All posts by Andrew Hamlin

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

In Hitchcock, The Knife Doesn’t Exactly Feel Like Justice…

Yes, Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock borrows from Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. Yes, both characters delight in sadism, “cutting up a few old touches” as they joked in Silence Of The Lambs.

Hitchcock, though, has to live just inside the line of decency. He can abuse women whom he wants to abuse (men scarcely register to him), verbally and spiritually. He can leave lasting marks on their psyches: Just ask Tippi Hedren. But he can’t step over the line. Maybe that stalling’s what drives him to gulp down solids and liquids. Booze for breakfast, booze for lunch, booze for dinner, and a fair number of between-meal snacks.

You have to give Hitch (he pointedly drops the “cock”) some credit for being a nice guy, though. No, you really have to at the risk of the whole show because here, unlike Silence Of The Lambs, they’re going for a conventional romance, and that means the two leads need likeableness. In the case of Helen Mirren, that’s no problem; still warmly smiling and sexy as hell, she drifts through the action on a puffy cloud, and the viewer understands her intentions are only the best, even if Hitch doesn’t.

Of course, the presence of a conventional love story doesn’t stop the filmmakers contratextualizing that with one of the most unconventional love stories presented in mainstream cinema. And that romance, of course, lies at the heart of Psycho. You won’t see much of Anthony Perkins onscreen as either himself or Norman Bates. (I told you men scarcely register to Hitch, although for cinematic purposes here, he identifies so strongly with Bates that he doesn’t need to think about him much.)

I do not agree with that school of thought stating that Scarlett Johansson has only one facial expression, but she does seem a touch more (oddly enough) animated, playing Janet Leigh. Of course, much of that comes at Hitch’s hands, or to be more precise, his sadistic voice.  They’ve cleaned Hitch up, but they can’t grant him potency. Hannibal became a man of action the minute he popped those cuffs: Hitch can only watch.

 

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Skyfall is Skary (Especially If You Don’t Dig Rats)

So James Bond is Scottish–ohwhatagiveaway! Or should I say, ohnothimagain?  Check, everybody in the UK is buds with everybody else, right? In semi-seriousness, though, that James Bond is a bad mutha–hush your mouth! But I’m talkin’ about James Bond!

You have to love James Bond like a reptile now anyway, because James Bond is Daniel Craig (now, anyway), and Daniel Craig is like a reptile most of the time. He lays down the reptile baseline, never moving his face except to think about licking his lips, and so the emotion has to flow around him; imagine a rock stuck halfway between the banks of a stream. Getting Moneypenny out into the field and allowing her to whup some ass certainly helps. That’s Naomie Harris, who is alive in all the ways that Craig is not. She’s a relief.

The plot? Oh yeah, M gets in over her head at the hands of some computer hacker and she and Bond have to re-affirm their long-dysfunctional relationship. This Bond installment’s cattywampus in that most of ‘em climax with the confrontation with the baddie, but this one throws in two such confrontations, the villain throwing himself boldly across the boss-agent two-step.

Ah yes, the villain. Javier Bardem. Put your upper teeth over your lower lip. Push those upper teeth out. Bite down gently on your lower lip. Then keep your upper teeth out and make a rapid chewing motion like you’re a rat on a piece of cheese. Chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew. Now imagine that you’re dressed impossibly cool and your hair is some unnatural color of blond and you’re advancing on a bound James Bond reciting some impossibly cool monologue that explains the nature of the world, and the camera pans in and you stride closer to the camera until you’re standing over Bond and you get to sum up.

Pay close attention, because a lot of people are going to be doing this shit next Halloween.  You mark my words right now.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

The Sessions Gets Under the Skin of Sexual Surrogacy, Slightly

Clever camera angles play down John Hawkes‘ enormous wide honker in the new dramedy The Sessions, hence playing up Hawkes’ resemblance to Robert Downey, Jr., which is of course part of director/writers Ben Lewin‘s game plan. As polio victim Mark O’Brien, who’s down (on a gurney) but not out, Hawkes has a naturalistic game to play and plays it through. We know this is a Hollywood version of naturalism because we never see Hawkes having to go to the bathroom and none of his attendants ever lose their shit at the nice man who’s paralyzed from the neck down.

The sex surrogate chosen to relieve Mark of his virginity is played by Helen Hunt, who got boldly naked for a paralyzed man twenty years ago in The Waterdance and goes considerably futher skin-wise here. We know this is a Hollywood movie because “boldly” means we get to see every inch of Helen Hunt, while we never see John Hawkes below the very top of the groin, hence preserving a time-honored double standard involving the penis as the final taboo. The movie makes warmly comic hay out of the societal fixation on penile vaginal penetration as the one true sex, hence setting up Mark O’Brien’s hangups as well as reinforcing them as long-held societal hangups. But in a movie set in Berkeley, you’d hope for more questioning of authority. Even authority of ideas.

I don’t mean to sound entirely grumpy at this film. Hawkes and and Hunt seem so utterly plausible as implausible people that they deserve all the praise; it’s three for three if you add William H. Macy as a priest who actually makes Catholicism seem warm and non-condemning.

I do recommend O’Brien’s original autobiographical article, which you’ll find here, and which gives a story messier, sadder, and more oddly touching than Lewin’s screenplay. O’Brien confesses his anxieties, his sexual disappointments in body, mind, and spirit–but also his urge to recite Shakespeare to his surrogate.  “Our culture values youth, health, and good looks, along with instant solutions,” he quite rightly writes, “… I fear getting nothing but rejections. But I also fear being accepted and loved. For this latter happens, I will curse myself for all the time and life that I have wasted.” The film could have put some more of that in its pipe to smoke.

As a final aside, I’ll mention that O’Brien died on the Fourth of July, 1999, age 49, after a life and career filled with grunting frustration and poetic insight. His surrogate, Cheryl Cohen Greene, is still alive and practicing, although she’s lucky enough to live in an area where surrogacy is approved of.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

V/H/S Arrives All Washy-d Up

I held out hope for V/H/S, opening this weekend at the Egyptian, for a single shot I’d seen of someone wearing one of those transparent face masks (look for more of them this Halloween season) where you can almost but not quite see the person underneath, see the humanity struggling to escape the fixed expression. The human visage looks out through its prison, but can’t touch, can’t influence, the outside world.

I still love those masks because they still creep me out, but guess what? You only see one in the movie for about two seconds, and by then it’s pretty obvious who’s wearing it to what end. I’d hoped the purloined-VHS tape gimmick might give rise to truly twisted tapehead horror manifestations; instead, all concerned filmmakers (six, counting the Radio Silence collective as one) go for the anti-gusto, emphasizing tape’s dull, leaden, murky qualities.

Of course, sinister and mean things can emerge out of that murk. David Bruckner’s bit starts off the way a lot of these segments do–with a cadre of idle youngsters caring for nothing but the next high–and by the time they figure out the lusty young thing they’ve picked up for fun is sucking their fun and everything else dry, it’s too late for them to do anything but scream. You’ll probably figure it out before them, of course–assuming you’re not as high. But second-guessing the bled-dry is one of the easy thrills of the modern-day horror film.

Kudos also to Joe Swanberg, who mixes paranoia and betrayal in a sickly brew and throws in video conferencing for extra slow-burn menace. On the whole, though, there’s a movie I’m thinking you should see instead. It’s called Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine. And he did things with the gaping-at-decay gestalt–slowing it down, siphoning off all underlying plot progress, leaning in close–that Ti West and company can only grimace and bear down at.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Planet Of Snail Takes Viewers on an Inner-Space Odyssey

In one of several centerpieces for the remarkable documentary Planet Of Snail, opening tonight at the Varsity, a young South Korean couple must face off against a burnt-out fluorescent light.  Fixing the light would be almost nothing–for most of us, that is.  However, the wife, Soon-ho, is not even five feet tall–she suffers from a spinal deformity, never fully explained in the film.  And while her husband Young-chan, stands much taller, he is completely blind and largely deaf, deaf enough for a classification of “deaf-blind.”

Young-chan stands on the bed, reaching for the circular bulb which until recently brought forth the light he cannot see.  He communicates with his wife mostly through finger-spelling into one or both hands.  He also carries a Braille translation machine, but this is not much use when changing a flourescent light.

Everything the two do together takes extra steps, relative to our planet.  And everything not laid out in ritual (for example, Soon-ho tapping to her husband at the table which bowls contain which foods) takes extra, extra steps.  But the couple never seem to grit their teeth, spit, or kick.  Maybe it’s selective editing on the part of the director, Yi Seung-jun, but he’s filmed and cut together a consensual positive attitude, a twosome game for anything.

We never learn Soon-ho’s exact problem, and many other things are never explained, such as family members, childhoods, and money.  Young-chan writes poetry, essays, and plays–although since he lost his sight in early childhood, he has never actually seen a play.  But this information, at for the purpose of Yi’s carefully considered study, proves inessential.  They have each other, they have their friends.

One of Young-chan’s friends, with handicaps very similar to his, recalls over dinner how he took Young-chan to visit Soon-ho for one of the first times.  It was very late at night, he remembers.  And the rain came down very hard.  The two men, with their onboard obstacles, had trouble escaping their blind-school dorm room and hailing a taxi.  But they did, and they made it.  Everything else flows from that.  A film which can make you step back and marvel at the pervasive, almost scary power of ordinary things must be one of the most remarkable films of its year.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Beauty is Embarrassing (Just Ask Wayne White)

Wayne White is one of those fellows, male or female, you know without knowing.  He collected three Emmys for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse (and broke one), designed the puppets for Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” video, designed the space ship etc. for the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight” clip, built a huge puppet head of Lyndon B. Johnson (not shown here) complete with tie, built even huger puppets like the one shown here, including one of George Jones’ head (not shown here). The latter is much larger than most of my college dorm bedrooms were.  That doesn’t cover everything.  But it covers enough to get started.

Beauty Is Embarrassing, opening tonight at the Northwest Film Forum, includes White’s wife, Mimi Pond, urging him obliquely to shave the beard he sports at the film’s outset, possibly because with a beard he looks shockingly like Joaquin Phoenix in the latter’s faux-loco phase.  A handsome feller with or without facial hair, White guides us through his escape from the South to New York City, his escape from New York City to Hollywood, and his escape from Hollywood to, hopefully, a better place inside and outside his head.

Along the artist’s path, thorny condundrums present themselves–the old follow-your-heart vs. count-your-money trick.  When White exhorts his audience to follow their hearts, I want to believe, but I’m also wondering, in this economy–in this world– if he’s exhorting cliff jumps.  His many paintings with many big words on them, many obscene, should make you laugh.  I also liked the eyeball barbell he brought with him: That’s one barbell with a huge eyeball at each end, each orb quite possibly pulled from George Jones’ cranium.  The film glosses over artistic struggle and makes life and creativity look easy, both potential pitfalls.  But it’s a warm opus with plenty of laughs.  And as White explains with surprising passion, he takes laughter very seriously.