute, yet sophisticated style and flair has made her an iconic symbol of the girls just wanna have fun lifestyle.

She has a cat too.  Continue reading “Rapid Response: Breakfast at Tiffany’s”

Rapid Response: Once

For the tiny little indie film “Once,” have its reputation, music and stars exceeded the expectations for the movie itself?

I remember falling in love with “Once,” once. It was the little Irish indie that could, a handmade love story and musical with non-actors, a budget that just barely exceeded $100k, shot with two handi-cams and in only 17 days. With hardly a story and already established music that was more folky and soothing than Top 40 radio friendly, it made it across the pond from Ireland on sheer pluck and warmth.

Since then, I became a big fan of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, The Swell Season and now Hansard’s solo work (I’ll get around to Spotifying The Frames, I promise). The “Once” soundtrack became a staple of my listening rotation, and in subsequent viewings of the film I found myself in love with both the songs and the presences.

I also remember thinking how easily something like this could be turned into a play: very small cast, no elaborate sets and a surefire collection of songs. Thankfully Broadway has done that adaptation tactfully instead of blowing it out of proportion as they usually do, and it’s not only won the Tony for Best Musical but also made a steady profit in no time at all.

In fact, everything about “Once” has made it larger than the movie itself. The film will be remembered for its Oscar and for introducing the world to Glen Hansard. But I wondered if it still held up as a movie. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Once”

Rapid Response: The Untouchables

When I first saw “The Untouchables,” I thought it was highly overrated for just being kind of lame and stupid. It seemed cheesy, and so it is. Brian De Palma is clearly making a modern day crime drama in the fashion of an Old Hollywood gangster movie. But now I think it’s overrated because it’s so plainly obvious that he’s doing that.

The problem with De Palma is that he’s a leech. He makes “homages” of classic American films, but he lacks his own personal style. His aesthetic is big and bold, but its without a defined pacing or tone. This is loosely true of “Scarface” too, a film that thrives based on its charismatic lead performance from Al Pacino, and one he also dedicates to Howard Hawks.

“The Untouchables” is the story of how Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and his small team of vigilante cops took down the Chicago organized crime lord Al Capone (Robert De Niro). But rather than take a truly interesting approach to this historical story, De Palma concocts an intentionally adorable and token back story for our hero and a series of big budget action set pieces that are bloody, but look clearly shot on movie sets, have corny dialogue and gigantic musical swells in a score by Ennio Morricone designed to place the viewer back in 1930 when this movie is set and could’ve been made. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Untouchables”

Rapid Response: The Circus

There’s real terror in our eyes as Charlie Chaplin dances atop a tight rope in the closing set piece of “The Circus,” and yet the Tramp turns it into a larf. He makes this goofy looking stunt where he’s pulled skyward by a wire look effortlessly graceful, and he’s such a showman as he awkwardly gags as a monkey puts its tail in his mouth as he’s trying to stay balanced. Watch carefully in a cutaway shot of the audience, and you’ll see a guy watching intently and eating his popcorn waiting for the Tramp to fall as everyone else screams in terror. It’s this little gag that makes the scene all the more delightful.

And the added surprise? He’s really up there on that rope.

“The Circus” is the first of Chaplin’s silent stragglers, a gigantic mess of a production in between “The Gold Rush,” “City Lights” and the rise of the talkie that still managed to be an uproarious comedy gem. If it doesn’t innovate in the way that “The Gold Rush,” “City Lights” and “Modern Times” do, it’s just as good and funny, if not better, and with just as much pathos. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Circus”

Rapid Response: First Blood

One of my journalism teachers gave a peculiar example in class one day. He called the moment when an article (or a movie) comes out to explain to you just what your dealing with the “Col. Trautman Moment,” in honor of Rambo’s Vietnam War commander who tells Brian Dennehy just how much deep shit he’s in far too late after he’s made Rambo angry.

In journalism we call this a nut graf. It’s an essential ingredient in a good article, but some of the best writers can weave it in naturally without using a line like, “You don’t know what you’re dealing with soldier.”

“First Blood,” or the first of a kajillion Rambo films, is a notoriously dumb and meat-headed ’80s action movie that, despite it’s popularity somehow got away from me until recently because…well, who cares why?

It spawned so many sequels not because it’s the most campy and outrageous action movie you’ve seen from the period or because Sylvester Stallone was such a bankable star after “Rocky” (that fame came after this), but that “First Blood” is an anti-Vietnam War movie. It’s right-wing take on the war was that, it can do real damage to the people like Rambo who come out of it, but the real harm comes from the society that doesn’t respect that these people are doing important work overseas.

This is more or less the mentality today: hate the war, not the soldiers.

So in that way, “First Blood” spat in the face of “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now” by making a war movie with a conflicted character but glorified, amped up action. It seems to advertise becoming a super soldier with lines like, “Those green berets are real badassess.”

But I’d be lying if I said the politics were the things that irritated me most about “First Blood.” In capturing Rambo, this small town has absolutely nothing at stake. Everyone here reacts like a hammy tough guy over the littlest bullshit gesture by the war vet. They’re all one-dimensional jerks who can so freely get killed off by the almost horror movie monster that is Rambo. After he escapes, he goes from low-key drifter to Bear Grylls in no time flat. And everything he does is diluted by this dark, ugly and occasionally incoherent film. It’s poorly written, agonizingly low-brow and redneck, and Stallone overacts the hell out of it.

So here’s my Col. Trautman Moment: “I don’t think you understand. This movie is terrible.”

Rapid Response: Peeping Tom

I spent nearly half of my college career studying a theory of communication that deals with looking through and looking at communication. It’s all about recognizing the fact that there’s a lens in front of you as you watch a movie, watch TV, look into a camera or even look out into the world with your own eyes and mind. The smarter of us understand that we are seeing someone’s perspective, and yet still we look, fascinated by the emotions before us.

Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” is a film about looking, being terrified at what we see, being unable to look away, and feeling tortured and gross for doing so.

It’s a psychological horror movie released just months before “Psycho” about a serial killer, Mark (Carl Boehm), who videotapes women as he’s killing them, all to capture their last moment of fear and rewatch it later. He’s horrified by his actions and his films, but Mark has the psychological disorder of voyeurism, making him consumed to invade a person’s genuine expressions of humanity, be they love or terror.

Mark’s films are all black and white and silent (which would likely be the only option for home video equipment in 1960), but Powell orchestrates them to eerie, silent movie ragtime, and “Peeping Tom’s” vibrant colors and careful framing create a disturbing, unreal effect. On aesthetics alone, we’re drawn into Powell’s cinematic flair, and we hate ourselves for it because of the nature of the story. His techniques seem to telegraph that through any form of movie magic, Powell can pull our strings and keep us transfixed and terrified no matter what he portrays. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Peeping Tom”

Rapid Response: Bob le Flambeur

“Bob le Flambeur” and Jean-Pierre Melville helped inspire the French New Wave.

Jean-Luc Godard was supposedly the first to travel down the streets of France with a camera hidden in the basket of a bicycle, but Daniel Cauchy claims Jean-Pierre Melville did it seven years earlier on “Bob le Flambeur.”

Melville and perhaps most specifically “Bob le Flambeur” were pivotal in inspiring directors like Godard and Francois Truffaut in the evolution of the French New Wave, films that valued directorial style, visual dynamism, gritty realism and numerous American influences.

“Bob le Flambeur,” along with Jules Dassin’s “Rififi,” mark the beginning of the modern heist film, and it’s got all the trimmings of a landmark movie in leading a cultural revolution in Europe.

Translated literally as “Bob The High Roller,” Bob (Roger Duchesne) is a compulsive gambler with a past as a bank robber. He has such an unhealthy obsession with gambling, he sits down at a table, buys only one chip and loses it instantly in the ante. But the biggest gamble of his life will be to rob a Montmartre casino on the night of the Grand Prix when it holds 800 million francs. He enlists a team full of specialists as well as his two proteges, Paolo (Cauchy) and Paolo’s lovely new fling Anne (Isabelle Corey), to perform the heist. He seems only to be taking the risk because it is his compulsion. It’s a dangerous game.

Bob Le Flambeur Anne

The film is rife with details and planning scenes that would become common place in films like the “Ocean’s” movies (not ironically, “Bob le Flambeur” also inspired the original “Ocean’s Eleven”), but Melville embeds so much life and vitality in all of these moments. Canted angles illuminate the surprisingly chic checkered walls of night clubs and casinos, wipe cuts and a jazzy soundtrack bounce the action forward in time, and steamy nude scenes are as revealing as anything put in a film up to that point. You can practically see the French New Wave leaping from this film.

Melville said in an interview in 1961 that he had made a list of 63 American directors he admired from before the war. To do so with European directors, he said, would be near impossible to even come up with 10. Melville relished American films and culture. He strove to make a movie like “Bob le Flambeur” without having money or actors who were willing to commit to a shooting schedule that ran over two years, all so that an American audience could admire them. He had a personal style that was both loved and loathed, and within a few years of this film, he would be one of the names you could add to that list of European masters.

Rapid Response: Broadway Danny Rose

In “Broadway Danny Rose,” Woody Allen cheekily riffs on the character he created in “Manhattan.”

Most of the characters Woody Allen plays are really just himself, but Danny Rose is the kind of character that riffs on the one he created in “Manhattan.”

“Broadway Danny Rose” has the black and white veneer of his early masterpiece set in New York, but it’s irreverent, light and notoriously silly. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Broadway Danny Rose”

Rapid Response: Ace in the Hole

There’s one thing today’s journalists can’t do with a computer, and that’s light a match as a typewriter slides back into place. It’s the way Chuck Tatum does it in “Ace in the Hole,” a terrific, Old Hollywood critique of the press in a grizzly, bitter noir.

Kirk Douglas plays Tatum as a smarmy, cutthroat reporter with attitude and condescending wit to his editor at the small Albuquerque newspaper, despite coming to him after being fired by a dozen newspapers on the other side of the Mississippi. Tatum craves a vicious cycle of “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism, and his belief is that one big story will break him out of New Mexico and back onto the East Coast.

He finally catches his break when a man gets trapped in a cave-in just outside a small Native American town. Tatum finds the man deep inside the cave. He says his name is Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), and he’s thrilled that not only is someone going to rescue him, he’s going to be in the paper too. Tatum plays up the angle that Minosa is trapped in an Indian burial ground, he bribes the local authorities for exclusive access, he forces Minosa’s wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) to stay and lap up the luxury that’s about to come in the media firestorm, and he even persuades the foreman to use an elaborate, slow and inefficient way to dig out Minosa. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Ace in the Hole”