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Nocturnal Admissions

By D.K. Holm

December 27, 2005

[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]

Year of the Dominatrix

THE BEST MOVIES, DVDS AND FILM BOOKS OF THE YEAR

[For your home listening pleasure here is an MP3 podcast version of my best of column ]

Here's my idea of the perfect end of the year round-up writer and 10 best lister.

This is a person who has seen virtually all the films released by the studios and most if not all of the European or specialty or indie films. This person is also on the DVD freeloader list and by rote receives all DVDs released in Region 1 through the course of a year. And he is a prolific reader, consuming all the film mags, the NY TIMES, the 'Frisco and L.A. and Midwest papers, the "alternative" papers, and all the movie websites and blogs. And if he is lucky, this person probably also attends all of, or at least the major North American film festivals.

This person is probably Roger Ebert. But it is definitely not me. I have an additional handicap, aside from poverty and lack of influence, which is that essentially I despise ten best lists. They are an affliction on the body filmic that, sadly, most responsible reviewers happily indulge. For me a year-end ten best list is one of the four vexing issues that preoccupy way too many writers and about which I care only a very little indeed (the other three are the Oscars, the blacklist, and the history of censorship woes through 2005).

Some vestige of duty still summons me, however, so I do sit down annually to review the previous year's output. But since everyone does it better, from Chris Ryall, who keeps a media diary throughout the whole year to better serve his year end recap, to ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, my column becomes a variation on how much I hate lists while trying to come up with new ways to subvert them. And each year I bring up the same complains, as I did last year and will next year in an endless mirrored funhouse of links.

In this year's column, I'm going to ruminate haphazardly on some of the things I liked and loathed — that I can remember, that is — from the previous year in screen, DVD, and book form.

Let's start out with some bad movies. One of the very virtues of freelancing is the very thing that makes one a poor end-of-year recapper: you don't have to see everything. Consequently, I avoid subjects I already have antipathy toward, such as animated features (though I loved WALLACE AND GROMIT AND THE WERE-RABBIT), certain kinds of family comedies (those with Steve Martin or Dennis Quaid), religious four wallers, and other works that would most likely find their way onto a worst list. Of the films that I did see, the worst included THE RING 2 and THE INTERPRETER (two films that woefully misuse their talented stars), THE AMITYVILLE HORROR (the pinnacle of the trend toward reviving '70s horror, either in remakes or in imitation of the style), UNDEAD (an incoherent zombie film made more as an industry calling card), THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (the epitome of the dull, overblown geek pandering films), GEORGE ROMERO'S LAND OF THE DEAD (a film that may finally explode the myth of Romero's prestige as a director), THE FANTASTIC FOUR , (yet another film that didn't understand the source comic), YOU AND ME AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (a pretentious indie film striving studiously for smallness), DERAILED (the inauspicious debut from the new Weinstein company), and THE CONSTANT GARDENER (for screwing up with alienating faux documentary artiness one of the better John Le Carré books).

These are films that aspired to some level of prestige or innovation, but ended up betraying their stars, their genre, or the viewers. Though it can be fun, it's useless to "go after" a film like CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, because though it might be educational to see it or mock it, such a film aspires to nothing more than its commercial goals, and in any case, everybody knows its bad in advance, if not knowing why in particular.

But it is also dangerous to pre-judge. For example, a seemingly inconsequential film such as ICE PRINCESS proved, when I caught up with it on DVD, to be in fact quite a nice, complex, and surprisingly downbeat tweener film.

Another peculiarity of freelancing is that, where I live, films that might have made a 2005 list won't even get here until 2006, or else only on DVD. With that caveat, here are some of the best films I saw last year.

I can say without qualification that A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE was the best film I saw last year. It is both artistic and exciting, and contains terrific performances from the leads. But it's co-habitant at the top of the list is SIN CITY (now even better in a two disc DVD set that I'll review shortly), the pulp side of HISTORY's concerns with debt and violence. Also crowding around the top of the list are KING KONG , a great action film and better than the original and I don't care what you say, and STAR WARS, EPISODE THREE: REVENGE OF THE SITH, probably the most underrated $848 million dollar earner in the history of commercial cinema. There's also THE WAR OF THE WORLDS , part of Spielberg's continuing dialogue with himself over the state of America, and MR. AND MRS. SMITH , the best pure action film of the year. Plus there were two funny thrillers ICE HARVEST and KISS KISS BANG BANG , that invented a whole new genre: film glacé.

I would group together as the fourth best film of the year a quartet of political films: SYRIANA , PARADISE NOW, MUNICH , and GOOD LUCK, AND GOOD NIGHT. The first three are variations on a theme, with the much less well known PARADISE NOW giving a suicide bomber's side of the story, just as one of the four story threads of SYRIANA does. These are all good films, and good political films, but not quite great on their own; together, they make for greatness, and a great marathon viewing experience.

To every other lister the following films are probably just B films, but to me such films as ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 are just as worthy to be in a 10 best list as a Merchant - Ivory film. Part of me thinks that the 13 remake is better than the first one. MINDHUNTERS was much reviled, but I liked its '70s attitude, and HIGH TENSION had a twist that most people saw coming, but it did augur a new brutality in horror films that we are now seeing or about to see in WOLF CREEK and HOSTEL. I didn't review SAW II but loved it. THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN, which hit too close to home, was the film I laughed with the most, except for the first 20 minutes of THE WEDDING CRASHERS. As usual, I'm sure that I left out a film or two that I saw but didn't review, or saw later on DVD.

Part and parcel of a top ten film is excellent performances. Here I think of Viggo's gentle but tormented face, and in MUNICH the way Bana reacts when he hears his daughter's voice on the 'phone for the first time. Here are some more nice memories: the way Naomi Watts's voice cracks when she screams "No" at the bi-planes. And I was so taken with the way Evangeline Lilly giggles in LOST that I even made an MP3 of it .

I was also taken with the sudden appearance of Angelina Jolie as a dominatrix in MR AND MRS SMITH, the sudden appearance of Maria Bello in a cheerleader costume in A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, the sudden appearance of Rosario Dawson as a stripper in RENT, the sudden appearance of Connie Nielsen as Diana Rigg in DEMONLOVER, the sudden appearance of Christine Taylor in dominatrix garb on the DVD of DODGEBALL, the sudden appearance of Michelle Monaghan as Santa in KISS KISS BANG BANG, and the sudden appearance of Kristin Bell (Veronica Mars!) as a dominatrix in REEFER MADNESS.

In terms of best DVDs of the year it is always easy to turn to Criterion, especially for its Kurosawa films, its French New Wave films, and its Michael Powell releases, among many others, to which they added in 2005. However three new companies are doing fantastic work. NoShame specializes in Italian films, from Antonioni to Ercoli. Panik House specializes, so far, in Japanese B films and Pinks. Grind House just issued a definitive edition of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. And then there is always Blue Underground, which has started issuing '70s Australian art films, and Anchor Bay, which is doing more and more TV shows.

Criteria, so to speak, for evaluating a movie on DVD are expanded, for obvious reasons. Not only must the film be worthwhile, but the transfer has to be outstanding, and the supplements truly supplemental, worth watching on their own. For me, personally, the Hitchcock set from Universal (which I am reviewing in a couple of weeks) and its first season of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, coupled with the earlier Hitchcock package from Warner, and Paramount's LIFEBOAT, were the No. 1 acquisition for me in 2005. But here are some more DVDs I got a kick out of: DEMONLOVER, season four of THE SHIELD and season three of FOYLE'S WAR, L'ECLISSE and Visconti's WHITE NIGHTS, Lindsay Lohan in the revised THE PARENT TRAP, the musical version of REEFER MADNESS, Maddin's COWARDS BEND THE KNEE, the first seasons of LOST and DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, the second season of SCRUBS, the new three disc set of TITANIC, the mini-series and first season of BATTLESTAR GALLACTICA (I agree with TIME: it is the best show on TV), and all the rock documentaries: DIG!, METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER, and THE END OF THE CENTURY, and all the noirs from Fox, Universal, and Warner.

Over the year, I started reading more great books without finishing (yet) than I ended up reviewing, so I won't mention those yet (except for one: Linda Ruth Williams's THE EROTIC THRILLER IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA [Indiana University Press, 466 pages, ISBN 0 253 21836 5]; a blend of much needed history, criticism, and interviews, it is an essential addition to any film library). But among those I did complete were three on Stanley Kubrick, including THE STANLEY KUBRICK ARCHIVES, Matthew Modine's FULL METAL JACKET DIARY, and DREAMS AND SHADOWS, an anthology of Kubrick's LOOK photographs. I also very much enjoyed and learned a lot from the late Alexander Mackendrick's ON FILMMAKING, Robert Rodriguez's book on SIN CITY, and perhaps the best film books of the year, Joe Bob Brigg's PROFOUNDLY EROTIC, an excellent history of 10 key films, and Mark Le Fanu's MIZOGUCHI AND JAPAN, maybe the best critical prose I've read in years.

Media Notes From All Over

If someone were to ask me for a recommendation of a good book about how movies work and how Hollywood functions, I — being no expert myself, really — would first offer up Kristin Thompson's STORYTELLING IN THE NEW HOLLYWOOD. This is a book of endlessly enriching insight, matched by a "formula" for screenwriting that I've found both utterly reliable and equally applicable to TV shows, TV seasons, and even film reviews themselves. But next I'd tell the neophyte to pick up the three volumes of Patrick McGilligan's anthologies of screenwriter interviews each with the core title BACKSTORY.

The first, BACKSTORY: INTERVIEWS WITH SCREENWRITERS OF HOLLYWOOD'S GOLDEN AGE came out in 1986, and featured interviews with Charles Bennett, W. R. Burnett, Niven Busch, James M. Cain, Lenore Coffee, Philip Dunne, Julius J. Epstein, Francs Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Norman Krasna, John Lee Mahin (especially interesting because of his highly conservative and anti-Guild views which set him off from the rest of the book), Richard Maibaum, Casey Robinson, Allan Scott, and Donald Ogden Stewart. It offered fascinating insight into the early days of Hollywood. No. 2, from 1990 and called BACKSTORY 2: INTERVIEWS WITH SCREENWRITERS OF THE 1940S AND 1950S, covered subsequent decades and here the writers (Leigh Brackett, Richard Brooks, Comden and Green, Garson Kanin, Dorothy Kingsley, Arthur Laurents, Ben Maddow, Daniel Mainwaring, Walter Reisch, Curt Siodmak, Stewart Stern, Daniel Taradash, and Philip Yordan) had evolved to be both more articulate yet more bitter, and also more involved politically, especially with the Writers Guild (McGilligan also did a side-volume, TENDER COMRADES, on blacklisted writers). Brackett, Mainwaring, and Stern are among the standouts here (though I wish, for balance, the book had translated or reprinted Bertrand Tavernier's diatribe against Yordan and what he stood for). No. 3 was one I was really looking forward too. Called BACKSTORY 3: INTERVIEWS WITH SCREENWRITERS OF THE 60S, it featured Jay Presson Allen, George Axelrod, Walter Bernstein, Horton Foote, Walon Green, Charles B. Griffith, John Michael Hayes, Ring Lardner, Jr., Richard Matheson, Wendell Mayes, Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Arnold Schulman, Stirling Silliphant, and Terry Southern (with Allen, Green, Hayes, and Southern of special interest, and with Silliphant offering an insight into the career of a very successful mainstream script writer). The University of California Press published all volumes, though each new one has shrunk in length from the last one, presumably as McGilligan's biography writing career escalated.

Now we have BACKSTORY 4: INTERVIEWS WITH SCREENWRITERS OF THE 1970S AND 1980S (University of California Press, 424 pages, $24.95, ISBN 0 520 24518 0), and for someone like me who came of age during that time covered it is of even more interest than the previous edition. It also proves easy to review, as I read many of the interviews already when they first appeared in magazines such FILM COMMENT, FILM INTERNATIONAL, and PROJECTIONS. And McGilligan, though an adept interlocutor, only does five of the 13 interviews (Larry Cohen, Walter Hill, Elmore Leonard, Alvin Sargent, and Donald Westlake), leaving eight (Robert Benton, Blake Edwards, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Lawrence Kasdan, Paul Mazursky, Nancy Meyers, John Milius, Frederic Raphael) to others. Still, it's good to have these chats all in one place, and the book forms a fine (and final?) brick in the foundation of the BACKSTORY history of Hollywood (surely a fifth volume on the 1990s and '0s would include James Mangold, Tarantino, Akiva Goldsman, Christopher McQuarrie, the Sprechers, Whit Stillman, the Coens, Callie Khouri, Cameron Crowe, Paul Attanasio, Richard LaGravanese, Woody Allen, Billy Bob Thornton, Paul Thomas Anderson, Bill Condon, Frank Darabont, Alexander Payne, M. Night Shyamalan, Susannah Grant, Brian Helgeland, Stephen Gaghan, Fran Walsh, Charlie Kaufman, Mike Rich, and Sofia Coppola, to name just a few).

Some of these interviews are priceless. Take Nat Segaloff's colloquy with John Milius. Like his famous interview in FILM COMMENT in 1976 with Richard Thompson, it's hilarious. Segaloff, it turns out, is an old radical, and so couldn't be more different than the conservative, militaristic, gun-toting Milius, but they get along famously. Segaloff notes of Milius that he is capable of talking about something besides himself, unusual in Hollywood, and that "when he intones, 'You know, it's interesting …,' invariably it is." Milius tells many an amusing story: about almost killing John Huston while on a quail hunt; of how he wrote the JAWS speech; and of meeting John Ford and John Wayne. His observations, on directing and how high school hierarchies have now become the norm ("I couldn't wait to get out of high school, when real life would begin. Now, I find myself, at age 56, living in a world that has become very much like the world that I was in when I was 16 and in high school. Our whole world, or whole culture, is like a giant high school dance. Especially Hollywood."), are fascinating.

God, I love this guy and his movies. I wish he would like me and be my friend, despite the fact that, as with Hawks and others, we are as opposite politically as can be (I doubt if he has as any use for my political avatar, Gore Vidal, as I'd have for his, whomever that might be — the interview steers away from explicitly political discussion). Segaloff at one point quotes Milius telling him darkly, "We have more in common than you like to think, and it bugs the shit out of you," and I'm guessing that that would be true of Milius and of many of the Hollywood people who routinely dismiss or marginalize him. Viewed without prejudice his presumably Redbaiting films such as RED DAWN and FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER are in fact somber, elegiac, and just as critical of American and some aspects of militarism as an Oliver Stone film.

The other great interviews in the book are with Walter Hill, Lawrence Kasdan, who says that STAR WARS is really a metaphor for Hollywood (page 170) and also offers insight into how to direct, and Larry Cohen, the Samuel Fuller of the '70s and '80s, whose rambunctious views make you love him, too, all over again.

John Huston is a running "theme" of the book. He lasted so long that almost everyone who got their start in this book's decades worked with him and has a funny story to tell. In fact, Hill tells a story that links up with Milius, noting that "Huston loved to argue. I remember once how I made a passing complimentary reference to APOCALYPSE NOW, and Huston did 30 minutes on what crap the movie was — wouldn't hear a word in favor of it (page 111)." Hill, fascinating in his own right, has terrific stories to tell and critical observations to make about THE GETAWAY, THE MACINTOSH MAN, ALIEN, 48 HRS., and others, as well as colleagues and mentors, especially Peckinpah. He makes an astute critical judgment of Peckinpah's work that might not occur to wide-eyed acolytes: "Peckinpah was a good writer, but he only had one voice. … He was good at structure and good at finding the ironic moment. On dialogue, it's a little harder to be completely generous. He was good at finding short catchphrases for characters that described their inner workings, but I always thought he was way too explicit in having characters baldly state thematic ideas."

But for a book so long in gestation it is more uneven than one might prefer. Not all the interviews are top notch and some aren't detailed enough for what are for the most part retrospective musings. Take someone who should be a good interview subject, Elmore Leonard. You'd think he'd be funny, but he comes across in this text as simply sour. He doesn't like Hollywood or most of its people and judges them harshly because mostly what they do is deviate from his novels and ruin them. His anecdotes tend to cast himself in a triumphant light, but in the reading they make him sound like a crabby, egotistical, difficult man. It's hard to reconcile this Crabby Appleton with someone who is otherwise so successful at observing human nature with an amused eye. Leonard does get off one brilliant aperçu, however: "When you go to Hollywood, they want you to make a Hollywood movie, and that's the problem." Another disappointment is that most of the interviews end in the mid-1990s (suggesting that this book is a tad late in its production history). One result is that we don't hear Leonard on BE COOL, either book or movie, or Kasdan on anything after WYATT EARP. In a perhaps compensatory function, an extensive section called "Bibliographic Notes" at the back offers up-to-date interviews with the subjects that the interested reader can use to get caught up. And some of the interviews are just plain lousy. Nancy Meyers is perfunctory, irritable, contrary, and willfully dense. Jhabvala is rather tightlipped, and the Blake Edwards is way too short (he should probably merit a book length interview at this point in his career).

But even the "bad" interviews are not without their insightful asides, and McGilligan must be commended for sticking to the project despite numerous distractions. Tout BACKSTORY is impressive, important, and, most important, eminently readable.

And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.

Not only that, I've got a new book out on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!

And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, January 11, at 9 AM, with the critics' ten best lists.

COMING SOON:A package of Hithchcock movies and TV shows, FLIGHTPLAN and REDEYE, DEAD AND BREAKFAST, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, the third annual DVD Tray of Horror, and more!

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