California Split (1974)

Gambling movies tend toward fable: The Cooler, Intacto, The Cincinnati Kid, even Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the goulash that is Rounders--all tacitly accept that Fate and Chance and Luck are real, primal forces, or agents to be angered, appeased, and bullied. The struggle against fortune (good or bad) is broad and dramatic rolls/parleys/hands mark the plot like a metronome (I have convinced myself that the poker scenes in Casino Royale are acid parody). These films pair the gambler's superstition with the gambler's degeneracy: The willingness to wager everything (the only stakes worth making a film about) is the mark of an action junkie, someone eager to burn his house down if he has a bet on fire department response time. Altman's California Split puts these two parts together in a way that avoids cliche: we settle into an immersive, barely plotted character study of two degenerate gamblers and only very late in the film do we realize that they are in the middle of a gambling fable that cannot end well.

Charlie (Elliot Gould) and Bill (George Segal) meet among accusations of cheating in a chaotic LA cardroom and bond over drinks, silly prop bets, and a mugging. Bill--an actual, productive member of society and only a casual gambler--is both fascinated and horrified by Charlie's life, with his call-girl roommates, petty ripoffs, and morning beer. Soon of course he's hiding from his boss, joining Charlie at the track, and getting in bad with his bookie. Two things really carry this movie through its desultory plot: First is Gould's great Altman chemistry--he owns the screen as a colorful, slightly menacing whirlwind, playing a character that is apparently about 80% Gould. Second is the sense of euphoric claustrophobia: Altman accomplishes this in part through his blanket of dialogue (in eight-track stereo!), which captures the non-stop and even oppressive hubbub of casinos and similar places; but he also puts together some great shots (Bill, giddy as if he's calling a new crush, gets off the phone with Charlie and gets a little tangled in the cord; Bill and one of the girls try to get undressed on a couch), where excitement, cramped quarters, and slightly oppressive close-ups combine into a great representation of the discomfort and thrill of out-of-control gambling.

Eventually, Bill is in deep enough that he gives it all over to a hunch: he has a "special feeling" and hocks all his possessions, and he and Charlie head to Reno for a high-stakes poker game. Bill goes on a heater and crushes the game (including Amarillo Slim); he takes his winnings to blackjack and roulette and craps; and we find ourselves watching the fable and wondering how it will crash down around them. A comedy (less for its laughs than its temperament) about the absurdity and pathos of gamblers becomes, in a matter of seconds, an understated, tense meditation on chance, expectation, and superstition.

This is a neat film to remind you what you like about "major" Altman--the bemused horror at Americana, the crush of people and lives, the setting as character. It is also a good film to remind you about the difference between confidence and luck, and the dangers of confusing the two.

[Photo: Egyptian Femme! EGYPTIAN FEMME!]

I will see Labor Pains, no matter what you say

So Lindsay Lohan's been in the news again. I'm not here to defend her choice of words, which though odd was probably not racist in any traditional sense. I'm here to defend my fondness for her, which has not died despite her terrible behavior and her even worse movies.

First, let's take a minute to remember her charming and delightful early days.

Behold the precociousness of her in the remake of The Parent Trap:



That uppercrusty English accent is totally recognizable!

Really good child actors with few exceptions (Jodie Foster, um...I can't think of any other exceptions...Scott Baio? Dean Stockwell, I guess) grow up to be...really good child actors. Think of Macaulay Culkin in Party Monster. He is perfect in the role, but only because he is a terrible over-actor playing a terrible over-actor. Christina Ricci has carved out a fairly respectable carreer almost entirely made of camp. But speaking of Jodie Foster, the first thing I remember seeing Lindsay in was the remake of Freaky Friday, in which she plays a Rebellious Teenager (or the Disney version of one). Freaky Friday isn't an important movie, and it does nothing new, but it is exactly what it sets out to be: cute, fun, competent, predictable. This is what I want from a PG/PG-13 teen comedy.

Which brings me to Mean Girls, a movie that slightly exceeds expectations on almost every scale. It's smarter than it should be. The cast is better than it looks. The jokes are funnier than you would expect -- people often point out that Tina Fey, who wrote the screenplay, was the first woman head writer on Saturday Night Live, which is probably true, but she was the head writer during one of the show's least funny eras. And yet.

I was dragged to Mean Girls (by Anna, who is my reliable date for lame movies, from Uptown Girls to Mamma Mia. So far). Before it left the theater, I had seen it two more times. Lindsay Lohan plays Cady, a high school junior transplanted from Africa, where she was home schooled, to a public school in suburban Evanston, Illinois. She is befriended by "art freaks" Damien and Janis Ian (hm), then betrays them on a climb up the social ladder of high school. Sounds like a boring cliche, and it is a cliche, but the script is so neatly crafted, the characters just three-dimensional enough, that the movie overall succeeds where it could very easily have failed. Mean Girls isn't flawless (it could be a little less homophobic, for one, and after repeated viewings the "Asian hotties" are truly cringe-worthy) but it's close.

LL starred in a few other fine-but-forgettable teen movies (Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Herbie the Love Bug). And she was in I Know Who Killed Me, a movie almost but not quite absurd and unsatisfying enough to be entertaining as an example of How Not to Make A Movie. Then there was Georgia Rule. Garry Marshall has directed a fair number of my least favorite movies, but Georgia Rule is in a category of its own. It feels like it was written for the Lifetime network, but it's rated R. It is sappy yet brutal, naive yet loveless. I really really hated it.

Still, on the strength of my Mean Girls affection, I decided to give Just My Luck a chance when I noticed it in the grocery store DVD rental box, and I thought it was fine. It was cute and fun and competent and predictable, just like I wanted it to be. And she was in Robert Altman's last movie, A Prairie Home Companion. For me, the PHC movie was just like the radio show - awesome when it's people performing songs and kinda pointless otherwise.

Anyway, I guess I would just like Lindsay Lohan to ignore Roger Ebert's advice that she "move on to more challenging roles." It seems clear that she can neither choose nor carry a heavy movie. But that's okay! We need more charming fun predictable character actors, and she can totally do that.

Oh, one more thing. Kristin provided the only plausible explanation of the weird line in LL's Access Hollywood interview. Turns out, she never said "our first colored president." Turns out, she said "our first unicorn president." Go watch it again. Now. She totally says unicorn. UNICORN.

Non-horror non-review: Black Orpheus (1959)

Marpessa Dawn and Breno Mello both passed away this year, which is too bad, but does provide an opening to bring up the one big film of their lives. ("Bring up," not "review," 'cause I spent two days not being able to find my copy in a garage full of boxes and being too cheap to rent something I already own; so I didn't get to rewatch it, but what the hell I love this movie anyway, and at least that means I'll keep this mercifully short.)

Black Orpheus is not horror, but it is a fable about our greatest fears (death and loss). And actually the film sort of divides neatly into two different horrorish films. The first features Death (in a fantastic skeleton/spiderweb/luchador costume) stalking Eurydice during Carnaval: Death is persistent and (despite costume-switching) not easy to fool; the scene where Death pursues Eurydice during the samba competition, and Orfeu chases both of them to the trolley station, is both suspenseful and garishly outsize, all Hitchcock pacing and Fellini visuals. The second, after Eurydice's death, is about the disorientation, the existential confusion of loss: Orfeu first attempts to find the dead Eurydice at the Bureau of Missing Persons; the Tiresias-like (he's blind, maybe? there's someone blind in this film...) janitor tells him where he can find his love--through a medium in a candomblé ceremony. 'Cause she's dead, right? From here, it's the great tragedy of the fable--Orfeu is not only unable to bring Eurydice back, he is even incapable of not causing her loss again.

The movement from natural suspense (someone stalking Eurydice) to supernatural terror (freakin' Death stalking Eurydice) to existential horror (you and everyone you have ever loved will die) is basically all the horror content Black Orpheus offers, but that's quite enough. Not to mention the wonderful songs, bold colors, classical allusions, and the most achingly sweet scene of children dancing that ever closed a movie.

When a Stranger Calls (1979)

"Why did someone make two movies, then make a movie sandwich?" -Kristin

We watched When a Stranger Calls last week. It starts Carol Kane (I had no idea when I rented it -- also, this movie was, in 1979, her fourteenth movie, says imdb. She was in Dog Day Afternoon? And Annie Hall? I guess I don't remember either of those movies as well as I think I do). Anyway, I liked When a Stranger Calls. It's always fun to see a familiar actress in a surprising role, and even without Carol Kane, it would have been an average tense scary movie.

Carol Kane is Jill, a young babysitter who receives harassing phone calls. She calls the police, who do not seem concerned and at any rate can do nothing unless she can keep the stranger on the phone while they trace the call. When they do trace the call, it is coming from...inside the house! Up to this point, the pace of the film has been slow, but now things happen fast: a shadowy figure at the top of the stairs, then the police are at the door, the children have been brutally slain in their beds, and the killer is arrested.

Years later, Jill is happily married with two adorable children of her own. Two way too adorable children, by the way: "Mommy, come closer. I have to tell you something." "What is it?" "I love you." We watch Jill act out domestic bliss, putting her children to bed, calling a babysitter for the evening. Meanwhile, the killer has escaped from a mental hospital, and he's up to his old tricks. Perhaps having lived through the trauma of finding you sat quietly downstairs while two children in your care were murdered in their beds would give you pause before leaving your own children with anyone, ever, but rational realistic behavior is not the point of a movie like When a Stranger Calls. The point of a movie like this one is to experiment with pacing and building tension. Well, that and laughing at this dude's hair. I'd say the movie is well worth seeing, except for that one thing...

Unfortunately, When a Stranger Calls is only about 4o minutes long. And in the middle of it, inexplicably, there is another, much more boring movie, comprising scene after scene of Colleen Dewhurst looking sort of washed up and slutty (yes, that Colleen Dewhurst) while walking fast down dark streets in heels. Charles Durning makes a valiant effort to weave the two stories together, but it is at best a tenuous connection.

p.s. Does anyone recognize the waiter at 0:22 - 0:26 in the clip above? Just curious.

Rear Window (1954)

"We're two of the most frightening ghouls I've ever known."

While this is probably the most technically beautiful movie I can remember seeing, to talk at length about Hitchcock’s camerawork would be like going to the Antarctic and reporting on how very, very cold it was. If you’ve been there you know and it can obscure its subtler features, like the native subcutaneous parasites. For the sake of everyone’s hypothalamus gland, this would be a mistake.
By confining us to Stewart’s perspective, Rear Window does not only implicate us in his voyeurism, it also invests us in its world. Loneliness and isolation are as major a part of the feel of the film as the guilty delight in watching, especially since its sounds are mostly ambient. It is not until the dog is killed that the leads act on the plot directly, meaning it is the killer who first breaks the neighborhood’s silent taboo. While the broach of privacy isn’t portrayed as less moral than the wife’s murder, it is the one that provokes an interaction. Compare the dog-owner’s denouncement of her neighbor’s indifference to Mrs. Thorwald’s scream the night of the murder. Every window turns to hear the dog-speech, but even our hero, who is watching the Thorwalds when the scream happens, responds by falling asleep.
Situated in this narrative world, Stewart and Kelly’s relationship is what I find most interesting. Even before anything is afoot, we witness Stewart’s neuroses over his “too perfect” relationship. The film’s discomfort with intimacy seems to stand in as their real problem, especially since Stewart’s version of the problem is inconsistent (he tells his nurse she’s too good while telling Kelly they’re too different). She’s a career-minded socialite; he’s a free-spirited adventurer who can’t be tied down; these would be the hallmarks of romance if they weren’t presented by complete absence. Unlike how a romantic comedy tends to show characters struggling to find a balance between their public and private lives, Rear Window ignores the public side and obsesses with the private while its lead characters begin the film by doing just the reverse. The mean, weird indifference of love is overcome by their engagement in the plot. If the two have nothing else in common they’ve found someone to share their perverse fascinations, which is, I think, as good a definition of happiness as any.
Stewart’s confrontation with Thorwald is remarkable, and Halloween-appropriate. While the film tends to confront the morality of voyeurism by having the characters flatly ask each other about it, this scene is probably the most useful to the discussion. It has signifiers of horror- the heavy steps up the stairs, Throwald’s now-obscured and surprisingly large figure looming in the doorway. While the terror of the scene is mostly based on our identification with Stewart’s character, Thorwald’s reaction is interesting. Upon entering to find a seated silhouette of a man Thorwald says, “Say something… anything,” before advancing. We are offered only the slightest glimpse of the murder’s terror: confronting a faceless man after days of being privately observed, to all appearances calm enough to stay in his chair when a murderer breaks into his door. A reversal made all the more chilling by its transience.

There's always room for giallo

The Psychic, 1977
(a.k.a. Sette Note in Nero, Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes)
dir. Lucio Fulci


I am no expert on Italian horror. I really love Phenomenon and some other Dario Argento movies, and I’ve seen a few of Lucio Fulci’s movies (including Zombie at least three or four times). But I don’t really have a sense of what to expect from Fulci, except these things: terrible special effects, weird inappropriate sexual content, interesting new kinds of gore, and characters who behave in ways that make no sense at all (the classic example of this last being the delightful shit-I-forgot-to-shoot-fritz-in-the-head plot of Zombie). When I rented The Psychic, I thought I would enjoy it for occasional surprise kills and an entertaining absence of logic or plot, but apart from some decapitations or falls-from-a-great-height or maggot-infested corpses, I thought I would be…well, kinda bored. I did not think I would genuinely enjoy the visual aspects of the film. I was pleasantly surprised. The utterly unsubtle use of color, especially red (another alternate title could be The Red Lampshade) puts this movie in a category—with Suspiria—of just plain beautiful movies.

Lisa and the Devil, 1973
(a.k.a. La Casa dell'esorcismo, The House of Exorcism)
dir. Mario Bava
(n.b. I was confused by Lisa and the Devil, and I didn't follow every minute of the plot, but I'm pretty sure there is no exorcism in this movie.)

I have no idea what this movie is about.


The eyes, Leandro, what color are the eyes?
Changeable my lady. But by candlelight they are blue.

Lisa is an American tourist. She sees a weird fresco of the devil, carrying a body of some kind, and looking a lot like Kojak. Then she gets lost in the narrow streets and alleys of Some Foreign City, meets Telly Savalis, and gets creeped out. Somehow, she ends up staying in an ancient house where Telly Savalis is, um, what, the butler? I guess? I’ll admit I probably did not pay as much attention as this movie requires. It seemed like every time I looked away from the screen for a minute, then looked back, a pair of completely new characters are making out in a different location, then the camera focuses on a statue nearby. Eventually, the blind matriarch of the strange ancient house reveals what everyone (except the audience) has been thinking: Lisa is the reincarnation of the dead bride of the blind woman’s creepy son.* Therefore, the son must chloroform Lisa, and have sex with her in the bed where he still keeps the skeletal remains of Elena, his first bride. Obviously.

Lisa and the Devil is surreal and confusing, but in a good way. The cast, especially Telly Savalis (looks like the devil, is the devil, eats many lollipops, sings about flowers), give memorable performances, and I found the final scene genuinely creepy and interesting.

Let’s just say this: Lisa and the Devil is my favorite movie about necrophilia and lollipops.

*It might be overstating it to say that Psycho invented the modern horror movie, but seriously what percentage of the last half-century of scary movies have not been about nutty sons and their overbearing mothers? Ten percent? Twenty? (Alien, Friday the 13th, Dead Alive are the first three that spring to mind…)

well calculated to keep you in SUSPENSE

Yesterday at work I listened to an episode of the long-running CBS radio show Suspense: "Consequence" starring James Stewart. "Consequence" originally aired on September 13th, 1945. Nothing makes me feel comfortable and nostalgic and dreamy like Jimmy Stewart's voice on a scratchy record. (When I was young, I had a recording of him reading Winnie the Pooh stories, and he always inspires feelings of calm and nostalgia.) What "Consequence" reminded me of though is what a genuinely really strong actor he was. When he says, "Of course she killed her. We both killed her" he sounds broken and heartbreaking.

Why you should listen to Suspense:

1. Some of the movies we know and love either started there ("Sorry Wrong Number") or were remade there ("The Lodger"). The popular "Sorry, Wrong Number" is better as a radio story. Agnes Moorehead's portrayal of claustrophobia and desperate aloneness is so real when you only hear her voice, in a story of a bedridden woman desperately seeking help with only the telephone for contact with the outside world.

2. Suspense will inform your experience of more contemporary horror. What television and DVDs are to to us now, these stories were in the 40s.

3. TONS of awesome movie stars. Frank Sinatra's first dramatic role was on Suspense. Off the top of my head: Joseph Cotton, Henry Fonda, Orson Welles, James Steward, Agnes Moorehead.

Suspense ran on CBS radio for twenty years, starting in 1942. Episodes are available online several places now:

http://www.archive.org/details/SUSPENSE

http://www.otr.net/?p=susp

I listen to the "Suspense Replay" podcast:

http://suspense.podango.com/podcast/648/Suspense_Replay