Comedies have, for the most part, really been on fire this year. While Hot Fuzz and Superbad still tower over the rest of the pack (I’m eagerly hoping for a great latecomer to give us a full trifecta), there have been a number of good films in a genre that has recently averaged only one or two worthwhile efforts a year. While Hot Rod isn’t at the top of the list, it is a worthwhile effort and does a good job of evoking the feel of the comedies of the 80s. For a movie that's apparently spun off of SNL (which would make it the best one since at least Wayne's World), this is doubly surprising and good.
Like those older comedies, this is a fairly lighthearted, whimsical effort, that manages to give us a lot of good slapstick humor without devolving into gross-out jokes. It stars Andy Samberg as a 20-something would-be stuntman who’s trying to raise 50 grand to pay for a heart transplant for his stepfather so that he can recover enough for Andy to prove his manhood by beating him in a fight. Along the way, he puts his body through an impressive amount of abuse, smashing into ramps, falling into pools, getting set on fire, and careening through the air with alarming frequency.
There’s a good deal to enjoy about the film, particularly in the form of a supporting role by Will Arnett as a romantic rival for Andy’s childhood crush. He is delightfully assholish throughout the film, and his closing scene makes me laugh a good deal more than it probably should. I still wish Arrested Development were back on the air, but if its absence allows us work like this, then I guess I can make do.
This movie may not be about to win an award, or even be the best comedy you could check out right now, but it’s fun and silly and fairly clever. Considering every last audience poll I’ve seen has said that the vast majority of people go to movies to laugh, this should do the trick for most of you out there. Go check it out.
Rating: ***
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Hot Rod
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan
So at long last, here’s the finale to the box set. While this wasn’t the final film to star Jason, it was the last Friday the 13th film, as in a rather convoluted agreement, Paramount sold the rights to the Jason character to New Line, but did not sell them the rights to the Friday the 13th title, requiring New Line to title them Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X. I’m not entirely certain I want to see Jason Goes to Hell again anyway; if memory serves me right, and it quite possibly doesn’t, it was one of the worst in the entire series, and featured Jason getting shot to little bits at the start by the army, only for the coroner to randomly eat his heart and become possessed by him, and then my brain shut down. This one’s better.
The film opens with some establishing shots of Manhattan at night, while an unseen figure who I guess is a radio deejay or somesuch goes on about how great this town is. As odes to the Big Apple go, it doesn’t exactly match up with, say, Woody Allen, but I guess it’ll serve. From there, we go back to Crystal Lake, as a passing boat occupied by sex-crazed teens accidentally frees Jason once more from his watery prison, and after dispatching them he hitches a ride on a larger cruise ship that somehow passes through Crystal Lake. The new ship is for a graduating class of roughly a dozen high schoolers and their chaperones on their way to doesn’t matter, providing him with a moderate amount of victims to ply his trade on. Obviously, after fleeing him on a lifeboat, the last few survivors make their way to Manhattan, closely followed by him, who evidently swam after them, where they have their final showdown.
Just a man about town, surveying all that he rules.
There’s a lot to like about this film. There’s the wonderful open laughing at continuity, as Jason’s mask is mysteriously repaired after being ripped to bits in the last film, or the big revelation that his entire childhood between his initial drowning and when his mom got killed in the first film was spent living in the lake itself, or how, once in Manhattan, his bloodlust is pretty much totally confined to the people on the boat and those who are in his path to them, rather than just going after everyone. There’s the fact that, for the first time in the entire series, a black guy (ignoring the child in part 5) manages to make it almost to the end of the film, before he makes an ill-advised decision to take the fight to Jason and engage him in a boxing match. There’s even the strange dichotomy between the big lovefest for Manhattan at the film’s start, and the shocking revelation at the end that its sewer system gets flushed with toxic waste every night at midnight.
Further, there are no fewer than three grand series traditions carried on here, in the proper Friday style. One is how the heroine is pretty much completely insane, continuing a tradition that has appeared in every film from part 5 to here (at one point she even causes a car accident because she hallucinates a young Jason in front of her, and in doing so kills one of the chaperones, who barely gets a mention afterwards). There’s the anti-helpful authority figure in the form of the principal, continuing a tradition that goes back to part 6, and who meets a particularly nasty end when he’s dumped in one of those barrels of ooze that New York always has lying around (Strangely, it only killed him rather than turning him into a mutant ninja. Oh well). Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, Teleporting Jason just goes completely into overdrive here. Someone runs directly away from Jason into a building, only to find Jason already waiting for him on an upper floor. Jason drags a cop off to the side into a shadow, only to instantly be directly in front of the cop car for no reason other than so that he can be run over. Best of all, at one point a girl gets trapped in a room with him, and while looking around for an exit, she looks right, to see him there, quickly turns left, to find him already there, then looks back right to see him there again. The man’s like Jamie Madrox, he’s got doubles everywhere.
This is obviously not great art, but Paramount certainly knew how to end their run on the series with a bang. It’s not the best film in the series, but it is one of the most fun. You should check it, and this box set as a whole, out.
Rating: ***
Friday, December 7, 2007
Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood
I meant what I said when I yesterday mentioned how the added supernatural element of part 6 was when the series really went flying off the rails, and that is totally born out with this film. Here, we not only get a Zombie Jason, but we have him going face to face with a girl with the Powers of Telekinesis. It’s every bit as good as it sounds.
This one is a bit renowned as being more heavily mangled by censors than any other film in the series, to the point where some of the deaths are rather hard to figure out. Despite this, there’s still a pretty decent amount of blood to be had, with Jason grabbing pretty much every sharp object short of a katana to take everyone out. At one point, in possibly my favorite part of the entire film, he kills one half of a couple with a spear, then leaves the guy alone so he can feel safe, but oh no – Jason actually just left so he could upgrade his weapon like in a video game and kill him more satisfyingly. It’s that level of dedication to his craft that places Jason a notch above your standard 9-to-5er slasher.
Besides Jason, there are two characters that really warrant mention, and that is Telekinesis Girl and her lovable shrink. Telekinesis Girl, also known as Tina, spends the movie being haunted by her memories of using her powers to murder her abusive father at their cabin on Crystal Lake back when she was a child, and after freeing Jason from the lake at the start, thinking he might be her dad, she spends her time doing a terrible job of looking shocked, and screaming a lot. Despite herself, she actually does do a passable job at holding her own against Jason, due I’m going to guess that due to the low budget nature of the film, her powers weren’t able to be used in any really interesting ways. Instead we get her swinging hanging lamps at his head, and dramatically slamming a door shut and shoving a table in front of it. She’s so hardcore.
Dr. Crews is just a delight every time he’s on screen, however. Played by Terry Kiser, he has taken her to her childhood cabin to allegedly attempt some sort of immersion therapy with her so she can get her stress-based powers under control. Of course, as she suspects, he’s not interested in curing her so much as getting her powers to become more active, and has a further agenda that somehow involves Jason, though exactly what that agenda is and how he was planning on freeing Jason and then sticking around in the area without dying is left unsaid. He’s also just one of the greatest creeps in movies; at one point he’s out in the woods arguing with Tina’s mother, who’s finally realized he may not have her daughter’s best interests at heart, and Jason shows up. As anyone with a strong sense of self-preservation would do, he simply grabs her and uses her as a human shield so that Jason can use up his bloodlust on her so he can be spared. Frankly, I admire his ability to think outside the box like that. If only the other characters had been as interesting as him, this movie would have been one of the best in the series.
Rating: * ½
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives
While most people though the previous film in the series was where the series jumped the shark, what with its Jason copycat (evidently forgetting that the first film also didn’t have Jason as the killer), I would maintain that this is where the series really flew off the rails. Further, I would argue that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the added goofiness the series gained here certainly gave it an off-kilter boost deep into the series.
The finale of the Tommy Trilogy (who is now played by Thom Mathews, after John Shepherd apparently became a born again), this is the movie that introduces the supernatural to the Friday the 13th universe by having Tommy accidentally resurrect Jason in the opening scene, giving us our first ever Zombie Jason. Apparently it’s not much fun being a decaying corpse, as he just goes on a full-blown rampage here, killing no less than 18 people here and basically wiping out half the damn town. It’s wonderful. He’s all “Rarrrh, you want some of this? Take this broken bottle to the chest, Groundskeeper! Yeah! Oh, you think you’re gonna make it out on your motorcycle? I think not! Take this pole through the chest for your efforts, bitch! Oh, trying to escape in your clumsy RV, eh? Well, why don’t I just shove one of your dumb asses through a goddamned wall and then cut the throat of the other? Yeah, that sounds right! Hey, Mr. Big and Bad Sheriff, you want some a dis? Oh, I don’t think you do! How’s about I just fold you up like an origami crane, how you like that? I’m on a rampage!”
Need a HAND, anyone? Yeah!
While Mathews isn’t as entertaining as Tommy as Shepherd or Feldman were, he still gets the job done, and we’re also treated to a perfectly over the top disbelieving police force headed by a Donald Sutherland lookalike, and – perhaps best of all – we finally get a camp full of children, unlike his previous rampages. They take the presence of an unstoppable killer in better stride than the counselors do, which I guess is understandable since the counselors are the ones that he’s mainly targeting. One of the boys even gets the best line in the movie, while they’re all hiding under their beds listening to their great protective counselor screaming for her daddy to come and save them: “So, what were you going to be when you grew up?”
This one gets my vote for being the single best one in the entire series (discounting, of course, Freddy vs. Jason), both for all of the above, and for the brilliantly stupid plan Tommy develops to stop Jason once and for all. Not the digging up his corpse and burning it part where he accidentally resurrects him, oh no. I won’t reveal how he tries to take Jason down completely, but I will say that the fact that it somehow works is pretty incidental to just how atrocious an idea it was. It’s a wonderfully over-the-top stupid idea that provides a great capper to the film, and to Tommy’s overall legacy in general. If you have any interest in slasher movies, you need to check this one out.
Rating: *** ½
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning
This probably ranks as the single most hated film in the entire series, as the killer turns out to not actually be Jason, but just a copycat (this is similar to the mass hatred of Halloween 3 for not having Michael Myers in it, regardless of how it’s still one of the best in the series). The people who have a blind hatred for this film based on that (and there are a great many of them out there) are fools.
This is, of course, the second film in the Tommy Trilogy, and Corey Feldman, aside from an opening scene in a dream sequence, has been replaced by an adult version played by John Shepherd. Surprisingly enough, after a childhood spent chopping a deranged killer to little bits, he’s now a rather emotionally troubled adult, and the film opens (after the dream and credits) with him getting shipped off to a home for disturbed teens. This gives us the sheer joy that is the Mentally Disturbed Hero, as he just goes completely bucknutty on a couple people, giving them some just delightful beatdowns just to keep everyone in line. This film is also notable for having the single most gorgeous women in the entire series, and if there’s only a couple really memorable kills in it, there’s still a lot more nudity than any of the other films, and I must say it’s very appreciated.
I will say, in defense of the haters of this movie, that the film’s big flaw does come in the form of the killer’s poor motivation. Just to spoil it for you here, he turns out to be a paramedic who gets called to the Home for the Criminally Insane Tommy is at after an incredibly annoying fat kid there gets murdered by another resident, only to find that the fat kid that got killed was his own son *Da-DUUN*. Naturally this sends him on a murderous rampage, and naturally he would decide to dress himself like the town’s most famous slasher to deflect suspicion away from himself, but I really must question his choice in victims. I can accept that he would blame the halfway house or whatever the hell it’s supposed to be for killing his boy and would target them, even if the one who actually killed his kid was arrested right there in front of him and is never seen again. What I cannot accept is how he kills like half a dozen other people that have no connection to the place, and for the most part only show up to accomodatingly die (and in one case get obligingly topless before accomodatingly dying). It just seems random, really.
By the way, for those following along to this box set with me, pay attention to the comment by the police chief about how Jason’s body was cremated after his death, and see how well that jibes with his corpse appearing in a grave in the next film. Continuity is for fools, I say.
Rating: ***
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter
Fans tend to be very divided about this film. Obviously part of that has to do with how it’s billed as “The Final Chapter”, and was initially intended to be the last Friday the 13th film, and then the profitability of the series enticed them to make seven more films and counting. Mainly, though, there’s a bit of an argument between those fans who feel that this was the last really good Friday the 13th, and those people like me who believe it’s actually the first really good Friday movie. One thing that is generally accepted by everyone is that it’s one of the best in the series.
I’m not completely sure why this one is so much better than the first three, but I can formulate some guesses. For one, despite the presence of Kevin Bacon in the original, this one really goes for broke on the star power, giving us none other than a young Corey Feldman as Tommy, who would later go on (with two other actors playing him) to be the star character of the next two films. Another key to this one’s success is in how it manages to neatly sidestep the problem of how the victims are invariably annoying idiotic teens by giving us two groups of people, the idiotic teens and a family that’s actually rather pleasant who lives near them that we can actually root for. Continuing with the last movie (just like the third film did, this one starts the same day the last film ended – I’m stunned people didn’t flee this town in droves), this one also ratchets up the violent and the sexual content, which is always appreciated with films like these.
Perhaps most important of all though, is that we finally get ridiculous Teleporting Jason, as he goes and kills someone in the kitchen, then is suddenly on the roof to kill someone from her window, and then its instantly back to the kitchen to grab a blade. There was absolutely no reason for him to go to the roof right then, but I certainly respect his decision to be the hardest working man in shlasherness. It may not quite reach the level of later movies in the series, but Teleporting Jason is aces in my book.
One final note on the ending; this may very well be the greatest ending in the entire series, with Tommy going completely insane and taking the fight right to Jason. I always have a fondness for the hero acting like a complete psychopath when he needs to be, so God bless ‘em for that.
Rating: ***
Monday, December 3, 2007
Friday the 13th Part 3
This film opens by helpfully reshowing us the campfire recap of the first film from the second film, just to help us all out in case we can’t follow such a difficult plot. I thank them for that, because I find I just can’t get enough explanations of what is going on in a slasher movie. Really, how else are we going to figure out that the guy in the mask wielding the machete is the villain?
Anyway, this film follows the bad luck of the town next to Crystal Lake, as it starts the same evening the second film ended, with Jason on the loose and raring to kill some more people, just as a new group of teens arrives to vacation at an old cabin while cheerfully ignoring all the news reports about the deranged killer roaming the area. Unlike the first two films, there was a serious effort made to make this film stand out, as (to the best of my knowledge) it is to date the only slasher film made in 3-D. Of course, the DVD doesn’t come with the 3-D technology, so we just get a normal film, but with the occasional randomness like the opening credits jumping forward, Jason firing a harpoon at the cameraman, etc. It’s that little added effort to please that pushes this one a little above the first two films.
One thing that’s interesting about the first few movies, despite my previously stating that I didn’t think they were as good as later ones (my favorites, specifically, were the “Tommy Trilogy”, or parts 4-6), is that we’re still dealing with a fully mortal killer. Sure, Jason can take a goddamn machete to the shoulder and get back up, but he gets hurt pretty badly, and can at least be knocked out by the axe to the face he takes here. Also of note, the violence has been ratcheted up considerably from the first two films (though this may be a result of relaxed censorship from the MPAA – the Friday series was notorious for having to heavily cut its violent content, and to date there has yet to be an uncensored DVD set to watch), which helps a lot with a genre like this. ‘Course, that doesn’t quite take it into “good” territory, as it has a slooooow beginning, a retarded ending that’s almost a parody of the ending from the first film, and an incredibly awful nerd character that you just wish could die in his first scene. Still, Jason does get his trademark hockey mask from the guy, so I guess he’s not all bad.
Rating: * ½
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Friday the 13th Part 2
A good many fans of this series point to the original three or four as being the pinnacle of the series. As one may have guessed from yesterday’s review of the first film, I am not one of those people. This one continues in that vein, as it may well be my least favorite film in the entire series (in fairness, I don’t really remember part 3 or Jason Goes to Hell very well, so either of them could easily take the crown). There are a couple good moments to this film, but they’re trapped within an incredibly tedious mess.
I’ll start with the beginning of the film. As much as I loved the grand Friday the 13th tradition of the killer flinging the corpses of past victims at the end survivors, this film indulges in another horror sequel tradition that I hate with an equal amount of passion. To wit, it beings with the lone survivor of the previous film for no reason other than to kill her off ten minutes into the movie. It just raises my “fair play” hackles when someone actually manages to eke out a win against the monster, only to be casually killed off to give us a “shocking” opening scene for the sequel. The most recent example I can think of with this was with Hostel 2, which I also hated. It’s just bad sportsmanship, really.
It’s also incredibly unnecessary, and makes a later, somewhat better done, scene completely redundant and useless. The film opens with her having a nightmare that flashes back to the first film, basically giving us a quick run-through of the entire plot and “shocking” twist, just in case there was someone going to see this who hadn’t seen the first film. Then when the camp counselors all get together in preparation for another grand camp opening, they all gather round the campfire at night as the head counselor repeats the entire story to them. I guess this was for people who missed the first film and who were also stuck at the concession stand for the first ten minutes of the film. I was a little hopeful that someone else would try to recap the first film at the end, just to accommodate people who hadn’t seen the first film and who also have really weak bladders that caused them to miss the first two recaps, but it never happened.
All that said, though, there were two moments that I love in this, and I’m going to spoil them for you here so that you don’t have to waste your time seeing this. The first comes about halfway through the film, as a schmuck in a wheelchair takes a machete to the head and then, because that’s clearly not enough on its own, takes a tumble down a flight of stairs, still in the wheelchair. Brilliant, I say. The other comes near the end, as the last remaining woman runs from Jason (who, prior to his claiming of the hockey mask, hides his hideous face here by tying a sack around his head with some rope) and hides under a bed. She can see his feet as he searches the room for her, but then steps away and she doesn’t see or hear anything from him for a while. Of course she assumes the coast to be clear, and crawls out from under the bed, only to find he had just been standing on a chair waiting for her to come out so he can stab at her with his trusty pitchfork. He’s a good egg like that.
Outside of that, though, this film really is the pits. While they were surprisingly popular, these early efforts in the series really had little to distinguish themselves from literally hundreds of similar slasher efforts being churned out in the early 80s. You probably don’t want to hunt this one down.
Rating: ½ *
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Friday the 13th
One nice thing about horror movies is that they seem to operate by a completely different set of rules than every other genre of film. For instance, while in most genres, a sequel is almost guaranteed to be inferior to the original work, here in the world of horror the reverse is true as often as not. While this isn’t always the case (as series like Pumpkinhead and Critters can show), it is certainly true with a great many of the more famous series, such as this one.
The plot shouldn’t need to really be recapped, but here’s a quick one sentence synopsis: a summer camp with a troubled history plans to re-open under a new management, but an unseen killer stalks all the counselors. There you go. I don’t know whether or not to approach this film as a product of its times, or if I should be judging it based on today’s standards. Either way, though, it’s pretty sub-par. The plot is basically just a body count-style horror movie revolutionized by Mario Bava, without managing to muster up the tension of previous slasher films like Halloween (its direct predecessor) or Black Christmas (Halloween’s direct predecessor). By today’s standards it’s extremely tame; there’s very little blood, and despite a game of strip Monopoly being played by several of the counselors, there’s pretty much zero nudity. As a film, it just doesn’t work. It also rather clumsily tries to emulate the style of Black Christmas or an early Argento giallo by showing most of the murders from the killer’s perspective, so that we can be appropriately shocked when the killer is finally revealed. This also doesn’t work.
Now, what does work? Well, the score by Harry Manfredini is much better than the film deserves, and goes a long way toward making the movie okay to watch. Additionally, you get an early performance by Kevin Bacon, in only (so far as I know) his second speaking role after Animal House, so if you’re like me and have a vested interest in seeing famous actors getting their start in no-budget horror movies, then this ranks right up there with Johnny Depp’s film debut in A Nightmare on Elm Street (though Bacon’s death scene isn’t nearly as impressive). Finally, this film begins one of my favorite horror traditions: after the cast has been whittled down to one or two terrified survivors, the killer then begins heaving the corpses of the earlier victims through the windows at them. It’s a grand Friday the 13th tradition that was sadly not used in Jason X, but given that there weren’t really any proper windows in the spaceship for him to heave corpses in from, I guess it’s understandable. It’s interesting to see how fun several of the sequels were, considering how weak the original is, but that’s how horror movies work, you know.
Rating: *
Friday, November 30, 2007
Rescue Dawn
What a harrowing, draining film this was. Werner Herzog is one of my favorite directors, and is perfectly suited to this, the story of Dieter Dengler, an American pilot shot down in Laos back when the Vietnam war was still being called a confrontation, and who escaped a P.O.W. camp and a treacherous jungle to make his way back home. Indeed, Herzog is so perfectly attuned to this story that this is the second time he’s filmed it; a decade ago, he made Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a documentary featuring Dengler himself telling his story.
I didn’t see that film, but this filmic retelling, with Christian Bale as Dengler, has a great deal of power to it. I have this listed as a war film, but there’s virtually no combat to be had in this; rather there’s virtually no soldier-versus-soldier combat to be had, instead giving us people on both sides of the conflict just being relentlessly beaten down by the environment around them, and by time itself. As soon as Dengler arrives at the camp, he starts talking with his fellow inmates about plans of escape, before being told he would have to wait until the rainy season for any chance of survival, which is five to six months away. Half the film is spent with the cast slowly wasting away at the camp, with food so scarce that even the guards are hungry enough to begin considering executing all the prisoners and claiming they tried to escape, just so they could go home and try to find food there. Bale is no stranger to weight loss for a movie role, as his 63 pound loss for his horrifying role in The Machinist holds the known record for weight loss by any actor for a role. It was interesting to see Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies as fellow inmates, though, both of which had been there months before his arrival and who are basically broken-down husks more than people. Davies in particular looks barely there, as his shirtless physique resembles a concentration camp survivor more than anything else.
Eventually, of course, they make their escape, and Bale and Zahn strike off together in search of rescue. As was predicted by Zahn, this is every bit as perilous as the camp itself was. If there is a constant theme in Herzog’s work, it is that nature is an all-powerful, chaotic beast that is fully capable of destroying us if we are not constantly on our guard, and that theme is fully on display in the jungles of Laos. They are continually beset by the likes of mudslides, leeches, patrols, and the ever-present curse of starvation, which wears them down so much that they eventually make the foolhardy mistake of exposing themselves to a villager in the hopes that he will let them have some food. The ending is obviously not very much in doubt, since Dieter’s story would never have been known if he didn’t make it back (indeed, Little Dieter Needs to Fly would have been particularly hard to make), but the journey he takes along the way is just brutal and agonizing.
Rating: *** ½
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Begotten
This is one of the fabled horror films that is pretty much impossible to acquire (unless you’re willing to drop a hundred bucks ordering a used copy from someone on Amazon). If you go to horror discussion groups like I do because I have no life you’ll occasionally see someone speaking about it in hushed, awed tones, like they got one step closer to something divine by the sheer virtue of having watched it. Now that I’ve finally acquired a copy of my very own through questionable means, I’m beginning to understand how they all felt.
There really is no other movie like this one. It’s essentially a filmed nightmare; there are no spoken words, and only a plot in the vaguest terms. What we get instead are a series of haunting images, opening with God disemboweling himself, releasing the Earth Mother from within him (none of this is explained within the film, mind you, I had to wait for the end credits to find out who these people represented), who then impregnates herself with him and gives birth to Son of Earth, both of whom wander a barren landscape until being attacked and destroyed by an unnamed group of people.
Just listed like that it sounds like an incredibly pretentious play that would likely have a total audience of five multi-lingual snobs with bad facial hair, but it is absolutely saved by the amazing visual and audio style. You know how every good horror movie has those shots within them that are just perfectly evocative of pure dread? Shots of blood dripping down a leg, or a group of cloaked people walking against the moonlight, stuff that is pure horror, and looks wonderful. This film, essentially, is a collection of those shots without any worrying about the plot getting in the way. The film is in black and white, with an overexposed negative, a grainy look, and numerous scratches to almost give it the look of a long-lost silent film print that someone just discovered in their garage. The sound is also incredible; with no spoken dialogue or music, it instead relies entirely upon sound effects, like running water or dripping blood or insects buzzing by, to give an aural feel equivalent to the visuals.
That said, the film does have a pretty big flaw, and that is its length. It’s a good deal shorter than an average movie (IMDB lists it at 78 minutes, though my copy was only 72), but it drags out too much towards the end. It would have been a masterpiece at thirty minutes; at 70+ it’s only good. Still, anyone who wants a visual representation of how to push the limits of what a no-budget film can do should definitely check this film out. Just good luck finding it.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Sawdust & Tinsel
If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from years of watching Bergman films, it’s that I never want to go to Sweden. You hear interest groups complain all the time about the poor treatment Arabs or blacks get in the cinema, but you never hear anyone talk about the decades of negative portrayals the Swedes have gotten at the hands of their resident pessimist Ingmar. All that I know of Swedish people is from these movies, and they are all filled with miserable, negative people that go around actively engaged in the pursuit of making themselves and everyone around them more miserable. That level of psychic damage can irreparably harm a nation, and if you don’t believe me, just ask the Germans what the psychic trauma of knowing they were the bad guys in two successive world wars did to their appreciation of pornography.
While Bergman had made some decent movies before this, it was here, with his (appropriately enough) thirteenth film, where he really came into his own. His familiar themes of depression and humiliation come to the fore here, as he follows a circus troupe that seems to be on its last legs as it arrives at a new town in search of the money it desperately needs to continue. Along their way, they find adversity in the form of pretty much everyone they encounter, up to and including each other. The ringleader of the show, Albert, and his wife Anne make up the main part of the film, as the two are constantly fighting for one-upsmanship in their relationship, which I think you’ll agree is always the sign of a happy couple.
The best, and certainly most easily quotable, example of their humiliation comes when Albert and his wife visit the town’s lecherous theater director hoping to borrow some of his costumes for their show that night. The director openly despises them for being the bottom rung of the entertainer ladder, and has no problem telling them so, in a searing speech in which he explains that he insults them because they let him, and that “you only risk your lives. We risk our pride,” before letting them go. This may all seem a tad harsh, but when you see how abysmal their show actually is, you’ll begin to understand.
I can’t honestly say this ranks up there with Bergman’s best works. It lacks the gravitas of such masterpieces as The Seventh Seal or Persona, as its main insight into the human condition is that we’re all a bunch of creeps, wading through the miasma of pain that is life. Frankly, I could have gotten that from almost every other film of his. For what it is, though, it is very good. This film will only appeal to a pretty select group of people, and if you’ve read this far, you probably already know if you’re part of that select group.
Rating: ***
