B Movies: The Town and Red Eye

 Both The Town (2010) and Red Eye (2005) are B movies.  Red Eye knows it; The Town does not.  

Red Eye is a fast, efficient, and dim-witted thriller.  (Credits will tell you that the movie is 85 minutes long -- but it has a crazily extended list of performers and crew at the end and, according to my assessment, the actual narrative is about 70 minutes in length.  Wes Craven, the famous horror director (Last House on the Left, Nightmare on Elm Street, the Scream franchise) made Red Eye and there's no question that he knows what he's doing.  Craven is like Clint Eastwood in that he conceives of the picture in terms of editing and acting and makes no effort to provide pretty pictures or directorial flourishes.  The camera is always where it needs to be.  Lighting is crisp, direct, and bright -- you can see everything and where people and objects are located in space.  (It's the sort of camera-work used in comedies to effectively deliver gags -- and, it should be observed that many of Craven's movies skirt the line between horror and comedy, particularly, the Scream slasher movies.)  The film's premise is that a plucky young woman who manages a Miami luxury hotel is flying back home from Dallas where she has attended a funeral.  She meets a friendly, alluring young man in an airport bar when her flight, a "red-eye" route to Miami, is delayed.  On the plane, the young woman (Lisa) finds herself seated next to the young man.  It's an omen of things to come when Lisa learns that the young man's name is Jack Rippner.  Once the plane is airborne, Rippner tells her that he is some sort of professional terrorist and killer.  He is scheming to murder a politician who will be checking into Lisa's lavish waterfront hotel in Miami in only a few hours.  Rippner tells Lisa that his confederates will murder her father if she doesn't cooperate with the scheme, a plot to put the politician in a suite of rooms known to the terrorists where he can be assassinated through the use of a rocket-propelled grenade.  Lisa is no easy target and not readily intimidated.  From the very outset, she fights back against Rippner, endeavoring to get messages to the cabin crew and others as to the villain's evil plans.  There are some startling moments of violence, alarming because not telegraphed to the audience -- Rippner head butts Lisa to knock her out, a favor she later returns, and Lisa manages to stick the tip of a ballpoint pen through the bad guy's esophagus, an injury that makes him more menacing because, undeterred, he hustles around wheezing and gasping.  The opening scenes in the film are ultra-realistic and the irritable passengers and haughty imperious stewardesses and gate agents will be familiar to most viewers.  The verisimilitude of these opening scenes and the claustrophobic sequences on board the plane are devised to lull the viewer into accepting a plot that becomes increasingly idiotic as the movie progresses.  Indeed, the final twenty minutes of the picture is, although thrilling, completely implausible and unmotivated.  After several chases through the airport, Lisa manages to steal an SUV, drives to her father's home, where she and the villain fight it out.  Lisa's lieutenant, an assistant manager at the luxury hotel, is enlisted to defeat the heinous plot.  In the last sequence, Lisa plays a version of the "final girl", a kind of protagonist largely invented by Craven -- this is a comely young woman who witnesses the slaughter of all of her friends at the hands of a mad killer; as sole survivor ("the final girl"), the young woman battles the villain, often in some sort of haunted house, and, generally, dispatches him.  Rachel McAdams, acting the role of Lisa, is a feisty "final girl" in Red Eye and she batters the villain so effectively that, in the end, the audience is almost tempted to sympathize with him. As soon as the mayhem is complete and the murderous plot foiled, the heroine makes a quip and the movie is done -- it ends as swiftly and efficiently as it began.

I call Red Eye a B-movie.  By this I mean that the picture is relatively short, without any ambitions other than to deliver thrills and suspense.  The actors in the film are relatively unknown:  Rachel McAdams as Lisa, Brian Cox (later to be famous for Succession) as Lisa's father, and Cillian Murphy playing the frightening, nonchalant, and vicious villain.  (Murphy is handsome to the point of being androgynous and creepy -- he's like a young Christopher Walken and he uses his eccentric appearance to good effect.  The plot in the film is devised to reliably deliver certain suspense and horror set-pieces; otherwise, the narrative isn't really carefully imagined or plausible.  Everything is cheaply done:  exterior shots of the plane, which are unnecessary in any event, are poorly made -- seemingly some kind of low-grade CGI.  There's an explosion but it's also probably generated by a computer.  Most importantly, the movie relies upon cliches and stereotypes: the plucky young woman who fights the villain as "the final girl", the ice-cold murderer with just a hint of savoir faire, the doting father and the snotty gate agents and stewardesses and, of course, the stock company of irritated passengers who seem to have come right out of some version of the old movie Airport.  There's not a single memorable shot in this movie -- and I mean this as a high compliment.  The heroine is given a scar on her collar-bone and she even has some kind of backstory as a rape victim -- but this is just window-dressing; it's like the flashes of lightning that appear through the plane's windows, just some seasoning to an otherwise stale plot.   

The Town (Ben Affleck) is B-movie with expensive actors and impressive production values.  It's a little bit sad when compared with Red Eye -- at least, Red Eye knows what it is; The Town has fancy affectations on which it can't deliver.  

Everything in The Town is a cliche or caricature.  The movie doesn't have an ounce of originality.  (This defines a B-movie in which variations played on a familiar theme are part of the fun.)  The problem is that everything in The Town has been done better in other films.  A good example is the setting, Charlestown, an embattled suburb to Boston -- it's right across the river, the place where the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought.  The movie involves professional criminals who are said to be ubiquitous in Charlestown.  (The film is so scathing as to its portrayal of Charlestown that a closing credit has to   remind the viewers that most people in the suburb are not criminals and merely upstanding citizens.)  We've been in this terrain involving Irish-American mobsters before.  The middle-class crooks and cops are the same people that we met in Mystic River, a much better film.  Similar, the mob milieu in Boston has been explored in various movies, most notably Martin Scorsese's The Departed and The Irishman.  Ben Affleck plays a righteous, stand-up bank robber -- another cliche deployed by the film.  His mob contains various blue-collar crooks including his close friend, a hair-trigger half-crazed thug of the kind played by Joe Pesci in Scorsese crime pictures.  There is a promiscous, if warm-hearted, girl from neighborhood who finds herself the rival of a luscious "toonie", the local argot for "yuppie."  These people are not particularly ambitious -- they are lower-middle-class folks who aspire to a berth in the middle-middle-class or, at best, the upper middle-class.  The "toonie"is a bank worker who gets swept up as a hostage in a bank robbery.  After the heist, the hero played by Affleck is assigned the task of tailing the former hostage to verify that she doesn't know the identity of the crooks who robbed the bank.  Of course, Affleck's character falls in love with the striving "toonie" girl.  Although Affleck wants to go straight, he gets coerced in a final job that turns into an apocalyptic shoot-out at Fenway Park -- the hoods are robbing concession money at the baseball stadium during a game.  The plot, which is extremely formulaic, is just a scaffold on which to hang three spectacular set pieces -- the first robbery, a second heist involving a chase through the alleys and narrow streets around Boston's Old North Church and, finally, the big firefight at Fenway Park which plays as a mash-up between Kubrick's The Killling (a heist at a race-track) and the big gun battle in Heat.  Affleck's character has a dad who is serving a life turn and who imposes on the hero his code of "fucked-up Irish Omerta" as one of the characters says -- Dad is played by a squint-eyed Chris Cooper in a gratuitous role that is somewhat similar to the part played by Willie Nelson as the elderly convict in Michael Mann's Thief.  There are no surprises anywhere in this film -- it follows very strictly ancient genre conventions, including the conceit of the relentless adversary lawman (here played by a ruthless Jon Hamm).  The movie is entertaining, well-made, and mindless.  There are some sweaty, tasteful sex-scenes with attractive actors.  The script is pungent with classic film noir lines and wise-guy talk:  the promiscuous local girl who is in love with Affleck's characters says:  "If you want to get the tail, you gotta chase the rabbit.  My mother told me that."  There's a pointless subplot in which the thugs punish a guy who threw a bottle at the "toonie" who is the hero's girlfriend -- they beat him up and, then, knee-cap him.  (This seems wildly disproportionate).  In this kind of movie, only two outcomes are possible:  crime doesn't pay and all the hoodlums end up dead or in prison; or crime does pay and the hoodlum hero gets away to hide, implausibly, off-the-grid in some sort of tropical paradise.  If you want to know how The Town turns out you'll have to watch the movie; it's entertaining and well-made but incredibly derivative.  If you have to make a choice opt for Red Eye, it's equally entertaining and three-quarters of an hour shorter.    

The Substance

 Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a formerly famous movie star, who is now working as the host and exercise leader on a calisthenics show called Sparkle Your Life.  She has just turned fifty and, when she uses the men's restroom (the women's is occupied), she hears the producer of the show, a vicious and grotesque TV executive, planning to replace her with a younger woman.  Brooding about this injustice, she's involved in a bad motor vehicle crash -- windows exploding and her vehicle rolling side over side -- from which she mysteriously walks away unscathed.  At the ER, a doctor checks her out and, then, an odd-looking young paramedic inspects her back, says that it is perfect, and slips a message wrapped in paper into her pocket.  The uncanny-looking paraprofessional has a sarcoma on the back of his hand.  

Sparkle lives alone is a picturesquely modernist and empty house cantilevered out over a canyon in the mountains.  (The house has eerie works of art and strange corridors filmed with lenses that make them seem to stretch out to infinity.)  The message she finds in her pocket encourages her to perfect herself by using a treatment involving something called "The Substance" -- a sort of Bo-Tox from Hell that she picks up in an alcove behind a graffiti-smeared metal door in a noisome alley.  "The Substance" works for seven days, restoring its user to her youthful perfected self -- it's a sort of "fountain of youth" drug that involves various injections (shown in gruesome close-ups), tube-feeding, and blood transfusions.  The stuff comes with strict instructions -- it's a Jekyll and Hyde formula:  you can only be young and beautiful for seven days without having to return to the decrepit shell of your aged body.  Of course, this being a horror movie, there are ghastly consequences for not playing according to the rules.

Horror films invariably evoke precursors.  In the case of the lavishly produced The Substance, the movie alludes to David Cronenberg's The Fly (as in that movie, at one point the protagonist's ear falls off) as well as Brian de Palma's Carrie with respect to the firehose of gore unleashed in the movie's last minutes.  The picture, as I have noted, also channels Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in that the fifty-year old Elisabeth Sparkle finds herself competing with her amoral younger avatar, a beautiful and profoundly selfish starlet called Sue.  Of course, the two women are one person whose appearance changes between the two personae.  There is also an aspect of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the film; as Sue prospers and becomes famous and universally desired, poor Elisabeth, reduced to a cadaverous shell lying on the bathroom floor, begins to spectacularly decompose,,literally falling apart.  The film's premise is ingenious but, of course, since this is a genre movie, the outcome is predictable, although things become so exuberantly horrific that the climax must be interpreted as a kind of black-comedy spectacle that is far funnier than it is frightening.  

Pictures involving this sort of Faustian bargain inevitably end in tears (or far worse).  Sue resents having to revert to Elisabeth every seven days and begins stealing Elisabeth's time, keeping herself young and beautiful, having sex with handsome men, and becoming famous on TV while her poor alter ego literally goes to pieces. This is a very glossy movie, with fashion magazine vibes -- it features immense, disturbing close-ups, vast amounts of nudity, and bizarre, surreal sets that seemed to have crawled into the present from German expressionist cinema.  The picture is full of outre effects:  an egg yolk injected with the substance immediately begins to clone itself into bright yellow embryonic cells.  Pustulant, necrotic wounds are injected with long needles in micro-close-ups.  At one point, while Sue is twerking, her buttock pops open and the gory abscess gives birth to a chicken drumstick that Elisabeth ingested before turning back into the glamorous sex-pot starlet.  The movie is entertaining enough in its gruesome way, but much too long -- there's just too many horrors particularly in the hyper-violent last quarter of the movie.  Furthermore, the picture cheats -- it establishes certain rules that are slavishly demonstrated and followed for the first two-thirds of the picture.  But, when the really spectacular grand guignol begins, the rules fall by the wayside and everything yields to the picture's excessively gruesome finalethat proceeds according to a certain pictorial logic, but violates the plot points earlier (and rather tediously) established.    

Someone once said that women's magazines show massive cognitive dissonance -- the periodicals feature mortifying diets and advice as to painful exercise regimens next to recipes for lavish and calory-rich desserts.  The Substance has this aspect; it features beauty advice of the nastiest sort:  reduce yourself to a living corpse while cooking tripe-soup and other incredibly rich recipes -- the film has its cake and eats it too, suggesting that the path to perfect beauty embodies deadly anorexia somehow yoked to insane amounts of consumption of ultra-rich (disgustingly rich) foods.  There are huge closeups of lips and mouths masticating gobbets of food, shrimp and pastry, shot with the comic delectation of a Monty Python picture.  At the climax, Sue and Elisabeth get somehow fused together in a single monstrous entity covered in tumors with a stray eye peeping out here and there and Sue's perfect face embedded in a web of scar tissue on the back of the hunchbacked, suppurating figure -- it's like the appearance of the Brindlefly in Cronenberg's movie The Fly, a hideous combination of both women, full of ugly sac-like fistulas, one of which gives birth by expelling a perfectly globular breast dangling on a sinew of gory tissue.  The critter shoots blood as if from a fire hose on the audience.  None of this makes any sense at all -- the last twenty minutes is completely bonkers, off-the-rails and implausible.  But the movie has the courage of its convictions -- when the Sueelismonstre, as it is called, takes the stage at a New Year's Eve celebration, the fawning audience and technical crew somehow don't notice that it's a hideous creature that has arrived on stage and not the beautiful Sue (the monster is hiding behind a cut-out of Sue's face but, of course, the creature is elephantine, hunch-backed with oozing naked legs like tree-trunks).  You ask yourself how can they not know that this is a monster clambering up onto the stage with the bare-breasted showgirls standing all in neat rows for the camera.  But, I suppose, one could argue that celebrity blinds people to the reality of those who become celebrities and that this explains, at least symbolically, why no one seems to notice that the leading lady has become a horrible lump of tumors and abscesses with, at least, two heads.  This is a very stylish movie.  In the opening scenes, we see workmen installing an inlaid star on a sort of Walk of Fame, presumably in Hollywood.  This is Elisabeth Sparkle's star.  The star endures on the pavement, gets tread upon, and, at last, in this opening sequence, someone drops pizza sauce or ketchup all over it.  At the end of the movie, in a scene that is a direct steal from John Carpenter's The Thing, Sue's face grimacing out of the back of the monster, gets detached and creeps on tentacle feet along the sidewalk to sit in the midst of gory polyps on the star in the Walk of Fame.  

People have saluted this movie as feminist.  I suppose it has lines and scenes that could be interpreted in that light but really this is just a very long, elaborately made, special effects movie.  It's stylish but this doesn't change the fact that the esthetic is that of a slasher movie combined with a Vogue or Cosmopolitan fashion-shoot.  If a half-hour were cut out of this thing and some of the more excessive scenes eliminated (I really didn't need to see Sue fight it out with the decomposing Elisabeth and, ultimately, beat her to death in big grisly close-ups), the movie might be a classic.  For what it is, The Substance is pretty good.  (The picture was made in France it seems, with French personnel; the director is Carolie Fargeat, a French filmmaker -- this is her second feature.)   

  

Happy-go-Lucky

 "To prattle" is to talk at length about trivial and inconsequential things, to speak childishly and repetitively.  In Mike Leigh's 2008 Happy-go-Lucky, the heroine, Poppy Cross prattles incessantly, maintaining a constant babbling stream of inane observations, half-reproaches, praise and encouragement.  She speaks incessantly and desperately as if to reassure herself that she exists, that she has agency, that she is present.  Poppy is baffling -- throughout Leigh's movie, she remains blithely optimistic and recklessly cheerful.  Something seems to be wrong with her, but we can't determine what it is and her strangely cheerful demeanor is, at once, intensely engaging and, even, endearing while also more than a bit uncanny.  In one scene, she goes to a doctor with serious  back pain; she tells the doctor her pain makes her laugh and she giggles continuously -- it may be that she has to keep up her cheerful patter in order to keep from collapsing into tears.  But this interpretation is too facile.  Poppy's optimistic and happy-go-luck temperament is a matter of her "humor" to use the 18th century concept -- this seems to be the way she was born, invested with an excess of ebullient high-spirits.  Happy-go-Lucky is that rare film that is about someone who is cheerful, kind, and, even, competent in her own way -- Leigh doesn't encourage us to speculate as to whether this demeanor is some kind of compensation.  The film insists on remaining on the surface; Poppy (as brilliantly played by Sally Hawkins) is happy because that is just the way she is.

Poppy is an elementary-age teacher.  At one point, we learn that she is widely traveled; she spent five years working as a teacher in Southeast Asia.  She lives with her practical roommate Zoe, also a teacher.  There is a very slight, delicate intimation that Poppy and Zoe may have been lovers once -- they seem intimate with one another, although this is possibly just the result of more than ten years close contact.  Poppy and Zoe go out to night clubs and dance until dawn.  They avoid romantic entanglements.  Both are committed and observant teachers who work on the weekends to make costumes and masks for their students.  When Poppy's bicycle is stolen, a theft that she takes in due course without much regret, she decides to learn to drive.  She hires a driving instructor named Sam to teach her behind-the-wheel.  Sam is one of Mike Leigh's typical badly damaged males -- he's a racist and conspiracy theorist, using occult theory developed by Aleistar Crowley to conduct his driving lessons:  the main rear view mirror, he calls Enraha, after the all-seeing eye at the pyramid of things.  Although he brow-beats and bullies Poppy, it's obvious that he is obsessed with her and would like to make her his girlfriend, although he's too strange, paranoid, and prickly to make any overt moves.  Poppy attends a Flamenco dance in which the exuberant, vehement teacher breaks down and flees the room in sorrow at her break-up with her boyfriend.  (In the world of Happy-go-Lucky, everyone has emotional problems and struggles except for Poppy who seems indifferent to the Sturm und Drang of life.)  One of Poppy's students is a bully.  Poppy infers that he is the victim in turn of cruelty at home.  A male social worker is recruited to interview the six or seven-year old boy and, indeed, it turns out that his mother's boyfriend is hitting him.  The handsome social worker is intrigued by the attractive, irrepressibly happy Poppy and makes a date with her.  She has sex with him and the relationship seems promising.  Meeting for the fourth or fifth driving session with Sam, Poppy brings along her new boyfriend.  (Sam has been glimpsed around Poppy's apartment, probably stalking her.)  Sam is outraged and stunned, prostrate with strangled jealousy, drives like a maniac, and almost crashes the car.  Poppy takes away his keys deciding that he is too upset to be behind-the-wheel.  This leads to an actual struggle in which Sam punches Poppy and pulls her hair.  She threatens to call the cops and, when Sam calms down, tells him that they aren't going to continue with the driving lessons.  Zoe and Poppy go rowing a boat on a small lagoon -- life is but a dream -- and as they coordinate their oar strokes, Poppy's boyfriend calls her to set up another date.  Poppy has said about Sam:  You can't make everyone happy but, at least, you can try."  There are several minor episodes that go nowhere  and seem to be improvised-- Poppy visits her married sister in suburb of London, Poppy has a back ache,  Poppy's sisters encourage her to make something of her life, in a bookstore, Poppy who is hungover tries to flirt with the clerk who rudely rebuffs her.  

The pivotal scene in the movie is emblematic, not narrative.  While Poppy is walking alone at night, she hears guttural noises and cries.  She fearlessly enters a corroding industrial site, an abandoned factory or warehouse, in which she encounters a man who is very seriously, floridly mentally ill.  The man is large, bearded, and, sometimes, threatening.  Poppy however approaches him and tries to talk, continuing her cheerful prattle as he mutters nouns and verbs over and over again -- to insane to say anything that makes any sense at all.  On several occasions, he becomes even more agitated and we fear that he will attack the heroine.  In the end, he wanders off in a harsh, abstract geometry of rusting trestles and girders. The episode is anecdotal and quite frightening.  But, however, we view the threat, Poppy is not afraid, shows no fear at all, and seems genuinely compassionate in her efforts to console the man.  In this scene, Poppy's pervasive cheerfulness seems to verge on something pathological -- she becomes in our eyes, a kind of holy fool.

The movie is a pendant to Leigh's recent Hard Truths, another 'comedy of humors' that approaches the concept from its opposite pole.  In Hard Truths, the heroine is angry, suspicious, and vengeful; she's cruel to the point of ferocious madness to those closest to her.  Leigh makes no attempt to explicate this heroine's ferocity -- it's just the way she is.  Hard Truths (2024) shows us the other side of the coin embodied by Poppy's good-natured cheerfulness.  In both cases, there's a suggestion that the heroines are seriously maladjusted to the world in which they find themselves.  Sally Hawkins who plays Poppy looks like a young Roseanne Arquette and she's effortlessly brilliant in the part; Eddie Marsan who plays the mad driving instructor is scary, pathetic, and funny at the same time.  The acting and direction is beyond reproach.    

Walker Art Center (June 20, 2025)

 En route to Fargo, North Dakota, I stopped at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on June 20, 2025.  I didn't know what was on display and didn't have any expectations as to what I would see.  As it happened, there were a number of things that interested me and the little expedition was an unanticipated success, an example, I think, of a pleasing serendipity, an unexpected gift.

There are three large shows on exhibit:  Ways of Knowing, Kandis Williams:  A Surface, and a large installation called "Sudden Places" by Pan Daijing.  Ways of Knowing consists of several large groupings of art divided into more or less arbitrary categories -- the curation of the art doesn't make much sense and there really is no connection between the different experiences on offer here.  The initial gallery is arid and doesn't promise much -- it's some highly conceptual work that covers the walls with small placard-like images.  Rose Salane's "Confessions" consists of images of handwritten notes in English sent to the proprietors of Pompeii returning objects filched from the archaeological site -- the actual objects returned in this way are displayed next to facsimiles of the notes.  It's mildly interesting as an example of the "avenging conscience" -- the correspondents seem desperate to disabuse themselves of their souvenirs which are mostly nondescript pebbles and bits of ceramic and a nail; the installation vaguely suggests that the tourists may have suffered from the malevolence of the objects themselves, although this is a matter of imagination imposing some kind of order on the collection which is, in fact, more or less, random.  In nearby vitrines, there are fragments of coral plucked out of a dying reef and anatomized by mechanical drawings of the artifacts.  On another wall, there are forty feet of picture postcards of temples and statues in southeast Asia and India.  I have no idea what these installations were supposed to be about -- and they were devoid of any interest.  Things improve, however, in the next galleries.  A couple of darkened rooms display large HD video of industrial processes or abandoned buildings on an Alaskan island -- it's St. Paul Island in the Aleutians.  These things have considerable authority although they are fairly predictable, the sort of large-screen languorous tracking and zoom-effect images that are common in video displays in contemporary art museums.  The images on the Aleutian islands, at least, feature walruses and seals glimpsed as if through an aperture of a toilet paper role and, on the soundtrack, there are some vague remarks about the Aleut language by a soft-spoken elder.  In one niche, a group of pretty Congolese boys in a choir sing seraphically while on the neighboring wall videos show copper wire spun and processed by huge menacing machines.  The juxtaposition, I suppose, means something but I don't know what.  Nonetheless, it's striking particularly since the choirboys wear big, crude copper crosses on their chests.  A large room is full of colorful drawings, brilliantly executed, I thought, depicting gory scenes in Egyptian and European history. This work is called "Time of Change" by the Armenian- Egyptian artist Anna Borghiguian and I thought it was extremely interesting.  The cartoons vary from horrible scenes of mayhem and torture and lyric images of people conversing in coffee shops and walking in parks.  Monstrous figures bare their teeth at us -- one of the villainous critters, a Nazi concentration camp doctor named Aribut Heim seems to have three or four separate rows of teeth; he's drawn extracting people's organs, surgery without the benefit of anesthesia -- as far as I could ascertain, Dr. Heim fled Germany for Egypt where he seems to have prospered for a number of years before being discovered.  There are scenes of various revolutions, images of the French guillotine, and riots in the street.  The drawing is very expressive and, in many instances, impressively colored and the diagrammatic images (they seem to be made on butcher paper about 30 x 18 inches) are covered with scribbled handwriting annotating the pictures.  Obviously, this is a show that would require several hours to properly appreciate and admire.  However, I am convinced that this artist, born in 1946, is important, a talent of major proportions.  "Cloud Museum" by Eduardo Navarro is a collection of diaphanous-looking garments on silver hangers, white robes with metallic scarves drooping down from three similarly silver rings.  The garments look like a flock of angels dropped to earth and roosting in a gallery with kitschy pink walls.  The next gallery, a big darkened room,  features a retrato (portrait) of someone named Antonio do Erouso, also known as "Catalina, the lieutenant nun".  Erouso, shown in painting from around 1640 (she was born in 1585) was a woman who was a cross-dresser, a transvestite in the service of the Spanish or Portuguese military.  Another HD triptych of screens features modern homosexuals and trans people commenting on the woman whom they imagine to be a spiritual forebear, a sort of elder or ancestor figure.  The three interlocutors are eloquent but annoying.  They interrogate the picture and seek to imagine the story of this odd figure.  This exhibit isn't art as far as I can see, but more some kind of history with modern-day interlocutors (more or less "talking heads") in big glossy images seeking to connect the baroque painting to their own experience -- the installation's interest isn't esthetic but primarily socio-historic.  Petrit Halilay was a boy in Kosovo during the troubles in that place.  His work "Very Volcanic over the Green Feather" consists of truck-sized cut-outs vibrantly painted in a child's palette hanging from the ceiling like gaudy clouds.  If you walk among the colorful and cheerful mobiles, they stir a little, wafted here and there and, on their back sides, you can see more somber images, a crying child and a column of military vehicles -- the inverse of the bright fowl and rainbow-colored landscapes are, in some cases (but not all) disturbing memories of the violence that the artist endured a child.

Kandis Williams':  A Surface consists of huge collages and other objects -- it's a vast retrospective occupying four large galleries.  The collages are lurid and densely populated with horror movie imagery and mobs of black and brown figures.  This stuff is marginally interesting, mostly due to the extreme and violent pictorial content.  I don't know what the artist intends by these collages -- is she arguing that African-Americans in this country have been monstrously abused by White people?  This is my surmise although the point is certainly not made with any clarity.  The labels are full of paranoid and hysterical allegations phrased in academic jargon of the worst kind:  for instance, "ontology is a conjuration from gods and monsters that white people make up to kill us all."  ("Gods and monsters" is a campy citation from James Whale's very queer The Bride of Frankenstein -- in the film, a mad doctor proposes a toast to "a new world of gods and monsters.')  More interesting are some assemblages made from artificial plants, intertwined green leaves and stems and potted orchids that have all been spray-painted with a greenish-white pigment.  These things have a vaguely malevolent aspect; the simulated vegetal growth seems sinister, somehow toxic, and menacing in its abundance and density.  The most technically impressive images in the show are two large lenticular prints -- these are images made with raised particles and fins of colored plastic that have the effect of changing from one picture to another when viewed from different angles.  Seen from one vantage, the viewer sees an audience in a darkened theater; from another angle, only a few feet distant, the image of the auditorium transforms into a picture of a Black diva who seems anguished and tearful; from another angle, also only a couple feet farther along the axis of the picture, the image shows the artist self-assured and singing into her microphone -- it's fascinating to see how the image changes and morphs into different pictures as you walk by it.  The name of the picture is "From the joy of seeing them to the pain of being them" -- a literal representation of how the proud, competent performer turns into a weeping figure mediated by the indifferent audience.  A second lenticular image is even more complex -- I counted six or seven separate images somehow stacked on top of one another and visible seriatim as the gallerygoer walks by the 4 foot by five foot picture.  These images are spectacular technical achievements and it is interesting to speculate as to how they are made.  A large series of images of the young Michael Jackson, painted on silk-screen is accompanied by label gibberish that I cite exactly as written:  "But more fundamentally a deepening of the compromise already integral to any exogamy that is able to remain patrilineal..."  Exactly what we were all thinking as we encounter these images of the late lamented "king of pop."  (Almost every one of Willaim's images is accompanied by a daunting tablet of printed text, hundreds of words that are completely incoherent and opaque displayed next to the pictures.)  

Pan Daijing's Sudden Places is another immense installation, occupying two large and very dark galleries, spaces that are about the size of a bowling alley.  It's unsettling -- the sound system creates an ambient rumbling and buzzing, a bit like the soundtrack of a David Lynch movie.  The floor is draped in some sort of rubbery fabric that smells strongly of chemicals and that rustles in a disconcerting way underfoot.  As you traverse the space, you feel unsteady, dizzy, as if about to topple over in the darkness.  In one corner of the big space, some five-foot long strips of tinsel, the sort of thing you might see on a Brobdingnian Christmas tree dangles from the ceiling.  Along one wall, there are blackboards entirely covered in illegible script, lit starkly from the side so that the chalk marks glow.  In the other room, there are huge video monitors playing something -- it must have been nondescript because I don't recall any of the images, just their grainy texture and the wan light cast from them.  In one corner, there's a slit in the wall through which you can look to see some construction debris, a sawhorse, concrete floors and a panel also marked with illegible chalk marks simulating some kind of writing.  This is an ambitious installation.  I have no idea what it is supposed to signify -- it's a kind of haunted house and I was happy to get away from it.  

These exhibits were so interesting and demanding that I spent almost two hours looking at them and didn't have time to really visit with the old friends in the permanent collection higher in the building.  I stood in front of Marc's Blue Horses and looked at the Edward Hopper painting of the secretary and businessman at night in an office that suggests a state of siege.  The blue horses snuffle at the landscape like overly excited dogs, blue harnessed to vivid blue.  Then, I was back on the highway, driving to Fargo.  

(Lenticular prints are, sometimes, called "Winkies" or "transforming prints".  They are made by printing different images on thin, raised strips that are interlaced so that several pictures are simultaneously present on the grooved surface.  The images as interlaced are installed beneath a lenticular lens which provides access to different aspects of the surface as the eye change position.  Lenticular prints fall into "transforming print", animated print, and stereoscopic 3D print categories.  They are similar to the so-called tabula scalata popular in the renaissance and baroque periods that also interlace disparate images on this surfaces.  The effect was discovered by paleolithic cave artists who cut grooves into images that they made so that, when viewed from different angles, horses seem to move their heads and tails and mammoths wiggle their trunks.

Pan Daijing is a Berlin artist born in China.  She is best-known for her musical compositions which are "noise" art and industrial techno in character.  She is queer and BDSM practitioner, often posing in leather with red highlights.  

 

Comments on The Long Goodbye and Dog Day Afternoon

 The Long Goodbye is a Robert Altman movie released in 1973.  It is famous for a violent scene in which a gangster breaks a coke bottle on his girlfriend's face, a woman who he has just praised for her perfect beauty, for the sole purpose of showing how mean he can be.  This is startling but the more surprising and shocking scene of violence in the film is when the tiny mannequin, Dr. Verringer (played by Laugh-Ins Henry Gibson), slaps the face of a raging brute of a man played by the volatile and frightening Sterling Hayden; Hayden is twice the size of Henry Gibson, a grizzled ancient mariner with hairy chest and a florid beard, but when the little doctor cracks him across the cheek, the big man is deflated, becomes disoriented (he is very drunk) and a few minutes later commits suicide in the surf pounding the shore at the Malibu Beach Colony where he lives.  Eliot Gould plays Philip Marlowe, muttering to himself and chain-smoking as he drives around 1970's LA in a sedan built thirty years earlier.  He's a living, walking, anachronism who doesn't fit into the scene at all. The cast is perverse:  Jim Bouton, the baseball player whose scandalous Ball Four was once a famous expose of professional sports, has the role of Terry Lennox, a sleazy Hollywood type accused of murdering his wife.  Mark Rydell plays Marty Augustine (and apparently imitates the mannerisms Robert Evans, a Hollywood mogul) -- Augustine is the gangster who wrecks the perfect profile of this girlfriend just because he can.  (An uncredited Arnold Schwartzenegger is used for comic effect -- he's ridiculously bulked up and doesn't look so much menacing as pillowy and inert.)  The film is also notable for an ear-worm score by John Williams, the smoky ballad "The Long Goodbye", a tune that obsessively occurs and reoccurs throughout the picture, performed by a lounge singer, a piano-bar pianist, full orchestra, as elevator Muzak, and, even, played by a Mexican marching band.  The effect of the music is to weld the disparate elements of the film into a hazy, languid whole -- an effect also achieved by the smoggy pastel photography of Vilmos Zsigmond; LA looks smoky, as if seen through the clouds of burning tobacco enveloping Marlowe and nothing is really clear; you keep waiting for the picture to come into focus, but it's an oblique, suggestive neo-Noir, elusive with nothing that you can really seize upon or grasp.  Zsigmond's blurry landscapes and pervasive haze is the seventies' equivalent of the baffling chiaroscuro that characterizes classic film noir, some of which featured the menacing and intimidating Sterling Hayden, here reduced to an impotent parody of Ernest Hemingway.  Gould is good, but indistinct in keeping with the film's nonchalant and casually dismissive attitude about its source material, the novel by Raymond Chandler which Altman admitted that he didn't read.  There's an elaborate scene in which the camera uses deep focus to exploit reflections on glass in the suicidal novelist's beach front house -- it's a sort of lazy dope-inflected homage to the mirror scene from Lady from Shanghai.  The notion is that we don't really know anything about anyone:  our best friends betray us and our wives are all unfaithful; everyone steals from everyone else.  Chandler's notion of Marlowe as a kind of knight (or holy fool), the only virtuous man in a world of iniquity, is convincingly demonstrated by the movie -- but the question for the audience is whether Marlowe's anachronistic virtue and loyalty is the result of dope-induced stupidity or, rather, strength of character.  I saw the movie in the heater when I was in college -- the scene that has come across the decades for me is the part of the movie in which Sterling Hayden's tough guy writer wanders out into the surf to kill himself; he has a vicious black Doberman that trots back and forth on the beach carrying his master's cane in his jaws:  the dog is pleased at performing for his master, but obviously distressed by the thundering surf and the black waves -- it's a superb canine performance.  In keeping with its dope-addled ambience, not much seems to be going on in the movie -- but, in fact, the picture's far better than it seems when you're watching it, a film that grows in your imagination.

Dog Day Afternoon is at the opposite end of the film spectrum to Altman's The Long Goodybe.  Everything in Lumet's  1975 film is crystal clear, energetically staged with ensembles of sweaty actors trapped in a bank building besieged by Al Pacino as the bisexual Sonny and his moronic sidekick, Sal (John Casale).  You can see everything; focus and editing are deployed to make things completely lucid and plausible. Pacino gets impressive harangues that he delivers in extreme close-up and everyone shouts at everyone else in overlapping cascades of insults and threats.  The plot, of course, involves Sonny's attempt to rob a Brooklyn bank to snatch money to finance his homosexual "wife's" sex change operation.  The robbery goes sideways and a hostage situation develops as Sonny holds the bank president and seven female tellers as prisoners at gunpoint while a volatile mob gathers on the street.  The writing is very good and the characters are portrayed in three-dimensions -- even the cops and FBI  boss are given distinctive personality traits.  The movie is a symphony of sweat -- it's a blazing hot day and, as the film progresses, everyone perspires in buckets, most notably Sal and Sonny whose foreheads ooze and drip with sweat.  Of course, there's no way out and the movie ends, more or less, as implied by the situation in the first 15 minutes.  Movies of this era channel Tennessee Williams and Sonny's character invokes one of the harried, working class heroes in something like a Streetcar Named Desire -- the roles are equally sweaty:  it's either New Orleans or the tropics of Brooklyn on a sweltering day. Pacino's style of  acting has always been hyperbolic and here he "outherod's Herod" or "tears a cat" to use Shakespearian parlance for this kind of exaggerated, narcissistic performance.  Pacino's overacting fits the part -- at times, he draws energy by stirring up the volatile crowd gathered to watch the hostage standoff at the Bank. In this film, we know exactly what's going on -- it's a strenuous, arduous exercise that exhausts the viewer. on its via dolorosa to the final, abbreviated shoot-out.  At its center, however, the film is like Altman's picture in that it features characters who are too complex to be readily understood, figures with a strange, compelling depth, a kind of filmmaking that, perhaps, doesn't exist in the big budget movies produced today.      

All is Lost

 All is Lost (2013) is an austere, minimalist survival picture.  Although it stars screen icon, Robert Redford, the film is a rigorous exercise that has an experimental aspect -- it has more in common with Robert Bresson than with a conventional Hollywood adventure movie.  The script, said to be only 32 pages long, explores a fatal accident at sea, without offering viewers any back-story, any dialogue, and any escape from the raw events depicted into "significance"; the movie bears no trace of allegory or symbolism.  The plight of the lone mariner is displayed with close attention to detail and there's no larger meaning to anything that we behold.  It seems that the movie must have been physically daunting to film; the movie is almost as exhausting to watch as it must have been to make.

Redford's character is called "Our Man" -- at least, this is how he is designated in the credits.  This unnamed man is piloting a large sailboat through the Pacific when he runs into deadly trouble.  We see him aroused from where he is sleeping on a couch under the deck -- a waterfall is pouring through a breach in the side of the sailboat.  The Man finds that he has run aground (presumably while sleeping) on a large, floating storage container.  The sharp corner of the freightcar-sized container has ripped open the side of his sailboat and flooded the living quarters.  The man is alone.  We never learn his name or where he is going or why he is piloting the big sailboat across the Pacific Ocean.  We are privy to a voice-over representing an apologetic last message that the Man puts in a mason jar -- but we don't know to whom "our Man" is apologizing.  Although,  the Man repairs the breach in boat's hull, he encounters a terrible storm.  The sail boat's masts are shattered and the vessel itself rolls over and over in the tremendous high seas.  The Man hits his head on a pipe and rips open his forehead. (Previously, he's fallen off the deck although latched to the ship by a cable and gets keel-hauled.)  Ultimately, the sailboat sinks and the Man has to abandon it for an inflatable life raft.  There's another squall and the life raft gets toppled over, rolling on the high seas.  The Man discovers that his water supply is contaminated with sea water and no longer potable.  (This calamity triggers one of the man's rare outbursts -- mostly, he is stoic and without expression during his travails.)  He has no food remaining and drifts helplessly across the ocean.  On one occasion when he catches a couple fish on his line, a shark lunges forward and seizes the fish, almost ripping them from the Man's hands.  The raft floats across a shipping lane and two huge container ships come within a few hundred yards of the shipwreck.  But despite our Man's efforts, the vast ships which dwarf the pinpoint of his raft pay him no heed.  At last, the man sees a small vessel approaching, lights a fire with his last matches on the raft -- the raft burns up and the man plunges into the sea, too exhausted and debilitated to even swim. As he sinks to the bottom of the ocean, he sees a light above and, perhaps, is saved.  (It's equally possible that this final vision is a flare in his dying brain and that, as in Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, the man has merely fantasized his salvation.)

All of this is dispassionately presented.  There's some minimalist music but no commentary.  The man cries out a couple of times but, except for dictating his message in bottle (which he does in peculiarly stilted and uncommunicative way -- probably due to inanition), Redford's character never speaks.  With the exception of a couple high-angle shots and some underwater images from below the raft showing schools of fish and sharks, the camera never strays from Redford or from his perspective.  The movie eschews spectacle.  The sea is either a mirror -lat expanse or turbulent with big waves but there are no memorable shots of the ocean or its weather.  (An exception is a single shot showing the sun as a blob of molten metal sinking into the sea at sunset.)  Our Man isn't particularly heroic and, certainly, doesn't engage in any derring do.  At one point, he ascends a mast and has to rappel down as swiftly as possible because of an advancing storm -- he seems barely capable of the feats required of him by the desperate plight in which he finds himself.  For some reason, he has no reliable radio, no back-up electronics or communication, no real ingenuity nor, even, much in the way of maritime competence.  In order to reckon where he is located, he has to carefully read the instructions on a sextant in a box -- he clearly doesn't really know how to use the sextant and charting his position, in any event, is meaningless:  the raft is drifting on the open sea and he can't control where it goes.  There is nothing visionary in the movie -- no dream sequences nor fantasies until, perhaps, the last shot.  Redford, like all the greatest movie actors, doesn't seem to be doing anything at all -- he scarcely raises an eyebrow during the entire film.  The camera simply studies his aging, handsome features as he, in turn, looks at things with a patient, appraising eye -- there's one thirty second outburst but Redford is conspicuously stoic throughout the rest of the film.  (Obviously, the part is extremely demanding physically and I was impressed with Redford's willingness to clamber up and down ladders and rigging in soaking wet clothing.)  The director N. K. Chandor has made what David Bordwell used to call a "parametric film" -- that is, an avant garde picture strictly defined by the parameters of location and the camera's insistence on focusing exclusively on the leading (and only) character and his point of view.  I don't like pictures of this sort -- they seem pointless to me.  But Chandor and Redford must be granted the courage of their convictions -- they don't dramatize anything since it's their faith that the dire situation is intrinsically dramatic without any false histrionics or spectacle.  In this film, a great tempest at sea is rendered as a man being flung about helplessly in a claustrophobic cabin; he gets rumpled like clothing in a dryer.  

Imitation of Life

 Imitation of Life wallows in excess.  There's just "too much" of everything:  too much emotion, too much conflict, too much suffering, too much super-saturated color -- at times, the screen looks like an open wound.  The acting is hyperbolic and, in the last half hour, when there is a sort of morbid triumphal procession, a death bed scene, and garish night-club imagery coupled with huge, expressive close-ups the picture slips into a sort of excited delirium.  In the opening scenes in which a little girl is lost at Coney Island, the  establishing shots feature a hundred-thousand bathers crowded into the image with a thousand embedded in brilliantly blue ocean.  (The sequence is so grandiose that the director, Douglas Sirk, can't sustain it -- after these spectacular establishing shots, Sirk has to use rear-projection to isolate his characters from the throng.)  Shots are punctuated with flares of brilliant red and the leading lady wears elaborate garments with pearls and diamonds.  Even when she is supposed to be poor and struggling, the heroine's platinum blonde hair is done up in a metallic coiffure that makes her skull look like its wearing the Sydney Opera House.  The movie is relentless.  When a teenage boy angrily confronts his girlfriend about her racial identity, he doesn't just sneer and sulk, but, instead beats her bloody, slapping her so in hard that she ricochets across the street and, then, viciously hitting her again and again until she falls into a gruesome pool of slime underfoot.  Her face is hidden behind gouts of blood.  There are no quiet moments in the picture -- if the plot isn't spinning melodramatically out of control, the decor and set decoration bellow at you.  It' bullying, like being screamed-at for two hours.  I suppose it's an accomplishment to maintain this level of wild expressionistic hysteria.  The subject matter is fundamentally unpleasant and it's creepy to have this stuff howled in your face.  But this picture is a classic of its kind and worth seeing and the subject matter -- the film is largely about race relations in this country -- is by no means inconsequential.  

Imitation of Life in its 1959 version is an adaptation of bestseller by Fannie Hurst, previously made into an estimable movie in 1934.  The two adaptations differ markedly with racial themes predominating in the earlier picture (starring Claudette Colbert):  the theme of the young woman who can "pass" as White has always been alarming to Hollywood censors at Hayes Office -- such a character is said to imply miscegenation, something forbidden in the thirties and problematic when Sirk made his much more glamorous and upscale version of the story in 1959.  It is interesting that the 1934 picture casts an African-American actress, Fredi Washington, in the role of the girl who can pass for White; Hollywood was less bold in 1959 -- that role is played Susan Kohner, an actress with a Latino background.  In the later picture, Lana Turner plays Lora Meredith, an ambitious and, somewhat, haughty blonde, who yearns to become an actress.  Lora is a widow with a young daughter and an important element in the film is the suggestion that she is too old to play ingenue roles -- in fact, she admits to having "lost five years" raising her daughter.  At Coney Island, Lora's daughter Susie goes missing.  Susie has been playing with a slightly older child, Sarah, the daughter of a Black woman named Annie.  Lora and Annie meet, their encounter also including a "meet cute" with Lora's love interest throughout the film, the aspiring art-photographer, Steve Archer.  Lora and Annie are both struggling financially -- Lora is behind on her rent and payments to the milkman; Annie and her daughter are homeless.  After some initial reservations, the two women agree to pool their resources and live together in Lora's cramped flat.  Lora hikes around Manhattan trying to find modeling jobs.  After much hardship (which includes repelling the sexual advances of Lora's smarmy agent), she achieves success and becomes a famous Broadway actress.  At her school, Annie's daughter is "passing" as White; she is appalled and ashamed when her mother comes to school.  Little Sarah refuses to play with Black dolls and asserts that she is "White".  Annie doesn't think it is prudent to Sarah for pass as White but admits that it pains her to know that she gave birth to her daughter "only to have her hurt" -- obviously, she is ambivalent about her daughter's light complexion and the advantages it confers upon her.  

Lora pursues her career in theater aggressively, cuts off her relationship with the poor photographer, Steve, and, ultimately, marries a famous playwright.  After ten years or so, Lora breaks with the playwright -- he wants her to continue playing leading roles in his comedies; she wants to be recognized for serious theater.  She renews her relationship with Steve whom she has always loved.  Sarah has a love affair with a White boy.  When the boy learns that she has a Black mother, he calls her a "nigger" and beats her up.  Sarah, then, tells the noble and long-suffering Annie that if they ever meet on the street she is not to admit knowing her.  Then, she runs away from home.  (Annie tracks her to a dive bar where she is employed as a singer -- in fact, Sarah is very good and seems to have real talent.)  Lora's relationship with Steve is again hampered by her ambition.  She has to go to Italy to shoot a film with an Italian director who is clearly intended to be Federico Fellini.  Lora asks Steve to watch over Susie who is now a senior in High School.  Steve is kind and sophisticated and Susie falls in love with him.  When Lora gets back from Italy, mother and daughter clash over Steve.  Susie realizes that Steve loves her mother and, so, she plans to depart for college in Denver -- Lora lives in an elaborate modernist house, seemingly in Connecticut; she has stables and thoroughbred horses.  By this point, Annie is dying.  She flies to LA to see her daughter performing in an glitzy night-club act.  Again, Sarah repudiates her mother.  Annie returns to Connecticut where she dies.  Annie has planned an elaborate funeral and the final fifteen minutes or so of the film involve her obsequies -- a spectacular service in which Mahalia Jackson sings majestically, then, followed by a procession along the city streets in Manhattan with a marching band and four white horses pulling a Victorian hearse in which Annie's casket is displayed like a particularly luscious wedding cake.  Sarah appears on the street, throws herself through the police cordon, and cries out that the dead woman was her mother.  The family is reunited in a limousine with Steve and Lora together again and Sarah and Susie weeping in one another's arms.  

The movie is full of startling effects.  In the dive bar scene, hideous patrons (they look caricatures from a Goya or Bosch painting) occupy the foreground while the glamorous Sarah taunts them seductively.  In a later night club scene, Sarah, as a show girl, does an elaborate dance, half-naked and miming that she is opening champagne, on a huge gaudy turntable.  The house in Connecticut is full of angular white balustrades and austere,clinical-looking stairwells.  Characters are trapped in geometric cages.  Annie watches her daughter perform in the clubs from behind baroque scrolls of ornamental iron. Hallways and bed chambers are militant (and suggestive) with big phallic beams and posts. The funeral scene involving all the characters in film (including the milkman whom Annie has sweet-talked in any early scene) is disproportionately lavish -- it's like the funeral for a head-of-state with Mahalia Jackson operatically singing over dark-suited congregants and ranks of lodge members, dignified Black gents with dark shirts ornamented with metals and ribbons.  The funeral demonstrates that the most notable person in our society is the least appreciated -- the humble, kind, hardworking, and efficient colored maid.  The suggestion is that presidents and movie stars and captains of industry are all well and good, but that the true laurels for achievement must be awarded to people like Annie, good and loyal servants.  This is really the only way the spectacular funeral scenes can be interpreted.  The point, I think, is that we don't know who is truly important in our society -- there may be classes of persons in our world upon whom everything depends but we don't know anything about them.  At one point, Lora muses with Annie that, perhaps, no one will come to her funeral.  Annie replies that she knows hundreds of people  Lora can't believe this is possible.  "Who do you know?"  Annie replies:  "Members of my Baptist church and I'm a member of many lodges and societies."  Lora is surprised:  "I didn't know."  Annie replies:  "Well, you never asked."