stoneunhinged

My wife brought me The Green Mile from the city library.  I watched it.  I liked it very much.  But once again, what a strange movie!

Like American History X, there is a kind of contradiction in tone.  But maybe that's typical Stephen King stuff.  There is a certain light-heartedness which doesn't doesn't fit the seriousness of the story.

Oh Jeff, you say, that's what makes the movie so good!  Oh, I say in return, it is indeed a good movie.  But think how much more powerful it would be as straight drama.  The light-hearted element detracts from the film.

What is brilliantly done is the mystical element:  there's just a pinch of it, elevating straight drama to something which might be profound.  Well, it could be profound without the comedic relief.

Again, maybe that's just Stephen King.  I have never read a single Stephen King book.  Or I seem to recall reading Carrie, but I can't really remember.  If I did, I was 12 or 13 at the time, and it obviously did not make a profound enough impact on me to make me certain that I have read it.

Strange, nicht war?

Oui, oui….

jj 

Yesterday I watched, for the first time, American History X.

What a strange, strange film!

I don’t recall when I lost saw such a combination of bad and good film making.  At times, the film is riveting—the script and the acting are generally superb (though Beverly D’Angelo overacts to the point of making me cringe.  Yet the overall storyline is cliched, lacks depth, and is simply not credible.

The film also has the frequent Hollywood paradox of being simultaneously preachy and obscene.  The violence in the film is by any standards brutal.  Very brutal.  (Apparently Hollywood has never discovered that the entertaining portrayal of violence might contradict any anti-violence message the film might intend to bring.)  Indeed, it is so brutal that it makes the preachiness seem worse than contrived—it seems like an excuse to justify the violent fantasies of the filmmaker.

The film, for those of you who haven’t seen it (and here is a spoiler), is about a dangerous Nazi skinhead who—after killing two blacks , going to prison, joining up with the prison Nazis but later being raped by them (graphically shown, by the way)—has a complete sea change and then attempts to persuade his younger brother that he shouldn’t follow in his footsteps.  It is remarkable how quickly he changes his mind.  Yes, he was raped in prison—but he had already learned that they weren’t “true blue” in their racist doctrine, which is what got him into trouble with them in the first place.  It is also remarkable how he convinces his brother in a single conversation to see the error of his ways.

If conversions were this easy, we wouldn’t need missionaries.  And we wouldn’t need films like this.  On the other hand, we wouldn’t have a good moral justification for showing mind-numbing brutality on screen.  And we don’t need films like this anyway.  Hollywood is at its absolute worst when it tries to teach us some moral values.  Perhaps that is because Hollywood is so morally bankrupt.  But a morally bankrupt Hollywood doesn’t bother me at all, unless it tries to teach me morality.

But I digress.

The music also bothered me.  The orchestration was so foreboding leading up to the last scene that I nearly guessed what was going to happen from the music alone!  Of course, I didn’t need the music:  the cliched formula was enough to let me know what would happen.

So, a bad film:  yet I’ve been thinking about it ever since.  It packs an emotional whollop, in spite of its cliches and preachiness.  Why?

Well, in my opinion, two reasons:  1.) Edward Norton as Derek Vinyard.  One word for him and his performance:  wow!  2.) the violence.  Derek Vinyard’s method for killing the second of the two black men is something I will probably never forget.

Yes, this film is all about the violence.

And what does that tell you?

jj

Last night I watched my new copy of Apocalypse Now Redux. It was an impulse buy from Amazon—I was ordering something else and tacked it on to the same order at the last second—as I was anxious to see the added 49 minutes.

Let me first say that I have thought about buying Apocalypse Now since getting my DVD player a year ago, simply because it would appear on my “Top Ten” list of films. But, having been late coming to DVD, I was unaware of the Redux version. I generally think that director’s cuts are a very bad idea. (Kind of like Paul McCartney going back and re-engineering Let it Be—an act for which he should have his Beatle’s license taken away. I mean, if Orson Welles were alive today, does anyone have the temerity to claim that he might issue a director’s cut of Citizen Kane? Only if he had gone completely insane.) So I was prejudiced against Redux even before I saw it.

As it stands, I feel somewhat indifferent. But on balance, Coppola should have left it alone. Aside from any small changes I might not have noticed, there were basically four significant additions to the film:

1). The sequence with Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) was lengthened to add a scene where Willard steals his surfboard right before boarding the PT boat. This provides some comic relief, I suppose, but comic relief in this film is—IMHO—unnecessary and unwelcome.

2). An entire sequence where the boat arrives at some outpost, being drenched in torrential rains and occupied by burned out soldiers without any commanding officer, at which the Playboy bunnies have been stranded. Willard bargains two barrels of diesel for time witht he bunnies, and a scene with Chef and Lance and two bunnies ensues. It’s bizarre—which fits the movie, I suppose—but comic and very boring. The comic relief is, again, unwelcome in this film. The very boring is unwanted in any film. Too bad that Coppola added this.

I’ve got to get more tea and make something for breakfast. So wait a few minutes.

[pause]

Okay, I’m back.

3). A lengthy sequence where the boat stops at what turns out to be a French plantation. There is a dinner scene in which several Frenchman lecture Willard about the French presence in Vietnam and the war and bla bla bla, while Willard just listens and receives smoking glances from some widow who we know is planning to seduce him later.

If you poke around the internet a while, you’ll find that this scene is universally panned as boring, preachy and totally unnecessary. I must concede the “unnecessary” part, since the film was fine without it.

But I personally found the sequence riveting.

First of all, the dinner scene is—in keeping with the movie—so bizarre as to be almost hallucinogenic. It ranks up there with Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Eraserhead.  There are at least fifteen or twenty people around the table.  They eat their fine food and drink their fine wine while the head of the family preaches to Willard.  There are others—a young, overly emotional man sitting next to Willard; an old man, being spoon fed, at the opposite end of the table; a guy with an accordian sporadically playing wildly inappropriate music between conversation points—offering bizarre interuptions and additions to the sermon.

But the sermon (and this, I think, is what other reviewers miss) not simply a good, solid, rational explanation of why a French colonialist would wish to remain in his “home” and an indictment of American involvement.  No, while some of it might make sense, on the whole it reeks of hysteria and desperation.  This man (Marais is his name, if I’m interpreting IMDB correctly) is yet another partial lunatic in the succession of increasing lunacy as Willard approaches Kurz.  In this sense—showing a group of Frenchman, trying to hang on to their property and sanity in Vietnam in the midst of full-scale military conflict—is much more interesting and effective than the surfboard theft and bunny scenes.  Those who see it as simply preachy should pay more attention to the incoherence of the sermon.

The seduction scene, when it comes, is equally bizarre.  The widow makes a pretentious and stupid speech about Willard being, like her dead husband, “two men:  one who kills, and one who loves”, while loading an opium pipe for Willard. They smoke. Then she strips and lowers mosquito netting around the bed in a choreographic sequence which makes the whole thing seem like an opium haze.

(The only part which truly hurts the scene is in the early part: during their after dinner drinks, when she starts to make her move, there is some truly sappy romantic sounding music which is embarassing.)

4.) Some scenes were added to the Brando sequence in Kurze’s compound.  I found it all riveting.  More Brando can only be good.  I do not understand why Coppola cut it to begin with.

So that’s my take on the Redux material.  I would have left out the comic relief, but kept the Brando stuff in.  The plantation sequence I’m indifferent to:  I found it effective, but the majority seems to find it boring.

My recommendation:  rent it once and watch it.  But don’t buy it.  Only buy the original release.

Later I’ll post on director’s cuts in general.  But for now I need yet another tea.

jj

For those of you losing sleep waiting on my review of the greatest western film of all time, you’re going to have to wait a few more days. I just can’t seem to find enough energy to tackle it. I mean, it’s like writing a review of the Bible: you don’t just throw it off like so much Haiku during a snowstorm. You know what I mean?

jj

First up: Unforgiven

Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven may be the finest non-John-Ford-or-Sergio-Leone western ever made.

The film follows Will Munney, an on-the-wagon alchoholic, pigfarming widower who used to be an outlaw of the lowest sort—a “killer of women and children”. When a group of prostitutes collect their savings to put a bounty on the head of two cowboys—one of whom took a knife to one of their own—a wannabe outlaw named the “the Schofield Kid” approaches Munney with the offer of a partnership to go murder the cowboys. Munney brings in his old partner, Ned Logan, to help out. And the three head on their way with murder for money on their minds.

Now Justice—or at least a kind of it—had already been offered by the sherriff—Little Bill. Little Bill had arranged for the cowboys to pay the owner of the prostitutes four ponies in damages. Certainly, if prostitutes are “goods”, and the “goods” have been damaged, monetary compensation should be more than enough to make things fair. And Little Bill certainly seems a fair kind of guy.

Furthermore, Little Bill wants to keep the piece. In fact, that’s his job. So when the first assassin arrives in town, Little Bill beats the living shit out of him. This, too, is a kind of justice—keeping order in the town and precluding a murder from taking place. In due time, Little Bill also ends up beating the shit out of Will Munney. Little Bill would seem to have everything in grip.

That is, until the cowboys are murdered and he whips Ned to death trying to find out where Will and the Kid are hiding out. He puts Ned’s body in a coffin, propped up on the porch of a saloon with a sign pinned to his chest saying something like “This is what happens to assassins” (forgive me, I can’t remember the precise wording of the sign.”

Will Munney, hearing about the desecration of his friend’s corpse, sends the kid on his way and takes up the bottle for his first lick of juice for over a decade, goes into town and shoots up a saloon, killing the saloon owner and Little Bill and three or four others.

Then he goes home, and the end credits tell us he took his family to San Francisco and succeeded in making a living in dry goods.

What do we make of all this?

I recall that at the time, Eastwood was all over television giving interviews to promote the film, repeatedly saying that it was about the consequences of violence. Ahem! Maybe he believed this—maybe he even still does.

Nowadays the film is called “cynical” in Wikipedia, and the IMDB review—which is, by the way, excellent for what it’s worth—says it is a film with “no heroes…and the differences between good and bad are deliberately blurred.”

But it is precisely this “blurring” which points us in such a profound way to the meaning of justice. Justice is not the invention of the “good guys”, or it wouldn’t be justice—it wouldn’t be a “truth” and would have no universal appeal. Justice consists of a kind of order where, in the end, everyone “gets what’s coming to them.” Bad men can become instruments of justice—just as instruments of justice (like Little Bill) can become bad men. Proportion, fittingness, a kind of balance strives to exist. Sometimes the balance is off, but the scales then tip back the other way. Will Munney tells the kid, “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” He also tells the kid, “We all got it coming.” Will understands this balance. When he enters the saloon, Little Bill recognizes him and berates him as a coward, a “killer of women and children.” His response? “Yes, I’ve killed women and children…and now I’m gonna kill you.” Whether Little Bill “has it coming” has nothing to do with who it comes from, whether the administrator of justice is some kind of avenging angel or an outlaw. And it doesn’t have anything to do with “deserve” either—perhaps Little Bill deserves a good beating or to pay a fine or to go to trial or to hang. It doesn’t matter. He’s going to die, because justice—a kind of balance which is part of the natural order and lies outside any formal contracts made by human convention—demands it.

My friend Clifford, in his comment on my last Deadwood post, puts it as a kind of juxtaposition between a law known “in the hearts of men” and a Hobbesian social contract. This is, I think, exactly right. Westerns are in general a rejection of a social contract notion of law in favor of some kind of natural law. A moral order exists, and whether we look at older westerns in which black hats and white hats symbolize the order or more recent westers which consciously try to blur things, this moral order—which precedes and lies outside conventional law—will prevail.

But enough on Unforgiven, at least for now. I must gather my energy to try to tackle the greatest western of all time—both modern and Homeric in scope, and therefore worthy of a well-rested mind. Until then,

jj

I shall attempt to reconstruct my post on Deadwood.

First, the acting is superb. In my deleted post I mentioned the performance of several actors, but I ain’t gonna bother to do it again, except for the following:

Molly Parker really got me all hot and bothered, but I confess it may have been her bustles, corsets and Victorian diction—delivered in a voice scarcely above a whisper, but which nevertheless failed to calm me any—as well as her acting. Wait, her acting would include her stimulating whisper. Ah, forget it.

Brad Dourif as Doc Cochran is absolutely mind-boggling. His performance gets better with each viewing—you begin to notice all the nuances of eye movement and body posture and everything else he put into the role. And Doc Cochran is a haunted, alchoholic, conscientious scientist stuck in Deadwood because of past indiscretions. Just like me, except I’m no scientist.

Powers Boothe is such a good actor that his role is almost irrelevant. He plays a bad guy, and you know it just as soon as you see him—he doesn’t even have to open his mouth. And really, it’s because he’s a good actor, and not SIMPLY because in the back of my mind he’ll always be Jim Jones and Curly Bill. No, he’s scene stealing good.

The rest of my deleted post was about justice and westerns in general and Deadwood in particular, but I’ll rewrite it in another post about westerns and justice. Maybe not today, but I’ll write it. So save your pennies to buy me a beer next time you see me.

jj

Last night there was a surge in traffic on my blog—after I had turned in for the evening without writing anything at all on the weekend.  My apologies, but I don’t think I plan to write on weekends in the future, either.  Anyway, I finished up computer stuff (including checking in here and reading my “blog stats”, which revealed that no one had yet looked at the blog) and put on a Deadwood DVD.

If I lived in the States, Deadwood might just be worth the price of HBO all by itself.  Certainly it is one of the most riveting pieces of television I’ve seen.

My father thought I would like it and gave me the entire first season on DVD.  My guess is that he did not care for it much himself because of the level of vulgarity.  Deadwood is raw, to be sure, and while some of the swearing is definitely anachronistic, the rawness lends an authentic feeling to the whole thing.  It is not perfect, nor is it even perfect television, but it is damn good.

Yesterday I re-watched the first four episodes (this is my third time throught the first season), which basically covers the life of Wild Bill Hickock in Deadwood.  Keith Carradine gives what in my opinion is an Oscar level performance.  Hickock is noble, dandyish, charming, flawed, tired, and extremely dangerous—and Carradine manages to convey all these things in almost every scene, just with the expressions on his face (well, with the exception of dandyism, I suppose, which does require the duds).

I read somewhere recently that EVERY western is in someway about the dying out of the Old West (I think it was Roger Eberts review of Brokeback Mountain, but I’m not sure and I ain’t gonna look it up).  But I think this is overly simplistic.  Indeed, many westerns are about this change:  think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  But what ALL westerns really have in common is a constant concern with justice and it’s endless manifestations within and without the law.  Sometimes justice is almost an accident, or it is even brought by someone who is—at least by modern standards—villainous, but it is always there.  It is always there because in human communities we make arrangements conducive to our survival, and that requires a kind of cooperation with each other.  Thus there is a kind of justice within every community of human beings, including the Mafia and street gangs.

And this is what Deadwood is about.  Deadwood is a town without law, but not without justice.  Justice is not always well served—as is seen when Jack McCall is found not-guilty in the ensuing trial after he murders Wild Bill—but it is always present.  And as the town grows, this justice is trying to assert itelf into formal, legal institutions.

In other words, Deadwood is an attempt to portray a Hobbes/Locke/Rouseau -ian move from the State of Nature into civil society.  And with cowboys.  Cool.

jj

And if not being able to buy Bruce Lee DVD boxed sets doesn’t bother you any (though it should) here’s this:

I also wanted to buy Sergio Leone’s trilogy with Clint Eastwood–in a boxed set. Here it is from Amazon.com: dollars.

But Amazon.de?: dollars. This appears to be only A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. Where’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? I guess you have to buy it separately “for a few Euro’s more”. This German edition offers a lot of extras, it would seem (you get 4 discs, after all), but you get only 2/3 of what the great Sergio Leone considered a trilogy. Can you imagine selling a boxed set of The Lord of the Rings without The Return of the King?

I know, I know, it’s just how the market works. What sells in different parts of the world is different, and if you can get more money for Clint Eastwood in Germany than in America, why not?

Except that I can just order the set from America and get what I want. We live in a global world–hasn’t everyone figured that out yet?

EXCEPT!!!!!!! You must have a code free DVD player, and though I own one, code-free DVD players are no longer available in Germany. I was told by one electronics store that in fact it is illegal to sell one, though I”m sceptical that they would actually put such a thing into law. Why should the EU or German government participate in Hollywood protectionism?

But my thoughts on DVD region codes is better saved for another post. I don’t want to become too unhinged: I haven’t eaten lunch yet, and I can’t sip on a glass of bourbon to calm myself down. Maybe I’ll have to wait until March. We’ll see.

jj

When I was sixteen or seventeen, living in Honolulu, I went through my Bruce Lee phase. Oh, the Beatles were still the most significant interest in my life, and girls were a close second, but Bruce Lee was a clear third, just above Lord of the Rings. Almost every weekend I went to see a Bruce Lee film in Downtown Honolulu, in the old fancy movie theaters which had long stopped showing current Hollywood films and were showing either Kung Fu or Porn movies. I saw each of the Bruce Lee films that I have entire fight sequences memorized to this day. For variety I checked out other Kung Fu films. The Golden Harvest films were okay; I loved Run Run Shaw. I still saw mainstream films, of course, usually on Friday or Saturday night, but I usually caught a Kung Fu film on Sunday afternoon, week in, week out.

So in the States last Thanksgiving, when some kind of bug got into me and I was buying DVDs as if they didn’t exist outside of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, I decided to go find a copy of Enter the Dragon for nastalgia’s sake. (Later that day I learned that it would have been Bruce Lee’s 65th birthday–cool coinkydinky, don’tcha think?)

Back home, I watched Enter the Dragon three or four times, and wanted more. I mean, the nastalgia thing can really get one going, can’t it? So I went to Amazon.de to find some of his other movies. NOT THERE!!! Much less a box set of all Bruce Lee’s Hong Kong movies (in other words, all movies but Enter the Dragon, which was produced and owned by a Hollywood company). If I am wrong, and a boxed set of Bruce Lee’s Hong Kong movies on DVD is available from a German retailer, then please let me know. Meanwhile I shall remain mystified why, in a country no less fascinated by the martial arts and the Far East than the United States, Bruce Lee appears to be a lesser legend than there. I shall also seriously consider ordering the DVDs from here: Hong Kong.

And what about Clint? See my next post.

jj