Certain Women

 Certain Women (2016) is an omnibus film based on three-stories about Montana people written by Maile Meloy.  On the evidence of the movie, Meloy seems to be a rather disconsolate writer, specializing in stories that are heavily influenced by the disaffected and minimalist work of Raymond Carver.  In prose of this sort, a character is brought to the brink of some recognition by interactions with others -- the text acknowledges the recognition that, nonetheless, doesn't really change anything for protagonist.  Life is too subtle and too complex for tales or short stories and so these are works in which the notion of a story is, in effect, refuted -- something happens and it is significant, but it has no actual effect other than, perhaps, to make a sad or troubled character even more sad and troubled.  I've confirmed this impression by reading several stories by Meloy available on the internet, including one called "Travis, B." which is the source for the third of the stories adapted by Kelly Reichardt in her movie.  People collide with other people; happiness proves to be an illusion:  sadder but wiser, the characters soldier on.  Reichardt's chilly, dispassionate approach to this material is lucid, wonderfully acted and staged, and, ultimately, as inconsequential as the stories themselves.  I like Reichardt's approach to filmmaking, very classical and pure and superbly observed.  But Certain Women may be a little too unresolved for many moviegoers looking for something more passionate or dramatic.  

A train crosses a snowy treeless prairie under a brooding range of cliffs.  In Livingston, Montana (although we have to surmise the location), a lawyer named Laura Wells is in bed with her scruffy boyfriend.  (He turns out to be the unfaithful husband of the woman featured in the second vignette.)  It's frighteningly cold outside -- dogs are getting their tongues and snouts frozen to their water bowls.  Laura (played by Laura Dern) is having trouble with a client.  The middle-aged man suffered a brain injury in a workplace accident.  He has apparently elected his remedy by settling his injury claims with the work comp carrier.  But he has ongoing problems, headaches and double vision and emotional lability, for which he hasn't been compensated.  The man (named Fuller) desperately wants to sue his employer but is precluded from making this claim by Montana's statutory law.  Fuller won't accept the opinion of Laura that he can't proceed on the basis of the doctrine of worker's compensation exclusivity.  She sets the man and his estranged wife up with a well-known personal injury lawyer in Billings, Montana. That lawyer confirms Laura's opinion.  On the way back to Livingston, the disappointed client begins talking about murdering people.  That night, he takes a man hostage at the clinic and won't release him.  He keeps asking for Laura and, so, she obliges the police by agreeing to parlay with the aggrieved client and the Big Man, his hostage, who is a Samoan who claims to be royalty.  The mercurial client releases the Big Man and persuades Laura to help him escape from the cops who have surrounded the business.  But Laura betrays him to the police and he is handcuffed and hauled away.

Without missing a beat Reichardt next shows us a young woman jogging in a snowy woods.  Some construction stakes have been set in the frozen meadow.  The young woman (Gina played by Michelle Phillips) is living with her husband Ryan (Laura's boyfriend) in a sort of semi-permanent tent at the edge of meadow.  The couple, who have a sullen teenage daughter, are planning to build a house in the woods.  They go to the home of an old man named Albert who has lived in a house since 1966 next to a big heap of sandstone, the ruins of a pioneer schoolhouse.  Albert seems slightly demented but he agrees to give them the sandstone blocks to use in the construction of their home.  Later, Gina goes to Albert's house where men are loading the shattered sandstone slabs onto a truck.  Albert looks out from the picture window of his house, seemingly confused by what is happening on his property.  We see him in long shot and can't exactly make out his face and expression.  When Gina waves to him, he doesn't respond.  He has, for some reason, protected the heap of stones for more than 50 years and, it appears, that losing that pile of rock has somehow shattered him as well.

An Indian woman feeds horses on a ranch.  She is alone and taciturn.  A little dog runs alongside her as she does her chores.  One night, she happens on a meeting at the public school where a group of a half-dozen teachers are waiting for a teacher to lecture them on "school law."  A  young woman named Beth (Kristen Stuart) conducts the hour-long course.  She has driven all the way to Belfry, Montana from Livingston, a trip that takes her four hours coming and four hours going back home.  The class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the drive, through mountains and snowtorm, is horrendous. After the class, the ranch hand talks to the teacher and they go to a truck stop to eat.  The teacher drives off to her other job at a law firm in Livingston.  Three times the class meets, these scenes punctuated by images of Jamie, the Indian ranchhand feeding horses.  On the third night, Jamie rides her horse to the class and, after the lesson, she offers Beth a ride on the animal to the cafe at the truck stop.  Jamie may be in love with Beth but she's too shy to reveal her feelings.   On the fourth night, Beth doesn't appear.  A man teaches the class announcing that the drive was too "arduous" for Beth -- Beth apparently thought the class was in Belgrade, a place much closer to Livingston then Belfry.   Jamie is alarmed that she will never see Beth again.  She drives to Livingston, reaching town late at night.  She can't find Beth and so sleeps in her pickup.  The next morning, she makes inquiries about Beth and is treated rudely.  However, she finds where Beth works and meets the woman in the parking lot. (We glimpse Laura Wells arriving at work at this law firm.)  Jamie says that she drove to Livingston because she couldn't stand the thought of not seeing Beth again.  Beth is literally speechless but, certainly, not interested in pursuing a relationship with Jamie.  Jamie says that she has to feed the horses at the ranch and drives away in her pickup truck. Exhausted, she falls asleep and the truck leaves the road, rolling to a stop in a snowy field.  

There is a short coda that shows Laura Wells with her brain-damaged client visiting at the prison where he is confined.  He asks her to write to him and says that the letter can be short and circumstantial -- "not a tome," he says.  Gina is hosting a football game view party in her tent at the site where her house will be built.  She looks at the pile of sandstone rock.  Jamie is alone with the little dog feeding horses. 

The story involving Jamie and Beth is extremely moving.  This effect is largely due to the presence of the great actress Lily Gladstone playing the part of the Indian woman and ranchhand.  (Gladstone was in Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon and she is a radiant actress that seems hypnotize the camera -- you can't take your eyes off her.)  The Montana landscapes are intensely realistic, expanses of grey and brown woods in fields dusted by snow with blue and white mountains jumbled together on the horizon.  It's not showy or spectacular, but, rather, a kind of indefinable beauty that resides in the empty, cold terrain.  There's not much going on in these stories and this, of course, makes you attend to them all the more closely -- because nothing seems to be happening we attend to tiny gestures, hesitations in phrasing, the implications of futile, inconsequential conversation.  The film exudes the "mind of Winter" as it was phrased by Wallace Stevens -- it iscold, rational, logical, each tale a sort of icy theorem.  

(In "Travis, B" published in the New Yorker, Reichardt has made the lonely male protagonist, his gait marred by polio, an American Indian woman.  Heterosexual encounters become homosexual in the film.  This transposition, for some reason, gives the story an even greater poignancy.)

They all Laughed

 There must be something wrong with me.  Most people praise Peter Bogdanovich's They all Laughed, a romantic comedy from 1981 as blithe, charming, and witty with a faint strain of sweet melancholy.  Bogdanovich, also, admired the film; he regarded it as his best and most fully accomplished work.  But I'm unable to join this chorus of admiration.  The film is so weightless and without consequence that I struggled to remain attentive to its complicated plot,   The picture involves a trio of private dicks tailing two beautiful women on suspicion of adultery.  However, in Bogdanovich's fantasy, all beautiful women are, more or less, instantly available for sex.  Therefore, in the context of New York, around 1980, detectives would not be required.  Rather, every woman between the ages of 18 and 60 would simply be presumed to be sexually promiscuous.  A jealous husband wouldn't have to go to the expense of hiring a private eye -- the promiscuity is open, apparent, publicly obvious and every husband is similarly guilty. In Bogdanovich's romantic fantasy, everyone is always doing it with everyone else and, even, small children are aware of their parent's infidelity and, even, complicit with it.  My critique of the film's plausibility betrays an unpleasant strain of voyeuristic puritanism in me; indignation at the idea that sexuality is wholly liberated except not for me or those in my circle.  Perhaps, this is the basis for my inability to see the merit in They all Laughed.

For the film's first ten minutes, we have no real idea what is going on.  There are gaggles of beautiful women and several men seem to be stalking them; the men signal to one another on Manhattan's busy streets and tail the girls hoping not to be seen.  The three detectives are played by Ben Gazzara (John Russo), John Ritter as the clumsy, naive Charles, bespectacled and obviously intended as a surrogate for Bogdanovich, and a man named Blaine Novak playing Arthur Brodsky.  Brodsky is a "head", always smoking pot, and he has an enormous frizzy mane of hair, wears shades, and affects the role of a pot-head -- he speaks in weird jargon referring to the women that they are tailing as "pre-bop", "post-bop", and "ex-bop", meaning looking for a sex, post-coital, and divorced.  All three men work at the Odyssey Detective Agency, a business run by an aging, angry Greek boss (who is cheating on his wife with the comely secretary) -- there's a Howard Hawks' aspect to the detective agency: it's like a version of the newspaper offices in His Girl Friday.  The women that the private dicks are tailing are played by Audrey Hepburn who looks melancholy and a bit withered in this role -- it must be one of her last parts -- and Dorothy Stratten, the former Playboy Playmate of the year, who is radiantly beautiful and funny.  (The rape and murder of Stratten by her pimp-boyfriend, the subject of Bob Fosse's Star 80, hangs heavily over the film which is dedicated to her memory; the 20-year old girl was killed before the film was released imparting a ghoulish aura to what would otherwise be an idyllic, lush, and funny performance.  This aura scuttled the whole picture which was not timely released.  Bogdanovich, for whom the film was literally a labor of love -- he was Dorothy Stratten's boyfriend -- retrieved the film from the studios, tried to market it himself, and failed horribly, resulting in the movie being cast into the shadows as a loser, the sort of film all righteous Hollywood producers abhor.  In a 2006 commentary on the film in which Wes Anderson interviews Bogdanovich, the older man says that he wanted to play the part of Charles, John Ritter's role, but 'was too old for Stratten' -- the irony is that Bogdanovich was involved in a torrid affair with Stratten during the making of the film.)  In the course of the movie, Ben Gazzara's divorced tom-cat falls in love with Audrey Hepburn's character --  but the relationship is doomed; she is a very wealthy socialite with a teenage son and she returns to her husband. John Ritter falls in love with Dorothy Stratten and she seems to separate from her boyfriend, a figure who is really only glimpsed in one scene as a bearish presence at the townhouse where the young woman lives.  Christy, a country-western singer at City Limits, is one of John Russo's girlfriends; when Gazzara's character abandons her to pursue Audrey Hepburn, Christy tries to seduce Charles (Ritter).  She almost succeeds but, after a night, dancing to hillbilly music at City Limits, Christy falls in love with Dorothy Stratten's boyfriend, a hirsute guy that, I think, people call "the gaucho" -- we have seen "the gaucho" courting Dorothy Stratten's character at the Algonquin Hotel.  There is a wedding at the end of the film; the romantic roundelay has produced two, more or less, committed couples at least for the moment:  Stratten with Ritter and Christy with the Gaucho.  The hippie doper has a group of, more or less, persistent and aggressive girlfriends -- every woman that he meets seems to fall into bed with him but, then, suffers pangs of homicidal jealousy.  John Russo (Ben Gazzara) has to let Audrey Hepburn depart on a Sikorsky helicopter with her oligarch husband -- the helicopter leaves from the Battery heliport.  He solaces himself with a gorgeous cab driver with whom he has earlier had casual relations.  They depart Manhattan for New Jersey with a plan to get drunk in the suburbs. (Patti Hansen who plays the sexy lady cab driver married Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones in 1983 and gave up modeling and acting.)

The film is well-made with atmospheric shots of New York City in 1980.  The World Trade Center towers over downtown Manhattan.  The film must have been made during a craze for roller skating.  The characters skate along the sidewalks and spin in circles on huge roller-skating rink that looks like a discotheque. (cf. Boogie Nights).  The women are all fantastically beautiful and sexy.  The dialogue is clever and there is a fabulous sound track comprised of country-western tunes (Bogdanovich had learned to love the music while shooting The Last Picture Show), Frank Sinatra singing Gershwin tunes, and little bit of classical music.  It's all graceful, balletic, and utterly shallow.  In principle I should like this movie, but I don't for some reason.  I suppose this is a defect in my sensibility.   

Bugonia

 Although director Yorgos Lanthimos opens up the action in Bugonia, this 2025 film is, in effect, a carefully imagined and powerfully written three-hand play, mostly confined to a single rather macabre set and featuring excellent performances by Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and an actor hitherto unknown to me, Aidan Delbis.  (Delbis, who is "neurodivergent" plays a character named Don, conceived as autistic -- he speaks with strange cadences, remains silent throughout much of the movie, but his presence is pivotal to the narrative.)  One can imagine this film, with some slight changes, staged as a play with one set and a couple of incidental walk-on parts in addition to the trio of principals.  The movie is modestly scaled and shot primarily in anguished close-ups; there are a few surreal black and white flashbacks that look a little like David Lynch at his most outre but, by and large, the picture is naturalistically designed and organized as a brutal confrontation between a kidnapper (Teddy played by a haggard-looking Jesse Plemons) and the woman he has kidnapped (Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller, an aggressive CEO at a big pharmaceutical company.)  The film is full of dark and vicious intimations.  Some people regard the movie as an "absurdist black comedy" -- but it's not really "absurd" and more horrifying than funny.  It's a great movie and emotionally exhausting.  Lanthimos is one of the world's best filmmakers and, when working at his peak, he can achieve effects that most directors would never attempt and could not even imagine.

Teddy is a badly damaged and psychotic conspiracy theorist.  He raises bees and the phenomenon of bee "colony collapse" has convinced him that a big pharmaceutical company is engineering the destruction of his beloved bees and, further, conspiring to destroy the planet Earth.  As we learn in elliptical flashbacks and by hints and intimations, Teddy's mother is in a coma, apparently as a result of an oxycontin overdose.  Furthermore, his father has vanished and Teddy seems to have been sexually abused by fat local cop who used to babysit him twenty years earlier.  Teddy is conducting strange experiments in his cottage in the country, a ramshackle place on a dead end in a ragged-looking woods.  On a hill, he has hives full of bees.  Teddy works for Auxolith, a surrogate for Amazon at one of its "Fulfillment Centers."  He lives with his almost speechless cousin, Don, a big bear-like kid with an asymmetrical face.  Teddy has become convinced that the CEO of Auxolith, Michelle Fuller, is an emissary from Andromeda, sent to our planet to conduct experiments on human beings. (Auxolith is like some sinister hybrid of Amazon and Big Pharma.)  With Don, Teddy kidnaps Michelle; Michelle is very fit, spending her pre-dawn hours exercising and engaging in mixed martial arts sparring with partners.  She nearly beats up Teddy and bests Don, but they finally capture her, drag her to their crumbling cottage in the country and chain her up in the basement.  Teddy, then, tries to get Michelle to admit that she is an alien invader from Andromeda.  Of course, Michelle is unafraid and can't imagine being really harmed by these geeky doofus kidnappers.  She debates the issue with them and tries to talk Teddy out of his scheme.  Teddy is convinced that Michelle has called for the Mother Ship to extract her from Earth in four days, during a lunar eclipse.  Most of the film consists of Teddy and Michelle dueling with words about the role of big corporations in our economy and fighting about whether the CEO is, in fact, a space alien.  Teddy has shaved her head on the basis of his fantasy that Andromedans use their hair as antennae to communicate telepathically.  He has also smeared her with some kind of antihistamine lotion for reasons I couldn't figure out.  Both Teddy and Don are "chemically castrated" having injected themselves with progesterone to allay any sexual instincts -- they don't want the attractive alien to use her female wiles on them.  Things go from bad to worse when Teddy tortures Michelle with electrical shocks.  When she withstands several hundred volts without dying, Teddy becomes convinced that Michelle is not merely a messenger from Andromeda but, in fact, the Empress of the aliens in that galaxy.  Spoilers will now follow:  Teddy and Don's plot goes awry:  the cop who abused Teddy years earlier when he was his babysitter shows up looking for the missing CEO.  Some murder and mayhem ensue.  Michelle discovers that Teddy has been experimenting with other poor victims whom he thought were from Andromeda -- he has a little basement room full of horrors: pickled heads and hands and a photo album showing him vivisecting people to discover if they are space aliens -- this aspect of the movie plays like Psycho.  Teddy is convinced that Michelle has an antidote for his mother's coma, disguised as anti-freeze.  He rushes to his mother's bedside and injects her with anti-freeze with predictably dire results.  Teddy and Michelle, then, have a final confrontation in which Michelle admits that she is, in fact, the Empress of Andromeda.  There's more murder and mayhem.  On Andromeda, Michelle concludes that the human race is too violent and unpredictable to be allowed to survive.  Michelle kills everyone and the film ends with the song "Where have all the flowers gone" played to a montage of shots of dead people strewn all over the world, on beaches, highways, on a ship sailing with dead captain and crew through the Aegean, a copulating couple dead in bed, burning vehicles and school classrooms full of corpses.  But the bees are flourishing once more.  "Bugonia" is a Greek word that describes bees spontaneously generating from with the guts of dead animals and, in fact, human corpses.  Life on Earth has been saved although all human beings are now extinct.  

Bugonia is very self-assured, confident, and bold.  Scenes involving Teddy's comatose mother, shot as flashbacks in high contrast black and white, are particularly effective.  The sick woman is pierced in a hundred places by three-foot long needles; in another scene, she floats like a black thundercloud over her crumpled bed or hangs over the Auxolith building tethered like a balloon.  The speechifying, which is most of the film, is thrillingly literate and theatrically intense. The film's score is gloomy and florid, sounding a bit like the adaptation of Henry Purcell's funeral music used at the outset of Clockwork Orange. The movie is successful in all respects.  (According to Wikipedia, the movie is a very close adaptation of a 2003 Korean film, Save the Green Planet directed by Jang Joon-Hwan. Lanthimos chief innovation is to substitute a woman for the male CEO in the Korean film.)  

Realm of Satan

 On its streaming site, MUBI suggests that Scott Cummings' Realm of Satan (2024) is a documentary about the Church of Satan.  In fact, it is something more interesting, I think, a peculiar hybrid between objective documentary footage showing actual Church of Satan members gathering for a ritual conclave (and engaging in a little group sex in advance of the ceremony) and strange visionary imagery that has a mythological, even Jungian, aspect.  Cummings, in interviews, has said that he was influenced by early films by Werner Herzog but there is no voice-over to explicate the odd things that we are seeing and almost no dialogue -- for most of its length the movie is silent or features diegetic musical sequences (for instance a woman singing "Gloomy Sunday" off-key and another lady producing music from a jukebox to which she dances rather gracelessly.)  The film is shot mostly in tableaux -- that is, shots lasting 15 to 30 seconds, displaying elaborately decorated interiors with figures standing at some distance from the camera.  Everyone looks right into the lens.  The shape of the movie is like Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise with gloomy black and white interiors and desolate outside scenes populated by eccentric characters who bicker or simply stare into the camera.  Herzog does something similar in his short movie Brother Huey's Sermon which documents a Black preacher's florid sermon intercut with traveling shots of the slums around the Church and interpolated portrait-style images of the preacher holding his Bible and posing for the camera.  

The movie is interesting, about 83 minutes long, and perverse.  I can imagine several approaches to this material -- one might emphasize the mundane aspects of the Satanist's life:  that is, showing them at a fast food place or walking a dog or shopping for groceries; one could emphasize the ritual practice in their religion and treat the audience to a few Black Masses with naked women on the high altar; one could interview the Satanists after the manner of Erroll Morris and let them talk long enough to reveal the folly of their beliefs -- anyone interviewed for a long enough period will end up saying things that completely contradict other statements made by the subject.  Or, I suppose, one might show the Satanists in a positive light, as people with the courage of their peculiar convictions and engaged in occult practices that have some efficacy in the real world.  The most challenging approach, I think, is the last and this is, indeed, the angle that Cummings takes in this movie. Cummings' Satanists are mostly magicians of various kinds and the film dramatizes this aspect of their beliefs by featuring magic performance on-stage --there is a guy stage-named the Great Cardone who does some impressive card prestidigitation and, then, performs a routine in which he makes a scantily clad assistant vanish from a small box into which she squeezes.  At one point, a person meditating nonchalantly hovers in the air.  A small black car zips across the United States starting in a place that looks like Palm Springs in California and, a few hours later, appearing in Poughkeepsie, New York.  The car, carrying members of the cult to a ritual conclave, leaves a trail of fire on the highway as it accelerates.  A paralyzed man shaves and, during this process, his reflection periodically blinks out, leaving the mirror mysteriously empty.  The High Priest struts across his kitchen with bare goat legs -- it's a startling effect.  At the film's outset, we see a goat laboriously giving birth.  The scene is shot from middle distance and lasts a couple minutes.  Later, a woman in a black hooded cape bares her breast and suckles the baby goat.  The various Satanists are depicted as having occult powers as a result of their affiliation with Lucifer.  At one point, the High Priest and High Priestess mix a foaming potion fizzing and gushing dry-ice fog; they toast the camera.  One woman spends a long time in her closet selecting a suitably black outfit for the conclave.  The ritual is underwhelming, just some people in what look like dark choir robes, shouting "Hail Satan!" and nonsense words in a dark suite of rooms.  The camera doesn't move except twice -- there's an austere tracking shot through the chambers in which the ritual celebrants are located; a Steadicam shot drifts down a suburban street in the neighborhood of the house where the ritual takes place.  Mostly, its unclear what we are seeing but the film has a kind of austere integrity and doesn't condescend to its peculiar performers, all of whom seem to be intensely aware of the observing camera.  The cult is under siege.  Someone has poured gas on the portion of the "Halloween House" owned by Joe "Netherworld" Mendillo, apparently in Poughkeepsie -- on ring camera footage, we see the vandals toting jerry-cans of gas onto the porch and lighting the house, which burns like a torch.  A few shots, later someone pounds a sign into the vacant lot where the house was previously located:  the Satanists are quixotically offering $6666 dollars for tips as to the identities of the arsonists.  In the final sequence, a man who is paralyzed navigates his wheelchair through his small, empty house.  He rolls into his bedroom and, with great difficulty, drags himself into his bed, rolling back and forth with inert legs to get himself into position.  He shuts off the light and a body of radiant gold light rises f rom his supine form and ambles up into the sky where it does cartwheels.  The film is haunting in an austere, understated way and worth watching.  

All that Jazz

 I should watch Bob Fosse's All that Jazz once every few years.  The film is astonishingly good.  The first couple times I saw this 1979 movie, I didn't notice that it was a musical and, in fact, structured like the great movie musicals of the forties and 1950's.  The film's surrealist touches and its uncompromising portrait of Fosse (played by Roy Scheider, the protagonist called Josh Gideon in the movie) as well as its documentary style exploration of the mechanics of producing a Broadway musical, complete with interludes featuring accounting and insurance, can easily mislead a viewer, particularly a naive one like me.  When I saw the picture in the theater, I thought it was a confessional work in which Fosse's misdeeds and betrayals are portrayed in relentless, if strangely egomaniacal, detail.  But Fosse is dead now and most of the women whom he loved have gone to their reward as well and, from a perspective of almost 50 years, the film now stands revealed as an artifact closer to Singin' in the Rain or The Band Wagon which it parallels, than to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.  Fosse was alive and creative when All that Jazz first graced the silver screen and his controversial presence, his crimes and misdemeanors, all cast a shadow over the movie.  Critics either lacerated the film for its hubris:  Fosse's arrogance for somehow portraying his glamorous infidelity as something like the engine for his creativity and the fatal flaw from which all his merit flowed.  Or critics lauded the movie for its brilliance, flamboyance, and courage.  I began in the former camp and I think I'm now in the latter, an admirer of the movie.  I'm in good company:  Stanley Kubrick said that All that Jazz was the greatest movie ever made.  The picture is akin to another masterpiece of self-loathing:  Fellini's 8 1/2 -- neither 8 1/2  or All That Jazz should work, but, somehow, mysteriously they do.  

Fosse shamelessly exploits sordid episodes in his life for the film's subject matter.  The luminous Ann Reinking plays Kate, Gideon's main girlfriend on whom he cheats at every opportunity.  (Ann Reinking, in fact, had been Fosse's girlfriend after his marriage to Gwen Verdon collapsed due to his serial infidelities; the film shows Gideon casually betraying her, forgetting that he has made an assignation with her for later in the evening and, then, having sex with another woman and falling asleep only to be discovered with the other woman in his bed by Kate who has let herself into the apartment.  Presumably, this mirrors some actual event.)  None of this matters much; time has erased the shame and it's possible, I think, to admire the movie for its technical and narrative achievements.  The remarkable aspect of the film is that it incorporates all the classical song-and-dance sequences of the conventional Hollywood musical, but so seamlessly that we don't notice these interventions as separate "numbers" or set pieces in the picture.  For instance, Fosse stages a big casting scene to a funk version of "On Broadway" -- we see hundreds of dancers lunging and spinning and the effect is exhilarating.  But this isn't merely a dance sequence but a part of the narrative which generally follows the plot arc of Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon -- an account of Broadway professionals producing a complicated big-budget musical.  There are two outstanding dance duets -- Fosse dances with his daughter who seems to be about 13 years old and, then, dances with the lissome Leland Palmer playing his first wife; both scenes are ballet-derived and involve Fosse circling his partner, lifting her, and setting her spinning.  (The scenes have some of the natural and organic qualities of the sequence in The Band Wagon in which Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse tentatively try to match their respective dance styles -- he's a tap-dancing hoofer and she's a famous ballerina -- as they stroll through Central Park.)  The pas de deux scenes in All that Jazz are so low-key and realistic seeming (both the little girl and the older woman are practicing their craft in the studio) that it has never registered with me that these are bravura dance-duets.  In the first, Gideon discusses his womanizing with his adolescent daughter as he chastely lifts and embraces her for the duet.  In the second, Leland Palmer, who is wearing a transparent leotard, slinks and slumps all over Gideon, moving seductively alongside him as if to remind the choreographer of their sexual relationship.  In this scene, Palmer taunts Gideon for "being so generous with his cock" and says that he can't even recall the names of the dozens of women hom he has seduced during their marriage..  Gideon is dismayed by his ex-wife's weirdly erotic condemnation of his bad behavior, but, in a remarkable development, turns her denunciation into an astonishing dance number -- this is the "Fly me" jazz dance which looks like an orgy orchestrated by Tom of Finland; the piece is sizzling hot but, ultimately, intended as a demonstration of the meaninglessness of casual sexual encounters.  In fact, at the end of the number, which involves flailing nude dancers and much homosexual activity, the participants call out their names as they shake hands and bid farewell to their lovers whom they scarcely know.  The musical's financial backers are horrified at the open eroticism on display.  But Gideon's ex-wife bursts into tears at seeing the work -- she knows that it is the artistic materialization of her soliloquy condemning her husband's promiscuity. Gideon has taken her condemnation and make it into something profound and beautiful.  And, indeed, the piece embodies both the disgrace and seductive power of promiscuous sex, orgies, bathhouse encounters -- it's fantastically exciting and, also, decadent and wicked and disturbing.  The piece has its cake and eats it too.  

The end of the film also derives from the finales of a number of famous musicals, most prominently Singin' in the Rain (we actually see a reprise of the dance in the flooded street, but here in a flooded boiler room) and The Band Wagon.  Both of these musicals initiate their final sequences in what seems like a recording of an actual Broadway dance number, but, then, expand into a vast and labyrinthine production that could never be mounted on stage. Fosse does something similar.  His hero has suffered a heart attack and is hospitalized.  Despite the cardiac event, Gideon has his friends smuggle cigarettes and booze into the hospital; unregenerate, he makes passes at the nurses.  But, ultimately, his heart continues to fail.  After a gory open heart surgery scene, he's in the recovery room when he suffers yet another heart attack.  The film slips into hallucination --  Gideon splits:  he is shown lying comatose in his hospital bed, breathing through a  respirator, and, also, operating a movie camera mounted on a crane that films increasingly febrile visions.  At last, the scene shifts to a womb-like dark interior, its sides slick with reflections on some kind of funereal plastic -- the characters in the movie are seated in bleachers and dancers with their bodies swathed in diagrams of their circulatory systems gyrate next to sinister rock-and-roll band.  Mannequin heads with flashlight eyes swivel, impassively recording the increasingly frenzied song and dance action in this gloomy, surreal amphitheater.  Ben Vereen plays the host at these proceedings and he jerks around spastically while the band plays variations on the song "Bye, Bye Love".  Jessica Lange playing the Angel of Death who has been shown in dialogue with Gideon has come to embrace her lover -- she suggests that Gideon was always half in love with her.  And, in a jarring final shot, we see Gideon's corpse on a table being zipped into a body bag.  The effect is devastating.  All that Jazz is shallow and tawdry and the points it makes are, more or less,apologetic and obvious.  But it's also great.     

Wild Grass (Les Herbes Follies)

 There are some movies that many critics regard highly that make no sense to me.  Wild Grass, a peculiar uncategorizable film directed by Alain Resnais, is an example of this phenomenon.  Some critics acclaim the film as full unexpected surprises; in my estimation, the movie seems entirely arbitrary, constructed of disparate elements that don't cohere, a capriccio that feels improvised and inconclusive.  Aspects of the picture that I interpret as "inconclusive" are seen by people who admire the movie as ambiguous, enigmatic, and open-ended.  Perhaps, there is an element of personal preference embodied in my skepticism about the movie.  Resnais is most famous for Last Year at Marienbad, his signature work, and a film that I have never been able to watch without distaste -- the picture's chilly elegance feels like an advertisement for some product I'm not interested in buying; it's glamorous and empty at the same time.  I think Hiroshima Mon Amour and Muriel are slightly better and more interesting -- but I don't have any fondness for them and wouldn't voluntarily watch these films again.  Although Resnais first became famous for his harrowing concentration camp documentary, Night and Fog from 1956, he continued to make movies into his old age -- Wild Grass released in 2009 was made when Resnais was 87.  The movie is muted, but technically splendid and there's no sense that Resnais' powers have been diluted by time -- indeed, most critics praise the movie as seeming like the work of a young man (but tempered by the wisdom of age).  My problem is that I simply don't understand the movie.  And, on the evidence of the reviews I have read, even the picture's admirers have no idea what the last five minutes mean.  In general, Resnais is a film maker who would reward, I think, close study -- he has made many pictures that I haven't seen and that were scarcely released in the United States (if released at all).  And, a number of these films, were highly acclaimed in France. Wild Grass wasn't his last movie -- he directed two more pictures after this film before dying in 2014 at 91.  Resnais' later career (in fact, almost his whole career) apparently consists of films of varying types, including light comedies, adaptations of Victorian melodramas, and musicals -- he adapted three plays by the British playwright Alan Ayckbourn.  Despite his affinity for English actors and scripts (one of his most famous pictures is Providence with John Gielgud), I have the impression that his movies are so intrinsically gallic that they don't travel well.  So this is to confess that I have probably misunderstood Wild Grass and underestimated.it.

A woman goes into an expensive part of Paris to buy shoes.  (Her feet, we learn, are hard to fit.)  She buys some spike high heels.  Walking away from the shoe store, a thief on a moped (or possibly a skateboard) snatches her yellow purse -- the film is punctuated with shots in slow-motion that show the purse airborne in the clutches of the thief.  The woman, who turns out to be dental surgeon named Marguerite Muir, goes home to a suburb near Paris where she takes a cold bath.  A middle-aged man (he seems to be about 55) finds Muir's wallet in a car-park.  He studies the wallet, looks at several pictures of Muir including a fetching image of the woman as an aviatrix (wearing goggles and a scarf).  Muir has a pilot's license.  This establishes an affinity with a man, name Georges Palet, who has had a lifelong fascination with flying.  Palet is an odd duck.  He lives with his wife in a big mansion.  There seems to be something highly sinister about him -- he fantasizes, for instance, about murdering a young woman because she has had the temerity to appear in public with her black panties visible through her white slacks.  Palet has done something terrible and may be a felon -- he muses that he can't vote.  The film teases the notion that Palet, who acts in an erratic fashion and shows a terrible temper, may be some kind of serial killer or rapist.  

Palet returns the wallet to the police, fretting about whether they will remember him from some previous crime that he committed.  (The cops are distracted by a party that they are having in the stationhouse -- it's someone's promotion.)   Apparently, the cops return Muir's wallet.  She calls Palet and thanks him but declines his offer to meet -- he clearly wants some kind of relationship with her.  Disappointed by the dentist's standoffish attitude, Palet writes an impassioned letter to her, mentioning his love of aviation, and insulting her.  He delivers the letter to her home and drops it in a mailbox, but, then, repents and tries to get it out of the locked box.  He talks to one of Muir's neighbors and learns more about the woman.  She sends him a three-line note, accepting his apology for the letter that he has conveyed to her through the neighbor lady.  This encourages Palet to write to her repeatedly and call her every night.  She is upset with him, but, also, oddly nonchalant at what seems to be his stalking.  Palet has constructed some kind of elaborate persona claiming that his wife is dying in the hospital and that his father was a motorcycle mechanic -- all of which is untrue.  When he calls at an odd hour, Muir answers the phone and tersely tells him that she wants to be left alone.  Palet flies into a rage and goes to her house where he slashes all four of the tires on her snazzy little sports car.  She reports this to the cops who go to Palet's big gorgeous house (he is painting it blue) and interview him.  These are the same cops from the stationhouse who are strangely sympathetic to the angry Palet  and urge him to leave the woman alone.  Palet reveals that he has been married for 30 years and has grandchildren.  (We see a dinner party with Palet's daughter, her husband, and Marcellin, Palet's surly and obnoxious son.)  

One night, Muir, for some unknown reason, calls Pallet's wife.  She learns that Pallet has gone to see a flying movie, the Korean war film The Bridges at Toko Ri.  Muir rushes to the cinema located near an Italian restaurant and down an alley from a cafe.  She sits in the cafe and sees Palet leaving the theater -- she has never seen him before and so there is a question as to how she is able to identify him.  (The film suggests some sort of elective affinity between the woman and Palet that allows her to identify him by intuition.)  She summons him into the cafe where they briefly talk.  He tells her that the movie, a childhood favorite, "did nothing for him."  Their meeting is peculiar from the outset.  Palet's first words to Marguerite are "So you do love me."  The interview goes awry and Palet says he never wants to see Marguerite again.  Marguerite proceeds to take her anger out on her dental patients apparently torturing them in her dental chair -- we see a painful montage of patients protesting at her cruelty.  Muir is now fascinated by Palet and wants to see him with his wife.  With her colleague, another female dentist, Marguerite goes to Palet's house.  Palet has gone somewhere but is expected in a few minutes.  While Marguerite chats with Palet's pleasant and attractive wife, Palet appears outside, castigates the lady dentist waiting in the car before, apparently, seducing her and possibly having sex with her in the car.  The next day, Marguerite doesn't go to work -- her dental office fills with unhappy, miserable patients.  Marguerite has gone to the Aerodrome (airport) to look at a Spitfire she flew for a group of enthusiastic mechanics at the hangar.  Marguerite drives back to Palet's house and picks up Georges and his wife.  The other lady dentist is along for the ride.  They go to the small rural airport.  Palet has to urinate and so he goes upstairs in the terminal, pees, and, then, his zipper sticks.  He can't get his pants zipped up.  Marguerite is looking for him, sees he is embarrassed about the stuck zipper, and kisses him rapturously while the 20th century Fox Fanfare plays (we earlier heard this on the soundtrack from The Bridges at Toko Ri.)  As they kiss, the screen flashes the word Fin  (or "End") although, in fact, the movie is not yet over and its most puzzling sequence is about to occur.  With Palet and his wife in a Cessna, Marguerite Muir takes off and flies into the sky.  She lets Palet take the controls.  His pants are unzipped and his underwear is bulging out.  The plane, as seen from below, does a series of acrobatic rolls and, then, drops down vanishing behind a line of trees.  The film cuts to wooded landscape, a lane with some strange-looking austere and humble-looking buildings in the distance, then, a jagged, razor-like outcropping of fractured rock, beyond the rock there are woods and meadows and a graveyard over which the camera sweeps.  Then, we see a domestic interior:  a little girl, who may be sick, is in bed while her mother works at a table: the little girl says "When I a become a cat will I be able to eat cat munchies."  And, on this note, the film ends.

The ending makes no sense:  does the plane crash?  Why is Palet's zipper stuck?  Why does the plane begin doing aerobatics rolling and spiraling through the air?  What is the meaning of the landscapes, the jagged rock, the graveyard?  Why does the little girl (who is she supposed to be?) make the weird comment about "cat munchies" and what does this have to do with the rest of the movie?  And, further, what has Palet done?  Why is he proposed to us as some kind of rapist or murderer?  Why does he fly into rages and, suddenly, lose interest in Marguerite?  And why does Marguerite suddenly become obsessed with him,. seek him out, and kiss him (when he's slashed her tires and been stalking her) in a scene purported to be the end of the movie but not.  Why does the film end twice?  Does Palet really seduce the other dentist or does he rape her or is this just some kind of fantasy?  Is there anything about the movie that we can trust?  The film is based on a novel called The Incident.  It is very brilliantly made with dense saturated colors.  Marguerite is played by Resnais' wife Sabine Azema, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, who appears in the film with a huge Afro-style mop of red hair.  There are ingenious scenes with voice-over while images appear in halos of light on the right side of the screen -- these are vignettes.  There are stream of consciousness sequences in which Palet muses on various things.  He seems obsessive and half-delirious until, suddenly, he's not -- then, he's inexplicably disinterested in the object of his desires (and, even, seduces another woman).  Azema's dentist appears flirtatious with her patients but it's hard to understand whether this is an act or authentic. The beautiful dentist has no back-story, no husband, no family, no history of any kind; by contrast, Palet has a sinister history but one that is never explained in any meaningful way.  The movie is all innuendo and intimation; it's a feast for speculation.  It's quite a feat to make a movie that is meaningful and classically lucid in form and mise-en-scene but impenetrable as a matter of character, motivation, and, even, fundamental narrative.  The movie is more interesting as an object of discourse and speculation than as an cinematic experience but it is, probably, some sort of brilliant work of art.      

  

   

Frankenstein (1931) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

 In preparation for Guillermo del Toros' version of Frankenstein scheduled for Netflix in November 2025, Turner Classic Movies presented a Frankenstein double feature, the original James Whale film from 1931 and, then, The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer Studios' first color film, directed by Terence Fisher and released in 1957.  The two films share the same premise, but are radically different.

James Whale's version, of course, is the classic film adaptation that defines the story and its characters and provides the standard against which all other pictures in this mold are measured.  There has never been a time in my life that I can recall in which I didn't know this movie.  I saw it countless times as a boy, always on TV, of course, in afternoon matinees on Channel 11 in the Twin Cities and interrupted by innumerable commercials.  For a few years, I lost track of the movie, but saw it again in college and, then, on occasion, on TV thereafter  The movie is very accomplished.  It's so well-known that no one can really accurately appraise the picture -- it's iconic.  On this occasion, I looked at the movie for aspects that I had earlier not noticed.  The movie begins with a dapper little fellow emerging from behind theater curtains to warn the audience that they will be shocked and horrified by the film and that, perhaps, they should take warning and -- (he doesn't exactly tell them to run for the exits but implies that they should consider this).  In the credits, Frankenstein's monster is described as acted by "?"  The film begins with a majestic tracking shot from right-to-left depicting mourners at a grave site against a stormy dark sky.  Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein and his hunchbacked henchman are, then, shown avidly watching the burial -- they intend to disinter the corpse.  This exquisite moving camera shot establishes the films somber tone; Whale's tongue is in his cheek, but his craftsmanship is such that the movie is a bit alarming even though crammed full of ridiculous and portentous dialog and hammy acting.  The picture is noteworthy for the brilliant performance by Boris Karloff as the monster --he makes the creature pathetic and strangely sympathetic.  Karloff is immured in prosthetics and make-up, but he acts in the silent fashion with his eyes, his body, and his eloquent, scarred hands.  Karloff's compassionate performance climaxes in the famous scene where the Monster drowns a child --it's all a misunderstanding, but extremely poignant.  In the final scene in which Karloff is trapped in a burning windmill, the Monster's distress and panic at the flames all around him is palpable -- he charges back and forth like a terrified animal and the audience's sympathies are entirely with him and not the braying mob with torches and pitchforks outside the mill.  Colin Clive's Dr. Frankenstein, who spends most of the movie blaspheming and arrogantly proclaiming his Promethean ambitions, is too obsessed to serve as a romantic lead.  Whale and his scriptwriter make sure there is another fellow in waiting for the lady's affections, a handsome, if unimaginative, fellow who is pining for Elizabeth and, it is implied, will get the girl when the presumptuous doctor is out of the way  -- he gets pitched off the top of windmill and broken like a rag doll on the turning blades of the thing.  The movie is very short -- I would guess about 75 minutes (this was true of all classic Universal horror films).  It is incredibly efficient in its story telling and manages to cram all sorts of things into its short running time.  There's a Bavarian festival complete with dancers in lederhosen and beer maids that ends disastrously when the father of the drowned girl makes an appearance carrying the limp corpse of his daughter -- this is another purely visual and classic scene and brilliantly realized in a long tracking shot.  The sets are heavily stylized, particularly the laboratory built vertically into a fang of crumbling masonry on a black mountain top.  The place is full of narrow, steep steps, dungeons and the like, painted shadows on all the surfaces.  The Monster rampages through a jagged gorge, a sort of peak-top slit canyon full of dramatic serrated ridges and huge heaps of black-painted paper-mache rocks.  The old fellow playing Baron Frankenstein, an irritating character role, has an enormous tumor behind his ear that is obvious in most of the shots in which he appears and disturbing to behold.  Viewers are conflicted as to whether this is giant wart, lipoma (fat tumor) or a goiter -- I think it's some kind of lipoma.  But once seen this can't be unseen. 

The Curse of Frankenstein is gaudy and designed as a sort of gross-out picture.  The Creature's face is a deliquescent pale blue and green (possible a homage to Karloff's make-up which was apparently green although this can't be seen in the 1931 black and white film).  The monster's face is crudely stitched onto his skull and seems to be melting away.  (Christopher Lee plays the creature.)  In this version, Dr. Frankenstein is a cad.  He has a servant girl that he has made pregnant and has no scruples about feeding her, as it were, to the monster.  (Frankenstein, as acted by Peter Cushing, keeps a grim-looking sarcophagus full of acid in his lab and dissolves unneeded, or incriminating, body parts in that vat.)  The movie features a frame story -- Dr.  Frankenstein is in prison awaiting execution; he summons a priest to his cell and there tells him what happened, hoping to exculpate himself from the various murders (many of them by the monster) attributed to him.  In this film, Elizabeth, Frankenstein's betrothed, is first portrayed as a little girl with her pushy mother, one of the Baron's impoverished aunts that he is supporting.  The marriage proposed between the two is not a matter of love but convenience, arranged by the officious busybody of the Aunt.  There is no hunchbacked Igor in this film; rather Frankenstein is assisted by Paul, a handsome bachelor who ends up, it is implied, as the girlfriend of the rather frosty and scheming Elizabeth.  Paul helps Victor Frankenstein steal a few corpses and assists with some of the quiltwork, but gets cold feet when he sees how hideous the monster will be -- his rejection of Victor's insane scheme is primarily on esthetic grounds (at least so it seems). The movie wallows in the gruesome aspects of grave-robbing.  A hanged man cut from the gibbet can't be used because the birds have pecked out his eyes and "eaten half of his face" -- we get just a momentary glimpse of the corpse before Frankenstein saws off his head, an action tastefully screened by the bottom of the frame, and, then, tosses the head in the acid bath.  He gets gore on his hands which he wipes off on his lab coat.  Apparently, there's no laundry service because he wears the same ichor-smeared coat throughout the movie.  Later, Frankenstein studies a pair of eyes that he keeps in jar that looks like it previously contained Gerber's baby food.  There is an obligatory scene with a blind man, an old guy with a boy leading him inexplicably through a brushy thicket.  (I had forgotten that the famous scene with blind hermit isn't in the original version of Frankenstein but appears in the sequel, 1935's The Bride of Frankenstein).  The monster runs amuck in the last fifteen minutes of the movie but doesn't really do much damage.  Karloff was massive, weighty, a stolid Redwood Tree of an creature; Christopher Lee is lithe, willowy, with very narrow shoulders -- he doesn't seem capable of inflicting much injury on anyone.  The movie is set in some unnamed German metropolis that looks exactly like London.  Hazel Court, playing Elizabeth, wears low-cut blouses that plunge more and more as the film progresses.  Horror films are primarily visual, the last aspect of modern moviemaking that remains closely akin to pictures in the silent era.  Therefore, it's a disappointment that The Curse of Frankenstein features so much society-style banter -- it's a very dialogue heavy movie and tedious for that reason.  The original Frankenstein is austere and alarming and remains very effective; curiously, the 1957 iteration seems more dated.  The Bride of  Frankenstein is the best and most ingenious of the lot -- but it's not iconic; it's already functioning as a cerebral and witty commentary on the 1931 version.  The Curse of Frankenstein has good production values and fine acting but it's flawed and dull.  

Shadow

 Shadow is a 2018 wuxia film directed by the much-lauded Chinese moviemaker, Zhang Yimou.  Wuxia films are a Chinese genre -- these pictures involve narratives set in ancient China with a vaguely mythological bent; wuxia means "chivalry and martial arts."  Such films are to be distinguished from martial arts movies, films that feature elaborate and protracted duels either hand-to-hand or with weapons.  Wuxia is said to be sub-genre of the martial arts category, stories set in a legendary era involving royalty and knights but with extensive combat sequences as well.  Wuxia involves elaborate, rather gothic, narratives, a bit like plot elements in shows like Game of Thrones.  There are warring kingdoms, love affairs and intrigue, as well as court conspiracies and political assassinations.  Shadow has a complicated, nearly impenetrable plot, a slow, rather meditative pace, and impressive battle scenes in its last forty minutes.  The film is a triumph of design.  Although shot in color, the movie proceeds against landscapes and interiors that are a grim black and white.  Rain falls perpetually from grey skies.  The action takes place in various subterranean tunnels, medieval streets that, although exposed to the (wan) light of day, seem to be far underground, and misty gorges filled with deep pools of water.  The set directors have taken inspiration from Chinese scrolls, many of them a thousand or, even, two-thousand years old -- images of hazy columnar mountains, strange eroded rocks, and distant grey mountain ranges swathed in fog.  Even the blood depicted in this film looks diluted, dark, and, generally, mixed with a monochrome slop of mud and rainwater.  All of the big violent scenes are staged in a downpour that is unremitting.  The only hint of color in the images are the flesh tones.  People wear black and white gowns.  In the King of Pei's court, there are innumerable semi-translucent screens on which the King has painted elegant calligraphy, an "Ode to Peace" composed with artistoc swaths of black brushstroke.  The entire film is composed in the murky greys and debased whites of an old, half-destroyed silent film.  There is no relief from the color scheme or the largely vertical set design -- the action takes place at the bottom of funnels of ragged cliffs, underwater, or on the tilted streets of the medieval city, Jing.  One expects that the sun will come out at the end of the movie.  But this expectation is thwarted -- the ending is like the last act of Hamlet, an accumulation of deaths that leaves almost no one standing; therefore, this grim denouement offers nothing to celebrate -- the rain is still falling.  

The film's plot is convoluted.  The picture starts with some exposition about the war between the City of Jing and the Kingdom of Pei. Pei's great commander and his wife are summoned to the court where rows of sycophantic courtiers kneel next to translucent screens in a perspective extended to the vanishing point.  The childish and self-absorbed King wants to conquer the City of Jing.  But he has (I think) agreed to wager the war on a single combat, a duel between the Commander and the enemy general Yang Cang.  To celebrate this endeavor, the King with his proud sister Qingping demand that the Commander and his wife play a duet on the zither.  Inexplicably, the Commander refuses and defiantly cuts off his top knot of hair.  The Commander declines the zither duet for two reasons:  first, he can't play the zither and, second, he isn't really the Commander at all.  The real Commander, dying like the grail king in Parsifal from a chest wound that won't heal, is holed-up in a secret grotto below the castle.  We learn that a peasant named Jingzhou is the Commander's "shadow" imitating the famous general and warrior.  From age 8, Jingzhou (who confusingly has the same name as the City of Jing), has been raised to act and fight like the Commander.  Although not of noble blood, he's a formidable combat soldier as well.  In the Commander's chambers, the maids set out futons for the Commander and his wife.  But, after everyone has left, Jingzhou goes off by himself, virtuously sequestering himself from his double's real wife.  (The plot bears some resemblance to Kurosawa's late film, Kagemusha which was subtitled, I think, the "shadow warrior.")  Yang Cang proposes an alliance between Pei and Jing City; he wants to join his son Yang Pang to Qingping, the King of Pei's daughter.  Indeed, he sends a token of the alliance, an ornate dagger.  But, it turns out that he is proposing to make Qinping his concubine, a degrading offer that enrages the young woman to the extent that in the hostilities she will take a decisive part as a woman warrior.  The real Commander has learned a new fighting style from sparring with his wife who repels his bamboo cane blows with her umbrella.  Although fighting is a Yang enterprise -- that is, male, the Commander has developed a Yin (female and liquid) technique -- this involves graceful, fluid motions in which an umbrella equipped with detachable spines and blades is deployed against the male swords and lances.  (In several key scenes, duels are filmed from a vertical perspective aiming down at a huge Yinyang symbol engraved on wooden platforms.)  After an hour of preliminaries, the army of Pei attacks Jing City while the Commander's shadow double duels with the great swordsman, Yang Cang.  These two threads of action are cut together.  The duel takes place on a yinyang decorated platform exposed at a height between two sheer cliffs of black rock.  The battle in the city involves a legion of metal umbrella-wielding warriors fending off crossbow shots with their whirling bronze parasols and unleashing storms of jagged steel in the direction of the enemies.  There's a Trojan horse aspect to the invasion -- the army of Pei has to swim underwater in the gorge where the flood is impounded by a dam to surface in the town.  The army wears primitive versions of scuba gear and breathe through hollow reeds connected to air balloons on their backs.  Yang Cang is defeated and the city of Jing taken by the Pei forces.  Quingping is struck down and, with her last breath (she's been stabbed repeatedly) uses the ornate gift dagger to kill Yang Pang, the young man who was supposed to be betrothed to her but wanted her to accept the role of concubine -- thus, she is revenged.  The shadow double finds his elderly mother has been murdered by someone -- at this point, I lost the thread of the film, and who couldn't exactly understand who was killing whom and why.  The real commander emerges from his labyrinthine tunnel and kills the foolish young king of Pei.  He also kills the shadow double.  Then, for some reason that is imponderable, he stages the scene to make it look like the shadow double and the king killed one another.  

The film is elegantly made and, generally, intelligible.  It's slowly paced but the stylized acting, the profoundly artificial sets, and misty gorges and mountains are entrancing -- the viewer watches this thing in a state of half-hypnotized enchantment.  Unlike many heavily stylized and artificial (set-bound) films, this picture is humorless, but exciting -- it reminds me a bit of the second half of Fritz Lang's Nibelungenlied film, Kriemhild's Revenge with its ultra-violent combat scenes and manufactured woods and rocks.  At no point did the film oppress me with the sense of claustrophobia that could be implicit in such a completely contrived and intensely disciplined mise-en-scene.  Shadow is so beautiful and strange that you forgive the film for its flagrant artistry -- of course, it's utterly pretentious but the pretense is about something real and the ridiculous stuff on-screen has a sort of grave and dignified elegance.    

One Battle After Another

 I grew up with movies made by the studios in the late fifties and early sixties.  These films were plot-driven but with the narrative designed to climax in a showy battle scene or gunfight.  Usually, action movies stirred in a little romance to keep female audience members attentive.  As a boy, I yearned for these plot elements to be streamlined, minimized, or, even, eliminated if possible -- after all, the plot was transparently only a device for justifying a violent climax.  Similarly, I didn't like the "mushy stuff" -- that is, the romance elements obviously thrown in as a sop to the women  in the theater.  I thought it would be a wonderful thing is a film could be composed of only the violent action during its last half hour -- what if a movie were all action with no plot at all or all battle without any character development or exposition or romance.  Now, sixty years later, I have got my wish and, of course,  there's only one thing worse than an unfulfilled wish and that's a wish come true.  Starting with Cy Enfield's Zulu (1964), war movies gravitated to pictures that were nothing but combat -- Sergei Bondarchuk's picture Waterloo (1970) is another example.  Movies like the John Wick franchise and the first half of Kill Bill are nothing but extended action scenes, unremitting duels and gun battles.  The title of Paul Thomas Anderson's recent film, One Battle after the Other, show that it is, in large part, a continuation and, indeed, perfection of this trend.  This long film (about 2 hours and forty minutes) is nothing more than an extended chase sequence, or, more accurately, one chase after another, a relentless series of car chases, foot races, double and triple chases with the pursuers themselves pursued by other adversaries.  It's a film that is physically exhausting, You walk out of the theater breathless as if you've run a marathon.

One Battle After Another, which justifies its perpetual motion by combat between revolutionary terrorists and ICE paramilitaries, is a bete noir with the Right.  For instance, The National Review has published harangues suggesting that the movie is a particularly bestial form of propaganda and that it is akin to treason to admire the picture.  In fact, the movie "inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland" is essentially apolitical -- this is signaled in an early sequence in which the hero is seen watching Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, a movie with an ostensible political subject but one that is primarily famous for its suspense thriller sequences and its triumphant action movie-climax. The politics of One Battle After Another are those of Wile E. Coyote versus the Roadrunner -- the coyote chases, the roadrunner runs and that's about it.  The film that the picture most resembles is another wide-screen epic 1963's, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a movie that, after some creaky introductory scenes, consists of nothing more than one chase after another, all the characters in wild pursuit of one another throughout the entire lengthy picture.  

The premise of One Battle After Another is that a group of urban terrorists called The French 75 stage a raid on an ICE detention facility.  There are some chases and a villain (the coyote) named Captain Lockjaw (played in monster-movie fashion by a grizzled Sean Penn) pursues the terrorists.  The terrorists are led by a fierce woman-warrior named Perfidia Beverly Hills -- the names come out of Pynchon.  She is as determined and ruthless as her opposite number, Colonel Lockjaw.  It's personal between Lockjaw and Perfidia -- she took him hostage and sexually humiliated him.  But it's the kind of humiliation that Lockjaw likes and, so, he's obsessively attracted to her.  Their liaisons which are like scorpions mating result in Perfidia becoming pregnant.  (In one indelible scene, she blazes away with a machine gun pressed up against her naked pregnant belly.)  Perfidia attributes the child to her boyfriend, Bob Ferguson, called Rocket Man, so-called because he is an explosives expert.  (Bob is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a continuous haze of marijuana smoke and with a look of anguished bemusement constantly on his face.)  After some more chases, Lockjaw manages to capture Perfidia.  She rats out the members of French 75 who are exterminated in a series of violent scenes -- it's like the demise of the SLA in Berkeley when they were hunted down and wiped-out after kidnaping Patty Hearst.  Perfidia goes into witness protection but bored by civilian life escapes into Mexico.  Sixteen years later, Perfidia's  child Willa is living with Bob somewhere in California.  True to her genes, Perfidia and Lockjaw's child is ferocious herself -- we first see her studying karate with a Hispanic sensei.  Colonel Lockjaw has been invited to join the Christmas Adventurer's Club, a cabal of sinister, White Supremicist, millionaires and industrialists.  Lockjaw has to establish that he is 100% Aryan to join the Club.  Their investigation has revealed that Lockjaw may be the father of a "mixed race" child.  In order to advance his admission to the White Supremicist cabal, Lockjaw leading ICE paramilitary cracks down on immigrants in the sanctuary city in California, hoping that, in this way, he can lure Willa and her father, Bob, into the open.  Lockjaw's plan is to subject Willa to genetic testing -- if she turns out not to be his child, he will simply release her.  If she is his child, Lockjaw decides that he has no choice but to make her disappear thereby eliminating any obstacle to his admission to the Christmas Adventurer's Club.  

Lockjaw conducts a raid on the high school where Willa with friends is attending a school dance.  Willa is escorted out of the school by another Black revolutionary, a woman, who drives her up into the hills where there is a convent of marijuana-growing nuns -- that is, a kind of safe house.  Lockjaw and his minions pursue both Willa and Bob.  Bob tries to flee the government forces by escaping over the Barrio roof tops with a group of Hispanic skateboarders -- but he falls into an alley and gets stunned and, then, captured.  (A network of Hispanic nurses in the hospital help him to escape from custody.)  Bob is trying to activate the sleeper cell of radical terrorists but the dope has addled his brain and he can't recall the password necessary to get those people engaged.  (Ultimately, he asks to speak to his interlocutor Comrade Josh's boss and breaks through on the basis of his fame as the bomb specialist "Rocket Man.")  The ICE commandos, now supported by some kind of neo-Nazi paramilitary, capture Willa.  Colonel Lockjaw tests Willa and determines that she is, in fact, his daughter.  He, then, tenders the girl to a Bounty Hunter named Avanti and tells him to get rid of her.  Avanti is troubled by this assignment and ends up killing most of the paramilitary that are holding Willa, allowing her to escape.  She flees in a car pursued by ICE agents who are, in turn, pursued by an assassin working for the Christmas Adventurer's Club with instructions to murder both Willa and Bob and, possibly, Colonel Lockjaw since they are  convinced that he is the father of a half-black girl.  This sets up the final set piece, an elaborate chase scene that takes place on an empty highway passing through badlands that make the road rise and fall precipitously like a roller coaster.  At various times, various characters are pursuing one another.  Lockjaw who was grievously wounded when Avanti massacred the paramilitary is also humping his way along the road, his face partly shot off, and trotting along the highway in his characteristic stiff and ramrod straight gait.  It suffices to say that Willa escapes.  Later, she reads a letter from Perfidia urging her to join the revolution.  Bob continues to smoke dope.  Colonel Lockjaw, who admires both his daughter and Perfidia for their ferocity, is eliminated by the Christmas Adventurers.  Word reaches Willa that there is an ICE raid planned for San Francisco and, so, she hurries away to help the immigrants evade federal officers.  

I have simplified the convoluted plot.  The movie uses characters invented by Thomas Pynchon in Vineland, but otherwise doesn't have a whole lot to do with the book.  Pynchon's influence is most apparent in the names of the characters and some jokes about the passwords used by the terrorists -- they have an elaborate Q and A procedure for identifying themselves more than a little like Bud Abbot and Lou Costello's "Who's on First" routine.  Anderson pushes his camera close to the characters and films most scenes in tight close-ups.  The camera is seldom still, restlessly following the action often in a hand-held format.  The film is shot in 35 millimeter format known as VistaVision.  In a lot of shots, characters are dimly lit or half-hidden in shadow.  The action scenes are immaculate, set pieces involving an urban car chase down alleys, the ICE raid on the sanctuary town in which a federal provocateur throws a Molotov cocktail and precipitates a riot, people running and hiding in the barrio, then, a series of car chases in barren territory culminating in the final up-and-down sequence on the desert road -- the road dips so suddenly and steeply that the audience feels the downgrade in their bellies (the camera seems mounted on the front of the moving car).  The climactic scenes with the cars lunging over the hills are similar to the final minutes of Spielberg's Sugarland Express, also an extended chase scene in which half-wrecked cars bounce over desert dunes in a sort of exhausted ballet.  The movie's mise-en-scene is masterful and the film is smoothly efficient -- there are very few memorable shots; rather, it's the editing and mobile camerawork that carries the burden of meaning.  One Battle After Another is extremely thrilling -- the picture feels far shorter than its almost three hours running length. The acting is good if rudimentary -- there are very few speeches of any consequence, mostly the characters are just running for their lives.  In fact, there's very little in the way of memorable dialogue -- the characters speak in slogans and acronyms, using military jargon and code.  Anderson is not afraid to use ugly-looking footage when it suits his purpose -- the camera work which is all close-ups isn't eloquent but it has a punch and keeps everything moving.  Although teasers for the movie show Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Bob, running around with a big long gun on his shoulder, a neo-Western image, as far as I can recall DiCaprio never fires a shot in the movie.

If this film had been released in October a year ago, most critics, I think, would dismiss the plot as a febrile fantasy, a wildly implausible conspiracy picture.  But that was then.  This is now.  People in masks and unmarked cars have been "disappearing" people off American streets.  Sanctuary cities have been raided and churches, hospitals, and schools invaded.  Elon Musk with Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, all of them billionaires and White, were prominently displayed behind Trump at his inauguration.  Trump has unconditionally pardoned more than a thousand violent rioters who tried to overthrow the election of Joe Biden.  The levers of government are being pulled to weaponize the Department of Justice.  Contrary to the National Review's criticism, this film feels far more prescient as to our current dilemma that it would have been in October of 2024 when most of the mayhem visible in Vistavision on the big screen was merely a twinkle in President Trump's eye.

Parthenope

 The great Italian director, Paolo Sorrentino, works in images and doesn't seem to have mastered the craft of narrative.  This is a minor deficiency -- Fellini was one of world's most famous and finest directors and, at least after La Strada, more or less abandoned coherent narrative.  Sorrentino is a disciple of Fellini and, similarly, uninterested in devising a plot for his films -- instead, he orchestrates moods using lavish, opulent cinematography, operatic characters, and surreal, baffling imagery.  Parthenope (2023) is one of his most characteristic works -- like its leading lady, the film's sheer beauty has been held against it.  Surly critics note the production involvement of Saint Laurent in the movie's credits and accuse the picture of being as empty and glamorous as a perfume ad.  The movie is excellent, but, as with late Fellini, often a matter of taste and, certainly, a test of the viewer's "negative capability", that is, willingness to abide with mystery and enigma.  

Parthenope is a beautiful young woman.  The film bearing her name depicts her life from birth through old age -- the movie ends with her retirement from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Trento where she has become a beloved and influential professor.  She is born in the water of a lagoon, a blue basin near the Palazzo where her wealthy family lives.  Her godfather, the Commandante, names her Parthenope for the sea-nymph who sought to seduce Odysseus with her voice, failed, and, then, drowned herself in the sea.  Her body washed up at the site of Naples and she is regarded as the mythic patron to the city.  (There are images in renaissance emblem books of water from Parthenope's breasts quenching the furious fires of Vesuvius).  Parthenope's supernatural beauty entrances her brother Raimondo as well as the housekeeper's handsome son.  Parthenope, like the young Jesus in the Temple, amazes the doctors at the university with her sagacity and self-assurance.  She adulates Marotto, an aging professor of anthropology and expresses a wish to become a scholar herself.  With her brother, Raimondo, and the maid's son, she goes to the island of Capri where she meets, by amazing coincidence (Sorrentino's plotting is very perfunctory) John Cheever, played by Gary Oldman.  (Parthenope loves Cheever's writing.)  When  she asks Cheever to walk with her, the elderly depressed man says that the won't because he "doesn't want to rob her of a second of her youth."  An oligarch whose helicopter hovers over the beach where she bathes, courts her unsuccessfully -- when she rejects him, he bluntly tells her that she is very stupid.  Ultimately, Parthenope has sex with the maid's gorgeous son; her brother, Raimondo, is heart-broken and his incestuous desire causes him to commit suicide.  During his funeral in Naples, his hearse is met by a hideous-looking VW bus spewing fumes from arthropoid spider-leg nozzles (the bus looks like a centipede) -- this is disinfectant against cholera which has come to Naples.  Parthenope, who excels in her studies in anthropology, drops out of school briefly because a talent agent has told her she could be an actress  (The talent agent, always swathed in veils or steam in her steambath, tries to seduce Parthenope, also unsuccessfully.)   Parthenope is told to visit a woman (stage-)named Greta Cool.  This is a "diva", a famous actress on the order of Sophia Loren.  At a celebration, Cool denounces Naples, which is her home town, as being corrupt, shabby, venal, and wretched.  This leads to Cool's confrontation with a City Father, a sort of gnome or ogre, whom she kicks repeatedly in the shins and, then, tries to bite off his ear.  He knocks off her red wig revealing that Greta Cool suffers from alopecia.  Discussion with Greta Cool leads Parthenope to renounce her ambitions to be an actress.  She tours Naples' teeming slums with a mafia boss who leads her through the mean streets to a pool hall where a pale young man and young woman are forced to copulate in public, some sort of weird ritual featuring the "fusion" of two houses of criminals in the Gomorrha ghetto.  Parthenope is pregnant with the mob boss's child but gets an abortion.  She returns to the long-suffering Professor Marotto to complete the doctoral dissertation -- Marotto tells her to write on the cultural and anthropological aspects of the miracle of San Gennaro.  Parthenope goes to the Cathedral to watch the miracle, which involves the liquefaction on Gennaro's feast-day of a clot of Christ's blood.  The miracle fails but a woman in the congregation spills her menstrual blood on the cathedral floor -- the coming of her period is another sort of miracle.  (The sequence is very redolent of the miraculous apparition of the virgin that causes a riot in a rainstorm in La Dolce Vita.)  Parthenope visits the Bishop of Naples, Teserone in his luxurious apartments.  He decks her naked body with jewels from the Cathedral's treasury and puts his hands on her genitals.  At that moment, the camera retreats from the love scene, through the various spectacular corridors of the palace, to the San Gennaro relic where we hear a faint dripping as if the clot of blood has, at least, partially liquefied.  Professor Marotto retires.  He lives alone with his disabled son.  Marotto's wife has left him and the old man sleeps on a cot  in the room where his son is confined.  Parthenope visits Marotto's home and is ushered into the room where the retarded boy is watching TV.  (He's like a grotesque Italian version of Beavis or Butthead; he crows about the Tv announcer saying the word "asshole.")  The boy is a vast ballon of marble-white flesh, a huge swollen mass the size of house with a tiny smirking face on the front of his globular head.  Parthenope declares that the boy is "beautiful" and strokes his marmoreal flesh.  In a brief epilogue, we see Parthenope, now about seventy, retiring from the anthropology department where two young women declare her influence to have been decisive in their lives.  That night, Parthenope goes outside and sees a huge parade -- the enthusiastic supporters of Naples soccer team are marching in the street under fireworks.  The team has won the Italian equivalent of the world series.  Parthenope is excited herself and says:  "Much time has passed.  But I'm still here.  I defend the City."  (Sorrentino is an avid soccer fan; the movie he directed before this film The Hand of God is a coming-of-age picture keyed to soccer and a controversial goal by Diego Maradona in Mexico City in 1986, the so-called "hand of God" goal.)

The movie is wonderful but, also, somewhat indecipherable.  It many ways it resembles Sorrentino's equally bizarre and enigmatic series made for HBO, The Young Pope (2016)and The Old Pope (2019)-- indeed, some scenes are almost identical including the horror-movie reveal of Stefano, Marotto's deformed and grotesque son.  Many allusions are lost on non-Italian viewers -- for instance, the frog-like Commandante represents Achille Lauro, the Italian right wing political figure and shipping magnate.  The mafia scenes are particularly difficult to interpret and there is a showy student riot complete with slow-motion molotov cocktails exploding -- I don't know what this represents.  There are two leit motifs:  men project onto Parthenope their own ideas and thoughts, often asking her "What are you thinking?"  Everyone wants to know what is going on behind her gorgeous face.  Another more academic aspect of the film is a question that keeps being posed:  What is anthropology?  After various inadequate responses, the question is answered:  "Seeing."  With that statement, Sorrentino aligns anthropology with film-making -- his movies are a form of anthropology.  Of course, Sorrentino's break-out picture is called The Great Beauty and, I think, the rather picaresque narrative in Pathenope is about the destiny of beauty in our world.  Celesta Dalla Porta plays Parthenope and, of course, she is a sight to behold.  

Excited Delirium: Alien: Earth and M, Son of the Century

 This is a true story. When I was in college, I entered a radio contest for free tickets to the Minnesota premiere of Ridley Scott's Alien.  I no longer recall what the contest involved, probably just making a phone call and praising the radio station (it was old KQRS in St. Louis Park), but to my surprise, I won, and found myself with two tickets to the opening night show at the Skyway Theater on Hennepin Avenue.  I had admired Ridley Scott's first feature film, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's short story, "The Duelists".  With my girlfriend, I attended the show with the movie projected to a packed urban audience -- it was an unpleasant experience, too intense, and the picture scared the hell out of me.  Later, I read a review of the movie that said that it was a disappointment, "just a gorilla in a haunted house horror movie."  That description cheered me up and can also be applied to the TV limited series Alien: Earth (2025) broadcast on HULU.  The show is written by Noah Hawley, the author of the very good scripts for the Fargo knock-off series.  Hawley is pretty skilled but Alien: Earth, so far as I can see, is a disappointment although the show has had good reviews and is impressively produced.  Hawley has the difficult task of expanding on a premise that remains, now, fifty years later, still just "a gorilla on a rampage in a haunted house."  He tricks out the show with a complicated plot involving intrigue and competition between two homicidal corporations and devises a good villain (the monsters have long since ceased to be villainous), a smarmy technocrat on the order of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk named "Boy Cavalier".  (Hawley's villain in the most recent Fargo series, played by the Golem-like Jon Hamm was one of the best bad guys in recent memory.)  The corporations are distinguished by their different approaches to AI:  one corp. uses so-called "hybrids", that is human clones in which the consciousnesses of dying people are installed; the other corp. produces "cyborgs" --  that is, half-human and half-machine personages with enhanced strength and intelligence.  These two different types of artificial beings are ostensibly important but don't seem central to the plot, a story about a gang of 'hybrids' confronting the space monsters in the context of some kind of convoluted intrigue involving industrial espionage.  A space ship transporting a menagerie of monstrous critters from deep space crashes into a huge tenement somewhere on earth -- it may be Singapore or Indonesia.  The monsters who come in various forms have escaped on the space ship and massacred the crew.  Of course, the crash into the apartment building allows the critters to escape, although, somehow, they are, more or less, captured and confined in some sort of laboratory, apparently on the island where Boy Cavalier is engaged in his sinister experiments -- in a parody of Peter Pan, Boy Cavalier has inserted the souls of a group of dying children into young adult bodies, a metamorphosis that much confuses the children who find themselves suddenly sexually mature and no longer riddled with cancer.  This experiment is conducted on a lush island that looks a bit like the environs of Jurassic Park.  The leader of the lost boys (and girls) on the island is a comely maiden named "Wendy" in homage to the pastiche of Peter Pan.  Wendy is super-smart.  She figures out how to communicate with the monsters and spends the last part of the series chatting-up the bloodthirsty critters and transforming them into her private army.  Wendy's also equipped with a fully human brother who has to be protected from the machinations of the wicked Boy Cavalier and the onslaughts of the monsters.  The creatures include some centipede-shaped bugs, malign walking stick insects like genus Argosarchus Horridus from New Zealand, ticks that creep into you bodily orifices and suck out all your fluids from the inside, and, of course, the so-called Xenomorph which exists in three instars:  octopoidal face-grabber, chest-burster, and the primate-like, long-tailed adult xenomorph with is sloppy hydraulically-automated jaws and acid blood -- the Xenomorph, of course, is the canonical alien and well-known to audiences from films in the fifty year franchise.  The best monster is a blob with squid-like tentacles and a globular, mucous head in which a half-dozen blood shot eyes are floating.  This beast is very fleet of foot, dances around like a tentacular Fred Astaire, ambushes you, and attaching to the side of your head gouges out one of your eyes -- the parasite, then, inserts its spherical six-eyed head into the bloody vacated socket whereupon all six eyes, then, become one great blood shot orb malignly surveying the world from the head of the person or creature (in one case a goat) who has been so colonized.  The monsters are great, but the special effects seem shaky -- the show doesn't seem to have much confidence in them and stages all the creature sequences the standard dim blue shadows that filmmakers use to conceal sketchy FX.  As in the original movie, there are corridors full of flashing red lights, gusts of steam, dark shadows, and jump-scares.  There's a lot of mayhem on screen but I found it weirdly soothing, soporific even -- I spent half my time ostensibly watching this show asleep, seized by slumbers just as the horrors became most intense.  I suppose this was because I didn't care about of the characters, felt nothing when the monsters reduced them to heaps of gory innards, and, although I detested Boy Cavalier, my distaste for the character was apparently not enough to keep me awake.  In the last episode, Wendy uses her powers to communicate with the monsters to unleash them on the various factotums loyal to Boy Cavalier -- apparently, the money had run out at this late stage because the climactic creature attacks are shown on surveillance camera footage, that is more grey-blue darkness with very little contrast, a very disappointing ending to the show. (It's been renewed and I expect we'll get, at least, another season of this stuff.)  

M - Son of the Century is a baffling biopic of Mussolini.  It's well-acted but seems to be completely pointless and mindnumbingly repetitive.  Mussolini preens and struts and, then, delivers about three extended speeches per episode.  When the Fascist isn't speaking, he's inciting his thugs to beat up and murder socialists in bouts of spectacularly choreographed street-fighting.  Each show features several battles, staged like incidents in World War One -- hordes of blackshirted goons beat socialists (in one case with rigid batons of codfish), gouge out their eyes, or set them on fire.  Mussolini watches theses fracases from afar, then, his libido stirred by all the ultra-violence -- it looks like poorly lit outtakes from A Clockwork Orange -- brutishly paws and fucks his malevolent-looking flapper girlfriend.  Mussolini also has a long-suffering wife, Rachelle, at home -- she has frizzy red hair and he also has sex with her, slaps her around, and, then, has to deal with her attempts to kill him with a revolver that she hides under her pillow.  Mussolini's rival is the poet Gabriel  D'Annunzio who is also a flying ace.  If anything D'Annunzio is farther to the right then Benito.  Mussolini is very prone to speechifying -- he gives speeches in the streets, to crowds of his thugs, and, then, in the Italian parliament.  His speeches are all the same -- in fact, each episode is, more or less, the same.  Mussolini schemes and like an Italian Richard III sucks the viewer into his confidence, declaiming his various Machiavellian strategies.  Between speeches, the Black Shirts beat everyone up and shoot many dead.  Mussolini has sex with his girlfriend, using her so harshly that she seems about half-dead when its time for the Duce to hurry to parliament or a political meeting to give another speech.  This material, which doesn't ever cohere into a plot, is extravagantly filmed -- the style of the movie is like Baz Luhrmann on speed:  it's all elaborate tracking shots, weird camera angles, sweaty close-ups like a Sergio Leone movie, with a soundtrack that is either operatic (Puccini and Wagner are much favored) or techno-rock.  The sets are seething with smoke and fog and gouts of fire (a lot like the corridors in Alien: Earth) and there are rickety scaffoldings everywhere, tenement-like slums, and misty riversides through which horseman ride in columns -- these scenes look like Bertolucci's 1900.  It's all either stylized or staged in elaborately decorated rococo palaces.  This show presents a single relentlessly frenzied libidinal texture that's almost completely featureless:  bouts of gruesome violence, rapes, and orations by Mussolini.  It's completely soporific -- I have never been able to stay awake for a single episode:  I'm always asleep at about 30 minutes into the hour-long shows, awakened by the theme music at the end, or, even, more belatedly by the opera or techno-rock accompanying the next episode.  Once, after I had fallen asleep to my dismay, I forced myself to watch the part of the episode during which I had been asleep.  I wondered if it would be different from what I saw before succumbing to slumber -- it was not:  Mussolini struts around, puffs out his chest, gives a long speech and, then, his thugs beat a score of socialists to death while the hero has sex with his mistress.  The program is spectacularly made, full of startling and wonderful images, and completely without any interest -- so far as I can tell it's just the same thing over and over.  (This is an Italian- British coproduction shot in Italian and directed by the Englishman Joe Wright).

Velasco and Gatsby at 100: MIA

 It's my ambition to spend the waning years of my life looking at art and reading books on art history and  criticism.  Too late, it seems.  My legs hurt now when I amble around art museums and my eyes don't focus well on the pictures -- it seems that I spend most of my time with my eyeglasses in my hand, stooped over to read labels.  Gradually, it seems that my experience of museum art is more about the labels on the wall than the pictures which seem increasingly blurry to me.  I've always favored graphic work, prints and engravings, and, indeed, this may be the only kind of image that I see clearly -- I can push my face up close to the image and, without my glasses, inspect the hachure and bite of the burin as exhibited by the print or engraving.  It would be nice to visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art every month, but I can't seem to make the time and, so, I am at the museum usually at intervals of three months.  I've been going to MIA since I was six and have been there many times and the place is very familiar to me although, on each occasion, I find something new and intriguing.  On October 2, after a brief business meeting in St. Paul, I drove over to the Institute, planning to see just one or two galleries before driving back to Austin.  But, as is always the case, I spent more time than I expected and, even, saw some things worthy of reporting to my readers.  Hence, this note.

The Mexican landscape artist, Jose Maria Velasco, lived from1840 to 1912, dying two years after the first great revolution of a century of revolutions, the Mexican Revolution, began in 1910.  Velasco is well-known, even revered in his home country, but, almost, completely unknown in the United States.  About 20 works are on exhibit at the MIA; these range from small watercolors and studies (rocks, jungle vegetation, and clouds) to heroically sized canvases that are akin in subject matter and photo-realist detail to paintings by the American artists Bierstadt, Moran, and Fredric Erwin Church.  (To my eyes, Velasco is most similar to Church with a little admixture of the visionary strain visible in Thomas Cole.)  The selection of Velasco paintings include a number of perspectives on Mexican snow-capped mountains looming over the Vale of Mexico, a grim-looking apocalyptic waterspout (the picture is very small -- if it were larger, the thing would be overwhelming) and the eruption of a volcano.  There's a startling picture of a feathery silver comet hanging over of one of Mexico's eerie endorheic lakes -- the huge comet is reflected in the dismal water trapped in a desert basin.  (The label treats the painting as a harbinger of Mexican revolution -- the image portrays a celestial apparition about twenty years before the canvas was made at the time of the uprising.  Velasco painted desert scenes with cactus and textile mills occupying the middle distance.  A Cardon tree in Oaxaca looks like a platter held up on a trunk and bristling with sixty saquaro cactuses -- a little fellow is visible at the foot of the surrealistic tree to provide scale.  A small painting of what Velasco calls a "rustic bridge" looks a bit like Menzel, it's a jerry-rigged collection of splintery planks hanging in trees drooping over a pond of murky water; however, the bridge, almost indiscernible in the tattered trees seems to have a pale skeleton tangled up in it -- on closer inspection, the skeleton is just a group of white anthropomorphic roots, although one must query why those roots have suddenly sprouted from the side of the tree about 10 feet above its base.  Velasco's masterpiece is a majestic canvas called "The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isobel", a large-scale work that the artist painted for an exhibition in Vienna and that exists in, at least, three versions, two of which are in the show.  Meticulously painted, the image, when reproduced for a book or Art Institute flyer, seems to be a photograph -- at full size, the canvas covers the wall (it's dimensions are 161 x 228 cm) and reveals its brush strokes.  But, viewed from middle distance, the picture has a photo-realist quality.  In the second iteration of the picture (1875), a woman carrying a baby walks along the stony hillside, two dogs and a small boy dancing in front of her;  the woman imparts a sense of scale to the huge barren landscape spread out below the hill.  In the middle distance, a pale grid with minute buildings marks the cathedral and outbuildings sacred to the Virgin of Guadalupe at the Tepec hill; farther away, a white stain on the valley floor, like an encrustation of salt, represents Mexico City -- the shallow lakes near the city extend to the right across a brown treeless steppe stretching to twin volcanoes on the horizon.  The 1877 version of the scene is brighter; the texture of rocky hills and slopes is more visible.  There are no figures.  A skeletal nopal cactus stands roughly where the woman and dogs were earlier located; to the right, a hawk bearing some creature in its beak skates across a gorge cast into deep shadow.  The bird of prey and the nopal cactus refer to the Aztec origin story; after emerging from caves from far to the north, the Aztec marched across the deserts for generations until they reached the promised land, a valley with a great salty lake filling its basin and an eagle perched on a nopal devouring a serpent.

Gatsby at 100 occupies two small rooms.  The exhibit consists of paintings and objects from the Institute collection accompanied by quotations from Fitzgerald's novel.  There's a first edition of the book with its spooky cover showing two disembodied eyes hovering over the title and a blue, hazy landscape.  I don't think the juxtaposition of art and citations from the book is particularly successful -- the images seem mostly unrelated to the passages from the novel.  But there are some fine things in the exhibit.  A large 1928 lithograph of a very freely drawn nude by Matisse ("Nude, Left Hand over Shoulder") is particularly fine.  A huge photograph showing mostly horizon with two farms at opposite ends of panorama is striking -- 2017 Tei Nguyen.  A lithograph entitled "Minneapolis" (Louis Lozowick, 1925) show the city as square slab towers and great pillars of grain elevators, their columns round as the ranks of a pipe organ.  

Every time I walk the corridors and exhibition spaces of the MIA, I discover new things, little treasures that I haven't seen before.  An eerie late painting by Winslow Homer looks like Robert Motherwell; it's called "Cape Trinity, Soqueney River."  A ribbon of moonlight illumines a huge black bluff overlooking water in which an odd, untethered strip of pale reflection shows.  The label pursues the post hoc fallacy suggesting that the big, abstract black forms prefigure Homer's death in 1910 -- but the canvas was painted in 1904; it's not a premonition of anything but Abstract Expressionism forty-five years later.  In a big room full of architectural models -- usually a place I ignore -- there's a metal ornament marked "Consultation Rooms" designed by Sullivan for the Farmers National Bank in Owatonna.  The "t" letters in the legend are an architect's tee-square -- the thing is green, verdant with ornamentation, a beautiful object.  Upstairs where the American folk paintings are hung, there's a huge canvas that seems to be a copy of Alfred Bierstadt's iconic painting, "The Last of the Buffalo".  This painting is a parody by someone named Keith Monkman made in 2009 and is called the "Death of Adonis".  A blonde cowboy, a bit like a young George Armstrong Custer, is falling backward from his steed.  Another bison hunter lies dead on the ground.  Aphrodite, portrayed as a sort of Vegas showgirl, with red spike heels and a naked ass squats next to the corpse.  Another blonde cowboy ("cowboi"?) is being gored by a big, furious buffalo.  (The image is cartoonish but striking and, particularly interesting, in light of another show in the Institute, a small room full of very strange renaissance prints called "The Weirdening of the Renaissance" -- the title suggests the jocular, cavalier tone on the explanatory labels.  In one of the engravings, a nymph is scrubbing away at Aphrodite's private parts while Adonis, halfway transformed into a stag, struts forward, advancing like a post man carrying a letter or some kind of perverse butler or valet. (In the background of the engraving, poor Adonis, now fully metamorphosed into a stag is being torn apart by his own dogs.)

I was thrilled to find my favorite painting in the whole world on show, the miniature Indian image of "Lovers Watching an Approaching Thunderstorm".  This small image was made between 1780 and 1790 by an anonymous craftsman of so-called Kangra School (workers in Himachal Pradish wherever that may be.)  This picture is something that I would be happy to gaze upon forever, or, until my retina detaches under the pressure of the image, or until my eyesight is destroyed by wet (or dry) macular degeneration.  It is the most wonderful thing and has not been on display for several years and so I am ecstatic to see it again.