Marisa and the Master of Space & Time

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A barebones romantic fantasy, Happy Accidents (2000) found its way onto my Netflix queue after a string of more recent films — Factotum (2005), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) and The Wrestler (2008) in particular — had me wondering: whatever happened to Marisa Tomei? She’d won an Oscar for My Cousin Vinny (1992), one of the Academy’s more perceptive, albeit unexpected, votes. But then, as fast as you can say, “Timothy Hutton,” she wound up in a series of thankless roles in too many ignored or mediocre movies. Outside of a gag guest spot playing herself on TV’s Seinfeld, other than the four aforementioned movies there’s little in the post-Vinny filmography to demand anyone’s attention. By the time she showed up for a small part in Wild Hogs (2007), her charisma and beauty were never more apparent; at age forty-three she stole what she could of an otherwise appalling John Travolta/Tim Allen midlife crisis comedy.

    There’s a toothless DVD commentary between Happy Accidents editor-writer-director Brad Anderson (Next Stop Wonderland, Transsiberian) and Vincent D’Onofrio, who plays Marisa’s love interest; though neither appears willing to explain or rationalize the film’s rather weird blend of humor and drama with science fiction. A woman pushing forty, burned too often in relationships, a codependent raised in an alcoholic household, Marisa’s Ruby Weaver meets and falls for D’Onofrio’s chatty Sam Deed in the park. Her attraction to this probable stalker and street crazy (he says he’s from the year 2470) is barely scrutinized in the script, but Sam is so blatantly off-putting to make us question Ruby’s sanity just for being with him. I credit D’Onofrio for a brilliant portrayal (few could make unlikeable so captivating), and Tomei occasionally shatters scenes from the gut, her blaring meltdowns over his jabbering eccentricity especially pungent. Props to Anderson for allowing the actors to flex, from the crazy rants about time travel to Tovah Feldshuh as Ruby’s mom, offering a perceptive obituary for the flame that’s died in her character’s marriage.

    Perhaps too ambitious for its own good, Anderson’s script is riddled with holes. Why, for example, is the rough hewn Ruby reading Anaïs Nin — and pronounces her name correctly — when she’d obviously be more at home with a Harlequin romance? How is this woman of modest means able to afford weekly therapy sessions? (Holland Taylor, better known as Charlie and Alan’s mother on Two and a Half Men, plays the therapist.) How does one explain Ruby’s revelatory phone conversation with Sam’s present day father, whose very existence would negate Sam’s ‘birth’ some four hundred years in the future? And how can we overlook the parallels between Sam’s quest to save the woman, with the similar themes in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995)?

    All these things considered, Happy Accidents is difficult to take literally, as a crossover genre piece. Regardless of the two leads’ excellent performances, its comedy, drama, romance and fantasy often fall short. Yet how does the picture manage to wander around in the mind days, if not weeks after viewing? Whether by design or not, Anderson has crafted a singular portrait of people trapped in a struggle to balance their emotions with common sense. He pays homage to the Marker film with freeze-frame zooms accompanied by narration, a subtle and welcome touch. Shooting at magic hour on the streets of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn just months shy of 9-11, DP Terry Stacey (In Her Shoes, Adventureland, TV’s Dexter) fuses the cold realities surrounding Ruby and Sam with the cozy warmth of an older New York, where a fuzzy Sunday afternoon glow so indigenous to that region transforms a ragtag scenario into an Impressionist odyssey. With the right frame of mind, you may even understand why Ruby would believe a man can travel through time.

“Dusty Happy End” by Dusty Trails, from Happy Accidents

The Big Sleep

By Richard Armstrong

Between March and August 2010 I worked as a ‘Maître de langues,’ teaching English at the University of Paris. During this time I saw hardly any films at the cinema or on DVD or video. Perhaps, mired in the newness of Paris, taken in by her looks and scents, overwhelmed by her exoticism, I didn’t feel the need for escape into movie worlds. Depending on the time of year, I taught, marked papers, read novels on balmy spring afternoons, took in art shows at sweltering summer nocturnes. After years of doing nothing but watching movies and writing about them, then researching and writing up a PhD on modernist cinema, I fetched up in an apartment in the 12th south of Bastille and inhabited classrooms and restaurants by day, and galleries, bars or my apartment by night. As my exile wore on, I had a series of bizarre dreams...

    ….I am watching Bonnie and Clyde, except that it isn’t Bonnie and Clyde but another film in which I see a band of evangelists in the Deep South walking down a country road praying, declaiming, and ‘speaking in tongues.’ When they reach the camera, they put somebody in a box; like a coffin. Then I see Clyde in prison on Death Row talking about how he can’t read because the warden won’t turn the lights up. I see a cell door and can just make out the spy hole which then closes. It looks like the eye in Un Chien Andalou. There is then a flashback to the start of Clyde’s career and he is sitting behind the wheel of a car about to rob a bank. It is night and raining....

    ….I am watching The Lost Weekend, but it isn’t The Lost Weekend. It is a film in which three men, including the protagonists of The Lost Weekend, Don and Wick Birnam, become retarded and, so to speak, ‘go native’ in appearance and behavior. I remark to some others that, made during wartime, the film dramatized the crisis of masculinity of that period in US history....

    ….I am watching Ace in the Hole with some others and comment on Kirk Douglas’ great performance. Then as we watch some business with ice cream being placed in a heated bowl on a Japanese person’s head, I begin to doubt that I am watching Ace in the Hole....

    ….I am watching The Age of Innocence and am struck by a particularly vivid scene in which a character at dinner discusses toppling a family’s reputation, thereby ensuring his social rise. This character and this scene do not actually exist in the film....

Above: Ray Milland as Don Birnam

    Clearly, these reveries are the result of deprivation. But what interests me about them is the way in which my movie-starved mind nocturnally fed on ‘scenes from movies,’ while these scenes do not actually appear in either these films or in any I have ever seen. Postulating the name of a film whilst withholding the film itself, the dreams staged deprivation by harping on ‘absent’ films. Whilst the scene of the evangelists walking down the road could feasibly appear in a film set in the American South, arguably the ‘kind’ of film Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) is, the scene does not appear in Bonnie and Clyde. (Given the blur of inexactitude into which these Parisian reveries plunged me, it seems imperative to stipulate their credits when referring to those, actual, films to which they referred so vaguely). Whilst it is conceivable that some left-field experimental take on The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945), might find its ‘weak’ men reverting to some atavistic condition, this does not happen in The Lost Weekend. Whilst The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993), is preoccupied for much of its length with characters jostling for social position, the scene I dreamt does not appear in The Age of Innocence. It is as though I was subconsciously ‘writing’ these scenes and labeling them so that I woke up with the impression that I had been watching a film called ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ ‘The Lost Weekend’ or ‘The Age of Innocence,’ whilst in my waking state I know these films don’t go like this. It is like being sung a tune which you are told is Mrs Robinson when it plainly isn’t.

    This kind of impressionistic nocturnal ‘moviegoing’ gives rise to the sensation that what you are watching is some generic film, a mishmash of movies seen with a particular actor or from a particular period. These dreams evince a fascination with Hollywood studio fare from the early to mid-50s, hence the references to Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda and Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951). The rather odd twist to the Ace in the Hole reverie might even suggest a wish to merge that film with another desert-set drama with racism at its core such as Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1954). Far from being about singular films, the finished article copyrighted by the studio and becoming for us documentary testimony to the facts of its making, these dreams emphasize what the finished articles have in common, not what makes them stand out but what makes them blend in. Interestingly, in this later example it occurs to me while I am dreaming that I am not watching Ace in the Hole, yet I do not recall feeling perplexed, confused or cheated by the realization. In the overwhelming majority of these dreams I recall only realizing what I was not watching after I awoke. Arguably, what I yearned for was not a singular example of cinema, but for cinema itself.

    Other episodes embody a strong desire to talk about movies, enthusiastically rehearsing plots to figures who seem disinterested. I am relating the plot of Friendship’s Death (Peter Wollen, 1987) to someone, but they are walking away from me. I am telling someone the plot of Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957). I wonder if the impulse to discuss or rehearse, if satisfied, would have been tantamount in the dream to actually watching the film, given the mainly scopic economy of this dream sequence? Was talking, in other words, another way of seeing? The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956), The Insider (Michael Mann, 2000), They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949), The Curse of the Cat People (Robert Wise & Gunther von Fritsch, 1944), Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921), L’Argent (Marcel L'Herbier, 1928), The Party (Blake Edwards, 1968): night after night I experienced the familiar frisson of anticipation as in my sleep I began to see a movie I knew I was going to savor, only to discover that it was not there... (In the case of The Wrong Man, purchased on DVD in Paris in 2007, now gathering dust in a friend’s attic, the absence seemed especially poignant).

    What am I to make of the spyhole in Bonnie and Clyde which becomes the eye of Un Chien Andalou? There is a strange contiguity about these nocturnal séances which bears out the odd associations of early Buñuel, but how appropriate, how historically coincidental, how serendipitous, to have evoked the cinematically hallowed tradition of screen surrealism in one’s dreams! This seems especially pertinent given how I had fetched up in the ‘City of Light,’ arguably the birthplace of cinema, and the site of its fortuitous affair with psychoanalysis. But was I dreaming ‘about’ surrealism in the same way as I dreamt ‘about’ Bonnie and Clyde or Ace in the Hole, merely to compensate for the absence of a singular cultural inventory? Or was I dreaming something new, a burgeoning rhetoric of association and inference producing its own artful juxtapositions after midnight slunk across Paris? Might the ‘film absent,’ itself a bizarre take on the film maudit so beloved of French film culture, give rise to a new canon of ‘film rêver?’

    On my final weekend in Paris I went to the Cinémathèque Française and caught The Shop around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940) and Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939) in the season then playing. They were the same films I had seen again and again across the years, each scene where I expected to find it, every flourish and remark just where I had left them. If they were different it was because I was different and they were still new. Despite their similarity to those I had seen in the past, I was not disappointed, and I have never enjoyed a trip to the cinema more, and have never dreamt of a single movie since.


Copyright © 2010 Richard Armstrong

Dynamo hum

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Carlos Dynamo’s X — Public Image is another of my favorite photo blogs to call it quits (C. Parker’s Starlet Showcase closed shop on September 8), but before leaving us he offered these images from the making of We Love You (1967): “Intended as a thank you to the fans who’d supported Mick and Keith throughout the Redlands bust and trial, the track was recorded while the band was awaiting appeal hearings, and with Allen Ginsberg, Paul McCartney and John Lennon on uncredited background vocals. The film, directed by Peter Whitehead, interspersed footage from the song’s recording session with Mick, Keith and Marianne [Faithfull]’s re-enactment of the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde. Also featured prominently was the infamous fur rug that Marianne had on when Redlands was busted.” Adios, Carlos. You will be missed.

Face off

Now that they’ve given us The Social Network, a box office hit and a very good film that I’d like to see again, the Facebook enterprise has surely jumped the shark, prompting me to deactivate my account lest I be associated with yet another tacky mainstream addiction that now feels as Cutting Edge as an AOL chatroom. Of course, one could say the same for Blogger, but I’m fatigued from keeping up with all these new outlets bent on nurturing ADHD. As my website has stalled out of apathy, this blog is where I’ll hang my hat… for the meantime, at any rate. And if my FB “friends” are truly just that, they’ll have no problem visiting me here.

    In order to better detox you from the FB experience, allow me to provide a few of that site’s typical posts which you may, through the link below, comment on. It is unfortunate that Blogger does not offer the thumb’s up “like” icon, a viable alternative in those times when one feels like a drooling, slack-jawed moron, someone akin to Jeff Goldblum’s hooligan in Death Wish (where he wore a Jughead-style felt crown and moaned “I’m gonna do a thiiing” while spray painting graffiti). So flex your mind around these witty, FB-style entries with a few Twitter Tweets thrown in for good measure, and become one with the networking universe:

Flickhead is feeling anxious.

…has his doubts.

…feels writer’s block coming on. Can you relate?

…just had the plumber in. There goes another $100.

Awful depressed after Social Network.

…watched the new David Lynch, and is baffled.

Sees how things could turn out.

Doesn’t like what he’s seeing.

“What poetry,” as Stanley Kowalski once ruminated.

The ups and downs of obsession

Via Acidemic, screen shots from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, reminding me of when a master filmmaker could quietly turn each individual scene of his (and Saul Bass’s) work into an iconographic image. Click to enlarge.

Italian dressing

Michelangelo Antonioni, Marisa Mell and Federico Fellini in 1971, via Farbror Sid. Click to enlarge.

Mystery siren

The eyes... they're putting the whammy on me! Anyone know who this is? (Click to enlarge.)

Hollywood cuties & French pips

I can still recall this Manhattan, long since gone and replaced by something wholly unattractive to me. (Click to enlarge.)

Ste. Raquel the Divoone

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Village of the damned

Above: Elizabeth Berkley (Click to enlarge.)

I’d like to join Dennis Cozzalio in celebrating the 15th birthday of Showgirls by offering the following Blogathon contribution I originally posted on January 11, 2006:

Showgirls (1995 — 131 min. — UA) Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Written by Joe Eszterhas. Cinematography by Jost Vacano. Edited by Mark Goldblatt and Mark Helfrich. Starring Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Robert Davi, and Lin Tucci as Henrietta ‘Mama’ Bazoom.

Asked in an interview what films and filmmakers he admires, director Jacques Rivette said something I didn’t expect to hear:

“I've seen [Starship Troopers] twice and I like it a lot, but I prefer Showgirls (1995), one of the great American films of the last few years. It's Verhoeven's best American film and his most personal. In Starship Troopers, he uses various effects to help everything go down smoothly, but he's totally exposed in Showgirls. It's the American film that's closest to his Dutch work. It has great sincerity, and the script is very honest, guileless. It's so obvious that it was written by Verhoeven himself rather than Mr. Eszterhas, who is nothing. And that actress is amazing! Like every Verhoeven film, it's very unpleasant: it's about surviving in a world populated by assholes, and that's his philosophy. Of all the recent American films that were set in Las Vegas, Showgirls was the only one that was real — take my word for it. I who have never set foot in the place!”

    The image of Rivette, creator of such modest, low-key works as La Belle noiseuse (1991) and La Bande des quatre (1988), enthralled by one of Verhoeven’s frenzied, mega-budgeted popcorn movies seems strange…until you realize the qualities shared by the people in their films. One step out of reality, wandering in a fog of wishes and ideals, they’re dismayed over the prospect of a life in banality. Rivette often deals in actors or painters or magicians or spirits for his characters; Verhoeven’s are the intolerant, aggressive bourgeoisie, often the products of caustic, unfriendly environments, people who know where the guns are hidden and how to use them, and rarely with a concern for consequence. Call it the cinema of impulse.

    After doing some intriguing work in his native Netherlands, Verhoeven proved his box office mojo in American action fare: Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992). He made a fortune, and was the best thing that ever happened to Sharon Stone. Total Recall benefits enormously from her haughty sensuality, as does Basic Instinct, Verhoeven’s first unabashed foray into glossy kitsch with an ice pick at its center. Both of her characters exemplify the adolescent male fear of independent, mature, beautiful women as vampires, using the promise of sex to drain the life from men who are, to the director’s understanding, innocent and hapless victims of circumstance.

    When casting was underway for Showgirls Sharon was approaching forty — some fifteen years (and a few pounds) beyond the film’s naïve, star-struck lap dancer Nomi Malone. The part went to statuesque wetdream Elizabeth Berkley, Sharon Stone Lite. All things considered, she does remarkably well in the role. (Up to that point, her biggest gig was the TV show Saved By the Bell.) Seemingly oblivious to such overripe dialogue as “You look better than a ten inch dick,” Berkley’s completely immersed in the vacuous persona, even poignant at times, often charging like a bull in a china shop to points beyond the Method. A total fantasy figure, her Nomi maintains a radiant complexion and a firm twenty-inch waist on a steady diet of cheese fries, potato chips and Big Macs — undoubtedly Eszterhas’s kind of woman.

Above: In any other film dealing with deceit and subterfuge, this image could stir up all manner of metaphysical ramification. In Showgirls, she’s simply putting on her makeup. (Click to enlarge.)

    There’s nothing inappropriate about the character as far as Verhoeven’s punch-drunk Vegas is concerned. Less a realist than a caricaturist, he milks the setting as a microcosm of consumerist decadence rotting from its own avarice and adrenaline. There’s no doubt that this was unintentional, since he’s admitted to approaching the script from a radically different perspective (in an interview supplied on the DVD, Verhoeven claims that it’s “a musical”), but Showgirls is littered with the sins of contemporary Sodom underlined by thumping Wagnerian techno pop.

    The media-fueled preoccupation with youth and appearance, gluttony and expensive toys, the loathing of middle-income people (characters here either own mansions or live in trailers)…greed, power, fleeting success, ego, vanity, manipulation, instant gratification…to say nothing of ferocious acrobatic sex that would land most of us in the hospital…these sundry elements permeate Eszterhas’s ludicrous scenario, which draws liberally from the well of 1940’s and 50’s backstage melodrama — specifically All About Eve (1950), this time with an exotic dancer gyrating her way up the ladder, stepping over the bodies in stiletto heels.

    It was slapped with an NC-17 rating for nudity and simulated sex in its cheesy stage shows and austere dance numbers. Berkley and Gina Gershon (playing the Bette Davis part) look fabulous in and out of their clothes, but the pounding repetition of bare, wrinkle-free skin punches lust and desire into numbness. Lacking the acumen for successful and stimulating erotica, Verhoeven manages to flatten their magnificent physiques into meat. Clenched facial expressions, hyperactivity and the arrogant sense of entitlement euphemistically called “attitude,” so fashionable in the 90’s and prevalent among the pinched and modish cast, sours the senses, causing physical beauty and the mere thought of sex to seem vulgar and redundant. (Not that it’s completely asexual: Berkley’s lap dance with Kyle MacLachlan and the lesbian tease sessions with Gershon do have their moments.)

    A case of the dragon consuming itself by the tail, Showgirls transcends the limitations normally set by genre and dramatic convention — and comes to embody every foul, odious thing it professes to abhor. That it evolves into a compelling (and very funny) reflection of western culture spiraling out of control for lack of dignity and shame was surely an accident. The picture was a box office bomb, killed by its MPAA rating and the reluctance of exhibitors to show it, causing Berkley’s film career to go south and sending Verhoeven back to the boot camp sci-fi of Starship Troopers. However, when Showgirls won a ‘Razzie’ award for worst picture, Verhoeven was on hand to collect the prize…even he thought it sucked. Perhaps too myopic to see, he may be unable to fathom it as an indictment of culture tainted by the very boorishness that made films like Total Recall and Basic Instinct hits.

Above: After it tanked in its initial run, United Artists tried hawking Showgirls as a so-bad-it’s-good attraction on the midnight show circuit, but no one was buying it.

Showgirls Trivia Contest: In a nightclub scene in the film, a DJ plays a 1990’s dance mix that borrows music from the soundtrack of what 1960’s movie? Send your answers here, with “Showgirls contest” in the subject box. Prizes will go to the first three correct responses. Prizes will be sent only to addresses in North America.

Furthermore…
Bloggers celebrating International Showgirls Day:
The Whine Colored Sea
Girish
Fagistan
Drifting
Obsolete Vernacular
Long Pauses
Hell on Frisco Bay
Elusive Lucidity
Cinephiliac
When Canses were Classeled
Supposed Aura
Nilblogette
Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee
Cinematical
Video Watchblog
GreenCine Daily
Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule
Bitter Cinema
Self-Styled Siren

…and…
Official site
IMDb
Showgirls screen grabs
Gina Gershon gallery

Parsley, sage and Rosemary’s baby

Chauntal Lewis in The Commune

There’s been some buzz over The Commune (2009), Elisabeth Fies’s debut as writer-producer-director that’s just found its way to DVD. Marketing itself as “a new cult classic” before any cults have had time to form, the scenario follows a virgin teen girl from a broken home (newcomer Chauntal Lewis) shipped off to live with her nonconformist dad (Stuart G. Bennett) who’s running a hippiefied brainwashing outfit in the middle of the forest. Cell phones and contemporary tween culture clash with tofu, macramé and late-60s dogma, sending the girl spinning into the arms of a young, hamburger-swilling local named Puck (an amply eyelined David Lago). But this midsummer’s dream is soiled by dad’s all-too apparent lust for his little girl, and before you can say Rosemary’s Baby, she’s being prepped for an unholy union with the Horned God himself.
    Shot inexpensively, the film’s less polished moments often revolve around Adrian Lee’s odd turn as a Mother Earth figure. Whether espousing fortune cookie philosophy or extolling dad’s divine guidance, the actor’s awkward line readings could be interpreted as either the work of a hopeless amateur, or an inventive approach to unhinge an already unstable environment. To these eyes, she comes off like Poltergeist’s Zelda Rubenstein (“Cross over children! All are welcome!”) auditioning for Chelsea Girls.
    Looking uncomfortably similar to Firesign Theatre’s Peter Bergman, Bennett’s daffy dad tends to get a bit bug-eyed on his frequent trips over the top. But as her character suffers in pampered pain, Lewis is excellent — to say nothing of the uncanny resemblance to Lindsay Lohan. And Fies’s eye and ear for the patchouli-n-paisley netherworld of late-60s hedonism rings fairly true, while her incestuous spin on David Koresh — would you send your kids to live with him? — could use a little fleshing out.

Milla’s crossing

Approximately fifteen minutes into Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), which was relentlessly hyped for its state of the art 3D, the technology flattens from age. A new 3D movie seems to come out every Friday, and this one sends decapitated heads, ninja stars, bullets and dropkicks into the eye at a blinding speed. But with all the labor going into the action itself, we never register the emotions that would cause the characters to chop, slice, mutilate and shoot one another. In fact, for something striving to be so hip, it quickly regresses to such retro eye candy gimmicks as slo-mo, midair freeze frames and other Matrix-era clichés.

    Stemming from a videogame, this, the fourth in a live action series, follows Resident Evil (2002), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), and Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), which were all written by Paul W.S. Anderson. He directed the first and this latest installment, both lacking the fun and energy of Apocalypse (directed by Alexander Witt) and Extinction (Russell Mulcahy). I got into the series via Blu-ray, and wonder if my disenchantment over the new one stems from the theatrical experience itself. Could these bubblegum epics be properly viewed only at home, in those precise moments when their frantic mindlessness is the best tonic for whatever ails?

    Milla Jovovich is back as ‘Project Alice,’ who we last saw floating among hundreds of embryonic clones gearing up to do battle with the Umbrella Corporation, evildoers supreme. For the record, I think Extinction is the best in the series, and its ending suggested a sequel with a lot more meat than Afterlife has shaking on its half-gnawed bones. There are inconsistencies and gaffes (Alice is stripped of her superpowers but regains them without explanation); a paltry, token nod to the flesh-eating zombies; a hollow, faceless villain; none of the previous films’ sense of mystery or dread; and way, way too much slo-mo. When the picture ends so abruptly, it’s the only thing we don’t expect.

    Jovovich is committed (she and Anderson are married), and often the sole focal point in a picture weathering rigor mortis. For better Milla, check her out in .45 (2006).