TARGETS (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968 USA)

The terror of a celluloid hero who confronts a gun wielding villain as imaginary horror becomes maniacal modernity; an empty life in red typeface. Peter Bogdanovich directs and stars in his debut feature, homage to the legendary Boris Karloff and an insider’s view of the bitter realities of Hollywood filmmaking while creating a well paced thriller whose violent nexus strikes back from the silver screen.

The story involves Byron Orlok an aging B-movie actor, exceptionally portrayed with dignity and class by Karloff, and his desire to retire from the rigors of a vapid business. As Orlok is courted by a young hotshot director (played by Bogdanovich himself) to star in one last film, the film cross-cuts with another story of an ordinary middle-class family and a clean cut son with an erotic fascination with firearms. The two seemingly disparate stories finally come together at a drive-in where the audience becomes victim, and the horrors of life prove more frightening than art. Bogdanovich uses clips from Roger Corman’s campy classic THE TERROR which stars Karloff (and a pre-madman Jack Nicholson) as a fictional template for Orlok’s latest creation. He provides an often funny and caustic insight into the cutthroat moviemaking business, as producers, advertisers and accountants become the butt of many jokes. Meanwhile, Bobby is a good looking All American guy, with a loving family and beautiful wife, showing no emotional warning signs on his suicidal road to nowhere. In one spooky sequence, Bobby is at the rifle range with his father, making small talk and cracking jokes. When his father goes down range to set up the targets, Bobby aims his rifle to find him in the cross-hairs…for no damn reason at all. When Bobby finally types his note and murders his family, it is done methodically and without emotion, actually taking the time to place the bodies in a comfortable position. Bogdanovich tracks his camera slowly across the floor, over the bloodstains, and climbs ever so deliberately towards the desk in a continuant shot until he focuses upon the typewritten letter, hacked out in red, the last testament of a madman.

Laszlo Kovacks’ wonderful cinematography captures both timelines with a claustrophobic tension, as Orlok the horror actor is brightly lit while bobby the average guy is isolated in darkness, both cramped in the tiny worlds of vehicles and apartments. When Bobby climbs the refinery towers, Kovacks shoots with quick zoom like a bullet striking its target, a fatal frisson that brings a heightened and believable reality. The night sequence at the drive-in is equally compelling, as the oblique lighting provides cover from the deadly sniper.

The power of the story is that no reason is given, no flashback to some imagined provocation is offered, only the callous disregard for human life reduced to tin cans. Fortunately, Orlok may have made a career from being the heavy but in his last appearance he proves to be the hero.

Final Grade: (B+)

UN PROPHETE (Jaques Audiard, 2009, France)



A young man’s life is written in scars, split between two racial identities: a journey of self-discovery between these warring factions but never divided against himself. Director Jacques Audiard’s terminal crime thriller is set almost entirely within the confines of concrete and barbed wire, but exposes the raw nerve of criminality whose fortune is mined like a vein of gold from the bedrock of society.

Malik is sentenced to six tough years in State Prison for assaulting a police officer. He must fend for himself in this jungle inhabited by voracious predators and insatiable raptors. He is equal parts French and Arab, a genetic admixture that isolates him from the protection of disparate gang lords. Soon he is given an ultimatum: murder an Arab snitch for the French mafia who hold majority control within the prison…or be murdered himself.

Malik is a boy who grows into a violent manhood while incarcerated, his claustrophobic world a mere shadow realm, a purgatory of six years that could lead him to a soulless eternity always at the mercy of others. But Malik begins to grow and understand, to reach his potential by never betraying his own morality, surviving but not selling himself so he can someday reach independence. He is creative and inventive, nurturing these gifts while haunted by the man he murdered; a ghost who never blames Malik or condemns him. As Malik gains the trust of the French mafia while ignoring their racial epitaphs, he plans his own future and the future of those who have coerced him into decisions not of his choosing.

Director Jacques Audiard never feels the need for forced exposition: we only know Malik through his incarceration as a young illiterate man with an allusion to a lengthy juvenile record, a the scars remain as mysterious as his past. Without resorting to flashback, a three dimensional portrait emerges through the confines of caricature. This is the anti SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION eschewing bloated morality and condescending cliché. Actor Tahar Rahim imbues Malik with a naiveté at conflict with ignorance, completing a compassionate portrayal of a man who never betrays himself, who does what he must to survive, and forges a friendship that transcends his mortal sentence. His performance is as sublime as a vision of white tail deer, jumping through the ether of neverwhere, following a path of salvation. The finale is as ambiguous as a dream…or the definition of justice.

Final Grade: (B+)

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (Peter Weir, 1975, Australia)

British colonialism fades into obscurity like three schoolgirls, their flesh and blood evaporating like the scintillation of a daydream. Peter Weir’s oblique narrative becomes transcendental and dangerous in its mystic rhythms, a magnetic force of frenetic urgency that subsumes all living creatures.

Appleyard College is an English boarding school on the boundary of the Australian Outback, a bastion of civilization taming the primitive wild, where the future meets the rock of ageless past. Apropos for a country whose empire spread like an infection, destroying and converting that which it didn’t understand into tempestuous Victorian principles. But Hanging Rock’s basalt pillars are guardians of time, sentinels that have withstood a million storms and will outlast the invaders…and the human race. On Valentine’s Day, a picnic at this monolith turns seemingly to tragedy when three students and a teacher disappear and only one is found alive, her elusive memory a figment of trauma where truth and imagination become inseparable. Though the film invokes police procedural, the story is not about the facts concerning the disappearances but in the aftermath, the effects upon Mrs. Applegate and her students, the police, the witnesses, and the community at large.

The mystery is never explained so Weir is able to focus upon the people: Mrs. Appleyard and her inability to cope with change, Sara and her lesbian infatuation with Miranda (one of the girls who never returns), and Michael an innocent witness who becomes obsessed with visions of the beautiful Miranda. This event has profoundly altered their lives while it’s just another sensationalist exercise in journalistic fashion for the rest of the world, human lives reproduced with ink and cheap paper. The story could be a masquerade of the young woman’s role in Victorian society, heir sexuality repressed beneath binding corsets, behavior redacted to exclude natural impulses. Weir shows the girls shedding shoes and clothing, possibly morphing into or merging with the world around them, leaving behind a static life of disregard. It is also a tragedy of class distinction leading to self destruction, as Sara jumps to her death because her benefactor fails to pay the required fee for the school, already suffering the loss of her best friend.

Mrs. Appleyard’s biological clock stops ticking at Hanging Rock, not from some strange magnetic pulse but from blunt force trauma.

Final Grade: (A)

MOTHER (Bong Joon-ho, 2009, South Korea)

A mother must tear down the wall that imprisons her son while facing the fact that she helped build it in the first place. Director Bong Joon-ho once again focuses upon an unfocused family: like THE HOST, the film’s conceit is a masquerade that conceals the familial trauma boiling underneath.

Hye-ja is an aging widow, her beauty fading beneath the veneer of time who must care for her only son, a mentally handicapped young man incapable (so she believes) of living independently of her crushing attention. Do-joon is physically a man in his mid-twenties (alluding that she had him later in life) but burdened with a mind that ceased growing in grade school. She has taught him to fight, to stand up for himself, but she is always there to bail him out of trouble though he is rarely the cause. She smothers him with love and affection, even sleeping in the same bed together like a baby, never wanting him to grow up and leave the nest. But one day a girl is found murdered and evidence leads to Do-joon’s arrest and conviction.

The film becomes an investigative procedural as Hye-ja avers his innocence because she cannot accept the possibility that her son is a murder. The police quickly close the case and she begins to uncover her own evidence to acquit her son, following the path of least resistance whose convoluted path becomes a journey of self-discovery. The story is literally teaming with red herrings, oblique motives, tortured testimony, and false leads whose conclusion becomes an inexcusable morality, shifting culpability and audience compassion. Hye-ja knows finally knows the facts but cannot accept the truth, redacting her own guilt and dissecting the corpus delecti, leaving the audience in the position of jury to decide if Justice has been served.

Final Grade: (B+)

WOODEN CROSSES (Raymond Bernard, 1932, France)

Ghosts march in formation across the sky, each with his own cross to bear. Raymond Bernard’s unflinching and brutal depiction of unfettered nationalism leads to muddy trenches full of stinking corpses, a purgatory where no living man walks the scarred landscape.

Bernard’s opening credits juxtapose ghostly soldiers with their eternal burdens, rows upon rows of wooden accusations that rage against the dying of the light, identities reduced to embossed names, personalities erased from the scripture of life. Cut to: proud young soldiers marching off to war, crowds of old men averring victory and frenzied women clutching children, waving flags, promulgating the disease of nationalism to future generations.

A young soldier conscripted from law school becomes the common thread of the narrative. He is briefly introduced to his new unit, his shiny canteen, polished boots, and virgin rifle yet to penetrate its target; a point of humor among the veterans. From this group of disparate people, the story follows them through hellish battle with very little introduction or back-story to dilute the exposed raw nerve of this pacifist diatribe. The focus is upon the men asleep in their fortification awaiting night patrol or crawling through thick mud, never knowing the reason why, only to do and die. The war is seen from a personal perspective, not from an omniscient vantage point that attempts to make sense from the bloody chaos. The soldiers know one thing: follow orders and hope their superiors are making decisions that will end this conflict.

One suspenseful scene depicts the destructive military hierarchy that considers men expendable, as the Germans begin digging beneath the trenches to seed the mine with explosives. The echo of picks cracking stone reverberates throughout the fort every night but the French must hold their position…at all costs. The tension builds when the sounds stop, heartbeats thick in their throats awaiting the inevitable, their blood tainting the hands of the High Command who washes it away without thought. A ten day battle entrenches the men in a graveyard, which will become a home to many on both sides of the conflict. No reason is given for the battles, no strategy to charge, retreat, or hold position is explained to those who sacrifice, only to do what they are told.

Bernard’s breathtaking expressionist cinematography moves quickly through the trenches and wastelands, utilizing low angle shots and expert mise-en-scene to frame violent compositions. In one scene, a lump of flesh is revealed in a bright flare, its shadow sneaking across the blasted ground like a soul unwilling to leave its Earthly vessel, until it is once again swallowed up by darkness. This is a bleak and nihilistic film, as the best anti-war message is to depict the reality of war as murder.

Final Grade: (A+)

MUMMSY, NANNY, SONNY AND GIRLY (Freddie Francis, 1969, UK)

Mummsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly live a life of disintegrating values and dehumanizing games, and become victims themselves of a sexual revolution. Freddie Francis’ bizarre brood of British banality is a delectable hybrid of Luis Bunuel domestic surrealism as written by Tennessee Williams.

The film begins with the unnamed protagonists (known only by their titular sobriquets) playing in a zoo and teasing the animals…and humans. These two teenagers act and speak like children, uttering annoying baby-talk with a riptide of sexual urgency. An unnerving implication of incest is revealed with finger-sucking aplomb while they search for a playmate. After discovering a drunken bum on a park bench, they bring him back home to Mummsy and Nanny to complete the Patriarchal pastiche, a nuclear family unit whose fuse is set to purposely implode. But Girly and her brother blackmail another man whose mannerisms are all to manly, seducing all three women and finally playing them one against the other, as sex becomes the greatest weapon.

Freddie Francis creates a claustrophobic fear in the shuttered mansion, where chilling details like boarded-up doors and locked rooms foreshadow events. Sex is juxtaposed with violence, as the shrill baby-talk barely conceals the murderous events. The fault of the story is that there is little sympathetic context, no character that becomes the focal point of audience attention. The events are orchestrated for effect; for physical detachment (like the head, for instance) and not emotional attachment. We just don’t care about anyone but applaud their comeuppance.

A black comedy of unique proportions, GIRLY upsets Christian values and redefines the family structure, as sex becomes the currency for survival, the man’s tool leveraging power and transforming the matriarchal structure where the daughter now usurps the throne.

Final Grade: (C)

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928, France)

A young woman’s faith cannot be burned away by the Church, whose business is packaging and selling God to the masses kept ignorant and violently repressed. But Joan awakens the holy ghost of spiritual revolution, inciting truth through martyrdom where action (or inaction) speaks much louder than words to an illiterate populace.

Carl Th. Dreyer’s expressive benediction portrays the virginal heroine as larger than life, her freckled visage dominating the compositions with tear stained compassion, her intelligent eyes reflecting the arc lights of an arch angel, revealing depths of humanity beyond the soul’s mirrored lens. Eschewing establishing shots, Dreyer films almost entirely in close-up allowing the characters to expose their flaws thematically, through physical grotesqueries and jaundiced expressions. This is a story told with the eyes wide shut to the injustice of religious mysticism, or balistraria that discharge curses like poisonous arrows. Dreyer depicts one elder priest with tufts of oily hair that look like demonic horns, and another whose wart become cancerous nodules of fatalistic demarcation. Joan is held in stasis by the camera, a devoted young women whose shaven head cannot hide her beautiful countenance. Dressed in men’s clothing, she has bigger balls than any of the priests who are enslaved to archaic documents that overrule basic human rights.

Dreyer often films from low angles casting the church mongers as monsters looming above the heroine (and audience), their ghastly presence omniscient like insane gods without appeal to their ignoble decisions. Joan is abused and debased but remains human, and though a few priests are sympathetic to her plight, they have been castrated by the very Church whose hypocrisy violates any sense of transcendental morality. His inspired montage worships Eisenstein’s cinematic philosophy, and the clashing imagery in quick cuts generates passion and friction, leading to the pyrrhic climax.

As the fire claims a young woman, burning away her flesh so her spirit can soar to the heavens, the holy cross becomes obscured by smoke and sin, while the villagers embrace their own judgment at the risk of sword and mace. A prescient tale of extremist belief through violence and power.

Final Grade: (A+)

SING A SONG OF SEX (Nagisa Oshima, 1967, Japan)

Four lascivious young men are on the verge of adulthood, their indistinct and indiscriminate futures like bawdy lyrics sung in the thick smoke of burning desire. Director Oshima Nagisa defines a superficial reality before it disintegrates into a fantasy of violent sexuality, revolution, and impotent murder.

Here in Oshima’s vision of Japan, the disenfranchised youth mirror their western counterparts, consumed by lurid advertising like insects drawn to sugary confection, where a once proud country is relegated to American folk songs, Woody Guthrie anthems proclaiming foreign lands now subsumed by the peaceful protestors whose words echo hollow over still waters. The four young men exist in a existential vacuum, a void where a mysterious woman is nothing more than a number, dehumanized into pornographic fantasy. These students recognize their sensei as nothing more than human, an older version of themselves perhaps, living a lie of social mores…so they take the path of social anarchy. Drunken words awaken nihilistic desires, and soon the wandering narrative becomes a murder mystery and police procedural, a smokescreen for the ethereal unreality as substantial as snowflakes.

Finally a lecture discusses the racial tensions between the Japanese and South Koreans while the young girl who is nothing more than number 469 is murdered in a classroom, moments before a gang rape. The oppressed know no boundaries, either by nationality or race, and the four young men shall inherit this pessimistic world: but they may not want it.

Final Grade: (B)

CRIME IN THE STREETS (Don Siegel, 1956, USA)

Frankie is trapped in his life like a cockroach in a matchbox, released by the love of his little brother. An early effort from Don Siegel, who directed the classic INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS the same year, adapts a stage play into a claustrophobic drama where the dirty streets are strewn with human refuse. But one social worker believes that some trash can be recycled.

Obviously staged on a barely populated back lot, it diminishes much of the chaotic frisson that would have resulted if the film had moved into the real streets where sidewalks are choked with human traffic, and trucks belch their stinking fumes into the lungs of the protagonists, where pollution becomes a malignant tumor growing inside of Frankie. Relegated to a staged performance, Siegel’s film becomes to melodramatic and verbose, relying on telling us instead of showing us, his cinematography composed of too many close-ups, establishing shots utilizing only a drab apartment, a soda shop, and a back alley that is rather well lighted. Siegel fails to use lighting to great effect and the final result is a made for television serial, more appropriate for Playhouse 90 than the silver screen.

John Cassevetes as the troubled youth Frankie steals the film, his quick temper repressed behind smoldering eyes; both intelligent and murderous. His every move is a ballet of brutality; his swagger, hunched shoulder, piercing gaze, commanding voice, while his hawkish visage is topped with a shock of black hair: he is every inch the avatar of a generation, representing a violent youth that transcends even James Dean: Cassevetes is a rebel with a murderous cause. Though much of the supporting cast is superfluous and bursting with almost laughable caricature (this seems like WEST SIDE STORY without Brillcream), Sal Mineo as the young follower hoping to earn his Christian name, and the psychotically effeminate Mark Rydell keep the story interesting. James Whitmore as the social worker is boilerplate, never letting the audience forget this is a “message movie” about disenfranchised youth. If this had been made a few years earlier, I suppose they would have blamed William Gaines and his popular EC Comics for juvenile delinquency too.

Final Grade: (B-)

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (Niels Arden Oplev, Sweden, 2009)

Lisabeth’s fiery spirit is inked upon her skin, a raven haired woman whose redemption is mirrored by the plight of a disenfranchised reporter, both victim of Patriarchal powers whose conflict ignites passion…and is cured by gasoline. Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev adapts his countryman’s novel into a pulse pounding thriller, an explosive journey through a young lady’s dark night of the soul. His camera doesn’t shy away from the ferocious sexual brutality, an important plot device that characterizes the turbulent heroine and subverts expectations: the remake will become an inane Hollywood fiasco, dumbed down for American audiences who are too stupid to read subtitles, who must be spoon-fed filmic pabulum that can be easily digested and passed through devoid of nutrient.

Oplev encapsulates a convoluted plot and expounds exposition without sacrificing characterization, and it’s the power of the two leads that fuels the narrative with a driving force, racing ever forwards even when it looks to the past. Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist the defeated reporter, is imbued with a subtle patience and compassion, his face a reflection of honesty and intelligence: a man whose moral code translates into an honest living. Noomi Rapace as Lisabeth is both aggrieved and grieving, antisocial but not psychopathic, her beauty belies the burden of some unexplained trauma. She is victimized but a survivor, Justice a violent poetry written in flames.

The structure could have easily descended to a montage of computer icons and conversations, but Oplev deftly juxtaposes action with cross-cutting whose corollary leads to audience coronary, the poisonous fruit blossoms into suspense and emotional fission. Suspension of disbelief is expected as even Apple computers don’t function at light speed, correlating data in the nick of time. And research through dusty tomes lost in dungeon-like archives takes time, microfiche notwithstanding. Swimming with more than a few red herrings, the story leads from pressed flowers to a grainy photo, and through a chamber of horrors towards a surprising climax.

Final Grade: (B+)

MARNIE (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964, USA)

A woman is split in complex personas but underneath she is still the same little girl, crying out for help, desperate for a mother’s love. Alfred Hitchcock’s final masterpiece is an amalgam of PSYCHO psychiatry and VERTIGO semantics, a bloody transfusion of traumatic therapy.

Hitchcock begins the film with a close-up of a yellow bag tucked under the arm of a raven haired woman (seen only from behind), walking a thin red line on a train platform. Our attention is drawn to the bag as Hitchcock cuts again to a close-up of a man screaming ‘Thief!”: an economy of visual language that begins the story of a tortured young lady. Marnie alters identities and skips from job to job, stealing from her employers then disappearing like a ghost, haunted by a troubled past the consumes her future tense. When she begins to work for Mark Rutland, he eventually recognizes her as “Marion” who stole from one of his clients. Mark blackmails Marnie into marrying him and thus begins another journey into the dreaded unknown inner world of the convoluted mindscape: but are his intentions well-meaning or selfish? Or both?

Hitchcock conveys emotional trauma in a few direct ways: the use of a red filter that blossoms onto the screen when Marnie suffers a breakdown, enacted by the color red in a specific setting (red ink like blood, red flowers in her mother’s house, a red polka-dotted shirt, or a red riding jacket); the lightening flashes that totally obliterate her image and burn a ghostly figure into the retina, her identity erased and occluded; the nocturnal tapping (like Poe’s raven) which invites Marnie into the land of nightmare; or the blank stare of total dissociation when she finally allows Mark to penetrate her femininity…which leads to her suicide attempt. Even her suicide is reasoned through and details justified when her husband asks her why she didn’t jump from the ship: “I wanted to die, not feed the fish”. Wonderful line!

Unlike Marnie, Mark has let go of his past which is beautifully revealed in his study when a branch crashed through a window and smashes his deceased wife’s remaining icons. In an almost callous way, he picks up a fractured piece and smashes it: “We all have to let go sometime”. A picture on his desk also depicts a ferocious animal which he exclaims pride in training, of making the beast trust him. Mark’s intentions seem both honorable and potentially despicable, and it’s to Sean Connery’s credit that his decidedness is both imperfect and credible. He admits to sexually blackmailing Marnie but his desire is to protect her from those “others” who would not be so kind. His sacrifice is not without payoff, as he beds the beautiful protagonist and holds a patriarchal dominance over her position.

One scene in particular is the crux of the narrative, of the violent need for healing through death, of reliving the victimization of a lost childhood: the runaway chase where Marnie’s only viable emotional attachment, her beloved horse Forio, is injured by her own fault and she demands the incredibly sad task of shooting him, to put her suffering friend out of his misery. It’s very interesting that she never turns the gun on herself, and from this point on she can no longer steal money to buy her mother’s affection. Marnie’s eyes reflect eternal sadness, her pallid visage a mask of anxiety (she almost looks like another person), and she pulls the trigger and whispers her apology. Tippi Hedren’s anxious performance is a tour-de-force and makes the film live, allows the audience to associate with the complex desires of a superficial thief…and her self-destructive impulses.

Marnie’s demons are exorcised in her childhood home still inhabited by her mother, under the giant shadow of a ship that looms like a phallus over their lives, understood when the flashback occurs. Bernard Herrmann’s score evokes all the right psychological chords, plucking audience attention, reverberating with delirious meaning, spiraling strings echo dark rooms and lamentations. Though Marnie may be on the path to recovery, her mother will always suffer her own aching crippled leg.

Final Grade: (A)

THE SACRIFICE (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986, Sweden)

Alexander’s devotion to his god mirrors Abraham’s sacrifice, a man who wishes to transcend selfishness to achieve salvation. Andrei Tarkovsky’s dense narrative is thick with characterization and melodrama, focusing upon a patriarch and his family while the outside world, revealed only through a radio broadcast and the piercing whine of jet fighters, is kept ethereal and unrealized.

Alexander severs the umbilical to the world, born of man and woman he is now child of god’s oath, beyond the understanding of his family. Tarkovsky evokes the eerie mysticism of Bergman by placing the sheltered parable on a lonely windswept beach, prayers like tidal forces slowly wearing away sin too slowly to be recognized. The charging rain and lurking mist obscure perceptions, leaving each character as an island in an ocean of despair. This is Bergman’s dark night of the soul where redemption can be attained…at a cost. Eschewing human law for biblical testament, Alexander remains true to his promise. He burns away the material, this elemental purge of earthly delights, to attain deliverance. And his faith remains as solid as a tree, young yet ancient, nurtured by the earth whose seeds will fall and prosper for future generations. There is hope.

Final Grade: (A)