The Green Fog

 Guy Madden's The Green Fog (2017) demonstrates a quasi-theological proposition:  for cineastes, Hitchcock's Vertigo is the Holy Grail, or, perhaps, the Holy Writ of film-making, the world's greatest picture.  Madden's movie proves that Vertigo contains all films ever made in San Francisco; conversely, The Green Fog demonstrates that every movie produced in San Francisco contains,at its core, Hitchcock's Vertigo.  The name for this theorem, abolishing distinctions between Vertigo and every other film featuring San Francisco, is "the green fog" -- a poisonous-looking mist that periodically seethes over the images, blurring them into an apocalyptic viridian smudge.  The green fog is not only a name for the phenomenon that makes all Frisco films Vertigo but, also, a science fiction peril, a meteorological system that swirls over the Bay area on the West Coast, a threat that is closely monitored by a phalanx of journalists bearing notepads and observed as well by scientists and gum shoes peering at video monitors and screens on which dozens of films are projected. 

The Green Fog, a movie that is about an hour long, is comprised entirely of fragments of film and TV footage edited into a series of meditations and variations on episodes in Vertigo.  The movie is constructed chronologically -- a viewer that is familiar with Vertigo (and Madden assumes that everyone watching the picture will have this basic knowledge) can detect the narrative outline of the Hitchcock film in The Green Fog, scenes spliced into the sequence in which the story proceeds in the 1958 thriller.  For instance, Madden's prologue shows us the advance of the green fog toward San Francisco, these eerie sequences intercut with a montage of men fleeing across rooftops in that city.  (Here, Hitchcock's source material appears only as the famous shot of the hand grasping a rail that initiates Vertigo and the deadly rooftop pursuit, and, then, I think in a flash of footage a dozen cuts later that is projected in black and white -- as far as I can determine, Madden usually incorporates the technicolor imagery from Vertigo into his film in black and white format, thereby defamiliarizing imagery that would otherwise probably dominate his film.)  After the prologue, there's a section called "Weekend at Ernie's" -- this part of Madden's film shows, among other things, Joseph Cotten in a wheelchair (simulating Jimmy Stewart's convalescence in Vertigo), then, a series of shots showing cars prowling after one another on the vertical San Francisco streets (Jimmy Stewart pursuing Kim Novak in the Hitchcock movie), a series of grotesque-looking restaurant scenes, and lurid dialogue sequences, edited so that the characters seems always just about to speak or with their lips closing having finished some utterance that we don't hear.  (There's a suitably tense and jagged score played by the Kronos quartet over the footage --except for a few moments in the movie, there's no natural sound and no dialogue, although we are treated to some amplified Foley effects:  bird calls, footsteps, the hiss of wind and waves, and, sometimes, a fog horn.)   We see sequences shot in the old Mission cemetery, the picture gallery of the Legion of Honor museum with people staring fixedly at paintings, and, then, a flower shop (or a half-dozen flower shops) followed by red roses bobbing in the deadly currents off Fort Point.  This is followed by a montage of about 20 shots showing people falling into water (corresponding to Jimmy Stewart rescuing Kim Novak when she leaps off the stone pier into the Bay) -- some of this footage is weirdly beautiful, including images of bright yellow divers resting at the bottom of the sea and figures thrashing in the water.  The famous Muir Woods scene in Vertigo is refracted through images of what looks like a primitive music video shot in that forest (there's a single flash of a shot from Hitchcock), this imagery carefully scrutinized by Rock Hudson studying video monitors -- the most obvious and persistent source for Madden's found footage is the old TV show McMillan and Wife.)  A gangster dips his bread in coffee -- then, we see a dozen couples in cars that are racing along the Coast Highway.  The road ends at a lighthouse from which about ten different figures seem to fall into an abyss.  The next section in the film is called "Catatonia" and represents the interlude between the death of the woman that Jimmy Stewart loves in Vertigo and his obsessive effort to resurrect her ending in her second death, as it were, when she falls from the bell-tower at the Mission Dolores.  In this part of the movie, the green fog gradually envelopes San Francisco, sometimes, also portrayed as a huge sea beast smashing the Golden Gate Bridge into pieces.  The green fog  refers to the remarkable scene in Vertigo in which Kim Novak, remade as the hero's lost love, emerges from the bathroom of her hotel room and is bathed in a supernatural green light -- a peculiar effect in Hitchcock's film that creates a rapturous if queasy effect that is almost impossible to define. (It's hard to imagine how Hitchcock came up with this peculiar visual notion).  There is a montage of sinister weeping clowns, then, beautiful women revealed in opening doors.  A series of erotic scenes follow and, then, there is the nightmarish drive in the dark down the coastal highway again, twenty shots of men dragging women up steep steps with the apparition of the Golden Gate Bridge looming over the city in the background.  We see the lighthouse again and a nun appears suddenly on a terrace.  More bodies plunge from heights of various descriptions,, corpses landing with an unconvincing thud.  An earthquake is underway.  The fog is drowning the city.  Flames envelope collapsing buildings and green smoke billows over everything.  There's a brief epilogue of a ferry crossing the Oakland Bay and some young lovers making eyes at one another.  

"What are we looking for?" Rock Hudson says as the Tv detective McMillan.  "I don't know," he replies answering his own question.  "but at this point, I'll take anything."  The Green Fog is comprised of probably about 400 snippets of film from pictures as disparate as Mel Brooks' High Anxiety (we see Brooks falling through the famous Saul Bass graphics of whirling spirals that comprise Vertigo's opening credits) to von Stroheim's Greed.  Madden and his team seem to have carefully studied every film and TV show ever set in San Francisco.   Obviously, they couldn't secure the rights to some pictures.  For instance, John Boorman's Point Blank is represented by the famous shot of a man's feet walking as the sound track snaps with the percussion of his heels tapping against the airport tiles -- Madden doesn't use the shot from Point Blank but cuts into the montage a similar image of boots on a floor amplifying the sound of the steps on his soundtrack to simulate the Boorman movie.  Throughout the picture, the editing is stunningly inventive -- a montage of gems and necklaces, for instances, is a surrogate for the scene in the Hitchcock film in which the hero discovers jewelry that the supposedly dead heiress once wore.  Often, Madden matches eyelines to create complex narrative schemata implying plot lines between movies that were made fifty years apart.  The famous scene of Donald Sutherland screaming as one of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (with alarming reaction shots) corresponds to the moment when Jimmy Stewart recognizes that he has been duped by Kim Novak's character -- the camera zooms into Sutherland's screaming mouth and, then, we are in a tunnel zooming away from San Francisco on the Coastal Highway heading toward the fatal denouement of the Hitchcock film.  The film's metaphysic is that Vertigo is somehow immanent in all movies made in San Francisco and, perhaps, in all narrative movies ever made -- there are scary towers, heights, open graves, lovers pursuing one another and erotic embraces, people try to speak but are interrupted( (they seem to stammer but no words come out). masked faces appear and vanish, the sea surges against the coast at Monterrey and under the stone steps of Fort Point, men drag unconscious women out of the foaming waves and all of this is studied abstractly by figures screening movies or watching video monitors with their ears covered under headphones as they listen to bugged conversations.  Everyone is watching everyone else, spying, eavesdropping -- it's all voyeurism while the green fog rolls in off the sea.  In Madden's account, this is the essence of narrative film:  anguished faces, an embrace, someone falling over and over again into an abyss as a camera dispassionately watches on our behalf.      

 

Everything Goes Wrong

 Everything Goes Wrong is a Nikkatsu Studios "Sun Tribe" or juvenile delinquent film.  It's a raw exploitation film directed Seijun Suzuki.  The movie has a complex plot and is very short -- it's about 71 minutes long.  The viewer spends most of the movie trying to figure out that relationship between the characters and, once this is understood, the film is pretty much over.  Japanese movies pose a problem for me for two reasons:  first, to my eyes, many of the characters look alike and, on first viewing, I can't figure out who is who; second, I find it difficult to reliably assess the age of the characters -- women, in particular, who look very young to me turn out to be middle-aged; therefore, I sometimes interpret male-female couples as lovers or siblings when, in fact, the characters are mother and son.  This leads to a misconstructions of an interesting nature. (Confusion of this sort is integral to this film in which the boys all seem to be in strangely romantic relationships with their mothers.)  When the characters are given names, they often are unfamiliar, confusing, and hard to remember.  I suppose these admissions are tantamount to racism to which I am willing to plead guilty.  

Everything Goes Wrong is the story of a promising young man who is tempted into criminality.  This boy, Jiro Sugati, lives with his mother, a secretary at an insurance firm.  Jiro's mother, Masayo, has been the mistress of a Japanese industrialist for ten years.  The Japanese industrialist, Mr. Nambura, is married and works for a firm that built tanks during the War.  Jiro's mother is war widow and the boy's father was killed in New Guinea when a Japanese tank (built by Nambura's firm) ran over him.  The movie begins with the delinquents watching an earnest-looking Japanese war film Fight to the Last Drop of Blood.  The kids come out of the movie, blinking in the hot light of Tokyo mid-afternoon, and, in several long virtuosic shots wander around an urban landscape rife with sleazy bars, cluttered disreputable alleys, and sex hotels.  At first, there seem to be a welter of plots and subplots although the film fixes on three narratives:  Jiro's troubled relationship with his mother, Jiro's friendship with a boy who is not a good student and has had to drop out of school to work in the Mitsubishi factory, and Etsuko who is pregnant and trying to raise money for an abortion.  Etsuko has been living with a callous student named Ono but he has now abandoned her.  The kids are all vaguely affiliated with a gang that shakes down couples coming from the Sex Hotel, blackmailing them for chump change.  There are two kids who wear panama hats (confusingly) who seem to be car thieves.  From time to time, cars owned by Europeans or Americans get hijacked and, apparently, chopped  up for parts.  A nearby American military base is also a source of various kinds of corruption.  Jiro fights with his mother over her relationship with Mr. Nambura who the boy regards as a war profiteer.  He runs away from home and spends an afternoon with his old elementary school buddy now working at Mitsubishi.  The boys go on rides at an amusement park but Jiro, who is intensely proud, thinks his friend is being humiliated by his work at the factory and so flees from the kid in horror. (Jiro is also particularly horrified that the kid's mother is a retired geisha -- that is, a woman with a tarnished background.)  There's a tavern decorated with music posters -- it's bizarre:  Coleman Hawkins shares space on the wall with a French poster advertising a concert of the works of Faure.  Some local boys sing doo-wop in the joint and there's even a girl group that sounds a little like Martha and the Vandellas.  Juvenile delinquents use the bar as their headquarters and engage in lots of underage drinking and cigarette smoking.  The delinquents have molls who have been initiated into the gang by (literal) gang-rape.  One of these girls, now ruined by her association with gang, seduces Jiro.  He goes to her squalid digs and has sex with her, afterwards pitching a handful of coins on her bed.  The girl, Toshimo, is outraged -- she may be the plaything of the coltish gang of delinquents but she's no hooker.  At the bar, a cynical  journalist exchanges quips with the weary hostess; he's writing an expose of the juvenile delinquent gangsters.  As the title of the film overtly advises, everything goes wrong.  Mr. Nambura searches the mean streets for Jiro with whom he is hoping to reconcile.  But, instead, of finding Jiro, he runs into Etsuko who is desperate to earn enough money for her abortion.  Etsuko tells Mr. Nambura that Jiro is hiding out at the beach.  Mr. Nambura goes there with him and is sighted by Jiro.  Jiro runs back home and advises his mother that her boyfriend is two-timing her.  Then, Jiro takes his mother to the beach where Mr. Nambura is with Etsuko, who has now taken off her shirt and is frantically trying to get the businessman to have sex with her.  This reveal backfires on Jiro.  Jiro's mom, who is a bit of a door mat, takes the blame for Mr. Nambura's apparent sexual infraction (in fact, Nambura has virtuously rejected the girl's advances) as evidence of her own failings as a woman.  She falls on her knees and begs Nambura to take her back.  This sickens Jiro who hurries downtown where he picks up Toshimo, kisses her frantically, and, then, steals a car.  Meanwhile, poor Etsuko, still without cash for her abortion, hurls herself down a flight of steps leading to the subway, thereby inducing a miscarriage. (A student denounces Ono, Etsuko's callous boyfriend and pronounces the moral of the film: "Today good will can't exist between people any more."   Meanwhile, Mr. Nambura happens on the joyriding couple of Jiro and Toshimo and makes the mistake of hitching a ride with them.  The couple go back to Toshimo's miserable digs where they are about to have sex in front of the nonplussed Mr. Nambura.  (Nambura, by this point, has admitted that he was a war profiteer but claims he was forced into that enterprise by his greedy wife, the daughter of a prominent member of the military industrial complex.)  Out on the streets, a bunch of kids are protesting Japan's militarization and the H-Bomb.  Toshimo admits that as the moll in the gang, she's been complicit in securing other girls for the delinquents to rape.  She attaches her face to Jiro's cheek by a strand of adhesive chewing gum while the lad smokes disconsolately.  At last, Jiro takes a wrench (earlier brandished by Toshimo to threaten a malevolent gangster) and beats in poor Mr. Nambura's head.  Spattered with blood, Jiro goes to the stolen car and, with Toshimo pleading with him to stop, drives wildly through the crowded streets.  With a motorcycle cop chasing him, he crashes head on into a truck, thus killing himself and poor Toshimo.  In her apartment, Jiro's mother hears the sirens.  The hapless Mr. Nambura is still alive, although barely, and we see him wheeled into surgery.  At the bar, the cynical journalist says that he probably has enough materials for a pretty good story and says he'll make sure he mentions the sad, world-weary barmaid.  

The film resembles American movies like Rebel without a Cause.  As in that movie, the picture posits a world of feckless, emasculated middle-age men who are useless as role models for their sons.  (The hero's father in Rebel without a Cause wears an apron around the house as he does chores.)  The Japanese men are the victims of World War Two, literally defeated and traumatized.  There are no viable models for masculinity, the film seems to assert, and so young men fall into the trap of becoming gang-members -- at least, the violent gangs are run by men who don't seem to be passive eunuchs.  As in the American films, the pop-sociology is questionable at best and, at worst, pernicious hokum.  Everything Goes Wrong relies upon a half-dozen coincidental meetings -- in a city of many millions, Mr. Nambura keeps running into the young characters whose mishaps provide the motor for the plot.  The climax involving the car chase is cheaply shot and unimpressive -- it features some unconvincing rear-projection footage with inserts of the supposedly pursuing and implacable motor cycle.  The picture wants to blame the entire malaise in post-war Tokyo on World War Two, which may be convincing if simple-minded.  Suzuki's direction in this film is pretty restrained -- often, his films are very expressionistic and over-the-top.  The movie is probably better than it looks but I'm not persuaded that it's anything other than mediocre.  

The Firemen's Ball

The story goes that Czech film maker, Milos Forman, left Prague to finish a movie script with which he was having difficulty.  Forman holed-up in a small village in the country to work in solitude on the script.  One night, he attended a lottery and charity ball fundraiser for the local volunteer fire department.  The affair was so bizarre and corrupt that Forman could think of nothing else.  He abandoned his previous project and with Ivan Passer sketched a scenario for a satiric comedy based on the experience.  The resulting film, The Firemen's Ball was premiered in 1967.  Predictably, Czechoslovakian fire fighters protested the movie and called for it's boycott.  Nonetheless, the short film -- it's only 74 minutes long -- was a big hit in Czechoslovakia, sold 750,000 tickets and, then, was re-broadcast to much acclaim on Czech State TV in 1969.  Critics are accustomed to consider the film an allegory about the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, but Forman denied that intention and, indeed, the movie was never censored or suppressed by the Czech government, notwithstanding the violent Soviet-backed crack-down in 1968,  Forman wasn't being disingenuous.  The film's satire is general, corrosive, and applicable to pretty much any human polity.

The Firemen's Ball begins with the camera following a small ceremonial fire-axe that is passed from hand-to-hand.  A committee of about ten older men, most of them fat and homely (one has a Hitler moustache) are planning a charity ball and intend to bestow the ornate little axe on their former chairman, a handsome and dignified older fellow (he's 86) who is dying of cancer.  The action takes place in Socialist Palace of Culture in a small town.  A man perched on a tall ladder is foxing the edges of a big ornate banner showing firefighters heroically engaged in putting out a savage-looking house fire -- the home has big red flames surging out of its windows and the firefighters are clambering all over the structure in their rooster-comb hats carrying hatchets and hoses.  The man foxing the edges of the huge banner is using a torch for some reason and, of course, he lights the decorative scroll on fire.  It burns as he dangles in the air.  The firefighters try to put out the blaze but their extinguisher doesn't work and the thing burns to ashes.  (The fate of the firefighter dangling twenty feet in the air is left to our imagination.)

The ball ensues and takes up the majority of the film.  The Committee have gathered various items as prizes for a lottery.  Apparently, the people attending the Ball, which is packed to overflowing,, have purchased lottery tickets with the proceeds to benefit the local fire department.  The Committee also plans a beauty pageant with the notion that the winner will bestow the ceremonial axe on the old man as the guest of honor.  Everything goes wrong.  First, the Committee can't find any girls willing to participate in the humiliating beauty pageant.  Second, everyone gets drunk and people (including the firefighters) start stealing the lottery prizes, a motley assortment of objects such as toys, china figurines, and comestibles in the form of plum brandy, head cheese and a ham.  The beauty pageant is a calamity:  the girls, most of them definitely not conventional beauty queen candidates, refuse to go on-stage.  When the processional march is played for the beauty pageant, the old man who is very deaf thinks it's for him and he prematurely strides up to the stage to accept his honor.  Meanwhile, the homely girls have fled to the women's toilet and won't come out.  The Committee members, then, drag a half-dozen young women at random up on stage -- the girls are like the Sabine women: they have to be hauled kicking and screaming over the shoulders of the firefighters who drop them on the stage.  Before the beauty queen can be selected, a fire breaks out at a farmhouse near the ballroom.  The firefighters fail to put out the blaze.  All the guests at the Ball use the opportunity to evade paying their drink tabs.  (The bartenders from the Palace of Culture try to recoup their losses by selling wine and beer from a folding table next to the huge, blazing fire.)  The old man who lives in the house is saved as are a few chickens and goat. Later, the Committee gives the victim of the fire all of the lottery tickets as a donation,  But this also turns out to be futile.  When the crowd returns to the ball room, most of the lottery prizes have gone missing.  This is an outrage and so the Committee shuts off all the lights and asks people to show some decency and put back on the table the prizes that they have stolen.  When the lights are turned-on, only one person is trying to put his ill-gotten goods on the table -- this happens to be one of the Committee members who has stolen the head-cheese.  All of the remaining prizes have now gone vanished -- so the unfortunate farmer just gets a couple of baskets of ticket -- "these are just worthless craps of paper," he exclaims.  In an attempt to salvage the evening, the old man is invited to the dais to receive the ceremonial axe.  The old man delivers an eloquent and dignified speech thanking the committee for the honor.  But, when he opens the wooden casket, the ceremonial axe is missing.  The film ends with an overhead shot of the burned-out house.  The old farmer's bed is sitting outside in the snow.  One of the Committee members, who seems to be senile, crawls into bed with the farmer as it begins to snow.  

The film is grotesque and very funny.  The filmmaking is very fluent and self-assured -- almost all of the participants are non-professionals,  just town folk in the village where the movie was shot.  Although the film has an allegorical aspect, it's not exactly clear what Forman is referencing other than human cupidity and folly in general.  Accordingly, the picture stands as a convincing symbol for corruption of any kind you want to imagine -- open-ended enough that the film will mean different things to different people.  (If you want to see the movie as an allegory for the corruption of Trump's regime, for instance, the film can certainly be interpreted according to that rubric.)  The notion that the firefighters are vigorously stealing from one another at a Ball meant for their fiscal benefit and that their depredations occur at the same time a very real building is burning down has a nightmarish quality.  Kafka, it must be remembered, was Czech himself and there are certainly aspects of the story consistent with his mordant vision of human life. 

Army of the Dead

 Army of the Dead was released streaming on Netflix on Friday, May 21, 2021.  The big-budget zombie film streams in about 20 languages.  After watching the film, I counted the credits for versions in Indonesia, Latin American Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian and Russian, and about a half-dozen Asian languages with characters that I couldn't recognize.  The film's closing titles show several LIDAR operators.  This is a data-capture specialty not previously credited -- at least, in movies that I have seen.  (Apparently LIDAR is used to collect data points by reflecting laser beams off objects that are scanned.  The data points can, then, be downloaded into a computer and accessed to make three dimensional models of complex sets or, even, figures -- technicians, for instance, sometimes LIDAR animals so that they can be convincingly recreated by CGI.)  The movie credits identify two dog and wolf wranglers -- but I didn't recall any dogs or wolves in the movie (maybe, that footage was cut).  Zack Snyder directed but had two second-unit directors and each of these directors had several assistants.  The film was shot in LA, New Jersey, and Las Vegas.  A credit thanks the people of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico for their cooperation -- although none of the film takes place in New Mexico, presumably some of the impressive desert sequences may have been shot on the reservation.  When one of the co-stars on the film was accused of sexual misconduct, Snyder and Netflix replaced the actor with Tig Notaro, a Lesbian comic, and, someone with impeccably politically correct credentials.  (Snyder notes that it cost Netflix several million dollars to fix the problem --I assume that the actor accused of bad conduct had to be bought-out on his contract and that Notaro was able to demand a premium for her services.  A number of scenes were shot with the bad guy, but Snyder says that he was very careful, used lots of green screen processes, and so was able to substitute Notaro for the other actor without having to do much re-shooting.)  A movie like this is not really photographic -- it's essentially a complicated computer program in which actors pose against backgrounds manufactured out of pixels.  The CGI artists and operators occupy about two minutes of end-credit, densely printed blocks of type scrolling by on the screen.  It's all really marvelous but, perhaps, ultimately futile in some way that I can't quite define.

Army of the Dead has a pleasingly classical plot.  It's like Oceans 11 rebooted as a zombie film.  Las Vegas has been overrun by zombies -- I take it that there is a vestige of satire here.  The city has been walled-off by ramparts of storage containers ringing the spectacular ruins.  For some unknown reason, a prison camp holding immigrants and, possibly, political dissidents has been built right next to the zombie-infested city.  The US President has given orders to drop a nuke on Las Vegas on the 4th of July.  A sinister Japanese businessman plots to send of team of mercenaries into the city for the purpose of removing 200 million dollars stored in a casino vault -- the casino has two towers named Sodom and Gomorra.  The Japanese gangster recruits an ex-soldier named Scott Ward to lead the team planning to sneak into Las Vegas, evade the zombie hordes loitering around Sin City, and extract the fortune from the casino.  The first quarter of the movie involves building the team of renegades and outlaws crazy enough to undertake what may well be a suicide mission.  This part of the movie is redolent of The Seven Samurai -- Scott Ward looks up old war buddies and persuades them to join his team.  In the end, Scott has put together a motley band of ten warriors -- a fierce Latina named Cruz, Peters (Notaro), a crack helicopter pilot, Vanderrohe, a handsome and sardonic Black soldier, Mikey Guzman an internet sensation, famous for killing zombies on videos posted on-line -- Guzman comes to the party with two associates a punk girl and boy (a third guy backs out); these people are obviously just cannon-fodder.  The Japanese businessman sends one of his thugs with the team to keep an eye on them.  A German kid named Dieter is retained to do the safe-cracking.  There's a subplot involving a Coyote who smuggles people in and out of the zombie-town -- Coyote is also named Lily and she's a Frenchwoman.  Lily has smuggled an Indian immigrant into Las Vegas but, then, lost her in the chaos.  The immigrant, Gita, is friends with Kate, Scott Ward's estranged daughter and Kate insists on joining the Mission to hunt for her missing friend.  (Kate's presence allows Snyder to slow down the action for dull and maudlin scenes involving the girl's troubled relationship with her father.)  A prison guard at the Camp is recruited as well -- he's a wicked fellow who sexually harasses the female prisoners and he gets his comeuppance about five minutes after the wall around the city is breached by our heroes -- Lily feeds him to the buxom and shapely Queen Zombie in exchange for something like safe passage.  In zombie films, bad guys get to be spectacularly killed two times -- first by the zombies and, then, by the human heroes when the bad guy is reincarnated as a bloodthirsty member of the Army of the Dead.  Of course, our heroes have to operate under time pressure -- the city is going to be nuked in a day and, later, when the President decides it's bad taste to bomb the zombies on the 4th of July, he moves up the date for the holocaust.  Instead of 24 hours, our heroes now have only about forty minutes to complete their mission -- not coincidentally this is the last forty minutes of this two-hour and 28 minute gore-extravaganza.  

The movie is good for its genre with impressive sets and special effects.  The action sequences although confusingly edited are over-the-top with lots of exploding heads.  Zombies are killed with spikes through the skull, bashed to death, machine-gunned by the thousand, set on fire, crushed to pulp, and blown into scraps of bloody meat.  Predictably, the thug planted in the team by the Japanese businessman has a secret agenda and ends up betraying his colleagues.  One by one, the people on the team are killed and turn into zombies themselves.  Time runs short.  The City is nuked.  And so on.  The ending, supposedly surprising, is wholly predictable and doesn't make any sense.  There's some mildly sardonic dialogue, but the picture isn't bitter Swiftian satire of the kind that we find in George Romero's cycle of zombie films.  There's some joking reference to current events, but the film is made for everyone on the planet and, so, has to be denatured to the point of being accessible to the lowest common denominator -- everything in the movie has to be instantly understandable in rural hamlets in the Ukraine or in Hindi-speaking suburbs near Mumbai or the mountain villages of Indonesia.  The international casting is intended to pander to audiences in Germany, France, Mexico, Japan, and India -- the heroes include African-Americans, a lesbian played by a famous Lesbian comedian, and other minorities.  Predictably, the two human bad guys are whiter-than-white Caucasians.  

The film roars ahead with shootouts, hand to hand combat with the zombies, and all sorts of other mayhem.  It's mildly amusing and I thought the film was fairly entertaining.  It's garbage, of course, and doesn't make any sense even on its own idiotic premises.  Gita who is confined by a zombie king who rides a zombie horse is just kept in an open room with her two colleagues and she makes no attempt to escape when the army of the dead is summoned from the premises to fight the intruders.  Why doesn't she run away?  The team infiltrates the zombie metropolis and immediately goes into a cellar where about five-hundred zombies are hibernating -- of course, the zombies wake up with gory consequences.  Why in the world would our intrepid heroes go into the cellar when they can just walk around the place outside and avoid getting up close-and-personal with the monsters?  The zombie economy makes no sense --what are the zombies eating?  They don't seem to be cannibals so how do they survive?  Bly Tanaka, the Japanese businessman who has set this whole plot in motion, is shown morosely drinking a scotch and water as Las Vegas is bombed.  Then, he's out of the picture.  Surely, he deserves a more showy demise.  The helicopter flying the surviving heroes out of the city is caught in the thermal blast of the nuke.  But the radiation and fire doesn't seem to burn anyone.  For some reason, the zombies have developed into an upper caste apparently capable of thought and planning who lord it over the shamblers, who just stagger around waiting to be shot in the head.  If the upper caste zombies are capable of planning and thought, how come they don't simply scale the walls of Las Vegas and escape?  They can use tools -- we see this when the King Zombie impales someone with a spear.  So why are they just passively waiting around to be slaughtered.  As one might expect, in this year of Covid, the movie implies that the zombies are a department of defense experiment that has gone awry.  With the clock ticking with regard to the nuclear attack, the characters inexplicably pause to express their intense and sentimental feelings for one another.  The hero, Sam Wood, has almost no forehead.  He seems to be what was once called a "pinhead"-- it's hard to warm to this guy since he looks so strange.  (The character is played by Dave Bautista who specializes in roles involving much grunting and muscular tossing of characters to and fro.  Snyder is particularly fond of shots showing people thrown about forty feet and rebounding off concrete walls or pillars without any noticeable adverse effect.  There's a zombie tiger in the movie, one of Siegfried and Roy's spawn, that has gone to the dark side.  Instead of mauling it's victims, it simply grabs them in its moldering jaws and pitches them against walls and ceilings.)

The film's first fifteen minutes, the best part of the movie, promises wildly garish and comical action, ridiculous situations, and spectacularly violent and clear fight scenes -- under the credits, the heroes take on zombies with rockets and chain-saws and each poses silently with his or her congressional medal of honor for taking down hordes of the undead.  Snyder stages the opening of the safe, a device called the Goetterdaemmerung to Siegfried's funeral march and this gives the scenes involving the safe-cracking a false, mock-heroic gravitas.  Bits and pieces of the movie are engaging but pretty soon it devolves into run-of-the-mill gore.  I suppose that this film cost about 250 million dollars.  The Army of the Dead features Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds" and "Viva Las Vegas".  I wonder what it cost to procured the screen rights to that music.  

Born to Kill

 "Most men are turnips," -- so declares Lorie Palmer, a beautiful and promiscuous girl in Robert Wise's 1947 Born to Kill.  Lorie extols the advantages of her new beau, Sam Wild, a man with shoulders a yard wide and a notably fierce demeanor.  Drinking with her boozy, one-eyed landlady, Lorie says that if you cross Sam, "he'll kick your teeth down your throat."  "Ain't that wonderful?" the old landlady says enthusiastically.  A little later, Lorie goes out with a callow, skinny hoodlum in an attempt to make Sam jealous.  She succeeds:  he beats both the boyfriend and Lorie to death in the kitchen of the boarding house.  No turnip he.  

Born to Kill wants to be conventional and, even, staid, but the movie is based on delirious crime novel, Deadlier than the Male and, notwithstanding its upper crust pretentions (it's set among the super-wealthy in San Francisco), the film quickly reverts to its pulp fiction roots.  Lawrence Tierney play Sam Wild, a violent criminal, obsessed with dominating others with a hair-trigger temper that he never expresses except by uttering imprecations as he cuts someone's heart out -- "you can't  just go around killing people," says Sam's boyfriend, Martin Waterman (played by Elisha Cook, Jr. in the sort of sexually ambiguous role designed for an actor like Peter Lorre --- Lorre was under contract to Warner Brothers; Born to Kill is a RKO picture.)  But Sam is a psychopath and has no control over his impulses and, of course, ends up killing half the principals in the movie.  

The plot is complicated and ultra-lurid.  After murdering Lorie Palmer and her hapless suitor, Sam takes the night-train from Reno to San Francisco.  Joining him on the train is the film's female protagonist, a distaff version of Sam, Helen Brent.  Helen has been living in the boarding house with Lorie in Reno, but when she finds the corpses in the kitchen, she coolly calls the train station, accelerating her departure from Nevada  and, in so doing, encounters the murderous Sam also hastening out of town..  (She has previously admired him while shooting craps in the casino where Lori flirts with the doomed suitor to rile up Sam.)  Of course, Helen is smitten with the Sam and, probably, has sex with him on the train although this is implied not shown -- there's nothing like a good murder to rev-up the sex drive.  We learn that Helen is a foster sister to a Frisco newspaper heiress, Georgia Staples.  Helen is engaged to the mild-mannered Grover, another male turnip who is wealthier than God as a result of a mining fortune.  When Sam barges into the mansion where the women live, Helen tries to have it both ways -- continuing her exciting affair with Sam while retaining her financially lucrative engagement with Grover.  Sam doesn't like being in second place, romantically or otherwise, and so he marries the newspaper heiress after a whirlwind courtship.  But, of course, he also continues his affair with Georgia.  Meanwhile, the boozy landlady from Reno, Mrs. Kraft, has come to Frisco intending to avenge the death of poor Lorie, her drinking buddy.  Mrs. Kraft hires Arnett, a German private dick, to hunt down Lorie's murderer.  Arnett plays the role that would be cast with Sydney Greenstreet in this movie (Greenstreet was also a contract player for Warner Bros.)-- he's fat, slovenly, and a gold mine of aphoristic quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible.  Arnett closes in on Sam Wild.  Like everyone else in this movie, Arnett is cheerfully amoral.  Perceiving that Helen loves Sam, Arnett blackmails her -- he threatens to turn Sam in to the authorities for the Reno murders unless she cuts him a check for $15,000.  Sam's boyfriend, Mark Waterman has also been installed in Georgia's palatial mansion.  So,  under one roof, we have Sam and his wife, Georgia (the newspaper heiress), Helen (Sam's lover) and Mark (Sam's boyfriend) -- it's a cozy situation for all.  Mark, who hopes to improve his relationship with Sam, freelances by trying to kill the beer-loving landlady, Mrs. Kraft.  But she's too tough and escapes.  Sam, who thinks that Mark is messing with Helen, carves out his heart on the beach where the unlucky boyfriend has been trying to kill the old lady.  When Sam isn't sufficiently attentive to the psychopathic, Helen, she calls Arnett to renege on her agreement to cash the PI out for 15K.  Arnett drops a dime on Sam with predictably dire consequences.  Shuffling out of town, the cynical Arnett buys a newspaper, reads the headlines that describe the film's denouement, and, then, remarking "The way of the transgressor is hard", throws the paper away as he strolls toward Union Station.  

The movie is directed in a manner that is completely pedestrian and unremarkable -- it's overlit and visually unimpressive.  (Some expressionistic sets representing the beach where Mark tries to murder Mrs. Kraft and, then, gets killed  himself are somewhat atmospheric -- however, this picture doesn't otherwise traffic in mood or atmospherics.)  Lawrence Tierney is inexpressive and has some of the specious glitter of a silent movie star -- he has a great profile and acts by not acting at all.  He has a curiously high-pitched voice and is a beautiful dreamer, a sleepwalker as David Bordwell has called the femmes fatale in forties and fifties movies.  He's filmed like Hedy Lamarr, a fabulous, inexpressive mask, and gets all of the glamor shots in the movie.  Arnett played by the aptly named German William Slezak is excellent.  The most memorable performance in the film is Esther Howard who plays the former glamor girl and elderly alcoholic, Mrs. Kraft.  She seems to have one glass eye that doesn't exactly track right and that is paralyzed into a perpetual glare.  Her dogged allegiance to her dead drinking companion is touching and a scene in which the evil Helen intimidates the old woman into silence is particularly effective and, convincingly, establishes the female protagonist as wholly vicious.  The good folks in the movie, the feckless Grover and the newspaper heiress are ciphers -- they look good but their just mannequins.  Of course, the film belongs to its villains.  At one point, Arnett surveying the City of San Francisco observes that this is a place "where every prospect pleases and only man is vile." (The quote is from Reginald Heber's 19th century "Missionary Hymn" -- the song that begins "From Greenland's icy mountains...") The film is a potent brew of lust and violence, competently directed, but Robert Wise, who is a cautious director, unfortunately plays it safe.  (Although tame by today's standards, the film was widely denounced for its depravity and censored by the Motion Picture Association; the picture was cited as an inspiration for a particularly heinous murder and withdrawn from circulation.  Lawrence Tierney claimed that he resented being cast as homicial thugs and that he was really just a "good guy" -- but there's no evidence for this self-characterization:  he was violent alcoholic who was imprisoned more than 12 times for bloody barroom brawls and once drew a knife on Jerry Seinfeld.)  

The Honeymoon Killers

Leonard Kastle's fetid The Honeymoon Killers is like something growing under a flat rock -- it's not something you want to look at, but it has its own relentless vitality.  If nothing else, the film never swerves from its grisly perception of corrupt human nature.  The picture is a freak show of cruelty, in some ways a black comedy so bleak that it dares you to laugh with it.  Simply stated, everyone in The Honeymoon Killers is repulsive to a greater or lesser degree; the film's strength is that it doesn't forbid you from sympathy for its repellent characters -- in fact, some scenes achieve considerable, if nightmarish, force  from our concern for the victims of the murderous protagonists.  The 1969 picture, shot in black and white that somehow manages to seem garish (as if comprised of tabloid photographs), the film's plot is simple and pitiless:  a fat woman and a smarmy Latin lover haphazardly murder lonely middle-aged women that they have swindled into marrying the man.  The couple, who are lovers, pose as brother and sister.  They don't really intend murder until the end -- rather, they sort of drift into killing the victims of their heartless fraud.  This can't end well and it doesn't.

Martha Beck is a vicious nurse, a sort of Uber-Nurse Ratched working in a hospital where, for some reason, explosions seem to be common.  Her neighbor Bunny, an officious interloper if there ever was one, encourages her to join "Aunt Carrie's" Lonely Hearts Club.  Through this club, she meets Ray Fernandez, a wannabe gigolo who preys on middle-aged women.  He writes them love letters, then, travels to seduce them, bilks them of their money and jewels and, then, vanishes.  At first, Ray thinks that Martha has something worth stealing.  This turns out to untrue, although he consoles himself with having sex with her before vanishing.  Martha is both possessive and resourceful.  She tracks down Ray and has Bunny call  him with the claim that the poor nurse is half-dead due to an attempted suicide.  Ray is weirdly flattered by this -- presumably, no one ever cared enough about him to display any real emotion, let alone an attempted suicide at being jilted.  Martha joins Ray and becomes his accomplice.  Pretending to be his sister, Martha accompanies Ray on his criminal forays and, in fact, encourages his thefts.  Martha's only rule is that Ray must remain sexually faithful to her -- he's not allowed to consummate the phony marriages that he contracts with the hapless women from whom he is stealing.  Martha is remorseless and efficient.  She deposits her owns elderly mother in a nursing home (and, probably, doesn't pay fees for her care) and helps Ray with his criminal enterprise.  Invariably, however, Ray's victims demand sex with him and, although he tries to hide these encounters from Martha, he's generally willing to make love to his victims.  Ultimately, Martha can't control her jealousy and, after another feigned suicide attempt, she revenges herself on Ray by turning him into the police.  This is self-destructive and both Martha and Ray die in the electric chair on March 8, 1951.  (The story is based on facts and has been filmed, at least, two more times -- in 2006 as Lonely Hearts with Jared Leto and Salma Hayek and in a notable version directed in 1996 by the great Mexican film maker, Arturo Ripstein, Deep Crimson; there is a Belgian version as well and, no doubt, several additional iterations are in the works right now.)

The portraits of Ray and Martha's victims are the best thing in the movie and this material is very disturbing indeed.  The victims are all repellent in one way or another and the film doesn't attempt to sentimentalize them.  The foibles of Ray's prey are obvious and, even, disgusting, but by virtue of those flaws these women are humanized to the extent that their murders are actually extremely troubling.  Everyone wants to be loved not  in spite of, but, indeed, because of our flaws and these poor women are ridiculously enamored with the sleazy Ray.  Ray's modus operandi  before emboldened by the more ruthless Martha, was to love 'em leave 'em.  But Martha's jealously leads to far more dire consequences.  Ray's first victim in the film is a spinster school teacher, a scrawny old maid who chortles "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in her bubble-bath.  She and Martha bicker over the fat woman's protective and intrusive relationship with Ray.  The couple don't kill her but simply leave with all her money and jewelry.  Ray, then, hooks up with a lecherous Southern belle who needs a husband so that her unborn child will have a father -- she got knocked-up by a married traveling salesman.  This woman schemes to get Ray in bed with her.  Martha gives her a handful of sedative pills that poison her.  Ray puts her on a Greyhound bus to Little Rock and, in the first of several really ghastly scenes, leaves her to die as she pleads with him for help.  (We see her sprawled on the bus seat with her eyes protruding and her tongue sticking out of her rigid jaws.)  Martha and Ray, then, go to Massachusetts where a athletic-looking widow runs a boarding house catering to musicians performing at Tanglewood.)  When Ray makes love to her at a picnic by a lake, Martha swims out into the deep water and tries to commit suicide.  The widow senses that something is amiss in the relationship between Ray and Martha and, apparently, escapes.  Next, Ray goes to Albany and seduces an older woman, a pious Catholic widow.  (The woman is miserly and vicious in her own right.)  Ray and Martha lure the woman to their cheerless home, tract housing on Long Island, where they beat her to death with a claw hammer.  We have every reason to despise this woman who is vain, extremely cheap, and a religious bigot.  But when she hears Martha calling Ray by his real name and discovers that she is trapped and in the clutches of vicious killers, we feel some real horror at what occurs -- the old woman pathetically begs to be allowed to leave the house, but Martha is remorseless.  After beating her to death with a claw hammer (and strangling her for a good measure using the handle of the hammer and nylon stockings as a garrot), Ray tosses his underpants on the dead woman to cover her face and, then, naked walks into the bedroom to have sex with Martha.  Then, Ray and Martha proceed to Michigan where Ray is corresponding with a war widow.  (She has a small daughter and they celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birthday complete with a cake and candles.)  On Valentine's Day, Ray goes out to buy a puppy for the little girl.  Martha, who learns that the woman is pregnant with Ray's child, flies into a rage and poisons the woman.  She's paralyzed and can't move, listening as Ray and Martha plan to "get rid" of the little girl.  Ray shoots the war widow in the head and Martha drags the screamng child to the basement where she kills her.  Then, Martha calls the police.  In the final scene, we see Martha being lead to Court by a nasty-looking prison matron.  Ray has written her a letter from Sing Sing in which he expresses his undying and eternal love for her.  A title tells us the date of couple's execution.  

The movie is very unpleasant but effective, a grim work of art that I'm not willing to watch again.  Everyone is vain.  Ray's victims are emotionally needy and whine in an irritating way.  There are many poignant or sardonic details.  One of Ray's victims gets him a hairpiece, a toupee because he is losing his hair over his temples.  Later, when Ray courts a much older woman -- she is 65 -- Ray puts some dye in the hairpiece, creating ersatz stands of grey in his black hair.  (It doesn't occur to him to just lose the hairpiece, which Martha hates anyway -- just before turning him into the police, she pulls the toupee off his head and announces that "(she) never liked it.")  The pious Catholic widow has pictures of Jesus of the most tasteless sort on her wall and, when she's killed, Ray and Martha throw the images into the hole in the basement where they are burying her.  When Martha quits her job at the hospital, she bellows "Hitler was right about you people" to the Hospital Administrator.  The two murder scenes in the last third of the picture are extremely harrowing -- we have the sense that the victims are completely at the mercy of people who have no concept of mercy whatsoever.  This creates in the film a particularly lonesome and forlorn atmosphere.  Everything is scrupulously mean, cheap, and in poor taste.  The houses are decorated with ghastly art.  When the widow from Albany splurges, she takes Ray and Martha out to a dismal cafeteria and bickers with the fat woman when she orders veal cutlets as opposed to the much cheaper pork chops.  Manny Farber, the renowned critic, invented the concept of "termite art", a disorderly improvised way of making films that devours itself and leaves no trace except evidence of its "unkempt activity."  Farber is highly acclaimed although much of his writing is deliberately unclear I think -- but The Honeymoon Killers is claimed as exemplary of "termite art' in his understanding and one can see the vivid, squalid energy in the film that aims at making no grand statement but simply and relentlessly proceeds down its appointed path.  (Farber thought that films like The Honeymoon Killers were best thought of as archaeological artifacts,  unintentional evidence of the sensibility and aesthetics of the time in which they were made.  Certainly, the dismal interiors in the film and the ugly furniture creates a strong impression of lower middle class life in the 'fifties.  In one scene, the characters are in twin beds with big backboards that seem to made of polyvinyl plastic -- one of the backboards is torn and the rip in the fabric creates a strange point of emphasis in the compositions, never exactly central but a troubling defect that marks the images and makes them indelible.)  There is an esthetic of ugliness just as there are are canons of beauty.  The elderly widow aspires to be a hat-maker and to sell her creations in Manhattan.  A bulbous white hat, pimple-shaped, and sporting a few bird's feathers worn by the widow when she is killed is one of the most hideous things ever seen in movies.  Shirley Stoler became famous for her performance as Martha.  Tony Lo Bianco plays the weak, corrupt Ray Hernandez -- he speaks with an accent and claims that he was raised in Spain.  All performances in the film, including the hapless victims, are memorable.  Leonard Kastle, the director, made only one movie -- he used to say that "he never made a bad movie" after The Honeymoon Killers.  The film was financed, just barely, by Warren Steibel the producer of Public Tv's Firing Line with William Buckley -- the movie was intended as a sort of neo-realist riposte to what Kastle and Steibel regarded as the specious glamor of Bonnie and Clyde.  Kastle was an opera writer and professor of music in upstate New York.  He took over direction of the film, after writing its script, when Martin Scorsese proved to be too exacting and slow in his approach to making the movie.  (Scorsese later admitted that his firing was probably warranted).  Kastle died with three unproduced scripts in his files that sound interesting.  You can read his obituary on-line.  He played organ at an Episcopal Church until a few months before his death.  Francois Truffaut claimed that The Honeymoon Killers was his favorite contemporary American film.  

Mare of Easttown

 HBO's police procedural Mare of Easttown illustrates both what prime-time cable does best and, also, how shows of this sort fall short.  The series embodies what is good and bad about current scripted television.  From its opening shots, a montage of decaying urban landscapes, the program establishes a kind of disheveled authenticity.  Set in southeastern Pennsylvania, in the suburbs around Philadelphia, Mare shows us a hard-bitten, but cohesively clannish, lower middle class milieu.  The houses are cluttered and unkempt.  Bits of stray wilderness lie at the fringes of the neighborhoods and there are desolate half-abandoned commercial districts interspersed in these suburbs.  Everyone seems chronically underemployed and the teenage girls are all young mothers or prostituting themselves for cash.  There's a lot of drug addiction and, by default, it seems, all the characters swill down gallomns of Rolling Rock beer.  Some of the streets are nearly vertical and, it seems, that, perhaps, there was some kind of hard rock mining in these forlorn-looking boroughs.  (There's some confusion in the film as to where the action is really supposed to be set -- Easttown, in reality, isn't a mining city like Allentown or Bethlehem where some of the scenes seem to have been shot; and it's certainly not like the vertical Appalachian landscape in the poor, decaying suburbs of Pittsburgh, where other sequences seem to take place.)  In effect, the filmmakers have created an imaginary landscape that embodies the American rust-belt with its ragged forests, polluted rivers, and decaying, mostly derelict industries.  The characters, particularly the titular Mare, a middle-aged female detective, all seem exhausted and at the end of their tether.  Domestic life is shown as crowded, squalid, and contentious.  The character are all related in one way or another and everyone supposedly knows everyone else's business.  Kate Winslett is effective and compelling as the show's heroine and, like the landscape where she lives, she is bitter and angry.  People waste their lives in this world -- entropy is too powerful and everything is falling apart.  One has the sense that the community has somehow irredeemably lost its center.  We don't often see this sort of environment in police procedurals -- these picture are generally set in big city urban centers or the ghetto or sometimes in the picturesque country.  Easttown is the weird, disorderly combination of rural and urban that, in fact, correlates to much of the country, particularly in the East Coast or places like Ohio.  The acting is hyper-realistic and every scene is staged for maximum gritty reality.  The performers impeccably imitate the sort of non-glamorous and inglorious folk that, of course, they are not and do their job without condescending to the poor bastards that they are playing.  Everything in the show looks just right.  

But, by the end of the first episode, it's also eminently clear that there's nothing new here in terms of plot and narrative.  In fact, the show trots out every shopworn cliche in the police procedural genre.  Mare, although obsessed with solving the mystery of disappearing teenage girls, is falling apart herself.  (How many shows of this kind feature a protagonist who is collapsing into some sort of profound dysfunction -- either alcoholism or promiscuity or just corrosive, paralyzing cynicism?)  When Mare goes to a bar within the show's first hour, we know that she will let herself be picked-up by stranger and have joyless sex with him. (In this case, Mare ends up in bed with self-absorbed writer, also a depressed and depressing fellow who has written one novel "popular with the ladies" but otherwise been afflicted with a monumental and protracted case of writer's block.)  Mare is given an earnest, wide-eyed and naive partner whom she must school in her weary brand of disenchantment -- there is the perennial clash between the idealism of youth and the discouraged disenchantment of middle age.   Mare's son has committed suicide and she is locked in a custody battle with her son's girlfriend, a junkie who is the mother of her grandchild.  Mare has a divorced husband, who looks like a schoolteacher which is exactly what he is.  He is earnest, well-meaning, and ineffectual.  There is a tough African-American chief of police who, of course, takes Mare off the case that is consuming her life.  And, of course, Mare responds by bucking her boss' authority and continuing to investigate the mystery notwithstanding official orders.  Mare's daughter is a cheerful, pretty lipstick-lesbian who has a cheerful, pretty and life-affirming girlfriend.  The plot is as exhausted as the characters -- it's a standard yarn about someone, possibly a serial killer, who is making teenage girls in the neighborhood vanish.  When a Catholic priest appears, we're pretty sure that he's a sexual predator -- which turns out to be, more or less, true.  There are two approaches to the detective narrative:  in one, an investigator working on a case that seems narrowly defined and, even, readily solved, stumbles onto a vast, sinister conspiracy -- Raymond Chandler's novels invoke this convention as do many movies, notably Chinatown and The Big Sleep.  In this kind of plot, everything starts out as disconnected and episodic, but gradually a pattern emerges that connects the events that we see.  The other approach to this kind of material is the way old TV detective shows were structured -- a new adventure every episode with no attempt made to connect the different plots.  (This how Dragnet or the CSI franchise police procedurals work.)  In Mare, the story starts with the heroine assigned the investigation of a murder in which a teenage girl, an unwed mother with a malevolent ex-boyfriend (and his even more malevolent current girlfriend) is found naked and dead in a ravine full of big rocks.  Another teenage girl vanished in mysterious circumstances a year earlier and the plot is full of  hints suggesting that the murder and the disappearance are somehow related.  Everyone is under a pall of suspicion, including Mare's ex-husband, the dead girl's ex, and the local priest (who lives with Mare's uncle, also a priest).  Mystery novels and movies always involve a lot of cheating and misdirection on the part of the auteur and we discover at the end of the fourth episode that the murder and the vanished girl (presumed dead) are not related -- despite all the clues planted to this effect.  This feels a bit like fraud perpetrated on the audience.  In fact, the movie, after adhering closely to the suspects in its large interrelated and clannish cast, imports a mad, bad guy from out of nowhere.  Mare and her partner get into a lethal shootout with this bad guy from nowhere and it appears that the mystery of the vanishing girls is solved, albeit in an unsatisfying way.  (There are various holes in the plot -- for instance, everyone knows exactly what everyone else is doing. But, if this is case, how come no one figures out that the teenage girls are hooking on-line for pocket money?)  Notwithstanding the "false end" concluding episode five, two episodes remain (and I haven't yet seen them) and, so, it appears to me that these shows will be used to ultimately solve the mystery involving the girl murdered in the rip-rapped river bed and, also, settle the soap opera aspects of the story -- that is, will Mare preserve her custody rights to her grandchild? How will things turn out with the lesbian love affair?  What about the novelist?  Will Mare's relationship with him continue?  These seem to me to be the strands in the first season of this show that need to be resolved.

There's nothing innovative or, even, particularly interesting in th show's conventional plot rife with banal and predictable staples in this genre.  However, the program is worth following for Kate Winslett's performance as Mare -- she's not afraid to make the character downright unpleasant and, even, unethical, although her dogged tenaciousness makes us admire the heroine even against our better instincts.  Mare is a variant on a uniquely American kind of failure -- she is famous in Easttown for a shot she made in a championship basketball game.  But this sort of fame is more than a little pathetic and fleeting.  (Her character is similar to the protagonist in Irwin Shaw's memorable short story "The Eighty Yard Run" published in Esquire in 1941, once a staple of college literature classes, but, now, alas most forgotten -- you should look it on-line and read it.) The minor characters are all pitch-perfect denizens of the dreary landscape in which they are confined.  And Jean Smart, who plays Mare's tough but loving (of course) mother is marvelous.  Normally, this actress is given thankless rolls as neglected middle-aged women afflicted with a strong vein of hysteria.  Here Smart gets to shine as a resolute survivor, a feisty old woman who won't back down and, yet, who counsels others to keep the peace -- she's far and away the best thing in the show and its worth watching just on account of her performance.      

The Grandmaster

 Apparently, 78% of the critics who reviewed Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster praised the film.  This is an example of why review-aggregating sites like Rotten Tomatoes are useless.  The Grandmaster is an execrable film, bad in some astonishing ways.  And I say this as someone who admires Wong Kar Wai and think that several of his earlier films -- particularly Chung King Express and Happy Together -- are very fine movies.  The Grandmaster is so bad that it seems to be some kind of perverse parody of a martial arts film.  It is so bad that it casts an unflattering retrospective light on the director's earlier movies.  How could someone so gifted make something this idiotic?  Were his earlier films also a bit silly?

In effect, the movie is a prequel to another well-known picture and a sort of origin film.  However, I won't name that picture yet and will withold the identity of the superhero whose origin the movie shows us.  The Grandmaster begins with the assertion that in Mainland Chinese martial arts schools are divided between the south and the north, the border being the Yangtze River.  A handsome middle-aged fellow with the improbable name of Ip Man practices southern Kung Fu from his hometown of Fushan.  Some interlopers from the North with allegedly different styles of fighting -- it looks all the same to an uninitiate (lots of skidding with the feet and karate chops) -- challenge Ip Man.  In true super-hero fashion, he beats everyone up, sometimes hacking down dozens of assailants at a time.  The greatest fighter in the north is someone called Gong Yutien.  Ip Man has some kind of aphorism-spouting battle with this guy -- the two men exchange fortune cookie slogans.  Apparently, the verbal combat results in a draw.  (Who knows? the subject has something to do with cookies itself and the fight concludes with a giant close-up of the proverbial cookie crumbling.)  Gong Yutien's comely daughter, Gong Er ("Gonger"?) comes south to Fushan and challenges Ip Man to a fight.  They exchange kicks and karate chops for a few minutes.  Here the film faces a challenge -- for plot purposes, Ip Man has to lose the bout, although he is incapable of being beaten.  Since Kung Fu requires exactitude in placing one's kicks and chops, and since previous fights have featured dozens of shots of unfortunate attackers hurled through windows, smashing down doors and crashing through furniture, the condition placed on this combat is that neither of the duelists will damage anything on the film-set.  (All of this fighting takes place in a dimly lit, gilded space without any precise geometry -- it's just a black void with some intense highlights.  This is supposed to be the Golden Pavilion, a brothel frequented by belligerent Kung Fu Masters who are always brawling here; the place is a little like the assassin's hotel in John Wick where various murderers are constantly slaughtering one another.)  For some reason, Ip Man and Gong Er fight on a stairway surrounding a central atrium.  About half of the combat is aerial and, when Ip Man reaches out to save Gong Er from a bad fall, he slips over the edge of the balustrade and the force of his impact pulls a screw out of a floor-board.  And, so, he is deemed to be the loser of the duel.  The fight is staged like a witless version of a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dance, featuring lots of cheek to cheek waltzing between flurries of amplified kicks and karate chops.  Of course, Ip Man and Gong Er fall in love, notwithstanding the fact that they are trying to maim one another.  (And notwithstanding that Ip Man is married and, apparently, has several children.)  Gong Er departs for the North.  The Japanese invade the South and eight years of privation ensues.  (We expect Ip Man to join the resistance to fight the Japanese, but, apparently, his bellicose ambitions don't extend to fighting for a cause or, indeed, anything useful.)  After the War, the film now shifts into romantic mode and, of course, Ip Man's wife has to be eliminated (his kids apparently died of starvation).  Ip Man goes to Hong Kong to teach his special brand of Kung Fu -- it's call Chun Wang. The wife remains in Fushan is now out of the movie.  Ip Man's venture in Hong Kong  involves a number of fights in which the hero has to best rival teachers -- no problem and easily accomplished.  Meanwhile, Gong Er's father has been killed and the villainous Ma San now rules the North -- he was a Japanese collaborator.  There's a spectacular scene on a glacier (it's always snowing in the North) as Gong Er carries her father's ashes -- where?  We don't know -- she's just marching across the ice with color-coded army of thugs behind her.  Gong Er has acquired a factotum who runs around with a literal monkey on his back a bit like a parrot on a pirate's shoulder.  Later, Gong Er fights Ma San at a train station where the world's longest train is rushing by the platform, perilously close to the combatants.  Gong Er uses her father's trademark move called "Old Monkey Hangs up the Badge" and manages to shove Ma San into the speeding train.  This kills him, although not before he can deliver a sort of soliloquy as he lies dying in the snow.  Gong Er goes to Hong Kong where she practices medicine.  There Ip Man looks her up and they sort of renew their romance.  By this point, the movie has become deliriously romantic and, even, uses  the ravishing "Deborah's theme" from Ennio Morricone's Once Upon a Time in America to underscore the doomed love affair.  Gong Er has become an opium addict due to self-medicating her pain resulting from the lethal fight with Ma San.  (This is the only fight resulting in a death -- the rest of the mayhem is all weirdly bloodless.)  She dies without passing on to the world her father's version of Kung Fu, called the "64 Hands."  She has made a vow to the Buddha that if divine providence grants her the right to kill Ma San, she will never marry, have children, or teach martial arts.  Ip Man continues teaching Kung Fu in Hong Kong.  He has a very young student who shows promise.  This student turns out to be Bruce Lee, the film's big reveal at its end.  The viewer has to rub his eyes in astonishment.  This huge epic spanning twenty five years or more is really just a vehicle to introduce to the world a minor-league movie star most famous for something called Fists of Fury.  (And mocked as a poseur in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). It's as if a film surveyed the Civil Rights movement for thirty years and ended with the declaration that this saga made possible the career of Kevin Hart or Redd Fox (Hart is too famous -- Redd Fox is better.)  The reader might think that I have labored to make the film seem ridiculous -- in fact, the actual picture is far sillier than this summary suggests.  

Wong Kar Wei is incapable of making a film that is visually uninteresting although he almost succeeds with the tedious fighting sequences and gloomy interiors in The Grandmaster.  The picture is stylized -- it's aesthetic seems to be derived from Chinese lacquer-work.  Except for the scenes on the CGI glacier, everything appears to happen indoors in a jet black void.  The ebony enamel coats everything with a sleek shining surface in which faces or objects are highlighted and glow as if suffused with shining amber.  Since the interior spaces are ill-defined to the point of being completely illegible, the fighting makes no sense -- there's no topography for the characters to traverse.  In fact, the combat scenes are dull to the point that I fell asleep during several of the protracted fights -- you can't tell what's happening and the action is fragmented into tiny, meaningless snippets of blow and counter-blow.  I assume someone carefully choreographed the battles but this doesn't translate into anything exciting because the footage is so fragmented and cubist.  The dialogue is completely idiotic -- for instance, when we see Gong Er as a child watching her father fight in another snowy studio landscape, she says in a voice-over:  "The music most familiar to me was the sound of bones breaking" -- this is her explanation of why she never became an opera star notwithstanding having a beautiful voice.  There's nothing like acting in the film-- we just get enormous Sergio Leone-style close-ups of completely immobile and impassive faces.  The shots are beautiful but inexpressive.  The movie was apparently cut by 15 minutes by Harvey Weinstein's group that distributed the picture in the United States.  The narrative elides most interesting or tragic events -- for instance, the destruction of Ip Man's family during the War -- and titles are used to bridge gaps where some sort of meaningful narrative should be.   At the end of the film, we are supposed to lament that Gong Er never passed on her father's trademark 64 Hands-style of fighting (with its signature reverse whammy move called "Old Monkey Hangs up the Badge).  Try as I might I couldn't work up any emotional response to that cultural loss -- and, in any event, there are innumerable other fighting styles with similarly exotic names that have survived.  Indeed, at the end of the film, in a jocular aside that is completely inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the film, Ip Man looks right at the audience and smirks:  "What's your style?" 

The Disciple

 It is sometimes averred that children are influenced to avenge the frustrations and failures suffered by their parents.  This influence is subtle and unintended, but effective nonetheless.  My father, for instance, wanted to become a writer.  However, he had to support a wife and a growing family and, so, he went to work in the Defense Industry and, indeed, remained in that employment until his mid-fifties.  Then, he revived his interests in creative writing, submitted a few stories for publication, but didn't succeed in that endeavor.  As if in recompense for my father's thwarted efforts to become a professional writer, I have spent my life writing, thousands of pages by this time, and millions of words.  Because of my father's inability to get his writing published, I haven't really tried to offer my work to the general public -- I just assume that I will never succeed in this endeavor.  Nonetheless, in some obscure way, I feel like I am redressing a wrong suffered by my father.  A similar dynamic is on view in Chaitanya Tamhane's The  Disciple, an austere masterpiece hidden in the darker recesses of Netflix.  In The Disciple, a man spends half his life pursing the ignis fatuus of success in the performance of Indian (Hindustani) classical music.  In this pursuit, the man, Shared Narulkar, aims to succeed where his father failed and, indeed, blighted his own life and that of his family with his obsession.  A conventional film, either made in Holly- or Bollywood, would show us the hero making good where his father failed.  The Disciple is more disheartening -- instead of achieving success, Narulkar simply replicates his father's failure in his own life.  His striving, it seems, is for naught.  The dynamic of fathers and sons is particularly pointed in the insular world of Indian classical music because the art is taught by discipleship -- aspirants to performance of this kind of music study with masters or gurus to whom they are indentured in all respects.  The disciple, for instance, is required to massage his master's legs and back -- we see Narulkar lovingly performing this service in the film.  But, not all father's are worthy of respect, and the film poses the question of whether Narulkar's guru (the young man calls him Guruji, apparently an honorific) is actually concerned about his pupil's well-being and success in his vocation or is merely exploiting him.  

The Disciple begins with a long shot of an Indian classical music ensemble performing.  A man in his late middle age is singing while younger people seated at this side play the tabla drums, a harmonium, and create droning tones on large instruments that look like emaciated, out-size string basses.  The ensemble is performing to a crowd of about 40 people seated uncomfortably on metal folding chairs in what looks like an assembly room at provincial high school.  Fans are running overhead and the room seems hot.  The camera slowly dollies toward the ensemble focusing not on Guruji who is singing, but on Shared who is seated at his side playing one of the big stringed instruments and gazing with undisguised love at his Master.  The film is constructed with classic symmetry -- the first hour is set in 2006 when Shared is 24; the second half of the film takes place 14 years later with Shared approaching forty.  There is a short coda to the film showing Shared married with a little girl -- he now seems to be about 45.  In the first hour, Shared performs with Guruji and is shown practicing with the Master.  He enters a competition and we expect that he will win a prize -- but, in fact, he doesn't even finish among the top three contestants. The film is punctuated with sequences shot in dreamy slow-motion in which Shared drives his motorcycle through the deserted and grim-looking streets of Mumbai, listening on earbuds to a lecture delivered years earlier by a renowned female singer named Maai.  Maai was a purist and never authorized any recordings of her performance -- because no recordings exist, there is nothing to criticize and the community specializing in North Indian Alawar music reveres her like the Hindu goddess of music, Shawasthi.  Maai's words are mystical:  she says that even "ten-thousand lifetimes would  be insufficient to learn how to successfully perform Raag as the musical form is called.  (I think this is the Indian word for what we call Ragas in the West.)  The performer of this music sings for her Guru and God.  All performances necessarily fall short of perfection and, therefore, fail -- "but one must learn to fail with sincerity."   The performer who seeks to do justice to his or her art must expect to tread "a path of hunger and loneliness."  Ironically, Maai's lecture was delivered to music enthusiasts in Belgium; she was so austere in perfecting her art that she never even allowed herself to be photographed.  Shared works transferring hundreds of hours of classical Raag on reel to reel tape to CDs.  With a friend, he sells these CDs at classical music festivals.  He and his partner are such purists that they are not willing to listen to the concerts where they sell merch -- shows that have catchy titles like Diwali Dawn.  "It would make your ears bleed" to hear this denatured Raag music, Shared's friend says.  The first hour of the film is interspersed with flashbacks that show Shared with his father -- we see the older man practicing this music with his son keeping him indoors when other children play outside.  Later, Shared travels halfway across Indian to a concert performed at dawn on a glorious-looking mountain plateau -- apparently, Raag's are composed for various parts of the day and, with his father, he is seeing a master perform a "morning Raag".  (The little boy has memorized the Raag forms that associated with the various times of the day.)  Shared lives with his aunt who gently suggests that he should consider getting a real job.  Guruji's health is declining -- we see  him with a doctor; Shared, of course, is expected to pay for the old man's medications and treatment.  The old man performs at a house party in a wealthy man's music room saying that he doesn't understand the introduction made by the hostess with respect to his performance -- "I understood only a little of the English," he says, adding with false modesty, "I will try to give a decent performance of a few songs."  Shared's sex life consists of masturbating to computer porn.  There is a remarkable transition:  we see the beautiful outdoor stage where Shared with his father hear the morning concert, the high ranges of the Himalaya resplendent in the distance.  But, then, the film cuts to Shared vomiting.  He has stage-fright.  At a concert, he performs in tribute to his guru and people politely applaud his efforts.

The film's second hour begins 14 years later.  (None of this signaled in any way -- we have to figure out the time-line from the dialogue; indeed, the film is so austere in its  technique that it doesn't put the flashbacks in any sort of pictorial quotation marks although, nonetheless, we pretty quickly understand that certain sequences are set in the past.)  Shared is at photo-shoot to promote himself for performances at festivals.  He has an agent who is pretty skeptical about his career.  In this part of the film, Shared is harassed by his mother (whom we never see -- he talks to her by phone) to marry and have children.  His mother doesn't want him to "waste his life like his father."  Guruji, who seemed on his last legs fourteen years earlier, is still alive, complaining of unremitting pain and still being supported, at least in part, by Shared, who continues to  buy his medicine and massage his legs.  Shared is now employed as a music teacher and has become the guru to about 14 students.  When one of them asks his master's permission to perform with a classical-pop fusion band, Shared is cruelly dismissive -- the boy can perform in that manner if he likes  but he will be expelled from the class.  In modern India this doesn't go over very well.  The boy's mother stalks off, muttering that she will report Shared to the school principal.  Shared observes a girl singer navigating auditions for a show like American Idol -- the young woman ultimately becomes famous, performing Raag to pop-rock accompaniment complete with stage-fog and slinky half-naked dancers.  Guruji tries to perform at a house-party in the wealthy man's music room, but is too sick to complete the show.  After the concert, Shared and a friend meet a fat critic who is famous for having disrespected the Mumbai classical music community.  The critic is scathing and there may be an element of North-South Indian bias implicit in the discussion -- the critic seems to come from the North where this form of music was perfected and dislikes the performance style in the South, Mumbai where the film is mostly set.  The critic says that Maai was a pious fraud -- she was a racist who denounced the Muslim influence on her music as "poisoning it" and spitefully ruined her own daughter's career.  Despite her mystical declarations, she was a wicked woman.  When the critic insults Guruji, Shared throws a glass of beer at him.  In what seems to be a dream, Shared hears Maai saying that "technique can be taught but not the truth."  And "the truth is sometimes ugly."  Shared performs for Guruji who tells him that  he has not succeeded and doubts whether he even understands the music.  Later, Shared donates the tapes on which Maai is speaking to a library -- but the librarians have almost no interest in the donation and don't know anything about the once-famous singer.  Guruji seems to die while complaining about the fact that his patrons scarcely pay him anything -- he gets some "dry snacks" and taxi-fare.  (Just when we think Guruji is dead, he revives -- he's one of those noxious old people who lives on indefinitely as a burden to all around him.)  At a concert, Shared becomes disgusted with his performance and storms off-stage.  There's a short epilogue, as it were, in which Shared is now married and has a child.  He's marketing his recordings of vintage Raag on a USB thumb-drive -- 300 performances per drive.  In the last scene, Shared sits on a train.  A young man comes onto the train and sings, accompanying himself with a stringed instrument .  Like the rest of the travelers, Shared seems embarrassed by the street musician and gazes stonily off into the distance.

The film is exquisitely filmed in very long sequence shots.  Each scene consists of only one or, perhaps, two shots.  For instance, when Shared takes his guru to the doctor, there is a shot of long duration showing the old man, almost like a cadaver, on an examination table.  A second shot shows the guru and his disciple conferring with the doctor at his desk.  More than half the movie consists of concert or performance scenes, usually shot with very slow imperceptible dollying motions in or out of the shot.  The scenes with the motorcycle moving along the midnight streets of Mumbai are visually striking.  Some of the sequence shots are deliberately inexpressive -- for instance, in the scene where Shared walks off-stage in despair, the concert is filmed from a long shot and we can't see the expression on the hero's face nor can we gauge how the audience is reacting to his performance (we see them from the back).   The only close-ups in the movie appear in scenes taken off TV shows.   The masturbation shots show the hero pleasuring himself in front of a screen on which no images appear -- we hear a woman moaning but can't see her.  (The director seems to not want to provide us with any prurient imagery).  In its ascetic style the film resembles movies by Pedro Costas or Straub and Huillet's The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach with its long performance sequences.  Some of the long takes involving performances also seem to channel Tsai Ming Liang and his movies like Goodbye Dragon Inn.  I can't judge the quality of the music in the film, but, it is riveting to see these performances.  (The music is something like Jazz in which the performer improvises using microtones and complex rhythms, apparently constructing the work from variations around a single note.  The form is very exacting and failure is apparently expected.)  Looming in the background is Satjayit Ray''s The Music Room, a film about a old Indian aristocrat who impoverishes himself by putting on lavish performances of Indian classical music in a specially designed chamber in his house.  (Ravi Shankar devised the score for that film.)  As The Disciple proceeds, we see that the audiences become smaller and smaller.  In the last concert scene, when Shared storms off-stage, the show takes place in what looks like a middle school cafeteria -- there are many empty seats in the audience.  The film raises more questions than it answers.  There are various musical communities that are so elitist and purist that they end up withering away -- no one can pass the litmus test for purity:  I think a similar film could be made about the ever-shrinking number of devotees to art-song and Lieder or the closed world of Delta Blues purists.  There is much about this film that is mysterious, but I think the picture is very, very good.     

(On the evidence of The Disciple, Chaitanya Tamhane may well become one of the world's great directors.  His first feature, Court, earned high praise.  The Disciple, the director's second film, was shot by the Polish cameraman, Michel Sobocinski and was produced by the great Mexican film maker Alfonso Cuaron.  Netflix has been criticized for, essentially, dropping the film without any advance publicity.  However, The Disciple won a number of awards at film festivals and, so, there are plenty of reviews that will direct to you to the film.)  

Things Heard and Seen

 Things Heard and Seen (Netflix 2021) is an okay ghost movie:  it delivers a few scary moments in its first hour and has an inventive, if predictable, script.   The movie demonstrates that the cable TV production companies have, by and large, run out of material.   The demand for new movies is insatiable and, so, companies like Netflix are forced to recycle variations on older better movies, faintly disguised by superficial elements that might seem new and different to someone who hasn't seen many motion pictures.  These surface elements create the impression that we are consuming something fresh and innovative, but, in fact, the narrative situations are generic and predictable.  The situation is something akin to the waning days of Hollywood Westerns when horse operas were set in Australia or the pampas of Argentina -- the fundamental plot is the same, but the scenery looks a little different and you have kangaroos instead of coyotes.but otherwise not much changes.  Hollywood, during its studio days, was a factory for turning-out hundreds of variations on well-established themes and marketing each of them as new and surprising.  There's nothing wrong with this paradigm if it is managed skillfully and Things Heard and Seen has good acting, a wicked undercurrent of satire, and excellent photography.  But the film is really just a mash-up of Kubrick's The Shining and Ari Auster's Inheritance, two much better movies that render the entire enterprise a little bit gratuitous.  Nonetheless, Things Heard and Seen is sufficiently entertaining, retains your attention, and has some amusing ideas and, so, it's worth watching if there's nothing better on TV.  Furthermore, my recognition that the picture is derivative is nothing that would surprise it's creators -- in fact, some scenes replicate sequences in the pictures that are obvious influences on the film.  The film makers (Robert Pulcineli and Shari Springer Berman) are, in effect, winking at you the whole time.

It's impossible to write about this sort of movie without revealing plot points that are supposed to be a surprise.  Therefore, proceed with caution.

The premise of the film is derived from The Shining.  A young married couple with a four-year old daughter move to a haunted house in upstate New York.  The husband and wife are troubled and their picture-perfect marriage is not what it seems.  Pretty soon, the ghosts in the house pick sides.  The husband is manipulated by an evil, domineering ghost who murdered his family -- this is the plot of The Shining.  The wife gets cozy with a friendly female ghost who was murdered by the evil husband.  As in the film Inheritance, the film demonstrates that ancestral evil is genetic in the sense that it gets passed down through the generations.  Marital discord resulting in murder has happened several times in the haunted  house -- during the late 19th century, during the 1960's apparently, and, at the time of the film's present established as 1980.  (It's inexplicable to me why the film is set in 1980 -- usually when a movie picks a time period before cell-phones and computers, the film maker is trying to avoid plot problems created by our era in which all information is instantly available.  In Things Heard and Seen, the characters have to research things in libraries and local historical societies and can't call for help when they are menaced.  But I didn't really detect much about 1980 that is integral to the film and had to keep reminding myself that the events in the movie are occurring 40 years ago.)

The film's first hour is its best -- after that, it devolves into predictable murder and madness.  And the film has one twist that is genuinely surprising, at least, until the viewer works out the dynamics of the plot.  The young husband, who is handsome and appealing, turns out to be a monstrous homicidal narcissist -- this is something we don't quite grasp during the film's first forty minutes or so when we are willing to give the roguishly attractive hero the benefit of the doubt.  But by the end of the movie he has become a slavering maniac along the lines of Jack Torrance in The Shining.  It turns out that the husband, George Claire (played by James Norton with a Kennedy'esque wave of hair over his brows) has faked a doctoral dissertation on the theme of the influence of Emmanuel Swedenborg on the American painter, George Innes.  He finds a college in a remote place in upstate New York where the 18th century mystic, Swedenborg, has not been entirely forgotten and, in fact, where his disciples still  hold seances  in his name.  Hired to teach art at this college, Claire begins seducing his students and has an affair with one of the (much younger) local girls.  Meanwhile, his wife, Catherine, an art restorer, is having problems with the ghosts in the house and suffers from isolation caring for the couple's nondescript (generic) four-year old.  She makes friends with an adjunct professor of weaving at the college and learns the horrific history of the farmhouse where she is living -- several murders spanning four or five generations.  The ghosts manifest in all sorts of ways and, at first, we think they're persecuting Catherine, although later it becomes clear that the lady ghost (or ghosts) in the house is, in fact, a protective spirit, a sort of guardian angel as Swedenborg would characterize the relationship.,  The ghost reveals George's lies.  Every time, he says something untrue, the spirit goes poltergeist and pitch crockery  against the wall acting as a kind of spectral lie detector.  When George takes his students on field trip to the Metropolitan Museum to view Hudson Valley School paintings, he runs into his former doctoral advisor who smells a rat.  The advisor tells George's boss, the kindly dean, Floyd DeBeers (F. Murray Abraham) that his new art professor is a fraud.  So George murders Floyd before he can fire him.  He also causes a serious accident, running the Professor of Weaving (who has become his wife's friend) off the road and almost killing her.  George is now taking counsel with the evil ghosts and they tell him to take an axe and... well, you can figure out the rest.  

The film has some eccentric, if interesting, trappings.  There are discussions of Swedenborg's theories about the after-life and some appealing imagery relating to the Hudson Valley School.  However, some of this material isn't really accurate and I would suspect that Swedenborg is spinning in his grave at the characterizations of this thought in the film.  George Innes is not really a Hudson Valley school painting -- he comes a generation later and is a sort of transcendentalist artist, very much an "odd man out" for most of his life.  Thomas Cole's three paintings "The Journey of Life" are not in the Metropolitan Museum but in the old New-York Museum.  On various occasions, the film's photography imitates either Thomas Cole or Innes with sometimes remarkable results.  The ending is unsatisfying if picturesque -- the villain simply sails his boat into a Cole painting and vanishes in an apocalypse of light and mist.  Amanda Seyfried plays Catherine, the wife, who has an eating disorder -- she's bulimic and the wicked George poisons her by putting drugs in her energy shake.  (Were there energy protein shakes in 1980? I don't think so.)  With her protruding eyes and scrawny physique, Seyfried looks almost identical to Sissy Spacek in The Shining.  (The director's make no effort to conceal the influence of Kubrick's film -- two tracking shots early in the movie channel the famous opening of The Shining in which Jack Torrance drives up the mountain pass to the Overlook Hotel.  As in The Shining, the child is the first to sense the presence of the ghosts in the haunted house and the little girl is about the same age as Danny in Kubrick's movie.)  There is some satire about academic standards -- the heroine's friend is an adjunct professor of "weaving".  Again, I'm not sure that colleges in 1980 were as free and liberal as they were to become later and the film's "me-too" style feminism is an artifact of a much later era.  Anxious to check all buttons, the film also decries homophobia as it existed forty years ago -- like the talented Mr. Ripley, the sociopathic George has stolen the identity of a gay better man, his uncle I think, who perished (possibly murdered by George) in a boating accident.  F. Murray Abraham came to fame playing an old man -- he was Salieri in Amadeus (1984)-- and he's still playing old men, here the Dean at Saginaw college.  Oddly, the actor gets younger with each year.  Here his character is a youthful 65 -- in fact, the actor is 81.