Review: “The Dictator”

I went and reviewed The Dictator for Screened. A little bonus feature backstory: I just recently (earlier this year) watched Borat and Bruno for the first time, and really ended up liking them. They’re way better movies than I had ever given them credit for. That said, all the trailers for The Dictator made it look terrible. Was that true? Or was it just bad marketing?

Find out by clicking through for the review! 

Directed Viewing: Balancing the Unbalanced: “Full Metal Jacket”

This is Directed Viewing, the weekly series where I look at the filmography of a given director in chronological order and write about them! Not only is this a great learning exercise for me, but it’s also great at filling in cinematic gaps and keeping the ol’ Netflix queue moving at a decent pace. Sure, it’s rife with assumptions about auteur theory, but that’s half the fun.

We’re in the twilight of this Stanley Kubrick project, which admittedly sounds a little weird since today’s movie is almost as old as I am, and yet considered ‘late Kubrick.’ That there was such a gulf of time between his last two movies doesn’t help, but this is also the first movie project I’ve done for a dead director, and I have to admit I approach these last films with a sort of melancholy. This is it, the entirety of Kubrick’s work. I come to these hesitantly, frustrated that there isn’t more to look at, feeling like there are still plenty of missing pieces in trying to figure out Kubrick and his films. But then, he’s flummoxed much smarter, more professional minds than mine, so I’m happy to sit at the feet of the greats and ponder freely.

Today’s movie is one that I revisit with such a big gulf of time I feel like I’m approaching it new. For whatever reason, while I’d seen the movie a few years before, almost all of it had slipped from my mind, leaving little more than the impression of having been seen. And now, having revisited it, I wonder how it could have ever faded. A question to answer in talking about the movie, perhaps.

Full Metal Jacket (1987)

There are very few things that I think are Perfect Cinema: moments that are so blindingly brilliant that I stand in utter awe of the accomplishment, swept up in whatever story is being told. But the first twenty minutes of Full Metal Jacket is perhaps the longest stretch of perfect cinema I have ever seen. From the opening credits of a whole generation of young men having their identity erased to Johnnie Wright singing “Hello Vietnam” through to the point where Joker (Matthew Modine) becomes leader of the group of marine recruits, I find that whole stretch of film one of the best singular, genius statements of cinema. It’s absolutely perfect.

It’s also the most talked about, and most widely remembered, part of Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam classic, so I don’t really feel the need to be exhaustive in describing it. What is amazing, however, is how every piece creates this world that puts us both in the shoes of these marine recruits and allows us to objectively observe them at the same time. From the original assault of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R Lee Ermey, in an instantly iconic role) that makes us hate him, through to the constant pounding of his voice and the training, Kubrick brings us slowly into this world. Much of what marine training is about is to create rigid automatic structures for soldiers to fall back on in the field, to make being a soldier more second nature than being a person, and that transformation happens on screen and in a small way inside each of us. By the end of it, we are as comforted by the brutal but understandable structure of Marine life as the recruits, at home with the long stretches of silence punctuated only by “Sir yes sir!” and the in-step march of a troop turned into one well-oiled machine.

Most of the memorable lines from this movie occur immediately. Did everyone only watch the first reel?

But that’s not all of what Full Metal Jacket is; if it was only a look into that evolution (brainwashing, if you want) from people to soldiers, I think it would be a well thought of curiosity. Instead, it is only the first half of Kubrick’s deeply conflicted look at Vietnam. And even as the training winds down, the encroaching madness of Private “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio, who really does steal the entire movie) begins to swell up and threaten every regimented structure we’ve come to rely upon in this film. It’s not only a foreshadowing of what will happen in the second half, but it’s its own watershed moment: Lawrence was initially the most sympathetic of the recruits, a kid who just wasn’t cut out to be a soldier.

But at some point in the training, we become so pulled into that world that his bumbling incompetence makes the audience turn on him as much as the characters do, and when he finally snaps he goes far beyond where we can comfortably follow. He is in a place of complete madness, up there with the worst most vicious monsters of Kubrick’s filmography, and we’ve been so lulled by the regulations of this military womb that the horror of his incomprehensible state is all the greater. He’s not just pitiable or scary, but antithetical to the world view we’ve had massaged into us for the past 40 minutes. Yet what he represents, this inability to cope with the horrors being asked of each of these kids, represents what all of them are going to experience the moment they’re shipped out to go fight and die halfway across the world. In some ways, Lawrence has the best fate of all his fellow recruits.

Privates Pyle and Joker. Joker seems to be the only one worried about Lawrence’s deteriorating mental state.

It’s really easy to dismiss the second half of Full Metal Jacket, because it isn’t as masterfully brilliant as the first half, but I think that’s doing the movie and Kubrick’s themes a disservice. Is it the lesser part of a clearly bifurcated film? Absolutely. But I think it requires all the more scrutiny because of its flaws, and because of how easily it gets lost in most of the broader discussions of the film. Taking place a year after training, we pick back up with Joker in Vietnam. He’s become a war correspondent for Stars and Stripes, which mostly requires him to sit around and enjoy living the high life of an occupying (liberating, if you want) force in the safety of the city while he interviews real war heroes and visiting top brass.

The Vietnam sequence is shapeless, but that is by design. Joker and his friends spend most of their time sitting around bullshitting each other, casually haggling prices with Vietnamese prostitutes like they don’t have a care in the world. Joker’s compatriots make fun of him for having not seen any real action, and Joker has the antsy quality of a man tired of peace that only the people who haven’t seen any sort of real combat seem to have. But that dichotomy is in keeping with Joker, who was always the smartest of his recruits, a soldier who wears a peace symbol on his flak jacket to, as he claims, “represent the duality of man.” He gets his chance, then, when the Tet offensive drives him and his crew out of the lap of luxury and out into the field.

Compared to the austerity of training, Vietnam seems like a rundown tropical resort, especially away from the fighting.

Finding himself attached to a squad that contains one of his fellow recruits, Joker witnesses the slow dissolution of the squad as they encounter the enemy again and again and their numbers are whittled down. By the end, there’s only a few left, including Joker and the aggressive Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin, playing the role he’d go on to rehash over and over again forever), who encounter a lone sniper that kills most of the increasingly frantic squad until they finally pin her down. It falls on Joker, then, to do the humane thing and shoot the wounded sniper, something he does only after much taunting and screwing up his courage. He emerges from the fight with the thousand yard stare the other soldiers had teased him for not having, and the soldiers happily march out of the movie and into the war singing the “Mickey Mouse March.”

The problems with this half of the film are obvious: there’s a lot of noise and chaos, but the action is fairly inconsequential. Saving Private Ryan this is not, and it doesn’t even have any of the obvious psychological weight that Apocalypse Now used to great effect. But I feel like Full Metal Jacket tackles the same themes as the latter film in its own, much more modern way. What the action in Full Metal Jacket represents is a threat to human morality, the danger of losing life and what that does to a person’s priorities. Many of the soldiers seem blazé about the threat they face, but in watching Joker become another in the line of soldiers who all share a similar experience, Full Metal Jacketshows us that it’s not a flaw of character but the only sane response a human can have to inhuman horrors.

When Joker finally gets to the front, he finds a gulf between him and the ‘real’ soldiers such as Animal Mother.

What I find most interesting in this revisit of the movie is how, then, the second half relies upon the first. I think that without the rigid structure of the training to build upon, what we’d see in the second half would be too ambiguous and nebulous to grab a hold of. It’s that institutionalized training that Joker and the other marines fall back upon to try to make sense of an insane situation, and it’s those memories that we as viewers need to fall back upon in order to keep any sense of perspective. The alternative is to have no handhold, and slip completely into the darkness, just like Lawrence did to catastrophic results. Maybe the soldiers have been dehumanized and dehumanize others, but what other result could you expect? They’re trained to fight and kill and survive, and there are prices paid for that, and even someone as peace-loving as Joker eventually has to sacrifice his innocence to hold onto his humanity.

Criterion Cuts: “Sanshiro Sugata”

Hello and welcome to the latest installment of Criterion Cuts, the weekly article where I dig into the archives of everyone’s favorite foreign/art house home video distribution company and unearth some obscurity and tell you just why it might be worth your time. As always, most of these come from the generous offerings available to Hulu Plus subscribers unless otherwise noted.

One of the key features (faults, if you want) of the Criterion Collection is that their choice of directors to focus on can be rather monolithic at times. Obscure directors, single-success filmmakers, or even modern working directors are rarely as featured in the collection as some of the classical heavyweights of ‘art’ cinema. Of those, by far the most monumental is the work of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. The Collection covers, in one form or another, 26 of the director’s 30 feature films, outpacing the next most prolific director (Ingmar Bergman) by a full four films.

I’ve actually stayed away from writing about Kurosawa films, by and large, because despite seeing a half dozen or so of his films I feel I’ve always had very little to offer on what is the most well-trodden ground of cinema. Sure, eventually I was going to have to do it eventually (this series will likely eventually outpace the release schedule of Criterion someday) but until I had something to say, or the right film to talk about, I was going to leave that to the people who had more passion for the subject, or better context than I, and enjoy the bounty of other offerings I had before me. Today, however, that changes with my first step into what will probably be years of the intermittant Kurosawa piece here or there. How appropriate, then, that I start at the very beginning.

Sanshiro Sugata (1943)

Kurosawa started his career, like most Japanese directors of his era, as a lesser member of the crew of other directors. After an apprenticeship of several years on early Japanese films directed primarily by by Kajiro Yamamoto, Kurosawa was given the chance to direct his first picture, and chose a novel by the same name from Tsuneo Tomita, chronicling the early days of judo. Kurosawa chose this book primarily as a way around the Japanese censors who had full oversight on film productions during World War II. Kurosawa’s sensibilities were decidedly Western, and he felt (with some accuracy) that the novel was so prominently Japanese in its subject and glorified such a popular part of Japanese culture that they would have no problems with his proposed adaptation.

It’s interesting, then, that the end result was a film that seemed so deeply Western in its sensibilities that the censors nearly refused to release it. It took the intervention of Japanese cinematic godfather Yasujiro Ozu, vocal in his praise of both Kurosawa and the film, to get it released. And even then, shortly after its original premier censors decided to take the knife to it anyway, trimming out 17 minutes of footage that have since been lost to time. What remains, then, is an interesting relic, considered passably acceptable by the wartime government, but only barely. And looking at even the truncated form, it’s rather amazing that the film managed to release even in such a mutilated form.

The movie itself concerns Sanshiro, a young man in 1880s Japan who travels into the city looking to learn jujitsu from the most famous and prestigeous school. Sanshiro meets up with the students of this school, an arrogant and antagonistic lot who drink and openly mock Sanshiro’s lack of formal training. They drag him along as they head out into the streets and cause all manner of juvenile chaos, until they run into and decide to attack an older man for being in their way. Sanshiro watches from the sidelines, in awe, as the stranger tears through a whole gang of students. This man is Yano, lone master of the new up-and-coming offshoot of jujitsu called judo, which is much more scientific and considered than the codified dogma of jujitsu. Sanshiro immediately decides to follow the better man, and begs to be taught in the ways of judo.

Sanshiro quickly becomes an incredible fighter, but Yano expresses constant regret that his star pupil is as brash and violent as the gang he left behind. Sanshiro, mastering the use of martial arts but not the philosophies, manages to become a folk legend for his violence. The children run through the streets singing songs about his savagery. After one particularly pointless street fight, Yano rebukes Sanshiro so harshly that Sanshiro finally feels a modicum of shame. Expressing the emotion with all the nuance of a bratty toddler, he throws himself into the pond outside the school and clings to a wooden pole. He rationalizes, out loud to anyone who will listen, that if he’s truly so awful he’ll punish himself by sitting in the water until he’s either forgiven or he dies of exposure—a traditional if foolhardy expression of samurai-style loyalty to a cause.

It’s while he sits in that pond, neglected and shivering in the cold, that he has a moment of revelation. Clinging to his pole, he sees a lone lotus flower bloom, and it is so beautiful and so fleeting an event that he learns an appreciation for living life necessary to give his willingness to die meaning. With an understanding of what it means to give ones life up for a cause, how weighty a choice that is, he pulls himself out of the water and supplicates himself before his master. He’s rebuked, forbidden from fighting as punishment, and genuinely tries to spend his time earning that moment he once experienced.

It’s here that the rivalry between schools picks up again. The jujitsu school, sure that their art is the best to be utilized by the police force, feels the need to show their strength by stomping out all competition: including Yano and his upstart discipline. An array of challenges occur, and Sanshiro is eager to step up to fight in the place of his teacher and his fellow, unready students. Instead he is instructed to simply watch as the entirety of his fellow class is torn apart by the larger, better trained jujitsu school. Sanshiro, finally allowed to fight, is so eager to show his capabilities that he kills the man he’s sent up against. Horrified, Sanshiro swears off fighting once again, retreating away from his teaching to try to escape the knowledge of what he had done by spending his days hovering around the temple.

It’s here that he meets a young woman who he falls in love with (this is, unfortunately, where most of the movie is trimmed, and their relationship is fleeting on screen, represented mostly through text inserts explaining the missing pieces of the script), spending his time with her reinforcing his appreciation of life. However, in his professional life, he’s being challenged to a fight to the death against the oldest fighter the rival school has. He also happens to be Sanshiro’s young love’s father. Sanshiro, torn between the devotion to his school and belief in his art, and fear for a further murder on his hands and a continuing cycle of violence, finally decides to go through with the match. But when he finally wins, he refuses to kill the man, forfeiting the whole contest and causing the entire martial arts community of the city to fall into chaos. Sanshiro, however, helps nurse the old man back to health, winning the respect of one of the jujitsu fighters and cementing his place at the old man’s daughter’s side.

The movie ends, then, with one final battle: the star pupil of the jujitsu school, a man who was much like Sanshiro but became vain and egotistical instead of humble and compassionate, challenges Sanshiro to a final battle to the death. Sanshiro, with everything to lose and nothing to gain, shows up to the meeting place among the flowing wheat on a hillside only to refuse to fight. Sanshiro, weaving out of the way of his murderous opponent, only watches as his foe exhausts himself and then makes a final mistake, falling and striking his head, a fatal blow that he was given every opportunity to avoid. Sanshiro mourns his opponent, a final lesson of compassion, as the film ends.

What’s amazing about this now little-seen film is just how decisively Kurosawa the whole thing feels right from the start. Many first-time directors struggle with, or at least are still developing, the authorial voice that eventually becomes their hallmark. This is especially true the further you go back, as directors had less tools and training at their disposal. Kurosawa, however, was something of an anomaly: he was already doing most of the heavy lifting as a unit director on prior films, so he had the technical know how; and he grew up watching Western cinema, even into wartime when such things were looked down upon (if not outright discouraged). He was the rare director of the era with a deep and abiding passion for viewing cinema before he made it, presaging the cinéaste auteurs that would later follow and be influenced by him.

And it really shows, as Sanshiro Sugata contains almost all the themes that would recur again and again in his work. There are curious differences, to be sure: unlike his hyperviolent samurai epics, Sugata is constructed to be increasingly less violent as the movie moves on, starting with the best action scene and ending with two men not fighting at all. And compared to the body count and heroic suffering his later films had, Sugata seems nearly cheerful in its relative lack of consequence. But Kurosawa’s style, with his flashy wipes and classical Hollywood staging, manages to firmly ground a very traditional Japanese story into the language of Western cinema.

This undoubtedly contributed to the tepid response he received from censors, but even moreso than that the themes of the movie seem strangely international for the Japan of the 1940s. Yes, it’s a period piece, but the movie advocates the benefits and necessities of adaptation and cultural flexibility that were nearly heretical during the war. Judo isn’t the best because it’s the most Japanese, but because it is the most modern, something that flew in the face of the traditional nationalism of the time but would become a recurring theme in his later period pieces. That these ideas survived the cut is a testament to how fundamental they are to the story, and certainly there was a basic element of cultural touchstones to work upon: Sanshiro Sugata was so popular Kurosawa made a sequel himself a few years later, and the movie has been remade half a dozen times since.

Normally I find myself qualifying first films with half-hearted terms like ‘curiosity’ or ‘interesting footnote’, but I’m glad that I don’t have to have such qualifications for this movie. Kurosawa’s first film is hardly an unsung masterpiece, but it fits firmly in with the rest of his work, smart with its themes and beautiful in its bold, culturally fused construction. Even with so much of it excised, it remains incredibly watchable, and just as relevant to the themes that would dominate his career as any of his other, more famous period action-dramas.

Review: “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”

Hey folks, my review for Jiro Dreams of Sushi is up on Screened. If you like food, or art, or documentaries, or any combination therefor… well, then, you should watch it! It’s a pretty great movie.

You can read the review here!

Light Bondage: “The Spy Who Loved Me”

Bond, James Bond. For fifty years that has been the cinematic calling card of one of films most enduring heroes. Sure, Bond was born in books, but it was through film that he became a household name and one of the movies’ most enduring legends. He is a character so archetypal that he is bigger than the half dozen men who have played him across nearly two dozen films, and that kind of longevity is both unheard of and a little bit magical.

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.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Let’s be clear right up front: I give Roger Moore a lot of crap, but this movie is actually pretty great. I say that because this is the one main series Bond movie I’m writing woefully out of order, due to a Netflix queue management mix up. I thought I was done with Roger Moore, and good riddance, ready to move from Dalton to Brosnan when this showed up in my queue as coming next. I was beside myself with disappointment, dreading having to suffer through another awful, dumb Bond from the Dark Times.

The Spy Who Loved Me begins with a British and a Russian nuclear submarine both going missing. Both countries governments panic, unsure quite how they were detected. This new, stealth-defeating technology finds its way on the black market, and Bond and Russian spy Anya Amasova (codename Triple X, played by Barbara Bach)  are sent by their respective governments to go and not only get the technology, but also to figure out what happened to the missing submarines. Of course, they quickly run afoul of each other, with the added complication that Anya’s lover was murdered by Bond during the pre-title action sequence.

What makes The Spy Who Loved Me work is the same sort of stuff that made From Russia With Love work so well: a focus on the low-key spy work of intrigue and feints and ambiguous motivations, jetsetting around the world to interesting and exotic locations, and an emphasis on the relationship between Bond and Anya. It’s not the flashiest Bond movie–a relief given the Moore period’s restless aspirations towards cartoon nonsense–and it’s certainly not the most nuanced. But given this series’ problems even constructing coherent narratives you care about, simple is fine so long as it works. And for the most part, The Spy Who Loved Me works quite well.

Bond versus recurring strong-man Jaws. Fan favorite or not, Jaws sucks. Sorry, it needs to be said.

Bond and Anya begin by dancing around one another, obviously knowing who the other is as two of the major spies on either side of the cold war. They play their game of cat and mouse trying to get the microfilm being put up for sale. Little do they know that the major villain of the movie, a rich crazy guy named Karl Stromberg (more on him later) didn’t want that information leaked, and sent metal-mouthed giant Jaws to murder everyone involved with it. So Bond and Anya end up forming an uneasy alliance to get the film from Jaws, who stalks them around Egyptian ruins in Cairo like something out of Lon Chaney horror film. There’s a particularly good scene where Bond comes across a tomb at night, lit in strange greens due to a show being put on nearby for the tourists, the announcer narrating a tale of mystery and death surrounding the structures over Bond fighting for his life.

Eventually they manage to outwit (and false kill, the guy ‘dies’ half a dozen times and keeps on surviving, an early precursor to the slasher villain archetype. Probably why he shows up again Moonraker, but we’ll save that for when it comes up. Either way, Bond discovers that the film is missing the key component of the technology only to have Anya knock him out and steal the film before he can tell her. Heading back to headquarters, he discovers Anya and the head of the KGB waiting for him, and thus begins a joint Russian/British operation to figure out who is stealing submarines and why.

Which brings us to the villain, which is probably the weakest part. He’s your typical super-rich madman, who wants to steal the submarines to make both countries attack each other and create nuclear war. I’m pretty sure this is the oldest plot in all spy fiction, showing up multiple times in Bond movies and hell, it’s basically also the motivation in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. The problem is, the reason he wants to do this is because he’s going to take the remnants of humanity to live in an underwater city using his giant water fortress sub. Part Rapture, part Legion of Doom, it’s full on stupid. I mean, that’s part for the course for these movies, I suppose, but it stands out in what is otherwise a fairly reasonable movie.

Villains getting really derivative in lair design.

Of other special note in this movie, before we break down the categories, is one of the most amazing car chase/chopper sequences in all of these Bond movies, as Bond and Anya race off in a car only to be chased by a car, a truck, and then a helicopter. It’s done almost all practically, and the way the helicopter rises up out of nowhere and races alongside the car as it drives down a cliff-side road is genuinely amazing. There’s an elegance to good aerial photography, and the stunts are grounded enough to feel utterly real and fully dangerous.

The Spy Who Loved Me isn’t exactly groundbreaking, and it’s probably not anybody’s favorite movie, but it’s a solid movie. And that’s saying a lot, considering how much I so automatically dislike Moore and this period of film. But hell, I’m glad to be wrong, because I enjoyed watching this one, and I’m happy it came at the end of the Moore viewing to send him off on a good note.

This gadget wins the award for useful function expressed in the dumbest way. LRN 2 TXT, BOND

The Theme Song/Opening Title:
“Nobody Does It Better” sung by Carly Simon. A bit of trivia, this is the first of what will become a trend of songs with different titles than the movie title. It’s also one of the ballads, which I usually hate but in this instance I think is fairly inoffensive. Unfortunately, the title sequence that goes along with it is relentlessly dull. Win some, lose some.

Most Ridiculous Gadget:
The real winner here is Bond’s new car, a Lotus Esprit that Q drops off halfway through the movie. Not only is it a cool car, but it has an oil slick, and the capacity to turn into a goddamn submarine. Bond drives it straight into the ocean, shooting missiles and dropping mines, and drives it right back out. It’s certainly one of the most extravagant vehicles, but it manages to sell it by being cool.

Everything else in this movie aside, this car is awesome.

Bond Girl Award for Most Thankless Role:
Since I’ve talked so long about Barbara Bach and how great she is as Agent Triple X, I’m going to skip this one. This is maybe one of the only Bond movies where she gets as much and as good screen time as Bond does, even if in the last half hour Bond has to go rescue her from the bad guy. That sucks, but otherwise she’s pretty awesome.

Best Bondickery:
Bond is chasing after one of the goons to try to get information, over the rooftops of Cairo. It’s actually a fairly neat fight scene, not for the choreography but because Cairo is just a visually interesting place, weaving across rooftop lattices. At the end Bond gets him at a dead end, the guy standing on the edge of a roof. The bad guy grabs Bond’s tie in order to maintain his precarious position, and Bond finally is able to get the information out of him. Once he’s spilled his guts, Bond swats his hand away, the bad guy plunging to his death as Bond calmly walks away. Throwing men off buildings: no big thang.

JAMES BOND will return in MOONRAKER

Directed Viewing: “The Shining” Curiosity

Directed Viewing has always been a project about discovering some greater comprehension of a director through their filmography. I’ve always believed that it’s the best way to learn about a director, their movies, and even the time in which they worked. That’s why initially I was very excited for the Kubrick project, but it’s also why as we approach the last few movies I find myself as frustrated as I am happy about the progress made in this particular project. Let’s call this installment my personal dark night of the soul.

I had seen as many Kubrick movies as I hadn’t going into this project, and certainly had seen most of the really famous ones. Some movies, like Lolita and this week’s movie, I’ve seen multiple times. Usually those were the ones that were classics but that for some reason or another I didn’t like. I’m often obsessive about classics when I don’t like them, turning them over and over in my head like some puzzle I need to untangle. What makes so many people consider something so highly? If it isn’t apparent to me, I have to keep working at it, hoping to crack it open like a particularly stubborn nut. I cracked Lolita, finally. My first experience with Dr. Strangelove in turn gave me a new trouble spot to worry over. You win some, you lose some.

The problem is that for all the work I’ve put into these Kubrick remains as much of an enigma as ever. Maybe even more than when I started. I can’t predict what I’ll like or hate, and I can’t predict whether or not what he’s doing is intentionally part of a greater whole or just another movie. Kubrick, with his constant and often conflicting adaptations, confounds the attempts to easily peg him within the concept of auteur theory. At times silly, others grave; his movies have a schizophrenic quality between despairing horror and hopeful (if cynical) good humor that has me running in circles trying to figure out who the man is, outside of a complex study of the extremes of humanity. It is, if you’ll allow me the obvious segue, maddening. Like today’s movie! (Whoa, who ever saw that segue coming?)

The Shining (1980)

This was my fourth time watching Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s claustrophobic haunted hotel story, and I’ll tell you from the start that it’s had a long uphill battle. The first time I watched The Shining I absolutely hated it, hated it’s stilted pacing and overwrought melodramatic atmosphere of horror, hated each reveal and how unrelentingly ambiguous it all was. But most of all, I hated the cast. Oh, how I hated the cast.

I’ve gone on record, multiple times now, with this crazy theory that horror movies have to hinge on you caring about the character who are put in peril. If you don’t feel worried about the people the film is following, or at least invested in their lives and goals, then the movie inherently doesn’t work. Sometimes it can still be enjoyable (Nightmare on Elm Street coasted on having a charismatic villain for a ton of sequels, though the first movie actually did fit the pattern of strong characters) but it can never be effectively scary. And The Shining‘s narrow cast of Shelley Duvall, Jack Nicholson, and Danny Lloyd were the epitome of unsympathetic leads.

Everybody at this point kind of knows the rough form of The Shining, even if they haven’t seen it: Jack Torrance (Nicholson) is a recovering alcoholic writer who decides to take a job as caretaker for a vast mountain hotel for the winter. Him, his wife Wendy (Duvall), and his son Danny are going to be sequestered away in the labyrinthine halls of a hotel that might or might not be haunted, a job that’s so psychologically taxing that one caretaker famously murdered his family during his winter stay. Oh, and Danny might already be psychically aware of the ghosts on some level, communicating with a creepily-accurate invisible friend. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh yeah. That.

Much of the cultural consciousness of The Shining is the “Redrum,” the hallway with the twins, the fireax and the manic “Here’s Johnny!” but in reality all of that stuff is in the last half hour or so. What is first and foremost in The Shining is the pace: like the winter itself, long and desolate and jarringly disconnected. We get there, but first it all starts innocently enough: instead we start with Jack interviewing for the position, Wendy and Danny left at home, a look at this couple in their ‘normal’ state. Except … they’re not really normal at all.

The thing that I somehow missed in my first few views of this movie, the thing that really stood out upon this viewing, is that from the start we are given no character to root for. I thought initially that it would be Wendy and Danny, because of how crazy Jack gets at the end. Of course the mother and child in peril are the ones the audience should sympathize with. But are they? In fact, revisiting it this time revealed the easy genre trap Kubrick actually never intended to build his film around at all.

Many of the long following shots are among the first uses of Steadicam on film, and Kubrick makes the most of the new technology.

Jack apparently once hurt Danny badly while drunk, an event that led to him not drinking. Wendy goes out of her way early on to support Jack to an outside party, saying that he’s a perfect father now. At the same time, when Jack is told the hotel might be haunted, he casually remarks that his wife will love that, as she’s a ghost and horror aficionado. Both of these things seem to be outright lies: Jack is obviously not a perfect father, as the next time we see him he’s acting like a complete sarcastic asshole to his entire family. And at the same time, he gives no impression that he told Wendy about the ghosts—in fact she seems genuinely shocked when they do show up—and besides she is a kind of nervous, histrionic personality that seems unsettled by a bad mood, much less horror films and ghost stories. Neither of these people seem honest about the reality they face, but the film never explicitly calls out their lies. We’re left only to infer that these are not people to be trusted.

The same is true for Danny, too. Early on he has an ‘episode’ where he envisions the horrors they’re about to be visited, seeing shots from late in the film. The way that episode manifests in the real world is not shown, but it’s bad enough that Wendy takes him to a doctor, who starts asking the kinds of questions associated with neurological problems like epilepsy. And in fact, later in the film, when the malevolent forces are at their worst? Danny is shown in a rictus-like seizure, surrounded on both sides with visions of the ghosts. Is he seeing things?

If ever there was a horror image that had been overexposed to the point of losing impact, it’s this one.

If you believe the only outside party, Danny is having some sort of psychic attunement to the hotel called a ‘shining.’ This person, a chef named Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), ‘speaks’ to Danny with his mind during one scene. Or at least, that’s what Danny thinks. In fact, the way he acts around Danny, explaining the dangerous of the hotel and the way it’s magic works, is in no way like how he acts around the adults, where he’s personable but just a chef. In fact, when we finally see him in his home, he’s just lounging around, pin-ups on his wall, and he casually refers to the Torrance family as ‘a bunch of assholes.’ It’s a subversive twist on the Magical Negro, an archetype so deeply entrenched in cinema that the idea that our perception of him might not be fully reliable is honestly the most radical twist the film throws at the viewer.

This is all backed up by a narrative that skips merrily between moments in time signified by title cards. The last open day of the hotel skips to a month later in a second. A Tuesday where things seem fine skips to a Thursday that’s ominous to a Saturday that’s downright terrifying. But what the film does is strip it all of context. We peer into this situation, the family neatly put under the glass box of the hotel, but neverdoes the film give us enough information to trust any of the things or people we’re seeing. Jack is the most obviously crazy, but who is to say how deep the psychosis goes? The film makes a strong case to implicate all three of them to one degree or another.

As much as I dislike Shelley Duvall’s performance, she does fearful very well by the end of the movie.

The problem with this all, however, is that it still equals the same thing: without a handhold to attach to, we don’t care about these characters. What The Shining does instead is construct this deeply complicated series of unreliable events, from the fundamental question of whether or not it’s ghosts or a strange fated event or simply people going crazy down to the simple truths of whether these characters as they’re presented to us are accurate. Does Jack actually sit at the bar and talk to the caretaker who murdered his family? If so, why does the character insist on a different first name? Does Wendy see the ghosts at the end of the film? Or is she just frightened by her husband’s sudden incoherent hostility and seeing things? Is his rage and violence even real? That would be the real kicker, to be sure, but if everything else is predicated on lies why shouldn’t the very plot be the same? Who went up to that hotel, and what happened to them while they were there?

The Shining then is more intellectual exercise than horror film. But it pulls the fundamental truths out from under us so many times and with such skill that in the end it trips itself up. We’re left with no signposts, no real thing to believe. Which brings me right back down to the basic concept with which I started: I don’t really like The Shining very much. I don’t think it’s scary, and I don’t like the characters. Rewatching it, and thinking hard about it, have made me respect it a lot more. I appreciate what Kubrick was trying to do (and have said nothing about the technical accomplishments with early Steadycams and smart design [see below]), but that doesn’t mean I connect to it or enjoy it.

Jack eventually becomes an inarticulate monster, but when he’s on that tipping point he justifies the rest of the movie. The descent is far more interesting than the result.

The interesting thing is I’m hardly alone in this. The movie was a critical and commercial disappointment upon release, despite the fact that Kubrick made it in hopes of turning around his niche appeal after the poor performance of Barry Lyndon. It was only afterwards, in the months and years after its initial release, that somehow it managed to worm its way into the popular consciousness and grow. I feel like that creeping mold type of social brainwashing is fully appropriate for a movie like this. It’s a movie that’s too clever for its own good, too ambiguous to contain the gut emotions it wants to evoke. As a horror movie, it’s a fundamental failure. As a treatise on the ambiguous nature of madness? It’s fantastic. But that doesn’t necessarily make for good genre cinema.

I assume most people on the internet have seen this video by now, but this short video essay on the spatial ambiguities in The Shining is absolutely required viewing. This was the first time I had revisited the movie since seeing that video, so I can’t recall whether I noticed these things so consciously before, but I certainly did now. Even unnoticed, though, I imagine such impossible structures play on the consciousness.

Criterion Cuts: “The Story of a Cheat”

Hello and welcome to the latest installment of Criterion Cuts, the weekly article where I dig into the archives of everyone’s favorite foreign/art house home video distribution company and unearth some obscurity and tell you just why it might be worth your time. As always, most of these come from the generous offerings available to Hulu Plus subscribers unless otherwise noted.

I watch a lot of movies from every era of film, sometimes for writing projects but often just because I like movies. That said, the more and more movies I watch, the harder it is to be really surprised by something. It’s not a bad thing once you adjust to it, but it does mean that when something does surprise you you really sit up and take notice. Today’s movie is just such a movie. It’s always fantastic to have something obscure to pull up and hold out to people as a movie absolutely worthy of people’s time and attention, and I’m glad to be able to do so without hesitation this week.

The Story of a Cheat (1936)

A middle aged man (Sacha Guitry) sits down at a Parisian cafe, book in hand, and sets about to writing. That writing—in a large, florid hand—details the man’s memoirs, and the bulk of the film’s narrative, starting at the innocent age of twelve, when the unnamed man (let’s just call him the Cheat) was a young boy caught stealing from the till of his family’s store in order to buy some small trifle. The family, poor and quick to punish, send the boy to bed without supper. In a stroke of luck that would come to be the Cheat’s only inheritance, the soup for dinner that night turned out to be made with poisonous mushrooms a family member had picked, and his entire family is struck down in a single night. The boy, in being accused of a crime he did not commit, was rewarded for his transgressions. His morality was never quite the same again.

His massive inheritance passes to him, but due to his age he’s put under the care of distant relatives who cheat him out of his entire trust fund. The Cheat, knowing that there’s no future for him here, runs away to get an array of jobs in the big bustling cities of the late 19th century. He grows from doorman to bellhop, meeting everyone and hobnobbing his way into the hearts and minds of the wealthy and powerful. He even has an implied tryst with a much older woman in his teenage years, a Countess who offers a gift of her esteem: a gold watch, which he brings out to show people at the next table over in the present day, kept for decades and part of the elaborate tale he tells, Forest Gump style, to both us and the people who pass by his perch.

During this period of youth, he even falls into historical events. A dishwasher he befriends turns out to be a foreigner with aspirations to assassinate Czar Nicholas II when he visits Paris, wrapping the Cheat up into his plans. The Cheat, strong-armed into going along with this crime, ends up writing an anonymous letter to the police in order to extricate himself, foiling their plans involving the hotel the Cheat worked at and leading to the arrest of the people who were threatening the Cheat’s way of life. The adventure is even intercut with news footage from that era, a mixture of fact and fiction that the rest of the movie dances around.

The saddest of sudden orphans.

The Cheat, deciding he’s spooked into going straight, and takes the only completely honest job he can think of: croupier in a casino. He goes to Monaco to live the high life, only to be drafted into the French army in World War II, getting himself wounded and laid up for most of the war, returning back to Monaco a much older, more weary man. Deciding that honesty didn’t get him very far, and left him bereft of much of his youth, he hooks up with a woman at the casino, relying upon his luck to win them money by throwing charmed roulette spins. The two decide to keep the scam going, and get married in order to hold each other to their 50/50 split, only to have their partnership’s luck spoiled by making it official and ruining them both with a series of statistically impossible bad spins. Those spins are so unlikely that the casino accuses him of cheating when he was utterly unable to, and fire him.

The Cheat spends his time gaining a fortune playing cards, and of course cheating baldly at them, until he discovers the one person he can’t cheat: the man who rescued him during the war, losing an arm in the process. The two men strike up a friendship, and the maimed man reveals to the Cheat his true passion: gambling, which he enjoys in a way the Cheat never did. His goodhearted passion makes the Cheat realize the joy in not knowing the outcome, and the Cheat decides to give up cheating for good. Promptly, he loses the entire fortune he gained, happily gambling away years of work in months.

Guitry explains to the camera how one might secret a card up one’s sleeve.

And the cheat, now old and destitute, brings his story to the present day. As he finishes his tale, he realizes that the woman he’s sitting across from is the Countess from his youth, now elderly and unaware of who he is. He tries to hide his watch from her, but she finally recognizes him anyway and then lets him in on a secret: she’s spending her years robbing the houses of the rich while they’re away on vacation, and wants the Cheat’s help. The Cheat declines, admitting two things: the luxurious house she’s targeting was once his own, and he still uses it as inspiration to regain his fortune; and that he’s finally found the only job where he can be honest and still do the things he’s good at—a security guard.

What’s amazing about this film isn’t it’s construction (from what I could gather it’s actually one of the first films to have a memoir framing device like this), but Guitry’s heartwarming and slyly funny way of telling it. It’s a deft tale, bouncing around a life spent always trying to grab the next opportunity, always on the wrong side of the seesaw of whichever morality was getting paid that day. Sacha Guitry was once a French superstar, in hundreds of plays and writer of dozens of books. He was slow to adopt film, though, and thus only made a handful of notable movies. His stock in trade fell rather sharply in post-WWII France, however, since he (much like his character) had decided to bank on whichever side was winning and was sympathetic towards the Vichy government, leading to him being nearly forgotten by film studies for decades.

There’s an early Bond level of gambling in this movie, which also serves one of the forgotten purposes of film: to show an audience the environments and lives of the wealthy, a peek into a world they’d likely never see.

But wartime loyalties aside, what he’s left is a number of really great, touching films, of which The Story of a Cheat is the best I have seen so far. It’s all of the human foibles of the best of Chaplin’s culture-spanning silent greats, with the sort of easy criminal nature that makes thieves like Danny Ocean our coolest cinematic heroes. They’re not the good guys, but they’re not bad, and you can’t help but love their enthusiasm for breaking all the rules. And when life throws as many roadblocks in their way as Guitry does in The Story of a Cheat, it’s hard not to see him as the underdog. Sure, he steals, but nobody ever seems to torn up about it.

It’s the kind of nebulous morality that only works in fiction, but Guitry makes it sing. There’s a casual ease to his films, including this one, that makes them feel like a great time with a good friend. Maybe it’s his way of scripting and shooting, which is decidedly deliberate and theatrical, allowing everything to unfold at its own pace without the strict demands of modern cinema. Maybe it’s Guitry himself, who always opens his films by addressing the audience as himself and introducing not only the actors, but the composer and editor and all, too, in an elaborate credits sequence more films would do well to emulate.

It’s the casual joy of someone who just wants to spin a yarn more than create a complicated piece of art, which is the best summation I could give for The Story of a Cheat—nobody is going to be challenged by it, but it’s still incredibly fun and watchable, the kind of stuff that makes cinema worthwhile. Of the many movies I cover in this article, this is among the most easily accessible, and I would recommend it without hesitation to absolutely everyone.

An older Cheat and his beloved Countess, reuniting by fate.