Jump over to followfocus to check out my farewell to one of the greatest video stores ever, Kim’s Video.

A Nightmare on Elm Street spin-off, Freddy’s Nightmares was an anthology series in the tradition of The Twilight Zone and the Tales from the Crypt comics.  In place of Rod Serling or the Crypt Keeper stood Freddy Krueger, killer of children, offering witty asides and on occasion participating in the story.  The show ran two seasons from 1988-1990, airing in Los Angeles in a late night slot on KHJ channel 9 (now KCAL).  The stories were like TV for the blind, a show-and-tell Scooby-Doo approach that led you by the nose from shock to shock.  The production value was as corny as Freddy’s one-liners.  And the show scared the crap out of me.

Rewatched online now, it’s embarrassing to admit being frightened by such cheap looking TV, particularly when I watched Freddy on a big screen with glee.  But a theatrical experience offers group moral support.  I watched Freddy’s Nightmares alone at night, and it didn’t help that the KHJ announcer reading the show’s content disclaimer had a voice that was very soothing — like Hannibal Lecter.

Unlike the third rate gialli I’ve seen, Freddy’s Nightmares scared me because of its cheap nature.  It was as if Freddy, killer pirate of dreams, pirated the airwaves and performed his own Grand Guignol (or worse, snuff) video in a dank corner of the Springwood High boiler room.  Moreover, the show often bore a narrative stream of consciousness that continued the second half of an episode by following a character indirectly related to the first half.  What I recognize now as a clever anthology trick seemed more like nightmare logic at age 12.  Indeed, this series was just amateurish enough to be made by a psycho killer, and a lack of evidence otherwise combined with an overactive (and possibly sleep deprived) imagination only amped my dread.

Of course, now it’s just lame.  Watching it online allows too many distractions — email, RSS feeds, squinting — for my inner adolescent to resurface.  And that’s probably for the better.  This is fear nostalgia, plain and simple.

// Freddy’s Nightmares at AOL Video

I don’t have a solid memory of the first time I saw Falling Down, the 1993 Michael Douglas vehicle about American white male frustration. I remember that the movie was still fairly new, that I watched it on a television (either via cable or videotape) and that it didn’t affect me much. The time was the early 1990s. Douglas was Hollywood’s Male Victim #1. Bill Clinton was a new President, I was in high school, and not too soon before there was a riot in nearby Los Angeles. My interest in the film probably didn’t go beyond the shoot-and-yell-at-people trend that came into vogue after Reservoir Dogs.

Fast forward to the present: I spend about half of the intervening years living in New York City. A terrorist attack occurs. The country’s tenor changes. Back in a Los Angeles hell bent on urban development, and with renewed interest in the city’s elusive soul, I figure, Hey, why not watch Falling Down again? It’s Los Angeles around the time of the riots. That’s interesting. Why the hell not?

Well, now I know. Because it’s lame.

As a movie, Falling Down is a footnote to the Movieland violence of the ’90s that led to Quentin Tarantino and all his bastard children. But it also uncomfortably teeters between 1980s genre corn and early 1990s superhip posturing. For all it’s sociopolitical pretensions, the movie has a vulgar ignorance of reality. It’s the kind of world where a gangbanger carries butterfly knife and a sad-sack cop about to retire has a name like Prendergast. I half expected (or hoped for) the baseball bat gang from The Warriors to show up and make it enjoyable. Any depth in the story is undermined by a sloppy camp: A kid can help Michael Douglas use a rocket launcher because he saw one on TV? That’s social commentary, right? Robert Duvall punches a fellow cop, who then falls onto his retirement cake?! Joel Schumacher’s strangling of the Batman franchise was never better foreshadowed.

As a cultural artifact, Falling Down is something quite different. It’s the result of the Gulf War, recession, and the 1992 riots, which happened during filming of the picture. That could make it prescient, but in a grander retrospect the movie is so typical of the “complacency” discussed so much after September 11. Douglas’s D-Fens character is pushed over the edge because of unemployment, being “not economically viable,” because his sprawling city is alienating and he has no place to fit between the rich and the poor. He’s outmoded, a throwback to the good old days of crew cuts and apple pie. Fine. But he chooses to take his aggression out on immigrants, fast food, street construction, and all forms of NIMBYism from the ghetto to the golf course. Cry me a river, White Man!

We know all along that D-Fens is the villain, and we’re strangely meant to sympathize with his discontent as much as we’re expected to condemn his actions. Yet not once does the film actually explore the causes of these frustrations or their possible solutions. It merely points them out, yells a bit and moves on, as ineffectual as its insane hero. I suppose that was a conscious decision meant to make the movie “edgy,” another relic of 1990s Hollywood.

Ultimately, the film is less about Los Angeles, as I’d hope it would be, and more about using Los Angeles as a prototype for Scary Urban America. Rather, Scary Urban America as it’s perceived from inside the safe confines of a car in rush hour traffic. L.A. aside, I would just prefer that if someone were to get out of the car and confront Scary Urban America, he or she would experience the real thing — and not some movie gangster with a plastic knife.

Over at fol.lowfoc.us, Amy Robinson has some thoughts about George Romero’s latest zombie movie.

What’s most striking to me about the film is how it trades the old idea of zombies as stumbling metaphors for an obsessive look at the human response to apocalypse. Involvement vs. Aloofness, Criticism vs. Action, etc. Examining these responses has always been part of Romero’s agenda, but in Diary to stay in communication and share stories of your immediate surroundings becomes a vital function of survival. As “mainstream” news of the zombies is woefully recut as propaganda, online user-generated content helps create a jigsaw puzzle of fact. This is social networking at its most useful!

Not since Night of the Living Dead has Romero’s social commentary involved the zombies so little. Here they’re rendered almost irrelevant. This time around the threat could be any threat — a tornado, a hurricane, a civil war, alien invasion. It just so happens that zombies are more entertaining.

The third (and second to last) film directed by Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky is a drunken bat stumbling out of hell, caring more for performance than continuity and hurling the viewer into what J. Hoberman aptly calls “the greatest Cassavetes film Cassavetes never made.” No doubt the gruff, manic antics of stars John Cassavetes (Nicky) and Peter Falk (Mikey) inspire that statement. So does the chronology of the film’s release, falling somewhere between Cassavetes’ own A Woman Under the Influence and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. But Mikey and Nicky lacks the focus and elegant patina of either of those films.

The May-approved, restored cut of Mikey and Nicky functions like some test of suspension of disbelief in terms of editing, a “Don’t” example to contrast Battleship Potemkin in a film class. That’s a controversial declaration considering both the film’s and May’s cult darling status, but jump cuts and bad continuity abound, and stray crew members are spotted in the wings. These often excusable futzes pile up from shot #1, a freeze frame unconvincingly used as Nicky’s POV, and they aren’t helped by the numerous cheated lines forced into unmoving lips and awkward alternate readings that were probably expected to work. Somehow, the French New Wave isn’t justifying this one.

Cinephile credibility be damned — it’s all too distracting for someone who makes these things his livelihood. But there’s more to this gripe than mere distraction: Somehow similar jump cuts and editing band-aids of Cassavetes’ own films are more endearing, or simply better finessed by the use of longer takes and clever camera placement. For instance, there’s this dressing room scene from Chinese Bookie, which is only a handful of well placed cuts. (There are more examples online.)

An overshot, mismatched film never flowed so well as one by Cassavetes, and by contrast May’s film feels “cutty,” the kitchen sink and then some, TV pacing that doesn’t match and ultimately kills the flow. And flow is what editing facilitates. Obviously editing is more complex than that, but its purpose in a narrative film is mostly to propel the story or character or emotion or moment. Like blinking, rhythm is inherent. What that rhythm may mean is up for argument. It need not always be invisible or graceful, but moderation is like a spoonful of sugar. Orson Welles is credited as saying that “a director presides over accidents.” If that’s so, an editor presides over the cover-up of those accidents. Like Nixon.

Of course, this is to say nothing of Mikey and Nicky’s interesting points, like the characters or the story or the film’s form or the treatment of misogyny in a film written and directed by a woman. Or the 1970s Philly streets. All that is for another time, another viewing, and another critic with less distraction.

Beowulf is an age-old, well-worn tale. The poem has credibility with genre fanboys and scholars alike. The story has Joseph Campbell written all over it. Beowulf is a tradition, a piece of culture, a touchstone, a public domain classic of Shakespeare proportions that should yield studio gold a la The Lord of the Rings.

The truth is that Robert Zemeckis’s movie version of Beowulf turns its actors into creepy cartoons and rewrites the story as a predictable Star Wars “sins of the father” cycle that feels relevant for almost two minutes. The only thing it really has going for it is 3-D.

It’s fitting that I saw one of the latest generation of 3-D films in a theater next door to the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. Like 3-D in the 1950s, Cinerama was a gimmick aimed at drawing audiences away from their newfangled TV sets and back into theaters. In the 1980s, Jaws 3-D and the like were meant to draw them away from newfangled VCRs. Now, in a time when DVD sales and theatrical box office are disproportionate, businessmen once again fear for the future of entertainment and I find myself donning glasses to participate in a new gimmick meant to draw people away from TVs, computers, phones and pods and backseats of SUVs. With the onslaught of entertainment options, Big Daddy Theatrical once again grows scared and explores new options by reaching backwards. Sins of the father, indeed.

Beowulf is presented in a format known as REAL D, one of several 3-D formats boxing for the championship belt of Heavyweight Gimmick. Yet no matter the format, a 3-D film will offer new challenges to filmmakers. We’ve come a long way since 1922, when The Power of Love was the first commercial 3-D film. Hell, we’ve come a long way since Captain EO. The camera can be moved in all sorts of new and nauseating ways, particularly in a digital environment. But what we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in 2-D may not always translate to 3-D, as evidenced by my eye strain headache after watching Beowulf. By the same token, a jaded audience isn’t content to simply marvel at a train arriving at the station. Once the novelty of 3-D wears thin after a few over-budgeted flops, audiences should demand a more refined mise-en-scène that better serves 3-D. Just as directors have to rethink their shots going from the big screen to the small screen or now the smaller screen, they will do well to get past the wow factor of simply throwing shit at you in 3-D. There is potential for a unique form of cinema if we can get beyond the marketing department.

If 3-D is to thrive as something more than another feeble life preserver, it needs an Eisenstein, an André Bazin, a Godard, a Hitchcock. Or all of the above. If it is not to thrive, well then, expect shit thrown at you.

Movies rely wholly on sight and sound. I’m not going to win any big academic awards for saying that, but it’s something I must remind myself of when dealing with a film like Johnny Got His Gun. It’s like when there’s a mass power outage and you realize how much you take electricity for granted: You could make a phone call, but your phone is cordless; you could use your cell phone, but local towers are out; you could get some cash, but all the ATMs are down. I could tell you how to better adapt a story set in the mind of someone who is deaf, dumb, blind, and limbless, but it wouldn’t be a movie.

Yet in 1971 Dalton Trumbo did just that, writing and directing a film version of his tremendous 1939 novel. For the last couple decades it’s been hard to find and known more as the better parts of the music video for “One”, by Metallica, who bought the distribution rights and did absolutely nothing else with them. Just another step on a long path of fucking up since Cliff Burton’s death.

As anti-war novels go Johnny’s got a hell of a lifespan, surviving bans and a handful of wars (and Metallica). Set entirely in the head of one of so many FUBAR soldiers, it’s rich and gripping and heartbreaking enough to make you miss the fact that there isn’t one comma in the whole book. Not one.

Unfortunately, less can be said for the film. Although Wikipedia claims Luis Buñuel was interested in directing, the film doesn’t swim in the pool of New Hollywood counterculturalism as much as it sits on the edge dipping its toes in the water. Obviously propelled by sentiments about the Vietnam police action, the film has its heart in the right place but always seems to fall short, and surprisingly so. Hell, Donald Sutherland’s in it! As Jesus! That’s got 1970s written all over it!

Perhaps the film is missing the irrational spark of the drug culture, or youth culture, or the other cultures of the day that Trumbo spoke to but wasn’t really a part of. Or maybe he missed out conveying the power of the novel that we can most relate to — that of human senses and communication. And maybe that has all to do with the medium.

Is there a way to convey being deaf, dumb, blind and quadriplegic on film? Sure, show a deaf, dumb, blind quadriplegic in action. On film, the best way to get inside that person’s feelings would be to show his or her facial reactions, the face being the best conduit for sympathy. The face of Johnny’s protagonist Joe Bonham (Timothy Bottoms), however, is horribly disfigured — either too much for the audience or for the film’s budget — and by virtue of the original story is covered anyway. So we’re left with the lesser option of voice over, which is a literary device, the kind of device that makes me wonder why I didn’t just reread the book. Other than to see Donald Sutherland play Jesus.

Then there’s the question of narrative perspective. Films afford different options than books when it comes to perspective; you have to get into Stan Brakhage’s heady closed-eye vision stuff to really get outside the box. The Johnny film gives its audience something the book doesn’t: the point of view of the outside world, of people besides deaf, dumb, blind Joe Bonham. This cements reality more than in the book, seen best when doctors speak and Joe doesn’t hear them, or in Joe’s rat hallucination. The rat incident in the book could be real or not, as could anything else Joe tells us, which makes the novel at times a delirious read.

This then complicates Joe’s memories/hallucinations we see played out, making them perhaps the most interesting part of the film. When his father (Jason Robards) speaks to young Joe about his fishing pole and democracy, reality gets bent only as it could in a 1970s American film. It serves the anti-war message, but what about the overall emotional purpose? The most powerful parts of the novel (for me) are Joe’s cries of how he can no longer function as a human being, how he can’t communicate or keep track of time. It’s what makes his struggle so great, and war so dehumanizing.

That is to say, Joe Bonham was stuck in a blackout with a cordless phone, and in a film without sight or sound.

// The owner of the blog Shooting Down Pictures has done the world a great service by, among other things, posting a few clips from this hard to find film on YouTube. Get to them before Lars Ulrich does.

There’s something about Italian genre films of the 1960s and ’70s that aren’t quite right. They appear to be cobbled together all too quickly for the basest international markets. They’re corny. They’re derivative. They often don’t make sense or, even worse, almost make sense. Their post-synch dialogue is unnerving and poorly mixed. Yet these films do have their occasionally spectacular visual displays, and so film nerds everywhere find joy in them.

Admittedly, I am one of those nerds.

Dario Argento’s Deep Red lumbers along as so many gialli do, awkwardly between dynamic, violent set pieces. In between such sequences is an abundance of acid-tinged art direction, otherworldly mise-en-scène, and clunky post-synch dialogue.

The big picture, however, is just Psycho without a twist: gender-bending murder stuff of which psychology papers are made. And we’re never misled to believe that anyone in particular did it. For the trained eyes out there, the killer’s face is even revealed in a mirror as our hero (David Hemmings, less the model he was in Blow Up) investigates the film’s first murder. (This spoiler appears to be cropped out — or blacked out? — of the video embedded above.) Everything is on the table from the beginning, at least all that Argento wants there to be, and the audience is left to sit back and enjoy the madness: wickedly fun/corny murder scenarios, a guilty pleasure score by Goblin, and screwball comedy hijinks between Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi in her obscenely tiny Euro-auto.

Ah, Argento. We keep coming back for more.

Wikipedia’s entry for the film there has a link to a scholarly essay by a guy named Paul Flanagan. The essay puts the film in the contexts of Sigmund Freud and Robin Wood. It’s all very clear and well organized with reference notes, as scholarly texts tend to be. If you want a step-by-step analysis of the film and Freud’s ideas on the uncanny, it’s the thing for you.

However, the essay skips the notion of the uncanny (“that which is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror”) as experienced when watching an Argento film. I mean the more visceral reactions to aesthetics that we have — the baroque art direction, the unease of Goblin’s Eurotrash synth, the unmotivated camera moves, the un-reality of post-synch dialogue. To me these add as much to the uncanny nature of Argento (and other Italian genre films). It’s a weird dread that creeps up behind you just as you’re asking yourself what the fuck is really going on, or why no one at the Blue Bar seems to be moving.

Normally when I revisit a film, my response is affected by time and place, but it’s never so with Suspiria. The film exists on a different plane located at the other end of some wormhole, a place where temporal shifts are the norm, where every room looks like a mod experiment gone wrong, a set that Kubrick rejected as too baroque for A Clockwork Orange. The story isn’t short of any of the narrative leaps, bound, and WTFs found in its Italian horror contemporaries. The agenda is style over script, design above all, and not in a bad way. Indeed, spectacle is the best way to dress up what would otherwise be confusing schlock. But spectacle is one thing, and total sensory immersion is quite another. Suspiria happens to be one of my favorite examples of such, and maybe it’s the visceral responses it elicits in me, the inexplicable dread despite a story that is so damn retarded, that whenever I watch it all previous viewings escape me.

The swell of the Goblin score at the opening titles climaxes in the gloriously corny synth motif that propels much of the film’s creepy ambiance. After a brief, narrated prologue we meet the American heroine Suzy Bannion, who arrives at an airport terminal in Germany (or is it a bus or a train?), catches a cab in the rain, and rides to a dance academy she is supposed to attend.

But it’s not that easy. The whole thing lasts about five minutes, with minute detail given to the most seemingly random, off-putting moments that could occur on such a short trip. Throughout the film, great attention is given to sound design, score, light and color, and a bizarrely mannered use of time — abrupt short cuts and drawn out longer takes come in an onslaught at any given time, without the flow of dance that you would expect from characters who are largely dancers. The cab ride merely prepares us for all of this.

The first couple shots are of Suzy walking in the terminal. The second cut in the film shows her point-of-view of the automatic sliding doors out of the terminal. At this moment, the theme music intrudes for a few beats and is then gone at the next cut, which is back on Suzy. That happens again for the next couple cuts until she reaches the door, which whooshes open to a torrential downpour that blows back Suzy’s hair. During this moment, we cut back and forth from Suzy exiting to the tracks the automatic doors run on. Why? Does it matter? The effect is jarring, puts importance on those doors, which operate like a birth canal for Suzy into the all too strange world to come. But really, she’s only walked down a hall and out some doors into the rain.

Ah, metaphor.

When Suzy finally catches a taxi, the ride continues with the same sort of attention to detail. Her dialogue with the driver is stilted. The driver is menacing in an unmotivated way, offering long pauses before answering her. As the cab winds out of the city we pan off to a roaring river or wash of some sort, and later we cut to water streaming down a storm drain in the street. The water motif can again suggest some sort of birth metaphor, or not. It simply doesn’t matter because along with the building score and the disembodied voices buried in the mix, the atmosphere is thick like paste. You’re stuck and can’t get out. This is the eeriest fucking cab ride ever. And nothing even happens.

Perhaps the Italian style of production — all sound done in post, all dialogue horribly post-synched — forces the need for such atmosphere embellishments. Or perhaps it inspires the opportunity. All the same, it is mastery of a medium, when nothing becomes something different altogether and elicits feelings because of it.

Dude–

So as I mentioned, I finally got around to the Bujalski films. It’s true there’s something fascinating about them — the speech patterns, the occasional generational identifiers, the lo-fi Cassavetes thing. But where Cassavetes characters can be unrealistically aggressive, Bujalski’s can be (almost) unrealistically passive-aggressive to the point of annoyance. It just makes me more conscious of how I speak.

Funny Ha Ha is by far worse about this than Mutual Appreciation. The second film at least has a character who calls people on their passive-aggressiveness. Mutual Appreciation sits better with me for other reasons, namely more narrative direction (not a lot, but more) and of course the Brooklyn nostalgia. The set piece in the club formerly known as Northsix and what appears to be the backyard of Iona certainly didn’t hurt.

Typical Bujalski dialogue might play like this:

“Do you want to, um, like, go out to dinner? Somewhere out?”
[Pause.] “Sure. I guess.”
“Because we don’t have to, you know… if you want to stay in.”
“No, I’ll go out.”
“We could order in if you want. Or make something here”
“No, I’ll go out. Unless you really want to stay in.”
“I just want to do what you want to do.”

So I watch my elocution now. (Still, the above conversation is one Carmen and I have almost nightly.) As for the dialogue’s effect on the movie, characters can become indistinguishable if you close your eyes, which can be a pretty depressing commentary if these films are really supposed to represent our generation.

But when it’s not over the top it’s also very realistic. The Cassavetes comparisons aren’t off base: Bujalski’s all about the Moment too, only exchanging Cassavetes’ drunken guffaws for drunken awkward pauses. I’d recommend you watch both films to get a sense of how much better Mutual Appreciation actually is (the audio alone is so much better recorded). Of course, maybe I only liked Mutual Appreciation because I watched it second. In any event, it’s inspiring enough to make you want to shoot something again.

Based on these two films alone, I don’t know if I can comment on the overall Mumblecore thing. It makes me want to see some of the others, but only because I’ve been pining for a new cinema movement ever since Dogme 95 devolved into a kind of joke.

Thoughts because you asked.

tony

p.s. I overwrote because I thought I’d kill two birds here and post this shit on the website. Do you mind? I mean, like, I could send you a shorter email. Um. If you want.