Skip the dismissals below and read Dave Kehr's TIMES review-- he's right about the director's body of work. [POSSIBLE SPOILERS] Fessenden's direction has improved over his '97 vampire film-- didn't miss that film's druggy atmospherics at all. This film has sequences of resourceful low-budget eeriness. WENDIGO shares one major weakness with the earlier film: Fessenden has no skill at all in depicting everyday domestic behavior. That the estimable Patricia Clarkson (whose work in HIGH ART marked her as a female-equiv of C. Walken at comic grotesquerie) hasn't a single chewy scene to work with here indicates misused talent. The child-actor is fine, though, suggesting a lot more than the script about why his parents are so intent on forging a weekend together. And a late scene of loved ones babbling as one begins succumbing to blood-loss is a powerhouse. Incidentally, my wanting to see this film was in part due to a late-'50s TV series of literate horror-stories-- SREDNI VASHTAR was in there, and, I believe, THE OPEN WINDOW. Anyone who saw its WENDIGO episode at age 9 is liable to remember, at inconvenient times, its wood-creature moaning "My feet! My burning feet of fire!!"
Reviews
17 Reviews
Songs from the Second Floor
(2000)
Morose Scandinavian lyric farce-- regional specialty
7 September 2002
A movie that induces jaw-drops and yawning within the same extended, unmoving shot, SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR leaves you plenty of time to think about what you're watching. You'll think about Swedish carpenters building one nearly identical set after another; you'll think about Edward Hopper's green-tinted interiors (a lot), and maybe about the late hilarious films of Luis Bunuel. I know nothing about director Andersson, but this film had some aspects of personal exorcism-- witness an extraordinarily exact recreation of Nazis executing two young Russian resistance fighters. This is not a film I want to watch again, but anyone seeing it projected adequately will carry a few of its images in memory for the rest of his life: my inadvertant selection includes a late shot of a gaping airport concourse that looks like some new kind of bourgeous Hell for corrupt executives.
The Cherry Orchard
(1999)
Try to see it where you can SEE it.
17 August 2002
Cacoyannis began his career filming Greek tragedies five decades ago. Anyone seeing his production of Chekhov's wonderful play knows he adores this work: the discerning casting, the use of Tchaikovsky's little-known piano pieces. Best of all is the look of the production-- its costuming and lighting have the quality of delicate homage. Watch for scenes like the arrival of auction-bidders in a muddy street midway through the film-- a bit of period recreation on a par with Coppola and Scorsese. Chekhov's brilliant bits of stage-business are treasured here: Varya's clobbering her wished-for fiance with a door-slam, Epikhodov's goofs, Yasha's mother-problem, and especially the family's sitting gravely down together before their dispersal. These are lovingly done, and if citing them here is meaningless to those who haven't read the play, I'm afraid the film will mean as little to them, especially on videotape, where the exquisite visuals won't count for much. The acting can't sustain novices-- the cast, especially the males, show the effects of limited rehearsal time, sliding in and out of cohesion. The exceptions to that are Katrin Cartlidge (in a role that often stands-out in stage productions), Ian McNeice, and Michael Gough, delivering the finest performance I have seen from his 50+ years of movie-acting-- acting-teachers should march students to see CHERRY ORCHARD to hear how Gough reads a choice line like, "Now I can die." Cacoyannis nodded in spots: the weird accents affected by the lower-class characters add nothing, and the hammy Act II beggar-- one wants to thrash him. This is not a great film. But the play it serves may be the past century's greatest. At a time when American theaters cannot afford large-cast period plays, a Chekhov-fan feels special gratitude for this production.
Intimacy
(2001)
A worrying near-great un-romance
8 August 2002
Can't figure out the disparities in this brutal piece of miserabilist art. Two distinguished actors giving brave performances every interview they give hereafter will ask them to account for-- a remarkable score of well-used rock art-songs-- a script that shifts from mumbled throwaways to eloquence without stumble. Still, even if the numbing grey-greenness of the images is intended, the dinginess goes past aesthetic overstatement-- cannot imagine Chereau intended to induce headaches, though that is the effect. Timothy Spall playing a cuckold is akin to Dennis Hopper as a psycho-- a good actor in a role he should not have taken. But the children are wonders of natural charm-- what is it about French film-makers that equips them to make juveniles seem casually superhuman? In a film that mixes-up visual ugliness and spiritual torment, the three radiant boys are especially cherishable.
East Side/West Side
(1963–1964)
A unique one-year series that someone should be thanked for.
16 April 2001
Beautiful series-- a one-season long experiment that tried to reflect a tumultuous time-period (its single season encompassed JFK's death, the Civil Rights Bill, killings of Civil Rights workers in Alabama, escalation of fighting in Vietnam). George C. Scott played a social worker in Manhattan, Cicely Tyson his secretary, and before they softened the series toward the end toward whimsey, they produced at least three episodes that have stuck in my head for nearly 40 years: 1. social services take-away the child of a prostitute, who was portrayed as a devoted mother-- her grief was seismic; 2. a young black father who loses a baby to a rat's attack gets a weapon and wanders through Harlem looking for someone to kill; 3. a middle-class black couple moving to the suburbs sets off a calculated real-estate stampede, and even the liberal whites who sponsored them finally rebukes them. The second of these episodes was blocked-out in Georgia-- am surprised we got to see the other two; criticism at the time inevitably used the killing word "grim". Actors were drawn from the NY casting-pool, and shooting was done in the streets of the city.
Yi Yi
(2000)
Bliss
13 April 2001
This is a movie stuffed with cherishable scenes an elements-- film-making as life-embracing as the Marquez letter the ill novelist sent friends, which is going-round on Internet just now. It is current enough that a troubled teenage cellist moves around her apartment humming the Shostakovitch waltz from EYES WIDE SHUT-- music to drive one mad. A series of meetings between the film's disenchanted Taipei businessman and the Japanese visionary the Chinese company is ripping-off is conducted in these men's beautifully modulated English-- the Japanese artist impresses as emissary from some high life-form than ours. The delightful child in all this is similarly endowed with an "old soul", if old-souls can be romantic-obsessives at 8.
An uncommonly fine TV adaptation
25 January 2001
Sometimes watching an older film leaves you hoping that the people who made it knew how good their work was. This adaptation of Twain improves upon the original in several respects, while honoring Twain's cold-blooded satire of the slave-owning culture in which he grew up. The care and detailed thinking behind this production is evident on every hand, right down to some beautifully-cast minor roles (Scotty Bloch's aunt, for one). At its center is a gutsy, singular actress, Lise Hilboldt. How could those making films in the early '80's not have noticed they had a major talent here, and created work to use it?
A film deserving re-discovery-- a gritty allegory of bilingualism
10 September 2000
Robert Young is an American director whose fitful opportunities to direct nearly always has turned up singular results. This treatment of the legend of a master horseman who evaded capture during weeks of vigilante pursuit shows Young's usual care with milieu, historical detail, and shadings of character. Olmos is a splendid icon in the lead, but the revelation is James Gammon, who never had a better film role, and the supporting cast is studded with fine character actors (including two who come over w/Olmos from the BLADE RUNNER set to appear here). A climactic scene, involving a female translator working between law and prisoner in a tiny cell, has stayed in my mind for 18 years for its depiction of a heartbreaking communion between adversaries. But Young knows what Westerns do best-- trains and horses, the two most cinematic subjects in the world-- and they're both here in aces.
Pungent, anti-romantic period tragicomedies
1 August 2000
In 1974 or so,I saw three of these hour-adaptations from Hardy's short fictions, broadcast on a Georgia PBS station. I have never heard of them being shown again in this country. What stuck in the mind was the ferocity of their ironies-- the several dooms the series' characters brought upon themselves. I discover now that Dennis Potter supervised the series, wrote some of the scripts-- and the link between these stories and the perversities of PENNIES FROM HEAVEN, written soon after, is a revelation (read "Barbara of the House of Grebe"-- a brutal ghost story like nothing else I've read in Hardy). I would love to have copies of these shows.
Here Is Your Life
(1966)
Swedish picaresque, in brilliant wide-screen format
30 July 2000
A beautiful bildungsroman-- a young man goes wandering through the world, making his way as he goes and meeting vivid people. The material isn't romantic-- poverty is general, and the young man discovers his own cruelty as well as the strengths that sustain him. This film had a huge cast, and Troell's use of widescreen fills the image with detail of 19th century provincial life that authenticates the performances-- I have remembered the dirty leer of its blacksmith for thirty years. I remember watching it, wishing there were an hour more of it.
A compressed domestic tragedy founded on impotence
10 June 2000
Eventually, this episode from the DEKALOG series will take on a life of its own. Beginning with a melodramatic premise-- a successful young doctor afflicted with irremediable impotence instructs his loving wife to take a lover-- Kieslowski constructs a 50 minute drama of extraordinary impact, the end of which is an affirmation of their marriage as a spiritual state these partners only half-perceive themselves. I called the film tragic above, but its arc parallels Shakespeare's late romance, THE WINTER'S TALE, right down to a near-miraculous conclusion. A lovely piece of work.
The Richard Boone Show
(1963–1964)
Boone's attempt at repertory-video-- unique as far as I know
21 May 2000
1963-64 featured two unique bits of prime-time series programming: George C. Scott's social work series on CBS, EAST SIDE WEST SIDE, with its vivid bi-racial stories (several strong enough they were never shown in Georgia, where I watched), and Richard Boone's one-hour series of original dramas, each one acted by the show's in-house cast of players. Boone, John McIntyre (WAGON TRAIN) and Henry Morgan (DRAGNET)were well known, Robert Blake was about to be-- the rest of the company were just as often featured (Bethel Leslie and Jeanette Nolan were particularly strong). They took the repertory ideal very seriously-- Clifford Odets wrote the premiere script, and their most noticed hour was written by Horton Foote ("All the Comforts of Home"). The quality of these shows was less remarkable than Scott's show, which I am convinced would still look good today. But Boone's experiment made a strong case for the idea that this was what actors should be doing, to enlarge their skills. Wherever Laura Devon, Lloyd Bochner, and Warren Stevens are today, they should be satisfied to have been part of this project.
Law of the Plainsman
(1959–1960)
One of a herd of Western series, but with two distinguishing features
21 May 2000
1959-60 may have been the TV year in which more than one-half of the prime team schedule was taken-up by Westerns. I can't swear to the virtues of this series-- was only 10 at the time-- but two things have stuck in my mind that recommend it. The first, its narrative gimmick: a lawman who was also Native American. Michael Ansara had charisma to burn. The idea deserved good scripts. The chief tug on my memory all these years was its theme-music-- what I remember is distinctive and beautiful-- a stirring anthem, probably not :45 seconds long. After scanning all the retro-recordings of TV music, hoping against all odds that someone would preserve it, I am resigned to whistling from memory. I wonder who composed it?
The Star Wagon
(1966 TV Movie)
Hoffman's mastery of sidekick roles
12 April 2000
That six people before me voted high-ratings for this long-unseen PBS broadcast from the '60s indicates that a few other people enjoyed it as I did. Anderson's play, from the '30s, featured Burgess Meridith and Lillian Gish in its original staging-- the story involves a disappointed inventor whose time-machine gives him a chance to revamp his life. Appealingly, the "early days" he and his buddy return to is a turn-of-century idyll (much of the broadcast was videotaped outside, near a lake). Orson Bean cuts a surprisingly romantic figure, and he has a lovely tenor solo of the traditional hymn "Jerusalem". But his stooge, a gnomish misfit with a compulsive belch, gets all the attention-- a very young Dustin Hoffman muttering and engagingly skulking in the shadows. Before THE GRADUATE appeared, this film anticipated the career to come. The film is once again available on videotape (priced expensively, for institutional use), and it will appear fitfully in retrospectives.
A knockout-- Ruiz does a Visconti.
28 February 2000
I got to see this film in London, and went not expecting much. Amazing, then-- this film could appear in a "Masterpiece Theater" format, afloat as it is in voluptuous costumes, spectacular food, beautiful interiors, gossiping grand dames-- the stuff that makes one keep going back to period costume dramas, hoping to find one this complex and piquant. Its swarming cast of characters have an almost symphonic density, and in the final soiree, in which the violin sonata that defines "Swann's Way", a viewer welcomes each face as it approaches the narrator/camera. A beautiful earlier scene, in which the Proust-character encounters a deranged Baron Charlus (John Malkovich) in the driveway of a spa moves its extended tracking shot in and out of shadows and real-light, and as Ruiz goes on risking lighting-difficulties and getting away with it, you realize this is one lucky movie.
Mojo
(1997)
Major disappointment-- Butterworth can write, but...
28 February 2000
A clever, economical play founders and collapses in its author's adaptation, in the most obvious way-- Butterworth indulges a character's psychotic eccentricities until a viewer cringes each time he re-enters the picture. Too bad he knocks the film so badly out of whack-- the two stooges whose interplay so delighted NY stage critics become spear-carriers in this rewrite. Harold Pinter has a talent for playing creeps, but the films one redeeming feature is Ian Hart, a good actor who here has gravity and authority, but he can scarcely keep the camera, so inclined is Butterworth to let the nutcase role to show off some more.
Act of Violence
(1948)
An arresting postscript to WWII triumphalism
12 February 2000
This dark, unsettling film is surely too unhappy ever to have found much audience. But TCM's frequent showings will find it at last a few viewers interested in knowing some of the scarier aspects of the post-war period. A purported war-hero lives in terror of being revealed as having informed on fellow POW's, and by the time his traumatized accuser, Robert Ryan, has closed in to take vengeance, the punishment seems almost secondary to Van Heflin's self-torment. I grew up the son of a POW, and know the dark area, not discussed openly, surrounding those soldiers who were not noble or self-sacrificing.
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