Anthony Lee Collins

Here’s the reposted review I promised last time.

For a long time this movie occupied the “see this if there’s nothing else” position in my movie list, but eventually there was nothing else and I did see it. I am certainly glad that I did, because it’s a pisser.

Yes, the three-part structure is swiped from Pulp Fiction, but the structure was the best thing about Pulp Fiction, so why not steal it? In any case, what Liman does with that structure is very different. Tarantino made a movie-nerd’s Ultimate Movie, whereas Liman is working on a somewhat more human scale, but with the speed cranked up to maximum. It’s got drug deals, dancing, loud music, violence, threats of violence, tantric sex, unbelievably stupid decisions, deceptive appearances, moderately good decisions, Las Vegas, a talking cat, Amway, Chiang Kai-Shek and a terrific car chase. And the main engine of the narrative is the desperate need to raise $380 so as to avoid eviction.

The story circles around (“careens around” might be more accurate) three times to the same simple scene where one checkout clerk convinces another to cover his shift so he can to go Las Vegas, and the whole thing moves so fast that by the end both the audience and the people on the screen have completely forgotten about one major character, so then the other characters have to go find him.

The cast is excellent, but special mention must to go Sarah Polley. This is very different from the role she played in The Sweet Hereafter, but she’s just as good here. What the two roles have in common is that she always conveys that the character she’s playing is thinking a lot more than she is letting on to the other characters, but usually she doesn’t telegraph what the character is thinking. It’s like seeing Kevin Spacey reincarnated as a teenage girl who’s just trying to pay the rent.

* * * * *

Later comments: It was interesting to read, in the article I linked to last time, how many of the small details in that scene were in the script. That pleases me, because the movie in general is full of great touches. For example, Simon, the English guy who switches shifts so he can go to Vegas, slides from his English accent into an Irish accent when he’s flirting with the girls he meets there. Some people don’t even notice that, but it’s always struck me funny.

Citizen Kane is thought by many people to be the best movie ever made in Hollywood. It is a great film, but I don't think it's even the best movie Welles ever made. I was always partial to Touch of Evil, though I also thought very highly of Falstaff (which I think is his best acting performance, at least in one of his own films) and The Trial.

But the version I'd been seeing of Touch of Evil was not the version Welles had made (which was not an unusual situation in Welles' history, unfortunately). The studio had seen his version and had demanded cuts and changes. Welles was not allowed to participate in this. When he saw the results, he wrote a 58-page memo proposing further changes. It was ignored. The studio's version was released, and it was not a huge success.

Then, forty years later, a project was started to recut and restore the film, as much as possible, following Welles' memo.

The 1998 re-edit involved no restored footage, just a re-ordering of what was there and the removal of some scenes Welles hadn't directed (and at least one scene which he did direct), plus changes in the sound and music, but it alters the whole moral landscape of the film, which is now even more clearly revealed to be a masterpiece.

It is not a "Director's Cut," particularly since some of Welles' original footage was lost (there is one significant scene that Welles did not direct, but the footage it replaced was thrown away, and Welles' memo did not ask for the newer scene to be changed). Welles' memo was not really focused on restoring his original version, but on making the film work with what was possible.

Touch of Evil was a film Welles was hired to direct (as opposed to generating the project himself) and it is pretty much the only one. But he made it his own, substantially changing the story of the book it was based on (Badge of Evil). He was originally hired to act (and his performance is magnificent), but then Charlton Heston (who was starring as a Mexican detective) asked for Welles to direct as well (at least that's the most common version of the story).

It was supposed to be Orson Welles' return to Hollywood after many years in Europe. He thought it would be the first of many movies he would make for Universal. Instead, the movie was taken away from him and he never made another film in Hollywood.

Perhaps the most famous part of the movie is the long tracking shot which opens it (it is specifically mentioned in the long tracking shot which opens The Player), and the studio put the credits and music over it despite Welles' objections (he wanted the credits at the end, as in Citizen Kane). But the whole movie is strong, with Charlton Heston playing a Mexican narcotics detective, Janet Leigh as his American wife and Welles as a corrupt detective in a border town.

I could go on and on, but just go rent it (and be sure to get the 1998 re-edit).

Two more recent movies which show the influence of Touch of Evil are Lone Star (which deals with the question of law in a border town) and LA Confidential (the disagreement between Captain Smith and Ed Exley about how a detective needs to function is a direct parallel to the arguments between Captain Quinlan and Mike Vargas in Touch of Evil).

The reconstruction is fascinating, since I was quite fond of the movie even from the earlier, butchered version. The question, which Welles always said puzzled him, was exactly why the studio freaked out and demanded it be redone. I have an idea about that.

One of the things that's most striking about the reconstruction is that it removes the studio-dictated focus on Mike Vargas (Heston's character) as the straightforward hero of the picture. For one thing, as Walter Murch (who re-edited the movie) points out, what Welles intended was for Vargas' story to be equal to his wife's story when they are apart, as opposed to Vargas being The Hero and Susan being merely The Wife.

But, equally important, the re-edit restores the parallels between Vargas and Welles' character, both cops, both men whose wives were threatened (and, in the case of Quinlan's wife, killed) while their husbands were out chasing criminals, both men who take the law into their own hands (Vargas argues against this, but when his wife is threatened he starts to threaten and beat people up to find out where she is).

The studio, I believe, didn't want to emphasize the parallels between the Hero and the Villain, though this was very consistent with Welles other films, where he frequently had more sympathy for the "villain" (there are elements of this in Arkadin, Othello, Falstaff. and other films).

return to the orson welles page

I recently watched a couple of movies which were set in Massachusetts. Other than that, though, they were very different.

One was The Ghost Writer. It was really enjoyable, and it reminded me in a couple of ways of The Ninth Gate, which I still intend to review at some point [later: I did]. Nobody mentions the connections, though, because The Ninth Gate was made during the time when nobody was paying any serious attention to what Roman Polanski was doing (i.e., before The Pianist).

In both The Ghost Writer and The Ninth Gate a not-so-innocent man is hired for a project (in both cases involving a book) that turns out to be a lot more complex and dangerous than it appears at first. The mystery requires him to travel and interview various creepy people who are pretty obviously concealing secrets. The ending is even similar in some ways (spoiler follows).

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The main similarity, though, is that each is about something big (in one case: politics, war, duplicity, and torture; in the other case: god and the devil) but in both movies the Big Subject is pretty much a MacGuffin. Adam Lang in The Ghost Writer is obviously Tony Blair, but it is not primarily a political thriller. It takes the political situation as a starting point and uses it, as Hitchcock did so many times, as the foundation for an entertainment. This is another similarity to The Ninth Gate, which was a movie about Satan and Satanists made by someone who is not religious.

The Ghost Writer is not on the level of the best Hitchcock, but it's really good, including some great performances (especially Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Williams as the ex-Prime Minister and his wife, plus Eli Wallach as a wise old Cape Codder and Tom Wilkinson as a mysterious professor). The movie consistently uses suspense and humor, rather than "gotcha" surprises. Even the house where the ex-Prime Minister is holed up with his staff is spooky in a modern way, exactly the type of house that non-Cape people with too much money build on the Cape.

The other Massachusetts movie I watched, at least briefly, was The Bostonians (Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala, starring Christopher Reeve and Vanessa Redgrave). As I said before, I'm re-reading the book, and I remembered watching the movie and not liking it, but I didn't remember why. So, I rented it and watched about fifteen minutes of it, enough to remind me.

The main problem, of course, is that adapting Henry James for the screen is a sucker's game. There is no substitute for that authorial voice, and showing the plain events of the story without it is pointless. And for this novel, most importantly, you lose the entire effect of the ending (one of my favorite endings ever).

But the other problem, which I realized almost immediately, was that Vanessa Redgrave was far too old to play Olive Chancellor. In the novel, Olive and Verena are fairly close in age. Verena is a few years younger, but Olive is definitely in her twenties. In the movie, she is clearly old enough to be Verena's mother. Which, to put it mildly, changes the dynamics of their relationship.

For a lot of characters, age really matters. As I've said before, as much as I like Robert Downey Jr., I don't want him to play Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice. Imagine Vicki Cristina Barcelona with Vicki and Cristina being in their forties and you see the point.

I'm watching Let Me In right now, and it would be a pretty good movie if it wasn't a very close remake of a much better movie (even a lot of the dialog comes right from the "good" subtitles of the original). Plus, it has annoying music, the kind that tells you how you should be responding to everything that happens on screen, in case you're not paying close enough attention.

I just watched Alice in Wonderland, and I liked it a lot. I remember some of the reviews complained that it wasn't the regular Alice story, but that's why I liked it. Do we really need yet another version of the regular Alice story?

It is great to look at, of course (it is Tim Burton, after all). And, since it is Tim Burton, the forward momentum is a bit bumpy, but you expect that.

I saw it on DVD, so I can't comment on the 3D, which was one of those "We'll shoot it in 2D and then convert it to 3D later on" deals. To the experts, that's apparently pretty much like shooting a movie in black and white and then colorizing it later.

But the story is good, the contrasts between the regular world and "Underland" are pointed without being telegraphed, and the actors are wonderful, particularly Johnny Depp (who I always like) as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham-Carter (who I don't always like) as the Red Queen ("I need a pig here!"). Plus the voice actors, especially Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat and Alan Rickman as Absolem the blue caterpillar. The Jabberwocky has very few lines, but they're especially effective because the voice is Christopher Lee's.

I liked Mia Wasikowska as Alice. In a movie like this, being "the normal person" can be a pretty thankless task, and she's rather bland in the early parts. Some critics complained about this, but I think it's deliberate. Alice is not totally engaged for a long time, because she thinks this is all a dream and she'll wake up at some point. But then she realizes that it is real, and what she does will matter a whole lot.

Of course, the story does have the "Is she the real Alice?" thing (in other words, is she the one?), but even so she does what she does by going off of the path that's laid out for her, by doing what she thinks she should be doing.

And, unlike Roger Ebert, I liked the ending. After all, it's almost always a guy who ends up being the champion.

Similar to The Matrix in that it deals with virtual reality, but since this is a David Cronenberg movie nothing is sleek, fancy or electronic. The guns are made from gristle and shoot teeth instead of bullets, and the "game pod" looks like sexualized stomach. Many of the people getting off on The Matrix would be unsettled (if not repulsed) by this movie, and that may be the idea.

Allegra Gellar (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is the inventor of a virtual reality game called eXistenZ, which is played by plugging a game pod into a "bioport" (a socket at the base of the spine). Some people (called "the Realists") disapprove of the whole idea and try to kill her. So, she and Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a "PR nerd" from the company she works for, go on the run. His biggest priority is trying to keep her alive, hers is to stop running long enough play eXistenZ with him so they can be sure her one-of-a-kind game pod (which she refers to as her baby) is undamaged.

But first they have to get Ted fitted with a bioport, so they go to an especially greasy rural gas station, run by Willem Dafoe, who does the operation as a sideline.

It goes on from there, with many twists and turns, and the world inside eXistenZ isn't any sleeker or more futuristic than the real world. A lot of it is both disturbing and a little silly, and in the end it's obvious that both reactions are part of the plan. Unlike The Matrix, this movie is in on its own joke, and it has a terrific ending.

Spoiler Alert!
Click Here! for the Secrets of Life, eXistenZ and Everything
(so don't click unless you've already seen the movie!)

"Cavities in the teeth occur for good reason. But even if there are several per tooth, there's no conscious organization there against the life of the pulp, no conspiracy. Yet we have men like Stencil, who must go about grouping the world's random caries into cabals."

– Dudley Eigenvalue, D.D.S.

This movie (or, at least, this review) really started to come together for me when I began to think about it in these terms. People create systems and conspiracies and rituals, as a way of warding off the randomness of real life.

The two main characters in this movie are Louie, a Mafia soldier, and Ghost Dog, an assassin who views himself as Louie's "retainer" according to the code of the samurai, because Louie once saved his life. Since then, he has worked as a hit man for Louie. When Louie wants somebody dead, he contacts Ghost Dog (by carrier pigeon) and Ghost Dog carries out the contract. They live, in many ways, in two separate worlds, and in fact, as the movie opens, they have only met twice, but they are a lot alike in that they are each living according to a code which may have outlived its relevance.

"Nothing makes sense anymore," as Louie keeps saying in this movie. Ghost Dog says, "Everything seems to be changing all around us." They both talk a lot about "respect." The particular Mafia family that Louie belongs to seems to be especially outmoded and outclassed. For one thing, they're all middle-aged men, or older. There are no young men in this family. Also, they obviously have a lot of trouble paying the rent on the rather crappy social club which serves as their headquarters. So, they belong to the past as much as the book of the samurai code that Ghost Dog follows.

The difference between Louie and Ghost Dog is that Ghost Dog seems to know and accept that he's living according to rules that he alone cares about, and that this is not going to work forever. At the end he deliberately faces death because the code requires it, because the alternative is to give up the code and live in a world where things have no logic or purpose.

Bear Hunter: This ain't no ancient culture here, mister.

Ghost Dog: Sometimes it is.

This makes me think of another Jarmusch movie, "Dead Man," where William Blake travels cross-country from Cleveland to the town of Machine, confident that he will have a job there because he has a letter that tells him so. Of course, he doesn't have a job, all he has is a piece of paper. And it makes me think of gamblers, both in Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise" and in Robert Altman's "California Split." In both movies, the gamblers have all sorts of hunches and theories and superstitions, and what is that but a way to pretend that the games aren't just totally a matter of chance.

The ending of "California Split" is a wonderful illustration of this, because a gambler says that he has a feeling that he's due for a big winning streak. He drags his buddy to Las Vegas, where he gambles and he wins big, but he feels hollow at the end, despite the money piled in front of him, because he had been lying. There was no "feeling," that was just a way to psych up his buddy, and that means that his winning was simply blind luck, just a random roll of the dice.

This is why the central image of this film (it permeates the film, though you see it only once) is the man building a large boat on the roof of his building. Raymond, Ghost Dog's best friend, brings him to see this, that a man is building a boat on a roof, with no way to ever get it off the roof and onto any body of water. They ask him why he is doing this, but since Ghost Dog speaks only English, Raymond speaks only French and the boat builder speaks only Spanish, not much communication is achieved.

And I wonder to what extent this might reflect how Jarmusch himself feels about his movies and why he makes them. After all, on one rooftop we find a man devotedly making a boat which will, apparently, never go anywhere, and on another rooftop we find Gary Farmer, who played Nobody in "Dead Man" delivering his most memorable line from that film, "stupid fucking white man." Jarmusch complained about the way Miramax failed to promote "Dead Man" at the time, and obviously the whole thing still bothers him (as well it should). I wonder how much he identifies with the guy building that boat.

Well, as I said in my piece on persistence, how does Robert Altman deal with how difficult it is to find some of his earlier pictures on video? He makes another one. Ultimately, that's all you can do.

And Jim Jarmusch obviously decided he was going to make a picture that would be more popular than "Dead Man," so this movie has a lot more humor, it has much more accessible music (by RZA, and it sets the mood as surely as Neil Young's lonely electric guitar did in "Dead Man"), and it's in color. But nothing was lost in this move toward (slightly more) popularity, it's just as much a Jim Jarmusch movie as any of his others.

Ghost Dog: Me and him, we're from different ancient tribes. Now, we're both almost extinct. But sometimes, you've got to stick with the ancient ways.

Roger Ebert thinks that Ghost Dog (the character) is crazy. Far be it from me to disagree with a review that praises a Jim Jarmusch picture, but I think this is missing the point, in a couple of different ways.

For one thing, I'm not sure the categories of "crazy" and "sane" apply here. Ghost Dog is a fictional character, and Jarmusch (as usual) avoids giving him much of an interior life. Some directors really want you to think the actors up there on the screen are real people, with histories and feelings and (perhaps) futures, but Jarmusch, like Hitchcock, for example, doesn't care about that.

And everything about the film reminds you that it is a film, that these are characters and not people. Everything from the artificial way people talk, to the series of books that Jarmusch shows us when Ghost Dog is talking with the little girl Pearline, to the perfectly synchronized conversations Ghost Dog and his friend Raymond have, even though they don't speak any languages in common, to the magical little devices that Ghost Dog solders together in the little rooftop shack where he lives with his pigeons, the devices which allow him to steal cars and break into houses, to the Mafia underboss who raps like Flava Flav, to the way Ghost Dog and Louie describe the final shoot-out as a scene in a movie (while they're in the middle of it), all of these things remind us repeatedly that this is not reality we're seeing up on the screen, it's a movie. One point of comparison might be Stanley Kubrick, since this is really a movie of ideas and images, not characters and motivation and psychology.

Also, is Ghost Dog really so crazy? He has, within the context of the film, taken a world with no order and imposed an order on it. Which is no different from what the Mafia guys are doing, trying to continue to live according to a code that seems increasingly pointless. As Vinnie says to Louie at the end, when Ghost Dog has wounded both of them and killed everyone else, at least he's taking them out the old fashioned way, like real gangsters.

In fact, another way of looking at the whole movie is as a dream. A young man being beaten in an alley for (as far as we know) no reason, might well imagine that a good man with a very large gun would show up to rescue him, and that he could then dedicate his life to that man. After all, if you look at the name Ghost Dog, the second word obviously refers to his devotion to his master, but does "Ghost" refer to his skill as an untraceable assassin, or is it meant to be taken more literally?

However, of course, I think it's falling into a pretty obvious trap to insist on any one "correct" interpretation of a movie which so explicitly invokes "Rashomon."

"It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream.
When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world that we live in is not a bit different from this."
Hagakure (the book of the samurai)

Ghost Dog
(2000)
Written and Directed by Jim Jarmusch
 
Cast:
Ghost Dog : Forrest Whitaker
Louie : John Tormey
Ray Vargo : Henry Silva
Raymond : Isaach De Bankolé
Sonny Valerio : Cliff Gorman
Vinny : Victor Argo
Louise Vargo : Tricia Vessey