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The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)
A Metaphysical Thriller, With Some Flaws
I'll begin by saying I'm a Basil Dearden film, and watched this primarily because he directed it. Overall, it is an entertaining film that offers a glimpse of a long-gone world, and of a style of filmmaking that also disappeared with the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I won't summarize the plot since many others already have, but it turns on the initially uncanny and increasingly creepy appearance of Harold Pelham's (Roger Moore, in one of his best performances) Doppelgänger, though like Pelham himself we don't actually see this double until very late in the film. His strange presence, however, is apparent from the moment early on when Pelham briefly dies on the operating table, only to revive temporarily with two heartbeats.
My two criticisms, beyond the annoyingly busy score, hinge on the confusing moment at the film's opening when the Doppelgänger seems to overtake the original Pelham, leading to the first accident (or does he?), and on the melodramatic ending, which probably could have been strengthened by jump-cutting straight from the crash through the bridge balustrade to Pelham, one of the two, walking back through the door of his home, without us seeing which one, the original or the double, it was.
In general, though, I recommend the film, and despite its flaws, it is quite entertaining and a metaphysical and psychological thriller. If it is ever remade, it'll have to be updated for the 21st century, but if done right and not Hollywoodized, it could work well. (It would be interesting to compare this original and a remake to the 2013 Canadian film The Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which is based on Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago's 2004 novel The Double.)
Le rayon vert (1986)
The Most From the Least
The greatest directors can make the most from the very least, and in this case, Éric Rohmer initially seems to present the viewer with the flimsiest of comic scenarios. A quiet young woman, Delphine, played expertly by Marie Rivière, finds herself short a summer vacation traveling companion. Big deal, right? From this we get a series of semi-humorous scenes, some verging on banality, in which Delphine travels to various spots, walks around or talks airily about things, but cannot enjoy herself, not only because she's physically alone, even when with friends, but also because, as we soon learn, she has broken up with a longtime boyfriend, Jean-Pierre.
What initially appears to be a depiction of loneliness born of isolation shades into a portrait, lightly but beautifully handled under Rohmer's tough, of a young woman's melancholy, frustration and depression. Delphine breaks into tears several times, and each episode raises the stakes, showing how sad and ultimately angry she truly is, not just because she has truly lost Jean-Pierre, but because she is the kind of person who is not demonstrative, not the life of the party--like the Swedish acquaintance she meets in Biarritz, or her Parisian friends--not inclined to play the games expected of single women. Instead, Delphine is a shy, soft- spoken introvert who takes things and potential relationships as they come, which might mean that she'll never again have a chance at love, or that she won't be able to act in the expected ways if the opportunity were to present itself.
Except that maybe she does, or at the very least, she does seize an opportunity that looks like desperation at first until the entire scene plays out. Though I clicked the "spoiler" button I will not give away the ending, but it is a stunner, so simple and incredibly moving. What is also a testament to Rohmer's genius is how he sets it all up, with a very believable, overheard, improvised conversation earlier, revolving around Jules Verne's story *The Green Ray,* and the mythic element in it. This should be a film every film student studies to learn how to pull off the most powerful emotional payoff with what appears to be almost nothing. And Rohmer and Rivière earn it. Superb.
The Void (2016)
Great Special Effects, Story Incoherent
This film receives three stars from me for its special effects, but its story deserves zero. What opened with promise turned into an incoherent muddle, and while I don't mind doing a little or even a lot of work, this story had no real plot whatsoever.
One basic question I had was: why was all this happening now, at this point in time? Why did the various events that occurred happen in the sequence they did? And if the person allegedly behind all of this had been planning it, why didn't anyone else notice before? How did all of this link up to that alleged house where people were killed, and why were the father and son involved in that? Why did they burn the young woman in the beginning? What happened to all of the people waiting outside? They couldn't all been crushed during that ludicrous scene near the end, could they? Also, why the three births? What led to the first one, and why her and not someone else?
I bet the filmmakers couldn't answer these questions, and if they couldn't, the movie should have been made.
The acting was so-so, the atmospherics were a bit ridiculous, and in general, this film fails to rise to the level of horror films of the past. Better to have a coherent, scary story than great special effects with no there there. Literally.
(BTW: Not really any spoilers in this review, but I don't want to be blacklisted, so just to be careful, I'm checking that box.)
The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011)
A Drecktastic Waste of Film Stock and the Viewer's Time
A pointless, implausible exercise in shocking violence and gore-filled degradation, untethered to any reality, this piece did not need to be made, or if the writer-director felt it needed to be filmed, he could at least have provided some justification within the film, narrative, thematic or otherwise, for what occurs in it.
Unlike the work of Todd Solondz or Lars von Trier, for example, there is no social commentary here; it is not situated in any recognizable milieu (except the upper middle class); its characters' motivations remain hidden from start to finish and there is no psychological or characterological basis for what occurs; its flat-to-melodramatic acting reveals nothing about performance or affect; and it does not even have a narrative or character arc (for the father, the son, or the mother) that would justify it being filmed.
On top of this, transposing this exercise in outrageousness to an African-American family is even more problematic. Did the filmmaker think by casting black actors that this would make the film more interesting? It does not. In fact what is essentially blackface makes this film even more unbelievable, more fake, and less humorous than if he had cast people like himself.
Ultimately this director wastes the viewer's time, while also unnecessarily searing images of incest, sexual abuse and murder into the viewers' mind. While I'm all for cinematic experimentation, if the writer-director cannot cinematically justify fantasies of this sort he should keep them to himself, and if he cannot, at least don't dump them on black characters and black people, who have more than enough to contend with.
Blue Velvet (1986)
What Lies Beneath the Surface
One of the greatest aspects of this film is the way that it peels back the surface of what appears to be real to show something much seamier, darker, more perverse underneath. While one can view the story straightforwardly--a young man finds a severed ear in a field, it leads to strange encounters, including with a beautiful, troubled, abused woman (Isabella Rosselini in superb form) and the very embodiment of evil (one of Dennis Hopper's top performances), and things take off from there--at a deeper level it dramatizes a vital metaphor for the world around us.
The often seemingly-placid surface of things is only that, a screen or scrim; whether in a city, the suburbs, or the town in which this film is set, a great deal simmers, seethes even, below the surface. The film's protagonist, Kyle MacLachlan's character Jeffrey Beaumont, does what many of us dare not, to investigate and dig deeper. Most of the time in our lives the results may not amount to much, but as Jeffrey finds out, sometimes real danger and horror lies ahead, and a severed ear should just be handed off to the police and not become the spark for trying to learn more.
Ultimately the film suggests that the payoff is rarely what we think, though we do end up learning something, about the world beneath the world of appearances, and about ourselves, and for that, as well as its thrilling plot, great acting, and singular strangeness, which caused a stir when it premiered, "Blue Velvet" is worth seeing, and more than once.