Girl, interrupted

Jennifer Carpenter as Emily Rose

I watched The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) ‘cold’ one night on cable, not knowing anything about it up front (my favorite way to see a movie), drawn in by the cast of Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson and Campbell Scott. “Based on a true story” of a woman who supposedly died from the title ritual, I found it quietly effective and creepy. Later I discovered that most horror fans weren’t as impressed. Leonard Maltin put it succinctly when he called the picture “unconvincing on all levels.” Could it be that, after the carnival spook show tactics of The Exorcist (1973), the lack of spinning heads and projectile vomiting somehow makes Emily Rose seem less ‘real’?

    To be fair, it strains itself to be too many things at once: horror movie, detective yarn, courtroom melodrama… with theology flapping in the wings. Plus, the screenplay (co-written by Paul Harris Boardman and director Scott Derrickson) squanders a potentially dynamic subplot about an agnostic lawyer looking to prove the existence of God in court to free her client, the priest charged with Emily’s murder.

    Emily Rose piqued my interest in the true story which turned out to be, as one would expect, far grittier and sadder. The girl’s real name was Anneliese Michel, a German and devout Catholic who exhibited signs of epilepsy and psychosis in her late teens. She took prescription drugs to quell these outbreaks, which became more frequent and uncontrollable in her early twenties. Anneliese, her parents and their parish priests eventually assumed she was possessed by demons and subjected her to more than sixty-five exorcisms in ten months. Suffering from dehydration, malnourishment, pneumonia and high fever as a result of the rituals, she died at the age of twenty-three, her body weighing just sixty-eight pounds. Her parents and the two priests stood trial for her death which, the state argued, was the result of religious fanaticism and could’ve been avoided with hospitalization. All these circumstances suggest a medieval tragedy, but Anneliese lived from 1952 to 1976.

Sandra Hüller in Requiem (click to enlarge)

    Since then she’s become an icon in modern German folklore, prompting Felicitas D. Goodman to write at length about her case in The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel (Resource Publications, 2005). Perhaps in response to Emily Rose, screenwriter Bernd Lange and director Hans-Christian Schmid took a realistic course in the barely-seen film, Requiem (2006). It’s a docudrama of an innocent incapable of pleasing her manipulative parents, while cracking under the strain of academia, peer pressure, medicine and religion. In regard to her possession, Lange and Schmid resist the usual horror movie hyperbole to portray an insidious disease rapidly consuming the girl, her family, friends and the community. Sandra Hüller is excellent in the part, changing personalities freely and convincingly. And Schmid, working with little money in 16mm, has created an evocative 1970s period piece.

Above: This clip combines images of Anneliese Michel with an actual recording of her during an exorcism.

Ann Savage: 1921-2008

The most toxic femme fatale of all, Ann Savage in Detour (1945).

AP obit

Wikipedia entry

Robert Mulligan: 1925 - 2008

Every spring I watch Robert Mulligan’s film of Herman Raucher’s Summer of ‘42 (1971). It’s a personal tradition, something I’ve been doing for decades. The film is loaded with nostalgia, both on the screen and in my mind, taking me back to when it came out and I was 14-years-old... around the age of the guys in the movie. If anything, the film’s a tribute to Jennifer O’Neill’s loveliness. It may not be Mulligan’s best — it may not even be that good at all to some people. But I’ll be forever in Mulligan’s debt for all of its soft-focus splendor, as well as Michel Legrand’s evocative music.

It must be love…

…Why else would I have sat through all one-hundred-sixteen minutes of the Farrelly’s whassupdate of The Heartbreak Kid? Michelle Monaghan. (Click the foto to enlarge.)

Jacques & Jules

Lockwood & Aimée in Model Shop

On Thursday, December 18, Turner Classic Movies offers two films rarely ever broadcast and unavailable on region 1 DVD. Model Shop (1969) was Jacques Demy’s one and only Hollywood production. Made at the invitation of Columbia Pictures (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was an art house hit), it continues the adventures of Lola (1961) with Anouk Aimée reprising her role as a cabaret dancer turned model. Fresh from 2001: A Space Odyssey and inches away from Palookaville, Gary Lockwood plays the callow young man in pursuit. (Another candidate for the role was then-unknown Harrison Ford, who talks about it with Agnès Varda in her excellent documentary, L’ Univers de Jacques Demy.) The critics weren’t kind and the public stayed away: Demy referred to it as ‘Model Flop’ and resumed his career in Europe.



    Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1962) was made between the box office hits Never on Sunday and Topkapi, and they all starred his muse (and future wife) Melina Mercouri. 1960s and 70s Dassin is a far different kettle of fish from the 1940s Dassin of Brute Force and Thieves’ Highway. I’ve always found David Thomson’s summation in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film fairly accurate and funny, if a little caustic:

“Together [Dassin and Mercouri] made some of the most entertainingly bad films of the sixties and seventies: pictures that outstrip their own deficiencies and end up being riotously enjoyable as one waits to see how far pretentiousness will stretch. In good company, and a little drink, He Who Must Die, Phaedra, and 10:30 p.m. Summer might cure would-be suicides.”

Day for Knight

Tragically overlong by an hour, The Dark Knight (2008) strains itself delivering two films at once: an intense battle between Batman and the Joker capped by an ill-advised run-in with second tier villain Two-Face. With the final product clocking in at a butt-numbing one-hundred-and-fifty-two-minutes, surely someone on the committee realized the first ninety would’ve sufficed nicely. Christian Bale is furniture as Batman, and Heath Ledger rifles through Brando’s grab bag of shrugs, mumbles and tics for Joker, but their skirmish crackles and hums — and looks positively stunning in Blu-ray. Once the Joker is caught and the focus lands on Aaron Eckhart’s character, the script becomes infected with hollow grandstanding and purple moralizing, as if a dull needle were popping the balloon.

Bryant Haliday alert

Were you aware that the co-founder of Janus Films spent twenty years in a Benedictine Monastery preparing for priesthood, studied law at Harvard, refurbished the landmark Brattle Theatre into a thriving cinematheque, and acted in a handful of low budget horror movies? Bryant Haliday (1928-1996) was a man of many tastes and talents, and projected an imposing figure on the screen, perhaps best served by the delicious Devil Doll (1964), playing a psychotic magician-ventriloquist haunted by a very nasty dummy.

Check the December 12 schedule at Turner Classic Movies for their late-night broadcast of Haliday’s last feature, Beyond the Fog (1972). Directed by Jim O’Connelly (Berserk!, The Valley of Gwangi), produced by the prolific Richard Gordon, it's also gone under the titles Horror on Snape Island and Tower of Evil. Arguably Haliday’s worst gig as an actor, any chance to see the great man at work is worth staying up late for.

Happy 100th birthday, Manoel de Oliveira

Manoel de Oliveira turns 100 today

According to the IMDb, Manoel de Oliveira is currently working on a new film. What makes this remarkable is that, on December 11 of this year, the Portuguese writer-director turns 100. He’s been one of my favorite filmmakers ever since I saw Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo (1997), and in celebration of this milestone I offer the following.
    It’s a discussion between Oliveira and Jacques Parsi, who worked on several of Oliveira’s scripts, aiding in the French translation and dialog on Party (1996), Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo and O Princípio da Incerteza (2002). For Je rentre à la maison (2001), Parsi worked on the screenplay and played a small role. Conducted for its presskit, the two men discuss Je rentre à la maison, sex, Buñuel, and James Joyce:

Manoel de Oliveira — Je rentre à la maison [“I’m going home”] is almost a non-story, as simple as its title suggests, which takes place in “fairytale” Paris at the beginning of the year 2000. The city of lights, center of all our complex western civilization, where the superfluous seems to take precedence over the essential. It is like a game played by innocent naughty children, and its results, may be, or rather, not be, a pathetic and unexpected socio-ecologic eclosion of tomorrow’s world, where to say “I’m going home” has lost its meaning. But no, this is not the story.
    In fact, although the action of the film is divided between the city and the theatre plays, etc., we should look at it as a whole. It is certain that we are dealing with a personal drama, undergone by a famous old actor, who is the innocent victim of an unexpected betrayal. The initial idea may seem exaggerated or even out of place, but in truth I must confess that it was exactly that which gave me the urge to write such a simple story.

Jacques Parsi — In filming Paris you create two pictures: one, the Paris of lights, the cafés, the expensive shops, and the other, that of Paris by night, dark and threatening. Why did you make this choice? Why Paris?

Manoel de Oliveira — Answering your two questions together I would say that the first is a sketch of the life of the city as it is today while the second shows it as the Center of Western Culture, which Paris is. Then, there is this globalization of all that is brilliant and satisfying, but there is also the other side, the dark threatening night as you call it, with its drugs, its ethnic, religious and political conflicts which are rife everywhere: in Eastern Europe in the Middle East, in Africa, Indonesia, without mentioning what is going on in Asia, or with the Indians in the Americas.

Michel Piccoli and Manoel de Oliveira

Jacques Parsi — We get the impression that the old famous Gilbert Valence [Michel Piccoli’s character in the film] is a negative personality. He says no to Silvia. Turns down his golden proposal . . . Is it experience? Is it age? Or is it the ethics that he invokes when faced with his agent?

Manoel de Oliveira — I think it is the result of the wisdom he has gained by experience. Just as I don't think his ethics were negative. It is from these same ethics that come the commandments ‘thou shall not kill, steal, exploit, discriminate,’ etc. . . These are the ethics written on top of the plinth in the “Place de la Republique” which holds up a bronze statue, and when we look on the back we can read the words carved in stone, “Labor, Liberdade, Fraternidade.”

Jacques Parsi — He doesn’t want to take part in the telefilm because of the “scenes of sex and violence.” Nevertheless there are great works which contain sex and violence. Joyce’s Ulysses was forbidden for years because of its pornography. What is it in your opinion that explains Gilbert Valance’s attitude in the today’s world?

Manoel de Oliveira — I respect his ethics, professed by the character himself. Whether as an actor or as a man. I think ethics are fundamental for the rules of human relationships. But I can’t see where there are great works confined to pornography. Sex, the source of all pornography, is an abysmal thing and this abyss perverts and attracts man’s animal instincts. It dehumanizes him. I say man’s animal instincts, because in animals pornography does not exist, nor does shame, while in Man the excesses of pornography pervert him and make him like a kind of assassin, the attraction of which may be similar or even confused with this other type of abyss. Pornography and assassination are outside the law, outside the bounds of morality. They spring from the confines of human nature and become absolute in themselves.
    Ulysses by James Joyce has value in itself not because of pornographic speculation, which is not an accessory to the content, as neither are the psycho-definitions that he gives some of the characters at the end. In both cases, however, they are no more than an exercise in seduction. In the second case they are what the author believes, or wishes his characters to believe. Going back to the first, this could be the overwhelming need of the narrator himself to expel his erotic libido. Here we could find reasons due to the author’s personal urge for a need to exteriorize out of context, whereas “I'm going home,” is still the basis in Joyce’s Ulysses, after Homer. What we find in the hurried and “modern” literature of today, is an elevated multiplication to the seventh power by many opportunist authors in repetitive works of violence and pornography for their own sakes, just because they are in fashion and sell well, which has nothing to do with the writings of Joyce. In this, the public things pass to the private and most intimate, without them, however, becoming mixed. In the case of the cinema, an irreverent director as aggressive as he is genial, I’m speaking of Buñuel, never showed the sexual act or pornographic scenes, things of an intimate nature which other, uninhibited directors in their search for audiences make public, as is especially the case on many television programs. Despite this, the violence in Buñuel’s films is more powerful because Buñuel, strange as it may seem, was, deep down, a modest man, and his films suggest more than they show, and the suggestion is more powerful than the act in itself, whatever that may be. The Greeks in their great tragedies held back from showing scenes of abominable acts “Kill the Children but not on stage,” they said. Anyway showing in public what should be done in private is always a lack of decorum. Today, however, the barriers are down and decorum is out-of-date, nothing shocks and “everything goes.”

Jacques Parsi — At the end, the camera doesn’t focus on Gilbert, who disappears, but on his grandson who up to now has only played a secondary role. Why did you suddenly focus him?

Manoel de Oliveira — Because up to now the grandson was secondary. But children have a sixth sense and a perception of disaster, he sees in his grandfather a model who represents a past free of wisdom and stability which collapses before his eyes; a tragedy which, consciously or not, the child applies to himself. It was not only affection which placed him there to witness the collapse, but the presentiment that the responsibilities of life will now fall on him in the same way his grandfather had reached the top of the ladder and fallen, defeated. Is life not a passing on of the baton, whether it is natural or acquired, stolen or won?


Buy Je rentre à la maison from Amazon

Let me die a woman!

Nathaniel over at Film Experience had me thinking about twenty of my favorite actresses — Peter at Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee was kind enough to extend an invitation to this meme. (That’s a great shot of Janet Leigh, Peter!) Here are mine for no reason other than “sometimes you need to be reminded.”

Isabelle Adjani


Bibi Andersson


Fanny Ardant


Stéphane Audran


Dorothy Dandridge


Catherine Deneuve


Ava Gardner


Audrey Hepburn


Shirley Jones


Nicole Kidman


Sophia Loren


Beverly Michaels


Nanette Newman


Bulle Ogier


Mary Pickford


Jean Simmons


Meryl Streep


Ingrid Thulin


Tuesday Weld


Natalie Wood

It’s my duty (pleasure?) to ask four more folks to announce their faves. I’d like to pass it on to:

GFS3

Bob

Jeremy

Ivan

Forrest J Ackerman: 1916—2008

The Ackermonster has died.

    His Famous Monsters magazine was the beginning of my education in film history. While reading about Karloff and Lugosi, I was also reading about Fritz Lang and Murnau. By following articles on James Whale and Tod Browning, I learned what a director was. It was in FM I first learned the names Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley. In reading Ackerman's ongoing adoration of Lon Chaney I learned about the beauty of silent film. And even though the puns got shaggier and shaggier with each issue, FM was the start of my lifelong love affair with film history.

    In the decades since reading FM I've pored through literally hundreds and hundreds of film books. Just last week I re-read A Cast of Killers, Sidney Kirkpatrick's book about King Vidor's investigation into the murder of William Desmond Taylor. It's a terrific book, one I've enjoyed twice now. And it's a book I probably never would have even known about if I hadn't known who King Vidor was, or had a fascination with the silent movie industry. I'm sure I never read about Vidor himself in FM — but my interest in that world started there. And for that I owe weird, silly old Uncle Forry a lifetime of gratitude.

—Nelhydrea Paupér

A.J. slumming; Bond’s quantum leap

Angie, buff & inked

James McAvoy’s the star of Wanted (2008), new on DVD and Blu-ray (yours truly has finally gone HD), and he’s not bad at action and comedy with his Russell Crowe good looks and adept timing. Plus, the film’s loaded with enough giddy cheap thrills and comic book plot twists to keep boredom away. But the main attraction is co-star Angelina Jolie, her lean and brazen aura making everything seem far more significant than it truly is. The unexpected kiss they share sets the stage for a human back story that sadly never occurs. Director Timur Bekmambetov, making his English-language debut after a career in his native Russia, is preoccupied with slam-bang gunfights laced with tension. As we’ve seen too many times before, those aren’t easy elements to balance, but he makes it work — almost to the end. (Order from Amazon.)

A lot of people have their panties in a knot over the new James Bond movie, whining that the violence, chaotic editing and overall lack of coherence and élan have corrupted 007 beyond recognition. Quantum of Solace (2008) — that title took balls — isn’t the best in the series, but its alleged felonies aren’t nearly as heinous as Roger Moore burlesquing Bond into witless buffoonery. Had the Moore films’ suspect ‘comedy relief’ — redneck Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun) or steel-toothed Jaws (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker) — been introduced all the way back in Dr. No, the series might’ve died at the starting gate.
    Continuing where the earlier Casino Royale left off, Bond is tossed into a deafening barrage of situations — and if you can follow it without Cliffs Notes, you must be in Mensa. There isn’t more I can add, as Quantum fades from the memory as rapidly as one of its chases. It feels like a bridge connecting Casino Royale to some grander chapter ahead.

Your mother should know

Flickhead’s To-See List: “Plucked”

Fowl play: Gina Lollobrigida and Ewa Aulin

Before the internet, the only time I ever read or heard anything about Plucked (1968) was the following capsule review by Joe Dante in a 1974 edition of Castle of Frankenstein magazine:

    “Weird Italo-French thriller doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of its marquee billing (‘Gina Lollobrigida — Plucked!’) but qualifies as a genuine curiosity mixing murder, sci-fi, social comment, sex perversion and sheer absurdity in distinctly European tradition. Chicken breeder Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose psycho-sexual sadism activities will be completely missing from TV showings, plots to push wife Gina into grain crushing machine and marry Ewa Aulin, who is plotting with her own lover to kill Trintignant and take over the chicken business. Subplot has radioactivity creating headless, wingless chicken mutants.”

    Such things could only rouse the imagination of your humble narrator then in his sixteenth year, prompting me to keep an eye on late night TV listings. Local stations used to show a lot of weird stuff at two or three in the morning, before cable (we were being warned about ‘pay TV’ — see below), back when no one knew what a VCR was. I did spot Plucked only once, playing on New York’s WOR in the middle of the night, but dozed off before the thing even started.

Above: Before anyone knew what HBO was, this prophetic public service announcement ran for years in theaters.

    If Dante were writing his review today, he’d call the picture a giallo. I’m sure fans have videos under its various titles — La Morte ha fatto l'uovo, A Curious Way to Love or, my favorite, Death Laid an Egg… but this post on Movie Morlocks says it’s still hard to find. If anyone can hook me up with a copy, I’d be forever grateful!