#losers watching me experience psychosis in real time

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👍 I had a time

[arecomicsevengood]

Quarantine Movies, Part 3

OLD BOYFRIENDS (1979) dir. Joan Tewkesbury

Not often I watch a movie and feel like “What the fuck is happening?” but I did with this one, written by Paul Schrader and directed by the screenwriter of Nashville. Talia Shire stars as a woman getting back in touch with her old boyfriends. She’s… recovering from a nervous breakdown? Sort of out for revenge? One ex hooks up with her again, and then, once abandoned, hires a private detective to track her down. A little boring at first, and then becomes baffling for most of its middle. John Belushi’s in it, playing a kind of pathetic schlub that feels convincingly like “the real Belushi” to me in the sense of me finding it uncomfortable to watch. I think maybe the film can be understood as a take on feminine psychosis in contrast to the masculine psychosis found in Schrader’s Taxi Driver screenplay. The psychosis here being this lack of self-knowledge that leads to manipulating people ostensibly towards the end of finding love.

KLUTE (1971) dir. Alan Pakula

Feel like I got the impression this movie was a joke from somewhere? Some Murphy Brown reference or something, playing to consensus of losers. (Edit: The joke’s in Wet Hot American Summer, but doesn’t really contain a value judgment about the movie.) It’s not great by any means but it’s not particularly tawdry given the subject matter. It is confusing that the movie is mostly about Jane Fonda’s call girl character, but the movie is named after Donald Sutherland’s character, who’s a detective. Maybe the joke was always just that people thought Jane Fonda played Klute. Movie digs into the sex worker’s psychology in a way that feels contemporary, except contemporary discourse doesn’t really allow for psychological insight, in favor of empty gestures towards representation. Sutherland’s out to solve a mystery, Fonda falls in love with him: I really did think this was smart in depicting a relationship where person was uncomfortable with the act of falling in love as running counter to their techniques of emotional distancing, except, I guess, for the fact that this is depicted in scenes of Fonda talking to her therapist that spell out what’s happening rather than depict this in a more organic way. But that it feels sort of shoehorned in is cool because the movie then largely has this mystery narrative it’s about. It is a little dull and could stand to be shorter, though the musical score does some nice grooves with dissonant elements on top, vaguely Morricone-style, though of course he’s got a deep body of work.

EYES OF LAURA MARS (1978) dir. Irvin Kershner

Criterion’s description of this chracterizes it as an “American giallo,” which seems about right. About a woman (Faye Dunaway) who takes violent/erotic photographs (shot by Helmut Newton) that coexist in both advertising and art gallery contexts. She starts having psychic visions of murder, the police are investigating her because some murders seem modeled after her photos, although that is not the case with any of the murders she has visions of, which then start to involve people she knows. So, like a giallo, there’s a lot happening, an interest in lurid style, and a disinterest in internal consistency as things ratchet up, and the twist ending (that the cop she started dating has multiple personality disorder) falls within that pattern as well. Not as good as the best Italian giallo, (which would I guess be Argento’s TENEBRE) or for that matter, the slasher movie HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, which is an American movie insane enough to exist in the same conversation.

THE GETAWAY (1972) dir. Sam Peckinpah

Steve McQueen gets out of prison and is immediately set up by the prison official, who his girlfriend (Ali MacGraw) slept with, to rob a bank. He gets double-crossed, and then goes on the lam with his girlfriend. While in the past I sometimes feel like I am listing the names of the actors as endorsements, I’m not really doing this with the cast of this movie or Old Boyfriends. Good action sequences and suspenseful moments. Feel like the iconic images in this are McQueen with a shotgun, blowing up cop cars. Peckinpah directs from a Walter Hill screenplay adapting a Jim Thompson novel. This predates Walter Hill directing movies for himself, but it’s interesting how much more flash there is to the action here than there is in The Driver, you can sort of detect certain elements as being Hill’s interest (like the suspense of being pursued) and other stuff being Peckinpah, like the baroque explosions of violence. I like all of it.

KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE (2016) dir. Robert Greene

This isn’t very good. One half adaptation of the Christine Chubbuck story with a documentary about Kate Lyn Sheil. Sheil’s good in other things, this feels like a failed experiment. Weirdly this came out at pretty much exactly the same time as a movie about Chubbuck starring Rebecca Hall? The Rebecca Hall movie’s pretty great, and is an interesting performance, I would be interested in watching a conversation between the two actresses.

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD (1998) dir. Martin Scorses

A rewatch. Nicolas Cage plays an ambulance driver, Scorsese directs from a Paul Schrader screenplay. I like Nicolas Cage a lot, I like the cinematography in this one. I knew I would enjoy this, didn’t remember John Goodman being in it, Mary Beth Hurt is really good in it, mentioned her being good in Light Sleeper too, didn’t realize she’s Paul Schrader’s wife. Insanely hectic energy, shot through with hallucinatory holy light. Patricia Arquette is probably the weakest link in the cast, though it is her different energy that enables her to seem like a potentially redemptive figure for Nicolas Cage.

RAGING BULL (1980) dir. Martin Scorsese

This one’s a classic, but I didn’t like it the first time I saw it, over fifteen years ago, I think on account of being hungry at the time. Still, probably not my favorite Scorsese. The dialogue is interesting, due to De Niro’s character having a high level of aggression and paranoia, where pretty much everything that gets said to him he responds “Why do you say that?” which lends short scenes this circular quality. This reveals his character, in an efficient way, even though it makes the scenes feel insane and somewhat circular.

HOPSCOTCH (1980) dir. Ronald Neame

I liked this one a lot when I saw it years ago, didn’t really know the director’s pedigree came from doing Alec Guiness comedies. I don’t normally rewatch movie but my memories of this were very pleasant in a way suggesting it would be comforting. Walter Matthau plays a spy who is retiring but who gets everyone mad at him, which makes this kind of Prisoner-adjacent. He runs around, being the smartest guy in the room, having fun at being able to outsmart intelligent agencies. All of the globe-trotting of a James Bond kind of thing, but with none of the bloodshed. No one dies in this, uptight people just get mad at Walter Matthau being cool.

NIGHTFALL (1956) dir. Jacques Tourneur

Tourneur directed the original Cat People, which I love, and Out Of The Past, a classic noir I was not fond of when I saw it in college. This one’s good too, adapting a David Goodis novel. I know Goodis from a piece in Jesse Pearson’s magazine Apology, that makes the case he’s the best writer of crime fiction, on a sentence level. The dialogue’s good in this, but there’s also a cool structure: Following different characters, with it being fairly unclear what their relationship is to one another for a while, some flashbacks reveal things. The characters in this are pretty likable, Anne Bancroft is the female lead and the romance is believable. She plays a model, it’sf ascinating to watch movies made by a studio and realize they have the same woman designing gowns for all of them. Like they have the glamour provided in-house because it’s recognized that’s part of what people go to the movies for, but the the films don’t become ads for the designer or anything, like the way Jean Paul Gaultier’s designs function in The Fifth Element or something. Theme song is sung by Al Hibbler, who cut a LP with Roland Kirk.

5 AGAINST THE HOUSE (1955) dir. Phil Karlson

Criterion Channel has a collection of noir films Columbia put out, this is one of them, with a pretty good-sounding premise: Kim Novak is a part of a group of college friends that set out to rob a casino, but one of the group’s PTSD sabotages it. It ends up not really working as a heist film, for a number of reasons, one is that the “perfect crime” they engineer is not that intricate, the other, more important element is the characters are unbearably smug in a way that makes them really hard to deal with. Novak’s good in it, but no one else is: While the men are supposed to be funny, but aren’t, Novak sort of just has to be beautiful. She sings songs in this, and maybe there’s a voice double, but it seems she has a good singing voice. You can probably skip this one.

THE BIG HEAT (1953) dir. Fritz Lang

Not as masterful as the films Lang made in Germany, but still really good. A cop investigating a murder quickly gathers that a conspiracy is afoot, people make mysterious phone calls immediately after he interviews them, he gets his life destroyed, but keeps going. Gloria Grahame (who’s also in Nicholas Ray’s amazing In A Lonely Place) is great as a gangster’s party-girl-who-loves-money girlfriend who has her beauty and then her life taken away from her. There is an element of feeling like you’re seeing cliches be run through their paces, but I don’t mind, given the pacing. It’s mean enough you don’t know how dark it’s going to get. Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister who also appears in Nightfall, gets a nice role in this.

MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958) dir. Irving Lerner

Oh, this one rules! Although I knew none of the people involved in it, everybody’s great. It feels slow as you watch it, it’s deliberately paced and seems to appreciate every scene on its own terms as a point of interest, rather than rushing through a plot. The score seems like it’s very close to just one instrumental piece, being used over and over again. About a dude, (who’s also in Kubrick’s The Killing, it turns out) becoming a professional hitman, and then flying out to California for a bigger job, where he has two people minding him. The hitman’s psychosis is not over the top, he just seems very self-contained, in a way that gets a lot of (almost) comedic mileage out of his interaction with other people

INVENTION FOR DESTRUCTION (1958) dir. Marel Zeman

This movie looks REAL weird and I have no idea how they got the effect? The degree of artificiality is highly distracting, in a way I don’t have a problem with in Guy Maddin or whoever. The whole thing sort of looks like the portraits of people that run in The Wall Street Journal? There are lines on EVERYTHING, like the sets are being made in this patterned way to replace color values. Everything looks artificial, but also collaged together. “Freely adapted” from Jules Verne, this involves boats, explosions, heists, etc. but all done in this sort of deep-focus theatrical staging that seems to combine animation and live action but in a way I can’t work out but also isn’t enveloping or convincing.

MAY FOOLS (1980) dir. Louis Malle.

I like a lot of Louis Malle, this seems vaguely like a deep cut, as I believe it’s unavailable on DVD. It takes place in France during the May ’68 protests, but is about a family getting together for a funeral/reading of a will. It’s suffused with weird free-flowing sexual energy, like everyone’s down to commit incest? Sort of in the name of revolution, but understandable as a movie in terms of being very french, and maybe something of a light comedy. (While Murmur Of The Heart also has incest in it, and is not a comedy, it’s very French.) People flirt with each other a lot, this is a pleasant watch if you are under quarantine and are fantasizing about casual sex or the overthrowing of the political class.

MON ONCLE D’AMERIQUE (1980) dir. Alain Resnais

This, too, is very French. The spine of the movie is Henri Laborit lecturing, lending the film an essayistic aspect, illustrated with footage of lab rats, but also footage of people wearing mouse heads and human clothes, the best parts. The guy’s theories seem agreeable to me but I don’t know what other people think about them. They’re illustrated by the fictional life stories of three characters, whose lives intersect eventually in their adulthood, though the film starts with them as children. Resnais is interesting, I’ve seen very few of his films but they’re all radically unique, though united by this intellectual edge.

FUGITIVE KIND (1960) dir. Sidney Lumet

Lumet also had a long and varied career, but I essentially view him as a highly-skilled journeyman, I guess due to snobbish bias gleaned from secondhand takes. I’ll watch pretty much any of his movies though, and so I watched this Tennessee Williams adaptation. Not sure I’d seen Marlon Brando in anything before, though I thought it was funny to say I possessed “the raw sexuality of a young Marlon Brando” in college. This whole movie is about how hot Brando is, and how all women want to fuck him and how all the men resent him. You would think the heterosexual male default would be to not notice how hot a dude is, but Brando is both physically ripped but with a feminine face that makes me “get it.” There’s a poetry to his sensitivity, but also an element of threat to how basically everyone who gets along with him is at odds with the racist, patriarchal, and parochial attitudes of the small towns he travels through.

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1974) dir. Sidney Lumer

This is an Agatha Christie adaptation, where Hercule Poirot is played by Albert Finney, amongst a large cast of huge stars who are both hamming it up and not really doing anything. After watching two movies with Natasha Richardson, was nice to see her mom Vanessa Redgrave in something, though it’s a small part. The ending, where the detective works out that everyone schemed to commit the murder together and then decides that he will let them all get away with it, is fun, though by and large the “comedy” here feels a bit dated. This kinda feels like something that you would’ve seen already after having caught bits and pieces of it on basic cable growing up.