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The stock noir constituents of nefarious criminal deeds, male existential malaise and bluesy chiaroscuro mise-en-scène comprise this violently brooding latest from Hungarian doyen of the slow-cooked metaphorical saga, Béla Tarr. The story centres on Maloin (Miroslav Krobot), a brusque railway switchman who appropriates a suitcase full of banknotes after he witnesses a bungled drop-off on the dockside beneath his watchtower, then, not knowing how to follow-up his criminal impulse, swiftly rejects his family and his morals. In tone, it reminds of Godard’s ‘Alphaville’ and Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’, especially the idea of innocence (such as it is) lost at the hands of reckless endeavour, and Tarr’s ingenious use of visual repetition brilliantly conveys how crushing, silent guilt slowly forces Maloin into a psychological corner.

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Yet, there are problems: the choice of ‘straight’ source material – one of Belgian writer Georges Simenon’s lesser-known pulp crime novellas –instantly clasps a stranglehold on the film’s intentions, carelessly dividing viewer attention between a disposable criminal plot, and a broader discussion on themes of theft, murder, shame and voyeurism. Visually, too, we’re only allowed a diluted rendition of that now-legendary ‘Tarr touch’ – the magisterial, minutely orchestrated black-and-white creeping camerawork. The sound, so rich and mysterious in past work, is here limited to tapping hammers in the middle distance and groaning accordion dirges which do little to cover-up in this released version the clumsy French dubbing of its Hungarian and British cast (which includes Tilda Swinton).

Yet, although the film’s overall meaning remains open – perhaps, too open (after its Cannes premiere, for instance, one critic told me they thought it was a musical) – ‘The Man from London’ lacks the grandiose  ‘cosmic’ intimations of the director’s past work, and though it contains many moments of sublime cinematic choreography, this is finally good Tarr, but not great Tarr.

It has been four years since the Men in Bad averted an intergalactic disaster; Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) has returned to civilian life, working in a small collection-office and has no memory of the days when he was an agent. But when Agent Jay (Will Smith) uncovers a diabolical thread masterminded by Serleena (Lara Flynn Boyle), an catastrophic Kylothian snake monster who disguises herself as a lingerie model, Kay is called ago to help spare the planet. 

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Adapted from a play dated of a new based on Ben Jonson’s Volpone, Mankiewicz’s screenplay finds a contemporary millionaire (Harrison in fine waspish form) inspired after a performance of Jonson’s play to re-enact the verbatim at the same time plan device on his three former mistresses (Hayward, Capucine and Adams) - posing as a at death’s door man to evaluation their reactions. The structure continually threatens to grotto in underwater the weight of over-fussy dialogue and confusing machinate twists, but the shrill-NZ hack cast (with a pleasingly restrained Maggie Smith as the hypochondriac Hayward’s nurse), and some sumptuous photography by Gianni Di Venanzo, make it much watchable. If cinema and stage farce have to get in bed together, this is one of the more well-spent unions around.

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Poltergeist

is one of those slightly enigmatic films, chock full o' flaws from many perspectives — including my own — that is able to rise above its countless gaffes and play like a minor masterpiece. Unfortunately, it's much easier to point out the problems than it is to say why it works. Part of it may be more generational than due to anything inherent with the film. I first saw

Poltergeist

in the theater as a fifteen-year-old; many of the people who love this film are close to me in age and saw it during or near its first theatrical run. My wife, on the other hand, a bit older and from a different culture, basically hated the film. To her, there wasn't anything to overcome the flaws. On the third hand, things like ghosts scare her, and when I suggested we head down to the dingy, dirt-floored cellar of our building just for the hell of it after the film, she quickly declined, so it's hard to read exactly what her thoughts were.

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For the first half-hour to forty minutes,

Poltergeist

is as much about life in suburbia as anything else. Implicit in the setting (and explicit in at least one of the film's trailers) is the fact that the house which is to serve as our primary locale is just like the house next to it, and the one next to that, and the one . . . The Freeling's, our family of protagonists, consists of pot-smoking parents–aging hippies who are now playing yuppies; a teenage daughter who is either on the phone or not in the same vicinity, physically or mentally, as the parents; and two young kids, a boy and a girl, the boy, at least, obsessed with pop culture (films, of course) like

Star Wars

,


Alien


, etc.

But it's not a drama, and isn't even really much of a critique of suburbia, or aging hippies, or anything that it brings up. That's not scripter

Steven Spielberg

's point.

Poltergeist

is a horror film, and where other writers would either forgo the dramatic and character development or focus on it in a postmodern derailment (like

American Beauty

, say), Spielberg is just laying out pizza dough so the meat and toppings have something to rest on.

Tobe Hooper supposedly directed

Poltergeist

. Famously, the story goes that Spielberg (who also served as producer and an uncredited editor) actually directed a lot of the film, if not most of it. That's not difficult to believe, as

Poltergeist

has everything in common with

E.T.

and

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

(and even


Jaws


to an extent) — Spielberg films chronologically close to

Poltergeist

–and bears no resemblance to most of Hooper's films. With all the similarities to

E.T.

and

Close Encounters

, it's surprising that

Poltergeist

didn't end up being another alien film–at times, it almost seems to want to head in that direction, especially with the electromagnetic radiation theme. But Spielberg seems to not care for evil aliens, and he wanted to make a horror film. Ghosts and Satan asking to phone home just wouldn't have worked for most people. Unfortunately,

Poltergeist

also picks up the problems that plague

E.T.

, and to a lesser extent

Close Encounters

.

The derivation that fights ghosts together stays together in Tobe Hooper's

Poltergeist

(1982)

Although they're certainly far from perfect, Spielberg wants to show a Hallmark family dropped into the middle of a fantastic situation. The problem is that his sentiments are a bit too sweet and syrupy, and the portrayal just doesn't ring true. Most of us are more dysfunctional than that. Our lives are not so clean. For depositing middle America in an unusual situation, Stephen King comes a lot closer to hitting the nail on the head. This fact makes the dramatic portions of

Poltergeist

a bit distracting, since you're wondering what planet these people are from. Some people think this problem plagues Spielberg's entire career, but I see it most pronounced in

E.T.

(especially) and

Poltergeist

, even if there are traces of it in the rest of Spielberg's work.

While we're on the flaws, others include the swathes of paranormal gobbledy-gook (well, "gobbledy-gook" is really redundant there) that bind the script, especially once we meet Tangina (and by the way, has anyone else recently noticed the politically incorrect munchkin jokes?), the terrible make-up effects (don't worry, I've already rapped Craig Reardon on the knuckles) during the "really bad zits" scene, and the excessive,


Blair Witch Project


-worthy screaming that reaches a fevered pitch in the climax (naturally).

Also, for my tastes, the transition from "maybe something weird is going on here" to "trees and closets are devouring my family" is a bit too abrupt, but I can understand conflicts about running time. It's difficult to know what would have been a better cut there. Another possible flaw, although this could have been the print my DVD was made from, was a horrendously awkward edit between the scene where Diane is showing Steve the kitchen phenomena and when they head to the neighbor's.

So, with all these problems, why the heck am I giving

Poltergeist

a strong recommendation? It's not just that this is an important film historically that you need to watch to earn the badge of "horror fan." It's that inexplicably, like

E.T.

, none of the flaws count for much in the big picture.

Poltergeist

remains entertaining, thrilling and scary anyway, and that's part of what makes Spielberg such a great director. He can give you cotton candy but miraculously make it a fully balanced gourmet meal.

The remoteness of the midwife precisely is essentially gone. The spread of technology and information has cast a connected net (no computer pun intended), that with rather few exceptions, spreads throughout. But, I still recollect a for the present when the unbelievable seemed to posses impervious, unreachable locales where hardly men had tread. Pursuing then I could imagine there capacity be places that held exotic mystery, jeopardy likely to be, and unseen wonders. Today? Not so much. These days Leo Dicaprio takes a trip via prop level surface and raft into the goodness of the Amazon to observe lone of its most isolated tribes, only to have one of the tribesmen, who stills hunts because his meals, doesn’t rub off last a stitch of clothing, or appearance of to posses any flavour of the month tools, point at Dicaprio and guess, “Titantic!”

Way back in the far simpler days of 1979 (but released in 1980), Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust took the stance that for all the civilized world’s superiority, modern man can still too easily fall into callous and cruel behavior. And, that he did it in a jungle/cannibal film, just goes to show why genre cinema has always been the best place to get your message flick mixed in with some good, cheap, vulgar, exploitation thrills.

Documentary filmmaker Alan Yates (Gabriel Yorke), his girlfriend Faye Daniels (Francesca Ciardi), two cameramen, and a guide disappeared while filming in the Amazon. Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) leads a small expedition into the jungle to find out what happened to them. Besides the inherent danger they face from nature, they venture into areas that are inhabited by warring tribes of cannibals, most notably the swamp dwellers, the Shamatori, and the elusive “tree people,” the Yanomamo. As Monroe feared, Yate’s documentary crew met a grisly end at the hand of the cannibals, however what he finds on the crew’s recovered footage tells a far more disturbing story than he could have expected.

This is a very well known film, but I am still going to play coy with the details because it serves the film better for any newbies. Suffice to say, what starts out as a by-the-numbers cannibal/jungle film, changes in the last half where we witness the raw documentary footage of the Yates expedition and the film takes on a cinema verite air. As a matter of fact, that the last half was the obvious inspiration for The Blair Witch Project- the viewer is meant to not be sure if what they are seeing is real. The film was also promoted as such, using unknown actors, selling the idea that it all actually happened. What is also most noted about the film is its grue and gore, from tribesman performing ritualistic rape, abortions, castration, impaled bodies, not to mention the cannibalizing, as well as the films actual, all too real violence against animals, in this case a anteater-rat looking thing, a piglet, a turtle, and a monkey.

Now, I didn’t find out about Cannibal Holocaust until the mid-late 80’s and it took me a good number of years before I actually stumbled upon a fringe video store with an all day wine-drinking proprietor who stocked oodles of bootlegs and weird stuff. The one thing I’ve never quite wrapped my head around is that it came out in 1980. It feels so much like a post-Vietnam era grindhouse flick, that I always assumed it came out a good six to eight years earlier and some smart theater probably double billed it with Last House on the Left. Regardless if came after the first wave of disillusioned post-Vietnam cinema, Cannibal Holocaust is a definite reaction to those times.

Previous Euro jungle/cannibal films like Man From Deep River (1972) and Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978) took the typical stance of being adventure-horror films depicting modern man lost among the primitives. Deodato wasn’t content to just go for that. He had previously delivered another fine jungle film, Jungle Holocaust (1977, aka. The Last Survivor, The Last Cannibal World), that likewise explored similar themes and aimed for more then just entertaining thrills. While Cannibal Holocaust transports viewers to an exotic place full of strange customs and primitive behavior, the subtext takes a definite stab at the media. Again, that is why I say it feels like such a post-Vietnam film, because that was the first war where journalists exposed the horrors (and futility) of warfare and made it commonplace for ma, pa, and little Jimmy to sit around the tv at 6PM and see those atrocities right before their eyes. To hammer the point home further, one of the Yates crew can be heard saying, “It’s just like Cambodia, man.”

Cannibal Holocaust’s history is filled with controversy. Aside from the real animal violence causing it to be banned in over fifty countries, it’s fake violence proved to be convincing enough that Deodato was dragged into Italian court where he had to prove it was fictitious. He also went on tv talk shows with the actors in order to prove the Yate’s crew hadn’t met a grisly end in the primeval forest. He sort of paid the price thanks to film makers like Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, who infamously manufactured stagy scenes and paid off villagers, tribesmen, and Congo soldiers to gain material and fulfill their sensationalistic agenda for mondo documentaries like Mondo Cane, Goodbye Uncle Tom, and Africa Addio. Even to this day, the film hit another blockade when Grindhouse had to go through a number of printers and accommodations because of the DVD artwork.

And, in a karmic way, I think Deadato deserved all the hassles he got. He did allow the animals to be killed. He did exploit the natives he filmed and perpetuated a stereotype about them that is far from the truth. In that sense, despite any “message” the film might have, he is still no better than any other mondo doc or exploitation jungle film makers like Lenzi, Martino, Jacopetti, or Prosperi.

I say all that, and I really like the film. Without a doubt, the film’s content and method is questionable, and those that abhor violence and cruelty to animals have every right to object to the film and flat out should not watch it. However, part of being a human being is that one can make allowances in their art and entertainment. Some things are a product of their time, and I’d no sooner totally damn Cannibal Holocaust than I would Birth of a Nation. And, hell, Robert Mapplethorpe’s subject matter might not always have been pleasant, but damn if his compositions werent pretty. You can sort of say the same here- I don’t condone everything I see onscreen in the film, yet, as conflicting as it may seem, I think the harsher material does artistically further the film as a work of shock cinema.

Despite being a group of filmgoers known for their sadistic streaks, for many horror fans Cannibal Holocaust manages to be too bleak and off-putting. Like the Pope said about Passion of the Christ, “It is what it is.” To complain about a cannibal film being disturbing and distasteful is a bit like complaining about a musical having too much song and dance.

Jan

19

Dashing young American James C…

January 19, 2010 | | Leave a Comment

Stylish young American James Crocker (Sam Rockwell) lives it up day and night in the London home of his failed actor father Bingley (Tom Wilkinson) and community climbing mam Eugenia (Allison Janney) who is for all practical purposes on buying a peerage. His standing is a everlasting conclusion to Eugenia and her formidable sister Aunt Nesta (Brenda Blethyn), further demolished by the provocative quidnunc column published under his diminutive of Piccadilly Jim, even admitting that he hasn’t written its content for years. When Aunt Nesta suddenly arrives in London from New York with step-niece Anne (Frances O’Connor), Jim instantly falls in adoration with Anne. In purchase order to give their relationship a maybe, Jim pretends to be someone else and takes on the name of the English Butler, but complications arise when he arrives in New York and finds no-one is who they seem.

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