Killshot

I’m no fan of DVD audio commentaries, but I found myself wanting one to find out how John Madden, a director best known for doily-and-lace (Mrs. Brown, Shakespeare in Love, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), wound up at the helm of this tough Elmore Leonard crime picture starring Mickey Rourke and Diane Lane. It’s called Killshot (2008), and if The Wrestler marked Rourke’s comeback as the brooding heir to Brando, then this could be seen as a welcome resurrection of his back alley noirs like Johnny Handsome, Angel Heart and Homeboy.

    Of Irish lineage, Mickey defies the PC police by playing a native American hitman nicknamed Blackbird. Taking a loose cannon stickup man under his wing (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, teetering over the top), Bird hunts down newly separated couple Lane and Thomas Jane, who can ID him to the cops when they’re not sidestepping the booby traps of their failed marriage. The screenplay adaptation by Hossein Amini remains fairly faithful to the novel, in which Leonard propelled the action through character thoughts and dialog more than description. Madden captures the tension within the feverish relationships, giving ample time to meaty secondary characters played by Hal Holbrook (quite good) and Rosario Dawson (even better).

    Killshot is about people’s mounting concerns over marriage, parenting, family, friendship, loneliness and despair. It taps into the human condition and stays mostly believable throughout. The performances are first-rate, but the overall presentation may seem depressing for viewers expecting glossy, insubstantial thrills. For this fan of both Diane Lane and Mickey Rourke, however, it delivers the goods.


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The Father, the Son and the holy(?) spirit of Ed Wood

Above: Christ of St. John of the Cross, Salvador Dali (1951)

The current Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon prompted me to dig out the following review I wrote in 2004:

“One for The Passion,” I said to the woman working the box office.

    “Whoa! Hold on to yo’ seat, honey, you gonna be in fo’ a bumpy ride!” she roared while handing me the ticket.

    Did anyone say this to the Pope before he saw The Passion of the Christ?

    It’s easy to approach this film with skepticism enough to color perception. Director Mel Gibson, he of Braveheart and The Man Without a Face, has repeatedly proven himself void of nuance and tact and subtlety. Which is to say, Mel the director is not all that different from Mel the actor. Other than his stoic drifter in The Road Warrior and his intimation of psychosis in the first (and only the first) Lethal Weapon, Gibson has stamped mediocrity across nearly every role, from Hamlet down to the abyss of Air America. His jabbering idiot in Conspiracy Theory is among the most appalling performances in recent memory.

    I was initially intrigued, however, when it was announced that The Passion would be filmed in Latin, Aramaic and Hebrew. (How many Biblical pictures, in their Israeli and Roman settings, have faltered due to faux Shakespearean dialogue spit out by corpulent Old Vic hams?) While the ancient languages are authentic, any additional attempts at ‘realism’ generate more problems than Gibson can handle… or appears to be aware of. Concerned specifically with the beating, whipping and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, The Passion is relentlessly unforgiving.

    Somewhere in the oodles of media coverage, someone must have referred to this as ‘The Gospel According to Mad Max’ or ‘A Crucifixion on Elm Street’ or ‘Good Friday the 13th,’ all fairly accurate assessments which underline the dubious quality of Gibson’s own Christianity. He has created over two graceless hours where a story of depth and wisdom has been wrung for its most superficial and horrific elements. It is a meditation on punishment and death, unconcerned with the ramifications of ‘everlasting life,’ and works from a characterization of Christ void of holiness.

    It does not recall the celebrations of the glory of God and man as rendered by Michelangelo or da Vinci, opting instead to interpret existence as a bleak, inescapable rat’s maze worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. At times broadly overacted (Gibson could have hired those Old Vic hams after all), The Passion is unmoved by the universal integrity of its subject. Love, compassion, understanding and forgiveness — Christ’s pet themes — are reluctantly, hastily broached. Gibson awards the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Supper scant lip service, glossing over them more out of dutiful obligation than personal attraction. (He allows more screen time to a clumsy aside depicting Jesus the carpenter as an ‘average Joe’ constructing a dinner table; the only thing missing is a six-pack of Bud.) When a Roman guard realizes Jesus is praying for his persecutors, it’s not a revelation of God’s grace, but Gibson’s calculated method to make people look foolish. And the Resurrection pales in comparison to its build-up, bizarrely anti-climactic and seemingly tacked on as an afterthought.

    Gibson has the chutzpah to drag Lucifer into the fray, and you can tell it’s Lucifer because the actor looks weird and has a maggot crawling out of his nose. But any correlation between this figure and the horrors imposed upon Jesus are obscured in the bombast. Carrying hideous dwarfs around for shock value, when Satan loses the soul of Jesus to God, we’re handed a scene that looks like an outtake from The Ninth Gate. This is kitsch.

    Right-wing Christian fundamentalists assured us that The Passion isn’t anti-Semitic, but even my goyim eyes were taken aback by the selection of actors for the Jewish roles. Central casting was raided for anyone ugly and large of nose (notice how many are photographed in profile), Gibson portraying them as an annoying lot — for the Romans, for Jesus, and for us. In conjunction with the stifling conservatism draped across America during its release (the Black Hole of G.W. Bush), the film draws eerie parallels with the aggressive Passion plays that fueled the fires of 1930’s Germany.

    It takes a gifted filmmaker to create inspirational art from this inspirational subject; Pasolini did it with The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and Nick Ray in King of Kings. But Mel Gibson harbors an agenda. He doesn’t display any appreciation for philosophical beauty. His vision offers no empathy, and his presentation of Christ is woefully mundane. An unmitigated failure, The Passion sets about to crucify rather than worship. It’s a cold, troubled, ungodly film.


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Sporting Wood

The following review is a contribution to The Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon, running from July 6-12 at Cinema Styles:

There’s a fringe cult that harbors a curious reverence for Ed Wood. Whether they defend his pictures or his standing as an independent filmmaker are moot points amid the gushing adulation. Ever since that ephemeral l’age d’or of Golden Turkey awards and Worst of All Time festivals (circa 1978-82), Wood’s pictures and exploits have been analyzed, scrutinized and documented beyond reason. It’s highly probable that there’s been more written about him than on Jacques Rivette and Jean-Pierre Melville combined.

    To these supporters, the discovery of Wood’s ‘lost’ uncut version of the porn film, Necromania is a major piece of a puzzle scattered about an uncharted course of topsy-turvyism. After his flagrantly inept attempts at science fiction (Plan 9 from Outer Space) and exploitation (The Sinister Urge), the descent into smut ran in concert with the filmmaker’s inability (if not abhorrence) to abide by the system. He wrote a bunch of raunchy novels and scripts under pseudonym, and took to heavy drinking. The inebriation became infectious: in the Wood-scripted Orgy of the Dead, a mid-60’s hallucination of graveyard ghouls and chubby lap dancers, even the cast appears to be blown to the gills.

    Made in 1971, Necromania has floated around over the years in substandard video dubs, but only in the R-rated of two versions. This new DVD from Fleshbot Films offers the full-tilt X-rated affair, the Unholy Grail of Wood’s fractured oeuvre. They have, in fact, provided both films on one disc for examination. Legend has it Wood shot the two separately because his R-rated cinematographer refused to do the X-rated stuff. (Why not have the X-rated cameraman cover both?) But they’re virtually interchangeable save for some genital closeups and a few sequences in which the celluloid appears to have been merely ‘flopped’ (actors facing left in one version are facing right in the other).

    Beginning with his usual plot device of innocent characters stuck at an isolated house where weirdness transpires, Wood replaces traditional B-film situations with cheesy sex clinic material. The director may have failed at emulating and arranging rudimentary genre forms in the early pictures, but Necromania finds him at ease with the disposal of drama and dialogue for shots of ungainly naked people squirming around on beds.

    There are, of course, the Wood trademarks. The free-style stock background music casually segues from bossa nova to do-wop and Egyptian themes without purpose. When an actor hits a snag trying to get his pants on, there’s no cutaway as he starts laughing over the predicament. And a gag of ringing for room service by squeezing a dildo (a ding dong?) is funny, inventive, convenient — and abandoned prematurely because the director didn’t know how (or care) to milk it for full effect.

    Cheap sets with wall-to-wall shag carpets and shag bedspreads are overlit to neutrality, while this “tale of weird love” (so says the title card) inadvertently defends the porn industry’s contemporary trend in body waxing, weightlifting and tanning beds. Wood’s low-rent cast is a grubby congregation of excess pubic hair, flabby beige skin, butt acne, cold sores and dirty feet. It could put you off sex indefinitely.

    At the end of its merciful fifty-four minutes, Necromania’s characters are snared into a transcendental state of eternal sex — short on penetration, excruciatingly long in tongue-wagging. They’ve avoided purgatory, a kaleidoscopic dimension where doughy extras grind all over one another in a game of nude Twister. We share their relief. As the leading man humps away with a bovine witch in a casket, the women lick one another to no end, and Wood reaches his climax. It’s all consistent within the ghetto of early 70’s porn, making Necromania the most competent picture of his career.


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Budd Boetticher’s ‘When in Disgrace’

In a blog post dated December 19, 2005, I wrote:

    “Despite all of his films, [Budd] Boetticher’s most memorable work is an autobiography, When In Disgrace. A fragmentary attempt to penetrate the alcoholic haze clouding a delusional man’s perception, it traces a stunted career in the bullring and ‘problems’ with authority figures in Hollywood. Amazed by his own good fortune in marrying actress Debra Paget, Boetticher sets his more fascinating accounts south of the border, from getting gored in the ass by a testy toro, to days and nights in rat-infested drunk tanks. A textbook example of self-will run riot, it surely deserves a second printing. (Copies are scarce.)”

    The first and only time I read the book was a copy borrowed from the public library, and even they had to special order it from another library system clear across the country. Used copies have been for sale online, but at prices beyond my limited resources.

    Last week I received this email from Scott Montgomery of Fallbrook Publishing:

    “We are a small publishing house and are the publishing successors for the title When in Disgrace… Our owner and Budd Boetticher were close friends for many years.

    “In going through our archives recently, I found that we have a small supply of never distributed copies of When In Disgrace in two of the most collectible editions. (The trade edition was limited to 1000 copies.)

    “These Two ‘Special’ Editions consist of:

    “1. Seven Brand New Copies (in pictorial slipcase—pristine condition). These are from the ‘deluxe first printing,’ limited to 250 copies, bound in yellow silk and SIGNED by the author on the limitation page. Memoir by the noted film director and bullfighting aficionado, primarily devoted to his long struggle to produce a documentary film about legendary matador Carlos Arruza. The paste-on slipcase illustration (identical to the jacket on the trade edition) is by Barnaby Conrad, who also wrote the Introduction. (The reverse side of the slipcase bears a full-color photograph of Boetticher, mounted, in the bullring.) Foreword by Bill Krohn. Signed by Budd Boetticher.

    “2. Three Brand New, full brown leather stamped and lettered in gilt, pictorial slipcase. Illustrated. These are Three (3) of only Fifty copies published, signed by author, Conrad and Robert Stack. With foreword by Barnaby Conrad and preface by Robert Stack. These are copies numbered 23, 39 and 49 out of 50 printed.

    “These Editions are amongst the rarest of finds in connection with Budd Boetticher.. The [books] are still in their original packaging from the printer and are pristine.

    “Might you know of a collector, or perhaps a museum that would have an interest in obtaining these collectibles, Mr. Young?”

    To which I thought, “Wow!”

    In light of the current economic downturn, Fallbrook has lowered the prices of these rare, unused volumes by fifty percent. Interested parties should contact Mr. Montgomery by email at fbkpub@aol.com, or phone him at (760) 723-6637.


Flickhead/Ray Young received no compensation for posting this announcement, nor has any affiliation with Mr. Montgomery or Fallbrook Publishing.

The Claude Chabrol Blogathon

Welcome to Ten Days’ Wonder: The Claude Chabrol Blogathon,* which I’ll be hosting from Sunday, June 21 through Tuesday, June 30. I ask the online film community to join me in honoring the artistry and proficiency of this unique and prolific filmmaker, as well as to celebrate Mr. Chabrol’s 79th birthday on June 24.

    Over the next ten days I’ll be posting thoughts, images, ramblings and reviews of his work, beginning with a bibliography of the online material that’s presently available. (Quite unexpectedly, Catherine Grant announced this blogathon on her indispensable Film Studies for Free, prompting me to believe she may have compiled a similar list. If this is the case, Catherine, please accept my humble apologies.) I will also attempt to provide a daily roundup of links to contributing blogs. To do so, I’ll need your help: please leave link(s) in the comments or send them by email. I’ll make every effort to post these links as soon as possible

~ Ten Days’ Wonder ~

Day One:

Flickhead: Reading Chabrol Online

Peter Nellhaus: Coffee Break

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: Back to Le Beau Serge

Day Two:

Flickhead: Class Status and Delusional Thinking

Jeff Duncanson: Que la bête meure

Peter Nellhaus: La Route de Corinthe

Vincent at Inisfree: Voyages avec Chabrol

Day Three:

Flickhead: Nada

Griffe: La Cérémonie de Chabrol

Ed Howard: Les Biches

Greg at Cinema Styles: Dreams… or Nightmares?

Day Four:

Flickhead: Joyeux Anniversaire Monsieur Chabrol!

Edisdead: Le Boucher de Chabrol

Ed Howard: Que la bête meure

Jeremy Nyhuis: L’enfer

Marilyn Ferdinand: Que la bête meure

Dr Orlof: Merci pour le chocolat

Day Five:

Richard T. Jameson: Claude Chabrol – The Classicist

Gareth: Claude Chabrol and Inspector Lavardin

Ed Howard: Le Boucher

Greg at Cinema Styles: Watch the Great Illusion Drown

Day Six:

Flickhead: Rien ne va plus

Temple of Schlock: Une Partie de plaisir

Ed Howard: Juste avant le nuit

Richard T. Jameson: La Femme infidèle

Edisdead: Juste avant la nuit

Day Seven:

Flickhead: Coffee break

Ed Howard: Les Noces rouges

C. Jerry Kutner: La Décade prodigieuse

Jean-Luc at Ciné-club: Le cri du Hibou

Day Eight:

Flickhead: Gallery

C. Jerry Kutner: Conversation with Chabrol

Ed Howard: Nada

Day Nine:

Flickhead: Fun facts!

Jeremy Nyhuis: La Cheval d'orgueil

Ed Howard: Une Partie de plaisir

Jeremy Richey: Les Biches

Bill R: La Fleur du mal

Day Ten:

Flickhead: Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie

Chris Poggiali: Claude Chabrol Clippings

Ed Howard: Cop au vin

Catherine Grant: Unsentimental Education: On Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes femmes

Better Late Than Never:

Sean Axmaker: Claude Chabrol on DVD

Rick Olson: La Fleur du mal

*—Thanks to Peter Nellhaus for his title and format suggestions!

Chabrol Day Ten: Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie

I’d like to thank all of you who participated in the Chabrol blogathon (especially the tireless Ed Howard!), and leave with this connubial moment between Stéphane Audran and Michel Bouquet in La Femme infidèle (1969). Au revoir.

Chabrol Day Nine: Fun facts!

My introduction to the universe of Chabrol occurred in the early 1970s when I was a teenager, spending afternoons in the public library pouring over copies of Film Comment, Take One, Evergreen, and Cineaste. At first the name intrigued me — how many Chabrols do you know of? — followed by the films themselves. I loved horror, mystery and thrillers, and here was someone being hyped as the French Hitchcock.
    Leafing through an edition of John Willis’s Screen World, I was drawn to a photo of a gaunt man, scary and enraged, holding an infant over his head, poised to throw it. The caption said it was Jean Yanne in Chabrol’s Le Boucher. Right then and there, I needed to see the film, but how? Where? His films were difficult to find in my bucolic Long Island neighborhood, and I had yet to master the streets and avenues of Manhattan or discover the movie timetables of The New Yorker, Cue, The Village Voice or The Soho News. Not only did it take me over a decade to see Le Boucher, but also to realize the error in Willis’s book: the still was from La Rupture!

Paul Gégauff was a novelist and screenwriter who wrote the screenplays for Chabrol’s Les Cousins, À Double tour, Les Bonnes femmes, Les Godelureaux, L'oeil du malin, Ophélia, Les Plus belles escroqueries du monde, Le Scandale, Les Biches, Que la bête meure, Docteur Popaul, and Les Magiciens. He appeared onscreen in Chabrol’s La Ligne de démarcation, and wrote and starred in Une Partie de plaisir (‘a piece of pleasure’), based on his quasi-autobiographic novel. In it, Gégauff plays himself, co-starring with his ex-wife and daughter — none of whom were professional actors. “[Gégauff] fascinated me by pushing the limits of self-destruction,” said Chabrol, “by his taste for extraordinary paradoxes and his real elegance. But he also showed me just how far this could take him into self-destruction.” On Christmas Eve of 1983, Paul Gégauff was stabbed to death by his second wife.
    Among his pet themes were triangular relationships and the duality of nature, the merging of opposites exemplified by Les Biches (1968). In one scene in that film, Jacqueline Sassard’s character pretends to be Stéphane Audran in a mirror until realizing she’s being watched by Jean-Louis Trintignant. The scene was nearly identical to a moment in René Clément’s Plein Soleil (1960), when Alain Delon mimics Maurice Ronet in a mirror. The earlier film was based on a Patricia Highsmith novel adapted by Gégauff. No fan of Clément, it’s doubtful Chabrol was aware that Gégauff had lifted from his own material.

Gégauff also inspired the character ‘Paul’ (sometimes ‘Popaul’ or ‘Paul Thomas’) who appeared in fourteen Chabrol films: Les Cousins, Ophélia, Le Scandale, Les Biches, La Femme infidèle, Que la bête meure, Le Boucher, La Rupture, Docteur Popaul, Les Noces rouges, Le Sang des autres, Une Affaire de femmes, L'enfer and La Fille coupée en deux. “Gégauff’s apparent racism and right-wing views, like his drinking and womanizing, made a tantalizing contrast with Chabrol’s own left-wing humanism, and his status as a Catholic family man,” wrote Guy Austin in Claude Chabrol (French Film Directors). “The attraction and contrast between Chabrol and Gégauff was to be represented time and again in two character types, Charles and Paul… Charles is an ironic version of the young Chabrol: innocent, reserved, repressed. Paul is Gégauff: cynical, charismatic, provocative.”

Consistent with his interest in mythology, ‘Hélène’ has been a recurring character in nine of Chabrol’s films. Inspired by Helénē of Troy — “the face that launched a thousand ships,” hence the catalyst or center of action — she’s been played most often by Stéphane Audran: L'oeil du malin, La Femme infidèle, Que la bête meure, Le Boucher, La Rupture, Juste Avant la nuit, Les Noces rouges, Le Sang des autres and Inspecteur Lavardin. In Greek mythology, Helénē was the daughter of Zeus and Leda; in Chabrol’s La Décade prodigieuse, Orson Welles plays the Zeus figure, while Leda is the mystery woman played by Antonella Lualdi in Chabrol’s À double tour.

Stéphane Audran, La Femme infidèle

The second Mrs. Chabrol, Stéphane Audran served as his Muse in twenty-three films: Les Cousins, Les Bonnes femmes, Les Godelureaux, L'oeil du malin, Landru, Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche, Paris vu par…, Marie-Chantal contre le docteur Kha, La Ligne de démarcation, Le Scandale, Les Biches, La Femme infidèle, Le Boucher, La Rupture, Juste Avant la nuit, Les Noces rouges, Folies bourgeoises, Les Liens de sang, Violette Nozière, Le Sang des autres, Poulet au vinaigre, Jours tranquilles à Clichy and Betty. Her biggest commercial and critical success to date is Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast.
    Her successor in the Chabrolian universe is Isabelle Huppert, who has starred in seven films: Violette Nozière, Une Affaire de femmes, Madame Bovary, La cérémonie, Rien ne va plus, Merci Pour le chocolat and L'ivresse du pouvoir. So respectful and trusting of the director, Huppert will reportedly do any Chabrol film without reading the script first.

Outside of a handful of films for Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy and Marcel Ophüls, cinematographer Jean Rabier worked almost exclusively with Chabrol throughout the 1960s and 70s, on forty pictures beginning with Le Beau Serge (1958), and ending with Madame Bovary (1991).

Most often as comedy relief, but also in straight dramatic parts, Chabrol has used Dominique Zardi in twenty-four films, and Henri Attal in twenty-six. They worked brilliantly together as a team, especially as the houseguests in Les Biches.

Thomas Chabrol

Claude’s son Thomas Chabrol has appeared in more than a dozen of his father’s films, making his debut at thirteen in Alice ou la dernière fugue. His jet-black eyebrows have been most visible in La Demoiselle d'honneur (as the detective), La fleur du mal (playing Nathalie Baye’s secretary), and L'ivresse du pouvoir (where he was Isabelle Huppert’s n'er-do-well nephew).

Pierre Jansen wrote the music for thirty of Chabrol’s films throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Since the 1980s, Claude’s son Matthieu Chabrol has been his primary composer with nineteen scores to his credit.

In 2002, I was approached by Pathfinder Home Entertainment to do audio commentaries on their then-forthcoming set of Chabrol DVDs. Then in its infancy, my Claude Chabrol Project provided perhaps more information on the filmmaker than anything else online save for the Internet Movie Database. With so few connections at hand (blogs and internet cinephilia had yet to blossom), I assume Pathfinder considered me a leading authority on Chabrol, to which I thought, “Ha!”
    At first I suggested that the eight films in their collection — Les Biches, La Femme infidèle, Que la bête meure, Le Boucher, La Rupture, La Décade prodigieuse, Nada and Les Innocents aux mains sales — be accompanied by audio commentaries by eight different people, one for each picture, if just to break up the monotony. Having been a fan of Les Biches, I volunteered to do that one with the provision I’d need four weeks to write a script, something that would keep the viewer entertained and to prevent me from blank spaces and repeated ‘ums.’ However, Pathfinder imagined I could handle all eight commentaries myself — fifteen or sixteen hours of chat, to be recorded within three or four weeks, recording to begin immediately, airfare (New York to L.A.), food and hotel accommodations at my own expense. My reward for all of this: several copies of the boxed set.
    This is why you don’t hear my voice on any of Pathfinder’s films. I did manage to write a biography which can be found on most of the discs. But don’t bother searching for it. Pathfinder didn’t afford me the luxury of composing anything substantial or polished — what’s there is a hasty first draft, and not very good.
    The collection arrived in stores and languished on the shelves: not many people were willing to shell out seventy bucks. Pathfinder’s mad rush was unwarranted and eventually backfired. The commentaries they got were mediocre; the writers and academics from the L.A. area they called in seemed to lack any passion for Chabrol. Far worse were the film transfers: Le Boucher isn’t bad, but the others are blurry and faded, with La Décade prodigieuse an unmitigated disaster. To my eyes and ears, the films looked and sounded better on Connoisseur’s VHS series made fifteen years earlier.
    As if to atone for their misdeeds, Pathfinder’s subsequent audio commentary for Chabrol’s Une Partie de plaisir offers film critic Dan Yakir and screenwriter Ric Menello locked in a great discussion. The picture quality is substandard, but the audio track is exceptionally entertaining and informative. (Menello did an equally good job on All Day Entertainment’s Le cri du hibou DVD commentary.)