Capsule Reviews: Macbeth (1971), The Book of Mary, They All Laughed

Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971)

Polanski's Macbeth, made in the wake of his wife and unborn child's brutal murder, manages to extrapolate its settings from the limits of the stage into something even more ascetic and and stripped-down. It takes place in hollow, filthy castles and frigid, craggy hills, and Polanski fills this howling void with blood. The director, grimly exorcising the demons of his own trauma, translates the violence of Shakespeare's drama in viciously straightforward terms. One of the first images is of a dead foe's shirt splotching with more and more blood as a soldier whacks his corpse with a flail, and the murder of Macduff's wife and son is so hellaciously rendered that no one could fail to see shades of Sharon Tate's death. Amending the source text only to make it, inexplicably, yet darker, Macbeth leaves one wondering why anyone would fight so savagely to rule such a realm. In a final stroke of nihilistic despair, Polanski frames the climax not as duel among nobles but little more than a street fight filled with cheap shots and the wild swings of insensible men, one driven mad by paranoia, the other by grief. Grade: B+

The Book of Mary (Anne-Marie Miéville, 1984)

A sort-of precursor to partner Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary, Anne-Marie Miéville's The Book of Mary shows what may be the childhood of Godard's protagonist. An intelligent, withdrawn child blotting out the sound of her parents' divorce, Marie gives lectures to imaginary pupils, using an apple half as a stand-in for an eye during a lecture on ocular surgery and later dictating from a pocketbook to her bedroom wall, even instructing the class to "be quiet" when her mother knocks at the door. Her parents encourage her to accept what has happened, but Marie finds denial and expression in art, hearing a conversation of voices in a concerto and later dancing with aggressive pain to Mahler's 9th. This dance, a naked response to the intellectualism of Mahler's composition, serves as a bridge between childhood and adulthood, a naive but beautiful interpretation of the music that seems to drain the last bits of her innocence before she can start to cope with her upheaval. The final shot, of her slicing off the top of an egg with a swipe, still confounds and teases me. Grade: A-

They All Laughed (Peter Bogdanovich, 1981)

I expect to do a full piece on this at some point in my life, but it is a film that uses all of its style toward such an overwhelming feeling of delight and retroactive regret that I only occasionally noted its almost tossed-off mastery. Check out this excellent piece by Sheila O'Malley that breaks down an early scene and how Bogdanovich's quick eyeline matches establish character relationships before anyone has been properly introduced. That scene confounded me when I watched it to the point that I kept dwelling on it as the film played out, until slowly all the pieces fell into place and revealed how that one sequence served as a map for the rest of the movie. There is a balletic choreography to that and other scenes that reminded me strongly of the work of Johnnie To, similarly able to impart an overwhelming deal of information visually with delicate shot patterns. Poised perfectly between the improvisational, naturalistic style of Cassavetes and shamelessly Old Hollywood depictions of the City That Never Sleeps. Grade: A+

Cactus River (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's shorts are the only thing more confounding than his full-length works, and Cactus River is his most obscure in some time. A black-and-white "tribute" to the Mekong River, Cactus River documents one of Joe's actors, Jenjira Pongpas, as she lives out her daily routine with her husband, an American ex-pat she met online and recently married. Sounds innocuous, until Joe plays the film at a lower frame rate, making it jerk around like a silent as the audio track plays only the roar of wind on a poorly covered mic and pops that somehow manage to be louder than the white noise.

Joe tends to attach a brief explanation to his shorts, perhaps anticipating the viewer's bafflement. Not that his statements are entirely helpful: they tend to be as cryptic as the films themselves, though they do sometimes offer a clue to be interpreted. The director's synopsis for this short relates how Jenjira changed her name to Nach, which means "water." Nach lives on the bank of the Mekong, which she worries will dry up soon thanks to Chinese dams. Does that explain the title, then? That this surging body of water may soon become an arid bed of desert plants? And if Jenjira now calls herself water, is she the river's heir? Perhaps this 10-minute abstract posits a Thai Anna Livia Plurabelle.

As ever with Joe's work, Cactus River overflows with indelible, evocative images. The choppy rhythms of the frame rate slow when the camera settles upon the Mekong in the frantic opening montage, put at ease by the river's flow (or, alternately, drying up with a blocked-off source. Nach's husband watches Thai TV on mute, the flicker of Joe's high-contrast film obscuring the image on the TV into what almost looks like a nuclear cataclysm until a cactus can eventually be made out, looming over its surroundings in a low-angle shot. The final, still image cuts to color as Nach beckons out over the river. Rebirth is a key feature of Joe's films, from the bifurcated structure of Tropical Malady to the reincarnation-cum-genre-tour that was Uncle Boonmee. As such, the last shot could be the "In Memoriam" photo for the Mekong, but also the first documented photo of its new avatar.

I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Upon its release, I'm Not There struck me as a hollow experiment, a nifty "what-if" but nothing more. Not helping matters, certainly, was my own lack of familiarity with Bob Dylan, a sacred cow whose enigmatic profile (as evidenced by this fragmentary "biopic") split into so many personalities that I never knew how to approach him. For all its dazzling formal techniques, I'm Not There frustrated me for doing nothing, it seemed, to explore Dylan's real personality. Its much-ballyhooed division of Dylan's various artistic reinventions into separate roles for different actors was its greatest weakness.

Of course, Bob Dylan's refusal to be defined as any one thing but Bob Dylan (and sometimes not even that), is what has made him endure as much as a mystery as a legend. Haynes does not attempt to "solve" Dylan, and if I'm Not There ultimately concludes that there may be no real Dylan under all those smokescreens, it nevertheless paints a compelling portrait—well, collage—of a man who exists wholly within pop culture. The trait that links the six characters representing Dylan's personae is a hint of persecution by those who love him, of devotion and mistrust displayed in equal measure. Even the earliest incarnation of Dylan, a mere child faces hardship, even if he has to invent some of it.

That child (Marcus Carl Franklin), who calls himself Woody Guthrie represents Dylan's beginnings as an ambitious folkie who drifted out of the Midwest as if a dissatisfied spirit of the Depression spat him out at the turn of the '60s. But by casting an African-American as the boy, Haynes begins a subtle but consistent critique of Dylan's public image wrapped up in the loving tribute. Woody spins all kinds of tall tales as a backstory to the families and hobos he meets riding the rails across the country, stories that appropriate misery and strife to make his life more compelling. Yet the child actor's race is the biggest appropriation of all, the artist who would become the ultimate in white liberal hipness seeing himself as a poor black kid at heart in a too-forward sense of identification with the truly downtrodden.

Yet the leap from this child, introduced circa 1959, to actors pushing 30, if not already past the line, could be seen as a respectful view of the artist's rapid maturity. Christian Bale takes the baton from Franklin to play Jack Rollins, the Dylan who erupted in Greenwich Village as the superstar of the '60s folk scene. The difference between the two characters is as vast as the gulf between Dylan's self-titled debut, filled mostly with passable covers of folk standards and his sophomore effort, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, such an instant, out-of-nowhere classic many still believe it is his true first album. Franklin's Woody, naïve and romanticizing the past, is the only character younger than Dylan was in each respective career phase, but Bale emerges a man of the moment, crystallizing the social ills of the day rather than hiding out in the past. Even so, Dylan is still a young man, barely over 20 when he becomes a cause célèbre and not yet 25 when he sends shockwaves through his devoted fanbase. He may have the voice of a man who has lived lifetimes, but he is still barely an adult.

Nowhere is this blend of maturity and youth more strikingly displayed than in Cate Blanchett's performance as Dylan's "going electric" avatar, Jude Quinn. This period of Dylan's life has been documented more than any other, a fact Haynes does not even attempt to hide as his grainy black-and-white stock and verité style recalls D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. That film showed off a combative, evasive boy sneering at the press (and fans) who hung on his every word. Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary, No Direction Home, looks at that same material from a retrospective angle, clarifying Dylan's seeming aggressiveness as the result of his unwillingness to be the voice of a generation, with all the baggage that would bring.

Not even the real Dylan, however, brings as much sobering insight into his younger self's belligerence as Blanchett. The actress' agelessness here serves as a trap for Jude. Wearing Dylan's black sunglasses, Blanchett plays Jude as peevish and vulgar, being outlandish just to get a rise out of those who feel he owes them something. But Blanchett's jittery leg twitching and head jerking suggest amphetamine addiction. The illicit substance keeps Jude going through his concentrated period of artistic fertility; the three album stretch Jude personifies is perhaps the most radical evolution of pop songcraft of the 20th century. It also leaves Jude strung out and nervous, his already apparent discomfort with superstardom exacerbated by a lack of sleep and an overstimulated brain. Jude takes off his glasses regularly, but one shot in particular, situated at the film's end, holds on Blanchett's face as she looks with uncovered eyes into the camera, lines practically forming around her eyes as her deflated, neutral facial expression communicates an endless weariness. It is ravaging enough to be either Jesus or Judas. Dylan at this time was both, and as Blanchett's Jude ages in that late shot, the motorcycle crash that Dylan fans know is right around the corner could almost been seen as a deliverance.

Blanchett owns much of the film in terms of screen time and presence, but the lesser-seen personalities contain their own insights, affections and critiques of the subject. Ben Whishaw appears as the poet side of Dylan, on trial by an unseen prosecutor that could be jilted radicals as easily as the Establishment. Richard Gere, playing Billy the Kid in a reference to Dylan's involvement with Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, shows Dylan in exile after his crash. The real Kid died at 21, but Gere recalls the 36-year-old Kris Kristofferson of Peckinpah's film, not a boy who lived fast and died young but a weathered and withered vision of a dying symbol. The child Woody made out like he had the weight of the world on his shoulder. Blanchett's Jude didn't have to pretend, and Gere's Billy still smarts decades later from all that pressure.

I'm Not There contains its share of in-jokes and references. Haynes employs overt Hard Day's Night quotations when Jude meets the Beatles, and the funniest joke of the movie involves Jude introducing Brian Jones of the Stones as being "from that groovy covers band." Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger) takes the film's metatextual elements to a new level as an actor who plays Jack Rollins and becomes a Dylanesque figure himself (he even marries the equivalent of Sarah Dylan, with whom he casually recreates the cover for Freewheelin'). These might be considered part of the typical pandering biopics do for fans, but then, the whole film requires a working understanding of Dylan's work and life from his early days through at least the '66 crash and a few scattered bits after that. The opening credits, played over shots of the outcasts of the world—complete with high-contrast, finely detailed images of coal-faced workers that recalls Gregg Toland's cinematography for The Grapes of Wrath—is clearly meant to evoke "Desolation Row." Unless, of course, you haven't heard that song, in which case the whole credits will be confusing. And the sly recasting of Bale's Jack Rollins, seen as a prophet to '60s radicals, as Dylan's Born Again avatar is a wry joke, for those who get it.

But perhaps this is how biopics of legends should operate, diving into the esoterica and letting those who have no familiarity with the artist—like my 18-year-old self—be left out in the cold. Why, after all, should the millions who love Dylan (or Cash, or Ray) and thirst for a real insight into the artist be forced to sit through a feature-length "greatest hits" for the sake of the clueless? Even if Haynes reinforces the notion of Dylan as fundamentally unknowable, his evocative, obscure shots and scenes say more about the artist than a host of documentaries and books. Case in point: Bruce Greenwood appears during the Jude section as a hostile journalist who hectors the artist for his immaturity. Greenwood is old enough to be the Establishment, his dismissal that of the older crowd who never understood why kids bothered with this guy anyway. Yet the actor returns for Billy's segment to play Pat Garrett, forced to confront the Kid one last time having failed to kill him in this universe. As Garrett stares into Billy's eyes, though, Haynes flashes back across characters as Mr. Jones harangues Jude, ignoring the young man's instability to attack its childish manifestations. Greenwood's Garrett feels the remorse of that memory; he did not kill the Kid here, but he did in a past life. This subtle connection says more about artistic martyrdom, misunderstanding and critical reevaluation than all the talking heads in the world.

The Heartbreak Kid (1972) vs. The HeartbreakKid (2007)

Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid is such an overwhelmingly black comedy that I cannot think of another movie to even approach its level of discomfort until Scorsese made The King of Comedy a full decade later. Charles Grodin has never been better nor more excruciating, and May's improv-based style allows the situation to grow even more unsettling as characters morph into human beings that break away from the limiting perspective of Grodin's obliviously manipulative protagonist. It is one of the best comedies of all time.

But so, to my surprise, is the Farrelly brothers' remake of the film, which trades the complex character interactions of the original for their trademark gross-out humor. There's Something About Mary contained an unexpected critique of misogyny, and The Heartbreak Kid takes it even further. Ben Stiller turns his usual bumbling but "lovable" character on its head, making him out to be a monster who uses women without remorse in pursuit of his own stunted ideas of self-fulfillment. Grodin's Lenny got married just to get laid, but Eddie gets married to prevent his lover from going off to pursue her own dreams. If the comedy of the film is lighter, the tone is no less savage.

My full comparison of the two films is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Killer Joe (William Friedkin, 2012)

Matthew McConaughey enters as the titular hitman in Killer Joe literally coated in leather, clad in hide gloves, jacket and boots. It is one of the film's countless, indelible grindhouse moments, the man so defined by killing that even his wardrobe comprises death. On McConaughey, this dark outfit announces the arrival of a wolf in sheep's clothing (or cow's, as it were). The law never fares well in William Friedkin's films, where police detectives always morph into the very forces they hunt so obsessively. Killer Joe picks up where those other films end: Joe Cooper enters the film a monster, and the only thing close to a mitigating factor in his behavior is that the people who enlist his services may be even more repulsive.

Taking place in cramped trailers, run-down streets on the side of the railroad tracks that time forgot, and strip clubs lit in the electric zapper blues of Friedkin's last film, Bug, Killer Joe erects a world so white-trash that it could contain any redneck. Well, almost any redneck, for the film populates itself with such extreme Southern-fried types that they clash as violently with this setting as they would in Beverly Hills. Friedkin wastes no time establishing the lunacy of his dramatis personae, with debt-ridden drug dealer Chris (Emile Hirsch) beating on a trailer door in the dead of night as the film opens, only to be greeted by a close-up of Gina Gershon's bottomless, be-merkined unmentionables. Vulgarity and casual domestic violence ensues. But Gershon plays Chris' stepmom, Sharla, and she gets off light compared to how Chris views his biological mother. To him, the latter is just a hefty life insurance policy waiting to be collected and the answer his problems with his drug supplier. When he offers to cut the rest of the family in on the loot, no one raises any objection to the idea of having the woman killed, not even the seeming bundle of innocence, Chris' teen sister Dottie (Juno Temple).

This, as it turns out, is the tame part of the film. Having found such agreeable chemistry with playwright Tracy Letts' words and subject matter with Bug, the two seem even more attuned with each other in Joe, where Letts' grotesque characters mesh beautifully with Friedkin's nasty direction. He tends to shoot in medium and medium close-up, pushing the viewer deeper into the depraved violence and lurid sex. (Films can get a NC-17 rating just for having too much nudity. Killer Joe wraps its nudity in incestuous desires and underage sex, practically daring the MPAA to invent an even stricter rating to deal with it.) Swooning camera movements only exacerbate the sense of discomfort as Friedkin constantly reels toward and away (but not nearly away enough) from the character's schemes and abhorrent behavior.

Intimacy is a hallmark of Friedkin's style, though it is often of the sort that ultimately pushes people away. The tracking shots in the gay clubs of Cruising moved horizontally but always felt like a descent into hell for Pacino's protagonist, who never has a clear break in morphing from hero to villain but gradually becomes so monstrous that the audience only realizes what is happening when escape is impossible. In The French Connection's climax, Doyle kills the federal agent hounding his extreme measures rather than the drug smuggler, though by that point one cannot say whether this is a grotesque accident or a seized opportunity. Killer Joe likewise, plunges into its filth, to the point that you can practically smell the smoke-infused walls and cheap beer stains on the carpet of the Smith's trailer. Ironic distance just ain't Friedkin's bag, though in a way that is a good thing. A long shot in this film is the only thing more unbearable than the more proximal shots. It gives clarity to that which is excruciating enough in piecemeal.

In a way, Killer Joe serves as the inverse of another immaculately composed, Texan black comic thriller, the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men. (McConaughey in particular left such a strong impression that, for a brief second, I even thought he acted in the other film until I remembered I was thinking of the Woody Harrelson role.) Their film went medium-to-long shot to Friedkin's medium-close-to-even-closer, stepping away from the action to take stock of the sad waste of the violence. It meshed perfectly with Cormac McCarthy's spare but universal writing, using its critical separation to make harrowing observations on the perpetuity of human violence. Killer Joe contents itself to stick with its characters, not tying them to a larger fabric but following their demented arc so closely that the audience cannot be extricated from what it sees.

And it's all held together by McConaughey, who turns the Sheriff Bell character from No Country into Anton Chigurh. He rarely raises his voice, and from the second he meets his new employers, gears begin turning behind his eyes as he makes contingency plans if—no, scratch that, when—Chris does not follow through on his end of the bargain. Joe never asks for anything; he merely says what he will take. Instantly gauging the likelihood of collecting payment for this job, Joe informs Chris and Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) that he will take Dottie as a "retainer" for his services until they can raise his fee. So matter of factly does McConaughey announce this news that neither brother nor father raises an objection. But the degree of gentility the actor adds to Joe's controlling, sadistic side during his "date" with Dottie makes his domineering presence even worse. It dresses up Joe in a mask of decency that confuses the poor girl as his polite, understanding behavior during dinner gives way to softly spoken but firm commands to obey him.

McConaughey has such a profound effect on the other characters that they react to him in distinct ways. Temple nearly steals the movie from McConaughey with her airy calm that mixes two parts naïveté with one part shining. The actress' sharp, angled canines have always lent her smiles an equal element of baby-teeth cuteness and serrated warning, and she has never played up that ambiguity so well. When they first meet, Joe sits at a table in the position closest to the camera, his black clothing rippling out across the left side of the frame as he stretches out lethargically to wait for his clients to arrive. Dottie, meanwhile, curls into a vertical line, folding her legs up to her torso and sitting bolt upright; even her hair stands up in an awkward bunch. This posturing makes her hard to read, harder still when she begins asking forthright questions about Joe's killings with a tone that balances on a knife edge between open curiosity and barely concealed bloodlust. Joe never looks so  ever again, but this little girl has clearly rattled something in his unflappable core.

That core is on full display, however, with the other members of the Smith family. Chris' eyes dart over the man and his voice trembles as he perpetually weighs whom he fears more, the mob boss about to kill him or the killer who can deliver him from his fate. Like a caged animal, Chris slowly grows bolder with Joe as his desperation mounts, but this only increases his chances of death. Ansel, who does not have to fret about the mob, can devote all his attention to fearing Joe, often saying and moving as little as possible in the man's presence as if the killer were a T-Rex, unable to spot you if you stand perfectly still. Sharla, poor Sharla, seems to feel at ease around Joe, perhaps overconfident that she could twirl him around her pinky like every other man in her life. That assumption costs her dearly in the film's climax, in which a chicken leg is used to push the comedy into full horror. A caesura that comes on a wave of bloodletting is, despite its final gag of a cliffhanger, a blessed relief from the nightmare. The best Friedkin films never really conclude anyway; they just finally let you out of the chokehold.

X-Men First Class: Modal Verb for Ability - CAN

I love all the X-Men sequels and prequels. This one is one of my favorites. You can't miss it.

I. Watch the movie segment and match the mutant's number with what they can do. Mutants are people who have special gifts with which they can perform actions regular people usually can't. What can these mutants do?

1. Hank

2. Mystique

3. Darwin

4. Banshee

5. Angel

6. Alex



( ) Break objects with his/her voice

( ) Create and throw shiny circles at objects and destroy them

( ) Hold objects with his feet

( ) Fly

( ) Adapt his physical characteristics in order to survive in different environments

( ) Spit fire balls

( ) Change his/her physical characteristics to look like someone else




II. Which of the mutants above would you like to be? Which one has the most interesting power?


III. Work in small groups. Imagine that your group will create a mutant with special gifts. Write 5 things your mutant CAN do. Your teacher (or the class) will decide which mutant is the most interesting one.


WORKSHEET

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - X-MEN FIRST CLASS

Answer key:

I.

4, 6, 1, 5, 3, 5, 2

Detective (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985)

The trio of films that followed Jean-Luc Godard's return to cinema mirrored, in some cases, his early work. Sauve qui peut (la vie), Passion and First Name: Carmen matched up in thematic and (vague) stylistic terms with Breathless, Contempt and Pierrot le fou. But it is Detective, Godard's lightest since Made in U.S.A., that truly recaptures the spirit of his New Wave material. Filled with cinematic and literary references, populated by existential refinements of various generic types (detectives, mob bosses, black-clad hoods playing billiards with a cigarette dangling from their mouths, disintegrating couples, paid-off boxers), Detective returns the director to his reflexive roots for a lovely throwback tempered only by the slight melancholy of the New Wave performers who now look older.

Confining the action to the Hotel Concorde Saint-Lazare, Detective moves between three groups of people whose paths overlaps as they move about the hotel. Godard films static takes that emphasize the boundaries of his setting, rarely able to move his camera far back enough inside a room to go further than a medium long shot. On the occasions that Godard does manage to put some distance between the camera and his actors, it comes in the form of dazzlingly placed high- and low-angle shots of hallways and the expansive ground floor, taking an uncharacteristic pleasure in the shining commercial retreat that lacks the director's typical, ironic assessment of the gold-plated chandeliers and plush carpet. Yet even these big, beautiful shots segment the hotel's layout into a series of locations unto themselves, suites and bars in a void that suggest proximity to each other only because all the characters keep running into each other.

Why, even the individual rooms themselves do not obey the stillness of the camera shots, instead morphing to take on the personalities of whomever occupies their space. Pairing older actors (Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Brasseur) with younger lovers (Aurele Doazan, Nathalie Baye) tends to make rooms feel suffocating and morose, but the women on their own add life to these confined areas. Most liberating of all are the scenes that join Baye with "French Elvis" Johnny Hallyday as the fight promoter to whom Baye's husband owes money. The young lovers add a new New Wave spark as an erstwhile youth icon like Léaud gradually reveals his age as his character inherits his disgraced uncle's obsession. There are other tonal modulations as well, such as the claustrophobia that pervades the detectives' suite when Doazan takes the camera they use to spy on people outside and turns it inward to watch the watchmen.

Not much about Detective's narrative makes sense on a first watch, but as Anna Dzenis rightly says, Godard takes more pleasure in the "investigation" than the payoff. If the still camera setups and the sense of regret that pokes through the old men's philosophical and literary proclamations, Detective nevertheless bursts with life. I cannot say how happy I was to see Godard bring back the credits style of his early features, with letters appearing on a black screen. He even spreads out the credits for nearly 20 minutes, devilishly breaking up the film as it builds momentum. The broad genre touches give way to specific reverence when a beautiful scene of lovers entwined together throughout the hotel is juxtaposed with clips from Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. Most impressive, however, is Godard's use of stereo, placing each channel in contrapuntal relation to the other and to aurally reproduce the kinetic imagery of Godard's filmography. In the film's best scene, Léaud and Doazan spy on their marks down in the hotel's restaurant, the audio track splits to put the dialogue of the watched in one channel and in the other...music. Classical cues take the place of Léaud's speech, aggressive when a woman blocks his line of sight and makes a bumbling, attention-getting apology and lower as he confers with his colleague. The music fits to the mood of the image, or does it create that mood? Either way, the scene encapsulates this delightfully tossed-off feature, a relatively commercial venture that nevertheless shows off the ways Godard could always innovate.