01 Sep
“Therefore, to eat a shoe is a foolish signal but it was worthwhile. And once in a while we should be foolish enough to do things like that. More shoes, more boots, more garlic!” -Werner Herzog
I recently watched the short documentary, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, in which the titular subject, in 1981 or thereabouts, eats his leather shoes to keep a promise to Errol Morris. Herzog told Morris that if he ever finishes Gates of Heaven, and gets an American movie theater to put on the movie, Herzog would come to Berkeley and eat his shoes. With a little help from Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, Herzog braises the boots for 5 hours and eats them while taking questions in front of an audience there to see the movie that would start Errol Morris’ rather brilliant career.
I have to confess, that despite the adulations of Roger Ebert and many others, I’m not much of a Werner Herzog fan. I’ve only seen a few of his films: Encounters at the End of the World, Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man, and Fitzcarraldo. I’d call Fitzcarraldo of the best movies I’ve ever seen, so good I will continue to dive into the Herzog oeuvre, but I have not cared for the other three movies. He is, however, interesting, to me. He also has something to say about everything, even though I tend to disagree with her perspectives, and I love his enthusiasm for what he does.
You can watch Herzog eat his shoe and talk about film and society and symbolism as an extra feature on the Burden of Dreams DVD.
15 Aug
Gary Kurtz, who worked with George Lucas developing Star Wars, and in making both the original and The Empire Strikes back (before creative differences drove him from the set of Return of the Jedi) spoke to LA Times about the split. The most interesting part is what he claims was the original Return of the Jedi:
The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn’t want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason.”
The discussed ending of the film that Kurtz favored presented the rebel forces in tatters, Leia grappling with her new duties as queen and Luke walking off alone “like Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti westerns,” as Kurtz put it.
Kurtz said that ending would have been a more emotionally nuanced finale to an epic adventure than the forest celebration of the Ewoks that essentially ended the trilogy with a teddy bear luau.
He was especially disdainful of the Lucas idea of a second Death Star, which he felt would be too derivative of the 1977 film. “So we agreed that I should probably leave.”
I was born in 1983, but we owned a VCR as long as I can remember, and I grew up with a frothing appreciation of the Star Wars movies, all three of which we owned on cassette. As something resembling a grownup, my interest in Star Wars has waned. I don’t watch the movies very often (admittedly, the DVDs I own are altered versions, and not at all the movies I first loved), and I daresay Return of the Jedi would have been a more interesting movie if the danger these characters were in had been given more gravity, had Han been killed, and had Luke Skywalker not stuck around to see Leia crowned, for reasons that sitting here, I cannot quite even imagine. Just a totally different movie.
03 Oct
The bride-t0-be and I saw Zombieland on Thursday night in a just-advanced screening (thanks, Aint it Cool!). The movie, which is getting plenty of attention and giving plenty of advertisement, is excellent in a funny and violent and ludicrous way. It’s also receiving comparisons to Shaun of the Dead, since both movies are zombie comedies with a touch of romance. Shaun of the Dead is also one of the better zombie movies ever produced, and for its part, Zombieland is the best effort to date in the realm of Fast Zombies (as portrayed in 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake).
Despite these obvious comparison points–all zombie movies are always compared to Romero, and now, presumably, all funny zombie movies that are successful will be compared to Shaun of the Dead–the movie I found myself most thinking about as the credits scrolled is one I remember being called The Legend of Hidden Lake, but since I cannot find that title on IMDB, I can only assume I’m misremembering this film, The Legend of Evil Lake, which seems as though it has a roughly similar plot.
Legend of Evil Lake is a Korean movie about ancient warriors and magic and power-lust. What struck me most about it, however, was that each action scene in the movie managed to reveal elements of the character. The way each character fought revealed their emotions and motivations and who they were. Zombieland is similar in this regard. Its narrator, Columbus, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is nervous and awkward, and keeps alive by following an ever-expanding list of survival rules that he keeps in a small notebook with him at all times. He runs before he shoots. Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee, meanwhile, is sadistic in his zombie killing. The zombies have taken everything away from him, and he, crazed, will take some back. The world is now a videogame for Tallahassee.
Don’t see the movie for that, though. See it for big trucks and guns and bloody clowns and the quick fire jokes. The fact that the action isn’t just empty noise is merely a bonus.
15 Sep
I confess: David Lynch simply does it for me. I’ve seen now four of his movies: Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., and now Lost Highway. His movies engage a variety of esthetic features. Eraserhead is black&white, with German expressionism popping in there; Blue Velvet touches film noir and has the rough, grainy feeling of the story it tells; Mulholland Dr is rich and daring and colorful; Lost Highway has the the aching calm of the ride home after a car accident.
Part of the appeal is the inscrutability. Lynch’s films can be explained in a sentence. Lost Highway: A movie about a man who may have killed his wife. This sentence is entirely true, and fails to reach any of the conflicts that make it so compelling. While talking about the movie today, a friend, entering the conversation late, asked what it was about, and I used that very sentence. His reply was a demanding: “And what?”
To get at the heart of the movie, it’s perhaps better go almost on a scene-by-scene basis. Fred Madison and his wife, Renee, are receiving unlabeled videotapes of their house. The tapes continue, and with increasing detail, coming inside the house to a shot of the them sleeping. The police can do nothing. Fred Madison, saxophonist and the husband, meets a mysterious and patently creepy man at a party. Meet Robert Blake:
The Mystery Man is a man of talent. He has Fred call his own house, and when Fred does so, the Mystery Man, standing in front of Fred at the party, answer’s the house phone. The scene is executed with malice and restraint. Fred is, like the audience, sufficiently creeped out.
The next day, another videotape comes in, unmarked as ever, and this one shows Fred killing his wife in their bedroom. Suddenly, Fred is convicted of murder. Suddenly he is in prison. Suddenly he is a man named Pete Dayton, and Pete Dayton is free. Free to fall in love with a woman named Alice, who looks identical to Fred’s deceased wife, and whom is the mistress of Mr Eddy, an apparent gangster.
In an effort to escape Mr Eddy, Pete and Alice attempt to rob an associate of Mr Eddy’s. They take what they’ve stolen, and drive out to the middle of the desert to visit a fence, who will give the money for the stolen goods. The fence isn’t home, so they’ll have to wait. Alice and Pete start to go at it on the desert floor. Pete tells Alice he wants her. Alice replies, “You’ll never have me,” and she darts up and into the fence’s cabin. When Pete stands up, he’s Fred Madison again. The Mystery Man appears, again, mysteriously, and leads Fred into the cabin. Alice is gone.
Fred, of course, asks where she’s gone. The Mystery Man replies with hostility, that she is gone and her name is Renee. If she said her name was Alice, she lied. And your name? What the fuck is your name? The mystery man is wearing a camcorder, and he is angry, and he is dangerous in ways that are entirely left to the audience’s imagination. Fred’s imagination has him pegged as damn frightening, also, and Fred books it from the cabin back to the car. The mystery man keeps pace without running or hurrying. Fred gets the car’s engine started and drives away.
He drives to the Lost Highway Motel. He pulls Mr Eddy from his room there, brings him outside. The mystery man reappears, shows Mr Eddy a handheld TV depicting Eddy and Renee having an affair. The Mystery Man shoots Mr Eddy, and drives away in Mr Eddy’s car. Fred goes off to tie up one little loose end, and ends up getting chased down the highway by cops. As he is doing so, he is getting apparently electrocuted, and is metamorphosing into yet something else. End scene. End movie. Being sober contemplation as to what the hell happened.
There are a few guidelines, I think, that are helpful when watching Lynchian cinema.
First: time is an illusion. Or, rather, it is flexible. The sequence of events should be questioned at every turn.
Second: if it is too fantastical to be real, it’s probably someone’s imagination.
My guess: Fred found his wife cheating, and killed her in a fit of rage and madness. The madness continues, and while in solitary confinement in prison, he imagines himself younger, free, and with his wife again. The dream unravels and reassembles, until the end in which Fred receives electroshock therapy. You can make your own theories.
On this view, the movie reminds me a bit of Finnegans Wake, in that both LH and FW take place in at least two distinct realities, with no clear lines of demarcation between them. The major difference, I suppose, is that the individual scenes that compose LH are deeply interesting and compelling the narrative forward, while FW is exhausting at every opportunity.
Images come from here, here,.
