Bellflower

Evan Glodell is the next great master of the American cinema. Bellflower is a visceral tableaux of dreams raised, hopes crushed, apocalypses internal and external, a drunken, violent argument both for and against the possibility of love between two humans; its argument, laid out in premises charred from without and bloodied within, demands to be heard.  It bears the outsider's perspective of Terrence Malick's Badlands, the emotional maturity of Peter Bogdonavich's The Last Picture Show and the stylistic ingenuity of Citizen Kane. 


In a grimy corner of the San Fernando Valley, Woodrow (writer-director-editor-engineer Glodell himself) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are lost in a boyhood fantasy. Moved out from Wisconsin to pursue a vaguely defined "California Dream", they pass their days scribbling in notebooks and making machinery for the coming end of the world. They aren't religious fanatics by any means - they are preparing, specifically, for the scenario presented in The Road Warrior, and building the Medusa, a fire-breathing muscle car driven by the villain in that film Lord Humongous, a larger than life figure both young men admire shamelessly, and whom "cannot be defied." Also at their disposal are a couple of shotguns, a flamethrower, and plenty of alcohol.

The relative peace of their regressive lifestyle is breached by Milly (Jessie Waxman), a care-free type who takes immediately to Woodrow. That the two meet in a grasshopper-eating contest at a bar serving dishwater-grey beer may be seen as harbingers of the oft-reference armageddon, but who's to notice when love is in the air? At this point Bellflower, which opened in a sea of flames, screeching tires and blood (established in a brilliant 15-second montage) turns on a dime. Woodrow and Milly go on a road trip to Texas in his much less threatening, but no less jerry-rigged Volvo (instead of spitting flame, this one drips bourbon). A third machine is a work throughout, dubbed by Glodell the "Coatwolf II" - it's his camera, a hybrid of several models, delivering images are punctuated by visceral lens flares and rapid shifts in focus within stationary shots.

As these visual techniques underscore that two men preparing for the facticity of a 30-year old Mel Gibson vehicle may not be entirely sane, so does this machinery begin to malfunction once the inevitable heartbreak transpires. Woodrow and Aiden are obsessed with control, with domination, with survival, as are all characters in your typical buddy action flick (or for that matter, those that buy the tickets to such fare). When Milly throws a wrench in their plans, the record does not just skip - it melts, while the turntable explodes. The only answer is rebellion - Woodrow and Aiden react not unlike the unnamed narrator and Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Only instead of credit card companies and capitalist culture, their terrorism is aimed against human relationships, especially those with women.

This has led more than one politically correct critic to suggest that Bellflower is singleminded in its hatred for the female sex, but I think this is to see only half of the film. One does not arrive at disenchantment without enchantment - there is more than enough romantic reverie before Woodrow finds himself peeling rubber, covered in forced tattoos, with a score to settle. There is also the fact that most of the violence in Bellflower's second half is allegorical if not entirely imagined; Lord Humongous does not, in fact, roam the Earth.

Too many films capture the subjectivity on one side of love or the other, the warmth of companionship, the depression of loneliness. Rarely is a film honest about both -  Bellflower is that film. This is not a story that relegates it strongest symbols to dream sequences or parables. Here is a motorcycle on an open road - there is a mushroom cloud. The world of Bellflower is three-dimensional, jagged, and currently in the process of exploding - the experience will be a little more than some viewers can accept. The emotions on display will strain both the hearts and stomachs of the audience. No tragedy is ever literally the end of the world, but this one feels awful close.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

By today's standards, the original Planet of the Apes would make for a very boring summer blockbuster. A spaceship crashes off screen - men are hunted by apes on horseback, but caught to quickly for a full-blown action sequence. Eventually, Charlton Heston is put on existential trial by a group of orangutans who seem convinced he is less than entirely human (hold your jokes). Some compassionate chimpanzees help him escape, and eventually he finds out that you no longer need to book ferry reservations months in advance to climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty. That Planet of the Apes was released right at the dawn of big budget special effects (1968, the same year as 2001) - just as conceptual movies about man's extinction were replaced by shiny children's movies. Mashing those two styles together would give you roughly what Tim Burton gave us in 2001 - a disastrously underdeveloped movie with monkey war scenes popping out at strange angles.

20th Century Fox's latest attempt to get the franchise back on its legs is Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which essentially takes Heston's character in the original only (PLOT TWIST), this time he's an ape! Despite what you may have heard, James Franco does not play the main character of the film (the theory is already out there that his role was reduced after he ruined the Oscars telecast). If you sat through the first 20 minutes of Deep Blue Sea, you know the only way to cure Alzheimer's is to make a dangerously strong animal super smart by expanding parts of their brains with experimental drugs. Franco is the chief researcher, and after one thrilling experiment gone bad, he adopts the last surviving chimp (played masterfully through motion capture by Andy Serkis), names him Caesar, and raises him as a human child for nearly a decade.

Serkis and his animators are masterful, and Caesar may be the best performance of the summer. His childhood and moral awakening are cute, funny, endearing, human in every way. After he attacks a stranger who was threatening an adoptive family member, he is taken to a primate shelter run by the simian-as-ever Brian Cox. The movie then goes to full Shawshank mode, as Caesar learns to fit in, and eventually hatches a plot for escape, all while teaching (and medicating) his fellow prisoners. This plot-line culminates in a thrilling escape and rampage through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge. Rise is no philisophical meditation - it knows that we know how strong chimpanzees are, it knows how scary the prospect of them being smart can be, and it exploits both with great results.

The problems with Rise begin at the end, which feels more like the middle of some new trilogy that is about to be sprung on us. Sure, Rise runs feature length because Franco gets to argue with his evil boss (David Oyelowo) about genetic testing, and then canoodle with Freida Pinto. The limited action we see is great - why pretend this movie is about scientific ethics? The movie feels so much more alive when we're in the world of the chimps, by the time the final confrontation comes, it becomes hard to find a real villain to root against. None of the other characters seem important enough to be a real antagonist. In a series where many of the individual chapters have ended with terrifying global and historical implications, Rise seems small scale. The "big twist" is idiotically shoved between title cards in the end credits - half of the theater is literally already out the door.

But oh that motion capture really is breathtaking. Really makes you want to see vast armies of apes taking out tons of humans across the globe, with the president negotiating with one and then getting crushed by his unbelievable strong....well, Summer 2013 maybe.

The Vault #73: Last Year at Marienbad

For the next ninety minutes, 12 months or however many consecutive lifetimes it takes, X (Giorgio Albertazzi) will ask A (Delphine Seyrig) if she remembers him. A does not. He will remind her of their meet-cute at a statue of Emperor Charles in a garden so manicured it seems to be a backdrop, perhaps even mimicking a  drawing that hangs inside the lavish European hotel where the two are staying. This similarity is no coincidence - this reflection is one of many that allows Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad to alternate between romantic fable and nebulous metafilm.

The French New Wave is almost universally regarded as the tipping point of cinema history, the moment at which the medium shifted from the beauty of modernism to the jagged edges of postmodernism. The tone of cinema changed entirely, largely from optimistic to pessimistic - on one side you have Fellini, Kurosawa and Howard Hawks; afterward Pasolini, Imamura and Scorsese. If, as Godard claimed, the camera mechanism had conspired to conceal the truth, now it laid those realities all too bare. Marienbad is a film in knowing conflict with itself, an impressionistic experiment that takes place in the most classic of settings. We are in familiar surrounding, a grand old hotel as seen in the finest high society films like The Awful Truth or The Rules of the Game; the plot itself, nearly unintelligible.

X undertakes only two actions - he recalls, through flashbacks, his memories of his first meeting with A; and he repeatedly plays a game with A's intended, X, each time losing on the final turn. The memories are as alien to A as the game is to audiences - we do know that X is not succeeding with either. It will soon be noted by both X and A that the memories may be dreams, and dreams so structured as to defy our expectations of actual dreams. Extras rarely stir in the background, and only speak when spoken to. The statues in the garden seem to levitate above the rest of the grounds. Scenes are shot entirely through reflections, then through reflections of reflections, as X seems to be drifting further from his purpose, which of course, is never completely revealed.

Many of the cinematic signifiers used in the New Wave, from Jean-Paul Belmondo's noir-chic in Breathless to Truffaut's many surrogates escaping to the local movie theater, were used as shorthand to familiarize the viewer with the setting of the film. This is not the case in Marienbad, where old and new are not only in disagreement, they literally don't recognize each other. A may be a ghost, A may be an identical twin, X may remember A from a dream - the rest of the internet will give you more than enough interpretations of the mobius strip that forms Marienbad's plot. One thing is certain - Resnais does not wish for this film to seem merely a continuation; it sees the past as an other, an enemy. It demands to be seen on its own terms, refuses to be part of a larger romantic narrative, just like A herself.

That opacity is less likely the work of Resnais and more likely from the mind of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the first-time screenwriter of Marienbad. Robbe-Grillet was well-known at the time as the progenitor of the so-called "new novel", which eschewed time, place and character. His work is a direct challenge to traditional and ever modern literary styles of the time. The expressions on the statues in the garden might be as important as those on the actors in a given scene - it is as much the whim of the audience as it is the director or the author. Surely there are shortcomings when adapting this sort of writing to the screen - live action cannot help but being representational in one way or another.

As per its postmodern perfection, it will be impossible to experience Last Year at Marienbad the same way twice. Different bits of overlapping dialogue will gain levels of significance; certain scenes will seem more clearly figments of one or more character's imagination; you may even find yourself spawning another "ironclad" interpretation of the endless competition between X and M. It is the most classic precursor one will find to the later works of David Lynch, all dead ends, high camp and impossible riddles. Yet it holds us with aplomb in its murmuring, mystical grasp. We will return again and again, this time with a firm conviction to solve to the mystery, because more likely than not, we were never there.