And now that we’re here, we arrive at undoubtedly the most famous and significant of Anderson’s films. We’ll be hopping into the discussion of the movie proper right away, but make sure to stick around after that for some final thoughts on Anderson, a look forward at his next project, and maybe even a sneak peek at the next season of Directed Viewing. It will continue to strive to be awesome!

There Will Be Blood (2007)

From the very beginning, There Will Be Blood creates a vision of America that is as harrowing and savage as it is beautiful. A man in the wilderness, working away at a silver mine, bearded and dirty and primal in the frenzy with which he chips away at the rock. In the middle of blasting a path, he slips on a ladder and tumbles down, breaking his leg. We watch him slowly force himself up, gathering his silver and heading into town, sprawled out on the floor of the prospector’s office as he gets the silver appraised. His priorities, debatable enough, are instantly clear. This is the introduction to Daniel Plainview, the self-professed plain speaking man of opportunity, played by a grizzled Daniel Day-Lewis.

Plainview takes his money and starts drilling for oil, his moment of triumph as they strike oil turned dark as one of his fellow drillers dies. Plainview, covered in crude, raising his black-stained hands up like a totem, finds himself adopting the now orphaned son of the dead worker.The son several years later becomes the baby-faced sidekick to his constant pitches to small towns across the ramshackle plains of California. Plainview wants oil, and wants a lot of it, and rolls out his seemingly generous terms like they’re random demands, never stopping to allow dissent or suggestion. His terms are iron-clad, leave them or take them. When a town has the gall to debate him, he walks out. He doesn’t need them–whether it’s because he has the luxury of choice or because he refuses to work with people with the backbone to stand up to him is never made explicitly clear.

He gets a prospect to a new oil field from a young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), who shrewdly sells the information for a huge sum and disappears with the money. Plainview and his son, H.W., make their way to the farm, posing as quail hunters, paying far less for the land than it’s worth over the objections of Paul’s twin brother Eli (Dano again), who is the local preacher and the only man who has a dim idea of just what Plainview is doing. Despite his objections, Plainview manages to buy up not only the Sunday land, but almost all of the land in the area. By the time the town has begun to realize that one man has their destinies in his pocket, he’s out front and center, selling them promises of schools and farms and improved infrastructure.

In many ways the movie straddles Western tropes and traditional pastoral, long stretches of wilderness and the small human moments that survive out in it.

It’s at this point the machinery of the oil drilling starts to roll into town. A lone set of train tracks, stretching off into the horizon like they go into unknown infinity, are suddenly violated by the arrival of a big steam engine belching dirty smoke and dirty men in equal measure. The establishment of Plainview’s camp and the driving of the first wells comes with the manic efficiency of turn of the century progress, a sense of the mechanized march of capitalism that bespeaks to early silent short films of workers going about their business in that slightly too-fast way of the era that seems clock-like and more than a bit soulless.

Confronted with this influx of men, and feeling more than a little taken advantage of, Eli gets quickly to work converting as many men as possible to his Church of the Third Revelation, establishing himself as the only other source of power in the town. Where Plainview is deceptively gruff and confident, Eli is supplicating and soft-spoken. Plainview dismisses him more than once before finally going to see one of his sermons, delivered in a ramshackle wooden box where he stomps and shouts and casts the demons out of a woman in a frenzy, the camera following this theatrical evangelical act as if Eli was throwing the invasive cameras out along with the Devil.

But Plainview believes only in himself, or ownership (if the two could be disentangled), and isn’t moved; he knows his own when he sees him, and recognizes in Eli the same snake-oil salesman charm that he uses to get his contracts. Plainview is only selling material comforts, riches and the progress of a town. Eli is far more dangerous, a supposedly humbled man selling eternal salvation to a population who is too remote to recognize his tactics for the shame they are. We are not fooled, nor is Plainview, but Eli would never openly admit to being Plainview’s rival. That smiling self-depreciation alone is enough to make him Plainview’s enemy. To his mind, all men are either under his employ or rivals to the bitter end, and that is the simple way of the world.

During this same period, Plainview’s adopted son H.W. is injured during a drilling explosion, losing his hearing. The boy retreats into himself during this period, at the same time a man purporting to be Plainview’s long lost half-brother arrives looking for a job. Plainview takes him into his confidence, seemingly unsure who to turn to now that his son cannot hear him. H.W. acts out against this new, distrustful intrusion, leaving Plainview to send him away to a school for the deaf. In fact, Plainview outright abandons him on the train, claiming they’re going together and getting up ‘to check the tickets’ right before the train pulls from the station. H.W. becomes, in his disability, just one more problem for Plainview to deal with.

Unfortunately, without H.W. there, Plainview’s misanthropy swells beyond its prior, already-crushing frame to encompass all of Plainview’s world view. He sends away incredible buyout offers with condemnation for daring to say he should spend time tending to his son. When Eli dares to come to demand the money promised to him by Plainview when he bought the land, Plainview attacks him and demands to know why his God and his faith healing couldn’t restore H.W.’s hearing. When he and his half-brother go to survey the one holdout in town, a plot of land that is necessary to build a pipe-line, Plainview admits to his only other kin

“I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. [...] There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone. [...] I see the worst in people. I don’t need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I’ve built my hatreds up over the years, little by little.”

There Will Be Blood is always beautiful, but often that beauty is transformed into a gothic, industrial sort of horror.

When, shortly thereafter, a memory he brings up doesn’t illicit an expected response from this man, Plainview relizes this man isn’t who he claims. His supposed half-brother wakes up with Plainview pointing a gun in his face and admits that he was only a friend of a man who claimed to be Plainview’s brother, dead several years of tuberculosis. He only came here to try to make a living. Plainview, having already sent away the only person he trusted and loved for saying that this man wasn’t who he claimed, shoots the interloper over his pleas for mercy. He buries the body and supposedly all is well, only to wake up the next morning with the man who had been holding out on him standing over him, suggesting he knows what Plainview has done and offering to allow him to build the pipeline, but not to drill, only if he submits to baptism by Eli.

Eli, of course, takes this opportunity to belittle and shame his opponent. Plainview is made to kneel down, limp and all, in front of the entire town where Eli forces him to admit that he’s sinned and reneged on promises and has abandoned his son. Plainview, grudgingly admitting all these things, has a moment of realization during the confession and each time Eli makes him admit he abandoned his son shouts this with greater and greater conviction. Eli glows with triumph at this supposed weakness, not knowing that in exposing Plainview to a realization of his own shortcomings, has earned himself burning hatred for the rest of his days.

The last fifth of the movie is a coda years after all of this, long after Plainview has retreated into a mansion where he sits in darkness, rich and drunk. H.W., who grew up and married the girl (a member of Eli’s family) he became friends with in town, comes to announce that he’s going to start his own company. Plainview, enraged that even the son he dared to trust and care about would supposedly betray him, lashes out with the truth that he was simply a ‘bastard from a basket’ and that H.W. has nothing of Plainview in him. H.W., in a show of compassion and measured response unique to a movie about men without, sadly walks away and leaves his father to his own anger, memories of H.W.s childhood leaving Plainview in an even darker place, descending the stairs to his basement, drink in hand, passing out in the middle of his personal bowling alley.

It’s here, in the end, at his supposed lowest point, that Eli finds him. Eli, now dressed in a fine suit and a famous radio preacher, helps him up and offers him a supposed business proposition. He’s come into possession of the drilling rights of the last bit of land that Plainview could never get, and now ruined by the depression and in desperate need of money, is willing to sell them to Plainview. Plainview, hung over and gnawing on a cold steak like an animal, offers that he’ll take the deal only if Eli admits that he’s a false prophet and that his god is a false one. After all these years, the memory of Eli’s attack at his vulnerability hasn’t fled, and he’s going to do Eli one better. Eli, his back as against the wall as Plainview’s once was, relents and denounces himself and his faith again and again at his urging.

The struggle between beliefs forms most of the thematic backbone of the movie, and Plainview never forgets the redemptive humiliation Eli visits upon him.

It’s here that Plainview reveals his ultimate triumph. He didn’t need the land, and refuses to buy it, having already drained all that oil when it seeped into the surrounding land and wells he was draining. It’s gone, and all hope of Eli’s salvation at Plainview’s hands is gone with it, as Plainview blossoms from indignation into fully self-righteous rage that Eli would even dare to think to come here for Plainview’s help. He stalks Eli down the bowling alley, a hunched over wretch of a man, shouting “I am the third revelation! I told you I would eat you, Eli. I told you I would eat you up!”

In this moment, Plainview is transformed from man into monster. Eli, begging for understanding and compassion, is greeted with Plainview bludgeoning him to death with a bowling pin like a caveman hunched over his prey. It took decades, but Plainview finally triumphed over all his competitors who stood in his way, his ambition and greed hollowing him out, the only other man who equalled his reach laid low by faith instead of Plainview’s supposedly superior ruthless cunning. Eli bleeding in a corner, Plainview sits and waits for his butler to come after hearing the screaming, only to tell him “I’m finished.”

And that is the true scope of There Will Be Blood, a story of America in both of its driving forces, of secular capitalism and the desire of ownership and influence; and the rising response of evangelical Christianity, packaging the same subjugation and need for power into a sense of moral superiority. Of course the two would come to blows, neither could stand the existence of the other, neither could allow anything else to rival them. It was blasphemy to them both, relgious or not. In fact, the only person who escapes the ultimate cancerous destruction of this whole system is H.W., who took seemingly the best things from both sides and fled towards the middle way, narrowly avoiding ruin through the grace of his tragedy that pushed him away from Plainview’s favor.

And this is, in the end, a story of Plainview. He is the American Man personified, a mixture of all the quirks and contradictions that our country has so long celebrated and idolized. He is a man of supposedly stoic bearing, hiding deep passions. A man of self-professed plain speaking, even when he’s lying through his teeth. A man of a certain nobility, the rugged individualism of all of our heroes, used as a front to push away the people he detests. He is John Wayne and Henry Ford wrapped into one man, with all of the qualities of American myth and utterly detestible for it. This is what our culture can unleash upon us, our best qualities in extremis turned to violence and petty squabbles, ambition little more than the culturally acceptable form of human nature.

I described There Will Be Blood as a horrific look at American, and I stand by it. It’s a beautiful film, and that beauty is used to show us the basest nature of humanity, of someone who has everything and still wants and wants until he devours every good thing in his life. It is the horror of ourselves, a mirror into the depths of what our culture prizes, laid bare for us to sympathize with as much as we recoil from it. Daniel Plainview is all of us, our fathers and our heroes, only with the conviction to see the excesses of his feeling to the end. And it’s only the power with which we reflexively reject it that we come through the experience of this movie, this masterpiece, with a greater understanding of that innate destruction in ourselves. As much as Plainview would hate it, what Anderson gives us is a sermon on our own social morality.

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So Now Then

Five movies isn’t a huge career, but Paul Thomas Anderson is not a speedy director and still fairly early in his career. For someone just barely over 40, he’s achieved the kind of notoriety that many directors never manage. And with potentially several more decades of movies left in him, we’re left at the end of this project wondering exactly where his career might go. But even with less than half a dozen movies to his name, themes have begun to emerge.

All of his movies, even Magnolia’s pieces, revolve around a central character that is as ambitious as he is self-destructive, a man who walks the line between success and failure and the audience’s tolerances for rooting for or against like it’s a circus act. I feel like that’s the one, big through line of all of his work, from the modest crime drama of Hard Eight to the reflective meta-commentary on comedic typecasting of Punch-Drunk Love to the two sided coin of traditional American Dream aspirational epics like Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood.

Those two in particular I feel are the key to understanding Anderson, with a reverence for the small moments in a person’s life that build up over time, like erosion of water over rocks, and carve mountains and cast entire lives into disarray. Dirk Digger or Daniel Plainview, the two men couldn’t be more different yet stand for the same thing. They are us, our society, as contradictory and ridiculous as it always is and always has been. And it is how these supposed outsiders rise up and fall low that form the backbone of Anderson’s work. Discussions of Anderson’s formalism only go so, but even this early the obsessions that drive him are there to mine.

His next movie is The Master, currently being shot and reportedly a potential  roman à clef for Scientology starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix, where Hoffman plays the leader of a post-WWII religion/cult and Phoenix plays a drifter who gets wrapped up in it only to start to question it when things get too serious. It sounds as deeply Anderson as any of his movies, probably deeply concerned with the same faith versus showmanship qualities that ran rife in Eli’s story in There Will Be Blood, extrapolated outward into a post-war sense of a world on the brink. Or maybe not. The joy of these projects is you get an idea of what might be coming, but (especially with younger directors) you’re never quite sure.

But no matter what the movie turns into, Directed Viewing will return again and hopefully many many more times in the future, as Anderson makes more movies and further extends his already rich cinematic legacy higher and higher.

Cleaning House

And that’s it! I’ve been trying to refine what these Directed Viewing seasons represent, with a tighter focus on recurring themes and hopefully a more comfortable mix of macro and micro views at the movies than the last project (Curse you, Jarmusch!) had. If you liked it, let me know. If you didn’t like it, well, let me know that, too. I’m happy to take criticism and suggestions of what to do from anybody who has them.

That wraps it up for Paul Thomas Anderson, but Directed Viewing continues on! I’m thankfully working with enough of a buffer that the next season will start next week! I have the next two seasons already planned out and in various stages of production, but if you want to suggest a director for this project let me know. I have a working list, but the more interest someone gets the more likely I am to push them higher on the priority list.

Until next week, I leave you with this teaser (no, not really a teaser) image, and leave you to think about what’s coming next:

image created by Dan Seagraves

Today’s movie is something of a quandary for me. I sometimes go pretty far afield, the result of picking my movies nearly at random from the giant list. This one falls firmly in the ‘oh god how do I write about something like that‘ category. So hopefully you’ll forgive the uncertain tone, the number of questions versus the number of answers. After writing this, I went and looked at a whole array of pieces on the movie, and found that outside of the facts no two people seemed to have the same interpretation. So I feel, at least, that my reaction to it is valid and that I likely didn’t miss something that would make it all perfectly clear.

Simon of the Desert (1965)

A man stands upon a pillar in the desert. His name is Simon (Claudio Brook), and he is introduced as an ascetic famous to the people who live in the surrounding lands. As the movie opens, he has stood upon his pillar for six years, six weeks, and six days, a number that would seem a bit on the nose if it wasn’t coming from surrealist director Luis Buñuel. On this day, Simon has received a gift from a wealthy benefactor: a taller, grander pillar. Simon descends among the people, trying to avoid their worship and ardor, to get back up on the perch to continue his supposedly edifying deprivations.

Simon of the Desert is the last Mexican film Buñuel would make, suffering from a lack of funding that meant the film never shot more than five reels and thus spools out its parable of faith and temptation in a scant 45 minutes. But in that amount of time, Buñuel manages to tackle the dichotomies of faith and religion with a humorous touch that belies the self-seriousness of its subject. I suppose, for the record, that I should point out that Buñuel was himself an atheist, but the reality is that the movie seems far more in tune with the intentions and emotions of the believers than many outright religious films (certainly most made today), so I will try to remain fairly agnostic in my appraisal of his intent, as I’m fairly sure Buñuel did in the making of the movie.

From the outset the film shows an interest in the juxtaposition of the base and righteous, the refined and the profane, that plants its tongue firmly in cheek. Simon refuses to be given blessings as he switches pillars, saying he’s nothing more than a sinner who is lower than any of the others, yet he seemingly doesn’t hesitate to climb up the newer, higher pillars, as if grander status and higher elevation will bring him closer to heaven. Among those who visit him is a fussy young priest, robes immaculate despite the dirt and dust of the desert wilds; and a dwarf who seems the greatest outcast of this small community, with nothing more than a goat he seems to have a more-than-natural affection for to his name. The two of them are openly derisive of each other, but Simon treats them both with equal equanimity.

Simon tormented (but mostly just mocked) by Satan.

The problem is that Simon’s level-headed compassion seems completely blind to the realities of his situation. When the people gather around his pillar and ask for a miracle, he says he can only offer prayers. A father, who has had both hands cut off due to thieving that he has since repented for, has his hands restored when Simon prays for him. The crowd seems to barely notice, though, and Simon’s mystical goodwill is wasted on a man who immediately uses his new hands to slap his child for asking too many questions. Even the priests, having witnessed a bona fide miracle, seem to take Simon’s pious gifts for granted. “Did you see that thing with the hands?” one asks. The other just shrugs, turning the conversation to bread.

In the immortal words of Uncle Ben, with great faith comes greater temptation, and  before long a new person shows up. She arrives to the wonder and befuddlement of the priests, who Simon mocks for being so easily tempted. The woman (Silvia Pinal), in a scandalous schoolgirl uniform, flashing gartered stockings under her short skirt, is quickly identified by Simon as Satan. His identification is greeted by the young woman turning into an old crone, who swears she will be back as she hobbles off into the desert to plot further temptations, Simon becoming the richest potential conquest.

Soon, in the movie’s only moment of outright comedy, a group of visiting priests stops to pray at the base of the pillar. One of the priests becomes possessed by Satan and begins cursing the church and blessing the demons. The priests respond with horror, counteracting each blasphemy with an opposite blessing. Well, that is, aside from some of the priests, who get so turned around in the rapid-fire exchange of blessings and curses that they end up repeating Satan’s blasphemies. In fact, Satan is so much more knowledgeable of their faith than they are that one priest turns to another mid-battle and asks what exactly it is they’re even blessing or condemning. The other priest, equally baffled, admits he has no idea.

Much of the movie is the interplay between Simon and this bewitching Satan, played with a freewheeling earnestness by Pinal, who manages to be bewitching at the same time she plays deeply on traditional catholic beliefs about sexuality and sin. She is the one glamorous thing in this ramshackle world, and as charmingly eccentric and sympathetic as Simon is, it’s her arrivals that become the bright spot of the movie. The second time she shows up, she’s dressed in white robes and a fake beard, carrying a lamb and pretending to be Jesus. Simon is almost thrown, but when he puts up resistance her patience breaks and she punts the lamb in frustration, throwing a temper tantrum befitting a toddler.

One of the more blasphemous, absurdists forms of temptation that visits Simon.

What’s interesting here is how petty the struggle over Simon’s soul seems to be. Simon has spent years atop this pillar, but it seems to have done little to help him. His deprivations have left him emaciated and filthy, the only thing he’s full of the doubts that gnawed at him and probably chased him up a pillar in the first place. At times it seems as indulgent as the petulant devil that pursues him and the populace who takes him for granted, a wealth of ritual that offers nothing more than a wall between him and the world of sin. Is what he does somehow harder than the priests and the people who live and struggle and suffer the day to day troubles? He seems sometimes to be better off, rewarded for his ‘suffering’ with food delivered to him every day and no obligations aside from standing there slowly going mad.

Eventually Satan comes a final time, this time not with offerings of temptation but with a final, powerful demand. She starts out effacing, mocking him with the fact that she is the only person around him who equals his faith in God. She is going to take him on a trip, she says, and suddenly a modern airliner swoops into frame and the two of them are gone. The movie cuts, abruptly, to a modern city and a 60s nightclub filled with people dancing to the music playing.

Simon and Satan, now made up in period-appropriate attire, sit and watch the teenagers writhe on the dance floor. Satan offers the knowledge that the teenagers are dancing something called “Radioactive Flesh,” and that it’ll be the last dance, bringing the apocalyptic symbolism that started the film around full circle with the apocalypse of the era, the nuclear inevitability that undoubtedly seemed as real as any faith in the mid-60s. He asks if he can leave, and Satan says that if he did he might find that he has been replaced by someone more pious in his absence. Simon, dejected, remains where he is as the film ends.

Simon, now with his hair trimmed and dressed in a sweater and turtleneck and carrying a pipe, is dressed like a parody of an intellectual from the time. What is most interesting with this coda (undoubtedly cobbled together due to the failure of funding) is how it recasts this rather timeless fable of faith in a modern context. Is the ascetic Simon of the desert the same person as the pretentious intellectual of the modern era? Is the comparison a cruel trick of Satan or Buñuel offering an equivalence argument relevant to modern audiences? If so, what does that say about Simon and his pursuit? Was his resolve for ultimate religious enlightenment through isolation as bad as the affectations and off-putting, presumptive superiority of the beatnik professor type he’s cast in at the end?

A much more existential perspective on the story at the very end. Budgetary necessity spawns narrative creativity.

What is obvious is that Simon’s final settling into the chair in the nightclub is Buñuel’s harshest critique of his pursuits. If he was truly uninterested in status, if this was indeed a fully selfless act, he would get up and leave immediately, starting from the beginning and in disgrace with no qualms or hesitation. But he doesn’t, he simply sits, and allows Satan the final victory over him, not one of temptation but of pointing out the faults that were already there, papered over by piousness.

What Simon of the Desert offers is a polemic not specifically against religion, but against the man-made institutions that would apply rules and rituals, concepts of inequality, to what is at heart an intellectual pursuit. Simon’s faults are the faults of organized religion, but they could as easily be the faults of nearly any pursuit big or small, and that’s where Buñuel’s evenhandedness really shines. He seems honestly sympathetic to Simon’s pursuits, if not his methods, understanding that it is human nature to want to take one’s strongest convictions to the extreme (as an often controversial filmmaker, how could he not know that intimately?) but that it is in itself a temptation to be avoided.

And what seems almost more interesting than the movie and it’s interpretations is that it exists at all. I can’t imagine such a nuanced look at faith and religion, done by someone who doesn’t even necessarily share those beliefs, existing in today’s world. Nonbelievers make films that act as all-out attacks on anything remotely faith-based, and the quality of ‘religious’ movies is either grotesquely simplistic fare like Passion of the Christ or preaching to the choir, evangelical morality tales (if you ever want to spend a few hours laughing at movie trailers, go look up movies like Seven Days in Utopia, or Courageous, or the hilarious The Life Zone). Buñuel is often a difficult director to appreciate, but a movie like Simon of the Desert manages to be as complex and refreshingly smart now as it was then. There simply isn’t much attempt made at this kind of conversation done through cinema.

But, as anyone who has followed the history of Ghibli knows, they are on the hunt for new talent to fill the mighty shoes of the aging director. Some experiments are successful and some aren’t. But they keep trying, and the most recent project is one that comes from a script (and supposed planning oversight) by Miyazaki, helmed by animator and first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi. So the big question is: how did the attempt work out? The answer, much to my relief, is a simple ‘beautifully.’

Arrietty adapts the story of Mary Norton’s novel The Borrowers, which most people probably know due to a live action Western adaptation in 1997. It’s the story of a family of miniature people, called Borrowers, who live inside the walls and under the floor of a house, getting by trying not to be seen by the human ‘beans’ and taking little bits here and there to live off of. The story of the first book, and of this movie, concerns the adventures of a young girl borrower who is spotted by a sickly boy human who arrived to rest in the small remote house.

It’s a simple enough story, reduced in Arrietty to the very basics of plot. Arrietty is young and fairly bold, in sharp contrast to her fearful, often-hysteric mother and her resolute, taciturn father. She has never known other borrowers, the last of the other families that had lived in the house having left long ago. The movie opens as she turns 14, on her first ‘borrowing,’ where her and her father head out into the house to gather things they need.

It’s here that she’s spotted by Shawn, who has come to live with his aunt to rest before an operation to try to cure an otherwise vague heart condition. Shawn and Arrietty are naturally curious about one another, but the borrower law states that if they’re seen they must flee before the humans come and do them harm, and Shawn’s behavior arouses the suspicions of Hara, his aunt’s maid, who has long suspected that something is living in the house and taking things and will stop at nothing to prove it.

What makes this adaptation work particularly well is how forcefully slowed down the story feels to suit the talents of Ghibli. The story has its antagonists and turns of plot, but most of it is simply existing in this detailed world. What Arrietty excels in is the quiet sense of long summer days and the small wonder of gardens and household objects made strange and beautiful by the scale Arrietty lives her world at. Many of the meetings between Shawn and Arrietty are soft, few words spoken, most of their communication done wordlessly.

And really, that’s what Studio Ghibli films have always excelled in. Their animation has always stressed a natural, impressionistic touch to humanity. Characters rarely overact for no reason, and when they do it only serves to contrast the small touches that highlight the skill of animation they bring to all their work. I can’t think of many animated films of any genre that can convey so much in how characters move or emote on their faces or in their eyes, but it has always been the shining truth of Ghibli’s work that has made them the respected name they are today.

And in Arrietty the animation has obviously not slouched. Still mostly eschewing digital augmentation of their work, the movie is resplendent with painted backgrounds, meticulous detail made to rendering a world that is made up of tiny things used as household objects (tiny teakettles dispense tea a giant drop at a time, stamps are hung up as paintings) but confident enough to let many of the brush strokes remain, giving the whole movie the feel of a pastoral European painting. The animation itself remains strong and fluid, with special care made to let it sit comfortably in this landscape world. The blending is superb, and the movie is a work of art in every frame.

That isn’t to say it doesn’t have its more visceral delights. The scale of the world gives Arrietty’s explorations a firm sense of adventure, with bugs that are scaled to the size of pets and nearly as cute, and real pets that are made the vast, dangerous creatures of the more mythic Ghibli films. A firm sense of comedy crops up at times, as well, with one memorable sequence involving a crow that is straight-up Disney inspired and the scheming maid Hara provides an almost slapstick level of physical comedy simply in the way she moves and emotes. In one of the more inspired voicing choices, in the American dub she’s voiced by Carol Burnett, who manages to make her exasperatingly meddlesome without making her into a real villain.

In fact, the dub is one of the usual solid jobs Disney has done in translating Ghibli’s films for American audiences. There’s a bit of renaming of characters that makes sense given the ambiguous setting, the kind of Japanese bent to Europe that only exists in a form of fantasy anime. Unfortunately, the only misstep is kind of a big one. Shawn, voiced in the US by actor David Henrie, simply isn’t up to the task of emoting the complicated situation that character is in. He’s a young man obsessed with beauty but convinced he’s about to die, resigned to the fact and living each day in a poetic obsession with beauty and death that is distinctly Japanese and is difficult to translate, much less act. It’s not a terrible job, but I know that role would work better expressed in a language where that character is almost stock in a certain type of meditative fiction.

Arrietty isn’t a terribly ambitious movie, content to be muted and effective in the grace those smaller intentions carry. But it is beautiful in doing it, a confident film that settles into the rhythms of childhood and wonder that so few films outside of Ghibli’s canon can seem to muster. In many ways, with its coming of age tale and focus on small family interactions, I was reminded most of My Neighbor Totoro, with similar modest aspirations and magical results. If that comparison seems grandiose, that’s because time has rendered Totoro‘s charms legendary due to esteem. Hiromasa Yonebayashi isn’t there yet, to be sure, and he has the script and supervision of Miyazaki backing him, but I doubt this movie could be any better handled in the master’s hands, and it deserves its spot as a wonderful entry into the history of the greatest animation film studio on earth.

Light Bondage is my attempt to rewatch the series and try to recapture some of what made these movies worthwhile. I might not always succeed (I’m looking at you, Roger Moore!) but in this biweekly series of articles we’re going to take a ride through the time capsule of the last half century with the world’s most famous spy/action star.

Thunderball (1965)

Somewhere about an hour and a half into this movie, during the six hundredth elaborately staged underwater sequence, near the climax of the film, I found me and my brother (who has never seen any of these movies and is joining me for this project at least until he gets sick of them) discussing maybe replacing the optical drive in his computer. That’s how interesting Thunderball is. And that’s me being nice. My other inclination would just be to call it interminable horseshit and end this piece now.

Thunderball was a movie that was originally going to be the first James Bond picture until a script dispute tied the production up in courts for years. I’m not sure what that movie would have looked like, but I can’t imagine them doing it with the kind of budget Dr. No had. Thunderball is a big, expensive, indulgent piece of cinema. How well you respond to that probably depends on what you’re looking for out of Bond movies.

There’s plenty of action, involving a plot by SPECTRE to steal some nuclear weapons through incredibly convoluted machinations and then to use said bombs not to actually commit any of the terrorist that seemingly makes up their charter, but to ransom the bombs back to the British government. This involves a spa where Bond is staying to keep tabs on SPECTRE, who under Bond’s nose sneak in a look-a-like of a NATO pilot also staying there to hijack the bombs for them. While there, they take the opportunity to try to assassinate Bond via malfunctioning spa equipment. No, really.

Finding good screencaps for this movie is really difficult, so instead enjoy these pretty good paintings that make this movie look cooler than it is.

Once Bond fails at getting anything done at the spa he ends up travelling to Nassau to try to find this now-dead NATO pilot’s sister, which involves a lot of bathing suits and diving sequences in the sunny Bahamas. A bunch of not particularly surprising twists and turns later, and Bond and a bunch of other agents/military forces are having a massive underwater battle and there are a bunch of sharks and shit and it’s ridiculous. Or it would be, if the movie wasn’t so damn boring.

Maybe it’s all the underwater stuff, which while technically impressive is ponderously slow as being in water typically is. Maybe it’s the script, without any memorable villains or Bond girls or elaborate death traps. Maybe it’s because Bond himself spends most of the movie being a witness to stuff happening but not really doing a whole lot. For a man of action, Bond is pretty passive in this whole movie when he’s not making quips and seducing women. Hell, he doesn’t even dispatch the villain in the end. He instead runs around, mostly shirtless, being typically smarmy and atypically wide-eyed about the events going on because the script dictates they must even if they don’t particularly make sense or involve the audience being invested in them.

And while a mindless action film has its place, technically Thunderball just doesn’t have it together enough to make that work. Maybe it’s just a relic of the 60s, but that undercranked action I’ve complained about the last two movies? Back with a vengeance, much to the detriment of the movie. In fact, even at the very end of the movie, which takes place on a runaway boat (something that it seems like they actually filmed going relatively fast for anyone who understands even at top speed boats aren’t exactly race cars) the film is sped up to the point of unfortunate, uninentional comedy. It simply won’t do, this haphazard manipulation of the movie. It’s a damn shame, because I feel in Thunderball‘s 130 minute run time is 90 minutes of decent movie. Not great movie, but certainly better than what we’ve been given. At this point I’m actually looking forward to Moore’s cartoony, ridiculous Bond. And that makes me genuinely sad.

This scene actually happens off-screen in the movie, which is kind of unfortunate because it looks great in someone's head!

The Theme Song/Opening Titles:
This is the part where I talk about how much I like Tom Jones. Maybe it’s a childhood raised on oldies, but Jones is like the Shatner of music (well, actually, Shatner is the Shatner of music, but let’s not split hairs) in that it’s hard to tell if his earnest confidence is knowingly ironic or completely genuine. But either way, his music is awesome and despite “Thunderball” making absolutely no sense when you listen to it Jones sings for the fences in a song that’s so full of gusto that Jones reportedly nearly fainted on the final note. Outside of that, it’s just some naked swimming ladies, so … you know, typical stuff. Though rewatching it after watching the movie itself, I’m getting underwater tedium flashbacks, which is decidedly unfortunate.

Most Ridiculous Gadget:
In the now-required contextless cold open action sequence after killing a villain and running away from a hail of gunfire, Bond finds himself on the roof where there is stowed a convenient rocket belt which he uses to fly down to the car below. It’s silly, and not at all practical, but the reason it makes this list is because it is an actual, functioning thing. Given all the almost-plausible gadgets that aren’t real in these movies, it’s perfect that the space age jetpack is the one that is totally real.

Bond Girl Award for Most Thankless Role:
There is no notable Bond girl in this movie. Sure, there are some women, and I guess if I had to pick one I’d pick Claudine Auger as Domino Derval, who ends up helping Bond and double-crossing the bad guy whose name I can’t even be bothered to remember. But she is notable only insofar as she was voiced by Nikki van der Zyl, who also voiced Honey Ryder in Dr. No. Which shows just how little regard for making distinct women characters these movies are getting. Seriously, nobody wins this award. We are all losers.

Best Bondickery:
Bond is in some sort of automatic traction machine to help stretch his back, strapped down by one of the therapists at this spa he’s staying at. Bond has already hit on her, only to be firmly rebuffed. This is a woman who is not interested in Bond at all, seemingly. She leaves him in peace for 15 minutes, and during that time a SPECTRE agent comes in and cranks up the machine, supposedly stretching him to death or something? I don’t know, it’s stupid.

Cheesecake picture? Sure. But you're going to think it's REALLY gross after the next paragraph!

Anyway, Bond passes out and is pulled out of the machine before he can get pulled to death by the machine by this woman, who is shocked that it could malfunction in such a way. Bond, aware that this was a SPECTRE attempt, doesn’t bother informing her of this but instead let’s her believe she nearly killed him. Then, as she starts worrying about the kinds of lawsuits and whatnot she could be facing, Bond suggests that instead of getting fired or going to jail or whatever that she just have sex with him right then and there. AND SHE DOES! So now our hero has gone from womanizing to straight up coercion. Which is a really thin line in movies like these, I know, but this one is just … ugh. I was genuinely angry watching this play out, and then get disregarded as just another conquest before more movie happens.

Ugh. I cannot repeat ugh enough, because that’s how this bullshit makes me feel.

Ugh.

JAMES BOND will return in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

Today’s piece continues to look at the work of Paul Thomas Anderson. Anderson, coming off of the critical success but commercial struggles of Magnolia, decided to switch gears entirely. He announced that his next movie was going to only be 90 minutes long, and that he was going to work with an actor that he was a big fan of: Adam Sandler.

Wait, what?

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Before we talk about this movie, let’s talk about Adam Sandler. I’m not going to pretend to play nice: I feel like Sandler’s career has mostly been a waste of everyone’s time. Sure, everyone was on board when Happy Gilmore came out, but looking back on it out it presents the same easy jokes that have exhausted most of his good will. And sure, he’s bankable box office draw still, but you get the impression that he’s happy to repackage the same abrasive man-children and juvenile gags over and over again.

It’s fairly clear he has a type of role that he mostly sticks to, as well. They’re downtrodden leading men, usually not quite schlubby but a stone’s throw away. They’re almost all universally a bit too naive for their own good, with a propensity for child-like sweetness and a constant proclivity for getting taken advantage of. In that way, they are true underdogs, beat up by the world. Yet when the script calls for big acting, almost every character is capable of ridiculous outbursts of wanton aggression. This is usually where many of the physical comedy gags come from, don’t worry too much about how uncharacteristic many of these outbursts can be.

So, given all that, what’s so amazing about Punch-Drunk Love isn’t that it plays against type–the typical example of a stereotyped light actor getting an ‘art’ role–but how it is truly and fully an Adam Sandler film. The difference comes in the care with which the world is constructed to allow this ridiculous character, not that different than all of its predecessors, to exist. It’s a love letter to Sandler’s entire career, constructed to allow him to make that role soar higher and achieve more than it ever had in more mundane films. And despite my general apathy for what Sandler’s selling, here it absolutely and totally works.

The movie starts out with Sandler’s character Barry Egan. He works at a company that sells stuff, mostly toilet plungers it would seem. But when we first meet him, he’s at work hours early, sitting alone in a big room in a small desk calling the help line of Healthy Choice foods. They have a promotion going on, see, and Egen’s the type of guy who reads all the fine print on everything. He thinks he’s found a loop-hole in their promotion that would net him a million frequent flyer miles for a song, and feels like he should check with them before trying to exploit it. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

The sense of space in this movie is strangely subjective. Everything is just slightly bigger and more imposing.

Barry’s neuroses go much deeper than that, even. He’s always dressed in the same blue suit, always finding an excuse why he felt the need to dress up. He’s a man seemingly unable to break routine. When a car accident near his workplace drops a harmonium on the street, he runs from it like the apes running from the monolith in 2001. Yet like them, he is unable to not fall victim to his curiosity, and brings it into the shop where he receives a thousand questions about why its there and evades all of them with a mumbling passiveness.

We quickly realize that Barry’s problems undoubtedly stem from the seven sisters who all walk all over him. He is the classic emasculated man, writ large by sheer volume, beaten down to the point where he politely answers sisters who have already hung up on him when they call, over and over, an attack squadron doing strafing runs against his ego. When he shows up at a party, he enters only to hear them talking amongst themselves about how he’s probably gay. When they realize he’s there, they don’t stop, they just start teasing him about it. It’s awkward and uncomfortable, watching him get torn apart by his family with such nonchalant savagery.

Barry responds to this with his normal quiet cheerfulness, though you can watch during the party as it all starts to unravel. It’s a string of tension, somewhere underneath the cheerful facade, and during the course of the constant chatter critical of him and his clothes and his job and his romantic life, he slowly boils over. A critical point is hit, and he flies into a rage, shattering several glass doors. His sisters’ response is to immediately start berating him.

Barry's ridiculous points-exploiting plan involves more pudding than should ever be gathered in one place.

Barry goes home and ends up calling a phone sex line, partially for companionship but undoubtedly in response to these efforts to undermine him. In full vulnerability mode. He ends up handing the woman on the line all of his personal information and suddenly becomes the victim of extortion, getting threatening calls when he cancels his credit card demanding money. When he hangs up the phone in fear again and again, they perceive it as a challenge and send a bunch of guys to rough him up.

As this is happening he meets the woman of his dreams, Lena (Emily Watson). She’s interested in him and seemingly okay with his eccentricities. She’s traveled the world in that old-fashioned way that signifies someone with a deeper, stranger understanding of the world. She seems to recognize his proclivity for losing his cool; when he tears apart the bathroom at the restaurant they’re in and they’re kicked out, she only worries insofar as his hand is bleeding, acting as if nothing happened when they end up out on the street. He is hopelessly taken with her, maybe the first time he’s taken with anyone. When she takes off to Hawaii for a business trip, he follows her on a whim, in part to escape the thugs that showed up threatening to beat him up but also out of pure romantic impulse.

What’s most interesting about this story isn’t necessarily its content, which isn’t necessarily all that extreme, but how well its integrated into this character. It’s a story with wild swings in tone, from an offbeat slice of life comedy about a man whittled away at by the world around him (maybe in the vein of Woody Allen, even, though far less nihilistic) to a romantic comedy that borders on the screwball comedies of the 30s/40s. Not quite in terms of rapid-fire clip and big gag set-pieces, but in the sense that nearly anything could happen and that the story has wandered firmly into uncharted waters. And would you believe it? A sense of the unknown and eschewing genre formula does wonders for investment in the story that unfolds.

The harmonium that literally falls at his feet, setting Barry's adventure into motion.

And this is truly Sandler’s movie, turning his two-sided manchild character into something genuinely unbalanced and a little bit dangerous. He’s sympathetic when he’s being torn down and when he sits there and just takes what the world dishes out, but when he explodes it’s genuinely more scary than it is cathartic or hilarious. There is the firm sense that this is a man who needs help, who could end up doing something he could seriously regret. In one notable example, the men sent to rough him up run into his car, injuring Lena. Barry, picking up a tire iron, just tears through the men who he had earlier fled from, picking them apart with a scary efficiency. It quickly ceases to be cute or a moment you can fully cheer for.

The film’s heightened reality that Anderson brings to a movie, and the skill with which he wraps stories around characters who dance on the tightrope of genius or failure, elevate Sandler into a star of his own making. It’s a bit like a magic trick, watching an actor I actively dislike put in a situation that turns him into someone I am compelled to watch; where every quirk of his becomes part of the world, texture to a story that unfolds with all the surety of a director of Anderson’s talents. Punch-Drunk Love is probably the best thing Sandler will ever do, and it’s a lighthearted and fun diversion from the serious film making Anderson is most known for. Yet it undoubtedly bears his stamp, and it’s uniqueness only underlines his considerable talents.

After last week’s giant effort in tackling all those Hanzo movies, I figured it’d be a nice change of pace to not only go to something smaller, but something I’ve seen. Today’s movie was one that I watched a few years ago and remembered really loving. An obvious choice, then, for this project? Well, yes and no.

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

Two lovers, a man and a woman, plan to kill the woman’s husband. He just so happens to also be the man’s boss. The man, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) has an efficient, elegant plan. He uses a rope and hook to climb from his balcony up to his boss’ without being seen. There, he shoots his boss and arranges the room to look like a suicide, climbing back down just in time to intercept one his his business associates in his own office. The perfect plan, except that when he and his friend leave the room at the end of the day together he remembers he left the hook dangling on the balcony. Racing inside, he slips unnoticed into the elevator just in time for the superintendent to shut down the elevator and the building for the weekend, trapping Julien inside.

What would be the entire plot of another movie is the first 15 minutes of Louis Malle’s debut film, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. The movie itself is an interesting straddling of the line between film noir and the not-quite-formed concept of French New Wave cinema, the plot wrapped up in concepts about self-destruction and deep expansive social ennui that emerged out of the latter genre when it broke out large several years later. But historical context aside, Elevator offers plenty to dig into here for a first-time director, even despite how conventional the base story can be.

Julien’s car, which he had just about driven off in before remembering that he left evidence, is stolen by a young thief Louis and his girlfriend Veronique. They drive off, looting through his car where they find the gun he used and a small spy camera. Their theft goes unnoticed, but the car is spotted driving away with a young woman inside by Florence Carala, the woman Julien was absconding away with. Florence (Jeanne Moreau) begins to try to piece together just what happened to Julien, as she worries whether he ran off with another woman or if something bad had happened to him in the murder attempt.

The crime scene, seen through the peephole of the door locked from the inside.

The plot here splits off into three separate places. The first, and most obvious one, is Julien’s struggle to get out of the elevator without having to alert any authorities. This also involves dealing with a patrolling night watchman and trying to climb up and down the elevator shaft, all mostly in vain. It’s a claustrophobic, isolated pot boiled threat of plot, but it is also easily the most conventionally noir. It is most interesting in opposition to the other two threads of story, more than in and of itself. If this was the entirety of the movie, it would simply be a curiosity more than a movie worthy of remembrance or discussion.

The second plot involves Louis and Veronique racing off in Julien’s stolen car. This is the most New Wave of the three stories, young lovers supposedly being pursued, trying to live as much life as they can in the limited time they’ve got. This same plot, expanded of course and with the elaboration of new concepts of how to shoot a movie, forms the basis of the first landmark New Wave film Breathless just two years later. Louis and Veronique manage to race an older German couple in France on vacation, and the two groups end up meeting in a hotel and throwing an impromptu party. Louis pretends to be Julien, which the German man sees right through but is seemingly ambivalent about. Later that night, Louis tries to steal the German’s car for beating him in their race, and when the German tries to stop him shoots both of them with Julien’s gun.

This is obviously the most self-destructive of the three, as Louis and Veronique both realize what they’re doing at each step is going to be their undoing but don’t really seem to care much about the consequences. They are living in the moment, and that’s seemingly enough to override any sense of danger or consequence. This kind of brash, impulse hero is about to litter French cinema for the next decade, but here it is tempered by a sense of conventional moral storytelling. After they murder the tourists, Veronique decides that rather than go to prison they should kill themselves so nobody can separate them, and the two of them swallow a bottlefull of pills in an attempted suicide.

This type of scene is probably one of the most uniformly French New Wave images in all of cinema.

The final story, though, is what really stands out in this movie. Jeanne Moreau’s jilted conspiratorial murderess Florence spends the night wandering the streets of Paris, trying to figure out what happened to her lover without giving too much away about what they had done. Moreau, slowly dissolving from carefully made up typical cinematic beauty to a more natural, careworn version of a woman on film than is usually seen, fills these quieter, more nuanced scenes with the power of an actress who knows how to do much with very little.

Malle went on to make The Lovers with Moreau after this, which catapulted her to stardom (and will undoubtedly show up in this series sooner or later), but that magic is here already. This is certainly a more feminist approach to women on film than noir or French cinema often showed before this, or even regularly showed after. She is proud and confident, carefully maintaining a sense of propriety and elegance even when she starts looking more and more frazzled, bags under her eyes and hair disarray from a night spent out in the city. And it’s her that provides the thread that unites the other two stories again into a cohesive ending, bringing every event back around with a startling tidiness and finality that gives the movie a final, fatalistic kick.

I started this article out by talking about how much I liked it the first time around, and upon revisiting it three years and nearly a thousand movies later I mostly stand by that, but my appreciation of it is muted by the acknowledgement that a third of it is simply okay, and that it works better as an example of era transition in cinema than it does as a great movie in its own right. Not that that’s in any way bad, mind you, but it’s a different kind of appreciation. Either way, it’s absolutely worth watching on either level, entertaining and beautiful.

The best part of the movie, by far, is also the quietest.

Oh, and I almost forgot! The soundtrack is by Miles Davis. Which doesn’t have much bearing on the film itself but is a masterful performance nonetheless. I’d be a monster not to mention it, as it’s the kind of thing worth seeing the movie for alone. The soundtrack is mournful and amazingly powerful for a movie that would typically call for a more conventional composition. Elevator to the Gallows absolutely has the best trumpet in film. Sorry, spaghetti western fanfares.

Pina is the story of Pina Bausch, a German dancer who rose to prominence in the 1970s as one of the landmark performers and choreographers in her field. Or, at least, it would have been, but shortly before Wim Wenders was to begin his documentary about Pina Bausch she was diagnosed with a cancer that rapidly killed her. Wenders was going to cancel the production, but the collaborators and students of Pina instead requested they go ahead anyway, and change the direction of the movie. And thus, Pina was born.

Pina is barely a documentary, then, in the sense that it tells almost no story. The movie instead is composed of various performances of the work both of Pina and of her students done in tribute to her, both on the stage and out in the world, segueing one into the other without much in the way of formal rhyme or reason. In between, those people she worked with offer up a thought, or a memory, or a final message to their friend and teacher. Often these are played as voiceover on the face of whoever is speaking simply looking into the camera, a fitting way of emoting for people who express entirely through physicality. Some of them say nothing at all, only looking and reacting into the camera.

The performances are all in a modern style, fairly informal and wrought with emotion and physical exertion, sometimes absurd and sometimes frightening and sometimes very sad. As I said earlier, I’m not even vaguely informed, so I cannot speak to the quality of any of the work, but I don’t feel like that particularly matters. What Pina presents is people performing their craft, packaged in a way it never quite would be on stage, for us to experience and reflect on and enjoy. I feel like subjective opinions about ‘quality’ at that point fall at the wayside due to the power of the larger picture.

Pina is the kind of tribute that only artists would offer to another artist. It is painters of movement and temporary grace, trying to translate their craft into another medium where it will live on and can be shared with others. It’s through their performances, their movements and constructions and emotions, that they both honor and say goodbye to someone who touched three generations of dancers. In one of the later sequences, all three generations take up the same roles, cutting between the youngest and the oldest and those in-between, throwing out any sense of time or structure for the truth that through all of her life, the art remained unchanged and singularly worthy.

Thus I struggle to really offer what would pass for criticism. This is a very personal film, and I feel it would be rude in the extreme to try to box it into prior conceptions of what a movie should or shouldn’t be. Besides, it is at its heart barely a movie, a performance piece that serves to instruct through doing more than telling. In that way, I can’t outright recommend it to anyone, though I found it very beautiful and touching. I would recommend anyone watch the trailer, and decide if that interests them. The movie is not much different than that, what you’re being sold is exactly what you’re getting. But it’s barely for audiences, shared only as tribute, and I feel like that makes it somewhat removed from the normal concerns of this type of film.

I will speak, however, to the 3D. As one might expect, the 3D in Pina is truly amazing, providing a depth and reality to the spaces on screen and the bodies that inhabit them that is absolutely additive to the quality of the film. This is only the third film I’ve seen that I would say argues positively for the worth of 3D past its use as a gimmick, but it might indeed be the strongest. I can’t imagine the performances being shown working nearly as well without the sense of depth, the necessary translation between the immediacy and reality of live performance on stage and the demands of the package of the cinema. So if you have any interest in seeing it, go see it now while you can still see it presented properly.

Note on reviews: I try not to spoil what I would consider major plot revelations in any of my reviews, but I do like to talk about movies in a way that would be meaningful to someone who has seen the film. Thus, assume there are probably more spoilers than you’d find in, say, the trailer for any given film.

I have a love/hate relationship with horror movies. They are the genre that probably got me into movies, something I would devour endlessly as a child and young teen, up late at night nearly every weekend to watch bad horror movies on cable stations. As I grew up, though, horror seemed to mostly lose its appeal. Part of it was that I saw the seams more, understood the formula. Part of it was the rise of the post-modern slasher with Scream, that mocked the thing I grew up loving while still carrying it on with the same basic formula. Part of it was the rise of ‘extreme’ horror, which is fine enough but never touched me in the same way.

I had more or less given up on being ‘into horror’ until two years ago when I sat down and put on a disc that someone had recommended. That movie was House of the Devil, from director Ti West. And that movie singlehandedly reminded me why I love horror movies. So it was with no small mount of hype that I walked into his latest movie, another horror movie by the name of The Innkeepers. Would this movie achieve the same magic? Would it remind me what I love about the genre? And better yet, would it be equally genius in how subtle its scares were?

The Innkeepers is the story of two employees of the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a run down hotel that is seeing its last weekend in business. The employees, Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) spend most of their time being shiftless and hanging out together. But they’re also deeply interested in ghosts, specifically the ghost that supposedly haunts the Yankee Pedlar of a woman who died there long, long ago. They are spending this last weekend, with the boss out of town and the rooms mostly empty, making one last pass with their recorder to try to catch some evidence of the ghost before the whole place is closed off and torn down.

The trick of The Innkeepers is the trick of many of the classics of horror: for most of the movie, nothing at all happens. The movie spends a lot of time just living with Claire and Luke. Claire obviously looks up to Luke, who is painfully obviously into Claire despite her ignorance. Luke tries his best to act cool, building a website about their hotel and its resident ghost and telling a vaguely fake-sounding story about how he once encountered the ghost, told over them sitting in an otherwise empty hotel dining room eating lunch. The entire first third of the movie, almost utterly scare free outside of some fairly obvious and tongue-in-cheek jump scares, is devoid of anything remotely resembling horror, instead just putting us in the world of these two people, almost entering the realm of indie romcom, aimless 20-somethings and their frustrated ambitions.

A person who comes into this movie expecting a scare a minute is, at this point, going to be very disappointed. But what this movie remembers, and so many often forget, is that making likable characters matters. Claire and Luke are protagonists that you want to see be happy and figure their shit out. You kind of hope they achieve their stated goals of seeing their ghost, but at the same time genuinely don’t want them to pay the price that that will probably cost them. It is something almost wholly forgotten in horror storytelling, the idea that maybe, just maybe, if you give a single shit about the people in the story they won’t just be bodies to annoy and then die, but people you empathize with. As much as I appreciate the rest of the movie, it’s those scenes that endear it to me.

Of course, things do go bad, and slowly the hotel begins to turn more and more terrible as their investigations continue. Anyone with any experience in horror knows how these scenes go, and the movie plays out respectful of the fact that this is probably not your first movie. Many of the obvious scares don’t pay off, and it serves to only ratchet up the tension. Ti West knows, better than seemingly any horror director I’ve ever seen, that a movie is at its scariest when something should happen and doesn’t. Long shots of hallways that do nothing. Rounding corners to see that nobody’s there. Opening doors into empty rooms that stay empty even when you flick on the light or cut to a shot of the protagonist. Horror movies are like sex: the payoff is good, sure, but the foreplay is what really matters.

This is helped with seemingly no interest in CG and some amazing sound work. Much of the scares are atmospheric, an old run down hotel with characters holding a microphone and wearing a headset to record paranormal activity. The way that the movie puts us in the sounds they hear, recorded or not, and how it seamlessly transitions between the two is a marvel of sound design. They say 80% of a jump scare is in the sound, but that’s also true of the long stretches of dread, the moments where nothing happens but the noises and the music combine to give the palpable sense that something is or will soon be very wrong.

So when the ghosts do arrive, extremely late into the movie, it’s almost a sense of relief. The movie is the slow build of pressure, unbearably so at times, and I often found myself cringing in my seat and trying very hard to fight the urge not to look. But of course I had to look, because looking away would be just as bad, not knowing or seeing the danger that I knew lurked around every corner. By the time the hand was fully tipped, it was with a palpable sense of relief. Ghosts might be frightening, but once they’re seen they’re quantifiable. The nothings become somethings, and that’s always much easier to cope with than the great, evocative question mark.

Needless to say I think The Innkeepers is a pretty good movie, and maybe even a great haunted house movie the likes of which only seem to show up every few years (I’d count The Others, or arguably The Orphanage as the last great one). It does what it does very well, with a relentless ramping up of tension that is only rivaled by West’s prior feature. The Innkeepers isn’t The House of the Devil, to be clear, it never reaches the same highs but it also doesn’t have such ridiculous camp moments. It’s a more even film, wonderful in its own unassuming way.

We continue with Paul Thomas Anderson, who, post Boogie Nights found himself offered essentially a blank check by New Line, who had made all sorts of money by backing his last picture. Given final cut of whatever he produced without even a concrete idea being made, Paul Thomas Anderson went off to create on his own terms without supervision. Which really explains how we ended up with

Magnolia (1999)

For the first fifteen minutes of Magnolia, we are tossed into a headspace and left to sink or swim in it. An unidentified narrator talks about coincidence as he presents three historical examples of extreme, elaborate moments of contrivance. You know, the point where the universe comes together to seemingly make the impossible possible. Call it fate, call it random chance, but that’s what we’re presented with in rapid-fire, breathless narration before the movie spins out into the present, introducing an array of characters in a number of complicated situations. It is watertight cinematic exposition, but there’s just so much of it, landing like a brick right at the front of the movie.

Magnolia is a movie about people, namely a bunch of people all spread out across the San Fernando Valley on one fateful but otherwise innocuous day. Naming them all and their backgrounds would take up nearly the average size of one of these articles all by themselves, so let’s just run down some of the notables: John C Reilly plays a Dudley Do-Right style police officer, all earnestness and romanticism. Philip Baker Hall plays the host of a long-running quiz show, recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. William H. Macy plays a down and out spokesperson who has spent his life trading on his name as the record holder for child contestant on the aforementioned quiz show. Julianne Moore plays the young trophy wife of a dying Jason Robards, tended to in his last hours by Phillip Seymour Hoffman who plays a hospice nurse. And Tom Cruise plays a motivational spokesperson selling wildly misogynistic seduction techniques through infomercials and seminars.

Whew. Okay. Still in board? Yeah, I know, I didn’t give anybody names. Trust me, if I bothered to do that we’d never be able to reduce this to a manageable thing.

Philip Baker Hall has less to do than many other actors, but manages to steal his scenes anyway.

Anyway, John C Reilly ends up meeting and falling for Philip Baker Hall’s daughter, who’s a drug addict who hates her father and seems primed for self-destruction before Reilly knocks on her door for a loud argument she had had earlier when her father came to tell her she’s dying. She rushes to flush her cocaine and ends up having him over for coffee. Reilly, ignorant in a dumb, sweet way, ends up saving her through sheer optimism. Macy’s character is sunk into a deep depression, constantly running out of money, constantly trying to catch the eye of a bartender at the bar he visits every day. He’s a man of great emotion left alone to stew in it, looking for an outlet. Tom Cruise’s character, in the course of an interview given while the events of the film take place, is revealed to be the long-lost son of Robards’ dying patriarch, abandoned at 14 by his father to take care of his mother as she was dying of cancer. Robards’ dying wish is to see his son, but Cruise has been living under a fake history to build his media empire around for years.

If this all sounds exhausting that’s because it is. Magnolia belongs to the rare breed of modern epics that focus not on scope, or of time, but of the tapestry of characters. You know the type: Best Picture controversy Crash and fever dream Rock vehicle Southland Tales are almost among this type, and bear no small resemblance to Magnolia. This is better than both of those movies, made with a typical sense of restraint and skill, with an eye to coaxing amazing performances out of every single one of the dozen or so major characters in the movie. But that doesn’t change its innate nature, which feels at times like trying to watch three movies at once.

In fact, the skill with which Anderson directs his movies might actually prove to be a big drawback to this kind of film, as Magnolia’s stories are so walled off in tone that it really does feel like you’re watching separate stories instead of a big, sprawling story with many threads. You know that eventually lines will cross and combine, because that’s the kind of story it presents itself as from the outset, but the structure of the film makes that idea seem forced. It’s strange, as Anderson is coming off of a movie that blends stories so seamlessly, but Boogie Nights was a singular story with a singular thread of theme and development. Magnolia, adhering so stridently to this idea of coincidence, goes out of its way to keep its threads running on just different enough timetables to not give the whole a similar momentum.

This isn’t to say Magnolia isn’t without its central focus. Far from it, in fact. Not only does it explore the nature of coincidence and connectedness that this sub-sub-sub genre of drama is known for, but it happens to a particularly well-rounded look at regret and failed relationships, especially those between parents and children. Sure, there’s a strange over-reliance upon cancer as a central theme, but the various degrees to which long-standing grudges and tragedies and betrayals are laid bare by death are examined in a surprising amount of nuance. Not everyone gets catharsis, and some that do end up realizing they didn’t want it. In that respect, Magnolia is a triumph of theme. It feels like a complete, well-rounded statement.

My reaction while watching Magnolia.

It’s not really a problem, then, to admit that I don’t particularly like Magnolia. It doesn’t particularly matter that it’s the best version of this type of movie I’ve seen when I just don’t like this type of movie. The various things it tries to do are commendable, and I don’t doubt the skill with which they’re executed, but it’s too much and I end up feeling totally disassociated with the movie. I’d much rather have watched nearly any of the various plots as its own, separate movie. Sure, it probably wouldn’t have been as ambitious, but I also wouldn’t have felt browbeaten by the weight of the film.

Part of this has to do with the star power behind the film, too. Anderson’s a director that seems to thrive on big pictures pinned upon the power and charisma of a single actor. That actor can be one of the greatest working today (Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood) or not actually that great of an actor (Mark Wahlberg), but it seems to be his greatest gift. Everyone else becomes ensemble, for better or worse, and that’s just how his movies seem to all be constructed. Well, aside from Magnolia, that is, that seems to have all stars and no supporting characters. Maybe that’s part of the exhaustion. Everyone is coded cinematically as the lead. Which might do wonders for realism where everyone is mostly on the same small, egocentric page, but on film it simply demands too much of the audience. Pick a star, stick with it.

Which leads me to what I really want to talk about, which is Tom Cruise. I’ve never really been a hater of Cruise, who has managed to work with some of the best directors in history despite being fairly limited as an actor. He’s always had star presence, but when forced to ‘act’ usually falls back on a certain primness and stony-faced intensity to try to carry scenes. Anderson, or Cruise, but probably both smartly avoid that here: Cruise’s character is a loud, energetic huckster of a sham of a man. He peddles his strange self-help seduction/actualization techniques in the most gross, juvenile language, a precursor to every bro-y asshole that arose in the decade after the movie.  Yet buried behind all that, coming out slowly over the course of the entire movie, mostly revealed in evaded questions and small gestures and looks, is a wounded kid who is still running from his childhood, covering up his traumas with a lot of swagger and a torrent of slick words. It’s a smart piece of character work, sad and hateful and ultimately sympathetic (if still maybe a bit unforgivable) and it is easily Cruise’s best performance to date.

Best part of the movie? I'm as surprised as you.

When I think about Magnolia in a way that allows me to neatly sum it up I’m kind of at a loss, honestly. It’s a good film, probably a great film–in fact Anderson says he doubts he will ever top it and considers it his masterpiece–but I just can’t quite get on board. It’s a strange thing to ‘get’ and appreciate everything a film does and still not feel any sort of engagement with it. But, well, there it is. It’s not a bad conclusion, but it’s a messy one suited to an equally messy film. The best I can say is it asks more and strives for more than many directors try to do their entire careers. That, at least, is fully and truly a wonderful thing, no matter what anyone who struggles with it will say.

Formality out of the way? Good. Let’s get serious. Today we’re going to do something a little different. Remember when I said last week I was going to take a break from the relentlessly arthouse fare and pick something with some pulp sensibilities? Well, I did.

In fact, I succeeded beyond my wildest imagination. In fact, it’s quite possible I went way too far in the other direction. But what’s done is done, and instead of talking about one movie today I have a whole series of ridiculous nonsense to talk about. I was originally going to do these as three separate articles, but realized that that would probably be the death of me (and certainly test the limits of your patience). Instead you get what follows, for better or worse. So let’s not delay in getting right to it

Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice (1972) /
Hanzo the Razor: The Snare (1973) /
Hanzo the Razor: Who’s Got the Gold? (1974)

I don’t even know how to introduce the historical context of Hanzo the Razor. But I’m going to give you the crash course, because it’s the key to understanding the what and why of these movies. In the early 70s, Japan’s movie industry (and indeed the whole country) was being quickly overrun by Western culture, which had spent a decade of counterculture to double down on a new paradigm of films that pushed the envelope, be it the sexually liberated, loose moral films of the counterculture, or the fascist ultra-violent response of the establishment in movies such as Dirty Harry.

And in the middle, a flood of exploitation cinema, including 1971′s hit Shaft, which was a studio riffing on a more extreme movie (in this case Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song) in order to appeal to audiences who wanted to see sex, violence, and stickin’ it to the man on screen in an easily digestible, palatable way. In fact, Shaft was–along with Sweet Sweetback–the precursor to a sudden explosion of blaxploitation cinema. Which I can only imagine found its way over to Japan.

Japan in the 70s was finding itself in a similar state. There was a deep sense that traditional Japanese culture was quickly being lost in the deluge of foreign interests. Japan’s economy exploded, turning it into one of the greatest capitalist powers on the planet. But that rapid expansion came with it concerns about what this money was doing to the integrity of its people and its government. Like the US, Japan was primed for media to ride counter-culture sentiment, and it’s upon that demand that Hanzo the Razor arrived on the screen.

Hanzo the Razor is a character developed by Kazuo Koike, a manga writer whose works also include the famous Lone Wolf and Cub. The character was developed for film by Shintaro Katsu’s Katsu Productions, which opened as a studio opposed to the traditional, floundering Japanese studios. Katsu was best known for his role as Zatoichi, star of a series of popular (if low key) samurai movies. With Zatoichi stalled in the early 70s, Katsu decided to adapt Koike’s more extreme works, with his brother starring in a Lone Wolf and Cub adaptation and Katsu himself taking on the role of Hanzo. Where Lone Wolf and Cub pushed the boundaries of violence, Hanzo pushed a much broader, moral agenda.

Hanzo the Razor is the nickname for Hanzo Itami, police inspector during Japan’s Edo period. Hanzo is a prototypical ‘cop who doesn’t play by the rules,’ the kind of fascist moral arbiter of the type of Dirty Harry. He exists as a man of greater honor than tradition, who upholds right even when it means going against his superiors. It is an anachronistic character to the core, derisive of samurai traditions that ruled Japan at that time and openly mocking of fundamental concepts like loyalty to one’s superiors and honor-bound concepts like hara-kiri. The traditional honorable samurai heroes are treated with open derision: a master swordsman who would probably be the hero of a Kurosawa piece hounds Hanzo for a duel the entire second film. At the end, Hanzo cuts him down mostly out of annoyance at his persistence, and leaves him to die in the street, the city folk walking around him like he was little more than trash.

Hanzo spends all three movies clearing out various forms of corruption within the government, from human trafficking to embezzlement of treasury funds. It’s a very modern sensibility towards its subject matter, tackling the kinds of things you’d see in a police procedural. And Hanzo, like a modern police officer of the genre, acts by his own higher sense of morality. He has two felons in his employ that are his comedic relief sidekicks, treating them as part gofer part slave, reminding them of their debt to him every time they try to object to another ridiculous assignment. He’s openly derisive of his boss (who manages to be one of the funniest characters in all three movies), a simpering coward of a man who kowtows to his superiors and is always looking to make some money on the side.

This happens. More than once.

In two separate movies Hanzo pretends to commit ritual suicide, once claiming he did it before showing up, his wrap stained red with blood he painted on in order to frighten his enemies. The other time, after a berating by his superior, he pulls out his sword and cuts into his belt right there, everyone watching on in amazement as Hanzo reaches into the gash in his abdomen and throws what they think are his guts at them. It turns out, to their amazement, to be chunks of watermelon. It’s the kind of anti-authoritarianism that would be unheard of in an actual genre piece, and speaks to the genre blend these movies strive for.

Historical context is again necessary here, as in the Edo period police were considered far beneath the samurai and Shogunate offices, meant mostly to keep the commoners in line, necessary grunt work intended for men of low honor. Police officers were often wildly corrupt or incompetent, prone to terrorizing the populace they were charged to protect. Hanzo is again the exception in his vehement opposition to all forms of corruption, going so far as to subject himself to the tortures the police use on suspects so he can gain a greater understanding of what they go through. These tortures are elaborate and bloody, to boot: Hanzo’s body is covered in scars, and he regularly pushes himself beyond the endurance of normal men.

The whole trilogy plays out with a sense of stylism for its setting and violence that speaks to its sometimes buried tongue-in-cheek satire of the genres it blends together. Hanzo is introduced in the first film in a cold open like a blaxploitation hero, filled with split screen that exists nowhere else in the trilogy and a funk soundtrack at odds with the quiet Edo setting. Enemies bleed with the liquid ferocity of a leaky water balloon, the kind of B-grade schlock that Tarantino referenced and lovingly mocked in Kill Bill Volume 1. These movies, presentation wise, are a weird cultural blend that just highlights the faults of both the traditional cinematic presentation of the era it purports to be about and the emerging genres that its hero takes to their ultimate extremes.

With me so far? Good, because here’s where it gets weird. You see, Hanzo the Razor hits those extremes through going so far in a particular direction that you might lose the plot right here, because what we have so far is a pop criticism against the usually stoic, grave jidaigeki genre of samurai films that were historically Japans most famous cinematic product. But in reality Hanzo’s goals as a character and series go way deeper than that, and it aims for much more focused, more complex targets. You see, Hanzo’s parody goes deeper than just pointing out how silly the self-serious films it comes out of are, it has plenty to say about the twisted psychology that those films seem to firmly take for granted.

Hanzo is always a relentless badass, to the point of caricature.

Not only does Hanzo subject himself to tortures to sympathize with the victims, but he’s seen getting visibly aroused by it. He brushes it off, but the sadomasochistic bent goes even greater. Hanzo is seen, post-conditioning, putting his penis on a wooden plate where he beats it with a mallet as part self-flagellating penance part strengthening exercise. He then takes the bruised equipment to a bale of rice which he proceeds to engage in joyless, grunting intercourse with, in order to further harden his resolve. It’s at this point Hanzo goes far beyond his inspirations and into commentary on them.

Why? Because Hanzo is in large part a reflection of the ‘virile man’ archetype. This is the hero that goes about imposing his rightness on the world not only through violence but by the subjugation of women through his incredible sexuality. You know this archetype. Not only was it deeply entrenched in Shaft, as previously mentioned, but it forms the backbone of another historically popular cinematic hero: James Bond.

Hanzo is like Bond and Shaft in that getting with the ladies is part of the key to him succeeding in his adventures, but while both of the Western heroes do it through what at least pretends to be a typical courtship ritual (the threats of violence are there, of course, but veiled under social niceties) Hanzo has no such pretense. Hanzo’s typical method of interrogation for female suspects is almost universally to rape them until they’re too in love with his giant, desensitized manhood to resist him, and willingly tell him everything he wants to know. This is usually done by suspending the victim in a rope net, and lowering her down on Hanzo, who then spins her around and around. In most cases, they end up joining his team of people working to break whatever case, taking up residence in his household for the duration of the movie.

Now, here’s where things get a little more complicated, because … well, rape. This is a big subject, probably one that deserves its own article at some point, well beyond the scope of the movies we’re covering here. But let’s be clear: I don’t think rape is a good thing (duh, obviously) and I think the representation of rape in cinema, especially in the 70s, is often so very mishandled, used as an easy fallback for revenge cinema and often shot with an idea of forbidden titillation. Hell, this isn’t unique to the 70s, this still happens all the time today (I’m looking firmly at you, David Fincher). I’d source this excellent article by Drew McWeeny as an example of the problem movies have with rape. Go read it, I’ll wait.

So I freely admit that the part where our hero rapes at least a person a movie is probably going to put a bunch of people off of the Hanzo the Razor series. But at the same time, I’m going to step out on a limb here and say this: Hanzo the Razor presents the subject with a surprising amount of nuance for its cartoonishness. There are actual horrors visited upon these women, things that the movie expresses with proper solemnity and are used as real examples of the problems of a life lived towards an idealized moral standard. But then there’s Hanzo, who’s assaults are played–fairly effectively, even–for laughs.

It's really hard to take scenes like this seriously, no matter how hard-wired you are to react to rape in movies.

Wait wait wait, I know, you’re shaking you head and saying “Oh god, how can you even defend that?” And I get it, I do. It’s in bad taste, for sure. But what Hanzo the Razor presents is what actual male heroes did and sometimes still do in movies and nobody blinks. It’s stripped of all the artifice, but it’s not that much different than your average Bond movie, and nobody seems to balk at those because the coercion and force used are tied up in a charming accent and a nice suit and the script trying to pretend you didn’t see what you just saw. Hanzo isn’t a movie about hiding, and it presents these scenes, ridiculous and unrealistic, not as some illicit exploitative eroticism (in fact these scenes are far too dumb, and mostly inexplicit, to be erotic to anybody), but as a commentary on the accepted, unspoken rape culture in this genre of cinema. It’s meant as satire, and plays as such, which is why I feel like it’s one of the few times the concept has ever been more or less well utilized by a filmmaker.

Unfortunately, it means it dips towards the genre of Japanese pink film, a trend towards softcore pornographic films that flourished in popular Japanese cinema from the 60s into the 80s. So it’s easy to mistake as another exploitation piece, meant to titillate in that weird, sometimes deeply misogynistic way that Japanese pornography can strike Westerners. I just want to be clear: these are not those movies. It does what it does with seeming care, buried behind its blustery, mockable parody of a hero. It’s not done for the sake of doing, but as message and criticism. You can still be put off by it, and that’s not only acceptable but understandable, I just want to be clear what we’re being presented with, because I feel it’s part of the key that makes these movies worthwhile.

Because at the end of all this, I feel like these movies are worthwhile. I don’t know of any other movies that so bravely step up and point out what our cinematic heroes are doing is wrong and monstrous, and manage to do it with some wit and humor to boot. It’s the kind of meta-referential boundary pushing comedy that even today is relegated to niche audiences by its sheer demands for accessibility (in some ways I’d draw a parallel between these movies and Hot Fuzz). I’ve taken the broader scope of talking about them all as a core idea rather than trying to break them down, so as we head towards the end of this article let me bring it back around to the films themselves, and their worth.

As a trilogy, Hanzo the Razor is a weird, certainly controversial thing. It’s not for everyone, and it requires a certain amount of historical savvy to even begin to parse what it’s trying to say. But hopefully I’ve provided enough of that history to bring you up to speed enough to know if these movies are for you or not. Because, in the end, I think they’re worth checking out for an audience able to handle the material. It makes no effort to meet you halfway, and that’s kind of the brutal magic of its critique, and probably why it manages despite its pulp sensibilities to be included in a set of films often so exploitation-averse as Criterion.

And if this whole thing interests you but seems like a slightly bigger commitment than you’d like, I’d recommend checking out at least Hanzo the Razor: The Snare. The second film is easily the best one, the funniest and most elaborate with the things it’s trying to say. The movie assumes you’ve seen the first one, but I’ve pointed out all of Hanzo’s eccentricities here enough for you to follow along. And if you like it, seek out the others. And if you don’t, well, that’s okay. Hanzo doesn’t care whether you like him or not, he simply is, a relic of a man out of time, doing his own thing against the tide of history and cinema.

Now have an amazing theme song send-off! You deserve it after all this.