TAKE FIVE: Anime
5/25/2007 5:00:00 PM
The same week that the Cartoon Network tips a whole roster of new animated programs aimed at adults, one of their graduates — Satoshi Kon, creator of the series Paranoia Agent and director of the acclaimed Perfect Blue — debuts his latest big-screen effort, Paprika. The sci-fi-tinged action fantasy features an adult storyline and a built-in audience of fans, but Sony Classics is hoping that America's anime-shy mass audiences follow it past its New York opening on Friday. Here are a few more recommendations for you if the only Japanese animation you're familiar with comes from the pen of Hayao Miyazaki.
URUSEI YATSURA 2: BEAUTIFUL DREAMER (1984)
Like Paprika, this big-screen spin-off of a popular Japanese animated comedy deals with the fallout when the boundary between dreams and reality become blurred. The original Urusei Yatsura series is something of a mixed bag, featuring the often-slapsticky antics of an alien girl attending a far-from-ordinary Earth high school, but Beautiful Dreamer is a different animal entirely: There are plenty of laughs, both lowbrow and high, early on, but it quickly morphs into something very unusual. The subject of dreams yields some extraordinarily eerie, chilling and surreal images, and there are some set-pieces — from a post-apocalyptic series of war games in an empty city to a ghostly parade in the middle of the night — that will stay with you far longer than you'd expect, given their origins.
GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (1988)
Containing an emotional depth and historical resonance otherwise lacking in much of Japan's genre-driven animation, Isao Takahata's film, based on Akiyuki Nosaka's outstanding novel, is perhaps the most moving and powerful anime ever made. The memoir of a young boy and his sister in Imperial Japan who struggle to survive in the waning days of the Second World War, Grave of the Fireflies is often charming and always affecting, and while it becomes almost unbearably sad in its final moments, it's also an unflinchingly honest portrayal of life in those tragic days, and has been rightly cited as one of the few films to come out of Japan that deals with the war's repercussions for ordinary citizens in a forthright way.
AKIRA (1988)
Some fans of the genre refer to this grotesque, stunning sci-fi drama as the Citizen Kane of anime. It's not that, quite, but Katsuhiro Otomo's masterpiece is one of the most important films in anime history; while it didn't single-handedly kick-start the American interest in Japanese animation, it netted a larger audience than the genre has managed before or since. The action-packed tale of a hapless member of a near-future biker gang who becomes infused with massive psychic powers as the result of a government experiment gone awry, Akira delivers plenty of thrills, but perhaps its biggest achievement is the full use of the big screen; most previous anime films betrayed their genesis in comics or the small screen, but Akira takes complete advantage of its bigger canvas.
METROPOLIS (2001)
Though this film (directed by anime veteran Rintaro and written by Akira's Katsuhiro Otomo, based on a comic by the late, legendary Osamu Tezuka) isn't a remake of Fritz Lang's silent classic, it does borrow its name and many of its theme: a sprawling, elaborate futuristic city; a problematic division of labor between machine and man; and the problems that arise when a human allows himself to develop emotional ties to a robot — and vice versa. Likewise, in its exploration of the ties between intelligence and emotion, it recalls Blade Runner more than a little. But all these elements take a back seat to the gorgeous animation and the astonishing, unusual design of the film; Metropolis looks like nothing that came before or since.
JIN-ROH: THE WOLF BRIGADE (1998)
Hiroyuki Okiura (a student of Mamoru Oshii, whose cyberpunk classic Ghost in the Shell was a massive anime hit a few years before) made an impressive debut with this so-cool-it's-chilly story of an alternate Japan. In Okiura's grim, oppressive world, the Axis won the Second World War, and Japan was occupied for several years by their former German allies — who left behind a legacy of brutality, paranoia and hatred. Set against this context (and illustrated in darkly beautiful style, with an unsettling combination of contemporary flair and Nazi-era trappings), a policeman begins a doomed romance with a young girl.
— Leonard Pierce
Previous Take Fives:
May 18, 2007: Gambling Movies
May 11, 2007: Hip Hop Documentaries
May 4, 2007: Posthumous Movies
April 27, 2007: Wrestling Pictures
April 20, 2007: Directorial Brothers
April 13, 2007: Hitchcock Remakes
April 6, 2007: Rappers Turned Actors
March 30, 2007: What’s That Strange Music I Hear?
March 23, 2007: Both Sides of the Camera
March 16, 2007: Meta Serial Killers at the Movies
March 9, 2007: Cash Rules Everything Around Me
March 2, 2007: What’s Your Sign?
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Vlad the Impaler Blows a Hole Through the Stockinged Head of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart
5/25/2007 4:15:00 PM
One of the unnerving things about writing the Impaler column is how much time I spend ripping apart filmmakers I actually like/love. Maybe someday I'll get around to ripping around the late Andrei Tarkovsky a much-needed new asshole, but in the meantime I'm reduced to slaying...David Lynch. This is not fair: Lynch gets primary credit for turning me into an artfag at the mere age of 13, when I was transfixed enough by The Straight Story's long takes to go twice. (Yeah, that was my first Lynch. Weird, I know.) Since then, I've absorbed all of Twin Peaks, slogged through his (thoroughly underwhelming) short films, gotten up early on a hungover Saturday to see Lost Highway, etc. You get the idea: My devotion is real.
So it was with real disappointment that I showed up at MoMA a while back to fill in one of the few remaining holes in my Lynch knowledge. Now, let's not be overly hasty: Future historians will debate whether or not Lynch jumped the shark with Inland Empire (answer is yes, by the way), but you can't claim that Wild At Heart is nearly as underwhelming. For one thing it reminded me of a time when Nicolas Cage wasn't tolerable at best, but downright praiseworthy: His All-American bozo act is unimpeachable, and then there's his climactic about-face. Pre beat-down by motorcycle gang: "What is it you faggots want?," delivered with maximum bluster. After beat-down: "I apologize for calling you gentlemen homosexuals," in a tone that suggests machismo which feels it's erred not in its fundamental homophobia, but merely in misjudging the gentlemen's sexuality. Maybe you just had to be there, but I was the only person LOLing in the theater, and I felt bad.
But let's not beat about the bush: Wild At Heart isn't just a bad movie, it predicts everything bad in Lynch's future movies. And by everything I mean Rammstein. I don't know when or where Lynch got fascinated by loud guitars with men growling in a way that's supposed to be fierce but comes off silly, but Nicolas Cage bonding with a heavy group of players who look like misplaced session players (and who apparently only play metal and Elvis classics) just reminds me that Lost Highway — otherwise one of the most terrifying films ever made, and maybe Lynch's masterpiece — will be almost rendered comical at certain moments by the ridiculous repeated extracts of Rammstein.
Wild At Heart also predicts The Straight Story — which isn't a bad thing, actually. This was the first time Lynch had a chance to openly attempt to outdo Days Of Heaven (something Straight Story arguably does), and there's one golden hour shot here that's pretty awesome. But there’s also sunshine the rest of the time, and therein lies the rub: The dictionary definition of Lynchian, whenever it's coined, will surely include darkness and shadows. Wild At Heart is sunny from beginning to end — a brightness of visuals that leads to perhaps the only time people acting in a Lynchian mode seem to be obnoxiously overplaying (this means you, Diane Ladd).
And then there's the whole question of Lynchian. Granted, at the exact moment that Wild At Heart's color palette seems to be attempting a redefinition of what a Lynchian film can achieve, Lynch piles on quirks that were already ossified in 1990. The prime offender here is a scene in a hotel lobby, just before Ladd finds out that Harry Dean Stanton's been killed: The frame is cluttered by not one, not two, but no less than three quirky bit players — who haven't had significant appearances before and don't appear again. One of these people is old, and another has a British accent; this constitutes their "quirkiness." It was David Foster Wallace's seminal essay on Lost Highway which pointed out that Lynch's sense of humor (his overt jokes, not his unsettling frissons that can cause uneasy audience laughter) is fundamentally unsophisticated, relying on broad humor about deafness and French accents. So it goes here. First you have 3 "quirky" people standing around a lobby for no good reason, and the next thing you know we have 3 hours of Inland Empire — the very definition of aimless Lynchiana — on our hands.
— Vadim Rizov
Previous Vlad the Impaler takedowns:
- April 13, 2007 -- The African Queen
- March 29, 2007 -- Aguirre, the Wrath of God
- March 23, 2007 – Close-Up
- March 8, 2007 – Sullivan’s Travels
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Exploring The Guardian's “Another View” Column
5/25/2007 3:45:00 PM
During a brief visit to Cannes I only had time to watch one film, Zodiac, which I thoroughly enjoyed and which as far as I could tell seemed quite accurate to the Robert Greysmith books. The Guardian occasionally runs a column, "Another View", which is a short piece written by a professional commenting on a film set in a field their set in. Today it’s Detective Chief Inspector Tony Boxall, who talks about his impression of Zodiac from a professional point of view.
Previous Another Views have focused on a Restaurant Owner talking about Fast Food Nation, a Mayan Archaeologist on Apocalypto, a Poker Player on Casino Royale) and most entertainingly, a Pagan commenting on the Neil LaBute remake of The Wicker Man (which was covered on Screengrab last year).
— Faisal Qureshi
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews James Gray’s We Own the Night
5/25/2007 2:45:00 PM
Thoughts I had during We Own the Night, in roughly the order they occurred to me:
- Hey, an American film. And no opening credits, despite an evocative opening montage of still photos depicting NYPD headbanging and drug-trade residue. Wonder who this could be?
- Joaquin Phoenix as a slick dude running a club in 1988 Brooklyn. Eva Mendes as his hot girlfriend. And lots of Russian mobsters. Who's into the multiculti stuff? I need more information.
- Mark Wahlberg is Phoenix's brother. Mark Wahlberg is a cop. Robert Duvall is their dad. He's also a cop. What movie did Phoenix and Wahlberg star in together? Did they? This seems really familiar somehow.
- Dialogue is a little on-the-nose. Visuals are purely functional. Theme seems to be family loyalty. Damn, I have no freakin' idea whose movie this is.
- Oh, I see, it's The Godfather in reverse. Instead of the good son who gets sucked into the family's criminal enterprise against his will, we have the bad son who gets sucked into the family's commitment to law and order against his will. That's kind of an interesting idea, at least if it weren't being spelled out so clumsily.
- Okay, whoever this is just pulled off one hell of a gripping suspense set piece. I can't remember the last time I saw an undercover sting operation that went so hellaciously awry.
- THE YARDS! Phoenix and Wahlberg were both in The Yards. And The Yards was at Cannes that year, I'm pretty sure, though I saw it at Toronto. I'm almost positive it was at Cannes. Could this be James Gray? Russian mobsters in Brooklyn, that's right out of Little Odessa. It must be James Gray. Has he even made a film since The Yards? That was seven years ago. I'd forgotten he even existed.
. This may top Death Proof for the year's most amazing car chase. Is Gray capable of something this kinetic? How did nobody ever think to stage a car chase in a torrential downpour before?
- I should do a ScreenGrab post in which I just lay out the exact thought process I'm going through while watching this one blind. I can incorporate some review-type stuff in there as well. Or will that make me look like a dork? Too late, probably.
- This film is clunky but it's also very heartfelt. Feels throwbacky in a mostly good way. I think it could actually stand to be longer — parts of it seem rushed. Too much plot, too few incidental but telling details.
- Is he really gonna end on that exchange? That would be kind of ballsy in its sheer earnestness.
- He is.
— Mike D’Angelo
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An Interview with the Man Who Brought You the Star Wars Lozenge
5/25/2007 2:00:00 PM
To celebrate the film’s 30th Anniversary, BBC Entertainment correspondent Kevin Young finally lost his Star Wars virginity and logged the entire experience at the BBC website. This got me thinking of all other Star Wars tie-ins, and I rediscovered this little item made just before the film's 20th Anniversary to sell you the British Lozenge, Tunes:
It was produced just after Pepsico had paid Lucas a then record breaking $2 Billion for exclusive licensing rights to Star Wars. But Mars Corp. (the manufacturer of Tunes) managed to get a tie-in by Lucas digging the original idea. Needless to say, PepsiCo wasn't happy with this at the time.
The director for this advert was Vadim Jean, then best known for the low budget comedy, Leon, The Pig Farmer and more recently for the Martin Short Vehicle Jimmy Glick in Lalawood. I interviewed him about his involvement with the commercial.
How did you first get involved in the campaign?
The way it works is that you get approached by the agency and they have a look at your previous work. If they like it, they ask you to come in and talk to them about how you would do it. When I saw the script, I thought: “This is excellent”. Every boy film maker’s dream really is to do Star Wars. A formative film really, for so many of us. I basically went and said: “We’ll make it exactly the same as the film.” Down to the precise framing of the shots, shooting it in cinemascope format, etc. So that when people switch on the TV and see the commercial, they’ll think they’re watching footage from the film. Until one of the guys says: “Maybe you should try one of these?”
And that was really what they were hoping for, so we tried to speak to Gil Taylor, the film’s original cameraman, and we watched the particular scene in the council chamber over and over and over again. The Production designer did the plans for the set, just from watching the video, because we couldn’t get the original plans. And we just tried to match it as faithfully as possible. And the costumes are the real costumes, sent over from Lucasfilm. They liked my work and they liked the idea that I suggested that we do it exactly as the film.
Did you use Gil Taylor on this as well?
No. He was very old, about ninety. No, I used a cameraman called Ivan Bird, who very carefully matched the whole look of the film.
The helmet appears pretty small, compared to what appears in the films. How do you respond to that?
Well, you have to talk to George Lucas, because it was the one he gave us. All the costumes are supplied by Lucasfilm, so we were in their hands. So if they tell us that that's the original, then who am I to say it’s not? If you run the commercial alongside the scene in the film, I think you’ll find it pretty close.
How’s your relationship with Lucasfilm?
Very good. They love it apparently. They had approval of it, and they’re delighted. They said it was the most faithful bit of licensing they’ve ever done. I’m very happy with that.
What are the differences you find between directing a feature and directing an ad?
Time, of course. The hardest thing is time, you have no time in a commercial. So for example, we’ve actually got a forty second cut of the commercial, which literally shot by shot is completely faithful to the scene in the film. The way that Darth Vader comes in through the room, there's a counter tracking shot, which takes him across from the entrance, when he comes in with Peter Cushing to the point in the table where they sit. And I shot that. In case they did a cinema version. The shot is exactly the same length in time. It counter tracks and brings him to the table, and the reason it isn’t in the commercial as it went out on Television is simply time. It’s very hard to put a developing shot into a commercial, because you suddenly find you’ve got no time left. So your images have to be very dense to tell the story very concisely.
— Faisal Qureshi
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews Catherine Breillat’s Une vieille maitresse
5/25/2007 1:00:00 PM
I must confess that my heart sank a bit this morning when the words "un film de Catherine Breillat" appeared, as her confrontationally explicit essays on gender dynamics (Romance, Fat Girl, Anatomy of Hell) tend to leave me cold. Nor was I especially psyched to see more of Asia Argento, who had already snarled her pseudopunk way through Boarding Gate and Abel Ferrara's hilariously awful Go Go Tales. But Une vieille maîtresse, which translates as An Old Mistress ( "old" in the sense of "former" or "longtime"), while very much in keeping with Breillat's thematic interests, turns out to be an adaptation of an 1851 novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly — a sort of Dangerous Liaisons minus the duplicity. This means that while the characters frequently have explicit sex, they do not, as Breillat's original characters are wont to do, suddenly start shoving random objects up their vaginas or offer cups of their menstrual blood as apéritifs.
Argento is impressively restrained in her ferocity as the title character, Vellini, who has no intention of renouncing her hold on a penniless gambler with whom she's been entangled for 10 years, even though he's about to marry a fabulously wealthy young beauty (Breillat discovery Roxane Mesquida) with whom he's sincerely in love. But it's first-time actor Fu'ad Aït Aattou, as the preposterously pretty male object of desire, who gives the film's genuinely revelatory performance, fully embodying the fatal combination of arrogance and frailty that gives this story of noble putrescence its bite.
That the battle of wills fizzles to a close just when you're expecting a conflagration is presumably a flaw of the source material; all the same, this is the rare period drama that feels at once faithful to its era and thoroughly modern. (Although the shot in which you can quite clearly see one of Argento's several tattoos through several coats of base is perhaps a bit too modern.) Breillat's ardent fans may well feel betrayed, responding only to the moment when Vellini hungrily laps the blood from her lover's gunshot wound; to my mind, this film cuts deeper than her more willfully outrageous efforts, precisely because it's populated by people who, deeply fucked up though they are, retain their sanity.
— Mike D’Angelo
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Video of the Day: Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown
5/25/2007 12:01:00 PM
What if Sam Peckinpah had directed a Peanuts cartoon? I found this totally twisted bit of spoof animation while searching for a clip of Joel McCrea in Ride the High Country (for our 20 Most Unforgettable Death Scenes list this week). It’s been giving me nightmares ever since.
Apparently it was directed in 1986 by then-CalArts student Jim Reardon, who would go on to work on The Simpsons. (There's more info here.)
Extremely well-done, and extremely creepy. Watch at your own risk.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Now Listen Up, Fools
5/25/2007 11:00:00 AM
It’s Friday, and that means there’s brand spanking new content up at the Nerve Film Lounge.
- In our broad-ranging interview with Bug director (and living legend) William Friedkin, he discusses not only his latest, triumphant return to form, but also the Cannes-certified resurrection of his much-maligned S&M thriller Cruising.
- Luc Besson’s Angel-A comes very close to being so totally awesome, and winds up being merely okay. Dig the poster, though.
- Lars Von Trier’s latest, The Boss of It All, is a lighthearted office comedy. (No, really.)
- Don’t be fooled by the soft and fuzzy Miramax marketing of Emanuele Crialese’s The Golden Door; in reality, this is a tough-minded, modernist film well worth seeing.
- The Japanese anime Paprika is equal parts frustrating and compelling.
- Bug so totally rules.
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Morning Deal Report: An Inconvenient Sequel, Besson vs. Harvey, Damon Done With Bourne
5/25/2007 10:00:00 AM
- A sequel to An Inconvenient Truth? Really?
- After Luc Besson expressed his extreme displeasure with the Weinstein Co. for their botched release of his kid-flick Arthur and the Invisibles earlier this year, Harvey Weinstein has hit back, calling the Angel-A director a “has been.” (So, uh, why did you buy his movie, Harvey?)
- Matt Damon is done being Jason Bourne.
- Indiana Jones is now a Yale professor, and he’ll be tearing up the streets of New Haven for an action setpiece later this year.
- Stephen Gaghan, director of the oil-bashing Syriana, has married into oil money. If you can’t beat ‘em, etc…
- Manohla Dargis deems Cannes 2007 a success. And it’s not even over yet.
- Dancer in the Dark is being turned into an opera. Better that than a Broadway show, I guess.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Weekly Top 1020: The Most Unforgettable Death Scenes of All Time, Part 4 (Spoiler Alert!)
5/24/2007 4:45:00 PM
Go here for Part One
Go here for Part Two
Go here for Part Three
Al Pacino, SCARFACE
“You wanna play rough? Okay. Say hello to my little friend.” Before every rapper, comedian and wannabe gangsta attempted his own pathetic impression, Tony Montana’s infamous lines kicked off one of the most incredible death scenes in movie history. As if singlehandedly avenging the deaths of Bonnie & Clyde, Sonny Corleone, and every other antihero who went down in a hail of gunfire, Al Pacino’s Scarface manages to slaughter a dozen or so men while, thanks to his coke-fueled rage, he himself takes machine gun fire as he taunts his would-be assassins that he’s still standing. It is only a shotgun blast from the back that finally sends him into a crucifixion pose, belly-flopping into the fountain pool below quickly turning the turquoise blue water blood red. Then that creepy music comes back in and the camera scans up to feed us the forced irony of a neon wrapped globe emblazoned with Tony’s mantra, “The World Is Yours,” all while director Brian De Palma’s elegant, symmetrical framing gives the scene a deeply ironic kick. There’s nothing subtle about the conclusion to De Palma’s three hour gangster epic, but then again there’s nothing subtle about anything in this movie — not the over-the-top plotting (courtesy of some whippersnapper named Oliver Stone), the acres of violence, or Pacino’s much celebrated performance. But would you believe us if we told you the film had some historical value? It’s actually not entirely inaccurate in its reflection of a strange, dark period of time in Miami when the amount of drugs, money and beautiful women concentrated in one area caused a crime wave the world has rarely seen. (Don’t believe us? Check out last year’s documentary Cocaine Cowboys, filled with amazing, first-hand accounts of Miami’s coke and crime heyday.)
Orson Welles, CITIZEN KANE
There are reasons why so many smart people think this is one of the greatest films ever made. This stunning opening scene is but one of them: As Welles dissolves creepily up towards Charles Foster Kane’s forbidding castle, you could swear that you’re watching a Universal monster movie. But then the movie goes experimental on us, as Welles cuts to a snowscape, followed by a jarring zoom back from a snow globe clenched desperately in a dying man’s hands, as a pair of lips cryptically whispers, “Rosebud.” (The movie will eventually turn into a documentary newsreel, then to a film noir, a marital drama, a screwball comedy, a musical, a thriller, and pretty much any other genre you can imagine.) What, exactly, is going on here? The beauty of Citizen Kane is that it manages to explore that question without ever really answering it: Narratively, we never find out the true meaning of Kane’s life. Stylistically, we go through the whole history of filmmaking up until 1941, even as the future of cinema is invented before our very eyes. And it would all have been nothing without that ominous, haunting death scene at the very beginning.
Samuel L. Jackson, DEEP BLUE SEA
Let’s face it: None of us were expecting much going into a movie about killer hyper-intelligent sharks directed by Renny Harlin and featuring an LL Cool J theme song about hyper-intelligent sharks. And Deep Blue Sea ultimately didn’t turn out to be much to write home about. But holy shit, its one stratospheric high-point is sure to live on in film history, long after people have forgotten who the hell Jean Renoir was. Just watch the clip.
Joel McCrea, RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY
In his later films, such as The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, the director Sam Peckinpah unleashed endless barrages of ammunition into his heroes in the last reel, as if nothing short of a minor war could bring them down for good. In this, his first great movie, the final shootout is comparatively modest in scale but no less lethal for that, as befits a hero — McCrea's aging hired gun, Steve Judd — who represents the best a man can be yet is still vulnerable to the rigors of aging, to betrayal, to simple feelings of disgust at the piddling insignificance of the no-account punks who can still take him out with a lucky shot. Peckinpah was lucky to have McCrea, an actor whose special, awesome ability to communicate total decency without ever seeming boring or sanctimonious had only deepened with age. At the end, having set things right, he sends the others in his party off to spare them the sight of his last moments and then, left alone and with the pain beginning to show in his face, he racefully slides out of the film frame, as if to spare the audience, too. A lot of other movies had coated the screen in gaseous emissions trying to make the Western hero's last stand seem mythic and emotionally moving, too; with one clean, simple gesture, Peckinpah and McCrea made their most revered competition, the Shanes and High Noons, look like the winners of booby prize day at Rodeo Clown College.
King Kong, KING KONG
"I'll tell you straight out, a lot of people assume that with me, everything is part of some angle. I can't say I blame them, really. That's the price of being a showman. When you've made the choices I have and gone around the world, risking life and limb every step of the way, just to make sure that I stay the greatest showman around — well, okay, I have had to do some pretty fast talking in my day, just to keep my head attached to my neck. Mama Denham didn't raise any dummies. Part of the attraction of the whole Skull Island expedition was knowing that if I brought back anything that was half as wild as the stories I'd heard, I’d have a sensation that would lay this town on its ear. Well, we definitely got people's attention, though not in the way I was hoping. So then all of us who were in the street look up and see him falling towards us, and then a minute later while we're finding ourselves none the worse for the wear except a couple of us could probably use a change of underwear, and I hear somebody say something about the planes killing him, and I'll admit that I just couldn't resist. Not planes, I say — 'twas beauty killed the beast. Everybody sort of moans, but me, I think it's a snappy line myself. But then, while I'm congratulating myself on my gift of gab, I look down and I see his huge dead eye, staring right at me. And I start thinking about how it might have felt for him, being dragged over here on that leaky tub, and then about what that crowd of gawkers must have looked like to him while he was chained up on that stage. Naturally, that's when the photographers show up, just at that moment when I'm sliding to the ground next to his body. Big, tough Carl Denham cried that day? Cried over the monkey terrorist who tore the stuffing out of the Big Apple? You bet your ass I did. When the monkey died, everybody cried."
HONORABLE MENTION:
Wolfgang Kieling, TORN CURTAIN
Alfred Hitchcock had his way with quick, speedy death scenes, usually through stabbings, shootings, or being thrown off large American monuments. So in some senses, this remarkably disturbing scene in the middle of his flawed Cold War spy thriller Torn Curtain, was a way to make up for his history of quick dispatches. Perhaps also irked that the James Bond films were cramping his style, Hitch wanted to show that in real life, killing somebody wasn’t easy or quick at all. As Paul Newman and Carolyn Conwell try to do away with Newman’s nefarious East German bodyguard, the man just refuses to die. Stab him, punch him, strangle him, hit him on the head with a cast-iron pan, nothing seems to work. What does finally do it for this creepy German fellow? A gas oven. Even in one of his weaker films, Hitch’s sense of ice-cold irony never left him.
John Cusack, THE GRIFTERS
Few people could write down-and-out losers like Jim Thompson, and Roy Dillon was one of the biggest suckers Thompson ever wrote. As played by Cusack, Roy fancies himself a cool hustler, but in reality he’s strictly small time. He essentially becomes the prey for two vipers, his girlfriend (Annette Bening), and his mother Lily (Anjelica Huston). After eliminating Bening from the picture, Lily goes after her son’s money, first intimidating him and then attempting to seduce him. Finally, she grabs a suitcase and takes a swing at him. Unfortunately for Roy, this happens just as he’s taking a drink from a glass of water. The suitcase hits the glass and shatters it, a large shard embedding itself in Roy’s neck. As Lily scrambles around, sobbing, grabbing all the money she can, Roy bleeds to death. In our opinion, what makes this a great death scene isn’t simply the originality of the method. The key to its effectiveness is that it’s one of the most pathetic death scenes in all of cinema. Roy was a crook, but he wasn’t very good at it because he was too sensitive to succeed. There’s no place for emotion or sentimentality in Thompson’s world, and unfortunately for Roy it’s the only world he knew. It’s a stupid, senseless death, one that’s strangely fitting for a character like Roy, who only wanted love in a lifestyle that had none to give.
Bjork, DANCER IN THE DARK
If there’s one piece of advice we’re qualified to give, it’s this: Do not rent Dancer in the Dark to watch on someone’s birthday because you heard it featured Bjork and musical numbers and the ending was “really moving.” Of course, it may be memorable, as you and your friends wipe tears of utter desolation off your faces, but it might also end with someone throwing themselves off the third floor balcony. As the last of director Lars von Trier’s Golden Heart heroines, Bjork shines as a vision-impaired naif (Selma) determined to help her son. Selma is convicted for a murder equal parts self-defence and insanity — as she is encouraged by her attacker/landlord to kill him after she has wounded him while fighting him off. She is ultimately hanged, and no singing and dancing chorus emerges to save her. Dancer in the Dark won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and the derision of many. The barren execution chamber, the hand-held camera “looking around” at the unofficial witnesses, and Bjork’s voice starkly ringing out the sweet melody of “this isn’t the last song”, sets the audience up to hope against hope. We wait in real time for the call, the instruction. And then, just as the lilting melody turns up, the floor drops out from under her, and we fall with her. Amidst all the gore and carnage served up on film and TV screens, Selma’s bloodless death is one you won’t likely forget.
— Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, DK Holm, Phil Nugent, Scott Renshaw, Vern, Bryan Whitefield
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