2002 (USA)
Director: Alexander Payne
Viewed: August 2, 2010
Format: DVD - New Line (2003)
Inception
2010 (USA)
Director: Christopher Nolan
Viewed: July 22, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)
“Ambitious” is a term frequently affixed to films solely due to the scale or complexity of their production, whether the work in question is one of the opulent, magisterial epics of old or a contemporary blockbuster that recruits battalions of computer wizards for its virtual world-building. One could say that Christopher Nolan’s Batman films warrant the label, if only because of their fulsome design and dizzying scope. However, Nolan’s taste for the ambitious is focused foremost on narrative, as epitomized in the disorienting, reversed chronology of his breakout art-house noir, Memento. Two years after The Dark Knight trampled everything in its path, that film’s sprawling, relentless, and often preposterous plot nonetheless endures as a grueling feat of sustained anxiety and twenty-first century terror. Now we come to Inception, the first feature written solely by Nolan since his 1998 debut Following, and it is, if anything, a doubling down on the director’s fascination with convoluted storytelling. Who else but Nolan could weave a tale that unfolds simultaneously in four linked dream worlds, where time dilates to varying degrees but always ticks inexorably forward? Who else would have the heedless ambition to even attempt such a thing, to convey such an elaborate scenario through the language of film? Who else but Christopher Nolan would even want to try?
1993 (USA)
Director: Brian De Palma
Viewed: April 9, 2010
Format: Laserdisc – MCA / Universal
While Carlito’s Way bears that telltale De Palma touch of the Grand Guignol, it’s positively staid compared to the excesses of the director’s earlier Latino crime epic, Scarface. And therein lies the root of the former film’s most conspicuous faults, for in tossing out the operatic lunacy while clinging to the shameless melodrama, De Palma neuters Carlito, rendering it essentially indistinguishable from any other gangster flick. That said, there’s plenty to admire here. Presenting only the final chapter of an underworld titan’s fall is an admittedly novel approach, and it’s fairly remarkable how De Palma sketches in so much back-story with so little exposition. While the film’s violence often seems dispiritingly obligatory, it’s also presented as a nasty, messy business. Tellingly, Carlito often bests his enemies through bravado and trickery rather than brute force, and the film privileges the competing criminal virtues of preparation and adaptability. Pacino, with a laughably protean Puerto Rican accent, is fully in his post-Sea of Love self-parody phase here, but Sean Penn, behind child-molester glasses and beneath a Larry Fine ‘fro, is deliciously loathsome as criminal defense attorney David Kleinfeld. Unfortunately, Carlito feels like a middling gangster drama from an aging stylist who is capable of much more. (see: Ridley Scott.) Most exasperating is De Palma’s affinity for torpedoing the film’s most appealing moments. This unfortunate tendency is epitomized in a scene where Carlito’s ex-flame Gail (Penelope Ann Miller) enticingly suggests that he could break down her chained apartment door if he really wanted to ravage her. What song does De Palma use to cap this searingly erotic sequence? Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful.” Yeesh.
2009 (UK)
Director: Armando Iannucci
Viewed: March 7, 2010
Format: Blu-ray - MPI Home Video (2010)
1973 (USA / Philippines)
Director: Eddie Romero
Viewed: February 19, 2010
Format: DVD - MGM (2001)
The hallmarks of a sexy, scuzzy Women-in-Prison feature–including a gratuitous shower scene complete with frolicking, and hard-assed lesbian guards in ridiculously short shorts–are pretty much dispensed with in the first fifteen minutes of Black Mama, White Mama. What remains is an exploitation The Defiant Ones, as Pam Grier and Margaret Makov (the former a working girl, the latter a freedom fighter of some sort) scurry from one ludicrous set piece to another. This is a straight-up Z-movie guilty pleasure, just the sort thing one can imagine a teenage Quentin Tarantino devouring. It’s a shame director Romero was so enamored with tedious gunfights, as it gives him less time to indulge in the loathsome weirdness that is the film’s real appeal. The torch-bearer of BMWM’s oddities is undoubtedly genre fixture Sig Haig, as a creepy, strangely high-spirited bounty hunter in a Jim Croce ’stache, whose choice of wardrobe and automobile are best described as “Roy Rogers on LSD.” That’s him above. Just take a moment to savor that shirt. Truth be told, I spent the better part of this film trying to puzzle out where the hell it’s supposed to take place. The vague “island” setting seems, at different times, to be somewhere in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Vietnam. Between the Spanish-speaking Asian gangsters and the stray police uniform patch with the word “Manila” stitched onto it, I eventually tumbled to the fact that we are, indeed, in the Philippines. Such is the way of cheap, sleazy films bound for grindhouses the world over.
1973 (USA)
Director: Larry Cohen
Viewed: February 19, 2010
Format: DVD - MGM (2001)
Perhaps the most valuable lesson to be learned from Black Caesar is this: Do Not Fuck With Fred Williamson. Not only can the man take a bullet in the gut and keep on coming for your traitorous ass, he will, as the above screenshot demonstrates, beat you within an inch of your life with a shoe-shine kit. I had been aware of ex-football star Williamson primarily from Italian dreck like Warrior of the Lost World and his campy performance in From Dusk Till Dawn. Little did I know that he had a significant career as a blaxploitation leading man, a career that this film kicked off. Intriguingly, many of Black Caesar’s elements crop up in Scarface, and especially in Goodfellas (including that aforementioned shine-box, which a corrupt cop uses to humiliate Williamson before it is turned on him as a weapon). Do you think that DePalma or Scorsese would ever cop to cribbing slightly from the fellow who directed Q, It’s Alive, and The Stuff? And by the by, that James Brown soundtrack? Pure gold.
Public Enemies
2009 (USA)
Director: Michael Mann
Viewed: July 3, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print
Public Enemies seems like the sort of film that was made for Michael Mann. Tackling the story of John Dillinger’s final months, Mann enters terrain with which he is intimately familiar. In Dillinger, he rediscovers his reliable archetypal protagonist: a man with a disciplined code of behavior, a code tested by allies and rivals and by the sheer capricious character of life. Like any period American epic worth its salt, Public Enemies examines the national soul from a variety of angles, pitting conflicting impulses against one another and commenting on contemporary agonies with a cunning reserve. Mann’s captivating style is as welcome as ever, even if it is unfortunately hidden by the murk of digital video. Despite this questionable choice, Public Enemies is peppered with stunning cinematic moments, matings of color, sound, and motion that linger long after the context has vanished. It’s a shame that the surrounding film is unexpectedly rote, a collection of lively sequences that lack the narrative thrust or consistency in tone that might have made for an outstanding criminal fable. It’s a gratifying and expressive film, to be sure, but Public Enemies doesn’t even aim for the psychological and social complexity of other late Mann works.
Drag Me to Hell
2009 (USA)
Director: Sam Raimi
Viewed: June 7, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print
Horror films with a camp sensibility are a dime a dozen, but outright giddy horror is a much more elusive creature. In his much-ballyhooed return to the form after a seventeen-year hiatus (if we disregard 2002’s The Gift), director Sam Raimi delivers the latter species in Drag Me to Hell, a wicked delight so gratifyingly realized that calling it a “genre exercise” seems faint praise. While its title suggests exploitation schlock in the vein of Die Screaming, Marianne and I Spit on Your Grave, the trappings of Raimi’s film are standard occult thriller fare. The tone, however, summons forth the nightmarish, absurdist character that was previously endemic to the Evil Dead films. Also evident is the bleak, even malevolent worldview that emerges from Raimi’s smaller (read: non-Spider-man) films, from Darkman to A Simple Plan. Exhibiting both tremendous confidence and a ravenous appetite for unholy fun, Drag Me to Hell deserves better than a soft-mouthed label like “tribute” or “throwback.” Let’s be clear: It’s a damn fine horror film in every way.
2008 (USA)
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Viewed: April 4, 2009
Format: Blu-Ray- Sony (2009)
1965 (USA)
Director: Blake Edwards
Viewed: March 12, 2009
Format: DVD - Warner Brothers (2002)
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