Black Bag

 Apparently, Great Britain is infested with top-secret, amoral, nihilistic secret service agencies for whom the end always justifies the means.  In The Lazarus Project, time-traveling agents re-set the world clock every time there is a nuclear holocaust or armaggedon,  Lazarus Project operatives are globe-trotters always in hot pursuit of purloined nuclear weapons.  The Lazarus Project is a cleverly written TV series produced in London; Black Bag, which has a similar premise, is a spy movie also set in the UK.  In Black Bag, the agents are engaged in murder and mayhem to stop a Ukrainian terrorist from planting something called "Severus" in a nuclear power plant.  Severus will bore through the shell of the reactor to set off a cataclysmic chain-reaction, predicted to end the war between Russian and Ukraine but at the cost of 20,000 civilian casualties.  (Severus is a pure example of what Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin" it's the object of intense efforts but nothing more than a plot device with no significance in itself.)  In both The Lazarus Project and Black Bag, the agents who are attractive young men and women have no real outlet for their super-confidential secrets and confessions and all suffer guilt at their misdeeds -- therefore, the characters solace themselves by having incestuous in-house love-affairs.  After all, there is no one else with whom they can share the violence and tragedy of their existences.  

Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh) begins with an elaborate and wholly pointless Steadi-cam shot following the hero, George, a stiff fellow with black hornrimmed glasses, into a club after passing through a labyrinth of corridors to encounter a fellow operative who tells him that there is a mole in the group of agents charged with neutralizing Severus.  George is supposed to ferret out the traitor, a problematic task because his own wife, Katherine, (also a spy) may well be the double-agent.  George stages a dinner party for the members of the Severus team and laces the chana masala with truth serum.  This leads to a noisy, and recriminatory, gathering that plays like something from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  The couples commence bickering, sexual infidelities are disclosed and ferocious insults exchanged.  George orders the participants to play a game in which they have to announce a resolution, not for themselves but for the person seated to their right.  This leads to more vicious fighting among the various couples until Clarissa, the tech who is expert in surveillance satellites, pins her boyfriend Freddie's hand to the table with a butcher knife.  (Not to worry -- he forgives her.)  An elaborately complex plot follows in which various clues are collected, all of which lead George to the reasonable suspicion that his wife is the Judas.  In this world, when anyone asks a question that is inconvenient to answer, they simply respond with the evasion:  "It's in the black bag."  George, who loves his wife, is met with her denials but, also, the "black bag" evasion.  A satellite is used to gather high-tech evidence and there's an extended scene involving a polygraph test that is confounded by Clarissa "clenching her anal sphincter" -- I have no idea whether this would work, although I assume the screenwriter, the  redoubtable David Koepp, has researched this issue.  (Koepp is a very famous Hollywood writer -- the Jurassic Park films are his scripts as are a number of other Spielberg projects including some of the Indiana Jones pictures.)   After many twists and turns, some aerial bombardment accomplished by a drone in a showy sequence, and several more revelations of sexual misbehavior, George and Katherine order their team to another dinner party, a reprise of the first horror-show in which the identity of the culprit is finally revealed.  Since all evidence points to Katherine, the viewer can be pretty much assured that she is not the mole.  

This is a well-made movie that is always exciting.  The acting is good:  Michael Fassbender plays the mild-mannered George -- he looks like a surrogate for Soderbergh himself.  Cate Blanchett is good as Katherine, a sort of femme fatale.  Much of the script is written in intentionally unintelligible jargon.  This is a  phenomenon that I call the Succession effect.  In the HBO series, Succession many scenes were composed in a rebarbative, nightmare lingo that is spoken so swiftly and confidently that the audience doesn't have time to figure what is actually being said -- you can generally get the tone of the remarks but not their precise meaning.  This is how Koepp has written the script for Black Bag -- people says stuff like "The Sat handover is 3 minutes and 20 seconds just long enough to gather several sigs."  Big chunks of the movie have that tone which the viewer has to interpret as hyper-technical spy-speak for high tech data gathering.  The use of this sort of impenetrable jargon was annoying in Succesion and it's no less annoying (if better justified) here.  The movie is fairly civilized, with intelligent nasty dialogue in the Albee manner, and I thought it was entertaining.  But there's not a lot of there there. 

The Witches of Eastwick

 George Miller's The Witches of Eastwick (1987) is a lavishly produced, operatic comedy starring Jack Nicholson in a menage a quatre with three women played by Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon.  The actresses are not ingenues but exhibited in this picture at the very height of their mature beauty.  The camera wielded by Vilmos Szigmond loves them almost as much, or, even, more, than their devilish gentleman-caller played by Nicholson.  They are filmed with supernatural radiance infusing their tangled locks of hair, posed like pre-Raphaelite Madonnas or Tuscan angels -- sexual love, it seems, makes them shine like icons in candle-lit niches.  Although deeply erotic, the film never really sexualizes its leading ladies -- there is no nudity and they are always dressed, more or less, in a lady-like if glamorous way.  Eros, in this film, is palpable but, also, somewhat abstract, almost Platonic in its manifestation.  At times, the film veers unsteadily into horror but Miller is so accomplished that he manages to juggle the ghastly with the romantic and comical in a way that doesn't rupture the tone of bemused adoration directed at women in the cast -- they are goddesses and not to be besmirched.  (I can understand this film better having seen Miller's most recent, highly feminist-inflected, iterations of the Mad Max movies -- the heroines of The Witches of Eastwick are earlier versions of the indomitable women warriors that we find portrayed in the post-apocalyptic road warrior films.)  Although there are several scenes set in a strait-laced Protestant church in the hamlet of Eastwick, the film is fundamentally and exuberantly pagan --  the picture pits the voracious energy of the masculine Devil against the serene and complacent trinity of the three goddesses, clearly muses for both Miller and his director of photography.  

Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer) has been deserted by her husband who has absconded leaving her with six daughters (whom miraculously all seem to be the same approximate age). Sukie works for a small-town newspaper that mostly retails local gossip.  Janey (Sarandon) is shown in the film on the first day after her divorce --she teaches music at an elementary school and is sexually harassed by the bombastic Principal.  Alexandra (Cher) is a sculptor who makes clay figures of fertility goddesses to sell in the local gift shop catering to tourists to the picturesque sea-side village, located apparently somewhere near Cape Cod.  Alex's husband has died.  At a Fourth of July picnic, the loathsome Principal makes an elaborate and boring speech.  The three women daydream and imagine the oration cut short by a violent thunderstorm -- and, no sooner thought than done.  A storm boils out of sky and sends the crowd scattering with bolts of lightning.  Later, when the women meet for drinks -- a weekly custom, it seems -- they muse that their wishes came true to bring a precipitous end to the Principal's tedious speech.  As they get drunk, the three women talk about their desire for a mysterious stranger to arrive in town, woo them, and bring sexual passion to their presently celibate lives.  Out of the storm, a long black vehicle appears, rushing through the tempest to their town.  Jack Nicholson playing a sinister figure called Daryl Van Horne is riding in the sedan driven by his servant, the uncanny giant Fidel (he looks a bit like Lurch on the old Addams Family shows.)  Van Horne buys the Lenox Mansion, said to be built on a seaside bluff where witches were executed, and fills the place with objets d'art and musical instruments -- the interior of the mansion is an elaborate, opera set with filigree, plaster bas relief and the huge blue lagoon in an enclosed natatorium.  First, Van Horne seduces Cher's character, Alex.  He is unremittingly vulgar, obscene, and lascivious.  Alex tells him that she despises him, thinks he's dressed like a fool (he lolls on a bed in pajamas like Hugh Hefner) and, even, smells bad.  But Van Horne, who describes himself as a "horny little devil", prevails on her and she becomes his lover.  He, next, consoles Janey to improve her musical skills by encouraging her to play with more passion.  Delicately, he parts her thighs to place her cello between them.  As he accompanies her, she plays with such unbridled passion that the cello and its strings ignites and burns up on the floor.  Alex and Janey, who learn that Van Horne has had sex with both of them, go to his mansion to confront him.  They find Sukie lounging around, sitting in a sort of caparisoned tent on the front lawn under the Downton Abbey-like facade of the mansion.  Van Horne summons the women to a game of doubles on his tennis court -- he uses magic to make the ball hover in the air, dart here and there, and fly into the sky where it ruptures a cloud to cause another downpour.  The women come to accept their roles in this Devil's menage -- we see them hovering in the air over the swimming pool, eating cherries out of a great floating bowl, and flying through clouds of pink balloons to the music of Puccini's Nessun dorma.  Meanwhile, another woman, Felicia, the newspaper editor's wife, (played by Veronica Cartwright) senses that deviltry is afoot in Eastwick.  She plays the part of Linda Blair in The Exorcist -- she seems entranced, possessed, spouting admonitory obscenities about the devil and his "whores".  (Characters vomit cherry pits somehow transferred to their gullet from the orgies at Lenox mansion.) The three heroines wish Felicia gone and, once again, this wish is fulfilled -- her husband, the mild-mannered newspaper editor beats her to death with a iron fire poker.  Appalled at what has happened, the three women vow to end their relationship with Van Horne.  Although Van Horne has played the part of the cynical caddish seducer, in fact, he has fallen in love with each member of the trio.  He's miserable that he has been rejected and tries to re-ignite his love affairs with them.  By now, the balance of power has shifted to the three women.  Van Horne tires to coerce them back into bed with him by various devilish tricks and, in fact, tortures Sukie, causing her extreme pain.  Alex and Janey fight back and, ultimately, make a wax voodoo doll representing Van Horne.  Sukie is cured and she joins her sisters at the Lomax mansion for the final showdown with Van Horne.  This is a noisy spectacular affair, involving all sorts of picturesque mayhem.  In the end, the Devil is defeated.  But the women are now all pregnant.  In a short coda, we see them bathing their sons, all of whom are, of course, the spawn of Satan.

The movie is very impressively shot, with fabulous locations, and wonderful action sequences -- parts of the picture are reminiscent of the Road Warrior films with Nicholson wildly crawling over the top of his sedan as its spins out-of-control down a winding seaside highway.  There is a sequence in which Janey's fifth grade band plays Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik with satanic inspiration -- the kids throw aside their music and perform like demonic infant prodigies.  Nicholson is fantastic, strutting around cock-sure with banter of this sort:  "I like a little pussy after lunch".  He wines and dines his prey in an oriental-looking Saracen tent set up on the front lawn of his vast manor.  The characters are always gorging sensuously on exotic fruits, whipped cream, chocolates.  In the last 15 minutes, Nicholson gets to pull out all the stops and reverts to the character he played in The Shining seven years earlier -- he rolls his eyes, grunts, and bellows and runs around like an enraged chimpanzee:  "all I want is my family all together," he laments.  I don't know the extent to which the film adapts and follows John Updike's source novel.  Nicholson gets to howl some spectacularly misogynistic harangues:  "When God makes mistakes, we call it nature.  Woman is a mistake."   Notwithstanding the Devil's misogyny, the power in this film is decidedly female -- it is the women who summon Van Horne; he doesn't call them.  And, when they find him inconvenient and dangerous, they don't hesitate to cast him aside notwithstanding all his wiles.  In the end poor Satan is desperately enamored with three heroines -- and this makes sense, we are also.   

The Way Back

The Australian director, Peter Weir, has not made a movie since The Way Back released in 2010.  I recall that the film was released to lukewarm reviews and failed to make any money.  It's a handsome production with strong performances but the picture is harrowing and unpleasant to watch.  Furthermore, there's a weird aspect to the script -- the movie seems to be a paean to Polish nationalism with a curious reactionary aspect.  Even the villains in the picture go out of their way to praise Polish patriots.  I assume this strange feature originates in the book on which the picture is based Slawomir Rawicz' The Long Walk (1956).  Peter Weir has been an acclaimed filmmaker -- he made The Year of Living Dangerously (with a young Mel Gibson), Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Witness (with Harrison Ford), The Truman Show, and a film version of Master and Commander (based on the Patrick O'Brien historical novel); his pictures have been intelligent fusions of thought-provoking and challenging narratives with star power and popular appeal.  Weir's instincts seem to have deserted him in The Way Back -- there's something impalpably wrong with the movie; it may be that the subject matter is too grim to be entertaining.  

During World War Two, a resistance fighter for the Polish underground is captured by Stalin's thugs.  The man is asked to sign a confession but refuses.  Then, the commissar confronts our protagonist with his wife who has been tortured into informing on him.  The resistance fighter, Janusz, is sent to a labor camp in Siberia, a hundred or so miles north of Lake Baikal.  The labor camp is a hellhole in which the prisoners are beaten, forced to work in subzero temperatures cutting down trees and breaking rocks, and systematically starved.  The Gulag is run from the inside by a group of malign career criminals led by Valka (Colin Ferrell) who plays a homicidal gangster -- he knifes a man to death in order to take his sweater which he, then, gambles away.  The work detail gets caught in a blizzard and a number of the weakened prisoners freeze to death.  Janusz, who is skilled in outdoor survival, saves the company by retreating into a forest (notwithstanding threats by the panicked guards to shoot him) and constructing a wind break.  In retaliation for his resourcefulness, he and his comrades are sent to a mine, visualized as a chaos of explosions, falling rock, and steamy shadowy darkness.  In the mine, Janusz hallucinates the door to a dacha with flowers on the sill that he staggers toward but can't reach.  The situation becomes increasingly dire and, so, Janusz with six other inmates plot their escape and flee from the camp in the snowy darkness -- the blizzard will cover their tracks.  After a desperate chase -- they are pursued by dogs -- the convicts elude the guards but, then, are trapped in the Siberian wilderness.  (Like Trump's "Alligator Alcatraz", geography not walls and guards are the main security measures confining the prisoners to the Gulag camp.)   One of the men has night blindness, wanders off while gathering firewood, and freezes to death.  The men become increasingly weak -- we see them eating bugs and contemplating cannibalism -- but, at last, reach Lake Baikal where there are remote and scattered villages from which they can steal food. Upon reaching the border with Mongolia, the fierce convict, Valka, refuses to leave Mother Russia -- he is a Russian patriot and, in fact, an admirer of Lenin and Stalin.  The escapees have picked up a wan, wraith-like Polish girl wandering in the woods near the great lake -- it's never entirely clear why she is alone in the wilderness and, as it happens, she is also a liar so her explanations must be discounted.  Because Mongolia is also a Communist country (and this film is avowedly anti-Communist), the characters continue to avoid villages and roads, walking cross country until they reach the Gobi desert.  They, then, stagger across the desert for hundreds of miles gradually perishing from thirst and inanition.  The Polish girl dies and others perish as well.  Only four survivors reach Tibet where they are met by some monks who assist them, demanding that they wait for Spring to limp over the Himalayas.  But our heroes are anxious to get back and, so, they hike across the Himalayas in mid-winter, ending up in the terraces where tea is grown in Bhutan.  This is effectively the end of the trek and the film doesn't really explain what happens next.  There's a montage involving the vexed history of countries behind the Iron Curtain progressing from the end of the Second World War through the Fall of Communism.  In the final scene, Vulka, who is now, an old man sees the dacha that he has envisioned for the last forty years, finds a key under a peculiar honeycomb-shaped rock and, then, enters the cottage where he is reunited with his aged wife.  

All of this is filmed with great conviction.  The protagonists starve, are frozen half to death, fall into water and run across fracturing ice; they are swarmed by mosquitos until their eyes are swollen shut and, then, crawl across an infinity of bright, hideous desert -- they drink mud and eat insects and fight with wolves for fragments of a rotting bloody carcass.  Their feet are scabbed, swollen, blistered and the sun burns their faces.  It's mostly horrific and utterly without drama -- it's almost impossible to make a movie about a hike of this sort:  what are you going to show?  people walking doggedly through all sorts of landscapes -- they just walk and walk and walk, quarreling sometimes, and, then, collapsing and dying.  Movies about people perishing of thirst in the desert don't have much appeal.  It's the same problem with the Titanic -- do I really want to see a bunch of people drowning in frigid water?  Parts of the movie are gripping and the landscapes are spectacular, huge vistas with tiny figures limping over the peaks or glaciers or sand dunes.  But the movie seems somewhat pointless.  Ed Harris plays an American prisoner haunted by grief; he is anguished over bringing his family to Russia where he was employed as some kind of engineer and, therefore, blames himself for his son being shot by the Communists.  The film's entire orientation is aggressively pro-Polish and anti-Communist.  A good comparison to this film is Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn about American POWs escaping through the wilderness from a hellish prison camp in the jungle -- somehow, Herzog makes a picture that is febrile, a visionary nightmare from which the viewer feels distanced due to the movie's beauty and feverish alienating intensity -- he aestheticizes starvation and misery.  Weir, who was also one of cinema's notable visionaries (I am thinking of The Last Wave and Picnic at Hanging Rock) can't quite figure out how to make walking interesting -- it's like The Lord of the Rings without the monster spiders, horror-horsemen, and orcs.  I wanted to like this picture because it's an honorable effort, but I can't recommend it.  

(The book on which the movie is based has recently been revealed to be a hoax.  There's no evidence that the protagonist and author actually completed the titular Long Walk  and there are, indeed, certain implausibilities in the story.  Knowledge that this grim trek never really happened is both reassuring but fatal to the movie, which seems completely pointless in the absence of a documentary basis in fact)_

To Live and Die in LA

 The logic of big business popular movies is the logic of advertising and publicity.  If something is successful, then, there must be enhancements, improvements to make it even bigger and better than before. William Friedkin seems trapped in this logic with respect to his film To Live and Die in LA (1985).  Friedkin's assignment, it seems, is to remake The French Connection in Los Angeles and amplify the effects in the former film until the audience is deafened and beat into submission.  Fundamentally, the picture is rooted in 40's and 50's noir, a humble B-picture genre.  Both The French Connection and To Live and Die in LA are variants on the tough, rogue cop picture, films like Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground and just about anything with Sterling Hayden (Crime Wave, The Naked Alibi and others down to Captain McCluskey in The Godfather.)  For better or worse, Friedkin aspires to something like art and kicks everything into high gear.  Characters can't walk down a corridor without the camera breathlessly rushing forward on a collision course with the figure; a simply colloquy at a desk, turns into a swooping 280 degree camera movement and, when someone enters a studio or a multi-room robber's roost, the camera zooms alongside, recording the entire space as if Friedkin had forgotten that he could cut to elide the space between opening the door and the cop's destination -- I guess Friedkin wants to show-off both the proficiency of his director of photography, the great Robbie Mueller, as well as the kinky and lush detail designed by his set decorator.  (Clearly, Friedkin wanted Mueller to replicate the extraordinary twilight effects and night photography in Wenders film noir The American Friend -- many sequences are shot at dawn or sunset, the magic hour and fast motion photography of the sun setting or rising makes the palms tremulous with a sort of wild hysteria -- Mueller loves the palm trees and fast forwards them so they writhe in the red light like souls in Hell.  I attribute to films like To Live and Die in LA, the annoyingly ADHD-style mise-en-scene in many of the films directed by Ridley Scott and his brother, pictures in which the camera is never still, but constantly flitting back and forth, hither and yon...

Friedkin begins the movie with a montage redolent of 40's (or, even, 30's) Hollywood productions showing bad guys corrupting the currency with counterfeit bills.  Some Secret Service guys are on the track of the villains.  One of the cops, a case-hardened veteran, is three days from retirement.  His young partner Rick Chance salutes him for his courage and commitment.  Needless to say, the older guy has tracked the counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe as Masters) to a remote gulch in the Mojave Desert where the villain is printing cash.  In this isolated venue, the senior cop, who is inexplicably working on  his own, is murdered.  Chance vows revenge and is willing to bend the rules to get his man.  The film tracks the talented, if evil, Masters as he frolics with bisexual models and kisses his boyfriend and periodically terrorizes and thrashes various folk whom he encounters.  Chance has a female informant to whom he is casually vicious -- he's also sleeping with her between bouts of bullying. For some reason, this girl, who seems a glamorous type of trailer trash (she works in a topless place as a cashier), is privy to all sorts of top-secret underworld gossip. Chance and his new partner, a straight-arrow named Jon Vulkevich, go undercover and negotiate with Masters.  The mastermind demands $50,000 upfront for some vast amount of counterfeit currency.  Chance can't get the department to advance the funds and, so, acting on a tip from his girlfriend and informant, the two cops stage a robbery of another con who is carrying $50,000 down from San Francisco.  They ambush the con, called in the film "a Chinaman", and shake him down.  The Chinaman gets killed by a sniper and all hell breaks loose as a small army of armed men and souped-up vehicles pursues Chance and his hapless partner.  This sets up the film's prinicipal set piece, a spectacular car chase which begins in a railroad yard full of moving locomotives, progresses through a fruit market where dozens of trucks are making deliveries in an extended alley about 15 feet long; the boys evade the obstacles in their way, drop down onto the empty bed of the LA river channel where they engage in a demolition derby chase for another few miles before evading their pursuers by driving the wrong way against rush hour traffic.  (Friedkin is clearly attempting to outdo himself with respect to the famous car chase in The French Connection, vehicles carooming between pillars of an elevated train.)  There are a few unproductive subplots involving another thug who pretends to turn informant but, then, escapes -- this is a very greasy-looking John Turturro -- and some complications ensue with respect to a crooked lawyer who has pocketed a big chunk of counterfeit dough.  There are raids, counter-raids, some sex scenes with beautiful depraved women, and, ultimately, a fiery climax.  The straight-arrow partner, Vukelvich, has been thoroughly corrupted and, in the last scene, he's calling on his partner's sleazy informant girlfriend to bully her before forcing sex upon the woman.  It's all unsavory and picturesque.  Friedkin films LA as a port city and most of the action takes place near the harbor or among the infernal refineries of City of Industry.  There's no trace of Hollywood in this picture, except that the molls are all registered with the studios and looking for work in the film business.  Friedkin makes LA look like one of the lower circles of Dante's Inferno.  And the picture has a throbbing sound track by the duo Wang Chung, including some songs that were once famous in the 80's.  

Nothing much changes in this genre; the bad guy has a drop-dead gorgeous moll who runs around in the 1985 equivalent of the lingerie these dames wore in the forties and fifties.  Because we are more sexually adventurous today, the bad guy and his girlfriend are bisexual -- in 1985, bisexuality was deemed to be the height of post-modern decadence.  (Today, a film like this would feature glamorous transsexuals.) The rogue cop casually beats everyone up and cheats with respect to evidence and, indeed, ends up engineering a robbery (involving the Chinaman) against fellow law enforcement -- this explains the army of cops who chase them after the poor undercover Asian is gunned down.  Friedkin's players are fantastically attractive -- the young Willem Dafoe is pretty as a Cosmopolitan model.  (In recent films he looks like his haggard face has been set on fire and the blaze put out with a rake -- but, in this movie, Dafoe is more beautiful than the leading lady.) The only person even more gorgeous than Dafoe is William Petersen, the rogue cop.  He's so preternaturally gorgeous that Friedkin saves a luminous close-up of him for the very end of the credits -- stick around to see it.    

The Hunter

 The Hunter (2011) features Willem Dafoe as a laconic mercenary tasked with shooting the last surviving Tasmanian tiger and harvesting its DNA for a shadowy, malign biotech firm.  Dafoe gives a constricted, low-key performance; he channels the sense of disappointment that underlies the movie.  The disappointment is not only thematic to the film, but, also, an aspect of the audience's experience:  in other words, the film is disappointing as a matter of thematic intent, but also disappoints by withholding the pleasures that would be conventional to a film of this sort.  Disappointment is not a bug but a feature of The Hunter.

Operating under the name of Martin David, Dafoe's character travels to a remote part of Tasmania and commences solitary excursions into the outback in pursuit of a single Tasmanian Tiger thought to live in the high, barren mountains.  He follows in the footsteps of another hunter who has vanished, leaving behind a devastated family.  His base-camp is the outpost from which the previous hunter named Jarrah vanished into the wilderness.  In that shack, David finds that there is no electricity, that the water is compromised, and two children are running feral in the neglected compound -- the place is like the Mexican hippie commune imagined by Robert Stone in Dog Soldiers:  there are speakers perched in trees and the branches near the house are decorated with Christmas tree lights.  Unconscious, like Sleeping Beauty, the children's mother, the wife of the missing hunter, is lying comatose in bed, doped into oblivion.  David is shocked by the desuetude in the shack and outbuildings but committed to his mission.  He tries to take a hotel room in the tiny town near the shack but the village is inhabited by malign hillbillies who are aggrieved that environmental activists are suing to shut down the town's only industry, harvesting and processing trees from the dense fern-filled jungle in the foothills to the mountains.  On several occasions. locals threaten David and we expect some sort of violence to erupt with the hero, as a trained mercenary, cracking the skulls of the village tough guys.  But this never happens.  Although there's an undercurrent of violence, no actual fighting occurs.  David is led into the wild by a bushwhacker played by Sam Neill.  Neill's character is avuncular but seems only slightly less hostile than the local hoodlums. With the help of the two children at the compound, David cleans things up, gives their mother, Lucy, a bath, gets the generator working so that the Christmas tree lights can be lit, and seems to rescue the family from their plight.  David is a fan of classical music and he plays arias and choral works from the sound system wired into the trees.  In the remote mountains, he sees tracks from the Thylacine and, perhaps, glimpses it.  He traps Tasmanian devils, guts them, and creates snares for the tiger.  But the beast is too cunning.  The scenes in the mountain meadows are impressive pictorially -- the heights look like the Scottish highlands, all heather and bog with tarns and spiky escarpments of cracked black rock.  On occasion, it rains and, even, snows.  There is a confrontation with hoodlums on the narrow highway and another encounter at a party at the compound where the widow and her children live.  But the menace posed by the locals never comes to fruition -- one side or the other keeps backing down, certainly, a realistic enough scenario but one that disappoints an audience hoping to see Dafoe's character revenge himself (and the widow) on the bad guys.  In fact, the widow says that the bad guys aren't all that bad -- they're just local men who are upset because they are unemployed.  David finds the bones of the widow but doesn't tell her.  His discovers a lair, a rocky den, where the Thylacine lives and seems to be on the verge of trapping the creature.  Sam Neill's character turns out to be in league with the biotech company.  The biotech company has lost faith in David and sends an assassin to kill David and replace him as the tiger's hunter.  This sinister plot goes awry setting up the film's inevitably disappointing and unprepossessing climax.  I won't detail the ending of the picture but will remark that the entire movie is set up to motivate a love affair between David and the young widow.  (We have seen that David has become a sort of surrogate father to the children.)  But the film disappoints -- not only is the love affair thwarted but audience expectations are disappointed in a way that seems almost perversely cruel.

The film, directed by Daniel Nettheim from a renowned novel by Julia Leigh, is always gripping.  The premise is fascinating and the movie is largely shot in the Tasmanian highlands, a remarkable landscape of heather, bogs, and boulders. But the fuse on this film is so slow-burning that it's extinguished before there is any real climax.  The picture has so much integrity that it ends in tragedy that remains undramatized.  In Australia, there is a genre of writing called Tasmanian Gothic -- Leigh's novel is considered an outstanding example of that kind of work.  The picture's ending makes sense conceptually but it doesn't satisfy the audience emotionally -- the whole thing is a sort of muted, intelligent downer.  It's very hard to understand why the movie has to end the way that it does.  Edited into the film are documentary sequences from the thirties showing the last Tasmanian Tiger in captivity.  Those images, reproduced in ghostly, silvery black and white, are profoundly disturbing:  the Tiger is a wolf-like creature with a lean, striped body and an elongated, somewhat reptilian head -- these tigers could open their jaws to an amazing breadth, a gape large enough to devour the whole world..  I think the picture is worth seeing for a number of reasons, not the least Dafoe's intelligent, melancholy performance, but you must watch this movie, if only to see the images of the tiger now thought to be extinct.  

The Gentlemen

 The British action director, Guy Ritchie, was once married to Madonna.  Apparently, their liaison lasted for six or seven years before ending in divorce around 2008.  Ritchie, who seems to exemplify "laddishness" (if that's a word), has a taste for superficial flash; this is not surprising in light of the director's relationship with the pop star -- his films are engineered like an Italian sports car, fast, sleek, and cruel, but without any intelligence beyond the capacity for generating torque and horse-power while clinging to the curves on twisty road.  For the first 15 minutes, a movie like the crime picture The Gentlemen seems like the best entertainment in town, hyper-articulate, expensively staged, featuring an all-star cast involved in brutal shenanigans mostly played for raunchy comedy.  After a half-hour, it all becomes a wee bit too much.  And, at the two hour point, you are begging for the damn thing to come to an end.  The precocious puerile humor, the nihilistic cynicism, and the lavishly (and pointlessly) complex narrative -- an unreliable voice-over, frequent cut-aways to illustrate points, cartoons educating the baffled viewer on various arcane points involving ethnicity and economics, and a general proclivity to not just penetrate but wholly demolish the fourth-wall -- all of these devices become exhausting; although the picture is supposed to be witty, knowing, and funny, the project is ultimately, more or less, humorless.  Ritchie's career illustrates the baleful influence of Quentin Tarantino -- his movies contain all of the twists and turns and learned variations on genre themes that you find in Tarantino but without the American director's commitment to his twisted characters and occasional flashes of brilliance.    

The Gentlemen ( 2019), a convoluted crime picture, sets out to be a cheeky, irreverent, and shocking entertainment.  It succeeds until it doesn't.   The movie features an all-star cast of impressive and charismatic male actors -- "laddishness"(if there is such a word) scarcely tolerates the presence of the female at all; the women's parts are lean to the point of vanishing.  Hugh Grant plays Fletcher, a master manipulator, who, for reasons that I couldn't understand, plays all sides against the middle in the film's elaborate and violent plot -- Fletcher is very talkative and the frame for the film is his erratic and effusive narrative providing both backstory, a chronicle as to the various plot elements in the picture, and, finally, cynical and profane commentary on the story he is narrating.  Mickey is played by Matthew McConnaughy, a cool as a cucumber marijuana farmer who has amassed a vast fortune by cultivating the weed in underground greenhouses and distributing it throughout Europe -- McConnaughy is great in his understated and deadly manner and, probably, the best thing in the movie.  Matthew is a Jewish millionaire who wants to buy Mickey's enterprise "lock, stock, and (smoking) barrel" to quote another of Ritchie's films; Jeremy Strong, a opaque presence (mostly known for Succession) plays the Jewish businessman.  Someone named Hunnam (apparently a well-known actor) plays Raymond, Mickey's hard-nosed and capable factotum.  Finally, Colin Farrell acts the part of an Irish boxing coach called "Coach" in the film who manages a crew of rapper martial arts experts, all of them Black, who appear from time to time to wreak havoc on the other characters.  There are Chinese and Cambodian gangsters and a mob of Russian thugs also thrown in for a good measure.  The picture specializes in a mild form of outrage -- it's casually racist:  ethnic identities are caricatured all in the name of good fun.  For instance, at the film's end, Matthew, the Jewish businessman, is equated to Shylock and, impliedly, forced to hack out a pound of flesh from his body in retribution for some of the mischief that he has created.  These racial and ethnic stereotypes are the equivalent of Tarantino's persistent use of the "N-word" in his movie, offenses that are justified by the picture's ostensible good humor -- indeed, it's "laddishness."  The movie's plot is so intricate and hard to divine that I won't try to summarize what occurs in the film.  The premise is that McConnaughey's blithe and nonchalant character wants to sell his dope empire.  Matthew bids on the empire but, unbeknownst, of course, to Mickey tries to run-down the price on the enterprise by setting rival mobs against one another -- everyone competing, it seems, to raid and trash the marijuana enterprise to reduce its value.  This leads to numerous killings, defenestrations, kidnappings, explosions, fires, and car-crashes.  The Toddlers, Coaches thugs, get into spectacular fights with the Chinese gangsters and Mickey''s henchmen.  After a dozen or so double-crosses, some Russian gangsters who have been lurking around the edges of the action get involved -- this is in the film's last five minutes.  There's more bloodshed and, then, the movie ends happily.   (I left out part of the plot involving a Rupert Murdoch style tabloid press mogul who is so hateful that everyone applauds when one or the other groups of the contending ethnic mobs force him to have carnal knowledge with a large and juicy-looking pig. This figure is played by the ugly and charismatic Eddie Marsan, one of Great Britain's best character actors,)  There's lots of satire, interesting to British audiences but opaque to me, about the so-called "Toffs" -- that is, the depraved royals and aristocrats who infest upper-crust English society.  Everyone speaks in elaborate, poetic jargon that seems cribbed from Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw -- these are very loquacious thugs who natter on in an intensely unnatural, stylized, and elaborate sort of discourse deploying the word "cunt" in every sentence. 

It's too much and, ultimately, I was yearning for this perpetual motion machine of smart-ass speeches and gruesome murder to come to an end.  The movie is ingenious but, ultimately, dispiriting.  The movie was apparently popular and, in fact, spawned a several season TV show of the same name.

Silk Stockings

Ninotchka (1939) is an Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a stern Communist idealogue who happens to be a woman softening and finding love in Paris; the movie, starring Greta Garbo (with Bela Lugosi as one of the Commissars) was a big hit and re-made 18 years, and one World War, later as a musical Silk Stockings.  The 1957 film was the last picture directed Ruben Mamoulian; Cyd Charisse plays the fierce female apparatchik courted in Fred Astaire.  Peter Lorre is one of the three Russian agents seduced by the City of Lights -- Lorre was old when the movie was made and he can't really dance and, so, he performs in the musical numbers by suspending himself between a chair and table and doggedly kicking at the air -- it's unutterably weird and endearing.  The movie was based on a Broadway revival of the film with songs by Cole Porter that are, more or less, clever, melodic, and forgettable -- the exception is a bizarre rock and roll number that Astaire performs near the end of the movie.  The picture is highly regarded, indeed, said to be one of the great movie musicals, but I wasn't attuned to its wave-length:  the dance numbers are suave but not explosive or particularly kinetic, the music is okay, the acting is excellent but the script is a bit schematic -- the story is simple to the point of being boring:  the stern lady commissar melts in the arms of Fred Astaire, here playing the producer of a movie musical himself, and apparels herself in silk lingerie, sipping champagne with her lover.  She comes to conclude that the beautiful is just as important as the useful -- a revelation that changes her life.  After the lovers are separated, she renounces her love and returns to her ideological purity until the plot contrives a basis for her to return to Paris.  Of course, Astaire is waiting for her debonair as ever, singing and dancing in a night club that Peter Lorre and his comrades have established for Russian emigres.  Love prevails and all ends on a merry note.  The technicolor photography is nondescript and the editing mostly invisible -- the film is sleek, well-appointed and craftsmanlike.  Paradoxically, Cyd Charisse is more sexy and has a greater erotic charge as the relentless Marxist fundamentalist -- a more serious movie would hint at some kind of tragic backstory involving famine and war (and we learn she was the commander of a woman's tank brigade).  Once she dissolves into an ingenue in love, the character is less interesting.  Fred Astaire is palpably too old for the role, something that he admitted himself to Mamoulian when he protested being cast in the picture.  The dance scenes are shot in continuous long takes to preserve the illusion that we are watching a Broadway musical from the other side of the proscenium.  The film's style is classical with very few close-ups.  There is a witty song about the three dwarves (this is the group of Russian agents including Lorre) being sent to Siberia.  When Ninotchka arrives in Paris her first priority is to see the sights -- which for her includes the Sewage Treatment Plant; with Astaire as her guide she visits both cafes and foundries.  Paris is represented by the Arc d' Triumph and a couple of sidewalk cafes; most of the action takes place in lavishly appointed hotel rooms.  A lot of the dialogue is cunning and funny.  The composer whom Ninotchka has been dispatched to retrieve -- he's modeled on Stravinsky it seems -- has written an Ode to a Tractor and, when Fred Astaire tempts him with a big salary to write the score for his movie musical, the man worries about taxes.  "You'll make $50,000," Astaire assures him.  Someone asks:  "What will the taxes be?"  "$50,000," the man says. (I think Mamoulian appears in the film as the director of the movie within the movie.)