The Slow and Easy Meetcute of a Summer's Day

Dennis Quaid rescues Meg Ryan from a giant cake in a moody, 1993 Western/noir called Flesh and Bone. It's a very pleasant movie to watch. Its pleasantness, in fact, overshadows its dramatic material and the biggest problem it has is in trying to concoct a dramatic climax.

Quaid plays Arlis, a quiet fellow who earns a living via vending machines he owns in various places across the beautiful desolation of Texas. One day, he sees a young woman pass out after jumping out of a cake for a bunch of guys. So he takes her home and gets her cleaned up.

She turns out to be a manic pixie dream girl called Kay (Ryan). She walks around in her underwear a lot, even though the cups of her bra each have "Boom" printed on them (two people misread it as "Boo"). She teases him for how quiet he is but he remains a gentleman. Quaid and Ryan have such good chemistry and they look so good in the drowsy Texas atmosphere I'd have been satisfied if the movie just petered out. The wardrobe has a pretty consistent cornflower blue/off-white colour palette and it's always easy on the eyes.

But James Caan and Gwyneth Paltrow are also in the movie, playing a couple thieves. They show up at Arlis' door because Cann plays his father. He asks his son to help him get some buckshot out of his back.

Paltrow shines in the minor role and Caan hams it up delightfully. The screenwriters obviously decided there needed to be some kind of big drama to justify all the moodiness so they cooked up a showdown between Caan and Quaid that doesn't really make sense. Though it does make it clear why Arlis feels he can't be with Kay, giving the story some nicely tragic undertones. But I'm not sure it was strictly necessary.

Robert Towne

How could I add to the heaps of praise for Robert Towne? He passed away on July 1 at the age of 89 and plenty of people have been writing tributes since then. But just go to YouTube and search for "Chinatown screenplay analysis" and you can see people have been singing his praises at length for many years.

Nothing quite equalled Chinatown. He'd done solid work on the Mission Impossible movies, The Yakuza, and Days of Thunder, but Chinatown set a high water mark nothing in his career approached before or since. It's likely the few crucial changes made by Roman Polanski, most notably the film's ending, that played a big part in what made Chinatown great but Towne's accomplishment is still considerable. Chinatown is a complex story requiring research and insight into human nature, intricately woven to be experienced equally well as a pulp detective yarn and a sobering view of cruel reality.

A scheme to exploit local bureaucracy, a culture obsessed with sex, one man's belief in personal glory and another's increasing belief in the destructiveness of his own existence, a woman just trying to salvage some kind of normal existence from brutally perverse circumstance, all of this comes together in Chinatown. It's one hell of a film.

X Sonnet #1860

Surprising cats abused the ferry ride.
With humid days arrayed, the week was wet.
Would grass at last destroy the other side?
The brittle greens comprise a foolish bet.
The country sews its stars in fields of stripes.
Yet banners wave "Hello" at rocket glares.
The flow of spuds could clog the frying pipes.
A condiment's obliged to take the stairs.
A pixel punch deployed aggressive bloom.
Replacement water turned to silt and ash.
An icy castle served to hold the room.
But frigid humans shunned the freezing bash.
A breezy meeting changed to blizzard form.
But few requested help to make them warm.

Holiday In the Trees

Happy Fourth of July everyone. I chose a pretty much all American film to watch last night, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. I actually just finished watching through the first two seasons of the series again and I'm looking forward to starting season three again next week. It's funny how the show that seemed so much about sweaters and misty, evergreen forests basically became an ideal summer series in its third season. But time had long since changed David Lynch from a director of small town Americana of the north to one who passionately loves desert landscapes and towns.

I wonder if all small towns are somewhat like Twin Peaks, not just American towns. It's not that the cheerful, graciously communal layer is an empty veneer but it seems inevitable that there would be a dark flipside to it as the leverage petty and competitive people apply to the secrets of their co-inhabitants mingles with the restlessless of dwelling within the scope of the small town. Would Nadine have gone mad in a big city where she might have been forced to meet an alternative to Ed? Certainly Ed and Norma wouldn't have to work so hard to keep their relationship secret. Would it be so easy for Leo to abuse Shelly in a densely populated neighbourhood? Obviously domestic abuse still occurs in cities but that Sherlock Holmes quote that comes to me so often comes to me again:

The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.

So, er, Happy Independence Day. Here's to a country that can foster art that holds up a brutally honest mirror. Not every country is so lucky.

Come What Mae

Twenty minutes of padding qualified last night's Acolyte to be considered an episode of a television series. Creator Leslye Headland co-wrote the episode so what little did happen is extra official.

It's official, Qimir is eye candy for the female audience Lucasfilm has been desperately courting for some reason. Qimir gets naked for Osha which convinces her to hear him out despite his history of murder and manipulation. Can you imagine if male screenwriters so blatantly insulted women?

By contrast, Sol ties up Mae when he finds out about the switch. Apparently he couldn't just sense she was a different person, he needed Bazil the sniffing alien to tell him. How does that effect my theory that one sister is a Force projection of the other? Well, the fact that they smell different certainly makes it less likely. The fact that Sol couldn't sense a difference between the two seems like it should make it more likely. Whatever happens, I'm sure it won't make any sense.

Mae takes a moment to bully Osha's droid. I feel I should take a moment here to note that the cute little comrades, Bazil and the droid, aren't very endearing. I remember the droid on Andor contributed so much to the show's tension because of his vulnerability and the sense that he depended on Andor and his mother. The little fellow on Acolyte is just kind of a gimp. I think we're meant to feel bad every time he's hurt but it's like screenwriters with no maternal instinct are trying to inspire maternal instinct. It comes off weird.

I feel like we're supposed to be thinking Venestra is really cool. A picture of her head is the thumbnail for the episode, green and bald, looking very Star Trek: TNG. Like, "Come for the Carrie Anne Moss, stay for . . . uh, Rebecca Henderson!" Anyone excited by her purple lightsaber whip? Maybe she'll use it on Osha's droid.

The Acolyte is available on Disney+.

The Hamlet Business

I've been hungry for some Shakespeare lately so when I saw Criterion has a playlist for "Pop Shakespeare" up this month I went ahead and watched the 2000 Hamlet with Ethan Hawke. The cast was mostly good, with Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius and Bill Murray as Polonius. I enjoyed it more than I thought I was going to but I'd still prefer to watch the Nichol Williamson, Laurence Olivier, or Kenneth Branagh versions (in that order). I hate it when Shakespeare plays are put in modern settings.

This one's set in the world of contemporary corporate takeovers, which recalls Kurosawa's loose adaptation of the play called The Bad Sleep Well, a far more effectively gloomy take. There were two things I really liked about the 2000 film, though. I liked how Ophelia is wearing a wire when she confronts Hamlet and I liked how the performance of Sam Shephard is allowed to carry the impact of the ghost's words to Hamlet. There's minimal makeup and optical effects, it's mostly just Sam Shephard standing there in a suit.

Somehow he made this bit particularly chilling:

But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood,

Julia Stiles plays Ophelia and the filmmakers seemed to have not had much faith in her because a lot of her lines are cut. But I liked when Hamlet discovered she was wearing a wire and was enraged by it. It was a nice way of showing the nature of Ophelia's madness, how hopeless she must feel after the incident demonstrates to Hamlet that he can't trust her even though she truly loves him. So here's some advice for young lovers--don't wear hidden microphones.

Hamlet (2000) is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet #1859

The boat concealed a zero deep below.
But people knew balloons were full of air.
The salvage crew disdained a bag to stow.
A level deck remained to smooth the dare.
A beastly boy would watch the wasted books.
As copper daggers gather dust, he waits.
No killer sought to tame the Devil's hooks.
The wounded climb in vain behind the Fates.
A worthy man may yet not ev'ry role befit.
A hasty word would dwell a lengthy space.
Reflections fail to stop the bullet's hit.
Implore, but don't presume, an act of grace.
The footage shows a ghost in guise of man.
The demon building housed the guts of Pan.

Another Troubling Sign

The little Antichrist was at it again in 1978's Damen - Omen II. William Holden takes over from Gregory Peck, playing Peck's brother, and has adopted Damien. As a horror film, it's better than the first, featuring a series of effective scenes of people getting killed by a supernatural force.

I liked how there was absolutely no moral element to the killings. A doctor who wanted to do tests on Damien is killed in a fallen elevator. There's no indication he was an alcoholic or an abusive parent. Satan just doesn't play by the rules and it's great. Every time someone gets killed it contributes to the impression that the sinister crows, accompanied by a guttural, vocal theme by Jerry Goldsmith, could come from anywhere.

The film has a really impressive cast. It seemed like almost every supporting character had a familiar face. Lew Ayres, Sylvia Sidney, Lance Henriksen, and a for some reason uncredited Leo McKern. McKern appears in an opening scene at an archaeological dig that's one of the best scenes. But it's an altogether satisfying film.