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Reviews
Devil's Pond (2003)
A GUILTY PLEASURE
It's more of a lake than a pond, and if you expect quality you'll have a devil of a time trying to convince yourself that its worth the rental price, but for me its just the type of bad movie that's a real guilty pleasure.
Imagine what might happen if a former A&F model playing a redneck psycho stalker manages to get the local hick Britney Spears lookalike, played by an alumnus from "American Pie," to marry him and go on their honeymoon for two weeks to a log cabin on an island out in the middle of a VERY isolated lake somewhere within a few hours drive of the podunk town they live in. It can be reached only after miles of travel over dusty logging roads. And the cell phone doesn't work out there either. You know there's gonna be trouble.
When Britney, still in her wedding dress, climbs into the truck immediately after the ceremony and tells her new cutie to "get us the f*ck outta here," you also know you're in for some wonderfully bad dialog, hammy overacting, bad direction and writing, and lots of lowbrow by the numbers fun. And this flick does not let you down. After a few days when Britney runs out of birth control pills, and A&F starts to get weird about wanting to make babies, she might want to end the marriage as quickly as the real Britney did hers, but boy does she have her work cut out for her to do it.
This movie is something a community college drama student from say, northern Minnesota, who had seen a lot of Hitchcock movies and decided he could make one just like them might turn out. Cary Grant or James Mason our leading man ain't but the disconnect between his obviously angelic mallrat looks and the manly deer hunting, wife beating, obsessive character he is asked to portray is most of the fun. The rest is laughing at how dense the chick is for winding up out there in the first place, and how once her brain cells start sparking a little she manages to get herself "the f*ck" out of the mess she is in. Enjoy. I did. :-)
Max (2002)
What if Hitler had become the Thomas Kinkade of Weimar Germany?
I like bad art. I really do. I have several C. M. Coolidge prints hanging in my den (you know, those poker playing dogs). I prefer the bloated Vegas Elvis who covered Frank Sinatra songs to the leaner King of Rock and Roll. One of my favorite writers is Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the `king of the pulps' who's florid, overblown prose and surreal, overly extended other dimensional metaphors redefined hack sci-fi and fantasy literature.
So, god forbid, would I buy a Hitler painting? The answer is a conditional yes, as you will see.
But first, I need to tell you I like bad art so much I decide to create some myself a few years back. I took an introductory black and white photography course at a local community college near where I live on the suggestion of a moody, bi-polar ex-friend of mine, who also signed up. Besides us, most of those in the class were just eager kids of limited artistic vision and lots of desire to create masterpieces. The instructor fed their delusions of greatness with the typical prodding to think abstractly and expressively.
So when it came time for everyone to put up samples of their work, the walls were full of grainy or out of focus images of isolated sections of zig zagging stairwells, distorted shadows cast on the ground by playground equipment, and other such interpretive stuff. Everyone was oohing and aahhing, including the teacher. Then it was my turn to show. All I had managed to produce was contrasty and technically well exposed and developed shots of old barns, waterfalls, mountain vistas, farm animals, clapboard country churches and such. I had violated the first rule of fine art. Which is make the viewer guess.
I like the movie `Max' because it makes the viewer guess what might have been.
Here we see the Hitler I have always wanted to see in a movie. Not the cardboard demonic Gross Deutsches Fuehrer that Hollywood `jackboot' operas, and `educational' TV are famous for. Not a prancing Chaplin or Mel Brooks buffoon either. Not even the sex pervert who liked to be peed on by frumpy dumb blondes almost half his age.
The Adolf Hitler of 1918 Munich in `Max' was a twitchy and socially awkward, army barracks dwelling, intellectually restless Southern (Austrian) hick (the German equivalent) who had acquired through self-directed reading just enough eclectic knowledge about philosophy and art to think he was really cultured, and who was just articulate enough to sometimes get by as a curiosity and hanger-on among those who were cultured. Didn't matter that most of the time he managed to relate everything to some haphazard knowledge he had picked up along the way about dubious, but nonetheless at that time in history, semi-respectable `sciences' like eugenics. That just added to the curiosity and amusement factor. When accused of being anti-Semitic for sarcastically praising Jews because they kept their blood `pure,' Hitler bristled. Anti-Semitism was for small minds, and he was not anti-Semitic. His views had nothing to do with old fashioned religious intolerance and sporadic pogroms. The Jews, and blood purity, were issues of public health, maintained the teetotaling, non-smoking Adolf. `Like sewage.'
As far as Adolf was concerned, if the world couldn't see and embrace `the facts', then damn it.
The film `Max' posits two possible ways for the world to embrace Hitler as an artist. It can follow the route already taken; it can embrace his emerging political vision as performance art, along with all the consequences that follow from that. Or it can possibly still embrace his visual art, which he had not yet totally given up on.
Almost all established opinion about Hitler's artistic skill, filtered through the hindsight of over 35 million dead in Europe as a result of WWII, holds that he was completely without talent as an untrained and untrainable wannabe painter. All he could manage was the most appallingly pedestrian and poorly executed renderings of public buildings in Vienna and elsewhere. Never any people in them.
What if that view were not quite right? `Max' almost makes you believe it isn't. I've actually seen some of Hitler's real artwork. Not all of it was droll architectural renderings. He did still life, animal studies (dogs were a favorite, one of his better dog drawings is actually in the movie, watch for it), bucolic country scenes, and even nudes (of women!), and portraits. None of it was abstract, expressionist, or strikingly original in concept, but it wasn't all technically incompetent either.
*spoilers*
The fictional mentor for Hitler in the movie `Max' was a man named Max Rothman. Rothman was a Jew, the independently wealthy son of a businessman. A painter himself, he lost his right arm in World War I, and had to fall back onto the role of art dealer afterward. He opened up a gallery of sorts in one of his father's abandoned warehouses where he hawked and promoted the `degenerate' and ambivalent art of such Weimar luminaries as George Grosz. He sometime bared his naked, stumped arm in a kind of Guerilla Theater, minus the cabaret, that ridiculed pre-war German militarism and the needless slaughter that resulted from it. Max Rothman was exactly what you would think might be Hitler's perfect excuse for the Holocaust. He was the kind of person that made a man like Adolf think about the things he didn't want to think about.
Rothman; however, wanted to do exactly that; he had plans for history's most prolific mass murderer (unless you count Stalin maybe). Max, the eternally liberal and optimistic Jew, rejected conventional historical wisdom and assumed that all Hitler really needed to flourish as a passable painter was a mentor to train and prod the monster within to come forth with discipline and structure on the canvas rather than in the beer hall. Instead of killing millions, the worst he would do might be to insult the tastes of millions with kitschy pictures of panting, friendly dogs and serene alpine landscapes.
If; however, he could go deep within his angry soul, maybe he was capable of painting and drawing something more daring, like a dazzling and demented vision of a Germanic future full of clover leafed autobahns crowded with sleek bug-like cars available for everyone, soaring vistas of symmetrically designed and uncongested cityscapes, full of art deco eagles, and red, black and white banners with curious crooked crosses on them fluttering everywhere. A future where smiling clean cut boys with good teeth, and golden haired girls with goldilocks braids in traditional Bavarian peasant dress marched in these sterile cities, and carried torches hailing their Germanic purity and pride in the new, better, modern world where everyone was protected by benevolent Robocop looking troopers, and there was never any garbage in the streets and the sewers never overflowed. `The future as a return to the past,' exclaimed Rothman, excited at the striking kitsch vision. It would be a really big exhibition.
Adolf Hitler, `Painter of Germania.' (trade name reserved)
Hitler as the first mass consumed conceptual pop artist. Where `Metropolis' meets Darth Vader, the Jetsons, and Wagner's Ring mythology. If not a whole new synthetic `postmodern' movement to counter Bauhaus, at least maybe a lucrative career as a comic book series illustrator. Thirty-five million lives saved for the sake of a little bad fascist art. Go to any suburban mall gallery, or any role playing gamer's shop, and I'll bet you can find worse.
It wasn't to be though. Even in Max's alternate world, Hitler had begun to be noticed by other reactionary, but artless men. He had already made a few speeches in a few beer halls. When his political mentor, an uncreative anti-Semitic army officer, got wind that Hitler was going to meet his Jewish artistic mentor to seal the deal on an exhibition that might be his big break and exit from politics, the world's fate was sealed. While Hitler waited anxiously at the appointed place for Rothman, the luckless art dealer became the first victim of the future Holocaust when a gang of beer hall refuse sent by the officer to seal his own deal with Hitler bludgeoned and kicked Max to death in a dimly lit apartment courtyard he was walking through on a shortcut route to meet the future of German art. Killed by men who most likely a few years later would be flesh and blood storm troops in a real Germanic future less than dazzling.
Hitler a bad artist on paper or canvas you say? Would you instead prefer Hitler the performance, deconstructive artist ripping up the map of Europe? I think if I could save just one of those 35 million lives by buying a Hitler print, I would be willing to put one in every room of my house (including the closets and bathrooms).
The Celluloid Closet (1995)
MEMO TO HAYS OFFICE: My gun is bigger than your gun!
`The Celluloid Closet' What's in a name? Is it a cabinet where wet film stocks are hung to dry after they are developed? Sounds reasonable. Maybe it's a sleazy, tabloid, documentary movie, done `Inside Edition' style, and hosted by Bill O'Reilly returning to his `journalistic' beginnings like the proverbial dog returning to its vomit, barking away as only he can while delving into the secret sex lives of Hollywood's liberal elites? That really sounds like it.
Was I in for a surprise. It is a documentary alright, hosted, I would say appropriately by Lily Tomlin (playing it straight and minus her trademark nasal snorting), that devolves not into an `outfest' of movie stars' hidden real life sexual behavior, but unfolds as a fascinating study of the gay themes and symbolism embedded throughout mainstream film from the silent era to the end of the industry's self-imposed Hays Movie Production Code `morals' censorship in the late 1960s.
You won't find out anything here, for instance, about what might have happened off the set between Rock Hudson and James Dean during the filming of `Giant,' but after watching `The Celluloid Closet,' you will never watch another old movie on late night T.V. in the same way again. Be warned, your mind will be permanently warped, whether you like it or not. If you want to keep your sense of celluloid innocence about Hollywood's `golden age,' that special time when matinee idols were always manly (at least on screen), method acting was unknown, and Ronald Reagan was president of the Screen Actor's Guild, this movie is not for you.
***Slight Spoilers (but worth it)***
Take `Ben Hur' for instance. Certainly no indie film. One of the righteous `studio era's' highest achievements. The daddy of all sandal epics. Shown on all the `superstations' just about every Christmas or Easter season. Winner of eleven Oscars. More than any other flick has ever won, even when stacked up against all those politically correct message movies made during the later, and often blasphemous `director's era.' Movies with people like Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon and Willem Dafoe in them.
No, 'Ben Hur' is not that kind of morally relativistic trash. It is a real straightforward man's movie. Bloody chariot races where the bad guy cheats and the hero wins. Stirring galley battles on the high seas. Actors with British accents playing noble Romans. Heck it's got Charlton Heston in it for goodness sakes! But, it seems, it also has a strong hidden gay message in it too. At least according to Gore Vidal, one of the movie's screenwriters, it does. Vidal claims he wrote the scenes between Heston and his Roman friend turned betrayer (played by actor Stephen Boyd) as if the two were adolescent lovers, and discreetly asked Boyd to play his part as if that were the case!
I suppose we are to look closely for that certain twinkle in Boyd's eyes when he looks at Heston, or a lingering hand on the shoulder during the reunion scenes. I understand we are supposed to attach some sort of subliminal meaning behind a spear throwing contest between the two in one scene. That sort of thing.
I don't know if I would ever pick up on anything like that (I sure haven't in all the times I've seen `Ben Hur' before learning this), but if I were told generally that such a gay theme had been slipped into this movie and told to figure out how and where on my own, I would have assumed that it was between Heston and his older benefactor, the Roman, Quintus Arrius, who adopted him (that would have been more in keeping with the historical Roman tradition). That; however, would be an intellectual assumption and not that of a `fellow traveler' picking up discreet clues in the acting, which I guess is what Vidal had in mind. Whichever way it swings, you will laugh heartily when Vidal reveals that he gave strict instructions that Heston not know about his practical joke for fear he couldn't handle it and would just go to pieces!
I don't really see any `smoking gun' for the NRA's Heston to worry about myself in `Ben Hur,' but you will be jaw-dropping dumbfounded, and slap yourself while mumbling, `how could I miss THAT,' when you view the short clip included from that classic old John Wayne western, `Red River.' Actor Montgomery Clift, playing John Wayne's son, and some other stock western actor are lovingly comparing the heft, shape, and size of each other's pistols during a quiet moment on the cattle drive. No need for any screenwriter's commentary there.
Far from Heaven (2002)
Hey BOY!, or How to sound Southern even when you are from Hartford, Connecticut
I remember reading somewhere that Douglas Sirk, the 1950's director of the saturated Technicolor tear-jerkers on which "Far From Heaven" was based, was a leftist.
That figures considering most "highbrow" reviewers of Sirk's movies say you can view them two ways: either as harmless soap-operas, or if you want to pay closer attention, as sly commentaries on the social and material wasteland that was upper-middle class America during that decade. Message movies in a nice package, maybe made that way just to fool the Hays Office censors and the Black Listers?
All that is probably wishful thinking, but if these reviewers are correct, why is a movie like "Far From Heaven" even necessary? Maybe sly isn't good enough anymore. And sly "Far From Heaven" ain't.
Anyone today who reads anything more complex than TV Guide knows that the 'Fifties were not the Paradise of Frank Lloyd Wrightian suburban angularity and bourgeois Kodachrome bliss that back issues of, say, Popular Mechanics, or re-runs (minus the Kodachrome) of Leave It To Beaver suggest it was. Did the average middle class man really come to the dinner table at home wearing a buttoned collar and tie when it was just the wife and kids? Did Mom wear pearls as she passed the mashed potatoes? All my born-too-late-to-know-in-person common sense and otherwise knowledge of human nature tell me to bet strongly against it. I'm sure the collar, at least, came unbuttoned long before dinner, probably right after the briefcase hit the floor, the grey flannel jacket hit the coat rack, and just before the first splash of scotch hit the rocks.
If Sirk, though, was sly in attacking the Myth of the 'Fifties, then Todd Haynes uses a sledgehammer to go after it.
"Far From Heaven" does have the look and feel of a 'Fifties flick. The costumes and set pieces are dead on. The music, you will swear, is actually recycled from one of those weepy old things from way back then (though it is not, it is an original score). The special features segment on the DVD release of this movie explain in much detail how the filmmakers went to great lengths to use the actual filming and editing techniques moviemakers used then, and sure enough those long shots of Mom crawling around town in her station wagon framed by blowing and rustling autumnal maple leaves sure look right.
**SPOILERS AHEAD**
It may look like the world of Ozzie and Harriet, or Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue Haynes is depicting, but it feels more like the Osbornes. Dad (in a role curiously cast with Dennis Quaid) is a Ward Clever tie-at-dinner Dad who also happens to be a closeted homosexual (a campy homage to the Sirk's favorite leading man Rock Hudson perhaps) working as a rising district sales manager for a television manufacturer in Harford, Connecticut. The action starts when Mom, ever the dutiful 'Fifties wife, decides to take Dad dinner to the office one evening while he is `working late', but instead walks in on him in the arms of another man. Somehow I can't quite picture a rising corporate executive in the 1950s willing to risk a HOMOSEXUAL liaison at the office anytime of day or night. Understandable, though, is how Dad met his lover, after a chance encounter in a dimly lit movie theater in a seedier section of town, which leads him to explore an equally dimly lit and typically pre `Stonewall' gay bar hidden nondescriptly like a speakeasy at the end of a dingy alleyway out behind the theater. Never any techno-music circuit parties likely in there.
It is the absurd moments such as these that make `Far From Heaven' both watchable and enjoyable, but as a reflection on 1950s social commentary it renders the exercise more `Peyton Place' than Douglas Sirk. Campy voyeurism into unspeakable worlds.
Another great laugher is the scene in the `doctor's' office after Dad decides to tackle his `problem.' `We are more enlightened than we used to be about this sort of thing,' the professional reassures him as he offers up such cutting edge treatments as hormone supplements, and various hinted at `conditioning' therapies (I imagine such things as electrical shock to the genitals while viewing pictures of naked men or some such ordeal would be one possible enlightened option). The doctor does caution his patient; however, that the success rates of any of the available treatments are rather low.
No contemporary Hollywood effort at trashing the lie that was 'Fifties middle America would be complete, or politically correct without something to say about Black and White, even if the movie is in gorgeous Technicolor. Haynes does not disappoint us.
Upper middle class wives in the 1950s might have be allowed some social outlets beyond bridge clubs, but one thing they were NOT allowed, even in Hartford, Connecticut was a close friendship with their black gardener. Not even a woman who has just found out her adoring husband is gay and needs a comforting shoulder to lean on. I said friendship, not a RELATIONSHIP, because that is all it ever amounts to, but even just a friendship, point well made by the filmmaker, is hardly innocent when bigots' dirty minds start to deceive their eyes.
Her gardener is no ordinary gardener either. He is college educated, and a loving widowed father who also happens to speak English more lyrically and precisely than her sales executive husband. The point of a college educated black man working as a gardener in Hartford, Connecticut in 1957, I'll bet, is to make sure the viewer of 2002 understands that, in 1957, Connecticut had more in common with Mississippi and Alabama than most people in the Connecticut of 2002 would want to admit it had.
If that scripting fact alone; however, doesn't slam the point home, the racist comments from the good Hartford bourgeoisie at the cocktail parties once their eyes start to deceive their minds will. Even an innocent stroll together down the sidewalk in the wrong part of town can take on the most sinister of meanings. You definitely get the feeling these are not the illusive tolerant white Northerners who would in five or ten years be marching arm in arm with Dr. King and Dr. Spock.
Another cocktail party, `post-outing,' provides the funniest and most classically melodramatic moment. Dad gets good and drunk, and after all the guests have gone home the couple sit alone in shadows and moonlight in the living room. Emboldened by the alcohol, he decides to try and make violent, mechanical love to Mom on the couch. After a short session of passionate Frenching and pawing, he pulls away abruptly in an overacted display of tortured agony and self loathing. When Mom tries to soothe him by telling him he is `all man' to her despite his `problem,' he loses control, like any good control freak of a man during the 1950s would do, and slaps her one across the face. I think I would give a whole years' worth of DVD rental costs to see Rock Hudson do that scene in this movie, if such were possible. He was, after all, a good actor.
Despite his best efforts to conform and reform, Dad just can't help himself. He finally finds true love in what has to be the most improbable contrivance imaginable, which sadly is also a typical `May-September' gay stereotype. During a retreat to Miami designed as a final effort to rekindle the lost romance between husband and wife, Dad happens upon a blond and handsome boy having dinner at the hotel with his parents several tables over. Glances exchange. Later when Dad and Mom relax poolside, Mom remembers she forgot something, and Dad dutifully offers to go back to the room to get it. While in there with the door to the hallway left conspicuously open, our blond boy walks up, shirt unbuttoned to show his smooth bare chest which he starts to stroke suggestively as glances exchange again, and then become stares. Now I can believe some pretty unbelievable things, but don't expect me to believe a gay man near fifty is going to get any teenage boy just happen to show up at his hotel room door looking for true love. Cash by the hour maybe, but not true love.
True love Dad does find though, and soon he is sobbing in the living room again, and this time it is he who asks for a divorce.
This leaves Mom to wish she could work up the courage to allow herself to act on her own forbidden feelings. That is not to be though, because her gardener friend decides to move in with relatives in Baltimore after his daughter is stoned by a gang of local Hartford Beaver Cleavers.
There are a couple of last sidewalk meetings before the couple part. In one of them, when he dares touch her in public, a businessman wearing a crisp suit and fedora yells to him from across the street in loud and uncertain terms, HEY BOY! Yes that is what he says. In Hartford, Connecticut. And in a SOUTHERN accent!! Yes an unmistakable, fake Hollywood, `Dukes of Hazzard,' `In the Heat of the Night,' `Cool Hand Luke' SOUTHERN accent. Listen closely, and you be the judge of it. Which proves one of Hollywood's most durable stereotypes is still alive and functioning. A bigot can live anywhere, but he can't sound like he does. Which proves life in the movies is like a box of chocolate covered cherries, pits and all.
Metroland (1997)
Attention Baleheads! This Brit Flick Dares To Show What "American Psycho" couldn't... (SPOILERS - Maybe)
Think the violent and brutal American Psycho showed "more" of
actor Christian Bale than any other movie?
Think again.
Despite what you may have heard about 'Psycho's less than daring "implied sexuality," and it's typically restrained American nude scenes, you won't see "all" of Christian anywhere in there, or likely will you ever in any American studio release.
If you are interested, though, you will see all of him in "Metroland," a quirky, non-violent, non-threatening, whimsical and romantic little British coming of age film. Confused?
If you are used to movies that feature sex, violence, and nudity
as one tantilizing package, you have a right be confused.
Imagine the recent Hollywood "wholesome" film, "A Walk To Remember." Only this time gosh golly Shane West walks around somewhere in there with absolutely nothing on. Mandy Moore occasionally decides to do the same thing. Same movie, just those little changes. Metroland is something like that. Innocently graphic in a way that an American-made film never could be.
It is true that Mr. Bale doesn't appear quite as yankee, yuppie buff here in London's suburban "Metroland" as he would later across the Atlantic killing prostitutes in Manhattan, and he doesn't once show us his behind while wielding a chainsaw.
****SPOILERS (Maybe)****
His proper, young "fish-belly white" British banker character; however, sheds his duds midway through Metroland and walks around in full frontal "wagging" glory in front of a completely naked woman while earnestly deciding NOT to commit adultery. Pretty tame stuff maybe compared to chainsaws and axes, but any red-blooded Balehead will scream like a banshee in heat, and themselves turn into a psycho to get access to the pause button on the VCR or DVD remote when it happens.
If you are not a Balehead, be sure to invite one, or preferably several over, and see what happens. Rent this movie for no other reason than this, even if you otherwise detest talky British flicks with a happy ending. The experience is not to be missed. :-)