Oscar Movies Orgy Part 1: The Road

John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a failure.* Ask any critic, who has or has not read the book. Beautifully visualized and capably acted, the film is dead on arrival, and interesting, but emotionless rendering of a "beloved" novel. Delayed for a year and then released by the fickly Weinstein brothers, the whole thing has turned into a disaster the like of which only McCarthy himself could depict.

The world has effectively ended. Something wholly catastrophic (what precisely is never revealed, with true post-modernist flair) has wiped out all natural life on earth, except for a few humans who chose survival over suicide (which is what "families are doing" faced with this situation). What's left are roving gangs of cannibals, who feast slowly on the extremities of their own compatriots, and the whole bodies of strangers. Also, one man and his son, heading for the coast. Apparently, they have been traveling for years (the boy was born after the "incident").

On the surface of it, this movie should be a knockout. The appearance of the world, the inherent danger in even encountering another human being, the constant struggle to "carry the fire" of humanity in the most dire conceivable times, should make for incredible drama. And it does. Viggo Mortensen is phenomenal, perfect for any McCarthy character, as though cut from a Matthew Brady daguerrotype, emaciated and determined. Hillcoat doesn't change the story much except for a few flashbacks to "before", when The Man's wife (Charlize Theron) opted for suicide. It's a faithful adaptation realized in rich detail (cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe does his best Roger Deakins impression). Here are three possible reasons why The Road fails to engage fully as a feature film, categorized by who is to blame.

1) Filmmakers: The Road is too literal.
From a cinematic point of view, getting caught up in all the various thrilling Cast Away and War of the Worlds aspects of the story may have led writer Joe Penhall astray. It isn't all thrills and chills - despite a few zombie-movie moments and scares, the film is quiet, mournful and sets the right tone for a "meaningful" commentary of human nature. The fact that it doesn't deliver will certainly leave it out of the Oscar race. Hillcoat's take is ultimately empty.

2) The Audience: Apocalypse how? [SPOILER ALERT]
Deep or not, this is a movie about the apocalypse - from the worst episode of The Twilight Zone to the final season of Lost, science-fiction fans demands finality, either in the form of answers or the end of the human race. We never find out what could kill everything on earth with the exception of some super-symbolic lone-wolf and cub. This is a strike against willful-suspension-of-disbelief. Once we get used to that, and the depressing and daunting situation looks doomed for failure, McCarthy (and Hillcoat) [DOUBLE SUPER SPOILER ALERT] pull the kid from the fire in the film's coda. When Viggo does inevitably pass on, the kid is almost instantly found by a nice group of people - what? It's a Hollywood deus ex machina so egregious I was certain McCarthy could not have been responsible. Which brings me to -

3) Cormac McCarthy is full of himself. 
You might not know this because you do not read the New York Review of Book and are therefore a lower form or life, but Cormac McCarthy is old, but has a young son. In order to cope with the fact that he will be dead for most of his son's life, he wrote a "parable" as they call it in English class, about the world he'll leave for his son. You might also be unaware that C. McCarthy is so important that his death will be analogous to the death of all natural life on earth. The kid has to live, and find a new family, becasue McCarthy's real son will probably not shoot himself at his father's funeral (as fun as that might be). A happy ending in a biblical parable is neither here nor there - in a movie about the end of the world, it is nothing short of betrayal.

As someone who has not read The Road (but has read a lot of other McCarthy), I'm getting a little sick of this battle of good v. evil on imagined-gruesome-battlefields business.  In this particular case, a film adaptation was exremely ill-advised. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a good college try.

In the Wake of the Hurricane, a Cage Bird Sings - Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Let me get this straight - Werner Herzog made a movie about a mentally unstable, drug-addicted police detective tramping around New Orleans and rubbing elbows with all sorts of unmentionables, and there is no mention of voodoo? For a movie that stars a possessed Nicolas Cage, this seems like a huge missed opportunity. Fortunate for us, its about the only avenue of the lower 9th Ward Herzog and his crew don't wander down.

Terry McDonagh has some serious problems. I'm not talking about his battered prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes), his mounting gambling debts (to bookie Brad Dourif) or his cocaine and heroine addictions. In classic cop movie fashion, McDonagh's real problem is the job - he has to solve a quintuple homicide of illegal Senagalese immigrants, or "it's your ass". It doesn't help that he also seems to be the only man on the force with a brain, assisted by an airheaded Shawn Hatosy and trigger-happy Val Kilmer.

If Kilmer's tone-deaf supporting turn in an utterly unimportant role was the oddest thing about Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the film might be quite forgettable. Thankfully, the prominent presence of rapper and Pimp My Ride host Xzibit as drug kingpin "Big Fate", distracts us. As does every scenery-chewing drop of Nicholas Cage's performance.

There is something about Nic Cage's acting style that suits him to the portrayal of drug addicts. A sniffer and snorter who also commands respect and weilds power? A perfect storm of Cage shouting, hunching and cackling his way to a career-defining (or ruining) moment. He channels Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Al Pacino in Righteous Kill with equal aplomb. Cage nails the dizzying highs, the horrifying lows, and all the hand-trembling goodness of a man who's had a little too much. And I'm not just talking drugs - whoring too.

Thankfully, the whole movie follows with McDonagh in its ruinous excess. On the skeleton of a script penned by William Finkelstein (scribe of four dozen or so Law and Order episodes), Herzog spins pyschotic gold, using post-Katrina New Orleans as the setting for a chameleon story; part noir, part shaggy-dog redemption story, Port of Call uses Cage's riveting barks and twitches to to make the mad German's first intentional comedy. There's a particularly funny motif of Cage seeing reptiles, and them seeing him; Herzog's well-worn theme of natural cruelty sizing up the current subject.

That's not to say that Herzog is mocking Cage and American conventions - he's realizing some of their untapped potential. Where Abel Ferrara's previous Bad Lieutenant starring Harvey Keitel was a drama about addiction, about a man turned monster, Port of Call takes the sunny view that a man with a big gun and a bad hankering can take the law into his own hands and do some good. Sounds like a Western. Which is why BL:PoCNO is probably Herzog's most American film yet.

The Vault #39: Baby Doll

Lost in the Brando-saturated career of by-the-book actor's director Elia Kazan is Baby Doll, his follow-up to On the Waterfront, which re-teamed him with A Streetcar Named Desire scribe Tennessee Williams. Kazan was a New Yorker, and though some of his work (Wild River, Streetcar) may have focused on Southern archetypes, he always kept his characters close enough to the city to retain some of that brutishness and fast talk concomitant with his origins.

Though it continues Kazan's love affair with filming plays and using method actors, Baby Doll takes a Faulkner-esque leap of faith into rural Mississippi. Archie Lee Meighan is a down-on-his-luck cotton gin owner living in a broken down mansion straight out of Absalom, Absalom! Why's his business run aground? Some Eye-talian fella, one Silva Viccaro (Eli Wallach, in his phenomenal silver-screen debut) has conglomerated all the local cotton fields under his new "modern" gin syndicate. No matter how much how hard Archie tries to stir up some good old-fashioned Mississippi racism, he can't seem to get the local lawmen interested. In a crowning insult, Archie's furniture is repossessed.

All his furniture, except for the crib in the nursery, where sleeps the objects of Archie's desire, his wife "Baby Doll" (Carroll Baker). Baby Doll is a naive 19-year-old with the mind of pre-teen, married off upon her father's death to avoid ending up like her Aunt Rose, a batty old cook/maid with Forrest Gump's intelligence who lives with the Meighan's in their declining grandeur. Archie has not consummated the marriage, for he has promised to wait until Baby Doll is of appropriate age (apparently, 20). Of course, he also promised to give her the life to which she was accustomed. He is forced to act alone against Wallach, who in turn plots his own form of revenge, with the mindless Baby bouncing between the two.

Baby Doll was extremely controversial upon its release - not for anything on the screen, per se, but for the idea of a fully formed woman with the mind of child being used as a poker chip. The scenes between Wallach and Baker have the quality of a pedophile luring his prey; although we aren't witnessing anything more than a flirtation with adultery, Baby Doll's pre-pubescent manner makes it seem like some grave sin is about to be committed.

Of course, it's not really Viccaro who's at fault. He's hardly the first to prey on Baby's below average intelligence, and her willingness to flirt. Kazan and Williams do a good job of turning the tables on the Southern land-owner, the supposedly upstanding genlteman of the story. You've never seen Karl Malden quite like this, as he fumes and stoops his way into a fury at what Viccaro is doing to his rightfully stolen trophy wife. Particularly funny are his black farmhands, who openly laugh at their boss and his stupidity. These details turn the deceptively simple story of a man treating a woman like chattel into a parable for the forces of change, even in the most backwards of places. The master of the plantation is powerless, as open sexuality and ethnic diversity threaten his domain; like Gary Cooper in High Noon, he can find no one to champion his cause - which in this case, is a good thing.

Viccaro has a monologue about how people wander the earth, build things, and then vanish, with both themselves and their works forgotten. Baby Doll herself seems to just be a project of Archie's, not a human being with her own projects. Will she be remembered as part of his legacy, or on her own terms? Or will she simply vanish, like the Old South that her ignorance represents? Appropriate to its day, Baby Doll doesn't make a broad feminist statement - it leaves the women on the porch, while the men sort things out.

I Often Go There: Hitch on SNL

Those Were the Days: Showgirls, 15 Years Later

A leggy blonde in country western garb stick her thumb out on the side of the road, somewhere in the American Wilderness. So begins Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls, the film famous for being widely released despite an NC-17 rating, and earning that rating via exposing the flesh of Elizabeth Berkely (among others), in 1995 only known for her role as Jessie on Saved by the Bell.

A lot can be said about Showgirls, a shamelessly explicit story about the rise of a troubled hooker to stardom in the morally bankrupt atmosphere of Clinton-era Las Vegas. The first thing usually brought up is its then-record-setting 13 Razzie nomination and 7 wins. The fact that Verhoeven made a personal appearance to accept the worst director award should tell you this film was not only the worst, but also made with the worst intentions.

I've argued here before that Dutch born Verhoeven and his partner in crime, writer Joe Ezterhas, take a satirical slant when approaching American genres. They'll deliver the smutty rags-to-riches story, replete with bicurious Gina Gershon, tone-deaf performances from each and every supporting character, and production values through the roof. However, they also cast Kyle McLachlan, best known for his work with David Lynch, in the male lead. Rather than put Sharon Stone at the forefront of this movie, already known in Verhoeven's work as a tramp and a low soul, they pluck high-school paragon of virtue Berkely out of television purgatory. From her perspective, it's her chance at the big time; but just like her character Nomi Malone, what she hears as cheers from the audience is really just mocking laughter.

Pure trash? Oh you bet. Berkely is a disaster from frame one, displaying two speeds: slutty and pissed. She storms out of about half the scenes. What's curious about Showgirls is how closely it mirrors well-known Hollywood classics like All About Eve, Dirty Dancing and Scarface. You have the unknown girl undermining her mentor, her relationship with a down on his luck dancer who pushes her to be great, and the eventual arrive at the top accompanied by an ostentatious pool sex scene and white plush couches all around. If Nomi Malone is a third generation removed Marilyn Monroe, Showgirls is a third generation movie as a whole.

Let's return to the infamous aspect of this movie - it's NC-17. Berkely is naked in at least half of it. Explicit sex at every turn. In the same way that Basic Instinct used a convoluted mystery to deliver plenty of Sharon Stone skin time, this movie borrows the framework of a dozen well-worn melodramas about rising to fame. The result is frequently boring, but incredibly strange. For a movie to win Razzies, it can't be a throwaway action movie or lacking romantic comedy; it has to believe it has a point, and just miss. There's something to see in Showgirls - no, not that.

Two By Gallo: Fake Criterions that Should Become a Reality

The Wall Street Journal blog Speakeasy has finally done an expose on the limitless message board entitled "fake Criterion Covers" on the Auteur's Notebook. Obviously this is a topic on which I have an opinion or two. It should be noted that Criterion cannot get its hands on everything, so putting up covers for films like A Clockwork Orange, The Matrix, Superbad or Jurrasic Park isn't going to get the wheels in motion on overpriced DVDs for those titles. For others, like Heat, great editions already exist, so why bother. I've sifted through over 3000 posts on this feed to bring you the best suggestions (along with a few of my own).

Glengarry Glen Ross: Now that Criterion finds itself in the David Mamet business, you might think a new edition of his desperation-on-a-stick play Glengarry Glen Ross would be imminent. It would mark the first appearance in the collection my a great many of the versatile actors involved, from Ed Harris and Al Pacino to Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin. What stands in the way? Glengarry is the only Mamet theatrical adaptation not directed by the man himself. Putting director James Foley (Perfect Stranger) in the company of Akira Kurosawa and Eric Rohmer doesn't seem quite right.

Crash: David Croneneberg has been treated quite nicely by the collection over the years, with Videodrome, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch all being early additions. If Criterion wants to continue putting out the more cultish of his titles, the James Spader vehicle Crash is the next obvious step. It's risque, it's fairly obscure, and it's directed by one of their favorites - I don't know why this doesn't exist already.

Buffalo '66 / The Brown Bunny: Vincent Gallo is many things - first and foremost, an artistic madman. Criterion has made hay in recent years with the start of the eclipse series, compiling several films by one director they haven't touched upon into a comprehensive box. Gallo's only made two feature length films - he could be in line for one of those Teshigahara-style box sets, complete with short films.

Buffalo '66 is begging for a good DVD to be made, and this way they can sneak in the far more challenging Brown Bunny without having to sell it on its own. I see Gallo in the same light as Lodge Kerrigan or David Gordon Green - Sundance finds clearly more on their game than most on the festival circuit. (Speaking of DGG, where's All the Real Girls?)

Starship Troopers: It's "cool" to complain about movies like The Rock and Armageddon having Criterions - one action movie we and the good people at Janus film can agree upon is Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. The battle sequences, as well as Casper Van Diem's irrepressible good looks are begging for the full treatment.

Of all the titles in this post, I'm sure this one would sell the best (Robocop was on of the first 20 discs produced by the company, and it enjoys a rabid following). Give 'em what they want. The Dutchman has plenty more titles I'd love to see - Showgirls, Black Book, Total Recall - if camp has become a legit part of the cinema landscape, Verhoeven could have his own section of the website.

Ripley's Game: So a movie starring John Malkovich that was well-received at Cannes, based on a book from Patricia Highsmith's popular Tom Ripley series...was never released in America? Mostly I'm including this title just to get you to see it, but this second take on Wim Wender The America Friend could earn its way into the Collection just based on pedigree alone. Maybe it was the chornological proximity to The Talented Mr. Ripley, or phoned-in feeling of Cavani's style, but I love this hollow, simplistic and pure evil take on Ripley, and wish more people had seen it. I think they would sell it on the location shooting the way they did The Friends of Eddie Coyle. 

Gallipoli: Another well-known filmmaker, another obscure film. Peter Weir's WWI bildungsroman features one of Mel Gibson's best performances and is the rare sports-war movie. They could put it in a Weir box with Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave. This film plays a lot like a Vietnam movie, about young men ten thousand miles from home fighting an enemy they don't know or care about. Somewhat influenced Malick's The Thin Red Line. If Criterion wants to direct and dictate taste, this isn't the worst place to start.

Badlands: Speaking of Malick, I'm sure they could get a hold of Badlands, a film in dire need of a fresh transfer. With the release of an extended edition The New World and Criterion Days of Heaven, this can't be too far off. This time, can we get Terry in the room to lay down a commentary track? While the new edition of Days was great, it was sort of thin on extras. They could do a better job this time.

Paper Moon: How is it possible Peter Bogdonavich, a man who has given a great part of his soul to commentaries, interviews and documentaries on the history of film has no title in the definitive collection? Perhaps it's because most of his films are only borderline decent, while the two that are legitimately good remain on some Columbia Pictures "classics" list. I wouldn't let go of The Last Picture Show, either, If I held the rights, but how about Paper Moon? Too conventional? It's a wonderful, politically incorrect screwball comedy starring a real-life father and daughter. You might call it sappy or cute, but Dr. Eliot Kupferberg deserves a polite nod, and this might as well be it.

Oldboy: Like it or not, Chan-Wook Park's fleshfest has a committed following. There are a lot of directors, like Park and Takashi Miike, who have done some seriously messed up stuff on camera in the past decade or two. Oldboy is the standout of the "violence-porn" genre. There has to be one of everything, so let them do the action-packed one. I'd watch an hour featurette on the hammer-in-the-hallway scene.

I hope at least one of these dreams comes true. And I'll close with one that definitely won't:

The Vault #38 Vincent Price Demands Your Respect Edition: Theatre of Blood

Vincent Price was never considered a great actor. He was the man who own the haunted house, the mad genius, the evil mastermind with the off-putting cackled and satanic features. Price made an admirable career out of playing campy villains in B-movies, most famously in adaptation of the work of Edgar Allan Poe. He was never the critic's darling - playing demented spooks isn't the best way to win awards. It seems Price was okay with this - he had quite a career, and will be forever remembered for his unique, if not subtle, performances.

In Theatre of Blood, Price's on-screen counterpart Edward Lionheart is not so content. A overwrought thespian scorned by the London Critic's Circle Awards, Lionheart fakes his own death, then a few years later, starts bumping off those responsible, each in the style of a Shakespeare play. One loses a pound of flesh around the heart, another is stabbed by a gang of homeless people on the Ides of March, and so on. For each murder, we get Price reciting some of the Bard's greatest verses, along with a preposterous costume or two. Lionheart is staging a season of theatre alongside his revenge. That each critic is played by a different acting legend, from Jack Hawkins to Dennis Price, is a bonus.

It might be enough to simply extoll the postmodern qualities of this movie, with lesser actor Vincent Price taking out his inferiority complex on those the public respected more, but there's actually a pretty good movie here. As a horror flick, Theatre of Blood is camp genius, with each set-piece leading unrelentingly into the next. Sometimes, as with the Merchant of Venice sequence, Lionheart's staging is classical; in other cases, as with his adaptation of Titus Andronicus (pictured), a more contemporary approach is called for. It's  no stretch to say one or two moments recall Heath Ledgers cackling, inventive Joker in The Dark Knight. 


It's odd that Price playing a murderous an insane stage actor also seems to be Price playing himself, but maybe this is part of his legacy - always to be thought of as a psychotic intellectual, with enough time to outline his evil plan and laugh about it rakishly. He is only attended by his gang of alcoholic homeless, but at least they are an appreciative audience.

Old Realism vs. New: Andre Bazin Part 1

A few weeks ago, I posted an excerpt of an interview with the Coen Brothers, where they contrast literary Naturalism with Hollywood "naturalism" (they used Michael Clayton as a prime example). Of course, if you want to talk natural, or as it is more commonly dubbed, "real" the first and best place to go is to Andre Bazin. I thought I would post the first piece of an essay I wrote about Andre Bazin's film theory, which deals with the literary versus the spectacle in auteur films. If you read my last post on the unsensational Frenzy, the bits on Hitchcock are especially interesting:


The metaphor of filmmaker as novelist is crucial to Bazin’s understanding of the formation of a film’s action and aesthetic. As a novelist is an observer of the human condition and the times in which they live, in the tradition of authors like Joyce and Dos Passos, so should the filmmaker simply be a witness to the narrative, rather than an active force within it. The evocative and descriptive powers of film need not be mitigated by tricks of editing; Welles incorporates “the totality of the image,” (Bazin’s words) represented by his single take deep-focus scenes into his thematic purpose. The impossibility of determining the meaning of Kane’s life is visually contrasted with the completeness of the images presented. Welles’ reality is indivisible - small parts are as important as large ones, short scenes as important as long- the viewer is confronted with the impossibility of summarizing a life or any part of it in simple terms. In other words, the raw impact of the image upon the spectator is psychologically affecting enough without the conventions of unrealistic melodrama and the abrasive juxtaposition of overdeveloped montage. “Fiction and filmmaking do not engage in mutual imitation; they adopt common purposes, they fulfill the same aims, without copying each other,” (Bazin); Welles utilizes a non-linear framework in the style of modernist literature in order to break the bounds of set Hollywood narrative.

This is not the only means by which a director can achieve a literary aesthetic; rather than formulate and expound upon a new style, one may minimize the audience’s perception of the old one. Bazin further elaborates on his novelistic sensibility in his praise for the American director William Wyler, who collaborated with Gregg Toland, the cinematographer of Citizen Kane, to create in the film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), “the [same] ideal composition as in the novel: the perfect neutrality and transparency of style which must not interpose any filter, any refractive index, between the reader’s mind and the story,” (Bazin). In Wyler’s case, despite producing adaptations of plays and a few star-driven studio pictures, the invisibility of the mise-en-scene allows for “pure cinema”; the viewer is so swept up in the long shots and the naturalism of the sets, costumes and lighting, they forget they are watching a movie at all and can be fully engrossed in the story.

What, then, is “impure” cinema? Bazin gave his readers some idea in a scathing review of Notorious (1946), a spy thriller from revered master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock. He bemoans the ceaseless tension and twisting of the plot (sounds like Michael Clayton on the nose): “there is something ridiculous about placing the vulgar iron filing of these ready made psychologists on the scalepan that would register a speck of gold dust!”. Bazin is willing to admit that Hitchcock was one of the most clever directors of his time, but he tends to focus on less audience-friendly pictures, such as the single scene films Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948), whose chronological density allows them to achieve some level of psychological realism. As for Hitchcock’s more popular films, such as Shadow of a Doubt (1945), with its “excruciating close-up of fingers” or Suspicion (1945), rife with tracking shots that re-orient the frame around a single character, Bazin accuses the director of “[leading] his audience by the nose,”. Before one has time to consider the emotional impact of the narrative on one character or another, Hitchcock has presented it in all-too-evident detail. The spectator has been once again reduced to being the direct object of a manipulation on the part of the director, as in Eisenstein’s films. And, as many if not all of these films involve life and death situations, a staple of melodrama, the audience is generally content to go along for the ride, no longer intellectually provoked to deconstruct the action of the story themselves (see below, not a likely situation). 

Though Bazin cedes that Hitchcock is one of the few masters of cinematic language, he is generally disappointed in the director’s blockbuster fare. A key to the psychologically realistic cinema Bazin wishes to see is a lack of escapism, a medium which allows for the audience to see a reflection of their own lives. If a filmmaker is to be perceived as an artist in the same vein as the novelist, his work must not be the stuff of pulp fiction: “cinema attains its fullness as being the art of the real.”


What can we glean from this? The psychology of the characters is not equal to the psychology of the audience, which seems precisely the point the Coens were making - they focus on the audience. Barton Fink might seem cartoonish, but its only his dread that we are meant to feel. And we do. Coming up I'll put up another excerpt that deals with what Bazin defines as the "right" kind of realism. Hint: it's Italian.

The Vault #37: Treasure in the Trash? Frenzy

For thirty years, Alfred Hitchcock was synonymous with the best in American film, despite being born in England and not moving to the states until after hi 41st birthday. From then on, The UK as a location and culture had a place in some of Hitchcock's films (Rebecca, Dial M For Murder) but front and center was always an American man or woman with which his intended audience could identify.

There fore, the opening of the master of suspense's penultimate film, Frenzy, should come as quite a shock. To the accompaniment of regal French horns, we see a helicoptor shot of the Thames, and fly by all the key sites, from Greenwich to London Bridge and Big Ben. The feeling is almost of a propaganda film - an abnormally sunny day in merry old England. This feeling continues as the lens falls upon a typically bombastic MP giving a speech about cleaning up the pollution in the city's water - that is, until a naked woman washes ashore right near the crowd listening to the speech. Though some disgust and shock is registered, the appearance of the corpse is not a total suprise. She's just the latest victim of the Necktie Killer.

Frenzy is best known as being the most graphic of Hitchcock's films; it presents the killer's murders quite frankly, with both nudity and on-screen violence. Some deride this film for going away from Hitchcock's trademark style which favored allusion over presentation - Frenzy is quite straightforward. There is no mystery - we know the killer within the first half hour. Rather than a sexy lead or enthralling romance, the film is split between three characters.

Jon Finch is Richard Blaney, a down on his luck, ill-tempered alcoholic whose wife shows up as the latest victim of the serial killer. Barry Foster is Robert Rusk, Blaney's rakish fruit vendor friend who may have something to hide (he does). Alec McCowen is the Chief Inspector, who spends his days mulling over the impenetrable case and his nights avoiding his wife's continental cooking.

Hitchcock always made the sexy blockbuster, so it's no wonder this film was not received with as much fanfare - it isn't really a genre film. It has more the of existential procedural qualities of Jean-Pierre Melville, and it plays stylistically like it was made for television. A great deal of this film, especially the inspector story line, is downright domestic. This from the director who brought us the exotic camp of Spellbound and the dazzling setpieces of North by Northwest.  Frenzy challenges its audiences expectations; it turns out that they were not game.

Of course that's not to say this isn't identifiably Hitchcock. Two soused psychologists loudly discuss the Necktie Killer in a public house; there is a breathless sequence where the killer must break the cold, dead fingers of his latest victim in the back of a moving truck to recover a vital piece of evidence. The sequences are unmistakeable, the minor characters predictably cartoonish. But at the center there is no flair or sensationalism. There's nothing American about it.

The Vault #36: Metropolitan

Metropolitan is a film by Whit Stillman, which is to say it necessarily concerns affluent New Yorkers, class consciousness and a loquacious supporting character played by Chris Eigeman (right). Despite his background in journalism, Stillman always seems drawn to subjects as far as possible from the headlines: namely, the late-night emotions, arguments and couplings of bored, unattached heir and heiresses. A bit like Woody Allen without all the messiness self-deprecation.

Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) is about to catch a bus home, when Eigeman's character, Nick Smith, drags him to an afterparty. Townsend, a "West-sider" and "Fourier-ist" is disgusted by the opulence of his wealthy new acquaintances, but soon becomes a fixture of the "Sally Fowler Rat Pack" at the behest of Audrey (Carolyn Farina) and the dismay of her skeptical man-friend Charlie Black (Taylor Nichols). Tom still loves his ex Serena however, despite her maintaining relationship via correspondence with some dozens of suitors.

I've railed against Stillman and his indulgent dialogue, slow-moving plots and thinly veiled performances (it's hard to imagine Eigeman in particular flourishing under any other direction...in fact, he hasn't). However, Metropolitan follows the tradition of a fimmaker's first often being his best; and unlike Disco, Stillman keeps most of the interesting and important moments in the hands and mouths of his male characters. His weakness writing for the weaker sex is very noticeable, as all but Audrey become interchangeable gossips, lushes and sluts.

The pressing question, if anything associated with this film can be call as such, is this: do we, and further, should we, care about any of this? In a rare but essential case of heavy-handedness, Tom talks about how out of touch the writing of Jane Austen is with contemporary times, saying all her books reveal is how awful it would be to have lived in the early 19th century; Audrey counters "don't we look even worse?". Another recurring rant deliverd with aplomb by Eigeman is the repulsiveness of titled aristocracy - it's much better to keep a low profile and be able to lose everything. These two elements underscore that Stillman is exploring aristocracy in America as a sort of fish out of water story - the problem is, they still have a fish tank. Tom acts as the audience, the observer going into the world of the "SFRP", but they never really come into his, and by extension, ours.

Nichols delivers the best diatribes, one which film-lovers in particular about Luis Bunuel, who misses the discreet charm altogether. Is Stillman trying to restore this charm? Or is his too a critique? It's hard to discern. There's no question that centering the film on Tom makes the "really rich" folk seem somewhat less human, but Tom hangs around and eventually makes friends, right? Nichols' constantly insisting that being born so well-off inevitably leads to failure also arouses sympathy. Maybe that's what makes Metropolitan a bit challenging and finally rewarding - it doesn't take a stand, so we really have to take everything in and make our own decision. All the annoying, horrible, funny and dramatic aspects of the life of the obscenely wealthy are on display. Like Tom, however, we have to make sense of it on our own.