Change Your Image
humanoid
Reviews
Kings of the Evening (2008)
Disappointing in so many ways
I saw KINGS at a special showing for local cast and crew, in association with the Austin International Film Festival, so I enjoyed the extra benefit of a Q&A afterward with the director and his father, with whom he had co-written the script, and some of the main actors. The audience, which was about one-third African-American, was enthusiastic about what they'd just seen. One or two commenters specifically appreciated such a positive portrayal of the Black experience, and several remarks suggested that the whole production was divinely ordained. Would that it were so.
I had first sensed that the results might be underwhelming when the opening credits ended by announcing that the story was "inspired by actual events" a claim so thin as to be hardly worth making. And then I began spotting anachronisms. Although the setting is the Depression, several of the male actors had visible ear piercings, and in an early scene, a blue-collar white man is sporting a very modern hipster goatee. The protagonist, who has just come off a two-year stretch with little more than the prison-issued suit on his broad back, has a wasp-waisted muscularity that could only come from hours spent every day with a personal trainer. And his sternly responsible landlady makes a habit of walking around in a red nightgown that, in those days, would have been taken by whoever saw her as a sure sign that she made her living from prostitution.
Of course, anyone who's trying to portray a time or place with which they're not intimately familiar is going to be hard-pressed to avoid such gaffes. I was much more disturbed by the movie's depiction of a Deep South in which racism hardly seems to be an issue. Whites and blacks mingle and converse and work together with practically no suggestion of the climate of oppression and intimidation that Negroes had to deal with every day. (See, for instance, Richard Wright's memoir, BLACK BOY.) In a social milieu where a colored child could be beaten to death for sassing a white woman, where lynching was a commonplace occurrence, and the Klan was respected and influential, it's dumbfounding that KINGS includes a scene where black men assault (and possibly murder) a white man with no apparent fear for the consequences. Indeed, the whole incident seems to be forgotten almost immediately. This bespeaks a cluelessness, not just about history but about the dramatic potential of the story, that undermines the whole project.
But here I'm veering into criticism of KINGS as a piece of storytelling. I don't want to be heavy-handed about this, because it's obviously a well-meaning film, and a crowd-pleaser as well. I'll observe that the movie isn't very ambitious it tells a simple, sentimental story of generally decent people trying to make do in hard times. One might give it points for its sweet-natured amiability, or even for glimmerings of class consciousness (for instance, in its sweatshop scenes). However, at almost two hours long, it's listless and unfocused, with little dramatic tension and so, for all that it tries to be heartwarming, remarkably little payoff at its resolution.
The central conceit of this movie is that the colored gentlemen of this small town meet in weekly fashion shows, at which they contend for a sort of "best-dressed" award. Andrew Jones, the writer/director, explained that he'd borrowed this idea from a similar contest held in South Africa by the Oswenka tribe. Indeed, he said, this is the source of the word "swank."
Well, in fact, "swank" is derived from Dutch or German. "Oswenka" is the form in which it's borrowed into Zulu. Similarly topsy-turvy is the philosophy of "swanking" that the foreign-born "Mr. Gamba" regularly intones before these scenes: "No matter how poor he is, if a man can face himself in the mirror, he can face life." Gamba himself, with his frayed and patched lapels, is the very model of shabby dignity. But apparently he's not talking about the importance of having a clear conscience or personal integrity.
What the participants in his contest go to great lengths to demonstrate is that they are dressed with a painstaking (and costly) attention to the slightest details of fashionable apparel. The character who joins in, arrayed in a mismatching outfit of stolen duds and worn-out footwear, is ridiculed by all and sundry. Only when he, and the other main characters, suddenly show up dressed to the nines, is this movie ready to grant them a happy ending.
It's characteristic of the failings of KINGS OF THE EVENING that its moral about the virtues of the struggling poor should be so thuddingly bourgeois.
La mujer del puerto (1934)
Surprisingly listless for a "classic"
From the very start, this movie is filled with striking cinematography, sharply drawn characters, and the promise of melodramatic riches, but it also exhibits a disconcerting lack of narrative drive.
Things happen, of course, and they surely must seem earthshaking to the characters involved (although the heroine seems a decade too old to be quite so naive about her cad of a boyfriend). But there's hardly any sense of dramatic tension, much less urgency. Indeed, the movie seems almost like an anthropological documentary, in which the camera spends much of its time dispassionately observing the behavior of ordinary folks at work and play, with little indication that the story is going anywhere in particular.
And then, with only minutes of running time to spare, out of the clear blue sky comes the (absurdly far-fetched) revelation that seals the protagonist's tragic fate.
There is much of interest here for students of film, or of the period of the Thirties, or of the movie's settings of town and port in Mexico. There's little psychological depth, though, and the most intriguing question about this "iconic" representative of the "film of sinners" genre is, What (aside from the boob shot) made such a seemingly dull story so compelling for the filmgoing public of its day?
King Kong (2005)
It's not good enough to be King
I don't intend to derogate this movie, which is pretty damn good for what it is-- a modern Hollywood-style entertainment-- but what it is isn't KING KONG. I say this as a Peter Jackson fan, going back to MEET THE FEEBLES. I used to tell people that I knew LOTR was going to be great, because I'd seen PJ develop into a thrillingly good movie-maker. But with his remake of his favorite movie, he's fallen into a trap where his facility-- and, apparently, the lack of people who'll tell him any more when he's going overboard-- has led him astray.
I'd take issue with people who declare the CGI flawless-- there were times, for instance during the brontosaur stampede, when it looked positively cheesy. But that's beside the point. The original KONG wasn't a great movie because of convincing SFX.
I must report that the word that kept popping up in my mind while watching KK was: "preposterous." It seems silly to harp on the logical inconsistencies of what is frankly a fantasy. But, think about that aforementioned dinosaur stampede. Could you really buy, for even one moment, the idea that anybody at all could have survived that situation and walked away? What about those fights to the death that KK keeps having with a variety of different monstrous critters, while holding tiny, delicate Ann Darrow in one paw? And he never, ever, is momentarily indelicate enough to even crack one of her ribs?
Here's another one: it's so cold in New York City that the streets are slick with ice. The skating pond in Central Park is so thickly iced that it can support the weight of a twenty-foot-tall gorilla. So when skinny little Ann is climbing a ladder on top of the Empire State Building, dressed in a thin, spaghetti-strapped gown, wouldn't you think her hands would be so numb with cold that she could barely hold on? For that matter, even if the building itself weren't slick with ice, can you conceive that any primate could climb and swing about the structure, high above the ground, without losing its grip? But Jackson's Kong clings to walls like a spider, as if by magic.
I'm not even going to get into Ann's weirdly intense, frankly erotic bond with Kong.
My most fundamental objection to PJ's KK is that it dismisses the aspect of this story that even DeLaurentiis's abominable remake understood is crucial-- that Kong represents the irresistible intrusion into our lives of horrors that are terrifying and uncanny. This is what has given KING KONG its lasting power, and this is what Jackson's impulse for sentimentalizing the story disregards. PJ wants us to empathize with Kong, to love the big ape.
The original KING KONG offers us an archetypal monster who only becomes sympathetic after we've been fully impressed with its capacity for turning our idea of a safe, predictable world upside down.
I first saw KING KONG at the ideal age, five or six, when nothing stood between my tender sensibilities and its overweening message of tragic doom. Conventional and glib as Robert Armstrong sounded when his Carl Denham said "It was Beauty who killed the Beast," he is a speaker of profound truths when compared to Jack Black intoning the same line, in a narrative where Beauty has done everything but pick up a Tommy gun to defend the Beast she's come to love.
In trying to make the tragic monster lovable, Jackson has betrayed everything that made King Kong more than just another creature feature monster. Jackson's tragedy is that he seems constitutionally incapable of having done it any other way.
Butterfly Kiss (1995)
...And Caterpillar Hugs
Seeing that so many people have gone out of their way to denigrate Butterfly Kiss, I feel constrained to weigh in on its virtues.
It is not a Hollywood entertainment, nor is it a Jane Austen prestige picture, or a politely naughty comedy for the art house crowd. It's a movie for people who are willing to risk a certain amount of emotional discomfort to gain the benefits of experiencing the world through unaccustomed perspectives. It's for those who want to learn about human beings on the margins of society, the forgotten, the pathological, the lost.
It's the sort of film that can't be appreciated without a high tolerance for unsympathetic protagonists, unreliable narrators, unintelligible motivations, and morally ambiguous conclusions.
In short, Butterfly Kiss demands an intellectual curiosity and nimbleness of mind that's not always characteristic of American audiences.
This is not to argue that it's necessarily a good film, or successful at achieving its ambitions. More than once, while watching it, I found myself wondering how much relation to real people this story might actually have. Unlike Monster, with which it has obvious parallels, Butterfly Kiss doesn't appear to be based on factual events.
The film's ability to cause me to "suspend disbelief" suffered from a touch too much Grand Guignol excess and, perhaps more damningly, writerly artifice. (For no clear reason, the protagonists are named "You"(Eunice) & "Me" (Miriam).)
But the characters kept on surprising me, which indicates, if nothing else, that there's something vital and alive about this story. By the end, I was moved to pity for these two deeply damaged women, and, perhaps more importantly, I was moved to compassion.
For that, I'd sit through an unpleasant movie any day of the week.
Girl with Green Eyes (1964)
New Wave Washes Up On Irish Shores
Long into watching this studiously "small," slice-of-life portrait of a naive young woman, I was still wondering if the film would turn out, in the end, to have been worth watching. Earnest in its desire to be grittily true-to-life, in the neo-realist manner of the Angry Young Men, it is also clearly intoxicated with the quotidian lyricism and plain-spoken poetry of la nouvelle vague. It attempts to be charming and brutally frank at the same time, and manages, to some extent, to carry it off.
But will we end up caring about Tushingham's somewhat obtuse small town escapee, or Finch's sophisticated cold fish? Or will we be left with the rather sodden sensation that we've wasted our time eavesdropping on bores? For my part, I was pleasantly surprised. The story ends with the palpable sense that Kate has grown up a bit, and Eugene has grown a little older and sadder. We've looked on as two people have lived their bittersweet lives, much as we live our own -- and we're a little sad to bid them adieu.
To sum up: not as fresh and appealing today as it probably seemed in its time, but still rewarding and worthwhile.
The Gay Desperado (1936)
Check Out The Cuffs
While watching this delightful farce, I was surprised to notice that Leo ("Braganza") Carillo's leather cuffs are each decoratively studded with a large swastika. This is, of course, a ubiquitous ancient sacred symbol which had only positive connotations before the Nazis appropriated it, but by the time this movie was made, it certainly had political implications. Was costume designer Omar Kiam merely employing a local graphic motif, or was he slipping in a pro-fascist symbol in the same way that SubGenius sympathizers placed the face of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs almost unnoticeably in the background of David Letterman's and Pee Wee Herman's original stage sets?
Insight (1960)
Vague memories of remarkable television
Mike O'Leary's comments remind me of the religious TV shows I used to watch as a child in the early 60's, Sunday mornings before church-- I was as impressed by their minimalistic production values (shot on videotape, I think, often on bare soundstages) as by their surreal enactments of spiritual dramas-- in fact, I remember one episode was a retelling of the medieval morality play "Everyman" in which motorcycle-helmeted police were going to escort the hero to his fate, Death... which lay behind a green door (causing me some confusion, later, when Marilyn Chambers starred in a pornographic film with a somewhat similar theme).