When I was a young man, I spent a lot of time listening to music in taverns in Austin, Minnesota, the place where I went to practice law. Austin had a vibrant music scene: a symphony orchestra, High school choruses and glee club groups that were known throughout the State and a large coterie of exceptional bar-band musicians. It's cheap to live in Austin and you could almost make a living playing every weekend in the taverns in town or located between Mason City, Iowa and the south Twin Cities suburbs. Ordinarily, there was no cover charge and the beer was very cheap and, if you came a few minutes before the music began (usually about 8:00 pm), you could stake out a comfortable place with elbow room, close, but not to close to the stage and the dance-floor, a seat with good sight-lines and ready access to the toilets and where the waitresses could reach you easily enough for re-fills. Some of the country-western and blue-grass bands played mostly covers, but, just about every group had a charismatic lead singer-songwriter who wrote originals, many of them very good and, in fact, popular with the crowd. You don't know these songs because they never established themselves outside Austin or beyond the limits of a few counties -- but they were good tunes, rousing, and the anthems of my youth. I stopped listening to live music in bars about thirty years ago -- in the Twin Cities, the cover charges were exorbitant, but, more importantly, you paid a lot of pocket money to stand in a dark corner of a dark room filled to fire-hazard with other sweaty people and couldn't see the band, couldn't hear either, and, of course, had no chance at all when it came to buying a beer. Shows like that were endurance tests -- uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and frightening -- and, so, after a while, I dropped out of the listening game. Later, when my step-daughter Sena Ehrhardt had a successful career as a Blues singer, I returned to clubs to hear her play -- but, in many instances, the milieu was unpleasant: too hot, too crowded, sitting somewhere way too far from the bar or the band. Worse, I thought, were the festivals -- for instance, the Blues Festival in Duluth: for me, those affairs were an ante-room to hell: enforced proximity with grizzled Biker wannabes and their tattooed molls, elbow-to-elbow crowds around the stage in inclement weather (either terrific suffocating heat or deadly sunshine or mud and cold rain), noisome porta-potties and vastly overpriced beer and food always accessible only at the end of a long smelly line of fans. The speakers boomed, but the sound quality was low -- it was like listening to music over a telephone.
On November 10, 2018, I ventured out to the Austin VFW to hear Billy Dankert and his four member band, the High-Meds perform. Jim (Billy) Dankert is the drummer of the Gear Daddies, the most successful of the Austin home-grown bands, and he wrote several of that group's signature songs. Dankert also is a fine graphic artist, an excellent cerebral painter, and he fronts a band comprised mostly of men from Austin with whom he graduated from High School in the mid-eighties. (Dankert has released a number of solo albums that are also well worth acquiring.) The show at the VFW was a benefit and it reminded me forcefully of the good old days -- the place wasn't overly crowded and the music was both relaxed and superb. The waitress was accommodating and there was no problem keeping a full beer in front of me on a table with a good view of the stage and musicians. Dankert's band has a ferocious attack and his songs are unpretentious, hard-rocking, and short -- most of them seemed to be to be about three minutes long. This is garage-band music elevated to art: Dankert's tunes are have infectious riffs and are carefully constructed. They seem built to last. (I once talked to a friend who was learning piano by playing songs by Joanie Mitchell -- my friend showed me the chord structures and how the melody was founded in that inexorable progression of chords and said that the songs "were built like a brick shit-house", meaning that as a compliment, of course. Dankert's songs seem similar -- they have a rotary motion like a turbine engine and the things spin swiftly, efficiently, and produce a wall of sound.) There isn't any unnecessary grandstanding -- no guitar-hero solos or extravagant interludes: the song begans, it rocks hard for three minutes, then, it's over. Dankert barks out a brusque "Thanks" to the applause and, then, tears into the next tune. The covers are equally adept, economical, and cut close to the bone. At least, one of them was a little perverse, a pounding version of "All I want is a room somewhere" from the musical My Fair Lady. It sounds improbable but the song was excellent. Dankert is not a prolific song-writer -- he told me that he works slowly and there is obviously an enormous amount of craft invested in this labor. After all, he's spent a lot of his life working in these vineyards. The band features bass guitar, rhythm guitar, and a lead guitar with a drummer (too loud for the room on the night that I saw the band). Adding to the powerful "wall of sound" effect are the keyboards -- on the night that I saw the band, one of the musicians played organ with an enthusiastic flourish. Dankert has a good rock-n-roll voice -- he has a high tenor that spikes through the band's roar. (In the lower range, the mix at the VFW made him harder to hear.) It wasn't a flawless show but, then, who wants flawlessness in live music -- you come for the imperfect experience in the moment, the irreproducible event on that special night in that special place. Seeing this show reminds me that I've amputated a part of myself by not attending more to live music and that I should go out more.
Sunday, November 11, 2018
Saturday, November 10, 2018
Bohemian Rhapsody
It's one of the oldest stories in movies: a plucky young man, the son of immigrants, defies his parents to become a pop music star. Along the way, he wins fame and fortune, but loses his moral compass. In the end, the hero is jarred into recognition that he has strayed from "right thoughts, right words, right deeds" as it is expressed in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). He finds a way of making popular music that doesn't offend the morality of his traditional parents, re-connects with those once vital to him, and finds redemption. This describes the plot of the new bio-pic about the lead singer of Queen, Freddie (previously Farouk) Mercury; my summary also describes innumerable other films of this kind, including one of the progenitors of the form in American movies, Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer. The only deviation from this time-honored story is sexual: Freddie Mercury is gay, although it takes him one-third of the movie to recognize this fact and his moral crisis is precipitated by the imminence of his death by AIDS.
Andy Warhol said, and I am always quoting this important proposition, that all Cokes are alike and all Cokes are good. The same truism applies to movies of this sort, whether Coal Miner's Daughter or La Bamba or The Jazz Singer in its various iterations. The form almost always pleases although, of course, one might wish for something a little more novel or, indeed, flamboyant when it comes to Bohemian Rhapsody -- Freddie Mercury had a great, perverse sense of style and he was a gay icon before such things could be unambiguouslyrepresented (one of his MTV music videos went too far with cross-dressing and gay imagery and was banned) and, accordingly, one might expect the film about his life to be extravagant, adventurous, even, perhaps, a bit experimental: the subject matter cries out for direction by Baz Luhrmann or, perhaps, Paolo Sorrentino. But, in fact, Bohemian Rhapsody is conservative, even a little slow-paced, and it feels somewhat perfunctory -- it dutifully pushes all the buttons and most people will tear up once or twice during the film, but there's nothing extraordinary about the way the picture is directed or designed. There are some excellent musical sequences, some great, if archaic-looking, montages, and lots of depravity (although the film is PG and doesn't really show anything you couldn't expose an intelligent nine-year old to.) One of the pleasures of the genre is that it can display the moral debasement of the pleasure-seeking folks in show business while at the same time asking us to pronounce judgement on their antics -- we get our cake and can eat it too. Here there are lots of scenes of hunky-looking lads in leather cavorting in gay bars and casting yearning gazes at one another -- at one point, when Freddy is lonely during a tour of the United States, he looks lustfully at truck driver who looks lustfully back at him; this sequence occurs while Freddy is talking to his cute blonde wife -- the impression we get is that if she had been with him to satisfy his sexual urges, Freddy wouldn't have become gay and, therefore, wouldn't have acquired his mortal illness. Later, the film is a little less primitive in its sexual attitudes -- ultimately, Freddy confesses to his wife that he is "bisexual" although for the second half of the movie his lovers are all, without exception, men.
I never much liked Queen. "Bohemian Rhapsody" always struck me as a shallow and derivative rip-off of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band and some of the group's biggest hits have a manipulative, even quasi-fascist buzz about them, particularly "We are the Champions" and "We will rock you" -- both tunes that would not seem out of place at a Trump Rally. But I enjoyed the musical numbers in the movie and, in fact, liked the songs better in the film than I ever liked them on the radio. And there are some things about the film that are informative -- Freddy Mercury's famous over-bite was caused by the fact that he had four upper incisors instead of just two; his parents were Zoroastrian Farsi's, displaced Persians who came to England via Zanzibar. This explains the curious reference in one of Mercury's songs to Allah -- "Bismallah" (if God wills). Throughout the movie everyone refers to Mercury as a "Paki" although, of course, he is no such thing, but, perhaps, the use of the Muslim expression "Bismallah" was intended as a taunt to British racists who mischaracterized the young man. The final half-hour of the film involves Mercury's decision to return to his band (he has abandoned them) and perform at Bob Geldorf's "Live Aid" concert in the mid-eighties. This seems pretty inconsequential but the film does a good job making the negotiations with disgruntled Queen band members preparatory to the Live Aid show fairly suspenseful -- this is really the only narrative suspense in the movie. Everything else follows the traditional pattern for music bio-pics of this sort. The final concert sequences are rousing, although there are far too many intrusive reaction shots inserted in the film to signal how we should respond. Although Queen was often pretentious in the manner of Pink Floyd and the late Beatles, I think they were best when performing their simplest material -- no one will persuade me that "Fat-Bottomed Girls" isn't their best tune and, indeed, one of the greatest rock 'n roll songs of all time.
Andy Warhol said, and I am always quoting this important proposition, that all Cokes are alike and all Cokes are good. The same truism applies to movies of this sort, whether Coal Miner's Daughter or La Bamba or The Jazz Singer in its various iterations. The form almost always pleases although, of course, one might wish for something a little more novel or, indeed, flamboyant when it comes to Bohemian Rhapsody -- Freddie Mercury had a great, perverse sense of style and he was a gay icon before such things could be unambiguouslyrepresented (one of his MTV music videos went too far with cross-dressing and gay imagery and was banned) and, accordingly, one might expect the film about his life to be extravagant, adventurous, even, perhaps, a bit experimental: the subject matter cries out for direction by Baz Luhrmann or, perhaps, Paolo Sorrentino. But, in fact, Bohemian Rhapsody is conservative, even a little slow-paced, and it feels somewhat perfunctory -- it dutifully pushes all the buttons and most people will tear up once or twice during the film, but there's nothing extraordinary about the way the picture is directed or designed. There are some excellent musical sequences, some great, if archaic-looking, montages, and lots of depravity (although the film is PG and doesn't really show anything you couldn't expose an intelligent nine-year old to.) One of the pleasures of the genre is that it can display the moral debasement of the pleasure-seeking folks in show business while at the same time asking us to pronounce judgement on their antics -- we get our cake and can eat it too. Here there are lots of scenes of hunky-looking lads in leather cavorting in gay bars and casting yearning gazes at one another -- at one point, when Freddy is lonely during a tour of the United States, he looks lustfully at truck driver who looks lustfully back at him; this sequence occurs while Freddy is talking to his cute blonde wife -- the impression we get is that if she had been with him to satisfy his sexual urges, Freddy wouldn't have become gay and, therefore, wouldn't have acquired his mortal illness. Later, the film is a little less primitive in its sexual attitudes -- ultimately, Freddy confesses to his wife that he is "bisexual" although for the second half of the movie his lovers are all, without exception, men.
I never much liked Queen. "Bohemian Rhapsody" always struck me as a shallow and derivative rip-off of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band and some of the group's biggest hits have a manipulative, even quasi-fascist buzz about them, particularly "We are the Champions" and "We will rock you" -- both tunes that would not seem out of place at a Trump Rally. But I enjoyed the musical numbers in the movie and, in fact, liked the songs better in the film than I ever liked them on the radio. And there are some things about the film that are informative -- Freddy Mercury's famous over-bite was caused by the fact that he had four upper incisors instead of just two; his parents were Zoroastrian Farsi's, displaced Persians who came to England via Zanzibar. This explains the curious reference in one of Mercury's songs to Allah -- "Bismallah" (if God wills). Throughout the movie everyone refers to Mercury as a "Paki" although, of course, he is no such thing, but, perhaps, the use of the Muslim expression "Bismallah" was intended as a taunt to British racists who mischaracterized the young man. The final half-hour of the film involves Mercury's decision to return to his band (he has abandoned them) and perform at Bob Geldorf's "Live Aid" concert in the mid-eighties. This seems pretty inconsequential but the film does a good job making the negotiations with disgruntled Queen band members preparatory to the Live Aid show fairly suspenseful -- this is really the only narrative suspense in the movie. Everything else follows the traditional pattern for music bio-pics of this sort. The final concert sequences are rousing, although there are far too many intrusive reaction shots inserted in the film to signal how we should respond. Although Queen was often pretentious in the manner of Pink Floyd and the late Beatles, I think they were best when performing their simplest material -- no one will persuade me that "Fat-Bottomed Girls" isn't their best tune and, indeed, one of the greatest rock 'n roll songs of all time.
Friday, November 9, 2018
The Hitch-Hiker
In The Sons of the Desert, Laurel and Hardy suffer awful punishment when they lie to their wives about a trip that they have planned. Something similar befalls Gilbert and Roy, the hapless victims of a spree-killing hitchhiker, in Ida Lupino's 1953 The Hitch-Hiker. Gilbert and Roy have told their wives that they are going fishing in San Felipe, a coastal town in Baja California. On the way, Roy, who is impulsive and a bit of a hot head, decides to stop in Mexicali to sample the flesh-pots there. Gilbert, who is more level-headed, doesn't want to get in trouble and, so, he pretends to be sound asleep when the two men drive between the garish neon-lights in the border town. Roy is loyal to his buddy and the two men don't stop. On the way out of town, they pick-up a hitchhiker -- before the credits, we have seen this guy, portrayed as a pair of sinister boots stalking around, gun down three victims, people who have picked him up. The little and abortive "lark and spree" in Mexicali has now put the men in harm's way. For the remainder of the short (71 minute) film, the hitchhiker torments them until his luck runs out and he is captured by the Mexican police. Edmund O'Brien plays the excitable Roy; Frank Lovejoy takes the part of the even-keeled Gilbert (who can speak Spanish) and William Tallman, later well-known for playing the indefatigable DA Hamilton Burger on The Perry Mason Show, is very effective as the psycho-killer. The hitch-hiker is like a figure from a horror movie -- he has a deformed eye that can not close and a broad grin of filthy teeth. The guy is awful to look at and this mirrors, of course, his moral depravity.
The Library of Congress has cited The Hitch-Hiker as worthy of preservation primarily because it is the first film noir to be directed by a woman, Ida Lupino. Unfortunately, the movie really isn't any good. The acting is fine but the script is lackluster and the film isn't exactly plausible. The movie's climax is so dull that it can't be called a climax -- the picture just ends in a muddle of very dimly lit shots on a dock. I got tired trying to decipher the very dark pictures on my TV screen and fell asleep four minutes before the short film ended -- I had to go back to re-run the denouement to see if I had missed anything. (I hadn't.) For most of the film, we see repeated shots of the car carrying the three men driving aimlessly around the Alabama Hills, 20 or so hectares of picturesque-looking hoodoos in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada at Lone Pine. Lupino shoots in the opposite direction of the Mount Whitney and, so, everything looks desolate, squat stone boulders heaped up in disarray against a dusty horizon. But she uses the same vantage so many times that the imagery becomes tiresome -- it's obviously the same dirt road over which the car travels first in one direction and, then, the other direction. Apparently, the script derives from the adventures of an actual spree-killer who haunted the upper Baja peninsula and was caught by Mexican police, as in this film, at the fishing village of Santa Rosalie. (Certain other elements of the actual story find their way into the picture -- for instance, the real killer threw his victims down a mine-shaft; in this movie, some scenes are shot around a mine-shaft that is shown to be very deep and dark, but nothing actually happens there). The story doesn't make sense -- it's not clear why the heroes can't run away at night (after all, the bad guy has to sleep.) Furthermore, we don't know why the killer has taken the men hostage -- what is the use of lugging them around the country when he could just kill them somewhere in the badlands of the Alabama Hills and drive their car to his ultimate destination? (We know he can drive a car -- he uses the car to hunt down the two men when they briefly escape.) Clearly, Lupino is working on micro-budget: In one night-time scene, shot in the studio, she puts the two hostages in sleeping bags on one side of a creek while the bad guy keeps his gun trained on them, even while he sleeps with his deformed eye open. The creek looks like a trough with a garden hose running water down its center and the schematic shot doesn't look anything like a real place outdoors. Throughout the film, the bad guy has taunted the two heroes (although this is also a misnomer -- they never do anything even remotely heroic): at one point, he makes them shoot bottles out of each other's hands. The killer's argument (and the moral of the film) is that he can prey upon the two men because they look out for one another -- Roy won't desert Gilbert and vice-versa. Thus, they are vulnerable to his depredations. "One of you coulda got away easy," he crows. The guy is nasty and, of course, the audience wants to see him get his come-uppance. But the film is decent -- there's no gory retribution: after the cops handcuff the hitchhiker, Roy slugs him a couple times, but the police pull him away, noting somewhat incongruously that "(they) must prepare their report." It would be nice to argue that this pioneering work by the very tough Ida Lupino is a masterpiece or, even, pretty good -- but, simply stated, it's mediocre. And, it's very merits, the film's decency, at its climax, detract from its effectiveness. David Thomson noted in hs book of film biographies that Ida Lupino was capable of making movies as "tough and fast" as Sam Fuller. But I think Fuller's movies are vastly overrated too.
The Library of Congress has cited The Hitch-Hiker as worthy of preservation primarily because it is the first film noir to be directed by a woman, Ida Lupino. Unfortunately, the movie really isn't any good. The acting is fine but the script is lackluster and the film isn't exactly plausible. The movie's climax is so dull that it can't be called a climax -- the picture just ends in a muddle of very dimly lit shots on a dock. I got tired trying to decipher the very dark pictures on my TV screen and fell asleep four minutes before the short film ended -- I had to go back to re-run the denouement to see if I had missed anything. (I hadn't.) For most of the film, we see repeated shots of the car carrying the three men driving aimlessly around the Alabama Hills, 20 or so hectares of picturesque-looking hoodoos in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada at Lone Pine. Lupino shoots in the opposite direction of the Mount Whitney and, so, everything looks desolate, squat stone boulders heaped up in disarray against a dusty horizon. But she uses the same vantage so many times that the imagery becomes tiresome -- it's obviously the same dirt road over which the car travels first in one direction and, then, the other direction. Apparently, the script derives from the adventures of an actual spree-killer who haunted the upper Baja peninsula and was caught by Mexican police, as in this film, at the fishing village of Santa Rosalie. (Certain other elements of the actual story find their way into the picture -- for instance, the real killer threw his victims down a mine-shaft; in this movie, some scenes are shot around a mine-shaft that is shown to be very deep and dark, but nothing actually happens there). The story doesn't make sense -- it's not clear why the heroes can't run away at night (after all, the bad guy has to sleep.) Furthermore, we don't know why the killer has taken the men hostage -- what is the use of lugging them around the country when he could just kill them somewhere in the badlands of the Alabama Hills and drive their car to his ultimate destination? (We know he can drive a car -- he uses the car to hunt down the two men when they briefly escape.) Clearly, Lupino is working on micro-budget: In one night-time scene, shot in the studio, she puts the two hostages in sleeping bags on one side of a creek while the bad guy keeps his gun trained on them, even while he sleeps with his deformed eye open. The creek looks like a trough with a garden hose running water down its center and the schematic shot doesn't look anything like a real place outdoors. Throughout the film, the bad guy has taunted the two heroes (although this is also a misnomer -- they never do anything even remotely heroic): at one point, he makes them shoot bottles out of each other's hands. The killer's argument (and the moral of the film) is that he can prey upon the two men because they look out for one another -- Roy won't desert Gilbert and vice-versa. Thus, they are vulnerable to his depredations. "One of you coulda got away easy," he crows. The guy is nasty and, of course, the audience wants to see him get his come-uppance. But the film is decent -- there's no gory retribution: after the cops handcuff the hitchhiker, Roy slugs him a couple times, but the police pull him away, noting somewhat incongruously that "(they) must prepare their report." It would be nice to argue that this pioneering work by the very tough Ida Lupino is a masterpiece or, even, pretty good -- but, simply stated, it's mediocre. And, it's very merits, the film's decency, at its climax, detract from its effectiveness. David Thomson noted in hs book of film biographies that Ida Lupino was capable of making movies as "tough and fast" as Sam Fuller. But I think Fuller's movies are vastly overrated too.
Thursday, November 8, 2018
The Other Side of the Wind
Netflix has assembled Orson Welles' legendary last project, The Other Side of the Wind, a film maudit shot between 1970 and 1976 and edited, intermittently, during the last decade of the great director's life -- Welles died in 1985 with the film only partly cut, bequeathing to posterity a 100 hours of footage and a chaotic mass of instructions and memoranda. I use the term "bequeathing" advisedly -- Welles' estate was a mess, besieged by competing factions and, of course, creditors desirous of recouping their investment in the picture. For most of my life, critics and journalists have breathlessly reported that someone was working on the film and that release was imminent. But these reports were always wrong -- the movie remained under legal lock-and-key and was not released until November 2018. Peter Bogdonovich, who appears extensively in the picture, seems to have been instrumental in securing the movie's completion and release -- but Bogonovich, himself, has grown old in these efforts. After Citizen Kane, Welles' work labored under a sort of curse, vexed by all sorts of problems, many of them self-inflicted -- Welles woes sometimes seem to have been contagious. Bogdonovich's own career has been blighted as well.
In a broad way, The Other Side of the Wind resembles Truman Capote's and incomplete Roman a clef, Answered Prayers. The film, like Capote's draft of a book, is fantastically ambitious, yet, also, weirdly gossipy -- it's an account of a famous, or some might say, infamous film-maker's last day alive, a movie that is surely intended to invoke for the cognoscenti real personalities in Hollywood and the film industry. In fact, a number of actual directors appear in the picture, notably Bogdonovich, Henry Jaglom, Claude Chabrol, and Curtis Harrington. Industry stalwarts like Darryl Zanuck are mentioned and someone who looks like Dennis Hopper mutters to the camera that he wants to produce a film that will attract John Wayne fans. The film within the film seems to parody Antonioni and there are innumerable "inside" allusions. Various sorts of Hollywood celebrities appear either in person or by proxy -- Lili Palmer, whose beautifully impassive mask-like visage dominates many of the images, imitates Marlene Dietrich; Georgie Jessel appears as himself. As with Capote's unfinished magnum opus, the film is concerned with fashion, notoriety, envious gossip, and most of its running time is devoted to a party for the 70th birthday of the film director, Jake Hannaford (John Huston) -- a party at which Hannaford's unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind is sporadically screened. (There are power outages that plunge the assembled multitudes in darkness during the screening -- thus, allowing Welles to demonstrate elaborate and picturesque chiaroscuro techniques.) The film's conceit is that Hannaford's celebrity is so great that a hundred or more videographers and cineastes (a term hurled around with contempt) have crashed the party and filmed its proceedings, either covertly or with the permission of those in attendance. The movie is shot on a variety of film stocks, all spliced together, probably a device that allowed Welles to shoot the movie as economics dictated and according to what kind of film he could afford at the time. Although the movie was filmed at intervals over six years, it is surprisingly coherent -- it seems, however, that Welles likely invited his participants to large blow-out parties and, in some cases, simply recorded their antics.
In all respects, the film adopts meta-filmic strategies. This is evident in the opening, a sort of foreword, that seems to be appended to the movie by Bogdonovich who narrates behind still shots, including an image of the car crashed by Hannaford -- at the very outset, we are uncertain whether Bogdonovich, who speaks of "many years" lapsing between the time that the film was shot and it's final release, is describing a fiction or the actual series of events resulting in the film that we are seeing. Throughout the movie, we are continuously teased with the notion that the film is a sort of distorted documentary, that it is showing us something about Orson Welles, although the director as actor never appears in the movie. The film poses an initial riddle to be solved, a bit like the structure of Citizen Kane and Welles' later films like Mr. Arkadin -- did Hannaford commit suicide in the smashed car after the party? Or was the crash a mere accident? (As in Godard's Contempt, the sports car crash is a metaphor for a film that is vexed and can't be successfully completely, what we would call a "train-wreck.) Borges' famously characterized Citizen Kane as a "labyrinth without a center" and this description applies even more aptly to The Other Side of the Wind -- the riddle posited as the film's raison d'etre is never solved. Indeed, most of the enigmas devised by the film remain mysterious through the picture's final image. And, at the outset, we are confronted with the question of how closely we should equate Welles and his baroque career with the central character, the 70-year old Jake Hannaford. In fact, the equation is never clear and, at times, it seems that Welles is, in fact, satirizing Huston himself, that Huston's persona as big game hunter, bullfighting aficionado, womanizer, and drunk with tendencies toward self-harm (papa Hemingway for movie-land) is a sort of joke to which Huston may not be fully privy -- Huston plays a self-aggrandizing monster, a sacred monster who speaks in aphorisms and seems to be boundlessly narcissistic. In some ways, he's like Welles as a bombastic, Falstaffian fixture on the late night TV shows -- he was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson and with Dick Cavett -- but, in other noteworthy respects, Hannaford is a parody of Huston's Hemingway affectations. (Hannaford's 70th birthday is on July 2 -- the date Hemingway killed himself.) But there's another element, one that seems obsessively if queasily superimposed on the narrative: Hannaford's sexual vigor is waning and Welles shows the old man watching the sex scenes staged in the film within a film with a savage voyeuristic concentration -- Huston is shown in huge, unflattering close-up, his eyes bearing down on the images projected on the screen. In the fragmentary film shown at the party, a handsome youth has sex with a beautiful older woman. The older woman is nude for, at least, a third of the film within the film, mostly shown from the rear ambling around various scenic locations. The older woman is played by Oja Kodar, Welles' mistress who is given a co-writing credit on the picture, and the sex scenes, very graphic by Welles' standards, seemed presented for the aging director's delectation -- he seems simultaneously aroused and intensely jealous as he watches footage of love scenes that he himself directed. (This aspect of the movie bears resemblance to Welles' last completed picture, his adaptation of Isak Dineson's The Immortal Story, an uncharacteristically restrained and short film about an old man who arranges for a much younger man to seduce and impregnate his beautiful young wife.) There is something perverse about the way that Oja Kodar is used in the film -- the camera both loves and despises her and her explicit sexual voracity is shown to be emasculating. (The movie abounds in subtle, and not so subtle, castration imagery -- in fact, a final scene shows an inflatable bag of air shaped unmistakably like a phallus torn apart by the blade of a scissors. In an early shot, someone asks if Hannaford regards the camera as "phallus.") At the same time, Kodar as exotic sexual vampire is also referred to as God -- it's Hannaford's contention that God is female; she's also the archetypal "dark woman" from America's psychosexual thickets: the movie is distinctly politically incorrect: Kodar is referred to as "Pocahontas" and "Minnehaha" and she prances around nude, her skin glowing red in the "magic hour twilight", dressed only in turquoise necklaces. In any event, there's something distinctly unsettling about Kodar's presence in the film: she's Welles' obscure object of desire, simultaneously the castrating Mother, the savage and sexually reapacious Indian maiden, God, the Devil, and the mythic object of the hero's quest. A haze of confusion hovers over the figure: Kodar is also completely silent -- she exists solely as an object of contemplation for the male gaze. Although we see her at the party, there's no indication that she can speak at all or that she has anything to say. In the movie, she's mostly completely silent -- a nude phantasm darting through some psychedelic and surreal arcade. (I suspect that Welles keeps her quiet because Kodar spoke with a strong Serbo-croatian accent that might have identified her, that is, established a place of origin, something that the film opposes -- in The Other Side of the Wind, Kodar is pure Jungian archetype and archetypes don't have home towns and aren't chatty.)
A central question raised by The Other Side of the Wind is how we are to interpret the film-within-the-film bearing that name. From the footage shown in the picture, The Other Side of the Wind as mise en abyme seems ludicrously bad -- the movie that Hannaford has made is awful, a kind of pretentious mélange of bad Antonioni (think Zabriskie Point) and a spaghetti Western. (The party scenes were actually filmed in Nevada within shouting distance of the mansion Antonioni blew to pieces at the end of Zabriskie Point.) A film executive named Max, early in the movie, watches part of the picture's opening sequence and declares the whole thing a "waste of time." But it's not clear what the executive means -- is the film a "waste of time" because its objectively awful or is the money-man commenting that he won't be able to make any profit on the Hannaford's self-indulgent project? (Hannaford, we learn, is proceeding without a script -- although this seems contradicted by a later scene in which we are shown hundreds and hundreds of story-boarded images from the film.) One of the characters announces that Hannaford, who began his career in silent films, is trying to make a movie for young people to show that he's "still with it" -- that is, relevant. And the film-within-a-film is replete with garish rock-n-roll sequences, several of them very effectively filmed, psychedelic light shows, casual sex, drug use, and the like. But Welles surely must know that the symbolic maunderings of the film-within-a-film, despite the beautiful way in which the scenes are shot and staged, are objectively terrible, indeed, risible -- in fact, interviews confirm that Welles regarded the film-within-the-film as a parody and a sort of joke. But the people at the party are all predictably obedient and seem to consider the picture that Hannaford is making as some sort of masterpiece. I presume this is Welles' satire on himself, on the notion that the great auteur can do no wrong. (The auteur theory is represented in the film by the hapless Joseph McBride, an early essayist on Welles, here cast as the scholarly cinephile "Mister Pister.") But it's not clear to what degree we are supposed to regard the film-within-the-film as wretched -- the satire is blurred, particularly because Welles' filmmaking is so ingenious and technically assured that he can't shoot an uninteresting frame of footage. Although Hannaford's The Other Side of the Wind (as opposed to Welles' film of that same name) seems horribly flawed, it is, nonetheless, compulsively watchable.
As The Other Side of the Wind proceeds, the film (here meaning the whole enterprise) becomes increasingly cruel, desperate, and sad. The specter of Hannaford's suicide (or accidental death) casts a shadow over everything. Sources of funding for the film-within-the-film dry up -- the studio shows no interest, some Texas oil-men proposing funding vamoose, and, finally, Hannaford "puts the touch" on his protégée Brooksie Otterlake. Otterlake has been successful with his pictures and he is the scion of a lumber dynasty. Hannaford simultaneously denounces others for suggesting that Otterlake be tapped for money while, at the same time, making a demand for cash himself. When Otterlake hesitates, Hannaford directs his rage at his protégée and the film ends with the two men tragically estranged. (This mirrors Bogdanovich's relationship with Welles. When Welles mocked him on TV on the Tonight Show, making demeaning comments to the guest host, Burt Reynolds of all people, their previously close relationship soured and Bogdanovich didn't talk to Welles again until a few weeks before the old man died. The rift prophetically on display in The Other Side of the Wind also arises in a context in which Welles seems to be cruelly caricaturing Cybil Shepherd, then, Bogdanovich's wife -- Hannaford has a baby-concubine, a little 16-year old blonde named Mavis, cute as a button, but so stupid that people mock her to her face. Her principal role in the movie is to pour drinks for Huston's character. Critics claim the character was based on the very young Cybil Shepherd who began her relationship with Bogdanovich during the shooting of The Last Picture Show.) Welles taunts John Dale while directing a sex scene with Oja Kodar -- Dale's genitals somehow get tangled in Kodar's dangly necklace and she has to use an alarmingly sharp knife to cut the necklace free. Needless to say, this interlude intimidates Dale and Hannaford, while shouting voice-over directions to his actors, implies that he's impotent. Dale, then, stalks off the set creating yet another impediment to the film's completion. At the party, things become increasingly dire. Hannaford and Otterlake, with their nasty cronies (led by the loyal Edmund O'Brien) mock a schoolmaster who has been invited to the party to share salacious anecdotes about John Dale. It's no surprise that these anecdotes all suggest that Dale is homo- or, at least, bi-sexual. (One hopes that Welles didn't act the way that Hannaford is shown as behaving -- Hannaford ceaselessly bullies people both on the set and at the party, generally employing sexually inflected taunts to compel his actors to despise one another. We know that Fassbinder behaved compulsively in this way, both from an innate sadism and a notion that the more tension he created on the set, the better the performances. This seems to be Hannaford's modus operandi.) Midgets get on the roof and start shooting off fireworks. Hannaford drags out a puny-looking rifle and begins to gun down the paper-mache dummies of John Dale posted in the rocks by the swimming pool. He engages in a racist rant about killing Indians, calls Oja Kodar "Pocahontas" whereupon she gets a gun and starts shooting lanterns (the power outage remains ongoing), presumably in the hope of burning down the house. Aware that the film will never be completed, many of Hannaford's acolytes and "yes-men" decamp, several of them indicating they plan to work with the studios on films that can make money. The Baron, Hannaford's longsuffering scriptwriter describes the director's remaining supporters, most of them old alcoholics, as "the good soldiers" like the men who crossed the Alps with Napoleon and Hannibal. The film critic, modeled on Pauline Kael, announces to the world that Hannaford always seduced the wives of his leading men so as to "possess his actors" by possessing their women -- her gossip suggests Hannaford's conflicted sexuality, something that has been on display throughout the movie. Welles engages in a little wish-fulfillment here: he has one of Hannaford's henchmen punch the critic in the jaw, knocking her out. The party-goers adjourn to an outdoor theater where everyone gets increasingly drunk and disorderly while the art film-within-the-film is projected on a huge screen in front of the parked cars. (All of this is spectacularly filmed.) Otterlake and Hannaford quarrel -- Otterlake says: "What did I do to offend you Daddy?" Hannaford tells him to kiss his ass. Otterlake, who has attended Harvard, cites The Tempest -- there are valedictory lines about "abjuring this rough magic" and "all our revels" being ended. Comes the dawn: John Dale shows up in the ruins of the party. Hannaford, who is driving the sports car, calls him "chicken", again accuses him of being unmanly (someone has earlier said "he looks like a girl") and, then, squeals away in the car in which he will die. In the film-within-a-film projected on the screen over the vacant parking lot, we see Oja Kodar slashing apart a great blow-up phallus. Cars are roaring by to their workaday destinations on the dawn-lit freeway behind the screen. The film-within-the-film ends apocalyptically (although this is not really the movie's ending -- the reels are being projected out of order): a tremendous wind roars across the desert, ripping down the film sets, and one of the John Dale dummies, caught in the vortex, has its head fall off.
The Other Side of the Wind looks fantastic. Welles fragments the action into thousands of shots. The cutting is so fast that sometimes it's hard to tell what's happening. And, yet, also true to form the movie's individual images are beautifully composed and, often, dauntingly complex, layers of reflections, mirrors, false perspectives. The movie has a distinct musical rhythm -- it flows in a way that is inescapably powerful. The dialogue is bitter, aphoristic, often memorable -- Welles has his actors lean in to the camera and deliver their lines in very tight, short shots: it's like a 30's screwball comedy shot by a Cubist: clever dialogue that is fragmented into a prismatic series of images: one riposte per shot, then, that shot framed with reaction shots to which there are other reaction shots. Some sequences are impenetrably complex: an orgy in a weird psychedelic toilet is fantastically intricate -- there are 500 shots in the course of a four-minute sequence that took Welles nine-months to edit. (This frenzied editing, of course, is partially camouflage -- Welles has to conceal that the footage was often shot at times separated by months if not years. For much of the film's production, Otterlake was played by Rich Little -- Little couldn't act and fled the set, a bit like John Dale, causing Welles to recruit Bogdanovich for the part. Welles didn't get Huston on-board until the very end: this means that he shot all of the people reacting to Hannaford's character without the leading man: Welles played that role and people were reacting to him. When Huston became available -- it was just before he shot The Man Who Would Be King -- Welles filmed him without most of the other actors present, shooting his dialogue scenes in the course of about a week. The fractured cutting conceals the fact that most of the principals in the film were never on-set together. The film is exceedingly bitter and savagely cruel. Whether the movie belongs to the highest order of Welles' work, some of which is the best in all world cinema, is disputable -- the film is too acerbic and its hard to make a successful movie about a main character who is an unmitigated louse or "prick" as Welles says in an interview. But there is no doubt that the movie is successful on its own terms, fantastically brilliant in its mise-en-scene, and not the work of an old and tired director -- rather, the film emits a sort of wild youthful energy. Whether the film represents Orson Welles at his best is unclear to me. But the movie provides Welles' most intense and troubling vision of movies and how they are made and the awful price that genius imposes: the Baron says at one point: Hannaford displays a truth of physics -- no machine can produce as much as it must destroy in the name of that production.
(A couple of anecdotes and additional observations: Gary Graver, Welles' cameraman, is the only DP in Hollywood who worked both with Ed Wood and Orson Welles -- he specialized in porno films and slasher movies. Les Moonves, the disgraced chief of NBC, is one of the participants at the party. The baroque sex scene in which Oja Kodar mounts John Dale in the front seat of a car that another man, possibly her previous boyfriend, is driving through a rainstorm was shot over a period of three years at different locations in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Paris. The "end money" for the film was provided by the Shah of Iran's brother-in-law -- when the Shah was deposed in 1979, the film was locked in a vault and kept there for years. Orson Welles used to say this: Every story has a sad ending. If it doesn't, that's because it's not the end yet. These anecdotes comes from a Netflix documentary accompanying The Other Side of the Wind, a picture called They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, mostly about Welles desperate attempts to get the film completed. This is a superb documentary and anyone planning to watch The Other Side of the Wind should also make time for the documentary which is indispensable in some respects.)
In a broad way, The Other Side of the Wind resembles Truman Capote's and incomplete Roman a clef, Answered Prayers. The film, like Capote's draft of a book, is fantastically ambitious, yet, also, weirdly gossipy -- it's an account of a famous, or some might say, infamous film-maker's last day alive, a movie that is surely intended to invoke for the cognoscenti real personalities in Hollywood and the film industry. In fact, a number of actual directors appear in the picture, notably Bogdonovich, Henry Jaglom, Claude Chabrol, and Curtis Harrington. Industry stalwarts like Darryl Zanuck are mentioned and someone who looks like Dennis Hopper mutters to the camera that he wants to produce a film that will attract John Wayne fans. The film within the film seems to parody Antonioni and there are innumerable "inside" allusions. Various sorts of Hollywood celebrities appear either in person or by proxy -- Lili Palmer, whose beautifully impassive mask-like visage dominates many of the images, imitates Marlene Dietrich; Georgie Jessel appears as himself. As with Capote's unfinished magnum opus, the film is concerned with fashion, notoriety, envious gossip, and most of its running time is devoted to a party for the 70th birthday of the film director, Jake Hannaford (John Huston) -- a party at which Hannaford's unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind is sporadically screened. (There are power outages that plunge the assembled multitudes in darkness during the screening -- thus, allowing Welles to demonstrate elaborate and picturesque chiaroscuro techniques.) The film's conceit is that Hannaford's celebrity is so great that a hundred or more videographers and cineastes (a term hurled around with contempt) have crashed the party and filmed its proceedings, either covertly or with the permission of those in attendance. The movie is shot on a variety of film stocks, all spliced together, probably a device that allowed Welles to shoot the movie as economics dictated and according to what kind of film he could afford at the time. Although the movie was filmed at intervals over six years, it is surprisingly coherent -- it seems, however, that Welles likely invited his participants to large blow-out parties and, in some cases, simply recorded their antics.
In all respects, the film adopts meta-filmic strategies. This is evident in the opening, a sort of foreword, that seems to be appended to the movie by Bogdonovich who narrates behind still shots, including an image of the car crashed by Hannaford -- at the very outset, we are uncertain whether Bogdonovich, who speaks of "many years" lapsing between the time that the film was shot and it's final release, is describing a fiction or the actual series of events resulting in the film that we are seeing. Throughout the movie, we are continuously teased with the notion that the film is a sort of distorted documentary, that it is showing us something about Orson Welles, although the director as actor never appears in the movie. The film poses an initial riddle to be solved, a bit like the structure of Citizen Kane and Welles' later films like Mr. Arkadin -- did Hannaford commit suicide in the smashed car after the party? Or was the crash a mere accident? (As in Godard's Contempt, the sports car crash is a metaphor for a film that is vexed and can't be successfully completely, what we would call a "train-wreck.) Borges' famously characterized Citizen Kane as a "labyrinth without a center" and this description applies even more aptly to The Other Side of the Wind -- the riddle posited as the film's raison d'etre is never solved. Indeed, most of the enigmas devised by the film remain mysterious through the picture's final image. And, at the outset, we are confronted with the question of how closely we should equate Welles and his baroque career with the central character, the 70-year old Jake Hannaford. In fact, the equation is never clear and, at times, it seems that Welles is, in fact, satirizing Huston himself, that Huston's persona as big game hunter, bullfighting aficionado, womanizer, and drunk with tendencies toward self-harm (papa Hemingway for movie-land) is a sort of joke to which Huston may not be fully privy -- Huston plays a self-aggrandizing monster, a sacred monster who speaks in aphorisms and seems to be boundlessly narcissistic. In some ways, he's like Welles as a bombastic, Falstaffian fixture on the late night TV shows -- he was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson and with Dick Cavett -- but, in other noteworthy respects, Hannaford is a parody of Huston's Hemingway affectations. (Hannaford's 70th birthday is on July 2 -- the date Hemingway killed himself.) But there's another element, one that seems obsessively if queasily superimposed on the narrative: Hannaford's sexual vigor is waning and Welles shows the old man watching the sex scenes staged in the film within a film with a savage voyeuristic concentration -- Huston is shown in huge, unflattering close-up, his eyes bearing down on the images projected on the screen. In the fragmentary film shown at the party, a handsome youth has sex with a beautiful older woman. The older woman is nude for, at least, a third of the film within the film, mostly shown from the rear ambling around various scenic locations. The older woman is played by Oja Kodar, Welles' mistress who is given a co-writing credit on the picture, and the sex scenes, very graphic by Welles' standards, seemed presented for the aging director's delectation -- he seems simultaneously aroused and intensely jealous as he watches footage of love scenes that he himself directed. (This aspect of the movie bears resemblance to Welles' last completed picture, his adaptation of Isak Dineson's The Immortal Story, an uncharacteristically restrained and short film about an old man who arranges for a much younger man to seduce and impregnate his beautiful young wife.) There is something perverse about the way that Oja Kodar is used in the film -- the camera both loves and despises her and her explicit sexual voracity is shown to be emasculating. (The movie abounds in subtle, and not so subtle, castration imagery -- in fact, a final scene shows an inflatable bag of air shaped unmistakably like a phallus torn apart by the blade of a scissors. In an early shot, someone asks if Hannaford regards the camera as "phallus.") At the same time, Kodar as exotic sexual vampire is also referred to as God -- it's Hannaford's contention that God is female; she's also the archetypal "dark woman" from America's psychosexual thickets: the movie is distinctly politically incorrect: Kodar is referred to as "Pocahontas" and "Minnehaha" and she prances around nude, her skin glowing red in the "magic hour twilight", dressed only in turquoise necklaces. In any event, there's something distinctly unsettling about Kodar's presence in the film: she's Welles' obscure object of desire, simultaneously the castrating Mother, the savage and sexually reapacious Indian maiden, God, the Devil, and the mythic object of the hero's quest. A haze of confusion hovers over the figure: Kodar is also completely silent -- she exists solely as an object of contemplation for the male gaze. Although we see her at the party, there's no indication that she can speak at all or that she has anything to say. In the movie, she's mostly completely silent -- a nude phantasm darting through some psychedelic and surreal arcade. (I suspect that Welles keeps her quiet because Kodar spoke with a strong Serbo-croatian accent that might have identified her, that is, established a place of origin, something that the film opposes -- in The Other Side of the Wind, Kodar is pure Jungian archetype and archetypes don't have home towns and aren't chatty.)
A central question raised by The Other Side of the Wind is how we are to interpret the film-within-the-film bearing that name. From the footage shown in the picture, The Other Side of the Wind as mise en abyme seems ludicrously bad -- the movie that Hannaford has made is awful, a kind of pretentious mélange of bad Antonioni (think Zabriskie Point) and a spaghetti Western. (The party scenes were actually filmed in Nevada within shouting distance of the mansion Antonioni blew to pieces at the end of Zabriskie Point.) A film executive named Max, early in the movie, watches part of the picture's opening sequence and declares the whole thing a "waste of time." But it's not clear what the executive means -- is the film a "waste of time" because its objectively awful or is the money-man commenting that he won't be able to make any profit on the Hannaford's self-indulgent project? (Hannaford, we learn, is proceeding without a script -- although this seems contradicted by a later scene in which we are shown hundreds and hundreds of story-boarded images from the film.) One of the characters announces that Hannaford, who began his career in silent films, is trying to make a movie for young people to show that he's "still with it" -- that is, relevant. And the film-within-a-film is replete with garish rock-n-roll sequences, several of them very effectively filmed, psychedelic light shows, casual sex, drug use, and the like. But Welles surely must know that the symbolic maunderings of the film-within-a-film, despite the beautiful way in which the scenes are shot and staged, are objectively terrible, indeed, risible -- in fact, interviews confirm that Welles regarded the film-within-the-film as a parody and a sort of joke. But the people at the party are all predictably obedient and seem to consider the picture that Hannaford is making as some sort of masterpiece. I presume this is Welles' satire on himself, on the notion that the great auteur can do no wrong. (The auteur theory is represented in the film by the hapless Joseph McBride, an early essayist on Welles, here cast as the scholarly cinephile "Mister Pister.") But it's not clear to what degree we are supposed to regard the film-within-the-film as wretched -- the satire is blurred, particularly because Welles' filmmaking is so ingenious and technically assured that he can't shoot an uninteresting frame of footage. Although Hannaford's The Other Side of the Wind (as opposed to Welles' film of that same name) seems horribly flawed, it is, nonetheless, compulsively watchable.
As The Other Side of the Wind proceeds, the film (here meaning the whole enterprise) becomes increasingly cruel, desperate, and sad. The specter of Hannaford's suicide (or accidental death) casts a shadow over everything. Sources of funding for the film-within-the-film dry up -- the studio shows no interest, some Texas oil-men proposing funding vamoose, and, finally, Hannaford "puts the touch" on his protégée Brooksie Otterlake. Otterlake has been successful with his pictures and he is the scion of a lumber dynasty. Hannaford simultaneously denounces others for suggesting that Otterlake be tapped for money while, at the same time, making a demand for cash himself. When Otterlake hesitates, Hannaford directs his rage at his protégée and the film ends with the two men tragically estranged. (This mirrors Bogdanovich's relationship with Welles. When Welles mocked him on TV on the Tonight Show, making demeaning comments to the guest host, Burt Reynolds of all people, their previously close relationship soured and Bogdanovich didn't talk to Welles again until a few weeks before the old man died. The rift prophetically on display in The Other Side of the Wind also arises in a context in which Welles seems to be cruelly caricaturing Cybil Shepherd, then, Bogdanovich's wife -- Hannaford has a baby-concubine, a little 16-year old blonde named Mavis, cute as a button, but so stupid that people mock her to her face. Her principal role in the movie is to pour drinks for Huston's character. Critics claim the character was based on the very young Cybil Shepherd who began her relationship with Bogdanovich during the shooting of The Last Picture Show.) Welles taunts John Dale while directing a sex scene with Oja Kodar -- Dale's genitals somehow get tangled in Kodar's dangly necklace and she has to use an alarmingly sharp knife to cut the necklace free. Needless to say, this interlude intimidates Dale and Hannaford, while shouting voice-over directions to his actors, implies that he's impotent. Dale, then, stalks off the set creating yet another impediment to the film's completion. At the party, things become increasingly dire. Hannaford and Otterlake, with their nasty cronies (led by the loyal Edmund O'Brien) mock a schoolmaster who has been invited to the party to share salacious anecdotes about John Dale. It's no surprise that these anecdotes all suggest that Dale is homo- or, at least, bi-sexual. (One hopes that Welles didn't act the way that Hannaford is shown as behaving -- Hannaford ceaselessly bullies people both on the set and at the party, generally employing sexually inflected taunts to compel his actors to despise one another. We know that Fassbinder behaved compulsively in this way, both from an innate sadism and a notion that the more tension he created on the set, the better the performances. This seems to be Hannaford's modus operandi.) Midgets get on the roof and start shooting off fireworks. Hannaford drags out a puny-looking rifle and begins to gun down the paper-mache dummies of John Dale posted in the rocks by the swimming pool. He engages in a racist rant about killing Indians, calls Oja Kodar "Pocahontas" whereupon she gets a gun and starts shooting lanterns (the power outage remains ongoing), presumably in the hope of burning down the house. Aware that the film will never be completed, many of Hannaford's acolytes and "yes-men" decamp, several of them indicating they plan to work with the studios on films that can make money. The Baron, Hannaford's longsuffering scriptwriter describes the director's remaining supporters, most of them old alcoholics, as "the good soldiers" like the men who crossed the Alps with Napoleon and Hannibal. The film critic, modeled on Pauline Kael, announces to the world that Hannaford always seduced the wives of his leading men so as to "possess his actors" by possessing their women -- her gossip suggests Hannaford's conflicted sexuality, something that has been on display throughout the movie. Welles engages in a little wish-fulfillment here: he has one of Hannaford's henchmen punch the critic in the jaw, knocking her out. The party-goers adjourn to an outdoor theater where everyone gets increasingly drunk and disorderly while the art film-within-the-film is projected on a huge screen in front of the parked cars. (All of this is spectacularly filmed.) Otterlake and Hannaford quarrel -- Otterlake says: "What did I do to offend you Daddy?" Hannaford tells him to kiss his ass. Otterlake, who has attended Harvard, cites The Tempest -- there are valedictory lines about "abjuring this rough magic" and "all our revels" being ended. Comes the dawn: John Dale shows up in the ruins of the party. Hannaford, who is driving the sports car, calls him "chicken", again accuses him of being unmanly (someone has earlier said "he looks like a girl") and, then, squeals away in the car in which he will die. In the film-within-a-film projected on the screen over the vacant parking lot, we see Oja Kodar slashing apart a great blow-up phallus. Cars are roaring by to their workaday destinations on the dawn-lit freeway behind the screen. The film-within-the-film ends apocalyptically (although this is not really the movie's ending -- the reels are being projected out of order): a tremendous wind roars across the desert, ripping down the film sets, and one of the John Dale dummies, caught in the vortex, has its head fall off.
The Other Side of the Wind looks fantastic. Welles fragments the action into thousands of shots. The cutting is so fast that sometimes it's hard to tell what's happening. And, yet, also true to form the movie's individual images are beautifully composed and, often, dauntingly complex, layers of reflections, mirrors, false perspectives. The movie has a distinct musical rhythm -- it flows in a way that is inescapably powerful. The dialogue is bitter, aphoristic, often memorable -- Welles has his actors lean in to the camera and deliver their lines in very tight, short shots: it's like a 30's screwball comedy shot by a Cubist: clever dialogue that is fragmented into a prismatic series of images: one riposte per shot, then, that shot framed with reaction shots to which there are other reaction shots. Some sequences are impenetrably complex: an orgy in a weird psychedelic toilet is fantastically intricate -- there are 500 shots in the course of a four-minute sequence that took Welles nine-months to edit. (This frenzied editing, of course, is partially camouflage -- Welles has to conceal that the footage was often shot at times separated by months if not years. For much of the film's production, Otterlake was played by Rich Little -- Little couldn't act and fled the set, a bit like John Dale, causing Welles to recruit Bogdanovich for the part. Welles didn't get Huston on-board until the very end: this means that he shot all of the people reacting to Hannaford's character without the leading man: Welles played that role and people were reacting to him. When Huston became available -- it was just before he shot The Man Who Would Be King -- Welles filmed him without most of the other actors present, shooting his dialogue scenes in the course of about a week. The fractured cutting conceals the fact that most of the principals in the film were never on-set together. The film is exceedingly bitter and savagely cruel. Whether the movie belongs to the highest order of Welles' work, some of which is the best in all world cinema, is disputable -- the film is too acerbic and its hard to make a successful movie about a main character who is an unmitigated louse or "prick" as Welles says in an interview. But there is no doubt that the movie is successful on its own terms, fantastically brilliant in its mise-en-scene, and not the work of an old and tired director -- rather, the film emits a sort of wild youthful energy. Whether the film represents Orson Welles at his best is unclear to me. But the movie provides Welles' most intense and troubling vision of movies and how they are made and the awful price that genius imposes: the Baron says at one point: Hannaford displays a truth of physics -- no machine can produce as much as it must destroy in the name of that production.
(A couple of anecdotes and additional observations: Gary Graver, Welles' cameraman, is the only DP in Hollywood who worked both with Ed Wood and Orson Welles -- he specialized in porno films and slasher movies. Les Moonves, the disgraced chief of NBC, is one of the participants at the party. The baroque sex scene in which Oja Kodar mounts John Dale in the front seat of a car that another man, possibly her previous boyfriend, is driving through a rainstorm was shot over a period of three years at different locations in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Paris. The "end money" for the film was provided by the Shah of Iran's brother-in-law -- when the Shah was deposed in 1979, the film was locked in a vault and kept there for years. Orson Welles used to say this: Every story has a sad ending. If it doesn't, that's because it's not the end yet. These anecdotes comes from a Netflix documentary accompanying The Other Side of the Wind, a picture called They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, mostly about Welles desperate attempts to get the film completed. This is a superb documentary and anyone planning to watch The Other Side of the Wind should also make time for the documentary which is indispensable in some respects.)
Monday, November 5, 2018
Lust Caution
Lust Caution is a languid suspense film, directed by Ang Lee in 2007, noteworthy primarily for its extremely graphic sex scenes. I'm not certain that the sex scenes are integral in any way to the story -- but they are certainly startling, staged in a titillating manner, and highly explicit. The film is beautifully photographed and, if anything, directed in a way that is excessive, and, even, distracting -- when someone goes outside, the streets are thronged with period cars, rickshaws, and mobs of people. We see long vistas, avenues in Hong Kong or Shanghai lined with marching soldiers -- the film is set during the Japanese occupation of China and there are people starving in alleyways, food-lines, corpses on the street. The elaborate, and, visibly, expensive period detail, the sumptuous robes and gowns and enamel-lacquered interiors all seem a bit beside the point -- but the film intends to impress with these details and, although there's no good narrative or thematic reason for this excess, the sets and garments, I suppose, are intended as a counterpoint to the voluptuous sex scenes. The movie is slow-moving, a rather laborious version of the old Mata Hari story -- a beautiful female spy seduces her victim, but, finally, can't bring herself to assassinate this man whom she apparently has come to actually love. The black widow's failure has the most dire consequences: she and her cell of resistance fighters are all killed.
Ang Lee's problem is to spin a two-hour plus movie from this slender anecdote. He accomplishes this by a complex, flash-back structure. We first meet the girl playing Mah-Jong with the wives of generals and military officials collaborating with the Japanese. The Mah-Jong games, loving detailed in the film, are inscrutable -- they seem to symbolize the lurking and oppressive force of bad luck, the evil fate that will destroy the heroine. A handsome, if sinister, military man, played by the go-to guy for explicit sex, Tony Leung (he appeared in Wong Kar-Wai's 1997 Happy Together in some memorable homosexual sex scenes), enters the room. He and the girl lock eyes and, then, the film retreats four years, to Hong Kong in the very opening months of the World War. The heroine is a student, taking courses in theater. She wants to appear in Ibsen's Doll House but is, instead, urged to act in an anti-Japanese propaganda play. The cadre of actors turns out to be resistance cell and they plot to murder the local general (Tony Leung) who is collaborating with the Japanese. The girl turns out to be a formidable actress and has no difficulty exercising her wiles to ensnare the treasonous general. But there's a problem -- she's a virgin and has to be deflowered before she can convincingly perform her role as an unhappy, adulterous young wife. (This is method acting taken to an extreme.) In these initial scenes, the girl is often shot in ways that are unflattering to her and that emphasize her naivety. One of the actors gets drunk and has unsatisfactory and painful sex with her. Properly prepared for her role as seductress, the girl lures the general to the place where he is to be killed, but he has qualms at the last moment and refuses to enter the building. Later, a relative of one of the actors arrives and harangues the troupe about their nefarious schemes. The actors stab him to death with broken shards of glass in a gory sequence that goes on for a long time and emphasizes the resistance fighter's clumsiness and inexperience with violence -- they talk fiercely but don't know what they are doing. The film, then, flashes forward. The girl is now in Shanghai. She encounters the man who had sex with her three years earlier -- she seems to harbor some feelings for him. Again, she is recruited and again assigned the task of seducing and killing the general who is now a chief torturer for his Japanese masters. The film's lurid sex scenes follow, many of them quite brutal -- true to his profession, the general likes rough sex which, also, seems to please our heroine. She is supposed to lure him to a jewelry store where he can be killed by the assassins. At the last moment, she tells him to flee and everyone, except the villain, ends of up dead.
A film of this sort is dependent the role of the leading lady. As far as I can see, the heroine in the film is excellent (Tang Wei) -- running the gamut from girlish inexperience to the hardened insensitivity of a jaded courtesan. (She was maybe too convincing in the sex scenes -- for a few years, the Communist regime in China banned her from its film industry; for instance, she was not allowed to appear in the Maoist drama, The Founding of the Party.) Lust Caution is gloomy and invokes the 1941Hitchcock film Suspicion, a movie that is showing in Shanghai and that the heroine attends. Indeed, the movies that the characters watch are integral to the film's themes -- the picture begins with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor in Waterloo Station (1940), a women's film involving selfless sacrifice, and features snippets of Suspicion intercut with ugly Japanese newsreels. Lust Caution is an impressive picture and instills a vivid sense of tragedy in the viewer -- both tragedy and waste: the girl seems to like the man who first had sex with her, but he never renews the relationship although, too late, he admits his love for her. The sex that she experiences with the torturer is spectacular and multi-orgasmic, but she doesn't really like the man and, perhaps, even despises him a little -- therefore, it is puzzling that she spares his life at the climax, although I suppose this is out of respect for his sexual prowess. It's not wholly clear what Ang Lee intends by this movie; he seems to be groping for some kind of comparison between sexual experiences -- naïve, clumsy first love and the depraved but technically accomplished experience with the jaded libertine. But this Last Tango in Shanghai is more than a little opaque and the plot is to slender to support much interpretation.
Ang Lee's problem is to spin a two-hour plus movie from this slender anecdote. He accomplishes this by a complex, flash-back structure. We first meet the girl playing Mah-Jong with the wives of generals and military officials collaborating with the Japanese. The Mah-Jong games, loving detailed in the film, are inscrutable -- they seem to symbolize the lurking and oppressive force of bad luck, the evil fate that will destroy the heroine. A handsome, if sinister, military man, played by the go-to guy for explicit sex, Tony Leung (he appeared in Wong Kar-Wai's 1997 Happy Together in some memorable homosexual sex scenes), enters the room. He and the girl lock eyes and, then, the film retreats four years, to Hong Kong in the very opening months of the World War. The heroine is a student, taking courses in theater. She wants to appear in Ibsen's Doll House but is, instead, urged to act in an anti-Japanese propaganda play. The cadre of actors turns out to be resistance cell and they plot to murder the local general (Tony Leung) who is collaborating with the Japanese. The girl turns out to be a formidable actress and has no difficulty exercising her wiles to ensnare the treasonous general. But there's a problem -- she's a virgin and has to be deflowered before she can convincingly perform her role as an unhappy, adulterous young wife. (This is method acting taken to an extreme.) In these initial scenes, the girl is often shot in ways that are unflattering to her and that emphasize her naivety. One of the actors gets drunk and has unsatisfactory and painful sex with her. Properly prepared for her role as seductress, the girl lures the general to the place where he is to be killed, but he has qualms at the last moment and refuses to enter the building. Later, a relative of one of the actors arrives and harangues the troupe about their nefarious schemes. The actors stab him to death with broken shards of glass in a gory sequence that goes on for a long time and emphasizes the resistance fighter's clumsiness and inexperience with violence -- they talk fiercely but don't know what they are doing. The film, then, flashes forward. The girl is now in Shanghai. She encounters the man who had sex with her three years earlier -- she seems to harbor some feelings for him. Again, she is recruited and again assigned the task of seducing and killing the general who is now a chief torturer for his Japanese masters. The film's lurid sex scenes follow, many of them quite brutal -- true to his profession, the general likes rough sex which, also, seems to please our heroine. She is supposed to lure him to a jewelry store where he can be killed by the assassins. At the last moment, she tells him to flee and everyone, except the villain, ends of up dead.
A film of this sort is dependent the role of the leading lady. As far as I can see, the heroine in the film is excellent (Tang Wei) -- running the gamut from girlish inexperience to the hardened insensitivity of a jaded courtesan. (She was maybe too convincing in the sex scenes -- for a few years, the Communist regime in China banned her from its film industry; for instance, she was not allowed to appear in the Maoist drama, The Founding of the Party.) Lust Caution is gloomy and invokes the 1941Hitchcock film Suspicion, a movie that is showing in Shanghai and that the heroine attends. Indeed, the movies that the characters watch are integral to the film's themes -- the picture begins with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor in Waterloo Station (1940), a women's film involving selfless sacrifice, and features snippets of Suspicion intercut with ugly Japanese newsreels. Lust Caution is an impressive picture and instills a vivid sense of tragedy in the viewer -- both tragedy and waste: the girl seems to like the man who first had sex with her, but he never renews the relationship although, too late, he admits his love for her. The sex that she experiences with the torturer is spectacular and multi-orgasmic, but she doesn't really like the man and, perhaps, even despises him a little -- therefore, it is puzzling that she spares his life at the climax, although I suppose this is out of respect for his sexual prowess. It's not wholly clear what Ang Lee intends by this movie; he seems to be groping for some kind of comparison between sexual experiences -- naïve, clumsy first love and the depraved but technically accomplished experience with the jaded libertine. But this Last Tango in Shanghai is more than a little opaque and the plot is to slender to support much interpretation.
Sunday, November 4, 2018
Hereditary
Hereditary (2018) is a successful horror film -- the picture establishes an unpleasant atmosphere and, then, exploits audience fear by having its principal characters act irrationally to put themselves in positions of maximum peril. In Hereditary, there is an attic swarming with flies, a lightless enclosed space in which a rotting, headless body is stored. Of course, the characters spend substantial amounts of time in the attic -- when something is scary downstairs, which is much of the time, where do they flee? To the attic, of course. Ordinarily, this doesn't make much sense and has to be accepted, tongue-in-cheek as it were, as a horror film convention. (For instance, in Jon Kraszinski's A Quiet Place, the characters are always going off alone to throw himself in harm's way -- none of this makes any narrative sense, particularly since Kraszinski's monster movie, posits the hero as a caring, effective, and fearless father. But, if this is the case, why does he blithely put his children in peril time and time again?) Hereditary's innovation is to make the convention of characters deliberately, if inadvisably, going into dark and scary coverts intentional -- ultimately, the people in Hereditary want to be dismembered or horribly mutilated: they seek refuge in places that maximally are awful because it is their intention to self-harm. This makes Hereditary's images of suffering more unpleasant because the people are inflecting pain on themselves -- this is their fate as members of a coven of devil-worshiping witches. Although Hereditary is not too sophisticated -- it lacks any sort of wit, eschews any self-mockery, and is grimly, if efficiently, nasty -- it is still fairly intelligent as a horror film: it's more similar to stylish and fairly literate pictures like Rosemary's Baby (Polanski 1968) and Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim (1943), movies that posit groups of devil worshipers passing for normal folks in milieu that are recognizably ordinary.
Everything tilts toward the radically abnormal in Hereditary: spectral voices summon devil-worshiping supplicants from school cafeterias and playgrounds. The house of horrors at the film's center has an interior that is completely, and theatrically, unrelated to its outside. The house's exterior is a typical McMansion, all gables and big windows set in a gorgeous forest beneath equally gorgeous mountains. The inside of the house is like one of Edward Kienholz' more hideous environments: it's all narrow corridors with ancient tightly shut doors, dark rooms with fireplaces guttering with sensitive flame, dismal, cell-like enclosures that all lightless -- in the attic, where the demons congregate, we actually see that the ceiling has been ripped open allowing jagged shards of light to penetrate the darkness. This is surreally opposed to the way the house looks on the outside. And, in fact, one motif in the film is that there are spaces within spaces, just as family histories contain horrors concealed within other horrors. The mother in the super-dysfunctional family living in the house-of-horrors is like a figure in a Tarkovsky film -- she makes little models of the house and stashes miniature figures, including demons, inside the tiny rooms that she builds. (She also can levitate like people in Tarkovsky's movies.) The concept is that there are secrets within secrets, although all will be revealed in the film's final grandiose sequence. This ending is the most exotic and spectacular aspect of the film -- after all the dimly lit Gran Guignol self-immolations and -beheadings at the movies frenzied climax, the picture ends with the coven of devil worshipers paying tribute to the chief demon, one of the Eight Lords of Hell, named "Paynim". Ominous music is central to horror films -- generally, a horror movies is simply risible without the spooky musical cues. Here, Paynim's followers gather in a sort of "treehouse of terror" -- I hope the reference to The Simpson's famous Halloween shows is intentional. On the soundtrack, we hear arpeggios that are clearly derived from the monumental music at the outset of Wagner's Rheingold -- this is the surging, churning "Rhine motif", complete with booming bass and endlessly sustained bass note (Wagner's famous E-flat note from which the whole world is fashioned). In the "treehouse of terror", Lord Paynim is crowned while supplicant devil worshipers kneel in obeisance, several of them, in a wonderfully disturbing tableaux, decomposing and headless bodies. The head of one of the carcasses has been mounted in a wooden idol to which the corpses are bowing. It's a completely psychotic and spectacular sequence, roaring with Wagnerian bombast, the music rising to a barbaric crescendo before the closing credits, weirdly enough Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now." The best horror film's are often ultimately silly and inconsequential -- despite the rave reviews, I don't think Hereditary is one of the greatest of such films, although it aspires to greatness in its otherworldly and barbarous last five minutes. And, therefore, if you can tolerate pictures of this sort, worth seeing.
Everything tilts toward the radically abnormal in Hereditary: spectral voices summon devil-worshiping supplicants from school cafeterias and playgrounds. The house of horrors at the film's center has an interior that is completely, and theatrically, unrelated to its outside. The house's exterior is a typical McMansion, all gables and big windows set in a gorgeous forest beneath equally gorgeous mountains. The inside of the house is like one of Edward Kienholz' more hideous environments: it's all narrow corridors with ancient tightly shut doors, dark rooms with fireplaces guttering with sensitive flame, dismal, cell-like enclosures that all lightless -- in the attic, where the demons congregate, we actually see that the ceiling has been ripped open allowing jagged shards of light to penetrate the darkness. This is surreally opposed to the way the house looks on the outside. And, in fact, one motif in the film is that there are spaces within spaces, just as family histories contain horrors concealed within other horrors. The mother in the super-dysfunctional family living in the house-of-horrors is like a figure in a Tarkovsky film -- she makes little models of the house and stashes miniature figures, including demons, inside the tiny rooms that she builds. (She also can levitate like people in Tarkovsky's movies.) The concept is that there are secrets within secrets, although all will be revealed in the film's final grandiose sequence. This ending is the most exotic and spectacular aspect of the film -- after all the dimly lit Gran Guignol self-immolations and -beheadings at the movies frenzied climax, the picture ends with the coven of devil worshipers paying tribute to the chief demon, one of the Eight Lords of Hell, named "Paynim". Ominous music is central to horror films -- generally, a horror movies is simply risible without the spooky musical cues. Here, Paynim's followers gather in a sort of "treehouse of terror" -- I hope the reference to The Simpson's famous Halloween shows is intentional. On the soundtrack, we hear arpeggios that are clearly derived from the monumental music at the outset of Wagner's Rheingold -- this is the surging, churning "Rhine motif", complete with booming bass and endlessly sustained bass note (Wagner's famous E-flat note from which the whole world is fashioned). In the "treehouse of terror", Lord Paynim is crowned while supplicant devil worshipers kneel in obeisance, several of them, in a wonderfully disturbing tableaux, decomposing and headless bodies. The head of one of the carcasses has been mounted in a wooden idol to which the corpses are bowing. It's a completely psychotic and spectacular sequence, roaring with Wagnerian bombast, the music rising to a barbaric crescendo before the closing credits, weirdly enough Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now." The best horror film's are often ultimately silly and inconsequential -- despite the rave reviews, I don't think Hereditary is one of the greatest of such films, although it aspires to greatness in its otherworldly and barbarous last five minutes. And, therefore, if you can tolerate pictures of this sort, worth seeing.
Barking Dogs Never Bite
Korean director Boon Jong-Ho directed this film, Barking Dogs don't Bite, his first feature, in 2000. The movie is an elaborate "shaggy dog story" -- both literally and generically. A "shaggy dog story" is an intricate narration that can be expanded with as many complications as desired but which remains ultimately (and intentionally) inconsequential. Typically, a narrative of this sort begins with some kind of event that seems scarcely worth noticing that, then, is elaborated into a complex, seemingly improvised plot -- the generic story is an account of people looking for a lost dog described by its owners as "shaggy", various enounters that occur during the hunt, and, at last, the revelation that the so-called "shaggy" dog is not shaggy at all. Boon Jong-Ho uses this plot template for Barking Dogs. The effect is a little like Wong Kar-Wei's Chungking Express with its interlocked stories revolving around a cheap, greasy spoon take-out place and films like Michael Haneke's Code Unknown -- disaffected city-dwellers, each isolated from the others, are entangled together by chance events in a narrative. The TV program Seinfeld typically exploited plots of this sort.
In Barking Dogs, a frazzled graduate student is tormented by the yipping of a small shaggy dog. (The story begins in media res and so it takes us some time to unravel the graduate student's motives.) He steals the small white dog, a kind of furry fuzz-ball terrier, and tries to pitch the animal off the rooftop of the large, anonymous apartment building where he lives. He can't bring himself to commit this act, nor can he hang the dog by its leash in the basement of the apartment building. So he locks the dog in an abandoned armoire in the apartment building's basement. Later, he discovers that he has probably seized the wrong dog. There is a granny in the building who is drying radish pickles on the roof and she has a Chihuahua with an irritating bark. The graduate student goes into the basement to rescue the white, shaggy terrier but finds that the apartment maintenance man is cooking the dog on his hibachi. (Here Jong-Ho arrests his plot and has the maintenance man tell a long maniacal story about a murdered janitor named "Boiler Kim" -- in this story, Jong-Ho tips his hand that his narrative will be complex, seemingly ghastly, but, more or less, pointless.) The graduate student, who is badly mistreated by his pregnant wife or girlfriend (she makes him crack walnuts for her, seemingly her only source of sustenance), dognaps the Chihuahua and, ultimately, throws it off the roof of the building. Two slacker girls who work in a toy store (barely work) and have access to a copying machine meet the little girl whose terrier has been eaten. The little girl puts up posters everywhere advertising a reward for the missing (and eaten) terrier. She says that she will commit suicide if her dog isn't found -- but dogs are fungible and, later in the film, we see her dragging another small, and equally irritating, dog on a leash. The slacker toy-store employees see the graduate student pitching the dog off the roof. It turns out that the unfortunate Chihuahua belongs to the old lady who is curing pickled radish on the roof top. The slacker girls pursue the graduate student, hoping to achieve fame in the Korea media by bringing the dognapped to justice. Meanwhile the graduate student's wife or girlfriend has purchased a dog, another nasty little white dog (a poodle), that she names baby. The graduate student loses that dog in a fog of chemical spray and the poodle ends up in the clutches of a homeless vagrant who tries to barbecue the small animal but is beaten-up by the slacker girls. The more attractive slacker girl helps the graduate student as he forlornly (and drunkenly) glues posters showing his missing dog to walls -- there is a distinct erotic tension between the unhappily matched graduate student and the girl, but, true to form, this pseudo-romance goes nowhere. And, so, it goes -- in the end, the two slacker girls are shown hiking in a woods, a distant forest that can be seen from the top of the Brutalist, concrete skyscrapers and that they have long yearned to explore. The graduate student is now a professor, having achieved his academic goals, although he doesn't seem to be too happy. All of this is presented in a fluid, brightly lit schematic style. There are some fantasy interpolations, including the story of another grad student who died when a subway train hit his head while he was projectile vomiting, and a sequence in which the roof-tops of the buildings are crowded with people in yellow hoodies cheering on the slacker girl when she rescues the poodle. Ultimately, the film is as irritating as is its privilege -- it's a genre that is as irritating and petty as the yapping dogs that are its subject. The film is admirably designed, however, and keeps multiple balls up in the air, juggling the different characters with aplomb. The problem that the viewer senses in the film's last third is that a narrative that is intended, fundamentally, as an irritant goes on too long -- this sort of story would be best at about an hour's length and the film seems to be, at least, 115 minute, or so, long. It's an interesting film, but, not good enough to sustain it's length.
In Barking Dogs, a frazzled graduate student is tormented by the yipping of a small shaggy dog. (The story begins in media res and so it takes us some time to unravel the graduate student's motives.) He steals the small white dog, a kind of furry fuzz-ball terrier, and tries to pitch the animal off the rooftop of the large, anonymous apartment building where he lives. He can't bring himself to commit this act, nor can he hang the dog by its leash in the basement of the apartment building. So he locks the dog in an abandoned armoire in the apartment building's basement. Later, he discovers that he has probably seized the wrong dog. There is a granny in the building who is drying radish pickles on the roof and she has a Chihuahua with an irritating bark. The graduate student goes into the basement to rescue the white, shaggy terrier but finds that the apartment maintenance man is cooking the dog on his hibachi. (Here Jong-Ho arrests his plot and has the maintenance man tell a long maniacal story about a murdered janitor named "Boiler Kim" -- in this story, Jong-Ho tips his hand that his narrative will be complex, seemingly ghastly, but, more or less, pointless.) The graduate student, who is badly mistreated by his pregnant wife or girlfriend (she makes him crack walnuts for her, seemingly her only source of sustenance), dognaps the Chihuahua and, ultimately, throws it off the roof of the building. Two slacker girls who work in a toy store (barely work) and have access to a copying machine meet the little girl whose terrier has been eaten. The little girl puts up posters everywhere advertising a reward for the missing (and eaten) terrier. She says that she will commit suicide if her dog isn't found -- but dogs are fungible and, later in the film, we see her dragging another small, and equally irritating, dog on a leash. The slacker toy-store employees see the graduate student pitching the dog off the roof. It turns out that the unfortunate Chihuahua belongs to the old lady who is curing pickled radish on the roof top. The slacker girls pursue the graduate student, hoping to achieve fame in the Korea media by bringing the dognapped to justice. Meanwhile the graduate student's wife or girlfriend has purchased a dog, another nasty little white dog (a poodle), that she names baby. The graduate student loses that dog in a fog of chemical spray and the poodle ends up in the clutches of a homeless vagrant who tries to barbecue the small animal but is beaten-up by the slacker girls. The more attractive slacker girl helps the graduate student as he forlornly (and drunkenly) glues posters showing his missing dog to walls -- there is a distinct erotic tension between the unhappily matched graduate student and the girl, but, true to form, this pseudo-romance goes nowhere. And, so, it goes -- in the end, the two slacker girls are shown hiking in a woods, a distant forest that can be seen from the top of the Brutalist, concrete skyscrapers and that they have long yearned to explore. The graduate student is now a professor, having achieved his academic goals, although he doesn't seem to be too happy. All of this is presented in a fluid, brightly lit schematic style. There are some fantasy interpolations, including the story of another grad student who died when a subway train hit his head while he was projectile vomiting, and a sequence in which the roof-tops of the buildings are crowded with people in yellow hoodies cheering on the slacker girl when she rescues the poodle. Ultimately, the film is as irritating as is its privilege -- it's a genre that is as irritating and petty as the yapping dogs that are its subject. The film is admirably designed, however, and keeps multiple balls up in the air, juggling the different characters with aplomb. The problem that the viewer senses in the film's last third is that a narrative that is intended, fundamentally, as an irritant goes on too long -- this sort of story would be best at about an hour's length and the film seems to be, at least, 115 minute, or so, long. It's an interesting film, but, not good enough to sustain it's length.
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