The Sanity Clause - Page 21 of 99 - Movie Reviews of New Releases and Classic Films by Brian Welk

Black Mass

Scott Cooper’s follow-up to ‘Out of the Furnace’ stars Johnny Depp as Boston gangster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger

The best scene in “Black Mass”, a biopic on the life of Boston’s notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, is when a naïve, young waif of a girl is picked up by Bulger and her stepdad after spending the night in jail. Bulger grills her on exactly what the police asked of her and how much she knows. What’s exciting about the scene is not the fear of what Bulger might do but how oblivious she is to all the danger she’s in.

The amusing nature of this exchange may be entirely unintentional. We know exactly what Bulger’s going to do with her. Director Scott Cooper has reduced Bulger into a monster, not even a ruthless human being with a hint of dimension. He kills and has people kill for him, and his fuse is so short that any sense of his humanity, or of those around him, is long gone.

Appropriately, Johnny Depp plays Bulger with an alien sensibility in line with his equally eccentric performances for Tim Burton and others. Thin, slick-backed gray hair, a forehead that dwarfs even his massively dark old-man sunglasses, and piercing blue eyes make him more vampire than gangster.

But Depp’s performance feels hollow in a movie that has little substance or real style behind it. “Black Mass” documents Bulger’s rise to power in the South Side of Boston during the ‘70s and ‘80s when Bulger became an informant for the FBI and his old childhood buddy John Connolly (Joel Edgerton). Connolly believes by looking the other way on Bulger, his intelligence can help the agency land a more significant Italian mafia family. But once the mob is out of power and Bulger is given a free reign of terror, the movie loses its steam. Cooper bookends the film with interview testimonials of Bulger’s crew making confessions, so there’s no tension to if or when Bulger and Connolly’s jig will be up.

Cooper has some talent as a director, but not as a storyteller or stylist. He borrows plenty of Scorsese-isms from other greater and equally mediocre gangster films, but adds none of the themes of morality or loyalty to any significant degree. It results in a lot of empty killings and point blank shootings in broad daylight, a lot of penetrating death stares and friendly conversations turned tense. Cooper staged similar scenes of dire gravity and violent melodrama in his last film, “Out of the Furnace.” But the Americana trappings found there had no bearing to social issues either, as though staging these scenes was enough to make such themes emerge.

“Black Mass” also falls into a trap of some unfortunate casting and poor usage of its talented cast. Joel Edgerton is so blindly a hot-head, the antithesis to Depp’s low-key hiss, that it’s a wonder he’s able to pull the wool over his superiors’ eyes. People like Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard, Corey Stoll, Jesse Plemons and Juno Temple are in the film so briefly they barely register. And if it seemed like there was nothing Benedict Cumberbatch could not do, make the Brit don a Boston accent and you may have found it.

In an interview with the police, one of Bulger’s cohorts is asked his opinion of his boss. “He’s strictly criminal.” “Black Mass” is so flat and generic that it can’t be held in much higher esteem.

2 ½ stars

Stalker (1979)

In Andrey Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”, three men leave their desolate reality and enter The Zone, a verdant yet isolated slice of nature that breathes, changes, evolves and punishes those who don’t respect it. The men are in search of a mysterious room rumored to grant wishes to any who enter.

To reach it however, the men aren’t braving obstacles or challenges, but revealing themselves to the higher power and unseen hand that watches over The Zone.

They pass through a sinister sewer, with metallic crunches accompanying every careful step. The camera tunnels behind the lead man and follows him shell-shocked for agonizing minutes. When he reaches the end, he gives up his only form of protection, a pistol, and makes himself entirely more vulnerable. He then descends a staircase into a room flooded with water, baptizing himself as he comes out the other side. And in a new chamber full of odd sand dunes, he collapses and bares his soul as though crossing a desert. The Zone has let him live for this long. “Yes, but why not forever”, he asks, tormented that he has escaped death but still not found solace or eternity. Finally, standing just on the precipice of the room capable of granting his inner most wishes, he adorns himself with a crown of thorns.

The spiritual and religious symbolism in “Stalker” is unspeakable, and yet the film takes a 180 in tone. People are shallow. The world is bleak. Solace is hopeless. Like Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” before it, “Stalker” is a gripping and tense sci-fi full of atmosphere and danger, but it profoundly grapples with themes of humanity and spirituality. It poses a fairly cynical idea that a room capable of granting all of humanity its innermost wishes is something of a paradox. “Unconscious compassion is not ready for realization.”

The film begins in a world so awash of color and life that it looks as though the apocalypse has struck. The opening shot creepily peers in at a sleeping couple, with the camera inching through barely open doors in a filthy room. Everything in this world is dank, with stagnant pools and junk scattered everywhere. The first man we see is a Stalker (Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy), who helps shuttle paying customers to The Zone to care for his wife and sick daughter.

His two passengers to The Zone are the Professor (Nikolay Grinko) and the Writer (Anatoliy Solonitsyn), who each seem at odds with one another as they debate the concept of truth in a bar. “While I am digging for the truth, so much happens to it that instead of discovering the truth I dig up a heap of…pardon, I’d better not name it,” the writer says.

The Zone is well guarded, and Tarkovsky stages some expert, stealthy tension as they slink through this labyrinth of slums guarding the entrance. They reach a trolley that will take them to The Zone, and after several long takes of the back of the riders’ heads patiently awaiting this forbidden place, the camera smash cuts into color.

This “Wizard of Oz” effect though is the exact opposite of not being in Kansas anymore. For the Stalker, The Zone is home. It’s full of ruin and death of those who have failed to reach the Room before, but it has a beautiful solitude. Rather than take the direct route to the entrance and risk being punished, Stalker leads Professor and Writer on the scenic route through caverns, fields and watery tunnels.

Tarkovsky keeps his camera at a distance. They’re treacherous and observant, but also strangely calming and hinting at a higher power. He shoots through doors and grates that act as portals and amp the nervous tension of being watched and judged by nature. We never actually see the danger, but we constantly sense it.

Better yet, we believe. “Stalker” is a film about faith, and it forces its characters to become pious, to give up their human boastfulness and certainty in favor of tapping into their innermost feelings. Tarkovsky stops the film several times for dreamy prayers and meditations that preach such piety. Here’s one that speaks volumes:

Let everything that’s been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.

Other films that consider similar themes of faith and humanity stop only at channeling The Book of Job. And others still could extract a slick action thriller out of “Stalker” (based on the Russian novel “Roadside Picnic”) but leave the spiritual ideas on the table. “Stalker” goes further and has an ending that grapples with the paradox of achieving our deepest desires and knowing the feeling of immortality or the afterlife. It’s not a cathartic ending, but in the film’s final shot we witness Stalker’s daughter resting her head on a table. The scene is in color, and she has taken a little of Stalker’s color with her. She moves a glass with her mind until it falls off the table, and we’re left with just a little hope at something more powerful lingering in our world.

Tangerine

Sean Baker’s film about transgender prostitutes is a modern screwball comedy and looks gorgeous.

It’s Christmas Eve in a sun-drenched Hollywood. Sin-Dee Rella is a transgender prostitute back out on the block after a month in prison. Her first stop is Donut Time, a divey hangout that’s pure LA. Her best friend and fellow trans-prostitute Alexandra thinks they’re celebrating. Sin-Dee’s pimp boyfriend Chester has been cheating on her while in prison, and not with anyone, but with some “fish”, their clever way of saying that bitch has a vagina.

Except this is news to Sin-Dee, and shit’s about to go down. We’re off to the races now.

This is the set-up of “Tangerine”, a fast-moving, spitfire, gangsta and girl power indie that’s a pure riot. Sean Baker’s film cranks the volume on a soundtrack that’s thug-life hip hop and dubstep and burns through an indie buddy comedy that’s hilarious, outrageous, but also potentially groundbreaking in its portrayal of transgender actors and stars. “Tangerine” is the most queer movie of the year, but also the most fun.

That’s because Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) gives no fucks on her quest to find Chester and the girl he’s cheating with, and though Alexandra (Mya Taylor) says she doesn’t want any drama, you know that’s all we’re going to get. Sin-Dee marches out of Donut Time as gunshots ring out on the soundtrack and rave music follows her down the street. Baker turns her into Dirty Harry, marching down Sunset with a vengeance, throwing burns and an increasingly creative vocabulary at anyone who pretends they don’t know where to find Chester (James Ransone) or that fish, whatever her name is. Something with a “D”.

Of course Sin-Dee isn’t the only girl on the block. And Alexandra’s only other real friend is a married cab driver named Razmik (Karren Karagulian). He solicits a prostitute only to be disappointed to learn that she has a pussy. He regularly goes down on Alexandra while passing through a car wash, anything to get away from the drunks and losers who take up space in his cab.

“Tangerine” is really a film about community. When Sin-Dee finally finds Chester back at Donut Time, the whole film turns into a small-scale circus and shit-show. But what has emerged through this entire day is a group of people who know everyone’s names, who occupy the lesser-traveled areas of Tinsel Town, and who have a mutual code and respect for everyone on the block. Even the cops are in on the game, calling Alexandra by name and giving her a pass when a guy tries to stiff her of $40. In a weird way when everyone is yelling and getting themselves thrown out of Donut Time, these people end up feeling closer. Alexandra didn’t want drama, but that’s what she got, and we know these people a little better.

Baker feels so close to his characters because “Tangerine” has the character of a home movie. Baker shot the entire film on an iPhone, and it looks gorgeous. The camera creates a sun-soaked movie full of vibrancy, it moves quickly and smoothly with the same sense of purpose as Sin-Dee, and it captures wide shots that match Alexandra’s loneliness. The purple, fluorescent hues of “Tangerine’s” horizon would be a shot to die for even with the best camera available.

“Tangerine” quotes a line near its conclusion: “Los Angeles is a beautifully wrapped lie.” Baker has wrapped LA around his finger, and he’s made yet another beautifully definitive movie of life in the city. But with its honesty toward transgender individuals and to this community at large, “Tangerine” is no lie.

3 ½ stars

Mr. Holmes

Ian McKellen and Laura Linney star in Bill Condon’s reimagining of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective.

At this point even a revisionist version of Sherlock Holmes has grown stale. The character has become so ubiquitous, with its own resurgence in the last 10 years, that anyone who thinks they’re genuinely putting a new spin on the character is likely trying to pull one over on everyone, and Holmes himself would be the first to call their bluff. The Robert Downey Jr. version of Holmes in the Guy Ritchie films may have been a wacky street tough, but those films might’ve actually veered closest to the original Arthur Conan Doyle creations than anything.

Make no mistake, “Mr. Holmes”, the new film by Bill Condon that tries to demystify Holmes in his old age, is still very much a Sherlock Holmes film. The reason it succeeds, largely due to Ian McKellen’s worn and weary performance, is that Condon’s film actually caters to adults. Only about half of the film is a traditional Holmes caper, but with all of the fantasy and spectacle removed. The remainder is a film of identity, a man near the twilight of his life, past his glory days, grappling with his reality both internally and publically. The mythology Holmes has to contend with only deepens and sweetens this mystery.

In McKellen’s first moments on screen you can immediately sense his age and experience. Holmes is a grump, but he’s highly observant. He arrives at a country home where he tends to bees in his apiary, but in his old age he’s at the will of his housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney) and her young son Roger (Milo Parker). Roger is impressed by Holmes’s ability to know where people have been just by looking at them, and while Holmes still has his wit about him, his timing is far slower.

McKellen plays Holmes with a degree of vulnerability, something that’s been rare among his foreboding superhero and “Lord of the Rings” work. There’s a sense that he’s well past his prime. In a diary, a doctor instructs him to make a dot every time he’s forgotten something, and the pages turn into a constellation of connect the dots. And yet he still has an exact count of the number of times his bees have stung him: well over 7,000 times.

Roger has also taken an interest in a story Holmes is writing recounting one of his most famous and final cases. In it, he’s investigating the habits of a wife who seems consumed and hypnotized by the glass harmonica. The story on the movie screen is to Holmes a farce, and yet in writing his own version he can’t recall how it ended differently. All he knows is that it must’ve been a failure, or else it wouldn’t have been his last.

Condon takes us into that story within a story, and McKellen gets an opportunity to shine as a showman, not just a weary old man. This is the classic Holmes we know, in which Holmes puts together clues and deduces accusations in a whirlwind that’s otherwise hidden to the audience, but there’s more gravity to this story. It doesn’t resolve in the way we hope and it provides something of a death sentence to his own state of mind. It reveals him as human in what is perhaps the first time Holmes as a character has been brought to such a relatable level.

“Mr. Holmes” is stately in its visual presentation, a more regal period piece instead of a more stylized affair. And while much of the film is slow and concerned with the calm, pastoral setting of his country home, it finds some sensation and heavy-handed drama in a surprise trip to Hiroshima.

Only Holmes’s story truly carries “Mr. Holmes”, as Condon stumbles in making Mrs. Munro’s side plot challenges with raising her son meaningful to Holmes’s main tension. But Holmes’s revisionist history itself remains one worth investigating.

3 stars

Rapid Response: Double Indemnity

Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” is one of the finest, earliest examples of American noir films.

We’ve grown used to the darkness. We’ve come to expect films to not have everything plainly visible and bright on camera, to see shadows and shades of color and light in the way we experience the world naturally. We’ve also come to see our heroes and our stars to make themselves look ugly, to hide in the shadows, to transform themselves, and to help make our viewing experience something other than natural, something disturbing and unusual.

I’m currently taking a course on Neo-Noir films, and our professor Drew Casper showed us clips of “Double Indemnity”, howling at the film’s introductory shots as he did at how dark they were, how many shadows could be seen on screen, how detailed and rich the sets were, and how much it looked like a film of the German Expressionist period. “This is a Hollywood film,” he screamed. “That’s the star! And his back is to the camera!”

Is it that hard to distance ourselves from the time and era in which we’re watching a movie? Can you imagine anyone watching the opening of “Nightcrawler” (the first week’s screening) and being SHOCKED that when we first see Jake Gyllenhaal’s Louis Bloom his back is to the camera, or that his face is partially darkened in the light?

Old Hollywood though really did have a fetish for making things look gorgeous. Everything was well lit and made to look stunning, even if that meant light came from unnatural places, or even if the scene was dramatic and grim. It took a foreigner like Wilder to break everyone out of the habit. Wilder was hardly the only or the first, and “Double Indemnity” is only a seminal work because it’s one of the finest, earliest examples of the form in American cinema. It holds up wonderfully today, even if its innovations don’t leap out and grab you in the way they once did.

Roger Ebert wrote very plainly in his Great Movies review of “Double Indemnity” that “the enigma that keeps it new, is what these two people really think of one another. They strut through the routine of a noir murder plot, with the tough talk and the cold sex play. But they never seem to really like each other all that much, and they don’t seem that crazy about the money, either. What are they after?”

The truth is “Double Indemnity” is a movie about greed, not about love and especially not about the perfect murder or the thrill of the pursuit. And Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson (Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck each at their absolute best) find that greed through sex, wordplay and their own desire for one another, if for no reason other than they’re present. Some of my favorite dialogue turns up as soon as Neff enters the Dietrichson home and catches Phyllis after sunbathing. “It’s two F’s, like in Philadelphia… You know the story. ‘The Philadelphia Story'”.

They’re hopeless and obvious flirts, with Neff in particular going cocky and rogue without hesitation. What’s more, he’s the one who rigs their scheme to the point that it gets them caught. He demands they play it straight, but then he goes for broke by arranging for “Double Indemnity”, not just to dump the body but get double the payment by doing it on a train.

Part of what makes “Double Indemnity” such an effective noir is that the tension is not in the murder itself. We have a lot of movie left once Mr. Dietrichson is dumped on the train tracks. The dogged suspicion of the claims manager Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is intense. He blows the movie wide open with a series of reversals that seal the couple’s fate. They don’t crumble under guilt or slip up out of a love for one another. Their greed just gets paid back big time…and double.

Rapid Response: Sergeant York

‘Sergeant York’ helped inspire Americans to enter into World War II and was a box office smash.

It’s a long-running debate as to whether movies can actually have an influence over people to the point that it gets them to act. Movies inspire people, but do they get people to get out of their chairs and vote, or change the world, or convince them to be a better person?

Mark Harris’s book “Five Came Back” strongly suggests that “Sergeant York” directly spurned support for America entering World War II (Pearl Harbor might’ve also had something to do with it). He spends the early chapters of his book examining the mix of opinions among Hollywood studio heads regarding isolationism or conflict. Some had Jewish heads who embedded political commentary and calls to action into their films, while others remained staunchly neutral and avoided any content that could be considered as taking a stance, much to the chagrin of some of the more politically inclined directors. In fact the government held hearings and injunctions accusing Hollywood executives of propaganda by ways of their films, sparking a debate about the purpose of entertainment and art in the movie business.

“Sergeant York” was such a massive box office smash, raking in $16 million at the box office in 1941 (adjusted that’s over $400 million domestically, placing at #107 on the all time box office list) that it seemed as though the public attitude toward the war changed overnight. But at the very least, it shook Hollywood from its preconceived notion that war films couldn’t make money. Hollywood developed a voracious appetite for war films following “Sergeant York”, and the film is so shamelessly inspirational and humble in its folk roots that it’s no wonder why it was such a success.

Howard Hawks’s film is set at the onset of World War I breaking out in Europe. The people of a small country farm town in Tennessee are not only unaware of the crisis overseas, but even “‘a feared” of it making its way into their humble community. They start to get defensive around a traveling salesman who brings up the news, but Hawks intends it as a critique against isolationism.

That’s because the people of Hawks’s Tennessee are such old-timey yokels to the point that they are practically incomprehensible at times. I watched “Song of the South” recently, and “Sergeant York’s” sing-songy, thick, in-bred hick dialogue is about the worst I’ve seen. The pastor talks of the birds, the bees, the squirrels and the most hackneyed axiom about a tree’s deep roots, while Mama York speaks to the Lord with the prayer at dinner, “Bless these bittens we dun got.”

The local color is especially grating because it takes a solid 20 minutes before Gary Cooper even shows up. The real Alvin York was probably late ’20s when this movie begins and early ’30s when he enters the war, but Cooper is straight-up 40, still living at home, working with his teenage brother and marrying the young Gracie Williams, played by the then 16-year-old(!) Joan Leslie.

I’ve also never quite liked Cooper as an actor. He’s square, feels old, and is so one-note. Given his other work as the honorable Lou Gehrig or the timid and aging Will Kane in “High Noon“, it makes perfect sense that he’d be the humble country boy Alvin York. And Hawks does all he can to paint York as an upstanding, working American, showing him plowing fields and lifting boulders in front of stupidly gorgeous black and white shots that borrow “Gone With the Wind’s” horizon.

“Sergeant York” is also frustrating because as a war movie it doesn’t get to France until its final half hour. The two halves of the movie are almost entirely different screenplays, the first building York up as a folk hero on par with Daniel Boone, the second building him up as a war hero. That last half hour though is stellar, not unlike how moving and iconic his closing speech is in “The Pride of the Yankees“.

But the first hour plus is a movie about how he’s a rambunctious man with no direction and with “Satan grabbing you by the shirt tails.” The local pastor (Walter Brennan) tells him religion will find him like a bolt of lightning, and then it quite literally does. York is in an angry rage during a storm when lightning knocks him off his horse into the mud. He goes down a hill and finds the church, and he’s a changed man. The film charts his inner need as a character and wraps up that story an hour too soon, but it finds a way to start fresh once he’s drafted for the army.

While other elements of “Sergeant York” are largely dated, this mid-portion may actually play well to a modern, Conservative audience. York files an exemption to drafting in the military based on his religion. It’s a sin to kill, but the law requires everyone to enlist. “What kind of law is it that tells you to go against the Good Book and it’s teachings,” York asks. Later the words “God” and “Country” are literally battling for space in his head, with the words echoing in a voiceover as he sits and ponders while looking out over his home valley (another remarkable Old Hollywood shot). In fact the army officers are instructed to keep an eye on him as a “conscientious objector”, and you could argue he’s genuinely being persecuted for his faith.

But finally an hour and a half in we get one stunning war sequence. It’s rapid cross cutting action, dual perspectives between the Americans and Germans, Hawks quickly disposes of the rousing American march music as soldiers start to get shot and killed, and everything is brightly lit and clear in a way Old Hollywood was best at. York’s claim to fame as a war hero involved him disarming 32 German machine guns, killing 20 German soldiers, and capturing 132 more Germans, including several high ranking officers, virtually single-handedly.

Hawks makes it a sight to be seen, and Cooper turns into a ruthless, kick-ass machine. It’s quite amazing how he transforms in the moment. There’s an early scene where he sets six bullets on a table in a row and asks his fellow soldiers, “If they were a flock of turkeys, which one do you shoot first?” The answer is the one at the end of the line. Shoot the leader, and the others see him drop and scatter. Take off the straggler first, and you can bag the whole flock. So it is with Germans apparently; the scene is absolutely thrilling, if not a little hilarious as well.

Much of “Sergeant York”, including his famous act of heroism during the war, is actually true to life and how the real Alvin York was perceived. Here’s how a journalist in the Saturday Evening Post described York: “the mountaineer, his religious faith and skill with firearms, patriotic, plainspoken and unsophisticated, an uneducated man who “seems to do everything correctly by intuition.” That’s Gary Cooper if it’s anyone, but the film, perhaps not unlike “American Sniper“, another shamelessly patriotic war film with some truly remarkable moments, is only interested in that one-dimension of York, and of the war. At one point Mama York flatly announces she has no clue why the US is fighting overseas as though to write off any serious politics outright, although Hawks may be aiming to capture the actual pulse and attitude of the country at the time. Most interesting though is how this movie came to be made at all, with York finally giving in to requests to adapt his life story because he was in need of money as he had grown older, overweight and diabetic. Still however, York was largely a philanthropic figure, despite how his reputation as an American hero had diminished prior to the movie.

“Sergeant York” won two Oscars, including one for Cooper, and was nominated for 11 in all. So can a movie inspire people? Like York during World War I, did Hawks’s film get America into World War II single-handedly? It’s hard to imagine any other movie with as good of a chance as this one.

Rapid Response: A Nightmare on Elm Street

Upon Wes Craven’s passing, ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ how learned an auteur the director was.

It’s regrettable that it often takes an actor or director dying before I decide to catch up on some of their movies. This week’s culprit was Wes Craven, and I concede that both horror films and ’80s films make up a particularly weak area in my film lexicon, so it’s no wonder that his classic “A Nightmare On Elm Street” was an unfortunate blind spot.

The film is no doubt an ’80s classic, filled with horror, gothic and literary references and the inspiration for many others for years and decades to come. While “Elm Street” is not as self-aware as Craven’s later “Scream” films, it is so plugged in and conscious of all the themes it borrows from, and Craven is nothing if not a learned auteur. Tina crawling on the wall and being hurled around like a doll recalls “The Exorcist.” That the film switches protagonists from Tina to Nancy part way through is a big nod to “Psycho”. And the sheer buckets of fake blood are purely a staple of ’70s and ’80s slasher movies and B pictures.

The film works gangbusters for a number of reasons. Firstly the idea that we’re not safe even in our dreams, even under the covers of our bed, in our sleep or in our own minds, where we so often escape for solace, is terrifically scary. The film completely overlooks the science of dreams and sleep as well, to the point that Freddy feels omnipotent and their attempts of avoiding sleep entirely feel hopeless. Second it has a perfectly simple, iconic score that so many films, horror or otherwise, overlook today. Third, Freddy Krueger is a wonderful villain. He’s got physical features, from his fingernails like knives, to his pork belly hat, to his dirty striped sweater, that when the characters describe him it makes him instantly recognizable to other teens experiencing the nightmares and to the parents who were responsible for killing him. Better yet, he’s taunting, sadistic and even teasing, going as far as to reveal his true, monstrous form to Nancy and Tina. Finally, it uses sexuality as a catalyst for horror in more ways than one and in more sophisticated ways than many teen slasher films do. There are probably thousands of pages of think pieces or academic papers dedicated to the one shot in this movie where Freddy’s claws reach up from in between Nancy’s legs while she’s sleeping in the bath.

But those have been areas that have been well-tread. What most interests me is how filmmakers dream. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” is all about dreams, but dreams of course are never the same between two people. We experience dreams in different ways and they provide different sensations for us depending on who’s dreaming. In “Elm Street”, Nancy and Tina wake up in their own worlds. Craven plays tricks on his audience to hide whether we can tell if we’re actually dreaming. When Nancy falls asleep in school, it looks as though her eyes have simply flickered shut for a moment. There’s no change in setting or in visuals that would indicate immediately that this is a dream, but before long we see something that’s out of place. The only problem is that it feels real.

We also know that getting hurt or killed in the dream world can hurt us in the real world, and that Nancy can bring back objects like Krueger’s hat into reality. And for the most part the laws of the dream world behave as they do in the real world. Only occasionally does the geography change, like when a curtain seals a boiler room wall behind Nancy, or when she hustles up the stairs only to get caught in quicksand sludge on each step.

Compare all this to something like “Inception”, in which Nolan’s dreams are transportive. They feel real, and we forget how we arrived there, but suddenly we can be in Paris, and suddenly we can be skiing in the Alps. Or what about “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, where there are no physical laws within dreams, where things are malleable and fantastical.

I’d like to believe that each filmmaker dreams differently, and how they convey dreams in their films says something more about them as filmmakers. It’s a project I hope to explore in more detail sometime down the line, but until then, having watched “A Nightmare on Elm Street” finally, I’m having trouble getting sleep of my own.

Side by Side: Lolita (1962) and Eyes Wide Shut

Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Lolita” are the two most sexual movies in his filmography. How do they stack up?

The opening shots of Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” are a tease. Nicole Kidman strips off her slinky black dress in a quick moment of voyeurism and sexuality. A strangely lilting waltz plays over the top, and Kubrick drops us not into a boudoir or a ravishing sex scene but the mundane act of a married couple getting ready for a night out. But the real tease comes in its opening sequence amid something of a slice of heaven. The opulent party at the home of Victor Zeigler (Sydney Pollack) is bathed in blinding white light and a soothing haze lingers over the whole room. Kubrick catches the moment with a lingering focus, slowly observing and backtracking his camera into the gleam.

Kubrick’s “Lolita” opens with two teases of its own. The first is an iconic one a good 20 minutes deep, in which Prof. Humbert Humbert (James Mason) gets his first look at the underage vixen that is Lolita (Sue Lyon), perched languidly in a sun bathing hat, sunglasses and a frilly bikini. The shot is as deceptively alluring as Kidman’s. But the real tease is the opening sequence in which Humbert enters into the sprawling mansion of Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers), the site of a long deserted orgy. Quilty’s cluttered home of paintings, pianos and ping pong tables looks like it could belong to Charles Foster Kane. He even drops a quick line about being Spartacus, this being the movie Kubrick made following his ancient war epic. But the hint of glamour and sense of building tension seen here does not begin to set the tone for the remainder of “Lolita”.

“Eyes Wide Shut” and “Lolita” are the two most sexual films in Kubrick’s filmography. There’s no sexuality in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, or in “The Shining”. There’s plenty of nudity in “A Clockwork Orange” but none of the “‘ole in and out” is really about sex. And any sexual tension found in “Spartacus” may be purely accidental.

What’s remarkable is how uninterested he is in sexuality in both “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Lolita”, how he uses the tantalizing possibilities as a diversion. “Eyes Wide Shut” was billed as a steamy sex romance between Hollywood’s then biggest power couple, but Kubrick uses orgies, prostitution, and bedroom pillow talk to stage an elaborate metaphor about fidelity. Similarly, “Lolita” was billed as the movie that simply could not have been made, one so scandalous in its subject matter, that how could it ever pass censors? And yet the film is often a farce, focused on the mundane and the ordinary slices of marriage and suburbia over the scandal.

Kubrick may be most interested in how dangerous sexuality can be. The first truly provocative sexual scene in “Eyes Wide Shut” involves Tom Cruise as Dr. Bill Harford tending to Zeigler in one of his many “house calls”. A ravishing model type is completely nude and passed out in a chair after having done too many drugs. But the scene is tame. Cruise plays everything so cool and professional, calm and reassuring that he saps the moment of its sexuality.

As for Humbert Humbert, he so quickly allows sexual desire for Lolita to warp his mind, to the point that he’s punished for even entertaining such thoughts. He’s now married to the shrill, needy and pitiful Charlotte (Shelley Winters), only to realize that Charlotte has no intention of bringing Lolita back into their lives. The whole point of this sham marriage was to remain close to Lolita, and when that’s in jeopardy he begins conceiving “the perfect murder”. Just that stray thought causes him to drop his guard, allowing Charlotte to find his diary and secret affections for her daughter.

There’s a spiritual sensation to sex in each of Kubrick’s films as well. “Eyes Wide Shut” is very clearly something of an existential journey. Cruise’s Bill is an affluent figure dragged through set pieces that are luxurious, grounded, dreamy, seedy, erotic, and plain bizarre. Each seems detached from the other, and Kubrick has erased a strong sense of time that would unify them. What’s more, we’re kept in the dark as much as Bill is. His keyboard playing friend hints to him about some of the most beautiful women he’s ever laid eyes on, but as he walks into that ancient, foreboding mansion, Kubrick doesn’t tease us as to what to really expect there. We’re going in dark, and when the pagan ritual and orgy does arrive, we’re made into spectators. Only a handful of films manage this much nudity and sex and feel completely sterile.

That aspect of course was what turned off so many critics to “Eyes Wide Shut” upon its release. It’s a movie with no heat, one wrote, but then Kubrick was always polarizing. Everything about the movie is a diversion away from sex, and given Bill’s many opportunities and temptations, he never succumbs. The orgy and everything in between is a stigma for his own fears and insecurities about his wife and marriage. The heat then is in the tension and conspiracy, how temptations may come back to punish Bill.

Humbert’s journey is less spiritual, but still profound. Kubrick uses Lolita and Quilty to toy with him, to drive him to madness. Humbert starts by dancing around the news of Charlotte’s death and how to best approach Lolita, but she can play coy and read him like a book. Her dialogue, all carefully within Production Code standards, toes the line between daughterly affection and something more lewd. Once they’ve relocated to Ohio, their affair gets a little less subtle, and even the neighbors begin to pick up on it. Soon Humbert’s hapless etiquette and politeness make him look tone deaf and alien. He’s overprotective and hyper attentive to Lolita in exactly the way she demands, but then she’ll never be satisfied, forever toying and always disappointed. By the end Humbert has grown into a lunatic, paranoid and crazy-eyed at even being away from her. Kubrick makes this all happen in economic one-takes, like when Quilty obsessively calls Humbert and the phone’s cord stretches across the room like a noose.

And for movies so largely about sexuality, they each end on a frigid note. Zeigler brings Bill into his billiard room to carefully explain out everything that’s happened over the last 24 hours. When Humbert and Lolita meet again after years of being apart, she plainly explains she’s married, pregnant, and even has glasses that make her look remarkably like her mother.

Dramatically, both of these scenes are something of a let-down, or an anti-climax. Kubrick has tied up all the loose ends in a way that’s largely less interesting than everything building up to them in either film. And yet these endings are by design. They remind of the after-effects of sex, the letdown that occurs outside of the moment.

Cruise and Mason are both weirdly perfect casting choices. Mason is so hapless and bland as Humbert, and you can see him straining in just about every moment to tolerate Charlotte and her friends. He gets some broad strokes of physical comedy as he so delicately and quietly tries to set up a rollaway cot in his hotel room while Lolita is sleeping. He never seems comfortable in his own shoes, and Kubrick is able to mold him like clay in his hand.

Cruise in “Eyes Wide Shut” is something of a revelation. Here is an actor who tries so hard in every role to be liked, who gives his all and never melts into the role, namely because he’s Tom friggin’ Cruise. Kubrick isn’t blind to Cruise’s celebrity, and the performance he elicits from Cruise forces him to be a blank slate and a pretty face. Cruise is so cool and confident with all the women he encounters and all the opulence and luxury he places along his spiritual journey, but you can see him squirming. You can see how thoughts of his wife’s illusory betrayal – which he imagines in hazy, black and white flashbacks – constantly weigh him down as he tries to keep a straight face.

The one performance in “Lolita” that doesn’t really fit into “Eyes Wide Shut’s” equation is Peter Sellers as Quilty. Sellers is so good in every moment he’s on screen. It rivals his work on Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”, but here he gets to play so many more characters and in so many different ranges. First he’s the effete and cultured dramatist creating sparks with the hotel’s bellhop and admiring the “lilting, lyrical” quality of Lolita’s name, all the while keeping a demonic looking muse in tow who never speaks a word. Then he gets the opportunity to turn in something of a Brando impression, sheepishly rattling off friendly pleasantries as a way of toying with Humbert’s mind. He displays a remarkable cadence in every word he says. Just watch him blinking and fiddling with his glasses; even Kubrick can’t look away.

All these performers are hot commodities in movies that have no desire for their sex appeal. Their casting is as much a tease as Nicole Kidman’s back, and though it’s not sexy, it’s remarkably scandalous.

Z for Zachariah

Craig Zobel’s follow-up to ‘Compliance’ is an intimate love story set at the end of the world.

The indie drama “Z for Zachariah” is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi in name only. Movies such as this year’s “Ex Machina” or the horror film “The Babadook” have played with genre as their setting to tell what is essentially a contemporary story. The scene and the plot are merely set dressing for a bigger parable.

Craig Zobel’s (Compliance) film however maintains such a tenuous relationship to its post-apocalyptic scenario that it’s a wonder he didn’t do away with it entirely. “Z for Zachariah” follows the survivor of a radiation outbreak living peacefully alone in her country farm and how she comes to care and love another survivor who stumbles across her home.

More so than a sci-fi, “Z for Zachariah” is a marital romance, and eventually a love triangle. It deals with questions of intimacy, faith, commitment, trust, personality and habit. None of the preceding has much to do with the act of surviving a nuclear outbreak, but these themes are contained in well-drawn and acted characters and a tender, theatrical scope.

Ann (Margot Robbie) is a country girl living in her secluded slice of the world, a valley that has remained untainted by radiation and the effects that seem to have wiped out humanity. John (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is another resourceful survivor who has made his way to the valley, only to fall sick and in need of Ann’s help for survival.

In them we see how tragedy, need and circumstance has brought out their core beliefs. It’s a battle of faith versus science, as Ann falls back on her Christian upbringing to help her sustain, while John is analytical and logical. He devises a plan to bring electricity back to her farm, but only at the expense of tearing down Ann’s cherished chapel.

They grow close and nearly intimate but withhold their temptations. These things need time, and they’ve got nothing but time, John explains. That changes when the drifter-type Caleb (Chris Pine) arrives on their doorstep. He’s a slick country boy with an equal helping of faith that John lacks, and his mere presence consistently makes him an untrustworthy figure driving a stake between Ann and John.

Ejiofor quite often steals the show, paring dialogue down to its quietest and simplest. He just seems profound and shrouded in feeling no matter when he’s speaking, including a bombshell about his past before arriving on the farm. But he even gets the chance to stretch himself, playing broad when initially exposed to radiation and comic when he gets drunk and learns that Ann, “even at the end of the world, ain’t gonna drink no cherry soda.”

Pine too has proven with this film he can act, casting sly glares and piercing glances that keep his character’s intentions ambiguous. As for Robbie, she’s a budding star who earns her keep as a tough, capable farm owner despite how low-key and coy she remains. Ann unfortunately becomes “the woman” and has far less to do once Caleb arrives and turns the romance into a love triangle.

Together the three of them bring unexpected depth to a story that’s as worn and traveled as the man at the end of the world. And yet Zobel can do little more than make his film a travelogue. Shot in New Zealand but done up to look like the American South, “Z for Zachariah” is less an atmospheric story than its plot suggests. The film is intimate enough that it could sub on stage, but it loses some of its cinematic qualities. in the process

Near the film’s ambiguous ending, Caleb expresses a desire to travel further south in search of what word has is a community of survivors, despite the refuge he’s found. Take “Z for Zachariah” out of the apocalypse and you’d have the same movie. That core story is something quaint and special, but there must be something more out there.

3 stars

Rapid Response: High Noon

The Anti-Western classic starring Gary Cooper has not aged well.

Gary Cooper’s Will Kane wears a black cowboy hat throughout “High Noon”. The fashion choice is by design. He’s a hero, but by the end his victory is hollow. The town’s people he has sworn to protect have all left him for dead, for various reasons, and when he’s finally fulfilled his duty, he retires out of disgust, not achievement. In the film’s final moments Cooper wordlessly casts his “tin star” to the ground and rides off on a cart with his newlywed wife Amy (Grace Kelly in her first role). For a movie about a man who nobly puts loyalty to his job ahead of loyalty to his family, it’s more bitter and callous than inspirational.

That end is enough to earn “High Noon” the title of an anti-Western, and with it a reputation as one of the best American Westerns ever made (it currently sits at #221 on the IMDB Top 250). Its hero Will Kane is full of fear and uncertainty, and he’s without confidence, support or even a strong sense of logic or values toward why he’s risking his life for this town. The cynical end following the climatic shootout is further one that calls out the McCarthy era fear-mongering and politics circa 1952, when the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and took home four, including one for Cooper for Best Actor. Fred Zinnemann’s (“From Here to Eternity”) film in a script by Carl Foreman (“The Bridge on the River Kwai”) casts scorn on the townspeople who are all too cowardly, greedy, spiteful or all three to help Kane kill the vengeance driven Frank Miller and his posse, who aim to gun down Kane once Miller arrives pardoned from prison on the noon train.

But so many of the best Westerns are already anti-Westerns. “The Searchers” grapples with vicious racism and hatred toward Native Americans in John Wayne’s hero. “Johnny Guitar” is a wild, feminist, damn near exploitation film. Later entries in the genre like “Unforgiven” remove some of the romanticism of the old West by focusing on an aging gunslinger. “High Noon” may have been one of the earliest anti-Westerns of its kind, but its innovations stop there.

Working in its favor is the real-time element, with characters constantly checking the clock and building up the myth of the demon set to arrive on that High Noon train, Frank Miller. It leads to a wonderfully effective use of sound, in which Zinnemann cycles through the town people in stark close-ups, only to be abruptly cut off by the sound of the train arriving at the strike of noon.

Equally effective is how every character in the small town of Hadleyville, no matter how cowardly, weaselly or vindictive they are, their personality is tied to the arrival of Miller on that train. One of Foreman’s more powerful twists is in revealing to us that Kane’s presence, despite his ability to clean up the town and run Miller out, has not been entirely welcome. Business at the hotel has dried up, more people had work as deputies, and many even called Miller their friend. It’s not just that Kane is a man without a country, but that even those who care most for him feel its in their best interest to see him leave town or fail.

“High Noon” however has aged horribly. It’s a prime example of an effective, Old Hollywood screenplay in which the dialogue is earnest, but thick and bluntly ineloquent. The characters have clearly drawn motivations and back stories, but everything is telegraphed. So much of the film is without action or personality coloring that the constant, Stanley Kramer led ideology can get weary. Whether its the simplistic views of what it will take Lloyd Bridges’s character Harvey Pell to become a man, or the recurring “High Noon” theme preaching “don’t forsake me oh my darling” whenever Kane ambles through town, Zinnemann’s hammy execution just doesn’t hold up as well as the edgy bent of Westerns by John Ford or Howard Hawks.

That changes slightly in the film’s famous shootout, in which Kane is resourceful and human more than just a slick quick draw. Zinnemann strips virtually all the dialogue in this sequence and even finds quick catharsis for Kane and his wife Amy.

“High Noon” has a lot going for it, and it’s likely a good entry point into Westerns, but a real classic it is not.

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