The thing about shamelessly borrowing from Scorsese’s Goodfellasis that it works. It worked for Paul Thomas Anderson when he applied the Goodfellas template to the Golden Age of porno in Boogie Nights. It worked for Todd Haynes when he applied it to the classic glam rock scene in Velvet Goldmine (even if he had to mix in a healthy dose of Citizen Kaneto throw critics off the scent). And now it has worked just as well for Jeff Nichols in his new film The Bikeriders, which is essentially just Goodfellas on motorbikes. All three of these Goodfellas derivatives follow a distinct pattern that starts in a Fuck Around era (in which they introduce the audience to the power outsiders feel when they find community in seemingly dangerous subcultures), followed by the requisite Find Out Era (in which those subcultures are unraveled by drugs & violence), distinctly marked by the turning of a decade. They all heavily rely on vintage pop-music montage and period-specific costume design to evoke the cool-factor appeal of their subcultural settings, often underlined in wry voiceover. I’m also of the lowbrow opinion that all three are the career-best feature films of their respective directors to date. It’s an overly familiar genre template, but that’s because it’s a consistently effective one.
If Nichols narrows in on any particular element of the Goodfellas formula that other imitators miss, it’s in the second-act narrator switch in which the protagonist-gangster’s wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), highjacks the story’s POV for a short stretch. We get a great taste of how overwhelming it is to be plunged into the deep end of a foreign subculture during Karen’s wedding-sequence narration in particular, but more importantly we get a woman’s perspective on what makes that particular subculture sexy. One of the most important line-readings of Scorsese’s script is Karen describing the first time she directly witnessed mobster violence first-hand, confessing “I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.” Jodie Comer’s wife-of-a-motorcycle rebel narrator Kathy keeps that horny engine running throughout the entire runtime of The Bikeriders, whereas Goodfellas only takes Karen’s POV for a few minutes. It’s not enough that Jeff Nichols dresses up every young character-actor hunk of today in the fetishistic biker gear of yesteryear, mounted on the backs of roaring sex machines. He also frames them from the perspective of a woman panting like a cartoon hound in disbelief of how ridiculous and how ridiculously sexy they are. Comer gives the best lead performance of the year as a result, even if she is just a regional accent in high-waist jeans.
Otherwise, the movie rides within the painted lines of the road that Goodfellas paved. The Shangri-Las check off the 60s-Girl-Group-Soundtrack requirement of the template, with “Out in the Streets” deployed as an overture that explains Comer’s lustful fascination with Austin Butler’s bad-boy rebel. She has to compete for his attention with Tom Hardy’s gang leader, who is living out a fantasy in his head in which he is the Wild One Brando to Butler’s Causeless Rebel Dean. Nichols positions Hardy as a weekend-warrior poser and Butler as the real-deal biker rebel that all of his fellow riders strive to emulate. They form a motorcycle riding club in the Fuck Around 1960s, then cower in disgust as it spirals out of control in the Find Out 1970s, mostly due to Vietnam War PTSD from their younger recruits. Comer maintains a “Can you believe these guys?” incredulity throughout that helps keep the mood light, recounting tales from the road to a photojournalist played by Mike Faist, who in real life published the anthropological portraits that Nichols adapted to the screen. From there, the cast is rounded out by young That Guy character actors playing eccentric bikers with ludicrous nicknames: Norman Reedus as Funny Sonny, Karl Glusman as Corky, Michael Shannon as Zipco, Toby Wallace as The Kid, etc. They all look just as great in their grimy leather jackets as the cast of Goodfellas looked in their shiny silk suits.
All of this posing & posturing in vintage biker gear makes total sense for a movie adapted from a series of portraits where motorcycle nerds & freaks posed for still images. It’s also appropriate for a subculture that was so intrinsically image-obsessed, wherein men with regular jobs & families would play dress-up with their buddies to live out the rebel-biker fantasies they would otherwise only see at The Movies. The Bikeriders is not a pure, prurient portrait of handsome men in leather & denim, though. It’s much less of a capital-A Art Film than Katherine Bigelow’s The Loveless in that way, even though it shares its themes & interests. The Goodfellas template allows it to indulge in as much sexy rebel-biker fantasy and subcultural anthropology as it wants without leaving a mainstream audience behind in its dust. It might be an unimaginative way to hold a movie together, but dammit it works every time.
One of the most beloved jokes among film people is the one about how everyone wishes that they could be like Terence Malick and take a twenty year vacation. This is a reference to the fact that Malick was so exhausted by the making of 1978’s Days of Heaven that he didn’t attempt to mount another film production until The Thin Red Line, which was released in 1998. The fact of the matter is that if this had been the last thing that Malick ever made, it would still be a masterpiece. With almost all of the film being shot during dawn and dusk, this is without a doubt one of the most beautiful movies of all time, an almost impossibly staggering work of art.
Bill (Richard Gere) is a manual laborer in a steel mill in Chicago in the mid 1910s. He has a temper, and when he knocks over a foreman during an argument and accidentally kills the man, he flees the city with his younger sister Linda (Linda Manz) and his lover, Abby (Brooke Adams). In order to avoid judgment and gossip for being an unwed couple, they pretend to all be siblings. They find themselves in the Texas panhandle, not far from Amarillo, and take on work as seasonal laborers at the farm of a wealthy but reclusive farmer (Sam Shepard). When Bill overhears that the farmer has been given a prognosis of only a few months, he convinces Abby to marry the man so that she can inherit his wealth when he dies and they can be set for life. Abby does so, reluctantly, but then finds herself actually falling for the farmer, while he in turn seems revitalized. Only the farmer’s trusted foreman (Robert Wilke) seems to think that anything’s amiss, but the farmer sends him off to another part of the huge ranch in a fit of pique. After a period of easy living, Abby and Bill get a little careless, and her husband starts to sense what’s happening. Before anything can really be done about it, Bill leaves the farm for a time, citing “business” elsewhere; he returns the following harvest at the same time as a new group of seasonal laborers, but a swarm of locusts isn’t far behind, and the attempts to burn them out only create more tribulation, with tragedy soon to follow.
Narratively, Days of Heaven is a little thin. Famously, Malick decided late in the process to cut a great deal of the dialogue and instead let a voiceover from young Linda carry most of the exposition, along with her insights. In turn, the voiceover was largely ad-libbed, which lends the whole thing an unfinished, extemporaneous quality. It’s the thing that I like least in this film, even though it was, legendarily, the only way that he could think of to make the film work, so who am I to judge? Further, I would say that there are parts of the film in which the narration is to the film’s benefit; this is most obvious in the early scenes, as it establishes the characters and their relationships to one another. There’s also a good bit of foreshadowing built in when she talks about her encounter with a traveling hellfire-and-brimstone minister, which neatly sets up the fire at the farm at the end in particular but also the general biblical influences that are found throughout, fitting for a film with “heaven” in the title. Like Abraham and Sarai/Sarah, a couple has to go into hiding and pretend to be siblings; like Jacob, Bill is kept from being with his beloved and forced to labor instead; like Moses, Bill survives a plague of locusts but never gets to enter the promised land because of the consequences of his temper. It’s relying on those associations to make the plot work, but that’s really not what’s important here.
What matters are the feelings of longing, and the way that the photography captures that transitional space between day and night (and vice versa). Everybody here is in a constant state of utter yearning, and the way that this is caught on film is lightning in a bottle. I also can understand why that made this one a nightmare to create, with less than an hour a day of the perfect light. That craftsmanship is apparent in every frame, however, and it’s definitely worth seeing if you have the chance. I was fortunate enough to catch this one at my local arthouse cinema, and I would say it’s the best way to go about it. If that’s not an option for you, then you’re in luck; although the original 2007 Criterion release has been out of print for a long time, there’s a Blu-Ray pressing that’s currently available.
I also don’t want to end this review without calling out Brooke Adams’s performance. I adore her as the mother to Ione Skye and Fairuza Balk in 1992’s Gas, Food, Lodging, and she’s also amazing as Sarah in Cronenberg’s Dead Zone adaptation. And who could forget her performance in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? In spite of all of those triumphs, this might be a career best performance for her, as she’s torn between the two men in her life. There’s a way that her face just breaks when she realizes that her world was never as solid as she thought it was when Bill’s temper gets the best of him for the last time, and it’s so subtle and so lovely. This is a slow one, but its reputation is as well-earned as Malick’s rest was.
For a moment, I considered not opening this review with a reference to Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, thinking to myself, “Surely, I’ve referenced it enough already.” Then I double checked and realized I’ve only brought it up twice previously (in my reviews for Beau is Afraid and The Love Butcher), so here we go! Tristram Shandy was published in multiple volumes, the first of which was released in 1759, not even two decades after the publication of the first novel of the English language, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, in 1740. Shandy has long been a fascinating point of study not just because it’s one of the first novels in our language, but because despite being one of the earliest examples, it already demonstrated many stylistic and literary characteristics that we associate with postmodern fiction. Novels went from a complete, well, novelty to something that could be deconstructed within an astonishingly short time, with Shandy featuring a stream of consciousness narrative, a playful interaction with the nature of the printed word on the page (including several pages left intentionally blank to demonstrate a story that the narrator does not know), and various other elements first-time readers are often shocked to find in something so old.
Fritz Lang’s most famous work, the pioneering silent science fiction film Metropolis, premiered in 1927; just four years later, his first sound picture M was screened for the first time. Within the short period between them, Lang had already developed some of the basic elements of what we would consider keystones of narrative filmmaking and used them in an effective way that’s the equal of any film that’s been produced in the intervening nine decades. In many ways, the introduction of “talkies” was like the building of a cinematic Tower of Babel (quick note here—I started writing this before seeing Metropolis and learning that the biblical Babel story is actually a big part of that text), necessitating a foundational re-evaluation of the language of the art down to its very core. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
M is the story of a Berlin in terror, as several children have been found murdered in a way that demonstrates they share the same killer. As the film opens, a woman scolds the kids in the courtyard of her building for singing a nursery rhyme about a killer of children as she sets the table for her daughter, who never appears, despite her mother’s increasingly plaintive shouts of the daughter’s name into an empty street. The girl, Elsie Beckmann, has already fallen beneath the dark shadow of Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), who lures the child to accompany him by purchasing her sweets and a balloon from a blind street vendor. Her eventual fate is implied as we see her beloved ball bounce into a ditch, and the balloon she was given drifts in the wind, abandoned. This sets off a fury in the city, as angry parents demand that more be done to apprehend the child predator, and this creates a domino effect. First, Inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) of the police begins to crack down on various underworld activity, including harassing the patrons of a seemingly legal drinking establishment. That leads, in turn, to a meeting between various capos—led by a man known only as “The Safecracker” (Gustaf Gründgens)—for different criminal elements around the city to convene so that they can start their own manhunt so that the investigation will end and they can get back to racketeering, prostitution, and the like.
While Lohmann’s men set out to find the murderer using then-novel forensic science like fingerprints, handwriting analysis, and behavioral studies, Safecracker’s boys set up an organized city-wide network of informants among the unhoused. Both end up finding Beckert at roughly the same time, as the killer’s habit of whistling “In the Hall of the Mountain King” during his compulsory episodes leads the blind balloon vendor from the beginning to identify Beckert to one of Safecracker’s men, and they tail him and even manage to tag him (with a white “M,” hence the title) before he realizes he’s being followed and ends up trapped in an office complex. The criminal underworld sets out searching the entire building where Beckert has gone to ground, while Lohmann’s men lay in wait at Beckert’s home, having discovered where he lived through methodical search and the discovery of red pencil shavings that matched the letters Beckert had written to the police. With Beckert now in their hands, Safecracker and company hold a kangaroo trial for the man, one in which he must plead his case for mercy, leading Lorre to give one of the greatest monologues in cinematic history.
One of the truly great inventions that Lang gives us here is the narrative montage. In a silent film, narrative has to be displayed entirely through image and action, with dialogue and the occasional expository interstitial card, while M takes advantage of the opportunity to deliver information through audible dialogue and visuals at the same time. There’s a point in the film where Inspector Lohmann explains the methodologies that he and his men are using to try and locate the murderer, and as he describes various departments and what they do, we’re able to “visit” those people and places without a break in his monologue and without having to create interstitial expository cards (the closest we come is to a sign that identifies the homicide department). It’s such a common part of contemporary film language that its use is invisible to us now but is a quantum leap in filmic storytelling that we shouldn’t take for granted. Germany’s first “talkie” was The Blue Angel starring Marlene Dietrich, appearing at the movie theater only a year before M, and yet Lang had already created something that’s as integral to the nature of film as we know it as the letter “e” is to our language. And this could have been catalyzed in just about any movie, but it just so happens to have happened in one of the true masterpieces.
That’s not the only thing that makes it feel so ahead of its time. So much of what we talk about when we talk about a film’s morals and ethics in the present is a discussion of the clarity of the value that the text espouses, but M is less concerned with blame than it is with prevention. That’s demonstrated in two ways: one that’s clearly intentional and is core to the reading of the film, and the other that’s a little more ambiguous and may have been unintentional. First, Lorre’s Beckert is one of the most compelling depictions of a compulsive evil on film. His utter fear at being trapped like a hunted animal pleading for mercy and compassion making him almost pitiable, in spite of the fear we know he inspires. At first appearing solely as a menacing figure, his terrified screaming about how he lives in a constant state of mental agony and that he can only quiet the voices when he commits these heinous acts, one can’t help but pity him, even while affirming that his afflictions don’t justify his crimes. Although there are several minutes of footage that are missing and the abruptness of the ending implies (at least to me) that there may be some frames missing from that final reel, the film that exists is the text that we have and so we must interpret from it. We never hear the verdict of Beckert’s trial; we cut away from the doors of a courtroom to find a few weeping mothers on the bench outside. “This won’t bring back our children,” is all that they have to say, and then “We, too, should keep a closer watch on our children.” Beckert is certainly to blame for his crimes, but he is not the only one responsible, and the only thing that we can exert influence over is ourselves and the company we keep, so that’s where our energy should go. Secondly and more subtly, it’s worth noting that although the police and organized crime figure out Beckert’s identity at roughly the same time, the police go about arresting Beckert by waiting for him in his home while Safecracker’s men catch Beckert when he already has his next victim in hand. Their methodology may not be “just,” but if this had been left entirely to the law, they would have only apprehended him after he had already slain another child, while community action prevented another death. The depiction of a kangaroo court makes it clear that we’re not supposed to see the summary execution of this guy as “justice,” and that the state’s justice should prevail (even if Beckert’s fate is ambiguous), but it’s still inarguable that one more little girl would have died if those same people hadn’t taken the law into their own hands in the first place. Prevention supersedes responsibility.
M has been so beloved for so long that it’s difficult to say anything new about it. It’s the kind of classic film urtext that has been dissected, contextualized, and decoded nearly to death in nine decades since its release. That also makes it the kind of urtext that has so much discourse that most people are intimidated by the sheer amount of scholarship surrounding it or think that it’ll be outside of their grasp to understand, or they think it falls into the category of impenetrable artsy-fartsy stuff that culture snobs are always going on about. None of that is true. This movie is extremely accessible, not to mention scary, beautiful, and bewitching. There’s a reason that it’s stood the test of time.
There’s something charming about the way that Blue Sunshine features several pans up to a full moon between snippets of action in the lead up to and following the title reveal. Every time you think “Surely I’ve seen the last of these goofy ass moon pan shots,” as we cut to a domestic scene in a kitchen, but then, nope, here comes another one. This film, like The Parallax View, was programmed for my local arthouse theater’s “The Paranoid Style in American Cinema” signature program, but unlike that film (or Lumet’s Network, which is coming up later in the month), this one treads into slightly campier territory. Weirdly, it seems to blend elements from movies that actually came after it, with the paranoid, on-the-run everyman at the center of events in which people lose control of themselves seeming to presage the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while the way that past casual drug experimentation comes back to haunt people years after their college days reminded me quite a bit of Firestarter, the original novel version of which wouldn’t be published until 1980. Even the mall setting of the finale seemed to presciently “borrow” from Dawn of the Dead.
Blue Sunshine opens at a party, where a group of friends gather around one of their friends, Frannie, as he does a bit of a crooner act. As part of the bit, he pretends to kiss one of the ladies present, and in their playful tussle, his hair is revealed to be a wig when it comes off in her hands. He has a psychotic break and flees into the woods. While a few of the partygoers go into town to see if Frannie found his way there, Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King) remains behind to search the woods, sending his girlfriend Alicia (Deborah Winters) into town with the others so that she can get a calmative for her nausea. Searching the woods, Zipkin hears the other women who were left behind at the house scream, and rushes in to discover that Frannie has returned and murdered them, throwing their bodies into a fireplace. Frannie reappears and the two struggle, making their way to the road as Zipkin tries to flee, finally pushing the seemingly superhuman Frannie into the path of an oncoming truck. The truck’s occupants, thinking that Zipkin has murdered an innocent man, attempt to apprehend him and even manage to shoot him in the arm. Back at the location of the party, the police have put all the pieces together and come to the conclusion that Zipkin is a murderer.
I’m going to skip ahead a little to the conspiracy here, because the film takes its sweet time getting to it. Frannie is not alone in his condition; all over the city, there are people losing their hair completely and then flying into psychotic, murderous rages. As it turns out, this is all owing to a particular batch of LSD, the titular Blue Sunshine, that all of the affected people tried ten years previously when they were all at Stanford. Zipkin, on the run and trying to prove his innocence, is forced to put this together, and it’s in this that the film really tips its hand vis-a-vis how unbaked an idea this is. Unlike Beatty’s reporter character in The Parallax View, Zipkin doesn’t seem particularly well suited for investigation, and comes to some of his conclusions with all the logic of a quick wrap-up at the end of an episode of Adam West’s Batman. He’s bumbling and sweaty, and King is very, very earnest in the role. And unlike other movies in which an innocent bystander is targeted because they photographed (Blow Up, Cat o’ Nine Tails), recorded (Blow Out, The Conversation), overheard, or otherwise became aware of something that someone wants to cover up, our hero isn’t fleeing the conspiracy or the killer, but the police.
You’d think that this would put an interesting spin on it, but what it means is that the conspiracy proper happens so far outside of the context of Zipkin’s story that the fact that the man behind the coverup is an up-and-coming politician is completely ancillary to the narrative. It doesn’t contribute anything to the film, and instead seems to have been included solely to cash in on the production decade’s general antipathy toward governmental figures in the national psychological wake of Watergate. That questioning of authority seems to run counterintuitive to the film’s Reefer Madness-like propaganda about the dangers of taking LSD in college, and long-time fears from self-appointed moral guardians that dropping acid would have severe deleterious effects in the long term (in this case, turning people into homicidal maniacs with instantaneous alopecia). That tonal whiplash is present throughout this thing, which is the exact kind of camp that ends up turning a movie like this into a cult classic. For instance, one of the opening scenes we see involves a woman confiding in her neighbor that her husband has been behaving strangely lately and losing his hair, and in the course of the scene there are a few fun character moments that wouldn’t be out of place in a John Waters film, as she screams at her son to stop eating chocolate pudding while her other son parades around the room with a parrot on his shoulder that’s nearly half his size. The next time we’re in that same location, Zipkin is rummaging through the house after reading about the family’s slaying in the newspaper and connecting some of the details to what happened with Frannie, and the soundtrack is filled with the family’s dying screams as Zipkin stumbles upon child-sized body outlines on the floor, complete with bloodstains of horrific proportions; it’s like something out of the early scenes of Manhunter, and it’s truly gruesome stuff. But then the next scene is a goofy bit where Zipkin Bat-deduces that he can get some information out of Senator Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard), or a scene wherein Flemming’s ex-wife (Ann Cooper) suddenly snaps and starts to attack the children that she’s babysitting with a knife, but the kids clearly find the bald cap on the actress hilarious, so they’re laughing as they recite their “frightened child” dialogue.
Granted, I would say that there aren’t any scenes of shocking violence so much as shocking images of the aftermath of violence, like the murder scene noted above. For the most part, the scenes in which the acid-activated killers feature them going about their sprees with very little energy, falling somewhere between Romero’s zombies and Karloff’s Creature on the scale of vitality. I have to wonder if this was, in part, a utilitarian choice; bald prosthetic technology wasn’t exactly at its peak in the mid-seventies, and there are many shots in the film in which the plasticky material the bald caps are composed of visibly wrinkles in ways that flesh does not. Further, the killers’ eyes also all turn black when their sprees begin, and the contacts used for the effect might have made it difficult to navigate the soundstage. When the former Mrs. Fleming is brandishing a prop knife at the not-actually-scared children in her apartment, she’s certainly moving with a sluggishness that suggests she’s just repeating a (barely) choreographed motion, and the fact that her gaze is focused directly in front of her (as opposed to down at the children) seems to indicate she also couldn’t see for shit. The only maniac that’s truly scary is the first one, Frannie, since he manages to get in a couple of good jump scares and his attack on the three partying women is the most shocking since it’s the first act of violence that we see. The showdown at the end between Zipkin and Flemming’s security man Mulligan—whom we are repeatedly reminded is a former football player—is delightful to watch, but Mulligan is so lumbering and slow that there’s never any real sense of danger. Normally, the tension that we get in a paranoid thriller like this one is whether our protagonist can escape the clutches of the shadowy cabal and get the truth out to the people, but here, it’s just a matter of being able to speed walk and hide; and you don’t even have to be that good at it either. When Mulligan starts his rampage, Alicia manages to escape from him by closing herself up in a very flimsy-looking plexiglass DJ booth, and she’s completely safe, even as he impotently pounds his fists against it.
Chances are, if the title of this film sounds familiar to you, you’re either too into the movies (in which case, pull up a chair and join us) or you’re a fan of either The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees, as Robert Smith of the former and Steven Severin of the latter collaborated as a micro supergroup under the name The Glove, which released only one album that took its title from this film. That alone would probably qualify it as a cult classic for some, but what makes this one work is how campy it is in spite of its earnestness. Writer and director Jeff Lieberman (perhaps best known for Squirm) really thought he was cooking with this plot, but that didn’t stop him from allowing (or perhaps encouraging) some of Zalman King’s acting choices here. I’m not familiar enough with any of the actor’s other work to say whether or not he’s capable of playing “anxious” with his face, but he’s certainly capable of doing it with his body language, even if the ways that this is displayed are comical. Late in the film, Zipkin meets with a doctor friend (Robert Walden, who turns in the most magnetic performance here, with Winters a close second) in a park to acquire tranquilizers, as part of his scheme to apprehend one of the Blue Sunshine killers without killing them, so that he can have them tested for chromosomal abnormalities that would prove his innocence. They convene discreetly in a public park, and the doctor has to tell Zipkin multiple times to just shake his hand and take the drugs. When he spots a cop, he tells Zipkin to walk away calmly, only to watch as he climbs up an embankment, swinging his arms and legs with Rowan Atkinson level gusto in the most conspicuous getaway possible.
This movie is also chock full of imminently quotable lines. The police are puzzled why a man who quit his last job because they wouldn’t hire enough women would suddenly turn around and barbecue three of them, but never consider that maybe their first guess isn’t actually correct. A woman consoles another woman about the upcoming anniversary of her divorce by telling her that the worst thing that “Nothing affected [her] more than when The Beatles broke up,” and that “[Her] divorce was nothing compared to that.” And, because watching an hour of Designing Women every day from 1997 to 1999 broke my brain in ways that have never healed, I instantly recognized the woman who tells Zipkin about one of the killings that happened to her neighbor as Bernice (Alice Ghostley), which made that scene even funnier, although I think that it’s being played for comedy intentionally (although you can never be too sure here). The finale of the film takes place in an unoccupied department store that’s part of the mall where Flemming is holding a rally, and everything about the whole sequence is hilarious: the fact that Alicia arranges to meet Mulligan (so he can be arrested) at a discotheque called “Big Daddy’s” inside a mall, the fact that she doesn’t let the fact that she’s technically on a stakeout stop her from getting drunk on martinis, the delivery of the line “There’s a bald maniac in there and he’s going bat shit!,” and even the way that Zipkin recites the entire spiel he was given by a gun shop employee like it’s the Bene Gesserit “fear is the mind killer” speech before he can shoot Mulligan with a tranq dart.
This one seems to be relatively hard to find; there was a DVD release twenty years ago, but it appears to be long out of print, and there wasn’t a copy of it anywhere in my vast municipal library system. If you get the chance to see it, I recommend it, especially if you’re a fan of movies that are competently made but with no apparent reason to exist or want to see a (sort of) conspiracy thriller version of a campy slasher.
It’s a well-known fact around these parts that I love a conspiracy thriller. I couldn’t have been more excited that my local arthouse theater programmed a month-long series of 1970s American thrillers, and I bought a ticket for almost every one of them. The first of these is a cornerstone of the genre, and one that was a sorely lacking blind spot in my checklist of canonical films of said phenotype. The Parallax View, a 1974 release from director Alan J. Pakula just two years before his second-best picture nomination for All the President’s Men (his first was for To Kill a Mockingbird), stars Warren Beatty. Beatty plays Joe Frady, a reporter in the Pacific Northwest, three years after he was present at the base of the Seattle Space Needle when a high-profile politician was assassinated in the restaurant above. He wasn’t in the room when it happened, but his ex-girlfriend Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) was, and she’s convinced that six of the other eyewitnesses who have died in the intervening time were the victims of foul play; Frady waves off her concerns as anxiety born of self-medicating, until she, too, turns up dead. Now convinced, Frady starts to pull at the frayed threads presented to him and discovers a conspiracy that permeates the fabric of the country’s leadership, one whose reach is far wider than he could have imagined.
In the book upon which The Parallax View is based, the inciting assassination was that of JFK, making it a part of the subgenre of conspiracy media that specifically appeals to the Dale Gribble set. Here, the assassination that precedes the opening credits is that of a generic independent politician with an eye on the presidency, as the film was released too late to attach itself to the Kennedy assassination without making itself a period piece. That didn’t stop this one from becoming as locked into a certain time as a period piece would be in the intervening half century, however, while also remaining unfortunately (if not unsurprisingly) relevant to the current greased-by-blood American political machine. Sure, there’s a lot of culture shock upon seeing Frady purchase a plane ticket with cash after he’s already boarded the plane. On the other hand, the film seems almost prescient in its depiction of the abject terror of living in a society shaped by shadowy forces that can arrange car accidents for reporters, poison newspaper editors in a way that mimics a heart attack, and knock a passenger plane carrying a progressive candidate out of the sky. It’s not that hard to make a connection between the fictional conspiracy at play here and, for instance, the sudden death of a whistleblower who raised safety concerns about airplane manufacturing just six weeks ago. That’s not really prescience, really, any more than The Simpsons “predicted” any of the things it’s been credited with foreseeing in recent years; it’s just an indictment of the fact that we’ve made much less progress in the past sixty years than we would like to think. It’s all just the pageantry of empire.
The Parallax View falls short of being a masterpiece. It has some really wonderful set pieces, and the picaresque nature of the narrative keeps things moving even when the story starts to feel a little slow. First, Frady goes to a tiny Oregon community where the political aide to the dead senator was last seen and where one of the witnesses was drowned while fishing when a dam was opened. This sequence is great, as you can feel the immense tension as the dam opens again while he’s investigating the area. This is preceded by an impressive fist fight between Frady and a local oaf, then followed by an exciting car chase that I would bet money was an inspiration to the future creators of The Dukes of Hazzard. Even after he manages not to drown, Frady’s editor Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn) still isn’t convinced that there’s a conspiracy afoot, until Frady miraculously survives the assassination of in-hiding political insider Austin Tucker (William “Mr. Feeney” Daniels), at which point Rintels relents. In his investigation, Frady discovers that an organization known as The Parallax Corporation is using mail-in personality tests to find sociopaths and recruit them to become assassins. From here, we get to the film’s most famous sequence (and it, in and of itself, is a masterpiece): a five minute montage to which Frady (undercover after submitting a false test) is subjected to as a kind of orientation/brainwashing. You can see it here, and although it functions beautifully in isolation, it’s obviously much more effective in the film itself.
In a lot of ways, this is the platonic ideal of a 1970s political thriller, disillusioned after a decade that saw the death of a beloved president, the murder of the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, the unmasking of another president’s illegal surveillance of the public. While the book was solely focused on the assassination of JFK, this one explicitly talks about the demoralization of an entire nation as there’s the murder of another public figure “every other week, it seems.” It’s also unrelentingly grim, as everyone turns out to be corruptible and already under Parallax’s sway despite initially seeming to be trustworthy, or genuinely good and invested in getting the truth out but very easy to kill and cover up, or less safe than they thought they were despite taking every precaution. No one is unreachable, no one is untouchable, no one is safe, and no number of civilian collaterals is considered too much, whether it be eighteen eyewitnesses, a plane full of people who were unlucky enough to be on the same flight as a senator, or an entire marching band that has the misfortune of having been selected to perform at a congressman’s campaign announcement. It’s bleak, but worth seeking out.
The evening after seeing Furiosa, I was visiting with a friend who had attended a different screening, and although they admitted that they had “been fighting for their life” after taking an edible, they spouted off a piece of criticism that I was stunned to hear: “I just wish there had been more action and less dialogue.” I couldn’t believe it; I’ve been teasing them about it for weeks now. I can’t conceive of how this movie could have tweaked the mayhem/monologue ratio of what was happening on screen in that direction even the tiniest bit. People have slept on this one, and the long time between the last installment and this one means that I can hardly blame them, but Furiosa is every bit as good as Fury Road, in that they’re both instant classics.
The film opens on child Furiosa, living in a green oasis somewhere in Australia (and trust me, we start in orbit here and dive down to the continent because George Miller wants you to know for sure that we are in Australia). She and another little girl are picking peaches when they come upon a group of scavengers feasting on a horse, with the intention of bringing the head back to their leader as proof of their discovery; Furiosa attempts to sabotage their motorcycles but is captured. Her mother pursues her captors and the two of them manage to pick off most of the bikers, with the last survivor making it back to the scavenger encampment with Furiosa, managing only to tell that he found a green place but not where before Furiosa fatally wounds him. When Furiosa’s mother is tortured to death by the leader of the camp, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), she stops speaking and becomes Dementus’s prisoner/replacement child, and she learns a great deal about the world that was through the teachings of Dementus’s “History Man” (George Shevtsov), who also serves as this film’s narrator. Through various changes of circumstance and squabbles among the disparate groups of scavengers, young Furiosa ends up taken by Immortan Joe, the main villain of Fury Road, to be one of his broodmares; she escapes from this by weaponizing the attention that she receives from Joe’s son Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones), cleverly giving him the slip when he tries to “have” her for himself. She slips out into the Citadel and disappears … for now. The rest of the film picks up years later, with Anya Taylor-Joy now in the lead role, but I don’t want to give away any more than I already have.
I came to Fury Road a bit late, having only seen it for the first time within the past couple of years. There’s a whole Sliding Doors other world where I saw it on early release. Nine years ago, a friend and I were going to meet up to go see Jurassic World, but because we got confused about which theater was which, we ended up getting there too late. This was back when the theater chain in question, Alamo Drafthouse, wasn’t owned by Sony and hadn’t already started to go downhill because it was starting to spread itself too thin too quickly, so although it was their (good) policy to not allow us into the movie after it had started, they gave us a raincheck for another movie in the future and offered us an open in spot in either of the next two films that were starting, both in ten minutes: Mad Max: Fury Road or … Terminator Genisys. We chose Genisys, of course, because obviously the new Terminator was going to be so much better than a different decades-too-late addition to a genre defining sci-fi franchise. Right? Obviously, no one remembers Genisys fondly (except for me, and I’ll come right out and say right now that my appreciation was 90% hormonal and not really related to the text as an artistic endeavor), but Fury Road has been touted as one of the greatest movies ever made since it first hit the big screen. Even as a latecomer to the phenom, I was completely captivated by it — its audacity, its scope, its vision. It’s a work of genius, and the only problem with that is that this film, which rivals it in many ways and even occasionally surpasses it in others, is being measured against it and found wanting. And I just don’t get it!
There does seem to have been a cult of personality that has been built up around Fury Road that has pushed past the limits of what the film is into making up legends about it. That is, there are people online who seem to think that every effect is practical and that there’s no CGI in the film. For one thing, Huh? and for another, Whuh? See, my friend that I went to see this with had never seen Fury Road, and when her mom came to town and wanted to see this one (because of her general affection for Anya Taylor-Joy as a performer rather than out of any interest in Furiosa in character or concept), she was hesitant. She decided to give it a shot based on the fact that this was a prequel and thus she wouldn’t be missing anything; she enjoyed it a lot, and we started watching Fury Road the following day, and the difference in these two movies and what is demonstrably computer generated … there’s no light between them. Fury Road starts with Max eating a two-headed lizard that’s just as cartoony as the mammal that we see in the desert in Furiosa. You have to be a fool to believe that there’s no CGI in Fury Road, and the same things that look fake in one look fake in the other.
That’s fine, actually! There are all sorts of fun new desert weirdos, methods of “road war,” and plans within plans in this one. Since it’s the past, we get to see one of Joe’s other sons that’s dead by the time of Road in the form of the hilariously named Scrotus (Josh Helman), who’s even more unstable than Erectus. The real standout here, though, is Hemsworth’s Dementus, who almost steals the show. Furiosa, by her nature, is a quiet, nearly silent character who deflects attention, while Dementus is a gloryhound with the temperament of a child, and it’s a lot of fun to watch. The guy gets around in a chariot drawn by three motorcycles; that’s just cool, man, I don’t know what to tell you. Even his entourage is fun, with one of his allies in the first of the film’s chapters is “The Octoboss,” a gothy gang leader whose presence is established throughout the film by the sudden appearance of a giant, tentacled, Lovecraftian kite, which wasn’t even my favorite new thing in the sky in this one (that would be the paratroopers and kite-sailors, which are super awesome but get taken down so swiftly and easily that you understand why they don’t appear after this). I know it seems like I’m going from topic to topic really quickly here, but that’s the pace at which this film is moving, so take it all in.
Furiosa doesn’t seem to have done very well financially, which means it may already be too late to see it in your market as you read this. That’s a shame. It’s not lost on me that, nine years ago, what was most readily available for me to access via the theater was all IP franchise material: Terminator, Jurassic World, and Fury Road. I made the wrong choice that day back in 2015, but you could just as easily make that mistake at the movies this year, as right now my closest multiplex is screening Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Inside Out 2, and … Fury Road. If you still can see this one on the big screen, you should take advantage of that opportunity. This is going to be a long, hot, franchise driven summer, and if there’s something that’s worth spending money for a ticket and popcorn for, it’s Furiosa.
I have not felt motivated to watch Richard Linklater’s undercover cop comedy Hit Man since it hit Netflix, but I did happen to catch its opening half-hour in the holiest of cinematic venues: muted on the TV at my neighborhood bar. The one sequence that caught my eye while I was enjoying my banh mi and cocktail that evening was an early montage of classic film clips in which Glen Powell’s pretend-hit-man explains that the entire hired assassin concept is a movie trope, not a real-life occupation. I don’t know whether the 1967 neo-noir Le Samouraï was referenced in that quick montage because I wouldn’t see it screened at the theater down the street from that bar until a few days later, but it would have fit right in. Like Branded to Kill, In Bruges, John Wick, Barry, and all the other hired-assassin media that Hit Man gently mocks for its outlandishness, Le Samouraï imagines a complex crime-world hierarchy in which money is routinely exchanged for murder, no questions asked – a world with its own bureaucratic rules & procedures. Like those films, it’s also fully aware of its indulgence in outlandish fiction, striving to be as cool & entertaining as possible without worrying about being factual. If anything, the most outlandish aspect of Le Samouraï is its casting of the extraordinarily handsome Alain Delon as an anonymous assassin who goes unnoticed in public as he executes his orders, which is a logical misstep Hit Man repeats by casting the Hollywood handsome Glen Powell as a master of disguise who can credibly disappear undercover.
In its own way, Le Samouraï is also a commentary on classic crime movie tropes, or it’s at least in direct communication with them. A few years after Jean-Luc Godard’sBreathlessshook up the French filmmaking establishment by returning to the high-style chaos of classic American noir, Jean-Pierre Melville offered a much calmer, stranger refraction of the American gangster picture. Delon’s mostly silent hitman glides through the streets of Paris with an overly professional, emotionless affect, but he still vainly checks his image in every mirror he passes, making sure his trench coat & fedora match the classic noir archetype projected in his mind. He’s a film trope out of time, which leads to great pop-art juxtaposition when he passes advertisements for modern products like Orangina on city streets. A disorienting organ motif loops on the soundtrack as he wordlessly carries out his work, dodges cops, and kills professional rivals, giving his crime world setting the same dreamlike quality that the Goblin soundtrack gives the ballet school of Dario Argento’s Suspriria. If Godard brought the crime film back to the poverty-row roots of its infancy, Melville pushed it forward past the point of death to the world beyond, sending his audience to a hypnotically hip hitman heaven. Most of the storytelling is visual, with all of the loudmouth blathering left for the cops on Delon’s tail. In other words, it’s all style, to the point where the style is the substance.
Any further praise I could heap on Le Samouraï that would just be variations on labeling it Cool. The opening scroll that explains Delon’s antihero protagonist lives by an honorable samurai code? Cool. His anxious-bird home alarm system; his small collection of adoring Parisian babes who will likely be his undoing; his deep knowledge of the public transit system that allows him to avoid arrest? All very cool. What’s even cooler is that I got the chance to see the movie with a full, enthusiastic crowd, thanks to the popularity of The Broad’s regular $6 Tuesdays deal. Like the muted television hanging over the local watering hole, $6 Tuesdays has become a great cinematic equalizer that has made watching movies into a communal event again, rather than something I do alone in the dark while everyone else watches Hit Man on Netflix at home. If there were only a new digital restoration of a classic Euro genre film I’ve never seen before making the theatrical rounds every week, I’d be set.
When I saw Don Hertzfeldt’s latest animated short at this year’s Overlook, there was an hour-long line of giddy nerds queued up to squeeze in for a specialty screening and Q&A. A few months later, ME was paired with a victory-lap roadshow exhibition of Hertzfeldt’s 2012 feature It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which I attended with a smattering of fellow introverts avoiding eye contact and the afternoon sun in the complimentary AC. Both experiences were immaculate. The hustle & bustle of the film festival environment made ME feel like a burning-hot ticket, especially since fans could corner the animator in the flesh to force such intimate experiences as asking questions during a moderated panel, showing him the tattoos he inspired, asking for autographs and, in my case, catching a glimpse of him wolfing down Shake Shack between screenings like a regular Joe. The theatrical rollout was obviously less intimate, but Hertzfeldt did his best to make it feel personal. As an intermission between the short & feature, he FaceTimes the audience with a pre-recorded message to explain the ways in which It’s Such a Beautiful Day was a breakthrough formal experiment for his art and to also apologize for exhaustion of watching it so soon after ME. It still felt like a one-of-a-kind presentation for a work that was once streaming without context or personalization on Netflix, even though this exact Cinematic Event is currently touring dozens of international cities.
I’ve never thought of Hertzfeldt as a public figure before this recent tour. Since he largely works alone on self-taught animation techniques that take years to calibrate, I’ve always imagined him as a reclusive outsider artist, the exact kind of quiet introvert that his movies attract to the theater. Early works like Billy’s Balloon, Rejected, and Beautiful Day all had a word-of-mouth quality to their cultural awareness, and if his widest critical breakout World of Tomorrow screened anywhere near where I live with this level of fanfare, I totally missed it. Unsurprisingly, it turns out Hertzfeldt does carry himself with a quiet, shy, apologetic demeanor, seemingly surprised by the continued cult enthusiasm for his animated stick figure abstractions. It also turns out that his public personality was a lot more integral to the tone & narrative of It’s Such a Beautiful Day than I remembered, since his gentle voice is a constant hum on its soundtrack as the film’s scene-by-scene narrator. There’s an observational comic-strip humor to It’s Such a Beautiful Day that makes it feel a hand-drawn diary, especially considering the direct, intimate rapport the director establishes with his audience through narration. That’s what makes it so horrifying when it develops into a diary of personal anxieties rather than a diary of personal experiences as its story escalates, given that if any of this happened to Hertzfeldt himself, he would be either institutionalized or, more likely, dead.
Hertzfeldt narrates the daily, mundane thoughts & experiences of a middle-aged stick figure named Bill. Our milquetoast protagonist starts his journey suffering the same nagging indignities that plague us all: awkwardly waiting for buses, awkwardly chatting with strangers, awkwardly navigating urban hellscapes, etc. Bill’s suffering takes on increasing specificity as his mental health declines, though, due largely to a brain tumor that distorts his ability to think clearly (and inevitably kills him). Although told in third-person, the narration is filtered entirely through Bill’s increasingly warped perception of reality, and the imagery warps to match it. The white copy-paper backdrop of Hertzfeldt’s early works give way to photographic mixed-media textures that Bill stumbles through in non-linear time loops, untethered from logic. His observations occasionally become crass & offensive as his POV is compromised by his tumor, making this one of the great illustrations of intrusive thoughts, mental illness, and unreliable narration. Like all of Hertzfeldt’s work, it’s also a great illustration of Millennial humor, from its grim death-wish nihilism to its LOL-so-random internet cringe. There’s even a literal bacon joke that anchors the picture to the Epic Bacon humor of the 2010s, which only makes it more impressive that the film manages to sketch out an earnest, authentic big-picture demonstration of what it feels like to think & function with a brain distorted by anxiety, depression, and physical malady. For a small, devoted audience, no film has ever felt truer.
When Hertzfeldt refers to It’s Such a Beautiful Day as experimental, he means it more in terms of process than in terms of genre. He filmed the animation cells for the project using a bulky 1940s camera, experimenting with how to segment the frame through multiple exposures by blocking the lens, sometimes mixing traditional animation with stock footage. Even so, there are some aesthetic touches to the film that do recall Experimental Cinema in the Stan Brakhage/Maya Deren sense, with flashes of pure color overtaking the screen to tell the story through emotion & mood rather than through figure & voice. It was a drastic evolution for an animator who used to work exclusively in black & white line drawings, with only a few pops of color adding visual excitement to the frame – an evolution that’s since only gotten more extreme through multi-media layering in The World of Tomorrow & ME. The one thing that hasn’t changed, really, is Hertzfeldt’s unique sense of comic timing, which mines dark humor out of the mundane absurdism of being alive. His ability to perfectly time a punchline made him a cult figure long before he fully distinguished his craft as a visual artist, so it’s been wonderful to spend so much time hearing those jokes in his own voice this year, whether in his heavily-narrated cult classic or in his Q&A tour promoting his new, dialogue-free short. It’s fitting, then, that the only way to access these films (if they aren’t physically traveling to your neighborhood theater) is to purchase them directly from the artist’s website. I imagine he personally packages each shipment by hand and includes a scribbled note of apology for making your brain a little darker with his harsh approach to life & art.
I recently saw Guitar Wolf perform at a crowded, raucous dive bar and was impressed by the band’s continued ferocity. The Japanese garage-rock trio has been around for as long as I have been alive, but they’re rocking and rolling as hard as ever, shredding & crowdsurfing through neighborhood venues the size of living rooms. Meanwhile, it took me two full days to recover from just one of their shows, suffering both headbanger’s whiplash and tinnitus from standing too few feet away from their overcranked amps. I am convinced that a single week of touring with Guitar Wolf would literally kill me, especially since they insist on continuing to wear their black leather pants & jackets (the official Jet Rock n’ Roll uniform) in the Gulf South heat. I left the show with a reignited excitement for the band, though, so I spent more time with them by revisiting their most prominent cinematic showcase to date: the late-90s splatstick horror comedy Wild Zero, in which they fight off a local breakout of astrozombies between playing gigs. Despite only currently being accessible via YouTube, Wild Zero has a sizable cult following—partially due to Guitar Wolf’s Ramones-style rock n’ roll superheroes presence in the film, partially due to its surprisingly progressive queer themes—and it was without question my first introduction to the band. That cult doesn’t account for all of Guitar Wolf’s audience, though, as evidenced by a recent failed Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a sequel titled Wild Zero 2: The Strongest Blood of Humanity. There’s apparently a disparity between the ecstatic enthusiasm of rock n’ roll maniacs who show up to see Guitar Wolf in concert (basically anyone who’s familiar with the phrase “Goner Records”) and the dimmed enthusiasm of schlock gobblers who’d show up to see Guitar Wolf onscreen again (aged internet nerds who used to trade zombie schlock recommendations on long-defunct message boards). There’s obviously plenty of overlap between those two groups; there’s just not enough.
Fear not, Jet Rockers! There’s already another Guitar Wolf movie out there waiting for anyone who’s seen Wild Zero a few too many times but wants to spend more time with the band while the buzzsaw feedback from their most recent tour fades from your eardrums. The 1997 indie cheapie The Sore Losers featured a small onscreen role for Guitar Wolf years before Wild Zero entered the chatroom. The band appears as The Men in Black (Leather): a mysterious trio of villainous space aliens who frame a rival alien gang for intergalactic murders. They’re introduced chugging beers in a Mississippi graveyard about halfway into the film, then randomly materialize at arbitrary points in the plot to wield swords, ogle strippers, and shoot CGI laser beams out of their eyes. They’re very much like the Guitar Wolf of Wild Zero, except they have yet to learn how to use their powers for good. The Sore Losers traffics in that kind of continued-adventures comic book storytelling throughout, directly referencing EC horror comics in its guiding iconography just as often as it references 1950s drive-in B-movies. Guitar Wolf is only one faction of local garage-rock royalty who parade across the screen. Members of The Gories, Oblivians, and New Orleans’s own The Royal Pendletons appear alongside them to make it clear this is the document of a specific, contemporary scene just as much as it is a nostalgia piece about vintage schlock media. Specifically, The Sore Losers is scuzzy, D.I.Y. exploitation trash starring hyper-local celebrities of the Memphis garage punk scene – a lost broadcast from the non-existent film division of Goner Records. Given that Goner was initially established as a means to book & distribute Guitar Wolf in America just a few years before this film’s production, it fully has the credentials to back that up (even if competing garage label Sympathy for the Record Industry initially released the tie-in soundtrack, as advertised in the credits).
Like Wild Zero, The Sore Losers opens with CGI UFOs invading planet Earth, except in this case the UFO transforms into a hotrod the second it lands. We’re told in voiceover that our antihero alien lead (Jack Oblivion) has been in exile from Earth for the past 42 years, punished for failing his 1950s mission to kill a dozen Northern Mississippi beatniks. He immediately picks his mission back up again in a scheme to get back into the good graces of his alien overlords on The Invisible Wavelength, finding it much easier to locate & kill hippies in 1990s Mississippi than it was to locate & kill beatniks there four decades prior. There are a lot of convoluted negotiations around hitting the exact dead-hippie metric that would earn his freedom, but narrative coherence isn’t among the movie’s priorities anyway. Really, the hippie hunt is just an excuse for the intergalactic assassin to go on a short road trip to Memphis, so he can pose in vintage rock n’ roll gear along the way with redneck farmers, astrozombies, heavy-leather dominatrixes, and Betty Page pin-up girls. The cinematic influences on this episodic adventure are clear: John Waters, David Freidman, Gregg Araki, Russ Meyer, etc. The vintage sexploitation bent to that reference material leads to a lot of onscreen nudity, but not a lot of genuine horniness, giving the whole thing the feel of a rockabilly-themed Suicide Girls strip show. It’s all mugging & posing, which is perfectly fine for a movie that’s clearly designed for an insular group of musician friends to celebrate how cool the scene they created together is by mimicking the cool the vintage media they grew up with. It feels appropriate, then, that the end credits scroll includes the organizers of The Sore Losers Bash, since the local premiere & party for the film was almost more important than anything that actually happens in it. As of yet, you cannot time travel back to that party to experience it for yourself, but you can order a reissue of the accompanying garage-rock soundtrack from Goner and blow out your eardrums in an attempt to recreate it.
It says something that the reissued Sore Losers soundtrack currently has a better at-home presentation than the film it promotes. I rented The Sore Losers for $2 on VOD and was shocked by how gorgeous the digital restoration of its 16mm footage looked streaming at home. The cranked-up color saturation vividly highlighted the vintage comic book influence of its guiding aesthetic, whereas just a few years later it likely would’ve been filmed in a grim, grey DV format. However, the version I rented via Amazon had sound mixing issues that made the garage-rock soundtrack barely audible as a background whisper, as if those tracks were accidentally muted in export. There are much fuzzier copies of the movie uploaded to YouTube where you can hear that the songs are supposed to be much louder in the mix, but a lot of the visual & aural details are lost in the lower quality of those transfers, so it’s really a matter of picking your poison. The reason it’s worth mentioning is that the entire draw of the movie is watching cool people model outrageous leather outfits to loud rock n’ roll music (especially if you know those people personally), so a major component of that is experiencing missing if you can barely hear the rockin’ tunes. The best way to view the movie, then, is likely to buy a physical copy on disc. Better yet, don’t watch it at all. Just go to the next garage rock show at your local dive bar and do some covert people-watching while the amplifiers cause irreparable brain damage. From what I can tell, not much has changed on the scene fashion or personality-wise since the 90s. You’re just likely to see more people wearing earplugs now, and I wish I was smart enough to be one of them.
As a result of last year’s Hollywood labor strikes, there was a short-term drought of big-ticket blockbusters at the top of this summer’s release calendar, which has sent media journalists into a doomsaying tailspin. A lot of attention & pressure has been focused on the box office performance of the mid-tier actioners The Fall Guy & Furiosa in particular, whereas most years they would’ve enjoyed their solid critical reviews without all the grim financial scrutiny weighing them down. I don’t want to join in the collective handwringing over the short-term profits those films scraped together for their investors, so instead I’ll just point to the bizarre middle ground I recently discovered between them while they’re still a hot topic. Like The Fall Guy, the 1978 action novelty Stunt Rock is a love letter to professional stuntmen, offering audiences a peek behind the scenes of film production stuntwork that’s usually left invisible. In particular, the film was created as a star vehicle for Australian stuntman Grant Page who, among a hundred other credits, worked on the Mad Max series all the way up to Furiosa. Unfortunately, Page did not live to see Furiosa‘s release, though, as he died in a car crash earlier this year as an octogenarian daredevil who did not know when to quit. There’s been no better time to celebrate his life’s work, then, and there’s no better way to celebrate it than by watching Stunt Rock.
Grant Page stars as himself: a charismatic stuntman with an uncanny fearlessness. The film is essentially an advertisement for his professional skills, with newsreel announcers cheering him on as “Australia’s favorite stuntman goes to Hollywood.” While working his first regular gig on an American TV show, he woos two awestruck blondes: the show’s Dutch star (former Verhoeven collaborator Monique van de Ven, also playing herself) and a fictional reporter who’s fascinated by his craft (Margaret Trenchard-Smith, the director’s wife). There’s not too much drama behind Page’s flirtations with those women, though. Mostly, the film is an excuse to watch him perform what the opening title-card warning calls “many extremely dangerous stunts.” Page drowns himself, sets himself on fire, hang-glides, and jumps into the windshields of speeding cars with the going-through-the-motions calm of a bureaucrat filing paperwork. His stuntwork is framed as an extension of Australian independent filmmaking in general, advertising the many thrills & spectacles of that industry with repackaged clips from Page’s resume. Aussie schlockteur Brian Trenchard-Smith creates his own exciting filmic language during that clip show by doubling the 16mm frames of the cheaper films to fill the wider 35mm scope for a psychedelic splitscreen effect. More importantly, though, he just wholly commits to worshipping at the altar of Grant Page, whom he was convinced he could make an international star.
Of course, “Stunt” only accounts for half of this film’s title & premise, and I’m somewhat burying the lede here by not also mentioning where the “Rock” fits in. While brainstorming in the shower, Trenchard-Smith came up with Stunt Rock as a simple combination of two popular mediums, envisioning a showcase for Page’s talents that would score his stuntwork with bitchin’ rock n’ roll. The Dutch production company who funded the project was confident that they could land a legitimate, popular rock act for the soundtrack, reaching out to bands like Kiss, The Police, and Foreigner before finally settling on a much-less famous Los Angeles act named Sorcery. Instead of a perfect marriage of stunt & rock, the combination of Sorcery’s stage act with Page’s screenwork ended up being more of a hat on a hat. The band plays generic, sub-Zeppelin stadium rock that wouldn’t be much to speak of on its own, but they pair it with a live performance of two pyrotechnic magicians who dress like Merlin & Satan to pantomime a Good vs. Evil battle while their songs narrate a play-by-play. There is a vague gesture in the plot that ties Page’s stuntwork to the band, contracting him to help innovate stunts for their magic act as a favor to his cousin. For the most part, though, the stunt and the rock of the title exist side by side as two separate, competing forces.
I suppose there’s some historic value to Stunt Rock‘s peek behind the scenes of 1970s movie-production stuntwork. At the very least, it includes early acknowledgements of filmmaking techniques that have since spread to general public knowledge: wigging, squibs, fire gels, etc. However, by the time Page is narrating the history of cinematic stuntwork over old-timey Buster Keaton & Harold Lloyd footage and comedic slide whistles, it’s clear you’re not supposed to be taking any of its film production insight too seriously. Most of its cinematic history is rooted in watching Page conquer America like King Kong, climbing our highest peaks and immediately falling off them. Meanwhile, he’s sharing the stage with one of the goofiest rock ‘n roll acts of all time, whose own stuntwork makes for a fun novelty while also elevating the grittier, gutsier film set stunts through side-by-side comparison. The volatile combination of those two acts is exciting in a way that directly appeals to the audience’s lizard-brain instincts, to the point where there’s simply no way to describe Stunt Rock without sounding like a 13-year-old dweeb; “It’s like if Quentin Tarantino directed an episode of Jackass . . . on acid!!!” It’s a great showcase for Grant Page, though, who really did have a peculiar, one-of-a-kind talent for getting into car accidents and setting himself on fire.
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