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Movies, Reviews
Two Lane Blacktop
Saw Two Lane Blacktop over the New Year’s holiday. It’s the story of two drifters who take their souped-up ’55 Chevy from town to town, drag racing when they can find a taker. Essentially they’re hustlers.
Along the way they hook up with a young woman who’s hitching around the country more or less at random. Later they meet a middle aged man, who picks up hitchhikers so he can have someone to talk to, and end up challenging him to a cross-country race.
Like the movie The Driver, the main characters are given labels instead of names, based on what they do (The Driver, The Mechanic), what they are (The Girl), or what they drive (GTO). Their backstories are nonexistent, and it’s clearly on purpose. When GTO starts to spill his guts, The Driver interrupts with a curt, “I don’t want to hear it.”
This movie is sort of the anti-Vanishing Point. Whereas that movie said that the open road is America, man, and you can meet a lot of interesting people there, this movie says that the road is barren, a wasteland.
In his review, Roger Ebert points out that this movie is about people who make the road their home. To them, the road is their destination, not just a path to somewhere else.
I thought the movie was very disappointing, though. If you’re making a character study, you’d think that the people in it would be interesting. Instead only Warren Oates, as GTO, really does anything (to be fair, his part is the best). In a way he and the others become friends, but it’s a fragile thing and in the end just sort of dissolves.
Plus the movie is boring in places, something I have a hard time forgiving.
Oddly enough, Slate just ran a retrospective on the movie. There were many great movies made in the 70s; I have a hard time putting this one among their number.
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Books, Movies, Reviews
BANG!
06.25.07 | Permalink | 2 CommentsThere’s a school of thought that every new crime novel needs to hit the ground running. You need a gun on page 1, a shot on page 2, and a body on page 3. I don’t subscribe to this theory.
But DAMN!! I just finished reading Warrant for X, a book by Philip Macdonald featuring his sleuth Anthony Gethryn. It’s a veddy veddy British book and was published back in 1938, when the world was a slower place – but 50 pages before the book gets going? Almost a hundred before anything interesting happens? Come on, man, hop to it!
Actually I’ve been reading a lot of “Golden Age” mysteries lately. Don’t really know why – I guess I just enjoy the whodunit form. For the past year or two I have had an almost pathological aversion to reading new stuff and as a result I’ve spent most of my money in used bookstores lately.
Not all on British aristocrats, though. I just bought a batch of “Hardman” books by Ralph Dennis. The first one? Pimp For The Dead. I say, sir.
Speaking of tedious. So I finally got around to seeing Children of Men. I am a fan of Clive Owen’s work, and I really wanted to like this movie – but I really, really didn’t. The action scenes, which were generally not amped up but were presented in a “you are there fashion”, were extremely well done, but they were islands in a sea of dullness. Widely seperated islands.
I think the biggest problem was I didn’t have any sympathy for the future world presented. There was never a point when I could say to myself, “Yeah, the world could turn out like that.” Unlike something as far out as Blade Runner.
On the other hand, I also saw Ocean’s 13 not long ago, and it was a terrific movie, as much a comedy as a heist picture. The plot was really irrelevant – in fact, I think you could cut up the first three movies, assemble the scenes at random, and no one could tell the difference – but the style, the music, the energy of this movie was infectious. It was immensely entertaining, not self-important or indulgent. It rocked.
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Movies, Reviews
Brazil
I finally saw Terry Gilliams Brazil the other day, only 20-odd years after it came out. One of the best movies I’ve seen in a while – as evidence, I’m still thinking about it three days later.
Brazil tells the story of Sam Lowry, by day a lowly clerk in the department of records, a cog in the massive machine of state. But when he sleeps Lowry dreams of being a knight, a rebel who fights for what’s good and true. And he dreams of an angel. It’s when he finally meets this dream woman that his life goes off the rails.
This movie draws obvious inspiration from Orwell’s 1984, but where the state in that book was all-knowing and all-powerful, in Brazil the state is just as efficient as in real life.
Unlike 1984, there’s a happy ending of sorts. In Orwell’s book, Winston Smith decides that the only free land that the state can’t control is the space between his ears – his mind is his own. But he’s wrong. In the end Big Brother owns even that.
But the superstate in Brazil is like 1984‘s bumbling little brother, and when Sam realizes that he’s wrecked his life and several others, when he realizes that his quest to be himself and to rebel against the state will cost him all he has, he flees to the only place he has left.
He flees into his own mind.
And lives happily ever after.
In Brazil.
POSTSCRIPT: I was watching a Tivo’ed episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation last night, and fast forwarding through the commercials, when for some reason I stopped to watch one. It was a new Visa commercial, where shoppers spin and twirl in perfect synchronicity – until one of them pays with a check, and the whole clockwork procession grinds to a halt.
The original commercial was set in a diner to the song “Powerhouse”. This new commercial is set at the florist’s. As I listened to the music, I realized it sounded familiar. A few more notes and I thought “Holy CRAP!” – the song was “Brazil”.
So, as a melody for a commercial that showed people happily acting as cogs in a machine, they chose the theme song from a movie about the dehumanizing effects of modern life. I suspect someone at their ad agency has a subversive sense of humor.
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Movies, Reviews
DVD Review: THE DRIVER
I was really looking forward to The Driver, by all accounts a tense little crime drama from 1978. The Continental Op and the Nameless Detective are, of course, famous for never being named, but this film one-ups them: nobody gets a name. Instead we have Ryan O’Neal as The Driver, Bruce Dern as The Detective, and Isabelle Adjani as The Player.
The story: O’Neal is the best getaway driver in the business. Dern is out to bag him, even if it means bending the law as far as it will bend. And that’s pretty much it.
Like many films from the seventies, The Driver is told as more through images than dialog, with only Dern getting a chance to ramble on, which he does (let’s hope the scenery was fat-free). A good approach for this kind of minimalist noir, which left me with high hopes.
Too bad the movie sucked.
First of all, it appears to be heavily influenced by the French film Le Samourai, in which the main character had a less sympathetic job as a hired killer. Both that character and The Driver live in squalor despite the fact they must be well-paid; both present a blank face to the world; both raise their competence to the level of a virtue. But where Jef in Samourai eventually showed a little humanity and a little desperation, O’Neal remains the same stony character at the end that he is at the beginning.
And one scene *totally* rips off The Getaway.
Adjani does nothing but pout her way through this role, showing all the dramatic range of a dishrag, which is strange since she was just spectacular in One Deadly Summer only a couple of years later. O’Neal never lets us see inside his character; if all his grim, silent staring had been cut, the running time would be fifteen minutes shorter. And there’s not really much of a twist at the end.
Only Dern and Ronnee Blakely (in a small part as O’Neal’s booking agent) really do anything on screen.
So, sadly, I can’t recommend this movie. See Le Samourai instead. Or read The Wheelman.
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Books, Reviews, Short Stories
Reading Room
08.02.06 | Permalink | 2 CommentsI finally finished up Damn Near Dead, an anthology of geezer noir featuring writers such as Victor Gischler, Sean Doolittle, and Megan Abbott. It’s the brainchild of editor Duane Swierczynski and publisher David Thompson, and yes, alcohol was involved.
The verdict? Damn near great. One of the best anthologies I’ve read recently, in fact. Gischler’s story is flat-out terrific, as is Abbott’s, and the rest are entertaining at the very least.
One guy I have got to read more of: John Harvey. His story “Drummer Unknown” from Robert J. Randisi’s Murder And All That Jazz was the pick of the litter, and his story here (forgot the title – sorry!) is just as good, and, incidentally features another jazz drummer. Harvey is best known for his Charlie Resnick series, and I think that’s one I’ll enjoy.
One of the books I came home from Con Misterio with was Mongo’s Back In Town by E. Richard Johnson. I was told it was an ultra-hardboiled crime story, and as a lover of old paperbacks, I was really looking forward to it, but as it turned out, I hated it! Loathed it, even! It sucked!
Much of the story is told through narrative summary rather than action and dialog. The characters are stupid and cruel, which is not usually a drawback, unless they’re stupid, cruel, and boring as they are here. Not only that, but the author isn’t too swift either. A crucial plot point concerned the identity of a corpse. He’d already given Character A a freshly broken nose, which Character B didn’t have. But he didn’t use this to differentiate them. So run the other way.
A paperback I did like was Ralph Dennis’ Hardman #4: Pimp For The Dead. Despite the unfortunate title and the packaging which implied a men’s adventure yarn, Pimp is actually a pretty straightforward detective story, set in Atlanta and making full use of local color. Jim Hardman is hardly (heh) a tough guy – instead he’s middle-aged and fat, though he knows how to swing a fist if he has to.
Richard Moore recommended the series, and also wrote up a short bio of Dennis and a summary of his work. It’s well worth checking out.
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