What did Jack Do?

In 2016, David Lynch made a 17 minute film What did Jack Do? apparently for the Paris art museum, the Pompidou Center.  This short film is now available on Netflix and worth watching.

Lynch's work is all of a piece and, despite embracing an enormous range of emotional states, the formal aspects of his art, nonetheless, gives his persistent viewers some sense of coherency.  One refrain sounded in all of Lynch's films asserts that all human beings, no matter how apparently civilized, are subject to dark influences -- these forces may be exterior, in the form of derelict vagrants or wicked doppelgaengers, or interior demons.  Lynch is fundamentally Manichean -- he perceives of existence in the most stark terms of good and evil.  These traits are on display in Lynch's little parable, a beast-fable with a Kafkaesque edge.

In a stylized and angular room, a table sits in front of a window that opens onto a vaguely represented train station -- sometimes, we hear train whistles hoot and there is a murmur of crowd noise occasionally.  David Lynch, with his upthrust shock of white hair, stands over the table where a small capuchin monkey is seated.  Lynch plays the role of some kind of investigator, a cop or FBI man.  He poses a series of aggressive questions to the monkey.  The monkey, filmed in close-up, has bulging black eyes and a quizzical expression -- he speaks in a raspy, computer-generated voice that correlates exactly to the movements of his lips.  This special effect is impressive and gives the talking monkey an uncanny aspect.  Through Lynch's questions and the monkey's clipped and belligerent responses, we learn that the monkey (named Jack Cruz) is a tough-talking underworld type who has fallen in love with a chicken.  When Jack perceives that the chicken is two-timing him with someone named Max, he apparently murders the man (or creature of some kind).  The dialogue is Lynch's interrogation of the evasive and wise-cracking monkey.  At the end of the dialogue, the monkey bursts into a typically Lynchian song, a lugubrious, droning tribute to love.  The chicken wanders into a corridor next to the room in which the interview takes place.  Smitten with love, Jack runs after the chicken and, apparently, is either apprehended or gunned-down.  About midway through the film, a waitress brings two cups of coffee, one of which is filmed in enormous close-up (we see the white foam on top of the coffee gradually dispersing).  The waitress is one of Lynch's stock characters -- a comely and inscrutable teenage vamp.

During its short running time, the film embodies most of Lynch's characteristic themes:  there is the tough-talk that always slips into bizarre and absurdly stylized clichés -- this is language not as communication but as music, a duet for two Damon Runyon characters.  Lynch generally perceives music as engendering dream-like states of reverie, hypnosis, or, even, some sort of possession.  (When we play Beethoven on the piano, in some sense, our hands are possessed by the spirit of Beethoven).  In this film,  the monkey's crooning lament is filmed as if occupying an entirely different space, a whitish stage where stylized limelights converge.  And, of course, there is the waitress bearing her cups of steaming coffee, a staple in all of Lynch's movies.

The picture is beautifully lit.  Lynch smokes with the cigarette in the corner of his lips and the smoke spirals majestically around his head.  The monkey-suspect seems embattled, guilty, defensive -- at one point, Lynch points out that the monkey's pupils are dilated:  of course, the close-up of the monkey shows bulging black eyes that are nothing but pupil.  The capuchin denies the observation.  the film's most interesting aspect is its tone:  the picture isn't cute or whimsical -- rather it seems deadly serious, a sinister duel between the cop and his simian adversary, both of which who seem to understanding his counterpart all too well.

Two Weeks in Another Town

Movie actor Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas) is down on his luck.  After his release from a genteel asylum where he has been taking the "cure" for alcoholism, he's been summoned to Rome by a famous director to appear in five short scenes in an upcoming production. Things go awry from the start -- at the airport, Jack encounters his former agent who denounces him in the most violent terms.  (Jack punches the guy in the nose -- there is lots of nose-punching and slapping in this picture.)  At Cinecitta, the film under production has run into trouble.  Jack greets the director, Kruger (Edward G. Robinson imitating Otto Preminger but without the Viennese accent) by punching him in the face; Kruger reciprocates.  The heroine in movie has just completed a love scene on a gondola in which both characters repeatedly slap one another in the face.  Blithely, the actress peels off her garments and swims scanty-clad to the shore of the Cinecitta pool simulating the sea. Kruger is told by his producer that he must finish the picture or he will be ruined.  As it turns out, the five scenes planned for Jack are scrapped, but Kruger urges Jack to stay in Rome to direct the post-synchronized dubbing of the film.  Things are complicated by three factors:  Jack is pursued by his x-wife Carlotta, who doesn't want him, but is using all of her considerable sexual wiles to wreak vengeance on him.  Jack falls in love with Victoria, the girlfriend of the leading man in the film, Davy Drew (a cluesless George Hamilton) -- this is after Davy punches Victoria, his girlfriend, in the eye for no apparent reason.  Davy Drew is understandably chagrined by Jack stealing his girlfriend and tries to stab  him to death.  Then, Kruger has a heart attack and can't complete the picture.  Fortunately, Jack is standing by and he steps in for Kruger.  Jack's relationship with Kruger is complicated by the fact that the director makes a sort of death-bed declaration that he slept with Carlotta, Jack's vengeful ex-wife. (She's dating a figure meant to represent Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, but she's not content with her boyfriend's billions -- she has to ruin Jack as well.)  Kruger is married to Claire, an embittered middle-aged woman who knows full well that Kruger has slept with every available woman in this Hollywood on the Tiber -- when she's not attempting suicide, she imperiously orders Kruger around.  Kruger agrees to her demand to fire Jack from the movie that he's just completed in the director's stead (Kruger is apparently feeling better). Jack falls off the wagon, attends a sinister orgy managed by the evil Carlotta, and, then, returns home -- renouncing his love affair with the beautiful and innocent, Victoria, so that the girl can return to Davy Drew's arms.  Somehow, this ending is supposed to be a happy one, but it's really more like the becalmed somnolence after an epileptic seizure. And it's wholly implausible that the beautiful Victoria would choose the callow and vicious Davy (a whimpering George Hamilton) over the manly, and belligerent Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas).

Vincente Minnelli directed Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) from a cynical novel by Irwin Shaw.  It's mostly a hack job.  Minnelli is more interested in the color and the furnishings of the elaborate sets than the characters embroiled in this complicated melodrama.  This is evident in the first scene in which Jack wanders around the asylum framed by florid-looking lilac blooms -- Minnelli clearly cares more about the lilacs than Kirk Douglas and, even, has Jack refer to them later in the film.  The picture is shot in handsome Cinemascope but its mostly unimaginative and confusing.  It's an adult film, nonetheless, in that the motives of all the principal characters are muddled and conflicted.  The script never quite congeals and the female actors, in particular, are weirdly blurred -- we're not sure how we're supposed to view them, although this uncertainty introduces some interesting ambiguities into the film.  Minnelli mostly restrains his famous sense for color, except for the climax and a scene in which three cardinals dressed in brilliant red suddenly appear on a night street to detonate the right of the big screen with a scarlet explosion.  The bickering between the vicious Kruger and his aggrieved raging wife is startlingly raw and realistic -- there are some spectacular "public scenes" between husband and wife on the Via Venuto.  There's a showy montage of shots of Bernini's Fountain of the Four River in the Piazza Navona, right outside the hotel room where Kruger reclines in bed in a bright  red gown in a bright red-walled room like some kind of Roman Emperor -- but I have no idea what the montage is supposed to signify (possibly its some sort of artifact from Shaw's novel).  Minnelli's trademark delirium is on view in only two linked sequences -- but they are doozies.  Jack gets drunk and goes to a party orchestrated by the evil Carlotta where Leslie Uggams is singing some kind of depraved torch song.  The party takes place in a weird vertically oriented tower replete with plush orgy-rooms full of oriental pillows and velvet curtains and grotesque lady-sphinxes:  Jack looks about the decadent company and senses the presence of Carlotta and, then, a filmy green veil wafts down from one of the apartments above in this Edgar Allan Poe set, a bizarre vertical assembly of rooms like something from The Masque of the Red Death.  Jack follows the descent of the veil, something like a motif that might trigger a ballet sequence in An American in Paris,  and climbs up to the highest chamber in this sex tower where he finds Carlotta sprawled out amidst all the finery of Babylonian harem -- of course, Jack repeatedly slugs and slaps Carlotta and, then, somehow drags her out for a nightmare ride in his Maserati.  Here, Minnelli abandons any semblance of reality -- the characters in the Maserati simply spin in vertiginous circles in a ray of yellow light, whirling around faster and faster while the engine roars and the music emotes until the pictures simply dissolve into color.   It's a remarkable sequence but not enough to redeem this movie, which, simply put, is interesting but rather bad.   

Le Silence de la Mer

Jean-Pierre Melville's first film, Le Silence de la Mer, is remarkable on all levels.  Shot in 1947 (but first released in 1949), the film, probably, should not exist in the first place.  Melville produced the movie using his own funds and shot the picture on "short ends" -- that is, thirty to forty second strips of film left over when reels were exhausted and thought to be impractical for conventional movie-making purposes.  Melville had not been able to secure the rights to the novella from its author Jean Bruller, a resistance fighter against the Nazis who had published the book under the nom de guerre Vercors in October of 1941,  Bruller said that the book was part of the French patrimony, was sacred to the resistance, and, therefore, should not be adapted into a film.  (More prosaically, Bruller probably thought that the movie couldn't be successfully adapted since all of its action is interior -- it is film in which almost nothing tangible or susceptible to being filmed occurs.)  Melville, a cineaste and resistance fighter himself (as well as a survivor of Patton's campaign in Sicily), made a bizarre bet with Vercors.  He would shoot the movie using his own money and, then, screen it for 24 bona fide resistance heroes -- if one of them voted against release of the movie, Melville vowed that he would destroy the negative before their eyes.  The story is too good to be true and, probaby, has been much amended in the telling -- and Melville admits that he broke his own oath (one of the resistance fighters was "thumbs-down" on the film)  -- but the tale suggests the peculiar, self-effacing rigor with which the movie is made and, also, I think accounts for some of its arcane appeal.

After a strange, but powerfully affecting, opening shot, Melville shows us a small town somewhere in France, a place occupied by the Germans.  At a country house, an old man lives with his beautiful young niece.  The two seem to never speak and appear to be in mourning over the occupation of their country.  A paper arrives that seems to imply that a German officer will be billeted with the uncle and niece.  Some adjutants appear in a handsome Mercedes Benz convertible and lug some big crates of books up to the room on the second floor of the rural house.  It's winter and cold outside.  One night, the German officer appears like a ghastly specter out of the icy night -- the German is named Werner von Ebbrenach and he is a peculiar cadaverous-looking man with enormous bulging eyes and long sensitive figures who stalks about like Frankenstein's monster (and is filmed from angles that accentuate his haggard height and his corpse-like features.)  The uncle and niece, without forming an agreement on the point, simply decide that they will never speak to the German, nor even acknowledge his presence in their home.  The uncle wonders whether this form of resistance isn't "inhuman" but his niece's indomitable will (she makes silence seem violently aggressive and even frightening) shames him.  The German speaks eloquent, impeccable French and he immediately recognizes that his hosts (as he calls them) are patriots and will never speak to him or, even, turn their eyes in his direction.  He announces that he "admires those who love their country" and looking up to imploring angel, a wooden figure posted on the wall, bids the couple "a good night."  For the next hundred days, the German officer comes to the sitting room where the uncle and niece are keeping vigil and, dressed in civilian clothes (suit and tie) embarks on a immense, unrequited monologue.  He speaks to the uncle and niece each night, after 9:00 pm when he has come from his duties in the occupied village.  The burden of his monologue is that he loves French culture and admires the French in all respects.  He claims that the Germans have come as apostles of a broader European culture and that they intend to somehow "marry" the two countries -- that is, effectuate an erotic alliance between France and Germany.  As these monologues continue, it becomes apparent that the motif of a wedding between France and Germany is allegorical -- the officer has fallen in love with the unspeaking niece who refuses to even glance in his direction.  It is also suggested that the niece has come to love the German.  The soldier, who has been wounded in combat, takes leave in Paris and inspects all of the cultural sites in that place.  At a meeting with German officers, he learns about the concentration camp at Treblinka and, then, discovers that the Nazi administrators of the occupation plan to annihilate French culture, that is, erase from history the very aspects of the nation that Werner loves.  Werner goes back to his farmhouse.  The winter is over and it is now summer and the gardens are in bloom.  For a week, he doesn't come down to the sitting room to harangue his "hosts."  Then, when he finally appears, the niece transfixes him with her eyes -- this is a startling scene containing a huge and terrifying close-up.  Werner covers his own face and says that he has sought a transfer to the Eastern Front where we understand he will certainly be killed.  The next morning, he leaves.  The Uncle has left a book for him open to a page that says "that it is the duty of good soldier to disobey criminal orders."  Werner reads these words and, then, looks up to see the old man staring at him fixedly, also a grey admonitory apparition in the dark country house.  Werner departs and the film ends. 

Melville's picture is a marvel of tact and it is exquisitely shot.  The niece appears often in profile against an entirely black background and she seems some sort of classical medallion shot in profile to emphasize that she is both overwhelmingly forceful and, yet, also oddly ethereal and without substance.  The room in which almost all the scenes occur is a character in its own right, a hollow sepulchralspace where a clock ticks loudly and the wooden angel peers down at the characters, a divine messenger hovering over the ranks of books on the shelves and the hearth where a fire is always burning.  There are many amazing sequences in the picture.  An image of a German tank seeming to fire at Chartres Cathedral is intercut into the film with astonishing skill -- although close inspection shows that the scene is shot with almost laughably primitive technique, a tracking shot up into the sky disguises the fact that the tank is peaceably parked in Paris as a public monument and nowhere near Chartres.  The camera is simply jiggled to suggest the detonation of the tank's cannon that we hear on the soundtrack.  Some of the scenes are surprisingly stylized, including images of the Nazis lounging around under huge swastikas.  The sequence in which Werner tours Paris is built from snippets of documentary footage seamlessly intercut with short shots made for the film.  The picture uses all natural light to enormous advantage.  The country farmhouse where the action takes place was, in fact, Vercors' home. Bruller (Vercors) said that he devised the book, published in October 1941, from his own experience billeting a German office, although the figure of Werner is based upon the redoubtable German intellectual, Ernst Juenger.  Despite its lack of action, the film is remarkably suspenseful.  Indeed, the film is shot like a combination of a horror film (the curious camera angles used for Werner) and thriller  (Of course, Melville is best known for his later pictures, a series of zen-like gangster movies.).  In the opening scene, we seem to witness a homosexual tryst or some other clandestine encounter.  One man drops off a valise at the foot of another figure -- both of them seem to be on a rooftop or somewhere with deep, plunging space.  The second man opens the valise and, under some clothing, finds a stack of resistance newspapers and also a slim white volume -- the camera approaches for a close-up that shows us that the volume is Le Silence de la Mer.  What is the "silence of the sea"?  This is a name for the force of the resistance, because, of course, the sea is never silent.  This is a picture that anyone interested in film should see and, even, study.

The Bridge

Apparently, screenplay wisdom posits that seven is the greatest number of consequential characters that an audience can manage in the course of a feature film.  We know this from Kurosawa's original Seven Samurai and its numerous iterations in American films.  This point is verified by Bernhard Wicki's 1958 The Bridge, a morose war film that documents the final days of Germany's Volksturm in WWII.  In the Volksturm, old men and boys were conscripted to defend the German homeland increasingly overrun with invaders.   The results, of course, were catastrophic for all involved.  In The Bridge, seven high school boys, all between 15 and 16 years old, find themselves abandoned to defend a river crossing in their rural home town.  The Americans are advancing in overwhelming force and the bridge is meaningless -- the invaders have already crossed the river at other points -- and, in fact, isscheduled for demolition.   But no one has told the kids manning barricades at the span.  American tanks advance and there is a desperate skirmish in which all but one of the boys are killed.  The film's closing title tells us that the massacre occurred on April 27, 1945 in an action "too inconsequential to be reported in any official dispatch." German viewers would know that Hitler killed himself on April  30, 1945 and that the war was over a few hours later -- accordingly, the death of the principal characters in the film is utterly meaningless, a final spasm of pointless violence in a war that is already, more or less, over.

Wicki's film was highly regarded when released, but has been superseded, of course, by more showy and spectacular combat pictures.  Until Criterion's release of The Bridge last year, the film was very hard to see.  It has never really been revived in the United States and, in fact, from an ideological perspective, is a picture that is not supposed to exist.  Each generation develops its own mythology and during the last forty years or so, there has been a legend to the effect that the Germans never came to terms with WWII, that the German people passed from rabid support of the war effort through total denial into an amnesia that is supposed to have lasted until Sebald's chronicle of the air war in On The Natural History of Destruction (1999) and books like Grass' memoir Peeling the Onion with his novel Crabwalk -- all works originating in the late 1990's.  Although there is, perhaps, a kernel of truth to this mythology, Wicki's film refutes this narrative -- the movie is an uncompromising examination of the pathology of the Volksturm and, certainly, not amnesiac in any way.

Like most war films, the picture divides into two parts:  the inexorable lead-up to the battle and the battle itself.  A plane has just dropped a bomb near a single-lane concrete span over a river.  The bridge is nondescript and provides access to an equally nondescript German town.  We see some church spires on the horizon and some ugly utilitarian buildings -- the town seems mostly deserted.  Those who can afford to flee have fled and the men are all fighting in the war.  A woman delivers milk from a  horse-drawn wagon.  A group of boys plays hooky to see the bomb crater by the bridge.  There's a scene in which a class of eight students (the boys who will be killed and a girl) translate English poetry.  The boys have built a tree fort next to the bridge, a nice touch that isn't over-emphasized but that provides a subtle leit motif as the film proceeds.  There's some underplayed rather enigmatic melodrama -- Karl's father, a wounded war veteran, is sleeping with Barbara, a middle-aged lady. (This distresses Karl who is loyal to his mother who seems to be dead.)  Walter, who likes jazz (his father calls it "nigger music") is angry at his father for seducing the servant girl.  When Walter rages at his father and, then, shouts at the girl, shoving her against the wall, she replies blithely "Your father was much gentler."  Walter's mother has been evacuated from the town that is now near the front.  Many of the people in town seem to be displaced persons.  the kindly Frau Mutz is caring for a boy who has lost his family, Hans.  Hans is older than the small and rather sickly looking Albert and Frau Mutz begs Hans to watch over her boy.  Juergen's mother is the milk lady, a woman is said "to never lose her composure."  Sigi raises rabbit named Alberich and Wotan..  Klaus has a girlfriend to whom he gives a watch with radium-illumined dial -- later, rather practically, Klaus asks for the watch back so that he can use it for "night patrols" now that he has been conscripted.  Klaus and Walter get into a fist fight over a cynical remark that Walter (angry about his dad's girlfriend)  makes about the local girls.  The Nazi party leader bellows at everyone while making certain that his own family is duly evacuated.  When the boys are conscripted, their teacher (excused from service due to a heart condition) goes to see the military commander in town and asks that the boys be sent to the rear.  The military commander, an old soldier, denounces the teacher as weak and defeatist.  But, later, we see that he pulls strings to get the seven boys assigned to duty guarding the bridge in town -- this is supposed to keep them away from combat at the front lines.  The boys, upon being conscripted, are enthusiastic recruits -- but their basic training lasts all of one day and consists of being run in circles in the garrison courtyard.  An old soldier notes that the drill sergeant keeps ordering them to "retreat" -- "They'll learn that soon enough on their own," he says.

Just before dawn, the seven boys are stationed at the bridge.  Before deployment, the commander gives the assembled troops (probably about 250 old men and boys) a hair-raising harangue telling them that they must be prepared to die for every square-foot of the homeland.  Kampf, Sieg, oder Tod, they are told:  "Battle, victory or death!" -- these are the only options.  But it's all tough talk that no one believes except the little boys.  The German troops are in headlong retreat from the front and the bridge has been slotted for demolition -- the Americans have crossed at other points and there is literally no strategic importance to the bridge.  The idea is to allow the boys a camp-out at the barricade at the bridge and, then, to withdraw them away from the Front.  But the local commander, who has formed this benevolent plan, gets shots by a couple of Nazi fanatics -- he is deemed insufficiently loyal to the cause.  No one tells the boys that the bridge is strategically insignificant and should simply be abandoned.  Their leader doesn't come back when he says he is going into town to get coffee -- the fanatics have gunned him down -- and so no one tells them to stand down.  The situation is the same as that memorably depicted in Neil Young's great song "Powderfinger" -- the powers that be have left these kids "to do the thinking" and, of course, they are clueless.  Just before dawn, a big convoy of German soldiers appears and crosses the bridge going in the wrong direction.  One of the soldiers gives one of the kids some chocolate -- "you might as well enjoy the candy before they put you in a box."  A commander on motorcycle with a big Iron Cross at his throat ventures onto the bridge and runs out of gas.  The boy's are impressed by hardened soldier and, then, a bit alarmed when he and his adjutant literally run away.  Some horrific sounds are heard and they get louder and louder.  American tanks are headed toward the river crossing.  What happens next is more or less predictable which is the whole point of the movie.  The combat scenes are documentary in style and very effective.  The entire film is shot and edited like an Italian neo-realist picture.  Everything is clear, modest, and carefully thought-out to make an appalling point -- the boys are all killed for no reason at all.  The battle scenes are shot in close-up with the children cowering in their shallow trenches.  Some of them show heroism but it is meaningless.  The American infantrymen are shocked that they are killing little boys and beg the kids to surrender but they, literally, don't know how to do this.  In the end, no one wants the boys to fight.  The town commander is horrified that they are shooting at the Americans, aggression that has caused the tanks to shell the town which is full of cowering women and children.  When he comes to remonstrate with one of the boys armed with a Panzerfaust (a recoil-less anti-tank weapon), the kid fires the bazooka at close-range at an American tank and the back-blast from the weapon burns off the face of the commanding officer.  In the end, the two Nazi thugs come onto the bridge to blow it up.  In a River Kwai development, the two surviving boys aren't willing to allow the span to be destroyed.  One of them shoots the Nazi with the demolition equipment.  But he's not careful about how he fires his weapon and the bullet goes right through the thug and kills his comrade.  And, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse Five: "So it goes."

The movie is excellent although it makes its points with a sledgehammer.  The boys are insufficiently characterized and really just cannon fodder -- there's a moving scene when the boy who punched Walter now cradles him in his arms on the bridge.  Blood is pouring from Walter's nose once more but this time he is fatally wounded.  Sometimes, I guess, a sledgehammer is necessary.

1917

Something about World War I encourages representation of its battlefields in a continuous and unbroken spectacle, an uninterrupted presentation of men and machines moving across ravaged terrain.  Perhaps, this sort of representation arises from the basically linear nature of the conflict -- two parallel trenches facing one another and snaking over the landscape of France and Belgium for 800 or more miles.  In 1930, Lewis Milestone designed the battle scenes in All Quiet on the Western Front as an unedited shot of men advancing slowly through bomb craters and barb wire in a hail of enemy fire -- the long tracking scenes of combat remains some of the most astonishing battle sequences ever filmed.  (In 1937, Milestone made a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front,  a picture called The Way Back.   For that movie, Milestone developing a tracking crane that would allow his cameras to follow battlefield action not only laterally but also vertically, craning up and down over obstacles -- with this device, Milestone was able to create even longer tracking scenes in his battle sequences in the later film.)  Stanley Kubrick in 1957 features minutes long tracking sequences in Paths of  Glory when Kirk Douglas as Dax tours the trenches and, then, later during the failed assault on the German position "the Ant Hill."  In 2013, the distinguished cartoonist, Joe Sacco, finished a book called The Great War: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme -- Sacco's book is made so that it can be read as a continuous scroll, opening up to show a thirty foot black and white panorama of the battlefield from the rear through the front lines and, then, progressing toward rear of the enemy forces; the effect is a bit like the extended panels of a Chinese scroll.  And, finally, Sam Mendes' 1917 is a film that is created to feel like a continuous take -- the entire movie seems to be presented as one perpetually moving shot, an enormous tracking sequence that follows the fortunes of two soldiers dispatched on a suicidal mission in April of  1917.

Mendes is an effective director.  I liked his American Beauty and his stage production of the musical Cabaret.  He knows how to orchestrate an action sequence:  the last half-hour of his James Bond film Skyfall transcended the material, staging a violent siege at a country house on the moors much in the way of a John Ford or Howard Hawks' Western.  By and large 1917 is successful.  Despite the perverse technique, the film doesn't flag -- at least for the most part.  There are some scenes, of course, where the viewer feels trapped with the soldiers and wishes that the director would just cut away so we don't have to watch protracted images of people just walking around or, even, sitting in a lorry that keeps getting stuck in the mud.  But, for the most part, Mendes keeps the film propelled forward and it's reasonably exciting.  The picture has no plot and no acting to speak of -- most of the performance consist of embittered clipped obscenities and horrified reaction shots.  Two young men, Blake and Scofield are dispatched on a nine mile run to reach a battalion of soldiers, the Devons, who are about to launch an attack that will be suicidally futile -- the Germans have retreated, but only to consolidate and fortify their position.  The British troops will be marching into a lethal trap.  The  Germans have cut the telephone lines, although it's not totally clear to me why the English would be relying on their enemy's communication system -- you just have to accept this as a premise for the race against time that governs the film's story, such as it is.  There are some real surprises in the narrative and, so, I'm not going to summarize what happens -- suffice it to say that the boys proceed through some nightmarish terrain, encountering all sorts of obstacles to their mission. 

Far and away, the best scenes in the movie are in its first half-hour -- these are the sequences in which the heroes depart from a meadow to the rear of their lines, advance to the front, and, then, creep through a hellish No-Man's-Land to reach the abandoned German positions.  The battlefield is decorated with appallingly mangled corpses and the craters are full of greasy water and rats are scurrying around everywhere.  This part of the movie represents a considerable achievement and is probably the reason to go see the picture.  Things, however, soon start to come unstuck.  First, there are minor details -- we're told about the stench of the dead horses and, in fact, as our boys scramble past the animal-corpses the air is full of humming, buzzing flies.  But later, the boys are creeping through pits full of human bodies, all of them half-decomposed and there seem to be no flies around at all.  (The same is true of a bravura scene toward the end of the movie in which the hero scrambles over a bulwark of floating bloated corpses in a river -- where are the CGI flies in this scene?)  There's a big explosion that buries one of the protagonists in a deep pile of fragmented concrete -- the other guy digs out his buddy who, amazingly, is okay.  (One would have expected the blast that tore apart concrete to have ripped the man's body to pieces as well.)  The worse miscalculation occurs late in the film -- it's a scene that is shown in the trailers broadcast on TV for the movie and rings totally false even in that context.  The hero falls into a river.  For some reason, the river is wild, full of spectacular white-water rapids roaring over huge boulders -- where exactly in Belgium or France would we find a river of this sort?  The river terminates at a huge waterfall over which the hero is swept.  This seems utterly implausible.  But, later, the hero reaches his objective and pulls his letter of orders out of his pocket to present it to Benedict Cumberbatch of all people who seems to have wandered in from Spielberg's War Horse.  The orders must have been written in indelible ink on strangely waterproof paper because there are no water stains at all on the documents.  How did they avoid getting soaked and becoming illegible when the hero was floating down stream through miles of white-water rapids and, then, falling eighty feet over a huge waterfall in which he is submerged completely for about two minutes in the cascade's plunge pool?  Even worse, there is a maudlin ending in which the hero looks through some papers -- there are family photographs and a sort of diary.  All of these materials were in his pocket when he went over the waterfall.  So how has this stuff survived without so much as a moist spot on the pictures and writings? 

Some of the movie works well enough -- a scene in which the hero approaches a group of soldiers about to be sent over the top and hears a man singing "Poor Wayfaring Stranger" makes perfect sense in the context of this film.  We have seen the main characters crossing dangerous terrain for an hour and, indeed, they seem to be wayfaring strangers.  A scene in which the hero wanders around a maze of ruined buildings lit by surreal flares that cast huge shadows is excellent and scary.  The actual combat scenes, which are limited to a few minutes in the movie's last ten minutes are impressive.  But a shadow hangs over the whole enterprise.  Inevitably, the movie looks and feels like a first-person shooter, that is, a video game in which the protagonist runs around a maze overcoming (or succumbing to) various hazards.  From time to time, in these games, the hero will stagger into a room lit by a fire and a solicitous officer will lean forward to confer with the man -- it's like those moments in Doom or Duke Nuke-em in which the first-person shooter suddenly encounters someone with a message relevant to the game:  "It sure you took you a helluva long time to get here, Marine!  But now that you've made up, load up your plasma gun with these ammo canisters and, then, get your ass up to the Starship reactor to see what's happening there."  It's not Mendes' fault that the movie feels a little bit like a first-person shooter or, even, a version of Myst where you have to navigate a complicated maze picking up clues.  But the picture has this ambience and it detracts a bit from the experience.

Written on the Wind

If you take off your glasses and turn down the sound, Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956) becomes a war waged between various colors.  Brilliant red wanders about the screen, sometimes flourishing as two diagonally opposed points.  Sometimes, blotches of red appear and, then, disappear only to reappear moments later.  An insinuating system of greens infiltrates the color fields that are salmon or pink or mauve, but always in counterpoint to splashes of eye-catching scarlet.  At the end, after a sort of frenzy in naugahyde-red and burgundy black comes to predominate -- willowy stacks of black sway on the screen punctuated with bursts of white light representing diamonds or hyphenated strands of pearl.  Written in the Wind is Sirk's most excessive and exuberant film -- the old German expressionists were handicapped because they had to work in shadows and black and white.  Sirk, who originated in German Expressionism, can use shadows, and does, but he has an extraordinary palette of colors to spray all over the screen --  there are walls and corridors in Written on the Wind, particularly in a Miami beach-side luxury hotel (with all the accoutrements of a New Orleans bordello) that are decorated in pastel colors that bear no relationship to anything in nature.  The film is stylized to the point of no return -- the color combinations compete with the mere human actors for the attention of the viewer and, generally, it is the colors that prevail.  If you put back on your glasses and watch the actors, principally Robert Stack and Rock Hudson who are poured like molten caramel over the harder and more angular women: Lauren Bacall and Dorothy Malone, you will see a spectacle of a different order, but, nonetheless, aligned with the battle of the colors:  super-stylized performances more archetypes than individuals, but nonetheless effective portrayed:  Robert Stack is the weak rich kid, his face always melting into various species of pathos or ineffectual rage, Rock Hudson as the soft, pillowy masochistic best friend, the maternal bosom offered to Robert Stack, Lauren Bacall as the hard-edged, self-assured virtuous woman, and Dorothy Malone as the infantile nymphomaniac.  These figures no less than the colors that they wear or with which they interact are part of the film's remarkable palette.

There's a plot, very swiftly and efficiently developed -- the film is shorter than I remembered, about ninety minutes, I think.  Rock Hudson (Mitch) is best friends with the richest man on earth, the scion of the Hadley oil fortunes, Kyle (Robert Stack).  The Hadley's make the Rockefellers and Standard Oil look like mere pikers -- they live in their own town, Hadley, with their own police force amidst and endless forest of matte-painted oil derricks.  A petrochemical haze hangs over this infinitely large oil-patch and, right in the middle of Main street, and in the backyards of the taverns, there are huge black hammer-shaped pumps rhythmically rising and falling.  (No one seems to live in Hadley and it has no residential neighborhoods -- it's just a tavern called the Cove, a bunch of gun shops labeled aggressively GUNS, and a country-club where women in remarkably colored evening gowns dance).  In some generic city -- big skyscrapers with shadowy and elaborate set-backs -- Mitch courts Lucy, a modern woman who is an assistant in an advertising firm that is devising a campaign for Hadley Oil.  But Kyle sweeps into the agency -- anything Mitch has Kyle is authorized to take from him and, so, smitten with Lucy, he tries to dump Mitch (unsuccessfully -- he sends him to buy cigarettes like an errand boy) and, then, flies Lucy and Mitch to Miami in the company plane.  It's like a flying corporate board room.  In Miami, Kyle tries to buy Lucy's affections but, unlike all the other floozies with whom he's associated, she takes a cab back to the airport to fly home.  Kyle, then, really turns on the charm and Lucy marries him.  Poor Mitch, as always, is left behind. 

The main characters, then, adjourn to Hadley where things really get gothic.  Kyle's sister, the nymphomaniac Marilee, loves Mitch but Mitch disdains her -- she's too wild and promiscuous for him.  She's always running off with roughneck oil-patch workers which precipitate barroom brawls that the feckless Kyle begins but that the beefcake Mitch has to end.  When Mitch rejects poor Marilee yet another time, she withdraws to her room at the family mansion, strips down to her skivvies and literally dances her father to death -- she puts a large portrait of Mitch on her windowsill and shimmies and twerks barbarically to the image, something that causes her poor dad to fall down the enormous curving stair steps in the mansion (it's a vast set the size of an airplane hangar with a parabola of steps leading up to the unimaginably remote second floor.)  Kyle who is dipsomaniac begins drinking again, straight corn liquor that he buys from a surly bartender at the Cove, a bar sitting right in the middle of the oil patch.  Marilee is tooling around in her red corvette.  She despises Lucy and taunts her, but Lucy, who is no shrinking violet, taunts Marilee back.  Marilee decides to ruin Lucy's marriage to Kyle after Mitch once again rejects her.  She encourages Kyle to believe that Lucy and Mitch are having an affair.  Kyle has a yellow corvette that he drives wildly here and there, skidding around corners.  Kyle sleeps with an ivory-handled gun under his pillow, presumably a substitute for his penis that doesn't work too well -- he's shooting blanks; Lucy wants to have a baby but can't conceive although it's not her problem -- the gun fetishist Kyle is the one who is sterile.  Then, suddenly, Lucy gets pregnant.  Marilee spreads the rumor that the infant will be Mitch's kid.  Kyle then gets completely drunk and beats up Lucy, inducing a miscarriage.  By this time, the African-American servants are terrified -- "there's gonna be a killing," the maid announces.  Kyle finds s gun, fights with Mitch, and ends up shot in the belly.  As if all the sexual issues aren't enough, Mitch and Kyle both recall when they committed some kind of infraction involving a Mr. Daley.  Kyle, of course, was the bad boy and did the wicked thing.   But Mitch got the beating.  Mitch has always been Kyle's whipping boy.  Kyle dies drunk, but remorseful.  Mitch is accused of murder.  Marilee blackmails Mitch suggesting that he can save himself by agreeing to marry her.  Mitch, of course, seems somewhat homosexual -- his real love was Kyle -- and so he has no trouble rejecting Marilee coarse, if immensely erotic, charms.  Marilee, dressed up wearing a black hat about the size of a dachshund and her mourning clothes studded with diamonds and pearls. goes to the inquest.  She is about to lie to punish Mitch for rejecting her, but, then, gnawing on her voluptuous lower lip, she realizes that she truly loves Mitch and cant' destroy him and so she tells the truth, although this means that he will depart (probably to Iran to work for Transamerican Oil) with his true love, the boyish and wasp-shaped Lucy.  Poor Marilee retreats to the family mansion where there is a big painting of her dad stroking his erection, a phallic-looking oil derrick.  The actual toy derrick is sitting on a table.  Under the picture of Dad and derrick, Marilee caresses the toy derrick, all but licking it, and the movie ends with the African-American servants rather sorrowfully shutting the monstrous iron gates to the Hadley family estate. 

In his other pictures, Sirk periodically indulges himself in a sequence involving flamboyant visual effects and searing colors -- he sometimes comes unhinged and slips into delirium as in, for instance, the funeral scenes in Imitation of Life.  Written on the Wind is delirious from beginning to end.  Revelations about  Rock Hudson's sexuality, not available to audiences in the fifties when Sirk's many films with Hudson were made, simply deepens the characterizations and makes these films all the more intense from a psycho-sexual perspective.  Fassbinder adored Written on the Wind and aspired to remake it (or something very much like it) in most of his films.  He never quite succeeded to the extent that Sirk succeeds -- but, then, he didn't have actors like Dorothy Malone, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack and, the greatest of them all, Rock Hudson. 

Uncut Gems

Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a gem dealer, in the 2019 film, Uncut Gems (Josh and Bernie Safdie).  The picture is produced in part by Martin Scorsese and channels some of the raw hysteria and aggression that powered some of that director's best pictures.  The movie is relentlessly animated, full of fierce and obscene talk, and the picture is impressive on a number of levels.  In the end, I think Uncut Gems is less than the sum of its parts -- there's nothing in the movie we haven't seen dramatized with equal vehemence in pictures like Goodfellas and Robert Altman's California Split.  Ultimately, the fate of the film's protagonist isn't compelling because Howard Ratner is so despicable on so many levels -- Sandler's performance is brave and he, certainly, doesn't hesitate to dramatize the sordid moral squalor and obsessional greed that afflicts this character.  The flaw in the picture is similar to a fundamental defect in Scorsese's magnum opus Raging Bull  -- Jake LaMotta was such an awful person that the audience never knew whether to fear his berserk anger or despise  or pity him.  The reason Raging Bull is a masterpiece is that LaMotta's horrific behavior is linked inextricably to his equally insane physical courage -- he risks his life in the ring; we can admire his courage while remaining horrified at its sources.  (And Scorsese somehow manages to make the brute seem pitiful at the end of the film -- something the Safdies don't accomplish.)  Sandler's Ratner seems to think that he can talk his way out of the dilemmas that his bad behavior has caused.  At the end of the film, he seems as amazed as the audience that he isn't able to successfully wiggle out of his moral (and physical) entrapment.  We know what's coming but, when it happens, we don't really feel anything for the character.  By contrast, Jake LaMotta survives and, implicitly, even wants a movie to be made about him -- this is far more disturbing than the conventional ending (a bullet through the brain) that concludes Uncut Gems.  There's no suspense in Uncut Gems -- we know how this has to end:  it's just a matter of getting from point A to point B.

Ratner runs a jewelry shop in the Diamond District in New York.  He seems to have a Black partner, Damany, and a luscious girlfriend, also, works in the store.  Ratner is a family man who lives in New Jersey.  He has a wife who physically resembles a somewhat older and hardened version of his girlfriend -- his wife despises Ratner and her beautiful features are frozen into a sneer:  she looks like some kind of chisel.   Ratner makes a living selling "bling" to professional athletes, rappers, and gangsters.  He's what Tony Soprano used to a call "a degenerate gambler."  At the outset of the film, Ratner is in trouble because of unpaid gambling debts -- he owes a lot of money to a tough guy who periodically assaults him through two gorillas.  (It turns out that this guy is his brother-in-law.  We learn this during the family Passover in which Ratner morosely recites the plagues visited on Egypt -- a list of troubles that seems roughly equivalent to his own problems).  Ratner has tapped some downtrodden Ethiopian Jews for uncut gems -- in this case, a fist-sized chunk of rock in which four or five huge opals are embedded.  (In the film's prelude, we see the aftermath of a horrifying accident at the opal mine that creates chaos in which two men can chip a big chunk of rock out of the deserted mine.)  Ratner is trying to sell diamonds to Kevin Garnet, a famous basketball player.  Garnet plays himself and he's pretty good.  Ratner gets the opal delivered while Garnet is in his shop -- it  comes in the guts of a big fish shipped on ice -- and the basketball superstar is fascinated.  When the glass of a counter in the showroom breaks while Garnet is studying the jewels, the basketball player is not injured and he takes this as a sign that he must acquire the opals in their matrix of rock.  Garnet takes the opals, leaving his Boston Celtics championship ring with Ratner as collateral.  (In this movie, everyone calls everyone else "nigger" or "my nigger" and there is, also, a lot of ethnically charged conversation about the fact that Jews are obsessed with basketball.)  Ratner immediately pawns Garnet's ring, uses the money to place a bet against great odds on a basketball game in which Garnet is playing, and seems to win.  But the thugs who are pursuing him, and administering periodic beatings, don't want him squandering his money on long-odds bets and they have surreptitiously canceled Ratner's bet made with the bookie.  Ratner remains in big trouble.  His girlfriend walks out on him.  He keeps getting intimidating or threatening messages over Passover.  and it's clear that the only way he can escape this jeopardy is by making a killing on the uncut gems in the opal.  But Garnet has the gems and regards them as lucky and doesn't want to release them to Ratner.  Ratner is convinced that the gems are worth almost a million dollars.  He retrieves the opals from Garnet who (he is confident) will buy the stones at a premium at an auction set up though a firm like Sotheby's.  Unfortunately, the gems are appraised at surprisingly low figure -- only about $150,000 contrary to Ratner's expectation of over a million.  (This is a surprising plot defect -- Ratner is a professional dealer in gems; surely, he would now how to appraise these kinds of stones.  Ratner's lapse in judgment here, which might be attributed to "wishful thinking", is puzzling -- we don't have any sense that Ratner's judgment, clouded by his gambling mania, is affected with respect to his shrewd and, obviously, successful gem business.)  Ratner persuades his father-in-law (Judd Hirsch) to bid up the gems at the auction and, catastrophically, he ends up the high-bidder.  Now, Ratner has to come up with money to buy back his own opals, plus commissions and fees. As a desperate final measure, Ratner takes the money from the auction (which is really owed to his father-in-law) and has his girlfriend place a complicated bet on the Celtics' game.  She has to fly by helicopterto Mohegan Sun casino to place this baroque bet that will pay off in vast sums, but only if something like 26 separate preconditions are met.  Back at the gem store, Ratner is besieged by his brother-in-law and his thugs who want their money back.  Ratner locks them in a security vestibule and, then, watches the basketball game.  All 26 qualifying events occur and Ratner wins the bet.  It doesn't matter.  The thugs kill him and his brother-in-law and content themselves with looting the store.  Most likely, Ratner would never have received any money anyhow.  His girlfriend takes the duffel bag full of money and departs in a limousine and it doesn't seems likely that she is going to look for Ratner. 

This sordid tale is presented with a ferocious attack -- cameras pressed to within inches of faces contorted by greed or rage or fear.  Everyone talks simultaneously in a weird argot comprised entirely of ethnic slurs and swear words.  The dialogue overlaps on so many levels that it is like Robert Altman on dexadrine.  In the opening shot, the camera glides closer and closer to the opal, then, enters the opal and passes through its crystal structure to emerge in some kind of wet tunnel -- this turns out to be the rectum of Ratner who is having a colonoscopy.  Uncut Gems isn't subtle.  In its first five minutes it establishes that Ratner is an asshole and solely an asshole.  (And Kevin Garnet is a garnet.)  The film is full of people bellowing at one another, either threatening or imploring.  Everything is shot in extreme close-up.  In one scene, Ratner's neglected daughter performs in a play where she vomits gold coins.  Again, the imagery here is not too subtle.  Sandler is excellent as Ratner -- he is increasingly cornered to the point that the bullet through the brain seems less comeuppance for him and more a merciful coup de grace; it puts him out of his misery.  The film has an astonishing score created by someone named David Lopatin.  The score is like Philip Glass in combination with Carl Orff -- there are odd intervals of chanting (voices that sound like both Gregorian chant and, sometimes, like Tibetan monks throat-growling) and there are bells, high-pitched choirs, whoops, and classical interludes with woodwind and synthesizer arpeggios.  The score is so good that it justifies several sequences that would otherwise be pointless.  After a visit to a nightclub where Garnet is celebrating his 36th birthday, Ratner and his girlfriend fight -- they both walk in opposite directions with the camera tracking on each of them alternatively.  The scene has no point; they aren't going anywhere consequential, but exists only as a showcase for the spectacular music roiling underneath the images.  In the final shot, the camera enters the bullet wound in the grinning and dead Ratner's face and, then, burrows through the wound into the crystalline world of the opal -- this is like the famous scene involving the bullet wound in Mick Jagger's head in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel's Performance. 

The film is good and I recommend it.  I don't like its morality, however.  Twice in the picture, Ratner makes a "Hail Mary" sort of bet, putting down huge money against wildly improbably odds, and twice he beats those odds to win.  This is an idiotic plot convention that is not only unrealistic but, also, depressingly conventional -- every deviant gambler in the world thinks he can save himself by one last, wildly aggressive wager.  There is another name for such people and it's used by the Casinos:  "losers."  I don't think it's useful to suggest that the way out of financial hardship is gambling.  That's a myth that Vegas and, even, the States in their lotteries peddle to the poor and ignorant.  I don't think that an otherwise ostensibly realistic film should show the hero twice beating the odds and making enormous profits on a bet -- it's a bad example. 

The Legend of the Mountain

The Legend of the Mountain is a 1979 supernatural adventure directed by King Hu. Hu was an important Taiwanese director (although he began in Hong Kong) -- his films Dragon Inn and A Touch of Zen were highly influential large-scale wuxia (swordsman) films instrumental in establishing the genre.  Hu's The Legend of the Mountain adapts an 17th century Chinese ghost story into an elegant, if fundamentally incomprehensible, spectacle.  The movie is set in the Song dynasty, that is the 11th century and it is full of vapors, fog, and vast mountain landscapes over which ancient stone compounds of palaces and temples, mostly abandoned brood.

A scholar named Mr. Ho has failed his "imperial exams", apparently, the tests required to enter diplomatic or government service in medieval China.  At loose ends, he accepts an assignment to translate a Buddhist sutra, a scripture involving the release of dead souls.  Ho is told that the sutra should be translated in isolation at an abandoned frontier fortress, the so-called North Fort.  During the film's first fifteen minutes, there is little dialogue and the picture consists mostly of images of the hero crossing spectacularly mountainous and wooded terrain.  Along the way, he glimpses a woman in white who plays a flute -- she beckons him forward.  A lama wearing a Tibetan Phrygian-style hat and saffron robes lurks on the trail behind him, shadowing Ho as he passes through the wilderness.  At a place on the edge of the sea, the Bamboo Island Pavilion, Ho rests and seems to fall asleep.  When he awakes, the sinister lama is trailing him again and the woman in white, who seems to be a ghost, appears from time to time to lead  him to the North Fort.

At the exquisite North Fort, a compound of elegant dressed stone walls, causeways over great lotus ponds, and flowering meadows and plazas under massive temples atop a hill, Ho is attacked by a shadowy figure that has long fangs like a vampire.  This turns out to be Old Chang, an elderly retainer who is apparently a deaf-mute.  A brazen-voiced middle aged woman, Madame Chang appears in the fortress and invites Ho to a dinner party.  The mysterious lama is skulking about the grounds and  there is Taoist priest named Mr. Tsui in attendance.  At the dinner party, Ho is introduced to Melody, Madame Wang's daughter, and another beautiful young girl who is one of Madame Chang's servants.  Ho gets drunk while Melody plays her little drum and wakes up in the imperial compound in the apartments of the ancient general's concubine.  In the night, while in an alcohol-induced delirium, Ho has slept with Melody and she now regards him as her husband.  The film associates lotus blossoms with sexual temptation and there are lavish scenes featuring the great water meadow filled with the floating flowers, little islands where insects flourish and copulate.  This part of the movie has a vaguely comic atmosphere -- Ho is entrapped by the household full of grotesque and obsessed characaters.  (It's oddly like a daytime version of James Whale's Old Dark House -- we sense that the people at the compound are probably ghosts of some kind, but they all seem to be eccentric.)  The sinister lama is, in fact, an exorcist and he has a little drum that he beats in competition with Melody-- they have a sort of drum duel that results in the lama being vaporized into a cloud of saffron dust.  Meanwhile, Mr. Ho has begun translating the sutra, work interrupted by interactions, some of them bawdy and comical, with the ghosts in the North Fort (if that is what they are.)   When Madame Wang touches some prayer beads, her fingers get burned to a crisp -- apparently, prayer beads are to Chinese ghosts what crucifixes are to European vampires.  To conceal her injury, Madame Wang suggests that Mr. Tsui and Ho stroll to the village and buy some household supplies -- it seems very incongruous to imagine that there is a village anywhere around.  The land is empty and deserted.  On the way to town, Ho and Tsui amble past a tavern.  A young woman, also clad in resplendent white and with her hair studded with elaborate silver trinkets, invites the two men into her mother's tavern.  She tells them that the market will be closed by the time they get to that place and that they should have a few drinks in the family bar.  Mr. Tsui gets drunk and passes out, possibly after a sexual encounter with the girl's mother.  The girl, Cloud, is told by her mother to pick some medicinal fungus, said to be good for headaches.  She goes with Ho to a strange landscape of sculpted rocks, small waterfalls, and boiling hot springs.  A storm blows up and Mr.  Ho takes shelter in another ruined compound where he spends the night with Cloud.  Cloud plays flute and is, apparently, the "beckoning fair one" that  Ho encountered on his way to the North Fort.  By this point, it seems pretty clear that everyone in the film except for the hapless Mr. Ho is either a ghost or some kind of supernatural agent.

The Legend of the Mountain now evolves into a complicated series of duels between ghosts and priests.  Cloud and Melody both vie for Ho's affections, although, possibly, their objective is to wrest from him the completed sutra that he is supposed to be translating.  There is a flashback that shows us that both Melody and Cloud were performers in the all-girl (and all-concubine) band gathered to entertain a local warlord named Han.  Melody was jealous over Han's attention to Cloud and, so, killed her rival by tipping her off a bridge into a deep ravine.  Han responded by exiling the murderous Melody.  Melody dies in exile, but is resurrected as a demon by a sinister Taoist priest.  After this flashback, which really doesn't illuminate the situation very much, Cloud and Melody fight for Ho, hurling colorful puffs of smoke at one another like hand grenades.  They leap up into the sky and perform pirouettes around one another in the tree tops.  (Most of this byplay is edited to disguise the fact that the acrobats are using small trampolines to launch themselves into the air -- there are a few shots showing some rudimentary "wire work", that is, figures skimming along through the brush about ten feet off the ground. The Legend of the Mountain was made before CGI existed and its special effects are all "practical" -- most of these effects consist of loud detonations, perhaps cherry-bomb firecrackers, and puffs of multi-colored smoke often filmed in reverse so that the smoke seems to suddenly be inhaled by the small blast from which it has emerged.)  Sometimes, the fight is between Mr. Tsui and the competing spirits.  Other times, the sinister Taoist and the rather porcine-faced lama duel -- the lama slaps his drum or slams cymbals together; his antagonist Melody or the evil Taoist pound on their little drums and sometimes the figures whirl by one another in mid-air, bouncing up and down on off-screen trampolines.)  Cloud seems to be a benevolent ghost:  when she plays her flute, we see idyllic landscapes full of song birds.  When Melody plays her flute (in addition to her drum she's a flutist), she conjures up landscapes full of aggressive black birds that dart down to feed on small emerald-colored frogs.  There's another pointless flashback -- we see that the clumsy, vampire Old Chang was once a lieutenant in General Han's army but has now been converted into a shambling, long-toothed zombie-lackey of the wicked ghost, Melody.  Ultimately, Ho finishes his translation.  The sutra gives his mudra special power against the various sorcerers and enchantresses in the film.  ("Mudra" signifies a religiously significant hand gesture or bodily posture that seems to have magical power over others.)  There's a big final duel involving more or less all of the characters.  It ends in a clap of thunder with the various adversaries vanishing or reduced to their attributes -- for instance, the lama disappears except for his cymbals and the two rival ghosts both seem to melt down into pools of smoking bitumen, gurgling hot springs.  Melody's severed head rests on the brink of the asphalt pitch pool where she has melted.  Fog obscures the images and Ho wakes up in the Bamboo pavilion -- it has all been some kind of dream.

The Legend of the Mountain was shot in Korea (with some landscapes in Yosemite National Park) and it's camerawork was conducted in parallel with the production of another film about mountain monks, also made using the same actors who would apparently simply change their garments according to the movie in which they were appearing. (This film produced in tandem with The Legend of the Mountain was Raining in the Mountain.) The final scenes of The Legend of the Mountain are totally inscrutable -- they seem part of the other movie about the monks:  we see a monastery and hundreds of chanting monks with the lama and several other priests presiding over some kind of religious ritual.  The Legend of the Mountain is over three hours long.  It's prevailing tone is that of comedy interspersed with some startling violence.  Some critics call the film a horror movie -- I didn't think it was either frightening or horrible.  The picture belongs to no known genre at least as far as Western audiences would be concerned -- it's not a wuxia (or period swordsman) martial arts movie.  I guess it is a Chinese ghost story -- a species of narrative that I don't understand and on which I would hesitate to comment.  The film involves all sorts of esoteric rituals and spectacle.  It's beautifully shot but emotionally vapid -- we don't really care about the outcome of all of the arcane airborne fighting  Indeed, to Western eyes some of the film seems almost abstract -- figures moving against gorgeous mountainous landscapes, the camera either slowly zooming in or out of the frame.  The picture is far more inscrutable than Japanese ghost stories like Mizoguchi's Ugetsu -- the ghosts in the Chinese film look exactly like actual people differing only from ordinary mortals by their ability to (sometimes) fly a little, or, at least, scoot through the tree-tops and pitch hand-grenade-like balls of smoke and fire at one another.  A viewer familiar with Japanese ghost stories, of course, always expects that there will be a dissolve to show that the elaborate compounds with their towering slate-roofed temples are just figments of the imagination and that, as in a Noh play, what we thought to be a sumptuous palace is really just a grass over-grown ruin, but we don't ever get this pay-off.  Because we don't know the rules of engagement -- that is, what these spirits and exorcists are capable of doing (and what limits exist to their power) -- the whole exercise, full of sound and fury, signifies next to nothing.  The Legend of the Mountain is a beautiful picture full of weird spectacle but I have no idea how it is to be judged or by what criteria.  (The short film essays on the movie are no help.  One of the commentators seems to think that the shots obviously made in Yosemite National Park were filmed in Korea -- this is obtuse to the point of discrediting the critic and his opinions.)

The Expressionist Figure at the Walker Art Center

"The Expressionist Figure" is an exhibition of 78 drawings, many of them tinted by water-colors, collected by Miriam and Erwin Kelen.  These works on paper were originally displayed on the walls of the Kelen's Minneapolis home.  For many years, the Kelen's have been closely affiliated with the Walker Art Center and, beginning in 1991, they endowed a fund maintained by the WAC for the acquisition of works on paper.  The drawings in this collection have been donated to the Walker and the show celebrates this act of generosity.

This exhibition is remarkably interesting.  The drawings are all beautifully made and many of them represent the work of important artists:  there are images by Degas through Kara Walker in the show and every one of them is worth close study.  The Walker displays the collection in about five rather small rooms -- the "hang" seemed to me to be thematic:  pictures with similar subject matter were grouped together.  All of the work is figurative -- in other words, the pictures show human beings, some of them highly stylized, but, nonetheless, all recognizably images of people.  The classical figurative image is the nude and, probably, about half of the art works feature naked women.  (Perhaps, this accounts for some of the fascination that the show exerts).  The pictures are graphic and a few of the images might be considered pornographic or obscene.  A number of the drawings display female genitalia and most of the pictures can be characterized as examples of "the male gaze".  For instance, there are several anatomically correct late Picasso drawings, one of them gorgeously adorned with yellow and green and night-blue watetcolored paint, and three of de Koonings' "women", pointy-breasted raw pink figures with praying mantis heads are also on display.  The entrance to the show warns that it contains images that are "adult" and that feature nudity.  Several sex acts are also on display. 

There are no weak images in the exhibition.  The Kelen's appear to have exercised excellent taste in accumulating these pictures.  It's not an overwhelming show -- you can tour the galleries, looking closely at every picture, in about an hour; this is the best sort of show, one attuned to connoisseurs, intimate and tactful:  this isn't a blockbuster entertainment but rather an understated collection for the discerning eye.  It is worth your time to come to the exhibition mid-week perhaps just before noon or early afternoon when the galleries are not crowded.  The show demands attention, because many of its pleasures are subtle, and you need to look closely, and with focus, at the images.   

It's hard to identify highlights in the exhibition because its general quality is so high.  Several works by the South  African William Kentridge, probably one of the most interesting artists working today, stand out as particularly fine.  The Picasso nudes are exquisite -- each curve and line seems somehow destined.  There are a number of excellent drawings from the German expressionist period including sketches by Max Beckmann, Pechstein, Otto Dix, and Grosz.  More modern German art is represented by a good, characteristic Baselitz (with his trademark inverted figure), an interesting portrait sketch by Anselm Kiefer, and a large and cheerfully obscene drawing with Pop Art elements by Sigmar Polke.  Fine drawings by Arshile Gorky and Matta are also on show.  (Matta's little surrealist personages are particularly amusing and grotesque:  the title to one of the works on show illustrates the importance of the comma:  the work is entitled "People eating, a cat, and musicians").  There are several exquisite works by a woman named Marlene Dumas, an artist of whom I had no knowledge, that are very remarkable:  one of them shows Marilyn Monroe being interrogated by House Unamerican Affairs Committee -- a shadow frieze of male profiles hovers over Monroe's gilded hair. Similarly, unfamiliar to me is a California artist named Rowan Pope -- he works in the genre of photo-realism, but his pictures, which are very ambitious (one shows the liberation of Buchenwald; another illustrates Kafka's The Trial) are virtuoso displays of draftsmanship, the work demystified, as it were, by margins deliberately left incomplete to show how the intricate images were constructed from graphite applied layer upon layer. 

The aesthetic displayed by this collection, it must be said, is at odds with the prevailing ideology at the WAC.  About half of these works are politically incorrect:  many of the big nudes have the aura of being odalisques -- in fact, there is a Matisse work that seems explicit on that point.  Some of the sex scenes seem casually exploitative.  The WAC curators don't hector the viewers except with respect to one work that presses hard against the current limits of political correctness:  This is a 1967 drawing by Christo, a sketch of a nude woman who has been wrapped in something like cellophane.  The drawing arises from a party at a mansion on the hill overlooking the WAC -- Christo had come to town to mount an exhibition and two models were hired to attend the party in the nude.  (Christo, of course, is famous for wrapping things -- later, he was to wrap a mile of sea-shore in  Australia and the Reichstag in Berlin.  At the party the naked girls were gift-wrapped as a present to the artist.  The sketch shows one of the women wrapped up at the party and a photograph in the catalog shows the two of them at the gathering.  A bit sternly, the curator tells us via wall label that after this party, Christo adjusted he attitudes about "objectifying women."  But almost all women shown in the exhibit are objectified in one way or another -- that's really the nature of the aesthetic underlying this show.  The WAC recently has gone "all in" for conceptual art that is intrinsically (and, often, irritatingly) political in natures.  But this show, full of works that are simply beautiful has no political agenda and raises only a few conceptual issues -- by and large, it's an "old school" exhibit of beautifully made things. 

Until the End of the World

Working in about ten different countries, between 1990 and 1991, the German director Wim Wenders produced Until the End of the World.  Wenders had gained international fame with his thrilled The American Friend based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith.  On the strength of this film, he was invited to Hollywood where he failed on a colossal scale -- his picture Hammett, made for Francis Coppola, was re-edited by the studio, repudiated by Wenders, and lost vast sums of money.  Wenders went back to making lower budget European films, including the wonderful The State of Things (1982) about a film crew near Lisbon that runs out of money while shooting a science fiction saga.  After a few years, Wenders was again "bankable" and had sufficient money (20 million dollars) to make the elaborate, globe-trotting Until the End of the World.  The film's final cut was something like five-and-a-half hours and, of course, the studios who had financed the picture were appalled.  They demanded cuts.  Ultimately, the film was released in 1994 in a three-hour version that was derided as completely incoherent, solipsistic, and self-indulgent.  Wenders had failed again, once more on a huge scale.  He returned to making much lower budget films and remains active today -- his documentary about Pina Bausch and her Wuppertal Tanz Theater was an international hit a few years ago.  (Wenders who is intensely interested in the technology of film shot that movie in 3D.)  Thought to be a lost film for almost thirty years, Wenders was able to restore the picture in 2015 and it has been released in four-and-a-half hour version by Criterion.  At its full length, the movie is an eccentric, frustrating, and, often astonishing, revelation.

Until the End of the World is nominally science fiction, set in "the future" -- that is, 1999.  The last scenes in the picture take place around the turn of the millennium, New Year's 2000. The picture has been released on two discs and, in fact, the film divides neatly into two diametrically opposed halves.  Everything in the first half is effectively repudiated by the second half.  Wenders has a superb eye for landscapes, both urban and wild, and the picture is extremely beautiful.  The acting is, often, laughably bad -- but there is a method to Wenders' madness.  The "bad" acting highlights the unreal nature of "images" and, ultimately, the picture is about a world threatened with destruction through a torrential flood of images.  Wenders has a complex, and sometimes not fully coherent, relationship with American pop (and pulp) culture.  To an American, popular culture is simply the sea in which we swim -- comic books, rock and roll, bad movies, bad TV are all taken for granted.  Wenders', despite his bad boy antics in the late sixties and early seventies, is a cultured European, a German who has made films based on novels by Goethe (his picture 1975's Wrong Movement -- Falsche Bewegung  is based on Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre).  To Wenders, American pop culture isn't self-evident -- rather, it is a strange, anarchic intrusion into the civilized, if moribund, world of European culture. In films like Alice in the Cities (1974), American pop tunes have a hypnotic, but alienating, effect.  Wenders' problematic, overly cerebral approach to the artifacts of American pop culture is on display in the extremely chaotic and rebarbative first couple hours of the film -- Wenders is adapting film noir acting and style in a particularly frantic and allusive manner.  To an American, film noir is normative -- it's something that we grew up with both in the movies and on TV.  To a European, the situation is more complex.  To immerse one's self in film noir for Wenders is like a Norwegian singing African-American blues -- there is an aspect of problematic cultural appropriation combined with an element that seems like parody but which is actually much more complicated.  (This is not to say that Wenders can't make a perfectly serviceable film noir -- his American Friend, in fact, is a classic of the genre.)  The effect of the first half of Until the End of the World is that of a pastiche imitating a parody imitating a comic parody, like something broadcast on Saturday Night Live -- the film's narrative is so distant from reality that it seems wholly contrived.  But, as we shall see, this is part of Wenders' strategy.

Wenders' 1999 is a dystopian fantasy, equal parts 1984 and Blade Runner -- people tool around in sleek torpedo-shaped vehicles that are actually just motorcycles in a metal shell shaped like a snow peapod.  Both men and women wear absurd crescent-shaped hats and dress in blouses and tunics made of shiny bangles that look like chainmail.  The sinister characters seem to have sauntered into the picture from The Maltese Falcon -- they all wear boxy suits and Sam Spade hats.  The city streets are lurid with graffiti and there are always people fighting or grappling in the background.  Everyone uses pay video-phone booths to talk to one another and people also carry valise-sized phones with screens.  In some cities, you have to pay a vehicle tax to enter the downtown area and, in Berlin, you have to rent a bicycle since cars are not allowed in the crumbling urban center.  Instead of an EU,  all countries maintain their own currency and, despite the characters rambling about the whole world, the cities all seem, more or less, the same.  As with all science fiction, some of this is prescient, some of it silly and stupid, some scenes convincing and others not so much.

The plot concerns a beautiful young woman named Claire (Solveig Dommartin) who has been sleeping around too much under the influence of too many "designer drugs" with too much Euro-trash in Venice.  (Venice's canals are afflicted by crowds of assholes on jet-skis).  Claire literally wakes up as the film begins, sprawled on a bed at some wild party.  She wanders away from the party, finds her car (which is guided by proto-GPS) and decides to travel to Rome.  Along the way, she contacts her boyfriend, Gene (Sam Neill) who lives in Paris and is writing a novel -- he narratives the film.  After passing through some picturesque tunnels, she finds the road blocked.  Everyone is fearful that a space satellite is going to crash to the earth at some random location and cause chain reactions that will destroy the planet.  When the road is closed due to fear the satellite will fall nearby, Claire literally goes off the map, driving over a high mountain pass and crossing a desolate plateau that looks like Tibet.  She gets into a car crash with the only other vehicle on the road for fifty miles -- the other car happens to be operated by a cheerful thug named Chico and his badly wounded boss, shot through the belly.  These guys have robbed a bank and are fleeing to Paris.  The gangster's car isn't drive-able and so Claire and the crooks make the next desolate hamlet in her vehicle and there decide the young woman will carry the money to Paris in exchange for 30%.  The money exists in about forty different currencies.  Around St. Etienne, Claire picks up a hitchiker who calls himself McFee; his real name is Sam Farber (William Hurt).  Farber has a strange camera that he uses to record events.  His eyes also seem to be wounded somehow and failing.  Claire has a boyfriend played by the long-suffering Sam Neill (he apparently is willing to put up with Claire's affairs and drug use).  In Paris, Claire reunites with her boyfriend.  But the hitchhiker, Sam Farber, with the peculiar camera steals her satchel full of money.  She, then, hires a gumshoe, Mr. Winter, played by Ruediger  Vogeler, in a very mannered performance -- he is playing a parody of a parody of a Dashiell Hammet character, perhaps, in revenge for Wenders' calamitous effort at making an  American film noir, the picture he directed for Francis Coppola's American Zoetrope, Hammeit.  Winter is supposed to find Farber in exchange for a commission from the stolen money.  Claire notices that Farber is being  pursued by a black man, possibly an aborigine, and we learn that Farber, in fact, stole a precious opal from a mine at Coober Peedy in Australia.and may be on the run for that reason.  Meanwhile, the cheerful thug, Chico, one of the bank robbers, picks up the scent and starts chasing Claire as well.  The story, then, ricochets around Europe with various permutations of people chasing one another -- Claire and Winter are chasing Farber, Farber is also pursued by the black detective, Gene, the Paris-based novelist (and Chico) pursue Claire and  Gene catches up to her from time-to-time, only to be abandoned when she takes the Transiberian Express to Beijing.  In the course of these adventures, Claire falls in love with Farber after having sex with him in Lisbon.  They end up traveling together in China and, then, Japan where Farber goes blind.  The couple on the lam flee to a remote mountain village where Farber's vision is restored by a Japanese herbal healer played by Chisu Ryu (now an old man, about 90 when the film was made, he is most famous for appearing in many Ozu films -- Wenders reveres Ozu.)  The couple then travel to San Francisco where Farber uses his odd camera to record an encounter with his sister.  We learn that the camera somehow records the biochemical transaction in the brain that constitutes seeing and can be used to help the blind actual regain some semblance of vision -- Farber is making recordings of everything in the world for his mother who is blind.  (Thus the gorgeous Vermeer-lighting in the interview with his sister.)  The camera for the blind has one bad side-effect, which seems vehemently symbolic -- it causes blindness in the person who uses it.  In the first half of the film, sequences have been set in Venice, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Tokyo, a mountainous resort in Japan, and San Francisco.  There have been various close-calls, short and long car chases, a sequence in which Claire and Farber are fettered together and have to flee through Lisbon's medieval alleys, lots of portentous dialogue about the imminent end of the world and much incredibly beautiful footage of canals, mountains and mist, ancient cities, tightly crowded trains, and urban slums. (The characters never have enough money and they are always staying in picturesquely squalid motels full of brawling extras under radiant sunset skies.)

With the cheerful thug, Chico, Sam and Claire take a Korean trawler to Australia.  We next see them in Coober Peedy, a limitless plain scoured by red gravel roads and countless craters from which gems have been mined.  The town is little more than tin shacks and some hangars where Sam and Claire with an aboriginal mechanic are fixing a small Cessna plain, apparently the most efficient way to travel to where Sam's parents operate a sort of mission among the desert dwelling natives.  Of course, Mr. Winter with his harmonica and Gene, the novelist played by Sam Neill arrive on the scene, occupying a huge rented RV somewhat similar to the vehicle housing the maniacal accountant on Sunset Boulevard in The State of Things. Gene and Sam get into a fistfight and are jailed; Winter has to bail them out.  The aboriginal detective tracking Sam on account of his opal theft also shows up in town, administers sleeping pills to Claire and chains her to the door of the Cessna, seemingly planning to come back later with the authorities to claim his bounty on her.  Sam gets the battered Cessna operating and with Claire takes off -- they travel a hundred km or so and, then, abruptly the engine fails.  Every electro-magnetic system in the world simultaneously ceases operation -- this is said to be the result of the United States firing a nuclear missile to destroy the Indian satellite threatening to crash to earth.  Sam has to crash-land the plane and. with Claire still chained to the door, (they unhinge it and she has to carry it in her arms), they set off across the desert.  After suffering some privations, they make it to a road where some folks are still mobile, driving old vehicles with crank transmissions that continue to work.  In the middle of nowhere, they encounter blind Edith Farber nee Eisner (after Lotte Eisner, I assume), Sam's mother with her native friend, Maisie.  Edith Farber is played by an indomitable-looking Jeanne Moreau, very pale and cranky in the broiling sun of the Australian outback.  Sam, Claire and his mother travel to a place called the Mbuntua Cultural Center, a magical oasis where there is a limpid spring cradled between tall heaps of sun-fractured red rock.  This is where Sam's father, played by Max von Sydow (also pale-looking, gaunt, and crabby), is conducting experiments in his cave laboratory.  Dr. Farber is an archetypal obsessed mad scientist and his lab is a state-of-the-art update of the crazy machines and weird electrical equipment that Dr. Frankenstein used to animate his monster.  The devices are installed on platforms in a cave with smooth interior surfaces decorated with aboriginal paintings -- it's like a kind of womb or looping small intestine and there's a huge transparent vat with glowing equipment submerged inside, strange little nooks and crannies within the intestinal chambers, diverticula you might say, as well as altar-like beds with huge horseshoe magnets at their heads.  This is where Farber intends to inject the images recorded on the strange camera operated by Sam into the blind woman's brain.  There are various malfunctions and the mad doctor curses at his son for his lack of attention.  Ultimately, Claire, who seems to be a clearer thinker and more capable of focusing on her memories, is recruited into the project and, at first, she is more successful than her lover in the "second viewing" project -- that is, creating biochemical reactions in Edith's brain that will create the simulacra of actual vision.  (The visions we are reminded have been recorded as images in the brain-camera and, now, are really further distorted because they are memories.).  The sequence at the mad scientist's Utopian community is about ninety minutes long and is the exact opposite of the film's first 2  1/2 hours -- in these extended scenes almost nothing happens.  The first half of the film involved frantic travels, "the ultimate road movie" as Wenders pitched the project to the money-men.  But the second half of the movie is very still, tethered to a spectacular exterior location and an equally spectacular cavernous mad scientist's laboratory.  Wenders has now shifted gears entirely and the film takes on a strange, utterly becalmed mood -- it is very much like the similarly becalmed scenes that were the best thing in The State of Things, the actors and crew members in that film getting drunk together, engaging in desultory sexual encounters, playing cards and walking along cold wintry beaches while the director of the science fiction film that they have been making goes to Lisbon first and, then, Hollywood to try to procure funding to finish the picture.  In Until the End of the World, all of the characters gradually assemble at the magical green oasis.  Gene and his sidekick, Mr. Winter, appear as does Chico and, even, the black aboriginal detective.  Ultimately, everyone in the movie is gathered together and we see, slowly developing, two alternate visions of how people should interact -- Mr. Winter, Gene, the detective, Chico, with a couple of Australians, including a skinny guy missing an arm, all form a band and spend their time rehearsing next to the green, limpid waters of the oasis.  In the cave, the mad scientist has made human beings into kinds of animate movie cameras and strange experiments take place with respect to the production of images.  Edith dies on New Year's Eve 1999, perhaps, exhausted by the experiments with injecting images into her brain.  There is a native burial service conducted by the aboriginal women -- Edith actually came to the oasis forty years earlier to study the women's societies among these native people.  Dr. Farber, who was in love with her followed -- he was, at that time, a great opthalmogist and spent years eradicating trachoma among the natives.  Alone, Dr. Farber becomes increasingly unhinged.  He embarks on his most perilous experiment yet -- "there are lines that should not be crossed," his lab assistant, a sort of pale,ferret-faced Igor says portentously.  Farber is now recording people's dreams and playing them back on computer monitors.  We have learned that the world did not perish. Gradually, the electro-magnetic web is restored.  After a kind of concert, Mr. Winter, Chico, the detective, and the rest of the Australians leave the oasis.  Sam and Claire have become increasingly immersed in their dreams -- they are now half-comatose sprawled in corners of the cave which has become a literal dream factory.  (At this point, Wenders' allegorical intentions seem clear.)  Both Sam and Claire become media-obsessed -- they spend every waking hour watching the playback of their dreams.  Finally, Gene kidnaps Claire and takes her to an open pen where strange white birds, mostly invisible, are constantly making derisive calls.  He locks her in the cage with the dream-playback device now inoperative -- it's batteries have failed.  It's like weaning a drug addict from heroin.  While she rages and bellows, he quietly types out a novel about her adventures.  He gives her the novel to read and the words effect her cure -- she is no longer addicted to images of her dreams.  Dr. Farber is captured by the CIA who want to know the secrets of his Second Viewing apparatus -- apparently, they torture him to death.  Sam Farber gets lost in an amazing labyrinth of eroded red hoodoos.  His aboriginal brother cures him of his obsession with dreams by having him sleep between two native holy men.  He sits in a barren eroded river-course and carefully draws a picture of a rock labeled helpfully "rock."  Later, we see Sam and Claire meeting in Tosca's in San Francisco -- but this is revealed to be just an alternative ending to Gene's novel that he discards.  Describing the second half of the film, Gene writes:  "In the beginning was the Word.  In the end, there will be nothing but images and there may be no cure for this disease of images."

Wenders' film accordingly consists of two parts.  In the first part, we see a world of images parsed by other images, the genre of the film noir and road movie mashed together, in an unreal spectacle of constant, frenetic motion.  The last half of the film is the opposite of the movie's first part -- it takes place in a single location where the characters are at loose ends, where nothing much happens, and where two models for human interaction (and community) are dramatized:  the scientific endeavor which ultimately leads to calamity and the gradual establishment of the eight-member musical ensemble that performs at the New Year's Eve party 1999 to 2000.  You can have science or music, the film suggests.  Movies are a combination of both science and music.   And, indeed, Until the End of the World, a complete catastrophe as a movie (never even screened in its entirety) spawned a CD that was an enormous international success -- the film's soundtrack, much of it commissioned for the picture, includes U2, REM, Patty Smith, Julee Cruise (as produced by David Lynch and Angelo Baldamenti), Lou Reed, kd lang and numerous other luminaries.  In the film, the team working in the dream factory, that is, the would-be scientists succumbs to insanity -- all science, perhaps, but particularly the science of the movies, is a form of "mad science".  The cave set, which is clearly a soundstage somewhere, represents the madman's laboratory from which film's come -- the embodiment of people's dreams.  The more successful the film, the more it diminishes life.  Seeing, Wenders suggests, is a zero-sum game.  The more you see, perhaps, the less you know and the more time you spend peering into your electronic screens, the less life is available to you.  The movie is incredibly prescient with respect to the plague of images that now afflicts us.  The scenes of Dr.  Farber, Claire, and Sam mesmerized and motionless while peering into their small hand-held screens are extraordinary.  Wenders longest and most expensive and most elaborately produced movie turns out to be a cautionary tract about movies -- better that you read poetry (one of the characters carries a copy of Walt Whitman's poems) or novels than go to the movies.  Images make the blind see, but they also fabulously addictive -- cell-phones, designed to keep you in touch with the world, in fact, abstract from real life and can addict you to images that are ultimately destructive.  The long second half of the film is designed to cancel out the delirious chase sequences in the first half of the movie.  Images span the world in the first part of the film; the second part of the picture is an allegory as to the destructive impact of allowing pictures to take over our lives.

Wenders Until the End of the World is ultimately an immense and self-destructive cult film.  Very few people will see the movie.  Most will tune it out during the frenzied parody that is the movie's first half.  But the picture takes a radical turn in its last two hours, develops self-critical muscles, and, then, in effect throttles itself.  And this is all while serving up a lush and extraordinary banquet of images accompanied by equally absorbing rock and roll.  In Wenders' masterpiece, 1976's Im Lauf der Zeit ("Kings of the Road" in this country), two men, one of them suicidal, travel from movie theater to movie theater in a German wasteland that looks like North Dakota -- they are trying to salvage old movie projectors, repairing them for the tiny, generally abandoned theaters in small hamlets.  The films projected are mostly John Ford Westerns and the movie depicts the inadequacy of film images to provide any meaning to the denuded and war-ravaged landscape.  All the men have is American pop culture ("the Yanks have colonized our subconscious" one of them laments), but this culture, rock and roll and American Westerns, isn't enough.  The more time you spend in the dark watching movies, the less time you spend living.  Until the End of the World takes these themes and develops them on a truly epic scale.  It's a necessary movie but one that is maddening to watch.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

I staggered out of Star Wars:  the Rise of Skywalker (2019) with the dismal sense that my brain had been sucked free of any interesting ideas and, somehow, my I. Q. (not too impressive to begin with) had been badly compromised.  The movie is a vast soul-destroying engine and it diminishes you. 

The film is the last installment in a series of pictures running on a yearly basis, it seems, since about 1977 -- if I remember correctly there was a hiatus of about twenty years between the first three installments and later iterations.  Apparently, the story fits together in some arcane way, generally it seems on the basis of genetics - all the main characters seem to be related to one another somehow, although this is as obscure as the family tree in a big Russian novel:  you've got lots of outlandish names, hidden relationships, etc.  Furthermore, chronologies get confused because no one ever really dies -- people seem to die but get brought back to life and, then, hang around as holograms or intrusive memories for generations.   The main characters are hard-wired into the Force, an all-powerful source of miracles of all kinds -- this strips all confrontations of any meaning:  if the characters mostly have omnipotence, know everything across parsecs of light-years, and can exercise mind-over-matter at will while resurrecting the dead, nothing has any stake at all.  All of the action seems to be a vain soap-bubble of fantasy in which omnipotent immortals indulge themselves in picturesque landscapes.  There is never any suspense, because we know no one can be permanently killed.  Now and then, a planet and all of its fauna and flora get blown to pieces -- but this is of no more consequence than swatting a mosquito.

Star Wars: The Rise of Starwalker begins with a long title full of impenetrable information but beginning with the characteristic expression:  The Dead Speak!  As I have said, in the Star Wars universe no one really gets to die --  in fact, they can't die because they are just manifestations of undying pantheistic or pan-diabolic forces.  This is evident even in the actors.  One of the characters is played by a prominent actress who died of a drug overdose about a year before this film was made.  The actress is still hard-at-work in this film, somehow revivified to play an important role in the movie.  (As a  lawyer, I would like to see the contract with the corpse or its family as to how this apparition gets paid -- presumably, the same way dead Alec Guinness got paid for his many post-mortem cameos in this series.)  As usual the Universe is at risk.  An emperor named Palpatine, thought to have died in an earlier episode, has now apparently been resurrected and he is causing all sorts of mischief through the agency of the guy who started off as Lena Dunham's boyfriend in Girls.  Adam Driver has to play the bad guy, Kyle Ren, I think, presumably because he has somewhat saturnine features and long black hair.  He is massing his dark forces on some planet with a name like Ezekal (at least this is how it sounds.).  None of the good guys know how to find Ezekal.  This triggers a noisy chase and hunt for a MacGuffin -- the magic navigator that will lead the good guys to the evil force's lair.  (The magic navigator is rather prosaically called a "Way Finder crystal.")  For the first two-thirds of the film, the good guys chase around trying to locate the "Way Finder".  Finally, Rey, a spunky young woman, locates the navigator only to have Kyle Ren demonstrate the utter unimportance of this plot point by crushing the crystal in his fist.  No matter, the good guys ultimately find the mystery planet and launch an all-out assault that is supposed to combine elements of the Battle of Midway and the miracle of Dunkirk.  There's vast slaughter of bad guys, hecatombs of white and black clad Storm Troopers are massacred at no cost to the good guys -- not one of them dies except the poor superannuated Princess who has to die because the actress who impersonates her perished from a drug overdose on a Transatlantic flight.  As far as I can remember no one else dies except for Kyle Ren, the Byronic bad guy,  and I'm not whether he was brought to life in the end -- I don't think so, but I can't remember for certain.   

There is no plot just a series of chases and light-saber duels tacked together.  Whenever a plot contrivance is required, the narrative simply invents something to keep things moving forward.  Space ships appear out of nowhere, are sucked out of the briny deep, and there are things like magic medallions that can be used to access fortresses and flying battleships.  Long dead characters appear from time to time to encourage the living.  Everyone labors under a sort of blood taint -- that is, everyone has questionable genealogy and people are always waiting with baited breath for their bad side to manifest.  Ultimately Kyle Ren, the bad guy, and Rey, the good heroine (who are, I think, brother and sister maybe?) have a big duel on the wreckage of the Death Star, now swamped by titanic waves on some kind of icy water-world.  This planet is inhabited, on its  shores, by comely Black warrior women who ride some kind of mastodon-horses.  Someone gets killed in the light saber duel but is obligingly brought to life because the movie has another half-hour to go.  Once again Rey and Ren end up with light swords drawn in some kind of enormous underground amphitheater full of colossal statues of villains and a vast mob of hooded figures who seem gathered for some kind of primordial Nuremberg Rally.  While Rey and Ren are dueling with the Emperor Palpatine, an old gent with grey skin and cataracts in his eyes, a giant celestial battle is taking place overhead between the armadas of the good Force arrayed against  the gigantic aerial battleship and its hordes of fighter jets.  For reasons that make no sense at all, Rey is supposed to harness her hatred to kill Palpatine and, thus, become the new Empress of the Dark Side.  (It's not clear how this is supposed to happen but the cataract-impaired Emperor harangues the heroine about killing him, demanding that she deliver the coup-de-grace.)  The whole movie has progressed to this point where the heroine is supposed to kill the bad Emperor.  But now she can't because, for some reason, this will make her bad.  So she doesn't kill the old man and, then, there's another huge duel involving the Emperor and Rey, now assisted by her brother, Ren, who has suddenly renounced evil and become a good guy.  Rey has two light sabers which are apparently twice as strong as one light saber in the wretched calculus of this film.  With her two light sabers (one would have been insufficient), she defeats the evil Emperor and kills him.  The audience is completely baffled.  Wasn't he pleading with her to kill him just three minutes earlier?  Anyway, he gets his wish and the flotilla of evil, black battleships fall flaming to the ground and, many light years away, poor Princess Leia finally gets to die once and for all.  Rey and Ren kiss and it looks like there is going to be some kind of incest on display, but, then, Ren solves the narrative problem by dying of undisclosed causes.  Everyone rejoices except for the bad guys who are all dead and mere molten slag.  Ren goes to some desert planet where there is a decrepit igloo and there announces to the world that her last name is....(wait for it!)... "Skywalker."  I've left out lots of amusing byplay with robots (they play the role of frisky and heroic German shepherds in this film), at least four or five sequences involving people on aerial jet-skis threading slot canyons or narrow fissures and innumerable battles both large and small.  It's all very frantic and violent.  (An entire planet that seems to have been designed by Piranesi gets blown to atoms.)  A couple of scenes signify how bad this movie really is:  in one scene, Ren heroically scales a vast escarpment of twisted metal and carbonized struts -- she almost falls several times and we are thrilled to see her catch herself and continue her brave ascent.  But we have earlier seen that she can fly.  So why doesn't she just fly up to the top of the metal wreckage and spare herself all this arduous and pointless climbing?. At one point, Poe, who is a grinning fly-boy out of World War II propaganda,, crashes his jet rocket-plane on a hillside.  A woman riding a mastodon-horse appears and makes a snarky remark:  "I've seen better landings," she says.  "I've seen worse," Poe replies as if this is clever repartee -- of course, we've seen about three-hundred worse landings (they are called fiery crashes).  It's completely idiotic and, begs this question, "Why did the supposedly competent pilot crash the rocket in the first place?"  You keep expecting some plot point to arise from the crashed rocket, but if this ever happens it occurs so much later that we don't register that the rocket had to be repaired.  The horrible truth is that the impressive special effect showing the crashed rocket seems to exist to support the exchange of supposedly witty, but, actually, moronic dialogue.  Later, when a attack force lands on the enemy battleship to knock out some kind of guidance system (query:  why don't they just bomb the system?), the warrior women riding mastodons attack with Poe at the lead.  At this point, even the feckless scriptwriters of this nonsense seem to be confused.  How did Poe learn to ride mastodon-horse?  One of the warrior women cries out:  "Not bad for only your second try!" referring to the aplomb with which the guy rides the mastodon-horse.  "I had a good teacher!" Poe replies.  (I maybe have Poe confused with someone else -- but you get the gist.)  The screenplay is like something written in crayon by third-graders. 

Toward its end, the film expresses a curious notion.  Each person is the sum total of thousands of generations preceding them and, therefore, all are embodied in one.  One person contains the universe.  And, so, I suppose that all my heroic efforts in writing this review and over a thousand other reviews will be rewarded if I persuade just one person not to pay $8.09 cents to see this film.  That one person will represent  multitudes both born and unborn who will spared the mindless and noisy tedium of this picture.