Even more so than your Slow Cinema auteur of choice, Steven Soderbergh is the master of the mundane. He consistently makes tight, thrilling, wryly funny dispatches from the florescent-lit hell pits of American tedium. A 70min experiment in early-2000s digi cinematography and purposefully deflated genre payoffs, Bubble is a perfect illustration of that skill. Its vision of America is a complex labyrinth of small-town diners, factory breakrooms, and low-ceiling apartments. The doomed souls who navigate those mundane spaces all work multiple jobs for the privilege of getting paid minimum wage, wondering in their spare time what it might have been like if they had stuck it out for a full high school diploma. When jailed for a violent crime, they complain “It’s horrible in here,” but it’s so oppressively bland everywhere else that it’s questionable whether rotting in a concrete cell is any worse than being free to work their next shift. Even the murder that lands them there is bleakly, purposefully uninteresting.
I suppose there’s some novelty in what type of Midwest factory employs these small-town workers. Bubble was shot in a real, operational doll parts factory in Ohio, which makes for some horrific digital-video footage in early scenes. The mundanity of the world outside the assembly line quickly closes in, though. Loneliness & petty jealousies shared among three of the factory workers leads to one of their murders, with only one clear suspect and no real need to investigate. A deleted scene explains the psychology behind that act of violence like the Freudian denouement of Hitchcock’s Psycho, but Soderbergh removes even that morsel of narrative satisfaction from the final cut. He also undercuts the potential for dramatic excitement or emotion by casting non-actor locals to play the central parts, mumbling their semi-improvised lines through obvious shyness. Even the camera’s movements are pedestrian, often just swiveling on a stationary tri-pod like an oscillating security cam. It’s all very matter of fact, and the facts of the matter are all grim, grey gruel.
Handling the editing & cinematography himself under pseudonyms, Soderbergh seemed to be having fun playing around with the unpretentious tools of the new digital filmmaking era. He even got hands-on in Bubble‘s distribution strategy, striking a deal with the Mark Cuban-owned cable company HDNet to release the film simultaneously in theaters, on-demand, and on physical disc. His pitch was that hopefully audiences would be drawn to see the movie in theaters and, if they liked it, would pick up a physical copy for repeat viewings on the way home. Corporate theater chains were outraged at this disruption to the traditional theatrical window, but that day-and-date release strategy has obviously become more of a standard practice in recent years. Bubble was supposed to be the first of six HDNet releases with the same improvised-drama filming methods and unconventional home distribution schedules, but instead it flopped and mostly fell out of circulation. I had to find my DVD copy second-hand, and it only includes a Spanish-language subtitles track, so it likely traveled far to reach me.
Forever adaptable, Soderbergh has been doing just fine in the two decades since the Bubble debacle. If anything, he’s since moved on to making straight-to-HBO cheapies instead of straight-to-HDNet cheapies, which feels like a minor step up in prestige. He’s also had a few theatrical hits since then and has flirted with the idea of early retirement, only to discover that he’d rather be making movies no matter the scale in production or distribution. Bubble is not his most exciting, imaginative dispatch from the great mediocre American void (that would be Schizopolis), but it might be the most indicative example of his stripped-down, unfussy style. In most other cases where a career-shifting work from a major filmmaker had fallen out of distribution, it would be tempting to petition for a spiffy new digital restoration from a boutique Blu-ray label. In Bubble‘s case, it feels totally appropriate for it to be stuck in time on thrift-store DVDs. The only reason to reissue it, really, would be for a new director’s commentary track looking back on how the industry has changed in the past couple decades, since Soderbergh happens to be the master of those too.
Sometimes, a movie can be so aggressively derivative that it crosses a threshold into becoming thrillingly unique. Recently, Vera Drew’s copyright-skirting The People’s Joker melted eight decades of Batman comics & movies into a shockingly personal, vulnerable self-portrait. One of this year’s buzziest horror films, In a Violent Nature, is a novelty slasher that simulates the sensation of watching a Friday the 13th sequel on an overdose of cough syrup. Further back, vintage Hong Kong action schlock like The Seventh Curse and The Dragon Lives Again “borrowed” familiar icons from better-funded American productions for their own absurd purposes, theorizing what it might be like if Indiana Jones had to fight off Xenomorphs or if “Bruce Lee” teamed up with “Popeye” to beat up “Dracula” in Hell. Lucio Fulci might not have been doing his most personal, innovative work when making an unsanctioned sequel to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but without Italian producers’ complete disregard for American copyright, we never would have gotten the underwater zombie-on-shark fight scene of Zombi 2. Genuinely transcendent, imaginative art can result from filmmakers being shamelessly derivative, as long as they fully embrace the practice and push it to its extreme. Just call it “post-modern” and all is forgiven.
That’s why I was pleased to discover that the big-budget South Indian sci-fi film Kalki 2828 AD is even more derivative than I initially expected. All of the promotional materials for the film led me to believe it was a mockbuster version of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, distinguished only from a Syfy Channel knockoff of that series by the fact that it boasts the biggest budget of any Indian production to date. It turns out that Kalki 2898 is less of an overly expensive Dune bootleg than it is a more general sampler of any & every big-budget sci-fi property you can name: Dune, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Fury Road, Guardians of the Galaxy, everything. As a result, the movie it ended up reminding me most of was The Fifth Element: a mostly goofy genre derivative with a few genuinely transcendent moments all of its own making. By the time a flashback reveals that its wisecracking anti-hero was trained by his mentor using laser-swords, it’s clear that the movie is uninterested in hiding its artistic debts to pre-existing material. When it climaxes with a giant wizard figure doing Gandalf’s “You shall not pass!” routine during a bridge-fight with said anti-hero in a Transformers-styled mech suit, it’s also clear that those obvious debts do not matter. Kalki 2898 may be derivative, but it’s also deliriously, deliciously entertaining.
Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan stars as the Gandalf-like wizard of that bridge fight: a wizened but weary warrior who has been cursed with immortality for a past sin but eventually uses his extended centuries on earth for good. Tollywood action star Prabhas (of Baahubali fame) pilots the smart-car mech suit in that fight as a Han Solo type: a mercenary bad-boy who only does good when it fits his selfish needs. They’re fighting over possession of a pregnant damsel in distress (Deepika Padukone, of last year’s Pathaan), who’s believed to be carrying a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. There’s, of course, a prophecy going around that her child could be The One: a warrior savior who will bring light to a desert hell planet that has been suffering in greed & darkness. Throw in a fascistic Empire who exploits the labor of the many to pamper the lives of the privileged few, and you’ve got the basic building blocks of a standard Dune or Star Wars knockoff, except maybe one with a concerning amount of attention paid to the Empire’s search for “fertile females.” Kalki 2898 constantly refers to major events of Hindu mythology in flashbacks that can be disorienting for uninformed Western viewers, but so much of its story is borrowed from a universal source of worship (corporate pop-culture IP) that the knowledge gap doesn’t matter all too much.
If there’s any way that Kalki 2898 closely adheres to its Dune inspiration in particular, it’s that it abruptly ends after three hours with only half a story told. One of the final images is a title card promising that the adventure will continue in the “Kalki Cinematic Universe,” and it’s been a while since I was excited instead of annoyed by that serialized approach to cinematic storytelling. That’s not the only hack move it pulls that would’ve annoyed me in most American blockbusters either. It includes many for-their-own sake cameos that wink to an insider audience (including one for Baahubali director S.S. Rajamouli); it follows up its “until next time . . .” title card with a mid-credits post-script that promises an evolution for the big bad villain. Worse, early flashbacks include horrendous de-aging CGI effects for Bachchan that betray the fact that the film was rushed to market before it was fully completed, with production having wrapped only a month before release. None of those usual red flags bothered me here, though, no more than I was bothered by watching it play around with the pre-fabricated action figures of more famous sci-fi properties. Kalki 2898 AD is playful & extreme enough in its scene-to-scene action that any questions of artistic integrity or originality feel beside the point.
It doesn’t matter how many times you see the same story repeated in genre movies, as long as there’s a little stylistic or thematic novelty added to the template. I’ve seen plenty of characters purchase possessed antique mirrors that warp their perception of reality and perception of their selves, mostly in cheaply produced horror pictures like Oculus, Mirror Mirror, and The Evil Within. I’ve never seen that story adapted into a feature length Golden Age porno before, though, which is the novelty that the 1981 film Pandora’s Mirror brings to the template. Vintage porno star Veronica Hart stars as the titular Pandora, who is mesmerized by an “enchanted” (i.e., cursed) mirror that she finds in the back of a dusty antique shop. No one in the film ever refers to her by “Dora” or “Dorie” or any other nickname; it’s “Pandora” every time in case anyone in the audience loses track of the allusion. Instead of seeing a demonic presence or an evil reflection of herself in the mirror like in most of these stories, Pandora’s mirror allows her to watch the sexual adventures of its previous owners over the past couple centuries, hypnotizing her in an erotic trance. Obviously, that set-up is mostly just an excuse to stage hardcore sex scenes in various period costumes, but it also plays directly into one of my favorite genre tropes: the doomed protagonist who becomes obsessed with something that’s obviously going to kill them, but they keep at it anyway because it makes them horny. The fact that the object of obsession is a magical mirror in this case is only the icing on the erotic novelty cake.
The only thing you need to know about Pandora is that her erotic obsession with her mirror is out of character and a cause for concern among her uptight yuppie social circle. The only thing you need to know about the mirror is that its owner is a seemingly immortal Dan Ackroyd type (Frederick Foster), who appears in every vignette but never has sex on camera; he’s only around to ominously answer questions like “How long have you been here?” with “I have always been here.” He does helpfully provide the backstory of the mirror’s enchantment, explaining that it was made from the wood of an oak tree that was struck by lightning, which is apparently where all enchanted lumber comes from. For any information on why the mirror is evil, we just have to draw our conclusions from the spooky synth score and the fact that Pandora is immediately addicted to gazing into its enchanted glass. There’s an interesting subversion there in how an object that’s typically associated with self-obsession and vanity is instead a voyeuristic window into the sex lives of others, but it all comes around by the time Pandora sees her own sexual fantasy reflected in cursed object (a threeway with the two gym bros who lift weights on the rooftop across the street from her apartment). This is largely a story about a woman’s masturbatory fantasies taking over her waking life until all she can or wants to do is stare into the sex mirror, to the point where she’s literally consumed by it.
If there’s anything especially notable about the sex here, it’s that every period-piece fantasy depicted is a group activity. We start with a Revolutionary War foursome, ramp up to an Old Hollywood poolside fivesome, ease back into a 1970s Broadway foursome, and conclude with a full-on S&M dive bar orgy (at NYC’s infamous Hellfire Club, reigned over here by a tiara-crowned Annie Sprinkle). The only one-on-one coupling occurs in a go-nowhere side plot in which Pandora’s boyfriend (Jamie Gillis) cheats with her conniving frenemy (Sandy Hillman) after being abandoned for too long as she stares into the mirror. Situationally, the sexual scenarios that appear in the mirror are pretty hot, especially as they play with the power dynamics of timid newcomers being seduced into deep-end group sex hedonism. In practice, the action can be a little too impractical & inhuman to maintain that erotic tension, though, especially since every single act of cunnilingues & analingus (and there are plenty) includes way more biting and random tongue flittering than direct, effectual licking. Worse yet, the casting-couch Broadway audition segment requires a performer to masturbate with the world’s least convincing dildo: a hollow, plastic toy seemingly cut in half with scissors, so that it collapses any time it’s squeezed. It would be beside the point to knock the film for not properly cropping out the shotgun mics & stage lights that creep into the frame during those sex scenes, but I don’t think it’s out of line to say the sex itself could’ve been a little more sincerely steamy.
Overall, this is a much classier picture than the only other title I know from director Shaun Costello (credited here as Warren Evans): the infamous 1970s enema-kink geek show Water Power (credited there as Helmuth Richler). The gauzy soap-opera cinematography, ambient synth soundtrack, and urban fairy tale premise all add to its mystique as one of the eerier outliers of narrative pornography’s Golden Age, at least in the wraparound story that connects the less satisfying tangents of cosplay group sex. It’s the sex that makes the picture an outlier in the larger canon of haunted mirror movies, though, so it almost doesn’t matter that none of the performers can seem to go down on each other without using every tooth in their jaw, or that Costello has seemingly never seen a functional dildo before. Just the mere fact that they’re fucking on camera at all is enough.
The Sweetest Thing is a major-studio comedy starring Cameron Diaz as a lovelorn socialite who’s become disenchanted with the nightclub hookup scene. Having matured to the point where she’s ready to seek Mr. Right instead of Mr. Right Now, she drops everything going on in her busy life to crash a wedding in the suburbs where she knows she’ll run into Thomas Jane, the kind of cute guy whom she would normally bed & ghost instead of genuinely getting to know. She’s joined on this impulsive road trip by her high-powered businesswoman bestie, Christina Applegate, who gently pushes Diaz out of her comfort zone as she gives being romantically vulnerable a shot for the first time in her life. Meanwhile, they both support their good mutual friend, Selma Blair, as she recovers from a recent traumatic breakup by letting loose with a few low-stakes, short-term flings for comic relief. It’s a story of three self-determined women supporting each other through the final years of their twenties in the cutthroat world of San Francisco dating. Heck, they might even find true love along the way.
That plot description fits the version of The Sweetest Thing sold in its contemporary trailers & advertising: a cookie-cutter romcom the whole girl squad can enjoy. It’s also technically accurate to the events of the story told in the film itself, and yet it is still a lie. Many gaggles of gal pals were deceived by it in the dark days of 2002, when they lined up for a wholesome Girls Night Out and were instead taken on a road trip through the dankest pits of Hell. The Sweetest Thing imagines an alternate reality where Romy & Michele are evil, high-functioning, and lethally overdosed on episodes of Sex and the City. Diaz & Applegate play deeply awful people – the most selfish, morally repugnant women to ever disgrace a martini bar. Blair plays a dead-eyed hedonist who continually stumbles into Rube Goldbergian sexual scenarios that expose her private bedroom indulgences to the wider San Francisco public, including nearby priests & schoolchildren. By the time her luckier-in-love besties tease her by playing keep-away with her cum-stained laundry on a city sidewalk, it’s clear what kind of romcom this truly is: a demonic one. Funny too.
While The Sweetest Thing may look like a classic Hollywood romcom from a safe distance, up close it’s clearly rooted in the tragically chintzy days of the post-9/11 2000s. It does not shy away from potential association with the most prominent “Women get horny too” media of its era, Sex and the City; it even opens with man-on-the-street interviews about Diaz’s heartbreaker behavior with her previous sexual partners, a device heavily relied on in early seasons of that landmark HBO sitcom. There’s a lingering Farrelly Brothers stench to its over-the-top raunch, however, which includes gags involving exploding urinals, maggoty backseat leftovers, and an ocular glory hole injury everyone sees coming except the woman who suffers it. Even just the casting of Cameron Diaz alone feels like a nod to that Something About Mary tradition of mainstream raunch, which brought a hetero brand of John Waters gross-out humor to the corporate multiplex. The “Unrated” DVD version of the film also includes an impromptu electroclash flash mob, wherein our three hedonistic heroines lead an entire restaurant of strangers in an extended dance number about the joys of giant cocks. What a trashy time to be alive.
Cruel Intentions director Roger Kumble brings little of note to the table here besides his working relationship with Selma Blair, apparently having gotten at least two all-timer comedic performances out of her to date. If you want an auteurist read on The Sweetest Thing, you have to look to screenwriter Nancy Pimental instead, whose credits mostly consist of TV episodes for bad-taste comedies like Shameless, The Mick and, most importantly in this context, early seasons of South Park. Critics, audiences, studio execs, and advertisers all seemed baffled by what Pimental was up to in her big-screen debut, but she was clear-eyed in her mission. She wanted to make a girly version of the kinds of gross-out, reprehensible comedies that boys got to make all the time, dressed up in the surface aesthetic markers of the safer, sanitized material that’s more routinely marketed to women. The biggest tip-off of her self-awareness is in the requisite dress-up montage before the climactic wedding-crash, in which Diaz & Applegate try on costumes from popular Hollywood comedies of previous decades. When they dress up as characters from Pretty Woman, Grease, and Desperately Seeking Susan, they’re giving studio executives exactly what Pimental was contracted to deliver. When they dress up in the pastel tuxedos from Dumb & Dumber, Pimental is signaling something entirely different to the audience. She wanted to make something chaotic, evil and, above all else, dumb. She succeeded greatly, and it’s a shame she hasn’t been given this much room to play around with genre expectations since.
Much like nu-metal, Crocs, and exposed-thong whale tail, it appears that VHS tapes are hip again. There’s already been widespread aesthetic nostalgia for the tape-warp wear & tear of vintage VHS tapes in horror cinema from the past decade or so, as evidenced in titles like Late Night with the Devil, WNUF Halloween Special, Rent-a-Pal, Beyond the Gates, Censor,V/H/S, and VHYes. But now I’m starting to see more appreciation for the physical tapes themselves, not just digital simulation of their degradation. Soon after the old-school video store Future Shock opened in Mid-City, renting both VHS tapes and VCR players, I attended an unrelated screening of the classic 1987 slasher The Stepfather at The Mudlark Theatre, projected from VHS to a hanging bedsheet. At the start of the movie, the audience warmly chuckled at the tape’s brief tracking issues and the projector’s struggle to calibrate its fuzzy image quality, but that attention to format eventually gave way to sincere tension & unease. It was a genuine 1990s sleepover atmosphere, as if we had snuck an R-rated movie past our sleeping parents. It was also very likely the first time I’ve watched a movie on VHS in almost a decade (specifically, since we covered Highway to Hell for Movie of the Month in 2015), since that’s around the time I gave away my VCRs because they all kept eating my tapes.
You don’t have to go to bootleg repertory screenings at Marigny puppet theatres to get in on the VHS nostalgia wave, though. While the collection & exhibition of physical VHS tapes is the domain of only a few true sickos, plenty movie nerds are exposed to VHS scans on a regular basis without intentionally looking for them. Anyone who regularly spends time searching YouTube, Tubi, Archive.org, and thrift-store DVD stacks for cheap-access cinema has been subjected to a deluge of sub-professional digi scans of VHS tapes, which are just as rampant now in the golden age of boutique Blu-ray restorations as they ever have been. Consider the curious case of Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, a 1985 comedy that had an initial theatrical release on celluloid, but is unavailable for streaming in HD. All official, legal uploads of the film to sites like Tubi, Freevee, and PlutoTV are the same scan of a vintage VHS cassette, since the film was a much bigger hit as a video store rental than it was as a theatrical release. That’s likely because the VHS cover dared to advertise the appearance of the popular character Ernest P. Worrell, despite the fact that his last-minute inclusion in the film is essentially a celebrity cameo. In theaters, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam was an anonymous, immediately forgotten comedy starring some nobody named Jim Varney. In video stores, it lingered on the shelves for years, boosted its official branding as An Ernest Movie. Even now, it’s still a kind of VHS rental, just one that’s untethered from a physical presence.
Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam officially marks the first big-screen appearance of Ernest P. Worrell, the fast-talking Southern fool who’s always mugging directly to the camera and addressing the audience as his good friend “Vern”. Before he was camping, slam-dunking, saving Christmas, going to jail, and getting scared stupid in his career-making star vehicles, Ernest was a recurring character in a series of 1980s television commercials directed by John Cherry, starring rubber-faced comedian Jim Varney. Cherry (from Nashville) & Varney (from Kentucky) mostly sold their Ernest ads to the Louisiana & Mississippi at first, but the popularity of the character spread wide enough nationally that they figured they could cash in with a legitimate feature film. Ernest was only one of Varney’s many stock characters, though; longtime Varney Heads will surely recall fellow ad-break mainstay Auntie Nelda, Varney’s old-biddy drag act with a perpetually sprained neck. Instead of capitalizing on the popularity of Ernest in particular, Cherry & Varney chose to use The Riddle of the Gloom Beam as a showcase for every character Varney had in his comedic repertoire, giving the actor room to test-run a bunch of vague, go-nowhere archetypes like Evil German Scientist, Australian Militia Maniac, Filthy Pirate, and Literal Trash Monster, along with playing the hits. It’s less comedically specific than the official Ernest movies as a result, working more like a sketch comedy revue than a feature film.
The titular Dr. Otto is, of course, a Varney creation: a broad mad-scientist character costumed with a living human hand for a hat. The evil lair where he regularly attempts world domination looks like what might happen if Rita Repulsa couldn’t afford to pay the light bill, but it’s lavishly decorated with a wide range of evildoer machines that don’t do any evil thing in particular except light up & smoke. His first plan of attack is fairly agreeable, using his “gloom beam” machine to erase all official records of debt, throwing banks & credit card companies into chaos, to the point where CEOs are putting revolvers in their mouths onscreen in what’s ostensibly a children’s film. Later, he threatens to use the gloom beam to kill all the world’s first-born children like a Biblical plague, but let’s not focus too much on that plot point. Instead, let’s all boo & hiss at the hero that the banks & government nominate to take Dr. Otto down: a square-jawed American patriot named Lance Sterling (Myke Mueller), Dr. Otto’s childhood rival. In flashback, we witness the disturbing difference between Lance’s privileged, WASPy upbringing and Dr. Otto’s miserable life in the gutter, which only encourages us to root for the mad scientist as he seeks revenge on the planet. That’s what makes it okay to cheer on the many disguises he takes in the present—including crowd favorites Ernest & Nelda—as they do objectively evil things to prevent the squeaky-clean hero from saving the day.
None of the individual jokes or visual gags in The Riddle of the Gloom Beam are especially funny, but the movie is charming anyway. It’s high-energy, low-budget independent filmmaking, making up for a lot of the dead air between failed bits with aggressive music-video editing tactics and handmade arts & crafts ingenuity. It’s also incredibly dark considering the average age of its target audience. If nothing else, it’s got to be the only children’s film I’ve ever seen include a minutes-long Deer Hunter parody, making for two visual references to suicide by gun. When I was a kid, television and the video store were cultural democratizers. Jim Carrey & Robin Williams may have had more legitimate, widespread distribution in brick & mortar movie theaters, but Varney was their professional equal in my mind at the time, thanks to then-lifelong exposure to Ernest ads & videos in the Southern market where he hit heaviest. If The Riddle of the Gloom Beam had any chance of earning cult-classic status, it would’ve needed a lot more Ernest content instead of flooding the screen with Varney’s lesser-known comedic personae (despite those characters’ later appearances on his short-lived CBS sketch show Hey Vern, It’s Ernest!). Cherry & Varney soon figured that out in better-remembered titles like Ernest Goes to Jail & Ernest Scared Stupid, which have a much more distinct comedic personality than this early outing even if they don’t match its creative, try-anything energy. Thus, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam is the exact kind of title that belongs on VHS; it would feel sacrilegious to watch it in any updated format, since it’s such a relic of its era. And in a way, that makes Tubi just as hip and plugged-in to The Moment as your local underground video stores and D.I.Y. neighborhood rep screenings (as long as you politely ignore the fact that the company is owned by Rupert Murdoch).
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.
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