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Movie notes.
Mean Men
Over the weekend I got into bed and watched The Maltese Falcon and Kiss Me Deadly on my wife’s laptop. As it happens, this was a good pairing, though I had picked them at random from the movies offered for instant viewing on Netflix.
On a superficial level, at least, the two movies are essentially identical: a gruff, mildly sadistic (“When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it.”) antihero, who loves nobody but his Girl Friday, gets himself mixed up in an occulted quest for a MacGuffin, which ends badly for everybody involved. The protagonists in the both movies are amoral, self-centered and cynical, though an extremely understated code of honor guides their actions. The arch-villains in both movies are women who pretend to be damsels in distress in order to manipulate the protagonists. One difference between the two protagonists is that, whereas Lily plays Mike Hammer for a fool, Sam Spade never really buys Brigid’s act as a helpless waif. Nevertheless, he has a soft spot for her, so he plays the role of her knight in shining armor in any case.
It goes without saying that the The Maltese Falcon is the superior movie, and it is equally obvious that Kiss Me Deadly has had the greater influence on subsequent filmmakers. For instance, is there any element of Kiss Me Deadly that Q. Tarantino hasn’t appropriated for his own movies? One is surprised that Tarantino hasn’t yet robbed Aldrich’s grave in order to grant his corpse a cameo appearance (or did he actually do that in Pulp Fiction?) I suppose The Maltese Falcon is not much imitated or quoted because it is not a movie easily cribbed from. Ford employs none of heavy-handed camera angles and lighting effects of the noir genre. In fact, the setups in the The Maltese Falcon are so meticulously inconspicuous that an careless eye might accuse the movie of having a bland mise-en-scene. No single shot stands out in my mind, yet, all of them working together, they make up an indelible whole.
In American pop culture, the hard-boiled detective is of less of a trope than a franchise, but these movies take the personality type to the extreme. These dicks are dicks, which would seem to place them beyond the pale, surely, of a popular art like Hollywood cinema. In general, unsympathetic characters are a hard sell within narrative fiction. Story tellers spend a lot of effort humanizing characters whom, were we to meet their type in real life, we would classify as “no good bastards” and simply shun.1
Why don’t we shun Bogart’s Spade and Meeker’s Hammer? Why do they make convincing protagonists?
Frankly, I don’t know. Maybe in Sam Spade’s case, his wisecracking eloquence sweetens his bitterness. Much of The Maltese Falcon is made up of verbal duels between Spade and the film’s many villains (one characteristic of film noir: a superfluity of villains). In Hammer’s case, the guy acts seemingly without volition. He manhandles women, takes grinning pleasure in smashing a guy’s hand in a desk drawer, brawls with the “cannons” — but all this is sheer, unmotivated id. Maybe it is bad intentions that we revile, and if we feel that an action was not entirely willed then we are less apt to feel negatively about the person who committed it.
We have Mad Men these days, but not too many mean men. Why is that?2
1 Characters that the story teller is unable or unwilling to humanize often come to a bad end, so the audience can derive a modicum of pleasure from watching them fall. Uriah Heep comes to mind as the quintessential example of this type of character.
2 I got tired of this post sitting in my draft folder, so I posted it. Obviously, it’s not finished.
bramble posted this.
panicandvomit: WWTA
Toyko from the blog panicandvomic gives an “interpretation” of the movie Where the Wild Things Are. He(?) has an idea or two in this post worth pondering, but he needs to slow down and articulate his ideas much better. As it stands, the posts sounds like a k-punk Mad Libs. Take an example:
“The main ways this film stays afloat is through an indy soundtrack—courtesy of Karen O.—which fills up every non dialogue visual moment by doubling the affect of the image with harmony. But embedded in this non-diagetic sound is the notion that audiences are no longer complacent with the silent spectacle a la carte. “
First, let’s deal with the film theory jargon. Non-diagetic sound is sound heard by the audience, but not by the character. Actually, the term is a bit more complicated, but to avoid quoting long passages out of Aristotle’s Poetics, let’s leave it at that.
Thus, when a character turns on the radio and hears a song, that’s diagetic sound. When the soundtrack plays sad music to highlight pathos of the character’s death, that’s non-diagetic.
Toyko is saying that the soundtrack overburdens the movie. I haven’t seen Where the Wild Things Are, but I got what Toyko means just from watching the trailer, but wouldn’t it have saved time and confusion by avoiding the needless jargon?
Later in the post, Toyko writes, “The structure of the island is the structure of adolescence, but we can also read it as one of our economic situation.” That’s a provocative thesis, but he doesn’t expound on it. Instead, he serves up a bunch of gobbledegook about dialectical relationships and the “failing nuclear family model.”
I applaud Toyko for trying to go beyond the standard mode of blogging which turns everybody into baby consumers, i.e., I like this; I no like that. He wants to put Jonze’s movie into a larger context (social, economic, political, etc). But doing that costs a lot of time and effort. You can’t blast it out off the top of your head and expect it to be persuasive.
bramble posted this.
I better start working on my karma now
ilovehotdogs | Smooth Talk (1985): Girl, you’ll be a woman soon:
I love this film still. In my next life, I want to come back as Laura Dern’s boyfriend (or girlfriend — I’m not picky!) The still is from the movie Smooth Talk, and there are a lot more stills where this came from. Follow the link above. BTW, ilovehotdogs dedicated the Smooth Talk post to local blogger beckler.
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BD Horror News - Fantastic Fest One Sheet for ‘Antichrist’
fouture hardcorejudas florencio
This is the second time I’ve blogged poster art for this movie. Von Trier usually doesn’t get me all that excited. Maybe it’s the hot sex scenes with Willem Dafoe that I’m subconsciously looking forward to. Yeah, that must be it.
bramble posted this.
Antichrist by Lars von Trier
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A pair of goose eggs. I’ve never seen a rating this low before. Isn’t there a counterintuitive bonehead or a sock puppet somewhere that can give this poor flop the dignity of a 1%?
bramble posted this.
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Zemeckis to Remake Yellow Submarine
really? why?
He is mad that Burton got to ruin Willy Wonka without asking him if he wanted to ruin it first.
bramble posted this.
TRAILER: Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (via mmflint)
Full version, not the teaser.
The speaking tongue-in-cheek to power shtick has grown stale, but I goddammit I don’t care. I want to see some Gekkos squirm.
bramble posted this.
bramble posted this.
With thirty-nine writing and twenty-three producing credits to his name, Hughes is still remembered best for the mere eight films he directed between 1984 and 1991. These dates seem almost too convenient. Beginning in the immediate aftermath of Reagan’s forty-nine state electoral sweep and ending at the conclusion of the first Gulf War, Hughes’s directorial career perfectly delineates the Era of Reaganism.
I wish I had time today to suss this out a bit, but I will just point out that almost all of his eight films seek to reconcile a conflict between members of an out-group and members of an in-group. Almost always the out-group is presented as blue-collar, while the in-group reeks of upper-middle-class privilege.
bramble posted this.
Another still from the Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.
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Marjorie Cameron as the Scarlet Woman in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.
