Pointless List : 5 90s Mainstream Hollywood Films

I came of age as a Moviegoer in the 1990s. I studied film and got an education, learned about the masters of World and Classic cinema, read books of theory and plenty of criticism. But i also went to the cinema an awful lot. Twice a week, every week. To all sorts of films, most of them American, Hollywood, mainstream productions. I saw a lot of bad stuff. And some great stuff.
And some stuff nobody seems to talk about or care about much anymore.
Well, I do:



Fearless (Peter Weir, 1993)
A very convincing case can be made for Jeff Bridges as the greatest American actor of his generation. His most obvious competition is New york Italian, but Bridges has shown greater range than either Bobby or Al, from his early "cocky teen" roles in The Last Picture Show ( Peter Bogdonovich, 1971) and Bad Company (Robert Benton, 1972) through the square-jawed hero roles in King Kong (John Gullerman, 1976) and Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982). He has also lately moved into villain parts in the likes of Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008) and has always been most at home in drama, where his range and easy grasp of emotion has been easiest to discern and meant that he has played an extraordinarily varied group of characters across what is proving to be an exceptional career. To top that off, he has created at least one absolutely immortal comic character too - the Dude in The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen, 1998). Through all those parts in all those movies, he has always been perfectly natural and normal, without any of the movie star glow that always - in every single role - surrounds the likes of Cruise and Roberts, which is what really marks him out as special. I have come this far without even mentioning what are, for me, his standout performances alongside The Dude. He was at his best in Thunderbolt & Lightfoot (Michael Cimino, 1974), Cutters Way (Ivan Passer, 1980), Starman (John Carpenter, 1984), Tucker: The Man And His Dream (Francis Ford Coppola, 1988) and in Peter Weir's outstanding Fearless. Fearless tells the tale of the survivor of an airplane crash who is robbed of his fear by the event. Having come so close to his mortality, he loses all fear of it, and is choking on a massive case of survivor's guilt, and his life is utterly changed - he views all of his relationships and life-choices differently and alienates the people around him while pursuing the connection he feels with another survivor, a young mother whose infant child died in the crash (Rosie Perez). at the same time he has begun to take crazy risks, like walking calmly into heavy traffic and balancing on the edge of a skyscraper's roof, and eating strawberries, to which he has a fatal allergy. This is a rare mainstream drama interested in our awareness of our own mortality and unafraid to confront that awareness. But then Weir, who has never really made a bad film, with only mild missteps like Green Card (1990) marring his record, has always been interested in this theme, evident in his work as far back as Gallipoli (1981) and Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) and his great gift as a director is an ability to investigate his themes without sacrificing any emotional impact or cinematic beauty in his films.
Fearless is full of great scenes - the awed opening scene, the terrifying crash when we finally see it in flashback, Bridges driving a car into a wall to make a point to Perez - and the performances are uniformly excellent. Perez matches Bridges, and Isabella Rosselini, Benicio DelToro and John Turturro aren't too far off that standard either. The way Weir and the actors portray the new tensions in Bridges' marriage to Rosselini is impeccable and extraordinarily moving, as is the films great climax. One of the best American films of the 90s and seemingly forgotten today.



Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998)
Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, William H Macy, Joan Allen, J.T. Walsh and Jeff Daniels star. Paul Walker too, in the kind of minor dumbass Jock role he was born for. Pleasantville came out too close to Peter Weir's brilliant The Truman Show (1998) to be appreciated. For it covers similar territory - the reality behind the perfect image of 1950s America, and hence, America itself, created by television - even if it goes about it in a radically different way. The premise is straight from a vintage Twilight Zone episode: a quarrelsome brother and sister are zapped into the reality of the brother's favourite classic sitcom, where they have to learn to live until they can find a way home. While the girl shakes things up with her modern sexuality, the boy tries to fit in with a world he loves for its wholesome innocence, but their presence has changed things already and conflict follows their arrival. Gary Ross was best known prior to Pleasantville for writing Big (Penny Marshall, 1988), and this film captures something of that ones melancholy feelings about lost innocence and worldly experience. Ross is clever, if a little trite in his fusion of narrative with style: the gradual encroachment of vivid colour into the monochrome world of Pleasantville allows for several beautiful sequences, a biblical reference (a girl with a shockingly red apple) and an incredibly euphoric feelgood ending. But the film is unexpectedly touching - in Macy's heartbreaking, stunned confusion at the sudden destruction of the only life he understands. In Daniels joy at discovering art and the beauty of the world. And in Maguire finding himself in another life and realising what is most important. All that, and J.T. Walsh as the bad guy. Its all very 90s in its fusion of a very sentimental mainstream vision with a slightly indie sensibility in its casting and sensibility. But it works.



Rounders (John Dahl, 1998)
One of the reasons Matt Damon has risen to be perhaps the key leading man of his generation has been the fact that he has never really been typecast. Indeed, he doesn’t even really have a type. He plays stoic killing machine, neurotic corporate spy, traumatised grunt, ambitious oil executive and conjoined twin with equal skill and relish. His superficial blandness – the fact that he is of average height and build, good but not great-looking, moderately athletic and intelligent enough in an unthreatening way – aids him in this respect, giving him a malleability denied to many of his contemporaries.
Early in his careeer, however, it was different for him. The success of Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997) gave Damon a new profile and suddenly he was pursued for a variety of projects. But those projects did generally cast him in the whizzkid role, aiming to ape the success of Van Sant’s film. In Francis Ford Coppola’s the Rainmaker (1997), he plays a whizzkid lawyer, and in Robert Redford’s The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) he plays a whizzkid golfer, albeit one who has lost all his whizz. Between those films, he played a whizzkid Poker shark in John Dahl’s Rounders. Dahl began the 90s as the rising talent of Neo-Noir, with Kill Me Again (1989), Red Rock West (1993) and the Last Seduction (1994) forming a major statement within that sub-genre, each nicely, even boldly directed and well-cast. He seemed to understand Noir in a way few contemporary directors do, and in a way that was palatable for modern audiences. He could only get better. Until he made Unforgettable (1996). Its critical and commercial failure rocked his career, and Rounders seemed like work-for-hire.
Except it might in fact be his most entertaining film. It feels almost like a 70s crime drama in its combination of strong characterisation and atmosphere, in the mix of grit with solid plot mechanics. And crucially it has been well-cast. Damon breezes through on that effortless whizzkid vibe, allowing his quick mind to transmit his calculations through his face in the poker scenes. Edward Norton, as his no-good ex-convict ex-Partner, is at his most Dustin Hoffman-esque, all tics and theatricality, ferreting away in the edges of the frame, an itch the film can't quite scratch. But Norton owns every scene hes in, aware of his own charisma and how best to use it. There is strong support from Martin Landau and Famke Jansen and John Turturro, and even Gretchen Mol before she best understood her own appeal, in what should be dull "girlfriend" role.But Rounders is too good for a dull girlfriend role, and so Mol - and screenwriters David Levien and Brian Koppelman - make her character a conflicted, complex human being, with her own reasons and rationales for everything she does and says in her relationship with Damon. And then there is John Malkovich, chewing ham and just about making it all work as Teddy KGB, the villain of the piece. His Russian accent is ridiculous, but Malkovich is still scary, and still riveting in his final showdown with Damon. For Rounders is surprisingly similar to a western, in its fall-and-rise-again heroic narrative structure, in its basic tenets, with its men duelling for money, and its long Leone style close-ups during the card games. The final card game is an epic battle played out almost entirely in close-up, with biscuits playing a key role. Dahl's direction is understated, with a muted colour scheme and a nicely defined use of space, and no pyrotechnics. Instead he focuses on these characters and on creating this fully realised, convincing world in which they exist. If it had been made during the 70s it would be a minor classic with an upcoming Criterion release, which is a big compliment to bestow on any film. As it is, its still a minor Classic, and you can go buy it on DVD right now...



Beautiful Girls (Ted Demme, 1996)
Scott Rosenberg was perhaps the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood at one point during the 90s. With Shane Black languishing in semi-retirement, if a producer wanted a quality brush-up on a dumb action Blockbuster, Rosenberg got the gig. He wrote Con Air (Simon West, 1997) and Gone in Sixty Seconds (Dominic Sena, 2000), but it was hard to detect any Rosenberg at all in either film except for a cracking line of dialogue here or there and the odd self-parodic wink of the eye at the audience. The film that had attracted the attention of Jerry Bruckheimer was Things to Do in Denver When you're Dead (Gary Fleder, 1995), a post-Tarantino crime movie filled with characters and situations from a thousand other pulp cliches but some great, if overly "written" dialogue. Rosenberg could write a funny line, that much was obvious. He finally showed he could write human beings and realistic relationships in Beautiful Girls. Based on his own old friends in his hometown, the film follows a successful New York Pianist (Timothy Hutton) back to his snow-covered hometown where he reconnects with his old gang of friends and observes their various failures with commitment and ageing. He has a ragged but tight crew of solidly working class guy-friends, still seeing high school girlfriends and living off former glories, played with easy charm and impeccable authenticity by Matt Dillon, Noah Emmerich, Max Perlich and Michael Rapaport. Rosenberg's script makes each a distinct figure with his own foibles and warmth, and the strength of their group bond is convincing and even a little moving.
More complex are the films women, played by Uma Thurman, Lauren Holly, Mira Sorvino, Natalie Portman, Annabeth Gish and Martha Plimpton. Rosie O'Donnell's character sums up the men's problems in a lengthy rant about unrealistic expectations based on physical beauty created by MTV and Playboy, but the film itself seems conflicted. Hutton's character seems happy to settle into a warm relationship with his longtime New York girlfriend (Gish) and is only really given pause by his instant connection with the 12 year old "Old soul" next door (Portman) and a long, revealing conversation with a Chicago dreamgirl (Thurman), but Dillion and Rapaport are overgrown adolescents, and Emmerich's marriage seems strained and uncomfortable.
Rosenberg finds solace in the warmth of friendship, in the support of family and community. Along the way there are a series of brilliant one-liners and funny monologues (Rapaport: "You let her behind the curtain, I know you did. You never let them behind the curtain, Willy. You never let them see the little old man behind the curtain working the levers of the great and powerful Oz! They are all sisters Willy... They aren't allowed back there... they mustn't see!"), there is a great soundtrack of vintage jukebox and modern indie, and the entire cast is note-perfect, particularly Portman and Dillon.
Demme used the first act of the Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) for inspiration, which explains a lot, and Rosenberg was inspired by his friend's responses to write the recent TV Series October Road, which is set in the same fictional town as Beautiful Girls, and shares many themes and ideas.



The 13th Warrior (John McTiernan, 1999)
Even at his commercial peak, John McTiernan was bafflingly underrated as a director. A master of mise en scene, he has few equals in his use of space and movement. His action scenes were, in his pomp, elegant, beautiful and muscular, but crucially always coherent and well-organised. Die Hard (1988) is perhaps the greatest action film of the 80s, transcending its own cliches even as it set them in stone for a hundred imitators, Predator (1987) is a thrilling, simultaneously bloated and pared down study of hunter vs hunted which manages to skirt Arnold Schwarzenegger's limitations as it faces him off against a creature even more alien and bizarre than he is, The Hunt for Red October (1989) is perhaps the only truly successful Tom Clancy adaptation and a great study in cinematic space, as McTiernan's camera prowls the confined setting of a nuclear submarine. Even the mostly deservedly maligned Last Action Hero (1993) has it witty moments, and is a bravely self-reflexive move on the part of this particular filmmaker. By 1999, when he came to adapt Michael Crichton's early novel "Eaters of the Dead", itself a retelling of "Beowulf", McTiernan had lost most of his clout, and the filming and editing processes were bedevilled with problems and studio interference. It is to his credit, then, that the result is such a bracing adventure film, telling this Viking legend in the style of Kurosawa with style and wit and an epic feel.
Antonio Banderas is a Muslim poet and courtier who accompanies a band of Vikings back to their homeland in the barbaric North in order to combat a terrifying, all-devouring beast. Along the way, of course, he comes to appreciate their values, courage, friendship and loyalty, while they learn to appreciate him as a Warrior and man.
The action scenes are terrific - not least the commando-style Viking raid upon the lair of the "creature" and the final attack upon the Viking fortress, shot mainly in slo-mo as the rain pelts down, in apparent homage to Seven Samurai (1954). But it is the smaller moments that best convince - Banderas gradually learning the Viking tongue just by listening and watching, his prayer before the final showdown, the Viking politics of challenge and combat put to cynical use, their contempt for his tiny arabian stallion trumped by its athleticism..
A year later Gladiator (Ridley Scott) would come out and sweep all before it, but McTiernan's film is just as good, if less overblown and more of a pure genre exercise. Now, what about a Directors Cut on DVD...?

Pick Up a Penguin

Penguin have always produced stylish, attractive books, particularly in their Classic imprints where they select classy cover images and present them in bold, simple designs. The most recent redesign of their Modern Classic range introduced an extremely modern font - Avant Garde - with white bands at the top and bottom of the cover. Often the image was recycled from the previous edition, but the new font makes a big enough difference to the overall look that every cover seemed fresh.

This year, a few new authors have been added to the Modern Classics line, which is what prompted this post. Walter Tevis has long awaited rediscovery, and Penguin have reissued his two most famous novels - The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Hustler - alongside the bafflingly neglected The Queens Gambit. Fingers crossed for a Modern Classic edition of his true masterpiece; Mockingbird. Shirley Jackson and Eric Ambler, both relatively low profile on the modern literary scene, also had three and four books republished respectively and Penguin issued an anthology of Robert E. Howard's work, Heroes In the Wind. I don't think I've ever seen quite such a subtle image on the cover of a Howard book...







All of which got me thinking about the quality of Penguin's cover art in general, and how downright beautiful so many of their books truly are:

Vintage Trailer of the Week 40

Battle of the Alpha Males - Lancaster versus Cooper. Burt hams it up, grinning that grin in more or less every shot, while Cooper is a deadpan monotone picture of calm. Robert Aldrich orchestrates some magnificent chaos and the whole thing looks amazing in glorious, luminous technicolour. That, the beautiful Sara Montiel, and that early pan around the battlements and rooftops as heads pop up make Vera Cruz as entertaining a Western as you can find from the golden Age...

"I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen".

I saw the trailer for Roland Emmerich'a undoubtedly bloated, awful piece of disaster-porn shit 2012 for the second time a while ago. And this time, beyond the tedium I had experienced on my first viewing, my main thought was this: Remember when John Cusack was sorta cool? When he still had some credibility? When he made interesting choices and good films?
He did once.
He seemed edgier than most name actors his age. He was plainly intelligent – in an articulate, witty way. He seemed like the kind of guy who would read good novels and maybe even some poetry but also like sports. Well-rounded.
A man, but sensitive.
Remember that?

His early career went almost perfectly. He came through on the fringes of the Brat Pack. He was in the same movies and the same kinds of movies but held himself apart from the likes of Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson, standing out in small parts and playing the lovable geek to near perfection in Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing (1985). He then coasted through much of the remainder of the decade, taking lead roles in mostly forgettable teen movies and smaller parts in dramas until Cameron Crowe made brilliant, immortal use of his oddly edgy appeal in Say Anything (1989). He followed that with some great work in The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990) and at that point in the early 90s he was as close to being an actual Movie Star as he has ever been. He showed that he had some depth by choosing to vary his work - taking small parts in Woody Allen films (Shadows & Fog (1991), Bullets Over Broadway (1994)) and auteur-directed projects (Map of the Human Heart (Vincent Ward, 1993), Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins, 1992) with more stock, mainstream material (True Colors (Herbert Ross, 1991), Money for Nothing (Ramon Menendez, 1993).

He never made the leap to the next level of stardom. He tends to get lost in ensembles in big films which he lacks the star power to headline, and I struggle to even remember him in so many of his films - The Road to Welville (Alan Parker, 1994), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Clint Eastwood, 1997), The Thin Red Line (Terence Malick, 1998), Cradle Will Rock (Tim Robbins, 1999). Of course there was some success. For instance, he is brilliant in Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999). But to really do his talents justice, he was forced to develop his own projects. Grosse Pointe Blank (George Armitage, 1997), which he co-wrote and co-produced is a made to measure vehicle for him: witty, urbane, just dark enough to be interesting, and playing off the nostalgia of his fanbase for those 80s teen roles. It wasn't much of a popular success, however. Nor was High Fidelity (2000, Frears), despite its successful twisting of Cusack's usual persona into a sort of cool geek everyman and adroit adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel.

Since 2000, however, it seems like Cusack has lost his radar. Maybe it happened before that. I remember reading an interview with him in the early 90s in which he was asked what was his least-favourite recent film. He replied that it was The Last Boyscout (Tony Scott, 1991), which was "fascist", among other things. Basically he claimed to hate it for its status as an empty summer blockbuster of the worst, most predictable kind. Setting aside my admiration for The Last Boyscout's hilarious Shane Black script and Bruce Willis at the height of his effortlessly smug megastardom, something about that interview always rubbed me up wrong. That feeling was worsened in 1997 when Cusack starred in Con Air (Simon West), an equally soulless, empty, even more "fascist" action blockbuster than The Last Boyscout (though it too has a funny, semi-parodic script, by Scott Rosenberg).

Since then, Cusack hasn't aged particularly well. Still relatively youthful in appearance, he lacks the gravitas or presence to play the kind of roles actors his age tend to play. This was a problem as far back as the awful City Hall (Harold Becker, 1996), in which Cusack comes over all serious and oscar bait intense and never pulls it off - though his efforts are undermined by Al Pacino at his hammiest - and never even really feels comfortable with the role or the film. In this decade, he has made fewer passion projects and taken fewer risks, instead working in a depressing series of commercial duds, from America's Sweethearts (Joe Roth, 2001) and Runaway Jury (Gary Fleder, 2003) through to Must Love Dogs (Gary David Goldberg, 2005) and Martian Child (Menno Meyjes, 2007). His interesting work is limited to Max (Meyjes, 2002) and Grace Is Gone (James C Strouse, 2007).

Which brings us to a tired-looking Cusack and 2012, and back once again to that the Last Boyscout quote all those years ago. Back then I bet Cusack could never foresee the day when he would need to make big event films in order to make the occasional film that satisfied him. But here he is, in what looks like an utterly offensive, derivative piece of excrement, and i find it hard not to feel disappointed in the man who brought Lloyd Dobler to life.
But then, as Cusacks go, Joan always was more talented...

Screengrab - MM by HHH

To my mind, the most beautiful opening sequence of the past decade is in Hou Hsiao Hsien's Milllennium Mambo (2001). A single, elegant, weightless tracking shot follows the lovely Shu Qi as she crosses a pedestrian bridge over a road at night, and in doing so sets the tone for the entirety of the film. A ghostly blue grey light fills the screen. Dance music is a distant, unconscious pulse on the soundtrack. Her narration is whispered, and it tells us the film's "story" and even suggests a theme in a few simple sentences:

"She broke up with Hao Hao, but he always tracked her down. Called her, begged her to come back. Again and Again. As if under a spell, or hypnotized, she couldn't escape. She always came back. She told herself that she had NT$500,000 in the bank. When she had used it up, she would leave him. This happened ten years ago, in the year 2001. The world was greeting the 21st century and celebrating the new millennium."

She is smoking as she walks, and her extravagant hair, shining black under the halogen glow, bounces with the youthful exuberance of her stride. She looks around and behind her often. She appears to laugh. At the end, she hops down the steps and away from the camera like an excited child. Cue title.

Vintage Trailer of the Week 39

One of the few lower budget, post-Star Wars Sci Fi features to be any good, Aaron Lipstadt's Android (1982) is a cracking little Frankenstein update with a brain, some truly wooden acting and a great ending. Plus: Kinski!

Mash-Ups

In this months Empire, which I found myself reading during a 4 hour delay at an airport, Stephen Soderbergh says this during a long interview:

"I edit stuff on my own, things that don't belong to me, just for fun, because it gives me that much pleasure. I have an hour and 50 minute version of Heavens Gate. I've got a mash-up of Hitchcocks Psycho and Van Sants Psycho, which I call Psychos."

I want to see both of those Soderbergh mash-ups. Psychos sounds especially great. what sort of radical cuts to Heavens Gate would a sensibility like Soderbergh's make? These should be extras on future dvds.

So that got me to thinking of other mash-ups, or radical re-edits that anybody with the right technology and enough time could do. Like that Jar Jar Binks-less version of The Phantom Menace some fanboy made back when anybody still cared about Phantom Menace and the fact that it had sucked so bad. For instance, a mash-up of Casino and Goodfellas focused on the Joe Pesci character, who is a broadly similar type in both movies. Or all three Lord of the Rings movies edited down into two hours, cutting out all the emotional bombast, most of the overlong, derivative battle scenes with their dodgy CGI and much of the windy, cod-Shakesperian speechifying about the 'age of man' etc. Would two hours even remain? I'm sure Soderbergh could find them.

Or how about a long, rambling Altman-esque London tale mashing all three of Woody Allen's London films into a multi-stranded panorama called Scoop Point Dream. They are all set in a tourist London of upper-middle class Kensington apartments and nights at the theatre mingling with the landed gentry unrecognisable to most people who actually live in the City, and the moral charge and erotic sizzle of Match Point might actually give Scoop some weight and make Cassandras Dream bearable. Or maybe not. The two utterly different characters played by Scarlett Johansson, meanwhile, would turn the whole thing into a bizarre study of split personalities and social compartmentalisation. Sounds riveting.

The climax of Cinema Paradiso features a mash-up montage of sorts, and I envisage a similar scene, editing dozens of boxing scenes together, beginning in beautiful black and white with The Set-Up and moving through Champion and Somebody Up There Likes Me and Body and Soul and even Raging Bull - nothing but punches thrown and taken, feints and grapples, knock-outs and recoveries - before bursting into beautiful colour for Kid Galahad and continuing through Rocky and Fat City and Ali and Cinderella Man. It sounds like an advert, I know, but it would be a dazzling advert...

Haiku 3

Two hours twenty is
Way too long for a bromance
Without the great Paul Rudd.

Vintage Trailer of the Week 38

Steven Soderbergh's post-Sex, Lies & Videotape commercial lean patch included this terrific coming-of-age movie, set during the great depression. Much more tough and gritty than this trailer suggests

Other Activities

Recently I've posted a couple of things at my Blog dedicated exclusively to football, so if you like the football writing I've done on this site, you should probably check them out here:

http://golgolgolgolgol.blogspot.com/

I've also started another blog which is a little more focused in its subject matter. It'll be a lot of pieces I couldn't really find a viable forum for elsewhere and don't fit in to what this blog is now. I wrote a "What If" blog about Michael Reeves a few years ago, which is one of my favourite posts and this entire blog will be in a similar vein. I obviously won't be posting there as often as I do here, but hopefully should manage one every month or so:

http://nodirectorhome.blogspot.com/

Screengrab - The Montage of Montages

Some bad movies contain scenes that stay with you. Scenes that tap into something universal, something true, perhaps. Or just scenes that are shocking - a moment of stunning violence, a jolt that will be what you come away from the film with. Scenes that are brilliantly mounted - an immortal shot, maybe, the staging of an event in a new way. You know what I mean. You can probably think of an example, right off the bat. This happens with great movies too. Some scenes just shine out of the films that house them, their power, their quality irresistible.

In the 1970s, Alan J Pakula was in the zone. He made a handful of magnificent films, each reminiscent of the last in its exploration of the unique atmosphere of that decade - the paranoia, the sense of a culture veering out of control - each an expansion on the last, in its way. This process climaxed with "All the Presidents Men" in 1976, a real-life detective story starring two of the most popular actors of the era which took a fiendishly complex sequence of events and made a gripping, enthralling and accessible movie out of them. Its also one of the best-directed films of the decade. But the film Pakula had made two years earlier is just as good - a taut, tight, terrifying conspiracy thriller with an unapologetically bleak ending and some unforgettable moments. Such as the opening assassination scene, oblique and disturbing and reminiscent of the murder of Robert Kennedy a few years earlier. Or the semi-comic bar brawl the hero deliberately involves himself in, in some town in the middle of nowhere. Or the moment he follows a man onto a plane and realises that said man intends to bomb the plane - when they have already taken off. Or the moment we realise just how in deep he is, and also realise that he hasn't realised yet. Or the unbelievable gut punch of a climax.



If you've seen "The Parallax View", however, then the scene that you will probably best recall is the Montage. Reporter Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty, someone else who had a fantastic 1970s) has gone deep undercover in order to infiltrate the Parallax Corporation, which he believes is involved in a Political Assassination and several subsequent "accidental" deaths. He gradually realises that Parallax is in fact an Assassination bureau, and that he has been called in for an interview. And that a big part of that interview will involve him viewing a film while his reactions are monitored - a sort of psychological litmus test, with psychosis the desired finding.

The film itself is a montage of stills set to an instrumental orchestral/rock backing. The stills include keywords - MOTHER, FATHER, ME, HOME, HAPPINESS, ENEMY - which each kick off a sequence of images. At first the images are comforting, warmly folksy and associative - stock photographs with classic, timeless feeling hanging in them. An old couple sitting together. A young father with his son in a backpack. Baseball. The White House. A woman with her baby. An obviously American house set in a green garden beneath a blue sky. The music is gentle and melodic, elegiac, almost nostalgic. On the second round of words, the editing quickens its pace just slightly, and the juxtaposition of images becomes more problematic and complex. After a comforting, nostalgic shot under "MOTHER", we see a weeping woman, for instance. On the third round, as the music becomes more aggressive and insistent, even martial, the images become disturbing. We see shots of brutality and violence and the sexual shots become more explicit and coarse.





It gets more disturbing - the editing faster, the images cropped and played off one another wonderfully. An extended passage suggests incest - shots of a naked couple entwined juxtaposed with shots of an archetypal mother figure - and homosexual parental abuse then equates happiness with a gleaming revolver. Enemy is mingled with home so that images of famous patriots and Presidents are side by side with shots of Hitler, all of it periodically interrupted with shots of military men and firearms. Violent images recur every few beats, almost like punctuation for every breathless theme. The Marvel hero Thor becomes a motif - the heroic ideal of 'ME' in the latter stages, which tail off in a quiet coda, returning to the tempo, lyricism and comfort of the opening moments.






At its peak, however, there is a nightmarish rhythm to the flow of images, distorting associative power and using suggestion brilliantly. Nazis and the White House, naked couples with homosexual imagery, violence with MOTHER, poverty with FATHER, guns with HAPPINESS, and so on. Whether it has any resemblance to the kind of thing that would evoke a specific reaction in a psychotic personality I have no idea, but as a piece of cinema, its works magnificently well, and only adds to the precise, creepy mood of the film.
Here it is, in full:

Signature Shots: Spike Lee

I had a long internal debate about what to entitle this (hopefully) continuing series. Signature shots or "Irritating tics"?
Because the difference between the two seems to be minimal in many cases.

Take Spike Lee. He likes to use a dolly shot, which isn't uncommon, of course. Except he mounts his actor on the dolly so that they glide right along with the camera. In close up, generally, altough occasionally he'll set the actor a little further back in the frame. He is a serious Director and he has made, in my opinion, a few genuinely great films in Do The Right Thing, The 25th Hour and When the Levees Broke, and I don't believe this shot is just a flashy example of ostentatious directorial style, as it might be in some director's work. Its an extremely risky shot - so contrived and pronounced that it always seems a statement of sorts, a declaration of the directors presence in a way few other single shots equal. I think Lee uses it to signal that a character is in an altered state - either that they have reached a sort of enlightenment, that they are in a psychological or emotional fugue or that they are not truly present in their immediate reality. In Malcolm X, he uses it as Malcolm approaches the Aubudon, where he will be assassinated. Here it is as if Malcolm is walking to his own death, fully aware and paranoid, and not quite feeling the everyday act of strolling in the street as most men might.



Which is laudable. But Lee has used it too often. If I see it in a Lee film now, I groan. And invariably, I do see it in a Lee film. He seems unable or unwilling to refrain from using this shot for very long. He varies the angle (sometimes above, sometimes slightly below, sometimes eye level) and the length of the shot and the movement involved, but it shows up too often in his work. Its perhaps best utilised in The 25th Hour, where Lee's camera glides serenely around post 9/11 New york, a place in which everyone seems to be in some traumatised state of altered consciousness.
But it doesn't matter what approach the material demands - even in a piece of (admittedly good) hackwork like Inside Man, Lee can't resist. It almost feels as if hes doing it to keep himself amused...



The shot it most reminds me of is a Scorsese shot from Mean Streets, where he mounts a camera to Harvey Keitel's chest. A drunken Keitel then stumbles around a party, the camera recording his every twitch and guffaw, tied as closely to his face as it is, but also suggesting the chaotic, sickening abandon of his night out. The Scorsese shot feels a lot more organic and a lot less controlled, and hence draws less attention to itself.
But then Scorsese has always had a sort of genius for justifying a spectacular, showy shot thematically or narratively. its one of the elements that made him such a brilliant director in his early career. Spike Lee, for all of his admirable qualities, possesses no such genius, and his stylistic flourishes often seem just that.