216. Despair

Song - Als Het Vuur Gedoofd Is (Acda en De Munnik)

Movie: Despair (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

I am unfamiliar with the Vladimir Nabokov novel this is adapted from, but I have read Lolita and some of his short stories. I've loved all of it, and find his cheerfully self-aware existentialism to be very much in my wheelhouse. Fassbinder evokes that really well here, vividly portraying both the personal demons and the societial disarray haunting Herman (Dirk Bogarde), without forgetting that Herman is a fictional character in a fictional story. Fassbinder, like Nabokov, knows that ultimately nothing but his own aesthetic choices will define how we perceive Herman, and fully delights in making these choices and signaling them to the audience. Dirk Bogarde is on the same page, choosing to act as arch and mannered as he possibly can at any given moment. It's a hugely entertaining performance, filled with elaborated gestures and wonderfully embellished dialogue. Bogarde often has to perform in situations that don't make sense of their own, without the stylisations of Fassbinder. He has to anticipate that a cut, a camera movement or the wonderful, often bordering on facetious, score will contextualise what's going on. He is also very often semi-obscured by, or seen through, windows and mirrors, a thematically relevant, but slightly overused, choice here. 

I had not seen a Fassbinder or Bogarde film before. It's both easy to see why they have been canonised as great artists and why Despair is usually not listed among their greatest works. Herman is the owner of a chocolate business in 1930's Berllin. He is also a Russian immigrant with Jewish roots, correctly suspecting that his wife is cheating on him with her dim cousin. As a result, Herman is experiencing dissociation and is obsessed with finding his doppelganger to take his identity. He eventually convinces himself he has found one (not even close, as Fassbinder constantly highlights) and plots the perfect murder, which of course turns out to be less than perfect. This exploration of Herman's mental state doesn't go anywhere unusual, either narratively, or psychologically, even if Fassbinder keeps things lively with ocassional asides into premonitions and potential alternate realities. 

Yet this slightness is also what makes the film quite interesting. Fassbinder (I suppose inspired by Nabokov) deliberately minimises Herman, turning him into a fairly inconsequential person. From an outsider perspective, his most momentous act (the murder of a random nobody) is so badly and uninterestingly executed, and of so little importance, it will at most raise the eyebrow of a semi-interested newspaper reader before being forgotten. Nobody in the film acts as if being a distressed Russian Jew in 1930's Berlin is of great historical or societal importance. Herman's Nazi-uniform wearing underling in the chocolate factory is presented similarly. As much as possible Fassbinder tries to see Germany in the 1930's from the perspective of someone living there at the time. He shows people debating politics and being concerned about extremist stances, but he doesn't let his characters betray any awareness of living through a grave historic moment.  

In the film's best scene, Herman is sitting in a bar outside when across the street a number of brownshirts throw bricks through the windows of a Jewish shop. Two Jews playing chess in Herman's bar look up from their game, and continue playing after the brief distraction. Passersby briefly (or not) take a look at the broken window, and go on with their daily lives. Even the store owners themselves don't make a scene, but take a broom, clean their entryway and get back into the shop. A couple scenes later (it's not always clear how much time has passed between scenes), Herman returns to the same bar. Thr chess table is now occupied by two non-Jewish Germans. 

215. Against All Odds

Song - Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now) (Phil Collins)

Movie: Against All Odds (Taylor Hackford, 1984)

The second movie in a row to kick it up a notch when it gets to Mexico! That is where Terry Brogan (Jeff Bridges) finds Jessie Wyler (Rachel Ward). Jessie's mum (Jane Greer) is the new owner of the LA Outlaws, the American football team that has just cut the injured Terry. Sleazy bookie Jake Wise (James Woods) sees this as a great opportunity to use Terry, paying him to search for his dissappeared lover Jessie. It's the kind of situation where nobody needs Terry and Jessie to fall in love, but, alas, they quickly find out they have the hots for each other. 

Against All Odds is more interested in being a Chinatown knockoff than in being a Body Heat knockoff, but it's much better at being the latter. Bridges and Ward have such great chemistry, it becomes very easy to root for them, especially once it becomes clear that Jessie is no femme fatale. She is the one that makes the first move in Mexico, and Hackford films many of the sex scenes from her perspective, highlighting the joy and pleasure she gets out of it. Usually in films like this that means that she is leading her lover on. Here she has no ulterior motive, which leads to a very convincing erotically charged love story.  

It's not just the romance that serves as eye candy. A street race between Terry and Jake is mostly about showcasing the speed and glamour of Ferrari and Porsche  A crucial scene set in a nightclub takes its time to evoke the fancy atmosphere of the place with its hypermodern design, its well dressed attendees and its glitzy stage performers. Naturally, there is also lots of driving on brightly lit streets, often to reach offices with ridiculously expensive interioir decorationg, including giant windows overlooking the city. There is not a single shot in which Los Angeles doesn't look like the prettiest place in the world. The same goes for Mexico. Of course, you can't justify a greyed out yellow sheen if you are the first movie in the world allowed to film in Chichen Itza. The film takes maximum advantage of having the mysterious Mayan ruins as a backdrup. 

I am a fan of 80's/90's visually appealing romantic thrillers, especially when they are filled with a bunch of great lead and character actors given roles perfectly tailored to them. This would have been one of the better ones if it was satisfied being that. But Against All Odds is more ambitious and also want to be a serious social commentary on the relationship between sports, politics and business. The owners of the LA Outlaws are shown to not care about American football and use the team to gain support for a construction project that would destroy a mountain. I get that the World Cup in Qatar was a long way from happening in 1984, but presenting rich and powerful folks using sports for their own personal gain, and to the detriment of athletes, as some new development was ridiculous even then.  All of this also happens in the most predicatble way possible, and is way less exciting than the increasingly knotty relationship between Jessie, Jake and Terry. While our rooting interests are clear, it's easy to imagine a scenario in which all these roles are reversed. All three of them are partly to blame for the situation they are in, and everyone's actions are mostly guided by self-interest. 

214. Born on the Fourth of July

Song - Born in the U.S.A (Bruce Springsteen)

Movie: Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989)

Born on the Fourth of July, is a (mostly) good movie, but it only truly becomes a certified 'Oliver Stone' once it reaches Mexico. Up until then, with the exception of a couple of hospital scenes, the film is easily recognisable as historic fiction. There are some scenes where Stone makes quite unconventional stylstic choices, but those all serve to illuminate the period he depicts and contextualise the characters' feelings and motivations. In Mexico, any sense of objective realism is thrown out of the window, in favor of maximalist subjective frenzy. And when it comes to that, Stone has no equal. Every shot is slightly off kilter, depicting something that could theoretically exist but feels unreal and the editing choices become more incoherent and mostly serve as a representation of (societal and individual) irrationality. As a result the film becomes fervidly disjointed, culiminating in a menacingly intense fight between the disabled and disillusioned Vietnam veterans Ron Kovic (the film is based on his autobiography, and co-written by him) and Charlie. Ron and Charlie are played by Tom Cruise and Willem Dafoe, who have not been instructed to be subtle. 

I get why people find Stone's descents into pompously irrational lunacy offputting, but I find it greatly appealing. It feels like a miracle that he successfully sustained such a maximalist approach for an entire runinng time in films like JFK, The Doors and Nixon. I haven't seen Natural Born Killers; that one always felt a little much, even for me, and it's probably for the best that he doesn't go entirely overboard in Born on the Fourth of July. With Tom Cruise as your lead actor you don't need to. I have always liked Cruise, but I never expected him to transform into a generous team player in the latest Mission Impossible and Top Gun films. He has always performed a bit as if he is outside of the reality of the other actors around him, making his own fabricated reality the center of the stage. Stone likes to do the same, and because he pushes the artificiality and subjectivity even further than Cruise, I think he is still quite valuable as a political fillmmaker. If you want to truly counter the idea that American power and American exceptionalism are objective virtues, you should not just criticise American power and exceptionalism, but also hightlight that your own criticism is not an objective truth. 

Born on the Fourth of July has a much more realistic 'objective' approach to historic fiction than Stone's subsequent films. Such an approach exposes much more Stone's own ideas and those don't always turn out to to be terribly insightful. Born on the Fourth of July makes less use of bluntly simplistic metaphors than Platoon, and is also more morally conscious, but it's also not nearly as sophisticated as it tthinks it is. Stone is clearly very proud of his recurring Fourth of July Parade sequences, and rightly so. They are wonderfully staged set-pieces, but all they communicate is that if you look beyond the pretty surface, America actually tells a lot of lies to its citizens. The film isn't really interested in any big ideas beyond that, and tries way too hard to turn this notion into an unifying theory that explains all of America. That's quite a shame, because when it focuses specifically on how the idea of patriotism affects Ron's life and relationships, it's really very good. It does have some other terribly misconceived characters, most notably Donna (Kyra Sedgwick). She is Cruise' childhood flame who is set up to spark his political awakening. Stone is just self-aware enough to realise just in time that this would be quite a hackneyed development, but that does mean that all the scenes between Donna and Ron never become anything more than uninspired filler,

213. The Crazy Stranger

Song - Laat Me (Ramses Shaffy)

Movie: The Crazy Stranger - Gadjo dilo (Tony Gatlif, 1997)

Very fitting that Romain Duris starred in L'Auberge Espagnole, an unseen by me 2002 film, about the experiences of western European Erasmus exchange students. You can easily imagine Duris and his full head of French hair be visible all around Paris in advertisements for studying at the Sorbonne, a poster child for 'civilised' Europe and its ideals of middle class mobility, progress and sophistication. As a certified fan of the European Union I happily subscribe to those ideals, but they have always been used (and not just by the Le Pens of the world) to stake out a difference between the 'good' Europeans and the uncivilised, dangerous, 'others'. Often times those others are Romani people. Tony Gatlif, the only Roma director to have won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, knows exactly what he is doing when casting Duris as Stephane, a Frenchman who goes to a Roma village comunity in Romania to track down Nora Luca, a singer he has a cherished cassette tape of. 

Stephane does not get a warm welcome. He is greeted as a crazy stranger who acts in ways that are completely alien to the way of life of the community. The village people fear him and pillar the kind Izidor who helpfully offers Stephane shelter and food, for potentially bringing unknown diseases into their midst. Once they figure out more abotu Stephane they conflate France and Belgium as interchangable exotic places that are far away from them. It's a funny and politically productive role reversal that never plays as cheap parody, because Gatlif doesn't turn it into a belabored metaphor. The cast mostly consists of amateur actors, basically real Romanian villagers probably playing something close to themselves, and the film presents their behavior and reaction to Stephane as authentic, without judging them. 

It also helps that Gatlif isn't much interested in great narrative developments. By the time we learn why Stephane has come to the vilage and why the cassette tape means so much to him, we barely care anymore. At that point, Stephanse has long become accepted into the community and The Crazy Stranger has become an energetic and fun hang out film, mostly interested in celebrating the culture of the people we see on screen. That mostly involves making music and dancing, greatly enjoyed by Stephany, partly because the young Sabine is especially interested in making music and dancing with him. The film is at its best when Stephane and Sabina go around the villages recording traditional folk songs, briefly turning this into a relaxed concert movie. Gatlf is happy to let it continue its meanderingly gentle course, until the ending scenes remind us that a sustained peaceful existence for the Roma is hard to come by. 

212. Who'll Stop the Rain

Song - Who'll Stop The Rain (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

Movie: Who'll Stop the Rain (Karel Reisz, 1978)

Who'll Stop the Rain combines all the characterstic elements that made American cinema fun and interesting in the 1960's, 70's and 80's into a highly entertaining thriller. From its own time period it's got Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte), a troubled anti-hero who struggles to live according to his values in a, in his view, rotten society. He is a soldier in Vietnam, about to return home, when his old friend John (Michael Moriarty) asks him to smuggle some heroin into America. The heroin is somehow connected to 'Washington' and Ray's paranoia sets in the moment he sets foot on the San Francisco harbor. It soon turns out his fears are grounded in reality and when the deal goes wrong he has to flee across the West Coast, together with John's wife Marge (Tuesday Weld), an independently minded bookstore worker who is married to John in defiance of her dad, and is also addicted to pills. 

The film shares some of Ray's pessimism and it directly presents Vietnam War trauma as the catalyst that sets the plot in motion. That's a bit clumsily directed with a couple too many flashbacks to undefined battle scenes, full of death and destruction, set in slow motion, that are meant to be poetic, but come off as tackily sentimental. Little else in the film can be called sentimental, but it's not above the sort of glorious tackiness and excesses that would define so many 80's movies. Reisz luxuriates in the glossiness of the arrogantly rich parts of Los Angeles (where Ray has come to try to sell the smack) and in the fantastically gaudy behaviors of its citizens, here represented by Eddie (Charles Haid). It's hard to believe that Anthony Zerbe, playing the federal agent in trail of Ray, has even more fun than Haid, colorfuly insulting his two dim henchmen, and super schmuck John. Reisz is happy to let the actors do their own thing, enabling even those with the smallest role to have a couple of memorable moments  All of this gives the film a wonderfully impulsive energy (at certain points it almost plays like a dry run for Midnight Run) that you wish was just a bit more stylistically charged and over the top. If the scene at Eddie's house doesn't quite get there, though the playful score brings it very far, the climax with its cacophony of folk music, gun violence and bright lights, does. It reminded me a bit, and this is a compliment, of the Wonder World super weapon scene in Beverly Hills Cop 3, even if it's (mostly) not played for laughs. 

That climax takes place around mountainous terrain in New Mexico, in Ray's hiding place he built in the 1960's to serve as a sort of commune away from the civilised world. The place includes an intricately designed sound system that enabled parties to be heard across the entire valley. Now it serves as a place (you know you are near it when you reach the giant peace sign painted on a rock) of refuge for Ray and Marge, who in anticipation of their next steps, dance to old traditional folk songs, share their fears and regrets, and slowly get more and more affection for each other as they make use of natural resources and analogue craftmanship to survive. Cops, criminals and dumb yuppies eventually destroy their serenity, leading to the aforementioned climax and the bleak final moments that remind you that this is indeed a film made in 1978. A couple years later, Nolte gets in the car. Nolte, by the way, is fantastic, in particular during the scenes in New Mexico, where he has to play Ray as mellowed by his love for Marge, without letting him lose his hard edge. His greatest moment though comes before, at Eddie's house, doing some silent face acting that is as almost as great as Robert De Niro's famous eyebrow movements in Goodfellas. 

211. High Fidelity

Song - Bloedend Hart (De Dijk)

Movie: High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000)

I've been rewatching Seinfeld in the past few months, seeing it for the first time when I am around the same age as Jerry and co. It's astounding how much better it is than I remember it, and I already liked it a lot. It's of course ridiculously funny, but I didn't expect it to also be so perceptive about its characters' general way of being, and their fears, insecrurities, hopes and joys. The show is rightly famous for its great use of irony, but through its use of irony it's also a very sincere portrayal of how  dumb, exhausting and gloriously ridiculous people can be when they are in pursuit of dates, love, friendship, and all kinds of other good experiences, without knowing exactly what they want, and about the genuine pleasure and happiness they get out of their ability to pursue these things. That makes them neither assholes nor paragons of goodness, but just rather relatable people who are sometimes wonderful and sometimes insufferable. Last year on this blog, I discussed Chungking Express in similar terms, and I think that Seinfeld and Wong Kar Wai's film do share much of the same pleasures. 

Contemporary thinkpieces about Seinfeld would do well to take a look at the show from this perspective, and consider that there are elements of it that make it aspirational and hopeful. It's an improvement that these days cultural perspectives have more room to address the racial and class privileges of the Seinfeld characters. But it's absolutely not a sign of progress that they can't imagine a world in which those privileges are expanded to more people. Poor and non-white people in America/'the west' have huge barriers to overcome, and it's positive that pop culture is increasingly addressing those barriers, but instead of just reflecting the real world, pop culture can also imagine a better and more fun world. At the moment, it's miserably failing in that regard, while mistakenly deluding itself that this is progressive. It's not a coincidence I think that Seinfeld was extremely popular among many people from former Yugoslavia in the 1990's. 

All of this basically explains my current reaction to High Fidelity. Seeing it a long time ago, I really really liked it. Watching it now, coincidentally at the same age as John Cusack was when shooting it, I thought it mostly sucked. Nobody who starts a review of High Fidelity with a two-paragraph aside on an unrelated pop culture phenomenon can honestly say they find the film fully worthless, but it's kind of amazing in retrospect that it was released two years after Seinfeld ended. It feels completely derivative of it. Cusack's Rob Gordon is a Seinfeldian self-absorbed character who is largely clueless about romantic relationships, has barely got his life together, goes on and on about topics of little relevance, and gets irrationaly angry about minor details. The main difference is that Seinfeld lets you make up your own mind about what's on screen, while High Fidelity holds you by your hand and tells you exactly when you should find Rob sympathetic and when you should find him loathsome. Too much of the film is one big exposition dump that doesn't understand that breaking the fourth wall is more powerful/shocking/funny when it's done sparingly. It's for example much less interesting to present the four incidents that led to Rob's breakup with Laura (Iben Hjejle) as a story that he tells the audience directly, than as a series of interactions between the two actors. Obviously the film is largely about how Rob's subjective experience of his relationships differs considerably from the reality, but there are ways to show that without letting him drone on and on to us. 

More surprisingly, I also thought High Fidelity has a somewhat banal depiction of how pop culture affects people's lives. To continue the comparison with Seinfeld, there the characters constantly riff about the movies/shows/concerts/etc they see. They make stupid jokes about them, make references to them in ordinary conversation, act in the way their pop culture heroes do, and use them as conversation fillers with strangers. In High Fidelity, Rob constantly blurts out what his favorite books are, his top 5 records, his top 5 artists, jobs, first singles, and whatnot. But we never get an impression of why "Johnny Cash's autobiography Cash by Johnny Cash" is his favorite book, how it has influenced his life, or what he gets out of Nirvana. Most of the pop culture references are presented in a highly generic way and could easily be replaced by others. There is one scene where Rob listens to The Velvet Underground after an unhappy encounter with his ex, and it it's only time in the film that it feels like there is a specific connection between Rob's experiences and feelings and the pop culture he interacts with. If the film had been more directly about how Rob, as an individual, is a shallow manchild, this would be less annoying. But it is more interested in using Rob as a figurehead for how 'we' are affected by pop culture and romantic fantasies, trying way too hard and too self-consciously to be a generational statement. I am no fan of that, and recently also got nothing out of The Worst Person in the World, despite very much liking other films by Joachim Trier. 

I also probably just don't care for Nick Hornby's perspective. After watching this movie I saw a clip from the new High Fidelity show, with Zoe Kravitz taking on the role of John Cusack. It involved a huge debate with her record store buddies about whether they should sell a Michael Jackson record to a customer and whether Jackson is more problematic than Kanye West. The dialogue manages to smugly present the record store owners as a bunch of highly obsessive and knowledgeable music geeks with strong opinions, but refuses to see the audience on their level, belabouredly spoonfeeding us every stale and obvious argument they are making. It's the kind of boringly joyless bullshit the film is also full of. Zoe Kravitz and John Cusack may be among the top 5 most sympathetic actors of their generation. It takes some effort to make them actively annoying.

210. The Gambler

Song - The Turn Of A Friendly Card (The Alan Parsons Project)

Movie: The Gambler (Karel Reisz, 1974)

Using university lectures to provide insight into your leading character's motivations and the film's broader themes is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It's especially beloved by the French and I always enjoy it, even if it can sometimes feel like blatantly cheap exposition, or is used to give the film an unearned veneer of intellectual heft. The Gambler contains two such scenes. In the first one Axel Freed (James Caan) makes a basketball analogy to explain why Dostoyevsky's assertion that "he deserves the sacred right to insist that 2+2 make 5" is a great expression of free will and embracing the possible over the rational. In the second one, he explains how a poem about George Washington makes a larger point about Americans being boringly risk-averse. In both scenes, the film errs on the side of cheap exposition, but James Caan turns them into something more. 

Caan plays Axel as a genuinely great professor of English, who is not only able to explain classic literature to his students by providing interesting and original interpretations that connect to their daily lives, but also conveys how much these works mean to him. When Caan reads from the material he teaches, you can sense the joy he gets out of luxuriating in the words and meanings of his favorite authors, and in making his students get it. Axel gets two more monologues outside of class, one in honor of the 80th birthday of his grandfather, a rich furniture magnate, the other as a joke to playfully annoy his girlfriend. Both are wonderful feats of oratory, with Caan knowing exactly where to pause, where to put an inflection, which word to emphasise, how to create momentum, to make sure his story has maximum effect. That Caan gets all this exactly right is key for the film. It shows that Axel knows what he is doing, hat he is an intelligent, well-adjusted man who could have a happy and good life if he wasn't a compuslive gambler, and that his gambling addiction is not a consequence of external factors. It's what makes The Gambler a really good character drame.

I have referred on this blog a couple of times to the famous quote about how there is no such thing as an anti-war movie. Well, in the same vein it's also really hard to make an anti-gambling movie. I always greatly enjoy the colorful characters, the stylishly written bullshitting, and the allure with wich the casino's and gambling cities are presented. Combine that with some great location work (the shadier, the better) and wonderful performances and it's hard to go wrong. The Gambler mostly doesn't go wrong, and during the first hour or so, James Caan gives an immensely compelling performance.  Unfortunately the film (knowing a little bit about him, this can probably be attributed to screenwriter James Toback) has some weird (socio-cultural) hang ups that eventually force Caan to act out some incredibly dumb situations, most notably the incident that incites his downward spiral and the ending scene. I imagine that one of the reasons for the 2014 remake is to present these scenes from a more enlightened perspective, but I am not in a rush to see it. If you want to make a modern version of this film your main actor should be Ben Affleck, not Mark Wahlberg.