Ξ February 18th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movies |
1960. Starring Toshiro Mifune. Directed by Akira Kurosawa.
The great Toshiro Mifune plays Nishi, an ambitious corporate assistant eager to climb the ladder of a shady land development company, going so far as to marry the chairman’s daughter. But unlike the other bureaucrats and salarymen who bow and scrape as part of their job, Nishi doesn’t want the respect of his father-in-law or the money that comes with his position. He wants revenge.
Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well has many of the elements found in American film noir, but instead of focusing on human corruption, it peels back the corruption infused in big business.
Nishi isn’t even Nishi — he has traded identities with a childhood friend in order to have the college degree and clean background required for the job. He’s really the illegitimate son of an executive from the same corporation, made to take the fall years earlier as part of a crooked kickback scheme. As Nishi, he’ll ingratiate himself with his powerful father-in-law, while at the same time confronting and exposing those responsible for his father’s death. He plays one crooked executive against the other, using threats, violence and shame to get to the next level.
The lengthy opening scene has enough drama to kick off three separate movies — the wedding of Nishi to the chairman’s young daughter, who we see has a disability; her protective brother, who makes an awkward, drunken toast; the gossiping members of the press, expecting to catch one of the attending executives being arrested; and, finally, a mysterious cake shaped like the corporate headquarters — complete with an “X” marking the window through which an executive has thrown himself — being wheeled in to the outrage and embarrassment of everyone.
For a two-and-a-half-hour subtitled Japanese film about corporate corruption, The Bad Sleep Well is compelling, even though it gets slowed down by guilt and remorse concerning Nishi’s marriage of opportunity to the chairman’s daughter. Mifune is controlled and powerful as the single-minded Nishi, and with his dashing suits, slicked hair and glasses, he portrays an extremely different character than his role in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. But just as he did in that film, he’s as formidable as a man who gets increasingly mad as he finally gets even.
Ξ February 10th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movies |
1941. Starring Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck. Directed by Preston Sturges.
There’s no better cure for a dark, rainy, depressing day than a Preston Sturges film. The Lady Eve is one of his best. Henry Fonda stars as snake expert Charles Pike, who, although heir to the Pike’s Pale fortune (”Pike’s Pale – The Ale That Won For Yale!”), doesn’t know much about ale or beer, and even less about women. As he states many times, he “just spent a year up the Amazon” and is returning with a newly discovered type of snake. But Charles is about to meet a snake on the boat back to New York — one that he is completely defenseless against.
Barbara Stanwyck portrays Jean Harrington, who with her father, “Colonel” Harrington (Charles Coburn), are a successful con-artist team known but apparently tolerated by the ship’s crew. Into their midst wanders this very rich, very naive young man still a little dizzy from his year upriver. All eyes are on him — particularly those belonging to the young golddiggers on the boat — but Stanwyck immediately captures his attention by tripping him. He helps her to her cabin, smells her perfume, and helps change her high heels, wide-eyed just an inch from her legs — and knows he is no longer in the Amazon. She toys with him, nicknames him “Hopsy” and sends him back to his cabin. This apparently will be a long con.
Almost as happy to meet young Mr. Pike is her father, who is excited to get him to the card table and separate his cash from his tuxedo. (So practiced a dealer is he that he rushes to his daughter’s bedside and deals her a hand as soon as she awakens.) But Jean is falling for the earnest, clumsy young man and asks her father to spare him — she thinks he’s about to propose and she’ll admit to the con game she’s started, but only after they get off the boat. Pike’s security man, played by the great Sturges regular William Demarest, gets wind of the grifters and exposes them before Pike can pop the question.
Pike is crushed and confronts Jean, who admits that, yes, she toyed with him, knowing how she could manipulate him, explaining how easy it was to get him on his knees. But she’s talking about how she got him to fall in love with her — it turns out that seduction is the biggest short con in the world. The young man feels foolish and leaves her once the boat reaches the shore. She vows revenge for the slight. “I need him like the ax needs the turkey,” she growls.
The second half of the movie takes place at charming Pike Manor in Connecticut, where we meet the party-giving Pike clan, whose circle is being invaded by a long-con grifter who suddenly shows up with his British niece, “the Lady Eve Sidwich” — who looks exactly like Jean from the boat. I’m going to stop the plot description here, except to say that there may be more than simple revenge that drives this spurned woman.
Since this is a Preston Sturges film, there’s plenty of slapstick and cocktails, oversized characters and, somehow, a love scene with a scene-stealing horse in the background. (There’s also a great crooked-card game.) There are many great lines, and an amazing scene in which Jean watches Charles by holding up a compact and narrating all the attention he’s drawing from fellow passengers. Both Fonda and Stanwyck are great — especially in the scene where she knows he’s discovered her real identity and is trying to keep him from slipping away. “You see Hopsy, you don’t know very much about girls. The best ones aren’t as good as you think they are and the bad ones aren’t as bad. Not nearly as bad.” For a snake expert, young Charles Pike doesn’t recognize a creature shedding her skin.
The Lady Eve was made in 1941, the same year Sturges wrote and directed his masterpiece Sullivan’s Travels. That was a heck of a year for American movies.
2008. Directed by Alex Gibney.
It was impossible, eventually, to tell Hunter S. Thompson, the journalist, from Hunter S. Thompson, the legend, and that was problematic. “Not only was I not necessary, I was in the way,” he explains in his familiar monotone mumble. The drinking had become expected, the drugs required, the guns were fired randomly, providing the dangerous edge, now that his writing wasn’t supplying it. The rebel celebrity had outlived the rebel insight, but, after years of drug use and alcohol abuse, he still controlled the narrative. He knew how to wrap up his story.
This remarkable documentary thankfully de-emphasizes the celebrity, and celebrates the journalist who infiltrated the Hells Angels, accompanied George McGovern on the campaign trail, and discovered the death of the American Dream in Las Vegas. His ability to see through the phoniness was cherished by readers of Rolling Stone and his novels, and his willingness to walk up “to the edge” endeared him to a rising youth culture. Riding his motorcycle late at night, helmetless, along the California coast, he pushed it to 100 mph. “That’s when I began to hear the strange music,” he remembered. During the day, draining glass after glass of Wild Turkey, and picking out keys on the typewriter like setting off mouse traps, he looked for the strange music in his subjects.
The film combines photos, home and archival video, re-enactments, portrayals, the demented artwork of partner-in-crime Ralph Steadman, and a devoted narration by Johnny Depp to make the point that Thompson wrote amazingly insightful works while creating a larger-than-life presence whose exaggerations, visions and lies made you unsure of every word. On the 1972 presidential campaign trail, says McGovern’s then-campaign manager, Thompson somehow captured “the least factual and most accurate account.”
Seeing things clearly was one of the amazing talents of this man, especially considering his mythic intake of alcohol and drugs — he saw things exceptionally clearly, even when hallucinating. And truth was the elusive goal he was reaching for, even when he couldn’t be sure it was in front of him at all. His dismay at the tragic mistakes of the McGovern campaign — announced vice-presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton was forced to withdraw from the ticket — and its defeat to Nixon made him lose hope, and the election of George W. Bush convinced him to give up any hope for the future of the country he loved. The portrayal here of his candidacy for the office of Aspen sheriff paints him as a doomed, passionate patriot.
No one seems surprised that Hunter S. Thompson shot himself at his Woody Creek home in 2005. He had talked about it for years. When his son heard what he first thought was a book falling to the floor in the other room, he stepped outside and fired a gun into the sky as a tribute. Later, friends would gather, as Thompson had planned, to fire his ashes into the sky as a funeral. It seems like a shame, to miss out on whatever his writing could bring us during the dark Bush years, but maybe the author knew that there was nothing left, and it was time to go. It was the only honest way.
Today marks six months since I quit my job. I’m happy to be able to say that I haven’t felt a bit of regret. Sure, when I go to pay rent every month, I wish I still had a paycheck I could turn over. But I don’t miss spending my days with bitter and unfriendly people. In a weird way, I miss the routine, but I’m working on a more-positive one, thinking of ways I can make and save money, applying for jobs, writing and communicating with creative and encouraging friends I’d neglected.
Quitting at the start of a recession may not have been the best idea, but stepping off the wrong path and onto a new one has given me a chance to make a better choice. I know that, had I stayed for the sake of having a job and a steady paycheck, my health and self-esteem would have suffered, and I may have become bitter and joyless as well. I’ve learned that life is too short for that.
So tomorrow begins a new day of possibilities, opportunities and ideas. Like I have for the past six months, I look forward to getting up in the morning, and seeing what might come my way. Maybe tomorrow will be the best day of my life.
Back in the ’80s, music was pathetic. There are very few exceptions — the world was obsessed with MTV, and artists like Michael Jackson and Madonna dominated radio, and if you didn’t like it, there was always yacht-rock captains like Christopher Cross. There was also new wave, which to some was an attempt to make punk more acceptable, more popular. I bought many records that had guys wearing makeup on the cover and playing weak-sounding keyboards on the record. Then one glorious day, I bought a strange record with a slightly ominous-looking cover photo.
Songs the Lord Taught Us was the Cramps’ first full-length record, and its murky, crazed songs had a big effect on me. There’s not a sufficient way to describe songs like “TV Set” or “Garbageman” or their cover of the Sonics’ “Strychnine” or their cover of Johnny Burnette & the Rock and Roll Trio’s “Tear It Up,” or any of the others. You have to listen to them. They were so wild, so frantic, in that age of staged weirdness, where you know everything is so calculated to be “out there.” When you saw a performance of the Cramps (wherever you were so fortunate to see such a thing in the pre-YouTube days, maybe on MTV’s 120 Minutes), you were focused on the lead singer, stuffing the microphone in his mouth, flailing on the stage, still singing. It seemed like genuine dementia — not something rehearsed, but something really wrong.
That was Lux Interior (born Eric Lee Purkhiser), the perfect guy to lead this perfect band. Along with guitarist/vixen Poison Ivy Rorschach, Lux led the Cramps through a dozen or so records, never compromising the band’s sound: raw rockabilly mixed with R&B and punk, with dark themes, even cartoonishly dark themes that seemed to be drawn from midnight b-movies and monster magazines. The Cramps’ Gravest Hits and Psychedelic Jungle were thick with tribal rhythms and Charlie Feathers-like vocals.
But maybe the clincher, the moment when you knew that the Cramps meant business is their performance at the California State Mental Hospital — a live show thankfully captured on video. The performance actually feels dangerous. It was dangerous for the band, who endures patients wandering onto the stage and hijacking the mic; for the patients, whose fragile conditions may not have been able to handle either the band’s performance or material; and for the activities coordinator who scheduled the performance, who must have been looking for a new job within a week.
Lux apparently died today, and the first indications are that it was the result of a heart problem. It was a well-used heart — he put all of it into the music he made, and I’m very thankful for that.
RIP, Mr. Interior.
The Cramps “Garbageman” (Video, YouTube)
The Cramps “Tear It Up” (Live, YouTube)