jai-38 Reviews

After Hours (I) (1985)

8-5-7-6-3 (maniacal laughter)

[9/10 · 24 February 2007]

Mr. Scorses's little off-beat picture between more acclaimed work remains one of my favorites and it gets better every time I see it. It gets under your skin -- it's a tale of paranoia that seems retro-geared from the mid '80s for our time -- and, at the same time, it's still as laugh out loud funny as when I first saw it during its original release. I've never been to New York City but Scorsese's best, "Taxi Driver", not as damning in its '70s milieu as people think, -- and Letterman's Late Night and years of SNL as well as Woody Allen and Spike Lee -- make me love the particularity of the city in a cool, detached way but "After Hours" has a weird universality to it, too. It's a voyage to get back home, hampered by beautiful, crazy women, frustrated gay men, hostile cab drivers, toll-takers, thieves, burly bartenders, performance artists, punks, and a vigilante mob lead by a Mr. Softee ice cream truck; a journey confused by protagonist Paul Hackett's conflicting drives and desires and sensibilities. This is comedy as nightmare and yet you believe in every second -- and it's all the more nightmarish. "I just wanted to meet a girl", implores Paul, "And now I've got to die for it!?". Stripped down and bare boned as compared with Mr. Scorsese's more acclaimed work, he provides (along with a perfect cast, a smart-eyed shooter, and his usual whip-smart cutter) a picture that stays with you and that you'll watch again and again -- especially when the world around you grows too weird.

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

If I Fell

[9/10 · 17 February 2007]

I recently watched A HARD DAY'S NIGHT at a local bar on their pull-down projection screen and around me I saw a roomful of people with big, fat smiles on their faces. I also saw a few melancholy faces, too, and I understood those as well, sort of. I'd seen the film many times before -- I rank it in my top 20 -- and it remains, always, fast, funny, and smart (shot in a kind of luminous black and white by Gil Taylor -- "...Strangelove", "Star Wars"). Director Richard Lester and writer Alun Owen caught a moment in time like lightning in a bottle and turned it into a jumpy, jangly thing that is as hot as it is cool and everlasting as The Beatles' music. I hesitate to write about their music or the stand-out moments in the picture (the lads were naturals, weirdly so} -- there are too many of those moments and part of the joy of the film is discovering them from that first, familiar guitar stroke onwards -- but I want to touch on that melancholy I saw in those faces. It's more than nostalgia. This is a depiction of a time that people born years after the killing of John Lennon watch and want to be a part of. You watch and want to be part of something just because it feels right. Roger Ebert was dead-on when he called this one of the great life-affirming motion pictures -- its liveliness alone is one of a kind.

That Thing You Do! (1996)

an oddball picture that hooks me every time

[8/10 · 24 January 2007]

Tom Hanks put a lot into this smart and funny off-beat picture (it's almost the cinematic equivalent of his persona when you see him interviewed on Letterman -- maybe it's that personally felt) which depicts the-rise-and-that's-all history of a one hit wonder band in the just post- British invasion '60s. It's hip and square at the same time and that damn song, played again and again in pleasing variations, is exactly right. The casting of the band mates, notably Jonathan Schaech (a wannabe Lennon or Dylan), Steve Zahn (a Ringo kind of goof) and Tom Everret Scott, a young Hanks lookalike, who has artistic jazz-minded desires, make for an ensemble that is heartfelt, real and friendly-- oh, and Ethan Embry plays the bass player. Hanks himself gives one of his best, and most understated, performances as the band's big-time producer/Svengali and Liv Tyler is the lead singer's perfect girlfriend, Faye -- "Well, Faye's special", says Hanks himself at one point and we know, any one who's been around a rock'n'roll band knows, he's right. Light, airy, kind of weird -- all the terrific (as well as the terrifically awful music -- "Lovin' You Lots and Lots" by the Norm Wooster Singers) is original to the film -- "That Thing...", even as it falters a little in its final third, makes you happy to watch a movie that its players and its makers are more than giddy to present.

The Swimmer (1968)

a terrific adaptation of Cheever -- and one of Burt Lancaster's best

[8/10 · 24 January 2007]

A man beyond middle-age living in tony, upscale Connecticut environs decides to swim home from one neighbors' swimming pool to another, drinking cocktails all along the way, engaging in friendly, empty banter and confronting all the demons of his life -- most of his own making. This is a late '60s experiment (and, thankfully, they were more experimental in the main in the '60s than today) that takes an exceptional short story by the uniquely American master teller of modern tales, John Cheever, and expands it into a character piece for the wonderful Burt Lancaster. Here he's playing an ordinary business executive stuck in an early '60s, three martini lunch time warp, a Viet Nam era/Hippie-Nation prevailed-upon Upper West side would-be master of the universe. A man who is strangely out of place and out of time and will suffer a fate, maybe cruel, maybe just, but one that he is entirely complicit in despite any protest. This is engagingly dark stuff told under the glare of a late summer bright sunny sky. The film's flaws are bound to its era of production -- auto-camera zooms and sunlight flares and delirious music montages -- but they mean little compared to the hyper-sophisticated smarts of its dialogue and the performances, obviously from Lancaster, but also the unique variety of women he encounters from his past before arriving at his horrible present. "It's a beautiful day! Look at that sky, look at that blue water!"

THX 1138 (1971)

a compelling, unique and hypnotic pseudo-documentary from the future

[9/10 · 22 January 2007]

There isn't any other movie like "THX 1138" -- it's that simple. It's a visionary piece that feels as though it's a documentary sent back to us from some distant future that's not so much totalitarian as it is technocratic. (It's a much funnier film than even its admirers acknowledge -- its chase finale is called off by government functionaries due to budget overruns and the protagonist is tormented by off-screen torturers who are having a hard time figuring out their new electronics.) As George Lucas' first feature, it marks not only a remarkable debut that experiments with both the graphic possibilities of cinema but explores a soundscape (designed with Walter Murch) that fully immerses the viewer in an environment as nightmarish as it is officiously bland and white-limboed. There's an original sensibility at work here that is expanded in "American Graffiti" and "Star Wars", an offbeat naturalism, a quirky you-are-there quality, that clearly places Mr.Lucas among those great '70s filmmakers, peers like Coppola, Spileberg, Scorsese and Altman, without the reservation and awkward re-evaluation predicated by his later and overwhelming unique success. Its plot, essentially a variation on Orwell's "1984" reimagined as an abstract escape picture, is much less important than its vision and style that layers image upon image, idea upon idea, in an overwhelming manner unique to adventurous cinema.

Nixon (1995)

If JFK is Stone's The Godfather , then Nixon is his The Godfather Part II

[9/10 · 18 January 2007]

Oliver Stone's kaleidascopic, prismatic vision of the life of one of the most monstrous political figures in American history is given a seethingly and unsettling human dimension as it encapsulates not just that life but a near-century -- the American century. Filtering the national and (to Nixon) personal meltdown of Watergate through the mindscape and biography of its central player, Stone imagines and documents a whirlwind of events, characters, and nightmares that come to a head in the 1960s and early 70s -- but as turbulent, and compelling, as all this is, the film succeeds also in a manner of mod-Shakespearean character incision. Anthony Hopkins doesn't quite look or sound like Nixon but he is Nixon -- all clammy, smiley failed charm and cunning smarts. As with JFK, Nixon's sister film, Stone assembles a massive and memorable cast with Joan Allen a knife-edged Pat Nixon and oily-creep wonkiness coming from James Woods and the late great J.T. Walsh as Haldeman and Ehrlichman; Frasier's David Hyde Pierce is unctuous as presidential lawyer John Dean and Paul Sorvino channels Kissenger -- oh, and Bob Hoskins is suitably weird as the J. Edgar Hoover we came to know and love. (On DVD, Sam Waterston turns FBI director Richard Helms into a black-irised golem.) John Williams' score rumbles disturbingly throughout -- a counterpoint to his elegiac heroism and knuckle-crunching conspiracy beats from JFK, and Stone's great cinematographer/collaborator Robert Richardson mixes stock and format and vision in a manner that's typically dizzying and slyly and meaningfully calculated. But this is ultimately Mr. Stone's picture and, like JFK, it will alienate any one who can't keep at least an open mind to the vagaries of what we perceive as history. Stone tears at that accepted history like the smart (and funny) pitbull he is. JFK and Nixon make for one long double bill but few others are their equal.

Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)

Coppola's dream as much as Tucker's, the story of two or three visionaries

[9/10 · 18 January 2007]

Francis Ford Coppola first thought of making Tucker as a dark Brechtian musical back in the 70s and went so far as to have Leonard Bernstein think about the music. When he actually made the film in 1987, Joe Jackson provided the hopped-up big band licks and gave Mr. Coppola his best score since Rumblefish. No matter -- it's as much a director's biography in hidden form as ever there was, Fellini, Bergman, and Woody Allen notwithstanding. Mr. Coppola is the visionary who tried to buck the system and almost succeeded only to be brought down by forces, real and imagined, that control the way things run. Preston Tucker had a rocket ship of a car with turnable headlights and seat belts; Mr. Coppola had great movies about wiretappers, the nightmare of war, and a silly bit of off-beat stuff about lovers in Vegas. The specific points of such a parallel biography need not be driven into the ground here -- suffice it to say that one can imagine a young Francis telling his younger, equally visionary associate and design nut George Lucas (executive producing here) to grow a beard -- just as Jeff Bridges, in a career-highlight performance, tells his engineer played by Elias Koteas. Lovely Joan Allen plays Tucker's devoted, whip-smart wife -- an Eleanor substitute -- and Christian Slater is Tucker's eldest son, perhaps a stand-in for Coppola's son, Gio, who died before the film was made and to whom it is dedicated. Brash, fun, funny, melodramatic -- a visual feast that plays on 40s and 50s conventions -- Tucker: the Man and His Dream couldn't be a better collaboration between visionaries: Coppola, Lucas, and Preston Tucker.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

visually grand and emotionally better than it's remembered

[8/10 · 17 January 2007]

The first Star Trek movie was produced at a time when the only other Trek were seventy-nine NBC episodes shot ten years earlier and endlessly syndicated. The initial and enduring reaction to the film was and is that it was cobbled together from a half-written script bolstered by nostalgia and the special effects technology bonanza propagated by Star Wars and Close Encounters. The fact is, those effects are pretty special -- from the Klingon battle to the vision of Vulcan to the Enterprise hanging in dry dock and its magnificent launch to the starship's penetration of all those bizarre layers of the V'Ger cloud -- and they all fold in quite effectively on the film's double-braced story: now-Admiral Kirk's obsessive struggle for control over his destiny and Spock's search for knowledge he can never possess without first understanding himself. Though it may lack the punchiness of some of its sequels (notably Nick Meyer's stellar The Wrath of Khan), the film has a vision and scope that made it then and makes it now a movie event in a way that very few of today's blockbusters can match. With imagery as much Kubrick as Lucas, a magnificent Jerry Goldsmith score, a still-friendly story dynamic that brings together old friends, an impact on every Trek incarnation to follow (particulatly, The Next Generation) and a sense of being a genuinely good and noble experience, Star Trek truly is a human adventure.

Nashville (1975)

one of Altman's best -- maybe the best vision of 70s America

[10/10 · 17 January 2007]

Robert Altman made great films that dealt with singular protagonists, like The Long Goodbye and The Player, but his ensemble pieces like MASH and Short Cuts have an energy unique to themselves. Nashville is likewise a one-of-a-kind original in this respect and genuinely weird -- it's impressionistic and musical, built on moments of you-have-to-pay-attention comedy and bleak smallness. It's easy to say that's it's a vision of the '70s (a Nixonion bicentennial era); a quagmire of nazel-gazing hopelessness, but that ignores its bracingly relevant themes of celebrity obsession, political change, and the way they both intersect over and over. Altman balances a cast of over 24 characters but rarely delivers a conventional dramatic scene and moves his camera off Lily Tomlin and Henry Gibson and Geraldine Chaplin (wonderfully daft), Karen Black, Allen Garfield, Ronnee Blaklee, Timothy Brown, Barbara Starr, Keith Carradine, Michael Murphy, Ned Beatty and even Jeff Goldblum before we can really know them and yet we do know them because we still bump into these people every day of our lives. That is Nashville's genius -- and Altman's -- the truthfulness of the dumbest country-and-western song, an inane patch of everyday dialogue, and the most irrational act of violence. Altman was always asked why the loner shot who he did instead of his obvious intended target... you should figure it out.

Swimming to Cambodia (1987)

Gray's genius connects terrifying history with the strangeness of movie-making

[9/10 · 17 January 2007]

The late and truly great Spalding Gray wrote and performed a number of brilliant monologues made into films by significant directors but none really better than "...Cambodia". Jonathan Demme and his cinematographer John Bailey ("Silverado"), as well as composer/"new wave" artist Laurie Anderson, perfectly complement Gray's vision of the here and there, the then and now, as well as history and movie-reality as he talks beautifully and insightfully and with deathly funny vision for over eighty minutes. It's a history lesson, a making-of-"The Killing Fields" and a perfectly bizarre philosophical treatise all at once. Roger Ebert once opined that "My Dinner With Andre" made a good counter-point double feature with "2001". I agree. Then watch Gray's "...Cambodia" after, maybe, "Star Wars"; great movies are wonderful things and come in many shapes and sizes.

Billy Liar (1963)

A brilliant comedy that may tear your heart out

[10/10 · 17 January 2007]

Billy's like a lot of us. In Tom Courtenay's career best performance he plays a man/boy of special talent and very ordinary limitations. In the tradition of the "angry young man" mindset prevalent in '6os British drama, the movie, in its involvingly naturalistic rhythms, goes beyond those limitations and is a genuinely smart and fun portrayal of someone who will never be what he could be. Its fantasy sequences are deservedly heralded but it's even better in its odd, small moments -- Billy playing blind with his buddy crossing a street, dictating his future plans into his boss' tape recorder, burying his head in his hands as a tune he actually wrote plays at a local dance; Billy is forced by circumstance, and his own shortcomings, to live a life he knows he's going to escape -- and won't. And Julie Christie is not only the girl every guy will fall in love with but she's also the one who proves to be Billy's impossible dream -- the twist is, she's heartbreakingly real -- she's right there and instead... Billy goes for the fantasy. Awful and real. Director John Schhlesniger's best; beautifully shot in black and white and scored with offbeat songs and music. It stays with you.