My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009)

Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) has murdered his mother (Grace Zabriskie) and barricaded himself inside her house with two hostages. The film's tagline tells us, "The Mystery Isn't Who. But Why." My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? "Inspired by a true story" of a man who killed his mother with a sword after over-identifying with a character he was playing in The Eumenides, Orestes, who also kills his mother. Herzog doesn't accept such a simple explanation as "over-identifying." The whole film is constructed around answering the 'Why?'. However, contrary to the tagline, understanding the 'Who?' is the key to understanding the 'Why?'. Most of the film is comprised of a series of flashbacks triggered by Detective Hank Havenhurst's (Willem Defoe) questioning of Brad's fiancee, Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny), the play director, Lee Meyers (Udo Kier) and the neighbours, Mrs. and Miss Roberts. The flashbacks reveal to us the strange life and behaviour of Brad in the time leading up to the murder. We learn there are two major events that precipated Brad's crime: he visited Peru for a rafting trip and came back hearing the voice of God; and he starred in The Eumenides. In other words, no explanation at all.

There are two very important shots that reveal more about Brad than Ingrid and Meyers do, each in one of the two flashbacks to Peru. In the first, we see Brad standing before the river, splitting the frame in half: one half is the green land, the other half is the white rapids. Gazing toward the river, Brad yells at his meditating companion that the river is reality. So in this shot, Brad is still facing reality. In the second flashback to Peru, the group has moved down river some. Now Brad is sitting on the rocks, facing the opposite direction of the river. One companion tells him he's behaving strangely and he says, "I'm just looking at the river," which is patently false. Brad is now no longer facing reality. Ingrid and Mrs. Roberts tell us Brad changed after his trip to Peru, but they can't explain why. Ingrid thinks it's the death of Brad's travelling companions, but the flashback clearly shows Brad's madness setting in prior to their deaths. Temporally, we can't see what happened in between the flashbacks to suddenly trigger his madness.

However, Herzog gives us one flashback--which occurs suddenly, without trigger, and is not told by or to anyone--between the two Peru flashbacks. It's a quiet shot of Brad's mother poking a piano key, then walking over (the camera follows her) to Brad, who sits at a drum set. She complains that Brad never plays his piano or his drums. We can also see a guitar at the bottom of the frame when she's at the piano. Brad tells her that she's the one who "tried to persuade" him to want the drums. We have no idea when exactly this moment occurred in Brad's life, but Herzog plants it between the two Peru flashbacks for a reason: in between facing reality and not facing reality is Brad's lack of direction in life, his inability to commit himself seriously to any vocation. As the film goes on we learn he used to play basketball, was into New Age thought (along with his fellow rafters), briefly got the notion to go whitewater rafting, decides to become a Muslim and ditches out of the rafting, decides to become a stage actor, and even, as he's being taken away by the cops, announces "I have taken a new vocation as a righteous merchant." He's a dilettante: he wants to do everything but will commit to nothing. He wants to continually remake himself according to each new fantasy and, in doing so, withdraws further from reality until fantasy and spontaneous self-reinvention takes over.

Brad is a model of this generation's malaise. We live in a wonderful time when so many options and opportunities are open to everyone. I decide I want to be a film critic, so I start this website. If I want to be a filmmaker, I can easily pick up a camera and put out a casting notice. So many options are open to us, as they are to Brad, that in this generation we have difficulty choosing just one or at least having the discipline to stick with one for a reasonable length of time. Brad's mother has made every opportunity available to him. He seems to have no job, yet he travels to Peru and Tijuana, owns a car, spends all day doing whatever he wants. He does nothing, ultimately. The answer to the titular question, "What have ye done?" could well be "Nothing." Brad is a disappointment.

So in the two shots that illustrate Brad's turn from reality, we can say that he has turned from reality because he doesn't have the ability to face it. To face reality would be to accept that he must commit himself to a vocation, a career, certain people in order to exist in the human world. One must limit oneself in order to be oneself. To be everything is just to be nothing. Brad isn't the only character unable to face reality. The companions with whom he goes rafting are equally unequipped to face reality. Brad correctly tells them the rapids are too dangerous during the rainy season, yet one continues meditating and the other only says, without much thought, that the challenge is why they've come. They know nothing about whitewater rafting, they're not athletic at all. When Brad later tells them he's not interested in their herbal teas and talking to 'Indians' in sweat lodges, we gather that they're New Agers. What could be a better summation of flakey dilettante lifestyle than New Agers, who grasp onto every new self-centered fad until the next one comes along? So they're pampered Californians with lots of time for flakey New Age thought thinking they can just master the rapids. They face the river, which, as Brad noted, is reality; and they die. They leap into a reality they're unequipped to face. Brad, at least, knows he's not equipped to face it and avoids it via retreat into fantasy.

One would think, given some of Brad's more erratic behaviour, that someone would have tried to get Brad help at some point. Yet none in his life are willing or able to face that reality. Brad's mother clearly lives for Brad. One particularly awkward scene shows her bringing drinks into Brad's room for he and Ingrid; she stands in the doorway for what feels like three minutes (it's around fifteen seconds, actually), until Ingrid at last thanks her. She lives to serve Brad and asks for gratitude only. She also still sees Brad as a child, to the point that of attempting to spoon-feed him. In that particular dinner scene, Herzog frames the shot so the window opens behind Brad and Ingrid, but the curtain covers the outside behind Brad's mother. If Brad has a whole world of opportunity for himself and is unable to commit, his mother has stripped herself of the world through her obsessive devotion to Brad. Their madnesses mutually feed off each other.

If Brad is a crude but accurate caricature of my generation, a generation of people unequipped to face reality, Brad's mother is equally a caricature of the problem, parents who live for their children and give them endless opportunities but no direction, no demands. (And those parents, in turn, are a product of a whole history of Western, materialist culture, which Lee Meyers might call our "Tantalate House.") Direction is what Brad lacks, his energies considerable but uncontrollable. Hence the importance Brad puts in the play The Eumenides. Lee Meyers, the play's director, is literally giving Brad direction. Meyers is the only character in Brad's life who has any sort of control over him. Meyers's relationship with Brad is vaguely fatherly as well: he's affectionate and spends more time with him than his job requires. Although Meyers actually kicks Brad out of the play for being disruptive, Brad calls only Meyers and Ingrid before committing the murder. Clearly they have mutual respect. Unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality now, the direction of the play becomes his direction in life. He has a sense of destiny, killing his mother an act of necessity and fate. After killing her, he casually tells a detective who is unaware he's the suspect, "Razzle them, dazzle them, razzle dazzle them." Life and performance, reality and fantasy, have been conflated. He claims to hear the voice of God, which warned him of the danger in Peru; but as soon as he's barricaded in his home, and immediately--in the film's time--before the key flashback, he tosses "God" (a container of Quaker oats) out of the house saying he no longer needs God. As soon as his 'performance' is over, he's again without direction.

The film concludes with the victory of reality. The first shot of the film is a train driving through a field, on its way to San Diego. The train's motion is rhymed with that of the river. The final shot is of San Diego traffic flowing by behind a basketball in a tree (so placed by Brad). The flowing traffic is like the flowing river and the flowing train: reality rushing on. Inability to face reality doesn't make it go away. The police surrounding Brad's house are a part of that reality, impinging upon Brad's existence in his mother's uterine, pink house whether he likes it or not. Brad has no choice but to eventually meet the reality they represent in some form.

Of course, the film shouldn't be over-intellectualized. Much of it is felt and not quite understandable, much as Brad is not quite understandable and the murder is not quite understandable. The inability to rationalize is a part of encountering the film. The music, for instance, is sombre, sorrowful, and seemingly out of place with the images, producing uncomfortable dissonance. Herzog's decision to make his actors sometimes freeze also produces discomfort as we wonder why they've stopped, yet are clearly blinking. Sometimes they even look directly into the camera. Much of the film's oddness seems present primarily to keep us in a state of confusion, Herzog's use of film form complementing the content so that the mystery of human behaviour and the problem of knowing becomes characterized in the very style. Herzog's camera movements are hypnotic, always moving slowly and gracefully in steadicam, reminding one of some shots in Touch of Evil (the detectives are named Vargas and Hank, coincidentally). So hypnotic are the movements, that I've become drowsy each time I've seen the film. These soporific qualities, the confusing weirdness, leave us as lost as Ingrid and Hank (who are not privy, as we've seen, to the film's key flashback) and all the more disarmed for the jarring moments when Brad explodes. This is only skimming the surface, a brief brainstorming session: Herzog's style in this film could and should be investigated in much more depth.

That Brad McCullum would be a monster for Herzog is no surprise. Considering Herzog's films are famed for their depictions of monomaniacal men, who are quasi-heroes of Herzog's films, a man unable to devote himself to anything as Brad McCullum is monstrous. Herzog focuses on one brief obsession in McCullum's existence, but its brevity and the ease with which it's forgotten make him a model of what Herzog doubtless despises. That Brad is a monster for us has more to do with his unpredictability. As there is no explanation, no good reason, for Brad's behaviour, predicting it is impossible. This keeps not just other characters like Ingrid and Lee on edge, but also the viewers. Though we already know his crime, Michael Shannon's intensity and conviction in every insane line and gesture makes McCullum frightening to behold. Shannon has shown himself to be one of the best actors in America with his performance in Bug, able to put total conviction in the silliest lines, deep menace in the most banal lines. In My Son, he is not nearly so histrionic, his performance more subtle, but the more frightening for it.

I've seen My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? four times now and it's only improved in my estimation each time. Yet, strangely, my perception of it changes with each viewing. The horror of the film struck me the first time. The second time, the comedy of it. Much of what happens in the film could just as easily be humourous as disturbing, or both at once. The last time I was struck with sadness, the film's title encapsulating it. The title is the final words Brad's mother utters when she's stabbed, words gently chastising, yet overwhelmingly sad: this woman who has lived her life for her son and is moved to tears by his gratitude has her life taken away for no good reason. The film's mysteries remain, perhaps magnified, and so does my obsession with it; I think I'll watch it another four times.

Puffball (2007) - 4/4

After being out of the feature film business for a long time, master filmmaker Nicolas Roeg returns with a very weird film called Puffball. This title refers not to a furry woodland creature, but to a form of mushroom that grows into an edible, watermelon-sized, white ball, in appearance not unlike the moon. There are no knife-wielding midgets or horny meteorologists in this one, but it may be Roeg's strangest film yet. Roeg focuses a microscope on life itself, like the puffball both beautiful and hideously fungal in its monstrous, struggling messiness from conception to death in endless cycles. Roeg spares us not one intra-vaginal blast of semen. Not surprisingly, given a subject matter as broad as life itself, Puffball is a drama, a thriller, a comedy, a supernatural horror, a fantasy and more.

Puffball concerns an architect named Liffey (Kelly Reilly) returning to her roots in the Irish country. She's purchased an old cottage and is using her architectural skills to design her dream house where she will live with her boyfriend. Her closest neighbour is Mabs (Miranda Richardson), a middle-aged woman with a teen daughter, twin little girls, and a desire to get pregnant with a son. Mabs's mother, Molly, used to live in the cottage, where she lost a son in a fire. Now the slightly-unhinged woman uses pagan rituals to 'help' Mabs get pregnant with a replacement son. When the magic doesn't work--because magic is nonsense and all--Molly determines Liffey's taking over of the cottage is the cause. Not only that, but a defective condom leads to Liffey getting pregnant. That bitch! New and sinister magic will be required.

Now my tone there was slightly tongue-in-cheek and there's a reason. Despite concerning a lot of serious issues about procreation and having a few harrowing dramatic moments, there's something darkly comical about the attempts to witchcraft Liffey's child into Mabs. The rituals themselves are bizarre enough that even Mabs' teen daughter grows increasingly disgusted with them. And not only do the amateur witches keep getting misinformed as to the fluctuating state of Liffey's pregnancy, but Liffey seemingly gets pregnant by two different guys in a space of three weeks when Mabs can't get pregnant at all. While pregnancy-envy is a serious thing and Roeg does take it seriously, at the same time he recognizes how ridiculous it is when Molly calls Liffey a bitch for taking Liffey's own fetus from Mabs. As though there were a limited amount of fertility in this corner of the universe. But that's magic thinking for you.

Roeg leaves it ambiguous as to whether there is really any magic at work. He refines his famous cut-up shooting style here to emphasize the interconnectedness of individuals. This sense is strong enough that one would be justified asserting magical connections. For instance, Molly seems to be aware of the exact moment Liffey discovers her dead son's baby booties in the cottage basement. There are a few such instances and one wonders if it is real synchronicity or a result of Roeg's cutting.

Roeg also develops a level of symbolic interconnectedness. Superimposition links the interior of the cottage and the architectural models Liffey keeps with the interior of her womb. A mystical stone called the 'Well of Odin' is linked with the vaginal passage, perhaps with the aperture of cameras, and with some of the mystical notions expressed in the film. A total filmmaker, like Lynch, Roeg uses the soundtrack to advantage as well. Roeg also employs a sort of aural superimposition, whereby the ghostly sounds of a little boy are heard at certain moments throughout the film.

Then there are the puffballs. These too are linked to the womb both in the appearance of pregnancy and again by means of superimposition of a fetus over the puffball. The puffballs are visually linked with the moon, which is in the first shot of the film. The moon, of course, is tied to the motif of cycles, menstrual cycles, the cycle of life. This is what the film is ultimately about. Life is represented in all stages, from the fetus, through the little girls, the teenager, the fertile young woman, the middle-aged woman, the elderly woman and death. Then life starts again. It is all interconnected. It's not magic. But when one considers the sheer implausibility of any single human life coming to exist and the almost infinite odds against it, the result of that struggle feels quite close to magic. It's not a wonder something so mysterious could drive one to witchcraft.

But Roeg doesn't allow just one perspective on procreation to shine through. Liffey is flatly disdainful of procreation; the development of her cottage is her substitute for childbearing. Surely a woman needn't be defined by childbearing. For Mabs and her mother, procreation is everything. "Conceiving's what drives a man," Molly says. Mabs' sister Carol holds the truthful view that some women seem to just need to be pregnant and are less interested in the result of that pregnancy. We also get the perspective of medical science, refreshingly lacking sentimentality. Roeg takes no sides, but allows for a pluralism of attitudes toward procreation.

However, what will be uncomfortable is how Roeg's distance studies and scrutinizes the female human as an animal. The females, with their desires to be pregnant, their sexual urges, and many of their activities, sometimes come across as mere animals, silly, pitiable, and vulgar. This may say more about myself than the film, but at times I saw Liffey, and to a lesser extent Mabs, as just a 'stupid animal' rather than a person with the dignity that entails. Of course, procreation doesn't allow for a great deal of conventional dignity. Perhaps it is the conventional notion of dignity and not the 'aberrant' behaviour that needs to be done away with. Humans are animals, after all.

It might be evident by this point in the discussion that males don't play a major part in the film. That is correct. This is a matriarchal film, with most of the tensions between the women and all of the tensions about the women. Molly's view that "conceiving's what drives a man" almost seems true. They're the playthings of the women, used for sex and generally quite submissive. There are two exceptions. There is the doctor. But he's not in the context of a relationship. His presence is merely professional. He represents medical science in a manner tantamount to allegory. The other is Liffey's boss and mentor, Lars (Donald Sutherland). He seems to step in from another film and totally steals the scenes he's in. He's not connected with the plot, but rather with the themes. He has two brief-but-magnetic appearances as a sort of amateur mystic reminding Liffey and the audience that "we know nothing." He seems to represent a position neither masculine nor feminine, but somehow beyond both.

To some extent Puffball is also about place. Because life can't take place nowhere and where it does take place transforms a place. In fact, there is no such thing as place in a purely physical world, is there? There is space. Mathetical space occupied by objects. When conscious beings enter a space and begin to transform it, make it their own, it becomes a place. That place resonates with the people who have shaped it and influences its progress as new people inhabit it, feel it, and develop it in new ways. If there's one good thing that can be said about Liffey--an otherwise supercilious and selfish human being I can't imagine anyone wanting to be within fifty feet of--it's that she understands and respects the significance of place. Unfortunately, the power of the place she's found herself meddling with is what gets her in much trouble.

Nicolas Roeg said in interviews Puffball doesn't belong to a genre: it's a film about life. I believe he accomplished what he set out to do. Puffball manages to be incredibly intricate and yet terribly messy all at once. It's a film full of ideas, full of paradoxes, full of beauty, and full of ugliness. Just like life.

November Son (2008) - 2.5/4

What filmmakers and writers often forget is the full implications of what they do when they tell any story. The reason a film like Once Upon a Time in the West has the epic power it has is because of the unique properties of storytelling, which creates a whole universe out of a very exclusive collection of people, places, and things. Just try to imagine the events of Once Upon a Time in the West as having taken place in this world. What does Harmonica's fate really matter? Or Frank's, for that matter? In the grand scheme of things, these people would not even register as blips on history's radar. The story, though, carves out a universe where these two people attain mythic proportions. They are mythologized. They are not so much actively mythologized as necessarily mythologized as a consequence of creating a universe that is viewed almost exclusively under the significance of the actions of these characters. There is nothing inherently important about Harmonica; but the film's universe is carved out in such a way that he is a central player in the rightful order of that whole universe. His killing Frank is the triumph of right, progress, justice, freedom over chaotic opportunism, or evil, if you will. In real life, we never individually have that sort of significance in the universe. Except perhaps for Caesar, Napoleon, or, alas, Hitler, almost nobody has ever had that level of significance in the real world. Yet even our mundane lives, carved out by a skilled filmmaker, could become somehow epic and our actions could appear to hold grand significance for the fate of the universe. If you don't believe me, read James Joyce's Ulysses or Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

I brought up this issue of the power of storytelling, especially cinematic storytelling has in order to address what I find so strange about November Son. The universe as it is represented in November Son revolves entirely around the implications of homosexual men. They are the Chosen Ones, the demigods upon whom the fate of all things rests, as construed by writer-director Jason Paul Collum. The film's characters include a young gay man, Eli (Sacha Sacket), who moves into the apartment of a woman, Marti (Tina Ona Paukstelis), who only rents her apartment out to gay men, because she's a 'fruitfly', which I believe is a woman who is attracted to gay men. The previous tenant, naturally, was also gay; he dies in the first few minutes of the film. Eli's homophobic father may or may not be gay and begins dating the previous tenant's mother (Brinke Stevens), who also claims to be attracted to gay men and admits her previous 'boyfriend' was gay. Eli gets a job as a photographer for a Christian lifestyle magazine, where the boss, Emily (Night of the Living Dead's Judith O'Dea), takes a shine to him as he reminds her of her deceased son, who was gay. Also, her husband was gay. There are a few other characters and, as you might imagine, all of their lives revolved around gay men.

Now were this film an erotic drama set in a gay community of some sort, then the fact that male homosexuality is the center of this universe wouldn't be so remarkable. However, this film is a thriller set in a normal community amongst Christian families. Yet every male seems to be gay, every female obsessed with gay males. The whole town is obsessed with homosexuals, as the passengers in random cars driving by Eli on bicycle, people who could not possibly know he is homosexual, throw cans at him. There are anti-gay signs around. This has a very peculiar effect. For one, it's ridiculous. Every time a new character mentions another gay person in his or her life, it became increasingly difficult to stifle a chuckle. But it also has a nightmarish aspect that undercuts what I believe to be the attempt at an anti-homophobia statement. There are even some cracks at George W. Bush. But rather than showing homophobia is a harmful attitude, it almost justifies homophobia in the face of a world that is torn asunder by the overwhelming majority of gay males and gay-obsessed straights. Despite that, it is fascinating and I must say rather entertaining. Internet Movie Database lists November Son as a comedy as well as a horror, so perhaps the everybody-is-gay mentalty is intended to be slyly humourous. If so, well done Collum.

So how does November Son work as a thriller? Well, the dynamic I've described above occupies the first hour and nine minutes of the hour and forty-four minute film. It consists of these various characters having one-on-one conversations about their lives and, most of all, about gayness and gay people. Emily in particular keeps confiding things in Eli and one wonders, "Why?" He doesn't need to know anything about her to work at her magazine. A character-driven thriller is great, but this is more of character-leisurely-strolled thriller. One doesn't even get any trace of a plot until that hour-and-nine-minute mark, when someone receives a hammer blow to the head at last. Moreover, the character motivations are often quite vague.

It all does ultimately tie up neatly and the build-up is to some extent justified and indeed explained by the finale. Once that thriller plot kicks in, there is one beautiful scene the horror fan can enjoy. Legendary scream queen Brinke Stevens, after an attempted assault, takes a stroll by a lake to wind down and spots a coffin beached on the shore. I won't spoil the scene, but it's a flicker of nightmare flavour in an otherwise plain but sometimes-touching gay melodrama.

On a trivial point, the interior decorators out there may enjoy the real houses in which the film is shot. They stood out for me, for whatever reason. Most films are shot on sets that are much larger than the rooms in real houses in order to accommodate film crews. Not November Son.

The Box Collector (2008) - 3/4

The Box Collector tells an eccentric, melodramatic story about small town people. I think this is supposed to mount up to some statement about jealousy. The basic plot concerns the very sheltered but handsome young Harry (Noah Segen), who likes to paint pictures of boxes. He is falling in love with a sexually provocative and exotic new neighbour, Marie (Lyne Renee). Working against this love is all the men in town who also seem to be falling for Marie and, most importantly, Harry's eccentric and potentially-dangerous mother Beth (Margot Kidder). As the story plays out in this peculiar small town, though, it goes far beyond a statement about jealousy. It becomes a grand expression of a perverse worldview I find deeply fascinating.

It only takes five minutes for this worldview to begin to show itself. As Harry enters the pharmacy to collect medication for himself and his mother, he's immediately set upon by the slutty cashier. She leans forward to flash as much of her ample cleavage as possible, asks Harry why he doesn't come around more often, and drops several subtlety-free clues that she wants him. On his way out of the pharmacy, Harry's friend Burt invites him for a drink at the bar, where it's made clear the slutty, sexy female bartender is into the virginal Harry. When Harry gets home, the beautiful and provocatively-dressed Marie, possibly a slut, is moving in next door and immediately takes a shine to Harry, making a show of her assets.

You may be wondering why I keep using the word 'slutty.' Surely I'm being a chauvinist scumbag? No, I'm just interpreting what is given on-screen. Burt makes clear the bartender will put out for anyone who pays. Similarly, the pharmacy cashier later wastes no time going for a ride with Burt. Even Marie is a 'massage therapist' by night, working in her own home. She's also perpetually flirting with all the town's men.

To be frank, the worldview being put forward here is that all attractive, young women are sluts. It gets better, though. You can't have sluts without slut-hungry men. And sure enough, all men who aren't Harry fall into the category. They are mostly represented in the character of Burt, however. Men are looked upon as incapable of fidelity; and due to the overwhelming number of sexy sluts in town, it's easy for them to cheat. Burt's wife Luz is both menacing and comic relief as his fiercely shrewish shadow, following his every move, just knowing he's adulterous. Beth, it turns out, is Luz's best friend. They spend all day reading tarot cards and bitching about how men can't keep 'it' in their pants. Beth herself was the victim of infidelity and despises all men who aren't her son.

The plot thickens further. Marie is on the run from her ex-husband with her daughter. She keeps complaining about how jealous he was because she was constantly giving massages to other men and flirting. She makes clear jealousy is something she can't stand. Of course, there's a difference between jealousy and not wanting to be humiliated. In this perverse world the filmmaker has set up, one can hardly blame her ex-husband for having been worried. But I digress.

The point of fact is that this bizarre worldview is very fascinating. It basically compartmentalizes all men into two categories: virginal mama's boys and horndogs. And it compartmentalizes all women into two categories: man-hating harpies and shameless, sexy sluts. It's not entirely clear which side the film stands on. It seems to regard with amused condemnation all of these categories. Marie and Harry alone offer some possibility for being a normal, happy, faithful couple in this twisted universe.

The worldview here is the polar opposite of what one finds in Russ Meyer's films. The ultimate expression of Russ Meyer's philosophy, Ultravixens, boils down to one oft-repeated line from the film, "Always look a good fuck in the face." The Box Collector is not appreciative of that philosophy.

So much for worldview. There are other things to enjoy in the film. The grotesque characters who embody the odd worldview are certainly fascinating and amusing to spend time with. They feel like real people. I grew up with people like this. However odd or caricatured they may seem to some, they're real. The most potent of the characters is Beth. Not only is she a complex woman with strong and frightening feelings, but Margot Kidder gives a totally uninhibited performance as this grotesque character. It is truly incredible. One would expect Kidder to be interested in preserving some glimmer of her sexpot image. She let's it all go. She wears huge glasses, hair so dry it might as well be seaweed, frumpy fortune teller clothes, and hobbles with a cane. Close-ups emphasize the wrinkles around her mouth as she delivers frightfully-impassioned lines or cold lines hiding the fire within. Apart from Beth, Luz (Adriana O'Neil) is a scene-stealer as the bitter, jealous harpy. The past-their-prime ladies definitely take control of this movie and show the men and sexy young women a thing or two.

As I mentioned, there is a problematic final three minutes. It calls into question most of the rest of the movie. There is something to figure out there, but I'm not convinced it's worth puzzling out. There is scarcely enough information given and even once one does puzzle it out, it won't reveal anything more about what the film has to impart: the strange worldview remains pretty much what it is. All it might do is serve to distance the worldview from the filmmaker, well-known British producer John Daly, who the end credits tell us wrote and directed the film. Daly passed away in 2008, before The Box Collector had a chance to get out. I wonder if the ending was his decision? At any rate, the film remains an emotionally powerful, fascinating picture that will offer plenty of entertainment for lovers of peculiar characters.

The Reflecting Skin (1990)

The Reflecting Skin is a grotesque picture on childhood horror, the terror of being innocent. This is especially the case when one's father is incinerated before one's eyes, one's closest friends are murdered by a gang of bored teens in a shiny car, and the mysterious foreign woman might be a vampire with a taste for one's older brother (a young Viggo Mortensen). The film is told entirely from the point of view of Seth Dove, a fairly typical boy with a strong imagination trapped in a lifeless rural area and surrounded by creepy and/or disturbed adults.

Renowned playwright Philip Ridley wrote and directed with a fine touch for the visual. The hanging jaws decorating the whaler's widow's home threaten to devour the meek Seth as he apologizes for a cruel prank. A dessicated fetus he finds buried and begins speaking to, an exploded frog, a sheriff missing multiple bodyparts (a reference to Lionel Atwill's character in The Son of Frankenstein, I wonder?), amongst other things contribute to the grotesque texture. Visual motifs of contrasting green and yellow grasses, some smooth and some jarring transitions comprise Ridley's visual style.

While Ridley's background as a playwright lends the films many strengths, it also detracts in some ways. Even had I not known Ridley wrote and directed, I would have guessed a playwright wrote the screenplay, simply because it reeks of the modern dramatic style. If you've ever read or seen performed Beckett, Pinter, or Shepard, the mother's muttering about gasoline, the economy of objects (heaven forbid that whaling spear not be used as a weapon!), and the sometimes too-evident linguistic motifs will seem familiar and artificial. And if you haven't read or seen any of those performed, think of the play with which Barton Fink opens.

Overall, The Reflecting Skin is not so heavy on narrative as it is on experience. Ridley's strength is really in recreating for the audience the genuine experience of childhood encountering, even creating, horror with innocence and gradually losing that innocence. A series of interrelated experiences over a single, awful summer in Seth Dove's life serve to steal Seth's innocence away as he ultimately makes a decision that costs someone their life. I could feel Seth's bewilderment and dread at many points, whereas at other points his psychology was alien to me. He's not a normal kid; but with parents like his, how could he be? At times one sympathizes with him and at other times he's a terrible puzzle. I think that's true of most innocent things, particularly children. We've all done odd things as children and experienced things of which we couldn't quite grasp the ramifications.

It's notoriously difficult to direct children, probably even more difficult to capture childhood in a film, let alone a horror film. The Reflecting Skin is second only to Night of the Hunter in accomplishing this. On the one hand, it's much more honest about children and childhood than Night of the Hunter. Lilian Gish's insipid comment that children "abide" is frankly embarrassing. On the other hand, The Reflecting Skin manages to set that childhood in a drastically more perverse landscape.

The Limits of Control (2009) - 2.5/4

Much to the delight of old Romantics like myself, there have been two strong anti-political cinematic statements in 2009, both by well-established filmmakers. These are Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino) and The Limits of Control (Jarmusch). Tarantino asserts the power of entertainment over politics and his film is so entertaining it triumphs over some of the most hardened hearts, save for Armond White and a few die-hard politicals. Jarmusch, on the other hand, asserts the power of art over the pragmatics of life, of which politics is of course a subset. Jarmusch, however, does not make his film itself a great work of art, and for this reason his message, to which I am entirely sympathetic, fails.

I have oversimplified Jarmusch's mission with The Limits of Control. To do him justice, we shall have to gird our loins and wax philosophical. There is a French philosopher-sociologist by the name of Bruno Latour. Latour had the idea of studying science laboratories the way anthropologists would study a tribal village and see what could be learned by putting scientific practice itself under the sociological microscope. He came to the conclusion, based on the data he collected, that science is more or less made up. For instance, there was no proof of the electron: it was an idea that was postulated to explain some observed phenomena and the scientific community agreed it exists. In this sense, science creates its own reality, according to Latour. Since science has something of a monopoly on truth in the west, this reality is one to which the majority subscribes. But that's not what's important. What's important is that science creates a reality. By the same token, each of the arts can be said to create an individual reality by means of its perception: music, literature, cinema. Is the reality of cinema the same as the reality of literature?

Jarmusch infuses this Gallic theorizing with the Romanticism I noted. A nameless man (Isaach De Bankole), who is either a secret agent or a mobster, travels Europe meeting one agent after another. Each agent delivers the same code phrase, then a monologue on philosophy, or science (chemistry, linguistics), or an art (music, painting, cinema), leaves a matchbox containing information, and departs. (This structure covering each of the arts, incidentally, is not post-modernism but modernism: it was previously employed by Melville in Moby Dick and James Joyce in Ulysses.) One character (Bill Murray), the only 'practical' character in the film, decries the uselessness of the arts and sciences for real life. For this character, what is not useful for practical reality is mere pollution of the mind. In this time when most critics, particularly academic critics, are only interested in a film of it displays politically relevant content, Jarmusch's point is a very pleasant one. It should be clear just by my description that the film is allegorical. Each of the monologues on an art is indeed useless to the nameless agent, whose sole purpose is collecting notes and diamonds, it seems. Tout ce qui est utile est laid, as Theophile Gautier put it. All that is useful is ugly. Each area of human inquiry is a reality of ideas worthwhile for its own sake. This is the position Jarmusch appears to be affirming.

I say 'appears to be' because it is entirely possible I missed some nuance; some ironic subtlety may have evaded my grasp. For instance, the emotionless protagonist never clearly enjoys any of the arts; he never gives any sense of enjoyment at all. On the other hand, Jarmusch gives no indication of sympathizing with this character. Rather, the characters he presents most sympathetically are the various monologue-reciting agents the man encounters, particularly Swinton's character. If I am correct, then the problem with Jarmusch's film is just that it was so very easy for me to figure out: it's too sincere. Art, and cinema is an art, arrives at truth by telling a series of lies. A series of truths that lead to a concluding truth is an argument and an argument is the substance of an essay. Jarmusch is creating an essay in cinema, but an essay that is made up of lies, that is, rhetorical tropes (allegory, metaphor, indeed the whole narrative is a rhetorical technique). While some might complain of Jarmusch being too cerebral, ironically my complaint is that he insults my intelligence. If Jarmusch wanted to write an essay on how French sociology, all influenced by Foucault, points to a new Romanticism, he should have taken his audience seriously by writing an essay with acceptable premises and a logical conclusion. This is taking the intelligence of the audience seriously. Poetry and rhetoric to establish an intellectual point is manipulation. He is trying to trick the audience into seeing the position he's taken. It's an assertion with persuasion rather than an argument. What might have been a good essay, if old news (Latour wrote his best work in the '80s), has become bad art.

Despite my displeasure with the overwhelming sincerity of The Limits of Control, I did enjoy the picture. The character who delivers a monologue on cinema (Tilda Swinton) praises particularly the non-narrative aspects of cinema. She explains that she likes moments in movies when nobody is speaking or performing significant action. I agree with her; I also enjoy quiet, inactive moments in cinema. Like her, who I believe to be a mouthpiece for Jarmusch, I appreciate the sociological and historical data to be found in cinema. As such, The Limits of Control is a delight. It is made up almost exclusively of such moments. Even the film's action has a certain passivity. A strangling occurs as matter-of-factly as a sip of coffee--for both the strangler and the victim, curiously enough.

As is often the case with films that boast an impressive cast, cries of "Over-indulgence!" can be heard from the reviewers. Art is supposed to be indulgent; there's no such thing as 'over-indulgence' in the arts. If anything, Jarmusch didn't indulge himself enough. He brings in his mind, but what about his deeper, inarticulable sentiments? The film's reception suffered the Ishtar-effect anyway. The Limits of Control is not just a "star-studded" film, though it looks that way in a list form. But a list is not the film. Watching the film, the cast does not get in the way. Rather, what one sees is a series of exquisite casting choices. Though they play small roles, Swinton, John Hurt, Bill Murray are maximally effective.

I wish very much I could say more about the visual style of the film, but I feel woefully inadequate to the task. It is a beautiful film. The cinematography and techniques are fascinating, particularly the way some shots are inverse copies of others. But as more philosophy student than film student, it takes me considerably more effort to do a visual analysis and I am clearly of the opinion that The Limits of Control is not worthy of that effort. Perhaps a clue in the visuals would reveal I have been unfair to the philosophical content of the film, but I couldn't see such a clue and, that being so, I don't see such a sincere film rewarding too close an analysis. There are better films out there making similar points to The Limits of Control and not insulting viewer intelligence in the process. I have in mind, of course, Inglourious Basterds. Good entertainment is always preferable to bad art.

The Least of These (2009) - 2/4

The Least of These is unoriginal and highly manipulative, yet still manages to be entertaining. This is without a doubt due to the affection and care put into its characters and a naive innocence writer-director Nathan Scoggins brings to the picture. The enthusiasm with which he crafts the film would make it seem he's unaware it's neither original nor terribly insightful.

Fr. Andre Brown (Isaiah Washington) is a new teacher at a Catholic boys boarding school. Is that setting off alarm bells in your mind? Boys and Catholic priests? Yes, The Least of These is about abuse and the complicity of church bureaucrats. It might have been timely ten years ago. Now it feels predatory. Fr. Brown's ally is the headmaster (Robert Loggia) and his enemy is Fr. Peters (Bob Gunton), who is suspicious of his mysterious past. He works to befriend a loner named Parker (Jordan Garrett) and tries to figure out what happened to his predecessor, a Fr. Collins who disappeared without a trace after a transfer.

The Least of These would have felt much more at home on the Hallmark Channel. Every predictable bit of cinematic manipulation occurs shamelessly and I groaned each time. So obvious is the dialogue that this old trick is used: Fr. Peters says he'll call Fr. Brown 'Andre' until he's earned his respect. Do you suppose there'll be a moment when he finally calls him 'Fr. Brown'? Indeed. During a foodfight, the score immediately switches to that 'this is a whimsical moment' music. I don't want to be too cynical: not everyone is as troubled by overt manipulation and obvious creative choices. I can see some--the sort of people who are easily engrossed and not too reflective--falling under the film's spell. But the cliche moments will repel many as they did me.

There are also some moments of downright incompetence and they occur primarily at the very beginning of the film. Awkward camera movements, a sudden irrational pan to a piece of luggage that's never seen again, and confusing edits make up the first five minutes. Given the rest of the film is competent, I can only charitably speculate that these scenes were shot under time constraint.

The mystery that takes over the second and third acts is mostly successful. Despite some predictable turns of events, there are some reasonable and interesting developments arising from the characters and their situations. One is never convinced of the possibility of things not turning out for the best, however, which detracts somewhat from the effectiveness of these developments.

The characters are the real strength of The Least of These. Fr. Brown is not some upstart who enters the school and wins the children over with his wacky, unconventional teaching methods. He even says so himself. He's just a young priest who is interested in getting to know the youths and in doing his job well. He's authoritative without being aggressive. He's someone anyone could respect, even if he doesn't always make the right decisions. In fact, that he doesn't always make the right decisions adds to the humanity and depth of his characterization. The youths aren't so successfully drawn, if only because, after spending so much time on them in the first act, Scoggins nearly forgets about them midway through the second act. Yet even they have a real interior life that distinguishes them from the mere boys' school stereotypes they might have been. It's too bad these characters have to occupy such a trite film.

Love Exposure (2008) - 4/4

Love Exposure is the cinematic equivalent of post-post-modern novels like Infinite Jest and White Teeth, or the novels of Murakami: big, ambitious, sprawling, yet with an emotional core and focus. To some extent, Love Exposure is even more successful than its literary correlates. It is an epic four hour romantic tragicomedy on the themes of love and perversion told with such a sure hand and masterful pacing that it manages to mostly redeem itself of its shortcomings.

Those shortcomings develop in the first act, within which the influence of post-modern literature is most evident. During the first hour of the film, I couldn't help but think of James Wood's criticism of White Teeth and similar novels of the style he labels 'hysterical realism.' As he put it, "An excess of storytelling has become the contemporary way of shrouding, in majesty, a lack; it is the Sun King principle. That lack is the human." Within the first hour, Sono has a quasi-religious School of Upskirt Photography with its own sacred writings and martial arts techniques; a teenage boy who sins to please his dad, a Catholic priest, in confession, and can only get an erection if he finds a girl who reminds him of the Virgin Mary; this boy becomes the King of the Upskirt Photographers and gains his own disciples. This is very entertaining, but too zany, too eager to please with "showy liveliness" that hangs off the characters "like jewelry." It is not the lack of plausibility that is difficult to handle, but the lack of human emotion and relationship in these conceptual rather than emotional connections.

With the second hour, Sono begins to truly redeem his narrative. With all the elements in place from the first hour, with the characters and their histories established, he begins to delve into real human emotion. The story is surprisingly simple in its outline: a Catholic priest and his son, Yu, are both 'perverts,' the priest for having had relations with a woman while a priest and Yu for being an upskirt photographer. Koike, a female regional director for a fast-growing cult, the Church of Zero, is a puritanical sociopath who becomes obsessed with Yu and so concocts a plan to convert Yu's Catholic family as an example to others that the Church of Zero is the religion to join. The love of Yu's life, Yoko, who is the adopted daughter of the woman Yu's father is marrying, becomes the means by which Koike will dominate the family. While the damage has been done, to an extent, by the first hour, by making the connections between many of the characters so fragile, based on the mere use of the phrase 'original sin,' or on one character accidentally appearing like the Virgin Mary, the remaining three hours focus entirely on the emotions and relationships of these characters. Yu's unrequited love for Yoko and the machinations of Koike, as well as a subplot involving the Catholich Church's refusal to allow a priest to marry, give Love Exposure a very solid emotional core.

Despite the shortcomings I point out above, Sono is overwhelmingly successful with Love Exposure. Every human is different, has a distinct psychology that comes from a unique upbringing and set of experiences; how the quest for love and how love itself are expressed in each person will differ. Somewhere along the way, ideologies like Christianity restricted the ways in which love could be sought or expressed and all alternatives are labeled 'perverse.' Sono examines the category of the 'perverse,' but doesn't try to argue with the label. Rather he argues for its being embraced. What Sono contrasts to love is not perversion, but guilt; and guilt is what homogenization imposes on those deemed 'perverts.' Yu is unabashedly a pervert, embracing the category explicitly. But he's a pervert out of love: love for his mother who tells him to find a girl like the Virgin Mary; love for his father who is only fatherly when Yu confesses obscene sins; love for Yoko who prefers him in drag. So is Yu's father, a priest who wants to get married, a pervert out of love. The enemies are those who want to abolish perversion with guilt: Koike and the Church of Zero who want to crush Yu, the Catholic Church that won't allow Yu's father to marry.

Having only seen Sono's one earlier work Suicide Club, I am astonished by how much he has grown as an artist. While he was very good to begin with, Love Exposure is an outstanding achievement as both entertainment and art. Any who watch it will be engrossed and the four hours will just flitter away; and any who watch it will come away wiser, as I believe I have. It's a film that won't leave my mind for a very long while.

Endnotes
1. James Wood, "Human, All Too Inhuman," The New Republic Online (August 30, 2001). http://www.powells.com/review/2001_08_30.html

Wolfblood (1925)

Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest (1925)

Chesebro, you ask? Here is what Wikipedia yields,
"George Chesebro (29 July 1888 – 28 May 1959), was an American film actor. He appeared in over 400 films between 1915 and 1954. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and died in Los Angeles, California."
This is true. He was a prolific actor. He had a moderately handsome face and often took the lead in silent westerns and serials.
Of interest to us, however, is his sole outing as a director, Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest. This is perhaps one of the most evocative film titles if the silent era. How does the film measure up?
The film concerns a logging company foreman, Dick Bannister, working in Northern Canada. Across the river is a rival logging company that resorts to sinister means to keep the upper hand. One of those means is shooting lumberjacks in the legs to prevent them from working!
After one such incident, Bannister decides to call the owner of Ford Logging Co. to get him to come in with a surgeon. It turns out the owner is a pretty young heiress and her fiancee just happens to be a surgeon (whom, we're informed, is so rich he never performs actual surgery, but treats it as an academic discipline).
The owner and the surgeon show up just when things are getting even more heated with the enemy foreman, Devereux. Devereux has Bannister beaten so badly that he busts an important artery. The only blood nearby is wolf's blood. Our surgeon, being so learned, knows it's possible to use animal blood, though the side-effects are unknown.
With the wolf-blood coursing through his veins and suffering from a concussion, Bannister becomes obsessed with the notion that he's a werewolf and wants to rejoin the pack--the pack of Phantom Wolves.
Lupine motifs increase as we bound towards the end, though it all resolves rather neatly, I'm afraid to say.
Wolfblood not a bad film. It has no great visual style like you would get from German horror of the time. The story itself bubbles down to a Gothic-inspired, lumberjack melodrama. However, if you enjoy silent films in general, the one hour is no waste of time. And it is perhaps the first instance of an attempt to base the werewolf ('Loup Garou') legend on science.
(For horror completists, Wolfblood has the distinction of being the oldest surviving werewolf movie. There was, in fact, a 1913 Canadian werewolf movie called The Werewolf that was destroyed in a fire.)

PHOTOS:

This wolf is thinking, 'I knew I shouldn't have volunteered; I hate needles.'
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3067/3068013916_555520e208.jpg?v=0

Scruffy Canadian meets a not-very-threatening wolf. Oh dear.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3184/3068013686_8d06c44a6c.jpg?v=0

Bannister chasing the Phantom Wolf Pack.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3041/3067175981_975fdb7279.jpg?v=0

A kiss,
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3027/3068013376_e159bb8358.jpg?v=0

The Serpent's Egg (1977)

Ingmar Bergman’s work, especially of his middle-period in the sixties and seventies, is characterized by a deep psychological focus, a fixation, filtering the rest of the world through a series of close-ups on his characters’ faces (usually Liv Ullman and Max von Sydow). Dark and brooding, it is as if the camera wants to read the very thoughts of the characters, and perhaps even of the actors who play them.

One wouldn’t expect, then, to find Bergman, in this middle-period, to try to tell a sprawling sci-fi horror epic; but that is just what he does in The Serpent’s Egg. A lesser filmmaker might adapt his style to fit the content, but not Bergman. He filters the nightmare world he creates through his sharp, penetrating close-ups and narrow fixation upon a character or two.

In this case, the fixation is almost entirely upon Abel Rosenberg, played by a young, puppyish David Carradine. Rosenberg, a Jewish trapeze artist, is unemployed in 1920s Berlin and spends most of his time drunk. In the midst of this stupor, he witnesses surreal horrors on the street—people being beaten to clean sidewalks, dead horses being stripped of meat—and oddities in cabaret bars, while those near him keep inexplicably dying, usually by suicide.

Entering his life at this time are his deceased brother’s ex-wife, Manuela (Liv Ullman), and a sinister childhood companion, Hans Vergerus, whom Rosenberg despises for reasons he tries to articulate but fails. While Vergerus seems intent on helping Rosenberg and Manuela with housing and employment, Manuela suffers from guilt and a mysterious illness and Rosenberg is drunkenly stumbling ever closer to discovering a conspiracy at work in his life.

The beauty of the film is that, while Bergman focuses, throughout most of the film, solely on the emotional and psychological crises of its Rosenberg and Manuela, and their struggles in the hardships of Berlin, he gradually builds up through inconspicuously delivered information, implication, and subtle alterations in mood a sense of something larger and malevolent in the world around them. Watching it the first time, one could be forgiven for thinking it is a dismal, slightly surreal period drama, with noir influences, until the ending delivers its stunning blow and a re-evaluation of everything that came prior is in order, revealing the horror beneath the surface.

Bergman scholar Marc Gervais argues—I think successfully—that Bergman was trying to create a film about 1920s Berlin by using the very cinematic style of 1920s Germany, to wit, expressionism.

Expressionism, in American cinema, had profound influence over two genres: film-noir and horror. In Germany, it was the default mode for sci-fi and horror. Not surprisingly, The Serpent’s Egg plays in part like a noir, like a sci-fi, and like a horror, always with that form of surrealism unique to expressionism. Although Bergman’s intense study of his characters is dominant, just under the surface of every close-up, two-person conference, or shot of Rosenberg going down an empty street is Scarlet Street (Lang), Metropolis (Lang), and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (originally intended for Lang).*

Each time I watch this film, I’m struck by what a remarkable achievement in storytelling and style this is. However, upon first watching, one may well be bored, underwhelmed. With good films, watching is the most important; with great films, re-watching is the most important. The Serpent's Egg is a great film. If you pick this one up on my recommendation, give it a second chance, a third chance, and then it’ll work its magic on you—it’ll shock and chill you.


-
*I wanted to write more about the nature and use of expressionism, noir, and horror in this film, but I can't do so without spoiling the film. So, you'll have to figure that out on your own, I guess.