Hey Look, It's Ringo and Frankie!

Under consideration, this universally beloved shot from Stagecoach, the one that moves from this:

... to this:

First things first and sliding immediately off topic, there are plenty of images capturing this moment all over the Internet and I might have swiped them for illustration. Unless making a point with incongruous stolen pictures, I try to create my own screencaps whenever possible, because, like Quaker Oatmeal and recycling beer bottles, it's the Right Thing to Do, and because there's a certain art to screencapping, one for which I sorta like to think I have a flair. David Bordwell would surely have a lecture for me about the inadequacies of the practice, but it's all I got. In this case, an even worse sin, I can't make frame enlargements and can't take frame grabs of Blu-ray discs. For all Blu-ray's myriad pleasures (including the fun of typing the gimmicky e-less "Blu"), the inability to screencap is an ever-increasing hindrance to the important work we do here. Sadly, the only other option is to, uh, take pictures of my TV screen, which is a hideous solution, and photography is an art for which I do not have a flair.

Anywhich, back to the shot in question. It is the first shot of John Wayne as the Ringo Kid, a gasping, audacious hero shot that stops the stagecoach in its tracks, dollying up on Ringo as he twirls his rifle, yells "HOLD IT!" and has a sudden, barely perceptible change of expression. Wayne has struck an elegant pose even though he's toting a rifle in one hand and a saddle in the other, the strain of this ridiculous feat betrayed not by his casual posture but the sweat streaks on his face that aren't apparent until the shot moves in. Basically it is an unforgettable, electric-buzzed moment and every element is perfect, even those that are not. Specifically, 1) the movement is just slightly faster than expected or is comfortable, and 2) this famously causes the shot to pop out of focus as it repositions into 3) the whoa-just-slightly-too-close close up of Ringo. There is a vast amount Stuff Going On in this shot which does not last more than three seconds, from the aureola crowning Ringo to its importance in Wayne's career, but I don't think it is fully unpackable because part of its power is of disruption; the thrill is in the way it feels subtly off, arhythmic and just-out-of-control.

That said, it is cemented into the film and a piece of a scene, and some of this impact comes from 1) the whinnying horses immediately before the shot. The eye-catching movement in the preceding shot is the horses pulling back in reaction, effect being that the dolly-in is pushing off of the backward momentum of the horses.

2) a goofy two-shot reaction of Curley (George Bancroft) and Buck (Andy Devine), immediately after, where Devine chirps "Hey look, it's Ringo!" in that inimitable Andy Devine way. On the front end, the picture-story is that the stagecoach crosses a ford in the river and comes toward camera, the effect being that the coach is pulling up on Ringo and drives straight into a huge view of his face.

So it's all in reaction and juxtaposition, and I'm going to say that Andy Devine is quite responsible for making this one of cinema's greatest entrances.

Speaking of which, we all have our favorites, and my shortlist would include Peter Cushing in Frankenstein Must be Destroyed!, Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest — elaborate setpieces climaxing with thrilling reveals and introductions that we won't go into right now, but top Orson Welles in The Third Man — keep some popular favorites (Karloff in Frankenstein) and dump others (Darth Vader in that movie about Darth Vader). This scene in Stagecoach, however, always puts me in mind of another great movie entrance, Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (yes, yes, he is visible as another character earlier in the film).

The reason the entrances of the cowboy and the transvestite alien reverberate off one another — though come to think of it both are fugitives from justice, questing for freedom and non-judgmental of the sexuality of others — is simply a jarring push in from this:

... to this:

But of course, while prepping these screencaps, it became clear that the moments are very different. The effect as a memorable, keyed-up introduction to a character is similar but John Ford does it with effortless 3-second economy, while RHPS director Jim Sharman is simply up to something else. Ringo appears during a lull when we aren't really expecting it, while Frank-N-Furter's entrance is a mini-climax to which a whole sequence is building. The first close up of Frank is, indeed, a privileged shot, but it is punctuation on a scene.

Frank's entrance in Picture Show has been moved from its place in the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show. In plot terms, this merely swaps the positions of the numbers "Sweet Transvestite" (first in original stage productions) and "The Time Warp" (first in the film). The reasons, one supposes, are that "Time Warp" is the sort of "hit single" of the musical, a live showstopper to which the play builds up, in a loose-knit plot that is an excuse for the songs. The film is more dramatically developed, and thanks to lessons learned from the stage show, has a better grip on pace and payoff. Once Tim Curry appears, the beast is basically loosed and one wants to get on up to the lab and see what's on the slab, rather than dally downstairs for, as Brad Majors puts it, "more folk dancing."

The scene bridging the two numbers then is not just an introduction. By repositioning "Time Warp", there is a gap left where there used to be an exchange concerning the whereabouts of delivery boy Eddie. In place of this missing exposition, the film adds: nothing. That is, the film's transition adds no additional narrative information, but creates a musical bridge, uniting a pair of songs. Frank descends to the first floor in an elevator behind Brad and Janet, and this little scene is scored with sound effects (and percussion) that build off the discordant piano banging at the end of "Time Warp" and ramp up to the fanfare at the top of "Sweet Transvestite". The instruments in play are a base tone laid down by the lowering elevator, a chorus of the chortling Transylvanians, the rhythm section stomp of Frank's platform heel, and the mounting chant of Brad and Janet's dialogue in metered back-and-forth ("I'm COLD, I'm WET and I'm just plain SCARED!"). This audio piece terminates with Janet screaming as the zoom into Frank's close up comes to rest.

The above awkward screencap of Brad and Janet in front of the elevator comes straight off the top of the shot in question, after Janet has already noticed the figure in the cage. The sort of platonic ideal of the composition is in a pair of earlier shots, like so:

Besides the aural component, the gag being staged in this scene is that the square couple is backing out of the ballroom, away from the Transylvanian weirdoes but into Frank in the foyer. So there are cutaways for reactions (Transylvanians rising from the floor as they see the elevator descending, Transylvanians assembling around red carpet, Janet goggling at Frank's back) and clarifying information (two close ups of the stomping shoe), all building anticipation for the reveal of Frank.

The screenplay's newly invented bit of business is well-motivated, with Brad dismissing Janet's rising hysteria by condescending and trying to minimize her concerns (Frank will later diagnose Brad: "Such a perfect specimen of manhood. So dominant."), and the rousing of the "Time Warp" spent Transylvanians providing reason for the couple to keep their eyes on the ballroom. Immediately after the money shot, before the gate slides open and "Sweet Transvestite" proper begins, Curry's close up is disrupted by a reaction shot of Janet, who becomes over-stimulated and, in running gag, faints. This puts a button on the scene, separates the elevator shoe-stomp as its own mini-song (audience participators traditionally stomp and clap along), and Janet's response cues the audience on how to react to Frank-N-Furter — that is, somewhere between Beatlemania-style abandon and what-the-fuck gaping. In short, Susan Sarandon provides the Andy Devine effect here.

Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 6 — 2005

Previous installments: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004...

The Exploding Kinetoscope — 10 Favorite Films of 2005


10. Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (dir., scr. George Lucas)

A far-too-gushing write-up from 2005 can be found here, republished for the Star Wars Blogathon.

With an element of gross misstep and a boggling triumph in every scene, this age's designated popcult touchstone epic marches and meanders to its in/evitable conclusion, and Star Wars ends. The end is the beginning is the end, as unspooling contradictions writhe beneath the surface of George Lucas' primal and personal glossy space opera. A full-frontal merchandising assault is mounted on the same stage as a politicized Greek tragedy about how genocidal dictators are born. Bleeding-edge tech is harnessed to create photorealistic Amazing Stories covers. Every major beat of the story is etched in marble, but destiny's grim march is constantly interrupted by noodling asides. The unreined imaginations of a hundred creature, costume, environment and spaceship designers are funneled through a director with no filter for kitsch, cliché, or dorkiness, and a stadium full of lightsabers cannot slice through the resultant clutter. The downward-sloping arc of doomed protagonist Anakin Skywalker is designed to take him from slave boy to slave cyborg, and focused on the moment when he will murder his pregnant wife, but when that defining moment arrives the cause of death is something like lack of will to live. The biochemical mechanics of the Force are explained, but in such a way as to explain nothing. Moldering Yellow Peril caricature villains are merged with amphibians in papal hats and named after Republican politicians.

The nominally straightforward plot is confused, baffled, and rerouted through twisting blind-corner mountain roads. Nothing so agonizingly prevized on every level from galactic to midi-chlorial has ever been so sloppy and strange.

We have here a series of children's films with images of decapitated and dismembered fathers as a major visual motif. There is something going on in the Star Wars prequels at direct odds with certain conventional wisdom that they are vapid, soulless, lazy, cynical cash-grabs: Bad in some conventional, grinding, anonymous fashion. They are many things, but normal they are not. They are profoundly weird and more than a little bonkers.

This shadowed half is intended to balance the bright-hearted Episodes IV-VI. Within the six-movement film cycle, the Episode I-III trilogy climaxes and resolves with a fall from grace, leaves the universe charred and smoldering and thus primed for new hope. In an infamous, much scoffed-about preproduction documentary clip, Lucas tells his team that the films are "like poetry." A peculiarly formal poetry they are, carefully metered, rhymed and assonated, highly allusive and steeped in mystic esoterica. E.g., General Senator Binks may not be funny, but his real role in the mythos is of the Holy Fool, and his place in the poetics is to rhyme with the sidekick life-debt of Chewbacca. Where the story does not work, the schematic is rich. Trash, perhaps, but singular, epic trash.

Revenge of the Sith specifically finds its director in purposeful, less spastic form, confident in the forward thrust of the film and not just isolated sequences. A sleek black helmet is lowered over the burnt skull of a little boy who once insisted that he is a person and his name is Anakin, and the weight of six films bears down and presses the mask to his face.

9. Sin City (dir. Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino, scr. Miller)

Set in a cherry-picked L.A.-New York-Vegas-Chicago-Detroit of the troubled imagination, Sin City is a film on a shopping spree to fill a cart with its favorite elements of noir, hard-boiled detective, cop thriller, and vigilante stories — essentially all of crime pulp — and is very probably bad for you. For cartoonist Frank Miller, the exciting parts of those genres are flappy trench coats, sensitive but impossibly tough guys, absurdly large guns, Madonna/whore complexes, serial killers with grotesque M.O.'s, tar-black irrationally placed shadows and glowing rim lighting, and a pervasive air of moral, mental and physical rot. Those looking for complex detective plots, sophisticated, dimensional femmes fatales and human-scale violence with realistic repercussions need not apply. Apart from the caricatured chiaroscuro, the reference point for Sin City is less Late Show Bogart movie than the sort of lurid crime magazines with a brand of hyperbolic violence Stephen King once charitably described as "gushy." Adapting Miller's comics for the screen, Robert Rodriguez takes the difficult road and assumes that while Frank Miller's psyche looks like a difficult place to live, it is a pretty hilarious, entertaining place to visit.


8. The Proposition (dir. John Hillcoat, scr. Nick Cave)

Hard, mean land, it seems, has made hard, mean men of its residents. Or perhaps they were drawn to this, their ideal landscape, as Hell was built for demons and the damned. If the classic genre theory reduction says that Westerns are About Civilization versus Wilderness, Law versus Freedom, Order versus Chaos, White Hat versus Black Hat, etc, to The Proposition this may as well be Mad Dog versus Mad Dog, or meaningless as Late Breakfast versus Brunch.

Bull-man Captain Stanley enlists captured outlaw Charlie Burns to put down his rampaging criminal brother, Arthur, somewhere in the hellscape of 1880's Australia. The collateral is to be younger Burns brother, Mikey, scheduled to walk or hang on Christmas Day, pending Charlie's success. As Charlie wanders, drinks, and laments, Stanley finds himself forced to protect Mikey from the wrath of the community. And everyone is compromised, every hand is bloodied, and man clings to the lie he needs to get through the long, boiling days.

Nick Cave's score is in wistful, hypnotic mode, and his screenplay is in brutal poetic mode that casts every human as killer, victim or ethereal outside observer. This is the shortlist of options as the characters trudge through the sun-pounded outback, looking for their place in the universe. Stanley aims to civilize the land, but in familiar, eternal, sickly comic Kubrickian tradition, has tragic ideas of what that means, how to do it, and insurmountable circumstances working against him. The cycle of history turns the wrong way. Stanley's brand of civilization cannot abide the criminals, cannot survive the rough justice the townspeople would like, and cannot truly coexist with the native population, and so the contradictions will be written in blood, gunpower and pain.


7. The Call of Cthulhu (dir. Andrew Leman, scr. Sean Branney)

The geeky, obsessed cabal of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society focus their efforts to create the Lovecraft adaptation of the highest fidelity to the source material in all of film history, and display sizeable cinematic prowess and good taste throughout. The simple and clever conceit that makes The Call of Cthulhu soar is to pastiche the fantasy film style of 1928, when the story was published, as if Lovecraft were being adapted in his own era.

Though some of the accuracy of the attempt at silent Expressionist style is dubious, on the whole it smoothes over the rough patches of semi-pro production. Arch performances, unrealistic sets and handmade special effects become strong artistic choices in a creaky / wildly stylized aesthetic, rather than flaws to conceal. Lovecraft's globe-jumping, disjointed, epistolary plot structure remains intact, and his antiquated, lugubrious purple prose is ingeniously transformed into irrationally-lit, oneiric images.

The way the story is built is more about pace and increasing scale than plotting. Notes left by a deceased academic relate tales of increased activity among demonic cultists around the world, and eerie, otherworldly clues point toward the awakening of a transdimensional alien god. Cthulhu is too twisted and feverish to be flattened into three acts, disinterested in character drama, but is full of vivid imagery and snowballs to a thrilling, monstrous and cosmic climax on a sea voyage to an uncharted, newly risen island.

Part of Lovecraft's enduring power is in the dread sense that the stories themselves are unstuck in time and space. That there is something Wrong with them, or maybe with the writer. That maybe he is slightly mad, or a visionary, or both. That the stories are doing something to you. Though he casts a long shadow over all mediums of fantasy art, these are the Lovecraftian qualities never captured in screen adaptation. Simultaneously hokey and august, the feverish Call of Cthulhu strays closer to those mad mountains than any motion picture dream-quester before it.

6. Manderlay (dir., scr. Lars von Trier)

For the fancy-schmanciest art movie on this list, I’m going to drop the pretty talk for a minute. Lars von Trier makes fairly accessible art films, full of ideas, discussion points for later, and crazy formal experiments. They also have strong stories that are communicated in a relatively normal way and movie stars from all over the world. So von Trier is a good starting place for understanding how normal, unfancy, untrained never-took-a-film-class people can get a lot out of art cinema, and with a little work even find it fun and exciting.

I dunno if the gods love a good provocateur, but I know I do. It is good for audiences of the arts, casual and serious alike, to be challenged and affronted. People don’t like to be fucked with. That is understandable in real life, but art is a great place where we can be provoked and irritated without actually being personally injured. It’s okay to be bored during an Andy Warhol film, because he really is trying to bore you, get you to a place where you think about why you’re bored, what about the movie is boring you, and what it means to be bored. Maybe it even makes you mad. Maybe the guy is fucking with you. Did you really leave the house and pay money to watch a guy sleeping? You did, and Warhol is certainly fucking with you. Maybe that’s a scam and you could make a movie like that, too. You could, but you didn’t. But you win in the end because you just had a meaningful sit-down with some challenging art, and that experience went beyond “liking” or “not liking” a movie.

Lars von Trier is also certainly fucking with you. In his case, the stories are emotionally direct and brutal and he’s honestly working out issues that are personally troubling and painful to him. But they’re also a joke. Not a trick or a prank on you for having feelings about the put-upon protagonists that von Trier abuses. The joke is about how extraordinarily cruel the universe seems to be. The nature of drama is conflict, so melodrama piles on as much misery as possible, and it’s funny, interesting and beautiful that we still respond to this, even when as absurd and excessive as in a von Trier plot, even when as minimally presented as Dogville and its sequel, Manderlay. It seems impossible to forget the artifice when the sets are a giant black box with white lines on the floor and the buildings have no walls, but it is possible, too, because we kind of do forget. This isn’t necessarily a difficult, distancing way to tell a story that we have to work at to figure out or how to look past. It is potentially a stripped-down, simple way to tell a story without unnecessary stage dressing, like telling ghost stories around a campfire.

Anecdotal evidence says that some people (Wikipedia would put a tag here that says “[Who?]” and the answer is “some Americans I read on the Internet”) don’t like that von Trier frames Dogville and Manderlay as films about America. This is apparently because the writer-director isn’t American and has never been here. Now maybe some of Those People are spouting off, haven’t seen the movies, and just don’t like the idea of the rest of the world having opinions about America. That’s weird for a lot of reasons, but if I may characterize the nation (this is what blogs are for!), the country is pretty much a big showoff and wants the other countries to talk about it at parties, so here you go, this is what one troubled, weirdo filmmaker from Denmark thinks. I know you can handle that, America. But giving Those People the benefit of the doubt, it’s great that they take issue with von Trier’s Land of Opportunity movies. It means that they’re engaging with the films and interpreting them.

Interpretation is necessary, because von Trier doesn’t actually make definitive statements. He doesn’t put forth an articulated thesis that he perfectly illustrates, but worries through complicated problems at length, and doesn’t resolve them entirely or come to definitive conclusions. Dogville is about things like the pitfalls of charity, kindness, capitalism, the work ethic, and the unbridgeable gap between ideals and their application. Manderlay is about those things plus American race relations, slavery, power dynamics, the meaning of freedom, democracy, and historical trauma. When we talk about those things in Real Life, we usually take a position, have an opinion that we cling to, and shout a lot. Von Trier gives individual characters strong opinions, puts them in conflict, and usually has something awful happen to everyone. His own position is not necessarily in the mouth of anyone onscreen or even easy to suss out. When the stage is cleared at the end of Dogville, all that is left is a God’s eye view of the void and a furious, snapping dog. I’d guess that’s as close to a mission statement as von Trier gives.

In Dogville's case, maybe von Trier uses the town of Dogville to stand for America the Real Place, or to represent the national character, or as stand-in for any capitalist nation, or the entire sphere of human society, or all of those, but it’s also just the isolated, specific, imaginary mountain town of Dogville. Now, in Manderlay, our old pal Grace is leaving in the car with her gangster dad, and she transforms from Nicole Kidman into the more starry-eyed and sincere Bryce Dallas Howard, and happens upon an Alabama plantation where the resident slaves aren’t aware that they have been legally emancipated for seventy years. So, being Grace, with her superiority complex, good intentions and deep sense of social justice, she sets about forcing the slaves to be free. This being von Trier, that plan will go about as well as expected, which is to say not well at all.

If your Manderlay discussion club needs some prompting, bounce over to the Rotten Tomatoes patch and see how the Fresh (32% of Top Critics!) and Rotten alike mostly agree that this is some kind of indictment of some aspect of something. Some critics find a scathing statement on President Bush’s Iraq war in the way Grace pushes freedom upon the Manderlay slaves — using machine guns if necessary — but doesn’t have a solid plan in place for the clean-up phase. Some critics find a condemnation of well-meaning liberal tendency to rush in, meddle and foist assistance on others without understanding the situation or helping people to help themselves. Some critics say both those things without noting the confusion of targets. But wait, does von Trier even know the particulars of contemporary American conservatism and liberalism? This seems doubtful.... Iraq war, sure. But also Vietnam. Also every time anyone ever forced anyone to do anything for their own good. Manderlay is more like a frustrated, angry satire of no-win situations, especially those shitty circumstances you’ve inherited, must take action upon, want to set right, but there’s no clean, correct way to do it.

What belief systems do we get to impose on others? How does America move past its historical atrocities? Specifically, how do white people feel about and deal with the legacy of slavery? Broader: how does anyone in the world deal with these kinds of traumas? How do they haunt us, how do we remember them and move forward, and what do we do when confronted with their residue? Have we truly dismantled and discarded our racist stereotypes? Which ones are gone, which persist, which could reoccur? Why do we continue perceiving truth, allure or usefulness in stereotypes that we know are hateful and untrue? When do you help people who don’t want help? How hard should you try to help? When have you accidentally imprisoned someone with your ideology? How complicit are minorities and the oppressed in their own subjugation? Sorry, I got lingo-y there on you. Point being that some of these topics are painful to consider in private, infuriating to discuss in public, but all necessary to confront.

Now maybe Lars von Trier is fucking with you, and maybe that’s a good thing. What separates the great provocateur from the chortling wiseass? How do we tell a challenging, serious artist from a naughty attention-mongering huckster? Well, that's part of the fun, isn't it?


5. Serenity (dir., scr. Joss Whedon)

In which Joss Whedon does the impossible, or at least attempts it, and succeeds to an implausible degree, and completes the birthing of the rumpliest and philosophically humane science fiction for the screen in decades. The impossible task of Serenity is to act as second (er, third) pilot episode of Firefly, season finale (should the film have performed better), and probable series finale for a failed-culted-resurrected television show. It has to do this without the broad cultural awareness of Star Trek, which would otherwise be a logical comparison. It attempts to function as a self-contained feature film, a continuation, a conclusion, reiteration and encapsulation. As a film that, in all reality, exists thanks to the support of a network of vocal fans, it wisely attempts to satisfy those supporters and thus mustn't bore them with repetition but needs to introduce a nine-crew member ensemble cast and the precepts of its SF universe.

The central mystery tease of the series is played out, namely What is Up with Wise-in-Her-Madness Teen Waif Stowaway River Tam? This being Joss Whedon's playground, the answer is obviously that she got kung-fu powers after patriarchal powers tampered with her personality. The stories can't all meet their tidy, intended endings. That option was lost years ago. So some of the Serenity's crew of bandits and fugitives are get the short shrift, but the single most important story arcs out beautifully: fourteen episodes of Captain Mal Reynolds accepting the part of outcast, outlaw, lost cause, unloved cynic pays off as he resolves his bad faith, stands unshackled and free. Roaming the frontier space after fighting for the losing side of the Unification War and resigning himself to a life of scavenging, running and smuggling, what we have here is a man trapped — like Howard the Duck — in a world he never made, restless, frustrated, and chasing an undefined Something.

Whether he could use some faith, purpose or just some inner serenity, Mal certainly needs to free himself from bad faith. And he does, in shining Existentialist hero fashion, release himself from that moral death-grip, realizes his inherent, unstrippable freedom in the universe. The Alliance isn't Inherently Evil Empire Par Excellence, but ideologically stifling; as Mal is being smothered more than most, he's in the best position in the 'Verse to notice and do something about it. And that's how Serenity pays off the character arc properly.

Mal's circumstances "force" him into outlaw role, but he wills himself into semi-cooperative inertia through all of Firefly, and he tells himself: I'm a bad man, I'm on the run, I'm struggling to survive, human relationships are barely tenable, and I have no choice in the matter. It is not that he plays victim, but Mal sees his unsatisfactory life inhibited by circumstance, blind to the myriad courses available to him. He's not "free" because he doesn't acknowledge himself to be free. Were Firefly-Mal singing the theme song, the refrain "you can't take the sky from me" is wistful and ironic, but by the end of Serenity it is a true, defiant statement of purpose.

In less fancy terms, Mal needs to stop feeling sorry for himself, and gets inspired to action because he finds something to stick up for, namely the right to feel sorry for himself.

This is the extraordinary par for a Whedon-engineered course. All three of his lead TV protagonists have been plagued bad faith, constrained by roles and external belief systems. Buffy Summers doesn't need to just grow up and accept that she's the Slayer: she needs to locate a viable moral space in which to live, give herself permission to have problems, accept that she is grown up but not Solved, and that circumstance may suck, but you're never out of options (and ultimately says the hell with being The Chosen One). Angel doesn't need to Fight For Redemption! Not when there's (probably?) no God, everyone who matters to him has forgiven him, and he's going to "hell" anyway: he needs to reconfigure his sense of purpose, moral system and definition of "redemption," moment to moment, for all his un-life (and ultimately says the hell with any further reward).

And Mal, too, chooses what kind of man to be. He's not redeemed. But he's something like free.


4. A History of Violence (dir. David Cronenberg, scr. Josh Olson, from the comic by John Wagner and Vince Locke)

Here’s the problem for diner owner Tom Stall, who lives an idyllic, calm life in small-town Indiana: gangsters show up and say he’s mob deserter Joey Cusack and his nature is to murder people. Tom denies this for a good while, and Viggo Mortensen plays the affable straight arrow family man with all his bodily cells except a couple muscles somewhere in his jaw and some that calibrate pupil dilation. Something is wrong, or was wrong, or is about to be wrong.

What does it mean for a film to be truly Cronenbergian? It must take more than inventive grotesque biological mutations. That’s a signature plot trope, not a quality, not a style. A video-playing chest-vagina is an example, not a theme in full flower. Cronenberg infuses his unpredictable, uncompromising take on genre pictures with a profound human sadness, a wintery melancholy that pervades whether his bent lens is trained on the sex thriller, the tragic monster saga, the psychic assassin yarn, pervy transgressive horror, adaptation of modern lit classic, or crime drama. The inner turmoil of protagonists explodes all over their physical reality in spectacularly gooey, messy or at least violent and traumatic form, and the mysterious transmutations of perception and reality, identity and form get blurrier, blurrier, meltier, meltier. So tooth-shooting guns made out of gristly flesh are in short supply, and A History of Violence sounds like somebody's term paper subtitled "Evolutionary Stasis and Sociological Satire in the Films of Stanley Kubrick," but the picture is inescapably Cronenbergian.

They used to make terse, starkly poetic, dolorous and doomed crime pictures approximate six per week back in the 1940s (coincidentally circa when Cronenberg was born), when everyone had problems with their souls due to the trauma of the war. Nobody is exactly sure what David Croenberg's trauma is, if any, but it causes him to make purposeful, confident cinema that glides along scene to scene like a mean animal that knows where it's going.


3. King Kong (dir. Peter Jackson, scr. Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, story Merian C. Cooper, Edgar Wallace)
Also available here are lumpen extended thoughts about Kong '05, the first film written about at length on ExKin.

The rarest of unnecessary remakes is one that not only assumes thorough familiarity with the original, but wants its audience to hold that original forever in their hearts with religious awe. King Kong '33 is an Ur-film, a primal, godlike thing that lives in human consciousness like the Old West, the Christ story, and the Oedipal complex. Kong has no company but The Wizard of Oz up in that stratosphere. Chaplain does not live there, not Casablanca, nor Citizen Kane. Just Kong and Dorothy.

It is, then, not possible to really remake King Kong any more than one could rebuild the Great Sphinx of Giza or raise a baby to be Muhammad Ali. Peter Jackson would not replace, revise or improve upon King Kong '33 even if he could, so King Kong '05 is what exactly? A meditative deconstruction and expansion? An extended film appreciation essay? A public display of affection? Sure, sure, and sure, and Jackson's King Kong is a dream journal. The accumulated flotsam in one man's brain from a lifetime of dreaming about King Kong. The result is sentimental and strange, juvenile one moment and sophisticated the next, and all things considered (including peeks at ill-conceived, long-ago screenplay drafts), possibly the most naked and honest approach the filmmaker could have taken.

Every thought that Peter Jackson has had about King Kong and could possibly weave into his film is crammed into the loom, including those dangling in contradiction and unresolved (e.g.- it is an adventure at heart or maybe it is not an adventure). But key among those threads is a theme in Kong '05 wherein each man kills the thing he loves. Obsessive, bottomless passion proves throughout to crush the fragile dream. It comes to bear most spectacularly for Carl Denham and Kong himself, but behind the curtain we sense Peter Jackson pacing in worry, knowing that the act of creating this film is not so different from hauling the giant gorilla across the sea and placing it on stage in Radio City Music Hall. And will that crazy scheme work? Can Peter Jackson ever be done with King Kong? Can any of us? Will it kill the beast, or will the ape unleashed kill the showman? Don't worry, folks. Those chains are made of chrome steel.

2. Grizzly Man (dir. Werner Herzog)

It is Man versus Nature as environmentalist Timothy Treadwell attempts to live among Alaskan grizzlies. It is Man versus Society as the National Park Service tries to prevent Treadwell from breaking the law. It is Man versus Self as Treadwell struggles with the the personal issues that cause him to shun life among humans and delude himself about how beneficial his presence is for his beloved bears. It is Man versus Destiny as Treadwell is inevitably killed and eaten by a bear.

And Grizzly Man is ultimately Man versus Man, in an ideological war between the self-designated protector of the bears and filmmaker Werner Herzog, who assembles Treadwell's own documentary footage and freely editorializes. It is impossible not to do so, as the fascinating, outlandish star blathers and rages and shoves his hands into fresh bear dung, pesters and taunts massive animals while insisting to his camera that the creatures love him, and gathers approximately zero useful data about bears. Treadwell's footage is bracingly beautiful, and absurdly hilarious in its own disconcerting, tragic way. In one of the movie year's most indelible scenes, Treadwell has his hat stolen by a wild Fox, who he has named Ghost and tries to treat as a pet. Ghost the Fox scampers off to his den with the cap, and Treadwell wails about the theft, the violation of his trust by the naughty animal, and never gets his hat back. Whether one sympathizes with Treadwell or agrees with Herzog that nature is a brutal, inhospitable, impassive force, one has to admit in the face of the evidence that a fox will steal your hat and just not give a shit. Nature is like that.

1. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (dir. Park Chan-wook, scr. Park, Jeong Seo-kyeong)

Mashing up the chain-reaction kidnapping plot of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and the extensively-premeditated revenge tale of Oldboy, Lady Vengeance concerns the elaborate score settling between convicted child murderer Lee Geum-ja and the man who actually did the deed. And between Geum-ja and her daughter Jenny, long lost to adopted parents. And with the families of several other murder victims. And between Our Lady of Vengeance and God.

The emphasis is on themes of identity and art, prep work and improvisation, and the hair-fine lines between sacrifice and degradation, grace and wrath, atonement and —wait for it — vengeance. As she examines a specialty firearm crucial to her painstaking scheme, Geum-ja is warned that ornamented gun is entirely impractical. She does not care, and murmurs only that it is beautiful, and every piece of her scheme must be beautiful. The death angel's day job at a bakery sees her excel at the decoration of tasteful, fancy cakes. As her life has been wrecked, her world shattered, Geum-ja reinvents herself with a purpose, and that plan is an elegant confection. Revenge is all she has, so it must be beautiful.

Central to that plan is complete full-body transformation, several times over. Before imprisonment she was a schoolgirl in over her head. The publicity circus around the crime recasts her as an angel-faced monster, and here begins the long, treacherous snaking of The Plan. As far as news media and prison personnel can see, in the arms of the penal system, Geum-ja becomes a repentant saint-in-training; so the Kind-Hearted Geum-ja facilitates her own release. Meanwhile, she wins the gratitude of fellow inmates by donating organs and murdering bullies; so the sisterly bonds forged and debts are incurred that may be paid off outside prison walls. And once outside, Geum-ja's decorations shift once more. Like a superhero suiting up, she paints on red eyeshadow, dons the coolest high-collared leather coat available, and chops off her finger in penance. If it is not artful, it is not worth doing.

Byzantine and intricate as Geum-ja's plan is, the film’s chronology is rewired into flashbacks and temporal cutaways. Information appears when and if the audience needs it, and not before, surprise reveals of causes after effects, as if the plot has gotten ahead of itself or Geum-ja’s scheme has outwitted the storyteller. The heroine undergoes (undertakes?) such radical behavioral shifts, transforming herself as required to achieve her next goal, that like Kill Bill, Lady Vengeance becomes a revenge quest as journey of identity. Where The Bride is winnowed down and built back up, Geum-ja is in a constant state of becoming.

Park Chan-wook lands his camera on unexpected views, literalizes metaphors without warning, frames to communicate dramatic relationship as much as compositional aesthetic and hops between scenes with flashy transitional devices. So the beatific Geum-ja prays and is crowned with the glowing aureola of a religious icon, or we glide between rooms on intercom cables to reveal one scene listening in on another, or a subtitle is rattled onto the screen by an overhead shot of tabletop coitus. Each scene has a little formal surprise in store. In one remarkable sequence the captive villain about to feel the wrath of Lady Vengeance is forced to translate from Korean to English and back again as Geum-ja communicates with Jenny. Blocked as a line of linked subjects with the translator in the middle, a gun pointed at his brain, split screen effects and simple editing gradually blur the geographical staging. The translator is gradually forgotten, disappears from the screen, though his voice continues. Halfway through the conversation the mother will stand with her back to the child, but Park continues cutting their close ups as if they are facing each other. In these moments, as Geum-ja makes her confession (through the mouth of a man also being forced into confession by repeating her words), states aloud her intention to kill, articulates as best she can her understanding of sin and atonement, she uses the act of her revenge as a statement. She literally makes her victim speak for her.

So what we have here is an exploration of the value of ritual, the role of the symbolic act in the invention of identity. Upon her release from prison at the beginning of the film, Geum-ja rejects a symbolic brick of tofu presented by her Christian comrades. It isn't a coded object with a secret meaning to unlock: its meaning is explained, and explicit. Shucking off the Kind-Hearted persona, Geum-ja requires more than a costume swap, and with high heels, red eyeshadow and burning cigarette in hand seduces the teenage bakery assistant. She has to transgress the boundaries of the Kind-Hearted to transform herself. And so she progresses, marking each step of the way with ritual and symbol, imbuing her quest with meaning beyond personal revenge.

"Atonement" is at the center of Geum-ja's Great Work, but for the film it is more a question than a purpose. That violence begets violence is a given in Park's Vengeance Trilogy, and here the Lady aims to atone by killing her guiltier partner in crime. And this outlaw justice, as outlaw justice is sometimes wont to do, actually may "solve" something — namely uncovering and halting a serial killer — but that is not the same as atonement. The damage to Geum-ja's original victim and his family is already done, and for this she can apologize, revenge, repent, and even affect positive change, but cannot undo. The pattern of destruction has encompassed more murder victims, but none can be saved. There is, however, another child and another parent wounded but struggling for air: there is still a chance for Geum-ja and Jenny. If Lady Vengeance wants something like redemption, wants to atone, wants her world set right, she'll have to forge the tools herself.

Lady Vengeance may famously fade to black and white in its director’s preferred version, but there is no black, white, or grey in the world of the Vengeance Trilogy. There are actions and consequences, impossible choices, and a cast of characters backed up against the wall. Everyone here is a victim of circumstance. Blackness swirls around them, but before they are enveloped, they will try, as Lady Vengeance says, to “live white.” All we can do is try.

Who Is the Coolest?: Lee Marvin’s Shirttails in BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955)

The geography for the stage of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, set in 1945) is a massive barbell, choked in the middle by the single street of Black Rock, opening at either end into dusty orange desert vistas. John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) arrives by ghost train at one end of the street, wanders back and forth to solve a mystery that resides somewhere in the wasteland at the other end. There is a story of the hard, bitter little city, the sins of all one-dozen-or-so residents, and the status of a missing Japanese farmer given the improbable name “Komoko”; this is the narrative meat proper, but the skeleton of Black Rock is filled out -- or picked away and revealed -- as the camera approaches each of these desert lizard-people as mysteries unto themselves. Macreedy is the town’s first visitor in four years, and the locals hate him before he steps into town, eyeing the slowing train with silent panic and confusion. Once they have to interact with him, every conversation is an exercise in concealing data, lying, talking circles around the topic. Getting information out of these people is like pulling teeth, and even the small talk is a particularly harsh enamel scraping.

So this is the shape of the Bad Day, Macreedy pacing and studying the land, everyone engaged in a game of Who Is the Coolest?, until all players crack and all secrets are outed. Each piece of character backstory or nugget of truth about their universe is hard won -- by Macreedy in most rounds, though sometimes he has to give some ground in the short view so an opponent will lower his guard. Who he is and what he wants, being the question actively playing on every set of lips in Black Rock, are the cards Macreedy won’t show until absolutely necessary. The allegorical wireframe about quiet, stoic heroism and insulated communities who poison their own wells is overlaid with the paper-mâché skin of its residents and weather-blasted buildings. The Bad Day is about a lot of things, macro and micro: the interment of Japanese-Americans during the second World War, the Hollywood blacklist, American racism, mob violence, the myth of the American West and various untenable molds of masculinity. The story in whole chews on these thoughts, the scenes are of people chewing on each other. So after a fashion, Bad Day’s scenes are driven by a question which is not “What Happened to Komoko?” but: “Who Is the Coolest?” This death match is determined through the gradual accumulation of curious details, actorly peculiarities; the Bad Day is the process of grit settling into grooves.

Macreedy keeps one -- presumably useless -- arm stiff at his side, fist shoved deep into jacket pocket. Unseasonable black off-the-rack suit adhering to his torso, Macreedy’s sweat soaks through the fabric as he ambles about in the blazing sun; Tracy looks like a baked potato seeping butter through aluminum foil wrapping as he rolls about on a very large grill. He makes some kind of point of remaining uncomfortable in the heat, ordering hot coffee at lunch to accompany a bowl of chili, and later claims he is the kind of man who has “never thought much” about lemonade. In that particular competition, Macreedy wins against a nerve-jangled telegraph operator in just a few moves, and the poor fellow is starry-eyed in terror that he has met a man who has never even thought about lemonade.

Pete Wirth (John Ericson who later teamed up with Anne Francis again for Honey West on TV), the dumbbell hotel clerk seems to want to deny Macreedy a room because he makes a visual rhyme with the “one-armed bandit” slot machine in the corner. In an entrancing bit of business, Tracy opens a fresh pack of cigarettes with one hand. There is dialogue, perhaps it is even plot-related, but the whole picture is suddenly about the tension and marvel of Macreedy popping the wrapper and biting off confetti strips of the inner foil, spitting the paper to the floor.

The back of Lee Marvin’s shirt refuses to stay tucked into his pants throughout the day. He fixes it at least twice, and it flaps around like a lazy flag. It is not really a wonder, since Marvin keeps covertly maneuvering his big log-limbed scarecrow body into contorted positions. Here his angry idiot ranch hand, called Hector, sprawls half-propped-up across Macreedy’s rented bed. James Dean strikes a similar pose in Giant, lazily stretching across the width of the screen, a little house on the horizon appearing to plop into his lap; Hector has climbed inside that building, legs poking out the windows like a cowpoke Alice in Wonderland, as Macreedy studies him, a sedated Bill the lizard. In another interesting shot, Hector leans his elbow against a wall some four feet away from his torso, surely providing more stress on his frame than relief. Hector picks postures for maximum silhouette impact. Hector has the moves and spirit of intimidation down flat, his signature feint being to act weird and simmer with vaguely motivated violence. But he gets flummoxed fast, mainly by Macreedy’s technique of questioning the literal logic of any insinuated threat. Long enough to look like he’s going to bow the hotel bed, boots surely ruining the bedspread, and glowering intently at his burning cigarette, Hector’s materialization in Macreedy’s room is a calculated intrusion of lanky non sequitur. In this match, Hector loses, unable to be more startling than an old man in a bathrobe who refuses to act the least bit surprised.

Meanwhile, Ernest Borgnine as Coley chortles and bounces about like a fleshy rubber ball with a grinning, google-eyed goblin face painted on it. He is giggly with delight over the opportunity to bully anyone, as if he has been deprived of opportunity for years. Macreedy stares at Coley, memorizes his opponent’s malevolent hop-about, until Coley dances to the end of his chain, and lashes out in a vehicular attack on a desert road, and in a perhaps even greater violation, dumps a whole bunch of ketchup all over Macreedy's chili. Macreedy seems to endure the outbursts only to gather facts and figures, place the violence in a diagram of Coley’s attack pattern. Next time the issue is raised, Macreedy swats Coley out of the way like a slow-pitch softball. It's one-armed judo precision against an inept berserker telegraphing his moves.

John J. Macreedy makes his way to the outskirts of Black Rock, to the ruins of Komoko’s farm at Adobe Flats. He paces. He crouches. He studies the depth of a well, the composition of the dirt, the flora of the area. It takes three minutes, and he has sized up the situation. Adobe Flats gives up all the backstory that the citizens will not; the dirt and plants and rocks and holes do not care who is coolest.

“I believe a man is as big as what'll make him mad,” Reno Smith tells Macreedy. The town heavy is Robert Ryan, whose career-long refinement of tough-souled goodies and baddies suppressing a psychotic streak is distilled into this pared-away Big Boss tyrant. Reno holds the town in hand by virtue of a few more IQ points, and at least understands the game they are playing. Do not flinch, do not back away, do not break eye contact first: Who is the Coolest? He is actually “mad” all the time, constantly fuming at flunkies Coley and Hector, and the entire colony of Black Rock. What he really means, though, is that man-size is determined by what makes a fellow completely lose his shit. For Reno, and by his own account, it took Pearl Harbor. So he’s at least as big a man as the entire country. And what’s bigger than that? For Macreedy, it takes the whole of the species’ fears, cowardice, inhumanity and intolerance.

Both men have already erupted in loud preaching, but only one lost an arm fighting for the country; the other incited a mob to murder. Reno gives a flame-eyed speech about desire to protect the Western country he knows, while Macreedy’s righteous rant is truly about personal bravery and individuality, his breaking point breached when the nitwit hotel clerk is too chickenshit to stand up for himself. When these symbolmen finally duke it out, it’s Reno the enraged, irrational, indignant going nuts with a gun, while Macreedy, beleaguered and persecuted, defends himself with methodical Molotov cocktails. All speechifying becomes irrelevant. Everything they mean and stand for is observable in how they fight, defined by their combat in the last round of Who is the Coolest? If Reno is the Big Boss of Black Rock, Macreedy has him beat. He’s bigger than the whole damned town.

Meanwhile, Hector’s shirttails flop out again, and billow in the hot breeze.