October 17: House/Hausu (1977 -- Nobuhiko Ohbayashi)

★★★

House is one of the most unique films I’ve ever seen if not the most unique.  I think of Japanese culture in general as having a flair for style, but House is style to the nth.

From the moment the film starts with its cute (Spice) Girls saying cute, artificial lines and wearing  cute, stylized clothes until the film moves on to the girls’ stylized demises as they are eaten by a lampshade, consumed by a piano or decapitated in a well, House is an outrageous, psychedelic race from one unexpected event to the other.  Gorgeous’ father introduces his new fiancé, and the woman is bathed in soft light as her scarf flutters languidly behind her.  She almost floats over to her stepdaughter-to-be.  The entire movie is one stylization after another.

But the sheer imagination in the film is the element I like the most about it.  Not only was I unable to anticipate what would happen from scene to scene, but I couldn’t even anticipate what was going to happen from one moment to the next inside a single scene.  When Fantasy discovers Mac’s severed head in the well, the scared girl throws the head back in and quickly turns around to another task.  No surprise there.  But Mac’s disembodied head then floats out of the well behind the girl and, after a couple of aerial flourishes, descends to the unaware Fantasy and bites her in the ass.  Later, the teacher/rescuer horrifies the watermelon farmer by wanting a banana, and when we next see the teacher’s car, the teacher has become a life-sized stack of bananas.  House has a staggering inventiveness that never seems to refer to conventional thought.

Throughout the film, I tried to get a grasp on where this movie might be coming from.  There’s certainly a little of the The Monkees TV show or Sgt. Pepper’s.  Some of the more horrific elements echo Monty Python or Dario Argento. But House is one of a kind, and though its consistent tone eventually runs a little slow over the course of 90 minutes, it’s still 90 minutes of some of the most inventive experiment I’ve seen.  The perfect Halloween flic. 

Later note:  Koganada's short, Trick or Truth, adds an important element to an understanding of this film.  There's more than just flash to Ohbayashi's work.  (http://kogonada.com/portfolio/trick-or-truth)

October 16: The Exorcist (1973 -- William Friedkin)

★★★★

When I saw Scary Movie in 2000, I knew the horror/suspense genre was dead.  That film took me right back to graduate school and Northrup Frye’s opinion that irony and parody were the last stages in the vitality of a genre.  Frye says you can parody a genre when the audience is so familiar with the conventions that they can recognize them and no longer see the genre as real or vital.  Just a form.  When the girl in Scary Movie runs from house, sees two arrows – one pointing toward DEATH and the other toward LIFE – and chooses the DEATH direction, I knew that horror had lost its vitality.  And in fact, most of today’s horror/thriller/slasher films have an undertone of winks and playing games with an audience who knows the conventions well.

So I enjoyed seeing this movie from before the death of horror, a movie that set so many of the conventions into place and a movie that still generates a few chills.  With the leaves almost off the trees here in the Maine woods, Lou and I fixed chili, put comforters on our laps and watched The Exorcist.

The Exorcist has a commitment to horror that is hard to find these days.  William Friedkin is making a serious film about real, rounded characters, and the film has high stakes, both philosophically and for the characters.  Do we give in to despair when confronting evil, the film asks us.  The actors, too, are committed to their characters and bring presence to them in their back story as well as in the immediate action.  We understand the conflict and issues that Father Karras faces with respect to his duties as a son and his duties as a priest, and we sense the frailty of Father Merrin from the time we see his early scenes in Iraq.  Of course, we spend so much time with Chris MacNeil that we become invested in her struggle as a mother to save her daughter.  Such commitment is hard to find in today’s fill-in-the-blank horror films, which have to struggle to even rise to being clever. 

As part of its serious thrills, Exorcist introduces some great gimmicks.  Of course there is the 180-degree head turn, the propulsive vomit, and the jumping bed.   And the extended cut I watched included Regan’s backwards spider walk.  But some of the creepiest scenes to me were in the medical offices with a jerky x-ray machine popping and waving its arms around and, of course, the blood spurting out of a needle inserted into Regan’s neck.  If awfulness like that can exist in the day-to-day natural world, what horrors can lurk in the world of the supernatural?  These are effective effects.

Coming out in 1973, Exorcist couldn’t help but have New Hollywood in it, and it takes aims at social conventions.  The church gets its demystification in Karras’, who has become a Jesuit after participating in the Catholic equivalent of ROTC and is having to fulfill his required service.  He’s not sure of his faith, and he constantly second-guesses himself for being a priest instead of taking care of his family.  The upper-middle class arts crowd gets its come-uppance, too, as we watch the director meanly harass a German servant and see sweet, young, upper class girl transformed into a demon.  Religion and class are two favorite New Hollywood targets.

There’s even a self-reflexive element to The Exorcist.  Before we see Reagan transformed into monster, we’ve already seen how cinema works as Chris MacNeil practices her lines and hits her numbers in the protest scene Burke is filming.  So given these scenes, perhaps The Exorcist isn’t so scary; after all, it’s only a movie.

October 12: Dead Man (1995 -- Jim Jarmusch)

★★★★★

I love this movie.  I’ve thought about it from a lot of different angles, but what I always come back to is that Dead Man has an irreducible quality that makes it more than the sum of the parts that I can identify.  The quest of the hero, William Blake, has a “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” quality to it – imaginative and phantasmagorical but with at least a toe in a reality I can recognize but not understand.

There’s the obvious Western movie aspect of Dead Man, and the film fits that genre.  Loner William Blake is out on a voyage, and he moves through a country of saloons, gunslingers, powerful businessmen, ambushes, sheriffs, bad guys and Indians.  And as the ineffective accountant journeys, he comes of age as a man.  It’s right out of John Ford.

But the West Blake finds isn’t in Ford’s Westerns.  The trio of bad-guy/bounty hunters tailing Blake includes a black man, killed early, and a reticent cannibal who eats his remaining, more talkative reward seeker.  A trio of trappers includes cross-dressing “Sally” Jenko, who regales his companions with graphic descriptions of how Roman emperors tortured Christians; his two big companions fight over who will have the right to rape Blake first, but all three of the trappers end up dead.  Blake dines on Sally’s beans and possum.

Dead Man’s Indians have far more complexity and history than the Indians in a typical Western, too.  More than the typical Indian guide to the white man, Nobody, is the dominant one of the pair.  Nobody saves Blake’s life while steering him through life in the West.  This Indian sidekick has a Western education, likes the work of the British poet William Blake, and has even been to Europe as a poster child Native Savage.  Dead Man also delivers a striking portrayal of a Northwest Indian village.  Jarmush shows the village as a walled fortress with tall, painted walls and large totems, and it has an interior like the casbah of a North African city.  The nuance and sophistication of Native American culture comes through clearly in the film.

But there is much more than the Western theme going on in Dead Man.  As he journeys though the West, William Blake is also journeying from innocence to experience, citing verses from Blake’s Songs as he goes along.  Naïve and tentative at the beginning of the film, the film’s Blake has become capable with a pistol by the end and has learned how to evaluate the risks he faces.  He goes from accidental gun-slinger at the hotel to hesitant shooter with the trappers to sophisticated defender of himself and Nobody at the trader/missionary’s post. 

There’s also an overlay of language change as Blake moves on this character arc.  Early on, Blake voyages to Machine, trusting the words in the letter that promise him a job.  In the introductory train sequence, Blake’s fellow passengers dress in more and more rustic clothes as the train moves West until everyone’s in buckskin and slaughtering buffalo out the window.  Meanwhile, the train Fireman tries to warn Blake to be cautious, but Blake can’t understand the man’s words; the two clearly have different ideas of what words are and how to use them.  Blake is similarly confused by Nobody’s language, partly because of the Indian’s abstract language but partly because Blake still doesn’t understand the West he’s in.  Nobody tells Blake that he’ll soon speak with his gun, and Blake soon does so to the two sheriffs who are seeking the reward on Blake’s head.  “Have you read my poetry?” Blake asks them before shooting them.  By the end of Dead Man, Blake is speaking the nonsense he couldn’t understand at the beginning.

The visual beauty of Dead Man is also important to the film.  I noticed time and again the tiny depth of field here that is typical of early black-and-white photography, and especially typical of that out West.  The focus would be on Depp’s eye, for example, while the rest of his face was slightly blurry.  And the rich black-and-white of the film has a 19^th century feel.  Often, too, the composition of the shots has a still-photo aesthetic, sometimes so stylized as to take you out of the movie in appreciation of how the image looks.

Such self-consciousness is a big part of the aesthetic of the film.  In addition to the occasional over-the-top images and the cross-dressing trapper, Dead Man has the most Caucasian Indian you’ll see in Gary Farmer’s Nobody.  Robert Mitchum’s long monologue with his back to the camera makes you aware of the camera, and the intercutting of the train wheels with the passengers’ changing dress highlights the filmic in Dead Man.  And there is Neil Young’s eerie, interpretive, intrusive, improvised soundtrack throughout.  Artifice is integral to the film.

What all this leads to, in the words of Roger Ebert’s infamous review, I don’t know.  But I was mesmerized and touched by Dead Man.  I don’t what I thought as William Blake was pushed off in his funerary canoe and his right-hand man and arch nemesis killed each other in the background, but it was a feeling of wonder.  The significance of Blake’s voyage is just out of my reach.  I can see a lot of parts in this film and many levels of significance, but all these elements ultimately lead to something bigger than the sum of the parts.  Beauty, perhaps.

October 11: Mystery Train (1989 -- Jim Jarmusch)

★★★★

I get pulled into movies like Mystery Train easily.  This one teased me by giving me touchpoints among three narratives that enticed me to compare the stories.  In two of the sections, the characters walk by the same empty lot with a city scape in back.  All characters pass by an abandoned movie theater.  All also go to the same hotel, and all comment about the lack of a TV.  All listen to the same radio show with Elvis’ version of "Blue Moon."  All rooms have a little chain that holds (or held) a plastic radio, and all the rooms have a picture of Elvis.  In each story, there’s the same crumbling overpass with the same train passing over it, and a gunshot punctuates each story.  I can’t stay away from an enticement like that.

Each of these stories has foreigners in Memphis, too, and they’re all dealing with crises in this city of logistics (there is transportation everywhere) and rock n roll/blues legends.  It’s an empty, desolate cityscape, and the young, hyper-styled, Japanese couple fixates on music while they work out their relationship.  The Italian recent-widow, who seems to know a good deal about guns, has just lost her husband and finds herself drawn in by a ghost story about Elvis…until Elvis actually appears to her.  A Brit hipster deals with his breakup and loss of a job by dragging his friends into an evening of drinking and violence.  

The Memphis cityscape is tired and beaten down, and the characters of the story, universal in their cultural range, are beaten down, too.  However, as the city has given rise to musical legends, so does it (and its music) get these pilgrims to pull themselves together and head  down the road to the rest of their lives.  It’s a wonderful experience to watch this happen in all three stories as the owner and desk clerk wearily take stock of yet another set of people moving on with their lives.

There’s something oddly positive about Memphis in Mystery Train.  It’s not a city of people – in fact, the city appears to almost devoid of residents. – but it’s a city of inspiration, a city where the urban ruin somehow lifts people up and sends them on their way.  Like its trains, planes and trucks do.  And like the music that found its birth here does.  

October 8: Drive (2011 -- Nicolas Winding Refn)

★★★★

There are eight million stories in the Naked City; this has been one of them. (Naked City, ending)

There's a hundred streets in this city. You don't need to know the route.  (Drive, opening)

There’s more similarity between Drive and noir classic Naked City than grammar structures and language rhythm.  Both films use specificity of location extensively; LA’s wide boulevards, sports arena, strip mall restaurants and river serve as settings for important actions in Drive.  And this LA is a complicated, corrupt, claustrophobic world where innocents are in grave danger, unrecognized conspiracies menace, and taciturn characters speak little.  Low angle cinematography and shadows also play an important role here.  The scene where Driver steps back out of the light after killing his first two attackers is such a heavy use of shadow that it would be at home in a classic noir.

Drive goes further than a lot of noir does, though.  The film has an intense, compelling opening that marries muscle car film convention to noir lighting and suspense.  The image of the helicopter light searching for the car is as tense and arty as any shot of noir police hunting for a fugitive.  And Nicolas Winding Refn’s soundtrack adds to the tension throughout the scene with the sports announcer calling a game on the radio and the car engine racing and quieting down rapidly. 

As Refn’s effective use of soundtrack throughout suggests, Drive veers from noir grammar in several other ways.  For example, there is no femme fatal to bring the hero down; instead, Driver is trying to save an innocent Irene from the complicated tentacles of corruption around them both.  And the focus of this film, while partly about solving the complicated mystery, is also about what happens to a man who tries to fight such decay.  Driver starts the film as an isolated warrior with rules and a code, but his movement is increasingly into violence even as he reaches out to Irene.  His character arc leads simultaneously toward social integration as well as toward horrible, graphic, gory violence as Driver finds he must fight evil by drawing on that within him that addresses the darkness around him

Stylish, noir and intense, Drive is a great, if disturbing, ride.

October 7: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998 -- Terry Gilliam)

October 4: Rango (2011 -- Gore Verbinski)

★★★