Robert Monell on Inland Empire.
"It's for the adventurous filmgoer only, all others need to move on."
Bob sees all, knows all.
This is an odd buddy comedy/western from 1979 starring Clint Eastwood as his then-usual amoral drifter and Shirley Maclaine as a nun, during the French intervention in Mexico. Don Siegel directs from a script by Albert Maltz & Budd Boetticher, so you know it's going to get violent.
The movie doesn't work in a lot of ways - for a start Maclaine doesn't make a very convincing Mexican (her role was intended for Elizabeth Taylor) - but it's an interesting oddity. The mismatched stars have surprising chemistry, Gabriel Figueroa's photography is gorgeous, and Siegel provides an ultra-violent ending worthy of Peckinpah.
The appearance of actual Mexicans in the main cast puts this movie well above Joe Kidd's casting of gringo John Saxon as a taco-eater. There are some great scenes of what was pretty extreme gore for a big-budget movie in those days.
Eastwood was in the middle of trying to change his image - this was made between Paint Your Wagon and The Beguiled - and his character is actually fallible for a change. He's grievously wounded at one point, putting him out of action, and his character is endearingly stupid and even naive. Not quite as stupid and naive as his character in The Gauntlet, but certainly not the near-invincible Machiavellian mastermind of the Dollars trilogy and High Plains Drifter.
Maclaine, though clearly miscast, is actually pretty good as the nun (who the audience quickly realises isn't really a nun, though Eastwood doesn't cotton to this). I'm not really a fan though, which highlights a problem with the movie: fans of Clint Eastwood and Shirley Maclaine are probably mutually exclusive groups.
PETA members will be unimpressed by the scene where Eastwood beheads a (real) rattlesnake and hands off its still-squirming corpse to Maclaine. The opening scene of Eastwood's horse stamping on a (real) tarantula might upset them too. The more old westerns I watch the less extreme the animal slaughter in Cannibal Holocaust seems, but at least they don't cut any monkeys' faces off in Two Mules.
Joe Kidd is one of the few Clint Eastwood westerns that I had not watched. It turns out that I was not missing a great overlooked classic, or even a decent guilty pleasure. A muddled script by Elmore Leonard, flat direction by John Sturges, and a really terrible score by Lalo Schifrin sink this one.
This is the story of how ruthless land developer Frank Harlan (Robert Duvall) attempts to stop a Mexican land claim by trying to assassinate the leader of the claimants, Luis Chama (John Saxon).
So why is it called Joe Kidd? Well, that's a good question. Joe (Eastwood) is first seen dressed as the western equivalent of a city dandy, laid up in jail for being drunk and disorderly and for poaching a deer off reservation land ('cause, you know, the Law really cared about the plight of Native Americans in those days).
Harlan tries to recruit Joe to help him hunt Chama, but he refuses on principle. Later, because Chama has tied one of his men to a fence post, Joe changes his mind and joins the hunt. It's at this point that Joe ditches his amiable facial expression and city finery in favour of the standard Clintus steely gaze, cowboy hat and duster.
It's never really explained who Joe Kidd really is, why he needs "men", why a guy who can hire "men" needs to poach, why he didn't join the hunt at first, why he did join the hunt later, or indeed what he's doing in the movie in the first place. I guess they needed a bigger box-office draw hero than John Saxon.
Speaking of Saxon, he's woefully miscast and has to hide behind a fake accent and stupid moustache. The guy is a talented actor who either makes a lot of bad career choices or just doesn't get offered many good roles. Most of the cast turns up duff: Duvall doesn't exactly set the screen on fire as the villain, Gregory Walcott (Plan 9 From Outer Space, Prime Cut) is boring as the cowardly sheriff, and almost nobody else made any impression at all. Don Stroud is memorable as Duvall's main thug, but he's mostly just there for Eastwood to make a fool of.
Eastwood is just like he always is, charming and icy cool. I just don't understand what he's doing in the movie. It's made by his production company, but that doesn't explain the plot. Director John Sturges had made some great movies: Bad Day At Black Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Ice Station Zebra, etc. This is not his best work. Don Siegel might have injected some energy and humour into the proceedings.
Lalo Schifrin's score is both bad and inappropriate. Shoddy sound design doesn't help - in one scene the sound of a wagon approaching continues even after it has stopped and everyone is disembarking, and even for the time the sound is flat and unimaginative, as if everything came from the library. The over-done sound of Joe's spurs is particularly annoying.
The end is particularly dumb.
Not recommended. Watch pretty much any other Eastwood western instead. Even Hang 'Em High.
Hi all
Thank you for the lovely comments. Unfortuantely due to stuff, I can't post comment son my own blog. Stink, but that's arf arf arf for ya.
So "Point noted!" to everyone. Chuck, I'm probably gonna check out season 2 at some point anyway, but thanks for the warning.
In other news, Philip Amos Pereira is born. He's my brand new nephew, as of the evening of Thursday August 16. You can see a photo of him here. Congrats to my sister Kibe & proud daddy Antonio!
This looked like such a great idea for a series. A cop in Manchester is hit by a car in 2006. When he wakes up, it’s 1973. He’s still a cop (a new transfer from “Hull”), though his car & his clothes are rather different, and everyone else seems to have transferred from The Sweeney. Is he in a coma, mad, or has he travelled in time? The series screams “HE’S IN A COMA!” at least twelve times each episode, but maddeningly refuses to develop the overarching plot.
The show captures the look & feel of ‘70s tv pretty well. It doesn’t particularly resemble real life, but neither do any other cop shows I can think of. Unfortunately, the inventiveness of the show ends with “Quantum Leap meets The Sweeney”. Every episode is a typical cop show story, plodding and predictable with plenty of room for moralizing from Our Hero, mostly about how much better things would be in the future if people in the past didn’t fuck things up so badly.
Clearly influenced by the work of Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective, Lipstick On Your Collar, etc), this has none of the depth or intelligence of his work.
The cast is quite strong, but the characters are defiantly two dimensional. John Simm is fine as DI Sam Tyler, whose main character point is that he is from the future and wants to get back. Philip Glenister is smashing as DCI Gene Hunt, who is tough, doesn’t play by the rules, and can drink any crim under the table – essentially he’s Jack Regan only not played by John Thaw. Dean Andrews’s moustache is perfect as DS Ray Carling’s moustache, fitting as it does on the upper lip of a total prick.
Almost every episode ties itself up into a neat little ball in the end, ‘cause this is a cop show and loose ends don’t happen. Opportunities at subversion and clever plotting are wasted at every turn. It almost doesn’t matter what unrealistic cops vs. Robbers tosh happens, ‘cause the story every time is “Tyler and Hunt don’t like each other, Tyler goes against Hunt, between Tyler’s futuristic know-how and Hunt’s police brutality they fit up the right bad guy, they give each other grudging respect, and then at the start of the next episode they’re back to where they started.”
There’s some nice stuff involving using the test pattern girl & her doll as a Mario Bava-esque scary little girl ghost, but for me this show was an infuriatingly mediocre mess of missed opportunities and blundering clichés. At only eight episodes, it shouldn't have had time to get as stale as it did.
I thought tv was supposed to be on a general upswing since I stopped watching it seven years ago, and that this was a particularly acclaimed show. To me it’s the same old bollocks re-packaged, in more ways than one. I guess I have to check out the second, and final, season just to find out if they ever get around to throwing anything unexpected into the mix.
Not recommended.
Peter Jackson started off by making a very funny alien-invasion gore comedy (91 minutes). He then made a sporadically funny gross-out Muppets parody (94 minutes). His third film was an hilarious zombie comedy (97 minutes). His fourth film, his best to date, was a serious and unconventional character drama based on a true story (108 minutes).
Jackson's fifth film, a Ghostbusters rip-off, originally ran 110 minutes and was expanded to a "director's cut" of 122 minutes. This is where the rot began to set in. Neither as serious as his previous film nor as funny as the first three, it really didn't need to be 12 minutes longer.
Jackson's next project was to be epic in scope, adapting a famous novel that the greatest fantasy writer of the 20th Century has described as "Epic Pooh". Jackson made this in three parts, each of which was later expanded: 178 minutes became 208, 179 minutes became 223, and 200 minutes became 252. When it was finally assembled into one long movie it became clear that Jackson had gone 203 minutes beyond Andy Warhol's Empire and made the longest, most boring movie of all time.
When Jackson's next movie came in at a mere 188 minutes (later expanded to 201) it might have seemed like a bit of an advancement for him, but in truth he was more boring than ever; this movie, a tall story about a big monkey, was a remake that added 97 minutes to the running time without ever adding a single significant element to the story.
This filmmaker does not just need an editor. He needs to be kept away from movie sets until he regains his senses. Reportedly he is writing & directing a movie based on the autobiography of a 60 year old punk rock singer. The way things are going, we can expect the movie to be told in real time.
Is there life in the old dog yet? Will Peter Jackson ever again make a movie that is not at least twice as long as it need to be? My guess is "No," but I live in hope!
Dealing with a cold is much easier if your upper lip is clean shaven.
"The biggest danger we face as a civilization, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not tossing hand grenades into television stations because of the commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones."
- from Herzog On Herzog
In 1942, the 27 year old writer/director/actor Orson Welles (then tagged "The Boy Genius") was embroiled in the filming of 3 movies simultaneously for smallish studio RKO: a dark thriller called Journey Into Fear, an ambitious and unique travelogue/documentary/anthology film called It's All True, and a downbeat family saga called The Magnificent Ambersons.
Welles's only previous film, Citizen Kane, had angered a lot of powerful people in America and had lost money at the box office. In addition all three of his current movies were running over schedule and over budget, and a recent management change at RKO had robbed Welles of most of his most ardent supporters.
RKO executives believed that The Magnificent Ambersons was too dark for wartime audiences. They also wanted to punish Welles for his various perceived transgressions. They arranged a screening of the movie in a city near Hollywood called Pomona, and double-billed it with a broad comedy called Mexican Spitfire Sees A Ghost. After sitting through this much lighter fare, the audience was unprepared for Welles's bleak vision, and RKO used this as an excuse to cut and re-shoot much of the movie without Welles's input. The movie, which had started at 148 minutes, was eventually released at 88 minutes, and the cut footage was all destroyed. RKO then started advertising their movies with a new slogan: "Showmanship Instead Of Genius".
(As "punishment" for working with Welles, a number of the technicians who worked on Ambersons were assigned to a b-movie unit to produce cheap horror movies with lurid titles. This unit also inherited a lot of of the expensive sets from Ambersons. The producer assigned to run the unit was David O. Selznick's former assistant, Val Lewton.)
As a result of this, a saying sprung up in Hollywood: "Will it play in Pomona?" This is a euphemism for "This is too arty &/or serious, we need to change it." (Another result was that in most of his future movies Welles involved himself much more heavily in the editing.)
In a scene towards the end of Inland Empire, Laura Dern is dying from being stabbed in the stomach with a screwdriver on Hollywood Boulevard. While Dern gives her "Academy Award death-scene performance", two homeless women have a lengthy and bland conversation over her body about catching the bus to Pomona.
Lynch's career has been plagued by producer interference, from the many problems he faced writing & directing Dune in 1984 to his being instructed to shoot racier footage for Mulholland Dr. in 2001. As a filmmaker obsessed by oneiric images and structures, Lynch has dealt with the medium of film as a "dream factory" and with how these dreams can be corrupted.
It's easy imagine Lynch seeing Welles as a kindred spirit, not just because of the problems they have had getting their movies made in the way they want, but as another explorer of the corruption underbelly of American society. Welles liked to describe himself as "THE technical master of the medium" (emphasis his) and it's quite hard to argue with that; Welles died in 1985, and it's my opinion that when Lynch wrote & directed Blue Velvet two years later he inherited Welles's mantle.
This is a possible key to understanding just one small scene in the most dream-haunted of Lynch's films, a film which to me stands with the best of Luis Buñuel, Maya Deren and Alejandro Jodorowsky as being rich with allusions, depths and meaning. A film that - like those of the other filmmakers I name - requires a certain amount of specialized knowledge to understand, but which offers rewards far greater than any narrative-driven cinema I have experienced.
That's my take anyway. I think I'd find it impossible to write a conventional review of this movie. It's the Mona Lisa, it's the Ode to Joy, it's the Bible.
Five Easy Pieces
This was a superb movie from 1970 in which Jack Nicholson plays Bobby, a piano prodigy who's left his supremely intellectual and gifted, yet dysfunctional, family to be a drifter; at the start of the movie he's working on an oil field. He's called back to the homestead because his father has had two strokes, bringing his pregnant waitress girlfriend (Karen Black in fine form) but then dumping her at a nearby motel because he's embarassed by her.
Bobby is basically a selfish cock, dodging responsibility and running away from any problems or commitments that come his way. I think it's the best acting I've ever seen from Nicholson. Carole Eastman's excellent script is character rather than plot driven, and contains many choice dialogue scenes (everyone talks about the chicken sandwich, but my favourite was the Filth Lady). My favourite scene overall is Bobby alone with his paralyzed father; the actor who plays the old man gives an extraordinary performance without moving or speaking. If you've seen it, you know what I mean.
Probably the best movie about personal responsibility I've ever seen.
Them
Sold as a lean & mean nerve-jangling thriller with a wicked twist in its tail, I found this French/Romanian movie to be a mechanical & by-the-numbers stalk & slash movie with a lot of stalking and not much slashing. I guessed the (rather ordinary) twist early on, which drained the suspense that hadn't already been sapped by the protagonists acting like typical horror-movie morons.
Oh well, you can't win 'em all.
And that's it! Festival over.
OK I still have two movies again, but I don't know when I'll next get net access so I'll post my round-up now. I'm only making it to 12 movies this year - yeah I know, piker. If you want a more complete round-up try Svend.
Retribution
Kiyoshi Kurusawa's low-key ghost story is a sharp character study with some great scares. A police officer investigating a murder finds evidence that seems to implicate himself in the crime. To say much more than that would be to spoil it, but this is an excellent movie that demands close attention. Critics who complained that it doesn't make sense are wrong; this movie makes perfect sense if you watch closely. I suspect that audience's abilities to watch mysteries is being atrophied by Hollywood's continual dumbing-down; people who still read books for grown-ups should do OK though.
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
If you love Leonard Cohen (as I do) this filmed tribute concert combined with interviews should delight you. If you don't, you might react like the teenagers in front of me who giggled and mocked and then walked out after less than 20 minutes.
Away From Her
Sarah Polley's writing/directing feature debut, about a couple in their '60s dealing with early onset Alzheimer's, is the most conventionally excellent movie I saw in the Festival so far. Julie Christie is superb as the woman slowly losing her mental facilities, and Gordon Pinsent matches her as the distraught husband. Sensitive and moving without ever lapsing into tear-jerker cliche, it bodes well for Polley's career behind the camera.
Paprika
The latest movie from Satoshi Kon, writer/director or Perfect Blue, Millenium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paranoia Agent, is very much in the vein of his first two movies: a mind-fuck fantasy vs. reality story involving a young woman with dual identities. This time it's about a machine that allows therapists to enter their patents' dreams, and what happens when someone starts abusing this power. I enjoyed it a lot, but not quite as much as the first two; it's just a little too similar structurally.
The King of Marvin Gardens
This early '70s movie starring Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern & Ellen Burstyn was disappointing when I saw it but had a lingering power the more I thought about it. Not the neglected classic it was touted as, but worthwhile.
Taxidermia
One of the most disgusting movies I've ever seen - and I actively seek them out - this was amusing but slight despite its extreme subject matter. Blood, buckets of vomit, the real butchering of a real pig, child molesting, bestiality, lots of foul things I won't reveal, and a general gross tone are all played for laughs. It's the story of 3 generations of a Hungarian family, and I thought it might have been funnier if I'd grown up in an Eastern European country as it's clearly satirizing Communist Europe.
The Secret Life of Words
Stepping back in front of the camera, Sarah Polley is superb as a young deaf & withdrawn factory worker who, instead of taking a holiday, becomes a nurse for a burns victim on an oil rig (Tim Robbins). This movie - which has been unforgivably spoiled by some reviews - is largely about what is not said and what is not revealed until specific moments. All the actors are great (including Julie Christie again in a small role) but Tim Robbins in particular has never been better. Deeply felt, honest, and oh so real, this is the movie I would most highly recommend that I've seen in the Festival.
Inland Empire
David Lynch's endlessly fascinating 3-hour abstract epic may already be my favourite of his movies. People who complained about having trouble following Mulholland Dr. are going to really hate this movie, which is rich in depth and meaning as well as being technically superb, but which has absolutely no coherent story. Lynch's strangest by far - people are going to really hate this movie - but in a lot of ways it's the one I've been waiting for from him. As always with Lynch the whole cast is superb - he's a master at getting great performances - but Laura Dern deserves special attention as she's the main thing holding it together. She was robbed at Oscar time. Others might shout "The Emperor Has No Clothes!" but fuck 'em.
Death Note 1 + 2
This two-part Japanese story, based on a manga that has also been adapted into anime, is an outrageously entertaining crowd-pleaser that held a packed theatre in thrall for four and a half hours. The story concerns a notebook that causes the death of anyone whose name is written into it, and it plays out as master detective vs. master criminal. It's neither gory nor scary, but is just ridiculously fun.
The Long Goodbye
This movie's sound design suffered from the aged and un-remastered Mono print - the dialogue was often difficult to discern over the sound effects - but this movie, updated by the great under-rated scriptwriter Leigh Brackett (The Big Sleep, The Empire Striked Back) from Raymond Chandler's novel to the 1970s and directed by Robert Altman (R.I.P) was enormous fun. In one scene, a ripple of whispers around the theatre said "It's David Carradine!" so you know it's good. Elliott Gould is superb as Philip Marlowe. Just rent it, it's around.
Tonight I see Five Easy Pieces and Them - maybe one day I'll get a chance to blog about those too.
Meanwhile, here's an article about how Harry Potter is symptomatic of children being lead away from Christ, instead of a cause. I have still never read any HP so I can't comment on the current debate about whether J.K. Rowling's inept prose is damaging children's ability to like good books.