If you are mature enough to remember with fondness Jacques Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON and Terence Fisher's THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, you will laugh at this. But that's not the whole truth, because you will only laugh when the fiendish Miss Ganush is off screen. When she is in sight, beware! You'll admire one of the best designed, weirdest creatures in supernatural cinema today. With her old age, one glass eye, rotten teeth and long, yellow nails (at just one hand, the right one), Eastern European hag Miss Ganush gives you the creeps by simply existing. This is how far our culture ventured in despising old age and demonizing older women in particular, true, but can't it be that every now and then one of them is really a witch? Black magic and witchcraft are, indeed, the source of DRAG ME TO HELL, with a touch of Le Fanuism in the idea that if you are accursed by a demon called Lamia - the vengeful spirit of all women ugly and abused - you'll be properly drawn to Hell to burn in peace. Cheers to Sam Raimi for having invented Miss Ganush, and cheers more than everybody else to Lorna Raver, the Hollywood actress that so beautifully played her as to making us ask for an immediate second course... er, curse.
Reviews
6 Reviews
The Eyes, the Mouth
(1982)
Cinema as Life Going On
30 May 2006
Marco Bellocchio's "Gli occhi, la bocca" is not an attempt to remake "I pugni in tasca" (1965), nor an essay born out of the vanity of self-quoting. It's true that the leading player (Lou Castel) is the same of the previous film, and that "I pugni in tasca" is quoted and even shown at one point (where we can see - from an oblique screen - the scene of Lou's mother assassination in black and white); but this is only because Giovanni, the character played by Lou Castel in THIS movie, is an actor and perhaps the same one who appeared in "I pugni" back in '65. What concerns Bellocchio here, aside from family problems and bourgeois maladjustment, is the question of the running of time. Castel says: "Time flows, we're always the same", and nothing changes. How are we to accustom to the problem of life's length? We're usually driven by popular wisdom to say that life is too short, but what if it were, in fact, too LONG? The only solution to this would be suicide, and in fact Giovanni's brother, Pippo, shots himself just before the film starts. How would Giovanni react to the tragedy, and Bellocchio with him? A reflection about the "entire lifespan" which separates "I pugni in tasca" from "Gli occhi, la bocca" is in order, and those seventeen years become the symbol of the entire problem of time and our maladjustment in it. Well worth watching and watching again, "Gli occhi, la bocca" gains more strength with the passing of years because this is one of its main issues. Now that we are in 2006, "I pugni in tasca" is forty-one years behind us and there's more than one reason to shudder. The only rejuvenating cure cure, then, is watching the new Marco Bellocchio's masterpiece, "Il regista di matrimoni" (The Weddings' Director, out now in Italy). The new film shows that, if Giovanni has hopelessly aged as perhaps WE have, Marco Bellocchio has not -- like Pippo, who in "Gli occhi, la bocca" refused to grow old.
Path to War
(2002 TV Movie)
The Very Opposite of a Jules Feiffer Cartoon
9 June 2004
A TV movie about President Lyndon B. Johnson? A historical drama about his "suffering" during the Vietnam war escalation? Intriguing idea, like its attempt of resurrecting from the dust of last century the climate which generated Johnson's Great Society political project... A vision that failed, even if the movie closes celebrating its persistence before the end titles. More than everything else, this is a stage drama unlikely to stand the real, terrifying drama going on outside the "halls of power" -- namely, in the bombarded and famished country of Vietnam. In the face of such a massacre (of both Americans and Vietnamese), when we are told that some 58,000 marines and TWO MILLION Asiatics died in the last four years of the war only, there is no drawing room drama that can give justice to the "mess". This was no simple "mess", it was a genocide -- something one would have thought belonging to a bloodier, more cruel past, like a new extermination of Jews. Here, the "Jews" were the Communists from South-East Asia: Vietcong, women, oldsters & children alike. America lost much more than a bloody war in Vietnam; the film partially tries to show that (like in the impressive suicide scene of a man who burns alive under the very eyes of Robert McNamara at the Pentagon), but generally speaking "Path to War" remains more interested in the affairs going on between the male trio of its protagonists: LBJ, "Bob" McNamara (whose wife had ulcer, we learn) and Clark Clifford, the man who succeeded McNamara as Secretary of Defence (a marvelously saturnine Donald Sutherland). I realize this is a historical film tailored to suit American audiences: it's just as right that they ask questions about their past and the more controversial figures of their political life; but I can assure you that, when screened outside the U.S., the film looks more like the capable drawing room caper which I mentioned before, no matter if THIS drawing room is Oval and located at the White House. All this taken into account, it's a standing tribute to its director, John Frankenheimer, and to its leading players that the film "per se" succeeds in capturing our attention and sustaining it through 165 minutes of dialogue and interior sequences, like no ordinary TV movie would be even remotely capable of doing these days. It is, in just one word, a mature conception of a historical movie, sustained by brilliant performances ands a good screenplay... The real shame is that too many of us (especially the non-Americans?) best remember LBJ through the devastating portrait Jules Feiffer made of those years in its cartoons. Forty years later, Frankenheimer gives us a different thing to muse about: we accept it from his "maestro" hands -- with just a little reserve in the back of our minds.
Mystic River
(2003)
It Gave Me the Creeps
9 December 2003
Warning: Spoilers
***SPOILERS!*** "Mystic River" shocked me and, from a certain point on, made me nervous and sweating, wishing I could leave the house to escape watching the friends-kills-friend murder scene. This was because of its underlying sense of trauma; now I have absolutely nothing against the use of terrible moments in high drama -- it's almost inevitable, as we all know too well since we first read a page of Dostoevskij or sat through a Shakesperean tragedy. However, one thing is the description of the dark side of reality (AND human beings), another is the spectacle of trauma, an experience capable of twisting or damaging our personality at a very basic level, and in earlier stages of our life. Dave, the scapegoat-victim of that terrible sequence, is such a damaged man; witnessing his prolonged, delayed execution on the shore of Mystic River gave me the creeps, like I was caught in a recurrent nightmare. Note that trauma as such is unknown to classic tragedists: it is Freud who invented the Oedipus complex, not Sophocles. When that doomed character killed his father (by accident) and married his mother (unaware it was her), he was a full-grown man: Oedipus was probably never `traumatized' in our present sense of the word, but became all the same a perfect embodiment of guilt and ill-fate. Discovering what he had done, he blinded himself as a form of repentance: self-mutilation as atonement. In contemporary film, however, guilt and trauma seem to matter a lot more than their catharsis. In "Mystic River", all proportions established, there is no way for atonement; its characters seem to be doomed from the start, one (Dave) is destined to function as scapegoat of this particular tragedy, and when the truth finally surfaces, there's nothing that can be done to change things. The only thing that CAN be attempted is to immediately stop the chain of killing and abuse, which is why the cop Kevin Bacon won't even arrest former friend-turned-murderer Sean Penn. It's the sole "catharsis" we are permitted in such a drama, nothing more positive than that. In the end, everybody is "blinded" in `Mystic River': Tim Robbins by losing his mind and life (after turning a murderer himself); Kevin Bacon by losing a wife; Sean Penn by losing a child and the apparent normality of his squalid life. That violence will stop at this level, and that Bacon's wife will return with a baby, are the only thin hopes in an otherwise ultra-black movie verging on horror. It seemed to me a film about an impossible "pursuit of loneliness" on hone hand (the characters, like so many Americans and other Westerners today, try with all their force to escape friendship, because of an innate sense of guilt or disturbance), and about a metaphysical truth on the other -- that "evil begets more evil", as Mr Eastwood is reported to have said. This is a completely justifiable statement, but being the gloomy film that it is, "Mystic River" remains a hopeless drama, so as to testify a modern approach to tragedy which largely consists in making a monument to feelings of guilt, impotence and loss of innocence (if any). Child abuse IS a tragic reality, but maybe not an hopeless one; in a world that is still human, traumas should be fought back and/or or accepted, not necessarily elevated to a metaphysical rank. Certainly, movies such as `Mystic River' offer more than one level of understanding, so that its ultimate theme may not deal with child abuse or revenge at all. In fact, it ultimately deals with the extremely thin interspexing of chance and chaos from which our lives are fabricated. With the fatality of our very appearance on Earth. Mr Eastwood, as an artist, showed us with painful participation the evil that was done; it's time for his public to find some way out.
We Still Kill the Old Way
(1967)
Midway Between a Mafia Thriller and Sentimental Comedy
14 April 2003
Although drawn from a powerful novel by Leonardo Sciascia, this results in an oversimplified, well-meaning social mystery set in 1965 Sicily, where two men are killed during a hunting party. A leftist professor (Gian Maria Volonté, a much better actor in the later Petri offering "Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto") decides to investigate the murders, only to find himself entangled in a spiderweb of corrupt politicians, "mafiosi" killers and sinister Church connections: the anonymous letters received by the victims - and, in due time, by the professor himself - were made with clippings from the Vatican newspaper "L'Osservatore Romano". There is also a fascinating dark lady character, a victim's widow, played by the splendid Irene Papas, whose black-stockinged legs wink through the whole film to the shy, undecided professor. When he resolves to take the woman, in a love scene near the end of the movie, it is unfortunately too late... The film can still be seen with some fun, but it's far from a serious rendition of the novel and it's not perhaps among the best Mafia movies made in Italy at the time. It's curious to note how so-called "spaghetti westerns", for instance, were often much more effective in describing corrupt politicians and Mafia-governed southern towns than their "mainstream" counterpart, like this typically engagé movie. I found also irritating the use of Cinemascope combined with low angles, continuous camera movements and extremely close shots, so that the narrative pace is fragmented and, more often than not, disturbed.
Ulysses Against Hercules
(1962)
Heroes from different eras join to battle villains!
7 May 2002
Ulysses - or Odysseus - vas an Achean adventurer-king who probably lived in the Aegean area around 13th century B.C., battled against the Asian city of Troy and reportedly destroyed it with the Trojan horse stratagem. Hercules was the mythical hero of an entirely different Greek civilization, the Doric one, who established itself on the ruins of the Achean kingdoms from the 11th century B.C. on. So the two men could have scarcely met in history, but in film they did! The result was a true Clash of the Titans: the cunning, seafaring king of Ithaca against the muscle-bound son of Zeus, here without the typical Steve Reeves evenly-trimmed beard. According to screenplay the father of all gods asks the strongest man ever to capture Ulysses and give him for revenge to the blinded Cyclops Polyphemus, the son of another offended divinity. While Hercules, always the zealot, promptly embarks on his errand to punish Ulysses, the latter reacts as a true hero of the human condition against evils that come from the gods. He is captured by Hercules, but in the end the two men will have to join forces to escape the bloodthirsty race of the Bird-men and battle the evil Troglodytes of king Laro, a madman who enjoys torturing women. With the aid of Ircanus, king of the eponymous city, they will defeat the villain along with his monster-cavemen; Hercules will have his beloved Helen while Ulysses will finally return to Ithaca. Mario Caiano, future director of "Amanti d'oltretomba", a minor cult classic in the Gothic vein, toys here with a good Ulysses (Georges Marchal) and a despisable Hercules (Mike Lane), a man who is truly softer than butter, capable of leaving a friend in the hands of his worst enemies and always eager to play the "amoroso", or young man in love. This ill-assorted but funny couple moves in a scenario which makes you think of future spaghetti-westerns, what with well-photographed ravines and desert beaches, & with the addition of fancy extras in "monster" make-up. The Bird-men dance better than they kill, but the Troglodyte cavemen will really impress a band of captive young women. Screenplay is mostly missing and direction may seem casual, but the fable has a better look than the average muscleman epic and its fantastic quality is not altogether spurious.
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