Thinking Out Loud

Category: 4 Stars

Good Stuff

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho still slaps, 60 years later

Rating: 4 out of 5.

What is left to be said about one of the most talked-about movies ever made? But rewatching Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho again for the first time in years, with a live audience at Rooftop Reds at Brooklyn Navy Yards, upended a few of my old opinions.

Reams have been written about its still-unusual structure, which violates every tenet of screenwriting — and considering the early exit of its top-billed actor, even the Hollywood star system itself. My memory was that the movie came to a crashing halt after Marion (Janet Leigh) met her fate, and never recovered its early dread, suspense, and wit — almost to the point of becoming a different movie. But on this rewatch, I was surprised to find that it flowed more soothly that I recalled.

Note the mirrors and reflections in Psycho.

It’s much funnier than I remembered, rife with intentional dark comedy, not “oh how quaint in retrospect” tittering. Some of the scenes that once felt out-of-place to me, such as when Sam (John Gavin) and Lila (Vera Miles) voice their dark suspicions to the comically folksy Sheriff Chambers and his wife, now play as willful satire. The Chambers’ inability to perceive the perversion and rot in their own community, in the form of harmless quiet boy Norman (Anthony Perkins), is an unfortunately timeless social issue.

The early office scenes hold up well, considering six decades of increasing cultural awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace. It’s very clear why Marion would be tempted to drop everything and flee: her subservient position to gross men, coupled with her hopeless financial insecurity.

Her lover Sam, a divorcée bunking in the back room of a hardware store, is suffering through a similar economic situation. But not subject to such harassment and humiliation, he never fully wraps his head around the extreme lengths that Marion took to escape. The very square Sam stands out as a 1950s-style relic that doesn’t belong in a dark thriller from 1960. But I’ve come to realize that that’s exactly the point: Sam is a basic normcore man’s man, which is intensely threatening to a resentful, twisted incel like Norman.

Still more mirrors and reflections.

Psycho is a clear ancestor to David Lynch‘s preoccupations in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. Lynch and Hitchcock both repeatedly examined the violent and sexual obsessions barely repressed below the surface of polite society. But the problem with Hitchcock is, as soon as he could depict more violence and sex on screen, he did, and all the artful subtext of masterworks like Vertigo (1958) turned into the overt nastiness of Frenzy (1972).

But Psycho (1960) sits at an interesting pivot point between his two extremes; racier than you may remember (with a few firsts or near-firsts, like depicting a secret tryst in a seedy hotel room, its star in a brassiere on the poster, and even an open toilet seat onscreen), but still using cinematic artifice in place of explicitness (the infamous shower scene technically features less nudity than you’d see during a shampoo commercial today, but still feels shocking, due to the effective montage and scoring).

In short, Psycho still slaps, 60 years later.

November 18, 2022
The sexual revolution freezes over in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm
Rating: 4 out of 5.

The Ice Storm takes place at the precise moment when the burned-out remnants of the ’60s sexual revolution belatedly limped into the disaffected ’70s suburbia. The centerpiece of the film is a supposedly liberating “key party” that proves otherwise, thanks to long-simmering resentments and inhibitions. Two generations of two families clash during a single disastrous night, beset by heavily portentous bad weather and bad ideas.

Director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus adapt Rick Moody’s novel, in what was either a nightmare or dream come true for art directors and costume designers. The very specific milieu of New Canaan, Connecticut in 1973 is rendered in oranges and browns, with the cast clad in plaids and shaggy hair, and the sets dressed with period flotsam like waterbeds and styrofoam packing peanuts.

Indeed, its overpowering upper-middle-class ’70s tackiness was the primary talking point at the time, and I recall titters from the audience when I first saw it in the theater. The fashions may be unflattering for most of the cast, but it must be noted that Sigourney Weaver looks stunning regardless.

A key party may have seemed like an exciting idea in the abstract.

In the 2008 Criterion Collection edition, production designer Mark Friedberg describes recreating his childhood playroom, designed by his architect father. He also incorporated his grandmother’s paintings and his father’s furniture. Realizing the titular ice storm took a couple strategies, depending on the surface, including hair gel, cast resin, and biodegradable goop.

The striking visuals are made even more convincing by the crinkling, crackling sound design. Also of note is the minimalist score by Michael Danna, featuring a Native American flute. The end credits feature another creature of the 1970s: David Bowie’s melancholic re-recorded version of “I Can’t Read.”

The film and novel both cite the Marvel Comics series Fantastic Four, which features a uniquely dysfunctional family unit. The conceit is effective, if a little obvious. Lee and Schamus would later more directly explore this territory in the under-appreciated Hulk (2003). I am also reminded of Todd Field’s Little Children (2006), which also posits that the behavior of adults and their children is not all that different — albeit in a bone-dry satirical tone that makes it a hard movie to like.

“Sometimes the shepherd needs the comfort of the sheep”

The casting for The Ice Storm is excellent all around, particularly for the young actors, who all went places. Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood would each go on to headline major franchises. The former plays a complex character, perhaps the only one who comes through the evening with his innocence intact. Yes, he had dark designs that wreak havoc, but he pulls back from causing real harm. Christina Ricci is especially perfect here; she appears worldly and cynical beyond her age, and yet simultaneously so young and vulnerable.

Of the four deleted scenes included in the Criterion Collection edition, two foreshadow the fateful key party. With these scenes cut, the party is less signposted as a significant event, and its true nature as a pivotal moment comes more of a surprise:
1. Ben (Kevin Kline) at the office, concerned with stagflation. Schamus cut the scene because it was “too funny” – this despite the fact they were under the impression the movie as a whole was going to be funnier than it turned out: uncomfortable and squirmy.
2. Elena (Joan Allen) and the reverend at a diner, before the party. Timely gas crisis lines are visible out the window.
3. Ben & Elena in bed, mentioning the party again.
4. Paul (Maguire) calls Wendy (Ricci) with a “moral dilemma.” He hasn’t been privy to what she’s been up to in his absence, so he doesn’t know she’s probably the wrong person to come to with these kinds of problems.
On the same disc, Rick Moody describes seeing an adaptation of his work as someone else’s interpretation of your dream. Like a translation of a poem into another language, it is patently impossible, and says more about the translator than the original poet.
November 5, 2022
Lou Reed and John Cale work through their complex feelings for Andy Warhol in Songs for Drella

Rating: 4 out of 5.

When I was a dumb teenager that didn’t know anything about anything, or could tell The Factory from a factory, I first heard Lou Reed through his Transformer and New York albums — the former via the David Bowie connection, and the latter through one track’s inclusion on Rainbow Warriors, a Greenpeace benefit compilation popular at the time.

I would shortly discover that these two albums represented a more accessible side of Reed’s sometimes challenging or confrontational discography — for my next purchase was Songs for Drella. Good thing I didn’t pick up Reed’s notorious Metal Machine Music at that point, or I really would have stopped there. Luckily I think I heard Magic and Loss next, and was back on track.

Detail from the Songs for Drella album cover; which really ought to have clued me in that it was not going to be a rock ‘n’ roll album.

I didn’t know what to make about a drumless song cycle, co-credited with a name new to me at the time, John Cale, and all about an artist I was only vaguely aware of, Andy Warhol. You can excuse a rural kid at the beginning of the ’90s for knowing only one fact about Warhol: he was that one weird artist that screen-printed countless images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup cans.

I’ve come to appreciate the Songs for Drella album more over the years, coincident with learning more about Warhol and The Velvet Underground. Warhol had died only a few years earlier, and Reed & Cale’s songs feel very immediate and personal, and not at all hagiographic. They were in a unique position to have known Warhol better than many who might presume to have opinions about him or his work. They evidently retained complex feelings about him, for it’s right there in the title: “Drella” was a derogatory nickname (Dracula + Cinderella) that Warhol didn’t appreciate.

Detail from the original VHS/laserdisc cover. “I love images worth repeating and repeating and repeating”.

Many of the songs channel his voice in the first person, about the mundane (perceived slights at an MTV event), to the cataclysmic (his attempted assassination by Valerie Solanis — who herself would be the subject of a dramatic depiction in the film I Shot Andy Warhol a few years later). Lest this all sound too artsy fartsy, some of the tunes are real bangers, like the stomping “Work”.

A live performance in December 1989 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was filmed by Ed Lachman, and a new 4K restoration is currently screening on The Criterion Channel. It was fortunately shot on film, not SD video, so it looks and sounds great. I listened to part of it through headphones, and the audio is notably clear and intimate. You can hear in the stereo mix when Reed or Cale even slightly turn their heads while singing.

“Work”, from Songs for Drella. The full film is available in much better quality on The Criterion Channel.

I strongly recommend the film for anyone with more than a passing interest in Cale, Reed, or Warhol, and who either doesn’t know the Songs for Drella album, or for whom it never clicked. Those with a mental image of Reed from his glam Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal period, or the cool tough guy downtown poet of the New York era, might be a little surprised to see him looking so studious here. The always-dapper Cale, with an excellent haircut, looks in his element. Watching a live performance of the whole song cycle straight through, with the two legendary musicians sitting opposite each other like a proper hoity-toity music recital, really suits the material.

October 22, 2022
Falling in love at the end of the world, in Wim Wenders’ Submergence

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Ladies, if your fella isn’t returning your calls, maybe he’s a secret agent on a tippy-top secret mission for queen and country. Fellas, if your girl isn’t liking your posts, maybe she has zero bars because she’s doing science stuff on the ocean floor.

I went into Submergence fully aware of the generally negative reviews, but I’m willing to watch anything by Wim Wenders, who directed at least two of my most beloved movies: Wings of Desire and Until the End of the World.

I suppose I can see how many (most?) people would find Submergence frustrating, but to me it is intriguing update to one of Wenders’ longest-running themes: falling in love, despite — or perhaps accelerated by — looming death. In Wings of Desire, an immortal being contemplates earthly concerns like suicide and the legacy of Nazi Germany, and chooses mortal love. The characters in The End of Violence and Until the End of the World live under different kinds of technological swords of Damocles: drones in the former, and nuclear disaster in the latter. After all, it’s right there in the titles.

In Submergence, two beautiful people (Alicia Vikander and James McAvoy) meet cute and fall in love, but each is haunted by their own particular view of immanent environmental apocalypse: hers primarily scientific and his political. Lest the Anthropocene Extinction and potable water crisis be insufficient cause for existential anxiety, there is also an eerily prescient prediction of a virus not unlike COVID-19. Submergence was released in 2017.

She is more optimistic than he about mitigating the disasters sure to come in the near future. Given how his mission goes drastically awry, with him a powerless prisoner while she remains actively in control, perhaps she is right.

The one key Wenders ingredient that is lacking in Submergence is his usual A+ primo taste in music. So many of his past movies have utterly superb soundtracks, particularly the sublime Until the End of the World, the cd of which was effectively one of the best mixtapes of the 1990s, and famously outsold the movie. But the score for Submergence is disappointingly generic and overbearing, and the only needledrops are the classical music that Danielle blasts through her bluetooth speaker.

October 6, 2022
Like a pizza in the rain: Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

You know you’ve graduated from Movie Buff into Old Movie Buff when you start saying “they don’t make movies like this any more”… but what if they really don’t make movies like this any more?

Catching up on Jonathan Demme’s filmography with Something Wild and Married to the Mob has really brought home the realization that midbudget romantic comedies/dramas have disappeared, especially any suffused with this much personality and quirk.

“Like a pizza in the rain, nobody wants to take you home”
David Byrne & Celia Cruz

Something interesting is happening in the background of every shot, and every supporting & background actor is an eccentric. A simple shot of Jeff Daniels making a phone call has a fascinating person simply standing in the background, a quick scene of buying a used car features John Waters, a New York City diner and a Virginia gas station are staffed by eccentric personalities, and a quick shot of Daniels and Melanie Griffith leaving a motel includes some background action of a family unloading a car that looks wacky enough to be its own National Lampoon Vacation movie. When today’s streaming/A24/Blumhouse financing model strictly limits the cast and locations of movies, a movie like Something Wild may not even be possible any more.

And of course Demme dipped into his deep rolodex of music buddies for an amazing soundtrack lineup, including: David Byrne, John Cale, Laurie Anderson, The Feelies, Sister Carol, and more.

August 10, 2021
Sit on my interface: Hackers is a 90s treasure

I can’t believe I haven’t had the pleasure until now. Energetic, funny, quotable, and scattered with fantastic montage sequences. The moment when Johnny Lee Miller sees Angelina Jolie for the first time is choice. And check the surreal imagery and avant-garde editing of its characters’ erotic nightmares — seriously; more than one!

It’s all laughably preposterous, but in a good way. And I’m not even talking about its hilariously fantastical vision of internet technology — I’m talking about: Miller’s accent, Lorraine Bracco’s horny sexbomb lawyer, Fisher Steven’s hair, the floppy discs tucked in trousers, the animated cityscapes of cyberspace, the rollerblades. Most of the actors playing high school kids are too old, and most of the actors playing grownups are too young. I could go on. A delight.

“Eww… hard copy.”

November 8, 2020
What are men, compared to rocks and mountains: Pride & Prejudice
Who doesn’t have great affection for the beloved 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice? But: I daresay Joe Wright’s 2005 feature film adaptation (the one with the ampersand) is my P&P. It may be less faithful to the text, but that’s fine; it’s its own thing. It’s delicious and I adore it.

I think of it as the precision-tooled sportscar version of Jane Austen’s novel; it may lose a lot of nuance, but it is a marvel of adaptation, It perhaps only suffers from omitting too much of the Wickham material, and softening Mr. Bennett’s culpability in the family’s dire situation.

The cast was selected with laser-guided missile accuracy, and the necessarily highly condensed screenplay makes some welcome adjustments:
- Mrs. Bennett (Brenda Blethyn) is less broad, and less oblivious to Mr. Bennett’s (Donald Sutherland) teasing, which is tweaked to be more loving than cruel.
- Lady Catherine (Judi Dench) is less of a cartoon villain, and is instead truly imposing and powerful. She may be wrong, but you can understand where she’s coming from.
- Lydia (Jena Malone) is more naive than an out-of-control wild child.
- And one other adjustment that I quite like: this Caroline Bingley (Kelly Reilly) has a begrudging respect for Lizzie (Keira Knightley), recognizing her wit and formidability, as opposed to her all-encompassing contempt in the 1995 version.
Rewatching the 1995 and 2005 adaptations in quick succession, an important (and in retrospect, obvious) point struck me for the first time, despite having also read the novel some years ago. Charles and Caroline Bingsley inherited their fortune from their late father, a tradesman. In other words, they are nouveau riche, not landed gentry like the Darcys and the Bennets. That they look down on tradesman like Lizzie’s uncle Mr. Gardiner, a lawyer, is nakedly hypocritical. Jane Austin bringing the socioeconomic critique!

For those interested in further exploring Austen’s extensive Hollywood career, please consult her official Letterboxd page.

(We watched this on old-fashioned DVD, and it was a very stressful experience: the previews were non-anamorphic, but thankfully the feature was anamorphic. My heart!)
May 16, 2020
Modern America is born out of lawlessness and chaos in David Milch’s Deadwood: The Movie

What an improbable treat, in an age of unasked-for sequels, that one of pop culture’s most notorious cliffhangers would receive resolution.

The HBO series Deadwood is not only one of their most acclaimed productions, but also the most lamentably unfinished. Its abrupt cancellation in 2006 was followed by persistent but vague promises of one or more movies. But as year after year passed, and practically the entire cast went on to higher asking prices, the practical matters of financing and scheduling a remount passed through the realm of the unlikely into the impossible. And yet, here it is, and we are all obligated to make some variation of a “crack open a can of peaches, hoopleheads” joke as we sit down to watch Deadwood: The Movie.

Time has found some characters grown stronger, such as a thriving Sofia (Lily Keene) and Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) become a successful businessman and landowner. But many are stagnating: Jane (Robin Weigert) may be a minor celebrity but still an alcoholic wreck, and Joanie (Kim Dickens) remains trapped in the Bella Union. Others are greatly diminished: Harry (Brent Sexton) is corrupted, and Al’s (Ian McShane) health is rapidly declining. As Al loses his faculties and Charlie’s lifelong righteous sense of justice blossoms to a quiet but heroic act of resistance, it’s easy to see that this is clearly deeply personal for writer/creator David Milch — the movie is all the more poignant now that he is ailing, and this may be his final work.

There are a few instances of outright fan service (flashbacks remind us of a key moments, Garret Dillahunt has a fleeting cameo as his third character, and it’s very satisfying to see Dan & Jewel bicker over canned peaches one last time), but the movie thankfully does not wallow in nostalgia. The Pinkertons are not mentioned once, and unless I’m mistaken, nobody calls anybody a hooplehead. Milch’s characteristically convoluted diction truly deserves the modifier “Shakespearean”, and is something to savor.

The original TV series was always a little — shall we say — loosely plotted, which worked mostly to its benefit. Whereas later HBO efforts like Game of Thrones were predominantly plot-driven (who lives, who dies, one battle more spectacular than the next), Deadwood was always about character and dialog, and the greater theme of modern America being born out of lawlessness and chaos.

But it would be fair to criticize Milch for frequently abandoning promising storylines if he got bored or distracted. The third season in particular has numerous threads that go nowhere: the character of Joanie suffers from a lack of material, and everything involving the traveling theater troupe is superfluous, despite how delightful Brian Cox’s performance is.

The concise two-hour movie format has the benefit of focusing Milch’s attention, but there is still room for a little narrative meandering. One such seemingly extraneous subplot that at first seems to be going nowhere in Milch-ean fashion is that of a young woman coming to town with the aim of working in a brothel, turning a few heads but failing to land a job. We’ve seen her story before, from the very first episode: Deadwood was a hard place, populated by hard people. You could group its denizens into roughly two categories: those desperate to escape something (Al: wanted for murder; the Garrets: escaping bankruptcy and sexual abuse; Seth: arguably running from his own violent nature), and those there unwillingly (mostly women, as Trixie and Joanie were both sold into indentured servitude).

The girl attracts the notice of the latter, who always struck me as one of the show’s most tragic characters: Trixie (Paula Malcomson) grew into adulthood with a deep sense of self-loathing, unable to accept that she might deserve love or kindness. Even when Al, her abusive pimp, tried to push her into a legitimate free life in society (such as it was in Deadwood at the time), she rejected it. The original series ended with Trixie still caught in this conundrum, and as we see her 10 years later, she still feels unworthy, compelled to sneak around through backdoors, and resisting Sol’s (John Hawkes) unconditional love. Thankfully, the movie finally grants her a breakthrough: she accepts Sol and receives a gift from Al, and finds herself with a trade and a place in society.

When Trixie recognizes the psychology of the broken girl who came to Deadwood as a last resort, she is equipped to show her a bit of kindness, and laments that she should believe that this is all she deserves. It’s not only a breakthrough for Trixie, but a crack in the lawless, dead-end history of Deadwood: now no longer only a place for the criminal or the desperate, but now with opportunities for people to better themselves.

One other touching moment of resolution I want to highlight, conveyed perfectly without exposition. The other great dangling thread of the series was that Alma (Molly Parker) and Seth (Timothy Olyphant) never closed the door on their love affair. As they smolder one last time, face to face at Trixie and Sol’s wedding, they are interrupted by one of Seth’s children. He scoops her up, beaming with pride and love, and rejoins the party. Like Trixie, they are both also finally freed.

June 1, 2019
Mr. Rogers consoles the country in Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

It’s a sad state of affairs when a documentary about one of the most simply good people to have ever lived must dedicate screentime to Trump, Brexit, and Fox News, but such is the world that conservatives have made. Even if no mention had been made of current affairs, Won’t You Be My Neighbor would have been a political statement. Much is said of Fred Rogers’ values as a Christian and lifelong Republican, but how many of today’s Christians and Republicans would recognize him?

Rogers’ famous message in times of crisis was to “look for the helpers”, but as noted by Jason Kottke and Ian Boost, this was intended to console children. After 9/11, he also had a call to action for adults: our duty is to be tikkun olam, “repairers of creation”.

January 2, 2019
Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” earns its exclamation point
Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is an allegory so undisguised that it barely qualifies as one. It’s more like a cinematic smoothie: blend one (1) King James Bible, the Big Bang / Big Crunch Wikipedia article, a heavy splash of Lars Von Trier-esque literal-as-metaphorical torture of a beautiful woman, season to taste with climate change science, and suffer through it.

A male filmmaker portraying a male artist as god, simultaneously elevating and exploiting the woman that supports him is, in a word, problematic. When I couldn’t willfully look past those misogynistic aspects, it brought to mind the risible Lady in the Water. At least the circumstances aren’t so grim that there’s room for a little comedy, as in portraying Adam and Eve (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer) as the worst houseguests ever.

But… but… but. Wow. Just, wow. I fully respect and understand many of the negative reviews, but I have to admit I found its punk rock spirit flat-out astonishing. What audacity to make something so deliberately confrontational, rude even. I quite literally watched most of the film with my jaw hanging open.

If nothing else, you can’t deny mother! earned its exclamation point.

Stray Observations:
- I’ve previously been ambivalent about Jennifer Lawrence as an actor, but she is superb here.
- Anyone else catch a whiff of Lindsay Anderson’s If…, another over-the-top allegorical phantasmagoria? But admittedly I am probably by distracted by the punctation.
December 29, 2018