Furie Road

Stray thoughts about Sidney J. Furie inspired by my recent work on two video essays for Imrpint’s forthcoming box set.

This is a really useful set — Furie is never considered as being part of the New Hollywood, but during the time frame covered by these movies — THE LAWYER, LITTLE FAUSS AND BIG HALSY, HIT!, SHEILA LEVINE IS DEAD AND LIVING IN NEW YORK and THE BOYS IN COMPANY C, he was right in there, despite being a Canadian who had made films in his homeland and in the UK. His style, both photographic and editorial, fits the bill — he worked with John A. Alonzo a few times, before JAA shot CHINATOWN. The actors he uses include Barry Newman, Michael J. Pollard, Robert Redford, Billy Dee Williams, Gwen Welles, Richard Pryor, Jeannie Berlin, Roy Scheider, a real panoply of the talent of the period.

The two major ommissions in Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls are Peckinpah and Fosse, which is bizarre since their inclusion would have strengthened the author’s assumption, never quite developed into an argument, that most of the directorial talents of the era self-destructed in a welter of booze and alcohol. I can only assume that they were excluded because they’re not quite the right type by way of origins: Peckinpah’s grounding in the western and Fosse’s in musicals mark them out as different from the movie brats. It can’t be their age, since Hal Ashby gets major coverage.

Furie is similarly an alien, and I can only assume that Biskind gave him the go-by because he didn’t consider him significant enough or that he was too level-headed, disinclined to destroy his brain with chemicals.

Furie has been typed — and has sometimes typed himself — as a one-trick pony, developing the elaborate style of THE IPCRESS FILE, then failing to develop anything else to replace it. But why should he? It’s fun. It attracted a lot of critical abuse over the years, but I love flamboyant style, and what we see in these films is a modulation of the concussed-fly-on-the-wall (or behind the potted plant, telephone, lampshade or in-box) approach, which delights in fracturing the widescreen frame with views through doorways, windshields, screen doors, and other architectural elements, but doesn’t necessarily startle the viewer by making the brim of a sombrero and its wearer’s shoulders the main compositional material, with the other guy’s face tiny in the distance, gazing through a narrow slot (as seen in THE APPALOOSA).

I’m curious now to see more of Furie’s recent films — he’s kept working, rather off-radar for most auteurist-types, for a remarkably long time. For now, I want to say that all the films included on this set are worth anybody’s time, and BOYS IN COMPANY C is some kind of masterpiece. The energy and insight Furie packs into every moment is really awe-inspiring. A two-hour movie with what feels like three hours of content.

Of course the presence of R. Lee Ermey as drill sergeant, well ahead of his turn for Kubrick, is an eye-opener, but the movie’s also notable for the younger cast, particularly Stan Shaw, Craig Wasson, James Whitmore Jr. And comparisons with APOCALYPSE NOW may be more germane — the movies were neighbours, both shooting in the Philippines at the same time, though Furie’s shoot started later and finished earlier. While Coppola creates a mood of psychedelic fog and madness, it’s the Furie movie that makes you feel like you’re in the midst of real, deadly events. A more conventional film but a more effective one in many respects, although one has to acknowledge that Coppola’s goals were different…

Daniel Kremer’s book, Sidney J. Furie, Life and Films, has been a great help — it’s the kind of book every living filmmaker wishes they had written about them.

One nice bit: Furie, wary of shooting in the Philippines, suspicious that corruption may be responsible for Coppola’s schedule and budget problems, asked the government man with responsibility for movie-making to what he attributes Coppola’s troubles. “Mr. Furie, my observation is that when the producer and director are the same person, and they argue, the director always wins.”

This Sweltering Guy

The word is out —

Fiona, Stephen C. Horne and I have contributed a video essay to the forthcoming Arrow Blu-ray on Bertolucci’s THE SHELTERING SKY. It streets in November.

One thing we missed —

I identified the above shot as an echo of Orson Welles —

And I think I was bang on, given Bertolucci’s talk of his Wellesian influence. What I overlooked, but producer Neil Snowden pointed out, is a more direct connection —

Now, I don’t know if Coppola had a great influence on Bertolucci generally — I know the reverse is true — but Vittorio Storaro shot both APOCALYPSE NOW and THE SHELTERING SKY so that is, one might say, highly relevant. A case of me leapfrogging past the fundamental in search of the obscure. 

Ape Crisis Centre

Sorry for the tacky title, but somebody already reviewed KONG: SKULL ISLAND with the tagline I LOVE THE SMELL OF APE PALM IN THE MORNING, better than which it is impossible to do. It wasn’t the famous Anonymous Wag, it was somebody real with a name, I just can’t recall who and can’t be bothered checking. but well done, Nonymous Wag.

I didn’t see KK:SI but I did see WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES, slightly dragged by Fiona, and it has just probably as many APOC NOW refs as the big gorilla one. There’s even a graffita reading APE-POCALYPSE NOW, so I couldn’t use that as my header either. The Vietnam stuff is a little heavy-handed and dumb, though in a war with the apes Americans surely WOULD call their enemy “the Kong” so I have to grant them that one. (They called their enemy that in ‘Nam, too — I know you know that, but did you know it was actually a made-up name? There was no such group as the “Viet Cong,” the US made the name up because they wanted something that sounded cool and sinister. NOTE: see correction in comments section.)

So, I was glad I saw this in the end — we’d seen  films one and two in the trilogy, and this one does its best to actually be a concluding episode, though I’m sure there’ll be pressure to do more — a reboot, or some kind of sequel that also serves as a remake of the original Chuckles Heston apetacular (still the best in the series/serieses).

DIGITALLY RENDER UNTO CAESAR

The first half hour is nicely directed, though the 3D didn’t add as much as I expected — maybe because the sinuously moving camera does all the 3D’s work for it. But I wasn’t really engrossed dramatically. Caesar (Andy Serkis and his army of animators) is quite chatty in this one, despite Noam Chomsky’s firm stance on ape language, but he apparently has never learned to use contractions. So talks like Data from Star Trek, or like a man in a biblical epic. This is obviously as deliberate as the ‘Nam refs, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. (Notice how Data’s robospeak gradually infected the rest of ST:TNG‘s cast as the writers forgot how people talk).

I guess the biblical epic aspect has always been there, from the casting of Heston to all the talk of a “Lawgiver,” echoing Heston’s role as Moses and eventually embodied by John Huston, director of THE BIBLE (and portrayer of Noah, another man who conserved species from an environmental disaster) in BATTLE FOR, the last of the original series. That movie is referenced here just enough (a single teardrop!), and there are lots of other clever harkenings to the earlier films, which the reboot has always been nicely respectful of.

But the first half hour is also terribly uninvolving. No effort is made to remind us of the personalities of the lead apes from the previous installments. One fellow only gets a little character grace note five minutes before being offed, which retroactively makes said grace note seem like a cynical plant. Inexplicably, the film’s baddie, the Colonel (Woody Harrelson as Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz with a side order of Robert Duvall’s Kilgore) shows up out of nowhere to kill some apes and set Caesar on a mission of revenge, then vanishes back to his hideaway — Caesar falls off a waterfall, very dramatically, but in the next scene is back in his (compromised, unsafe) base camp, making plans. It feels muddled, and the emotion is dampened by confusion.

Fiona points out that the film is still afraid of female apes: none of them talk in this film, and they don’t fight, contrary to nature. They don’t have big purple behinds, so the movie resorts to having them wear little hair braids so we know who’s a girl. They make little feminine grunts, the way real apes don’t. I think the rot set in with Tim Burton’s appalling POTA movie, with Helena Bonham Carter and Lisa-Marie as sexy ape-babes. Ugh. That’s the only bit of wrongheadedness from that abomination which has kind of survived and mutated, as if exposed to an experimental gas canister (Burton is getting to resemble an experimental gas canister more and more).

BAD TIME FOR BONZO

There’s also, I would say, a problem with the first half’s post-apocalyptic landscape. Unlike the crumbling cities of DAWN OF, there’s nothing specially evocative about, say, a Snow Cat lying abandoned in a snowy forest. It looks like quite a normal site. I love post-man settings in the same way I love empty set photographs — I’m all about the defining absence, me. So this was disappointing.

But it was in the midst of the snowy rural stuff where the film is aiming to be THE SEARCHERS with even more sign language that it starts to get good. There’s a quite brilliant scene of Maurice the orang (Karin Kanoval and her animators) and a silent little girl (Amiah Miller) which is LOOONG, wordless, quiet, tender and hypnotic. Really unexpected in a summer blockbuster. And the film starts improving right now.

Next we meet Steve Zahn (and his Zahnimators) as the comedy relief chimp (his “Oh nooo…” sounds very Scottish, somehow). Comedy relief characters are primarily needed by films with no sense of humour, or films afraid that a sense of humour will deflate the pomposity that sustains them. Both certainly factors here — any film with a lead who can’t use contractions must be afraid of humour. Get it safely contained in one character and you’ve quarantined it. But Zahn & co create a rather adorable figure here. So appealing, I worried he was being set up for a moving death scene. But the film doesn’t ALWAYS do what you expect.

EMOTION CAPTURED

Now the movie becomes a prison camp flick, and the Colonel shows semblances of another of his rank, Saito in BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI. But it’s a wall he’s building. Yes, this feels like the first anti-Trump blockbuster (or the first I’ve seen — I don’t see many). And it will feature an ape swinging from a Stars and Stripes which is also inscribed Alpha Omega and is also on fire. An image for our times. (Also prefigured by John Huston, this time in WINTER KILLS.)

Science fiction films never accurately predict the future (except BRAZIL, which has all come true) but one hopes this does, just so we can have Don Jr. lose the power of speech and his dad shoot him. Oh, come on. It’d be interesting.

But the movie isn’t as dark and vengeful as that, after all. It has a much more nuanced take on vengeance than, say THE REVENANT, which proved remarkably dumb and unsophisticated. And it even redeems the somewhat fascistic ending of RISE DAWN, which had Caesar depriving his enemy of apehood so he could kill him without breaking the “Ape Shall Not Kill Ape” rule. That climax, which seemed like it was meant to be just cool and bad-ass, is back-engineered to seem genuinely proto-fascist, something that must be atoned for and which leaves trauma for the perpetrator, or maybe this was always part of their plan (the writers of the first film are execs on this, granting a sense of cohesion and trilogic world-building). Caesar feels guilt for killing Toby Kebbell as Koba the bonobo (I just like writing that) and gets a chance to act differently this time.

APE PLURIBUS UNUM

So maybe because I like apes or because I don’t like concentration camps, this movie got quite emotional for me. I seemed to continually have something in my eye (mayve it was the 3D). It wasn’t profoundly moving, because torturing animals always gets a reaction (my friend Alex makes fun of the bit in RISE OF where Malfoy shows up with girlfriends to abuse apes — “No matter how evil you are, it’s unlikely you’d think that torturing chimps would be a good way to impress the girls,” — but in fact, animal abuse is a staple of entertainment, since drama depends on a good bit of unpleasantness to work its magic). Arguably, it was all too easy. But it worked. And it didn’t become so manipulative and Von Trieresque that I resented its effect.

It’s nice to get a proper trilogy. The middle one is the darkest. The first and third are the best. This is as it should be.