Bloggers always mean well…they cluck their thick tongues, and shake their heads and suggest, oh, so very delicately…

Moira Redmond buggin’ out in Nightmare

Never mind the clucking tongues and shaking heads of too many blogging cinephiles, I submit as My Favorite Movie of 2008: Wanted, the hyper action movie with curving bullets, talking looms, crafty allusions to Oedipus the King, Morgan Freeman (no one lends quite as much eloquence to the word ‘motherfucker’) and my future second wife, Angelina Jolie as a lean, buff, off-the-hook assassin named Fox. Ridiculous? Fer shur. Idiotic? No doubt. But since I’ve seen it five times (and would gladly watch it again this very minute), it’s got to be My Favorite. True, I’ve seen better this year, but none worth seeing more than once, let alone five times.

    One blogger dismissed it as “the single worst movie of the year,” sending it below Mamma Mia!, The Love Guru — the frikkin’ Love Guru!!! — Fool’s Gold and the migraine-inducing Jumper. Feh! If Jacques Rivette can give a shout out to Showgirls, Starship Troopers and Elizabeth Berkley, I’ll give mad props to this parable about withering under, and standing up to, The Man. As Morgan’s character says, “Insanity is wasting your life as a nothing when you have the blood of a killer flowing in your veins. Insanity is being shit on, beat down, coasting through life in a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside and the key to release it.” Deep! I am so totally there.
    I admire the film’s divergence from the studied black cynicism of The Dark Knight and its ilk, that murky subgenre that seems to flourish during Republican administrations. Nor is Wanted deliberately safe and mundane — it motions beyond the mainstream banality of Spiderman, Superman and Batman — and I think avoiding conventional heroism turns a lot of people off. Plus, there’s the enigmatic Jolie, who’s vastly more interesting than furniture thespians like Toby Maguire and Christian Bale. When the young man asks her badass in designer shades if she ever wanted to be ‘normal,’ for a second or two Jolie nearly levitates. “No” wafts through those amazing lips with gentle but godlike aplomb.

    I doubt dragging Richard Corliss into the fray will beef up my cred with you nonbelievers out there, but I’m down with his assessment in Time: “The contours of [Jolie’s] face and body are improbable, arresting and unique; she’s simply not designed to play ordinary people. We don’t doubt her skills as a serious actress, but she’s much more seductive and satisfying as a fantasy or cartoon character. Or a saint from some fertility cult: Holy Jolie…Densely tattooed, richly skilled in the automotive and firearm arts, Jolie’s [character] reeks of a take-charge sexiness we might call feminismo. When, to make a point, she kisses Wesley in front of his perfidious girlfriend, you can almost hear the curling of toes of every comic-book guy in the audience; the nerd ecstasy is that palpable.” I couldn't agree more.


Meanwhile, I was still thinkin’…

After the success of Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955), a brief wave of similarly themed thrillers came and went. Not to be confused with about a dozen other movies sporting the same title, Nightmare (1964) is Jimmy Sangster and Freddie Francis with the ‘b’ unit at Hammer, and something that’s eluded me all these years until now. It’s a crazy little movie with as many twists and turns as there are in the heads of its two main characters, young Janet (Jennie Lindon) and nurse Grace (Moira Redmond). There’s a father figure/husband milling about in the form of David Knight, an actor who projects a distracting overbite that had me thinking of Austin Powers’ teeth. Nightmare is set in Gaslight territory, with a fleeting kiss between passionate Lindon and apprehensive Knight zipping by without proper explanation. Once you think you’ve got it figured out, Redmond has a psychological meltdown of the Bwa-Ha-Ha! variety that’s well worth the price of admission.

For those who don’t know the case, Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008) comes complete with the details and opinions the rest of us are (all too?) familiar with. Made without Polanski’s participation, it outlines the “alleged” statutory rape, the shafting imposed by a spiteful judge, and the filmmaker’s exile in Europe. One thing I didn’t expect were the lovely home movies of Sharon Tate. Zenovich has better success with them than the clips she uses from his films. Compelled to illustrate Polanski’s declining mental state in his real life, she cuts to him climbing the walls in The Tenant, and the effect is nearly comical.