The Testament of Ann Lee

 The Testament of Ann Lee is about 70% conventional bio-pic: the picture traces the life of Ann Lee, the visionary founder of the Shakers.  About a third of the movie is comprised of Shaker tunes, simple, melodies with devotional words that either sung or chanted or, in some cases, rhythmically grunted.  These songs are choreographed as modern dance sequences in which the performers stamp their feet and beat on their chests with both hands to create percussive accompaniment to their dancing.  The dance scenes, sometimes involving dancers hurling themselves across dark forests or charging into lush meadows, involve massed forces and are, at least, initially, thrilling.  (The movie is too long and includes too many choreography scenes which become repetitive.)  This rather dour, and morose, movie about a religious cult is, in fact, a musical -- music is integral to the film's meaning and represents a way to visualize the religious devotion of the sect.  The sound track's score is also alive with droning noises, slithery skittering tremolos on violin, and other avant-garde techniques -- the score is like a lavishly orchestrated and late romantic illustration of a book on entomology.  It's unearthly and, often, strangely beautiful in an inhuman manner.  Paradoxically, the best dance number in the movie is the last which is the least flamboyant -- this dance scene represents the Shaker's characteristic ritual movements:  they plod around in slow circles, sex-segregated:  sometimes the ranks of men shuffle forward with their upraised hands twitching in prayer while the women keep time by stomping their feet.  An overhead shot shows us the groups of dancers rotating slowly on the Meeting House floor -- the shuffling and the stomping gives the movement something of the aspect of ceremonial dancing at an Indian pow-wow.  The expressive leaping around in the earlier dance scenes, often punctuated by people yelping and screaming and gibbering in tongues, is choreographed to "mean something" and, therefore, ultimately less effective than the sober dancing, ecstatic but determined, the motions of people who will be dancing for hours, in the film's last scenes.  You feel that you are looking into a real Shaker worship service, while the other dances, mostly, strike the viewer as slightly ridiculous variations on typical expressionist modern dance.

Conventional bio-pics are predictable and, unfortunately, tend toward dullness.   Except for the dancing, The Testament of Ann Lee, which is scrupulously realistic and historical, is sober, respectful, and slightly tedious..  The chief interest in the film is the dramatization of events that will not be familiar to most people, episodes in the life of a religious visionary who founded a proto-feminist cult.  Mona Fastvold directed the film written by her and her husband, Brady Corbett -- the two of them wrote The Brutalist and two other renowned art-house films, also featuring remarkable, through-composed scores.  Fastvold cleaves to the known facts about Mother Ann as the members of her sect called her.  True to form the movie commences with Ann Lee's birth and childhood and ends with the burial of her body, apparently at a commune that she founded, at Nisakyuna, New York.  The movie is beautifully shot in muted, almost monochromatic colors -- there are landscapes that have the slightly blurred and grubby look of Constable paintings and interiors are bathed in subdued Vermeer lighting.  The exteriors are often wintry and sere with bare trees standing in windy, snow-covered forests.  Fastvold is committed to making the movie beautiful in its dark, grim way and this is apparent in very early scenes that show Ann as a little girl working in a textile mill in Manchester, England.  The mill is objectively horrific, a place with toxic drifting fibers and the children wrestle with big hurtful looms and wear masks against the pollutants in the air.   But Fastvold's imagery of the mill and child workers is very elegant, a symphony in soft whites and greys.  

Ann's father is a blacksmith.  When Ann is about nine,she wakes up one night to see her father ramming himself into her rather listless, bored-looking mother.  This horrifies Ann and, at supper with her seven siblings, she declares her father is a villain for mistreating her mother in that way.  This earns Ann a beating to which her mother only very mildly objects.  As a teenager, Ann joins a sect of Methodist who have developed a theory that God is bisexual and that the Jesus' second-coming will occur in ther person of a woman.  These people celebrate by ecstatic dancing while they make gobbling noises and call out for forgiveness -- they are called the Shaking Quakers. At this time, Ann marries another blacksmith.  This guy has the habit of whipping her with bundles of  twigs while engaging in coitus a tergo.  Ann is unenthusiastic about these conjugal relations and, in fact, considers them devilish.  Four times she is pregnant and four times the child dies before it is a year old. (We see bloody birth scenes and the new-born rejecting Ann's breast.)  This misery drives Ann half-insane and further into the arms of the religious sect to which she now belongs. There's some half-hearted persecutions  by the authorities associated with the Church of England and Ann is thrown in jail where she nearly dies of inanition.  (In jail, she practices levitation but without much success).  Released from jail, Ann is carried to an infirmary where she remains very ill.  It's at this infirmary that she conceives, with her patrons the "Shaking Quakers", the idea of fleeing Britain for America.  There's a tumultuous sea journey with the sailors taunting the Shakers until a tempest in which Mother Ann's prayers seem to save the ship.  On board, the Shakers dance and sing "All is concert / All is Summer / While to Heaven we are going."  In New York, the small band of Shakers -- there are about ten of them -- see a slave auction which Mother Ann denounces, crying "Shame!  Shame!"  The American scenes are a reprise of the Book of Acts in the Gospel and will be received by viewers, more or less, in accord with their responses to that part of the Bible.  I am an admirer of Acts and believe it to be an early example of the epic form in literature applied to the Gospel -- but the Acts is repetitive and triumphalist as is The Testament. A young man and woman are caught in flagrante, making out in a privy apparently and they are banished from the group.  (Mother Ann says that their love is a 'beautiful thing' but not to be tolerated in the celibate sect of the Shakers.)  Later, Ann's husband gives her an ultimatum -- have sex with me or I will abandon you.  Ann is unrelenting -- at least, the blacksmith husband finally gets the blow job for which he has been importuning Ann for years, paying a prostitute for her services before departing from the movie.  One of the Saints, using his twitching index finger as a dowsing stick finds a prophesied meadow along the Hudson in Upstate New York where the Shaker colony of Nisakyuna is founded.  (There are shapely montages of the Shaker's working wood on the lathe and planing timber to make their famous chairs and meeting houses.)  "Do your work as you would live for a thousand years," Mother Ann says, "and, also, as if you would die tomorrow."  There's more dancing intercut with shots of austere, modernist-looking interiors of the men and women's dormitories and the meeting houses.  Ann is threatened both by the British and the Americans -- the Americans doubt her group's commitment to the Revolutionary War that is ongoing.  After another imprisonment, Ann Lee is released by Governor Clinton.  She goes on a long tour of New England and founds six new colonies.  Near the end, a mob of armed men attack the Shakers at night, burn their buildings, and savagely thrash Mother Ann -- the men are tied-up over a fallen log and whipped into unconsciousness. (The men strip Mother Ann and expose her genitals to determine if she is true woman or a eunuch.)  It's not clear to me who these persecuting brutes are affliliated with.  The War ends and Mother Lee, much debilitated by travel and hardship, declines, becomes forgetful and dies at age 48.  The women wash her corpse while the Shaker's dance and, then, she is buried.  In the last shot, we see the Meeting House with an image of the Tree of Life stenciled on the end-wall, a male and female Shaker is silhouette looking at one another  but silent and motionless.  The shot has the prim elegance of late 18th century American folk art.    

The film has a Shaker-like simplicity and directness:  there's nothing fancy about it.  A noteworthy aspect is the portrayal of Mother Ann by Amanda Seyfried, a bold and courageous performance but monotonous.  There is a voice-over narrated by a woman who has a cast in one eye -- she tells the story in simple language, keeping us moored as to time and place.   Of course, the Shaker's insistence on celibacy doomed them.  There were two surviving Shakers in 2025, both elderly and living at Sabbathday Lake in Maine.  A 57-year old woman from an Episcopal Convent joined them in that year, bringing their number up to three.  You retain the movie in your mind and I now believe it is better than it first appears.  

The Secret Agent (2025)

 The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonco Filho) is a very big movie.  It digresses, sprawls, and zigzags through time with abrupt flashbacks and flashforwards -- the narrative doesn't proceed diachronically, but rather begins in media res and, at the end, projects itself forward into the present.  The film has a large cast of characters interacting with one another, spans many years, and explores in a leisurely process a number of themes, not all of them consistent with the picture's principal plot points.  The tone of the movie also varies from grotesque comedy to neo-realist austerity with surrealist episodes tossed in for a good measure.  The Secret Agent doesn't aspire to be a movie but an entire world, a portrait of Brazil in the mid- and late seventies -- it is, to borrow a phrase from Henry James, a "loose and baggy monster."  Some movies are so ambitious as to dwarf most films -- two recent examples come to mind: Brady Corbett's The Brutalist and Yorgos Lanthimos' version of Frankenstein, Poor Things (for that matter Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein also has this character).  By contrast, some movies that are supposed to be very big seem small, even claustrophobic -- I'm thinking of the Dune films by Denis Villeneuve which are shot in the dark and largely involve dynastic bickering with characters whispering to one another in dim cloistered rooms.  For better or worse, there's more in The Secret Agent than I can comfortably describe and the film is more varied than my account will make it seem -- it's simply more diffuse and difficult to assimiliate than most other movies.  Furthermore, the picture assumes a knowledge of Brazilian history which I don't possess.

The movie starts with a paradigm sequence.  A man, seemingly named Marcelo, is driving a bright yellow VW beetle through an arid landscape.  He stops for gas, noting a decomposing corpse lying by the station, under a flimsy panel of cardboard.  (It's the result of a robbery that went awry.)  The older men in this movie are frequently shirtless or have their shirts wide open over their bellies -- it is very hot and humid in Brazil.  A middle-aged fat attendant, wearing an open Hawaiian shirt, pumps gas for Marcelo and tells him about the corpse and how it has been rotting in the sun, harried by feral dogs, for the last week.  Some half-naked girls in a car drive up, sniff at the corpse, and make a rapid exit, music blasting in their vehicle -- they are drunk and celebrating the carnival.  Two sinister highway cops show up.  They take no interest in the body which the dogs are sniffing around.  Instead, they harass Marcelo, apparently, wanting to put the bite on him for a bribe.  Marcelo says he doesn't have any money and the corrupt cops have to be satisfied with a half-pack of cigarettes, the only bribe Marcelo can make.  Marcelo drives to Pernambuco, a northern Brazilian city in the vicinity of Sao Paulo.  There he finds a dwarfish old woman, Dona Sebastiana, who is related to him somehow and a group of eccentric neighbors, including some Angolans and a robust, lusty lady dentist (with whom Marcelo has an affair.)  Although it takes a while for us to understand this, Marcelo's wife, Fatima, has died.  Marcelo has left his child with Fatima with his in-laws:  the grandfather is the projectionist at the Cinema de Luz in the city.  Marcelo is some kind of academic, but seems to be on the run.  And, in fact, most of the people around him in Pernambuco are fugitives of one kind or another -- the Angolans are fleeing persecution in Angola, a number of the other people in the circle are also on the lam from a corrupt and vicious government in Brasilia. (People say that the government has got itself up to "mischief.")  After its prologue at the gas station, the film is divided into three novelistic sections:  "A Boy's Nightmare," "Identification Institute", and "Blood Transfusion."

In "A Boy's Nightmare", we learn that Marcelo's son is afraid to go to the movie Jaws, playing in revival at the movie theater where his grandfather works.  His fear is based, in part, on a macabre discovery -- a big shark caught off the beach has been dissected and found to contain a partially digested human leg.  Fernando, the little boy, has made a picture of the nightmare creature with the leg sticking out of its toothy maw.  The shark is clearly symbolic, probably representing the predatory aspects of Brazilian politics in 1977.  Marcelo goes to work at the "Identification  Institute" where he is researching his family history -- he wants to know about his mother who died when he was young.  (She is said to have been a "slave" of a wealthy family whose son, Marcelo's father, got her pregnant).  Meanwhile in Brasilia, a plutocrat named Ghirotti hires two menacing assassins to travel to Pernambuco to kill Marcelo (this is confusing to some degree because Marcelo is the hero's nom de guerre; his real name is Armando).  The killers are a scary-looking Corporal discharged from the armed forces and his stepson and protege, the steely eyed murderer, Bobbi -- he is the Corporal's stepson and, it is rumored, that the Corporal killed his mother.  The assassins fly to Pernambuco where it is Carnival season with the streets flooded with merry-makers.  Already 91 people have died inthe Carnival and, perhaps, more will end up dead before the party concludes.  There are three strange digressions which I didn't fully understand.  A German tailor impresses the local hoodlums with his scars from World War II.  We think he's a Nazi but, in fact, the man is a Belgian Jew and refugee.  (The German seems to thinks it expedient to let people think he's a bad-ass Nazi -- the part is played by the redoubtable Udo Kier who seems to have been fantastically active in the last year of his life; he also has a major role in this year's season of the Navajo detective series, Dark Winds).  A wealthy woman has not watched the child of her servant properly --this has resulted in the three-year old girl being run over and killed.  The servant calls for justice and a big meeting with lawyers is set up for the Identification Institute (which bizarrely the cops claim to be the Police Station.)  Media gets involved in the story and there's a fracas of screaming and crying women at the Identification archives.  (I couldn't figure out this digression.)  Finally, some crooks go to the morgue, pick-up the shark-gnawed leg (because they are afraid it will be identified) and substitute, apparently another leg -- things are so chaotic in Brazil that apparently dismembered legs are  just lying around.  The real dismembered leg is insulted by this treatment and, somehow, rises from the dead, hopping vigorously around a public park full of people fucking in threesomes (seemingly Brazilian parks get very lively after dark);  the leg chases the lovers around kicking them in the ass with great and alarming force.  (Again, I didn't fully understand this sequence, but expect it may have something to do with Brazil's exuberant tabloid culture -- the adventures of the "Hairy Leg" are front page news and sell-out extra editions of the papers.)  

In the second part of the film, Identification Institute, we learn why the vicious Mr. Ghirotti has commissioned the hit on Marcelo (Armando).  Ghirotti is from the South and feels all Brazilians in the north part of the country are indolent slackers.  Ghirotti, an industrialist, goes to the University of Pernambuco where Armando (as I will call him henceforth) is running an industrial engineering department with about 12 colleagues.  Ghirotti meets with Armando and says that he will use his contacts in Brasilia, the Capitol, to shut down the department unless Armando gives him rights to the patent on a leather-tanning machine that he has invented.  With his half-wit and sadistic son, Ghirotti insults Armando's wife who is lower middle class -- after all her father is a movie projectionist, although a righteous and hardworking man.  They are at a cafe and Fatima, Armando's wife, is incensed and returns the insult to Ghirotti.  The plutocrat is not used to this sort of treatment particularly from a despised northern Brazilian wench whose father is lower middle-class.  And, so, he apparently decides to have Armando, whose wife has now died from pneumonia, killed.  Bobbi and the corporal hook up with the local gendarmes who are all totally and cheerfully corrupt. They drive around town drunk and plotting violent mischief.   In the film's last section, "Blood Transfusion", the assassination plot comes to a head.  The two killers are slothful themselves and they hire a local stevedore, whom Bobbi, the corporal's step son, calls "an animal" to his face to murder Armando.  The attack goes awry and two of the local cops are gunned down by the murderous stevedore.  Bobbi goes in pursuit of Armando but finds the assassin hiding in a barber shop; he has left a blood trail from being shot in the leg.  Bobbi heedlessly barges into the barbershop and is killed by the stevedore.  (The stevedore says something like "who's the animal now.")  At a final party, the group of exiles and refugees plans to leave Pernambuco -- Armando is going to pick up his son, Fernando, at the movie theater; the various refugees from government violence plot to leave the country and the Angolans are immigrating to Sweden.  The matriarch who leads this group, Dona Sebastiana, talks about fleeing Brazil in the thirties to live in Paris where she had a French lover.  The party ends with a round of toasts and it seems that all will be well although the murderous Corporal is still at large.  Two young women are studying the story, listening to recordings of statements made by Armando in 1974 and 1976-78.  For some reason, the young women are transcribing the recordings.  One of them, Flavia, gets the recordings of Armando's statements -- she regards Armando as a sort of hero and freedom fighter.  (We have seen a newspaper on micro-fiche showing a gruesome picture of Armando gunned down on the streets of Penambuco.)  Gradually, we understand that this part of the movie is a kind of epilogue and takes place in the present.  Flavia goes to a hospital where she donates blood.  The doctor supervising the operation is Fernando, Marcelo/Armando's son now middle-aged and distinguished.  Flavia talks with Fernando about his father's story.  Fernando tells Flavia that after he went to see the movie Jaws with his grandfather all of his nightmares about predatory sharks ended.  (The suggestion is that film, by confronting our fears, can heal us from historical trauma.)  Fernando drew pictures of his lost mother, lost father, and himself  riding bravely on the back of a Great White Shark.  The doctor doesn't seem to think that dwelling on the past is of much use.  The last shot shows a brightly lit convenience store with pop music blaring from it.  (Throughout the movie, pop songs have been an index of time and the period in which the movie is set -- for instance, we hear a pop song by the group Chicago setting the story in the mid-seventies.)  

I like enigma.  There are many aspects of this film that I can't quite explain.  (For instance, a shot of Udo Kier in the street celebration ecstatically dancing with the rest of the crowd, many of whom wear masks and Indian headdresses.)  These mysteries endear the movie to me and, despite some dull passages-- there is a long intensely detailed discussion at the University of Pernambuco about Ghirotti's denial of funding to the department -- the movie is surprising, moving, and mostly a treat to watch.  The camerawork makes the heat and sun palpable and the violent scenes are graphic and impressive.  The movie is long, 2 and 1/2 hours, but it is worth your time.  

Pompeii: Under the Clouds

 There is a distinct pleasure watching what seems to be formless chaos slowly resolving into order.  This is a dark room effect:  observing an image developing in a pool of chemicals, a metaphor that is made manifest in some scenes in Gianfranco Roso's Pompeii:  Under the Clouds (2025).  This effect is also given a thematic dimension by Roso's persistent use of haze, clouds steamy fumes gushing from volcanic vents -- imagery that also operates as a primordial chaos gradually resolving into coherence.  What first seems inchoate is slowly revealed as highly structured -- every picture in the movie resonates with other images, echoing them or rhyming or opposing earlier shots in a sort of dialectical montage.  The film is as highly determined as a lyric poem in which each word matches and illumines every other word.  It's not easy to articulate what Pompeii:  Under the Clouds means because its strategy is to suggest a system of correspondences that are visual and not literary.  For instance, one of the themes of the movie involves ruins and damaged sculpture, tons of wrecked marble figures that apparently have been dug out of Naples' dirt. In the basement of a museum displaying spectacular marble figures intact in its galleries, there are hoarded piles of stone heads, legs, feet, and torsos, all sorted into macabre-looking troves.  Someone says that the piles membra disjecta look like ex-votos and, indeed, we have earlier seen a church with prostrate worshippers inching like worms across the terrazzo floors under displays of votive objects -- piles of knees, elbows, heads and breasts in plaster form offered to the Saints in the hope of healing.  In an early sequence, after witnessing a fumarole agitated with ropes of mud cast into the air (only partially glimpsed), we see two horse-carts mysteriously drawn by their animals across chest-deep water in the Bay.  (What are the horses doing in the water?)  Later, we see the horses and carts clip-clopping against an ancient Roman road -- the sound of the hooves is very loud.  In other shots, we see the two horse carts trotting around a race-track or otherwise marching down narrow lanes.  There is no clue as to what these horses mean or why they punctuate the action, but this visual theme imparts an aura of modest surrealism to the film.  A Ukrainian freighter is off-loading corn at a big grain elevator in the harbor.  The Syrian crew works to scrape all the corn out of the vast, stadium-sized hold.  In a few days, they will return to Ukraine (Odessa) where they will be bombed again.  The slowly emptying cargo hold looks like, and rhymes with, the ruins excavated by archaeologists around the city --  these are big dark pits where workers scrape and shovel the earth (just like the Syrians empty the bin of the ship.)  Ultimately, the viewer concludes that there is nothing in the movie that isn't connected in some overt, or occult, way to other images and motifs. (The movie is shot in black and white and runs 115 minutes).

The film establishes a number of nodes or locations from which the system of correspondences emanate.  There is the basement of the museum filled with broken statuary, visited periodically by white robed technicians (their garments mirror the white marble of the sculptures) who illumine the objects with flashlights -- the best way to display them someone says.  Flashlights are used by several firefighters and a prosecutor who creep along subterranean catacombs, tunnels made by assiduous tomb-robbers.  Flashlights also illumine a great underground labyrinth where a tour guide, speaking in English, shows buried artifacts and architecture embedded in the walls made of sedimented and compressed volcanic ash.  Above the claustrophobic tunnels, the prosecutors in helicopters survey the crowded city looking for evidence of looting and tomb-robbing.  The Syrians are emptying their huge ship, creating neat pyramidal heaps of corn that mimic the appearance and shape of Vesuvius.  Meanwhile, students from Tokyo University are deep in pits excavating an ancient villa. An old man named Titti,runs an antiquarian bookstore and seems to tutor students after school.  Each afternoon a dozen or so kids, some of them very young and others teenagers gather at tables in his back room.  We see one boy curiously pawing Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.  At the end of the movie, Titti is reading that book, very close to the end of the massive tome, something that surprises and impresses a teenage boy who seems to be collecting Neapolitan recipes.  Fires break out in the city and have to be fought by the municipal fire fighters.  The fire fighters operate a call center.  There is an earthquake and dozens of people call terrified that Vesuvius is about to erupt again.  Some people call for the firemen to rescue cats or because they are suffering pain or because they can't lift a sibling who has fallen and can't get up.  One guy always calls at 11:10 am to verify the time.  These mini-operas conducted by phone call are comical at first, but the desperation grows.  Hoodlums set a whole neighborhood and the adjacent trees afire.  At the end of the movie, a woman pleads for help as her husband beats her with her children shrieking in the background.  The woman will not leave her husband, she says, because the "children love their poppa."  The harrowing call is too much for the call center worker who waits for the carabinieri to arrive and, then, walks off-camera.  The mysterious horses trot along the street.  The volcano is hidden in clouds.  Rain falls and the Syrian sailors look out  across the wet city.  In Pompeii's ruins, tourists wander around with umbrellas and streams flow along the gutters of the ancient roads.  An empty commuter train rattles along a track, slipping through a cut in the rock that is like one of the villa excavations in the town.  This shot mirrors images of the train similarly empty setting out for its run early, in the darkness before dawn.

Naples, under the volcano, seems poised at the brink of perpetual ruin,  And it is already ruined, a city of artifacts, crumbling walls, and obliterating mists.  The city seems ringed by menacing volcanic vents and mud geysers.  It is undercut by the tunnels of tomb robbers and the ground is full of voids that plaster can fill to embody the corpses that were once entombed in the pyroclastic flows.  An abandoned movie theater, crumbling before our eyes, shows a documentary about Pompeii and scenes from Voyage to Italy, Rossellini's film about the breakup of a marriage starring Ingrid Bergman and George Saunders -- we are shown the scene in the movie in which the plaster casts of a couple embracing in death are uncovered.  The theater is empty.  In the final part of the movie, it has fallen apart completely and images are no longer projected.  The film's epigraph is:  Vesuvius produces all the clouds in the world, words by Jean Cocteau.    

  

Cutter and Bone ( Cutter's Way)

 Cutter and Bone was released in 1981 as Cutter's Way.  I have no explanation for the name change.  The movie illustrates an instructive point:  many of the best movies are those that are modestly proportioned, not unduly ambitious, and populated by vivid and interesting characters.  Cutter and Bone is a small scale film noir, intelligently directed by Ivan Passer, an emigre from Czechoslovakia who had written and made a number of excellent movies in his home country -- he was part of the generation of Czech new wave directors that included Milos Foreman who also defected to Hollywood.  Cutter climaxes with a single gunshot -- there are no explosions and no other violence in the movie, although the picture proposes a sort of American brutality that is as red, white, and blue as the flag and tasty as mom's apple pie.  Early in the movie, someone encounters a battered corpse in a garbage pan and begins to violently retch.  The film is true to its premises -- namely that actual violence is rare but an affliction that crosses generations, men and women are largely opaque and disappointing to one another and, even, themselves, and that there is corruption in paradise:  the film is set in a version of Santa Barbara that is all posh gardens, green jungle, and colorful festivals.  The movie represents a high point in the early careers of Jeff Bridges (Bone) and John Heard (Cutter), but everyone in the movie is very good, particularly Lisa Eichhorn playing Cutter's alcoholic wife.  The movie alternates between high society and middle class domesticity portrayed as neighborhood bars and small, steamy bungalows -- the friction between mansions with their polo grounds and the small crowded home where Cutter lives with his mournful, depressed wife is an important aspect to the movie:  the two worlds seem wholly apart, separated by money and class, and, yet, the maimed Cutter, who apparently comes from wealth, navigates both realms.  The picture has shrewd things to say about these two Americas, but its theses and critique are always secondary to the hazy, almost dream-like and somnambulant ramblings of its main characters -- people who are in thrall to self-destructive impulses.

Bone is a lady's man, too pretty for his own good.  We first meet him crawling out of a bed occupied by the dismissive and icy Nina van Pallandt.  (She's playing a southern California trophy wife, a cameo role that reprises her part in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye).  Bone is a boat salesman and his technique for closing the deal involves sleeping with the wives of the wealthy men in the market for yachts and cabin cruisers.  He works for a pudgy ineffectual man named George who spends most of the movie cowering.  Nina van Pallandt's housewife isn't impressed with Bone's sexual prowess; he repays the compliment by telling her he's had "better."  She's not interested in Bone's sales pitch on the yacht that's for sale.  Bone later sneers that she and her husband are looking for something "a lot smaller."  Bone goes to a bar downtown.  There's a Spanish heritage festival underway complete with mariachis and baton twirlers as well as floats and high school marching bands.  In a bar, Bone meets the obscene and abrasive Cutter, a Vietnam vet whose service has left him sans one eye, one leg, and one arm.  Cutter is brilliant and frighteningly abusive -- he's bitter about the war, his mutilation, and the fact that his morose wife, Maureen ("Mo") seems to like Bone a lot better than him.  Cutter's bitterness, however, masks a deep-seated urge for justice, to set thing right in a world that is irrevocably flawed.  In the bar, Cutter insults some Black pool players, using racial epithets that almost get him beat up.  Bone leaves the bar, planning  to sleep on one of the boats for sale in the harbor marina.  In the alley behind the bar, Bone's Austin Healy breaks down, a symbol for Bone's rather dilapidated glamor.  In the dark and rain, he sees a man near a garbage can -- we can't really see what the figure is doing and it's just a flash of dark on dark on the screen.  The next morning, garbage collectors find the corpse of a 17-year old cheerleader in the garbage can.  During a parade at which Cutter denounces the patriotic floats rolling past, Bone sees a man ramrod straight on a white horse -- this is a local oligarch named J. J. Cord.  Bone thinks that this was the man he saw by the garbage can where the dead girl was discovered:  we have no idea whether he is right about this identification which seems fanciful.  However, Cord's car was torched the morning that the corpse was found, suggesting, perhaps, that he is trying to destroy evidence of the murder.  Cutter is approached by the girl's sister, a woman who seems like a dimwitted opportunist -- she wants to blackmail Cord and, also, sleep with Bone.  Cutter latches onto this hare-brained scheme with righteous fury.  He sees Cord as embodying the privilege and sense of arrogant entitlement that motivated the Vietnam war.  He doesn't want money but, rather, justice -- and we have the sense that he wishes, through this crusade, to avenge himself or avenge the injuries that have crippled him.  The problem with Cutter is that he is always chugging whiskey from a bottle and never really sober -- he makes a good match with Maureen who is also a drunk and who also drinks her vodka neat from the bottle.  People in the know believe that Cord, a veteran himself of World War II, is a dangerous man -- he has made a fortune in oil and we see the ocean disfigured by off-shore drilling rigs.  Bone is fearful and doesn't want to tangle with Cord.  Cutter, however, prosecutes the extortion scheme, delivering a blackmail letter to Cord's offices in LA.  That night, "Mo" actually sleeps with Bone, apparently consummating a relationship that has been simmering for a long time.  "Mo" wants Bone to stay with her, but he sneaks off to sleep in his boat -- he is always "walking away," Cutter says.  Cutter's house is burned to the ground and "Mo" is killed.  Cutter accuses Cord of killing his "wifey" at a polo game and vows revenge.  Bone thinks that "Mo" killed herself after their sexual encounter.  After some squabbling, Bone and Cutter crash Cord's party with Cutter armed so that he can kill the oligarch.  

The movie's tone and atmosphere is hard to characterize.  In one notable scene, Cutter steals a horse and rides it through a garden party, wildly running through a buffet table and terrorizing the guests.  The scene is staged for laughs -- the horse knocks over butlers and women in expensive gowns and tears up tents pitched in the yard.  But this comedy is laced with bitterness and, even, tragedy and Cutter, whom we have seen limping pathetically, seems suddenly unleashed as a real force for justice, wrath riding on a white horse.  While watching a parade, Cutter who is drunk and profane talks about the Spanish who are being celebrated in the parade as enslaving the Indians and working them to death.  He tells this parable:  "When you first see a Vietnamese mother and her child lying in the ditch dead, you say that you hate the United States of America and wish it would lose the war and be destroyed.  Then, you think about this more and say:  "I hate God.  It's God that has done this." and, then, you think about this a little more and say:  "I'm hungry.  Let's eat."  The film is filled with brilliant bits of business -- a particular highlight is a scene in which the completely drunk and destructive Cutter smashes his neighbor's car with his own vehicle and knocks down a fence in the process.  The neighbor calls the cops and Cutter appears, seemingly sober, explaining the accident as a result of his war wounds.  The cop investigating the scene thinks of Cutter as a war hero and ends up chastising the neighbor who, in turn, calls the cop a fascist.  It's both funny and maddening.  If you can see this movie, do yourself a favor and watch it.  

You were never really there

 At ninety minutes, You were never really there is probably British filmmaker Lynn Ramsay's most accessible movie.  Since the narrative is formulaic, the viewer isn't too disoriented by the shock cuts and unresolved scenes -- you fill in what is missing from your understanding of the genre and its conventions.  Ramsay gestures at those conventions enough to keep the film, more or less, on track, although it's pretty evident that she has, on some level, contempt for the material.  A traumatized Iraq war veteran -- is there any other kind in the movies -- is paid to rescue a senator's daughter who has been trafficked into some kind of elite pedophile brothel.  Joe, the vet, fulfills the contract, thereby, inadvertently, discovering a wider and more sinister conspiracy that involves the governor of the State.  A bunch of bad guys get killed and the vet, who fantasizes about committing suicide, survives the bloodbath along with the girl, Nina.  That's it -- there's nothing more in the movie and most of the plot points that I have recounted are established very elliptically.  The film is highly derivative:  the creepy milieu of wealthy perverts is reminiscent of certain aspects of Eyes Wide Shut.  The plot seems based on Scorsese's Taxi Driver, although the movie is much more primitive than the Scorsese picture:  Travis Bickel in Taxi Driver is mentally ill and, at least, some of the conspiratorial aspects of that movie are halllucinated; Joe, in Ramsay's film, is severely damaged by PTSD but he's not crazy and the ring of pedophiles that he uncovers, a febrile conceit of far Right conspiracy theorists, is apparently intended to be real.  Parts of the movie play as variations on themes established by the Epstein files, although this movie was made before that scandal became widely notorious.  A scene in which the mercenary marches away from a pond in which he has just deposited the corpse of his mother emphasizes the percussive sound of Joe's feet on the lakeside trail -- this scene duplicates John Boorman's Point Blank image of Lee Marvin hustling through an airport with the sound of his heels on the tile floor amplified.  

We meet Joe in the aftermath of one of his rescue missions.  He's mimicking suicide with a plastic bag wrapped over his face.  There's blood on his tools, including a ball-peen hammer that he has wrapped in a rag.  Leaving the hotel, he throws away his equipment and is then attacked by someone -- we don't know who this is.  He head butts the guy and knocks him out.  Back at home in New York City, Joe tends to his elderly mother.  She's been watching horror films and is scared.  Joe mimics one of the knife scenes in Psycho, gesturing at his mother as if he's going to stab her death while making the high-pitched squealing sound from the Psycho score.  They play some kind of game.  Joe's mother is already a mummified corpse, haggard and emaciated with startlingly white skin.  The next day Joe goes to see a contact, Angel, in his bodega.  Money is exchanged.  A young man sees Joe come into the store and this alarms the mercenary.  He cuts off contacts with Angel and the bodega and, then, goes to see McCleary, a weary middle-aged man who is his handler.  McCleary sets up Joe with a new job:  $50,000 for retrieving a teenage girl from sex traffickers -- the girl is the daughter of a smarmy senator named Votto. (Votto, in turn, is an acolyte to an even more smarmy pol, Governor Wilkins whom he is assisting in an election campaign.)  Joe has no trouble infiltrating a sort of pedophile brothel in a townhouse, beating down the guards with his ball-peen hammer.  He extracts the girl, an angelic child named Nina, and takes her to the fleabag hotel where her father is supposed to retrieve her.  At the hotel, Joe and the girl see that someone has thrown Votto off the top of a skyscraper.  There's a knock at the door:  someone from Votto's office but this guy is immediately killed by crooked cops who fight with Joe (he kills one of them) and abduct the girl again.  Joe finds that McClearly has been murdered and finds his mother under a pillow pierced by a shot that has also pierced her eye.  Joe wraps his mother in plastic and takes her to a rural pond where he weights the body with stones and drops it into the deep water (the lake seems to be implausibly abysmal).  Joe, then, tries to commit suicide again by drowning himself but changes his mind.  He gets in his car, tracks the governor for whom Votto was campaigning to a huge mansion, a bit like the estate in the Kubrick movie.  Entering the mansion, he kills the guards, makes his way to the Governor's playroom and finds the man dead on the floor with his throat slit.  Downstairs in the dining room, Nina is eating her lunch with a straight razor covered in blood at the table.  Joe and Nina go to a local diner where Joe fantasizes about shooting himself in the head.  But he doesn't kill himself.  Nina, who has really spoken up to this point, says that "it's a beautiful day."  Joe agrees.

Joe's mind is a rat's nest filled with all sorts of hideous memories.  All the usual suspects are there:  an abusive and demanding father, domestic assault on Joe's mother, and lots of ghastly memories of bad stuff happening in Iraq:  at one point, Joe recalls giving an Iraqi girl a candy bar only to see the girl killed by another kid for the candy.  These memories invade the film by way of intrusive, jump-cut flashbacks.  There's some kind of fetish about counting:  both Joe and Nina count backwards to themselves, perhaps, to soothe their troubled minds -- this counting establishes a bond between Joe and Nina, both victims of severe abuse.  Joe, played hysterically by Joaquin Phoenix, spends most of the film sobbing and toying with the idea of self-harm and suicide.  The suicide fantasies erupt into the film in a  jarring explosive fashion.  Despite its extremely conventional plot, the movie's imagery is surprising.  We frequently don't know exactly what we are seeing -- there's a lag between what we see and what we later understand to be the case.  A good example is a scene in which Joe is transporting his mother's corpse out of town for interment in the pond.  He has wrapped the body in plastic.  While driving Joe opens the window.  We hear a rustling sound and, then, the film cuts to the plastic covering the head of the body seeming to move -- is the old lady alive?  No, it's just the wind disturbing the plastic in which she is wrapped.  The movie never really explains Joe's backstory.  We're never shown what has really traumatized him to the point of becoming a catatonic, embittered survivor.  This is all left to our imagination.  The film is gripping, fast-paced, and, mostly, opaque.  I admire the technique but I've seen this stuff all before in better movies.  There isn't a moment in this film, which feels very advanced and adventurous in its mise-en-scene, that isn't essentially a rip-off of some other movie and the nod to right-wing conspiracy theories is, I suppose, faintly offensive.  

War Machine

 Preliminaries occupy about half of the Netflix picture War Machine.  The last half of the movie is a gory, but effective, combat picture.  In form and structure, War Machine follows the pattern set by movies like The Sands of Iwo Jima and Full Metal Jacket.  The hero is trained for special operations combat by brutal and exacting taskmasters.  The training regimen is dehumanizing and cruel -- about 150 applicants for special operations as Army Rangers are subjected to abuse until their number is culled to about 15 or 20 soldiers.  The ranger applicants have to hump it up sheer mountain slopes, run with mountainous packs on their shoulders, and beat one another silly in boxing matches; they are tossed with fettered hands and feet into the deep end of a swimming pool  Sometimes, they have to march along the bottom of the pool carrying big weights in their hands, an exercise that almost results in the insanely determined hero drowning.  They practice with machine guns and crawl around under strands of razor wire in mud.  (All of this takes place in an astonishingly beautiful Alpine landscapes of glaciated peaks, deep gorges, and torrential rapids roaring through canyons.)  The recruits are given numbers instead of names.  The hero, a burly man-mountain with folds of muscle corrugating the back of his neck, is called 81.  The other applicants don't like the rough, tough, and taciturn 81 -- he is older than the other men, has a chip on his shoulder, and is already a Silver Star combat hero.  He also has something to prove to himself.  During an earlier campaign in Afghanistan, specifically Kandahar, his unit was ambushed and wiped-out to the last man -- the only survivor of the rocket attack was 81.  In that massacre, 81's brother was mortally wounded.   Just before the explosions, 81 and his kid brother mused about attending Ranger training and qualifying for special operations.  In the battle, 81 took  a piece of shrapnel through his thigh, yanked it out of the muscle, and, then, carried his unconscious and dying brother ten miles back to base.  Before reaching the perimeter, he collapsed and his brother bled out.  81 has now decided to apply for Ranger training, although he's middle-aged, to honor his brother.  He has the letters DFQ tattooed on his biceps, the acronym standing for "Don 't Fucking Quit."  Against all odds, he wants to do his dead brother proud by successfully completing the hellish ranger training and crossing a literal finishing line inscribed in the gravel with the scroll of the ranger logo.  This is War Machine's set-up, it's situation, in which our hero will be tested to the limits of his courage and endurance by actual combat.  There are different variations on this simple and fundamental plot:   in Full Metal Jacket, all of the abuse from the Drill Instructor merely equips the recruits with idiotic slogans and unrealistic expectations that result in the death of most of the characters -- training has made the Marines literally psychotic and they don't do too well when confronted by a teenage Viet Cong girl sniper.  In the traditional form of this story, represented by John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima, the tough sergeant's training pays off in actual battle and men succeed in their mission precisely because their instructor was so relentlessly harsh with them.  War Machine is a hybrid between the two narrative types:  all of the gung-ho training and motivation is pretty much useless when your adversary is a robotic killing machine built by sinister space aliens.  As in the Kandahar raid, the Rangers get wiped out to the last man, except once more for 81, who staggers across the finish line badly wounded and hauling the mangled recruit number 7 on his back.

The second half of the movie is a straight-forward, gruesome chase --the giant robot, a bit like one of the Transformers, stomps around slaughtering the soldiers.  After their initial encounter with the machine, about half of them are dead.  The rest succumb during the next forty minutes.  The premise is that the Ranger candidates who have reached this advanced stage are sent on a mission into the enormous and unpeopled wilderness -- their task is to avoid ambush by what is called the cadre (other troops), blow up a crashed plane, and, then, extract a POW from an enemy camp.  In this war game, 81 is called upon to lead the unit, a task that he abhors because he keeps suffering flash-backs of the massacre in Kandahar.  The men reach a crashed craft  (it is sleek and ultra-modern) which they interpret as the plane they are supposed to blow up.  81 tours the woods a few hundred yards away and finds that a smashed airplane is lying in a clearing.  Meanwhile, the other troops have set up explosive charges on the space-craft believing it to be some kind of classified bomber.  (The presence of the alien craft in the wilderness is motivated by various color-by-number plot points that are not worth detailing.) The charges are detonated, an explosion that really pisses off the War Machine.  It rears up, lumbers around and blasts the Rangers into bloody gobbets.  7 gets his leg blown apart and has to be hauled around on a stretcher.  This is a severe inconvenience when the men are cornered, have to cross a raging river, and get swept over a waterfall.  Somehow, 7 survives this.  By this time, most of the recruits are not just dead, but blown to  pieces or impaled on sharp tree stumps or burned to a crisp.  The War Machine has laser guided guns; it acquires its targets by scanning the landscape under foot, visualizing somehow the soldiers, and, then, blowing them up with rockets.  Sometimes, it fires round bowling ball bombs up into the air so that they rain down on the troops like mortar shells. The action ends, more or less, with a kind Mad Max Furiosa chase involving an armored personnel carrier in which the few surviving rangers are fleeing and the machine that is hot on their heels, showering them with fire.  Only 81 and the disabled 7 survive this attack.  81 hoists 7 on his back and staggers into the camp where the soldiers are mustering to repel the alien war machines.  It turns out that hundreds of them have beset the planet and are shooting it out with the earthlings.  81, no longer shy about leadership, gives an inspiring speech about fighting the machines and the movie ends with the troops gathering for the inevitable ultra- violent sequel.  I think it's called War Machines in the plural, a bit like Alien was followed-up by Aliens.

The movie is well-made nonsense.  It's stupidly gung-ho.  The action sequences are exciting and there are lots of well-staged explosions and stunts.  The movie is entertaining for its two hour length but disturbing.  Another picture that War Machines resembles is Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, a cartoon movie about amiable fascist troops battling space bugs.  Starship Troopers, based on a right-wing novel, by Robert Heinlein is brilliantly made with spectacular combat scenes with the space bugs -- it's innovation, compared to movies like the Star Wars franchise, is to take the combat seriously and show the soldiers ripped to pieces by the insect warriors -- peoples' limbs are torn off, they are beheaded, disemboweled, skewered, reduced to puddles of entrails and body parts.  The same applies to War Machine:  the ranger recruits are splashed into the sky, horribly burned, and wounds gush arterial blood.  It's fantastically gruesome and, so, the viewer feels a bit unclean -- the awful fascination of watching the human body reduced to bloody fragments is part of the movie's appeal.  This would be bad enough but, as I watched War Machine, I was conscious of the fact that American bombers and ballistic missiles are at this exact moment destroying Iranian targets, and killing hundreds of people -- real war makes a picture like this seem obscene and indecent.   

Eephus

 Eephus, we learn, is the name for a certain kind of pitch in baseball -- the ball is said to travel so slowly that the hitter is baffled, can't wait to swing, and ends up swinging early, thereby, missing the target.  One of the players in the film of the same name has (allegedly) mastered this sort of pitch.  I am hesitant to accuse this laid-back, cinema verite picture of making attempts at anything so vulgar as symbolism or, even, meaning, but one could argue that Eephus, the movie imitates eephus, the pitch:  nothing seems to be happening, it's all belated and there's no narrative really, no plot to speak of, no climax and, certainly, no real conflict except the rather low-key and mild antagonism engendered by the baseball game depicted in the film.  The viewer, like the batter, is baffled and, probably, swings too soon at assigning a meaning to the movie -- you run the risk of critically striking out.  On the other hand, baseball is the American game par excellence and among intellectuals provides metaphors for everything -- consider for instance Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh (prop.)  and Bernard Malamud's The Natural.  So Eephus resists meaning and seems to be about nothing, while, at the same time, the picture appears to comment obliquely on the American scene, mortality and death, the changing seasons both in human life and nature, and the inevitable "dying fall" that accompanies all endeavors.  The film suggests elegy and, also, may be a particularly subtle kind of ghost story -- perhaps, the players are phantoms themselves.  In the end, everything fades away into darkness.

On a Sunday in late October, two amateur teams meet to play ball on a diamond that is about to be destroyed for the construction of a new school.  The teams, in red and blue respectively, are Adler's Paint and the Riverdogs.  This will be the last game on the old ball field.  The trees have changed colors and the film is bathed in golden light; in the woods, the leaves are falling.  There are four or five spectators who leave as the game progresses -- an old man who may be demented watches for a while but wanders off; one of the younger players, the only Black man on the teams, has a girlfriend who sits in a lawn-chair for a while but also leaves.  There are two stoner kids.  Another old man scores the game and his marks on the score-card punctuate the action such as it is.  For a while, a food truck sells pizza to the dismay of one of the players who is on a strict diet -- most of the players are middle-aged and overweight, some comically so.  The game is uneventful, although a tie results in the play continuing after dark.  The camera cuts away from the action and, so, we only barely see the game -- there are pitches, hits and fouls:  in one spooky scene, a player hunts for a lost ball in the autumnal woods but can't find it; the staging of the scene suggests a horror movie but nothing happens.  (There's a fat kid smoking a cigarette in the woods who is reprimanded by the player -- the searching man has to find the ball because they don't have that many spares.)  The captain of Adler's Paint gets extracted from the game midway because he has forgotten to attend his niece's christening -- there's a lot of foul-mouthed cursing about this.  One of the players says that this is the reason he never wants to have a niece.  If you watched the movie carefully, and kept track of names, you could probably identify various characters with specific traits in the movie -- but it's not the kind of picture that invites you to watch carefully.  Rather, it's more like a baseball game itself, a sort of benumbed tedium that encourages conviviality more than competition.  The picture has a hazy, October ambience (it's set in rural Massachusetts), possibly the result of the picture being shot on 16 mm or some sort of cheap film stock and, then, anamorphically blown-up to 35 mm.  When the demented old man wanders off, another younger (but still middle-aged) man appears and briefly takes over the pitching in the game and the leadership of the Adler Paints team.  Then, this figure simply vanishes.  We have the sense that old-time baseball players are simply materializing to commemorate the final game on the diamond.  The picture has some of the rhythm of an Ozu movie -- there are empty frames:  shots of vacant lots,  kids playing soccer with only their heads bobbing above the boards around the field, the sky with clouds drifting overhead.  It gets dark but the game continues, now a tie.  The umpire and other park officials call it quits but the game continues with the scorekeeper up in the rickety press box above the field calling strikes and balls.  Finally, the players have to arrange their cars in a semi-circle to cast imperfect light on the field.  The game loiters, dawdles -- the bases are loaded in the shadows and someone gets walked.  One of the team wins -- I can't recall which and it doesn't matter.  The film ends with shots of the players vanishing in the darkness.  One of the men has brought fireworks to celebrate the last game.  We see the glare of the fireworks only but the rocket in the air or their explosions.  A man stands in silhouette in the player's dug-out while the light around him flares in different colors.  

The film, directed by Carson Lund in 2024, has won a number of prizes including the Cassavetes award for best picture made on a budget under one million dollars.  It is lyrical and poetic but puzzling.  In the end some of the players get drunk on beer and end up just lying in the outfield staring up at the sky.  A clue to the film's method is the use of the great Frederick Wiseman on the soundtrack intoning various quotations about baseball, for instance, Yogi Berra's gnomic remark:  "It's getting later earlier."  (The picture seems to imitate Wiseman's technique in his famous sprawling documentary films. When I was in law school, I had a softball team and, on Fridays, we met in the park under the old Bunge building, an ancient grain elevator, to play.  No one cared about the outcome and we played against people we picked up in the park.  Since I was a lousy hitter and can't field, I played pitcher, the place where I could do the least damage.  We didn't gather until 7 or 7:30 at the park.  In the Summer, we played until 9 or 9:30.  But as the season advanced, in early Fall, we would play until the darkness made it impossible to bat or catch balls hit into the air.  When you're young, the sky looks big and is full of lovely evanescent clouds.  My girlfriend then was on the team -- she could both bat and field.  We didn't have enough players to allow anyone to be a spectator -- if you came you had to play.  I don't know if anyone else even remembers those Friday games.