The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Saw The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a film from the 70s about a man who owns a not-very-hot strip club.  It's desultory and cheap, more the Kit Kat Klub than the Moulin Rouge.  The owner swans around with his girls, being the king of his little tawdry kingdom, mostly in close-shots which leave him looking bored, isolated, his giant face floating in the darkness looking down at his drink, or whatever.  He seems to be in a place of decadence, knowing that his girls only put up with him for the paycheck, but enjoying the simulated attention in any case.  He seems self indulgent and self loathing.

This starts to change when he's forced by gambling debts to murder the titular Chinese bookie.  This bookie is some sort of important person in the underworld and soon the nightclub owner is the subject of assassination attempts and sinister car rides, beatings and threats.  But, critically, the camera zooms out at this point and the nightclub owner comes alive.  As he struggles against the gangsters, he takes more of an interest in the world.  His nightclub picks up, and we can see him talking to people, moving to shots which place him in the middle distance, we see him more embedded in the world.

The film seems to suggest that this guy just needed something to struggle against to wake up and rediscover the thrill of the hustle.  It's sort of unfortunate that some bookie-murder was apparently the panacea that was called for, but I suppose it's more interesting than the more conventional subjects these films use to bring their protagonists back to life (ie: orphans, girlfriends, retarded relatives, talking animals, etc)

There's also a bit at the end where the nightclub owners lectures his girls on the power of fantasy and pretend.  It's a piece which feels very much like the director is talking to us.  Like the nightclub owner, the film director is the king of his little temporary empire.  There will always be bigger fish which he has to duck and deal with, but this little corner is his, and he wants to entertain people.

The film is very 1970s.  It's slow and full of grainy closeups.  Naturalistic dialogue trickles out at a relaxed pace.  The feel of the film is fairly relaxing and mild, in spite of its plot.  It's an interesting film.  Not really a slam dunk of a popcorn film, but not an inaccessible headscratcher either.  It's a nice, sincere little 1970s film.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

Saw The Bonfire of the Vanities, Brian De Palma film based on a book by Tom Wolfe, so expect a cynicism and worship of stockbrokers.  True to form, this film follows a stockbroker who escapes from an attempted mugging by running over one of his would-be assailants.  This blows up into a civil rights matter and the stockbroker's life is destroyed.  The film is solid, but fairly cynical and, well, the stockbroker does come out looking good.

The film was made in 1990 (2 years before even Rodney King) but it has many echoes of modern times.  Today, the millionaire Park Avenue stockbroker would be a much harder sell as the protagonist.  In this film, the black mugger is treated as terrifying, the detour into the South Bronx looks like a trip to hell.  There are cars burning and crazy people screaming into the car windows.  It feels sort of uncomfortable but then again, this is the sort of film where no one comes off well.  The Park Avenue set are portrayed as vapid, artificial, overwhelming, and self-absorbed.  This is somewhat better than how the Bronx-ians come off (which is: monstrous) but it makes their depiction of a piece with the rest of the film.

Anyway, the film is very cynical.  The poor and the rich alike, antagonists and protagonists are all completely self-interested and playing roles to extract the most value for themselves from the situation.  It's a darkly comical premise, but it feels too cartoonish to tip fully into actionable satire.  It's political commentary of the South Park style: everyone is corrupt, so why care?  Just look out for yourself.  And this is a viewpoint, I guess, but it's not very helpful.  It's partly the fault of the source material but also of DePalma.  There's a reason he wanted to shoot this film, after all.

There's also some confusing casting choices.  The film is narrated by Bruce Willis who plays a sleazy, drunken journalist.  The protagonist stockbroker is played by Tom Hanks, who is a hard sell as a stockbroker falling from grace, sweating through his shirt.  The stockbroker's wife however is amazing as a hissing, crystalline Stepford Wife who smilingly informs the stockbroker "I'm leaving you.  Right after this dinner party."  Delicious.

De Palma is a masterful technician however and the camera work is tight and perfect.  He makes excellent use of split screen for one scene to show the behind-the-camera drama at the same time as the televised event.  He also does that double-exposure thing to show the foreground and the background in perfect focus together.  It's great camerawork.

The rest is a little limp though.  The film is definitely not bad.  It's entertaining and dark and wry and a solid way to spend two hours, but it never really dazzled me.  I feel Hudsucker Proxy is a more entertaining wacky satire, Network is better as social commentary, and the Sweet Smell of Success is better for delightfully dark comedy.  This movie is a little of all of those things though, which is pretty good.

Our Hospitality

Saw Our Hospitality, a slightly dusty old Buster Keaton film about a New York man (Keaton) who returns to his ancestral Appalachian home and unwittingly into an ancient feud between his family and the Canfields.  The film is divided into two parts: getting there and then surviving the rivalry.  It's fairly funny in a quaint, pokey kind of way.  I laughed a few times, but only at strange things.

The first half was really great, with lots of gags about how small New York was back then and the horrible oldness and ricketyness of their trains.  There's some great gags with a tiny train following the tracks as they snake around a grazing donkey or over a fallen log.  Looney Tunes level creativity and humor - I liked it.

The second half climaxes in a waterfall rescue that's not very funny of course, but is quite impressive.  Keaton gets a rope around his middle and uses it to swing and be swung by all kinds of objects.  Keaton has this manner of taking a simple encumbrance and milking it for all kinds of bizarre physical humor.  It's so rigorous, it feels almost scientific.

Anyway, an alright film.  Not quite gripping enough to keep my attention all the way through, but perhaps this is more of an indictment of me than of the movie.  Solid flick!

Chelsea Girls

Saw Chelsea Girls, a boring yet enigmatic film directed by Andy Warhol (but really by Paul Morrissey.)  It was originally 6 hours long, however they mercifully cut it down to only 3 hours by cutting the screen in half and playing two films next to each other.  The projectionist was free to switch the audio channel however they wanted.  The version I saw is free on YouTube, so that may be the official sound selection for all I know.  It's a series of about a dozen short films (30 minute or so) starring Andy's drugged-up, indolent friends.

Here's the movie in microcosm: two guys are laying in bed.  One is fairly attractive and wearing only underwear.  They talk for a while and then a woman gets on the bed and straps the attractive guy's wrists together with her belt and winds a scarf around his neck.  He sort of writhes about for a while and it's not clear if he's being strangled or is on drugs or is just bored and playing around or doesn't even want to be there.  This goes on for another 15 minutes.

I can enjoy some delicious ambiguity and I like an attractive guy, but to be left stranded with nothing to entertain me for so long is either malicious or incompetent and I think most likely the latter.  The entire 3 hours is like this.  We see attractive people from the 60s being bored out of their minds and vaguely improvising for the camera.  It's interesting as a sort of time capsule of how theater-types behave when they are as bored as we the audience have become.

There is one moment though, that I was able to latch on to: this guy who is tripping on something strips while telling us very personal details about his relationships.  It's not salacious (the personal details) but more like a therapy session.  He talks about how he loses himself in other people, how he becomes what they want "and then I-" he says as the film cuts him off.  That's a nice bit.  In addition to the emotional baring being mirrored by the flesh baring, he has indeed become what I wanted from the film: something personal and interesting to think about and relate to.  And then, just as with his relationships - he's gone!  Lovely.

It makes me wonder if there's something I missed in the other sequences.  But then it's followed by some dude shooting up heroin and proclaiming himself to be the pope in a braying voice and carrying on with not-very-amusing banter.  This tedium drags on for another half hour before the whole film finally finishes as every other scene did: for no apparent reason.

So, rare glimmers of something interesting all but lost in an arid, self-indulgent wasteland of a movie.

Scorpio Rising

Saw Scorpio Rising, a famously non-pornographic film which is nonetheless impressionistic and  scattered, telling its story through song lyrics and barely glimpsed flashes of homoerotic imagery.  There's not much story but we sort of follow this biker guy who suits up in his leather finery, goes to a party, and then crashes on the way home.  Apparently this was a serendipitous film which the stars aligned for.  The main actor apparently just actually lives like that and The Wild One just happened to be on TV at the time.

The film is quite sinister.  It's hard to tell how much is for effect and for fun, and how much is in earnest.  There's a lot of sexy/threatening leather outfits which are obviously more about excitement than intimidation, but there's also a fair amount of Nazi paraphernalia which might be more of the same, but has certainly not aged well if it is.  Contrasting with this, there's also a fair amount of footage from an old film about the life of Jesus.  The main character mounting a motorcycle is intercut with Jesus mounting a donkey.  The main character lives with disregard for danger, or perhaps self-destructively pursuing it.  His bedroom is decorated with images of James Dean and clippings of motorcycle deaths.  He is too beautiful for this world, or perhaps to wicked for it.

Another thing about this film: it makes liberal use of shmaltzy 60s pop.  It has a very David Lynch-ish feel, showing homoerotic, sadistic hazing rituals with Torture by Kris Jensen playing on the soundtrack.  The songs seem to innocently/sinisterly fawn over the main character, calling him a devil or an angel, a rebel.  It's very slick, very sinister.

Listen to Britain

Saw Listen to Britain, a short propaganda film which opens with a Canadian poet quoting (in his words) a famous American, reinforcing the allied forces here.  This quotation is the last bit of dialogue we hear.  After that the camera bounces, impressionistically, between bombers flying overhead as radios play in living rooms, dancehalls full of singing people while men strap on their helmets in grim, silent, silhouette.  It's very stirring, kind of pokey and old, and sort of nice.

The film reminded me of other experimental, character-free films, such as Man with a Movie Camera or (to a much lesser extent) Meshes of the Afternoon.  This film is only 20 minutes long so it never really drags, but it is also a bit old and pokey.  The version I saw (linked above) had an unfortunately poor sound track, which undermines the impact of the film a bit.  Even with a decent soundtrack however, Roll Out the Barrel does not give the same mood it once did, centuries ago and miles away.

It's an interesting sort of curiosity of a film.  Definitely peaceful and pleasant, but not terribly accessible or gripping.

Pyaasa

Saw Pyaasa, a black and white Hindi movie from 1957.  It was a swooning, sentimental kind of musical drama.  It followed a struggling poet who is sidelined by society and treated with cruelty.  The only folks who will stick by him are street walkers, peddlers, and of course other poets who recognize his genius, but alas whenever it comes to actually giving the poet money, suddenly everyone turns very cruel.

The film is sweet and sentimental.  There's songs about the sad artificiality of prostitution and of lost love.  There's a dream sequence (possibly within a dream sequence?) which is as swooning and ethereal as anything in An American in Paris.  The film is very touching and sweet, a romantic film at its heart.  It does dip into musical absurdity once in a while however.  I couldn't help but roll my eyes every so often when the poet suddenly breaks into song once more, to the amazement and raised eyebrows of the established poets, recognizing their fellow (once more.)

The film is ultimately a sort of bitter fairytale about this poet who is sooo deserving of recognition being cheated and ignored and sneered at at every turn.  The film is so sweet and the poet guy is so pathetic however that it easily avoids being just a wallow in sour grapes.  There's the standard machinery of a musical as well: love triangles, mistaken identities, scheming but loyal servant characters.  It's a very well made, familiar, sweet, sad film.  It's tender and nice and yes a little hokey but I, with my love for melodrama, completely forgave it.