May the sun shine on the career of Christopher Doyle for many a year to come, one of the best cinematographers alive today is this guy. If this movie succeeds in one thing, then it's bringing him to the attention of the American public at large, in as much as the general public could ever be aware of him (or perhaps i could be as evangelical as to declare that it is positively an honor for the American public). It's just a shame the film doesn't really achieve anything else (except for the acting). I mean, if you're going to remake a movie, then remake it, don't just xerox it for gods sake.
Reviews
16 Reviews
Lost Highway
(1997)
Disorganized religion
4 July 2002
This is the most shockingly religious film I've ever seen. I think i finally get the point of David Lynch after seeing this movie again (first time around i though it was a bit pointless and artsy like everyone else). The one little thing that finally made the film register for me was the Islamic tattoo on Bill Pullmans hand that you have to strain to see in the party scene, thereafter everything fell into place : The born again thing when he turns into Balthazar Getty, the introspection at the beginning when he finally discovers himself by watching the video tapes, the demon/demonic angel he meets at the party and dispatches Robert Loggai to hell after showing him his sins (on a portable TV), Gettys vision of hell in the mansion (now i know why Marilyn Manson appears in that sequence) and at long last i get the ending. It's not just a hackneyed cliche of the chase movie, he's on the run from the demons that chase us all, and again he starts to change personality right at the end of the movie. That seems to be the whole movie summed up : the human fight between attaining god and avoiding sin and evil. It's just a shame there seems to be a little bit of male heterosexual idiocy in painting women as the symbol of sin and temptation. Some things never change.
Looking for Richard
(1996)
Shakespeare/Marlowe risen from the dead
4 July 2002
A very difficult and rare thing is achieved in this movie : Shakespeare is made entertaining and easy to understand, even in it's 400 year old dialect. Pacino does even more for Shakespeare than Orson Welles did 35 years before him. That said though, the movie seems to have been made in the editing room, quite how much of it's success is down to Pacino, and how much is to the credit of the editor is debatable. If you can't stand Shakespeare, then this is the movie for you.
(Just so you know, Shakespeare was the front man for Christopher Marlowe, a gay Brit exiled in Italy for political reasons. Don't believe me ? Go watch the documentary "Much ado about something")
(Just so you know, Shakespeare was the front man for Christopher Marlowe, a gay Brit exiled in Italy for political reasons. Don't believe me ? Go watch the documentary "Much ado about something")
The London Story
(1986)
Dirty Government
4 July 2002
This is pretty much a piece of anti-Thatcher propaganda, commenting on the selling off of British Business interests to the USA, and the corruption of Government. Shot on a very low budget, making the most of the use of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet on the sound track. It's actually quite funny, culminating in a dance routine on the south bank between the spy and her collaborators. Twenty years down the line it's a good reminder of the sheer grimy pathetic seediness of old England and the dirty old Conservative Government of the 1980's. Well worth a look.
A Woman Under the Influence
(1974)
Love is sex and sex is love
4 July 2002
Life's all about love. Or at least that's what Cassavettes believed. The anti-thesis to this movie has got be Eyes Wide Shut, where life just comes down to sex, regardless of relationships. Mabels love is for everyone too, not just her husband. It's like she has a disease : a pure heart. The problem is this goes against society which is all masks and manipulation, and no one in the movie can figure Mabel out. She gets branded as crazy for being free of bulls**t. In Eyes Wide shut everyone has their mask and keeps it firmly on, even when Kidman & Cruise recognize their masks for what they are, they still have to keep on going, and the solution is sex. Maybe what's missing in Eyes Wide Shut and present in A Woman Under The Influence is the presence of God. Perhaps the question about Mabel is wether she really is pure or is she just another person dealing with the complications of life and human genetic programming. We all manipulate to get what we want, maybe Mabel is just doing the same on a grand scale. Mabel finds it quite easy to bring a man back to her place for sex, maybe because she's not getting her emotional-love fix from her husband, but still, it seems to boil down to just sex again. Cassavettes seemed to believe in his Love philosophy, but i wonder...
The Conversation
(1974)
Talentless Director, Good Movie
4 July 2002
It's a great movie, despite Coppola having directed it. But then he hired a great cinematographer to shoot it : Haskel Wexler, and then fired him to take the preassure off himself. And of course Coppola had almost nothing to do with the editing, which is so important in this particular movie, so most of the credit has to go to Richard Chew & Walter Mirsch. Yet again a bad director pulls off a good movie by hiring talented collaborators. On this basis i urge anyone who hates Coppola movies to see this movie.
Homophobia or Equality of Violence ?
4 July 2002
I recently saw this movie for about the fourth time, and it finally dawned on me that there were two gay characters in it. The movie is essentially a love story, and then the story of what happens to a man when he loses it. In Pekinpahs heterosexual take on love, the gay presence is in the form of a couple of hired killers. I can't fathom what it is supposed to mean or what was going on in Pekinpahs head. He hired a gay actor, Gig Young, to play one of the killers and to my nieve eyes the charterizations aren't really prejudiced in the context of the movie. Pekinpah even allows a moment of emotion when the Gig Young character dies and his boy friend (that's the impression the film gives anyway) reacts to his death in exactly the same way as the Warren Oates character reacts to the murder of his girl friend : with a gun. In a perfect world i don't think the film can be seen as homophobic, everyone is equal in this movie, and equally violent, but in the eyes of a male heterosexual audience ? So, what do the straights think ?
The Wicker Man
(1973)
Pagan Poetry
4 July 2002
A rare thing indeed, this movie : a decent religious film. It's just a shame it cops out in the end by reducing the islanders to murderers. The music makes the movie what it is more than anything else. As for Edward Woodward, that's got to be one of the best pieces of casting and acting in movies ever. A word of warning if you see the restored version : the footage looks like it comes from a release print or work print, not the original negative, consequently the quality is very noticeably inferior to the rest of the film, and there are at least two moments of restored footage that would have been better left out.
The Godfather
(1972)
Credit to Gordon Willis
4 July 2002
After seeing the first two Godfather movies again, I'm reminded how much their success is to the eternal credit of cinematographer Gordon Willis (and the production designer & actors), and how much the great fraud of Francis Coppola being a talent is held up entirely by his collaboration with people like Willis, Vittorio Storaro and Haskel Wexler in the 70's and early 80's. For all those people out there who still think that The Godfathers are the greatest movies ever, just remember to give credit where credit is due.
Burn!
(1969)
Oh dear, another message movie
4 July 2002
If, like me, you've only seen The Battle Of Algiers and are immediately impressed by Gillo Pontecervo as a director, and then come across this movie... Well, the "message" may be very admirable and all that, but the movie is a drag. Bad editing and a strange documentary style of camera work that was fine in Battle Of Algiers which took place in our modern time, put in a period piece like this ? It just jars all the way through (i think the contrast somehow just cancels the movie out). And far too much socialist sentimentality, especially the scene on the beach after the slaves succeed in rebelling : a montage of people just walking along with the most melodramatically romantic music possible, that just goes on and on and on. I mean, if you want to deliver a "message" then you have to get an audience. This movie looks like it was made entirely for the satisfaction of the directors ego.
Ulysses' Gaze
(1995)
Bad Translation
3 July 2002
WARNING : While the Greek language dialogue is eloquently written and acted, the English language dialogue in this movie is dire. The attempt at being poetic doesn't make it into the translation. The first time i saw this movie was on video, i had to turn the sound off and listen to a Portishead album as an alternative sound-track. It's a good movie, but it just goes to show that a director should not work in a language that isn't their first or that they are not 100% fluent in. Erland Josephson, on the other hand, is perfection in any language.
Oleanna
(1994)
The heterosexual mans burden
3 July 2002
I don't care how much bad-mouthing this movie gets, if you watch it expecting it to be something it's not then sure, you'll be disappointed. It's not a character drama or anything vaguely mainstream, it's purely an intellectual argument in the form of a movie. Sure, that's not good enough for most people, and fair enough. But if you open your ears when you watch the movie (and maybe your mind as well) then you might get something out of it. It's all about what we accept as normal behavior that we shouldn't, what we accept as the rules of social engagement when we need not, about what we deem as normal without thinking. The rules of present society shouldn't be engraved in stone for eternity just because that's how we've behaved up untill now. We should learn to think for ourselves and not just do as society tells us (and in the case of Oleanna it's Patriarchal society). Prejudice has no reason to exist if we learn to think for ourselves and question the rules of conduct. Heterosexual men are the prime offenders in this scenario. The William H Macy character blithely walks through the film without ever realizing his own prejudice, he's just doing what's normal to him, without ever thinking about it. By the end of the film his pathetic ambivalence is revealed for it is : gross chauvinism in extreme. If you haven't seen the movie, it's definitely worth the effort. If you've seen it and didn't like... i wonder, is it mostly heterosexual men that have a problem with this movie ?
Bitter Moon
(1992)
Bad Photography
3 July 2002
I keep trying to like this movie just because it has the name Polanski attached. I don't think the story is as stupid and hopeless as people make it out to be or that it's a pure commercial exercise. I think it's just the photography that lets it down. It looks like it was shoot for TV. It has no substance. John Cassavettes could get away with it, but then his movies over flow with emotion and power of acting, but Bitter Moon is not that kind of movie. The old rule states that you can never save a badly acted or scripted movie by just laying on a lot of beautiful photography, but with Bitter Moon that rule seems to be in reverse.
The Tenant
(1976)
Racism Subtext
3 July 2002
Several times in the movie the Polanski character is questioned about his nationality and has to keep saying that although he is from Poland, he's a French citizen. Maybe this is the key to the film : Racism ? The identity problems seem to stem out of this. Everyone is hostile to him because he's not French. His friends in the film are all ex-patriots (or at least in the English language version they have American accents. Maybe i'm reading too much into that). I just can't think of anything else in the film that offers any explanation to the Polanski characters identity problems. If Polanski's own life is anything to go by, shuttling around the world for work : Poland, UK, USA, France, then perhaps the race thing has some validity.
H Is for House
(1973)
Nature boy
3 July 2002
"A woman who lived in the country watched and awaited for the approach of the city. She was convinced they would come directly from the north and only in the afternoon..." If you get the chance to see this little film it'll be worth the effort. It's not very demanding, certainly not very intellectual in the usual Peter Greenaway style, but it's diverting enough. Greenaway seems to be in love with the countryside and suspicious of the city. He gives us a compactly edited little montage of all the things he loves about what appears to be his countryside home.
Touch of Evil
(1958)
No tampering
3 July 2002
Only got one point to make here, about the supposed directors cut of the film released a couple of years ago : The one single change is the removal of the opening credits, pasted on top of the famous opening dolly shot, and relocating them to the end of the film. Supposedly this is the way Welles wanted it, backed up by studio memos and Welles even says as much in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in the 60's or 70's. The only problem is what happens to the sound track. Sure, the space is filled in with plenty of appropriate background noise and the occasional burst of source music, but that opening shot lasts a long time, and there is a great chunk of it that is just empty. With the original opening music gone the sound track becomes dead, the screen becomes dead, and the poor viewer becomes deadly aware of the camera. Surely Welles would have disapproved ? The question is, if you can't do it to the exact specifications of the conveniently dead director, then isn't it better to just leave it alone ? And even if it is now exactly as Welles supposedly wanted it, it very obviously hurts the film. You can't do more damage to the audiences expectations than breaking the illusion of the story in the first 5 minutes. And as for welles insisting in the above mentioned interview that it was released all wrong, so what ? The guy had half his films taken away from him and turned into garbage by studio bosses, producers and hack-editors. Of course he's going to be on the defensive about every little thing. The truth is, re-editing the sound track for the opening shot weakens the film (getting rid of the credits is something else, Welles was right in that the opening shot does set up the whole story and we don't need to be distracted from it. However Welles himself admitted that the opening shot was a bit of a tour-de-force and the kind of thing that draws attention to it's self, which he said he was against. Killing the sound track does exactly that thing). I know it seems only a detail, but for people who like their moves to be movies and not displays of directorial masturbation, it's an important detail. Even the restorers introduction at the beginning of the film has that film-academic attitude about it. Okay, the real point of the argument is : Will studios please stop tampering with good movies just so they can get a re-release and make a buck. (a side note in response to someone who complained about the title of the film : It was supposed to be called Badge of Evil, which makes a bit more sense, but the studio decided they knew better ...Jesus Christ, i think this review means I'm a movie-anorak. Excuse me while i go slit my wrists in shame).
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