Tuesday's Overlooked Movie, or actually a loads of them

Theodore Rex: doncha just love 'em?

We held another movie festival at the cabin loaded with all kinds of weird stuff just last weekend. Here are the films we watched:

Race with the Devil, 1975 **½ (Warren Oates and Peter Fonda on the run from the hick satanists, not bad, but not memorable, except for the ending)
Gymkata, 1985 * or ***** (really stupid martial arts film that never slows down and is actually pretty good entertainment if you're drunk and with lots of friends around)
Beast in Space AKA La bestia nello spazio, 1980 * or ***** (absolutely inane and absurdly cheap space flick made with the same plot as Walerian Borowczyk's artsy horror film The Beast and the same lead actor, Finnish-born Sirpa Lane)
Wake in Fright, 1971 **** (Australian film thought being lost, but found in the early 2000's, very noirish stuff about a guy who gets stuck in the middle of nowhere with lots of Aussie drunks fooling around and shooting kangaroos just for the fun of it, Ted Kotcheff's strong direction)
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, 2010 **½ (mildly funny I Walk the Line parody with some good music, but almost 30 minutes too long)

Die Wand: human and nature

Die Wand, 2012 **** (or even ****½) (I'd seen this earlier, but wanted to show it to my friends: grim, ecological and possibly post-apocalyptic anti-thriller, with lots of gorgeous mountain scenery, made in Austria of all places, based on Marlen Haushofer's novel from the sixties)
The Foetus, 1997 **½ (Finnish lost film from the nineties which I've managed to salvage on VHS, uneasy mix of extreme gore, extreme perversions and highly experimental editing and storytelling, irritating at best, but almost always interesting, luckily only 40 minutes long)
The Last Circus AKA Balada triste de trompeta, 2010 *** (inventive, wild and unpredictable, but not very interesting thematically, the first film by Alex de la Inglesia I've liked)
Copkiller AKA L'assassino dei poliziotti, 1983 ***½ (see my earlier review here)
Vampire's Kiss, 1988 * or ***** (awful but funny "Nicolas Cage goes ape-shit crazy" vampire film from the yuppie era)
Theodore Rex, 1995 * (so awful I wanted to eat my brains, luckily it was very late and I was very drunk)
El ángel exterminador, 1962 ***** (one of Buñuel's masterpieces, very eerie drama of upper-class jerks who are suddenly not able to leave the room of a house they're in)
The Mechanic, 1972 **½ (Bronson actioneer trying to be deep, better when there's only action on the screen)

More Overlooked Films here. (And here's the lowdown on the last year's Cabin Film Festival.)

Mädchen in Uniform (1931)

I managed to see this German cult film about a girl dormitory recently and I thought it was worth blogging, even though it's not Tuesday and the Overlooked Films meme. The film is a rare example of an all-female cast.

The beautiful film by Leontine Sagan is a look at teenage girls' love life that develops in a dormitory governed by a tough mistress. There's also a young teacher who cares for the girls and at times lets them get near her - and one of the girls, a new one called Manuela, falls in love with her, with tragic results.

The film is both frank and tender, at times with striking visuals and sensual erotics, and it must've caused quite a buzz at the time. I think the film was also ahead of its time as for the girls' appearance. Many of them look like they could be from any decade, not just the Germany of the early thirties. Especially Hertha Thiele as Manuela is very stylish in her chignon (she's very pretty, too). It's tempting to read the film as a critic of dictatorship (under which Germany was soon to fall), but it also might be projecting later incidents into the past.

Mädchen in Uniform is a very interesting and beautiful film, not to be overlooked by anyone seriously interested in the history of cinema. It's possible the film has no official English title, IMDb gives these two: Girls in Uniform and Maidens in Uniform.

Django Unchained and The Paperboy

Sorry, I've been quite busy lately trying to work out some new books. Here's a quick post of two films I saw recently and thought might be of interest to the readers of Pulpetti.

Django Unchained: the first Tarantino I really liked since Jackie Brown. I hated Kill Bill 1, liked the second part slightly better and was pretty bored with Death Proof. (I haven't seen Unglourious Basterds yet, but I'll try to watch it soon.) In Django Unchained Tarantino's grandeur that veers toward bad taste is in good balance with the drama and there are some very good moments throughout, not to mention some very good actors. I liked this a lot.

The Paperboy: gritty neo-noir film about some low-life trash and some idealistic newspapermen in the deep South in 1969, based on a novel by Pete Dexter. I liked this, too, but there seems to be something missing from the film and I can't quite put my finger on it. Nicole Kidman and John Cusack are brilliant in this, they walk on the edge of overacting all the time.

Ridley Scott: Prometheus

I've always liked the Alien movies and have a soft spot in my heart for almost each one of them. There's much to like even in David Fincher's Alien3 and almost in Alien Resurrection as well (don't mention the Alien Vs. Predator movies here). I was almost excited to see Ridley Scott's Prometheus, though I must admit I haven't particularly cared for anything Scott has done since, with the possible exception of Thelma and Louise. (I don't actually much care for Blade Runner either, but to be able to say something precise about it, I'd have to see it again.) Especially Gladiator left me utterly cold.

Prometheus has an intriguing, if over-developed and over-familiar premise (von Däniken, anyone?). I liked the way the film seemed to say: there's no point thinking about whether your God likes you, you have to go on living nevertheless. But the film also has lots of meaningless subplots and too many characters that are not developed enough. When you think "now this is finally getting somewhere", the film ends. (And the ending is particularly stupid.) There's still some nice tension-building throughout and some spectacular scenes. I liked the way this is an Alien film without actually having any Aliens (save the end).

The Raid: Redemption

I saw this new Indonesian action movie earlier today and I can echo Vince Keenan's sentiments when he wrote this piece on his blog. I thought some of the kung fu scenes were a bit too long (for some reason I like it better when a guy tackles 20 other guys, but less when there are only two or three, as in the longest battle scene of the film), but nevertheless this was great entertainment. I liked especially how the important plot points were hidden in quick, snappy dialogue. They didn't develop the things for too long, which is alway good. (Someone actually complained me just yesterday that my novel Jumalten tuho is too quick in introducing the characters. What, you wanted to hear two pages of telling what he eats and did twenty years ago?)

Lots of overlooked movies

I was going to do this on Tuesday, but I just haven't had time for this kind of thing lately as I've been teaching at the university (creative writing? what do I know about that?) and it seems to take away the energy and everything. So, the thing was that I spent weekend at the cabin with six friends of mine watching movies all the time and drinking booze and not much else. Here's the list of the film we watched, with my starred reviews and Wikipedia and other links. Any of these could be a contender for Todd Mason's Overlooked Movies blog meme!

William Witney: Master of the World (1961) **½ (Vincent Price, Charles Bronson, Jules Verne and Richard Matheson, but still pretty dated)
Allen Baron: Blast of Silence (1961) ***½ (here's my earlier blog post about the film)
Jack Sholder: Alone in the Dark (1982) ** (could've benefited from sticking to the weirdness it starts out with)
Eli Craig: Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010) *** (quite funny at times)
Mario Bava: Rabid Dogs (1974) *** (pretty suspenseful and nasty [see the photo], stays cinematic even though set inside one car for about 80 % of the running time)
William Klein: Mr. Freedom (1969) ***½ (very funny political oddity, very outrageous and purposefully stupid and in-your-face)
Peter Bogdanovich: Targets (1968) **** (pretty effective and well made early portrait of a mass killer, Boris Karloff is great in this)
Narciso Ibanez Serrador: House that Screamed (1969) *** (slow-moving but effective piece of erotic Euro-horror)
Neil LaBute: Wicker Man *½ (might've been something if Nicholas Cage didn't chew up the scenery so (in)famously, still - or because of that? - very funny)
Elliot Silverstein: The Car ** (always wanted to see this, but isn't actually much, the titular car is quite good)
Antonio Margheriti: Cannibal Apocalypse ** (sounds great, but doesn't amount to much of anything, the beginning in Vietnam is good, though)
Tommy Wiseau: The Room * or ***** (unbelievable narcissistic crap, poorly done, weirdly written and very strangely acted, very, very, very funny almost all the time)

We also started Manos, the Hands of Fate, but it was so goddamn awful we had to stop 15 minutes in. Plus we watched several short subjects, like Jacques Drouin's animations and Tex Avery and episodes of  Family Guy etc. So, you can pretty much gather we had a good time!

John Carter of Mars

I recently saw John Carter of Mars, the 3D film version of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars novels. The film has been getting rather mixed reviews, but I thought it was entertaining and well-made. The 3D effect is believable and didn't make me nauseous nor give me a headache. The Mars landscape (Marscape?) is very well made and the monsters and other creations look good. (Some people seem to think the tharks don't look at all what they've had in mind, but this is bound to happen everytime someone makes a film out of a loved book.)

I have some reservations, though. The drama is rushed at points, and important stuff is bypassed too fast. The main actors are not very interesting - I already forgot their names -, though Dejah Thoris looks great. (Her transformation into a sword-yielding science woman is a good thing, a trembling Victorian-era princess would be stupid in 2012, though the science bit isn't very convincing. Her sword-yielding and good physics seem to serve up to those nerdy teenagers who like to fantasize about sword-yielding princesses. The Dojah Thoris of the film might not be someone with whom the female audience empathizes with.) The battle scenes are at times confusing and sometimes even not very exciting. The main baddies (the priests of Iss) are over-written.

My main gripe is that the film is too damn serious! Some have said it's stupid and full of fluff, but I thought the movie could've benefited from being funnier, more ironic in the good old swashbuckling manner. John Carter's transformation into a cynical loner seems forced, but than again the cynical anti-hero has become almost a cliché in the recent times. The tharks are not entertainingly hostile anymore, they are just plain hostile. Tars Tarkas's heroics feel imposed upon. The frame story with the Martian priests on Earth also feels forced - it also feels like they're going to do a TV series on this. But with these reservations I'd give the film something like two and a half out of five.

I also reread the first two Mars books by Burroughs, with the new cover illustrations by Ossi Hiekkala (see the photo above). The better of the two is the second one, The Gods of Mars. The story never slows down during the first 100 pages. It's pure wonder of story-telling. The first one, however, seems even haphazard at times. The genre rules of the Victorian time also slow the story down. The magic is still there, though, and Burroughs remains one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Nota bene: I edited the bit about Dojah Theris's transformation, as I happened to read someone else's opinion on that and I got to thinking about it again.

Xanadu!

I've never seen Xanadu, but Vince Keenan's blog post about it is very funny and actually thought-provoking.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: The Marquise of O

In Arthur Penn's seminal private eye film, Night Moves, Gene Hackman says that watching an Eric Rohmer film is like watching paint dry on the wall. Hackman is not a nice man in the film, so everything he says should be approached with caution.

Especially when Rohmer makes films as beautiful and stunning as his (only?) historical film, The Marquise of O (1976; the same year as Penn's film!). It's based on a story by Heinrich "Mikael Kohlhaas" von Kleist and it's about a widow who gets mysteriously pregnant after being saved from some village savages by a Russian count (played by Bruno Ganz). The sets are very well done, the compositions are beautiful (I believe Rohmer has stolen some images from the famous paintings of the era; see the image on the left), the dialogue is very funny in its pompousness and German strictness, and the story is moving. What more can you possibly want? The film is absolutely hypnotic, even without music (yes, this is an European art film without any music). My only gripe with the film is that the ending, the last line of the film seems a bit too ironical.

More Overlooked Films here.

PS. And oh, I could also mention The Jack Bull, a rather recent TV western I watched some weeks ago, because it's based on "Mikael Kohlhaas", von Kleist's best-known story. The transition of the 16th century Europe to the late 19th century Wild West is made quite well, but I didn't buy John Cusack as a Western character, for some reason or another. Recommended otherwise.

Winterbottom's Killer Inside Me

Michael Winterbottom's controversial rendering of Jim Thompson's famous paperback original, The Killer Inside Me, didn't seem to make much impact in Finland. Maybe we're so used to looking at helpless women getting beaten and kicked to death we don't care. Many commentators here said the film is lame.

I watched the film recently on DVD and have to wonder: lame? what the fuck? I didn't see anything lame about this - it was a very powerful and unsettling experience, even though I'm pretty accustomed to read about rapes and beatings.

Winterbottom's film is very close to Thompson, but stays away from going into killer Lou Ford's head. He's seen from the outside, his own comments in the voice-over narration don't do much to deepen what we already see. I think this might be what makes the film lame to others. They want to see some crazy stuff happening, the guy going really insane and saying "boo!" and thinking perverse thoughts all the time. This stuff doesn't happen here - it would be just too easy and public-pleasing - and I really think this is the best way to film Jim Thompson.

I realized watching this that's it's been almost 20 years, since I read Thompson's novel. About time to revisit it, especially when the film made some things clearer that I hadn't understood the first time around. But I do remember that I wrote a review of the then new Finnish translation and compared it to Ellis's American Psycho and Donna Tartt's The Secret History, under the headline "The American Nihilism", and came to the conclusion that Thompson outwins both Ellis and Tartt in the harshness of his vision.

Cuban film The First Charge of Machete

Before my Christmas wishes I wanted to say something short about a stupendous film I recently saw: it's a Cuban agit prop/art film The First Charge of Machete from 1969, directed by Manuel Octavio Gómez. It's a retelling of the Cuban rebellion against the Spanish in the 1860's, but the point in the film is how it's made: it's as if the style of the sixties' cinéma vérité style had been invented already in the mid-19th century and the movie was made as if the rebels, the Spanish officers and several people on the street were interviewed by the film crew, and there are lots of hand-held camera shots. The main point in the film, though, is that the film has been artificially rendered almost totally black-and-white, there are scenes in which the pictures have no grey areas anywhere. You could almost say: "Sin City, eat your heart out! These guys did it already!"

Especially the battle scenes that have been shot with hand-held cameras are very, very striking. You could say: "Steven Spielberg, eat your heart out!" I mean, these guys did already 40 years ago what Spielberg tried to do with his Saving Private Ryan. There's also no sentimentality that jars the Spielberg film. The First Charge of Machete is also clearly a political film: there's no doubt it's about the Cuban revolution and also the Vietnam war, with the Spanish playing the role of the US, telling that they only want to bring peace and comfort to the Cuban people who've asked for their presence during these troubled times. The machete of the title refers to the only weapon the poor Cubans have. It's the fist of the proletariat, the film seems to be saying. (I wonder if Robert Rodriguez has seen this. I mean, doesn't his Machete have the same theme?)

The Cuban film meets of course quite a few problems, especially the question why the film has deteriorated so badly if the film as a medium existed already in the 1860s? If they have come to the same narrative conclusions as the original cinéma vérité directors of the 1950s and 1960s (Jean Roach, the Maysles brothers, D. A. Pennebaker etc.), why does the film look it's over hundred years old? It would mean that they  made the first films already in the late 18th century, not late 19th century, as the case is now.

But this doesn't really marr the film's impact. The battle scenes are very, very exciting, one of the most exciting ever put on celluloid.

Here's a longish quote from the book The Film as Subversive Art (thanks to Mies Mikkonen for the quote):

"Possibly the most "aesthetic" and "experimental" of revolutionary Cuba's films, this outstanding work utilizes high contrast photography, overexposure, and solarization to create the faded chiaroscuro and poetic authenticity of the period it depicts. The film deals with an 1870 uprising against the Spanish occupation troops in Cubam in which the machete originally used to cut sugar cane, becomes a weapon of people's warfare. The portrayals of decadent upper classes and heroic peasants are sharp and incisive, and distancing devices - such as the characters addressing the camera - are used the induce attitudes of analysis instead of involvement. The emergence of such a strongly poetic work within the Cuban film industry testifies to the divergent aesthetic tendencies permitted expression within the revolution."

eBay has a DVD on sale.

Two Ken Bruen films coming - and the first Finnish translation

Ken Bruen's excellent noir novel London Boulevard (2001) will be published in Finnish by Arktinen Banaani next Spring. The film based on the book will hit the big screen in the UK on November 26th and in the US February 2011. Which will probably be the European release date as well - and also the release date of the Finnish edition.

Here's the trailer and some more info for the film, written and directed by William Monahan, starring Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley. The book is a clever pastiche on Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, but also a hard-hitting crime novel in its own right.

Ken Bruen's other novel, Blitz (2002), will also be released as a film pretty soon. The film will star Jason Statham, which might turn some people away, but the trailer here seems as gritty as they come.

Rare Clint Eastwood western

Over a week ago, at the annual Summer meeting of the Finnish Western Society, paradoxically called "pukkujoulut ("Lidl Christmas" or something like that), held in Oulu we watched a rare Western movie from the fifties that's reportedly never been released on VHS or DVD. Ambush at Cimarron Pass (1958) would be totally forgotten these days if it didn't star the young Clint Eastwood in his first film to get a screen credit. He's billed third in the opening credits, but there was a rerelease - probably later in the sixties, after his Italian Westerns - in which he was credited first.

The film is not a B-picture, as someone might have an urge to call it. It's more like a cheap A-western, shot in black & white Cinemascope (or actually Regalscope). The film was written by prolific pulpster and later prolific B-picture writer John K. Butler (whose Steve Midnight stories from the Dime Detective are very good), and I think this shows in the dialogue. It's very crispy at times: "What happened to him? He's much nicer now than before." "The Indians made him nice."

Otherwise the film's virtues pretty much end there. Eastwood isn't very good - he plays a young, hot-headed Southerner, who's in with a ragtag crowd of other Southerners who haven't given up the fight after the Civil War. Eastwood grins uncomfortably through the film, and one won't give him a long future on silver screen. Scott Brady, the first-billed star of the flick, plays a Yankee officer who leads a small gang of soldiers. They end up ambushed by some Indians - we never see much of them and they act pretty stupidly. (Which is of course a Western cliché, but these guys are really dumb. And there's not too many close-ups of them. Maybe their contract with the studio didn't say anything about the close-ups. Actually there are not too many close-ups of other actors either.)

My biggest problem with the film - beside that it's wooden and doesn't pack much suspense - is how the only female character is portrayed very stupidly. Her whole family is slaughtered, even to the smallest kid, and yet she tries to hit on all the men she sees, with a greedy lust in her eyes. Maybe she's gone into a severe shock after traumatic events? And yeah, okay, the film ends more abruptly than anything I've seen in a long time.

Eastwood has been reported saying that Ambush at Cimarron Pass is "the lousiest Western ever made". In this interview he says the film almost destroyed his career, because he thought he never wanted to act again. (His wife talked him out of the decision, and then came Rawhide.) Is it because of Eastwood the film has never been released on video? Has he put a ban on it? It seems the film can be seen occasionally on something called Western Channel. Our version was taped from a small Finnish cable channel in the mid-eighties and transferred to DVD. We had a great time watching the film, as we had a small cinema at our use. I bet there are not that many people alive who have seen this on silver screen.

There's a long comment on IMDb here, which contradicts a lot of things I've said here. It is true that I fell asleep in the middle and maybe all the good parts came during those 5-10 minutes. See also this blog post. Seems like there's an illegal download doable from here.

Frank Miller's and Zack Snyder's 300

Last Friday night we were out having fun with my friends from our victorious movie pub quiz team. Between hopping from one bar to another, we were at one of my team mate's place and watched the Blu-Ray edition of the movie 300. Someone might think that I'd go for a movie about sword-yielding Spartans, but I thought - and all of my friends - the movie sucked big time. There were several points in the movie that I really disliked.

First. There's no plot. The movie is basically one long battle scene. There is some intrigue behind the lines, but not enough to merit a mention. I think the same marred Ridley Scott's Gladiator for me: the plot wasn't just interesting enough.

Second. The movie is full of empty posturing. The dialogue is silly and full of meaningless one-liners. The movie is directed with a bent toward empty posturing. Some of the battle scenes are not very exciting, since Snyder likes to stop the action by showing blood flow in slow motion or some such nonsense. Everything looks nice on a photo, but the drama just doesn't move along.

Third. The movie is politically so appalling that you feel like John Milius is a Commie pinko. It's not very hard to understand that Sparta is the USA, the ugly, hideous and back-stabbing witches are the UN and the Persians are - well, Persians (or Iraqis). Miller and Snyder like to show everyone else but Spartans are ugly or weak (the other Greeks that come to help the Spartans; they are presumably the British). Or a homosexual and a pervert - when Xerxes, the King of the Persians, came on the scene I burst out laughing and started to sing Sylvester's disco classic "You Make Me Feel Mighty Real". The movie also shows that the conflict between Persia and Sparta is one-sided, that the Persians just move in on Sparta - oh poor, poor Sparta!

Aside from the political overtones (they really not undertones) of 300, it's possible to see the plotlessness and the slow-motion being good examples of the new Hollywood cinema that's more based on videogames and their aesthetique, and not on old-fashioned drama, like Spartacus or Ben-Hur. It's more about the cinema of attraction rather than drama. It's also possible to see that these new historical films take the genre back to the its older roots, the ancient myths, Greek myths, Beowulf, etc., where the plot is not the crucial matter. However, I can't stop thinking that both Gladiator and 300 are just utter bores.

John Hillcoat's The Road

For once I had a chance to go to movies last Sunday. I picked John Hillcoat's The Road, thinking it was by the Coen brothers - perhaps they'd've made another Cormac McCarthy film? But no, I remembered the real director when I got to the movie theatre.

I didn't mind, since the film was excellent. The postapocalyptic scenes were so overwhelmingly desolate and grey, almost without colours, I was on the verge of bursting into tears almost throughout the movie. I also thought the usual problem with road movies - there's not enough tension in what happens with everything just taking place one scene after another - was largely gone. This was a very exciting movie.

There were some scenes that were a bit too sentimental, and I didn't find the ending totally satisfying, but there was also a twist that set everything seen before it in a new light and gave it another level of meaning. I was worried for a minute, though, that this might become a cult classic for some extremists who think a new nation can be built upon total destruction (à la The Turner Diaries), but then again they would be idiots. (Has never stopped anyone before, has it, though?)

This got worse reviews than it really deserved. I'm sure it will be recognized as an American classic in ten or twenty years.

And would someone please publish a Finnish translation of McCarthy's Blood Meridian?

Steven Soderbergh's The Good German

The Good German is a film about Americans in Berlin just after the Second World War. George Clooney is a reporter who gets mixed up in international intrigue that has to do with concentration camps and the Nazis' attempt to build rocket missiles. The film is based on Joseph Kanon's novel, but I haven't read that one; Kanon is well-respected, though.

I saw a comment somewhere that this just isn't Casablanca. I don't think that's an apt comparison, since this is far more brutal and cynical than Casablanca. True, Soderbergh uses a very stylish technique that brings back images of film noir and the Expressionistic films of the thirties, with their back-projections and dark shadows. But this is still something else than Casablanca, a look into a dark world that almost entirely abandons the romanticism of Casablanca. This is more noir than Casablanca ever was.

That said I must admit that The Good German didn't win me over totally. It's still far more about style than content. Especially the end left me pretty cold, even though the big revelation comes at the last minute. It has something to do with the fact that Cate Blanchett's character never comes as alive as one would like her to be. (There are conflicting opinions in the IMDb I provided above.)

Kiss Me Deadly, once again

I finally saw the real ending of Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, when it was shown late last night on Finnish television. The film itself I saw at least for the sixth time, and it never stops to amaze me.

There's been some debate about whether this, the original ending, is really better than the false ending we've come to know. Okay, it's really unrelenting in the false ending when we never see Mike Hammer and Velda escape the exploding house, but it's always been a bit clumsy and rushed. Some have said that Aldrich foresaw the metafictional techniques of the New Wave of the sixties: when the world goes mad, the films must give up their old narratives and go mad. Yeah, right. They were thinking that in the fifties' Hollywood.

Let's go through this once more: Aldrich was a director who liked to show off how marvellous he is. Look at some of the camera drives in Vera Cruz. The man who made those couldn't have made anything like the false ending of Kiss Me Deadly. These traits show also in Kiss Me Deadly: the backward opening credits, the smooth camera drives from rears of the cars, the short camera drive in the scene in which the truck driver tells Hammer that the man he drove over was pushed*, the editing in the fight scenes (Hammer beating a guy at top of the long stairs, Sugar Smallhouse and Charlie Max fighting in the water with Hammer). They are fast, fluid, furious, never clumsy or crude. How could one think that this guy could've done the false ending of Kiss Me Deadly?

There are some glitches in the film, though. When Christina Bailey is being tortured and we see only her legs (and hear her screaming), her legs don't move. That's clumsy, but forgivable. When Mike Hammer is being tied down to a bed and Dr. Soberin walks into the room and starts talking, we see only his shoes and trousers. We hear him talk, but there's something clumsy about his appearance. It seems clearly that he's not speaking aloud in those scenes. This may have been done on purpose, to heighten the nightmarish quality of Hammer's condition.

There are also some scenes that make some of the ironic hipster audience giggle, like Velda doing her exercise badly (I think that must be done on purpose) or Carl Evello's half-sister sucking up on Mike Hammer. That was parody of the private eye clichés already when the film was made, and the fact that the sister's behaviour is never fully explained actually increases the absurd feel of the film.

I think David Lynch learned everything from this film (plus Sunset Boulevard). You always have a feeling everything is not explained and you're witnessing a dream. Just see the scene in which Carl Evello talks to the tied-up Hammer and repeats: "Remember me." If that doesn't remind you of Twin Peaks, then nothing does. (Or then you haven't seen Twin Peaks.) In the end you also have the flashing lights that are seen in every film Lynch has made, from Eraserhead on. And I'm pretty sure the house that explodes backwards in Lost Highway (Lynch's best film, if you ask me) is a reference to Kiss Me Deadly, as is also Bill Pullman, who looks a lot like Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer. (I've been wondering whether the fact that Jack Nicholson in Chinatown looks like Ralph Meeker is a coincidence or a pun on Polanski's and Nicholson's part. Both films strip private eye of his heroics.)

I'm no fan of Mickey Spillane and his books. I grant he was very, very influential, but I'm a bit sad to notice that he's been replacing Ross Macdonald as the third part in the hardboiled trinity beside Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. That must say something essential about our time. My doubts about Spillane's merits is one of the reasons I like Kiss Me Deadly so much: it shows what kind of guy Hammer really is. I've always wondered how some fans of Spillane like Ralph Meeker and say he's the best Hammer player on screen, while he's clearly incapable of doing right decisions, is a bit stupid, falls for traps and enjoys making his secretary flirt with old men and listening to the sleazy tapes Velda makes of her meetings. And he's a sadist, enjoys beating other people and smashing things. Yeah, the people he beats up are baddies, sure, and yeah, he's angry when he beats the morgue attendant (great scene, that) and the athletic club clerk, sure. Sure. This man is not a hero.

There are so many things I like about Kiss Me Deadly that I could go on and on writing about it, but real life is calling me (gotta take a shower and start preparing lunch for family). If I have the time and energy, I'll write something about whether Aldrich really wanted to make a travesty of Mike Hammer. If I don't, please see James Naremore's discussion on the film in his book, More Than Night.

* The truck driver looks like James Woods in the scene, doesn't he?

Monte Hellman: The Shooting

I just saw Monte Hellman's enigmatic western film The Shooting, for the first time on big screen, I think. I had seen the movie earlier at least two times, but both times from television only, and with a wrong picture ratio. I'm loving the film more each time I see it.

There are lots of things to like about The Shooting. It may not suit any western fan's tastes, and I believe there are more people who are not into westerns, but like Hellman's film, than there are people who love westerns and still like Hellman's film. Get it? That might've been a bit convoluted... The atmosphere is very eerie, nothing is ever very clearly explained and there's a feel of absurd theatre. The photography is great, with people running in a distance from one edge of a picture to another. There also lots of extreme close-ups, like when we see Jack Nicholson's eyes for the first time. There's not much action and when there is, it's not exactly very thrilling, but that's not what Hellman has set out to do.

Someone might ask: "What has set out to do then?", and I have to admit the answer is not very clear. There's not much symbolism in the film, which coincides with the feel of absurdism. Someone might get some clues from the names of the characters, which may - or may not - point to some moments in American cultural history. Hellman himself said that the shooting in the end is meant to resemble the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby - there's a newsreel grittiness to the picture, alright, but otherwise I find it pretty far-fetched.

What's the most important thing about this film, to me, at least, is that it's a perfect embodiment of American cinematic art, emphasis on "American". The Shooting, regardless of the absurdist feel to it, is essentially an American film. There are no elements of French New Wave brought to it. The Shooting is not self-reflective, as something by Jean-Luc Godard might be. Even though it's a piece of absurdism, The Shooting is still a B-western, populated with smirking hired guns, saloons, horses, saddles, six-shooters, Indians, a tough lady, deserts. You could watch this in a drive-in and, well, feel cheated, but you wouldn't be able easily to recognize it as art.

The later American art films, of the late sixties and early seventies, have a European feel to them, and I've always thought there's something phony about it, starting from Bonnie and Clyde. Not so with The Shooting. Hellman's western is something Budd Boetticher might have done had he gone on directing westerns in the sixties, and it's also something Elmore Leonard's western novels, like Valdez Is Coming (which admittedly came a bit later), were going to. The idea of one man suddenly standing alone in the desert (take a look at how Leonard's "The Captives", the basis for Boetticher's The Tall T, starts) is something essentially American.

The same could be said about Hellman's other 1966 western, Ride the Whirlwind, and even more so, but The Shooting remains the most important of the two.

This isn't very good, but check it out anyway: a later-made trailer for The Shooting.

And what Crank and Beat the Reaper have in common?

The usual apology: I've been busy, haven't been able to post anything here. I've seen lots of interesting movies lately and been wanting to write about them, but for now this will have to suffice.

Crank, starring Jason Statham, seems to be a minor cult favourite already, even though it came out in 2006. The movie is no-holds-barred crime flick, with Statham running around for 1:30 hours, drugged almost all the time, trying to find out - well, what? I kind of lost track. The movie is just too over over-the-top, with every scene being full of cinematic, editing, cutting and photographying gimmicks.

I admit there's sort of inventiveness involved, but even for me it was too much. I could've taken most of it, if there had been more sense or depth to the plot. There's a possible tragedy in the movie, but I wasn't touched. In contrast I found myself moved when I saw the last 30 minutes of Luc Besson's Leon the other night. I'm no fan of Besson, far from it, but I've always liked this film. The scene with Jean Reno forcing Natalie Portman to leave is a tear-jerker. Yet the film is overtly violent - over-the-top in its day. Will I cry in 2025 when I see Crank again? I mean, the ages change and what seems to be over-the-top might someday become the norm, but with Crank - nah, no way.

So what's this gotta do with Josh Bazell's hyped crime novel, Beat the Reaper, that was recently translated in Finnish (under the title Niittaa noutaja)? The same sort of over-inventiveness, almost being over-the-top only for the sake of being over-the-top. The plot isn't much, and I thought the backstory with all its Auschwitz connections was very lightweight and felt forced. When I reached the climax I said: "C'mon, that's plain stupid!" But okay, I gotta give Bazell that I hadn't seen that one in any other book.

Same goes for Crank. After we'd watched it, Elina said: "Never seen anything like this." Neither had I, and I'm not sure if this is the way things have to go.

Nevertheless, I was happy Beat the Reaper being translated, since in its own way it's part of the noir renaissance, the neo-noir movement.

Winterbottom directs Thompson's Killer Inside Me!

Check out the promo trailer here.