The Edge

 I saw The Edge (1997) on cable about 30 years ago.  The movie is simple the point of being archetypal.  Over the years, I haven't recalled much of its plot (there isn't much, in truth, to remember), but some of the film's lines have stuck with me and, even, become axioms that I often quote.  At one point, the hero bucks up his hopeless comrade by telling him:  "What one man can do, another man can do."  At the climax, the bad guy aims a gun at the hero and tells him that "life is full of betrayals.  You're best out of it."  Someone provides the edifying advice:  "Don't ever feel sorry for a man with an airplane." There is a bit in the script about making fire from ice -- it has to do with molding snow into a lens like a magnifying glass and, then, focusing the lens on kindling on a sunny day.  (I seriously doubt if this would work, but I, certainly, hope so and have brooded about this wilderness survival trick for about half my life.)  Whenever I am lost and don't know my way, I recall the hero's admonition to his fellow castaways:  "Most people who get lost in the wilderness, die.  And you know what they die of:  shame.  Instead of thinking, they keep asking themselves 'how did I get myself into this problem?' and 'Why is this happening to me?' until, in the end, they just give up and die."  The last line in the movie, which is a lie, is the greatest and most simple:  "How did the other (castaways) die?"  "They died...saving my life."

The Edge directed by the New Zealand Maori film-maker, Lee Tamahori, represents that director at the beginning of his career, right after his breakthrough movie about the Maori people Once were Warriors (1994)  Great things were expected of Tamahori, but he was seduced by Hollywood, ended up making a series of movies that were, apparently, each successively worse and more formulaic and never, it seemed, reached his full potential.  That said, his first two movies are masterpieces of a kind and well worth seeking out.  (It may be that his last picture The Convert, shot in New Zealand in the Maori community, may be similarly powerful and a return to Tamahori's roots:  I don't know I haven't seen this movie released in 2023 and it is hard to find.

The Edge is a standard issue wilderness adventure movie.  Its premise is crude and predictable:  three men find themselves alone in the Alaskan (or Canadian) wilderness.  (The awe-inspiring visuals were shot around Banff and the Columbia ice field.) The protagonists are a smarmy fashion photographer (Bob, played by Alec Baldwin), his African-American assistant, and a billionaire, acted in a restrained manner by Anthony Hopkins.  The men have taken a plane north to a small lake in the hope of meeting an authentic trapper and Native American, a man named Jack Hawk.  Bob wants to incorporate Hawk's rugged features into his fashion shoot which involves the billionaire's trophy wife Elly, played by the actual fashion model Elle MacPherson.  On the way to a remote lake which turns out to be different from the destination they announced back at the base camp at a luxury lodge, the single engine Cessna hits a flock of birds and crashes into an icy body of water between snowcapped peaks.  The pilot drowns but the three men escape relatively uninjured.  They set off to walk back to Jack Hawk's cabin where they expect search parties will be looking for them.  But there are rushing rivers to cross and an enormous bear that decides to hunt them down as prey.  That's the situation and, in fact, the plot of the movie.

What redeems this formulaic "lost in the wilderness" film are several factors.  First, there is the awe-inspiring landscapes against which our trios travails are filmed.  The movie is beautiful and the snow and cold and rain are palpable.  Second, the film inverts our expectations -- the billionaire turns out to be courageous, resourceful, and, even, virtuous.  Hopkins plays the part superbly projecting quiet, eccentric confidence and his acting is the center of the movie.  Third, the movie involves a subplot, also very much a formula:  the smarmy fashion photographer played by the smirking Alec Baldwin is sleeping with the fashion model married to the billionaire and Baldwin, playing a deep-dyed villain, is plotting to kill the rich man.  (Baldwin is spectacularly loathsome, but he also displays a real gift for sardonic comedy and one can see the appeal that led him to comic roles on Saturday Night Live and, of course, 30 Rock where he was very funny -- he has a gift for mimicry and is excellent at imitating a fey, lisping homosexual (at one point, he accuses Hopkins' billionaire of "latent homosexuality").  Fourth, the film is written by David Mamet and the lean muscular aphorisms punctuating the script are the highlights of the movie and the aspect of the picture that I have recalled for 30 years.  Viewed in retrospect some elements of Mamet's latter-day support for Donald Trump and the author's right-wing Republicanism are visible in the movie's adoring stance with respect to the billionaire, described by his unfaithful wife "as a most excellent man." The last reason to seek out this movie is the spectacular performance by the bruin thespian, Bart the Bear.  Bart was a ten-foot tall 1500 pound brown Kodiak bear and, with Rin Tin Tin, he was one of the best animal actors to ever appear in films.  Bart, who was easy-going and gentle, provides a truly fearsome performance as the movie's vicious animal villain.  Hopkins has said that he spent hours observing Bart's acting chops on the set and learned a lot of things from the bear whom he "respected as a fellow actor."  Bart died in 2000 at 23 in Heber City, Utah.  

Underworld USA

 Somewhere in the recesses of this Blog, there is probably a previous note about Sam Fuller's Underworld USA.  After about thirty minutes, I realized that I had seen the movie before -- I recognized a swimming pool on top of a building that a mob boss was using to front his criminal enterprises; the natatorium sponsored a swimming club for disadvantaged youth and hosted swim meets as the plump, vicious gangster spent his afternoons lounging around the pool with his henchmen.  I didn't remember the rest of the movie until a startling sequence in its last five minutes, but I often focus on decor and locations and the exotic detail of the rooftop pool in a squat skyscraper with a sign over its entry:  Normal Industries (or something of that sort) was memorable to me.  I haven't consulted my previous entry, if it even exists -- forward! is my motto and I'm not interested in what I have done or written in the past.

 Fuller's 1961 release is a complicated revenge story bound up by some peculiar (likely studio-imposed) parameters:  apparently, officials, as late as 1961, frowned on plots in which the hero is allowed to escape scot-free (or even awarded) after committing crimes.  In Underworld USA, the movie devises every possible contrivance to keep its hero, who is certainly murderous and violent, from actually killing anyone.  Sure, he figures out ways to get bad guys killed but never, until the last sequence, delivers the coup de grace himself.  This is a tricky proposition since the film involves a number of gruesome deaths.  Tolly Devlin (played by Cliff Roberstson) is small-time, penny-ante thug.  We see him rolling drunks when he is 14 on New Year's Eve.  Fuller likes to begin his movies with flair and the opening sequence involving a staggering drunk, people singing Auld Lang Syne off-screen, and a savage beating enacted by shadows on a wall, is an impressive piece of filmmaking.  But pretty soon, Fuller slips into the film's rhythm which is mostly overlit, interiors in which people talk to one another after the manner of TV series in the late fifties and early sixties.  After rolling the drunk and snatching his wristwatch and wallet, young Tolly gets assaulted by another even more vicious hoodlum who tries to gouge out his eye with a broken bottle.   This attack leaves Tolly scarred around his eye and, therefore, lets us identify him when he has grown up to be Cliff Robertson.  The guy getting beaten to death in the alley is Tolly's old man, also a career criminal who is killed by four thugs.  The plot of the movie is Tolly finding faces for the shadow figures pummeling his father.  Tolly's eye wound is treated by a kindly old bar maid who is unable to have children of her own and, therefore, inhabits an apartment that is full of pictures of babies with its shelves laden with spooky-looking baby dolls.  The bar maid runs a gin joint where criminals congregate.  Twenty years pass while Tolly is in jail for various stupid property crimes.  In prison, he finds one of the villains who killed his dad and, as the man is dying from blood cancer, extorts the identities of the other killers out of him:  they are Gunther, Smith, and Gela. Released from the Big House, Tolly sets about hunting down the killers and exterminating them.   This involves a complicated plot in which Tolly infiltrates the gang led by the effete fat man sitting next to the swimming pool in his bathrobe in the Normal Industries building.  Tolly is in league with two helpers:  one is Driscoll, the City prosecutor who was supposed to bring the killers of the senior Devlin to justice:  apparently WWII intervened and Driscoll ended up in the infantry as an officer of the Big Red One, the unit in which Sam Fuller served in Italy and later France and Germany (where he participated in the liberation of a concentration camp).  Driscoll has come out of the army and resumed his work in law enforcement , but he's now a United States federal lawyer, the boss of something called the Crime Committee.  Tolly's other assistant is a whore with a complexion like vanilla ice-cream.  She's working for the mob picking up drugs.  (In the film, drug addiction is treated as an abhorrent horror and peddling dope is seen as worse than murder.)  The prostitute, named Cuddles, is about to be beaten to death by one of the mobster's henchman but Devlin comes to her rescue and uses the relationship with the bad guy as his means of entering the mob in which Gela, Gunther, and Smith are leading capos.  (The girl gets whacked viciously on her pale white cheek and Fuller lovingly dwells on the wound which becomes infected or something so that the prostitute becomes feverish, hallucinating with big beads of sweat on her brow.)  Of course, Tolly will fall in love (reluctantly) with the whore and, after viciously insulting her for being a woman of ill-fame, even proposes to marry her.  Tolly figures out ways to get the gangsters to kill one another -- mostly, this is accomplished by creating fake memoranda allegedly written by federal prosecutor Driscoll implicating the bad guys as finks.  (In the movie's peculiar ethos being a fink is almost as bad as peddling dope.)  Up to the last reel, Tolly pummels the bad guys but never kills one of them.  But, then, he invades the moist environs of the swimming pool and attacks the fat guy.  He drowns him so that the criminal's corpse floats in the pool like dead whale.  On his way out of the mob headquarters, a wounded henchman guns down Tolly.  Tolly, mortally wounded, then staggers around in a desolate, empty part of the city before dropping dead among garbage cans in an alley similar to the squalid location where the movie began.  The reader will observe that the movie solves the problem of its hero killing a man by having Tolly promptly dispatched by the drowned gangster's bodyguard.  The closing sequence in the empty and dark city is undeniably impressive and looks like it was staged by Orson Welles.  

Fuller is didactic and there's an interesting lecture by Driscoll in the middle of the film in which the crusading DA, flanked by military regalia associated with the European campaign in World War Two (Big Red One memorabilia) describes organized crime in terms of generals, battalions and platoons.  Fuller wrote the movie but his intent is a little obscure.  Is he trying to imply that military honor and combat are really nothing more than an aspect of organized crime.  (In one lurid line, a mobster says "we gotta get 'em between ten and fifteen.  Send your boys out to the schoolyards to peddle dope and recruit the girls.")  The movie is well-made but, curiously, seems too long.  It's about 100 minutes long and would be better as a savage blast of hatred and violence about 80 minutes in duration.  There seems to be 15 to 20 minutes too much stuff in this picture.  

Let the Sunshine In

 I am completely baffled by Claire Denis' 2017 Let the Sunshine in.  The film is eccentric in many respects and I'm unclear as how its peculiarities cohere.

Isabel is a woman, perhaps, 50 years old with a complicated love life.  She yearns for love but ends up scandalizing and repelling everyone with whom she has sex.  She's beautiful (the part is played by Juliet Binoche) and desirable and has no difficulty finding romantic partners, but her taste in men seems, more than a little, problematic.

We first behold her naked facing up at the camera.  Then, one of her boyfriends, a burly banker, literally bangs her for the first five minutes of the movie.  The banker is a control freak and wants her to orgasm on command and he's also a bully (we see him pushing around a hapless bartender).  The banker is married and can't restrain himself from comparing Isabel to his wife whom he refuses to leave.  "You are interesting," he says (or words to that effect), "but my wife is remarkable."  Isabel doesn't need this kind of abuse in her life and, so, she orders the guy to get out.  But, for the rest of the movie, the loathsome banker hangs around, trying to seduce her.  Next, she flirts with an insanely egotistical actor.  He whines to her about problems he is having with his wife.  They end up in bed, apparently -- we're spared the scenes of intercourse -- and, then, she quarrels with the arrogant fellow and dismisses him from her life.  Whatever she's got, it's compelling because like that Banker, the actor also hangs around.  She flirts with a cab driver, but he's appalled by her and this goes nowhere.  Then, she goes on a retreat to some rural enclave called Souterraine.  This is an artist's conference -- our heroine is an abstract expressionist artist a bit like Joan Mitchell (at one point, we see a photo of Joan Mitchell).  She paints like Pollack -- stapling down her canvas on the floor and making big calligraphic marks on it with her brush.  In the country, a bunch of artists go for a little stroll, each of them trying to outdo the other in their rhapsodies about nature.  (In fact, the landscape in which they walk is completely ordinary -- a pasture with some wooded hills and a small stream.)  The pretentious art-talk drives Isabel batty and she begins howling like dog and screaming insults at the solemn French painters.  That night, in a disco, she meets a guy who has his mouth pinched to a little cupid's bow with very hollow cheeks -- he looks like a heroin addict or junkie of some kind.  Isabel's ability to pick boyfriends is unerring as is her (bad) taste in men.  She takes up with the junkie and, more or less rapes him, but he seems to be conflicted about her and, so, they part company as well. She has one suitor who wears a floppy hat like Bob Denver on Gilligan's Island, an unfortunate and surely accidental allusion.  This goes nowhere.  Isabel has also been hooking up with her ex-husband.  Someone has told her that ex-husband has been dating Isabel's patron who owns the gallery where she exhibits.  This turns out to be an untruth.  The buxom, matronly gallery owner has an African boyfriend who sleek and suave.  Isabel poaches that guy and they go for a long walk together on the empty Paris streets.  Isabel pleads with the African to come to her house and make love with her, but he resists -- he'd like them to date a little longer and has to take his kids on vacation for a month anyway.  He says that he'll find her later when he returns from holiday.  The film, already a bit elliptical and seemingly without a plot, now takes a very strange turn.  The picture cuts to a couple having a loud quarrel in a parked car.  The couple is a weeping young woman and the pug-faced bruiser, Gerard Departdieu.  Depardieu throws the girl out of his car.  We see the Eifel Tower and, then, the film cuts to Isabel being interviewed by Depardieu.   At first, the talk is therapeutic and we think that Depardieu is a psychiatrist of some kind -- he has the same gently probing manner as a good therapist.   But, it turns out that he is soothsayer.  He's telling Isabel's fortune from various photographs of her lovers over which he dangles a kind of pendulum which spins in one direction or another.  It's a cold read and Depardieu speaks in riddles and very broad generalities.  "Painting is important to you" -- a phrase that could apply to just about every middle class Parisian.  But, of course, Isabel, who is now revealed to be not only sexually promiscuous and crazy, but also extremely stupid, takes Depardieu's oracular utterances for the gospel.  The titles run as he assures her that she will meet someone the equivalent of "tall, dark and handsome", a stranger that will finally fulfill her.  Amazon Prime doesn't let you watch closing credits and so I don't know how the colloquy with Depardieu ended -- the movie just tripped off and switched to another picture (Orson Welles Confidential Report as it happened).  

Isabel is physically desirable, but she is a mess.  Her moods shift in a matter of seconds from loving adoration to raving rage.  You certainly can't identify with her -- she is an enigma from beginning to end.  I don't have any idea what the movie is supposed to be communicating.  For what it is, Let the Sunshine In  (I think the French titles translates to something like "A Nice Sunny Room") is interesting and we get a fascinating look at Paris and its restaurants, streets and cafes.  But the whole thing is completely opaque.  

Wikipedia tells me Claire Denis' movie is based on parts of Roland Barthes' book, A Lover's Discourse:  Fragments.  This is not helpful to know and it's hard for me to imagine how a text by Barthes, the semiotician, could possibly inform an episodic movie like this one.  I have no idea how to interpret the series of truisms delivered by Gerard Depardieu and I don't even have a hypothesis for why he is introduced via the fight in the car with some woman who is not part of the movie.  I suppose if I thought about this long and hard, I could come up with some justifications for Depardieu's role in the movie (which is literally marginal), but the film is too slight to waste time thinking about.   Claire Denis is a very accomplished director, and has made some masterpieces, but this isn't one of them.

The Rose of Nevada

The Rose of Nevada (Mark Jensen, 2026) is an indie film made with next-to-no budget that has garnered some good reviews.  Jensen is a filmmaker in U.K. and has made one previous movie that is also well-reviewed, a horror film called Enys Men.  The Rose of Nevada is essentially a silent movie; the film is comprised of shots that are often discordant (if striking) and don't require a synchronized soundtrack to make sense.  This means that there are no extended dialogue scenes -- people speak in short declaratory sentences or grunt at one another.  The soundtrack which is all recorded up close -- that is, no one is ever remote from the camera (and microphone) -- is post-synchronized in a rudimentary way and obviously dubbed.  This gives the film the odd ambience of a badly dubbed Italian picture from the sixties.  The movie was shot with a Bolex 16 mm camera which means that the frame is boxy and the images are grainy, often marred with streaks and fountains of debris on the film-stock.  Many shots seem to be either tail or front leader and bleed into red and yellow.   The camera can't move and, so, the movie is built from close up still-life images:  we see bleeding fish in ice, a bunch of scary ratchets and winches, rust patterns on The Rose of Nevada which is fishing boat, battered shingles, garbage in the rain, rust and corrosion patterns on pieces of iron shot from so close a vantage that the images are abstract.  There are several POV shots, but the camerawork, although effective in a discursive way, is primitive.  The movie's style of editing, the voices sounding remotely and muffled on the soundtrack, and the repetitive images of rust and rot all make the movie ultimately very tedious.  There's no acting to speak of, since the players are deprived of their natural voices and the sound emerges from some kind of deadened casket.  The movie's plot is also extremely repetitive.  The blemishes in the film's production, which some critics find powerful and rife with meaning, don't really contribute anything to the picture's pedestrian plot and, in fact, make watching the movie something of a trial.

A fishing boat, the Rose of Nevada, vanished 30 years before the movie begins.  Now, the empty boat, a tiny red tugboat sort of vessel, bobs on the water next to a monumental wall, a quay that seems constructed like an Inca fortress from huge blocks of rusticated granite.  The owner of the boat wants to put the vessel back out at sea so as to earn profits from fishing.  Three hands are recruited:  a sullen kid named Nick (or Luke) who is impoverished and lives with wife and child in an apartment with a rain-sodden rotting roof, another young man, possibly named Liam (he's just a single barfly) and an old sea dog cap'n named Murgie.  An elderly woman who appears to be demented, or may be some sort of scary sibyl, warns the townsfolk that no good will come from setting out to sea on The Rose of Nevada -- the last time the ship was on the ocean, it vanished for thirty years and with all its crew, including the ghostly old woman's son.  (She's a version of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.)  The ship goes out to sea for a couple days and catches a great haul of fish.  But the damned Rose of Nevada is some sort of maritime time-machine.  When the boat next docks, it is 1993, more than 30 years before it set sail.  Needless to say Nick/Luke, who misses his wife and daughter, is distraught.  He goes to the place where they lived, breaks into it, and sneaking around exits the apartment through a window, badly damaging the roof (which is sketchy) and, of course, resulting in the leak in his house that tormented him earlier in the film.  Nick/Luke just wants to get back to 2025 but there's no way to accomplish this.  The other young man, Liam, discovers that he has a wife and child waiting for him on the docks.  He acclimates himself to the situation quickly and moves in with the young woman and his child.  About every two days, The Rose of Nevada sets forth on the briny deep to catch fish.  At one point, the fishing vessel is caught in a squall and almost capsizes - the net gets wrecked when it gets tangled around the prop of the boat.  Murgie, the cap'n, has said that the community relies on the fishing vessel -- for every one of us, Murgie says, there are five men ashore who are counting on us.  When the boat comes back to the harbor, everyone from the community, accordingly, helps to mend the torn nets and fix the boat.  And, so, it goes out to sea again.  In the end, Nick/Luke has a dream or hallucination about bidding farewell to his wife and child.  His wife says "There is no time..." apropos of Nick/Luke hurrying back to the boat, but the gnomic statement stands for the meaning of the movie.  

The film seems like an ineptly made episode of The Twilight Zone, a half-hour episode expanded to almost two hours.  The narrative is confusing and I have no idea what parts of the film are supposed to mean:  for instance, there's a motif of roses brought to a cliff over the rocky beach with the implication that someone is going to commit suicide by hurling themselves over the precipice;  Nick/Luke goes up to the cliff where he sheds some tears and broods over the problems of being, as Vonnegut says "unstuck in time."  But Nick/Luke doesn't kill himself and, later, even makes his own separate peace with the situation.  We last see him enjoying breakfast  with mom and dad -- I think it's his mother who becomes the scary wraith-like sibyl in the opening scenes in the movie.  The dialogue is risible:  it's all of the Popeye the Sailor species of discourse -- lots of "Arghs!" and growled imprecations in an incomprehensible dialect.  The movie is a hollow puzzle film that is much too long and confusing to be interesting.  There are excellent scenes involving the mechanics of fishing, an enterprise which seems to involve extremely hard labor.  But those parts of the movie consist of about 5 minutes -- except that the movie just keeps repeating over and over its "toilers of the sea" footage.  

Normal

Before streaming it, I knew nothing about Normal except that the movie had some fairly good reviews, was made by a director whose work I had found interesting (although I didn't remember his name) and that the picture was set in rural Minnesota.  Of course, a film about crime in a small town in this State has some distinguished predecessors, namely Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan and the Coen brothers' Fargo.  And, so, I expected something witty, well-acted, and rooted in the folkways of the Land of Ten-Thousand Lakes.  Normal has nothing in common with previous Minnesota based pictures.  It's a raw, violent, action movie with some well-staged gun fights, an idiotic plot that delights in its implausibility, and a body count that must reach fifty or sixty corpses, many of them buried in snow drifts lining the town's main drag.  The picture is entertaining, but morally reprehensible:  it's mostly an excuse to choreograph gory deaths for its characters, brutality that might be disturbing if the picture weren't so thoroughly cartoonish.  Ben Wheatley, a British director, made this picture and it's a bait and switch -- for about twenty minutes the picture mimics Fargo and A Simple Plan, but, then, it switches into a shoot 'em up that looks one of John Woo's hyper-violent gangster pictures.  The only surprising thing in the movie is that it fools its audience into expecting something on the order of the Coen Brothers and, then, suddenly departs for the wild and wooly territories of Hong Kong action movies.  

Normal is a typical Minnesota town with a local bank filled with gold bullion bars and mountainous piles of greenbacks all hoarded in the vault by the Yakuza, a Japanese crime syndicate that, for some reason, has decided to conceal its ill-gotten gains in the village.  The town's sheriff has died in unusual circumstances, frozen to death in his underwear with a ice-fishing auger in his hand.  A new sheriff is filling in for the deceased, a mild-mannered temporary cop named Ulysses.  Ulysses is played by Bob Odenkirk, the great actor who made Better Call Saul such a sensation; here Odenkirk is playing a role that requires him to run around firing a machine gun, throw bombs, and blow people up.  (He also stabs a guy with an awl in the eye and, then, beats his victim's head against a wall to hammer the sharp point into the villain's brain.)  Odenkirk is an attractive presence in the film, channeling the sort of humble good guy vibes that were so convincingly displayed by Bruce Willis in the Die Hard films.  He's the sort of fellow who yearns for a way to win back his ex-wife, recites love-struck soliloquies to her, and won't enforce the town's laws, giving even DWI suspects a pass on their drunk driving.  His plan is to sit out the six weeks prior to thecounty election and, then, get out of Dodge when the new sheriff assumes his role.  Of course, since it is Minnesota, it's constantly snowing and there's a vagrant moose wandering around the small town's streets and alleys.  (I hate to break it to Mr. Wheatley but there aren't any moose in the soybean and corn country where the town is located.)  A couple of sad sacks straight out of Fargo plan to rob the town's Savings and Loan.  They take hostages and the local cops led by Ulysses, the new interim Sheriff, hurry to the Bank.  When Ulysses enters the bank to negotiate with robbers, he is suddenly engulfed in a hail of bullets fired by his own men -- that is, the local cops who know about the treasure in the vault decide that it's time to gun down the sheriff so that the lucrative business with the Yakuzas isn't discovered.  This is the best and most interesting scene in the movie, the sudden attack mounted on our hero by his deputies, a puzzling development that is not explained until we are shown the glittering content of the vault.  The two inept robbers fight off the deputies for a while and, then, are thrown out of the movie -- badly wounded, they leave town in a snowstorm driving a snow-plow.  (This is disappointing because the dimwitted nincompoops are amusing in a sort of commedia dell' arte way.)  The rest of the movie consists of Ulysses and a sidekick, the daughter of the sheriff earlier murdered by the bad guys, running around the snowy village and killing people.  Some people get bonked on the head with bars of gold, the mayor (played by the luckless Henry Winkler) gets blown to smithereens, some get gutted or their heads blown off.  Meanwhile the Yakuza are flying into town on a private jet.  An army of about twenty Japanese gangsters arrive in the snowy village.  By this time, the bad guys have made common cause with Ulysses and his sidekick to deceive the Yakuza.  Everyone attends a celebratory party with the Japanese gangsters breaking bread with the townsfolk across a long table in the local bar.  Someone pops a champagne cork and everyone pulls their guns and automatic weapons.  The exchange of fire results in all the bad guys, whether villainous locals or Yakuzas, getting shot to pieces, thereby ending the movie on the basis of the slaughter of its entire cast except Ulysses and the girl who somehow survive.  There is nothing in the movie, except the reversal of fortune involving the bank robbers, that is even remotely surprising or unanticipated.  Once the premise is established and the nature of the armaments defined the movie simply follows its own vicious logic until nobody (or almost nobody) is left alive.   

The gunfights are showy and involve lots of bullets tearing through glass bottles, windows, and other friable stuff.  Many of the shoot-outs involve high explosives and big bouquets of fire.  Wheatley is obviously an admirer of John Woo's work and he stages the gunbattles with pyrotechnic confidence and a keen eye for the trajectory of bullets, ricochets, and shattering glass.  By comparison with the violent scenes in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, Ben Wheatley is a master craftsman when it comes to exchanges of gunfire and fights with sledge hammers, awls, and other tools usually found in small-town hardware stores.  Nolan doesn't know how to configure an effective fight scene.  Wheatley's movie, which is more or less terrible, at least, has good, clearly choreographed battle scenes.  

The movie is sort of a cheat.  It's not even made in Minnesota although the scenes in the small town have a convincing appearance.  The picture was shot in rural Manitoba out on the great plains.  At least, the snow looks convincing.  

The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) is a big-budget, lavish, prestige production.  A lot of A-list stars appear, disguised by beards or disfigured by the scars, cataracts, and make-up simulating old age.  The movie, despite its almost three hour length is briskly paced, and never even remotely dull.  It's something that you admire from a great distance, strangely inert and remote -- not because the story chronicles events now 3500 years in the past, but, because the movie is so carefully made, its stewardship of Homer's epic poem so cautious, its attempt to be relevant to modern times so strained, that one is put-off by the production.  I enjoyed the picture and recommend it, and, certainly, don't intend the churlish critique of the movie by Emily Wilson, the famous translator, published in The London Review of Books, but I must say that the exercise feels academic in some ways, without real urgency, and, ultimately, unnecessary.  

The acting in the film is perfunctory at best and, at worst, bewilderingly bad.  Brad Pitt, playing the hero, a man of many minds and devices, seems, more or less, hapless.  In fact, he's like a modern man wandered into a world with an ethos that he can't understand, let alone embody -- the actor looks palpably bemused by the various threats that he encounters and he is afflicted by self-doubts that make him seem woefully weak and ill-prepared for the challenges that the script hurls in his way.  He confers with Athena (played by the dark-eyed Zendaya) as if she were his therapist at a provincial Veteran's Administration hospital catering to those with PTSD.  Pitt had to bulk up for the role but it's unpersuasive -- he's a brawny circus strong-man but weak as a wet noodle.  He's improbably contrite over the slaughter during the sack of Troy and, generally seems clueless -- it's pretty obvious that he doesn't want to get back to Ithaca that much and, no sooner back home, immediately sets forth again on a quixotic quest to sail into the setting sun.  This part of the movie is cribbed from both Dante and Tennyson's poetry, but without the emotional resonance in their verse:  Odysseus at the ending of the movie just seems confused as to his objectives.  Nolan has it that he wants to set up a shrine somewhere to the heroes that died on his trip -- pretty much all of them -- and went unburied.  Dante and Tennyson, by contrast, give the old Odysseus a last  spectacular adventure, a sort of Bronze Age space shot through the Pillars of Hercules and to the Isles of the Blessed or Mount Purgatory, a heroic venture but one that is inevitably doomed.)  The film engages in lengthy and repetitive meditations on Zeus' law -- that is, a law of hospitality that in essence requires that one treat strangers as if they were "gods in disguise", in other words, a pagan version of the Golden Rule.  None of this is particularly illuminating since the movie doesn't really dramatize the violations of Zeus' law for which the over-tender Odysseus feels crippling remorse.  The sets are gorgeous and the exterior locations smitten with Mediterranean light feel vivid and inexorable -- the sea even seems "wine-dark" sometimes.  The monsters are  impressive, particularly the hideous cyclops with his one eye inserted like a vaginal slit in his gnarled face.  (The film can't use the famous pun and jest by which Odysseus derides Polyphemus -- if you are asked who blinded you, tell them that it was Nemo, that is, "no man."  The joke works in the Odyssey because Polyphemus is not alone and merely one of a tribe of aggressive Cyclops monsters; here the poor fellow is like a Norwegian bachelor farmer, dwelling absolutely alone except for his sheep, in his cave)  The battle scenes are impressive until the final slaughter of the suitors which Nolan totally botches.  Penelope is good, both desperate as well as resolute and Telemachus comes off better in the movie than in the actual epic -- he seems less callow in the film. Samantha Morton gives the best performance, I think, as the matter-of-fact witch who turns Odysseus' men into the swine that they already were.  She literally kneads their faces like dough to make them into pigs and she's wonderfully casual about her malevolence -- she is like an aggrieved housewife inflicting revenge on the patriarchy and I thought her scenes were among the best in the movie.  A lot of ink has been spilled on the casting of a beautiful black African actress, Lupita Nyong'o, as both Helen and her treacherous sister Clytemenestra (they are twins).  Nolan is far shrewder than his critics -- he uses the actress in a way that doesn't appeal to her beauty, but rather that exposes her as either a badly scarred victim of the Trojan war (her famous face slashed and one of her eyes almost put out -- presumably by the vengeful Menelaus -- or as a serpentine villainess who wrathfully hacks poor Agamemnon to death.  In these roles, the woman's exotic features, her mask-like face, and her blackness itself becomes symbolic for a female power that is deeply alien both destructive and frightening.  (Again, in his casting, here Nolan improves on Homer.)  The scenes in Hades have an appropriate unearthliness although I certainly would have wanted to see the ghost of Achilles (who would rather be a pig farmer's thrall than the King of the Shades) and Odysseus' mother -- both of whom appear in the epic when the hero ventures into the Land of the Dead.  Nolan doesn't know how to set up suspense before the final bloodbath in which Odysseus with Telemachus butchers the Suitors.  By this time, the audience is getting restive and we are anxious for the final murderous rampage to begin.  Homer has Odysseus shoot his arrow through no less than 40 ax handles; Nolan is content to stage this test of strength and accuracy with a mere dozen axe-handles propped together to make six openings through which to fire his arrow.  (Here Nolan again improves on Homer who insists upon a level of prowess in his hero that is wholly unbelievable.)  The slaughter of the suitors is poorly choreographed and badly conceived.  Nolan thinks he can cover the improbability of the sequence (one man and his 20 year old son against forty) by cutting so fast that you can't follow the action.  Nolan puts his camera in the midst of the chaos and spins it around, using mismatched quick cuts that are completely uninformative.  This is the opposite of the presentation in Homer in which every slash and every arrow's flight is precisely detailed and the gore involves real people whose characters have been developed in the poem so that we know not only how but who is dying.  Nolan just wants to get the obligatory massacre done and he stages a violent frenzy that doesn't make any sense.  (He should have brought in a Japanese samurai-movie director to stage this scene -- Japanese action directors know how to show one swordsman defeating a host of enemies; Nolan has no clue.)

The movie's dialogue is slangy and informal.  This is okay as far as it goes, but sometimes results in laughable lines:  at one point someone says, apropos the sinister sea people:  "But we're the most advanced civilization of the Bronze Age."  I probably am quoting the line wrong and, perhaps, I misheard it -- but this is a specimen of what the language in the film sounds like.  I have a recommendation:  a movie like this should either be filmed in archaic Greek or, better yet, presented as a grainy silent film complete with Soviet style montage, intertitles, and iris effects.  The Odyssey would have been much better if the movie had been directed by Guy Maddin, the great Canadian filmmaker, shown on distressed black and white film, equipped with a heroic score and no dialogue at all.  Somehow, no matter how hard you think about it, you can't quite get your mind around this IMAX wide-screen technicolor production starring Brad Pitt.  The Odyssey is a great work of art, but its ethos is totally alien to us today -- there are some points of contact, but, by and large, the world depicted in the epic is impenetrable and unavailable to us today.  Nolan struggles to make the picture relevant and, even, contemporary but, really, just ends up highlighting how remote from us Homer's world of vengeful Gods and monsters is.  

The Big Knife

It's not often that a Hollywood movie indulges in a succinct summary of George Bernard Shaw's essay, "The Quintessence of Ibsenism".  But you will find that indulgence in Robert Aldrich's 1955 melodrama The Big Knife.  The film shows us goblin-faced Jack Palance as a movie star, Charlie Cass, brooding on the distinction between philistines, idealists, and realists.  The allusion is showy and not really apposite but it''s part of the heightened diction and extravagant manner of the dialogue in this film, written by Clifford Odets and, apparently, first presented as a Broadway play.  The film is static and takes place on a single set, a lavish Hollywood home decorated by a large Rouault painting of a morbid-lookiing clown and a large sculpted head of the Buddha.  Everything you need to know about middle-brow culture in the nineteen-fifties is encoded in the film's single set, a location that one can imagine fitting quite comfortably under the proscenium arch of a Broadway theater.  There's an offstage bedroom upstairs, above a spiral of metal steps with a vaguely nautical aspect -- this is where the film's mischief and mayhem occurs.  A hi-fi with tuner and record-player is present to play Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony".  The furniture is all sleek and modernist -- it looks like Eames designed the room and furnishings. Everything about the movie's milieu and content screams the sort of stylish Playboy-boy pad intelligence of the mid-fifties.  I know:  my father, a jazz fan had a book of Rouault pictures, a hi-fi on which he played 78 rpm discs of Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" and an abstract expressionist image of a scarcely recognizable clown painted by one of his friends who was attending the Institute of Art in Minneapolis.  My father who was from central Nebraska didn't know anything about Ibsen -- theater didn't exist in the Sand Hills town from which he came, but his father, a Lutheran minister had a book of Ibsen's plays (Modern Library in an Everyman edition) that probably had never been read.  If one were inclined, we might lament the general decay of taste and intelligence in this country -- the level of culture on display in Odets' play and the very effective movie made from that script, lean and mean and totally lucid as directed by Robert Aldrich, is sadly absent from most of what passes for art and film today.  I should observe that my father greatly admired Jack Palance, but for his performance as the lethal gunfighter in Shane:  as Shane says to the little boy who is his acolyte -- "He was fast...fast on the draw."

The situation in The Big Knife bears some similarity to Ibsen's plays such as Hedda Gabler.  The context involves a crime, the concealment of that crime, blackmail, and wounded idealism.  More than a little sexual infidelity is thrown in for a good measure and the screenplay is an exercise in anguished solemnity and angst leavened by a good deal of lurid, trashy melodrama.  I am praising this movie, by the way, and suggesting that you find a way to see it.  The matinee idol Charlie Cass is owned by Stanley Hoff, a monstrous entrepreneur and studio boss.  Cass is married and his wife detests Hoff and believes that Cass' work for the man traduces all of his ideals -- apparently, Cass was once involved in leftist, radical theater in the thirties (the type of theater associated with Clifford Odets), but now he has succumbed to the more lucrative and reactionary film industry.  Cass' contract with Hoff's studio has expired and the boss wants him to sign up for another seven year term, a business proposal detested by Cass' idealistic wife played by Ida Lupino.  The relationship between Cass and his wife is complicated by the movie star's serial infidelty and he has separated from his spouse who serves as the voice of his aggrieved conscience in this film.  At a party two years earlier, Cass got drunk, crashed his car, killing a child in the process.  With him in the car at the time was a floozy, Dixie, played convincingly and with more than a morsel of bathos by Shelley Winters (here credited as "Miss Shelley Winters).  The studio has covered up the hit-and-run accident to the extent of pinning the crime on Cass' longsuffering business manager -- indeed, the manager has served nine months in jail for the crime he didn't commit.  When Cass tells Hoff that he won't sign the contract renewal.  Hoff with his vicious henchman threatens to expose the movie star's crime.  Dixie shows up, swilling tequila, and tries to seduce Cass successfully, it seems.  As in Greek drama (and there are Greek masks signifying comedy and tragedy over the hearth), the unseemly stuff occurs offstage into a sort of loft above the main living room set.  Cass' virtuous wife shows up and there's more debate about the situation.  Cass first signs the contract but, then, rebels inducing a titanic rage in Stanley Hoff.  Meanwhile, Dixie has been thrashed severely by Hoff for threatening to expose the crime (Hoff's broken several of her ribs).  She's self-medicating in a local bar and has had "six martinis".  Hoff sends a henchman to murder her, announcing these plans to Cass.  And, so it goes.  The climatic catastrophe is off-stage as in Oedipus Rex announced by shrieks of servants.

Your response to this stuff will be dictated by how your respond to Odets heightened and lyrical dialogue.  Plenty of people were critical of Odets bombastic rhetoric even at the time he produced it.  But the movie is now my age, 71 going on 72, and time has burnished Odets' dialogue with its patina.  Some of his phrases are insufferable -- "you have peritonitis of the soul" -- but much of his writing now seems archaic, gnarled in a pleasantly complex way, even, dare I say it, Shakespearian.