movie reviews

eXistenZ

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 3 Comments

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!)

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

~ Anthony Lee Collins

"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

Kill Bill

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment


Six things I like about "Kill Bill (Volume 1)":
(From November 2003)

1. This is the first Quentin Tarantino movie I've ever wanted to see more than once. The others were clever and entertaining, but once you'd seen them once, you had the whole story.

2. It clearly takes place in an alternate universe, but you only learn that bit by bit. It's a different world from ours, both in large things (no police, obviously) to small (airplane seats have special storage slots so that passengers can store their samurai swords). I like movies which take place in a world slightly, subtly different from this one, like "eXistenZ." That's often a lot more interesting than movies with rocket ships and computer-generated monsters.

3. Uma Thurman. No performance in a movie like this will ever be nominated for an Oscar (hope I'm wrong), but it should be. Roger Ebert has pointed out that acting in a movie like this is, in some ways, a lot more difficult than acting in yet another "Sundance thumb-sucker." The reason is that there are no real characters in a movie like this, just action figures and genre stereotypes. If actors are going to create characters who seem like real people, they have to do all the work themselves, as Uma Thurman does here.

4. It continues a very interesting progression for Tarantino movies, which has never been commented on in anything I've read. His first movie, "Reservoir Dogs," was entirely about men. His second, "Pulp Fiction," was mostly about men, but there were a few women characters. "Jackie Brown" had a lot of men, but it was a woman who drove the plot. And "Kill Bill" is, of course, mostly about women.

5. There is a reason for the unreality of the characters that's beyond Tarantino's famous enthusiasm for various types of trashy movies. This is a puzzle film, as I think of them. "eXistenZ" was a puzzle film, and so was "The Ninth Gate." A puzzle film is a movie where it's really ideas which are the main thing. Characters and plot are secondary, and the traditional Hollywood rules of good guys and bad guys, and getting you to identify with the protagonist, and so on don't apply.

The "Ninth Gate" is really a movie about choices, and about how the Devil would work (if he were real). "eXistenZ" has quite a bit to say about reality, games, movies and sex, as I mentioned in my review. The "Matrix" movies are basically puzzle movies, too, which is probably why the creators thought it was okay to have such clunky dialogue and one-dimensional characters. Apparently their extensive reading never included George Bernard Shaw.

If "Kill Bill" is a puzzle movie, what is it about? Well, more will be clear after the second half comes out (I assume, or at least I hope), but for now there are two very clear threads at least. One thing which was pointed out in the current (Nov/Dec 03) issue of "Film Comment" is how much of the movie is about trying to belong to a culture that is foreign to you. Tarantino has been criticized repeated for his use of Black slang, especially how many times the word "nigger" appears in his films. Well, this is alluded to early in "Kill Bill" when Vernita Green mutters to herself, "I should have been motherfuckin' Black Mamba," a code name which instead belonged to Uma Thurman's character, Beatrix Kiddo.

But where this theme is really explored is in relation to Japanese culture. O-Ren Ishii, another of Beatrix' targets, becomes the boss of all crime in Tokyo despite being only half Japanese. At the first meeting of the crime council after she becomes its head, she asserts with great finality that this subject is off-limits. Later she mocks Beatrix for being a silly Caucasian girl playing with a Samurai sword. By the end of their fight, she apologizes for this insult, and, for this half of the movie, that apology is pretty much the climax. Beatrix has asserted her right to be part of the Japanese culture, first by her mastery of the language and then by her mastery of the weapon.

The other main theme which is visible so far is the idea of a woman taking revenge for being abused. Not only was Beatrix nearly murdered on her wedding day, she was pregnant at the time, and her husband and all the members of the wedding party were killed, but when she was in a coma for four years, a hospital orderly pimped out her unconscious body for $75 a pop.

The beginning of the movie asserts (quoting Star Trek, of course, not Les Liasons Dangereuses) that revenge is a dish best served cold, but Beatrix is not cold when she takes her revenge on Buck, the orderly. His truck, which she steals, says "Pussy Wagon" across the back in big letters, and, as she drives around in the Pussy Wagon, getting her revenge on "the cunts who did this to me, and the dick responsible," it's easy to see that she's changed the original meaning of "Pussy Wagon" pretty completely.

Each of the major female characters (Beatrix, O-Ren, Go Go and Vernita) has a persona of traditional non-threatening femininity (respectively, air-headed tourist, traditional Japanese okusan, simpering schoolgirl, and mom) which she adopts when it suits her. This cover is then dropped when it's time to get violent (or at least serious), usually very suddenly.

6. I think there's a big surprise coming in Volume 2 (at least one), something which will show the first part in a different light. Just a guess, but I think that's one reason the movie was split into two parts.


Six thoughts about "Kill Bill (Volume 2)":
(From November 2004)

1. If you think of Volume 2 as a sequel (as opposed to the second half of a two-part movie), it's a pretty gutsy one, since it is quite different from the first one, and its virtues are very different from the first one.

The first movie was visual, kinetic and very violent. This one is verbal, quiet and intimate (and occasionally very violent, of course). With the exception of the opening (the flashback to the wedding rehearsal massacre), none of the scenes have more than three characters in them, and many have only two.

There is also a lot more dialogue than in Volume I (except for the "Man from Okinawa" scene, and the "no subject will be taboo" scene). There's some wonderful humor (even now, saying "gargantuan" or "you should listen to this, 'cause this concerns you" makes me laugh), and some terrific performances.

In the first movie there's no way to calculate exactly how many people Beatrix kills (probably 25-50). In the second one, she kills exactly one (Bill, of course).

On the other hand, if you think of "Kill Bill" as a single 247-minute revenge movie delivered in two parts, then it is very well structured. If it is ever released as a single feature (and I understand it will be), I would go see it.

2. I predicted that something was going to be revealed about the plot in the second half which would change the way we looked at the first half. I was wrong, but only because I included the word "plot." The plot (apart from how Tarantino jumps back and forth in time) is very straightforward:

Beatrix Kiddo, a professional killer, finds out she's pregnant. She tries to go straight and get married to somebody who doesn't know about her past. Her former associates track her down and kill everybody in the wedding party. Beatrix survives, however, and is in a coma for four years. When she recovers, she resolves to kill her former associates, one at a time. She does.

That's about it, but that summary leaves out everything good about the movies, and it certainly leaves out what the movies are about. There are no plot revelations in Volume 2, but there is a big fat theme revelation, and it was worth waiting for.

Last November, I explained my interpretation of what the first movie was about. The second one is about motherhood. Beatrix gets pregnant (by her "murdering bastard" boss Bill) and she thinks this means everything has to change. A mother can't go jetting around the world killing people for money, can she?

Of course she can. Beatrix is wrong, as Bill points out, and her mistake sets the whole thing in motion. Motherhood doesn't replace everything else in your life, everything you enjoy and live for and are good at, or at least it shouldn't (and, ultimately, it won't).

I'm on an email list for Tori Amos fans, and after her daughter Natashya Lorien was born, some people on the list were saying, "oh, Tori won't be able to tour anymore (or she won't want to), she's a mother now."

But why should having a child mean you have to give up being a musician, or a lawyer, or an actress, or an investment banker, or a killer?

(Besides, at around the time that Tori's daughter was born, David Bowie had a child also, and nobody on www.davidbowie.com was saying that he shouldn't ever tour anymore because of little Alexandria Zahra. So, it's obvious that there's a bit of a double standard in operation here.)

With this in mind, it's interesting to go back and watch Volume 1 after having seen and thought about Volume 2. In the "Showdown at House of Blue Leaves" section, there's a moment when you can tell that Beatrix is "in the zone," like a basketball player whose shots are all falling, or a pitcher who's throwing the ball exactly where he wants every time. This is what she does better than anybody else in the world, and, as Bill forces her to admit, it's what she loves.

At the end of the movie, both when she leaves the final murder scene and during the credits, she's carrying her daughter, but she's also still got her Hanzo sword. This is not "she's got her revenge, and now she lays down her weapon to raise her child." She's going to raise her child, but she's not going to give up doing what she loves.

Which is pretty much the moral of the movie.

3. One danger in a movie like this (a series of confrontations and fight scenes) is that it can seem like the point is for each fight scene to top the one before. Tarantino wisely doesn't do this. When you think, "hey, he'll never top what just happened," he takes things in a different direction, a different style, a different point, so that "can he top this?" isn't the issue.

In the "climactic" confrontation between Bill and Beatrix, for example, the whole fight lasts less than twenty seconds, and they are both sitting down throughout, but it's not at all unsatisfying. And, for those who thought it was "too easy," I'll just point out that in the last scenes Bill drinks quite a bit, and he is obviously fairly sloshed by the time he and Beatrix are sitting outside together. If you were going to face the greatest warrior in the world, would you be trying to get a buzz before the fight? Not if you expected to win, you wouldn't.

4. With a movie like this, you have to suspend disbelief, of course, and you have to accept the rules of an alternate universe. You have to be able to buy into some characters with really strong but fairly simple emotions, but not to let that emotional involvement distract you from the director giving you some Really Cool Bits to look at and listen to.

The original Really Cool Bits director was Alfred Hitchcock. As one critic put it, he was such a fetishist that he figured out how to turn the audience into fetishists, too. He would have understood the very careful way various elements are combined to produce some really great moments in this movie.

And Sir Alfred would have understood something else about Kill Bill, too, which is the strange feeling of watching a movie where the strongest emotional relationship is not between any of the characters, but between the director and the lead actress. Many people have picked up on Tarantino's comparison of his relationship with Uma Thurman to von Sternberg's relationship with Marlene Dietrich, but for a somewhat more recent example, see the movies where Hitchcock directed Grace Kelly.

What Thurman brings to "Kill Bill," in addition to providing a focus for the director's (ahem) enthusiasm, is that she obviously decided to play all this foolishness as if it really matters, as if these are all real people, and as if Beatrix is a real woman who has lost her baby, who has just been nearly murdered on her wedding day by the father of that baby.

Somehow, at least in my opinion, all of this manages to work, but I don't think I'd recommend it as a blueprint for how to make a good movie.

5. Orson Welles pointed out that the best thing which can happen to an actor is if you don't appear in Act 1, but everybody in Act 1 talks about your character. As soon as you appear in Act 2, the audience will think you're great because they've just heard you talked about for an hour. This doesn't always work (see "Apocalypse Now"), but it can work if the actor (and the writing, of course) lives up to the expectations, and David Carradine does. He plays Bill, who appeared in the first half only as a voice and as a hand fondling a sword, and as boots walking across a wooden floor before putting a bullet in Beatrix' head.

Bill appears for real in Volume 2, and you see what a bastard he is, but you see a lot more, including why Beatrix was in love with him. A great part and a great performance.

6. The Credits.

Tarantino loves actors, and he features them superbly in the closing credits. There are two complete sets of actor credits, one after the other, both including the entire cast of both movies. The first is set to a ferocious version of "Malaguena Salerosa" by Robert Rodriguez' band Chingon, and it showcases every performer perfectly, including a full acting credit for Yuen Wo-ping's fight team, which is richly deserved.


Two things I didn't like so much about "Kill Bill":

1. In Volume 1, during the "Showdown at House of Blue Leaves" section, first Beatrix and then Johnny Mo "run" up through the air to the balcony. Very "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," but not really right for this movie, which otherwise carefully treads the border between "extremely unlikely" and "absolutely impossible" without stepping over it.

2. In Volume 2, during the final conversation between Beatrix and Bill, he refers to her as a "natural born killer." In the context of the point he is making this is true, but obviously it's Tarantino's attempt to reclaim the phrase from Oliver Stone (Tarantino wrote the original story for "Natural Born Killers." and he hated the final result). I can understand the impulse, but I'm sorry. NBK is a phenomenon in a much larger world than the one Quentin Tarantino inhabits, and there's no way for him to make it his again.


My favorite "Kill Bill" theory:

O-Ren Ishii gets a whole section of the movie about her "origin" and early life. This doesn't seem so odd at the time, this is the sort of movie where all the characters might get origin stories. But they don't, even though some of them (Beatrix and Bill, for example) are more central to the story.

So, why does O-Ren get an origin story? Is it just because Tarantino wanted to do an anime sequence? Well, that's one theory, but I found a different theory online that I like a lot better.

When O-Ren's parents are killed, there is a character in the room, an assassin who works for the mob boss who kills her mother. He is tall and lean, with a shock of straight hair, wearing a suit, carrying a sword which looks an awful lot like a Hanzo sword, and he kills O-Ren's father, but she never sees his face because she's hiding under the bed.

What if that guy is Bill? Hattori Hanzo's former student who betrayed Hanzo's teachings by going to work for a yakuza boss. Who knows full well when O-ren comes to work for him later on that he killed her father and she doesn't know it because she never saw his face from under the bed. That guy would really be a bastard, wouldn't he?

One final thought. Don't rule out a "Kill Bill Volume 3" someday. There are three major characters left alive at the end of Volume 2 who have great reason to seek vengeance on Beatrix at some point.

Kill Bill
(2002)
Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino,
based on the character The Bride, created by Q & U
 
Cast:
Beatrix Kiddo : Uma Thurman
Bill : David Carradine
O-Ren Ishii : Lucy Liu
Vernita Green : Vivica A. Fox
Budd : Michael Madsen
Elle Driver : Daryl Hannah
Earl McGraw & Esteban Vihaio : Michael Parks
Johnny Mo & Pai Mei : Gordon Liu
Nikki Bell : Ambrosia Kelley
Edgar McGraw : James Parks
Buck : Michael Bowen
Trucker : Jonathan Loughran
Hattori Hanzo : Sonny Chiba
Bald Guy : Kenji Ohba
Sofie Fatale : Julie Dreyfus
Gogo Yubari : Chiaki Kuriyama
The 5,6,7,8's as themselves
Proprietor: Yuki Kazamatsuri
Charlie Brown : Sakichi Satô
The Yuen Wo-Ping Fight Team as The Crazy 88's
Reverend Harmony : Bo Svenson
Mrs. Harmony : Jeannie Epper
Tommy Plympton : Chris Nelson
Rufus : Samuel L. Jackson
Larry Gomez : Larry Bishop
Karen : Helen Kim

and introducing
Perla Haney-Jardine as B.B.

Dr. T and the Women

~ Anthony Lee Collins

"Women are incapable of being bad luck by themselves. It's men who make them that way. Women, by nature, are saints. They're sacred, and should be treated that way."

– Dr. Sullivan Travis

Robert Altman's movies often begin in chaos. The camera moves, characters pass by, snatches of conversation are heard, and we seldom learn anywhere near as much as we want to, but almost always enough to make us curious. The beginning of "Dr. T and the Women" is masterful, as the camera moves in and out and around and through the waiting room and examining rooms of Dr. Sullivan Travis, a very upscale gynecologist in Dallas, Texas.

Robert Altman's movies often begin in chaos, and usually they coalesce, though not always. "Dr. T and the Women" is precarious until the very end. I think that ultimately it does work, though there is a sudden element of magical realism at the end which is neither appropriate nor necessary.

However, I can certainly understand people who think this movie doesn't work. What I don't agree with, though, is the argument that it's sexist. In talking about "King Lear," Orson Welles said that someone like Lear, a "man's man" who lives with his knights (his Queen is long dead), totally clueless about women, was clearly, in Shakespeare's eyes, a real loser.

Altman has taken this idea one step further, showing us a man who is surrounded by women on all sides (his family is all female, his staff is all female, and, of course, so are his patients) but is still as totally wrong about them as Lear. When Dr. T is out hunting with his buddies, the only time we see him with men, he comes off as an authority on the subject of women, sagely giving them the wisdom I've quoted above. It reminded me of "The Philadelphia Story," with all those disagreements about whether Tracy Lord was like a goddess, or more like a queen.

Another director might have thrown a wink at the audience, to make sure we realize that he knows what horseshit this all is, but (as I've said before) Altman always prefers to assume that his audience is paying attention and thinking for themselves.

Admittedly, most of Dr. T's patients (all idle upper-class women) are pampered and foolish and bitchy and vain, but the point is that Dr. T encourages and enables all of this. He books repeated appointments for women who have nothing wrong with them (thereby clogging his calendar and delaying the appointments of the few patients with actual ailments). He and his staff flatter all of his patients constantly. He indulges his patients in every way, most hilariously in the scene where he allows a woman to smoke while he examines her.

The ultimate result of all this is shown with Dr. T.'s wife, Kate, who basically reverts to being a child because for years he's treated her like one. He wants to give her everything, shield her from things that are unpleasant or troubling, flatter and adore her, never thinking that this might not be what she wants or needs at all. She is hospitalized after she takes off all her clothes and cavorts in a mall fountain, and her doctor explains to Dr. T that she is suffering from Hestia Complex.

Hestia Complex (which does not really exist, as far as I can tell) is something that supposedly happens to women who are loved too much, but Dr. T doesn't understand how he could have caused this, or why he's not being allowed to see his wife.

The other element in Dr. T's crisis is that he meets Bree Davis, the new golf pro at his club. A former member of the pro tour, she's pretty and intelligent and funny, and they hit it off right away.

And this is where Dr. T's cluelessness becomes impossible to ignore. Bree seduces him on their first date, and he immediately begins operating under the assumption that they're in love (he doesn't seem particularly worried about the ethics of the situation, either). As time goes on, he starts to make more assumptions about their relationship, completely ignoring all the realities of the situation:

1) He's a married man, devoted to his wife,

2) his wife is institutionalized,

3) Bree is a professional athlete, just taking a break from the pro tour, and

4) her seduction of him is as brisk and efficient as any you're likely to see, in or out of the movies.

In addition, this expert on women is oblivious to the fact that his nurse is desperately in love with him, he's oblivious (as far as we can tell) to that fact that his sister-in-law (who's living with him, along with her three daughters) is a lush, and he's oblivious to the fact that his daughter, who's about to be married, is gay and in love with her maid of honor.

All of these threads come together at the end of the picture, along with some unnecessarily apocalyptic weather, to put Dr. T face to face with two things. He realizes that women may not actually want the smothering devotion he calls love (he offers it to Bree, describing his vision of their life together in detail, and she quite reasonably asks, "why would I want that?"). And he realizes, or remembers, that his original motivation to become a doctor may have been for some reason other than providing flattery and pampering to the wives of Dallas' elite.

I won't reveal the final scene, except to say that I think it works (once you get past the phony "magical realism" transitional device, which is every bit as silly as the frogs in "Magnolia"), and to report that there was applause in the theater where I saw the film.

I thought Richard Gere's performance was excellent, though I admit that I don't have much to compare it to, since this is the first film I've seen him in since "Days of Heaven." Altman uses Gere's movie star looks and demeanor just as he has in the past with Paul Newman. Outside of Gere and Helen Hunt, nobody in the cast has a whole lot to do. This is not a multi-character fugue like Nashville or "Short Cuts." All the characters are basically only there because of how they relate to Dr. T.

The best performance in the picture, besides Gere himself, is Shelley Long, who plays Dr. T's adoring nurse Carolyn. I usually don't care for Long all that much, but once again Altman has taken somebody we know mostly from television and figured out exactly what they could do best in a movie. She gets more laughs around the edges of many scenes than any of the other actors do when they're center stage.

Altman has used Lyle Lovett in minor roles in several films, but this time Lovett doesn't appear on screen but instead provides the soundtrack, and it's very good. The music (by Lovett and his Large Band) is light and mostly understated, subtly telling us how to take certain scenes. For example, it's really the music which makes sure we see Kate's dip in the fountain as sad rather than funny. Also, Lovett's songs "You've Been So Good Up To Now" and "She's Already Made Up Her Mind" run through Bree's seduction of Dr. T, commenting on the action without being at all redundant.

There are two things which keep this from being in the first rank of recent Altman films. One is the ending, which is flawed, as I said. The other is that its concerns are so narrow. It has one basic theme, one story to tell and one point to make, and this makes it pretty thin compared to Cookie's Fortune and, especially, Kansas City. But still, it's worth seeing.

Dr. T: Do I make you happy?

Bree: I'm a very happy person.

Dr. T and the Women
(2000)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Annie Rapp
 
Cast:
Dr. Sullivan Travis : Richard Gere
Bree Davis : Helen Hunt
Kate Travis : Farrah Fawcett
Peggy : Laura Dern
Carolyn : Shelley Long
Connie : Tara Reid
Dee Dee : Kate Hudson
Marilyn : Liv Tyler
Harlan : Robert Hays
Bill : Matt Malloy
Eli : Andy Richter
Dr. Harper : Lee Grant

Cookie’s Fortune

~ Anthony Lee Collins

In the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, people's golf games were forever being interrupted by the annoying realities of war. In Holly Springs, conducting a rigorous homicide investigation is okay, as long as it doesn't interfere too much with the fishing.

Deputy Lester Boyle: He had nothing to do with it, alright? He's innocent. You can trust me on that one.

Eddie "The Expert" Pitts: And what makes you so sure of that, Lester?

Deputy Lester Boyle: Because I've fished with him.

Between 1969 and 1976 Robert Altman directed more first-class movies than any other American director has ever made in that amount of time. The result is that I keep going to see his pictures, even though some of the recent ones have sucked. This one doesn't suck even a little, in fact it's a hoot. Loose and funny and warm (Altman's movies started to go downhill when he started to show contempt for his characters), featuring some terrific performances.

This movie takes place in Holly Springs, a dozy little southern town where a sign in the liquor store proudly proclaims that, "on this site in 1897, nothing happened." Which seems to be true of most days in this century, too.

Everybody in Holly Springs knows everybody else. Everybody knows Cookie, who's well-off and eccentric, pining after her dead husband Buck in their big old house. Everybody known Willis, who looks after the house for her, and who likes to take a drink or two down at Theo's (almost as much as he likes fishing). Everybody knows that Cookie has two nieces, Camille, who's the local martinet of good taste and culture, and Cora, who's sweet but a bit dim.

Cookie can't stand Camille or Cora, but she is quite fond of Cora's daughter, Emma. Emma is Holly Springs' "bad girl," though most of the wickedness we see involved her extremely individual style of driving and parking. She's just arrived back in town in the van she lives in, with some facial bruises which are never explained.

Everybody knows about Cookie and Willis and Camille and Cora and Emma. And then one day Cookie is found dead of a gunshot wound and Willis is arrested. Like the 4077th MASH, Holly Springs is a very functional society which has evolved its own rules and systems, and even though the evidence compels the police to arrest Willis, nobody thinks he actually did it. In fact, some of the best scenes take place at the jail, where the door of Willis' cell is never closed (let alone locked).

Emma is furious, completely convinced that Willis is innocent, and she's somewhat frustrated that nobody pays much attention to her arguments, because they all think he's innocent, too. So, in solidarity, she moves into his cell with him, which is also convenient for her to conduct periodic fevered couplings with Jason, her former beau, who is now a deputy. Typically, they go to great lengths to hide what they're doing from Willis, who just lies on his bunk and smiles, not fooled for a minute.

Meanwhile, Camille and Cora move right into Cookie's house, cheerfully taking down all the yellow tape that marks it as a crime scene, as they prepare for the performance of "Salome" that the town church is putting on for Easter. Camille is running the entire production, of course, even to the extent of revising the text and giving herself a co-writing credit with Oscar Wilde.

This is pretty much Altman's manifesto against people who give a damn about what other people think, and it's great. And, as in "M*A*S*H," the good, cool, relaxed people way outnumber the weird, uptight, self-righteous people, which is a nice way of looking at things.

Cookie's Fortune
(1999)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Annie Rapp
 
Cast:
Camille Dixon : Glenn Close
Cora Duvall : Julianne Moore
Willis Richland : Charles Dutton
Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt : Patricia Neal
Emma Duvall : Liv Tyler
Jason Brown : Chris O'Donnell
Manny Hood : Lyle Lovett
Lester Boyle : Ned Beatty
Otis Tucker : Courtney B. Vance
Jack Palmer : Donald Moffat
Billy Cox : Danny Darst
Eddie "The Expert" Pitts : Matt Malloy

The Player

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

Robert A. Heinlein once wrote a story called "He Built a Crooked House." In this story, a house constructed in four dimensions* falls in on itself (California earthquake), and the result is a small box of a house, obviously only one room, but when you go inside the whole eight-room house is there. But any exit to the outside world just leads to another part of the house. There is no way to get out.

Robert Altman's "The Player" is the opposite. It looks like an ordinary house, with all the usual rooms, but if you try to go in the front door, you end up in the back yard. If you try to go in through the garage door, you find yourself coming out of the basement. There's no way to get in, because there is no inside. It's all surface.

The first clue, the one that sets everything up, is the long tracking shot that opens the movie. The camera moves around and around a studio lot, following different conversations, looking in windows where various writers are pitching various (mostly inane) ideas for movies.

All well and good, but the tip-off is that it calls attention to itself. First, in one of the conversations we overhear, one character is complaining to another that there are no long shots in movies anymore. It's all cut-cut-cut. Then he goes on to remember great long shots in the past, including (of course) the long tracking shot that opens Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil."

The whole movie is like that. You can't miss anything, Altman points at everything of any significance. It's like an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, where if someone is crying someone else will hold up a sign saying, "Sad, isn't it?"

The characters are all two-dimensional at best. None of them even need names, except as a convenience. They could just be called The Player, The Aspiring Player, The Idealistic Victim, The Self-Involved Writer, etc. And none of them have any really likable qualities, so there's no risk of the audience getting particularly emotionally involved with anyone.

(BTW, movie reviewers who talk about the writer who dies being victimized by the studio system are betraying their own prejudices (reviewers are writers, after all): the guy is a nitwit and his idea for a movie is narcissistic and inane.)

I could go on, but I would start to give the idea that this is a pan. I heartily recommend people see this movie, I just want to give some idea of what to expect.

The movie is Altman's movie about Hollywood, but not in the obvious way that "SOB" is Blake Edward's. I love "SOB," but the "Hollywood director gets back at Hollywood by making movie showing director screwed by system" thing was a pretty straightforward response. Altman is after a much subtler joke, and he carries it off wonderfully.

This is a bad movie (by any ordinary standards, including the standard we expect from the director of classics like Nashville and McCabe & Mrs. Miller). But that's the point. He made a Successful Hollywood Movie, every bit as inane as the Bruce Willis/Julia Roberts blockbuster that he shows us the finale of. And it has been, of course, very successful. He is telling us that the Altman Victimized by Hollywood thing was wrong. He could have made this movie at any time. Unlike "SOB," this is not a bitter movie, because Altman is not bitter. He's been playing his game, by his own rules, and he's won.

I only wonder one thing. This movie means Altman will have a much bigger budget and more clout when he directs his next movie. I wonder if he has had something specific in mind.

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* Explanation on request

The Player
(1992)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Michael Tolkin
 
Cast:
Griffin Mill : Tim Robbins
June Gudmundsdottir : Greta Scacchi
Walter Stuckel : Fred Ward
Detective Susan Avery : Whoopi Goldberg
Larry Levy : Peter Gallagher
Joel Levison : Brion James
Bonnie Sherow : Cynthia Stevenson
David Kahane : Vincent D'Onofrio
Andy Civella : Dean Stockwell
Tom Oakley : Richard E. Grant
Larry Levy : Sydney Pollack
Detective DeLongpre : Lyle Lovett