The Menu

 The Menu is an elegant and sophisticated pastiche of mad slasher and torture porn horror films.  It's meaning and significance is obscure to me.  But the film effectively delivers the suspense and gruesome thrills that characterize the genre.  This is something like a cross between Saw or The Hostel (the sinister laboratory of torture) and Halloween, complete with a "final girl", the plucky heroine who ultimately outwits the insane sadist who has murdered everyone else around her.  It's an exploitation movie for "foodies", starring the famous actor (and Shakespearian thespian) Ralph Fiennes as the mad chef who organizes the orgy of slaughter in his ultra upscale restaurant.  It's trash, indeed, trash of a salacious variety, and the plot never really makes any sense at all -- but this is a lurid horror film and, viewed in that light, pretty successful.  

A "foodie" named Tyler and his date, Margot, travel by ferry to an island on which The Hawthorne, an elite, ultra-fashionable and expensive restaurant is located. About 15 other diners are gathered in a sleek, black chrome and ebony room where they are served by an army of waiters.  In an stainless steel kitchen open to view by the patrons, a dozen or so cooks are working like automatons to prepare the five course menu fixe meal.  The cooks labor with their noses close to the dishes that they are preparing, all sorts of ingredients reduced to emulsions or atomized foam with wild flowers tweezered into place as garnish.  The cooks are clad in spotless apparel and act as if they are the members of some kind of cult -- they speak in unison.  Presiding over this eerie kitchen and dining room is the head chef, the famous Julian Slowik, played with campy aplomb (he's a bit Ernest Thesiger in The Bride of Frankenstein) by Ralph Fiennes.  As becomes almost immediately apparent, Slowik is insane and intends to murder all of his arrogant and super-wealthy customers.  Of course, he intends to torture and kill everyone during the course of the baroque five course meal that he is serving to his guests.  Slowik isn't really equipped with any motive for the mayhem that he intends -- he seems to be simply psychotic, although like most movie madmen extremely voluble and well-spoken.  Somehow, Slowik has succumbed to ennui with respect to the restaurant business and, instead of gracefully retiring, intends to murder all those who have enabled his success. The movie traffics in a sort of anarchist "eat the rich" sensibility -- the slaughter of the elites gathered for this prestigious last meal is really just an exercise in wish-fulfillment and envy for the audience; these people have all sorts of money and can afford pleasures denied to the rest of us and, therefore, must be tortured to death.  There's really nothing more intricate about this film and this is its raison d'etre.  

Over the course of the meal, the guests have fingers severed, are mocked by the insane chef, and Slowik's "angel" investor is fitted out with wings and, then, slowly lowered into the sea to be drowned as a spectacle for the diners.  One of Slowik's cult-members, a boy chef commits suicide in the presence of the dinner party.  Slowik, for no good reason, decides to punish himself by forcing one of his girl chefs to stab him in the groin with a kitchen scissors; apparently, he has sexually harassed this woman and apologizes to her by urging her to impale him on the sharp blades.  The men are all rousted from their seats and force to run around the island while the cooks pursue them like wild game -- this is a completely pointless sequence and adds nothing to the movie but confusion -- it's padding to make an 80 minute shocker last for two hours. Tyler's date, Margot played by the delicious Anya Taylor-Joy, figures out that these games can have but one fatal outcome.  She finds a radio and calls for help.  The Coast Guard arrives but the rescuer turns out to be an actor on Slowik's payroll and this episode is merely a sadistic ploy to create hope in the doomed diners before dashing those hopes to pieces.  Margot figures out Slowik's weak point and, cunningly, exploits it -- Slowik is really just appalled by the pretentious "molecular" and deconstructed cuisine that he is serving to the fools gathered in his restaurant; she offers him an alternative, more down-to-earth course and buys some time so that she can escape.  (By this point, her annoying date, Tyler, has hanged himself out of despair at being rejected by his idol, the celebrity chef Julian Slowik.)  Everyone else ends up murdered in a spectacular conflagration.  Out at sea, Margot, whom we learn was really an escort hired by the unfortunate Tyler to attend this "last supper", smokes a cigarette and contemplates the horror! the horror!  

The movie isn't offensive and has a very funny script.  The diners slated for torture and murder all deserve their fates -- they are a group of vicious rogues and well-heeled plutocrats:  a serial adulterer, some high-tech bros with blood all over their hands and questionable tax returns for a good measure, a vicious food critic from an important magazine, a sleazy failed movie star, and a woman who drinks continuously throughout the movie and is introduced to us as Slowik's mother.  When the food critic complains that the emulsion in one of deconstructed dishes (it's bread but without the bread -- just some chemical smears for flavoring the bread that isn't served), Slowik keeps sending her larger and larger bowls of this yellow-orange emulsion until she has a bird-bath sized basin of the stuff on her table.  In general, the vicious, selfish wealthy people gathered for the meal deserve what they get and so the murders are all in good fun.  It's impossible to figure out why Slowik is determined to kill everyone, including himself, and his wait-staff and sous-chefs -- it's some sort of pique over the poor taste and questionable morality of the customers frequenting his cafe and his own status as a celebrity chef for such people.  But, certainly, the revenge is far disproportionate to the cause for the revenge.  

The movie is full of good actors with juicy roles.  There's lots of inside foodie lore on display.  The picture is very handsomely produced with elaborate sets and an enveloping sense of doom and calamity as the movie progresses -- there's no escape from the remote island.  Some of the grotesque scenes and events remind me of James Ensor's macabre culinary paintings -- his "La Cuisiniers Dangereaux -- the Dangerous Chefs" of 1891 in which a plump waiter serves Ensor's head on a platter, the 1896 painting of two skeletons fighting over a pickled herring, or "Comical Repast -- the Banquet of the Starved" with a some hapless bourgeoisie are about to tuck into a meal of insects and decomposing scraps of bone.  The director Mark Mylod is a notable cable TV director -- he has helmed episodes of Game of Thrones, 
Shameless, and 16 episodes of Succession.  Mylod directs lucidly but, as with Succession, all of the witty repartee and the clever casting, adds up to nothing.  It's as tasty and empty as one of Chef Slowik's disassembled ingredients, an atomized froth that is without any real substance.  You know something bad is going to occur and the doom of the restaurant patrons is worked out in lavish detail but you don't know why any of this happening.  It's like the extravagant slanging scenes in Succession where everyone denounces everyone else in the most witty and obscene ways possible; it's posited that everything is at stake due to some complicated financial maneuvering, thus the on-screen hysteria, but you don't know why.  

Pleasure

 Pleasure is a Swedish film produced in the United States in 2021 and directed by Ninja Thyberg. (It appears to have had its American premiere in Austin at the South by Southwest festival in 2023).  The movie blurs the distinction between hard-core pornography and a scripted realistic feature-film drama -- the film is 105 minutes long.  It's interesting on the basis of its sordid subject matter, a documentary-style exploration of the porno industry.  Like many films on this subject, the movie exploits its subject, featuring lots of lush sex scenes shot for erotic titillation while at the same time venturing a critique of the exploitational aspects of the hard-core porn industry.  There's nothing in this movie that isn't, more or less, self-evident:  it  should come as no surprise to most viewers to learn that the performers who make movies of this kind are entangled in a nasty business rife with opportunities for coercion and abuse and, further, that most of the people involved in this kind of work lack much in the way of a  moral compass -- when the porn-actresses aren't being assaulted or cajoled into accepting abuse, they are scheming to betray one another.  It's an open question, I suppose, as to how much the sex workers in the pornography industry differ from actors in show business in general.  In some ways, the plot of the movie is a variant on films like A Star is Born, featuring an ambitious performer who will do anything to further her success in the business -- in broad terms, the narrative could be transposed into mainstream films or, even, a corporate setting without doing much violence to the premise.  What gives Pleasure its buzz, however, is the graphic sex scenes, the blunt and graphic negotiations involving bondage and simulated rape and acrobatic exercises required to implement certain outre intercourse scenes.  The picture is well-made, with carefully composed shots, some long takes in which the women talk about the industry, and opulent sets -- poolside parties, Vegas mansions, and various porn studios.  The central character Linnea (aka Belle Cherry) is a cipher -- she's undeveloped and, with the exception of a long, crepuscular scene in which she talks by phone in a misleading way to her mother, we don't know much about her.  She seems preposterously ambitious and weirdly stupid -- part of the film's premise is that Belle Cherry is a neophyte in the industry:  we learn about the ins and outs of the porn business through her inexperienced eyes.  The film purports to be "sex positive" but, in fact, its a formulaic morality tale -- Belle Cherry succeeds in the industry but at the cost of betraying others, moral compromise, and, in the end, she has become the very thing that is problematic about business:  in the penultimate sex scene, we see, that she has become hardened into a sexual predator herself.  So despite the film's glib nonchalance about graphic sex, the film espouses a highly conventional morality -- Linnea/Belle's immersion in the sewer of the sex industry ends of befouling her both physically and morally:  at the end of the movie, she has chlamydia (or a bad yeast infection); she's, more or less, diseased and has become a a bad person, a "sinner," although the film would shy away from this word, it is, nonetheless, apt  It seems that you can't make a film on this subject without slipping into moral condemnation, indeed, something like "slut-shaming."  This was the case with the much better Boogie Nights and, certainly, seems to be the case with Pleasure.

We first see Linnea shaving her pubic area in preparation for her first performance in a sex scene.  At first, the business seems weirdly genteel.  There is a lot of discussion about consent and limits.  Linnea as Belle Cherry gives her consent on film, holding a valid photo-ID and a current newspaper to verify the date.  The sex scene works out fine:  she's paid $900 and Belle starts looking for other work in the business -- does she have a "Green Card"?  Details of this sort that interest me are ignored.  It quickly becomes apparent that Belle's success in the industry will be dependent upon her signing with a well-connected agent.  A man named Mark Spiegler is reputedly the best agent in the biz and Belle connives to persuade him to work for her.  (Her first few gigs are under the aegis of a Black agent who encourages her to seek out jobs involving rough and abusive sex, bondage, and other fetish subject matter).  Belle encourages who roommates to explore work in the industry.  Her best friend, Joy, is interested but gets into a fight with some male "talent" at a pool party -- she pushes the man into the pool and he angrily calls her names.  Belle does a bondage shoot with a woman director who is extremely careful about protecting the actress from harm -- she is given elaborate instructions as to safe words and how to demonstrate her boundaries even when encumbered with a ball gag in her mouth.  This shoot is also well within Belle's range and she seeks out harder material.  For some reason, she agrees to a rape scene involving two men.  Things slide out of control and, in fact, Belle is actually raped and roughed-up. This scene is disturbing because Belle repeatedly calls for a time-out, the camera is shut-off, and, then, "talent" importunes and sweet-talks her into more abuse -- saying that she's strong and self-confident and will be able to endure the torment that they inflict upon her; Belle is a "good sport" and, so, against her own better instincts, continues with the abusive rape scene.  Afterwards,  she complains to her agent, the Black porn actor, but he turns on her, saying that she contracted for the gig without his knowledge and got what she deserved.  Belle fires her agent, sets up a meeting with Mark Spiegler who seems uninterested in her -- she needs to show him a resume with more rough stuff on it.  Belle, then, embarks on an exercise program of rectal dilatation, using butt-plugs of increasing size, so that she can successfully perform the "holy grail" of interracial anal sex -- that is, "double anal."  After much preparation, she performs this feat to everyone's amazement and surprise -- double anal has never been attempted before, let alone, successfully.  This prodigious act gets her better gigs.  She signs up for a humiliation and abuse scene and encourages her roommate, Joy, to work with her.  But the male actor contracted for the scene has backed-out and Belle with Joy find themselves working with the vicious guy that Joy pushed into the pool a few weeks earlier.  This guy takes the opportunity to aggressively abuse and humiliate Joy.  When Joy later complains, Belle refuses to back her up, disloyally claiming that Joy is hysterical and that there was nothing out of the ordinary about the scene.  (In fact, Belle was well-aware that the male performer was using the gig to abuse Joy.)  Belle and Joy are no longer friends.  Throughout the film, Belle has admired an elegant and successful porn star named Ava.  In fact, she aspires to Ava's success.  Belle is now well-established in the business and gets a chance to work with Ava.  During the shoot, Ava refuses to perform oral sex on Belle saying that she's "all creamy down there" and smells bad to boot, apparently due to a yeast infection.  This causes a change in plans for the sex scene.  Belle gets fitted out with a black dildo strap-on and has sex with Ava.  Something snaps in Belle and she violently rapes Ava, slapping her face and spitting on her.  After the scene, Belle and Ava are riding back to a party in a limousine. Ava is nonchalant and seems none the worse for wear.   Belle says that she wants to get out of the car.   The driver pulls over and Belle gets out.  On this ambiguous note, the film ends.

The movie seems authentic in its portrait of the sex industry.  Many of the performers are actually sex-workers in the trade.  (The loathsome Mark Spiegler, the proprietor of Spiegler Girls, plays himself and there are actors in the movie with names like "Chris Cock", "Cezar", and so on.  Spiegler, a disreputable Jewish guy, is spectacularly unattractive and wears tee-shirts with weird slogans such as "I Hope your Cell-Phone falls down the Toilet.")  The movie is implausible at its heart for several reasons:  first, the leading lady has a completely flat chest -- she would not succeed in the porn industry without breast enhancement but no one suggest this to her.  I suppose its unchivalrous to make this observation but the star is naked on-screen for half the picture -- she has an angelic face and a nice derriere, but her tiny breasts would disqualify her for success in the porn industry at least on the level that she desires.  You can't ignore this sort of stupid casting mistake.  Second, much of the movie's middle act involves Belle's preparations for the "double anal".  The problem is that there is no such thing as a "double anal" -- try to figure out the logistics of such a thing, particularly with the very well-endowed African-American "talent" involved in this picture.  Of course, with some huffing and puffing, double penetration can be achieved -- this is sex with penetration simultaneously in the vagina and rectum.  In fact, what the film seems to show is merely double penetration, arduous in itself, but a staple of group sex scenes in modern porn movies.  (I kept wishing the camera would give us a "money shot" vantage on the "double anal" so that I could see how this act is performed -- but the movie, which starts out with aggressive close-ups of genitalia and penetration becomes increasingly discrete as it proceeds.)  The third problem is that by the time that Belle gets raped, she is already sophisticated  in the business and, certainly, knows that precautions must be taken to avoid this sort of abuse.  Furthermore, she seems weirdly unaware that, the moment her consent is withdrawn, the sex scene will turn into criminal assault -- a rape that could be prosecuted against the male actors and their enablers.  In the sex industry, all sorts of safeguards exist to protect performers from assault or, more crucially, from being thrown in jail for rape.  The Swedish female director, Ninja Thyberg, is adapting a 2013 short subject that she earlier made with the same name.  But the feature-length movie has a curiously archaic view of the sex industry -- it seems to be taking place in a pre-"Me-too" era.  After the charges levied against Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, the sort of things shown in the movie would not occur -- and the abusive "rough" sex scenes would have to be very carefully choreographed and supervised.  We now live in a world in which Shakespeare productions routinely hire "Intimacy Coordinators" and I see no reason why a multi-billion dollar porno industry would not be similarly attuned to avoiding litigation and protecting its human assets.  In a "red carpet" interview with the woman playing Ava in Pleasure, she noted that the movie is very true to life with one exception:  Belle performs the "double anal" scene for free (presumably just too show such a thing can be accomplished).  The actress in the interview at the film's premiere said that, of course, no one ever works for free in the porn industry.       

Der Freischuetz

 On the eve of his wedding, Max, der Freischuetz (The Marksman) is having trouble with his gun.  He hasn't hit anything for a month and, at a target shooting competition in the Bohemian village where he lives, his bullets all go astray.  The townsfolk are unforgiving.  As Max sulks, they mock him.  Do you remember this gesture?  Extend your right index finger and, then, stroke back and forth along its length with the pointer finger of the other hand.  For some reason, this gesture means "Shame on you!", not only here in rural Minnesota, but, also, in the deep and dark German forests at the end of the 30 years war.  Choruses of nubile peasant girls dance about the sullen huntsman gesturing shame upon him and a choir of baritones and basses, strapping foresters, also deride the unfortunate fellow.  Max's beautiful and virtuous betrothed, Agatha, is fearful.  (You don't have to be Dr. Freud to decipher some of this imagery.)  On the morrow, Max will have to shoot true in front of all the town (and the formidable game warden who is also Agathe's father, Kuno) to earn his right to wed Agatha -- and it looks increasingly unlikely that he will hit the mark.  What's a fellow to do?

Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischuetz is an1821opera and a sort of bargain basement, Dollar General parody of Faust. Max hurries away from the convivial gathering to make a deal with the devil, the so-called Black Huntsman, Samiel.  He is encouraged to this desperate measure by Caspar, a rival for the affections of Agatha.  Caspar has previously done business with Samiel in the Wolf's Glen, a nasty ravine full of corpses and slimy serpentine creatures that seems to serve as a sort of garbage dump for the villagers. Caspar gives Max a magic bullet that he has acquired from the Black Huntsman and he uses the cursed ammo to shoot down an inoffensive eagle.  At that same moment, in the village, a picture of one of Agatha's ancestor, a scowling ancient head forester, drops off the wall, striking Annchen, Agatha's frisky gal pal.  (The two women sing duets about the upcoming marriage and Agatha's recent dream, a foreboding vision in which she imagines herself a white dove shot out of the air by Max).  At midnight, with Caspar, Max consults the devil and, later, the revived corpse of his mother. He and Casper laboriously cast seven bullets -- six will unerringly hit their target; the seventh round belongs to the devil.  The two hunters divvy up the ammo and go their separate ways.  Caspar who has three rounds wastes them on a fox; Max, who isn't much brighter, shoots some other critters and ends up with only the devil's bullet to use on the morning of his wedding.

Before the wedding, a garland is delivered to Agatha.  The box turns out to contain a funeral wreath.  Improvising a garland from white roses given to her by a holy hermit, also a resident in the woods, Agatha goes to the target-shooting competition.  Max fires the devil's bullet which seems to strike both Caspar and Agatha -- they fall to the ground in a sort of swoon.  Kuno, Agatha's father and the game warden, denounces Max for having trafficked with the dark forces.  But Agatha seems to have only fainted.  (Caspar is pierced by the devil's bullet and dies.)  As she revives, the Hermit appears as a deus ex machina.  He pronounces forgiveness on the erring Max and, it is agreed, that after a year's probation the hero can wed Agatha. Kuno decides that all of this mischief was caused by the village's tradition of requiring men to target-shoot for their brides -- he decides that the town should modernize and join the rest of the 17th century and, so, abolishes the custom.  There is a final chorus of praise to God and all ends on a happy note.  

The opera is goofy, but appealing, and contains a broad variety of music -- robust choruses, trios and quartets, as well as dramatic and spooky horror movie stuff (for instance, the slithery chromatics that characterize the Wolf's Glen) -- some of the occult themes sound a bit like Mozart's third act music in Don Giovanni and, in general, the opera, containing extended passages of Singspiel and, even, spoken dialogue, is similar to passages in The Magic Flute.  The libretto, the stormy overture, and the exotic subject matter is all exemplary of German romanticism -- the opera has a patriotic, echt-Deutsch aspect, themes that seem derived from the Grimm brother's Maerchen, and lots of boozy beer-hall music -- drinking songs and choruses sung by doughty huntsmen.  The scene in which Caspar and Max forge the magic bullets will return in German opera thirty years later in Wagner's Ring, specifically the forging of Siegfried's sword in Act I of that opera.  (In fact, Wagner's love for Weber's music, particularly the turbulent overture to Der Freischuetz inspired the young man to learn to play the piano and, later, become a composer himself and there are echoes of Weber's music throughout Wagner's works.)  The opera is audience-pleasing and relatively short -- it's about two hours long in the version that I saw.

You can see this opera complete and with subtitles on YouTube in a production designed and performed by the Hamburg Opera and Philharmonic. The show is handsomely shot and edited, but has a peculiar feature -- the opera's overture is played over images of a puppet theater foreshadowing key scenes in the show.  The image is pillar-boxed, that is, tall and narrow and the live-action figures move in a strange skittery way -- a bit like insects or marionettes.  I can't tell if the effect is intentional or some kind of artifact of the motion capture.  Mouths move mechanically as if tugged open and shut by strings and the Wolf's Gorge is filled with twitching animated piles of debris, leaf-monsters and writhing fallen limbs -- the characters seem to interact with shadowy animated figures like stop-motion apparitions in a film by Jan Svankmeyer or the Quay Brothers.  

 

What's Up, Doc?

 What's Up, Doc? is a movie that I've known about for most of my life.  Something about Barbra Streisand once repelled me (I can't recall what it was) and, so, I've avoided this 1972 farce directed by Peter Bogdanovich until my 70th year on this Earth.  (Bogdanovich is dead now as is Streisand's co-star Ryan O'Neill; Streisand herself is 82 and known today, partly, for the so-called Streisand Effect, that is, drawing adverse attention to yourself by foolishly attempting to enforce legal rights and incurring, thereby, a backlash. The march of time is cruel, appalling, and relentless.)  My ill-informed prejudice denied me the pleasure of watching this delightful picture when I was younger, and, perhaps, more susceptible to the movie's arduous slapstick comedy.  But I'm happy to have rectified this critical error in judgement.

What's up, Doc? as the name implies is a cartoonish slapstick comedy.  Although some of the witty chatter sounds a little like Thirties screwball comedy, the heart of the film is invested in scary and chaotic gags, the sort of strenuous antics perfected by people like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.  Bogdanovich is faithful to his source material -- in fact, the movie would play fine as a silent feature with only a few intertitles.  Streisand, of course, is a famous chanteuse, but the movie perversely affords her only two opportunities to perform -- she sings the opening number "You're the Top", a Cole Porter tune, but not on-screen and, then, renders a beautiful version of the piano ballad  from Casablanca, "As Time Goes By".  Streisand has a perfect intonation and a truly gorgeous voice -- I had forgotten how good she is.  But most of the picture involves the heroine in peril, dangling from roof tops or pursued by villains in toboggan-style car chases down the streets of San Francisco.  She's as young and athletic as her co-star and acquits herself in the picture's action scenes with gamine determination and agility. Ryan O'Neill in the Cary Grant part is excellent as well and, of course, prettier than Streisand who is handsome but not exactly beautiful.  

The plot is carefully contrived and nonsensical.  Four identical overnight bags (characterized by a red plaid pattern) are in play.  One bag contains Professor Howard Barton's musical igneous rocks -- the eccentric and mild-mannered professor is promoting the theory that cave-men invented music by rapping out diatonic tunes on stones.  Another bag is full of a king's ransom of jewelry.  A third bag, the prize of competing gangs of spies, contains top-secret government secrets.  The fourth bag, owned by Streisand's character, Judy Maxwell, is full of her underpants and other garments.  Of course, the bags are mistaken for one another, stolen by the various gangsters, jewel thieves, and spies who populate the periphery of the movie and most of the film involves madcap chases to retrieve one suitcase or another from the clutches of the people trying to steal them. The movie takes place largely in the rooms and corridors of the 17th floor of San Francisco's Bristol Hotel, the place where a musicology conference which Howard is attending with his screechy, overbearing fiancee - acted by a painfully plain Madeline Kahn in her ingenue role.  The scenes in the hotel corridor with various villains and protagonists slipping in and out of adjacent rooms play like a bedroom farce by Feydeau or one of the British purveyors of this sort of thing (for instance, Michael Frayn's Noises off), but the movie is surprisingly chaste -- although the dialogue is suggestive in a pre-Code sort of way, there's no sex at all actually shown or, even, implied in the film.  

The plot is too complex to summarize.  Suffice it to say that Howard is sent to a drugstore to get some buffered aspirin -- the comedy is in the adjective "buffered" insisted upon by Howard's bullying fiancee.  Wandering the streets, Streisand's character, Judy Maxwell, a sort of female hobo in a snappy Carnaby Street cap, is famished.  She sees the hunky Howard and falls for him immediately -- so she spends the rest of the movie pursuing him.  Judy is a polymath, a perpetual student, and she knows everything about everything -- of course, she's a perfect match for the shy, studious, if ineffectual, Howard.  The bags get confused with one another and everyone runs around chasing everyone else, the whole thing climaxing in a spectacular slapstick chase parodying the movie Bullitt down the nearly vertical streets of San Francisco.  Bogdanovich is nothing if not hard-working and the loose ends all have to be tied-up in a trial scene that is the movie's one serious defect -- it goes on too long and the harried Judge is a bit over-the-top even by the standards of this film.  The picture has the happy ending that the audience has been foreseeing from the film's first ten minutes and is satisfying in all respects.

What's Up, Doc? is shot in bright, analytical compositions by Laszlo Kovacs, the geometry of the gags is well established and makes the physical comedy work.  You have to see a movie like this in the right mood.  Some of the comic chaos is, to my eye, more than a little nightmarish.  In one scene, the dawn aftermath of a fire and brawl that resulted in much broken glass (and Streisand dangling twenty stories above the street from a hotel window sill), the camera lovingly surveys the ruins and pans over shattered glass, charred furniture, and tangled up debris -- the effect made me almost sick.  Furthermore, some of the physical comedy, if taken too seriously, is quite upsetting.  I know some people who have a horror of Laurel and Hardy for these reasons -- it's too dark, cruel, anarchic, and the destruction is simply too real.  The same can be said about many of the bravura sequences of chaos in this movie -- cars and motorcycles crash, people get flung around violently, huge panes of glass are broken, and hapless workers who are mere bystanders have their handiwork ripped to pieces.  Speeding cars zoom through an intersection, narrowly missing a poor guy on a tall ladder again and again, until, of course, at the very end of the gag, the inevitable occurs.  Ryan O'Neill is so pretty that he's a sort of joke in himself, a cartoon figure. In one scene, an image that launched a million male stripper routines, he parades around bare-chested in his tight white underpants with a little plaid bowtie (the color of the overnight bags) decorating his throat.  At the end of the movie, Streisand says something like "Being in love means never having to say your sorry", the famous line from Love Story also starring O'Neill -- he replies "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."

The film critic John Simon panned this picture, commenting notoriously on Streisand's appearance, saying that she reminded him of a rat crossed with a white aardvark.  I now understand the animus on display.  One of the music critics plays a fellow called Simon (Kenneth Mars) who speaks in pretentious dialogue with John Simon's infamous Transylvanian accent; the critic is given a whole repertoire of fey and irritating mannerisms.  Obviously, Simon took offense, denounced the picture as without humor, mocked Bogdanovich for attempting to make a picture of this sort since he was (Simon claimed) totally lacking in talent, and threw in a vicious personal attack on Streisand to boot.  But the movie is, in fact, brilliantly made, very skillfully directed, and actually extremely funny -- Bogdanovich got the last laugh.  

There's a hair-raising stunt 2/3rds of the way through the picture.  Streisand is careening downhill on bicycle rigged up to deliver groceries -- it has a big box on the front between the handlebars.  The bike is basically out-of-control and moving at top speed.  O'Neill sprints alongside the bike, catches up to it, and jumps onto the box on the front of the contraption.  You want to applaud O'Neill's courage and athleticism -- the stunt is done in a long take without the use of stunt double.  O'Neill could have been a success in cowboy movies, but, so far as I know, he didn't work in that genre.

Made in England: the Films of Powell and Pressburger

 Made in England:  The Films of Powell and Pressburger is a BBC documentary featuring Martin Scorsese as "presenter."  The picture is essentially an anthology of highlights from Powell and Pressburger movies produced in England between the late thirties and about 1960 -- there are also a couple of notes on some movies made by the two men outside of their famous collaboration.  These pictures are so extraordinary and visually opulent that it is a pleasure to revisit them and Martin Scorsese's ardent commentary is often acute and interesting, casting light on his own films which are also excerpted in the documentary.  There is more about Scorsese's life and cinephilia in the picture than there is biographical information about Powell and Pressburger -- we are provided almost no information about their lives, marriages, children and things of that sort.  The movie's director (David Hinton) keeps the film steadfastly focused on the movies under consideration.  Scorsese is shot facing the camera in a full-frontal portrait, appearing in somewhat gloomy-looking screening room.  It's a cliche that demonstrates that this movie about supremely imaginative filmmakers is itself singularly unimaginative and, rather, plodding in its approach to the material.  The picture slogs through the Powell and Pressburger repertoire in chronological fashion, showing classic and memorable sequences from their films with Scorsese's comments interpolated.  There is no voice-over and Scorsese, although eloquent isn't particularly penetrating in his remarks nor is he profound. Clearly, these movies mean so much to the director that he regards their merits, and their technical achievements, as self-explanatory -- the Powell and Pressburger films are monuments and, therefore, accorded monumental status.  The film is a delight because of the clips from the movies, presented fully restored and in glorious black and white as well as technicolor, but it feels longer than its 136 minutes. 

Scorsese first saw these movies in disfigured versions in black-and-white (and cropped) on television.  But he was able to intuit their poetic qualities.  The curious imprimatur on these films:  productions of Powell & Pressburger with neither man given precedence is explained in some short interview clips from the film's subjects:  Pressburger who was Hungarian and Jewish wrote the pictures and devised the structure of the films; the two men collaborated on the dialogue; Powell directed photography, set direction, and editing.  Clearly, some sort of alchemy was at work because the whole is greater than the parts:  Powell seems a shy, reticent, and plain-spoken English country squire, a hail fellow with vibrantly ruddy cheeks. (In the sixties, when he had fallen out of favor, he was living in poverty in a cottage in Kent and spending a lot of time in his "Caravan" -- that is, a mobile camper wagon.)  Pressburger looks like an accountant gone to seed --he wears horn-rimmed glasses and unkempt hair and he speaks with an accent that makes him sound like Bela Lugosi.  Powell's style is intensely visual -- part of the peculiar aura cast by these movies is that the mise-en-scene is essentially that used in silent pictures:  the story is told visually in a collage of intricately edited shots, montage that looks like it could have been devised by Pabst or, even, Griffith or Abel Gance; this footage is punctuated with enormous close-ups of faces (often looming, short reaction shots) that are both beautiful and grotesque -- characters wear too much make-up, their eyes are unnaturally huge, and they are surrealistically expressive.  There is a certain "look" to a Powell and Pressburger film, I think, arising from the juxtaposition of shots of natural locations or sets, generally both beautiful and somewhat stylized, and the glaring eyes like high-beam headlights of the characters in the movies.  (Powell served his apprenticeship with Rex Ingram working in big French studios in Nice and his ultra-expressive way of staging movies clearly derives from lessons he learned on those silent film sets).  Scorsese links his use of color in Mean Streets with P & P's The Red Shoes; he traces some sequences in Raging Bull back to an elaborate scene setting up a duel of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943); Scorsese did the commentary on the Criterion disk of that picture.  Scorsese says that P & P's eccentric loners and uncompromising artists influenced his creation of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle (he points to the obsessed Lermontov in The Red Shoes).  Scorsese, whose greatest pictures are, arguably, his highly staged and lyrically edited music documentaries (for instance The Last Waltz) has great admiration for Powell's "composed film" sequences -- for instance, a climactic scene in Black Narcissus in which two women fight on the edge of an abyss (the one woman has red swollen eyes like a vampire or zombie) fused with a soaring score.  This technique of editing film to music reaches its climax in the wild and grotesque phantasmagoria in Tales of Hoffmann.  Scorsese seems to regard P & P's WW2 pictures as profoundly moral, seeking a meaning in the chaos of the war while endorsing British common sense and values.  After those films (Colonel Blimp, 49th Parallel, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death), the two men seem to have lost their way and the differences in their orientations toward film became more and more divergent -- Pressburger wanted to move in the direction of realism and seems to have endorsed stories that now seem to be proto-New Wave; Powell's imagination became more exuberant, surreal, and fantastical, culminating in the wildly lurid and intensely operatic The Red Shoes and, then, of course, his adaptation of an actual opera in surrealistically inventive and sinister Tales of Hoffmann.  It was this latter movie that wrecked the men's partnership.  The film's producer, Alexander Korda wanted to shorten the picture by radically cutting the last tale -- Powell protested but Pressburger implied that he agreed with the critique.  After that dispute, the pair made a couple of additional movies but they are said to be bland and stolid:  O Rosalinda, Ill Met by Moonlight, and The Battle of the River Plate.  After parting, Powell made one final transgressive masterpiece on his own, Peeping Tom, an alarming meta-film about the dangers of voyeurism and sadism in the movies, and, then, after another couple of cheaply made final pictures, more or less went silent.  By this point, P & P, largely forgotten in their native Britain, were ripe for reevaluation -- Powell, in particular, had been so viciously maligned by critic for Peeping Tom, that his career was in ruins in the U.K.  American directors like Brian de Palma, Scorsese, of course, and Francis Ford Coppola presided over a revival of their films and Powell actually married Scorsese's editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.  Scorsese was a close friend to Powell for more than 15 years and says that he talked to him daily.  Scorsese emotionally tells us that Powell's support helped him through hard times, particularly after he made The King of Comedy, a departure from the director's previous very expressionistic films that was initially baffling to many critics.  

The documentary is a tribute and Scorsese is passionate and eloquent.  To some extent, the movie ignores some P & P's extreme eccentricity -- consider for instance, the subplot involving an assailant fetishist hacking off women's hair in A Canterbury Tale, or the elaborate debate about American versus English culture in A Matter of Life and Death or, for that matter, the strange pastoral idyll in that film with a naked shepherd playing a panpipe to his animals as the bedraggled David Niven staggers across the meadow; Colonel Blimp ends with a very peculiar and digressive coda about subterranean water in bombed-out London.  Every major P & P production contains some sequences that doesn't exactly fit, something discordant and even eerie -- at least, as far as I am concerned, the documentary give short shrift to this aspect of these men's work. 

It's best for viewers, particularly those who don't know P & P, to take note of the film's cited in picture and seek out these movies.  I know that I will try to find an opportunity to see a Powell and Pressburger film that I didn't know about, The Small Back Room (1949), an example of a hyper-realist post-war picture that seems to be a combination of the The Best Years of our Lives and a film noir.  If this film, encourages you to watch Powell and Pressburger's great pictures, it will have served its purpose, whatever it's limitations.

I am not a Monster: the Lois Riess murders

 Erin Lee Carr is a Minnesota girl who is an internationally recognized documentarian.  Carr specializes in ultra-lurid crime stories -- the names of some of her films are illustrative:  Thought Crimes:  the Case of the Cannibal Cop, I love you, now die!,Mommy Dead and Dearest, The Ringleader:  the Case of the Bling Ring.  She has also made documentaries about Brittney Spears' lawsuit against her father and the sexual abuse inflicted on the little girls on the Olympic Gymnastics Team.  She is reportedly working on a scripted film about the notorious killer-lawyer Alex Murdaugh.  Ms. Carr has written a memoir about her relationship with her father and her own drug addiction.  She was an editor for Vice both in print and on-screen and worked in production on Lena Dunham's Girls.  In short, Carr has her finger on the Zeitgeist and has proven to be a swift, efficient, and effective purveyor of tabloid crime stories.  Her most recent production -- and she is incredibly prolific -- is I am not a Monster:  the Lois Riess Murders.  This is a well-edited, if prosaic and unimaginative, documentary about a grandmother who committed two murders in 2018.  The show's novelty for me is that Lois Riess was a well-known figure in the small town of Blooming Prairie, Minnesota -- a village of about 2000 people located 17 miles from Austin, my home.  My excellent paralegal has lived in Blooming Prairie for 35 years and, so, she is personally acquainted with several of the people interviewed in Carr's 2024 HBO Max documentary.  Of course, I have represented people from Blooming Prairie, tried cases with clients from that place, and have driven through the town hundreds of times.  Once I even went swimming in the town's idiosyncratic public pool, a gravel pit amidst nice residential homes with a small beach and deep, cold water.  

I am not a Monster, of course, demonstrates the opposite of the proposition espoused by the title. Without much doubt, Lois Riess is a monster, a stone-cold psychopath, and egregious, self-serving liar.  Like many people of her kind, she overestimates her ability to talk her way out of trouble and, so, Carr, filming her where she is presently domiciled for life (the Shakopee Women's Prison), gives her plenty of rope with which to hang herself and, of course, Riess obliges.  (She is the kind of person who wants sympathy because she is a widow -- but, of course, she is widow because she killed her husband.)  Carr's documentary consists of nicely filmed but unimpressive interviews, generally conducted in someone's kitchen or living room or (weirdly) in empty taverns.  There's no narration although some titles orient the viewer to events.  Carr works by letting her interview subjects speak their piece, typically without much interruption, and, then, editing their words into meaningful 20 or 30 second snippets.  This is state of the art documentary film-making -- there are lots of ominous drone shots with the camera gliding over the nondescript grain elevators and commercial downtown of Blooming Prairie.  Cars drive down empty snowy highways and we see deer running through the forests, really just shelter belts, somewhere in southern Minnesota -- the influence of the Coen Brothers Fargo is pretty much everywhere evident.  The story is gruesome and sensational:  Lois Riess was a hard-partying woman whose husband operated a waxworm bait farm -- the place grew waxworms, a kind of plump, succulent larva, to be sold nationally and apparently was very profitable.  Everyone knew Riess and her husband, David, as a fun couple, heavy drinkers and habitues of the local restaurants and taverns in town.  (Blooming Prairie has a modest demi-monde of hedonistic businessmen and their blonde attractive wives.)  When Riess didn't show up at a fishing competition, people were alarmed.  The cops discovered that the man was dead, decomposing on the floor of his bathroom in his ranch-rambler adjacent to the worm farm.  Lois Riess had shot him and, then, stayed in the house for ten or 12 days before making a somewhat inept escape in the couple's expensive SUV, a Cadillac Escalade.  For the first half-hour of the show, Carr lets Riess give her account of the couple's secret life -- despite all appearances to the contrary, they were unhappily married and David was supposedly abusive.  While he was inflicting psychological abuse on Lois, she used her gun to shoot him repeatedly.  When the stench in the house became significant, she put towels under the closed bathroom door, opened a window despite sub -zero temperatures, and ran the toilet's fan to expel the smell.  Lois, then, drove to Fort Myers, Florida where she picked up a nice blonde woman in the bar, sharing stories with her about being a widow and victim of abuse.  The blonde woman was about Lois' size and age and had the same color hair.  Lois shot this woman to death, stole her credit cards and money, and, apparently, decided she would cross the border into Mexico after driving to Brownsville, Texas.  But Lois enjoyed drinking at bars and, on South Padre Island, picked up another lonely middle-aged widow, seemingly planning to kill her as well.  (For some reason, she didn't follow through with this third victim.)  By this time, the FBI was in hot pursuit and they captured Lois a few days later while she was nonchalantly having drinks at the bar at one of the local seafood places.  Lois was extradited to Florida, a death penalty state. To avoid capital punishment, she pled guilty and was, then, returned to Minnesota where she is serving a life sentence in Shakopee, a Minneapolis suburb.  

Lois is initially plausible in her rather baroque attempt to impose the blame for Dave's murder on her unfortunate husband  But the film shows us that she is at heart a psychopath, a compulsive gambler who seems to have stolen from everyone who ever trusted her.  (She stole over $55,000 from a mentally disabled sister that she was supposed to be assisting as her conservator and seems to have gambled away hundreds of thousands of dollars.)  It quickly becomes apparent that you can tell when Lois is lying because her lips are moving.  She cries and talks about "black-outs" and abuse but has no justification for the murder of her doppelgaenger in Fort Myers.  Various local people, both in Florida and Texas as well as Blooming Prairie, talk about their encounters with Lois.  With the exception of two "talking heads" no one show much sympathy for the murderous woman.  One of the sympathetic witnesses is Lois niece who appears willing to give her aunt the benefit of the doubt; an old friend cautiously suggests that Dave, despite appearances, was a mean bastard himself.  A gambling addiction counselor stinks up the show with various pop psychology excuses that are irritating and morally corrupt -- it doesn't help that this woman is filmed in what seems to be a closed bar.  

The show is of no redeeming social value.  It's garish, simple-minded, but fascinating.  And it's fair in its own sub-literate, exploitative manner -- Carr lets you make up your own mind and doesn't tip her hand.  But after three hours, it's pretty obvious what is going on.  A reasonable criticism of the show is that it's too long -- it has a grim coda featuring the suicides and deaths of Riess' family members.  The material is worth about two hours, but the show. I must concede, is as interesting as a  bad wreck on the highway and you can't really look away.    

Hacks

 Hacks is sit-com in three consecutive seasons.  It premiered in May 2021 on HBO Max and has been renewed for a fourth season at the conclusion of its third series in 2023.  The program is very entertaining, sharply written, and has excellent actors.  In essence, Hacks is an "odd-couple" buddy comedy featuring Jean Smart (Deborah Vance)as a 70-something comedian struggling to re-invent herself with new routines and jokes with the assistance of an earnest young writer Ava played by Hannah Einbinder (the actress is the daughter of SNL's Larraine Newman).  Ava is about 25, politically correct, and bisexual (primarily lesbian although she hooks up with men from time to time.)  She acts as the foil to Deborah Vance, a fantastically wealthy show biz personality, who had been performing to sold-out crowds at the Palmetto Casino for the previous thirty years -- her show has become a bit archaic and rote and the boss at the Casino has decided to replace her.  This triggers a crisis in Deborah Vance who reaches out to Ava whom she has employed as a joke-writer and general factotum for new material.  The show is about the strained relationship between the two women (Deborah Vance is monstrously selfish and Ava more than a little irritating with respect to her virtue signaling) and how their work relationship matures into something like mutual respect and friendship.  Since the show's narrative trajectory is from sarcastic acrimony and hearty dislike to affection, the program can't really reach its sentimental climax, always implied by the dialogue, without destroying itself.  Therefore, like many sit-coms the show has a perpetuum mobile aspect -- it has to regenerate itself by showing the women's attitudes toward one another evolving into close friendship, but, then, throwing a wrench into the works, contriving new reasons for them to be at odds and dislike one another.  At the end of each season, there is a touching scene of friendship and, then, some sort of clash between boss and her paid-servant and writer that casts their affection into doubt and threatens to make them irreconcilable enemies again.  For instance, at the end of the third series, all plot complications have been resolved into a happy ending -- Vance gets her network late-night show, seems about to reconcile with her estranged sister, and has anointed Ava as the head writer for the program.  But Vance, then, betrays Ava (out of paranoia about the late night gig succeeding) and Ava fights back, blackmailing her boss with the threat to expose an embarrassing sexual impropriety.  This is parallel to an earlier season in which Ava drunkenly exposes some of Vance's peccadillos, seems about to get fired, but stays on the famous comedian's payroll albeit subject to lawsuit for violating her Non-Disclosure Agreement.  (Vance enjoys suing people and seems to be casually vicious.)  This plot complication is resolved when Vance dismisses the lawsuit but, then, fires Ava, saying that she wants to encourage her to "write her own material" and be successful in her own right.  Of course, the firing must be only temporary, otherwise the show would implode.  The money-maker situation has to be preserved at all costs although this gives the show a sort of herky-jerky aspect.

At its heart, Hacks is not so much different than the old Mary Tyler Moore Show if the focus of that program were primarily on the boss figure, that is, Lou Grant who, if I recall correctly, later got his own show.   A successful sit-com requires excellent supporting actors (think anchorman Ted Baxter, for instance, on Mary Tyler Moore or Carl Reiner, Morey Amsterdam, and Ann Marie on the old Dick Van Dyke show) and Hacks has an abundance of funny, quirky, and interesting second-bananas:  there's a lonely gay personal assistant, Deborah's agent and fat side-kick, Kayla, the casino owner, Marty who is, a cynical old Vegas hand, as well as several other amusing sycophants who work for Deborah and, often, travel with her.  There's quite a bit of soft-core gay sex to distinguish the Cable show from network TV and the jokes are often quite raunchy, but the program has its heart in the right place and, ultimately, is just as didactic and sentimental as Mary Tyler Moore -- the show affirms the value of personal growth:  Deborah has to re-imagine her act and extricate herself from various personal traumas in her background; Ava's arrogance and know-it-all preaching to the indifferent Deborah has to be tamed and she must learn both a measure of humility but also self-confidence as to her own abilities.  Deborah's dirty jokes and ethnic slurs must be re-evaluated and, ultimately, she has to apologize for some of her more hurtful schtick. The conflict between overweening ambition and relationships sacrificed to this ambition must achieve a proper balance and so on.  The show's premise is that the flamboyant, cruel and witty Deborah Vance must learn life-lessons from the "woke", hip Ava and, of course, vice-versa.  In this respect, the show isn't all that different from an old Andy Griffith episode -- it's just got a lot dirtier dialogue (one of Ava's would-be girlfriends wants to piss on her; Ava figures out the woman is a Republican and says she won't be pissed-on except by progressive Democrats) and more sex -- I don't recall Barney Fife getting it on with Floyd the Barber, although this always seemed a possibility to me.  

The series, somewhat like Curb Your Enthusiasm, provides a glimpse into the lives of ultra-rich celebrities.  Deborah Vance has several homes, but spends most of her time at a lavish French chateau somewhere in the foothills near Vegas.  (At Christmas, she has snow machines blast artificial and chemically toxic "snow" all around the premises.)  She jets around in a private plane and hobnobs with other arrogant and entitled show business types.  She's not merely a stand-up comic but has a fantastically successful home shopping network line of apparel and other accessories.  Hacks asserts that Deborah was badly damaged when she was allowed to host a network late-night show or, at least, it's pilot thirty years earlier but, then, lost the gig when gossip asserted that she had burned down her ex-husband's house in a fit of pique.  Vance's sister betrayed her with her husband, destroying her family and creating infamy about the comedian which caused the networks to cancel her program.  (Vance, gamely, capitalized on the scandal with a series of lurid jokes about torching her husband's place.)  The estrangement between Vance and her sister, now lasting forty years, is also a source of conflict on the show, antagonism that seems always perpetually about to resolve, although the program requires that acrimony persist in order to keep regenerating its plot.  

Despite her sadism and selfishness, Deborah Vance is portrayed as a survivor, a woman who has made it  big in an avowedly sexist milieu.  Hacks has a number of shrewd things to say about how women who don't comply with gender stereotypes are treated in the show business and society in general.  This critique, I think, may account for the many Emmy awards that the show has won, including an Emmy for best actress for Jean Smart.  These awards are justified.  The show is generally very good, funny, and entertaining.  If it occasionally brings a tear to your eye, this is just gravy.