248. Wall Street

Song - Money (Pink Floyd)

Movie: Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987)

The phone rings, followed by a pulsating drum beat. Half asleep, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) picks up to be greeted by "Money never sleeps, pal". Gordon Gekko (Micheal Douglas) is on the other end of the line hyping his protégé up with arrogantly confident wisecracks about how much money and sex he will provide him with, until the sunrise stops him in his tracks. Awestruck he exclaims "I've never seen a painting that captures the beauty of the ocean in a moment like this". He says it with an affected emphasis aimed to seduce Bud, but that doesn't make his sense of wonder less genuine. The scene ends with a half-dressed, speechless, heavily breathing Bud, and the return of that fabulous drum motif, that appears in a number of scenes, and always for just a couple of seconds. Just enough to excite you for what's coming, and to want more of it. 

The sunrise described by Gordon Gekko is decent. But Stone's filmmaking choices (and Douglas' acting choices) make you feel that the sunrise is indeed the greatest goddamn sunrise the world has ever seen. And when, in another scene, Charlie Sheen quotes Art of War back to Michael Douglas, you will almost forget that they have just been humiliatingly put in their place by a rich British aristocrat, played by Terence Stamp. By the time the camera glides past the sksyscrapers of the Upper East Side and Bud notes that "this is home" in a montage set to the Talking Heads nobody will even think of Stamp, or the (im)morality of Wall Street trading anymore. In no way is this a knock on the film, which I abslolutely loved. Stone wants to put you in the mindset of Bud Fox, and to a lesser extent, Gordon Gekko, to evoke how it feels to be in the position they are in, or rather, believe themselves to be. Gekko, and in his footsteps, Fox, are influential Wall Street businessman with a lot of money, power, connections and access. Though the film explores this, it is equally, if not more, interested in how this reality distorts their worldview and makes them experience life as if they are untouchable giants on top of the world. It's absolutely intoxicating and when Stone and Douglas tell they are surprised by real Wall Street traders telling them that Gordon Gekko is their hero, they should not be believed for a second. The film is designed to elicit exactly that reaction, at least until the moment Gekko wrecks Bluestar, and the film puts Martin Sheen's (I like that he plays Charlie's dad) perspective more to the foreground. 

The famous "Greed is Good" line is one of those moments people like to cite when discussing how easily audiences miss the point of the film. Douglas' lines though come in the context of a longer speech in which he theatirically complains about the decline of America as an industrial nation, but is spot on (even when looking from a more leftist perspective!) about the issue at hand, namely that a corporation shouldn't have 30 vice-presidents who are nothing but symbolic paper pushing figureheads producing nothing, yet earning millions of dollars in salary. If greed is the opposite of that, as Gekko implies, it's at least not bad. Gekko also proceeds to note that greed in all its forms is good, not just greed for money, but also for life, knowledge, and love. And well, who can argue that greed for knowledge is bad? Of course, it's ridiculous for Gekko to put his greed in oppoistion to the greed of the vice-presidents, but there is a lot more going on the scene than just "look at this capitalist idiot, propagating that greed is good, when greed is, in fact, bad." This is even further complicated by the fact that Oliver Stone is just about the least modest mainstream filmmaker out there. The man will exploit every filmmaking resource he has at his disposal to make his movie, and more often than not, it's damn good. 

Daryl Hannah is also good. She got a Razzie Award for her role, and though it's been well documented by now that the Razzie folks are nothing more than attention-seeking smug bastards, neither the cast and crew of Wall Street nor herself were very happy with her role and performance. It suprised me to find that out, because she is really the one character that embodies both the seductiveness of Wall Street life and its rottenness. She is essentially a high-class prostitute 'used' by Gordon Gekko to lure young folks like Bud into his inner circle. She can't escape this life, but also enjoys it. She gets to express herself as an interior designer, and genuinely falls in love with Bud. Yet she also knows that she only has as much freedom as Gekko allows her, all of which gets to the forefront in her final, fantasitcally written and performed, scene with Bud.  She is the film's most complex character, and I don't think it would be nearly as great without her.

247. First Spaceship on Venus

Song - The Final Countdown (Europe)

Movie: First Spaceship on Venus - Der schweigende Stern (Kurt Maetzig, 1960)

American professor Hawling is part of an international crew of scientists, engineers and astronauts on a spaceship bound for Venus. When not working, he likes to play chess against his fellow passengers, usually beating them soundly. The one opponent he can't defeat is the ship's robot Omega. After the umpteenth mate, Sumiko, the Japanese doctor on board, confronts Saltyk, the Polish developer of the robot. She explains that while Omega may be an impressive technical feat of machinery, it lacks a heart. Saltyk listens to her, rewires Omega, and when the robot lets the professor beat it, a rejuvenated Hawling immediately starts bragging to his team about his great chess prowess, completely oblivious to what has happened. 

This little subplot is a good example of the film's good-natured corniness, for better and for worse. It's easy to feel sympathetic towards a film that has such a sincerely utopian view of the potential of peaceful international cooperation to improve humanity. We are told that beyond just discovering extraterrestrial life, the Earth's greatest minds are also close to eradicating hunger and physical labor. The world will then see the value of international, interracial solidarity (worth noting though that the black passenger on the ship is the only one without a nationality - he is 'African' - and the only one who speaks German with an accent), come together to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons and end the Cold War. But the film is afraid to make any interesting/fun/artistic choice that could distract it from bringing its message across. The acting and the dialogues are so wooden that the actors may as well stand in front of a Powerpoint and give a presentation. 

I didn't realise this before watching it, but this is a film produced by DEFA, the state-owned film studio of East Germany. That does put the punch-line of the chess story in a different view. In an American film this would have been a pointed, sharp joke that's worth thinking about. In this context, it is state-approved messaging, regurgitated propaganda that's not even ferocious enough to work as serious criticism (the film's many reminders that the Americans are responsible for Hiroshima are at least a bit saltier). Now, some would argue that on the global political stage, even during the Cold War, the Americans were the biggest power 'colonising' the world with their culture and their capitalism, and that the communist state-produced films were a subversive corrective to that. But that glesses over the question of why the Americans were/are more succesfull in promoting their culture and lifestyle to the rest of the world. Part of the answer is that you will see in American movies jokes about dumb Americans that are critical of the very fundaments of American life. In First Spaceship on Venus there is not a single lighthearted moment that would allow for even a little doubt or ridicule of a communist idea. 

246. A Canterbury Tale

Song - Solsbury Hill (Peter Gabriel)

Movie: A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1944)

Allison Smith's (Sheila Sim) plans are altered the moment she gets out of the train station in Chillingbourne. She has come to the (fictional) town as a Land Girl, a woman called on to work on a farm to replace the men off fighting the war, only to become the latest victim of a mysterious figure who sneaks up on women in the dark and puts glue in their hair. Together with Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price) and Bob Johnson (John Sweet, an actual sergeant in his only acting role), respectively a British and an American soldier, she sets out to uncover the identity of the "glue man". 

A Canterbury Tale can't reach the great heights of A Matter of Life and Death (few things can), but it does share its genuine love of people, and their interactions. There are many movies (that present themselves to be) about the importance of human connection, but it's much rarer for a movie to be about the process of human connection. There is a short scene where Bob is calling his buddy in London to tell him he is delayed, He is observed from the background by a bemused Peter. There is no deeper meaning or subtext to this scene. It is simply about how wonderful it is to express interest in what your friend is up to, and more generally, how wonderful it is to be willing to engage with the world around you and feel at ease in doing so. It does matter here that Allison, Bob and Peter are all presented with poise, confidence and earnestness, qualities that Powell and Pressburger seem to find vital for being able to experience and approach the world and the people in it with comfort, curiosity, joy and moral seriousness. Above all else, expressing how great it is to be able to be like that, is what both A Canterbury Tale and A Matter of Life and Death are utimately about. 

I wonder if A Canterbury Tale influenced Twin Peaks. In particular the relationship between Bob and Peter almost plays as a blueprint for Dale Cooper and Sheriff Truman. The development of their friendship is as important for them as solving Laura's murder/finding the identity of the glue man, but more than that, it's about their heightened awareness of how fulfilling it is to behave in ways that give you the opportunity to experience the joys of humanity (including damn good tea/coffee!). Both Twin Peaks and A Canterbury Tale see this as a sacred, miraculous experience, that is crucial to be able to withstand, though not necessarily defeat, the ultimate evil, whether that's BOB, or Nazi's. In Twin Peaks this is mostly communicated through the shamelessly melodramatic formal choices; in A Canterbury Tale mostly through the performances and the constant reminders of the spiritual context around Canterbury. The film insists that the characters are not only aware of their connection to each other, but also to the nature and history of their surroundings, seeing them as basically direct descendants of the pilgrims of Chaucer's time.  

What stops the film from greatness is that the glue man is essentially a stand-in for Powell and Pressburger. Once caught, he explains that he wants to stop the women from going out with the soldiers in town. His reasoning has nothing to do with the war effort or with sexual morality. Rather, he is simply a raconteur who has always dreamt of preaching about the history of Canterbury, without being able to find a right audience. Now that his little town is filled to the brink with bored soldiers, he can finally fulfiill his dream explaining Canterbury's special place in the history of England. The film itself is even preachier. Almost every plot point ultimately serves to teach a moral, practical or historic lesson, with the overarching message being that Americans and Britons have much in common, and should be friends who work together to make the world a better place, whether that entails unmasking the glue man or beating the Nazi's. Some of these scenes are really infantilising, in both content and form. For example a point about the idiocy of American isolationists is disguised as a joke to not come off as cheap propaganda, but it is so blatantly the latter that the attempt to disguise it only makes a very valid argument come off as insidious manipulation. 

245. Ladyhawke

Song - Total Eclipse Of The Heart (Bonnie Tyler)

Movie: Ladyhawke (Richard Donner, 1985)

In the early days of this project I wrote up The Fabulous Baker Boys, lacking the vocabulary to talk about 'Makin Whoopee' without it coming off as creepy or boringly obvious. But I can say that it's a curse on the audience to cast 80's Michelle Pfeiffer and then make her appear half the time in the guise of a hawk. Out of jealousy, the Bishop of Aquila (John Wood) has damned her and her lover Navarre (Rutger Hauer); she, Isabeau, is a hawk by day, while he is a wolf by night. And every sunset and sunrise they are tortured by an ephemeral glimpse of each other's human bodies. They can only bring an end to this ordeal by appearing together at the Bishop during a solar eclipse. That's why they need Gaston (Matthew Broderick), the only one to have ever escaped out of the prison beneath the Bishop's palace. Of course, the real reason for Gaston is that without him this would have to be an austere film about two cursed lovers silentily battling the forces of nature and of the Bishop. That  would have required a lot physically from Hauer and Pfeiffer but the real pain would have been for the producers, who would not have gotten their return on investment. 

Still, you should be able to satisfy commercial demands without being unfavorably compared to Black Knight. Who doesnt't remember the 2001 comedy about a stereotypical black comedian who has to adapt to his surroundings when he is magically transported into medieval times? It's much better than Ladyhawke, which essentially imagines how a stereotypical 80's high school teen would behave when transported into medieval times. Firstly, Martin Lawrence is inherently funnier than Matthew Broderick. Secondly, Broderick plays Gaston as a lazy student who gets accidentally sent to 14th Century Italy and now has to use his rudimentary knowledge of history to survive. That could be quite funny, but Gaston is conceived as a pickpocket from the actual Middle Ages, and the film wants him to be both that and a time-travelling Ferris Bueller. Which leads to a lot of irritatingly daft lines, often enunciated by Broderick as if he is participating in an oral exam. 

The film's attempts to merge the medieval with the contemporary also extend to the score produced by Alan Parsons. It's typical 80's synth-heavy pop with sudden ocassional outburts that make it seem as if you are listening to an orchestral score for a traditional epic. I quite liked the music, but it never really meshes with the action and the images on screen, making it feel a bit too disparate from the movie. The truth is that Hauer is the only one who succesfully adapts to what the film is trying to do. He portrays Navarre as a stoic courageous romantic who would rather express his love for Isabeau and his honorable family history than his discontent with Gaston. He is often given sarcastic zingers in response to Broderick's shenaningans, but he delivers them as if they are beneath his dignity, as if he feels that he shouldn't be saying what he does.

244. Son of Mine

Song - Bestel Mar (Rowwen Heze)

Movie: Son of Mine - Gluckauf (Remy van Heugten, 2015)

You can't tack on a redemption arc in the final 15 minutes after spending 1,5 hour wallowing (convincingly and entertaingly!) in bleak violent nihilism. It's not only absurd to ask for sympathy for one of the most irredeemable brutes I've seen recently, it's also a betrayal of the writing and Bart Slegers's performance. The film is really strong in portraying Lei and his son Jeffrey (Vincent van der Valk) as figures fully devoid of humane qualities, or any capacity for moral introspection and goodness. Both men act as if they are driven purely by greed and prehistoric survival instincts - one of the film's most memorable moments is van der Valk's evil, lecherous little laugh as he discovers that he gets to transport some young foreign prostitutes for a crime boss. He doesn't end up doing anything to the women, but that laugh is horrifying enough. 

The aforementioned crime boss Vester is played by Johan Leysen as if Christoph Waltz was the film's first choice. He carries himself with an unearned air of sophistication, pretending that he is trying to save ghouls like Lei and Jeffrey from themselves, while desperately needing them for his dirty jobs. He is a ruthless killer giving orders in farmers overalls, befitting the setting. The film takes place in the mining villages in the southern part of the Dutch province of Limburg and all the actors speak in dialect. Van Heugten smartly does not tie any social considerations to Jeffrey and Lei's behaviour, while still showing how their lives are shaped by context-specific details. A meeting with gangsters from Liege is quite notable as it reminds that in a big city these men would hide in the underwould, while in the Limbug vilages they are part of the fabric of society, living their lives alongside everyone else. As none of the villagers are introverted types, this leads to some tense and darkly funny conforntations that always have the potential to explode in many different directions. That makes its key plot twist, expressed only with a quiet cut, only more effective.

I was so surprised and enamored by how van Heugten set up the final act that I thought he could do only one thing to lose me, and, well he did. To be fair, Lei's sudden desire to do good and be absolved for his sins doesn't entirely come out of nowhere. The film is not shy to show the crosses he wears, even if it never considers how the idea(l)s behind them may shape his life. Even so, Lei starts the film blithely shooting a rifle at his ex-wife's house, effectively kindapping his son, and only gets more brutal from there. It's hard to believe how anyone working on the film could think the last 15 minites sentimentalising him were a good idea. Still, Son of Mine was in 2016 the big winner of the Dutch equivalent of the Oscars. Even with a better ending that should have been Sam de Jong's Prins. 

243. Alice's Restaurant

Song - Massachusetts (Bee Gees)

Movie: Alice's Restaurant (Arthur Penn, 1969)

I have a lot of love for the (American) counterculture movement, but its ideals tend to be better than its movies. Alice's Restaurant is an adaptation of Arlo Guthrie's 18-minute breakout song Alice's Restaurant Massacree, essentially a glorified podcast in which Guthrie rambles on about a rather insignificant incident, with a superficial anti-war message added to the back of it. The film has Pete Seeger cover Woody Guthrie's (Arlo's father) Pastures of Plenty and an unknown singer perform Joni Mitchell's Songs to Aging Children Come. Both songs barely last three minutes, but evoke much stronger images and feelings just through their lyrics and performances than anything the movie actually visualises. That's perhaps understandable; Alice's Restaurant Massacree is such a literal-minded song that the movie doesn't really have anywhere to go.

Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Joni Mitchell are probably three of the greatest American artists of the 20th century and it is not entirely fair to complain that Arlo Guthrie is not as poetic as them. Unfortunately, there are many other reasons why he is the main problem with the film. For one, he has barely any screen presence and can't act. In a previous post on Trading Places, I wrote how much I love Eddie Murphy for essentially always breaking the fourth wall between him and the audience. Well, Guthrie seems to be breaking the fourth wall between him and the director. You get the feeling that he is concentrating so much on making sure that Penn approves his line deliveries and expressions that he is barely able to convincingly interact with his fellow actors. The bigger issue is that this also seems to be his attitude towards the counterculture in general. Alice's Restaurant Massacree feels like the equivalent of an overexcited teenage boy telling his older friends about the first time he bought alcohol, without yet knowing how to drink it and experience its pleasures. To an extent, that's understandable as Guthrie was 20 when he wrote the song, but what makes the whole thing even more grating is that he combines his childish affect with ironic swerves that are meant to make him seem more knowing than he is. 

Guthrie's strained presence permeats the whole film, There are too many stiff and stilted scenes that peter out indifferently and as a result there is so little connecting tissue between individual moments that everything feels even more inconsequential than it is on paper. Some dialogue scenes come off as so affected it almost feels as if the actors have been dubbed. Thankfully, in the second half, the focus moves away a bit from Arlo towards Alice (Patricia Quinn) and her boyfriend Ray (James Broderick). Aside from owning a restuarant in Stockbridge, Massachussets, they also own a deconsecrated church where they host (parties for) various fellow travelers in the counterculture movement. Alice sleeps with many of these visitors, but always returns to the much older (and seemingly monogamous) Ray, who is a bit of a mysterious figure. It is unclear whether he is a genuine believer in the ideals of his communitiy, or a con man who uses the movement to exert power and manipulate the people close to him. Alice and Ray's relationship is a fascinating one (they are not good for each other, but are ultimately all they got) and leads to broader questions about the counterculture movement as a whole. Whether it's secular or not, Alice's church sees much of the same rituals.

242. The Third Man

Song - Vienna (Ultravox)

Movie: The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

It's not as great as Casablanca, but similarly to it, The Third Man is about a man who has to choose between the greater, moral, good and his personal feelings towards an important figure from his past. And like Rick Blaine, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is a foreigner stuck in a city that has become a hotbed of international intrigue. Unlike Rick, however, Holly believes that doing the right thing will also get him the girl, failing to realise that 1949 Vienna is way too complex for straightforward expressions of love and loyalty. The city is divided into four sectors, ruled by the Americans, Brtions, Sovjets and French, with its central area designated as an international zone and the ravages from the war still highly visible. Not an ideal state of affairs, and as The Third Man shows, one that was for obvious reasons not much liked by the locals. Yet, the film also paints a vivid picture of Vienna as a place of opportunity and escape for a diverse crowd of intellectuals, diplomats, spies, hustlers and outcasts, turning it into a perversely appealing city where you can forge new identities, make fortunes on the black market, and have the freedom to operate in the shadows, to be disreputable outside the control of traditional and centralised institutions. At least, if the Russians don't get you. 

The Third Man may portray a world that has long disappeared (though Vienna is still a city of immigrants and one of the centres of international spycraft), any contemporary freelance (copy)writer will recognise a part of them in poor Holly Martins. Holly is technically an author of mediocre pulp paperback westerns, but low on income, he has been forced to accept his old friend Harry Lime's (Orson Welles) invitation to come to Vienna and write up his new self-funded healthcare startup. Alas, just upon arrival in Austria, Holly finds that his friend has died in a mysterious car accident and decides to investigate the situation. In the process he falls in love with Harry's bereaved lover Anna (Alida Valli), mostly because a beautiful, kind woman talking to him seems to be a rare phenomenon in his life these days. Holly should know better than to pursue her, but the film is partly about how hard it is to reconcile your feelings with the cold hard facts.  

It's easy to see why Reed's direction has become quite iconic. Admittedly, he does overuse the Dutch angles a bit; there are a number of scenes where he goes to such great lemgths to get a canted shot, it almost stops the film in its tracks. You always see what he is going for, but there are some cases where a more straightforward shot would have made more sense, both narratively and aesthetically. But it is interesting how succesfully he combines this stylised approach with a more documentarian one that sets you right in the middle of Vienna and provides a great sense of life in the city, of the atmosphere in its restaurants and streets, and of how the strange political situation influences ordinary lives. It is particularly attentive to how all these foreigners work to overcome language barriers, and the frustration of the Austrians to not be able to speak in their own language to the people in charge of their city. Reed's exaggerated noirish expressions help evoke that unease, the feeling that nobody truly knows anyone in the city, that you don't really have a sense of what could happen at any given point, and the ensuing  impossibility of making long term, permanent plans, knowing that everything could change in an instant.