Drag Me to Hell (2009)

USA, 99 minutes
Director: Sam Raimi
Writers: Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi
Photography: Peter Deming
Cast: Lorna Raver, Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Dileep Rao, David Paymer, Adriana Barraza, Chelcie Ross, Reggie Lee, Molly Cheek

I enjoyed seeing Sam Raimi working in the horror genre again—he has to console himself somehow for getting robbed of the Spiderman franchise, right?—and I get the impression he must have enjoyed it himself too because there are a lot of nice touches here along the way. My personal favorite happens to be a goat at a séance, which is very funny. Be sure to watch for that. Lorna Raver is absolutely inspired as Sylvia Ganush, the old Gypsy woman who throws a curse. Alison Lohman as Christine Brown, the overly ambitious bank employee who turns Ganush down for an extension on her overdue mortgage payments and thereby earns that curse, is adequate-plus as the youthful female tabula rasa over which all the abuse gets written. And there's plenty of chills and surprises right down the line. CGI is way overplayed, but when doesn't that happen nowadays anyway? But maybe I'm too old for the kind of heartlessness that finishes this one off? I know it's a time-honored tradition in some of the best horror movies to end on a gut-punch downbeat that also feels like a throwaway (i.e., Night of the Living Dead), so it's not as if it hasn't been done before. But come on, have a heart. Some interesting points here.

Sunshine Cleaning (2008)

USA, 91 minutes
Director: Christine Jeffs
Writer: Megan Holley
Photography: John Toon
Cast: Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin, Jason Spevack, Steve Zahn, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Clifton Collins Jr., Paul Dooley

A pleasant and engaging dramedy of a struggling broken family in Albuquerque trying to get along, featuring an ingeniously unpleasant concept—the two sisters one day start a business cleaning up crime scenes. The premise is preposterous, of course. No organization that depends on such services, namely police departments and insurance companies, is going to let just anyone do the work. But never mind that. Comedy alternates with gross-outs, including one repulsive and touching scene straight out of "Hoarders," as the movie slowly drifts from promising into cornball territory, exploring the pains of the young women whose mother committed suicide when they were still girls. I particularly didn't see the need for imaginary CB radio conversations with said mother, but overall the whole thing is sweet and affecting enough. I think what raises it a notch or two more are the performances of Amy Adams and Emily Blunt. Adams is solid as a single mother and the type of person no doubt known by many of us, one who never quite made it past the pressures and competitions of high school, and now, a minimum-wage housecleaner, finds herself driven to a series of poor decisions and fits of pathological lying in a never-ending attempt to win the respect of her former classmates. Emily Blunt makes a nice turn as the disaffected, eternally cynical and sarcastic younger sister, a variety of klutzy punk-rock goth chick who can never manage to do anything right. Lots of good chemistry throughout, and Alan Arkin as the failure dad is fine as always.

Roman by Polanski (1984)

As a good American, I am genuinely torn about this whole thing with Roman Polanski. On the one hand, there's no doubt that he committed a crime, and a serious one at that, and arguably got away with it. But on the other hand I respect, admire, and love his movies so much (especially Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, and at least two made after the crime, Bitter Moon and Death and the Maiden), and believe they are significant and important enough that I want very badly to look the other way. I'll own that because it's an awful lot of great movies from just one artist, two of which would likely never have been made if the mob outside with the torches and pitchforks had anything to say about it. (There's also the issue, which I note in passing, raised by William Faulkner on John Keats: “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”) Then there's the serious and generally underreported problem, explored at some length in the 2008 HBO documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, with the presiding judge in the case, who was removed from it for various ethical improprieties after Polanski had fled the country; they were not eccentric tics of interpretation, but serious breaches. Additionally, I think sexual predation of children is too often a grossly misunderstood crime, and certainly one abused on a regular basis in order to manipulate inflamed passions. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, because it does—and, in this particular case, did—but there are exceptions, which I sometimes think are probably more like the rule, and which in any event certainly mean that the extra mile always needs to be gone to not give the mob what it wants. All this said, Polanski's memoir adds still another level of complexity to the story by fleshing out the uniquely remarkable context of his life: his parents taken away by Nazis when he was just 5 years old, left at that age to fend for himself in the Polish countryside; as a youth, surviving and eventually escaping the oppressions of the Soviet-sphere Communist regime that followed World War II in Poland; and of course the well-known fate of his first wife Sharon Tate, who, two weeks short of giving birth to their first child, was slaughtered by the Manson group. More generally, Polanski's account contributes a lot to an understanding of the life that has shaped the sensibility that has driven an undeniably impressive body of work. So if tending toward a sense that splitting the difference here and just letting Polanski continue with his life and work as the best possible course of justice for everyone, all things considered, with Polanski simply required to endure the public approbation he has and certainly will from now on—if that makes me an apologist, then, well, I'm sorry.

In case it's not at the library.

Old Joy (2006)

USA, 76 minutes
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Writers: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt
Photography: Peter Sillen
Original music: Yo La Tengo
Cast: Daniel London, Will Oldham

Kurt, played by Will Oldham, and Mark, played by Daniel London, are both in their 30s, old friends from college. Mark is married with a newborn infant and living in Portland, Oregon. Kurt has remained a lost and wandering soul. They have not seen one another for awhile. One day Kurt calls Mark and asks if he'd like to spend the weekend in the mountains camping—he knows of a great hot spring. Mark and his wife figure it would be OK for him to get away. So off go the two old chums, stopping on the way out of town for Kurt to get some pot, which Mark politely declines throughout. Their conversation along the way is desultory and keeps missing the connections. They stop at a restaurant to eat and get directions. They get lost anyway. They find a place to camp. They find the hot spring—which does appear quite lovely. They return to Portland. Say good-bye. Resume their lives once again. I hope I haven't given too much away. The one thing I can't give away is how or why it works so well. But it does. It's allusive and sad and ultimately quite beautiful, particularly in its final scenes, which offer no answers beyond an overwhelming and almost shatteringly wistful emptiness.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

UK, 98 minutes, silent
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Marie Belloc Lowndes, Eliot Stannard, Alfred Hitchcock
Photography: Gaetano di Ventimiglia, Hal Young
Cast: Ivor Novello, June, Malcolm Keen, Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney

Very few silent movies that you see nowadays, particularly those with the greatest reputations, are ever actually silent—some, such as Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, with its score written by Chaplin himself, never were. And when you do happen to see one, the silence becomes positively intrusive, engendering a distracting kind of anxiety, which has to say something for how much music (leaving aside dialogue) contributes to the action of films, or at least our understanding of them now, and also makes one wonder about how the various live accompaniments back in the day colored the perceptions of a single film as it traveled from place to place. This Hitchcock silent, which I saw with its 1999 scoring, is no exception. Even if the music is a bit repetitive and not always synched perfectly to the action, it's charming enough and soothing for me just to have it there. I suppose this is all somewhat off the point. The Lodger is clunky as only a silent film from a director still learning his craft could be. At the same time, it's not hard to recognize the Hitchcock touches that would continue all the way to Psycho and beyond: screaming, terrified dames; a brutal serial killer who roams the streets of London knifing his victims (he strikes on Tuesdays); suspicion, anxiety, mistaken identities, questionable motivations, lust, jealousy, and a cameo by the director. The print I saw, transferred to a DVD for a circa 2004 product, was doubtless restored to some extent but remains old and damaged, losing detail to the point where occasionally faces are hard to make out. But it's worth seeing for anyone even casually interested in Alfred Hitchcock.

Blood Meridian (1985)

 

This remarkable novel tends to be typically identified as Cormac McCarthy's best, at least to date, and certainly it's my first choice, one of those very special books that is not only worth rereading but actually seems to get only better and better every time through. My first time I found it a bit difficult—the dense and allusive language, the murky plot points, the march forward across quintessential 19th-century American West landscapes and experience, overlaid by a skein of repulsive yet seductively beautiful horror, and the opaqueness of its ostensible main character, known only as "the kid." Another tour through let me see more of what McCarthy is doing, and incidentally made evident that, for me anyway, the real main character here is the ubiquitous, malovently charming, and always unsettling Judge Holden, who simply appears everywhere that matters. Him and the landscape of history. Wrestling. Alternatively titled "The Evening Redness in the West," which I think tells us more about McCarthy's intentions regarding bloodshed than sunsets, this tells a hallucinatory version of the story of America and its self-declared manifest destiny, detailing the violence, brutality, and casual cruelties of the usurpation and occupation of the far side of the North American continent, with a muscular language pulsing with hypnotic rhythms. The action often grows positively unworldly, as with one arduous trek across a desolate stretch of mountainous, boulder-strewn desert, and the whole thing feels like a dream that someone else is having, and probably would like to wake up from.

In case it's not at the library.
 

Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)

 

USA, 106 minutes, documentary 

Director/writer/narrator: Alex Gibney 

Photography: Maryse Alberti, Greg Andracke 

Another decent documentary looking at the excesses of the Bush years in terms of its foreign policy, and another one already dated by developments that keep emerging (or that don't, but in which the stalling has advanced the story, to the degree it has been advanced, which is not nearly enough, as public concerns about it sadly sink into the sunset of his economic calamity). Focusing on the cancer of torture, a/k/a "harsh interrogation tactics" and the like by apologists, the unofficial official policy for which most likely started in Bagram and Guantanamo Bay but didn't really enter public consciousness until Abu Ghraib, this documentary examines the disappearance of a young Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar and his subsequent mysterious death at Bagram in 2002, relentlessly uncovering the horrific details as it burrows deeper and deeper for the information. Among them: Dilawar was beaten so badly that his legs were essentially pulped while he was still alive. All follow-up investigation has so far shown that he was guilty of nothing, but merely caught up in unfortunate circumstances; in the wrong place at the wrong time, as they say. U.S. government response: "oh no we dit-ten" alternating with "ooops." These things are important—this information has to get out. But they are formidably depressing too, and so, for better or worse, is this documentary.

Happy Trails (1969)

 

"When You Love" This one came tumbling through my life almost accidentally, an album vaguely recommended by someone somewhere and that I heard later creasing the background of a party (as I recall, and I don't well), weird live takes on Bo Diddley strained through a San Francisco hippie filter. At the time I was too easily charmed by the crowd noises and extemporaneity of live albums and hence drawn first to the section labeled "Where You Love." Later I heard the album again at a friend's, late at night, in the basement of his parent's house. We had to get up early for school the next day. That's when John Cipollina's brilliant guitar clarified itself, a thing raw and poised and urgent and probing and just about completely riveting every moment it is present. The section labeled "When You Love" quickly entered my short list of favored solos, guitar and otherwise, headed by Miles Davis on "Pharoah's Dance" and Duane Allman on the At Fillmore East "You Don't Love Me" and "Whipping Post." I have to say it still ranks high, although I'm not presently prepared to offer a more comprehensive ranking. That will have to be a project for another time.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

 

USA/Germany, 153 minutes

Director/writer: Quentin Tarantino

Photography: Robert Richardson

Cast: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, Gedeon Burkhard

I hear that Quentin Tarantino recently took to the lectern—one would like to imagine him pounding it with passion, red-faced and perspiring, but God probably doesn't love us that much—to make the case for himself as an official Auteur of the Cinema, as of approximately exactly the release of this outlandish World War II fantasy. OK, whatever. To me, that was obvious enough from Pulp Fiction (and fairly probable even with Reservoir Dogs), and I was ready to toss him up into the canon then and certainly am now. Maybe I have a lower bar. Or maybe the whole thing is a joke. But the point is that, at bottom, Tarantino operates at far more serious levels than just surface-gliding referential cinematics. Ironically, cynically, irreverently—yes, obviously. Even overbearingly. But undeniably tackling them. Consider, as just one example, the varying fates of the believer and non-believer characters in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino's movies are rich with narrative and character and human interaction, and always steeped (arguably too much, as with this one) in an encyclopedic embrace of film traditions. I was prepared for my first disappointment here, dubious about a translation of Sergio Leone's spaghetti-western revenge syntax for the Holocaust story that willfully, even merrily, sets itself to trampling widely agreed-on sacred territory, basically making shit up as it goes along even as it attempts to co-opt sympathies via blatant manipulation. He just about pulls off the whole thing too—his only mistake is almost an incidental one, which unfortunately compounds itself: casting the overly smug Brad Pitt, who steps all over himself and the story and everybody else too in a crassly hambone performance. I could also do without the elaborate plot points and heavy-handed referents of the narrative climax, which take up the last hour or so. But watching Tarantino's movies is so monumentally entertaining and satisfying that I found myself (as usual) forgiving even his ridiculous excesses. This is overall not one of his best, it may even be his least, but when it's good it's very, very good. And, yes, he's an auteur. Let's close the book on that one now.

Computer World (1981)

 

"Computer Love" Kraftwerk gets off the train and opts for the keyboard just in time for the dawn of the era of personal computing. The result is practically the last thing anyone expected from electronic music at the time (or even now): simple, warm, and lovely, almost unimaginably beautiful at points, wistful and poignant, with moments of dry humor to keep it real. The machines, you might say, are providing the way in to our collective humanity, and here Kraftwerk demonstrates the practical applications. I listened to this first, when it was new, on one of those old cassette recorder/players the size of a kleenex box. No hi fi at the time. But even then the stunning beauty was entirely there. That's the level they are operating on here, and well, and still. And while it's certainly arguable that others have bettered this since, you'll notice that they are all standing on the shoulders of it.