FILM REVIEW - Rio Bravo...

...

Rio Bravo is, in my opinion, the best western ever made, and one of the greatest character studies. What it lacks in force and spectacle it makes up for in an impeccable study of male camaraderie. While The Searchers, another great western, connects the wild, vast, infinite landscape of the west to the wild, obsessive, bitter Ethan Edwards and to a lost age in Western civilization, Rio Bravo restricts it's setting to a small western town and it's cosy yet claustrophobic interiors. The story concerns three men of law (John Wayne, Dean Martin and Walter Brennan) and a young-gun (Ricky Nelson), who find their quiet lives interrupted by the acts of a despicable murderer (Claude Atkins), whose arrest attracts the attention of his brother, a local rancher who plans to use any means neccessary to break his brother free. They must hold them off until the marshall arrives. So the relationships of the men are put to the test, not just by criminals, but by weaknesses (age, alcoholism, naivety) and of course women...

The performances are impeccable; Hawks, always great with actors, made John Wayne appear weak but very human and tender as few directors could, and Walter Brennan gives a strong and comic performance as the ageing, insecure but feisty Stumpy. Dean Martin is pitiful but funny and strong as the pathetic, broken-hearted alcoholic. Ricky Nelson is Ricky Nelson, but he fits in perfectly as a young gunslinger, and Hawks couldn't resist giving us a musical number. There is something profound in the way these men interact, in the way tensions increase inside and outside. Hawks filmed them with a restrained, strolling, casual camera, capturing the inner-feelings of these men in a simple and natural manner. The more one watches it though, the more an expressive directorial power is evident. There are very few close-ups in the film, but they're used to express the simplest yet most quietly profound things; a man-rolling a cigarette, a man whose shakes are cured. It's certainly not all about men though. When John T. Chance ventures away from the cosy and gruff male surroundings of the jail he is confronted with many threats; bandits, murderers, and women. Angie Dickinson plays "Feathers," an entertainer at the local bar who takes a liking to him as he keeps an eye on the gambling. They have wonderful chemistry together, particularly in a scene in which Dickinson is getting dressed (erotica anyone?) and the two casually discuss their lives, trying to keep hidden the forces of attraction at work. So each character has a weakness, women, girls, alcohol, and age, trying to hold on to their dignity and honour even if it means risking their lives. Bravery is another theme the film explores, each character has to overcome their flaws and prove themselves; Brennan shows that despite his age he can still put up a fight, Martin cures his alcoholism, Wayne finds love, and Nelson learns a thing or two.

Hawks, not usually discussed when it comes to "technique" was undoubtedly a masterful visual storyteller. The entire opening of the film is dialogue free; only gestures and expressions are filmed. In a bar a dirty, torn-up Martin wanders a bar looking for some way of buying beer. Eventually a man (the murderer) tosses a coin into a spittoon. As Martin crouches to retrieve it the spittoon is kicked away and there is revealed Wayne, towering over him, a look of pity, disgust and sadness on his face. This scene alone is evidence of the seldom admitted or realised expressive mastery of Hawks' direction. But Hawks (in some ways humble, not in others), successfully keeps any "direction" invisible to the casual viewer, and so we are totally enveloped in the story. His style is quiet, subdued, lethargic, but observant and quite deliberate. The film ends on a note of acceptance and contentment, as each character, having proven themselves, go on with their lives...a great film about life, love, and masculinity...as David Thomson said; a man is more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world...

FILM REVIEW - Mulholland Dr. ...

... *MAY CONTAIN A FEW MILD SPOILERS*

I recently rewatched this; my all time favourite film, and I'm happy to say I'm still madly in love with it. The Silencio scene didn't make me cry like it did before, but the film still shattered my soul and stuck pins into my heart. Every time I watch this film I notice something new, each time I watch it I see a slightly different film; it's forever original and new; timeless. Like most films that are truly special to me, I can't watch it very often, and I wouldn't want to wear myself out anyway, but I cherish the experience when it comes. But enough of me extolling my love, time for a proper review.

Mulholland Dr.; Hollywood...a near murder...a car crash...a beautiful woman without memory or identity...a demonic man behind a wall...an aspiring young actress named Betty...a chance meeting...a young director at war...a quest for identity...a cowboy...a rotting corpse...love...Club Silencio...crying...Hey pretty girl...time to wake up....reality...Diane Selwyn...Camilla Rhodes...betrayal...obsession ...hatred...murder...a wonderful dream...an ugly awakening...realisation...the truth...demons from the past...suicide...silencio...

The plot of Mulholland Dr. isn't the easiest to decipher (the line "dreams are nothing more than wishes, and a wish is just a dream" from Harry Nilsson's "The Puppy Song" could be a help). It's not the easiest film to review either. The film is more intent on mood, feeling and emotion. Yet after a few viewings there is revealed a narrative as beautiful and simple as water flowing in a stream. For all it's twists and turns Mulholland Dr. is really a very simple film about love, obsession, regret, guilt, dreams, imagination, the corruption of the Hollywood dream-machine, and finally the death of creativity. I think I've deciphered most of the film, but I'm not going to reveal anything. I will say this however; some parts are dream, and some parts are reality. The innovative and highly inventive narrative blurs every line that might separate reality from dream, creating a frightening and thought-provoking ambiguity. The film follows several narrative strands in the first half. Firstly there's a woman who loses her memory in a car crash (the beautiful Laura Elena Harring) that saves her from a mysterious and unsettling murder attempt on Mulholland Drive. She finds herself in the apartment that is soon to be occupied by a young aspiring actress; Betty. Betty is from Canada. She is cheery, chirpy, bright and giddy, like Doris Day. She is welcomed upon arrival in Hollywood, yet soon disovers the woman hiding in her apartment (who has now adopted the name "Rita"). Together they try to recover her identity, and become, err, very good friends. They have some very scary encounters on their quest. Then there's Adam Kesher a young director at war with studio execs over his latest project. He is in some of the funniest scenes of the film (Lynch always had a gift for absurdist humour). In one particularly comic scene he goes to a meeting with the execs and two Mafia bosses, who insist on a girl named Camilla Rhodes getting the lead part in his movie. Tensions run high as one of the bosses (Badalamenti, Lynch's brilliant composer), regurgitates his espresso and claims it to be "shiiit!" Adam refuses to give in and smashes the Limo they came in. Hilarious. And if that wasn't enough, he's kicked out of his home by his wife and a pool-man and ends up meeting a scary cowboy while covered in pink paint. You have to see it to believe it. What is interesting about the story so far is the duality. As "Rita" descends into some nightmare Betty ascends into her Hollywood dream. Anyway, at some points these strands collide, as Betty visits the casting operation of Adam's new film, a musical with some catchy songs in it. At the behest of the hypnotic cowboy Adam gives in to demands and casts Camilla Rhodes. Interestingly, the Hollywood dream seems to fall apart after this. Betty and "Rita" fall in love and find themselves in a large theater where a magician reveals hidden truths and Betty is awakened. She wakes up as Diane, a much less vibrant woman on the verge of collapse. She is obsessed with her lesbian lover, Camilla Rhodes (Laura Elena Harring), and after being humiliated at a party by her she vows revenge, leading her to commit an act through the corrupt services of the real Hollywood that leads to her tragic self-destruction.

Lynch directs with an expressive mastery unrivalled by any other director working today. His technique is immaculate, his use of the floating camera to convey a dreamlike fluidity, the various perspective shots, blurred to convey emotional upset or otherwise, extreme close-ups that build up an unbearable tension throughout, and much more. But how can I praise the brilliant directorial work without praising those who helped make it so; Peter Deming, whose camerawork creeps through corridors and floats as if deep underwater, and whose cinematography makes every frame beautiful and rich with detail, so that every shadow looks as if it's hiding something. And not to mention Angelo Badalamenti, whose score and brilliant use of sound are essential to the mood and emotional effect. Indeed at the end credits, the sound gives the viewer the feeling of being lost to an underworld, a deep ocean of sadness, of drowning in the mind. And Lynch's attention to detail glues the very deliberate narrative together (clever use of waitress name-tags, strange faces and other things that might seep into the subconscious mind. The performances are exquisite, particularly from Watts (a towering achievement), Harring and Theroux.

As I've mentioned eariler, the film is rich thematically. It's ultimately a sad and disturbing yet highly imagined and stylized portrait of Hollywood, a land of murder and violence, of corruption, a factory that sells unreliable dreams to naive young Bettys, and a place where artistic integrity is overcome by a yearning for "the good life." The second last shot of the film is masterful, panning over the dark reality of Hollywood; corporate and sleazy while the spectres of Betty and Rita, happy and smiling dance over it. A wonderful, beautiful, and ultimately heartbreaking film...silencio...

FILM REVIEW - Gummo...

...

Gummo is like a really gorgeous girl in a bikini who's been dragged along a gritty concrete path littered with glass at 60 miles per hour. It's like a tornado blew a pile of home-videos to pieces and scattered the pieces for miles, then some bored, lonely, outcast teenager discovered them and decided to piece them together, adding his own little videos to it. In short, Gummo is both beautiful and moving, and horrible and depraved. It all depends on the viewer, and how he/she looks at it. It's a grotesque collage, a nihilistic chaos caused by some natural disaster...

Harmony Korine's Gummo begins with images of life in a small American town; Xenia, Ohio. It shows life before and during a tornado that hits and devastates the town, as Solomon, one of the anti-heroes of the film, provides a haunting and sad voice-over. The images in this scene are like little snippets of memory; of nightmares, newscasts; dreams, paradise. One second we see a small girl smiling at us, the next minute we see things flying through the air as Solomon tells us he looked up the skirt of a girl he saw fly through the air. As shocking as some of this is, it's never graphic, indeed it's totally suggestive, coming only from blurred and grainy bits of image and Solomon's description of the event. This opening sequence, both vague and vivid, sets the mood and tone for the entire movie. Then we are introduced to Bunny Boy, a mysterious skate-boarding kid who wears rabbit ears and never talks. He is caged in a filthy bridge above a freeway; urinating and spitting on the traffic below, smoking and kicking at the fencing that separates him from the outside world. Far from being random and pointless, this scene symbolizes his loneliness and alienation from the rest of the world. The rest of the world speeds away while he is trapped in the boring, timeless Xenia. Indeed he is lonely throughout the film, wandering the streets and skate-boarding. He is rejected and "shot" by two foul-mouthed youngsters in cowboy costumes in a junkyard; only really finding love in the form of the two blonde sisters after he kills their beloved cat without them knowing and falls into their arms in a swimming pool in the pouring rain in the haunting final sequence. The sisters wander around the town talking about random things, like attracting boys, and the cat. One of them is played by Korine regular Chloe Sevigny, who demonstrates to her sister a method of making your nipples look bigger; putting duct tape over them. They have a little sister who tags along with them. In one scene she puts a large image of Burt Reynolds over her face and proclaims -

"I wanna moustache dammit! I wanna look like Burt Reynolds!"

She's not the only character to mention a famous celebrity. In one sequence an albino woman talks to the camera about her attraction to Patrick Swayze. There are several such odd tangents in this film. And last but definitely not least there are the two main characters, those who we follow through most of the film; Solomon and Tummler. Solomon is a young boy who lives with his mother. His father died in the tornado. Tummler is much older. He lives with his father. Tummler and Solomon travel around town on dirt-bikes and kill stray cats by drowning them or shooting them with BB guns, selling them to a man who in turn sells them to restaraunts. They also enjoy talking, having sex, sniffing glue and drinking milkshakes. The people in this film also seem to live in abnormally cluttered houses, piled high with junk. From this brief description they may seem depraved and sick, but in the film they are portrayed as free spirits doing the best they can to make a living under the circumstances, and the activities are never graphic, in fact they are never seen save for the drowning of a cat near the beginning. There are some tender moments between the pair, as when high on glue Tummler talks to Solomon about his homosexual brother, who apparently moved away. Jacob Reynolds and Nick Sutton give fantastic performances as the shameless yet charming pair.

It's a very complex and often incoherent film, with too many ideas to digest in one viewing. Yet while at first it seems random, and it certainly is in parts (like a Tornado-stricken wasteland), Gummo does in fact have a deliberate if very loose narrative structure. The lives of certain characters sometimes impact off one another, and this is not made apparent at first, but unfolds before the viewer's eyes, as after Bunny Boy is embraced by the sisters, we see that it is he who killed the cat they spent so long looking for. So they adopt a new pet, a bunny instead of a cat. This is both funny and absurd. Near the start of the film, Tummler is about to shoot the cat belonging to the sisters, only to be stopped by Solomon, because it's a house-cat (apparently they only kill stray cats). If Tummler had killed the cat, things might have gone differently in the film. So what at first seems random and pointless is in fact important and consequential.
So what meaning can I uncover from three viewings of the film. Well I think it's ultimately a film about nature, and the sometimes incomprehensible, unneccessary and pointless destruction it can cause, from the tornado to the whipping of a cat hanging from a tree by Solomon and Tummler. The film asks what the point of morality and order is when it can be completely blown away in a second by something humans can't control or stop; mother nature, or God. It's also about alienation, boredom, isolation and death. In one particularly difficult scene Tummler disconnects the life-support machine of the grandmother of a rival cat-killer, claiming she's "been dead for ages." Perhaps she has. It's as if from the moment the film starts we've been swept up in a whirlwind and taken to Oz, only it's not full of lions and tin-men, it's a harsh yet beautiful place full of death and decay. As we follow the stray cats who kill the stray cats there is revealed a face, the distorted face of a sad, decaying society that molests and casts out it's children. This is a film about people desperate to find a point to their lives, to find a jewel among the rubble. It's disgusting, painful, nihilistic, beautiful, funny, fascinating, meaningful, pointless, random, and it's also a masterpiece. Bernardo Bertolluci called it "the one revolutionary film on the nineties." A film critic famously called it "the worst film ever made." It could be both, it all depends on how you look at it...