Town Bloody Hall, DA Pennebaker (Criterion Collection, 1979)
Norman
Mailer presides over, rather than merely participates in, a town hall event on
the theme of women’s liberation. The year is 1971 and a critic who joins him on
stage, Diane Trilling, considers him the most important writer of the time. Upon
hearing this, in 2024, I gaped at the screen in disbelief. Ha, what a time!
This most eminent man of letters comes off as if he writes in nothing but an open bathrobe. His
misogyny is half-shtick, half-sincere, and both halves are equally tiresome.
His swaggering style of crudeness is cringemaking. Yet everyone, with few
exceptions, actually takes him seriously. Squint and one sees that he makes a
valid point or two: addressing accusations that his fictional characters
represent exactly what he thinks (though what he thinks isn’t that much more
enlightened), that purely accusatory rhetoric breaks down any dialogue between
men and women on the subject (though perhaps that was just how he heard it). Pointing
out that literary fashions change isn’t saying much. The handful of writers who
define an era are, for one reason or another, bound to be relegated to the
background sooner or later. It’s up to the reader to resist getting swallowed
whole by the trend of the day, or to defy it, nursing and tending to some
healthy doubts by sifting through the past for what merits reconsideration. But
watching Mailer, I’m content to leave him there, in the past.
As
historical document, Town Bloody Hall may have some value, with a number
of recognizable names making cameos. As conversation, however, it hardly
entertains or illuminates, though the audience plays along, clapping, hissing,
laughing—mechanically, so they look like they’re having a good time, as
Hitchens observed of certain audiences. During the ending Q & A, Anatole
Broyard gets up and asks a dumb question, stepping into the role of that
audience member who has the sudden urge to offer himself up as a punching bag,
on camera, no less. Germaine Greer responds to the question waspishly, which is
understandable, but then her haymaker, the cheap gag, barely grazes. This exchange about sums
up the night. I’m not sure I’d have stuck around that long to hear it. The
original event was approximately 3.5 hours. The movie is half that length and still
I only felt relieved to get to the end.
The
Third Shadow Warrior,
Umetsugu Inoue (1962)
Originally
I was toying with writing a standalone piece on this called “On Power” because it
could be the best film statement I’ve ever seen on the subject, nested within a
magnificent plot. It takes place in 16th-century Japan. Samurai ride
through a village. One drops something on the ground and tells a peasant standing
nearby to pick it up. It’s a severed head. Other peasants leap back, aghast,
but one looks after the samurai in awe. This peasant eventually receives a
strange but alluring offer: given his resemblance to a local warlord, he’ll be
paid handsomely to leave his humble village and live in luxury as one of his
body doubles. Hidden in the warlord’s home with the other doubles or “shadows,”
they spend their days learning to mimic the warlord to perfection—his limp, his
voice, his mannerisms. They hang out. They eat well. But they only realize what’s
really demanded of them when the warlord loses his eye in battle…. The peasant
goes on to experience everything degrading and humiliating that comes with the
pursuit of power, all without ever wielding it. Then his sorry carcass returns namelessly to the soil. A work of art that can serve as an inoculation.
Kill Me
Again, John
Dahl (Tubi, 1989)
I
scrolled past this one for a long time before I finally chose it. I like Val
Kilmer. I like the idea of Val Kilmer as the lead in an 80s noir movie. And I
liked the movie even though it seems, at first, to follow convention closely.
The money. The crime. The double-cross. The femme fatale. The detective who
takes on the case against his better judgment and gets in deeper than is safe.
Then, with a couple of surprises, not all that surprising in themselves but perfectly executed, it's lifted above convention and,
coupled with visual kick and not a wasted scene, takes its place near the best
of the genre. A debut and an underrated gem. Reading about the director, I
discovered that the movie he made after this is one I watched years and years
ago and have been eager to watch again, another one that doesn’t get mentioned enough,
Red Rock West. I’ll be making it a double feature.
Royal
Warriors, David
Chung (Criterion Collection, 1986)
A
pair of criminals on a plane attempt to break loose from police custody. As
mayhem erupts, three law enforcement officials onboard, unknown to each other, intervene.
The criminals wind up dead, the plane lands safely, and the three are hailed by
the media as heroes. Soon a bond between them is forged. But the criminals have
brothers in arms who track down the heroes to pay them back. On the whole, I
found this to be one of the less satisfying Hong Kong action movies I’ve seen, with
no particularly memorable fights or chases (to say nothing about the drama). This
subtitle, though, will forever bring me joy: “Michael, I will revenge for you!”
Amanda, Carolina Cavalli (2022)
My
knowledge of Italian cinema amounts to some Westerns and dramas, nothing from
within the last 50 or so years. I took a chance on this movie to hear Italian,
to see the actress starring in it, glimpsed in the button reclining in an
inflatable pool mattress, in action, and to learn what a modern Italian comedy
is like. This one is a debut. It can be grating and twee. Some scenes are
incongruously serious in tone. But it’s promisingly weird. And more often than
not, it has the intended effect. Benedetta Porcaroli plays Amanda, a woman in
her midtwenties who lives at home with her wealthy mother. She has no: friends
lover job ambitions prospects reliable source of pleasure.
She has at least one thing going for her: even when everything and everyone
discourages her from being who she is, which isn’t evil, just abrasive and bewildering
and exhausting, she never stops unsettling the world, to shake something
out that’ll moor her and give her life meaning.
…Arguably, that’s a thing.
Panic
in Year Zero, Ray
Milland (1962)
What happens immediately after major US cities are struck simultaneously by nuclear weapons? An anonymous all-American (white) family is driving to a vacation spot when a bomb goes off in the Los Angeles area, where they just left. Panic sets in and order soon crumbles. Freeways clog. Desperate people begin sacking towns for supplies and townspeople, in turn, take up arms and set up roadblocks to keep non-residents out. Degenerates see an opportunity to go on a crime spree. The father swiftly does what he must, even if it’s morally dubious, to ensure that they all survive. He steals guns at gunpoint and escapes to a cave in the mountains to wait out the chaos. The plot proceeds smoothly. The acting may be unremarkable but the drama of the situation is convincing. And it’s ultimately thwarted by the badly misjudged choice of musical accompaniment: unironically sprightly jazz, as if they were hurrying to get to a wedding on time. That’s mainly what I took away. Conclusion: Nuclear war, the collapse of society, and weddings are best set to grim soundtracks.
Tampopo, Juzo Itami (1987)
I
first encountered this director years ago in a novel by Kenzaburo Oe called The
Changeling. Since then I’ve always kept his work in mind to view one day. Tampopo
is his most acclaimed film. It’s a cartoonishly festive sendup/celebration of the
gastronome lifestyle and, in particular, the art of making ramen. It’s somewhat
baggy, wandering from the core story to include self-contained side stories that
are all quite unlike each other, though each has its own charms. But the crackling
energy of joie de vivre links everything together and never flags. And it similarly
presents a lesson about mastery from another (albeit fairly different) Japanese
food classic, Jiro Dreams of Sushi: What are all the steps involved in
whatever you’ve chosen to devote yourself to and how can each be improved upon?
This is one way of separating the dabblers and mediocrities from those determined
to get better (or to be counted among the best). Breaking something down in
this manner makes all the work involved—and all the issues that must be
addressed—highly visible and daunting. It also allows one to appreciate
everything that goes into creating the object of admiration.
After
Tampopo, Itami would go on to make a movie lampooning the yakuza. It got
him slashed in the face. He wore the scar proudly.
The
Thin Blue Line,
Errol Morris (1988)
Thanksgiving
weekend, 1975. Dallas, Texas. A policeman, Robert Wood, stops a car on the
road. As he approaches the vehicle, the driver shoots him multiple times and flees.
The policeman dies. His partner shoots after the car as it disappears into the
night. Eventually law enforcement tracks down a suspect, Randall Adams, 28.
Appearing in interviews with the filmmaker, I see a man with a detailed
explanation of his activities on the night in question, conveyed with anguish
and astonishment at his fate. He has no criminal record. And there’s no
discernible motive for why he’d murder a policeman out of nowhere. The other
suspect is David Harris. He was sixteen at the time. He’d picked up Adams earlier
that day, who’d been walking around, looking for an open gas station. The teen
was driving in a stolen car. He’d also stolen the gun used in the crime. He
already had a criminal record. Later, he bragged to friends that he’d killed a
cop. And still later he committed armed robberies (and murder). A likely motive
for the shooting: evading capture. Meanwhile, his side of the story makes
little sense: Adams, a stranger, was driving his car for some reason that isn’t
explained and shot the police officer. Then Harris leaves Adams at a hotel and
decides not to call the cops. And the whole time he relays this questionable account
of a murder, it’s with all the emotion of recollecting an errand he once ran,
occasionally smiling.
The
Thin Blue Line is
heartening and instructive in how effectively it makes a case, using techniques
such as repetition and reenactment that were then innovative and that today are
standard (though often misunderstood). But it’s more chilling as proof of how
easily justice can be denied to an innocent person, even when the real culprit
would seem rather obvious. (This mood is enhanced by Philip Glass’s score.)
According to Adams, a policeman pulled a gun on him, trying to force him to
sign a confession. An infamous psychiatrist, Dr. Grigson, talks to Adams for 15,
20 minutes and comes to the exact wrong conclusion, accusing Adams of being a
psychopath deserving of nothing less than the death penalty and Harris as the
innocent. A key witness can’t get his facts straight and admits to deliberately
omitting at least one, with a laugh. Morris, in an interview with Slate
decades later, mentions Rashomon and its multiple perspectives on the
same crime as an influence. But where Akutagawa ends with jejune despair (and
Kurosawa forces hope), Morris answers by getting to work, probing into the
available evidence and achieving true clarity. And, after Adams spends eleven
years in prison, justice. A judge nearly sheds a sentimental tear as the
prosecution refers to the thin blue line of law enforcement that saves society
from chaos. To be more precise, it’s the sort of rigorous investigative effort
people such as Morris display that has any chance of saving us.
