Don't grow accustomed to your face...

"...I said I'd make a woman and indeed I did," sings Henry Higgins in a reprise of "You Did It" (cutting off the song "Without You") late in the second act of My Fair Lady.  In that context, it was just an obnoxious solipsistic way of dismissing a woman's claim of self-sufficiency, by merely claiming that he had always wanted the woman to be assertive and independent, while in fact he could not tolerate anyone of any gender not bowing to his whim.

In short, it was meant to be funny and it was.

It's not funny and not meant to be in The Skin I Live In (2011) the creepiest and most perverse variation of the Pygmalion myth I've experienced (leaving aside straight-out horror movies, which are usually intentionally risible).  To use a phrase I loath, "SPOILER ALERT."  (I don't bother with this idea because (a) the concept of this blog is to have a conversation with the reader about films, not to review them, and respecting the distributor's marketing plans is not part of the agenda here; and (b) because the idea that the main interest in the narrative is the surprise in being caught up with the twists and turns is a 20th and 21st century perversion of the ancient art of storytelling, which consisted in keeping the listener rapt EVEN THOUGH the listener knew the story, knew all the stories, and wanted to see what you do with it.)

(Continuing this exegesis -- theatergoers do not want Hamlet to come out all different and surprising, and do not want their Mozart piano concertos to have trick endings.  These sorts of demands for endless novelty are, I maintain, MARKETING considerations, NOT artistic ones.  And there is research to show that people enjoy stories better when they already know the ending.  More of this in my next post.)

Luckily, Almodovar understands at the deeper level what he's doing.  The story, which is appalling as any Greek myth, tells of a man who mourns his dead wife by converting his hysterical and suicidal daughter's rapist into a fireproof replica of her.  Take that, Medea!  Represent, Oedipus!  Clearly this is not meant to be accepted as events that could have actually happened at any real time in any real place.  Almodovar signals this with the make-believe production design -- all solid colors, mostly primary, surfaces unblemished, a kitchen with no mark of ever having been used, a lecture hall that looks like it was completed minutes before shooting.  There are no signs or indicators of real life here, of the quotidian details of existence.  This is the stuff of myth, which is the only way Almodovar could get away with it (if only he did).

Two other observations and I think I'm done.  One is that the entire first half hour and the double meaning of the title are virtually a red-herring.  Much footage is devoted to the perfection of flame-proof skin, presumably as a reaction to the protagonist's wife's terrible death in a flaming car accident.  But that ultimately is of no consequence.  That gun that Almodovar puts in the drawer in the first act is never taken out again.  The experimental subject never encounters potential injury by fire, fire is no part of the plot.  Frankly, the details of gender-reassignment are of far more significance.  And when Banderas's boss tells him to stop this line of experimentation, he does, without complaint and without secretly carrying on, like any decent self-respecting mad scientist.

Yes, the title is there because of what the characters do, the guilt they bear, the burdens they carry, all the questions of identity that such a title raises.  But the double meaning it reaches for is by way of a cheat, of a plot situation that is simply grafted onto the story.  That really should have been re-thought.

Finally, I have no idea what Banderas is doing in this movie, other than that he has a history with Almodovar, they helped build each other's careers and there must be a sense of mutual obligation.  Because he is clearly miscast.  What Banderas does is contained fury.  That's his brand.  The script calls for contained madness, a note not within Banderas's range.  There is never a thing to suggest to irrational, or even really the dangerous quality of this character.  In an effort to contain the insanity of the story, Banderas exhibits a calm impassivity which registers as indifference, especially when he casually abandons the experimentation that is supposed to be the premise of the film.  Banderas's face does not yet have the visual complexity to convey two thoughts at once (compared to, for instance, an Anthony Hopkins or a Kevin Spacey), so for most of the film he seems to be merely obeying the script's dictates, without any conviction that there's anything to them.

Almodovar has always wanted to marry insightful drama with scenes of revulsion and horror, but backed to the wall on this film, he seems to have settled for the latter.  Pity the better film lying just under the skin of this one.

Hard as steel in Pittsburgh. And Cleveland.

This is from the opening sequence of Kill The Irishman (2011), a hard-nosed, hard-boiled, hard-knuckled semi-noir gangster picture set in, of all places Cleveland (because it is based on a true story that happened there). This is not an innovative or surprising movie. It has Paul Sorvino and Vincent D'Onofrio playing Italian mobsters, which is hardly a new idea. (I think you should be able to just buy ready-made clips of Paul Sorvino playing a big mafia don and just paste them into your movie without troubling Mr. Sorvino to come to your set or read your script, which seems hardly necessary in the circumstances.)

Irishman falls solidly in the category of "underdog union stiff who becomes union leader then becomes mad dog gangster who's nice to kids and old ladies." Jimmy Cagney would have been right at home here. But Cagney would also have to acknowledge that Ray Stevenson, who has been a big, solid, completely dependable, yet surprisingly nuanced actor in international film and television projects for a while is, in this film at least, a big fat movie star. He is utterly riveting, and makes all the contradictory parts of the character fit together. (Speaking of big and fat, Val Kilmer is becoming frightening. Doesn't he have any friends or family who will tell him what is happening to him? He is becoming so puffy, he is losing control of the facial muscles required for acting.)

Here's what you need to know about Kill the Irishman: a lot of big guys hit each other in the face hard, and an incredible number of bombs go off. Mostly car bombs (one of which provides Christopher Walken with perhaps his best movie death ever), but at one point the baddies take an entire house out. And as best as I can tell, it's neither a miniature, nor CG. This relatively low-budget movie blows a real house up. Or down, as the case may be. It's worth the price of admission. Other than the lack of nudity, Joe Bob Briggs would LOVE this movie. I appreciate that it stays hard and tough straight to the end. They don't round the edges off the protagonist, Danny Greene, nor even elevate him to a tragic hero. He gets a lot of people blown up until someone blows him up. To me, movie-wise, that's money in the bank.

Speaking of money in the bank, that's on the mind of Russell Crowe in The Next Three Days (2010), who, in one of the best sequences, does not rob a bank. Yes, yes, I know, the movies are filled with scenes of people not robbing banks. But this one is really fine, especially since there is not one word of dialogue about anybody robbing a bank. But his decision, his plan, and his reconsideration of that plan are all conveyed without a word. Bravo, director Paul Haggis, who as a writer, would have been expected to spew words at such an important point, only Mr. Haggis seems to understand how movies work.



No, I don't buy that Pittsburgh community college teacher Crowe can suddenly become a resourceful, lightning-reflexed commando-spy as he rescues his wife from a life sentence for murder. No, the idea that a couple running from the law would take along their 6-year-old child is a bit of a strain. And using Liam Neeson in a single scene to deliver some exposition is both insulting and a waste of natural resources. But the movie goes at a good clip, especially in the second half and Russell Crowe has the movie-star gift of being able to clearly represent what he is thinking without a word or a gesture, which is useful because the story does not give him anyone he can share his plans with (a pretty bold choice in itself). Much of the fun of the first half is just wondering, "what the devil is he doing that for?" and awaiting the pay-off you know, given the iron laws of film narrative, will be coming.

Here's another thing to like: Elizabeth Banks really seems as though she would be worth it. If your choice was whether or not to break the law, risk life and limb and go into permanent exile in order to save say, Sandra Bullock or even Katherine Heigl, from an unjust punishment, you might have to give it some thought. Maybe it's just me (and I don't even care for blondes much), but Elizabeth Banks, who has been such a loyal buddy in all those Judd Apatow movies, seems worth the risk. And I don't think that's a little thing, as movies go.

I do wish the movie had given us a more interesting head cop to chase Crowe, although perhaps casting a star in that role would have been cliche, and, with an ensemble of unknowns one can enjoy the illusion that these somewhat bumbling cops are a long-standing team who really know each other. Brian Dennehy, the tight-lipped father of the tight-lipped Crowe (good thing these actors are not paid by the word), has, unlike the universe, stopped expanding, and now looks ill, for the opposite reason that he used to look ill. Perhaps a completely healthy-looking Dennehy would be disturbing.

Neither film was very successful. I suspect Kill The Irishman didn't get the marketing to overcome the fact that it's star is not yet established as a leading man and the true story it is based on is neither well known, startling or heart-warming. The wrap-up of The Next Three Days was probably unsatisfying for American audiences; it is established that one smart cop has figured out what really happened and that Elizabeth Banks is innocent, but he fails to uncover the exculpatory evidence which is indeed yet to be found and we presume that Crowe, Banks and son will be forever on the run, which is sad-making for most people.

But they are both kick-ass movies that move and keep moving for most of their running times, and better yet, both feature generous authentic helpings of flyover country which is so rarely on display in mainstream American film. Maybe somehow people in the future will figure out that not everything in America happened in New York or Los Angeles.

The sons of Norman Bates

The Killer Inside Me (2010) is entitled to film noir credentials due to its source material, a novel by Jim Thompson, perhaps the bleakest among celebrated hard-boiled writers. But the story takes place under a blistering Texas sun, and the film manages to feel like noir without ever looking like noir. Instead of moody shadows from overturned lamps or shiny wet pavements reflecting the streetlamps, we have the blank, affect-less face of Casey Affleck, an actor who, after Gone Baby Gone, is on his way to becoming his own hard-boiled genre.

Moreover, director Michael Winterbottom has a history of making films, most notably Tristram Shandy, which are about themselves. This may be more admirable than making films about other films; it is at least less derivative. So we are spelled the Brian DePalma-style quotes from better movies in favor of drilling deeper and deeper down into an empty man.

Is Lou Ford a sociopath or psychopath? Is he a seething volcano or a emptied-out husk? Neither Thompson nor Winterbottom seem to want to answer that question, but simply scatter random clues, especially about Lou's mother who apparently taught him to use women as punching bags. The film favors long takes with traveling cameras carefully displaying the spatial relationships among locations, and especially between cars and interiors, as if the film were being shot by a crime scene photographer. It is hard to make sense of the plot, for though it isn't complicated, the offered character motivations don't make much sense. And as if to throw up their hands in confusion with Affleck's polite and obsequious killer, a character A.O. Scott of the New York Times described as "Eddie Haskell on his way to strangle a puppy," the filmmakers do not let him escape as Thompson did, but leave him a self-started, but somewhat ambiguous housefire.

Lou Ford may just be the latest of nice young men who kill. I suppose the great-granddaddy of them all (aside from Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Gray) is probably Danny from Night Must Fall a twice-filmed Emlyn Williams play which feels in the theater as if it is two hours about nothing except whether or not there is a severed head in a hatbox. It set off a plethora of similar pleasant yet homicidal young men, culminating in Norman Bates (or was it his mother?). And Norman and his co-creator, Alfred Hitchcock established that most dangerous of rules of film in the post-Classical age: you can't trust anyone or anything.

Norman also set off some direct imitators in the first decade after his debut, such as Keir Dullea in Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing (1965). My feelings about Otto Preminger seemed to have been shaped more by the public persona he used in the 50s and 60s to promote his movies; the Prussian tyrant director, forever purchasing expensive literary properties, cramming them with stars and making glacially-paced superproductions such as Exodus and Hurry Sundown. Now that I examine his work without the baggage of his publicity, I see an interesting use of space and a respect for actors. His films are theatrical but in the good way. Not theatrical meaning given to overacting and static cameras, but in the sense of framing the action broadly (in this case using the 2:35 proportions well), giving actors distance and room to establish characters and relationships, rather than using close-ups and editing to create a performance, and the use of long takes both to enhance those performances and to delineate the space among them and between different loci of action. Look at this clip and how clearly Preminger sets the relative statuses of the characters, the jockeying for control between Keir Dullea and Laurence Olivier and the precise layout of the school from which Bunny has disappeared.



(Production of this film was undoubtedly the inspiration of the observation by Noel Coward - who plays a supporting role - "Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.")

Preminger's approach suggests a respect for his collaborators, especially the writers John and Penelope Mortimer (John Mortimer was most famous as the creator of Rumpole) and the actors; it contradicts the pose of the arrogant self-sufficient autocrat the Preminger projected. (Of course, the whole facade was a sham -- Preminger was not Teutonic, as he played in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17, but an Austrian Jew.) Bad manners or not, Preminger lets things unfold, and in a swift efficient manner unlike most of his 1960s epics. In fact, it goes swiftly enough for most of the audience to have overlooked nice young Keir as the possible culprit in Bunny's disappearance. Most of the film is engaged in trying to suggest that Carol Lynley is mad.

Speaking of madness, Anthony Perkins, the original Norman Bates himself, got the tables turned on him in the game of "Who is Crazier" in Pretty Poison (1968) a pitch-black comedy variant of Lolita. Like, Killer Inside Me, it is a sunlit noir, here in a sun-dappled early New England autumn. Perkins, freshly paroled, seeks to seduce Tuesday Weld, here at the tail end of a 10-year period of playing prom queen types, with tales of being a secret agent under cover as a criminal and hints of involving her in his dangerous escapades. Perkins adds the wonderful quality of appearing to very possibly believe his own stories. Weld appears to succumb to his fabrications, even offering her own innocence; but that gift becomes a weapon, and in this scene she suggests they push their relationship to the next stage -- flight.



The would-be predator becomes the tool of the real predator, especially as Weld convinces Perkins to participate in the murder of her mother, played by B-movie icon, Beverly Garland (still alluring at 50). Lolita becomes Double Indemnity and the madness keeps spiraling up.

Pretty Poison has some nice visual flourishes beside the healthy-looking all-American countryside. The factory Perkins works in produces a chemical waste the color of blood, presaging the violence to come and echoing the fears of the then-emerging environmental movement. There is a multiplicity of viewing devices and lenses - binoculars, windows, an industrial lens at the plant, amplifying the sense of the male gaze on Weld's character. And the denouement is perfect, with Perkins pulling the pin of the grenade on himself, and Weld seeking out her next victim. It both recalls the femmes fatale of the 40s and suggests that Norman Bates was never as great a threat as Norma.

Appealing to all the senses

Most Americans don't watch enough foreign films. I say that not because I'm a snob or I think you should be one, but if you're a film buff, watching a film in another language opens you up to the purest idioms of film, unencumbered by either the felicities or the clunkiness of language, and the distraction of jokes and flippancy. It's closer to watching silent film, but better, and yes, there's a synchronized music score, but more importantly, even if one doesn't understand each word as it is coming out, one can hear the inflections, the rhythms, the timbre of the speaking voice, coupled with the expressions of the face, the tilt of the head, the roll of a shoulder which convey the speaker's meaning at a deeper and truer level than the words selected.

And I Am Love (2010) isn't about talk very much, anyway. There are sights and sounds, sure, but I can't think of another film that endeavors to evoke smell, taste and touch so thoroughly as this. I Am Love will surely be remembered as the film in which a woman had a virtual orgasm and fell in love upon biting into a prawn. I mean, this was some terrific prawn. And the thing is, this woman did not expect to fall in love. She didn't want to fall in love. She had a husband and a family. A big family. A big rich family (her husband's). There was no good reason to fall in love except for this fantastic prawn.

I Am Love is one of the most sensual movies it is possible to see with your eyeballs. It is a film of textures, of surfaces, of warmth and cold, of brisk mountain air and seaside breezes, of flavors, some dark, some pungent, of the touch of fingers, a massage, a haircut, of lying in the tall grass with warm sun on top and sharp jabs of long grass on the bottom. That feeling is--I presume--intensified by having to rely on subtitles to follow the relatively minimal dialogue. And to complete one's verbal disorientation, Tilda Swinton speaks Italian with a Russian accent, as she is playing an emigre. In one scene it is evident that her character does not understand English! How completely appropriate then, that her character turns away from the seemingly obvious advantages of having married into a wealthy and prestigious Milanese family, to a romance with a humble chef, whose mode of living embodies all those sensual pleasures.

You cannot write about I Am Love without talking about the exciting and surprisingly suitable score from the works of concert composer John Adams. Adams, with Phillip Glass is probably our most influential composer today. He was grouped with Adams as a minimalist, for his accompaniments often rely on simply triadic harmonies, rejecting the harmonic density of mid-20th century music. But Adams has a gift for melody and development of form that Glass has not chosen to explore, and he is our best and most interesting opera composer alive. If you haven't heard his song-cycle/music I Was Looking At The Ceiling and Then I Saw The Sky is a neglected masterpiece. Go seek it out. You won't be sorry.

Adams has never licensed his music for work in film before, and did not write anything especially for the film. Instead the music was culled from his recorded catalog, and sequences were even written, shot and edited with pre-selected music in mind, most notably a sequence in which Swinton's character sort-of stalks her lover-to-be (who is a friend of her son's) through the streets of San Remo, finding herself in a Russian Orthodox Church, where she involuntarily stumbles onto her former self. The music both chugs (like the fabric mills which are the basis of the family fortune) and sings (like the souls of the lovers). If this movie can't make you want to go out and eat gourmet Italian food, it should make you seek out the work of John Adams.

There are a few ways a story of a wealthy middle-aged woman going off with her young lover can go. It can be a super-charged, rediscovering passion story like a Diane Lane movie, it can be a story of regret and despair--separation from her children and hurting her former spouse. And indeed there is tragedy in the story, but it is incidental to the main motion of the narrative, and in a way, releases Swinton's character to embrace her new path. The result is not melodramatic or romance, nor tragedy, but the difficult process of being reborn, of embarking a new life with no promises, no guarantees, but new hope of living one's true nature.

I try to refrain from straight-on reviewing or recommendations, but I Am Love, co-written and directed by Luca Guadagnino, is easily one of the best films of 2010 and I couldn't get to the end of the year without saying so. I am sorry I was not aware of it during its theatrical run and didn't see it on a big screen. If you do seek it out, try to watch it on a large monitor or projected and be sure to run the sound through a decent audio system. This movie goes straight past the intellect and goes straight for the senses like nothing I've seen.

In similar fashion, The Secret In Their Eyes (2009), last year's Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, looks as though it's going to be a movie for the brain, but goes instead for the heart. It begins like an Argentinian version of TV shows like Law and Order or House, both programs that co-writer, director and editor Juan José Camapanella has worked on. A retired investigator is revisiting a case from 20 years before, but what is being revisited is not just a case, but the life lived prosecuting all those cases, and the opportunities lost or disregarded along the way. In particular, he is reflecting on The Girl That Got Away, his superior at work, in social class and in education, who married suitably and had a family. Now they re-meet to discuss his investigation into this old, dead case and discovers things may not be as old and dead as he thought they were.

The secret of the film is in its titles. The clues are not bits of carpet fibre and DNA. They are looks between the adoring and the adored, returned or not. There is a beautiful echo early in the film, when the investigator intuits the perpetrator of a violent crime by the look he is giving the victim in an old photograph. Only a few minutes later, we seem the same investigator in another old photo, giving the same look to his unobtainable adored. The picture above is a vivid demonstration of what this film does so well. The investigators have identified the violent offender, Gómez, but he has been released because he is a hired killer useful to the Peron regime (in power at the time). The prosecutors learn they have been bested and get on the elevator. A moment later, Gómez boards the elevator. Not a word is exchanged. Gómez loads and checks his gun. The threat is all the more undeniable for having remained verbally unstated. It is like the thriller film's equivalent to a Lubitsch moment.

One of the pleasures of this film is that everything is of a piece: the "top story", the crime investigation and the "under story", the lost romance or organically intertwined. The low-key, amber-toned cinematography, understated music score and Campanella's own crisp editing all fit together as if conceived all at once in a single burst of creativity. It is a film of discretion, of understatement, of respect for its audience, confident that the audience will put together the pieces of both stories and see the connections without being whacked over the head with them. It is a lean-forward, not a sit-back, film. Lead Roberto Darin reminds me of Joe Mategna, with even more soulful eyes, appropriate for a film about seeing.

The Dragon Tattoo series, Let The Right One In and The Secret In Their Eyes demonstrate (if it needed demonstrating) that a foreign language film can be a high-quality, relatively conventional commercial and accessible film. It need not be either experimental and off-putting or derivative and schlocky. All these films will receive (or have received) American remakes. Don't wait for them. Check out the originals. The week between the holidays is a great time for cocooning with movies. Put some foreign language films on your list. It's true that if your eyelids droop, and you miss a subtitle or two, you might feel lost. But have a sip of coffee and stay with it. Your eyes, and perhaps your other sensory organs, will thank you.

Let Lisbeth Be Lisbeth

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (2009) provides a good argument for the American industrial method of film development and production. No American filmmaker (and we will see the proof of this as the American re-makes start to come out next year) would tolerate a film with so many foregone conclusions and so little suspense, even given one's natural expectations in a melodramatic mystery series.

Moreover, the Swedes have a touching faith in a government's goodwill and competence in the investigation of a rogue intelligence squad. (And I'm a progressive.) Sure, there are some bad guys hiding the crimes of the Soviet defector the recruited 40 years ago, but there is a whole gang of young, vigorous well-financed government investigators ready to take them down. If there was an American film (as it will be soon), the next thing would be the call from the shadowy senator or captain of industry speaking to an unseen official, telling them to shut that investigation down. Then the idealistic crimefighters would have to go rogue, pursuing the bad guys outside of the blessing of the law. But remember, this is Sweden, so ***SPOILER*** the good guys win without any opposition.

Then there's Lisbeth's trial and hearing. The bad guys have accusations and false dignity. Lisbeth and her lawyer have mountains of incriminating evidence against the bad guy so -- surprise -- they win.

Worst of all, Lisbeth is reduced to a passive object for most of the movie, and only gets decked out in full Salander-goth rig about 1-1/2 hours into a 2-1/2 hour movie. And she gets into her full leather-and-razor-blades gear in order to...go to court. It makes no sense -- in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, she proved herself an excellent and dogged investigator. How come she's not put to work to investigate her own case? Worst of all, the key to the whole case is discovered by a minor character called Plague, who is completely unnecessary and redundant in the narrative. There's nothing Plague does that could not have plausibly done by Lisbeth. (I hope the American remake writer reads this!) Overall, the hard-won improvements of the second installment over the first, especially in making Lisbeth the center of the action, and the person who can resolve her own problems and questions, has been dealt away by a rather flabby and inefficient approach to suspense.

There is an action sequence, which comes in the oddest place, at the end of the movie after most of the story is over. It's somewhat satisfying, but we've already seen Lisbeth vindicated, so it is really no more than an amusing coda.

I presume most of this narrative lumpiness comes from the source novels. Larsson has the strangest procedure as a writer of suspense and action. Usually the protagonist makes a clear plan toward his goals, then turns a corner and complications and problems stretch out into a seeming abyss before them. But Larsson reverses that. When you can see a long and difficult path of difficult complications and obstacles on the way to the goal, Larsson suddenly shuts that down. How will Lisbeth escape the clutches of her homicidal father, who is only a few doors down in the same hospital? One envisions a complex sequence of cat-and-mouse as father evades the rather thin defenses of the Swedish security forces. But no, some guy we've never met before comes and shoots the old man in the head, then shoots himself and we're left saying --wait...is this story over now? Nope, because Larsson has a deep sack of stuff from out of nowhere that he continues to reach into.

Clearly Larsson never took an American playwrighting or screenwriting course, in which 3rd act threats must be made evident in the 1st act, and every little character detail pays off, e.g., the hero's hobby of whittling, as we saw in the second scene of the movie, means that he will whittle a way out of his predicament in the second-to-the-last scene. Americans write movies the way Indians live off the bison -- every little scrap is used. This is why, although Europeans are producing more and more commercial blockbusters, at least on their own continent, those hits have to be rewritten and remade here. (The exception here is Jean-Luc Besson, who clearly has studied mainstream American filmmaking with passion and insight.) It's not just the language of the words, it's the entire language of narrative which must be adjusted for American expectations.