Up from the Past

Rec 3: Genesis: written by Luiso Berdejo, David Gallart and Paco Plaza; directed by Paco Plaza; starring Leticia Dolera (Clara) and Diego Martin (Koldo) (2012): Enjoyable fake-found-footage Spanish horror movies Rec and Rec2 become a less enjoyable horror movie combining found footage and traditional narrative elements.

There are nice gory and goopy bits scattered throughout, but an awful lot of this is just rote zombie action set at a wedding. The interesting religious reveal at the end of the first Rec has become here a shovel hitting us in the face over and over again. Lightly recommended for people who have seen the first two and will see the fourth (and ostensibly final) installment.

The Big Sleep: adapted by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman from the novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler; directed by Howard Hawks; starring Humphrey Bogart (Philip Marlowe), Lauren Bacall (Vivian Rutledge), John Ridgely (Eddie Mars), Martha Vickers (Carmen Sternwood), Louis Heydt (Joe Brody), and Charles Waldron (General Sternwood) (1946): Perhaps the most indispensable hard-boiled detective film of all time -- only Chinatown rivals it, though The Maltese Falcon too has its champions.

Screenwriters Leigh Brackett (who would thirty years later work on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back) and Jules Furthman and Chandler's original novel supply most of the verbal fireworks, William Faulkner having wandered back to Oxford, Mississippi in the middle of screen-writing to drink, hang out with his wheelbarrow, and inspire Barton Fink. Virtually all the dialogue crackles with wit and substance; the plot is twisty but ultimately perfectly logical (though depending on which version you see, the mystery of the chaffeur's murder may or may not be fully explained).

The performances are stellar throughout, with lengthy reshoots a year after the original completion of filming to beef up the badinage between Bogart and Bacall. Hawks directs with his trademark rapid-fire dialogue, and the black-and-white cinematography is beautifully deployed by Syd Hickox. If for no other reason, one needs to see The Big Sleep to fully appreciate the Coen Brothers' gonzo homage/parody, The Big Lebowski, with its warped parallel characters and situations (and use of the word 'shamus'). Highest recommendation.

Poltergeist: written by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, and Mark Victor; directed by Tobe Hooper; starring Craig T. Nelson (Steve Freeling), JoBeth Williams (Diane Freeling), Beatrice Straight (Dr. Lesh), Dominque Dunne (Dana Freeling), Oliver Robins (Robbie Freeling), Heather O'Rourke (Carol Anne Freeling) and Zelda Rubinstein (Tangina) (1982): Stephen Spielberg essentially co-directed Poltergeist and controlled its post-production, and it shows: this is very much a mirror image of E.T., released within a week of Poltergeist in 1982.

Much of the early material with the family soon to be beset by vengeful spirits works pretty well; we're in Spielberg suburbia, where the Dad is distant (figuratively here; literally in other Spielberg films) and the Mother is the spiritual head of the family. The supernatural starts with what seems to be a furniture-moving poltergeist ("Noisy ghost") but soon moves into high-tech pyrotechnics, rubbery models, stop-motion trees, and large accumulations of skeletons rocketing up from the muddy ground.

I can't say the Spielberg kitchen-sink approach works all that well in horror -- indeed, many of the later effects here would be spoofed to a certain extent by Evil Dead 2. There are brief moments of wonder, but the Spielbergian need to underline every effect and every emotional sequence with music, flashing lights, and endless close-ups of people looking awestruck quickly dissipates that wonder.

One of the elements of the main plot -- the disappearance of the little girl from her own house into an alternate dimension, with only her voice being able to be heard in our dimension -- is lifted pretty much wholesale from the Richard Matheson short story and, later, 1962 Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost." Besides being afraid of old Twilight Zone episodes, original story-writer Spielberg was also apparently scared of trees, his face melting, clowns, and really large faces. And getting trapped in a crowd of skeletons. It's amazing how many of the horror tropes here previously showed up in Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lightly recommended.

The Face That Must Diet

Dark Passage, written and directed by Delmer Daves, based on the novel by David Goodis, starring Humphrey Bogart (Vincent Parry), Lauren Bacall (Irene Jansen) and Agnes Moorehead (Madge Rapf) (1947): Enjoyably loopy film noir sees Bogart play a San Francisco businessman wrongly imprisoned for his wife's murder. He escapes from San Quentin. Shenanigans ensue. And for the first 45 minutes or so, we get first-person camerawork from Bogart's perspective, seeing his character only fleetingly in a newspaper photo.

I'm guessing film cameras got smaller some time after the end of WWII, as first-person POV shows up in a couple of other films of the time, only to be abandoned because, frankly, it's annoying as hell. And you can't see your star. Though here the POV serves the story -- Bogart's character gets plastic surgery to change his face, and once he's got that new face (Bogart's normal face) the POV switches to the traditional third-person. Got all that?

Coincidences drive the plot. Lauren Bacall's character is obsessed with Bogart's character being railroaded. Luckily for him, she's driving around near San Quentin when he escapes so she can pick him up. Luckily for Bogart, the first cabbie he hails later in the film knows a good plastic surgeon who makes a living operating on criminals and the wrongly accused innocent. Unluckily, there are so few characters that the revelation of the real murderer's identity lands with something of a dull thud. Really, who else could it be?

Nevertheless, it's all quite a bit of fun, with the level of coincidence and accident reaching a crescendo so as to resolve pretty much everything. Lauren Bacall is cute as a button, and Bogart stretches a bit here, playing a guy who's definitely not cool under pressure until the last few minutes of the film. Not a great film, but worth watching. Recommended.

Bogart Becoming Bogart

All Through the Night, written by Leonard Spigelgass, Edwin Gilbert and Leo Rosten, directed by Vincent Sherman, starring Humphrey Bogart ("Gloves" Donahue), Conrad Veidt (Ebbing), Kaaren Verne (Leda), Jane Darwell (Mrs. Donahue), Peter Lorre (Pepi), Judith Anderson (Madame), William Demarest (Sunshine), Phil Silvers (Waiter), Jackie Gleason (Starchie) and Frank McHugh (Barney) (1941): Released five days before Pearl Harbour, this movie's jokey tone and somewhat light take on foreign saboteurs didn't sit well with audiences once America entered World War Two.

Still, this is a jolly and involving comic-drama that sometimes seems way, way ahead of its time in its combination of action and comedy.

Bogart, on the cusp of superstardom (High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon came out earlier in 1941, while Across the Pacific and Casablanca would be out within the following 13 months), plays "Gloves" Donahue, a loveable gang leader in New York. He's from the Damon Runyon school of loveable gangsters, and comes complete with a loveable, interfering Irish mother played by Jane Darwell, who'd recently won an Oscar for playing loveable Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.

Gloves and his men stumble across a Nazi spy ring, and soon only Bogart and the daughter of a concentration-camp prisoner stand between New York and Nazi saboteurs, partially because the police are idiots. Boy, are the police idiots.

It's all played breezily and, if you've watched a lot of classic television, you'll note that a lot of supporting actors would go on to rewarding television careers, most notably Jackie Gleason (The Honeymooners), Phil Silvers (Sgt. Bilko) and William Demarest (the grandfather in My Three Sons). Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt -- both of whom would reteam with Bogart in Casablanca -- and Dame Judith Anderson round out a surprisingly high-powered cast. Blink and you'll miss a miniature Nazi dachschund getting blown up. Recommended.

Blue Steele

In a Lonely Place, written by Andrew Solt and Edmund North, based on the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, starring Humphrey Bogart (Dixon Steele), Gloria Grahame (Laurel Gray) and Frank Lovejoy (Detective Nicolai) (1950): An enjoyable and atypical vehicle for Bogart, who gets to play a protagonist whose guilt or innocence related to a murder is only one of the questions about him.

As screenwriter Dixon Steele, Bogart alternates between Bogartian charm and nearly psychotic menace as he woos next-door neighbour Grahame while simultaneously being investigated for the murder of a hat-check girl he hired to summarize the plot of a novel he'd been hired to turn into a screenplay.

Yes, he's lazy too, at least when it comes to reading things.

The movie gradually reveals Steele's troubling history. He was a good C.O. in World War Two, and he was also a good screenwriter before his military service. Now he stinks -- and he's got a history of violence towards women, and violence towards anyone who annoys him, that's hard for the police to ignore. Can love save him? And why is he so damned angry?

While offering a fairly cynical take on early 1950's Hollywood, the movie also seems more modern at times than one expects. Steele really is an anti-hero -- one could see Jack Nicholson playing the role if this were the 1970's -- and the film doesn't necessarily answer all the questions one has about the character. Nicely shot by Nick Ray (Rebel Without A Cause) and solidly acted throughout, this is an unusual film for Bogart and for the time period. Recommended.

Revenge of Beretta

Books:


The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories edited by Leslie Shepard: This relatively short hardcover anthology was released during the vampire boom of the 1970's, which explains the production values -- it's printed on amazingly thick and luxurious paper. It's not a great anthology by any stretch of the imagination (for one, it's too short to be so), but it does contain a number of fine stories. Most importantly, one gets the terrific novella "Carmilla" by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, a pre-Dracula vampire tale that manages to be both sporadically erotic and genuinely horrifying. I've also got a soft spot for E.F. Benson's somewhat murky "The Room in the Tower" and Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla", also included here, as is the deleted prologue to Dracula, "Dracula's Guest." Recommended, though I was disappointed that Dracula was not in fact the editor.


The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: Collins produces a great Young Adult science-fiction novel here, in the first part of a trilogy that's satisfying on pretty much every level. In a dystopian future, war and environmental disaster have left most humans in North America confined to zones dedicated to specific agricultural, industrial and mining purposes, all ruled dictatorially from another zone.

To fulfill a Bread-and-Circuses mandate while also demonstrating its absolute control over everybody, the government stages The Hunger Games every year. Two teenagers from each zone a male and a female) are dropped into an artificially manipulated 'game' zone in which they must compete to the death until only one winner remains alive. We follow our appealing, pragmatic, rebellious protagonist as she is selected for the games, undergoes training, and then must battle to win while trying to come up with a way to keep her fellow conscript from her zone alive.

Collins creates lively, appealing, flawed characters, and she really ratchets up the tension during the length section of the novel devoted to the games themselves. What I also like about the novel is the growing realization on the part of the reader that this future must be a long, long way from now: genetically modified plants, animals and insects abound; the technology available to the government is staggeringly advanced; the majority of the people, kept from both this technology and from any understanding of their true history, mostly have no conception of 'our' time. We've become less than myth.

This is a dandy achievement in a sub-genre that includes works like The Running Man, Series 7 and "The Most Dangerous Game." Highly recommended for anyone 14 or over.


Movie:


Iron Man 2, written by Justin Theroux, directed by Jon Favreau, starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Mickey Rourke, Scarlet Johannsen, Sam Rockwell, Garry Shandling and Don Cheadle: The first Iron Man movie was notable for the unusual fact that the non-superhero sequences were far more interesting than the superhero battles, primarily because of the charm of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony "Iron Man" Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow as his long-suffering personal assistant "Pepper" Potts.

The strength of the original is pretty much the strength of the sequel as well. Unfortunately, sequelitis sets in to such an extent that an abundance of new characters threatens to push Downey and Paltrow aside for long stretches of the movie. The movie grunts and sweats to not much effect because of the heavy lifting involved in getting characters such as War Machine, Black Widow and Nick Fury enough screen time to prepare us for upcoming Marvel-franchise movies Thor, Captain America and The Avengers. It doesn't help that director Favreau seems to be profoundly uninterested in the dynamics of action sequences -- we're subjected to lengthy CGI battles among various permutations of people wearing metal suits and robots, none of them executed with much flair.

What's supremely odd is that the movie replicates many of the flaws of another superhero movie sequel, Batman Returns. We get a filthy, vaguely disgusting villain who doesn't much resemble his comic-book progenitor (here, Rourke's Whiplash; there, Danny DeVito's Penguin). We get a superhero woman in a catsuit (Johannsen's Black Widow; Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman). We get a climactic army of rocket-wielding, civilian-threatening beings (Rourke's robots; DeVito's penguin army). We get a scene-stealing evil industrialist (Rockwell's Justin Hammer; Christopher Walken's Max Schreck). Both Iron Man and Batman are publically disgraced early in the movie. And so on, and so forth. The Penguin's army of of penguins with rockets strapped to their backs is actually a much more credible threat than Rourke's robot army, which proves incapable of much more than property damage.

Heck, Whiplash even has a pet bird -- a cockatoo, not a penguin, alas. Articles on the making of the movie have noted that Rourke came up with Whiplash's cockatoo companion himself, as if this were a bold bit of Method character creation and not, as I thought every time the bird was onscreen, Rourke unintentionally paying homage to the 70's cop show Beretta. So many characters. Recommended, though just barely.


Across the Pacific, directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet (1942): This unremarkable wartime thriller gives us Bogart at the beginning of his stardom after more than a decade in Hollywood -- he even gets his name above the title thanks to the success of the previous year's Maltese Falcon. Astor and Greenstreet were also in the much-superior Falcon, while Falcon director Huston had to leave this picture with several scenes left to be done by another director thanks to wartime committments.

Basically, Bogart seeks to thwart a Japanese plot against the Panama Canal on the eve of Pearl Harbour. Unfortunate ethnic and racial stereotypes abound, including an American-born Japanese man who is really a Japanese collaborator. It's like a promo for the Japanese internment camps. And he wears really thick, distorting glasses! Ha ha! That is hilarious! Not recommended, though some of the visual effects and model work are unusually incompetent, even for the era -- both a ship and a plane appear to have been designed and animated by a five-year-old child with a bad case of the shakes.