Busy, Busy, Busy

I’m quite chuffed with the expressions of interest so far in The Late Show: The Late Movies Blogathon. But no harm in reminding you all that it’s happening and encouraging more of you to get involved. Late movies from directors, actors, writers, cinematographers, studios, interpret it as you will.

I’m thinking Fiona and I should record a Shadowcast for the occasion too.

Meanwhile, I can announce another video essay, this one attached to Arrow’s Blu-Ray release of BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE. “This might be our best ever,” observed editor Timo Langer as we reviewed our work. And it’s out in time for Christmas!

With new editor Alex Starr I’ve also made an extra for BORN YESTERDAY, which was a real pleasure, though also a tricky one. That one will appear in the New Year.

Next up: to London in early December to interview a TRUE FILM LUMINARY. More soon.

Image and title of this post from THE WHALES OF AUGUST.

How the West was Not

So, I got Netflix for THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, which of course meant we could watch THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS, so we did. I used to indiscriminately like all Coen Bros movies, with a slight preference for the early, funny ones. The tendency towards emptiness did start to nag at me a little as early as MILLER’S CROSSING and BARTON FINK. The nasty sense of humour didn’t — I have a fairly dark S.O.H. myself. But then came INTOLERABLE CRUELTY and THE LADYKILLERS which I disenjoyed so thoroughly it made me retroactively question even my favourites, and proactively question subsequent films.

I suspect the following will make David E. impatient, since he was onto the Coen’s combo of snark and misanthropy from the start.

Here’s my run-down of the episodes in this latest western compendium. Not too many specific spoilers, but plenty of comparisons with the Bros’ earlier offerings, good, bad and ugly.

1. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The ballad itself is practically a proper musical, except that, as with OH BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? the songs are all sorta diegetic. We have the welcome return to the fold of Tim Blake Nelson, and the unbelievably crisp cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel, who they got acquainted with on PARIS JE T’AIME and used again to even better effect on INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, a flm with a unique look in the Coen oeuvre. It’s fascinating to see iconic western imagery shot in an ultrasharp digital way. When people start by telling you they liked the photography it reliably indicates they hated the film, and I hated this episode. The “humorous” violence is mean and squicky: the severed thumb from THE LADYKILLERS is back. Remember how funny it is when Travis blows the guy’s hand off in TAXI DRIVER? That’s how funny the mutilation gag is here. The saving grace is Carter Burwell’s music: this whole movie is the best showcase he’s had for a while.

2. Near Algodones. Or, One Damn Thing After Another. A pretty good Leone imitation in places, this is nevertheless just as pointless and unpleasant as Part 1. James Franco as a bank-robber is given no appealing qualities, so his Really Bad Day is neither a nightmare we can empathise with nor even a justifiable punishment. These two episodes look to have been written in an afternoon. Both end, kind of, with The Last Sight You’ll See, harking way back to BLOOD SIMPLE’s grotesque yet kind of poetic plumbing close-up final shot.

3. Meal Ticket. Here’s where I start to wonder if the ordering of the stories is a problem. As soon as we meet the armless, legless “protagonist” of this one, we expect that something terrible will happen to him. Which means viewing the whole film in a queasy suspense, and not being surprised. The wintry, nocturnal look is really gorgeous and the reason for the story being told, as with the previous installments, is inscrutable. Shit happens, you say? No shit. Fiona was on the point of bailing at this point… but got drawn back in.

4. All Gold Valley. Things take a turn for the better here, maybe in part because we have a story by Jack London. It’s no TO BUILD A FIRE but it’s good. All the episodes are magnificently cast from both a dramaturgical and a physiognomic point of view, but here Tom Waits is actually given sympathetic traits, and though we suspect we may be being set up for a fall, this is not entirely true. This was the first yarn that didn’t make me feel horrible, and the nature photography ascends to new heights of loveliness,

5. The Gal Who Got Rattled. Another adaptation, this time from Stewart Edward White. whose stories have been used by the movies a fair few times, but not since 1941. A really grand evocation of a wagon train. Likeable characters. “I’m really worried about this girl,” said Fiona of Zoe Kazan’s nervous young frontierswoman. There’s a cute dog. This one’s a proper story, very strong, strikingly presented. It would play even better if it weren’t following a trio of sick joke blackout sketches: we need to believe the Coens are sincere here, for the yarn to play emotionally. It COULD be taken as another set-up/punch-line bit of cynical manipulation, and of course if we can give the Coens more credit than that and actually embrace the apparent warmth of feeling and sympathy, the film will play MUCH better. It’s a great little film: Kazan is terrific, and Bill Heck and Grainger Hines ought to be stars.

Also, by this point, the use of pages turning in a book of wild west yarns, with coloured illustrative plates, is really paying off. It’s something I don’t believe we’ve seen before in a film: the illustrations pluck a moment from the narrative, often from near the end, and then we wait for it to turn up and make sense in context. It can add a little extra touch of inevitability to a tragedy, an added twist of irony to a joke.

Also also, it’s nice to finally meet a girl. I know westerns have traditionally been male-dominated, but watching this one’s like going to prison (if you’re a man). Only with less sex.

6. Mortal Remains. OK, Tyne Daly is here so you’ll get no complaints from me. Well, maybe a few. This is DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS only on a stagecoach instead of a train. I mean that literally. I liked the misty cut-out buildings that nod both to NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and the whole history of the western movie set. A bunch of facades with nothing behind them seems an apt metaphor for something or other, but what? Oh yeah.

The garrulous English character is hard to process as anything other than a riff on THE HATEFUL EIGHT, and it does feel like the Coens have been treading familiar ground: Tarantino already gave us a western full of talk, with epic iconography but an oddly intimate, enclosed locale, and a lot of unpleasant characters doing horrible things we cant possibly care about. The mysterious, even mystic quality the Coens aim to evoke here certainly adds a new flavour, but as this one fades out I realize why anthology films usually have a framing structure. It’s hard for one episode to deliver an ending satisfying enough for all six.

Maybe the Coens need to stick to adaptations. Their two strongest films, the ones that feel most like they have a reason to exist, are NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and TRUE GRIT. The brothers are experts at pastiche, and their delight in language, both verbal and cinematic, is a kind of redeeming feature (they do care about SOMETHING), but what they get from an original author with world experience and an interest in people seems to be something they struggle to achieve by themselves.

Dissenting views are welcome.

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS stars Delmar O’Donnell, Harry “Oz” Osborn, Ruby Sparks, Oskar Schindler, Dudley Dursley, R.M. Renfield, Mary Beth Lacey, Colonel Oates and Alastor ‘MadEye’ Moody.

Coming Soon

 

1

Raoul Ruiz was a busy man: always filming. His filmography, according to the IMDb, stands at 63 features (though one is completely posthumous) and 27 shorts. Ruiz claimed not to know the whereabouts of many of these films and, given his globetrotting career as a political exile from his native Chile for much of his life, this seems quite credible. The thing was to keep working. Most established professionals don’t bother with shorts because there’s no money in it (unless you’re Scorsese) but Ruiz, as noted, liked to keep occupied.

2

The plot of this 1997 entry concerns a tiny religious cult based around a fragment of film, known as LE FILM A VENIR: The Coming Film. The phrase echoes that used by French movie trailers, their equivalent of Coming Soon. And, as with THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, the film within the film shares its title with the film itself.

Ruiz, who had made a short film (DOG’S DIALOGUE, 1977) almost entirely out of still photographs, planned this one as a kind of live-action photostrip in which the actors don’t move but the props do. For whatever reason, in the finished work he does allow his cast to move from one pose to another, making the strangeness less overt. It creeps up on you.

3

A matter-of-fact voice-over weaves an odd plot-line through a series of inscrutable images, or maybe most are actually quite mundane shots and only the words are making them strange? The situation shifts back and forth, with some lovely, dreamlike tableaux amid other, more banal images, all co-opted into Ruiz’s haunting, absurd narrative. The story seems to click shut like a trap, while remaining elusive to the point of vaporousness. What happened? Did anything happen?

4

Ruiz deserves to be better known and this film seems like a useful set of training wheels: discover his playful surrealism in a bite-sized unit. If you don’t speak French, the autotranslate function can be used to make the film much harder to understand.

5

Thanks to Ruizdiaries for translating RR’s preparatory thoughts on this film.