The Worst Person in the World

 During a climactic argument in Chasing Amy, the heroine, challenged about her past sexual encounters, says:  "I was an experimental girl, for Christ's sake!  Maybe you knew early what track you were on from A to B but, unlike you, I wasn't given a map at birth and, so, I tried it all."  This snippet of dialogue captures some of the qualities of protagonist, Julie, of The Worst Person in the World.  (The film is a 2021 romantic comedy that slips into sobriety and, even, mourning at the end of the picture; directed by Joachim Trier and made in Norway the movie features the luminous Renate Reinsve as the picture's "experimental girl".)  The picture is an even-tempered and mild-mannered portrait of an attractive woman -- she sometimes seems very young and, at other times, appears to be almost middle-aged -- involved in a romantic triangle:  the film depicts her relationship with two men, Aksel, a writer of underground comix, who imagines himself a perpetual rebel and insurgent -- in fact, he's rather bourgeois -- and Eivind, a gawky guy who is also trapped in a fantasy of perpetual youth:  he's underemployed as a coffee barista in downtown Oslo.  The film is charming and, certainly, entertaining enough -- it starts in the Annie Hall mode as a character study of a fascinating young woman; at first, the tone is pure Woody Allen, blithe with brittle-seeming intellectuals, well-stocked book cases, and clever, funny repartee (making small talk at a party, Julie claims that she's a doctor and that "cuddling children" will turn them into drug addicts, an assertion that terrorizes the perfectionist Norwegian mothers with whom she is talking.).  In the last part of the film, mortality intervenes and the movie takes a considerably more somber turn when one of the characters is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and dies.  Parts of the movie are satiric and malicious -- the character of Julie is like a Jane Austen heroine if one of those characters had achieved some notoriety for posting on-line a short story about fellatio.  (The two male characters are fans of the story although one wonders to what extent self-interest plays a role in their approbation.)

Trier is consciously literary and he structures the film into 12 chapters, each neatly entitled and separated by some black frames from one another with both a prologue and an epilogue.  In the prologue, we see Julie in college and observe her flitting from one vocation to another:  first, she wants to be a doctor, then, a psychologist and counsel, and, finally, a photo-journalist, although she really doesn't achieve anything in photography until the end of the movie.  She enters a relationship with the underground comix guy Aksel -- he has made comic books about a feral and subversive bobcat ("Guape").At a party celebrating a new publication by Aksel, Julie gets bored, and wanders away.  Festive occasions in Oslo are celebrated on a high green hill overlooking the city where there is an elegant esplanade.  (In the film's first shot, we see Julie in a black party dress in profile against the backdrop of the bluff and harbor below on one of Oslo's endless pale summer nights.  The scene is repeated twenty minutes in the movie -- this is the image showing Julie's escape from Aksel.) Julie crashes a wedding party also in a house atop the bluff where she meets Eivind.  They are both drunk and they play a little game in which the objective is to see how intimate they can get with one another without actually having sex -- the answer, by the way, is "pretty intimate" since they take turns watching one another urinate.  There are several more parties in the film.  In one of them, Aksel takes Julie to meet his friends, most of whom have children.  He wants to have a child with Julie. The married couples fight, and both Aksel and Julie are embarrassed.  When Julie, drunkenly says, "let's make a baby", Aksel doesn't seem to take her encouragement to heart.  Julie has lied to Eivind about being a doctor.  She actually works as clerk in a bookstore.  She is upset to see Eivind come into the store.  We are later shown that he's with Sunniva, a woman who wants a book on "Green Yoga".  There's a flashback to Sunniva and Eivind camping on a desolate mountain in Finnmark.  Eivind has done a genetics test through Ancestry and discovered that she has 3.6% Sami blood.  This turns her into a Sami shaman and ritual practitioner as well as an environmentalist; Eivind struggles to keep up her with modish shamanic rituals, her yoga practice as a teacher and her environmental activism.  Ultimately, when Eivind breaks up with Sunniva to live with Julie, he condemns himself as a traitor to her and the climate -- that is, "the worst person in the world."  Julie is in love with Eivind -- who she imagines in a startling sequence as the only person in the whole world:  everyone else is paralyzed and motionless.  She breaks up with Aksel who worships her.  It's a sad and disturbing scene:  poor Aksel is left wearing a shirt but without pants or underpants when she walks out on him.  Julie doesn't have a gift for happiness.  She quarrels with Eivind whom she denounces as shiftless.  Then, she learns that Aksel has pancreatic cancer and is dying.  She visits him on several occasions.  He announces to her that she is the great love of his life.  He is morose and terrified and, later, we seem him enduring pain.  Julie gets Aksel to talk about his childhood -- they do a sort of nostagia tour of Oslo and Julie takes pictures of him with her large Canon camera.  Aksel dies and Julie is with Eivind. She's pregnant with Eivind's child and decides to have the child.  But she miscarries.  In the epilog, we see Julie taking publicity photos on the set of a movie that seems to echo some of the themes and aspects of the film we have been watching.  The actress in the movie goes outside where she meets Eivind who is holding their baby.  

This summary doesn't capture the pictorial ingenuity of the film or its complexity.  Julie's parents are divorced.  Her father seems to be a pathological liar -- he lies but it doesn't matter because no one believes him in the first instance.  There's a scene in which Julie with friends takes mushrooms and has vivid and frightening hallucinations -- she's in an old woman's body suckling an infant.  There are interesting and baffling visual motifs -- in an early scene, Aksel shows Julie a window in his apartment that has thick crazed glass; when he's dying, Aksel shows Julie tinted windows, stained glass, in a childhood flat.  We see Oslo through those red, blue, and yellow panes.  When Aksel says that Julie was the love of his life and the reason he wants to keep living, she's too honest to reciprocate -- he is obviously not the love of her life. (There's a painful detail:  Julie cuddles with Aksel in his hospital bed, but when he puts his hand on her breast, she nonchalantly brushes it aside.)  When Aksel asks her if she was faithful to him, she also wounds him with her honesty, admitting that she was involved with Eivind when they were together.  Aksel's comic is adapted into a Christmas movie called Guape ruins Christmas, obviously an atrocious corruption of his work.  The picture is beautifully shot.  It doesn't add up to a whole lot --  but it's an effectively mounted work and very compelling.  Julie isn't the worst person in the world, nor is she a "very good person" as Aksel says -- but she's vibrant with life and no better nor worse than most of us.  

The Rip

 "Rip", apparently, refers to law enforcement confiscating money earned through criminal activities.  Obviously, there is a strong moral risk associated with so-called "Rip" operations.  What's to keep the cops who have snatched money from bad guys from skimming some of the proceeds for themselves?  Cops are underpaid and, generally, have domestic expenses associated with divorce or child custody problems.  Therefore, strong temptations exist for police officers to expropriate for their own use some amount of the ill-gotten funds that they have seized.

This is the background for Joe Carnahan's very entertaining police thriller The Rip starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as Miami-Dade cops severely tempted by 20 million dollars discovered in a "stash house." Affleck's "Sarge" is involved in a love affair with a fellow police officer.  She gets shot, seemingly by corrupt cops, who are aware that she knows about a huge treasure at a cartel stash house in the suburb of Hialeah.  Sarge's brother, a G-man, is investigating corruption among the Miami-Dade cops.  (He and his brother have a contentious relationship which leads to a fist fight between them in the station house.)  Matt Damon, confusingly called both LT and Dane, is broke -- he is on the verge of losing everything due to a bad and destructive divorce.  Obviously, he's on the look-out for a score that will save him from financial ruin.  The cops seem to be morally flexible.  They sit around afterhours, watching their buddies drive recklessly doing doughnuts in the parking lot while all the officers chug down beers.  Dane has a message that there's a Hialeah stash house with money available for the taking.  With Sarge and an Asian cop called Mo who is a straight arrow, as well as two cocky female officers, the cops drive to the suburb and talk their way into the house where they think the money has been hidden.  They have a sort of terrier named Wilbur who has been trained to sniff out filthy lucre.  The neighborhood where the house is located is eerily empty.  The only person within blocks seems to Desi, a Columbian immigrant, who says that she is house-sitting while probate lawyers work out title to the premises which belonged to her abuela.  The house is full of junk and seems crumbling around Desi's ears.  The cops search the house and discover more than 20 million dollars of cartel cash, bills piled up in dry wall plaster buckets.  But there are other corrupt cops nosing around the neighborhood and the cartel, perhaps, is also engaged in surveillance of the strangely empty neighborhood.  Dane and Sarge bicker about the money and seem baffled as to what to do -- will they steal it all or merely a part or will they turn it in to the boss (who might steal the money for himself).  Meanwhile, an army of bad guys is converging on the house:  gang-members and crooked police out to score themselves,  Someone phones the cops guarding the money (and counting it) in the house telling them to vamoose or "in thirty minutes people will start to die."  Sarge and Dane, are baffled -- they are sorely tempted to steal money but have trouble figuring out a plan.  Desi, of course, the woman house-sitting, would have to be eliminated.  And if the money is stolen, how are Sarge and Dane going to split up the dough, particularly since the two female cops will have to be bought off and something will have to be done with the straight-arrow Mo.  There's another call saying that the cops need to leave right away or "in ten minutes, people will start to die."  The time passes and bad guys attack with machine guns, blasting the house, more or less, to pieces. And so it goes.

I can't provide more of the very complex plot without revealing lots of details as to surprising twists and turns in the story.  Suffice it to say that "things are not as they seem to be", an archetypal plot described in the excellent Ethan Hawke vehicle "The Low Down" a recent cable TV series. The Rip is not a serious movie but its very entertaining.  I was reminded of Walter Hill's Trespass (1992) in which firemen happen on a treasure in a burning building in East St. Louis and are besieged in an old foundry  and attacked by scores of bad guys.  The aspects of the movie involving greed and characters conniving to steal the treasure for which everyone is contending are similar as is the pressure-cooker environment of the foundry ruins under attack. John Carpenter's second or third movie, Assault of Precinct 13 (1976) is also closely parallel to the action in The Rip -- the cops are cut off, trapped while menacing thugs tighten their strangle hold about the precinct house.  The other picture which The Rip resembles is A Simple Plan (Sam Raimi, 1998) a variant on the primordial allegory about greed, Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale"; A Simple Plan involves a family man and small-town account who finds a treasure in a plane crashed in a wintry woods in rural Minnesota.  Two-thirds of The Rip are frightening and suspenseful, mostly confined to the shabby old house full of garbage and the spooky empty neighborhood.   The last third of the movie is less focused, involves two chases, and seems less dire and suspenseful -- there's a slackening of tension as the various conflicts and betrayals are worked out.  This part of the film is not as good as the middle section of the picture, but still exceedingly clever and interesting.  I'm tempted to say that "they don't make movies like this anymore" -- you will see that my comparisons and correlates are all more than 25 years old.  This is a very well-designed and exciting suspense film that I recommend.  

 

Pain and Glory

 A Spanish film director, perhaps in his sixties, is afflicted with many painful health conditions.  Something, possibly a cancerous tumor, is blocking his esophagus and he chokes when eating or, even, drinking water.  His knee is stiff and he walks with an antalgic gait.  Back pain keeps him up at night.  (Antonio Banderas who plays the film director named Salvador Gallo has obviously closely observed elderly people afflicted with pain -- the character seems stiff, limps, and backs carefully into his vehicle when he sits down since neither his knees nor his spine can be trusted to bend as they should; it's a fine physically astute performance.)  Gallo's pain has sidelined him for four years and he lives like a hermit in a voluptuously decorated apartment or condominium in Madrid.  His only associate is a middle-aged woman, Mercedes, who assists him and may be his business agent.  Pain and Glory is a film by Pedro Almodovar and, broadly speaking, it is formulaic and predictable -- something will disturb Gallo's withdrawal from the world and the film will document his painful return to creativity in his profession.  The film that we are watching is revealed, in the last shot, to be the vehicle by which Gallo restores himself as a moviemaker.  Almodovar began his career in the seventies as a cartoonist composing comic-strip telenovelas -- he's has never fully eschewed the esthetics of that form:  Pain and Glory turns on two outlandish coincidences, events which are "tamed" as it were by the relatively sober propriety with which Almodovar treats his subject matter.  We may recall that Fellini cut his teeth as a cartoonist; Pain and Glory resembles in many respect Fellini's autobiographical 8 1/2 -- the plight of the creatively blocked film maker is explored through flashbacks and allegorical emblems (in 8 1/2, the rocket stalled on the launchpad; in Pain and Glory, the mysterious ailments that afflict Gallo).  In both films, the director's love-life is at the center of the movie, suggesting that the dissolution of the hero's libido is part of his problem.  The films also explore various dreams and memories from the central characters' pasts.  Pain and Glory as the name implies is more optimistic than Fellini's visionary film, a movie that suggests that the hero's incapacity derives from pathologies in the film industry and society as a whole:  8 1/2 is vividly satirical -- I don't see much satire in Almodovar's film which has a more realistic tincture.  Like Fellini, Almodovar has a great eye and his images often carry an astonishing weight of flamboyant beauty -- "flamboyant "is the key word:  Gallo's apartment is comprised of great, eye-popping swaths of bright red, particularly in his kitchen which is as gory as an abattoir.  Also like Fellini, Almodovar is a collector of beautiful faces and bodies -- in the memory scenes, the young director as a boy is played by a luminously angelic child; the boy's mother is the radiant, ageless Penelope Cruz -- the boy's first crush, a mason who tiles the walls of the cave where the child lives, is also gorgeous.  And he traipses around totally nude.  The rural landscapes are resplendent -- women doing laundry drape brilliantly white sheets on riverside bushes in a spectacular display.  The past, as recalled by the director, is a strange country -- the little boy has his glamorous, beautiful mother all to himself and the little family lives in some kind of whitewashed cave cut into a hillside.  

The movie's opening shot shows us Gallo submerged in a pool.  The camera surveys a red ridge on his body, a surgical scar extending from "nave to the chops" as Shakespeare would have it.  Clearly, the insides of this fellow have been exposed.  So Pain and Glory begins with an emblematic shot of a wounded body, posing the question as to what is inside -- an inquiry that the film will answer.  A movie made by Gallo thirty years earlier has been revived and the director is asked to appear for a Q & A at some film society.  He is supposed to appear with his star, a handsome actor whose association with Gallo ended with this movie, called Sabor or "Flavor".  The picture was supposed to be about the ecstatic manic vibe connected with cocaine use.  But the star was a heroin addict and he literally brought the movie down with his acting -- apparently, glum, self-centered, and numb.  According to Gallo, this wrecked the movie, although the film has become a cult movie.  Gallo goes to see the co-star.  After an initially tense few minutes, the two men start "chasing the dragon" -- that is, smoking heroin together.  Because of his pain symptoms, Gallo becomes addicted to heroin and has to buy it on the street.  While he is passed-out one day in the actor's apartment, the performer reads a text on Gallo's laptop called the addictions -- it's a thinly veiled autobiographical story about a three-year gay love affair between Gallo and his boyfriend who was a heroin addict.  The actor is enchanted by the story and asks that Gallo let him have the text so that he can manufacture a theater piece, a monologue from it.  The monologue is premiered in an intimate theater and the actor observes a middle-aged man in the audience weeping.  It turns out that his man, who is only temporarily in town and on business (he lives in Buenos Aires),is the real-life figure with whom Gallo had the love affair that is depicted in "Addictions."  The actor tells the man where Gallo lives and he goes to his house.  The two men reminisce about the past, kiss, but don't have sex.  The man from Buenos Aires is now an upstanding citizen, not addicted to any drugs, and married with two children.  The happenstance encounter with the man from Buenos Aires is the first of the two remarkable coincidences on which Almodovar rests his story.

The second coincidence involves a childhood memory of his mother engaging an impoverished plaster-worker and mason to renovate part of their cave.  The tradesman is illiterate and the nine-year old Gallo is extremely precocious and kind -- he agrees to teach the man to read and write in exchange for his labor at the cave.  Gallo is preternaturally patient and succeeds in teaching the mason to read.  The mason is a talented artist and he makes a sketch of Gallo reading in his house.  Gallo, as a pain-tormented and famous director, sees an advertisement for a Barcelona art gallery in which the painting of the little boy reading made fifty years earlier is depicted as for sale.  With his assistant, Mercedes, he goes to the gallery and buys the painting.  There is writing on the back of the painting in which the artist praises Gallo for his patience and kindness in teaching him to read.  The painting was sent to Gallo but he had moved and the picture never reached him.  Gallo is greatly moved.  He consults with a doctor about the tumor in his esophagus.  It turns out not to be cancerous but, in fact, a spinal bone spur that is occluding his throat.  Surgery is planned.  The little painting opens Gallo to more memories and he recalls seeing the tradesman, naked in the cave, bathing after working on the picture.  Gallo is so smitten with the handsome tradesman that he faints dead away.  Gallo, after remembering this moment, is inspired to write a story (and, probably, the scenario of the movie we are watching) called "First Desire."  As he falls asleep under anesthesia, Gallo has a vivid dream of fireworks exploding and, then, realizes that he is with his beautiful young mother watching the night sky that is full of fire and color.  The camera pulls back and we understand that the scene with Gallo and his mother is part of the film we have been watching -- a girl is holding a sound boom over the woman and her son.  A few minutes earlier, Gallo has tried to reconcile with his elderly mother but only partially achieved his objective.  The old woman wants to die in her village but Gallo can't get her back there in time.  So she dies in the ICU and, in fact, alone.  We are given to believe that Gallo's creativity has returned to him.  

It's a complex film filled with weird dead ends and mirroring or parallel effects -- Gallo's estrangement from his mother mirrors his estrangement from the star of Sabor which continues after Gallo does a Q & A with the audience at the revival and acknowledges his anger at the man for turning his cocaine-inflected movie into a heroin addiction show.  The two coincidences both involve art works (the theater piece based on "Addictions" and the young plasterer's painting of the boy who has taught him to read.)  The partial reconciliation between Gallo and his heroin addicted lover (who is now a straight-as-an-arrow family man) is mirrored by partial reconciliation between Gallo and his very pious mother who has not been able to accept with equanimity Gallo's homosexuality.  Other parallel effects are obvious in the movie.  The idea seems to be that art can be a form of redemption and that the very existence of the autobiographical Pain and Glory has redeemed Gallo and, for that matter, Almodovar. 

Royal Cambodian Bronzes at the MIA

On a cold, sunny day between Alberta Clippers, snow squalls, and blizzards, I drove up to Minneapolis to see the exhibition at the Art Institute of bronze figures made in Cambodia mostly around the second half of the 11th century AD.  The battle of Minneapolis was ongoing, masked and heavily armed ICE agents fighting with protestors waving flags and signs and blowing whistles.  (A woman had been shot dead on a residential street a mile and a half from the Art Institute -- this event demonstrates the inadequacy of visual evidence; on cellphone footage, the homicide can be seen from about five different angles from various distances and, yet, no one can really agree as to what the footage, filmed in broad daylight really means.)  Trump is cracking down on Minnesota, apparently in a spasm of pique, induced by the fact that he has never won the State in the three elections in which he stood for the office of President.  It's reputed that there is widespread chaos, but, the City is, in fact, mostly peaceful, people going about their business oblivious to the pepper spray and rubber bullets being fired elsewhere.  I didn't see any trace of the riots or ICE goons attacking people.  The sun was bright; there was a lot of wind and it was very cold.  

The Royal Cambodian Bronzes are mostly petite figures, greenish with oxidized copper or scuffed by centuries of neglect.  There are a number of figures, also four feet high, carved from dingy grey sandstone. The bronzes were once gilded with gold leaf and adorned with jewels but the precious substances are now long gone.  The show involves many artifacts from a French museum (Guimet) and the original label material and catalog were written in French -- the exhibit isn't traveling anywhere but Paris and Minneapolis.  (I assume that this is because show is technical and highly specialized -- it consists of variations on sacred figures that may look, at least to the unpracticed eye, highly similar; it's a show for connoisseurs of a particularly specialized type -- people who know the doctrinal differences between certain types of Buddhism and who can apply that knowledge to deciphering small variations in the iconography.)  I found the show interesting and looked at everything as carefully as possible -- but the calm bronze faces in poses indicative of serene contemplation are introverted and don't really reach out to you. This is a hushed alien world.  An exception is a monumental figure of Vishnu resting on his side between the ages of the world, a figure that is somewhat akin to the images of the Buddha at his Paranirvana -- that is, the figure crowned in architectural kind of headdress, tiered and vaulted like the Chrysler Building in New York resting on his side, often in a naturally occurring rock shelter or a chapel in a temple.  Vishnu has swashbuckling features with a raffish moustache and each of his elbows are jointed with an extra set of forearms and hands so he can accomplish twice the work of salvation.  The big figure, reclining on the ruin of his torso (the parts look like tubes from Civil War era submarines) startles due to its size and the rather eerie and indeterminate aspect of its features (or, more accurately, its state of disrepair):  ruins have a sort of uncanny appeal and this wrecked bronze is big enough to seem to be a sort of ruin, an underwater temple, perhaps, with tubes and hollows where eels might swim under the degraded pumpkin-sized head of the figure.  

Visitors glimpse the monster through the glass of a closed door as you enter the show.  You, then, traverse several fairly dim galleries in which about 150 bronzes are displayed.  There are fragments of figures, many Buddhas demonstrating the gesture for conversation  or fearlessness (two hands pointed palm out to the viewer) or the earth witness gesture made when the Buddha achieved enlightenment and called the Earth to be his witness of the defeat of Mara and forces of illusion. There is a rare object called a lingakosha (that is, a ceremonial covering for a linga -- that is, Shiva's generative phallus); it looks like kind of round protective container for a manhole cover; a few feet away, there's a miniature linga, a small thumb-shaped bollard in a bath for ablutions.  The bronzes seem to be meditating -- their eyes are half-closed and there is something comatose about the figures.  Apparently, the bronzes demonstrate an epoch in which Buddhism and Hindu Gods co-existed in Cambodia at Angkor Wat.  Indeed, the Hindu gods seem to be evolving into the stream-lined dome-form of the meditating Buddha -- the Hindu figures feel a bit more kinetic than the profound repose of the Buddhas.  At Angkor Wat, the Cambodian King made a vast reservoir and, then, planted a walled island in the middle of  the water.  The reservoir was supposed to simulate the sea churning like milk for uncounted eons in the original chaos of the world.  From the churning of the sea, a figure arises resplendent and immense -- this is Vishnu reclining on a heap of cobras as if on pillows.  Vishnu uses his elbow-jointed forearms of two of his four limbs to bear up the weight of his mighty crowned head.  Vishnu sleeps until a lotus grows out of his naval.  From the lotus' moist petals, Brahma, the all-Father, is produced -- this is the inception  of a new world.  A video tells this story in the anteroom to the final chamber where the great Vishnu is reclining, his features eroded like the face of a burn victim, hands and feet like geological events.  Elaborate floral arrangements have been left as offerings to the figure and, in the corners of the room, there are more heaps of flowers, large banners of the Kingdom of Cambodia, and crossed lances and pikes.  The fragmentary figure casts a shadow like a mountain range on the wall.  In 1936, a local monk dreamed that the Buddha came to him and pleaded to be released from his prison of mud at the center of the now-empty, jungle reservoir.  When the monk dug in that place, the former island at the center of the artificial lake, the colossal figure was discovered.

In another gallery, there are some works by Sopheap Pich, a Cambodian artist who escaped the barbarous Pol Pot regime to come to America.  His works are fragile made from rattan. One of the works is a Buddha form disintegrating so that it seems to float above the ground, disembodied, a mere outline of the Enlightened One dematerialized so the figure seems faint and vaporous.  The tips of the rattan have been dyed in some red substance -- not fully but only a few strands.  When Sopheap Pich returned to Cambodia, he went to the village temple near where he had lived as a boy and young man.  The temple was in ruins, covered in ugly pock marks.  The Khmer Rouge had used the temple as a prison, interrogation center, and had executed hundreds of people there.  I wrote down the name of the temple in my moleskin:  Wat Ta Min.  

As I write, 18 monks and a dog named Aloka are walking 2300 miles from Fort Worth's Huong Dao Vipassana, Bhavana Center to Washington D.C.  Originally, there were 19 monks but a truck crashed into their procession, resulting in the amputation of the leg of one of the men.  The monks wear saffron robes and are shaved bald.  The walk is for peace and to show loving kindness to all beings.  (The dog, no longer able to keep up with the monks, had to be treated for dislocated hips -- Aloka meets the monks at intervals.)  It's too bad that the 129-mile pilgrimage will not bring the monks to Minneapolis where peace and loving kindness are in short supply.  There's another blizzard coming out of Alberta.  If you happen to meet the procession of monks, step out of their way, put your palms together over your heart and bow forward -- don't talk to them and don't attempt to make eye-contact.  

High Anxiety

I'm sorry, dear Reader, but I have never found Mel Brooks to be particularly funny   My father showed me The Producers when I was about 13 and, because he found the movie hilarious, I obediently thought it was pretty funny.  (I later saw The Producers in a revival on Broadway and found the whole thing noisy and a bit tedious).  Most of Brooks' movies (for instance, Blazing Saddles) are sophomoric and outrageous rather than funny.  Comedy is very much a matter of personal taste and I acknowledge that my views on this point are idiosyncratic and, quite probably, wrongheaded. But I've never been able to warm to Brooks' form of comedy -- the exception, I think, is Young Frankenstein which manages to be funny as well beautifully made and stirring after the manner of the old Universal  horror movies of the thirties.  

High Anxiety (1977) is a Hitchcock parody film, incorporating elements of The Birds, Psycho, and Vertigo in the pastiche.  Brooks uses his repertoire stable of actors:  Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, and Madelaine Kahn.  He plays the hero himself in the film, a psychiatrist with a fear of heights (similar to the Jimmy Stewart character, Scotty in Vertigo).  The plot involves a murderous nurse (played by Leachman) who dominates an expensive insane asylum.  Hitchcock's movies are ultra-elegant, sophisticated, and sexually perverse.  His camerawork is stylized and extremely expressive:  Hitchcock favors exaggerated point-of-view scenes (a gun rotating in a first-person suicide scene, a shot through a glass of milk being consume by character); he also favors high, analytical angles, shots aimed straight down on the set and characters, and elaborate dollying and tracking effects -- Brooks doesn't have the budget or skill to imitate most of these effects and he, certainly, is unable to capture the swooning, dream-like sexuality that pervades Hitchcock's best movies.  (If you want to see Hitchcock parodied to perfection look at Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill or the first half of Body Double.)  Brooks' films (with the exception of Young Frankenstein) are tawdry, intentionally cheap-looking, and slovenly -- the humor resides in the ethnic comedy and the outrageous performances by the actors.  Although Brooks imitates some of Hitchcock's signature effects, he doesn't get them right and the film's direct parodies fall flat.  Brooks' sort of humor is physically embodied by Cloris Leachman who plays Nurse Diesel in the picture -- she wears a nurse's outfit and had her breasts rigged-out in a pyramidal upthrust brassiere that looks like the bra sported by Madonna during her one of her concert tours.  Leachman has a moustache, grey face, and speaks in a foreboding, portentous tone.  The make-up and costume are so over-the-top that she seems wholly monstrous. There's a scene in which she tortures Harvey Korman dressed in leather Nazi-style dominatrix gear in which Leachman is so hideous and menacing that the scene can't really be played for laughs.  She spanks Korman and, a few shots later, when he meets with Asylum's director, played by Brooks, we see him seating himself very gingerly on his bruised bottom.  The shrill Madelaine Kahn playing a JAP (Jewish-American Princess) appears as Brooks' love-interest -- she's fairly amusing but the part is underwritten.  The best and worst things in the movie feature Mel Brooks.  At a piano bar, he suddenly begins to croon a cleverly written song called "High Anxiety" -- he seems to be parodying Frank Sinatra and the sequence (similar to the "man about town" song and dance in Young Frankenstein) is very funny.  On the other hand, an extended scene involving vulgar New York Jews bickering at an airport might be funny to Jewish audiences; but I didn't think all the kvetching in this scene was funny at all.  High Anxiety also suffers from the absence of Gene Wilder.  The role of an old Jewish psychiatrist seems  obviously written for Wilder and the actor intone his lines echoing the comedian's distinctive delivery.  

There's a scene that embodies, I think, High Anxiety's  failings.  This is a showy sequence modeled on the famous stabbing scene in which Janet Leigh is butchered  while taking a shower.  Brooks cuts and assembles the scene in a montage that essentially duplicates the sequence in Psycho.  The murder scene in the original film begins with one of the strangest shots in cinema -- the camera is pointed right up at a shower-head that sprays water in perfect jets down onto the camera.  And, yet, the camera doesn't get wet.  So where is the camera located?  This riddle which is experienced subliminally by the viewers creates a dream-like ambiance to the violent murder -- the killing takes place in some strange space that is radically unlike actual space.  Brooks also points the camera up at the shower head or spigot.  But the water bursting out of the spigot pours onto the camera and drenches the lens.  This simple change alters the entire experience of the sequence, making the whole gory thing seem vastly different  from  Hitchcock's vision.    

Destry Rides Again

 By 1939, the definitive features of the movie Western were established so fully that the conventions of the genre could be satirized, inverted and subverted, and contested on-screen in popular entertainment.  Destry Rides Again is a product of the cinema's Golden Age annum mirabilum 1939.  The comedy Western stars Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich.  The film proceeds at such breakneck pace that the viewer doesn't get a chance to really admire it and, accordingly, the whole thing seems slightly flat -- there's the faint tedium of something perfected to the point that its execution feels perfunctory.  The movie seems to have been largely improvised with the actors required to learn a couple new pages of dialogue each day before shooting.  This sense of improvisation, however, doesn't deter from the film's effect, which is more pronounced in memory than during the actual screening:  it's a picture that improves with thought.  The movie is improvised the way that Louis Armstrong's Hot Five or Hot Seven improvised -- there is a fleet, blithe, interlocking of classic Western tropes that is perfectly phrased and timed and pitch perfect.

Bottleneck is a wild and wooly Western town in which everyone exuberantly shoots their six-guns in the air and brawls.  (This is depicted in a bravura tracking shot disfigured by the film's titles -- the titles obscure the carefully choreographed action and, further, hide some instances of impropriety that might have been problematic in 1939).  The town's main industry is vice, exemplified by a colossal saloon and brothel, "the Last Chance" that is the center of Bottleneck's booze, gambling, and sex industry.  The boss of the saloon is a nasty hombre named Kent, played by Brian Donlevy in the fashion of a moustache twirling villain in an 1890's melodrama.  Kent's moll, Frenchy, played by Marlene Dietrich distracts poker players so that she can tamper with their cards, thus, insuring ill-gotten gains for Kent.  Kent cheats a farmer out of his ranch and farm.  The farmer complains to the sheriff, Keogh, who is, then, murdered by Kent and his gang.  Keogh's body is concealed and Kent, colluding with the corrupt town mayor, appoints Wash, the hapless town drunk as a substitute for the dead man -- hoping, of course, that Wash will be wholly ineffectual as sheriff.  Wash admired a gunman named Destry who cleaned-up the hellhole town of Tombstone and killed many bad guys in the process.  Destry has been ambushed and killed by being shot in the back, but his son, Destry Jr. (I'll call him) is available and comes to Bottleneck on the stagecoach to assume the duties of assistant sheriff.  Destry doesn't make an auspicious first appearance -- he steps off the stagecoach holding a lady's parasol (he's just trying to be helpful to the maiden with whom he has been traveling) and also carrying the young woman's canary in a cage.  Destry doesn't sling guns and is unarmed -- the fate of his father has made him into lawman who refuses to use firearms to pacify tough guys.  He prefers to talk the bad guys out of their criminality by spinning parable-like yarns that generally begin with the phrase:  "I once knew a fellow in Amarillo  (or Omaha or Dodge City etc.)..." -- he's like Abe Lincoln as a lawman.  Of course, Destry is quick with his fists and periodically stuns bad guys or bullies by beating them down.  He's also an ace shot and uses his marksmanship skills to cow would-be villains.  

The town is completely corrupt:  not only Frenchy but the mayor and most of the populace is involved nefarious activities. The plot of the film involves the redemption of the drunk, Wash and Frenchy, the floozy, Wash takes his role as Sheriff seriously to every one's amusement and, then, chagrin.  In fact, the poor old drunk is so loyal to his office that he ends of dying in line of duty.  When Frenchy tries to seduce Destry, he rebukes her and says that she's got a pretty face hiding under her caked make-up, tweaking her on the cheek.  This admonition turns Frenchy into an honest woman and, also, ultimately results in her death.  (Inadvertently, I think, the movie stands for the proposition that if you are redeemed from your vices, death follows immediately.)  Both of the death scenes are well-managed.  Wash is humiliated about being shot in the back; his shirt is untucked as he lays dying on the floor of the jail. Destry tells him that his father was also shot in the back, because the assailant was afraid to face him and, gently tucks  in his shirt.  As Frenchy is dying, she tries to rub the lipstick off  so that she can kiss Destry goodbye with properly purified lips.  When the menfolk in the town prepare to slaughter one another, Frenchy urges the women, all of whom despise her, to stop the battle and, at the climax, an army of women armed with planks of wood and rolling pins marches between the assailants and, then, storms the "Last Chance" saloon, ripping it apart in a fierce spectacle in which they revenge themselves after the manner of Carrie Nation on this den of iniquity.  The film is full of the things that we yearn to see in a Western:  there's a family besieged in a farmhouse, a battle between cattlemen and sodbusters, riproaring bar fights including a protracted "cat fight" between Marlene Dietrich and Una Merkel, beautiful horses galloping across the chaparral, plenty of gunplay, three great songs including "Little Joe, the Wrangler" and Dietrich's signature "See what the boys in the backroom will have" sung in the actress' throaty baritone, as well as a witty, ingenious script.  In my view, the film's only failing is that Destry is set up to marry the "nice girl" (Frenchy is dead) -- the "nice girl" is the comely sister of a bully cowboy; her part is underwritten to the point of non-existence and the ending seems purely opportunistic and perfunctory.  After pursuing an affair with Frenchy, the audience wonders how Destry could possibly be interested in this pallid, conventional girl.  (Apparently, Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich were involved in a torrid affair when the movie was being made.)

The Room Next Door

 The director of The Room Next Door trademarks the movie in its opening credits:  it's a Film by Almodovar -- just as earlier there were films by Bunuel.  Curiously, The Room Next Door is lucid, restrained, and modest to the point of reticence.  Almodovar is famous for this campy and lurid melodrama.  The trashy aspects of Almodovar's sensibility are not much on display in The Room Next Door.  After a couple of garish episodes, the picture settles down to be a philosophical meditation on mortality.  The picture is more like a work by Ingmar Bergman than John Waters, a director whose esthetics and taste is closely aligned with Almodovar.  In fact, the movie, although ravishing pictorially, is something akin to a two-hander play and, in fact, could be staged readily in theatrical form -- the film is dominated by Tilda Swinton playing a dying war correspondent and Julianne Moore as her friend.  Both women distinguish themselves in the film -- Swinton's make-up is ghoulish and the eerie-looking actress seems very plausibly moribund; at times, she takes on a ghostly appearance.  Julianne Moore is splendid as the victim, as it were of her friend's rather macabre venture.

Ingrid (Moore) is a novelist.  At a book signing in Manhattan, she meets a friend who tells her that someone with whom she was close years ago is now dying of cancer -- this is Martha.  Ingrid goes to visit Martha in the hospital.  She is debilitated by chemotherapy for her cervical cancer and has been told by her physicians that her illness is terminal.  Martha, a loner, wants to die on her own terms and, so, she has acquired a "euthanasia" pill with which to commit suicide.  Martha tells the nonplussed Ingrid that she doesn't want to die alone -- she wants to die knowing that her friend is in the room next door.  Martha and Ingrid worked together a couple decades earlier as journalists employed at a magazine newsroom.  Ingrid has been a very successful war-reporter and seems to have ice in her veins.  She is estranged from her daughter, Michelle, and seems to have no other friends or family.  After considerable debate on the merits of the plan, Ingrid agrees to travel with Martha to upstate New York, apparently Woodstock, where Martha has rented a luxury mansion in the mountains -- it's a hyper-modern lodge with staggered metal towers and elegant art on the walls (a painting by Edward Hopper plays a significant role in the film.)  Martha becomes increasingly feeble and loses the ability to walk.  Ingrid cares for her, but only to a limited extent -- Martha plans to kill herself before she becomes a burden to others.  At one time, years earlier, Martha and Ingrid were sexually involved with the same man, Max, played by a rather hectic John Turturro.  Max is convinced that climate change is destroying the world and he can't restrain himself from lecturing everyone.  In fact, he has been engaged to give a  lecture at a college in the area and engages in a brief, very mildly flirtatious luncheon with Ingrid.  The signal for Martha's suicide will be that she will shut the red door to her bedroom.  One day the bedroom door is shut.  Ingrid finds that Martha has died on the chaise-lounge chair on the back deck to the house.  Ingrid is interrogated harshly by a local cop who is a religious fundamentalist and senses that Martha has killed herself with Ingrid's assistance.  Max has retained a lawyer to represent Ingrid and the attorney intimidates the cop.  At the end of the movie, Michelle, Martha's daughter (also played by Tilda Swinton) visits the lodge.  She sits with Ingrid on the balcony of the house, both women reclining in the the lounge chairs and it begins to snow.  During earlier episodes of snow glimpsed through windows, Martha recites the famous closing peroration in Joyce's "The Dead".  The snowflakes falling outside the hospital are pink, a bizarre effect of climate change.  Max, whose role in the film seems obviously superfluous, harangues Ingrid about global warming -- he's a scold whose romances with Ingrid and Martha have been thwarted by his refusal to collude in bringing another child into this sordid world.  The isolated setting and angst on display as well as the literary citations, particularly James Joyce, suggest a two-woman play set on a remote island or somewhere in the dark Swedish woods -- in fact, there are several direct allusions to Bergman including a showy cubist image of the two women's faces in profile, a reference to Persona.  

The movie is compelling but it's not exactly a barrel of monkeys.  Swinton's skull seems more and more exposed with each scene in the film -- in the end, she's a scary gaunt cadaver, barely alive.  (The make-up and effects are startling and it's a relief to see her appearing as the dying character's daughter, Michelle -- she's revived and come back from the dead.)  There are a few Almodovar touches:  a subplot involving a Vietnam veteran afflicted by PTSD has a lurid kick to it:  a fire is burning in a house in a field with neither road nor pathway to the structure -- the image has the vivid surreal aspect of a bad dream.  Almodovar likes beefcake in his movies -- a hunky trainer in a Woodstock gym gives Julianne Moore a little tutorial.  The episode goes nowhere but it's an excuse to highlight a spectacularly beautiful young man.  At the end of the movie, Almodovar forgets that he's making a moody meditation on death and the film slips briefly into a crime picture.  Another handsome young man, the small-town cop, viciously interrogates Ingrid as to her friend's death, casting cruel aspersions on her.  This is Almodovar's first film shot in English (although I think the mountain scenes ostensibly at Woodstock were filmed near Madrid.)  He obviously has a deep distaste for American religiosity -- the interrogating cop has a nasty edge of fundamentalism that is mythical, pure fantasy, a dream of American illiberality.  The most remarkable aspect of the movie is its tremendous beauty -- it's hard to figure out how Almodovar makes the big house in the woods and the character's outfits and the art around the house so ravishing to behold.  But it's wonderful to see.