The Stunt Man

 Released in 1980, director Richard Rush's The Stunt Man is a vibrant example of seventies' counter-culture film-making at its best.  There's plenty of casual sex, nudity, and grind-house style violence.  The picture has a loose, "anything goes" atmosphere.  At the same time, there are pot-head profundities on display:  the movie is about the ubiquity of betrayal in Hollywood, about the effects of the Vietnam war, and, even, a meditation on the nature of reality:  since the picture is the backstage chronicle of an ambitious director shooting a World War One epic, we are invited to deliberate on what is real and what is fictional.  The director is played by Peter O'Toole, probably a caricature of Francis Ford Coppola on t location for Apocalypse Now.  O'Toole as Eli Cross, a narcissistic director, never has his feet on the ground -- he is literally suspended on his crane, hanging in midair, generally with no obvious means of support, or zooming around in a small helicopter, the so-called "chopper" as it is called in the movie.  I said the movie features pot-head profundities, a comment that is not intended to be derogatory, and the film insists, I think, that Cross is not only a flamboyant film maker but, also, "the grand inventor" of all things, God himself.  (O'Toole is more convincing in this role than the deity that appears in the Bible.)  The picture is a peculiar and unstable mixture of serious subject matter, high-flown eloquence, and down-and-dirty pulp fiction with gratuitous sex, tits and ass, and lots of elaborately staged explosions and chases.  The director, Richard Rush, is an enigma -- he cut his teeth on low-budget exploitation films, made The Stunt Man, which was highly regarded in its time, and, then, slipped back into audience-pleasing genre pictures. Critics determined that Rush was neither 'fish nor fowl", not exactly Francis Coppola but, also, considerably superior to the exploitation films that he ended up making.  Hollywood likes type-casting not only in its actors but also directors and, since no one could really assimilate The Stunt Man (famously praised by Pauline Kael as one of the best pictures of the year) Rush wasn't given the right material for his talent and ended-up slipping out of view.

The Stunt Man was one of two novels written by the New Yorker investigative reporter Paul Brodeur.  It was published in 1970 before Brodeur became well-known for his crusading journalism -- he was one of the investigators that exposed the carcinogenic effects of asbestos and was, generally a specialist in pollution and toxic tort exposes.  My suspicion is that the unique qualities of The Stunt Man derive from what were probably literate and, even, high-toned aspects of the source novel.  The picture involves a Vietnam war veteran on the run from the cops and probably suffering from what we would call today "PTSD."  The veteran stumbles onto a film set involving a classic car crashing off an old bridge into a river.  The car is driven eccentrically and the vet believes that it is trying to run him down.  He interferes with the car and, then, sees it plunge off the bridge and into the river.  (Although the car crash is an effect in the film that Cross is making, the vet interprets it as occurring because of his efforts to avert the vehicle from running over him.)  A stuntman drowns in the crash.  The vet continues his escape and ends up at a beach where a battle is being filmed "with five cameras", a big spectacle involving many showy explosions, fragmentary corpses (they turn out to be men in make-up half buried in the sand) and bi-planes strafing the advancing troops.  A cop is investigating the disappearance of the stuntman whom we know to have drowned in the river.  He harasses the director and his crew and, under pressure, they claim the scruffy fugitive is, in fact, the missing stunt man.  The cop smells a rat but he can't get to the bottom of the ruse.  Cross hires the vet who is impersonating a stunt man to perform real stunts in the movie.  They call the vet "Lucky."  Lucky turns out to have genuine gift for "hell for leather" stunts involving significant danger.  He has sex with a make-up girl and, then, is seduced by the film's leading lady played by an angelic-looking Barbara Hershey.  After some amusing chases filmed in Keystone Kop manner by Cross -- Lucky evades an army of inept German troops wearing comical Pickelhaube (that is, Prussian helmets with spear-point tops) by clambering all over the complicated gables and eaves of the Coronado Hotel (a landmark on the beach in San Diego).  Some of the stunts seem lethal and are increasingly dangerous and Lucky comes to believe that Cross is trying to engineer his death -- probably to conceal the actual death of the stunt man in the river.  In the course of his love affair with the film's leading lady, Lucky learns that the character is also sleeping with Eli Cross.  This leads to some quarrels.  Hershey is puzzled by Lucky's naivety -- she says that actresses having sex with directors is just the way the industry works.  Lucky and the actress get drunk and have a slapstick love scene involving a set that they partially destroy and about forty gallons of paint.  (There's a fantastic purely seventies' line in this scene -- Barbara Hershey who is half-naked and covered in paint, cries out:  "We gotta get organized!")  Lucky acts out the offense for which the cops are chasing him -- he beat up his wife's boyfriend  (she was unfaithful when he was in 'Nam) in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop -- and persuades Hershey that he is fundamentally harmless.  (As a Vietnam vet everyone has suspected him of rape, murder, and various war crimes.)  Cross persuades Lucky to perform the stunt that killed the other stunt man.  He and the leading lady plot to flee the film set and avoid the potentially deadly stunt in the river.  This sets up the climax of the movie.  

Pauline Kael commended the movie as "kinetic" and film's mise-en-scene is, indeed, a triumph of controlled, vivid chaos.  In the opening scene, a buzzard snatches an apple as two line-men look on and, then, are confronted by the fleeing vet.  The sequence involving the first river stunt features a picture perfect stream running in a narrow gorge -- there's a tree off-balance and about to topple into the water, a memorably strange image.  Much of the film is staged like a silent comedy, in particular, the scene in which the vet clambers all over the facade of the Coronado Hotel as dozens, if not hundreds, of German soldiers pursue him firing guns and dodging bullets blasted down on the crumbling structure by a pesky bi-plane -- this is a triumph of action film-making both comical and scary and it's as good as anything Steven Spielberg has done.  Even dialogue sequences jerk and spastically dance around -- huge waves batter a sea-wall splashing thirty feet in the sky in one scene.  The camera placement is exemplary and the editing is sharp as a razor.  Pennants whip in boil in the wind.  Surf pounds the beach and, overhead, the helicopter banks and turns and spirals.  Peter O'Toole's Eli Cross seems sometimes to underplay and act down to earth, but, most of the time, his British diction is perfect and rotund and he declaims his speeches as if they were Shakespeare.  O'Toole's dramatic delivery if offset by the grungy appeal of Steve Railsbeck who plays Lucky -- the contrast between the two acting styles is one the pleasures offered by this movie.  Expensively made and brilliantly acted, The Stunt Man is as fun as a cult movie, but better, I think.  

Sentimental Value

 Joachim Trier's 2025 Sentimental Value is an ambitious picture that explores, among other things, intergenerational trauma, art as therapy, self-destructiveness, and intricate family dynamics.  Trier is painting with a broad brush and freights his film with too much material -- there is too much neurosis, guilt, and reconciliation in the movie; I found it exhausting and, after ninety minutes, was longing for the thing to be over -- I think its two hours and 13 minutes long.  This is an estimable movie by an important director but it's excessive in the sense that the viewer can't quite keep the various patterns devised by the director in mind -- presented in short sequences that end with the screen suddenly dark, the movie has a staccato rhythm and, despite its potentially lugubrious subject matter, the film has a light touch -- it's like one of Woody Allen's pictures from the eighties without the one-liners and Borscht belt gags; in fact, the movie has a role that seems tailor-made for Woody Allen -- this is the part of Gustav, the manipulative director, who seems brazenly willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of his art.  With a little spin, the movie's rather Gothic subject matter could be presented as a black comedy -- Trier doesn't opt for comedy but, I admire him, for not shaping his material into some sort of tragedy or melodrama either.  He's a realist, at least in this movie and most of what we see and hear is plausible on the level of quotidian observation -- these seem to be real people and their interactions aren't heightened, nor do they veer into Bergman's metaphysical darkness.  In its odd way, it's a companionable movie.

The intergenerational trauma underlying the movie is socio-historical and, also, personal.  Gustav's mother was a psycho-therapist, practicing in the family's wonderful-looking early Victorian house.  During World War Two, she was betrayed by neighbors as a member of the Resistance, sent to a camp, and severely tortured.  When Gustav was eight, his mother hanged herself, an enigmatic and catastrophic act that is either over-motivated or under-motivated depending upon how you view things.  Gustav is a film-maker and has achieved international fame.  He's also seventy and hasn't made a movie for fifteen years.  But he has written a script about his mother which he regards as his magnum opus.  Netflix is interested in financing the movie and Gustav is engaged in machinations to cast the film, hire a director of photography and a technical crew, to get the picture made.

Gustav has two daughters by his wife whom he has divorced.  The movie begins at the family home where people are gathered after the funeral of Gustav's ex-wife.  No one seems particularly griefstricken -- these are Norwegians and they are masters at maintaining a stiff upper lip.  Nora, the eldest sister, is an actress who has appeared in a TV series but is mostly active in Oslo's theater.  She suffers from severe stage-fright.  In an early scene, we see her refusing to go on-stage during the premiere of some classical drama -- it may be Chekhov's The Sea Gull or some other work in the classical repertoire.  Nora flees through the backstage area, fights people trying to drag her on stage, and, then, summons her married boyfriend and demands a lightning sexual encounter with him.  He says there's not enough time and, so, Nora replies that he should hit her hard in the face to knock her out of her hysteria.  He slaps her and, after some more struggles, she goes on-stage and, apparently, amazes everyone with her performance.  Later, Nora says that she's only 20% functional and 80% fucked-up.  Her dysfunction consists of anger and loneliness with depression.  By contrast, Agnes, Nora's little sister, is successful -- she seems to be happily married, has an eight-year old son on whom she dotes, and works as an "academic historian" as she says.  Gustav's flamboyant and belated appearance at the family Leichenschmaus or funeral buffet destabilizes the situation and knocks the sisters back into memories of their childhood.  Agnes starred as a child in one of Gustav's movies, indeed, probably his last movie before the fifteen years dry period.  The movie, a fragment of which we see, harkens back to the Occupation of Norway and involves Nazi soldiers snatching a young boy while his sister, played by Agnes, watches from a nearby train.  Since that movie was shot, neither of the sisters has had much to do with Gustav -- he's selfish and has been an absent father.  Gustav approaches the older sister, Nora, and asks her to play the role of the mother in his new play.  Nora refuses angrily and won't even read the script.  At a retrospective of his films at Deauville, Gustav meets a Hollywood starlet, Rachel (played by Elle Fanning) and, after a night drinking with her on the beach, casts her in the role of his mother. Rachel comes to Norway where Gustav is planning to shoot the movie in the family home (where Agnes is living).  He intimidates Rachel by showing her the footstool that his mother used to climb up to a noose to hang herself in one of the rooms in the house -- this is a lie:  everyone in the family knows the footstool came from Ikea.  It turns that Rachel is a bad fit for the part.  The plan is to shoot the movie in English which seems problematic.  Gustav has Rachel cut her hair and change its color so she looks more like Nora.  Finally, Rachel, recognizing that she is miscast, graciously withdraws from the movie.  Gustav has written the role for Nora, whom he recognizes as sharing traits with his mother.  He hopes her performance in the film will free her from the burden of the past.  At first, Nora refuses to even read the script.  But, then, at last, Agnes prevails upon her to study the script.  (This is in the context of Gustav trying to cast Agnes' son, Erick, as the little boy in the movie -- that is, as Gustav himself as a child; Agnes refuses and accuses her father of egoism and being opportunistic and malevolently manipulative.)  Gustav has a heart attack but is too mean and tough to die.  He directs the movie with Nora playing the part of his suicidal mother and, in fact, Erick as the child.  There's an intentionally confusing sequence near the end in which we don't know whether we're watching the movie or a film within the film.  (This echoes an earlier scene in which Nora begins crying and curls into a fetal posture by her bed -- a scene that turns out to be a part in a play in which she is acting; we can see the audience in the long shot of her on the floor.)

This summary omits many interesting things in the movie.  There's a bitter and moving meditation on old age:  Gustav's long time cameraman is not sufficiently spry to manage the hand-held camera shots in the proposed film and his old friend, at first, seems to reject him for the project.  Nora's married boyfriend gives up on her -- now that his wife has divorced him, Nora thinks that they can expose their love affair, but the boyfriend isn't interested in committing.  There's biographical scenes from Gustav's youth and middle-age and a long sequence in which Agnes, the historian, researches her grandmother's capture and torture by the Occupation forces. Trier films family squabbling about the dead mother's possessions and there's conversation about the status of the old house -- Gustav's wife was granted the house in the divorce but the papers were never filed and Gustav expects the home to revert to him.  Much of this material, broadly speaking, is superfluous.to the main plot which involves Gustav persuading Nora to act in the role of his mother.  The staging of the final scenes suggests that, perhaps, Gustav has re-written history so that his mother does not commit suicide -- but this is very unclear.  (The clue is whether we hear the Ikea foot stool knocked over when the act occurs -- Gustav's mother has shut the door on the chamber where she commits the act.,)  Another curiosity in the film is narration, seemingly by the old house itself.  The house has a crack running from its foundation up to the attic -- it's like the fatally flawed House of Usher.  

Sentimental Value is never less than highly cultured, subtle, and beautifully made and acted.  It's a little too diffuse for my taste and I prefer Trier's earlier The Worst Person in the World which seems more focused and coherent to me.  But it's probably important for those interested in cinema to see this movie and the time spent watching the film is certainly not wasted.  

Macbeth (Guthrie Theater on February 8, 2026)

 It pains me to say that culture in the United States is slowly, but inexorably, renouncing Shakespeare.  The urgency, it seems, that once underwrote prestige productions of Shakespeare has leaked away and, somehow, dissipated.  You won't see evidence of this tendency anywhere but in the repertoire theater companies that once regarded Shakespeare as central to their project -- elsewhere Shakespeare's theater is so far from the mainstream as to be invisible, a tissue of misinterpreted legends buried under detritus like Grand Theft Hamlet.  However, this trend is most obvious at the regional festivals once mostly dedicated to Shakespeare but now slumming with musical comedies and politically correct and virtuous shows about oppression, abuse, and fortitude in facing hardship.  In the little town of Lanesboro, picturesquely nestled under the pale cliffs looming over the Root River bridge and the old grain elevator, an Ibsen festival flourished for about twenty years.  The sponsors of the festival produced all of Ibsen's major plays, including a heavily redacted version of Pillars of Society, but, then, energy flagged and audiences diminished and, two years ago, I think, the Ibsen festival announced that it was pleased to continue is summer repertory productions except without any Ibsen at all -- the shows on offer now are versions of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, British farces, and other audience-pleasing fare.  What is the cause for Shakespeare's shrinking importance?  (Ibsen has already been forgotten.)  I think this has something to do with the notion that post-George Floyd and post-me-too feminism, the works of the Bard have become increasingly irrelevant -- when a play needs apologies and contorted justifications to be presented, the work seems unnecessary.  Color-blind and gender-blind casting can supply some rationale for a new look at Shakespeare's plays, but, ultimately, those measures create more havoc and trouble than they are worth; in Elizabethan theater largely concerned with dynastic issues, the tyrannical power of fathers, and intricate family melodrama, gender- and color-blind casting is a distraction on which many progressive directorial ambitions have foundered. There are no queer subtexts in Shakespeare, although this sort of emphasis can be provided from outside (and, indeed, far outside) of the Shakespearian canon.  But just because you can distort a text to support a currently fashionable thesis or interest doesn't mean that it should be done.  I'm wounded to say that Shakespeare, with his peculiarly impenetrable diction and surfeit of plotting, hasn't got a lot to say to audiences in 2025.  And, so, I can feel the Bard of Avon slipping away, his plays drifting toward the status of artifacts in a museum.  This process has been continuing all my life -- people older than me will recall Lawrence Olivier's versions of Hamlet and Henry V; I recall Peter Brooks mounting a Midsummer Night's Dream that featured Diana Rigg in a state of (mostly) undress.  But, as Shakespeare became more and more culturally remote, the plays began to seem less and less important, perfunctory exercises in tongue-twisting diction.  They say that a frog will sit in water with the heat gradually increasing until it is boiled to death.  (This is a myth).  The new Guthrie production of Macbeth, however, is the performance for me that has made this particular frog leap far and wide away from the water in which it is immersed.  Shakespeare, I'm afraid, is no longer persuasive of anything.

A famous man of the theater, Joe Dowling, has directed this Macbeth.  Everything seems hastily contrived and slipshod.  The play is cut to an hour and fifty minutes, which, in itself, is not a problem.  Macbeth has to move at lightning speed to dramatize the sudden and lethal destruction of its two main characters.  There should be a sort of ritualized frenzy about the play.  In this production, the violence is downplayed -- the bloody soldier who announces Macbeth's berserker courage and ferocious slaughter of the King's enemies is scarcely wounded at all.  He was not bloody, in fact, as far as I could see.  Modern sensibilities in polite theater-going have banished the gore (beheadings and so on) to an offstage status.  There's a bow to horror fans -- and Macbeth is more akin to a modern horror movie than a well-made play -- in the show's final moments in which dead Macbeth is hoisted by his ankles above the stage, to dangle head downward at the curtain.  But this effect is spoiled by the time it takes to engineer this effect -- supernumeraries are busy attaching bondage-style cuffs to dead Macbeth's ankles and this labor seems contrived.  (Better to just sever Macbeth's head off-stage and have MacDuff brandish the thing by its gory locks at the final blackout -- again, confident velocity is everything in the staging of this show.)  The play looks like it's done on the cheap -- when Macbeth tells his servant to strap on his armor for the final showdown, the harness looks like a poorly made leather vest; it's not armor at all.  The only elaborate effect is saved for the penultimate scene when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane -- six or seven soldiers stand behind neon-lights configured like straight 30 foot tall pine trees; it's showy but, also, tone-deaf:  a glitzy Las Vegas effect imported onto the dour, grim Wurtele Thrust Stage.  The show's is badly cast.  Macbeth is played by a handsome pipsqueak of a boy -- he has absolutely no charisma and no gravitas.  Lady Macbeth is better and she seems palpable older than her youthful husband.  The witches aren't frightening.  They prance around a hole in the stage from which some fog emerges, chanting in unison, an effect that doesn't ever work successfully in the theater.  Mercifully, the dramaturge has cut the two scenes intended to cater to King James' morbid interest in witchcraft and demonology -- these are the scenes in which Hecate makes a completely redundant appearance.  The idiotic scene in which Malcolm claims all sorts of damnable vices to test MacDuff (I think -- the whole thing makes no sense) is inexplicably retained.  "I'm a really bad, bad guy," says Malcolm and, then, tells the baffled MacDuff that he's exceedingly temperate and virtuous -- this is awful stuff and really should be omitted from any reasonable performance of the play.  Otherwise the cuts are mostly local, inconspicuous, and scattered -- of course, the witches aren't going to be allowed to put boiled Jew in their potion.  The Scottish troops wear black jumpsuits and have little red berets like Curtis Sliwa's subway vigilantes.  The final duel between MacDuff and Macbeth is staged as a knife-fight -- it looks tawdry and unconvincing, a couple of slender pretty boys pretending to be bar-toughs in a tavern scuffle.  Ultimately, this production by the much-vaunted Guthrie Theater smells like a High School show featuring a precocious, but callow, cast.  It's not the Guthrie's fault -- it's the Zeitgeist.

La Grazia

 Paolo Sorrentino's new film, La Grazia (2025) concerns a man on the brink of old age taking stock of his life.  This situation (it doesn't amount to a narrative) is amplified into consequence by the fact that the movie's protagonist is the President of Italy.  The irony explored by the film is that its famous and successful hero, who seems almost universally beloved, has come to doubt his achievements -- in fact, he wonders whether he has accomplished anything useful at all.  Some elderly men afflicted by this doubt might arrange to sit down with their pastors for a philosophical chat; President de Santis, the film's hero, has a collegial conversation with the Pope, an African with grey dreadlocks and a snazzy motorcycle.  The Pope turns out to be not much help:  "You have no future," Pope bluntly tells the President.  The Pope also diagnoses the President's problem:  "You must make yourself light."  The President has only a few months left in his regime -- he has been in the lavish Quirinal Palace (the President's residency) for seven years. But there are a number of things weighing him down, resisting the Pope's injunction to be more "light":  among the affairs of State, there are two pardons testing the limits of the criminal law -- an abused woman has stabbed her husband while he was sleeping 18 times but claims his mistreatment justified the act; a high school teacher who has resigned his position to care for his wife with Alzheimer's is the subject of a pardon petition made by his ex-students:  the teacher suffocated his wife claiming that this was euthanasia justified by the woman's violent rages and anger.  Adding to his burdens, the President is considering a law authorizing euthanasia in certain circumstances, a politically risky enactment that is strongly opposed by the Pope and his Church.  The President's relationship with his daughter, herself a renowned jurist, is suffering due to his vacillation as to the euthanasia bill -- she acts as the President's closest advisor and is one of the drafters of the bill. (If I sign the bill, the protagonists says, I'm a murderer; if I don't, I'm a torturer./ The President's son lives in Montreal where he produces pop music, neglecting his vocation as a classical composer.  To add to his misery, the President's horse, Elvis, is slowly dying -- and the President is unable to give the order to put the horse out of its misery; this reluctance mirrors his hesitation at signing the euthanasia bill into law.  Further, the President is mourning the loss of his wife, the love of his life, eight years earlier.  Complicating his mourning is his knowledge to an absolute certainty that his wife was unfaithful to him at the start of their forty year marriage.  The President who declares himself as a famous Judge to be an absolute advocate of the truth wants to know the identity of the man who cuckolded him -- he's still prone to undignified jealous rages.  And the poor fellow is hungry all the time:  his daughter has put him on a diet of quinoa and broiled chicken breast -- no pasta for him.  Cigarettes have been banned but he bums them off the cuirassier, his bodyguard and confidante.  President de Santis has written a two-thousand plus page treatise on the criminal law (no one can get through the text which is apparently incredibly detailed and exhaustive.)  The only thing he seems to like is rap music -- he listens on ear-buds and memorizes some of the lyrics.

The film, although visually extravagant, is simple enough.  In the course of the two hour picture, the President will issue a pardon to one of the two convicts serving time, his horse dies, his daughter leaves Rome to visit her brother in Montreal and is off-stage when the President's term ends; the President will sign the bill authorizing euthanasia, and will discover the secret about his wife's affair.  He will take the advice of the Pope and imagine himself as very light, as weightless in fact.  Most of the movie's principle conflicts will be resolved and, in effect, all will be well -- it's all somewhat predictable and sentimental but moving as well:  despite his unhealthy obsession with his wife's adultery, President de Santis is a decent man, a good and fair judge, and a politician whose self-sacrifice has saved the Republic -- at least, this is what people claim when de Santis goes to La Scala and is acclaimed by the other operagoers as a hero.  Sorrentino's picture is quiet and self-restrained -- it's a rare thing, an attempt to explore the life of a man who is virtuous and, what's more, a politician.  The movie contains a number of spectacular images and set pieces; it's lush with interiors full of ancient books and huge marble statues.  It's Rome and everything is outsized, larger than life including the lavish rooms in the Quirinale Palace.  All of the episodes are discrete, chapters in a book that seem set off from one another, but they are carefully configured to echo and resonate with one another.  The President's fear of aging and the feebleness of old age is embodied in a scene in which the Prime Minister of Portugal comes for a state visit -- they've rolled out the red carpet but a sudden squall with rain uproots the carpet and blows it around so that the old, feeble ruler ends up on the ground.  Rain falls in torrents. The imagery is slowed to a nightmare stagger:  "Am I as old as he is?" the President wonders.  In another scene that develops the idea of the "lightness of being" (to quote the Milan Kundera novel), the President watches an astronaut at a space station -- the sound is disabled and video has failed so the astronaut can not see the President.  He sheds a tear  and, then, laughs at the tear which floats in the air like a small quicksilver planet.  The President's daughter goes to visit Isa Rocca who stabbed her husband while he was asleep.  The woman is beautiful and transfixes the lawyer with a steely intimidating stare -- her eyes seem to spark with electricity.  Later the President goes out to the same prison where he insists on sitting in the waiting room with the hard-bitten family members of convicts.  He interviews the ascetic school teacher whom he concludes to be fundamentally dishonest about his own motives. After bidding farewell to his staff (his social calendar secretary, a handsome woman, seems to be in love with him), the President walks back to his apartment overlooking the Spanish Stairs -- since his daughter is gone to Montreal and not controlling his diet, he orders a pizza for his first night at home alone.  In a video face-time session, he talks to his son and daughter.  It's a warm conversation but I don't think it restores the rift between parent and child.  The president finds out who cuckolded him but, as one would expect, that information doesn't make any sense.  Make sure, you stay for a final scene embedded in the credits.  The President has an old friend, Coco, who is fashionista and art collector -- although paradoxically she's proclaimed that she wants to burn all the museums.  Coca is a plump matron who wears huge round glasses and she is impulsive, outspoken, and amusing; she's flamboyantly selfish -- when she sees what is on offer at a dinner party with the President (it's quinoa and broiled  white fish served in tiny portions) she excuses herself and says that she will go out to some place for a better meal.  In the last scene, Coco is slurping her soup while the President, seated before his own bowl of soup, glares at her with disturbing and utter hatred.  "Get off my fucking back!" Coco says, an imprecation that seems to soothe the ex-President.  

I liked this movie and, of course, enjoyed its stunning photography and locations, as well as the dense, aphoristic chatter.  But, I think, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts.  It's a jigsaw and a movie that is ceaselessly clever in articulating its themes and crafting episodes that embody and challenge those themes.  But it also feels somewhat inorganic and schematic -- Sorrentino can exhaust you with all the heavy lifting required to stitch this non-narrative into a discourse on old age, suffering,and friendship -- these are worthy subjects but, also, a bit confining.  The movie never really opens up to let the fresh air in.  Toni Servillo, Sorrentino's surrogate as an actor, is astonishing as the President.  There's a sleek and inquisitive-looking robot dog that leads the procession from the Quirinal Palace to the Spanish Stairs - it's some kind of anti-terrorism weapon but elegant as whippet or Norwegian elkhound. 

The Grapes of Wrath

 During the Battle of Minneapolis in January 2026, Bruce Springsteen accompanied by Tom Morello played a concert at First Avenue on the stage made famous by Prince.  The concert was in support of the armies of protestors who openly opposed and, in some instances, impeded ICE personnel brutalizing people on the streets of Minneapolis.  The concert's motto was "ICE out!", a phrase chanted by the people in the room and balcony overlooking the stage.  Springsteen played his protest song written for the occasion, an anthem called "The Streets of Minneapolis" in which the singer calls out the authoritarian violence occurring on Nicollet Avenue and declares resistance to the goons who killed the American citizens Rebecca Good and Alex Pretti.  Springsteen also sang "The Ghost of Tom Joad", another anthem about poverty in the United States and the progressive forces arrayed against that poverty.  In this song, the symbol for resistance to the corrupt "New World Order" is the protagonist of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad.  The song cites some of Joad's famous promise to his mother that he will be present in spirit any time the forces of injustice oppress the poor and, also, anytime the poor rise to express their joyous resistance..  Morello unleashes a savage guitar attack on the evils identified in the song -- he uses every possible virtuosic technique to dramatize the ingenuity, rage, and hurricane-level force with which people will oppose tyrants:  at one point in the concert, he plays his guitar with his teeth (after the manner of Jimi Hendrix) turning the instrument over to reveal a placard that reads "Arrest the President!"; the front side of his guitar is emblazoned "ARM THE HOMELESS!"   The idea seems to be that the storm is coming, wrath is at hand, and the righteous will trample out the "vintage of the grapes of wrath" in an irrepressible uprising, a sonic storm of steel.

Inspired by this concert (you can see it on You-Tube), I decided to take another look at John Ford's 1940 Grapes of Wrath.  The movie is made with fierce urgency and feels like a documentary.  (It's somewhat like Guzman's The Battle of Chile or Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers.)  In a hundred years, people will understand the Great Depression through Ford's film -- it's imagery, I expect, will replace actual footage from the Depression in the imaginations of Americans; I think this is a phenomenon similar to what will occur with Spielberg's Schindler's List -- the Hollywood movie that will likely come to stand in for the horrors that it presents.  (Something similar has a;ready happened with regard to Eisenstein's films -- footage from Eisenstein's pictures about the Russian Revolution have actually come to signify the Revolution to the extent that the tentative and very uncommunicative real pictures and film are mostly banished to the outer darkness.  

Ford's documentary effects are achieved by a variety of means.  First, there is the bleak but spectacular photography by Gregg Toland -- images that have an iconic force;  lone figures striding through desolate landscapes, night shots full of shadow and light that look like George la Tour (for instance, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad delivers his famous speech by the light of a cigarette -- his sharp features are sculpted in an acid-bath of shadow; the crowd scenes in shanty towns or near fence-lines mobbed by striking workers have a singular power and immediacy without surrendering the authority of single faces and contorted bodies to choreographed group motion:  German expressionism and the Russians reduce crowds to abstract vectors, diagrams of force.  Ford's crowds, whether brawling or dancing, display a unity of motion highlighting, however, individuals within the group. The protagonist, Tom Joad, is no saint -- he's a walking hair trigger of anger and bitterness.  When his mother says that she prayed that prison would not make her son "mean", you can see that it has been "touch and go" with Tom -- his rage is explosive and when he strikes, he kills.  Tom constantly makes cynical and bitter comments even to those helping him (he taunts a truckdriver who gives him a ride) -- he's a highly flawed and, even, frightening protagonist.  Midway through the movie, my wife said that the people "all looked so weird" and asked why the extras and, even, some of the main figures in the movie were so eccentric in appearance -- in fact, downright ugly.  Clearly Ford is simulating the austere and stark portraits of victims of Depression as portrayed by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans -- the people in the film, look gaunt, haggard, they have bulging eyes and, often, move in a shaky way; clearly these are people who have been starved.  The young girls are bony and there are big-eyed skeletal children and wretched old ladies trying to uphold their dignity in frayed sun-bonnets and threadbare dresses.  Everything is vividly imagined and clearly shown - the farm trucks weighted down with  immigrants seem impossibly frail and overloaded; the small impoverished towns look suitably unwelcoming, the ruined farms squashed by caterpillars, the pointless gestures of defiance:  men brandishing guns that they are too beaten and crestfallen to fire, meaningless brawls, a preacher defiantly holding out his arms to be cuffed at the wrist.  There's four-fifths of a work of genius on screen.  The last ten minutes declines a little into sermonizing and the sermons are delivered in bad faith -- obviously, the only answer to the misery that we see is some form of Communist Revolution, but John Ford (and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson) aren't willing to endorse the logic of that solution and, so, the movie glides into a kind of mysticism about the omnipresence of Tom Joad and the resilience of the People. (with a Sandbergian capitol "P").  In the film's last shots, we see Tom Joad striding alone against a barren horizon.  Then, Ford shows us a great procession of  rattle-trap trucks, crowded as floats in a May Day parade, crossing the desolate land -- it's supposed to be a sign of the ever-enduring power of the people.  But, ghosts don't lead flesh-and-blood revolutions and Bruce Springsteen's song is about "the ghost of Tom Joad."  But the picture's delirious, half-baked ending is also filmmaking of a high order just not as powerful as the genius stuff of the first 4/5ths of the picture.

The excellence of the movie lies in its innumerable, powerful details.  When a gun is discharged in a Hooverville, an old lady is hit by the bullet and lies dying in the dirt street.  Two other old ladies cradle her body in their arms and cry out:  "She's bleeding to death."  A sheriff's officer shrugs and says "those 45's do sure make a mess."  The matriarch of the Joad clan tries to feed a crowd of starving childrn.  One of the kids sniffs that he's had a chicken recently and doesn't want hand-outs -- another little kid says the boy and his dad are lying and that they are just as hungry as rest of them.  Ma sends the mob of urchins to "get flat sticks" so they can scrape out the bottom of her stew pot.  But the kids run to a mountain of empty cans and pick them up so they will have something to put their booty in.  The cop in a small California town says that he came from Oklahoma only two years earlier and, then, warmly greets the Joad family -- a breath later, he tells them to get out of town before sundown.  In a work-camp built like a KZ Lager, management systematically cheats the workers, unilaterally reducing their wages to less than starvation pay.  People protesting this injustice get beaten with ax-handles.  The half-crazed former preacher, played with wild-eyed enthusiasm by John Cassavetes is killed for advocating "mutual assistance" and collective action.  In the final scene, the migrant workers have left a WPA camp where they are treated kindly, provided medical care, and protected by the Federal Government.  What has enticed them to leave this safe harbor?  I guess it's Ford's desire to end with a spectacular image, that is,  to show us a panorama of old and battered trucks stretching to the horizon and rolling down the highway into the sunset.  

Der Tiger (The Tank)

 Der Tiger, dubbed The Tank in English, is a morose and hopeless German horror film masquerading as a war picture.  It's claustrophobic and literally dark -- the titular tank rumbles through inky forests and hides submerged at the bottom of a river. The inside of the Panzer is a jumble of tight metal boxes that isolate the five-man crew into small metal coffins -- the photography is incoherent and the interior space within the tank although researched, I assume, with Teutonic thoroughness, makes no sense at all.  This is problematic since half of the movie is shot within the Tiger tank. The film has a M.Night Shymalan plot twist that an alert viewer will see as easily as we can visualize the huge specter of the tank lumbering forward a mile or two miles away.  The plot twist is a kind of warped theological variation on Ambrose Bierce's famous story, Zwischenfall auf Eulen-fluss Bruecke.  The movie represents an attempt to make a war film for German audiences.  Obviously, the picture has to be strenuously anti-war without any semblance of heroics, cold, morbid, utterly without the specious exhilaration famously implicit in the tracking shots in All Quiet on the Western Front or the helicopter assault in Apocalypse Now.  The movie must make industrialized warfare look drab and hellish as well as idiotic to boot.  If this is the film's objective The Tank succeeds; the picture seems influenced by Das Boot, the submarine epic made in Germany forty years ago or so -- it shows men in a can with bolts breaking, gouts of fire harassing them, and water drizzling all over their sweaty faces and heads.  And, in a surreal scene, the tank in this picture actually goes underwater and becomes a kind of U-Boat.  I understand that this movie is something of a success in Germany:  there's a hunger for war movies even when they are largely deemed politically incorrect -- but, if a film is made to strip every ounce of glamor or excitement or, even, suspense out of war, then, of course, this should make us question why the picture was even produced in the first place.  War doesn't have many defenders these days and, if the point is to show us, in a doggedly literal way that War is Hell, I think, everyone will likely agree with that proposition.  

A tank is retreating across a night-time battlefield lit like a Bosch hell-scape by innumerable little fires.  The Russians, viewed as shadows in the distance, are advancing and they intend to blow up the bridge over which the tank must drive to escape the sledge-hammer of the Russian attack.  The bridge is bombed and, also, mined by the Russians.  A whirling firestorm ensues and, as the tank crew see a sinister-looking deer on the bridge, the span appears to collapse.  The tank commander has some orders in a folio and, after a conspicuous lacuna during which the bridge over the Dnieper melts into the fire, the soldier rejoins his four member crew where they are repairing the Tiger tank in what looks like the ruins of a church or monastery. ) The tank commander has orders called "Operation Labyrinth" to drive the tank through No Man's Land and, then, behind enemy lines where he is supposed to liberate a general supposedly killed at Stalingrad but, now, thought to be alive and hiding in a bunker in Russian territory. This general is named von Hardenberg -- I have no idea why the name invokes Philip George Friederich Freiherr von Hardenberg, the German romantic who wrote under the pseudonym "Novalis".  (Go figure?) The tank with its five man crew sets out, rolling through a landscape that is a sort of oak savannah with stands of big trees, meadows, and dirt tracks running in all directions.  There are a bunch of adventures.  The tank wanders into a minefield and some big nasty-looking mines have to be defused -- the men are lying on their bellies and sweating profusely.  They pass some zombie-like soldiers rerouting road signs, presumably to confuse the enemy. On the radio, they can't get any signal but some priest solemnly intoning the Latin mass.  There's a tank battle filmed in a sober analytical manner that is devoid of any real interest.  One of the soldiers dies when his lungs are shredded by shrapnel.  We see lyrical shots of one of the commander reunited with his wife although this turns out to be a flashback.  A Concentration Camp light next to cyclone fence blinks on and off.  In a Russian village, a ghost general has his men round up all the women, and children in town, lock them in a factory or warehouse and, then, use a flamethrower to inundate the building in a sea of flames. (Lots of shrill screaming)  At long last, the tank reaches a prairie where there is a deep bunker filled with orangish flame, a spider-hole hide-out full of whores and carousing Nazi soldiers enjoying a last post-apocalyptic chug of Schnaps.  Friederich von Hardenberg, the general killed in Stalingrad, is there, whining about the battle and the evil orders given by Hitler and, of course, sans one of his hands.  It turns out that the tank commander and Hardenberg are not just old buddies, but that the scary-looking corpse-general introduced him to his wife in 1939.  We learn that these family members in Hamburg, for instance, have all been killed.by incendiary bombs.  There's a few more explosions and speeches about following orders and, then, the movie ends in s flashback to the bridge over the Dnieper, the firestorm there, and the malignant-looking stag glaring at the doomed tank and its crew.  I can give you a clue about the picture:  after the bridge collapses, the tank crew perishes and the movie is set in Hell.  The horror! The horror!

This movie is fairly well-made.  The acting consists of grunts and cursing.  It's completely superfluous and unpleasant and so, although I sort  of liked it as a guilty pleasure, I recommend staying away.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Blue Moon

 I like Blue Moon (Richard Linklater, 2025) and recommend it with reservations.  The movie has an unlikely subject, demise of the great lyricist Lorenz (Larry) Hart and observes the Aristotelian unities -- it takes place in what feels like real time in one location and with limited number of actors.  Obviously, the picture is a hobby-project, a movie made for the sheer love of the script and its subject, and the film is lovingly crafted, a work ripened over a dozen years.  (Linklater is patient and takes time on his projects; Boyhood was shot over a period 13 or 14 years.  The director wanted to use his favorite leading man in the lead role but didn't think the handsome actor, Ethan Hawke, looked sufficiently ravaged to play the role -- and, so, Linklater waited a decade for Hawke to age into the part.)  The movie has a claustrophobic aspect, shot on a single complex set in Dublin, a set that simulates the appearance of Sardi's, a famous restaurant and bar, popular with show-folk, in New York's theater district.  Essentially, the movie consists of a series of monologues interpolated between snatches of very witty and allusive dialogue.  The picture, therefore, will not be to many people's tastes.  A half hour of it put my wife to sleep.  It is more akin to Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre than to recent biopics about Johnny Cash, Dylan, and Springsteen.  The speeches and the clever repartee carry the movie.  Furthermore, the show has no real dramatic arc and has no place to go.  These defects, if they can be so characterized, are consistent with the film's subject matter --  the hero Lorenz Hart is washed-up, a self-destructive alcoholic and he has literally no place to go; his luck has run out.  As a man of the theater, it is appropriate that the film is also a very theatrical and stagy interpretation of events involving him that it portrays.  The burgundy red, lushly upholstered piano bar with its walls of framed caricatures, is a sort of "no exit" set, a portrait, as it were, of the inflamed interior of its protagonist's soul. 

Larry Hart has spent 25 years making highly acclaimed Broadway musicals with his partner Richard Rodgers.  Hart is tiny, about five feet, bald and unsightly.  He defends himself with his wit which is cutting, razor sharp, and self-deprecatory.  Alcoholism has limited his ability to work as Rodgers' partner.  While Larry was drying out in the Doctor's Hospital  (where he will die in a few months at 47), Rodgers composed the music for Oklahoma with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein III.  The show is a huge success, although Larry thinks it's simple-minded, conventional, and sentimental.  It's war-time and the show is defended by Rodgers and others as being an idealized work intended to raise spirits and morale during the fighting.  Larry, although he admires the musical more than he cares to admit, tends toward satire -- he mocks Hammerstein for always going for the easiest and most obvious rhyme ("grand" / "land" for instance).  Hart leaves the show early -- he's seen rehearsal productions in New Haven -- and goes to Sardi's  where an after-party is planned.  He engages  in banter with the bartender played by Bobby Carnavale.  The bartender is gruff but kindly and he hesitates to serve Hart since he doesn't want to jeopardize his sobriety.  The lyricist is waiting for a girl with whom he has fallen in love, Elizabeth Weidell -- this is a 20 year old that Hart theoretically desires.  In fact, he's probably gay and his passion for the young woman is a creepy blend of possessiveness, masochistic fawning, and voyeurism -- he wants her to regale him with stories of sexual encounters with fellow students at Yale where she is studying.  Hart, the piano-player, and the bartender quote lines to each other from Casablanca and imitatethe actors in the movie.  Hart mournfully cites Humphrey Bogart's line from the movie:  'I knew then that nobody would ever love me like that --" a key citation in the film.  Oscar Hammerstein III, a huge beefy walrus of a man, and Richard Rodgers come into Sardi's with their entourages and a mob of patrons and backers.  Elizabeth, whose mother is a backer, appears.  Rodgers has bought her flowers and some other gifts, some of them intended to commemorate a trip to a lake in Vermont which Hart remembers with great (and misguided) tenderness.  (Hart's infatuation with Elizabeth doesn't keep him from flirting with the boy who delivers the flowers -- he invites him to his party after the party, a big soiree for which he has retained the "Golden Gate Quartet".  Hart keeps inviting everyone that he meets to his party but it's obvious that no one is going to come -- success is a magnet and, after Sardi's, everyone (including Elizabeth) intends to attend the part of Rodgers' place; people seem embarrassed by Hart's invitations.  After some more monologues and dialogue, Hart makes his plea to the girl in the locked coatroom at Sardi's (he has prevailed on the coatroom attendant to let him importune Elizabeth in that place).  She tells him about a sexual encounter with a handsome boy with whom she is hopelessly in love.  After intercourse, the man has "ghosted her" -- he hasn't called for the four months since the interlude.  Larry is strangely excited by the story.  She says that although the man was impotent in their first encounter and has avoided her after their second interlude, she would, nonetheless, drive thirty hours across the country to see him again.  Larry remarks that no one will ever love him like that.  Elizabeth admits that she loves him but "not in that way."  Larry understands; he says that in every love affair there is someone who gives love and someone who, more or less, passively receives the love given to them.  The party at Sardi's is over.  Larry introduces Elizabeth to Richard Rodgers who seems a little too interested in her -- she leaves to go with him to his party.  The pianist plays "Blue Moon", Larry's most popular song, but a composition that he doesn't like because it is too simple and too sentimental.  In the opening shot, we have seen Larry collapse in an alleyway in a rainstorm.  A title tells us that Larry died at Doctor's Hospital four months later after being found in the gutter half-frozen to death.  He dies at 47.  Rodgers goes on to compose another 15 successful Broadway musicals with Hammerstein.  

The film is understated and laced with interesting allusions to World War Two era culture in New York City.  The characters are carefully drawn in depth:  Rodgers, for instance, who has jilted Hart is portrayed as a man driven to the limits of his patience by Hart's self-destructive drinking; he seems to wish Hart well and this is not merely a theoretical aspiration -- he actually agrees to hire Hart to write lyrics for a revival of a show that they co-authored years ago.  (It's a Connecticut Yankee and Hart did in fact scratch out five new songs for the revival, before his drinking killed him.)  We see a young Stephen Sondheim, apparently nine years old, sniffing dubiously at the rhymes in Oklahoma and pronouncing the prosody sloppy and simple-minded.  (Hammerstein has brought the boy to Oklahoma)\. George Roy Hill, the film maker from Minneapolis who made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, gets a brief cameo as a starstruck Yale theater student.  The great essayist E. B. White also appears in the film as a fellow alcoholic, writing notes as he sips on a martini and exchanging quips with Hart -- it's a fine, dignified part that grounds the movie and keeps it from spinning into the untethered fantasies in which Hart is trapped.  (Hart is given credit for the idea behind E. B. White's children's book, Stuart Little - spelled with a "u" as Hart insists; this is pure fantasy.)

If a movie leaves a lingering series of ambiguities and complications in the viewer's mind and if it is pleasing to contemplate those uncertainties -- the film's negative capacity as it were -- the day after watching the picture, then, I am willing to account the movie as very good, a successful enterprise.  If you are still sorting through the intricacies in the film several days later, then, the picture was, I think, excellent. Linklater is a softspoken director who works directly without any flash or spurious glitter -- it's easy to underestimate him.  But he is certainly one of our best contemporary film-makers.

The Worst Person in the World

 During a climactic argument in Chasing Amy, the heroine, challenged about her past sexual encounters, says:  "I was an experimental girl, for Christ's sake!  Maybe you knew early what track you were on from A to B but, unlike you, I wasn't given a map at birth and, so, I tried it all."  This snippet of dialogue captures some of the qualities of protagonist, Julie, of The Worst Person in the World.  (The film is a 2021 romantic comedy that slips into sobriety and, even, mourning at the end of the picture; directed by Joachim Trier and made in Norway the movie features the luminous Renate Reinsve as the picture's "experimental girl".)  The picture is an even-tempered and mild-mannered portrait of an attractive woman -- she sometimes seems very young and, at other times, appears to be almost middle-aged -- involved in a romantic triangle:  the film depicts her relationship with two men, Aksel, a writer of underground comix, who imagines himself a perpetual rebel and insurgent -- in fact, he's rather bourgeois -- and Eivind, a gawky guy who is also trapped in a fantasy of perpetual youth:  he's underemployed as a coffee barista in downtown Oslo.  The film is charming and, certainly, entertaining enough -- it starts in the Annie Hall mode as a character study of a fascinating young woman; at first, the tone is pure Woody Allen, blithe with brittle-seeming intellectuals, well-stocked book cases, and clever, funny repartee (making small talk at a party, Julie claims that she's a doctor and that "cuddling children" will turn them into drug addicts, an assertion that terrorizes the perfectionist Norwegian mothers with whom she is talking.).  In the last part of the film, mortality intervenes and the movie takes a considerably more somber turn when one of the characters is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and dies.  Parts of the movie are satiric and malicious -- the character of Julie is like a Jane Austen heroine if one of those characters had achieved some notoriety for posting on-line a short story about fellatio.  (The two male characters are fans of the story although one wonders to what extent self-interest plays a role in their approbation.)

Trier is consciously literary and he structures the film into 12 chapters, each neatly entitled and separated by some black frames from one another with both a prologue and an epilogue.  In the prologue, we see Julie in college and observe her flitting from one vocation to another:  first, she wants to be a doctor, then, a psychologist and counsel, and, finally, a photo-journalist, although she really doesn't achieve anything in photography until the end of the movie.  She enters a relationship with the underground comix guy Aksel -- he has made comic books about a feral and subversive bobcat ("Guape").At a party celebrating a new publication by Aksel, Julie gets bored, and wanders away.  Festive occasions in Oslo are celebrated on a high green hill overlooking the city where there is an elegant esplanade.  (In the film's first shot, we see Julie in a black party dress in profile against the backdrop of the bluff and harbor below on one of Oslo's endless pale summer nights.  The scene is repeated twenty minutes in the movie -- this is the image showing Julie's escape from Aksel.) Julie crashes a wedding party also in a house atop the bluff where she meets Eivind.  They are both drunk and they play a little game in which the objective is to see how intimate they can get with one another without actually having sex -- the answer, by the way, is "pretty intimate" since they take turns watching one another urinate.  There are several more parties in the film.  In one of them, Aksel takes Julie to meet his friends, most of whom have children.  He wants to have a child with Julie. The married couples fight, and both Aksel and Julie are embarrassed.  When Julie, drunkenly says, "let's make a baby", Aksel doesn't seem to take her encouragement to heart.  Julie has lied to Eivind about being a doctor.  She actually works as clerk in a bookstore.  She is upset to see Eivind come into the store.  We are later shown that he's with Sunniva, a woman who wants a book on "Green Yoga".  There's a flashback to Sunniva and Eivind camping on a desolate mountain in Finnmark.  Eivind has done a genetics test through Ancestry and discovered that she has 3.6% Sami blood.  This turns her into a Sami shaman and ritual practitioner as well as an environmentalist; Eivind struggles to keep up her with modish shamanic rituals, her yoga practice as a teacher and her environmental activism.  Ultimately, when Eivind breaks up with Sunniva to live with Julie, he condemns himself as a traitor to her and the climate -- that is, "the worst person in the world."  Julie is in love with Eivind -- who she imagines in a startling sequence as the only person in the whole world:  everyone else is paralyzed and motionless.  She breaks up with Aksel who worships her.  It's a sad and disturbing scene:  poor Aksel is left wearing a shirt but without pants or underpants when she walks out on him.  Julie doesn't have a gift for happiness.  She quarrels with Eivind whom she denounces as shiftless.  Then, she learns that Aksel has pancreatic cancer and is dying.  She visits him on several occasions.  He announces to her that she is the great love of his life.  He is morose and terrified and, later, we seem him enduring pain.  Julie gets Aksel to talk about his childhood -- they do a sort of nostagia tour of Oslo and Julie takes pictures of him with her large Canon camera.  Aksel dies and Julie is with Eivind. She's pregnant with Eivind's child and decides to have the child.  But she miscarries.  In the epilog, we see Julie taking publicity photos on the set of a movie that seems to echo some of the themes and aspects of the film we have been watching.  The actress in the movie goes outside where she meets Eivind who is holding their baby.  

This summary doesn't capture the pictorial ingenuity of the film or its complexity.  Julie's parents are divorced.  Her father seems to be a pathological liar -- he lies but it doesn't matter because no one believes him in the first instance.  There's a scene in which Julie with friends takes mushrooms and has vivid and frightening hallucinations -- she's in an old woman's body suckling an infant.  There are interesting and baffling visual motifs -- in an early scene, Aksel shows Julie a window in his apartment that has thick crazed glass; when he's dying, Aksel shows Julie tinted windows, stained glass, in a childhood flat.  We see Oslo through those red, blue, and yellow panes.  When Aksel says that Julie was the love of his life and the reason he wants to keep living, she's too honest to reciprocate -- he is obviously not the love of her life. (There's a painful detail:  Julie cuddles with Aksel in his hospital bed, but when he puts his hand on her breast, she nonchalantly brushes it aside.)  When Aksel asks her if she was faithful to him, she also wounds him with her honesty, admitting that she was involved with Eivind when they were together.  Aksel's comic is adapted into a Christmas movie called Guape ruins Christmas, obviously an atrocious corruption of his work.  The picture is beautifully shot.  It doesn't add up to a whole lot --  but it's an effectively mounted work and very compelling.  Julie isn't the worst person in the world, nor is she a "very good person" as Aksel says -- but she's vibrant with life and no better nor worse than most of us.  

The Rip

 "Rip", apparently, refers to law enforcement confiscating money earned through criminal activities.  Obviously, there is a strong moral risk associated with so-called "Rip" operations.  What's to keep the cops who have snatched money from bad guys from skimming some of the proceeds for themselves?  Cops are underpaid and, generally, have domestic expenses associated with divorce or child custody problems.  Therefore, strong temptations exist for police officers to expropriate for their own use some amount of the ill-gotten funds that they have seized.

This is the background for Joe Carnahan's very entertaining police thriller The Rip starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as Miami-Dade cops severely tempted by 20 million dollars discovered in a "stash house." Affleck's "Sarge" is involved in a love affair with a fellow police officer.  She gets shot, seemingly by corrupt cops, who are aware that she knows about a huge treasure at a cartel stash house in the suburb of Hialeah.  Sarge's brother, a G-man, is investigating corruption among the Miami-Dade cops.  (He and his brother have a contentious relationship which leads to a fist fight between them in the station house.)  Matt Damon, confusingly called both LT and Dane, is broke -- he is on the verge of losing everything due to a bad and destructive divorce.  Obviously, he's on the look-out for a score that will save him from financial ruin.  The cops seem to be morally flexible.  They sit around afterhours, watching their buddies drive recklessly doing doughnuts in the parking lot while all the officers chug down beers.  Dane has a message that there's a Hialeah stash house with money available for the taking.  With Sarge and an Asian cop called Mo who is a straight arrow, as well as two cocky female officers, the cops drive to the suburb and talk their way into the house where they think the money has been hidden.  They have a sort of terrier named Wilbur who has been trained to sniff out filthy lucre.  The neighborhood where the house is located is eerily empty.  The only person within blocks seems to Desi, a Columbian immigrant, who says that she is house-sitting while probate lawyers work out title to the premises which belonged to her abuela.  The house is full of junk and seems crumbling around Desi's ears.  The cops search the house and discover more than 20 million dollars of cartel cash, bills piled up in dry wall plaster buckets.  But there are other corrupt cops nosing around the neighborhood and the cartel, perhaps, is also engaged in surveillance of the strangely empty neighborhood.  Dane and Sarge bicker about the money and seem baffled as to what to do -- will they steal it all or merely a part or will they turn it in to the boss (who might steal the money for himself).  Meanwhile, an army of bad guys is converging on the house:  gang-members and crooked police out to score themselves,  Someone phones the cops guarding the money (and counting it) in the house telling them to vamoose or "in thirty minutes people will start to die."  Sarge and Dane, are baffled -- they are sorely tempted to steal money but have trouble figuring out a plan.  Desi, of course, the woman house-sitting, would have to be eliminated.  And if the money is stolen, how are Sarge and Dane going to split up the dough, particularly since the two female cops will have to be bought off and something will have to be done with the straight-arrow Mo.  There's another call saying that the cops need to leave right away or "in ten minutes, people will start to die."  The time passes and bad guys attack with machine guns, blasting the house, more or less, to pieces. And so it goes.

I can't provide more of the very complex plot without revealing lots of details as to surprising twists and turns in the story.  Suffice it to say that "things are not as they seem to be", an archetypal plot described in the excellent Ethan Hawke vehicle "The Low Down" a recent cable TV series. The Rip is not a serious movie but its very entertaining.  I was reminded of Walter Hill's Trespass (1992) in which firemen happen on a treasure in a burning building in East St. Louis and are besieged in an old foundry  and attacked by scores of bad guys.  The aspects of the movie involving greed and characters conniving to steal the treasure for which everyone is contending are similar as is the pressure-cooker environment of the foundry ruins under attack. John Carpenter's second or third movie, Assault of Precinct 13 (1976) is also closely parallel to the action in The Rip -- the cops are cut off, trapped while menacing thugs tighten their strangle hold about the precinct house.  The other picture which The Rip resembles is A Simple Plan (Sam Raimi, 1998) a variant on the primordial allegory about greed, Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale"; A Simple Plan involves a family man and small-town account who finds a treasure in a plane crashed in a wintry woods in rural Minnesota.  Two-thirds of The Rip are frightening and suspenseful, mostly confined to the shabby old house full of garbage and the spooky empty neighborhood.   The last third of the movie is less focused, involves two chases, and seems less dire and suspenseful -- there's a slackening of tension as the various conflicts and betrayals are worked out.  This part of the film is not as good as the middle section of the picture, but still exceedingly clever and interesting.  I'm tempted to say that "they don't make movies like this anymore" -- you will see that my comparisons and correlates are all more than 25 years old.  This is a very well-designed and exciting suspense film that I recommend.  

 

Pain and Glory

 A Spanish film director, perhaps in his sixties, is afflicted with many painful health conditions.  Something, possibly a cancerous tumor, is blocking his esophagus and he chokes when eating or, even, drinking water.  His knee is stiff and he walks with an antalgic gait.  Back pain keeps him up at night.  (Antonio Banderas who plays the film director named Salvador Gallo has obviously closely observed elderly people afflicted with pain -- the character seems stiff, limps, and backs carefully into his vehicle when he sits down since neither his knees nor his spine can be trusted to bend as they should; it's a fine physically astute performance.)  Gallo's pain has sidelined him for four years and he lives like a hermit in a voluptuously decorated apartment or condominium in Madrid.  His only associate is a middle-aged woman, Mercedes, who assists him and may be his business agent.  Pain and Glory is a film by Pedro Almodovar and, broadly speaking, it is formulaic and predictable -- something will disturb Gallo's withdrawal from the world and the film will document his painful return to creativity in his profession.  The film that we are watching is revealed, in the last shot, to be the vehicle by which Gallo restores himself as a moviemaker.  Almodovar began his career in the seventies as a cartoonist composing comic-strip telenovelas -- he's has never fully eschewed the esthetics of that form:  Pain and Glory turns on two outlandish coincidences, events which are "tamed" as it were by the relatively sober propriety with which Almodovar treats his subject matter.  We may recall that Fellini cut his teeth as a cartoonist; Pain and Glory resembles in many respect Fellini's autobiographical 8 1/2 -- the plight of the creatively blocked film maker is explored through flashbacks and allegorical emblems (in 8 1/2, the rocket stalled on the launchpad; in Pain and Glory, the mysterious ailments that afflict Gallo).  In both films, the director's love-life is at the center of the movie, suggesting that the dissolution of the hero's libido is part of his problem.  The films also explore various dreams and memories from the central characters' pasts.  Pain and Glory as the name implies is more optimistic than Fellini's visionary film, a movie that suggests that the hero's incapacity derives from pathologies in the film industry and society as a whole:  8 1/2 is vividly satirical -- I don't see much satire in Almodovar's film which has a more realistic tincture.  Like Fellini, Almodovar has a great eye and his images often carry an astonishing weight of flamboyant beauty -- "flamboyant "is the key word:  Gallo's apartment is comprised of great, eye-popping swaths of bright red, particularly in his kitchen which is as gory as an abattoir.  Also like Fellini, Almodovar is a collector of beautiful faces and bodies -- in the memory scenes, the young director as a boy is played by a luminously angelic child; the boy's mother is the radiant, ageless Penelope Cruz -- the boy's first crush, a mason who tiles the walls of the cave where the child lives, is also gorgeous.  And he traipses around totally nude.  The rural landscapes are resplendent -- women doing laundry drape brilliantly white sheets on riverside bushes in a spectacular display.  The past, as recalled by the director, is a strange country -- the little boy has his glamorous, beautiful mother all to himself and the little family lives in some kind of whitewashed cave cut into a hillside.  

The movie's opening shot shows us Gallo submerged in a pool.  The camera surveys a red ridge on his body, a surgical scar extending from "nave to the chops" as Shakespeare would have it.  Clearly, the insides of this fellow have been exposed.  So Pain and Glory begins with an emblematic shot of a wounded body, posing the question as to what is inside -- an inquiry that the film will answer.  A movie made by Gallo thirty years earlier has been revived and the director is asked to appear for a Q & A at some film society.  He is supposed to appear with his star, a handsome actor whose association with Gallo ended with this movie, called Sabor or "Flavor".  The picture was supposed to be about the ecstatic manic vibe connected with cocaine use.  But the star was a heroin addict and he literally brought the movie down with his acting -- apparently, glum, self-centered, and numb.  According to Gallo, this wrecked the movie, although the film has become a cult movie.  Gallo goes to see the co-star.  After an initially tense few minutes, the two men start "chasing the dragon" -- that is, smoking heroin together.  Because of his pain symptoms, Gallo becomes addicted to heroin and has to buy it on the street.  While he is passed-out one day in the actor's apartment, the performer reads a text on Gallo's laptop called the addictions -- it's a thinly veiled autobiographical story about a three-year gay love affair between Gallo and his boyfriend who was a heroin addict.  The actor is enchanted by the story and asks that Gallo let him have the text so that he can manufacture a theater piece, a monologue from it.  The monologue is premiered in an intimate theater and the actor observes a middle-aged man in the audience weeping.  It turns out that his man, who is only temporarily in town and on business (he lives in Buenos Aires),is the real-life figure with whom Gallo had the love affair that is depicted in "Addictions."  The actor tells the man where Gallo lives and he goes to his house.  The two men reminisce about the past, kiss, but don't have sex.  The man from Buenos Aires is now an upstanding citizen, not addicted to any drugs, and married with two children.  The happenstance encounter with the man from Buenos Aires is the first of the two remarkable coincidences on which Almodovar rests his story.

The second coincidence involves a childhood memory of his mother engaging an impoverished plaster-worker and mason to renovate part of their cave.  The tradesman is illiterate and the nine-year old Gallo is extremely precocious and kind -- he agrees to teach the man to read and write in exchange for his labor at the cave.  Gallo is preternaturally patient and succeeds in teaching the mason to read.  The mason is a talented artist and he makes a sketch of Gallo reading in his house.  Gallo, as a pain-tormented and famous director, sees an advertisement for a Barcelona art gallery in which the painting of the little boy reading made fifty years earlier is depicted as for sale.  With his assistant, Mercedes, he goes to the gallery and buys the painting.  There is writing on the back of the painting in which the artist praises Gallo for his patience and kindness in teaching him to read.  The painting was sent to Gallo but he had moved and the picture never reached him.  Gallo is greatly moved.  He consults with a doctor about the tumor in his esophagus.  It turns out not to be cancerous but, in fact, a spinal bone spur that is occluding his throat.  Surgery is planned.  The little painting opens Gallo to more memories and he recalls seeing the tradesman, naked in the cave, bathing after working on the picture.  Gallo is so smitten with the handsome tradesman that he faints dead away.  Gallo, after remembering this moment, is inspired to write a story (and, probably, the scenario of the movie we are watching) called "First Desire."  As he falls asleep under anesthesia, Gallo has a vivid dream of fireworks exploding and, then, realizes that he is with his beautiful young mother watching the night sky that is full of fire and color.  The camera pulls back and we understand that the scene with Gallo and his mother is part of the film we have been watching -- a girl is holding a sound boom over the woman and her son.  A few minutes earlier, Gallo has tried to reconcile with his elderly mother but only partially achieved his objective.  The old woman wants to die in her village but Gallo can't get her back there in time.  So she dies in the ICU and, in fact, alone.  We are given to believe that Gallo's creativity has returned to him.  

It's a complex film filled with weird dead ends and mirroring or parallel effects -- Gallo's estrangement from his mother mirrors his estrangement from the star of Sabor which continues after Gallo does a Q & A with the audience at the revival and acknowledges his anger at the man for turning his cocaine-inflected movie into a heroin addiction show.  The two coincidences both involve art works (the theater piece based on "Addictions" and the young plasterer's painting of the boy who has taught him to read.)  The partial reconciliation between Gallo and his heroin addicted lover (who is now a straight-as-an-arrow family man) is mirrored by partial reconciliation between Gallo and his very pious mother who has not been able to accept with equanimity Gallo's homosexuality.  Other parallel effects are obvious in the movie.  The idea seems to be that art can be a form of redemption and that the very existence of the autobiographical Pain and Glory has redeemed Gallo and, for that matter, Almodovar. 

Royal Cambodian Bronzes at the MIA

On a cold, sunny day between Alberta Clippers, snow squalls, and blizzards, I drove up to Minneapolis to see the exhibition at the Art Institute of bronze figures made in Cambodia mostly around the second half of the 11th century AD.  The battle of Minneapolis was ongoing, masked and heavily armed ICE agents fighting with protestors waving flags and signs and blowing whistles.  (A woman had been shot dead on a residential street a mile and a half from the Art Institute -- this event demonstrates the inadequacy of visual evidence; on cellphone footage, the homicide can be seen from about five different angles from various distances and, yet, no one can really agree as to what the footage, filmed in broad daylight really means.)  Trump is cracking down on Minnesota, apparently in a spasm of pique, induced by the fact that he has never won the State in the three elections in which he stood for the office of President.  It's reputed that there is widespread chaos, but, the City is, in fact, mostly peaceful, people going about their business oblivious to the pepper spray and rubber bullets being fired elsewhere.  I didn't see any trace of the riots or ICE goons attacking people.  The sun was bright; there was a lot of wind and it was very cold.  

The Royal Cambodian Bronzes are mostly petite figures, greenish with oxidized copper or scuffed by centuries of neglect.  There are a number of figures, also four feet high, carved from dingy grey sandstone. The bronzes were once gilded with gold leaf and adorned with jewels but the precious substances are now long gone.  The show involves many artifacts from a French museum (Guimet) and the original label material and catalog were written in French -- the exhibit isn't traveling anywhere but Paris and Minneapolis.  (I assume that this is because show is technical and highly specialized -- it consists of variations on sacred figures that may look, at least to the unpracticed eye, highly similar; it's a show for connoisseurs of a particularly specialized type -- people who know the doctrinal differences between certain types of Buddhism and who can apply that knowledge to deciphering small variations in the iconography.)  I found the show interesting and looked at everything as carefully as possible -- but the calm bronze faces in poses indicative of serene contemplation are introverted and don't really reach out to you. This is a hushed alien world.  An exception is a monumental figure of Vishnu resting on his side between the ages of the world, a figure that is somewhat akin to the images of the Buddha at his Paranirvana -- that is, the figure crowned in architectural kind of headdress, tiered and vaulted like the Chrysler Building in New York resting on his side, often in a naturally occurring rock shelter or a chapel in a temple.  Vishnu has swashbuckling features with a raffish moustache and each of his elbows are jointed with an extra set of forearms and hands so he can accomplish twice the work of salvation.  The big figure, reclining on the ruin of his torso (the parts look like tubes from Civil War era submarines) startles due to its size and the rather eerie and indeterminate aspect of its features (or, more accurately, its state of disrepair):  ruins have a sort of uncanny appeal and this wrecked bronze is big enough to seem to be a sort of ruin, an underwater temple, perhaps, with tubes and hollows where eels might swim under the degraded pumpkin-sized head of the figure.  

Visitors glimpse the monster through the glass of a closed door as you enter the show.  You, then, traverse several fairly dim galleries in which about 150 bronzes are displayed.  There are fragments of figures, many Buddhas demonstrating the gesture for conversation  or fearlessness (two hands pointed palm out to the viewer) or the earth witness gesture made when the Buddha achieved enlightenment and called the Earth to be his witness of the defeat of Mara and forces of illusion. There is a rare object called a lingakosha (that is, a ceremonial covering for a linga -- that is, Shiva's generative phallus); it looks like kind of round protective container for a manhole cover; a few feet away, there's a miniature linga, a small thumb-shaped bollard in a bath for ablutions.  The bronzes seem to be meditating -- their eyes are half-closed and there is something comatose about the figures.  Apparently, the bronzes demonstrate an epoch in which Buddhism and Hindu Gods co-existed in Cambodia at Angkor Wat.  Indeed, the Hindu gods seem to be evolving into the stream-lined dome-form of the meditating Buddha -- the Hindu figures feel a bit more kinetic than the profound repose of the Buddhas.  At Angkor Wat, the Cambodian King made a vast reservoir and, then, planted a walled island in the middle of  the water.  The reservoir was supposed to simulate the sea churning like milk for uncounted eons in the original chaos of the world.  From the churning of the sea, a figure arises resplendent and immense -- this is Vishnu reclining on a heap of cobras as if on pillows.  Vishnu uses his elbow-jointed forearms of two of his four limbs to bear up the weight of his mighty crowned head.  Vishnu sleeps until a lotus grows out of his naval.  From the lotus' moist petals, Brahma, the all-Father, is produced -- this is the inception  of a new world.  A video tells this story in the anteroom to the final chamber where the great Vishnu is reclining, his features eroded like the face of a burn victim, hands and feet like geological events.  Elaborate floral arrangements have been left as offerings to the figure and, in the corners of the room, there are more heaps of flowers, large banners of the Kingdom of Cambodia, and crossed lances and pikes.  The fragmentary figure casts a shadow like a mountain range on the wall.  In 1936, a local monk dreamed that the Buddha came to him and pleaded to be released from his prison of mud at the center of the now-empty, jungle reservoir.  When the monk dug in that place, the former island at the center of the artificial lake, the colossal figure was discovered.

In another gallery, there are some works by Sopheap Pich, a Cambodian artist who escaped the barbarous Pol Pot regime to come to America.  His works are fragile made from rattan. One of the works is a Buddha form disintegrating so that it seems to float above the ground, disembodied, a mere outline of the Enlightened One dematerialized so the figure seems faint and vaporous.  The tips of the rattan have been dyed in some red substance -- not fully but only a few strands.  When Sopheap Pich returned to Cambodia, he went to the village temple near where he had lived as a boy and young man.  The temple was in ruins, covered in ugly pock marks.  The Khmer Rouge had used the temple as a prison, interrogation center, and had executed hundreds of people there.  I wrote down the name of the temple in my moleskin:  Wat Ta Min.  

As I write, 18 monks and a dog named Aloka are walking 2300 miles from Fort Worth's Huong Dao Vipassana, Bhavana Center to Washington D.C.  Originally, there were 19 monks but a truck crashed into their procession, resulting in the amputation of the leg of one of the men.  The monks wear saffron robes and are shaved bald.  The walk is for peace and to show loving kindness to all beings.  (The dog, no longer able to keep up with the monks, had to be treated for dislocated hips -- Aloka meets the monks at intervals.)  It's too bad that the 129-mile pilgrimage will not bring the monks to Minneapolis where peace and loving kindness are in short supply.  There's another blizzard coming out of Alberta.  If you happen to meet the procession of monks, step out of their way, put your palms together over your heart and bow forward -- don't talk to them and don't attempt to make eye-contact.  

High Anxiety

I'm sorry, dear Reader, but I have never found Mel Brooks to be particularly funny   My father showed me The Producers when I was about 13 and, because he found the movie hilarious, I obediently thought it was pretty funny.  (I later saw The Producers in a revival on Broadway and found the whole thing noisy and a bit tedious).  Most of Brooks' movies (for instance, Blazing Saddles) are sophomoric and outrageous rather than funny.  Comedy is very much a matter of personal taste and I acknowledge that my views on this point are idiosyncratic and, quite probably, wrongheaded. But I've never been able to warm to Brooks' form of comedy -- the exception, I think, is Young Frankenstein which manages to be funny as well beautifully made and stirring after the manner of the old Universal  horror movies of the thirties.  

High Anxiety (1977) is a Hitchcock parody film, incorporating elements of The Birds, Psycho, and Vertigo in the pastiche.  Brooks uses his repertoire stable of actors:  Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, and Madelaine Kahn.  He plays the hero himself in the film, a psychiatrist with a fear of heights (similar to the Jimmy Stewart character, Scotty in Vertigo).  The plot involves a murderous nurse (played by Leachman) who dominates an expensive insane asylum.  Hitchcock's movies are ultra-elegant, sophisticated, and sexually perverse.  His camerawork is stylized and extremely expressive:  Hitchcock favors exaggerated point-of-view scenes (a gun rotating in a first-person suicide scene, a shot through a glass of milk being consume by character); he also favors high, analytical angles, shots aimed straight down on the set and characters, and elaborate dollying and tracking effects -- Brooks doesn't have the budget or skill to imitate most of these effects and he, certainly, is unable to capture the swooning, dream-like sexuality that pervades Hitchcock's best movies.  (If you want to see Hitchcock parodied to perfection look at Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill or the first half of Body Double.)  Brooks' films (with the exception of Young Frankenstein) are tawdry, intentionally cheap-looking, and slovenly -- the humor resides in the ethnic comedy and the outrageous performances by the actors.  Although Brooks imitates some of Hitchcock's signature effects, he doesn't get them right and the film's direct parodies fall flat.  Brooks' sort of humor is physically embodied by Cloris Leachman who plays Nurse Diesel in the picture -- she wears a nurse's outfit and had her breasts rigged-out in a pyramidal upthrust brassiere that looks like the bra sported by Madonna during her one of her concert tours.  Leachman has a moustache, grey face, and speaks in a foreboding, portentous tone.  The make-up and costume are so over-the-top that she seems wholly monstrous. There's a scene in which she tortures Harvey Korman dressed in leather Nazi-style dominatrix gear in which Leachman is so hideous and menacing that the scene can't really be played for laughs.  She spanks Korman and, a few shots later, when he meets with Asylum's director, played by Brooks, we see him seating himself very gingerly on his bruised bottom.  The shrill Madelaine Kahn playing a JAP (Jewish-American Princess) appears as Brooks' love-interest -- she's fairly amusing but the part is underwritten.  The best and worst things in the movie feature Mel Brooks.  At a piano bar, he suddenly begins to croon a cleverly written song called "High Anxiety" -- he seems to be parodying Frank Sinatra and the sequence (similar to the "man about town" song and dance in Young Frankenstein) is very funny.  On the other hand, an extended scene involving vulgar New York Jews bickering at an airport might be funny to Jewish audiences; but I didn't think all the kvetching in this scene was funny at all.  High Anxiety also suffers from the absence of Gene Wilder.  The role of an old Jewish psychiatrist seems  obviously written for Wilder and the actor intone his lines echoing the comedian's distinctive delivery.  

There's a scene that embodies, I think, High Anxiety's  failings.  This is a showy sequence modeled on the famous stabbing scene in which Janet Leigh is butchered  while taking a shower.  Brooks cuts and assembles the scene in a montage that essentially duplicates the sequence in Psycho.  The murder scene in the original film begins with one of the strangest shots in cinema -- the camera is pointed right up at a shower-head that sprays water in perfect jets down onto the camera.  And, yet, the camera doesn't get wet.  So where is the camera located?  This riddle which is experienced subliminally by the viewers creates a dream-like ambiance to the violent murder -- the killing takes place in some strange space that is radically unlike actual space.  Brooks also points the camera up at the shower head or spigot.  But the water bursting out of the spigot pours onto the camera and drenches the lens.  This simple change alters the entire experience of the sequence, making the whole gory thing seem vastly different  from  Hitchcock's vision.    

Destry Rides Again

 By 1939, the definitive features of the movie Western were established so fully that the conventions of the genre could be satirized, inverted and subverted, and contested on-screen in popular entertainment.  Destry Rides Again is a product of the cinema's Golden Age annum mirabilum 1939.  The comedy Western stars Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich.  The film proceeds at such breakneck pace that the viewer doesn't get a chance to really admire it and, accordingly, the whole thing seems slightly flat -- there's the faint tedium of something perfected to the point that its execution feels perfunctory.  The movie seems to have been largely improvised with the actors required to learn a couple new pages of dialogue each day before shooting.  This sense of improvisation, however, doesn't deter from the film's effect, which is more pronounced in memory than during the actual screening:  it's a picture that improves with thought.  The movie is improvised the way that Louis Armstrong's Hot Five or Hot Seven improvised -- there is a fleet, blithe, interlocking of classic Western tropes that is perfectly phrased and timed and pitch perfect.

Bottleneck is a wild and wooly Western town in which everyone exuberantly shoots their six-guns in the air and brawls.  (This is depicted in a bravura tracking shot disfigured by the film's titles -- the titles obscure the carefully choreographed action and, further, hide some instances of impropriety that might have been problematic in 1939).  The town's main industry is vice, exemplified by a colossal saloon and brothel, "the Last Chance" that is the center of Bottleneck's booze, gambling, and sex industry.  The boss of the saloon is a nasty hombre named Kent, played by Brian Donlevy in the fashion of a moustache twirling villain in an 1890's melodrama.  Kent's moll, Frenchy, played by Marlene Dietrich distracts poker players so that she can tamper with their cards, thus, insuring ill-gotten gains for Kent.  Kent cheats a farmer out of his ranch and farm.  The farmer complains to the sheriff, Keogh, who is, then, murdered by Kent and his gang.  Keogh's body is concealed and Kent, colluding with the corrupt town mayor, appoints Wash, the hapless town drunk as a substitute for the dead man -- hoping, of course, that Wash will be wholly ineffectual as sheriff.  Wash admired a gunman named Destry who cleaned-up the hellhole town of Tombstone and killed many bad guys in the process.  Destry has been ambushed and killed by being shot in the back, but his son, Destry Jr. (I'll call him) is available and comes to Bottleneck on the stagecoach to assume the duties of assistant sheriff.  Destry doesn't make an auspicious first appearance -- he steps off the stagecoach holding a lady's parasol (he's just trying to be helpful to the maiden with whom he has been traveling) and also carrying the young woman's canary in a cage.  Destry doesn't sling guns and is unarmed -- the fate of his father has made him into lawman who refuses to use firearms to pacify tough guys.  He prefers to talk the bad guys out of their criminality by spinning parable-like yarns that generally begin with the phrase:  "I once knew a fellow in Amarillo  (or Omaha or Dodge City etc.)..." -- he's like Abe Lincoln as a lawman.  Of course, Destry is quick with his fists and periodically stuns bad guys or bullies by beating them down.  He's also an ace shot and uses his marksmanship skills to cow would-be villains.  

The town is completely corrupt:  not only Frenchy but the mayor and most of the populace is involved nefarious activities. The plot of the film involves the redemption of the drunk, Wash and Frenchy, the floozy, Wash takes his role as Sheriff seriously to every one's amusement and, then, chagrin.  In fact, the poor old drunk is so loyal to his office that he ends of dying in line of duty.  When Frenchy tries to seduce Destry, he rebukes her and says that she's got a pretty face hiding under her caked make-up, tweaking her on the cheek.  This admonition turns Frenchy into an honest woman and, also, ultimately results in her death.  (Inadvertently, I think, the movie stands for the proposition that if you are redeemed from your vices, death follows immediately.)  Both of the death scenes are well-managed.  Wash is humiliated about being shot in the back; his shirt is untucked as he lays dying on the floor of the jail. Destry tells him that his father was also shot in the back, because the assailant was afraid to face him and, gently tucks  in his shirt.  As Frenchy is dying, she tries to rub the lipstick off  so that she can kiss Destry goodbye with properly purified lips.  When the menfolk in the town prepare to slaughter one another, Frenchy urges the women, all of whom despise her, to stop the battle and, at the climax, an army of women armed with planks of wood and rolling pins marches between the assailants and, then, storms the "Last Chance" saloon, ripping it apart in a fierce spectacle in which they revenge themselves after the manner of Carrie Nation on this den of iniquity.  The film is full of the things that we yearn to see in a Western:  there's a family besieged in a farmhouse, a battle between cattlemen and sodbusters, riproaring bar fights including a protracted "cat fight" between Marlene Dietrich and Una Merkel, beautiful horses galloping across the chaparral, plenty of gunplay, three great songs including "Little Joe, the Wrangler" and Dietrich's signature "See what the boys in the backroom will have" sung in the actress' throaty baritone, as well as a witty, ingenious script.  In my view, the film's only failing is that Destry is set up to marry the "nice girl" (Frenchy is dead) -- the "nice girl" is the comely sister of a bully cowboy; her part is underwritten to the point of non-existence and the ending seems purely opportunistic and perfunctory.  After pursuing an affair with Frenchy, the audience wonders how Destry could possibly be interested in this pallid, conventional girl.  (Apparently, Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich were involved in a torrid affair when the movie was being made.)