Casualties of War, diected by Brian DePalma

 

1989's Casualties of War is one of dirctor of DePalma’s best films, a straightforward and powerfully told morality tale, highlighted by notable performances from Michael J.Fox and Sean Penn. De Palma has always been a master of moving the camera in virtuoso turns (or rather, someone who has mastered the virtuoso camera turns of others, such as Hitchcock, Eisenstein, et al), but he is too often a lousy storyteller who replaces plausibility with sensationalist absurdity. But with his project. Here, he gets the combination right: he tackles a crucial issue–at what point do liberators fighting for an essential good become worse than the evil they think they’re fighting? –with the right script, the right actors, and a balanced filmmaking style.

There is not a wasted scene, not a gratuitous cut or splice to hijack this movie’s power. Michael J.Fox does a credible job as a soldier with religious convictions that conflict with his mission, whose boundaries, he finds, are being improvised and diminished, and Sean Penn is stunning as hyper-macho team leader whose loyalty for the good of his men under his command changes from good soldier to concentrated evil; his sense of morality is shattered and ground to dust, and there is a gleaming insanity just behind those radiating blue eyes. What also comes into an articulate focus are De Palma’s views on violence towards women at the hands of warped men.In his previous films, women seemed little more than witless innocents or scheming, sulking whores who engineered their violent ends due to a variety of self-serving schemes; leeches, blood suckers, vampires, debilitating things to be poked, shot, prodded with blunt instruments, drills, knives. The director, a competent technician with a conspicuous desire to sit among the greats in the Auteur Pantheon, seemed to have issues with women, issues that seemed to find only extreme resolutions. The ambivalent treatment of the misogyny made you wonder whether DePalma was an inept moralist who couldn’t make his movies perform both as entertainments and moral inquiries, or if he was merely interested in the thrill of seeing women abused by disgruntled men.

With Casualties of War, the focus turns to the churning culture of men in wartime, on a band of soldiers who recreate and embrace their loyalty only to one another in the field to the tragic exclusion of all else. DePalma lines up the scenes of escalating violence and decreasing reason, until Penn’s character offers up a lone Vietnamese woman for his men to rape, offered up like a cash reward for a job well done; this is more than a melodramatic turn according to a prefigured script, but an effective, disturbingly presented result of group thinking. The issue is not nuanced considerations of good versus evil and what appropriate punishments should be meted out–it is a blunt, plain truth, the inflicting of pain by the powerful against the weak. This problematic director for once gets that across forcefully, artfully, unambiguously.

BLADE RUNNER, directed by Ridley Scott and BLADE RUNNER 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuv

 

Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," stands out as a visually stunning and thought-provoking work. The film successfully captures the essence of a future Los Angeles, employing a stylish film noir aesthetic. It skillfully plays with light and dark contrasts, utilizing a subdued color palette that evokes a sense of decay and pollution, which suits the futuristic thriller genre. However, Blade Runner's significance extends beyond its visual appeal. The film tackles a range of compelling issues, encompassing spiritual, sociological, and philosophical themes. From the androids' quest to meet their creator and extend their lives to the exploration of immigration, urban congestion, cultural blending, and the unscrupulous introduction of dubious technologies into the consumer market, Blade Runner delves into thought-provoking subject. While Ridley Scott has directed other notable films such as The Duelist, Black Hawk Down, Gladiator, Matchstick Men, and The Martian, none of them possess the combination of ideas, tone, and visual allure that made Blade Runner a truly unique masterpiece.

It is intriguing how Blade Runner, with its elegant design, encapsulates a wealth of substantial ideas, capable of sparking numerous discussions and generating an abundance of scholarly writings. This resonates with Philip K. Dick's fascination with how societies willingly surrender their humanity, the innate qualities of curiosity, adventure, and industriousness that drive humans to explore and push boundaries. In Dick's novels, technology often represents a force that diminishes human essence by gradually eroding their free will. As machines assume tasks previously exclusive to humans, those who prioritize convenience and leisure over a grittier existence may not appear tragic. It becomes challenging to empathize with individuals who exist solely for sensory pleasure, devoid of genuine concerns. In summary, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner remains a cinematic gem that surpasses his subsequent works in terms of its captivating visuals, profound ideas, and engaging atmosphere. It aligns with Philip K. Dick's exploration of humanity's surrender to technology, portraying a future where the loss of genuine human experiences is a tangible consequence.

The sequel to the Scott masterpiece, Blade Runner 2049 was not a film I anticipated optimism, as Ridley Scott, the director of the first film, a masterpiece recognized only after its unspectacular theatrical performance and the oh-hum reviews, was an erratic director, to be kind. He was very capable of making movies that while boasting an attractive style, would let you down with half baked story lines and conventional Hollywood endings, whether they be     upbeat or bleak by the end of the last reel. Fortunately, smarter judgment prevailed and director Dennis Villeneuve--Sicario, Arrival, Prisoners-- was brought on board to extend the replicant saga. Fittingly, the film is a luscious, lovingly detailed, and poetically blurred vision of a polluted and decimated Los Angeles and western United States, and the enticing and confounding issues that arise from the creation of very human like androids to essentially function and exist as nothing other than a disposable slave class remain with us. The smart matter here is that the right story elements are drawn from the original film, the right characters are brought back to furnish       us with ideas as to how matters have changed over thirty years , the mysteries have deepened more so , and the mysteries remain. BR 2049 has all the issues the lured us in from the original motion picture, but it is its  own majestic, dystopian saga. It is equal parts meditation, philosophical debate, action movie, love story and, above all, a mystery, all the strands perfectly fused together seamlessly. This film is a masterpiece.

 

SOME CAPSULE REVIEWS

 (I came across a trove of newspapers, the UCSD Guardian, saved in pdf. format online and discovered this, one of my first attempts to be a film critic.I thought I'd put here for all to view, if only to remind myself that I  sounded quite a bit more precious than I  do know. There are creaks and groans and other odd sounds of aging that give my proclamations a soundtrack of authority.The films were special media screenings for the 1980 San Diego International Film Festival which held forth for a few fondly remembered years at Sherwood Hall of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. Yes, I sound a little more pompous than I do know. My voice hadn't cracked yet.-tb)

As one of the few "critics" in town to see the preview screening for the San Diego International Film Festival, scheduled from now until Nov. 3 at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, I'm inspired to think that the movies reflect Frank Zappa's description of his music: no commercial potential. This isn't to say that the films are so irredeemably bad that no one, intellectual and lowbrow alike, would sit through them -far from it - but the festival board has gone out of its way to have an international collection of film· makers whose works fall well outside the norm for the movie going public, films that one isn't likely to see at the Guild or Fine Arts, let alone UTC. In any case, this year's movie crop isn't bound to please everyone. For my part, basing my judgment on evidence of the six screenings I attended, [have to give an appreciative grin.

First off I may as well deal with the film that did the least for me, Radio On, a British and German coproduction directed by Christopher Petit. Petit is the former film critic for the British weekly Time Out and  a film theoretician in good stead who, following the precedent t set by New Wave  icon Godard, Rivette and Traffaut, has decided to put theory into practice and become a film· maker himself. The problem is shameless emulation and a lack of insight into the subject matter. Radio On concern itself with a young London disc jockey on the way to Bristol to uncover the mysterious circumstances behind his brother's death. His subsequent encounters leave him with a feeling of alienated finality, ennui and despair. Filmed rather well in black and white over a terrain of freeways, bleak country road and grey cityscapes, the film fairly reeks of the movies by German director Wim Wenders. It features Wenders· like long takes, ponderously slow exposition shot and muted emotions of characters, who are unable to communicate much at all. Petit, though, seems to have misread Wenders, who in films like Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road and The American Friend. is usually able to investigate such things as cultural dislocation, the ramifications of the cargo-cult on postwar Europe, how pop culture mythologizes reality and how those verities come to play in the psyches of his characters. Petit's people merely strike a stance of thin·skinned alienation and sulk as the camera soaks in the impressively miserable environs, like a working·class bar, a rural gas station, and all night bakery. . 

What does Petit intend to tell us? I suspect his intentions are nothing more than to show us that civilization is unable to give us the things we need. American director Bob Rafelson intended much the same with his Hue Easy Pieces, but succeeded. Rafelson on at least gave us the benefit of character development, an archaic notion to many vanguardists but a ploy that still gave Pieces unity. In essence, Radio 0n is empty and  exists more as a fashion pose than an edition to an art form

Woman Between Dog and Wolf, directed by French director Andre Delvaul is a well wrought film about with the dodgy subject of stoicism at the conceptual center of what it unfolds in narrative. As Belgium is pushed into World War II, a man joins the pro·Nazi nationalist movement and leave to join the conqueror of the Eastern Front. In the interim, his wife (Marie Christine Barrault) is treated with hatred by her neighbors, retreat into the actuary of her house, and tries her best to maintain a home of order and normalcy. A resistance fighter takes refuge in her cellar, culminating in their having an affair, and the resistance fighter's vouching for her against revenge· minded neighbors : Through the resistance fighter's interaction, her husband I pared the death penalty and returns home , and from there he develops an obsession for his former cause, unable to adjust to present-day realities. He continually y tries to justify his past by writing his memoirs. Dclvaux handles this story with a neat, precise hand, especially in his editing. Instead of going the fashionably "arty" route of long takes, the scenes are brief and succinct, establishing their plot particulars and schematic cues rapidly, then fading away gracefully as the screen darkens and then awakes on another local and incident.

The Last of the Blue Devils, directed by American Bruce, Ricker, is a documentary about the Kansas City jazz scene. It's also a case of taking the good along with the bad. The bad in this case is the editing, which is aimless and leaps from one thing to another with little cohesion, most specifically in the way Ricker intercuts vintage footage of Count Basie and Ivory Joe Hunter with more recent film. The good are the performance, inducing superb concert footage of Basie and his band, a jam session between saxophonists Paul Quinchette, Charles McPhearson, a trombone and the blues vocals of Hunter, whose capacity to belt a lyric hadn't diminished a bit as he aged. Generally, a messy but fun movie.

Those familiar with the way Alfred Jarry presented dictators in his King Ubu plays will have fun with Adolph and Marlene, a  film directed by German director Ulli Lommel. The festival program notes say the movie is a bit of "historical speculation" about an alleged liason between Hitler and Marlene Dietrich. The film’s intention is less than the far-fetched speculation one would suspect. It is an exercise in turning the Hitler persona into an excuse for buffoonery, casting him as an ideological Imbecile whose various diatribes, much of it taken from Mein Kempf, collapse under the weight of their illogic. The Hitler character, performed unctuously by Karl Raab, is a man of penultimate pettiness, unable to distinguish between the drive for power and affection, between sentiment and mawkishness, clear thinking and lunatic espousals. The effect is comic, but also underlines the tragedy of power becoming a thing in and of itself, without purpose or goal. In all, Aldoph and Marlene is comic enough to elicit some  self-satisfied snickers, though I could have done without the ending. As Hitler's and Eva Braun's bodies burn during the fall of Berlin, Marlene and her manager Luminski drive by and stop while, unfathomably, a group of Black American GI's stand in the foreground on some steps. Marlene hands Luminiski a small globe small as an egg shell, and he perches it daintily on his fingertips. "Don't you have a bigger globe?" he asks her, eyes heavy. Marlene smiles icily and drives off. . Weird, no? Symbolic, no? The conclusion seemed a trifle arty to me, an intrusion that muddled what until then had been a well·played absurdist comedy, Lommel would have served his purposes better had he eschewed all these metaphors and had played it straight. # Of the six films I viewed, the most problematic was

Elisa, Vida Mia (Elisa My Love) by Spain's Carlos Saura. It is an arid , fragmented. maddeningly slow meditation on love and hate, life and death, reality versus illusion, and maybe a couple of other themetic  duplications I missed along the way. A woman (Geraldine Chaplin) goes to visit a retired man (Fernando Rey) who lives in an isolated house in the far reaches of Spain. From there she encounters various hallucinations about the lives, deaths. and loves of herself and other people, and a general confusion of what is real or imagined. No doubt, as the program notes say, that Saura's intention is not to provide any clean answer to the dilemma. but to “... evince the linking of imagination and memory ," but for me the film is a labored affair, top-heavy with its own importance. Though only 110 minutes long it became an endurance contest.   

On the other hand, L 'lmportant C'est D'aimer (The Important Thing is to Love) a French, Italian and German release directed by Andrzej Zulawski, is great, a love story that goes beyond the tawdry wrappings of the genre and deals with love in connection with guilt. indebtedness. and commitment. Romy Schneider, an actress lately reduced to making porno films, meets up with Fabio Tassi. a cynical photographer. who at first is interested only in exploiting her. But he falls for her and tries to help her by financing a revival of Richard Ill. To do so Tassi goes into debt to a lecherous uncle, thuggish pornographer for whom Tassi unwillingly works. The potential affair between Tassi and Schneider doesn't occur because she is married to an impotent husband (J acques Dutronc). w ho pulled her. from dru g addiction and prostitution, and to whom she eels an incalculable, unpayable  debt. What is set up is a complex arrangement of relationships in which characters are bound to one another through debts and commitments to intangible virtues. Tassi is indebted to his gangster uncle who feels he's owed the loyalty of a son to a father. Schneider is attached to her husband, who feels guilty about not being able to perform sexually. More than that, the film is about set of values, a search to have love and sex mean something in a culture that uses it as a commodity, as barter at the lowest level of human exchange. The film is taut as a guide wire as the emotional tension, with the violence being the explosions of frustrated, emotionally· constrained characters who can't seem to break out of their respective cells.

BURN AFTER READING, written and direced by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

One recalls the concern which was vividly expressed that the Coen brothers have set themselves on cruise control since multi-Oscar wins for No Country for Old Men, the current evidence being the new comedy, Burn After Reading. It's familiar character terrain for Coen fans, this time focused on a gaggle of Washington DC nitwits and imbeciles who try to get the upper hand when a canned CIA analyst's memoirs, on CD, is found by an attendant in the locker room of a local gym. What follows when the CD gets into the hands of two inordinately self-seeking body trainers, wonderfully kinked performed by Francis McDormand and Brad Pitt, is the sort of comedy the Coens excel in, a detached though acute view of a many characters operating agendas from myopic cocoons who are frantically pursuing their ends regardless of consequences. Theirs is a comedy of situations where nothing is thought-through by the characters, everyone is looking for the shortcut, and all the assumptions crash, burn and sometimes are fatal when the gravity of collected self-regard takes hold and takes over.

Their genius is to make you laugh at all this, no matter how unsympathetic the characters might be; the unsympathetic nature of the figures in Burn After Reading is the charge leveled against the brothers this time out, as well as some complaints that they're borrowing from their other movies, particularly Fargo and Oh Brother, but to the first challenge mostly I'd counter that being able to “relate” shouldn't be the sole basis to enter a film's narrative. What matters is how well matters are brought out, made compelling; Burn is compelling, if nothing else, but more so, it is a film by masters. They are practitioners of Hitchcock's techniques of voyeur-noir --their camera notices everything, notes each gesture, figure of speech, constructs different scenarios as to where the plot might go, and then allows a particularly fragile house of cards to collapse.

Shallow as they be in life's purpose, their quirks, their world views are fully delineated and detailed. This has the sort of aesthetic remove that made Nabokov an effectively satiric novelist; wouldn't a Coen Brothers' version of Laughter in the Dark be an ideal match up of sensibilities? Nabokov, always in love with people's schemes, their rationalizations, and the erotic inflection when lust and avarice influence the chatter and buzz phrases, would like the Brother's merciless technique and distance; he'd appreciate the way their movies can get in close without embarrassment to expose a considerable vacancy where something like a soul should be.

You remember that humorless Brian dePalma turned Tom Wolf's dyspeptic novel Bonfire of the Vanities into a fat, trudging monster that turned the author's flinty wit and lacerating details of New York greed and class where the wounds inflicted were secondary to everyone being manic and mirthless for all the tortured reasoning their obsessions required. There wasn't a laugh to be had, and you merely experienced unpleasant folks at the expense of the time you might have spent doing something more interesting. Had Joel and Ethan Coen helmed the screen adaptation, one would be singing their praises further for maintaining a balance between the audience's voyeur like interest in what is none of their affair and the nearly clinical portrayal of Bad Faith as a quality no sympathetic spin. As is, however, Wolf's book suffered the fate of being another of dePalma inflated galleries of borrowed camera styles, and Joel and Ethan have fared well enough without him. Duncan Shepard, film critic for the San Diego reader and one of the better essayists on film matters Coen has a punchy, succinct and on-target review of Burn After Reading here. It's significant, as Shepard is America's fussiest film critic; fair, and hard to please.

Mostly, far beyond the aspect of whether I find sympathy with a film character, is whether the project is fun. Art of any sort has to be fun, which isn't to say fun on the level of the playground, but more with whether I regret the time I spent engaged or not.” Art” is a massive set of aesthetic activities that accommodates many agendas in its generalized practice, the practice of "having fun" not the least of them. "Fun" is that sense of something that engages and provokes in someway a facet of one's personalty that makes up the personalized and skewed way that one understands how the world works, in fact. Whether Cage piano recitals, James Carter solos, Fassbinder film festivals, or whatever gamier, tackier sounds cleave to ones' pleasured ganglia, the quality of fun, that fleeting, momentary state that defines an activity, is why we're attracted to some kinds of music, and not others. It's a legitimate definition for an aesthetic response, but the problem comes in the description of the response, the articulate delineation of what made a set of sounds "fun".

The point, of course, being that everything that is entertaining or distracting from the morbid sameness of daily life cannot be said to be exclusively in the domain of the willfully dumb, conceived in a massive expression of bad faith: what is entertaining, from whatever niche in the culture you're inspecting, is that activity that holds your attention and engages you the degree that you respond to it fully.

HEAT. directed by Michael Mann

 I've seen director Michael Mann's three-hour masterpiece Heat four times, thanks to HBO and Netflix, and a recent review the other night has convinced me I ever was of its greatness. Maybe it's just a guy thing where the typical male obsessions, like guns, cars, violence, are elevated to potentially embarrassing levels of reading, but the ironically named Mann has the relaxed style to pull off the task. "Cool" and "style" are important words to remember. It's a heist film as tragedy, and it's particularly arresting to seeing the unsettled rage of Pacino's dogged cop contrasted with the coolly methodical criminal of DeNiro set against the vast, cluttered, over lit loneliness that constitutes Mann's idea of Los Angeles. Mann is controlling his materials, and his decision to limit the amount of shared screen time between his top-billed stars was wise indeed; rather than a conventional vehicle plot geared to accommodate big stars in uninteresting situations, we get ins to study in distinct, and not-so different contrasts as the competing personalities and their agendas head to an ending where only one, or neither of them is standing. Mann, at his best, gets the hard-boiled genre where all a man has going for him is his professionalism and the personal code that comes with it, and Heat, to me, is an intriguing extension of the style.

Some critics were alarmed by what they felt was Mann's reluctance to have a feeling for human relationships –we are in the country of stoic individuals conducting themselves by codes of honor and conduct that places weight on the action, not words and their adjectives--the movie is about human relationships reduced to the occupations that command everything; emotional attachments are a luxury the characters, cops, and crooks alike, cannot afford. This is a given in heist dramas, but tiny, really, has been done to show the devastation that The Life has on the personal level. Pacino has grudgingly accepted the isolation his work has forced him into and pursues DeNiro without let up, whatever the cost to himself or those around him. DeNiro's character, in turn, has a code that says, in effect, that someone in the life needs to be ready, always, to abandon whoever and whatever is around them the minute they know the "heat" is around the corner; the tragedy is slowly set into motion as he violates his code, his rules for existing in the life he's chosen and attempts to take his girlfriend with him. His end is inevitable. For me, Heat's success is how Mann expands the minimalist conventions of the narrative line and examines the irrevocable ruin in human relations that the characters' choices result in.

I don't know about the characters being unrealized, since I think this is in the tradition of Hemingway wherein blatant introspection is nil. Still, much is conveyed through a series of small details, glances, scars. Perhaps you don't see it, but there's a lot that is said between the lines here, and the acting--Jon Voight is particularly effective here with his restraint, among others--creates a tangible feeling of emotional attachment being hammered into silence by a rough trade. The bit with Pacino's daughter is the least convincing thing in the film; my impression is that Mann had four to five hours of film he had to edit to an hour. This is obviously a truncated storyline that should have been excised from the film. But it's a flaw I can live with. Mann has been taken to task for not making his case about alienation by subtler means, without resorting, as one critic wrote, "….to extremism because the vast majority of people never get so mesmerized by their jobs that they lose their humanity the way De Niro does." The complaint, of course, is that Mann loves the build-up to a grand explosion of feeling where only a character's capacity for ballistic reaction can satisfy the need. Mann, though, I think is well in the tradition of dramatic tragedy, as DeNiro's character's, master thief, thorough professional, a planner who makes no mistakes in his agendas, assumes that he can defy the odds against getting caught and thus assumes his carefully articulated professionalism will shield him from unlucky happenstance. He is a sufferer of unwarranted pride, a carrier of hubris who claims credit for all that great around him. The tragic form demands that the Universe correct itself; since one thing corresponds with everything else within the dramatic frame, equilibrium must be reestablished.

Heat is a tragedy, and tragedies require extremism. There is no more extremism here than you'd find in Shakespeare. This isn't saying that Mann's work here equals The Bards, but only that the outsized action we witness is in perfect scale with the tragic form. It operates at the appropriate level. Heat is a movie, and movies generally demand "extremism." Films are required to be "larger than life," perhaps, but “extremism” here is a general requirement of both tragedy and the noir aspects Mann is working in. The conventions of the narrative style don't allow for the middle ground, the kind of emotional richness reserved for the world's civilians, with straight jobs that have regular hours. The minimal and the maximal are the options in this case, and Mann does what, I think, is a credible job of getting something operatic from this story of two men, bereft of other human satisfaction and nuance, plunge ahead to an inescapably lousy ending. The scale of the Heat works beautifully. 

The Wire, as I said, is one of the best television dramas ever, period. It comes from writer/producer David Simon. His book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets inspired the edgy, quirk-ridden genius of the late Homicide: Life in the Street, produced by Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson. Simon has a genius for getting the stories of all involved just right. Under his direction, he creates complexity, gray areas and flaws, and other gripping nuances in characters that make his unique style of crime fiction fascinating, arresting, and moving. The distinction between The Wire and Heat, as you've alluded to, is the difference between TV and movies as forms; a continuing weekly drama can develop characters over time, and layers can be added without straining credulity. Movies, even long ones, have to be more efficient in how their characters and plot mechanisms are deployed. In any event, I think both projects are fantastic pieces of work. 

I have an affection for some films that have intractable flaws, along with the works of odd and flawed novels and messily writing poems. There is much I find to like and admire in Apocalypse Now and Heat, enough, indeed, to make them worth initial and subsequent viewings. A good deal of what these two long and notable films deal with is an idea of a character's humanity getting wrapped around a Big Idea, whether it's seduction with origins ideological or professional. The drama, which I do believe is convincingly put across as a felt experience in both these films, comes as characters find themselves making decisions to finish the tasks and duties they've set for themselves, no matter how profound their regret and misgivings are. Style, of course, has much to do with how watchable these outsized actions are, and both Coppola and Mann managed watchable movies that caught, manipulated, and sustained their respective tones. Heaven's Gate, though, I found singularly unwatchable, the problem is that Michael Cimino isn't a particularly interesting chronicler of people's lives as they move toward their destinies. Vincent Canby called worse than a forced tour of your living room, and I'm not one to argue. The Deer Hunter, in turn, was pretentious, vague, structurally incoherent from the get-go. This aggravating movie was like someone continually clearing their throat to make an Important Statement but never delivers anything the least bit edifying.

Getting human beings as "they actually are" is a conceit and is an impossible task. Characters in narratives, regardless of genre, are all ideal types. The question really needs to be whether you appreciate a particular director or writer's creations in a terrain more or less created out of whole cloth. Different genres have different givens as to what sorts of nuances and backgrounds characters have; this leads us to stereotypes, of course, and what we respond to is how well someone might avoid the obvious and give us new wrinkles, twists, turns, and habits of mind. David Simon is terrific at this. Mann, in turn, has his moments too.

KISS ME DEADLY

 

I had the good fortune to stumble across Kiss Me Deadly while channel surfing last night, director Robert Aldrich's crisp and cruelly stylish film black and white 1955 film adaptation of novelist Micky Spillane's brutish detective novel . Spillane's antagonist (rather than hero) is a lug named Mike Hammer, a thuggish sociopath with a private investigator's license.  Hammer was a decisive and deliberate break from the fictional private eyes that preceded him in American pulp culture; unlike the creations of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who created characters who had wit, instinct searching for a slim set of facts, Hammer was mostly an early version of the Hulk, someone who would smash first and then try to figure out what it was he destroyed. 

The glory of the Mike Hammer novels, though, was Spillane's style, which was, despite what misgivings and protests one has against the lack of an articulate moral center, swift and stinging and paced at a tempo that made it easy to forget how venal and ludicrous the plots might happen to me. The prose was blunt and to the point, but it made you abandon your reservations and give yourself over to the sequence of rage and revenge that was to follow. Hammer is a dunced-out brute, portrayed with a detached, tightly wrapped asshole style by Ralph Meeker. That's the appeal. He knows a gun in the gut, and a good back of the hand gets results faster than reasoned discussion. Notable, too, is that the fact that Hammer's character seems to particularly relish the opportunity of decidedly non-masculine men, like the piggy, squealing fellow who gets his hand slammed hard in a drawer or the priggish, likely closeted clerk at the athletic club who gets slapped around by Hammer in a humiliating fashion. In any case, this bullying gets a few things straight: he is in command. I laughed when Hammer, who is not a cop and didn't identify himself as a private eye, barks orders at the clerk, who sheepishly acquiesces. 

This film is beautiful, not just stylistically, but because Aldrich plays it straight with how he presents the whole thing. The paranoia here, cutting to the bone and radiating like so many of the garish lights from the angular, heavily contrasted black and white frames, acts as an x-ray. Everyone's business is exposed, everyone's agenda, or lack of one, is revealed, no matter how much they assert their innocence or intentions.

NIGHTCRAWLER, directed by Dan Gilroy

 

Nightcrawler, the directorial debut of screenwriter Dan Gilroy, is akin to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver in its close observance of titular characters of no observable depth of integrated personality who improvise their worldviews and philosophies on the fly. The shred goal of the men in both of these films is that they are at the frayed ends of the society they live in, seeking either to have it fit and serve their erstwhile agendas or disrupt, disturb, and injure in some fashion that comes with a warning. In Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro plays a sociopath who transfers his feelings of impotence and inadequacy onto the oppressive demands of the consumer culture; driving a cab through New York at night, he roams among the hookers, pimps, and drug dealers whom he finds disgusting and nurses an attraction-repulsion with those he perceives as rich and powerful, a class he wishes to both be a part of and wishes to destroy as well. Feeling that he's been dealt the rawest hand possible by powers on high, he vaguely plots to make something happen, something that would both change the way things are and define him as someone to be noticed and respected. During Taxi Driver, effectively maneuvered by director Scorsese, Travis Bickle, De Niro's emotionally unassimilated character, morphs from a sad and comic figure to someone who becomes menacing; the feeling that something will eventually, sooner than later, go wrong with this scenario is unavoidable.

Nightcrawler is another cool, restrained, artful study of a marginal personality attempting with their self-invented methods to define himself in a world that knows him not. Jake Gyllenhaal is a petty thief named Louis Bloom who hustles his way into the world of being a freelance news videographer, the sort of dude who waits in his car, listens to a police scanner awaiting the announcement of a bloody auto accident, a robbery, a murder, plane crash, and then responds so that he can film it and sell the morbid footage to a local news channel. Gyllenhaal has, like De Niro, a sort of charisma that he oozes and applies effectively in the role: a wide smile, wide, attentive eyes, and a patter borrowed from self-help books and online encyclopedias. This is a beautifully shot movie, a grand picture of Los Angeles after dark, with sharply drawn contrasts; the color scheme is gorgeously dark and makes the city's nocturnal side, shot from hilltops, side streets, alleyways, and four-way stops, glisten even still like a display of expensive diamonds. Gyllenhaal's character is, to be sure, a sociopath, someone of no real concerns for the world apart from his ability to negotiate a better position for himself; as the character rises in his new profession of filming the bloodiest events after hours, we witness him manipulate, twist, and apply his creepily persuasive talk to gain his way. He displays a mastery of his character that is unnerving to see unfold, wherein different situations we see him learning how to coax responses he prefers to come from people, going from botched negotiations when trying to get a price he wants for stolen metal material, to getting lowballed on a price when he sells his bike to a pawnbroker.

He learns from his mistakes by obsessively analyzing the words he chose in those situations and scours the internet courses to study research about human behavior and taking business classes where he appears most impressed by the lessons that instruct him in strong, goal-oriented business language. His life becomes dedicated to a business plan that he has adopted as a philosophy and perhaps a substitute for a moral compass; when confronted with objections, protests, and criticisms of his rationale and activities and results of plans that hadn't gone well, Gyllenhaal responds with a firm, calm response that is denial couched in the rhetoric of mass-market motivational books. The effects are frequently comic, as the character baffles and bamboozles others, but there is a sense of the thing culminating in an oncoming catastrophe. Gilroy, directing his script, has the right touch for establishing the growing sense of unease; even as the story accelerates and the danger becomes more intensely presented, the film is steady in the pacing; there is the sense that you're watching an accident about to happen and there is nothing you can do to stop it. A large part of the horror is when we realize that we are watching a man who is without compunction, remorse, or any sense of moral right or wrong. He is a monster, a real monster, with no agenda apart from achieving his ends. This is a fine motion picture, wonderfully filmed, acted, and edited. One looks forward to more movies from Dan Gilroy.