The Lowdown

 The Lowdown is an eight-part neo-noir series set in Tulsa and produced by Ethan Hawke.  Hawke plays the show's protagonist, a scruffy investigative journalist named Lee Raybon.  Raybon fancies himself a "Truthstorian"-- that is, a sort of muckraking historian committed to uncovering the uncomfortable truths about Tulsa and its environs.  He writes for a life-style periodical, a bit like the granddaddy of all such 'zines, The Village Voice.  At one time, these sorts of publications supported a diverse population of columnists, muckraking journalists, city-hall reporters, and sex advice writers.  The Lowdown is dated in that these periodicals have all gone the way of the dinosaurs, rendered extinct by the internet -- even the redoubtable Village Voice is a mere shadow of its former self.  Accordingly, the program requires an initial suspension of disbelief -- the series' politics and milieu make The Lowdown feel like its set in the late seventies or early eighties, but, in fact, I think, it's supposed to be contemporary.  The show's somewhat archaic (and obsolete) ambience is considerably heightened by its soundtrack, featuring slightly sinister tunes by J.J. Cale as well as some country-western songs by David Alan Coe and the like.  The series has a hip, outlaw perspective -- it's full of references to Faulkner, Tulsa's own Joe Brainard (a famous gay painter and writer), Larry Clarke (who made Kids in Tulsa), and the pulp crime writer, Jim Thompson.  It's the kind of show rife with allusions that flatters the viewer by making him or her feel like a hipster "in the know" as to the local "home-cooking" that the program presents.  The faded disreputable neighborhoods in Tulsa, under the shadow of the downtown skyscrapers built by oil companies, are vividly rendered and the program has a funky improvised feeling.  One of the producers, Sterling Harjo, is known for another show set in Oklahoma, Reservation Dogs, and the cast is enlivened by a number of Native American actors, some of whom are very funny -- the late Graham Greene, a renowned Indian actor, has a small cameo in one of the episodes.  There are a number of effective Black character actors in the show -- in fact, Lee Raybon,  the hero, has a black sidekick and aspects of series invoke the buddy comedies on the seventies and eighties as well.  

The plot is predictable and many of the shows genre conventions are completely stereotypical.  The crusading "Truthstorian" comes equipped with an attractive and sassy ex-wife and perky, feisty teenage daughter.  (The girl helps her father solve the crime or explicate the corrupt situation that the program shows us.)  There is a big Black man with an eyepatch who seems to be hosting a perpetual smoky barbecue party with backroom where deals get done.  Kyle McLaughlin is excellent as a seemingly corrupt politician who is running for governor of the State and entangled with a network of White supremacists and skin-head Nazis.  The politician's brother, a gay cowboy, has been found dead.  Raybon knows the man slightly -- he once came into Raybon's used bookstore and, in a dreamlike scene, states the show's premise:  "There is only one plot:  Things aren't what they seem." citing Jim Thompson, the crime writer.  Investigating the gay cowboy's death, Raybon stumbles into a complicated conspiracy which has to do with eliminating the cowboy (the bad guys have staged his death as a suicide) so as to implement a real estate transaction involving land stolen from the Osage Indians.  (Raybon who is quick with allusions describes the plot as being like Chinatown,)  Raybon encounters various crooked corporate executives and religious fanatics -- the episodes are full of memorable eccentric characters.  About every two shows, the bad guys warn Raybon to stop snooping around and give him a beating to impress the point on him.  But Raybon is indefatigable and ultimately publishes an essay uncovering the plot.  There are some refreshingly unexpected twists in the last episode which imparts to the whole thing a mood of low-key, comic ebullience -- there are some violent scenes and one gruesome sequence in which a man is tarred and feathered (sustaining terrible burns) but the show doesn't get too dire and the tone remains reasonably light-hearted.  The ending features a wedding and one of the main characters, shown to be a villain, weepily performing the song "Luckenbach, Texas" in a Tulsa dive bar -- the woman can't sing but performs the entire song.  

The show is shaggy and digresses frequently.  The digressions which have boozy, blurry, dream quality and are the best things in the show.  The program treats us to extended sequences in which people just get drunk and converse without moving the plot forward at all; there's an extended seduction in which the characters slowly get drunk enough to fall into bed together.  These idiosyncratic parts of The Lowdown are where the show really shines -- it's unhurried, charming, and atmospheric; watching these scenes the viewer feels enveloped in a haze of cannabis smoke or half-drunk on good bourbon.  The progam's glory is its cast:  Jeanne Tripplehorn plays the adulterous wife of the poor dead cowboy (a part played effectively by the soft-spoken Tim Blake Nelson); Tracy Letts, who is the palest of all pale faces, plays a corporate assassin and Peter Dinklage appears in one show as a berserker used book shop owner who was previously in business with Raybon.  There are many Native American actors who are very funny.  In the last episode, some key scenes are shot in the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa with its weird melange of solomonic, twisted columns and Spanish Mission style colonnades.  The wedding at the end takes place in the Philbrook's impressive ornamental gardens.  (The Philbrook Museum is located in the mansion once owned by the Philips Petroleum mogul, Wade Philips.)

The Low Down is an excellent series and I recommend it enthusiastically.  

Certain Women

 Certain Women (2016) is an omnibus film based on three-stories about Montana people written by Maile Meloy.  On the evidence of the movie, Meloy seems to be a rather disconsolate writer, specializing in stories that are heavily influenced by the disaffected and minimalist work of Raymond Carver.  In prose of this sort, a character is brought to the brink of some recognition by interactions with others -- the text acknowledges the recognition that, nonetheless, doesn't really change anything for protagonist.  Life is too subtle and too complex for tales or short stories and so these are works in which the notion of a story is, in effect, refuted -- something happens and it is significant, but it has no actual effect other than, perhaps, to make a sad or troubled character even more sad and troubled.  I've confirmed this impression by reading several stories by Meloy available on the internet, including one called "Travis, B." which is the source for the third of the stories adapted by Kelly Reichardt in her movie.  People collide with other people; happiness proves to be an illusion:  sadder but wiser, the characters soldier on.  Reichardt's chilly, dispassionate approach to this material is lucid, wonderfully acted and staged, and, ultimately, as inconsequential as the stories themselves.  I like Reichardt's approach to filmmaking, very classical and pure and superbly observed.  But Certain Women may be a little too unresolved for many moviegoers looking for something more passionate or dramatic.  

A train crosses a snowy treeless prairie under a brooding range of cliffs.  In Livingston, Montana (although we have to surmise the location), a lawyer named Laura Wells is in bed with her scruffy boyfriend.  (He turns out to be the unfaithful husband of the woman featured in the second vignette.)  It's frighteningly cold outside -- dogs are getting their tongues and snouts frozen to their water bowls.  Laura (played by Laura Dern) is having trouble with a client.  The middle-aged man suffered a brain injury in a workplace accident.  He has apparently elected his remedy by settling his injury claims with the work comp carrier.  But he has ongoing problems, headaches and double vision and emotional lability, for which he hasn't been compensated.  The man (named Fuller) desperately wants to sue his employer but is precluded from making this claim by Montana's statutory law.  Fuller won't accept the opinion of Laura that he can't proceed on the basis of the doctrine of worker's compensation exclusivity.  She sets the man and his estranged wife up with a well-known personal injury lawyer in Billings, Montana. That lawyer confirms Laura's opinion.  On the way back to Livingston, the disappointed client begins talking about murdering people.  That night, he takes a man hostage at the clinic and won't release him.  He keeps asking for Laura and, so, she obliges the police by agreeing to parlay with the aggrieved client and the Big Man, his hostage, who is a Samoan who claims to be royalty.  The mercurial client releases the Big Man and persuades Laura to help him escape from the cops who have surrounded the business.  But Laura betrays him to the police and he is handcuffed and hauled away.

Without missing a beat Reichardt next shows us a young woman jogging in a snowy woods.  Some construction stakes have been set in the frozen meadow.  The young woman (Gina played by Michelle Phillips) is living with her husband Ryan (Laura's boyfriend) in a sort of semi-permanent tent at the edge of meadow.  The couple, who have a sullen teenage daughter, are planning to build a house in the woods.  They go to the home of an old man named Albert who has lived in a house since 1966 next to a big heap of sandstone, the ruins of a pioneer schoolhouse.  Albert seems slightly demented but he agrees to give them the sandstone blocks to use in the construction of their home.  Later, Gina goes to Albert's house where men are loading the shattered sandstone slabs onto a truck.  Albert looks out from the picture window of his house, seemingly confused by what is happening on his property.  We see him in long shot and can't exactly make out his face and expression.  When Gina waves to him, he doesn't respond.  He has, for some reason, protected the heap of stones for more than 50 years and, it appears, that losing that pile of rock has somehow shattered him as well.

An Indian woman feeds horses on a ranch.  She is alone and taciturn.  A little dog runs alongside her as she does her chores.  One night, she happens on a meeting at the public school where a group of a half-dozen teachers are waiting for a teacher to lecture them on "school law."  A  young woman named Beth (Kristen Stuart) conducts the hour-long course.  She has driven all the way to Belfry, Montana from Livingston, a trip that takes her four hours coming and four hours going back home.  The class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the drive, through mountains and snowtorm, is horrendous. After the class, the ranch hand talks to the teacher and they go to a truck stop to eat.  The teacher drives off to her other job at a law firm in Livingston.  Three times the class meets, these scenes punctuated by images of Jamie, the Indian ranchhand feeding horses.  On the third night, Jamie rides her horse to the class and, after the lesson, she offers Beth a ride on the animal to the cafe at the truck stop.  Jamie may be in love with Beth but she's too shy to reveal her feelings.   On the fourth night, Beth doesn't appear.  A man teaches the class announcing that the drive was too "arduous" for Beth -- Beth apparently thought the class was in Belgrade, a place much closer to Livingston then Belfry.   Jamie is alarmed that she will never see Beth again.  She drives to Livingston, reaching town late at night.  She can't find Beth and so sleeps in her pickup.  The next morning, she makes inquiries about Beth and is treated rudely.  However, she finds where Beth works and meets the woman in the parking lot. (We glimpse Laura Wells arriving at work at this law firm.)  Jamie says that she drove to Livingston because she couldn't stand the thought of not seeing Beth again.  Beth is literally speechless but, certainly, not interested in pursuing a relationship with Jamie.  Jamie says that she has to feed the horses at the ranch and drives away in her pickup truck. Exhausted, she falls asleep and the truck leaves the road, rolling to a stop in a snowy field.  

There is a short coda that shows Laura Wells with her brain-damaged client visiting at the prison where he is confined.  He asks her to write to him and says that the letter can be short and circumstantial -- "not a tome," he says.  Gina is hosting a football game view party in her tent at the site where her house will be built.  She looks at the pile of sandstone rock.  Jamie is alone with the little dog feeding horses. 

The story involving Jamie and Beth is extremely moving.  This effect is largely due to the presence of the great actress Lily Gladstone playing the part of the Indian woman and ranchhand.  (Gladstone was in Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon and she is a radiant actress that seems hypnotize the camera -- you can't take your eyes off her.)  The Montana landscapes are intensely realistic, expanses of grey and brown woods in fields dusted by snow with blue and white mountains jumbled together on the horizon.  It's not showy or spectacular, but, rather, a kind of indefinable beauty that resides in the empty, cold terrain.  There's not much going on in these stories and this, of course, makes you attend to them all the more closely -- because nothing seems to be happening we attend to tiny gestures, hesitations in phrasing, the implications of futile, inconsequential conversation.  The film exudes the "mind of Winter" as it was phrased by Wallace Stevens -- it iscold, rational, logical, each tale a sort of icy theorem.  

(In "Travis, B" published in the New Yorker, Reichardt has made the lonely male protagonist, his gait marred by polio, an American Indian woman.  Heterosexual encounters become homosexual in the film.  This transposition, for some reason, gives the story an even greater poignancy.)

They all Laughed

 There must be something wrong with me.  Most people praise Peter Bogdanovich's They all Laughed, a romantic comedy from 1981 as blithe, charming, and witty with a faint strain of sweet melancholy.  Bogdanovich, also, admired the film; he regarded it as his best and most fully accomplished work.  But I'm unable to join this chorus of admiration.  The film is so weightless and without consequence that I struggled to remain attentive to its complicated plot,   The picture involves a trio of private dicks tailing two beautiful women on suspicion of adultery.  However, in Bogdanovich's fantasy, all beautiful women are, more or less, instantly available for sex.  Therefore, in the context of New York, around 1980, detectives would not be required.  Rather, every woman between the ages of 18 and 60 would simply be presumed to be sexually promiscuous.  A jealous husband wouldn't have to go to the expense of hiring a private eye -- the promiscuity is open, apparent, publicly obvious and every husband is similarly guilty. In Bogdanovich's romantic fantasy, everyone is always doing it with everyone else and, even, small children are aware of their parent's infidelity and, even, complicit with it.  My critique of the film's plausibility betrays an unpleasant strain of voyeuristic puritanism in me; indignation at the idea that sexuality is wholly liberated except not for me or those in my circle.  Perhaps, this is the basis for my inability to see the merit in They all Laughed.

For the film's first ten minutes, we have no real idea what is going on.  There are gaggles of beautiful women and several men seem to be stalking them; the men signal to one another on Manhattan's busy streets and tail the girls hoping not to be seen.  The three detectives are played by Ben Gazzara (John Russo), John Ritter as the clumsy, naive Charles, bespectacled and obviously intended as a surrogate for Bogdanovich, and a man named Blaine Novak playing Arthur Brodsky.  Brodsky is a "head", always smoking pot, and he has an enormous frizzy mane of hair, wears shades, and affects the role of a pot-head -- he speaks in weird jargon referring to the women that they are tailing as "pre-bop", "post-bop", and "ex-bop", meaning looking for a sex, post-coital, and divorced.  All three men work at the Odyssey Detective Agency, a business run by an aging, angry Greek boss (who is cheating on his wife with the comely secretary) -- there's a Howard Hawks' aspect to the detective agency: it's like a version of the newspaper offices in His Girl Friday.  The women that the private dicks are tailing are played by Audrey Hepburn who looks melancholy and a bit withered in this role -- it must be one of her last parts -- and Dorothy Stratten, the former Playboy Playmate of the year, who is radiantly beautiful and funny.  (The rape and murder of Stratten by her pimp-boyfriend, the subject of Bob Fosse's Star 80, hangs heavily over the film which is dedicated to her memory; the 20-year old girl was killed before the film was released imparting a ghoulish aura to what would otherwise be an idyllic, lush, and funny performance.  This aura scuttled the whole picture which was not timely released.  Bogdanovich, for whom the film was literally a labor of love -- he was Dorothy Stratten's boyfriend -- retrieved the film from the studios, tried to market it himself, and failed horribly, resulting in the movie being cast into the shadows as a loser, the sort of film all righteous Hollywood producers abhor.  In a 2006 commentary on the film in which Wes Anderson interviews Bogdanovich, the older man says that he wanted to play the part of Charles, John Ritter's role, but 'was too old for Stratten' -- the irony is that Bogdanovich was involved in a torrid affair with Stratten during the making of the film.)  In the course of the movie, Ben Gazzara's divorced tom-cat falls in love with Audrey Hepburn's character --  but the relationship is doomed; she is a very wealthy socialite with a teenage son and she returns to her husband. John Ritter falls in love with Dorothy Stratten and she seems to separate from her boyfriend, a figure who is really only glimpsed in one scene as a bearish presence at the townhouse where the young woman lives.  Christy, a country-western singer at City Limits, is one of John Russo's girlfriends; when Gazzara's character abandons her to pursue Audrey Hepburn, Christy tries to seduce Charles (Ritter).  She almost succeeds but, after a night, dancing to hillbilly music at City Limits, Christy falls in love with Dorothy Stratten's boyfriend, a hirsute guy that, I think, people call "the gaucho" -- we have seen "the gaucho" courting Dorothy Stratten's character at the Algonquin Hotel.  There is a wedding at the end of the film; the romantic roundelay has produced two, more or less, committed couples at least for the moment:  Stratten with Ritter and Christy with the Gaucho.  The hippie doper has a group of, more or less, persistent and aggressive girlfriends -- every woman that he meets seems to fall into bed with him but, then, suffers pangs of homicidal jealousy.  John Russo (Ben Gazzara) has to let Audrey Hepburn depart on a Sikorsky helicopter with her oligarch husband -- the helicopter leaves from the Battery heliport.  He solaces himself with a gorgeous cab driver with whom he has earlier had casual relations.  They depart Manhattan for New Jersey with a plan to get drunk in the suburbs. (Patti Hansen who plays the sexy lady cab driver married Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones in 1983 and gave up modeling and acting.)

The film is well-made with atmospheric shots of New York City in 1980.  The World Trade Center towers over downtown Manhattan.  The film must have been made during a craze for roller skating.  The characters skate along the sidewalks and spin in circles on huge roller-skating rink that looks like a discotheque. (cf. Boogie Nights).  The women are all fantastically beautiful and sexy.  The dialogue is clever and there is a fabulous sound track comprised of country-western tunes (Bogdanovich had learned to love the music while shooting The Last Picture Show), Frank Sinatra singing Gershwin tunes, and little bit of classical music.  It's all graceful, balletic, and utterly shallow.  In principle I should like this movie, but I don't for some reason.  I suppose this is a defect in my sensibility.   

Bugonia

 Although director Yorgos Lanthimos opens up the action in Bugonia, this 2025 film is, in effect, a carefully imagined and powerfully written three-hand play, mostly confined to a single rather macabre set and featuring excellent performances by Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and an actor hitherto unknown to me, Aidan Delbis.  (Delbis, who is "neurodivergent" plays a character named Don, conceived as autistic -- he speaks with strange cadences, remains silent throughout much of the movie, but his presence is pivotal to the narrative.)  One can imagine this film, with some slight changes, staged as a play with one set and a couple of incidental walk-on parts in addition to the trio of principals.  The movie is modestly scaled and shot primarily in anguished close-ups; there are a few surreal black and white flashbacks that look a little like David Lynch at his most outre but, by and large, the picture is naturalistically designed and organized as a brutal confrontation between a kidnapper (Teddy played by a haggard-looking Jesse Plemons) and the woman he has kidnapped (Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller, an aggressive CEO at a big pharmaceutical company.)  The film is full of dark and vicious intimations.  Some people regard the movie as an "absurdist black comedy" -- but it's not really "absurd" and more horrifying than funny.  It's a great movie and emotionally exhausting.  Lanthimos is one of the world's best filmmakers and, when working at his peak, he can achieve effects that most directors would never attempt and could not even imagine.

Teddy is a badly damaged and psychotic conspiracy theorist.  He raises bees and the phenomenon of bee "colony collapse" has convinced him that a big pharmaceutical company is engineering the destruction of his beloved bees and, further, conspiring to destroy the planet Earth.  As we learn in elliptical flashbacks and by hints and intimations, Teddy's mother is in a coma, apparently as a result of an oxycontin overdose.  Furthermore, his father has vanished and Teddy seems to have been sexually abused by fat local cop who used to babysit him twenty years earlier.  Teddy is conducting strange experiments in his cottage in the country, a ramshackle place on a dead end in a ragged-looking woods.  On a hill, he has hives full of bees.  Teddy works for Auxolith, a surrogate for Amazon at one of its "Fulfillment Centers."  He lives with his almost speechless cousin, Don, a big bear-like kid with an asymmetrical face.  Teddy has become convinced that the CEO of Auxolith, Michelle Fuller, is an emissary from Andromeda, sent to our planet to conduct experiments on human beings. (Auxolith is like some sinister hybrid of Amazon and Big Pharma.)  With Don, Teddy kidnaps Michelle; Michelle is very fit, spending her pre-dawn hours exercising and engaging in mixed martial arts sparring with partners.  She nearly beats up Teddy and bests Don, but they finally capture her, drag her to their crumbling cottage in the country and chain her up in the basement.  Teddy, then, tries to get Michelle to admit that she is an alien invader from Andromeda.  Of course, Michelle is unafraid and can't imagine being really harmed by these geeky doofus kidnappers.  She debates the issue with them and tries to talk Teddy out of his scheme.  Teddy is convinced that Michelle has called for the Mother Ship to extract her from Earth in four days, during a lunar eclipse.  Most of the film consists of Teddy and Michelle dueling with words about the role of big corporations in our economy and fighting about whether the CEO is, in fact, a space alien.  Teddy has shaved her head on the basis of his fantasy that Andromedans use their hair as antennae to communicate telepathically.  He has also smeared her with some kind of antihistamine lotion for reasons I couldn't figure out.  Both Teddy and Don are "chemically castrated" having injected themselves with progesterone to allay any sexual instincts -- they don't want the attractive alien to use her female wiles on them.  Things go from bad to worse when Teddy tortures Michelle with electrical shocks.  When she withstands several hundred volts without dying, Teddy becomes convinced that Michelle is not merely a messenger from Andromeda but, in fact, the Empress of the aliens in that galaxy.  Spoilers will now follow:  Teddy and Don's plot goes awry:  the cop who abused Teddy years earlier when he was his babysitter shows up looking for the missing CEO.  Some murder and mayhem ensue.  Michelle discovers that Teddy has been experimenting with other poor victims whom he thought were from Andromeda -- he has a little basement room full of horrors: pickled heads and hands and a photo album showing him vivisecting people to discover if they are space aliens -- this aspect of the movie plays like Psycho.  Teddy is convinced that Michelle has an antidote for his mother's coma, disguised as anti-freeze.  He rushes to his mother's bedside and injects her with anti-freeze with predictably dire results.  Teddy and Michelle, then, have a final confrontation in which Michelle admits that she is, in fact, the Empress of Andromeda.  There's more murder and mayhem.  On Andromeda, Michelle concludes that the human race is too violent and unpredictable to be allowed to survive.  Michelle kills everyone and the film ends with the song "Where have all the flowers gone" played to a montage of shots of dead people strewn all over the world, on beaches, highways, on a ship sailing with dead captain and crew through the Aegean, a copulating couple dead in bed, burning vehicles and school classrooms full of corpses.  But the bees are flourishing once more.  "Bugonia" is a Greek word that describes bees spontaneously generating from with the guts of dead animals and, in fact, human corpses.  Life on Earth has been saved although all human beings are now extinct.  

Bugonia is very self-assured, confident, and bold.  Scenes involving Teddy's comatose mother, shot as flashbacks in high contrast black and white, are particularly effective.  The sick woman is pierced in a hundred places by three-foot long needles; in another scene, she floats like a black thundercloud over her crumpled bed or hangs over the Auxolith building tethered like a balloon.  The speechifying, which is most of the film, is thrillingly literate and theatrically intense. The film's score is gloomy and florid, sounding a bit like the adaptation of Henry Purcell's funeral music used at the outset of Clockwork Orange. The movie is successful in all respects.  (According to Wikipedia, the movie is a very close adaptation of a 2003 Korean film, Save the Green Planet directed by Jang Joon-Hwan. Lanthimos chief innovation is to substitute a woman for the male CEO in the Korean film.)  

Realm of Satan

 On its streaming site, MUBI suggests that Scott Cummings' Realm of Satan (2024) is a documentary about the Church of Satan.  In fact, it is something more interesting, I think, a peculiar hybrid between objective documentary footage showing actual Church of Satan members gathering for a ritual conclave (and engaging in a little group sex in advance of the ceremony) and strange visionary imagery that has a mythological, even Jungian, aspect.  Cummings, in interviews, has said that he was influenced by early films by Werner Herzog but there is no voice-over to explicate the odd things that we are seeing and almost no dialogue -- for most of its length the movie is silent or features diegetic musical sequences (for instance a woman singing "Gloomy Sunday" off-key and another lady producing music from a jukebox to which she dances rather gracelessly.)  The film is shot mostly in tableaux -- that is, shots lasting 15 to 30 seconds, displaying elaborately decorated interiors with figures standing at some distance from the camera.  Everyone looks right into the lens.  The shape of the movie is like Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise with gloomy black and white interiors and desolate outside scenes populated by eccentric characters who bicker or simply stare into the camera.  Herzog does something similar in his short movie Brother Huey's Sermon which documents a Black preacher's florid sermon intercut with traveling shots of the slums around the Church and interpolated portrait-style images of the preacher holding his Bible and posing for the camera.  

The movie is interesting, about 83 minutes long, and perverse.  I can imagine several approaches to this material -- one might emphasize the mundane aspects of the Satanist's life:  that is, showing them at a fast food place or walking a dog or shopping for groceries; one could emphasize the ritual practice in their religion and treat the audience to a few Black Masses with naked women on the high altar; one could interview the Satanists after the manner of Erroll Morris and let them talk long enough to reveal the folly of their beliefs -- anyone interviewed for a long enough period will end up saying things that completely contradict other statements made by the subject.  Or, I suppose, one might show the Satanists in a positive light, as people with the courage of their peculiar convictions and engaged in occult practices that have some efficacy in the real world.  The most challenging approach, I think, is the last and this is, indeed, the angle that Cummings takes in this movie. Cummings' Satanists are mostly magicians of various kinds and the film dramatizes this aspect of their beliefs by featuring magic performance on-stage --there is a guy stage-named the Great Cardone who does some impressive card prestidigitation and, then, performs a routine in which he makes a scantily clad assistant vanish from a small box into which she squeezes.  At one point, a person meditating nonchalantly hovers in the air.  A small black car zips across the United States starting in a place that looks like Palm Springs in California and, a few hours later, appearing in Poughkeepsie, New York.  The car, carrying members of the cult to a ritual conclave, leaves a trail of fire on the highway as it accelerates.  A paralyzed man shaves and, during this process, his reflection periodically blinks out, leaving the mirror mysteriously empty.  The High Priest struts across his kitchen with bare goat legs -- it's a startling effect.  At the film's outset, we see a goat laboriously giving birth.  The scene is shot from middle distance and lasts a couple minutes.  Later, a woman in a black hooded cape bares her breast and suckles the baby goat.  The various Satanists are depicted as having occult powers as a result of their affiliation with Lucifer.  At one point, the High Priest and High Priestess mix a foaming potion fizzing and gushing dry-ice fog; they toast the camera.  One woman spends a long time in her closet selecting a suitably black outfit for the conclave.  The ritual is underwhelming, just some people in what look like dark choir robes, shouting "Hail Satan!" and nonsense words in a dark suite of rooms.  The camera doesn't move except twice -- there's an austere tracking shot through the chambers in which the ritual celebrants are located; a Steadicam shot drifts down a suburban street in the neighborhood of the house where the ritual takes place.  Mostly, its unclear what we are seeing but the film has a kind of austere integrity and doesn't condescend to its peculiar performers, all of whom seem to be intensely aware of the observing camera.  The cult is under siege.  Someone has poured gas on the portion of the "Halloween House" owned by Joe "Netherworld" Mendillo, apparently in Poughkeepsie -- on ring camera footage, we see the vandals toting jerry-cans of gas onto the porch and lighting the house, which burns like a torch.  A few shots, later someone pounds a sign into the vacant lot where the house was previously located:  the Satanists are quixotically offering $6666 dollars for tips as to the identities of the arsonists.  In the final sequence, a man who is paralyzed navigates his wheelchair through his small, empty house.  He rolls into his bedroom and, with great difficulty, drags himself into his bed, rolling back and forth with inert legs to get himself into position.  He shuts off the light and a body of radiant gold light rises f rom his supine form and ambles up into the sky where it does cartwheels.  The film is haunting in an austere, understated way and worth watching.  

All that Jazz

 I should watch Bob Fosse's All that Jazz once every few years.  The film is astonishingly good.  The first couple times I saw this 1979 movie, I didn't notice that it was a musical and, in fact, structured like the great movie musicals of the forties and 1950's.  The film's surrealist touches and its uncompromising portrait of Fosse (played by Roy Scheider, the protagonist called Josh Gideon in the movie) as well as its documentary style exploration of the mechanics of producing a Broadway musical, complete with interludes featuring accounting and insurance, can easily mislead a viewer, particularly a naive one like me.  When I saw the picture in the theater, I thought it was a confessional work in which Fosse's misdeeds and betrayals are portrayed in relentless, if strangely egomaniacal, detail.  But Fosse is dead now and most of the women whom he loved have gone to their reward as well and, from a perspective of almost 50 years, the film now stands revealed as an artifact closer to Singin' in the Rain or The Band Wagon which it parallels, than to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.  Fosse was alive and creative when All that Jazz first graced the silver screen and his controversial presence, his crimes and misdemeanors, all cast a shadow over the movie.  Critics either lacerated the film for its hubris:  Fosse's arrogance for somehow portraying his glamorous infidelity as something like the engine for his creativity and the fatal flaw from which all his merit flowed.  Or critics lauded the movie for its brilliance, flamboyance, and courage.  I began in the former camp and I think I'm now in the latter, an admirer of the movie.  I'm in good company:  Stanley Kubrick said that All that Jazz was the greatest movie ever made.  The picture is akin to another masterpiece of self-loathing:  Fellini's 8 1/2 -- neither 8 1/2  or All That Jazz should work, but, somehow, mysteriously they do.  

Fosse shamelessly exploits sordid episodes in his life for the film's subject matter.  The luminous Ann Reinking plays Kate, Gideon's main girlfriend on whom he cheats at every opportunity.  (Ann Reinking, in fact, had been Fosse's girlfriend after his marriage to Gwen Verdon collapsed due to his serial infidelities; the film shows Gideon casually betraying her, forgetting that he has made an assignation with her for later in the evening and, then, having sex with another woman and falling asleep only to be discovered with the other woman in his bed by Kate who has let herself into the apartment.  Presumably, this mirrors some actual event.)  None of this matters much; time has erased the shame and it's possible, I think, to admire the movie for its technical and narrative achievements.  The remarkable aspect of the film is that it incorporates all the classical song-and-dance sequences of the conventional Hollywood musical, but so seamlessly that we don't notice these interventions as separate "numbers" or set pieces in the picture.  For instance, Fosse stages a big casting scene to a funk version of "On Broadway" -- we see hundreds of dancers lunging and spinning and the effect is exhilarating.  But this isn't merely a dance sequence but a part of the narrative which generally follows the plot arc of Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon -- an account of Broadway professionals producing a complicated big-budget musical.  There are two outstanding dance duets -- Fosse dances with his daughter who seems to be about 13 years old and, then, dances with the lissome Leland Palmer playing his first wife; both scenes are ballet-derived and involve Fosse circling his partner, lifting her, and setting her spinning.  (The scenes have some of the natural and organic qualities of the sequence in The Band Wagon in which Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse tentatively try to match their respective dance styles -- he's a tap-dancing hoofer and she's a famous ballerina -- as they stroll through Central Park.)  The pas de deux scenes in All that Jazz are so low-key and realistic seeming (both the little girl and the older woman are practicing their craft in the studio) that it has never registered with me that these are bravura dance-duets.  In the first, Gideon discusses his womanizing with his adolescent daughter as he chastely lifts and embraces her for the duet.  In the second, Leland Palmer, who is wearing a transparent leotard, slinks and slumps all over Gideon, moving seductively alongside him as if to remind the choreographer of their sexual relationship.  In this scene, Palmer taunts Gideon for "being so generous with his cock" and says that he can't even recall the names of the dozens of women hom he has seduced during their marriage..  Gideon is dismayed by his ex-wife's weirdly erotic condemnation of his bad behavior, but, in a remarkable development, turns her denunciation into an astonishing dance number -- this is the "Fly me" jazz dance which looks like an orgy orchestrated by Tom of Finland; the piece is sizzling hot but, ultimately, intended as a demonstration of the meaninglessness of casual sexual encounters.  In fact, at the end of the number, which involves flailing nude dancers and much homosexual activity, the participants call out their names as they shake hands and bid farewell to their lovers whom they scarcely know.  The musical's financial backers are horrified at the open eroticism on display.  But Gideon's ex-wife bursts into tears at seeing the work -- she knows that it is the artistic materialization of her soliloquy condemning her husband's promiscuity. Gideon has taken her condemnation and make it into something profound and beautiful.  And, indeed, the piece embodies both the disgrace and seductive power of promiscuous sex, orgies, bathhouse encounters -- it's fantastically exciting and, also, decadent and wicked and disturbing.  The piece has its cake and eats it too.  

The end of the film also derives from the finales of a number of famous musicals, most prominently Singin' in the Rain (we actually see a reprise of the dance in the flooded street, but here in a flooded boiler room) and The Band Wagon.  Both of these musicals initiate their final sequences in what seems like a recording of an actual Broadway dance number, but, then, expand into a vast and labyrinthine production that could never be mounted on stage. Fosse does something similar.  His hero has suffered a heart attack and is hospitalized.  Despite the cardiac event, Gideon has his friends smuggle cigarettes and booze into the hospital; unregenerate, he makes passes at the nurses.  But, ultimately, his heart continues to fail.  After a gory open heart surgery scene, he's in the recovery room when he suffers yet another heart attack.  The film slips into hallucination --  Gideon splits:  he is shown lying comatose in his hospital bed, breathing through a  respirator, and, also, operating a movie camera mounted on a crane that films increasingly febrile visions.  At last, the scene shifts to a womb-like dark interior, its sides slick with reflections on some kind of funereal plastic -- the characters in the movie are seated in bleachers and dancers with their bodies swathed in diagrams of their circulatory systems gyrate next to sinister rock-and-roll band.  Mannequin heads with flashlight eyes swivel, impassively recording the increasingly frenzied song and dance action in this gloomy, surreal amphitheater.  Ben Vereen plays the host at these proceedings and he jerks around spastically while the band plays variations on the song "Bye, Bye Love".  Jessica Lange playing the Angel of Death who has been shown in dialogue with Gideon has come to embrace her lover -- she suggests that Gideon was always half in love with her.  And, in a jarring final shot, we see Gideon's corpse on a table being zipped into a body bag.  The effect is devastating.  All that Jazz is shallow and tawdry and the points it makes are, more or less,apologetic and obvious.  But it's also great.     

Wild Grass (Les Herbes Follies)

 There are some movies that many critics regard highly that make no sense to me.  Wild Grass, a peculiar uncategorizable film directed by Alain Resnais, is an example of this phenomenon.  Some critics acclaim the film as full unexpected surprises; in my estimation, the movie seems entirely arbitrary, constructed of disparate elements that don't cohere, a capriccio that feels improvised and inconclusive.  Aspects of the picture that I interpret as "inconclusive" are seen by people who admire the movie as ambiguous, enigmatic, and open-ended.  Perhaps, there is an element of personal preference embodied in my skepticism about the movie.  Resnais is most famous for Last Year at Marienbad, his signature work, and a film that I have never been able to watch without distaste -- the picture's chilly elegance feels like an advertisement for some product I'm not interested in buying; it's glamorous and empty at the same time.  I think Hiroshima Mon Amour and Muriel are slightly better and more interesting -- but I don't have any fondness for them and wouldn't voluntarily watch these films again.  Although Resnais first became famous for his harrowing concentration camp documentary, Night and Fog from 1956, he continued to make movies into his old age -- Wild Grass released in 2009 was made when Resnais was 87.  The movie is muted, but technically splendid and there's no sense that Resnais' powers have been diluted by time -- indeed, most critics praise the movie as seeming like the work of a young man (but tempered by the wisdom of age).  My problem is that I simply don't understand the movie.  And, on the evidence of the reviews I have read, even the picture's admirers have no idea what the last five minutes mean.  In general, Resnais is a film maker who would reward, I think, close study -- he has made many pictures that I haven't seen and that were scarcely released in the United States (if released at all).  And, a number of these films, were highly acclaimed in France. Wild Grass wasn't his last movie -- he directed two more pictures after this film before dying in 2014 at 91.  Resnais' later career (in fact, almost his whole career) apparently consists of films of varying types, including light comedies, adaptations of Victorian melodramas, and musicals -- he adapted three plays by the British playwright Alan Ayckbourn.  Despite his affinity for English actors and scripts (one of his most famous pictures is Providence with John Gielgud), I have the impression that his movies are so intrinsically gallic that they don't travel well.  So this is to confess that I have probably misunderstood Wild Grass and underestimated.it.

A woman goes into an expensive part of Paris to buy shoes.  (Her feet, we learn, are hard to fit.)  She buys some spike high heels.  Walking away from the shoe store, a thief on a moped (or possibly a skateboard) snatches her yellow purse -- the film is punctuated with shots in slow-motion that show the purse airborne in the clutches of the thief.  The woman, who turns out to be dental surgeon named Marguerite Muir, goes home to a suburb near Paris where she takes a cold bath.  A middle-aged man (he seems to be about 55) finds Muir's wallet in a car-park.  He studies the wallet, looks at several pictures of Muir including a fetching image of the woman as an aviatrix (wearing goggles and a scarf).  Muir has a pilot's license.  This establishes an affinity with a man, name Georges Palet, who has had a lifelong fascination with flying.  Palet is an odd duck.  He lives with his wife in a big mansion.  There seems to be something highly sinister about him -- he fantasizes, for instance, about murdering a young woman because she has had the temerity to appear in public with her black panties visible through her white slacks.  Palet has done something terrible and may be a felon -- he muses that he can't vote.  The film teases the notion that Palet, who acts in an erratic fashion and shows a terrible temper, may be some kind of serial killer or rapist.  

Palet returns the wallet to the police, fretting about whether they will remember him from some previous crime that he committed.  (The cops are distracted by a party that they are having in the stationhouse -- it's someone's promotion.)   Apparently, the cops return Muir's wallet.  She calls Palet and thanks him but declines his offer to meet -- he clearly wants some kind of relationship with her.  Disappointed by the dentist's standoffish attitude, Palet writes an impassioned letter to her, mentioning his love of aviation, and insulting her.  He delivers the letter to her home and drops it in a mailbox, but, then, repents and tries to get it out of the locked box.  He talks to one of Muir's neighbors and learns more about the woman.  She sends him a three-line note, accepting his apology for the letter that he has conveyed to her through the neighbor lady.  This encourages Palet to write to her repeatedly and call her every night.  She is upset with him, but, also, oddly nonchalant at what seems to be his stalking.  Palet has constructed some kind of elaborate persona claiming that his wife is dying in the hospital and that his father was a motorcycle mechanic -- all of which is untrue.  When he calls at an odd hour, Muir answers the phone and tersely tells him that she wants to be left alone.  Palet flies into a rage and goes to her house where he slashes all four of the tires on her snazzy little sports car.  She reports this to the cops who go to Palet's big gorgeous house (he is painting it blue) and interview him.  These are the same cops from the stationhouse who are strangely sympathetic to the angry Palet  and urge him to leave the woman alone.  Palet reveals that he has been married for 30 years and has grandchildren.  (We see a dinner party with Palet's daughter, her husband, and Marcellin, Palet's surly and obnoxious son.)  

One night, Muir, for some unknown reason, calls Pallet's wife.  She learns that Pallet has gone to see a flying movie, the Korean war film The Bridges at Toko Ri.  Muir rushes to the cinema located near an Italian restaurant and down an alley from a cafe.  She sits in the cafe and sees Palet leaving the theater -- she has never seen him before and so there is a question as to how she is able to identify him.  (The film suggests some sort of elective affinity between the woman and Palet that allows her to identify him by intuition.)  She summons him into the cafe where they briefly talk.  He tells her that the movie, a childhood favorite, "did nothing for him."  Their meeting is peculiar from the outset.  Palet's first words to Marguerite are "So you do love me."  The interview goes awry and Palet says he never wants to see Marguerite again.  Marguerite proceeds to take her anger out on her dental patients apparently torturing them in her dental chair -- we see a painful montage of patients protesting at her cruelty.  Muir is now fascinated by Palet and wants to see him with his wife.  With her colleague, another female dentist, Marguerite goes to Palet's house.  Palet has gone somewhere but is expected in a few minutes.  While Marguerite chats with Palet's pleasant and attractive wife, Palet appears outside, castigates the lady dentist waiting in the car before, apparently, seducing her and possibly having sex with her in the car.  The next day, Marguerite doesn't go to work -- her dental office fills with unhappy, miserable patients.  Marguerite has gone to the Aerodrome (airport) to look at a Spitfire she flew for a group of enthusiastic mechanics at the hangar.  Marguerite drives back to Palet's house and picks up Georges and his wife.  The other lady dentist is along for the ride.  They go to the small rural airport.  Palet has to urinate and so he goes upstairs in the terminal, pees, and, then, his zipper sticks.  He can't get his pants zipped up.  Marguerite is looking for him, sees he is embarrassed about the stuck zipper, and kisses him rapturously while the 20th century Fox Fanfare plays (we earlier heard this on the soundtrack from The Bridges at Toko Ri.)  As they kiss, the screen flashes the word Fin  (or "End") although, in fact, the movie is not yet over and its most puzzling sequence is about to occur.  With Palet and his wife in a Cessna, Marguerite Muir takes off and flies into the sky.  She lets Palet take the controls.  His pants are unzipped and his underwear is bulging out.  The plane, as seen from below, does a series of acrobatic rolls and, then, drops down vanishing behind a line of trees.  The film cuts to wooded landscape, a lane with some strange-looking austere and humble-looking buildings in the distance, then, a jagged, razor-like outcropping of fractured rock, beyond the rock there are woods and meadows and a graveyard over which the camera sweeps.  Then, we see a domestic interior:  a little girl, who may be sick, is in bed while her mother works at a table: the little girl says "When I a become a cat will I be able to eat cat munchies."  And, on this note, the film ends.

The ending makes no sense:  does the plane crash?  Why is Palet's zipper stuck?  Why does the plane begin doing aerobatics rolling and spiraling through the air?  What is the meaning of the landscapes, the jagged rock, the graveyard?  Why does the little girl (who is she supposed to be?) make the weird comment about "cat munchies" and what does this have to do with the rest of the movie?  And, further, what has Palet done?  Why is he proposed to us as some kind of rapist or murderer?  Why does he fly into rages and, suddenly, lose interest in Marguerite?  And why does Marguerite suddenly become obsessed with him,. seek him out, and kiss him (when he's slashed her tires and been stalking her) in a scene purported to be the end of the movie but not.  Why does the film end twice?  Does Palet really seduce the other dentist or does he rape her or is this just some kind of fantasy?  Is there anything about the movie that we can trust?  The film is based on a novel called The Incident.  It is very brilliantly made with dense saturated colors.  Marguerite is played by Resnais' wife Sabine Azema, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, who appears in the film with a huge Afro-style mop of red hair.  There are ingenious scenes with voice-over while images appear in halos of light on the right side of the screen -- these are vignettes.  There are stream of consciousness sequences in which Palet muses on various things.  He seems obsessive and half-delirious until, suddenly, he's not -- then, he's inexplicably disinterested in the object of his desires (and, even, seduces another woman).  Azema's dentist appears flirtatious with her patients but it's hard to understand whether this is an act or authentic. The beautiful dentist has no back-story, no husband, no family, no history of any kind; by contrast, Palet has a sinister history but one that is never explained in any meaningful way.  The movie is all innuendo and intimation; it's a feast for speculation.  It's quite a feat to make a movie that is meaningful and classically lucid in form and mise-en-scene but impenetrable as a matter of character, motivation, and, even, fundamental narrative.  The movie is more interesting as an object of discourse and speculation than as an cinematic experience but it is, probably, some sort of brilliant work of art.