Tag Archives: Grand Illusion Cinema

Stephen Fry Confronts the Warts-and-All Genius of Richard Wagner

Fans of operatic composer Richard Wagner devour and worship his works with an unabashed fervor normally endemic to Deadheads or Star Trek fans.

Wagnerians frequently travel around the world to view stagings of his operas, pore over hours of recordings of his compositions, and scarf up shelves of books covering Wagner’s life and creative output. This town’s done more than its share of stoking that devotion, too: Seattle Opera has built an international reputation performing the composer’s music-dramas (the company re-mounts its lavish staging of Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle this August).

One of those self-confessed Wagner nuts, actor/writer/raconteur Stephen Fry, offers a guided tour of his obsession in Wagner and Me, a fascinating 2011 documentary opening at the Grand Illusion tonight and running through January 31. It’s a combination travelogue, biography, and love letter that reveals as much about its host/narrator as it does its controversial subject.

On the face of it, there’s ample reason for Fry’s adoration. Wagner stood as one of the most important creative figures of the nineteenth century, a composer of towering brilliance who essentially invented things like the leitmotif (one melody that recurs, in slightly varied form, throughout a musical work — think John Williams’ recurring ‘dum dum, dum dum da DUM dum’ theme surfacing in different tempos and instrument combinations throughout Star Wars).

Wagner also wedded that compositional mastery with an incalculably ambitious dramatist’s touch. His monumental four-opera Ring Cycle drew from Germanic and Norse mythology to explore the duality of humanity’s thirst for power and its need for love. Key pieces of the Cycle’s pocket universe were co-opted outright by generations of storytellers (including a chap named Tolkien), and the composer’s melodies have served as indelible soundtracks for everything from cinematic napalm bombings to Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Fry, it turns out, is one hardcore fan. He’s followed Wagner’s oeuvre passionately since the age of twelve, when he heard Tannhauser on his dad’s gramophone, and much of Wagner and Me follows the actor’s first trek to Bayreuth. The South German town serves as “Stratford-upon-Avon, Mecca and Graceland, all rolled up into one” for Wagnerians, housing a grand Opera House built for Wagner by King Ludwig as well as the composer’s gravesite.

Wagner and MeWagner fans should find much to enchant them throughout Wagner and Me. The movie provides a brisk Cliffs Notes on the composer’s life and career, and it frequently hauls out eye-popping vistas in Germany, Russia, and Switzerland. There’s no denying the power and potency of the music on display, and Seattle Opera fans will surely welcome glimpses of noted Wagnerian singers Christopher Ventris and Linda Watson, both of whom performed in the company’s Parsifal in 2003.

Fry’s been given impressive access to the inner workings of the Bayreuth Wagner Festival, and he makes the geeky most of it, whether he’s waxing rhapsodic during rehearsals of Die Walkure or playing the opening chords of Tristan und Isolde on Wagner’s personal piano.

But there’s an exceptionally ugly 800-pound gorilla in the room in the form of Adolf Hitler, whose worship of Wagner tainted (irrevocably, many believe) the composer’s stirring compositions. Wagner and Me goes from simply engaging to quietly riveting when the Jewish-descended Fry addresses the stench of Naziism that continues to hang over the music, as well as the composer/dramatist’s vitriolic anti-Semitism.

Fry’s openly disquieted by both (having lost relatives in the Holocaust), but defends the art in the end, refusing to let the transcendent brilliance of the music be corrupted by racism or the Third Reich.

That astonishing music — and the insights of conductors and artists who’ve helped keep it alive — bolster that idealistic stance, so when Fry attempts to rationalize Wagner’s personal and ideological ugliness, he can’t help but sound a little naive. Yes, Wagner was a creative genius, and an artist doggedly committed to his muse. Yes, he lived in an era rife with casually-accepted anti-Semitism, and much of his prejudicial venom may have been born from personal jealousy over the financial success of his contemporaries, Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer (both Jews themselves). But Fry’s assertion that the person most hurt by Wagner’s anti-Semitism was Wagner himself feels like a futile attempt to find some shred of personal decency in an already-unlikeable (and unrepentantly prejudiced) human being.

Leave it to one Wagner scholar, author Chris Walton, to balance admiration with a refreshing gust of practicality. Wagner “may have been a nasty little man, and a nasty anti-Semite,” he states, “but that doesn’t make his music any less supreme.”

Kung Fu, Spaceships, and Disembodied Heads Trump Hobbits this Weekend

Sure, you could join the sheeplike throngs shambling into thousands of multiplexes this weekend, tossing their lucre at some butt-numbingly long fantasy blockbuster starring Sir Ian McKellan and a bunch of hairy-footed guys with pituitary problems.

But I’ll lay you dollars to dwarves that the presentation opening at the Grand Illusion Theater tonight contains more action, violence, gratuitous nudity, monsters, spaceships, wholesale mechanical destruction, and fun in any given two minutes than that Peter Jackson bladder-tester can muster in its entire three hours.

This evening, the Illusion busts out Trailer War, a compilation of vintage coming-attractions trailers compiled by the mad hatters at Austin, Texas’s Drafthouse Films. If you’re looking for real seat-of-the-pants cinematic adventure and surprise on a movie screen this weekend, you’ll find it in spades and in glorious 35mm here (don’t believe me? Check out the resolutely NSFW trailer below).

Drafthouse pooled largely from 1970s and ‘80s grindhouse fodder for the source material. It was a time just before the proliferation of home video, when popcorn movies were still made by enterprising hucksters with the souls of carnies. Said con-men followed their guts, hurtling every salacious and exploitable element possible into their films without the aid of big budgets, focus groups or corporate accountants. Bereft of the funds and star-power wielded by Big Hollywood, B-movie makers became masters of selling the sizzle, not the sometimes gristle-laden steak.

Trailer War lays out a staggering (in more ways than one) variety of mini-movies in its 112 minutes–kung fu flicks, blaxploitation obscurities, gore-drenched horror epics, peek-a-boo sexploitation, and more. Many of ‘em are bat-shit crazy enough to knock even the most jaded viewers for a wallop. Try finding an unpretentious, irony-free modern equivalent to Thunder Cops, a Hong Kong oddity whose trailer showcases an ass-kicking Buddhist prayer cloth, gun battles, high-flying kung fu, hordes of zombies, a multi-armed priest, and a disembodied head toted around by a radio-controlled helicopter–all in 3.5 minutes. And words simply fail to capture the warped magic of the prog-rock car crash orgy that is Stunt Rock’s coming-attraction spot.

Expect plenty of strange bedfellows to go with the titillation, too. Trailer War also includes the preview for the Italian Star Wars knock-off Starcrash, in which you’ll see Bond Girl Caroline Munro, former child evangelist Marjoe Gortner, Oscar-winner Christopher Plummer, and David frickin’ Hasselhoff dodging laser beams and flying plastic spaceships around the galaxy.

The above three examples, mind you, only cover about 11 minutes of Trailer War‘s two dizzying hours. Hobbit, Schmobbit.

[Trailer War plays at the Grand Illusion through December 15.]

Put the Blame on Rita Hayworth and Gilda at the Grand Illusion

Sex on a stick: Rita Hayworth in Gilda.

Want to see the sexiest two minutes ever committed to black-and-white film? Get thee to the bottom of this post.

Want to see the sexiest two minutes ever committed to black-and-white film, in luscious 35mm, on a big screen here in Seattle? Get thee to the Grand Illusion Cinema between tomorrow and next Thursday.

The Illusion’s screening Gilda (the 1946 crime classic from whence said sexy two minutes sprang) for a week-long run as part of a mini-Glenn Ford retrospective that began last week with Fritz Lang’s gangster drama, The Big Heat. Ford’s never been a particular favorite of mine (as a noir hero, he always felt more grouchy than tough or world-weary), but in Gilda he does solid work as Johnny, a guy working for shady gambling impresario Ballin Mundson (George Macready) in South America. Johnny’s big assignment? Keeping an eye on Mundson’s new wife, Gilda (Rita Hayworth)–a gig complicated immeasurably by Johnny’s previous (and unknown-to-Mundson) romantic entanglement with the spitfire bride.

On its surface, Gilda is a sturdy film noir directed with economy by Charles Vidor, shot artfully by Rudolph Mate, and peppered with lesser-known but awesome character actors like Joseph Calleia and Gerald Mohr. But the arguable reason it’s endured is Hayworth, whose jaw-dropping beauty and undeniable sexual charisma go hand-in-hand with her vulnerability. And the love-hate pendulum that swings back-and-forth between Gilda and Johnny feels downright modern in its execution.

Lovingly photographed by Mate in a stunner of a strapless dress and damn near fogging the screen with her sensuality as she pulls an elbow-length glove from her arm, Hayworth–almost without trying–turns the jaunty standard, ‘Put the Blame on Mame,’ into something downright carnal. Try to keep your eyes in place as she does her thing.

Traveling Beyond the Black Rainbow with Director Panos Cosmatos

In an era where numbing literalism too frequently masquerades itself as art, films that dare to take audiences on unexpected journeys emerge all too infrequently. Beyond the Black Rainbow, which opens at the Grand Illusion tonight, is one of those wonderful rare birds.

The basic plot could pretty much fit on the head of a pin: A silent, psychically-gifted young woman (Eva Allan) quietly endures existence/incarceration in an isolated commune, under the care of Dr. Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), a therapist who’s far more unstable than the patient he’s overseeing. But Beyond the Black Rainbow turns out to be far more than the sum of its David Cronenberg-gone-Solaris parts. It’s not so much a formula horror/science fiction film as it is a strange, half-remembered, languid nightmare version of one. Fueled by a combination of childhood nostalgia and fevered imagination, first-time director Panos Cosmatos has crafted an immersive, surreal, eerie, and utterly fascinating mind-trip of a movie that transcends its pulp framework.

Cosmatos grew up around creative parents–his mother was an artist, and his father George P. Cosmatos worked for years as an in-demand action director of films like Tombstone and Rambo: First Blood, Part II–and ironically,  Beyond the Black Rainbow was partly born from their parental concern. Restricted from watching many of the films on the shelves of his local video store, Panos found himself conceiving fanciful stories based on the images screaming from the lurid, hyper-colorful display boxes that housed the store’s VHS tapes. Three decades later he’s tapped into those mental movies, and into the dreamlike pacing of that era’s films, to create something truly unique.

Love it or hate it, Beyond the Black Rainbow won’t leave you once you’ve seen it. And not surprisingly, talking to the director is as enlightening and surprising as viewing his odd cinematic progeny.

You’ve described Beyond the Black Rainbow as being inspired by the packaging of old horror and science fiction VHS tapes. I love the notion of you creating a work of art that’s inspired by your outsider’s imaginings of what was in those tapes. Could you elaborate on that?

Well, I sort of had this story idea in my mind about a girl in an institute, that wasn’t really connected to any era. And after my father passed away, I found myself sort of drifting back into that state of nostalgia, and I was going back and watching a lot of the films that made me feel good when I was a kid. I sort of started to realize that I needed to express that, somehow.

As I was thinking and sort of meditating on this nostalgia, I remembered being in that video store–Video Attic–back in the day. I spent hours imagining these movies, and all these kind of disparate elements started to come together.

This other concept that I had was to create a fictional religion in…an art installation. I would see these empty storefronts, with a fold-out table and someone sitting there with some tablets and books for some religion. So I sort of invented this idea of the Arboria Institute. Again, it was just going to be an art installation, but simultaneously I was trying to figure out what facility this girl was in [in the movie]. And then I realized I’d already invented the facility in a divergent creative tangent, without knowing it was this Arboria Institute. And those two things kind of merged.

The movie is set in 1983, and it’s very evocative of the era visually. It has strong visual and thematic influences–I see bits of early Cronenberg and Solaris, and the score and saturated colors bring to mind Dario Argento and the Italian gialli. But the end product doesn’t feel like pastiche.

I became obsessed with color around the time I began [developing] the movie, because I’d always planned to make my first film in black-and-white for budget reasons. It felt at the time like it would be easier to make a movie look beautiful in black-and-white. During that time period, watching a lot of old films, though, I started to fall in love so much with the very rich, saturated color and pulsating grain–just the whole feeling of color. It started to mean so much to me that I realized that I had to make the movie in color.

Your eye for color is definitely at odds with the visual scheme of most modern movies. 

Around the time I started coming up with these ideas, movies in the mid-2000’s were still going through this stage of being very visually de-saturated and bland. And I just really wanted to go in the exact opposite direction and make something that was just exploding with color.

You’ve created a movie where not a lot actually happens per se, yet it manages to be very hypnotic. 

I always wanted to make the film be in what I would call the Trance genre, like Phase IV and Apocalypse Now…films that are very heavy on mood and ambience and tell the story very visually, not verbally. And I always appreciate films [that are] sort of probing further in those worlds.

The musical score is really immersive and incredibly well-integrated into the film. How early on in the process did the score come in?

Well, when I realized the movie was going to be set in the ’80’s, I determined pretty quickly that I wanted a very rich, thick, juicy-sounding synthesizer analog score. While I was writing, I wasn’t listening to a lot of era-specific music. I actually listened to the score for the Half Life 2 videogame a lot, which I really loved and found really inspiring. But for the actual film itself, I wanted it to be era-specific. Through a stroke of luck, really, a friend of mine introduced me to [composer] Jeremy Schmidt. I showed him a rough cut, and he got involved.

Was there anything that you filmed but didn’t end up using, or wanted to film but weren’t able to, due to budgetary or time limitations?

Well, I’d say 99% of what I wanted is in there. I mean, we storyboarded the movie beforehand, and basically I shot the storyboards. Our schedule was so tight, I didn’t really have time to shoot anything but what was on the page and the storyboards.

In the film, there was going to be animated sequence that was a contrast to the opening narration, that kind of dealt with the darker side of what the Institute had become in the ’80’s. I even roughed it into the cut, with just a voice-over and a temp track. But ultimately we ran out of money, and it sort of fought against the mood. Drawing an element of the film was just too specific. Jeremy wrote an amazing piece of music for it, which hopefully we’ll be able to put out.

The movie’s style is so dreamlike that it will provoke some viewers into wanting rational explanations for some of the situations and the characters’ actions. But I think determining those things for yourself as you’re watching it is part of what makes the movie interesting. Is that a sensibility that you were plugged into when you were making it?

Absolutely. I wrote a story that was pretty straightforward. As simple as it is, though, I decided to allow for atmosphere and to let the characters and the look of the film and everything like that just come…In tune with this idea of creating an imagined film, I didn’t want it to be too story-driven. I wanted it to be more like an open landscape that the audience could project their own fears and desires and memories onto–like a Rorschach test.

What’s next for you, project-wise?

The film that I want to make next is the flip-side to the coin of this film. This film is very controlled–it’s all about control and repression. And I want to explore the flip-side of that, which is just a more primal kind of explosion of emotion…The overall rhythm of it will be more propulsive, I think.

Samuel L. Jackson Seeks Redemption in The Samaritan

With crowds predictably crowding The Avengers, I thought I’d take a look at Samuel L. Jackson’s other film for this season.  The Samaritan, playing without much fanfare at the University District’s Grand Illusion Cinema through June 7th, takes all the tropes, all the bright ribbons of the suspense-grifter-thriller and gives them room to breathe.  Unfortunately for its protagonist and several people around him, some breaths hurt to take.

Yes, it seems simple enough in synopsis:  The con, Foley (Jackson, also listed as a co-executive producer).  His release, after 25 years, for putting a bullet in the head of a man we see on his knees, in front of the gun, in the film’s first shot–a man who turns out to be Foley’s old partner.  Foley trying to go straight and check in with his parole officer.  The devil in Foley’s ear, Ethan (Luke Kirby), son of Foley’s old dead dome-shot partner:  Slick, flamboyant, not a hair out of place (just like his father before the bullet), dancing around what he actually wants until he steps up to Foley’s chin and demands it.  The woman, Iris (Ruth Negga), young and beautiful but certainly too learned in the streets to be called a girl, majestic in her cheekbones and soft but skeptical eyes.  The mark, Tom Wilkinson, who can play an upper-class saint or a refrigerated-heart monster with only minute variations of facial muscle between them.  Here, of course, he can’t be the good guy.  Jackson’s big enough, in all ways, for a movie full of them.

Director David Weaver uses Jackson’s classic facets–the wide eyes, the stilted, proclaiming diction when driven to passion–but lets them have their moments, rather than cattle-prodding action along.  The Big Con plays second fiddle to Foley’s struggle for, if not redemption (from a negative number to a positive number), at least absolution (from a negative number to zero).

Other directors, even talented and subtle ones such as Neil LaBute with Lakeview Terrace, end up using Jackson as a symbolized prop manipulated patently by external forces–complete with Jackson’s character lying lifeless in the Jesus Christ Pose at the end of that one.  For The Samaritan, Foley wields a big gun for the money shots but his circumstances, and his struggles, end up in other onscreen characters’ hands even as he tries to pull them back to his bosom.  And no matter how convoluted and unlikely the plot (especially the last half hour), the people keep acting like real people.  I’m only sorry how nobody real’s buying.

 

So Much Horror Your Head Will Explode at the Grand Illusion Halloween Weekend

Of all the local theaters serving up horror movies in October, the Grand Illusion Cinema has offered the most sustained and varied horror programming for the month. From classic Lon Chaney Jr. werewolf flicks to demented Japanese monster epics to zombie gutmunchers, the Illusion’s covered just about all of the boogeyman bases over the last three-plus weeks.

This weekend, they’re pulling out all the stops for a veritable Horror-palooza–three mind-blowing triple features that encompass the glory years of horror and exploitation and (maybe) the greatest golden-age gothic chillers crafted by an American studio.

Friday night’s assault begins at 7pm with The Brain Eaters, a straightahead 1958 sci-fi shocker loosely (but not loosely enough: a lawsuit ensued) based on the Robert Heinlein story, The Puppet Masters. Alien parasites set up camp in a small Illinois town, and it’s up to stalwart scientist Ed Nelson to save the world. Like a lot of thrillers of the era, it sports a reasonably involving plot, a zippy pulp pace, and some of the most wonderfully ludicrous monsters you’ll ever see in an old B-flick (the parasites bear a remarkable resemblance to fluffy bedroom slippers with pipe-cleaner antennae).

Things get gothic for Friday’s second feature, The Awful Dr. Orloff, a 1961 horror flick directed by the Spanish schlock auteur Jess Franco. Franco’s never been a favorite of mine, but Orloff‘s the closest thing to a classic he ever produced; a genuinely atmospheric chiller that takes a formulaic mad-scientist-repairs-hideous-daughter’s-face plot and runs with it.

Last but not least, The Magic Serpent brings together ninja magic, period swordplay, and giant monster brawls in a twisted 1966 Reeses Peanut Butter Cup of Weird. Tell me the trailer doesn’t give you the itchy pants to see it.

Saturday Night’s triple-feature cobbles together three very strange cinematic dogs (compliments of–big surprise–the fine folks at Something Weird Video). The first, The Godmonster of Indian Flats, imagines how a dusty old-west town might handle the onslaught of a giant, mucous-covered bipedal sheep monster (really).

Second up, The Zodiac Killer presents a 1971 dramatization/exploitation of the infamous serial killer’s exploits.

Capping the night’s bill: Bloody Pit of Horror, a notoriously odd 1965 stew of early-sixties cheesecake and cartoonish sado-masochism. Talk about strange bedfellows–the muscular executioner/tormentor running around torturing and murdering buxom models happens to be Mickey Hargitay (the actor/weightlifter papa of Law and Order: SVU’s Mariska Hargitay!).

The folks at the Grand Illusion are playing coy with the actual content of Sunday’s triple feature (possibly for legal reasons), but if the hints on their website are to be trusted, it’s a rare opportunity to see three of the horror genre’s undisputed masterpieces, on a big screen as God intended. I’ll follow the theater’s lead and offer a few hints: Think neckbolts,  electricity, and immersive black-and-white.  And don’t miss any of  ‘em.