To Control Something That's Out of Control: On Tony Scott

Tony Scott’s shocking suicide yesterday brought an end to not just one of the most influential careers in modern Hollywood, but also one of the strangest and most divisive. It’s interesting to note that, for a guy so often identified with blockbusters, he really had just a handful of genuine hits: Top Gun was huge, Beverly Hills Cop II was huge (mainly because it was a sequel to a box office phenomenon), Enemy of the State and Crimson Tide were huge-ish. Otherwise, films like Days of Thunder and The Last Boy Scout were generally seen as underperforming and not quite there. And True Romance, now correctly viewed as one of Scott’s best films, was basically a flop. Despite all that, his influence over not just other filmmakers but also male moviegoers of a certain age is undeniable.

Almayer's Folly: Leave It All Behind

Chantal Akerman’s updated adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Almayer’s Folly, which opens at Anthology Film Archives today, starts off with one of the most elegantly controlled and tense sequences I’ve ever seen. We see an open air night club somewhere in Asia. As random people go in and out, a shadowy figure moves into the frame and ominously enters the club. Akerman then follows the man from behind, slowly, as he makes his way towards a stage where a lounge singer, backed up by some awkward, scantily clad female dancers, lip syncs to Dean Martin’s “Sway.” The man watches the performance for an extended moment. Then, he goes onstage and stabs the singer, dragging the body offscreen. The music stops and the dancers all flee. All, that is, except for one -- a tall Eurasian girl with a distant look in her eyes, who continues her clunky dance as the empty silence gathers around her. A voice offscreen whispers, “Nina. Dain is dead.” The girl stops, and moves into close-up. And suddenly begins singing a religious song, in Latin, looking straight into the camera.

We may not know exactly what just happened, but we’re riveted nonetheless. This is what Chantal Akerman does at her best. She takes a moment and slows it down to such a degree that anything seems possible. Some directors like to hold their shots to give the viewer space and time to contemplate and explore. But Akerman’s not an analyst. She’s a hypnotist. She uses shadow, composition, and sound – just listen to this film sometime, with its mesmeric use of water and rustling reeds, its drifting waves of classical music and timeless pop – to pull us into this wild, twilight world.

Theory vs. Practice

[Herzog] left the precipice to scale the higher peak across the valley. I followed him. After we started to climb the perilous spindle, however, Herzog ordered me to go back before I killed myself.

"Werner, this is not the way I'm going to die," I affirmed.

He stared at me knowingly, but Herzog was insistent, so I retreated. Herzog continued on, clinging to the bare cliff, his toes searching for inches of support. I called out to him.

"Herzog, what do you think of the auteur theory of filmmaking?"

"The what?" he replied while hugging the rocky cliff two thousand feet above the ocean.

"The auteur theory -- you know --"

"The auteur theory? I don't know what that is. What is the 'auteur theory'?"

"Forget it!"

"What?"

"Forget it!"


-- From Alan Greenberg's Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass, which is well worth your book-buying dollars.

“You Must Become a Terrible Thought”: Nolan, Batman, and Hope

I’ve written quite a bit about Christopher Nolan over the years. (Again, go here read my review of The Dark Knight Rises for the Nashville Scene, or go here for some of the pieces I’ve written about Inception.) A couple of months ago, I wrote something for Vulture about the way that Nolan seems to weave his films around individual ideas, in which I also speculated about the potential themes in The Dark Knight Rises – which, needless to say, I hadn’t seen at the time. Having now seen the new film a couple of times, I’d like to talk a bit more about the ideas – or rather, the one main idea – behind it, and how Nolan presents it.

Some context: I said in that Vulture piece that “each of Nolan’s films is built around a single idea that eventually seizes control of the characters and, eventually, the film itself.” In Memento and The Prestige, for example, that idea seems to be identity. In Inception, it’s regret. In Batman Begins, it’s fear. And in Insomnia and The Dark Knight, it appears to be guilt.

Of course, the problem many writers have with Nolan isn’t so much that his films are devoid of ideas or themes, but that said ideas and themes tend to be blunt and inartfully stated. (For some very smart and very critical writing on Nolan's films, you should check out some of Jim Emerson's work.) Needless to say, I disagree. True, Nolan’s dialogue is often quite matter-of-fact about such things: He has Stanley Kubrick’s precision but lacks Kubrick’s talent for the glancing blow, the subtle gesture. What Nolan does have, though, is a unique ability to make sure that everything in his films – not just dialogue, but performance, music, visual style, editing…everything -- whirrs around these central ideas. It’s a single-mindedness, a totality that, for me at least, can be awe-inspiring to watch.

In Medias Res...

"Valedictory from the very start, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises is somehow both the saddest and the most cartoonish entry in the director's Batman trilogy — sad in a strange way, and cartoonish in a good way."


Here's my review of the ambitious, riveting, silly, unforgettable, compulsively beautiful Dark Knight Rises. More to come, soon.

Forgotten Films: Gone to Earth (aka The Wild Heart) (Michael Powell, 1950)

To learn more about the Forgotten Films project, go here.

The legendary filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, aka “The Archers,” made Gone to Earth at the height of their popularity – they had just come off iconic films like The Red Shoes, and Black Narcissus – but its somewhat catastrophic reception would mark the beginning of their career decline. (Subsequent films, such as Oh, Rosalinda! and Battle of the River Plate, would not duplicate their earlier successes.) It didn’t help, of course, that the film never quite worked out production-wise: The project was a collaboration with the legendary producer David O. Selznick, who would later cut his own version of the film and release it in the US. (More on that later.) Any way you look at it, these troubles are a dispiriting legacy for such a beautiful and heart-wrenching film.

The Pact: Scared Stupid

The Pact is kind of a dumb movie, and that may be both its greatest failing and its greatest asset. It certainly doesn’t have the ingenious, everything-clicks-into-place machinery of, say, The Turn of the Screw, nor does it have the pure shock orgy of something like The Descent. Indeed, it’s full of ostensibly risible plot holes and moments that make you actively question what you’re seeing onscreen, and not in a good way. But for the most part the damn thing just plain works. That is to say, it made me scared of my house in a way that no other haunted house movie has in quite some time.