Dune

 Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021) is disappointing in all respects.  As advertised, the film is visually grandiose but, with some exceptions, pictorially inert.  The huge landscapes, of course, are mostly desert and, therefore, the picture seems designed in shades of light brown, beige, and grey.  Indeed, the movie is mostly monochromatic and would probably look better in black and white.  Heavy reliance on special effects imparts to the film a stilted, claustrophobic feeling -- the picture is edited in a very sedate, even, conservative manner.  Villeneuve wants you to admire his huge sets and sepulchral chambers and throne rooms and so the film loiters a bit on some of its most expansive locations.  The movie's sensibility is Fascist -- the big scenes involving hordes of soldiers kneeling before their lords look like grey-brown out-takes from Triumph of the Will.  This is the sort of movie in which people don't walk from here to there -- rather, they "process" or parade across the set, big phalanxes of marching men that form ornamental patterns similar to what Fritz Lang accomplished in Metropolis or his two-part Nibelungenlied  epic.  The landscapes are imposing but the stony battleship-shaped islands in the rain --off Scotland, I suppose -- look better in the recent Star Wars films and the huge deserts locations with eroded heaps of rock rising from enormouis drifts of sand are seen to better advantage in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia or George Miller's Mad Max:  Fury Road.  The acting is wooden and completely dull.  But, of course, this is a result of the awful script -- it's full of cliches and stilted aphorisms and none of the dialogue is even remotely plausible.  Furthermore, the people speak in a weird mixture of feudal locutions, faux Arabic, and gratingly modern slang.  Although the characters mostly have weird euphonious names that sound vaguely Muslim, one of the guys in the movie is called Duncan Idaho and a warrior played by Josh Brolin acts like he just stepped out of TV cop show.  The principal villain, Baron Harkonnen is cribbed in whole from Marlon Brando's bizarre turn as Captain Kurz in Apocalypse Now.  Bathed in Rembrandt-lighting, the huge bald man caresses his vast orb of a skull, exactly mimicking Brando even down to his strange half whispered lisp with which he delivers his fortune-cookie lines.  At one point, Harkonnen surfaces from a pool of what looks like motor-oil in which he is recuperating from from being killed earlier in the movie -- when he emerges from the murky fluid, he is lit exactly like Martin Sheen popping up out of the jungle swamp waters to assassinate Kurz in the Vietnam picture.  When a bunch of flying craft with scissor-shaped wings travel in formation over the desert, the shots are designed to imitate the helicopter sequences in Apocalypse Now -- all that is missing is a performance of "Ride of the Valkyries" on the sound track.  (The Hans Zimmer score is bombastic, deafening, and dull -- it just repeats the same flourishes over and over again.)  There are many effective shots in the movie and the pictorial highlight of Dune is a big battle in the monochrome capital city on the desert planet Arrakis -- the place is full of vast ziggurats and pyramids shaped like those at Teotihuacan in Mexico (in fact, the urban planning in the place looks to be 10th century AD Mexican). Accomplished actors in the film like Charlotte Rampling and Xavier Bardem just look silly.  

The film's plot is very simple.  Despite claims by some reviewers that the picture is hard to understand, in fact, Dune has a lucid narrative that is classically formed.  The first forty minutes or so of the movie are devoted to exposition.  The picture sets up the situation:  the House of Atreides has been granted the concession to harvest the hallucinogen "spice" from the desert planet of Arrakis.  The concession was earlier operated by the Harkonnens who are bad guys, villains of the worst sort.  The Harkonnens have been mining the spice needed to dope up the Space Guild Navigators, a group of freakish mutants who drive the interstellar crafts of the "Imperium", the name for the confederacy of worlds; the navigators pilot their craft in some sort of drug-induced and visionary stupor.  The nasty Harkonnens, who march around like Nazis, have been mercilessly exploiting the local Fremen, a group of desert-dwellers who look like Bedouins and wear bluish burnooses equipped with tubes that they run up their noses for some unknown reason.  (No doubt, Frank Herbert, the author of Dune described their physiology and use of the tube in great detail in one of the appendices to his series of novels.).  A group of witches has something to do with the good guys at the House of Atreides, the dynasty that has been granted the spice concession by the Imperium when the wicked Harkonnens were expelled from the planet.  The witches, called the Beni Jesseret (or something on that order) are a group of weird women who look like nuns.  But one of them member is the concubine to Lord Atreides and the mother of Paul.  Paul, played by the tiny and effete Timothee Chalamet (even the actor's name is twee) has certain characteristics that suggest that he is the long-awaited Messiah, the Mahdi to use the word from the movie Khartoum tthat turns up in this film, worshipped by the mercilessly exploited Fremen.  The Beni Jesseret have a special voice that they can use to hypnotize enemies and make them do their bidding, but, mysteriously, they refrain from using the voice most of the time, just allowing the pointless mayhem to continue around them when a single uncanny and resonant "Stop!" would suffice to end all the fighting.  (One shudders to think what would happen if one of these peculiar nuns shouted to their enemies:  "Why don't you just fuck yourselves!")  No doubt, Frank Herbert wrote an appendix in one of his novels explaining the peculiar reluctance of these weird women to use their magical command voice.  This is one of those super-powers that if exercised too frequently would render the plot's various perils superfluous and nugatory.  All of this and lot more is set up in the first 45 minutes and handled fairly efficiently.  

No sooner are the Atreides ensconced in Arrakis, then, the evil Harkonnen launch a sneak attack to destroy their rivals.  This sneak attack is splendidly visualized with seas of fire falling from the skies and shadowy figure hurtling through besieged corridors.  All of the House of Atreides are slaughtered except for the effeminate Paul and his mother, as well as a couple of brave retainers.  (Although the story takes place 10,219 or something with anti-gravity space ships hovering everywhere and massive steam-punk technology used to extract the spice from the desert, people run around swords and fight elaborate duels hand-to-hand with edged weapons.)  After the battle, the film is nothing more than an elaborate chase with the good guys struggling to escape the vicious Harkonnens and the barbarous Fremen watching from the sidelines.  By the end of the film, Paul and his mother have established their credibility as leaders with the insurgent Fremen and the hero announces "This is the beginning" whereupon the film (part 1 of a two-part saga), simply goes black.  

As this plot summary shows, the movie is an amalgam of a Western recast as a primitive space opera and a reprise of T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the source material for Lawrence of Arabia which Dune resembles, although much to its detriment.  Specifically, we see the good White folks fleeing vicious outlaws across dangerous terrain full of wild animals (here desert sand worms that are as long as freight trains) and even wilder Apaches -- in this case, the noble if savage Fremen. (The nomadic Fremen are led by Xavier Bardem playing a thankless role that would have been relegated to Anthony Quinn in the "Golden Days" of Hollywood.) Similarly, the dynastic set up, a duel between two empires is redolent of the setting of the First World War in Lawrence of Arabia with the hero leading a desert uprising against the cruel Ottoman Turks, here the Harkonnen.  The movie is strangely indifferent to its own racist premise:  a White Messiah or Savior will come to the brown peoples and lead them to victory against their oppressors.  The trope of the White savior come to assist the primitive colored folks is intrinsic to the story and can't be ignored.  (This theme is integral to Lawrence of Arabia as well but, because based on Lawrence's own anguished and hallucinatory account, treated with much more nuance and subtlety in David Lean's film version of this story.)  The movie seems strangely faithful to Herbert's novel, a book that I've tried to read several times and abandoned because it is so poorly written and so infested with the most primitive of space opera motifs.  For instance, in one scene, Baron Atreides says that he should marry Paul's mother -- of course, we thought the couple was man and wife.  And, later, someone disdainfully remarks that the Baron's concubine is dead, killed in the big battle in the Babylonian-Mexican capitol city.  This detail is simply pointless but shows that the scenarists thought that they should cleave close to Herbert's book.  

The movie is fairly dull.  The worms are not impressively depicted.  (They seem to have mouths full of Blue Whale baleen with which they sift the sand for nutrients. Where they get the water to sustain their vast and horny bodies is unclear to me -- possibly there are aquifers deep under the dunes from which the sip drinks from time to time.)  I will end with faint praise.  Despite my cavils, the picture is sufficiently interesting that I expect I will pony up admission to see Part II.  I suppose the picture is superior to David Lynch's spooky chaotic version -- but there's nothing in  this new version as memorable as Lynch's spice-doped space navigators, hideous mutants bobbing around like enormous guppies in some kind of stew.    

(I saw the film in Rochester, Minnesota on the largest screen available, an IMAX projection system.  In fact, that screen isn't all that huge.  It reminds me of the screens in old-style movie palaces such as those in downtown Minneapolis around 1966.  Hopkins, in 1965 may have had a larger screen. The image is projected or shown in a golden section rectangle and, certainly, doesn't wrap around the viewer.  At the theater in Rochester, for the noon showing, the theater was pitch-black -- no one thought to turn on the lights.  And so we entered and had to grope around in the darkness for our assigned seats (a new and nasty innovation in movie-going) in inky gloom.  This was extremely hazardous.  Then, at noon, the theater began the presentation with a series of deafeningly loud coming attractions, a series of five big "event' movies featuring comic book heroes -- these are the sort of movies that you couldn't pay me to attend, utter garbage.  But, for some peculiar reason, the thunderous coming attractions were played without any picture whatsoever, just noise and a black screen.  Finally, during the last coming attraction, the screen lit up with explosions and super-heroes being flung pointlessly through the air.  But at that moment, all of the house lights came on and the pictures faded away in the glare.  Then, Dune proper began but with the house-lights still lit and, therefore, diluting the images on screen.  Someone complained at this point.  So what was the response?  The theater shut off the lights and began to project again the whole horrible series of coming attractions trailers -- this was, I must note, sheer torture.  After Covid, I attended a movie that was projected wrong so that all of the action took place in supernal (this was The Green Knight).  Then, there was a whole series of mistakes made at the theater in Rochester where I had come to see Dune.  It makes me despair of leaving my house to see a movie -- at least at home, I don't have to risk breaking an ankle in utter darkness, can avoid punishingly loud and stupid coming attractions and see a movie shown at approximately the level of brightness that the film maker contrived for his or her work.  No humans are involved any more in projecting or screening movies and the result is that it's painful to attend a movie in the theater.  Dune, a long movie (two hours and 35 minutes) didn't start properly for more than 45 minutes after it was scheduled to begin.)   

Midnight Mass

 Midnight Mass is an impressive Netflix horror mini-series.  The show is directed by Mike Flanagan, a specialist in the genre, and the showrunner for The Hauntng of Bly House and The Haunting of Hill House, previously big hits on Netflix.  At it's core, Midnight Mass is just another vampire show, similar in production values to Guillermo del Toro's The Strain (produced for FX in 2014).  But Flanagan's mini-series is wildly ambitious, expertly acted, and transcends its genre in all respects.  The film involves a vampire (and, then, a cult of vampires) arming themselves for Armageddon on a small island, an hour or so off the "mainland" -- apparently, Crockett Island, where the action takes place, is  supposed to be somewhere off the coast of New England.  Elements of the film seem autobiographical -- Flanagan is a recovering alcoholic and was raised as a Catholic and plot elements relating to substance abuse and morbid religiosity are integral to the show's narrative.  Vampire movies exploit our fears of contagion and infection; in Midnight Mass, the Roman Catholic Church and its rituals are the agent of infection.  Rather subversively, the show portrays religion as a sort of malign contagion, spreading from person to person like a species of vampirism.  Vampires make more vampires.  Roman Catholics make more Catholics.  Both vampires and Catholics feed on the "body and the blood."  Midnight Mass makes literal the notion that Christians are cannibals, devouring their God who has been made man.  (The idea is already literal in Catholic theology that insists that, by transubstantiation, the elements of bread and wine are actually changed into the real body and blood of Christ.)  The sad villain in Midnight Mass, a much-beloved priest become a blood-thirsty vampire, must, of course, preach to his flock.  Flanagan exploits his villain's profession to present a number of flamboyant, well-written sermons.  Indeed, I can't recall a horror movie that was so congested with talk, much of it brilliant, but, nonetheless, just a tiny bit annoying and tedious.  Everyone preaches at everyone else and each character is granted a couple of aria-like monologues. This is particularly evident in the fourth and fifth episodes of the show in which the action slows to a stand still while the characters belabor one another with speeches and sermons.  The quality of the writing is so excellent that these monologues don't irritate when consumed in reasonable doses. My recommendation is to watch no more than one episode a night.  (Episodes are between 60 and 75 minutes long and pack a lot of material into each show; individual episodes are labeled by books in the Bible, beginning with Genesis and ending in the 7th episode with Revelations.)  The show is made with lots of flash and dazzle.  The editing is disjunctive and frequently violates the 360 degree rule, with shots involving dialogue filmed from directly opposing viewpoints. The movie also uses "time jumps", breaking up scenes into individual shots that aren't cut into seamless whole, but rather elide action to create a stuttering,,off-balance rhythm.  Sound is used in an overlapping way -- we hear the last dialogue from a previous scene under a new sequence or, sometimes, the reverse technique is used -- sound and dialogue from an upcoming sequence invades the previous images.  Although Flanagan is said to eschew "jump scares," in fact, the film is unpleasantly full of these cheap, but effective, shocks.  The action is completely lucid and stylishly filmed.  Crockett Island is fully and coherently imagined and provides a plausible backdrop against which the narrative takes place.  There are "music video" montages in which the filmmaker shows action occurring at various locations but unified by a pop song that knits the individual sequences together -- this is a staple of mini-series shows of this sort, a cliche, but effectively deployed here.  The long dialogue scenes will be a matter of taste for some viewers since these parts of the show are completely static.  Nonetheless, the director (who also wrote the film) is obviously confident that these scenes are sufficiently interesting to engage the viewer, even thought nothing flamboyant is happening, and, if one follows my advice, and watches only one show per sitting, these parts of Midnight Mass are compelling.  Horror elements are kept unobtrusive for the first two episodes but, then, become increasingly vehement and central as the show proceeds.

Riley Flynn, a young man who has been a venture capitalist, is a drunk.  In the opening scene, he has killed a young woman in a drunk driving accident.  He sits benumbed at the side of the road with a fresco of skyscrapers glittering across a dark bay in front of him.  EMT's are working on the dying girl.  Her face is encased in a glittering halo of glass shards embedded in her flesh and the broken glass glints in the flashing lights -- it's an image of some kind of strange martyrdom.  After Flynn serves four years in prison, he returns to Crockett Island, where he was raised, and lives with his parents; both of them are pious Catholics and his father is a fisherman.  (The film's casting is questionable -- Riley seems to be about the same age as his father which is incongruous; another prominent character, notionally an old woman with Alzheimer's Disease seems younger than her daughter, the town's physician.  The idea that the people on the island have no particular age and seem younger than they should be realistically is another element of the show that puts viewers off-balance and seems intentional).  The village on the island is overwhelmingly Catholic -- if there are Protestants they are few and far between and invisible.  (This is a characteristic element of Catholic ideology -- Protestants as a low-grade form of heretic are just ignored.  By contrast, Muslims, for instance, are prominently featured in the film since they pose a real challenge to the Catholic faith.)  The town's priest, also suffering from dementia, seems to have gone missing somewhere on the Mainland.  (In fact, we learn that he went on a tour of the Holy Lands, rather implausibly wandered off in a dust storm in the desert and got himself vampirized by a monstrous figure with wings that he believes to be his "guardian angel.")  Spoilers will follow here, although I'm not going to report on anything that an alert viewer won't figure out by the middle of the second episode.  The charismatic young priest who has replaced Monsignor Pruitt, the old pastor, is a vampire.  He systematically converts the pious townsfolk into vampires by putting blood in the Communion wine.  This creates an ingenious plot device:  the town's atheists and outcasts and the Muslim sheriff are immune to contagion because they don't take Communion.  Since Riley Flynn is an alcoholic, the priest offers to conduct AA meetings with him  (required by his probation) and, later, with the town drunk, Joe Collie.  In these scenes, AA tenets are rather daringly proposed to be elements of the vampire cult -- for instance, the famous Serenity Prayer, is repurposed to be an admonition to accept your vampirism as something that "can's be changed."  The notion of conversion is satirized by the Catholic priest transforming his parishioners into vampires.  (However, the show is completely humorless -- there's no "satire" really:  all of this is played with a somber straight face.)  As the priest transforms his parish into vampires, Mass can't be conducted during daylight hours -- the sun burns up vampires.  So Mass is now offered at midnight.  A little infusion of vampire blood does wonders for the constitution -- a paralyzed girl walks, victims of arthritis can dance again, and a woman with Alzheimer's suddenly recovers and recognizes people that she has not been able to remember for years.  At first, it seems that vampire-blood is good medicine and everyone is doing well, becoming as the film tells us "their best selves."  But, then, a fetus mysteriously vanishes from a pregnant woman's womb and the priest starts killing people for their blood.  All of these lurid plot points are wrapped in volumes of exorbitant talk:  sermons, monologues, two long recitations about the meaning of death, Bible quotations, and, finally, an exhortation by the vampire Priest to his flock, admonishing them to be soldiers prepared to do horrible things for their faith.  Although in summary, the narrative sounds ridiculous, the plot is presented in a convincing way and with complete confidence -- the wild elements of the story seem reasonably motivated and the show links its motifs together into symbolic patterns that have a powerful resonance.  

I'm a bit skeptical about the film's premise -- a study of faith and loss of faith presented with the eloquence of a movie by Ingmar Bergman combined with a vampire narrative that is full of hoary conventions and obvious scare elements.  But, somehow, the thing works and the fundamental equation of religious faith with vampirism is both thought-provoking and persuasive.    

  

Flaming Creatures

Faming Creatues is a legendary underground film, produced by Jack Smith and first shown at the Bleecker Street Cinema in April 1963.  Frequently banned, the movie has been hard to see and remains probably impossible to access on a big screen.  The WAC featured this film in October and November 2021 at its Benton Mediatheque, a sort of video juke box in the museum.  But I wasn't able to see the movie on the Walker premises and watched it by on-line on the Walker Art Center website.  Due to its subject matter, I would guess that the film is likely not available for a public screening even in an art gallery context.  On various occasions, the movie has been seized by authorities and destroyed or simply locked away.  Jonas Mekas once smuggled copies of the film out of harm's way.  But, later, the movie's maker, Jack Smith, accused him of theft after the two underground movie-makers became enemies.  Amos Vogel celebrates Flaming Creatures in the most extravagant terms in his well-known book Film as a Subversive Art.  J. Hoberman, the Village Voice's movie critic wrote an entire book about the short 45 minute picture.  (For a time, he was the film's de facto owner through the estate of Jack Smith who died in 1989 of AIDS-related pneumonia.)

So how does the film compare with the infamous glamor of its legend?  First, the picture is literally hard to decipher -- the film stock is obviously distressed and has become even more scarred and illegible with time.  The movie was made with a budget estimated at $300 (in 1963) and shot on discarded reels of army surplus Kodak film.  The resulting images are grainy, frequently out of focus, and, often, over-exposed to the point of being blizzards of white swirling around shards of black shadow.  Smith frequently uses extreme close-ups, particularly for the so-called "naughty bits" and so it is unclear whether we are seeing breasts or buttocks or just granular images of belly fat and elbows.  A few limp penises flop around, sometimes wiggling disconsolately at the edge of the frame like fat, just excavated earthworms. (In a celebrated shot, a woman or transvestite with dark eye shadow and vampire lips and teeth glowers at the camera, a flaccid penis seemingly poised on her shoulder.)  There are a couple of large, soft breasts, that are either cupped or wobbled by disembodied hands, some nipples shot as if through a microscope, and little patches of hair that could be either pubic or a hirsute underarm.  Smith's camera is often tilted to extreme angles, foreshortening the action such as it is.  Sometimes, he uses very fast cutting to create strobe-like effects with bleached bits of body and eyes and hair flickering in the image.  On other occasions, he spins the camera or makes it tremble to simulate an earthquake or some other seismic disturbance on the set.  The credits are hand-lettered in a sort of snaky calligraphy and, often, obscured  by the profiles of performers standing in front of placards telling us who made (and performed in) the movie.  It's my estimate that about a quarter of the picture can't be decoded -- it's just damaged  abstract patterns of light and dark.  The soundtrack consists of kitschy orchestral music, degraded tangos, and some rock and roll classics for which, undoubtedly, no legal rights were ever secured.  (The rock 'n roll tunes give parts of the film the atmosphere of some of Kenneth Anger's avant garde pictures.)  As far as I can tell, all of the action takes place on a single set dominated by huge vase, probably about four feet tall and vaguely Asian in character.  A pale arrangement of flowers emerges from the top of the vase but the film's focus flattens the image so that the spray of blossoms appears on screen as an amorphous white nimbus above the vase, a kind of bright cloud that is otherwise not defined.  At the heart of this aureole of blossoms, there's a skeletal crook of branch that reads on screen like a deformed black letter.  A cage-shaped lantern hangs overhead and its bars and grid-shaped members seem to enclose and enfold some of the action when the camera is perched overhead to shoot through the thing -- sometimes, we see the cage-like lantern lying on the ground among the naked, exhausted performers.  About every three minutes, Smith achieves a startlingly beautiful composition -- a tableaux of half-naked people splayed across the floor or a frieze of dancers, one of them thrusting her foot toward the focal plane so that it seems to protrude through the screen.  In some shots, a single half-nude figure gesticulates over a pile of orgy-wearied actors.  There are people in the film who are obviously women; penises to signify men, and a small mob of performers who seem to be transvestites or intersex.  It's never immediately apparent whether we are looking at a beautiful woman or a man made up to resemble a beautiful woman or something in between.

The film starts with a blurred face and someone saying "Ali Baba comes today."  There are titles and, then, we see what appears to be a haggard drag queen sniffing flowers.  Some of this footage is shot through lace and looks a bit like von Sternberg's stylings for Marlene Dietrich.  There follows an extended sequence that consists of close-ups of people smearing lipstick on their lips.  (This part of the movie obviously has influenced Guy Madden and there are many shots that he has imitated in his films.)  There is a voice-over that explains how to apply lipstick interspersed with questions such as "Does lipstick come off when you suck cock?"  Close-ups of lipstick being applied begin with smooth features but morph into shots of bearded men smearing the lipstick on their lips..  Someone says that lipstick doesn't come off while sucking cock.  "Not if its indelible," another voice replies.  This sequence is followed by an extended rape scene.  A woman, clearly visible as such because one of her breasts is exposed, he held down and raped by first one figure and, then, three -- she bares her teeth and seems to scream in distress.  The rapists expose her pubic hair.  She writhes and we can't tell whether she is enjoying the assault or resisting.  Everything shakes and, perhaps, the lantern falls down.  The rape footage reaches a climax of fast cutting so that the images become indecipherable.  Then, we see the victim, still with her breast exposed, standing like a figure in a Greek tragedy over a heap of entangled bodies.  The rape victim is consoled by another figure (possibly a transvestite) and the film luxuriates in blurry shots of flowers, jewels, petals, and heaps of chiffon drapery. An orgy follows with about six participants although there are no long shots or, even, medium shots to depict what is actually  happening.  The screen grows white with chiffon and silk and lace and we see insects, possibly flies or beetles burrowing through the fabric.  This sequence is like something viewed through a microscope at high magnification with weird, dark, paramecium-like forms wriggling around.  Another orgy seems underway, although at the edges of the frame with the camera focused on a box like a casket.  The box's lid opens and a woman who looks like Marilyn Monroe emerges and begins sucking blood from the throat of a man wearing an odd headdress.  The vampire rolls her eyes back into her head so that in the sockets defined by eye-shadow we see only white.  The soundtrack plays the song:  "It wasn't God that made honky-tonk angels." Then, a woman dances with another figure.  At first, this couple is shot vertically from directly above.  Then, we see several other figures in the background, a gay man in tight white pants posturing for the camera and a flamenco dancer in black with a rose in her mouth and an odd figure of indeterminate sex wearing a sort of spangled fez.  Gradually dancing figures fill the frame.  Of course, we know this will end with an orgy on the floor since the ground is also covered with figures that are either writhing or comatose.  An orgy does ensue scored to the tune of "Be-bop-a-lu-a she's my baby."  Everyone ends up exhausted, lying with eyes rolled back in ecstasy on the floor.  Someone lights a post-coital cigarette.  We see a limp penis wiggling and, then, a breast wobbling and jiggling faster and faster and, then, a handwritten title tells us that this is "The End.".

The film was made when this kind of imagery was legally suspect and you could pay a real price for displaying transgressive pictures of this sort.  Today every fourth-grader with a cell-phone has seen pictures much more explicit and, for that matter, easily interpreted -- nothing in Flaming Creatures can be seen clearly.  When the movie was made sex was still linked somehow to glamor and the film's "flaming creatures" are movie stars -- it's been said that they are acting out the fantasies in which audiences invested the "flaming creatures" on the screen such as Jean Harlow or Marilyn Monroe or, for that matter, Rock Hudson or Clark Gable.  The film seems archaic because, in large part, the link between glamor and the erotic has been irretrievably broken.  The movie is like something found on a trash-heap (as Godard said about Weekend) irretrievably broken but still faintly intelligible if only as the memories of memories.  

Lost Soul: the Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's "The Island of Dr. Moreau"

 David Gregory's arresting 2014 documentary, Lost Soul:  the Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's "The Island of Dr. Moreau" has the fascination of a freak show.  The picture, no doubt incomplete and biased in favor of the quixotic Stanley, chronicles the production of a big-budget Hollywood horror movie, The Island of Dr. Moreau, an ambitious film maudit featuring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer.  The film's thesis is that Richard Stanley, a genuinely creative if eccentric auteur, conceived a project too ambitious to be inexpensively produced as an  independent film.  As the picture's budget increased, studio executives become concerned about their investment and wrested control of the film from its creator.  The picture was completed, albeit in a seriously compromised form, and derided as a failure when released in 1996,  Stanley, for his part, was effectively blackballed as impractical, inefficient, an artist as opposed to the sort of skilled craftsmen that Hollywood values, and spent the next 20 years in exile and solitude.  Late in the film, an actress named Fairuza Balk, one of the picture's performers, says that the story illustrates the power of money in Hollywood and that the film's executives were so greedy "they would sell their own mothers for cash."  But she misunderstands what we are shown in the documentary.  The vice that destroys Stanley and his project is not greed, but pride.  Stanley has no control over the production after the first week of shooting, but the movie collapses anyhow -- in large part, this is because of the outrageous (if amusing) behavior of Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando on the set, and, also, attributable to the derisory arrogance of John Frankenheimer, the Hollywood stalwart recruited to salvage the production.  It is pride that goeth before the fall, a precept illustrated in Fassbinder's similar picture Beware the Holy Whore, a fictionalization of the calamities that befell one of the German's productions -- calamities all having their origin in the brutish arrogance of the people involved in making the movie.  

Richard Stanley is a South African who had lived for 20 years in London before conceiving the project of yet another film version of H.G. Wells' cautionary, anti-vivisectionist science fiction novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.  Stanley is the best thing in Gregory's film, prepared, it seems, as an adjunct to the director's return to big budget cinema with his production of The Color out of Space, an adaptation of a Lovecraft novella that starred Nicholas Cage.  With luminous pale skin and classically aquiline and handsome features, Stanley is prettier than any of his actors and, at least on-screen, highly charismatic.  He's like Lord Byron in Hollywood, exceptionally glib and eloquent -- Stanley speaks in perfect prose delivered at a dizzyingly fast clip.  As befits a specialist in horror films, he seems to believe in the occult and claims to have engaged a sorcerer to influence the outcome of The Island of Dr. Moreau.  We see him tramping about the mountains at Montsegur in France where he lives, noting that this was where the Cathars, whom he regards as fellow maligned eccentrics, made their last stand against the forces of orthodoxy.  We see him wearing a cape and wreathed in romantic mist in the mountains.  Stanley had been obsessed with Wells' novel since early childhood.  He tells us that H.G. Wells believed that Joseph Conrad imitated the structure of the novel and the character of Dr. Moreau in conceiving his novella "The Heart of Darkness."  The two writers had been friends but Wells' assertion of plagiarism destroyed their relationship.  Conrad, for his part, said that the inspiration for his "Mistah Kurtz" was the British explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, who happens to be Richard Stanley's great-great grandfather.  The director had prepared some story boards and written a treatment of the novel that was supposedly close to the book but much more lurid -- for instance, Moreau is sleeping with his beast-(wo)men.  (Stanley also confesses that he felt cheated when an earlier film advertised a scene in which a woman changes into a  panther -- the earlier movie with Burt Lancaster didn't deliver, but Stanley intended to shoot that scene in his version.)  Stanley had made two highly regarded indie horror films, low budget pictures but effectively directed and, so, he pitched his project to New Line Cinema's money men.  They were intrigued, impressed by Stanley's fervor and intelligence, but skeptical as to whether he could manage a large budget picture.  Originally, the production was conceived as involving a budget of 6 to 8 million dollars.  Here greed intervenes -- someone had the idea of casting the film with expensive movie stars:  initially James Wood and Bruce Willis were to perform with Brando.  The film's producers decided that the project was too ambitious for the relatively inexperienced Stanley and so they recruited Roman Polanski to direct.  Stanley retained a warlock in London to convene his coven and cast spells when he went to plead his case with Brando.  To everyone's amazement, Brando liked Stanley, possibly due to the influence of black magic, but more likely because he was intrigued that the South African was related to Henry Stanley who had been the model for Kurtz in the Conrad book and its subsequent adaptation in Apocalypse Now (featuring Brando of course).  In any event, Brando demanded that Stanley direct the picture and since the star's  involvement was thought to be vital for the film's success, the inexperienced South African was retained on the production.  There were bad signs, however, at the outset:  one of the studio execs was bizarrely astounded that Stanley took four sugars with his coffee, a violation of industry norms that seems to have alarmed the man; the budget was written with a one and a half million contingency for replacing the director if this was required.  (The Hollywood executives who appear in the film are unwilling to articulate what they found disturbing about Stanley, possibly due to a fear of appearing philistine in the documentary, but the implication is that they found him "visionary" and, therefore, too creative to work successfully on a big-budget production.  Stanley's pride doomed him.  Objectively, he was too inexperienced to control a film that was now budgeted for 50 or 60 million dollars and out of his depth.  Self-destructively, Stanley selected a rain forest location in Queensland, Australia, one of the wettest places on earth and built an elaborate set an hour from the nearest amenities.  Stanley wanted to key his images on a mountain looming overhead, but the peak was rarely visible in the fog and rain. and his set was too close to the peak in any event to provide a good view of it.  Stanley rented a spectacular house, a sort of treehouse, and refused to leave it, apparently paralyzed by anxiety over the production that was slipping out of control.  Bruce Willis ended up in a divorce from Demi Moore and withdrew from the project,  Val Kilmer, then at the peak of his fame, was hired to replace him.  Kilmer came to the set and taunted Stanley.  After a week of shooting, Stanley was fired, paid his full director's fee on the condition that he not approach closer than 40 kilometers to the film set.  He withdrew into the forest to plot revenge and smoke marijuana.

The really astonishing stuff occurred after Stanley was fired, falsifying the picture's implicit contention that Stanley was too creative and visionary to successfully direct the movie.  In fact, the behavior of Kilmer and Brando was monstrous from the outset and became increasingly monstrous as the production appeared.  Brando, of course, was horribly miscast.  The original mumblecore method actor was ill-suited for an essentially declamatory role in a horror film.  (After Last Tango in Paris in which Brando was allowed to play himself, he was miscast in just about every other film made at the end of his career -- he's miscast in Apocalypse Now, for instance, a huge fat man with a lisp supposed to imitate a ruthless Special Forces commando.)  Brando appeared on set with his face painted Kabuki white, wearing a white tunic of some sort described as a "diaper".  He demanded bizarre hats and wore a  bucket over his bald head that he had filled with ice.  (Brando liked business with ice as witness the famous scene in Missouri Breaks, played by the actor in drag, in which he soothes a painful tooth with a cube of ice extracted from a tub where the corpse of someone he has just assassinated is cooling.)  The film's cast included the world's smallest man, a 17 inch tall midget from the Dominican Republic.  Brando rewrote the script to eliminate a very skilled German actor who had been hired to play his assistant.  Brando substituted the midget for the German and dressed him up exactly as he was dressed, creating a "mini-me" effect.  The midget was an inveterate sexual harasser and, apparently, an excellent dancer -- there's footage of him dancing in a club with people making a wide circle around the actor to keep from "treading upon him."  In the documentary's climax, Stanley comes  out of the jungle and answers a casting call for extras for the film he conceived, ending up cast as a bull-dog man, unrecognizable in a latex mask he wore for the part.  He infiltrated the set and had access to explosives, but didn't blow anything up.  Stanley remarks wryly that he began the film as its creator-god and ended playing one of Moreau's monstrous beast-men.  Stanley remains too arrogant to attribute the catastrophes that beset the picture to his own delusional pride.  He claims that the film project collapsed when the warlock in London developed a brittle bone syndrome that reversed all of his spells -- this led to hurricanes, people getting bit by spiders so venomous that their "flesh melted", and a host of other misfortunes.  Brando's daughter, Cheyenne, had committed suicide and the star was only willing to appear for a week at the location in Australia -- on the day of his first scenes, he simply didn't come out of his trailer.  Later, Val Kilmer wouldn't leave his trailer until Brando had come out; Brando likewise said he wouldn't emerge until Kilmer was on the set.  The stand-off lasted for several days.  Of course, no one could restrain Brando and Kilmer's arrogance because they were simply paid so much money that they didn't care about the project in the slightest,  By this point in his career, Brando had complete contempt for acting and told Fairuza Balk that she didn't need to do any thing at all to earn her wages since the script was garbage anyhow -- just take the money, he said.  Both Kilmer and Brando were not merely content to take the money and run; rather, they took the money and, then, tried to tank the production.  

Gregory's documentary is 99 minutes long and one senses that there would be enough material here for a whole mini-series.  Every minute of the movie is compelling.  There's a melancholy coda:  after making the critically acclaimed Color out of Space in 2016, Stanley's ex-girlfriends accused him of beating them up and had court records to prove their claims.  Stanley's magic again had gone awry.  He's now blackballed in Hollywood on account of domestic abuse.  The studio that profited from The Color out of Space paid the proceeds to a foundation for battered women and vowed to never work with Stanley again.

Slow Machine

 
Slow Machine (Paul Felten and Joe Denardo) is an enigmatic 2020 film about an actress unable to distinguish between roles that she is playing and reality.  This is one explanation for the movie's eerie events and paranoiac sensibility.  Of course, whenever paranoia is involved, there is the possibility that the shadowy figures bent on "retribution" as the film's heroine puts it, are real and that she is actually in danger -- it's not paranoia, as the saying goes, if they are really out to get you.  The film's structure seems to oppose this latter possibility although the boundary between real events and fantasy is unstable and we're never sure exactly what we're seeing.

Stephanie, an actress living in Queens, is fearful that she is being pursued.  She has fled to the suburbs where she has crashed with a group of musicians who are rehearsing some new songs.  (The music has a droning, vaguely menacing sound, melancholy and anguished, a bit like something by Nick Cave.)  Stephanie says that she fears retribution.  She seems agitated and unhappy.  However, she is exceedingly voluble, almost too loquacious for the situation and her moods are volatile -- at first, she refuses to play touch football with the band members, but, then, engages in the game with a sort of feral aggressiveness. A title takes us back in time a week.  Stephanie wakes up after being black-out drunk in a bed in a strange, minimally decorated apartment.  The apartment belongs to a cop, Gerard, who blithely observes that Stephanie should check to see if she remains "unviolated" (which she does).  Gerard works for some sort of secret police and claims that he has assassinated various people.  Gerard also claims that he is married, but seems to flirt with Stephanie.  He asserts that his apartment is a sort of 'safe house' operated by the agency for which he works.  Next, we see Stephanie at an AA meeting that she disrupts by claiming that she invites "judgement" and that she thinks "shame" is important to her recovery.  By this time, we note that Stephanie sounds slightly different every time we hear her speak -- sometimes, she has a faint accent that is impossible to place (she claims to be Swedish); on other occasions, she speaks with a Southern accent.  Stephanie meets with an icon of indie films, Chloe Sevigny, playing herself.  While the women drink, Sevigny describes a recent audition.  She was sent a tremendously compelling fragment of a script and, then, summoned to some remote and decrepit warehouse to read for the part.  At first, the foreboding location harmed her concentration but, then, she read beautifully -- the text poured forth from her with complete conviction.  After rendering this spectacular performance, the author producing the play, Sevigny reports, lit a match and burned the script to ashes.  And she never heard from the author or the play's producers again.  At a party, Stephanie meets Gerard and a belligerent cop from another agency.  Stephanie performs a part for which she is auditioning, a Gothic monologue involving incest and drunkenness and crime.  Gerard is a little dismissive saying that the lines are "low-end Sam Shepherd."  Stephanie and Gerard fight and, although they seem to be teasing one another, the tussle ends with the cop lying on the floor with his skull fractured -- an accident, but a dire  one.  Stephanie, then, flees to the commune of musicians recording songs in the suburbs.  (Apparently, the band is called "Slow Machine"; the other meaning for that phrase is the slow, deliberative approach of an unavoidable and disastrous fate -- at least, this is what Stephanie says.)  A scruffy band member tries to have sex with Stephanie.  She rejects his advances -- he has a girlfriend in the band -- and goes back to Gerard's apartment.  There, she finds an argumentative and imperious lady realtor who tells her that Gerard died.  She can't say anything else because "the apartment isn't even listed yet."  Another title tells us that some years have passed.  Stephanie is with a casual pick-up, watching a film in which she is acting with a strong Texas accent.  The man leaves and Stephanie calls her husband and small daughter for a Skype or Zoom conference.  Stephanie's husband seems sad and defeated.  Stephanie tells the little girl a bedtime story about a pig named Bertram who knows that "there is something bad in the forest."  She recounts how Bertram rooted in the ground and, then, dug down and unearthed a wet --- But the little girl has fallen asleep.  Stephanie seems to be in some kind of trance and we suspect that she was about to disclose that Bertram the pig had dug up a corpse -- possibly the body of poor Gerard.  But we don't hear the end of the story and her husband, who has pop-bottle thick glasses, says: " I was a little worried where you were going with that (story)."  In the final scene, we see Stephanie venturing down a dank-looking corridor.  It seems that she has entered the uncanny space where Chloe Sevigny auditioned with the best script she had ever read -- a text that was, then, burnt to ashes.  (The end of the movie is unclear but it is possible that what we have been watching is, in fact, some version of the script offered to Chloe Sevigny and, then, irrevocably destroyed.) 

The film is very short, about 71 minutes long and interesting throughout.  There are probably several different interpretations that one could advance about Slow Machine.  My view is that the film reverses the relationship between reality and performance -- we tend to think of performance as commenting on reality and the dominant term in our existence is the real as opposed to the imaginary.  But the film seems to suggest that, perhaps, what matters is the performance, the expressive monologue and that "reality" is just a framework on which to hang what really matters -- acting and the performance of carefully written and melodramatic speeches.  In such a world, the "real" is subordinate to the imagined and, at the end of the film, Stephanie seems about to vanish into her own fantasies.  

Her Socialist Smile

John Gianvito's documentary, Her Socialist Smile is a fascinating and ambitious exploration of Helen Keller's radical political beliefs.  Gianvito is a follower of the American revisionist historian, Howard Zinn, and Her Socialist Smile develops that writer's thesis that the real history of the United States has been suppressed and hidden by the Capitalist academic establishment and media.  Arguments to this effect in this film seem persuasive to me on the basis of my own experience:  of course, I have known about Helen Keller's inspirational life since I was a little boy.  (Helen Keller was once so well-known that every kid knew several tasteless, if funny, jokes about her -- for instance, the blind-deaf woman trying to read braille from a hot waffle iron.)   I knew that Miss Keller was both blind and deaf, that, somehow, she learned to communicate, that her relentless teacher was Annie Sullivan, and that she had been impersonated by no less than Patty Duke in the movie The Miracle Worker -- I knew that she had met with Kings and Presidents and that she had been an international celebrity.  But, of course, I didn't know that she was a radical Socialist, an admirer of Vladimir Lenin, and an advocate of violence in service of the Revolution -- in fact, in 1912, she broke with Eugene Debs, the famous mainstream Socialist, over the use of violence to overthrow the Capitalist government and, in fact, endorsed the Wobblies (the I.W.W.).  In every way but the most literal, the little blind-deaf girl was a bomb-thrower.  I have no doubt that this aspect of Keller's biography has been almost wholly suppressed.  Keller herself noted that when she advocated for blind war-veterans or condemned the treatment of sight-impaired African-American children, she was wildly praised and lionized.  But when she addressed the root causes of these injustices -- profiteering that led to horrific international wars or an economic system that caused blindness in Black children by not providing them with routine medical care and resources, she was derided or ignored or, even, accused of lunacy.  Helen Keller was considered to be an inspirational figure, an independent thinker, and an icon so long as she kept within the bounds of advocacy for the handicapped.  But the moment she transgressed those limitations and engaged in political advocacy, she was claimed to be helpless, delusional, and a tool of sinister Bolshevik handlers.   

I didn't much like John Gianvito's earlier film The Whispering Wind and the Profit Motive, although I admired its peculiar, off-putting integrity.  In the previous film, Gianvito almost literally adapts Zinn's history of the United States, filming locations where events important in the writer's alternative history took place.  The film featured gorgeous shots of empty meadows, fields, and gravestones without any commentary at all.  By contrast, Her Socialist Smile adapts the materialist objectivity of the earlier film, incorporating many enigmatic seeming shots of trees and flowers and insects, while also using just about every other cinematic technique available to makes its points.  Where the earlier film was minimalist, austere, and stripped-down, Her Socialist Smile is fulling of jarring cuts, weird and evocative period footage and, even, features a performance by the Slovenian punk rock band Pankriti performing an earsplitting and exuberant version of the Italian Socialist anthem, Bandiera Rossa.  (This sequence, a real kick in the face, with the music accompanied by red titles on a black background that accelerate until they can't be read, is a highlight of the movie:  play it loud!) There's also a dry lecture delivered by Noam Chomsky in which he accuses Lenin of being a "right wing deviationist."  Gianvito's presentation avoids images of Helen Keller herself -- we see her in only four or five archival scenes showing her in the 94 minute movie.  Instead, Gianvito, following the technique of the purist Communist filmmakers Danielle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, uses copious quotes by Keller, expecting us to read whole paragraphs of text displayed on the screen.  Reading, however, is coupled with sensuous shots of the natural world that are puzzling at first but have a two-fold purpose:  first, Keller knew the world by touch and the extreme close-ups of animal fur, peeling paint on old walls, ferns, and trees moving in the wind have a tactile force -- we grasp that feeling these things gave Keller her sense of reality.  Second, Gianvito's nature footage features caterpillars, tiny industrious insects, even a slow-moving snail -- his point is that the pace of progress may be almost imperceptibly slow and incremental, but, in fact, the movement toward social justice is both inexorable and irresistable:  in the end, the truth will be known and human beings will be liberated.  Gianvito embodies this faith in a final shot of plants releasing great quantities of fluffy white seed into the air -- truth is an insemination as well as an inevitable dissemination.  Tiny, inconsequential gestures toward equality and justice have an incremental effect that will some day culminate in a just society.  The other visual strands in the movie are period footage, for instance, anti-Bolshevik cartoons and scary pictures of the aftermath of the Centralia Massacre; there are images of strikes and civil unrest.  We see only one shot of Helen Keller in motion -- the images show her rising from her typewriter (she typed in braille) and making her way stiffly across a room:  there is something weirdly robotic about her and she has the hieratic posture of an archaic Greek kore, a maiden who is the bride of Hades.  Similarly, we hear Keller's eerie and (to my ears) completely unintelligible voice only twice -- at the start of the film, we see braille characters being typed and hear Keller speaking with another voice "translating," as it were her, blurred falsetto words, more a strange atonal aria than speech.  At the end of the film, when Keller was old, a man asks her some questions:  Are you happy? and If you could have one wish granted what would it be?  She answers and, by this point in the film we are so engaged that we strain to hear what she says -- but the words can't be deciphered, something in response to the latter question about "light" perhaps, but who knows what she is saying?  This final scene confirms to us that despite her world-wide fame, Keller remained mysterious, an enigma, and, perhaps, ultimately beyond our understanding.  (Keller says something similar about her visit to post-war Hiroshima -- she says that a man badly scarred by the atomic bomb let her feel his face and she writes:  "the rest is silence....")  Apparently, Keller was something of comedian after the manner of Will Rogers.  She toured in vaudeville opry-houses between 1920 and 1924, answering questions posed to her by the audience -- her answers were apparently wry, humorous, and aphoristic.  The movie periodically takes a break to show us some of these remarks, the words projected in front of ornate old theater screens.  The documentary establishes its materialist bona fides by not cutting away from mistakes or, seemingly, irrelevant material -- an an early scene, the woman who reads Keller's words into a microphone in the studio talks about her lunch and discretely burps before reading the text required for the movie. (Near the end of the movie, we see her packing up notes and script and leaving the studio.)  A reader who floridly recites words written by W.B. Dubois has something go wrong with his hearing aids and has to stop in mid-sentence -- these misfires are dutifully recorded by the filmmaker.  

The movie is full of remarkably interesting bits of information.  Keller was an admirer of Marx and thought that The Communist Manifesto, "if not imposed on anyone", was the world's greatest political tract.  When Keller asked the International Society for the Blind to translate a book by Mikhail Bakunin into braille, the organization refused -- she had to pay someone to make the translation.  There are many extraordinary quotes -- although a believer in women's suffrage, Keller subordinated her feminism to her socialism:  I'm not just  a suffragist, she wrote, I'm a militant socialist suffragist.  We must free men and women together before we can free women,"  Although her Alabama father was a slave-owner, she preached that "White supremacy augers ill for this nation."  She called for a "world-encircling revolt"and argued that the wretched of the Earth are entitled to use violence to achieve their liberation.  Toward the end of the movie, we see dead animals, basically road kill, and hear about "three fires" -- there are shots of Nazis burning her books in Nuremberg, then, we learn that a catastrophic fire burned her archives including the manuscripts of her biography of Annie Sullivan, a book called Teacher.  She had to reconstruct the text for publication -- a task that took her ten years.  Then, when the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, the Keller Foundation archives two blocks away were destroyed, another enormous loss archival materials and, in fact, two employees were trapped in an elevator and died in the fire.  One of the few things surviving the blaze was an uncanny looking portrait bust showing Keller as she was when she toured post-war Japan -- the torso is scarred by flame and its blind eyes are huge, blank, and unsettling.  Asked "What is the greatest illusion?" Keller said:  "To think we have none."  Asked what was her greatest pleasure, she replied "walking in the woods" and feeling the plants, the bark of the trees, the breeze, and the flowers.  (This disclosure late in the film motivates many of the beautiful shots of plants and little animals in the movie.)  Keller remained true to her political convictions until the end of her life.  She wrote that "(her) life was not a hardship compared to the lives of working men and women ground under the heel of oppression."  

Her Socialist Smile was produced by MUBI and should remain available into the indefinite future on that streaming service.  True to Gianvito's theories about the media, I fear that this film may be hard for many people to see.  But it's an inspiring and provocative work and I highly recommend it.  

Beware the Holy Whore

Rainer W. Fassbinder's Beware the Holy Whore is thought to be the crowning achievement of the director's early phase, a dozen or so movies that he made with his Antitheater repertoire company between 1967 and 1971.  The movie depicts a film production staffed by characters so comically depraved that the film seems satirical, something on the order of a Monty Python film.  Apparently, Fassbinder and his associates were, in  fact, so viciously perverse that the movie can be construed as a sort documentary -- Fassbinder apparently dramatizes dysfunction on the set of his previous film, a sort of Andy Warhol Western called Whitey.  Fassbinder made Beware the Holy Whore in the month of September 1970 and released the film two months later.  He completed one final picture with his cultish corps of actors in the Antitheater and, then, disbanded that group, although continuing to work with his favorites from these early productions.  Fassbinder's last Antitheater productions were so self-absorbed and self-referential that they pose the risk of disappearing into themselves, crawling "up their own asshole" as it is sometimes picturesquely said.  

Shot in startling color, Beware the Holy Whore is conceived as a series of static tableaux, sometimes interrupted by sequences of short scenes (sequence shots) presented in a discontinuous, syncopated fashion.  Fassbinder's talents as a director of theater are on display -- he blocks the shots so that his actors can strike poses against the white backdrop of a resort hotel lobby and bar where the film production depicted in the movie is becalmed.  (The film looks back to Godard's Contempt, a movie with a similar color scheme and Mediterranean setting and forward to Wenders The State of Things, also set in crumbling resort hotel in Portugal I think Fassbinder's movie is set on the island of Ischia off the coast of Italy.)  On occasion, Fassbinder moves the camera, sometimes tracking his characters as they strut around the hotel lobby -- there is plenty to see:  in the background couples embrace or dry-hump or languorously dance to the juke box and the bartender sometimes looks on censoriously or simply sprawls unconscious over the bar.  The decor is a rehearsal for the extravagance of Fassbinder's later Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.  A  big picture of a cockfight dominates one wall and there is a life-size terra-cotta saint who seems be imploring the movie people to behave with some semblance of humanity or, at least, simple reason.  Sometimes, a ravishing sea-coast is visible.  Although the movie is stagey and hyper-theatrical, a few scenes open out into the landscape -- some dialogue is filmed through the windshield of a moving car and a couple of shots occur on the hotel terrace or in its courtyard cramped with lights and other film apparatus (none of which is ever really shown being used in the movie.)  In the penultimate shot after we have watched the one and only scene from the movie in production actually staged, a camera whirls around a decorative frieze, a bit like the gilt and stucco of a European rococo palace and one sequence is filmed in a room adorned with walls painted in the trompe l 'oeil style of Pompeiian murals.  After the scene with the camera accelerating around the frieze decorating the wall, Fassbinder returns to a preferred mode of representation in the film, the principal characters all seated in a row disconsolately looking into the camera lens that is recording them.  

The film begins with a weird monologue from a kid in black cowboy hat who seems to be the movie company's drug dealer.  (He describes a cartoon in which Goofy realizes that he has become a part of a criminal enterprise.)  The static shot featuring the kid is shot heroically from a low angle featuring lots of sky and wind -- apparently, the image harkens back to the wild, wild West motifs in Whitey, although we wouldn't know this without the movie's "liner" notes on its DVD case.  (The film comes without commentary as part of the Criterion Eclipse series of lesser-known movies by famous directors.)  The opening shot looks like an outtake from Tom Laughlin's Billy Jack (1971) -- obviously, the movie isn't modeled on the Hollywood picture which comes a few months later, but there was, it seems, something in the air at the time that establishes a certain look for hipster drug dealers.  (You can see similar cowboy hats on the Berlin low-lifes in Werner Herzog's Stroszek).  The movie, then, traps us in the hotel lobby where the film's characters are getting drunk, necking, and taunting one another.  Two licentious looking young women survey the people in the bar and one of them says:  "This place is crawling with gays" -- which is an understatement.  The blonde bully of a director Jeff has promised a woman named Irm that he was going to marry her.  But he's abandoned her and, every time, they interact he slaps her in the face.  (She hysterically screams that he's beaten her "half to death.")  Jeff is sleeping with Ricky, a handsome young man who, however, yearns to return to his wife and child.  "Coach" a craggy-looking Roman stuntman (or fight-coach) tries to seduce Hanna Schygulla (playing herself); she teases him but, then, seduces Eddie Constantine, the famous French tough-guy who has been imported to supply some class to the movie.  (Before seducing Eddie Constantine, Hanna first makes fun of him, imitating grotesquely Constantine's facial expressions.)  "Coach" who delivers his lines in accented English gets drunk when rejected by Hanna and begins hurling glasses onto the floor.  Then, to get the attention of his would-be girlfriend, he dives into the broken glass and cuts himself badly.  It seems that Irm was financing part of the picture, but, now, that she's been beaten by Jeff, she won't offer any more money.  The project has run out of cash and film stock.  Jeff blocks a scene with his camera man, but they don't have film to shoot the sequence -- it requires Eddie Constantine to murder a woman by a karate chop (something he thinks will be ludicrous and that he opposes).  Sasha, played by Rainer Fassbinder himself, waddles around in a white suit -- he's some sort of production manager and bullies everyone.  But he is mercilessly bullied by Jeff, played by the baby-faced and sardonic, Lou Castell. The men all wear skin-tight jeans and boots; the women are dressed in easily discarded dresses and don't wear bras.  Hanna Schygulla runs around half-naked in a little white outfit with no back and not much front either.  (Fassbinder likes to have her sitting around with fully clothed men entirely naked.)  All of the women have enormous hair, Schygulla's big perm is like an Afro.  Jeff is smitten with Ricky although this doesn't stop him from sleeping with some of women hanging around the set.  A translator gets fired, for no good reason -- this causes her family members, who are important local folks, to threaten to deport Jeff.  Jeff ends up hysterically castigating members of the cast and crew and, then, pitches to the ground howling and tearful.  "You all hate me," he says accurately.  Finally, someone punches him in the gut while Hanna dances to Ray Charles and the other cast and crew members either neck or quarrel with one another.  There are a bunch of short scenes demonstrating that complete erotic and artistic chaos has descended on the film company.  Jeff stands on a sort of dock where the entire cast is piled up either like corpses at a Concentration Camp or the blissed-out participants exhausted from an orgy.  Jeff berates the heap of bodies.  We see the murder scene in the movie that is said to be about "state sponsored brutality" (it's called Patria y Muerte) and it's just as bad as Eddie thought it would be, totally unconvincing with the actors all laughing uproariously after Jeff cuts the take.  Jeff says that he won't be content until his faithless lover, Ricky, is "completely destroyed."  Ricky has earlier told someone that he won't be satisfied until Jeff is "completely destroyed."  Irm says that she won't be satisfied until "Jeff is completely ruined."  Notwithstanding  this scirocco of revenge blowing about the set, Jeff says that the film will be no good unless everyone has fun (Spass) working on the project -- the notion of spassmachen (that is, "having fun") is one of the peculiar phrases that is repeated on various occasions in the movie.  In summary, everyone more or less sleeps with everyone else, regardless of gender, everyone insults everyone else or mocks them or humiliates them in front of the others; everyone swills gallons of cuba libre -- even when the resources are gathered to make the film, no one really does anything to advance the project.  Periodically, Jeff throws screaming fits and says that everyone is plotting against him.  At one point, Hanna tries to stab Sascha -- it's not clear why she engages in this murderous assault but it's in keeping with the rest of mayhem occurring on this film location.

So what is this all about?  Early in the film, one of the degenerate-looking women says that the film is being made by a group that is "like a commune."  She is referring to the Antitheater company, Fassbinder's cult of which he was the resident tyrant and sole proprietor.  (This "commune" is visualized in the scene in which all the cult members are  heaped up on top of one another, either unconscious or engaged in sex, and Jeff berates them for being non-productive.)  Critics interpret the movie as showing why the Antitheater paradigm of film production necessarily failed -- things were too intense, the characters had too much history or "baggage" as we might say, and a movie production company founded on everyone having sex with everyone else is probably not a good business model.  If this is the point, it's a trivial one and, probably, not worth making across the length of 104 minute movie.  Godard's Contempt is about the nature of representation and the impossibility of male-female relationships; Wenders' The State of Things is about how the great amounts of money necessary for film making lead inevitably to fatal compromises -- his film is, at least, partially about Roger Corman and gangsters.  Fassbinder seems to be trying to figure out what wrong in the intricate web of sexual and sado-masochistic relationships that comprised the Antitheater -- but the riddle seems pretty easy to solve:  Jeff (the film's surrogate for Fassbinder) is a monstrous egotist and, ultimately, his technique of pitting his players against one another is doomed to failure.  As Homer Simpson would say:  "Duh?"  An example of how inbred the film is:  Irm represents Irmgard Hermann, one of Fassbinder's longsuffering actors who, in fact, the director did severely beat -- but, in the movie, Irm is played by Werner Schoeter's muse Magdalena Montezuma and portrayed as a nauseatingly hypocritical hysteric.  I assume that there are layers and layers of this sort of stuff going on in the movie, but it would be exhausting and pointless to try to sort this out.  Nonetheless, it's a tribute to Fassbinder's superb eye and his wit that the film is watchable at all.  And there's a great quote from Thomas Mann just before the film goes black:  "I'm deadly sick of depicting humanity without partaking in humanity in the slightest."  The soundtrack includes wonderful songs by Leonard Cohen, Ray Charles, and Elvis Presley -- it's a million dollar soundtrack that you couldn't buy for love nor money nowadays.  

   

Squid Game

Squid Game (2021), a nine episode South Korean series, is exuberant garish trash.  The show is hyper-violent and sadistic, but it has engaging characters. spectacularly designed sets, and brilliant;y conceived and executed action scenes.  The program is state-of-the-art entertainment and, although it is foolish, a vicious combination of The Most Dangerous Game and torture porn thrillers like the Saw franchise, the show's power is undeniable.  Squid Game demonstrates the importance of interesting and likeable characters -- programs of this sort are dependent upon audience identification with the protagonists of the show and our affection for them; as in professional sports, we need to have a team for which to root and Squid Game provides this satisfaction in spades.

The show's premise is simple enough.  A group of down-and-out characters are recruited to participate in violent games.  The protagonists are desperate to make a few bucks (or the South Korean equivalent thereof) and, after being slapped around by a sinister figure in the subway, a well-dressed man who plays a game with the hero in which he gets to slap the man's face each time he loses the competition (it has something to do with throwing down some sort of packet to make another packet bounce off the pavement), the action gets underway at a remote island staffed by an army of robotic soldiers armed with guns and wearing inscrutable masks.  These forces are led by a figure clad in black, face concealeed behind an elegant cubist mask -- the so-called "front man".  The island has a huge dormitory for the participants in the games, about 500 people initially. (The players are transported to the island unconscious after being gassed in the vehicles that pick them up to be taken to the island.)  The set at the island is like the lair of one of James Bond's nemesis super-villains, an elaborate system of candy-colored steps and doorways, a Piranesi-like maze, although brightly lit, through which the poor players trudge to the tune of the "Blue Danube Waltz".  There are various playgrounds, also pastel-colored, where the action takes place.  Everything is designed to look like a high-tech primary school playground and the characters all wear uni-sex uniforms bearing their numbers.  #1 is a very feeble old man; #456 is the show's hero, the kind and honest, but hang-dog gambling addict, Seong Gi-hun.  (This actor, who reminds me of a young Jimmy Stewart, is so appealing that he will no doubt become an important international performer on the strength of his performance in this show).  Other principal characters are Cho Sang-Woo, a young man from the neighborhood where Seong Gi-hun lived as a boy and the kid from the 'hood, who went to college,and became successful as a ruthless business man -- he is someone whom everyone admires, although as the show progresses it becomes apparent that he will commit cold-blooded murder and betrayal to survive the horrific games that the participants are forced to play.  Kang Sae-byeah is refugee from North Korea, embittered and, also, ruthless although we find that a trace of humanity remains in her.  There's a nasty gangster with a serpent tattooed on the side of his throat (Deok-su) and a half-crazed older woman who offers herself sexually to other players to achieve an advantage.  The principal characters, that is, those who survive the first three or four games, are rounded out with a cop who has infiltrated the nightmarish island playground (Jun-Ho) and a Muslim, a Syrian refugee, the endearing Abdul Ali.  The show is effective because these characters are convincingly delineated, act in a way that seems plausible, and engage our sympathies.  If the show wasn't well-written with good characters, it would just be a festival of torture and murder and, probably, would be unwatchable.  

The games on the island are hideous parodies of playground amusements.  There are three general rules:  (1) Once a game is started it can not be stopped until it is concluded; (2) players who lose are eliminated -- we quickly learn that this means they either die in the game or are shot in the head by the staff upon losing; (3) the players can vote as to whether they wish to continue and, by a simple majority vote, the games will end and the participants will be returned to their ordinary lives in Seoul  Every time a player is killed, a jackpot of currency suspended in a golden globe over the dormitory floor is flooded with more money -- ultimately, the winner of the game will take home several billion dollars.  The last rule is the most insidious -- the players participate in the lethal games on the basis of their free-will; this is what they have signed-up for.  Indeed, after the horrific first game in which several hundred competitors are killed, the participants have had too much and they vote to end the competition.  All survivors are returned to Seoul, but in a powerful, and depressing episode called "Hell", most of them run afoul of the same weaknesses and oppression that compelled them originally to enlist in the games and, so, the great majority of them solicit their handlers to return to the island and the deadly sports practiced there.  The games that follow:  a terrifying tug of war over an abyss, a race over a bridge made with panels of tempered and untempered glass (you can stand on the tempered glass; the untempered will break underfoot propelling you to the ground sixty feet below), and, finally, a savage brawl between the two survivors in the rain, the titular "Squid Game" -- all of these episodes are filmed with the utmost conviction and are as realistically plausible as the horrifying games of Russian Roulette in the movie The Deer Hunter.  Some of the games have a particularly fearsome aspect:  after the "tug of war" competition encouraged people to form teams based on loyalty and physical strength, the competitors decide that the next game, unknown to them, will be something similar and so the players choose for their partners people whom they trust -- in one case, a husband and wife form a team.  But the game is marbles involving competition between  the partners and the loser will be murdered by the staff.  This game is intended to destroy any remaining trust and loyalty between the participants.  The goal is to reduce the players to a state of feral paranoia.  In one episode, this is accomplished by the red-clad staff on the island giving the competitors only one hard-boiled egg and a bottle of water for supper.  This leads to players stealing from another and, ultimately, a vicious riot in which about forty of the competitors are beaten to death.  The sequence of games is concealed from the players with the result that attributes beneficial in an earlier game may be the exact opposite of what is required for the next competition.  

There are several subplots that are interesting and compel attention but that ultimately go nowhere.  An intrepid cop infiltrates the staff on the island, has various adventures, but, then, gets rubbed out (possibly by his own brother) in the penultimate episode.  A lot of footage is devoted to his attempts to navigate the weird world of the armed gunmen supervising the games, but the narrative never develops into anything significant.  A doctor playing the game is recruited to dissect fresh corpses to deliver the organs by diver to Chinese boats waiting off-shore -- this plot also leads nowhere, although it provides some diving gear to be used by the cop when he (unsuccessfully) tries to escape from the island.  (The autopsy - organ harvesting plot also allows the show to indulge in some indelibly gory imagery which also seems redundant in the context of the gruesomely violent games.)  The last several episodes have unnecessary elements -- what does it add to the show to bring into the action a group of utterly decadent oligarchs who wear elegant animal masks and wager on the outcome of the games?  This aspect of the film incorporates all known cliches and stereotypes, including sexual degeneracy, about the super-rich -- it's a bit like out-takes from the orgies in Eyes Wide Shut.  Some explanations given for the proceedings in the last episode, which seems too long, are unsatisfying.  When the sole survivor sees someone being recruited for the games in the subway, he saves the man by taking from him the card necessary to contact those managing the spectacle.  Later, the hero turns back from boarding a plane setting up the inevitable sequel -- in this show, he will infiltrate the games again as a participant in order to destroy them.  (At least, this is what the ending suggests.)

The series is produced with utter conviction.  It's full of bizarre nasty details.  Corpses are loaded up into caskets decorated with pinkish ribbons like gift boxes.  There's an underground crypt that serves as a crematorium where the losers are burned to ash.  The walls of the dormitory are decorated with schematic and cheery diagrams of the children's games that we know to be horrifying.  Squid Game has the courage of its perverse convictions -- the show is willing to pause for extended periods to detail quiet interactions between the players.  (In the last episode, a game is played in which everything is staked on whether passers-by will will try to help an drunk who is freezing to death on a street corner -- although this isn't as gaudy as the ultra-violent games, this sequence is also brilliantly produced and very suspenseful.)  It may be that the series is a commentary on Trump's form of capitalism -- one guy wins everything; every one else is a pathetic loser.  In a shamelessly hypocritical manner, the show seems to be critical of TV programs like American Ninja -- that is, reality shows in which game participants engage in feats of dexterity and strength in playground-like settings.  Implicitly, the show condemns the viewers for watching it.  But you can't look away.  

Genus Pan

Genus Pan plays like a morose, minimalist version of John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  Three men on leave from the gold mines where they work wander through a wilderness. Gradually, the get on each other's nerves.  Unlike Huston's movie, Genus Pan and its narrative stakes are scrupulously impoverished -- the men aren't lugging sacks of gold dust, but have scarcely enough money to pay for their expenses in trudging home.  In fact, they embark on their odyssey by foot because they don't want to pay for transportation back to their villages and are fearful that predators in the big city through which they would have to pass might cheat them of their hard-earned wages.  Lav Diez, the Filipino director, released this film in 2019.  It's shot in somewhat distressed black and white, composed in long sequence-shot scenes in which the characters appear in middle distance against tangled and menacing foliage.  In the first hour, about six scenes involve fording small streams.  Another six scenes show the men sprawled on the ground resting at the end of a long day trekking.  There are no close-ups, no music on the soundtrack which sometimes features amplified animal sounds -- either roosters crowing in a sinister way or dogs barking or, in one case, some kind primate (I think) howling from an unseen tree.  Like Diaz' El Norte, his apocalyptic version of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the film seems designed as raw clash between good and evil -- as I have earlier observed Diaz is not a subtle film-maker and he proves his points with brute sledge-hammer efficiency.

The three miners involved in the trek are Andres, a wage laborer in the gold mine, and two supervisors rather incongruously called (by Andres) Sir Paolo and Sir Baldomera ("Sir Baldo").  Early in the film, we see Baldo, who has lent money to Andres, abusing the young man and demanding that he pay back every cent that he was loaned.  Andres doesn't make much money and, when the mining company extracts living expenses and other charges from his pay-check, he has next to nothing to take home to his family.  Andres' mother is ill and losing the ability to speak; Andres' sister requires some sort of operation and, needless to say, the mining company's health care benefits leave a lot to be desired -- in fact, the company doesn't have much of a workers' compensation program either:  the men all recall other workers "buried alive" in the mines without any compensation.  Paolo is a Christian and seems saintly.  We see him kneeling in stream, arms outstretched, praying.  On other occasions, he reads his Bible.  The action takes place on a big island that the Americans call "Sleeping Turtle Island" although the locals call it "Hugaw" or "dirty" island.  The place has an ugly history.  During the second world war, the Japanese used the place for rest and recreation and, apparently, kept sex slaves ("comfort women") on the island for the enjoyment of  their troops.  (The miners make some nasty jokes about this history.  The mining company also apparently provides prostitutes and one scene involves the men waiting their turn with a girl offscreen whom we never see.  The island is windy with high hills covered in tall grass -- it looks a bit like the landscape in Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line.  There are dark forests and lots of streams.  Andres believes that Baldo is becoming "corrupt", ruined by the employment practices of the vicious mining firm.  Paolo struggles to keep the peace between Andres and Baldo.  For his part, Baldo thinks Andres is disrespecting him and, in one scene, takes a machete and plans to hack the younger worker to death -- he repents of this intention and throws the machete in one of the ubiquitous streams.  Paolo asks Baldo to give Andres back the money that he demanded from the worker at the film's outset.  However, Paolo is willing to fund this act of generosity -- he gives Baldo the money and demands that he pay Andres with it, making him whole for the loan.  (Reluctantly, the rather sadistic Baldo agrees to do this.)  Things start to go off the rails when a weird animal cry echoes through the jungle.  Baldo says that it's "Clown" and says that "Clown" is laughing because there are twin lizards in the jungle, seemingly meaning himself and Andres.  Previously, we have heard on the soundtrack a dialogue between a man and woman discussing chimpanzees, the titular "genus pan" -- such beasts are said to be "selfish and violent" although it is also maintained that they have the same sort of brain as homo sapiens.  Andres wanders off to a river bank where he greedily eats fruit from a bush.  This fruit has hallucinogenic qualities and seems to trigger a vision in Andres -- he sees a big black horse.  Apparently, a big black horse appearing out of nowhere signifies bad luck and death.  Baldo is enraged that Andres has seen this evil omen.  However, the Christian Paolo says that this is just heathen superstition and, in fact, the apparition was caused by the hallucinogenic fruit of the Buta bush.  

Things go badly wrong in the last hour of this film -- the picture clocks in at about two-hours and forty minutes, very short by Diaz' standards.  (He has made 11 hours pictures.)  This part of the movie is haphazard, seem incompetently improvised, and deviates sharply from the themes in the earlier part of the film.  In fact, the picture deteriorates into a sort of mad murderer scenario, a Hollywood plot involving an insane killer but not filmed with Hollywood's characteristic aplomb and attention to narrative coherence.  It doesn't help that half of the footage is blurry, the subtitles look like pedantic academic footnotes so small as to be scarcely visible, and the narrative is muddled to the point that you can't figure who is doing what to whom, let alone why -- people's motivations in the last part of the film are indecipherable. 

Just three hours from their village, the three miners spend the night next to a typically murky stream, tangled with big serpentine mangrove roots.  They all get drunk and, finally, mysterious references to Clown and the Two Geckos are explained.  (Diaz tends to show us something inexplicable and, maybe, an hour later gets around to providing background narration making sense of what we've already seen -- and been puzzled-by; it's a valid technique but seems deployed mindlessly by Diaz as an anti-Hollywood trope.  Much of art cinema is based on willfully violating narrative conventions that Hollywood would deploy to make plot points plausible.)  It turns out Clown was the boss of the two men when they were little boys performing a circus act -- a clown show called "the Two Geckos".  Baldo and Paolo were impressed into the circus when they were six and eight years old and, although they initially recall how much fun they had performing, there is a dark subtext.  Alcohol causes Paolo to recall that Clown abused the boys, beat and starved them.  This contradicts Baldo's warm memories of their days in the circus.  Both men are very drunk and in a long monologue scene (it last about ten minutes as a single static shot), Paolo rages about his ruined childhood.  Baldo gets mad and smashes in Paolo's skull with a rock.  The drunken Andres, then, fights with Baldo and brains him as well.  Both of his colleagues now dead, Andres flees to his village having stolen their money.  It seems odd that two of our three characters turn out to be ex-circus clowns now turned gold miners  -- why not former poppy farmers or paratroopers or child prostitutes?  There's no back story to explain this weird development and it feels completely arbitrary, like something made up in a bull-session with the writer while drinking beer or smoking pot late at night.  Back in the village, we get new characters, the homicidal Inggo, "Turtle" Mariposa (Paolo's daughter) so named because she walks with painful stiff slowness something like a female zombie, Sarge, some sort of paramilitary cop, and others whose role I couldn't figure out.  There's more talk of the peculiarities of Hugaw Island, including the fact that the place was a smuggler's paradise and that its various malign legends, including the sinister black horse, were invented to scare off outsiders.  For some unknown reason, Andres confesses to the murders, speaking to his mother, Turtle Mariposa, and a woman who seems to be some sort of local witch doctor.  The fat, malevolent Inggo demands that Andres give him the money taken from dead Paolo and Baldo.  Andres refuses.  Whereupon, Inggo kills Andres' mother with his machete.  It's Good Friday and flagellants are marching around the landscape morosely whipping themselves -- just another day in the Philippine Islands..  For reasons that aren't apparent to me, Inggo kills about five of the flagellants, apparently out of pure malice.  Andres talks to the witch woman who wants him to join their indigenous tribe up in the "serene" and pure mountains.  (This brings an entirely new dimension into the film, something about the exploitation of native tribes in the Philippines.)  She and Andres see the ominous black horse, who announces his presence by pawing at the water in creek.  There's a brilliant and evocative shot of the horse standing in the creek; the water reflects the nearby jungle and the horse seems somehow suspended in the air while the witch-woman gestures in such a way as to seem to be petting the horse -- although she standing about 20 feet away.  Inggo makes Mariposa snitch on Andres -- after all, he has admitted to murdering her father.  It's not at all obvious to me why Inggo is killing everyone in sight.  (We have no idea who he is.)  There's another scene of the murders of Paolo and Baldo in the woods that adds a pointless Rashomon dimension to the movie -- this image of the killing doesn't look anything like what we saw before.  The movie becomes increasingly untethered.  Time passes in confusing succession and the film flits from one vague location to another -- "flits" is the wrong term since each sequence shot last two or three minutes.  People are sitting in huts singing what I interpret to be Easter hymns -- this is all happening between Good Friday and Easter.  The gangster cops led by Sarge surround Andres and gun him down.  Inggo stalks Turtle Mariposa, not a very difficult task since she walks with a painfully slow gait, staggering along one of Diez' trademark white paths in the jungle.  Apparently, he intends to kill her with his machete.  Why? To what end?

It may well be that people are brutish and act like chimpanzees.  But you need better evidence for this proposition than a series of events without any motivation at all except the island's sinister ambience.  This is a bad movie and makes me suspect that Diez' work, with which I'm not familiar, must be extremely uneven in quality.