THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

“The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” is the poetic title of the acclaimed, 1997 autobiography of a leading French fashion editor, Elle’s Jean-Dominique Bauby, as well as this film adaptation (Miramax) by the noted painter turned filmmaker, Julian Schnabel, which led off the Festival’s screenings for critics in mid-September.
‘Jean-Do’ (in the film, the piquant Mathieu Amalric of “Kings and Queens” and “Munich”) as he was known, had a devastating cerebral stroke, at 43, which left him a victim of “locked in syndrome,” able to communicate only by blinking the remaining, working muscle of his left eye-lid. (My partner quipped that Schnabel’s film might be aptly titled, “My Left Eyelid.”)
That is, in order to utter a single word, Jean-Do’s therapists had to verbally run through the French alphabet to gather every letter of every word for his blinks, a brutally tedious business that makes Bauby’s creation of an entire literary work something quite miraculous.
“The Diving Bell” nearly replicates Alejandro Amenabar’s 2004 “The Sea Inside,” which featured Javier Bardem, as the eminent-but-totally paralyzed-Spanish author, Ramon Sampedro, who wrote his way out of his 30-year physical straight jacket by, ultimately, obtaining euthanasia. “The Sea Inside” won the Best Foreign Language Oscar of 2004)
In Schnabel’s film, Bauby becomes reconciled to his fate long before expiring due to a clogged tracheal breathing tube.
Schnabel is nothing if not inventive in lolling the camera over to pan vistas approximate to Bauby’s ‘butterfly’ point of view or interpolating whimsical photos of the handsome young Brando in place of the less than dashing M. Amalric. Schnabel’s final image, reversing Antarctic glacier slides by running them backwards, is ironic, but it fails to work for me as persuasive reparation. Such global warming catastrophes can no more be repaired than the life of an ingenious stroke victim.
I appreciate the authenticity of New Yorker Schnabel’s working in French (from a translation of Ronald Harwood’s English screenplay) at the hospital where Bauby was treated and featuring the therapists who worked with him, even though Schnabel claims to dislike films set in hospitals, as I do.
Schnabel’s first choice of Johnny Depp (who played two screaming queens for Schnabel in his previous film, “Before Night Falls”) for Jean-Do would have been a more commercial one for Miramax, but Mr. Depp did better for Disney, Miramax’s parent company, by repeating his inspired pirate queen in “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
Two footnotes. The flashback scene of the pre-stroke Jean-Do shaving his invalided, crotchety, 92-year-old father (Max Von Sydow, age 77) is the best scene in the film for me. Every stroke of the safety razor is amplified on the soundtrack by boosting the scraping sound. The scene becomes surgical, anatomizing their father-son co-dependency and showing the vibrancy of Amalric possessed of all of his physical faculties. It is also a tribute by Schnabel to his own beloved father, who died at 92, while living in his son’s West Village home.
Schnabel had a flood of film offers following his marvelous “Before Night Falls,” (2000), which starred Javier Bardem as the fugitive gay Cuban poet, Renaldo Arenas. In the long interim since that film, Schnabel wrote a screenplay adaptation of the popular novel, “Perfume,” but fell out with the producer and got bounced from that production. He understandably loathes the 2006 film of “Perfume,” which he thinks truly stinks.
It strikes me that Schnabel’s three films, including his first, “Basquiat” (1996) are all biographies of tormented figures in the art worlds of three nations.
Schnabel claims that before signing on to direct “The Diving Bell (of death) and the Butterfly” (Bauby’s flitting mind and wandering eye), he turned down a slew of commercial projects including “8 Mile” and “American Gangster.” I don’t think Schnabel should have rejected all of those opportunities. Although he won the Best Director award at Cannes for “The Diving Bell,” he coveted the Palme d’Or, which went to the Romanian abortion drama, “4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 Days,” which was also shown at the New York Festival.

MARRIED LIFE

“Married Life” (Sony Pictures Classics) is as prosaic as its title. Writer-director Ira Sach’s third film is leaden and feels considerably longer than its 90-minute length, despite its excellent cast of Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, and a new blonde yum-yum, Rachel McAdams.
The picture is a highly conventional sexual rondelet of infidelity, with husband Cooper attempting to poison his wife Clarkson in order to marry McAdams, possibly because divorce is unheard of in their bourgeois set. The year 1949 is conveyed by the style of the autos; the Pacific Northwest setting I only gleaned from the program notes.
When the author-director acknowledged, at the press conference, that he was a gay man, I subversively thought, “Is that why the film lacks the slightest hetero lubricity?” I tabled that too personal supposition, and realized that you can’t have homely Chris Cooper as the sexual fulcrum of such a lusty comedy when he is, of course, bound to be trumped by the handsome Brosnan. Moreover, you can’t play off a genre flick like “Sudden Fear,” as Sachs said he had, (in which Joan Crawford is fearful of her hunk husband, Jack Palance, as a potential poisoner), when “Marriage”’s lame script (from an obscure 1952 English novel) seems much more a Feydeau sex farce than a thriller.
Sach’s says his last two films have been “realistic,” (his previous, “40 Shades of Blue” – 2005, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance), but, frenzied infidelity has, of course, its own reality. Comedy may simply not be Sachs’ bailiwick. Patricia Clarkson, however, is “a sunny, funny, honey” treasure of the American film, as this picture is not.

I JUST DIDN’T DO IT

“I Just Didn’t Do It” is the not-guilty plea of a slender, mop-haired Japanese youth (Ryo Kase), falsely accused of groping a 15-year old schoolgirl on a jam-packed Tokyo commuter train.
This honest kid is told at the outset of this excessively long, 143-minute procedural, to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and pay a small fine, or face protracted jail time and a judiciary that is less interested in his innocence than its near-perfect record of convictions.
The boy refuses to cop a plea and demands exoneration. (We see in the opening scene that the offending hand hiking up the girl’s skirt is much more powerfully veined and older than that of the slender, tapered hand of the young accused.)
This near-documentary of Tokyo’s penal and judicial system marks a notable change for writer-director Masayuki Suo from his delightful hit, “Shall We Dance,” (1996), but the poor lad’s ordeal and the ultimate, terrible wrong done him makes the audience suffer with him because of the film’s length and its’ successive repetitions.
The attempt by the youth’s defense to recreate the precise configuration of the train door’s overcrowding, for an exonerating video presentation to the court, struck me as both wonderful and absurd.
It is miraculous that the lad’s defense team could find the vanished woman who witnessed the incident on the train and came forward to protest the lad’s arrest, only to be dismissed by the police. That the judge refuses to accept her testimony, prior to convicting the wretched young man, is a heartbreaking injustice as great as the youth’s false arrest and imprisonment.
Poor boy. He should have paid the fine, but he “just didn’t do it.”

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS

I felt obligated to see “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (IFC First Takes) because it was the buzz film of this year’s Cannes Festival and earned for its Romanian writer-director, Cristian Mungiu, the Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.
I knew the title signified the length of term prior to an illicit, late abortion in Ceaucescu’s repressive Romania of 1987, and that it was shot, by Oleg Mutu, the cinematographer of “The Death of Mr. Lazauescu,” a great, but deeply depressing Romanian film of two Festivals ago, in gray-green dun color. So I knew the picture would not be pleasurable.
The Festival screening began at 10 a.m., an unfavorite hour for this late-nighter, in an as-yet uncooled Walter Reade Theatre. So my receptivity was not great. In the opening scene, as the young women dorm mates (four to a room) discussed obtaining black market Kent cigarettes with their male, dorm fence, prior to the lead, blonde Otilla’s (Anamaria Marinca) obtaining a clandestine hotel room to relieve her close friend, the dark Gabita’s (Laura Vasiliu) four-months-gone pregnancy, I knew I would simply have to endure the ordeal. Indeed, the film was just as wintry and oppressive as being in the, bleak, iron curtain country which Romania was in those days.
Abandoning the important birthday party of her boyfriend’s mother (shown us in such tedious, tightly-framed bourgeois, gemutlichkeit torpor you could plotz), she deserts her boyfriend’s family gathering to tend to her friend.
And then a miracle occurs, rather like the epiphanies of the Dardennes Brothers’ films, in which love is transcendent–transforming a seemingly immoral tale into a sublime morality. The comradeship and solidarity of the women, complicit in an act that could have sent them both to prison along with the abortionist, transcended the awful deed. (Mungiu, 39, whose third film this is, shows part of the bloody, aborted fetus’ umbilicus, enough to make us severely chastened.)
Mongiu told us he had deliberately eschewed quick cutting in favor of long takes, as well as use of any sophisticated equipment like a Steadicam. He wanted the film to look bare and ultra-spare.
Anamaria Marinco is a truly marvelous actress, but Mungiu, who flew her in from London, (where she made a TV series, “Sex Traffic” which won her a BAFTA Award in 2005) disliked her audition, as he had all the women her age he had seen, and only came to admire Marinco as she became the part of Otiilla on film. Evidently, she speaks perfect English in order to appear on the British telly, as did the former English major, writer-director-producer, Mungiu, at his Festival press conference.

(Anchor Bay)

John Landis’ DEER WOMAN
Dario Argento’s JENIFER
Lucky McKee’s SICK GIRL
Stuart Gordon’s HP LOVECRAFT’S DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE
Don Coscarelli’s INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD
John Carpenter’s CIGARETTE BURNS

I don’t get Showtime on my cable plan, so these are the first opportunities I’ve had to watch the ‘Masters’ series. There is definitely something cumulative about them, and there are several more to go, so perhaps I should have waited. Let’s call this an interim report.

The series, cobbled into concept and production by Mick Garris, was a thrilling notion. Our best horror genre stylists – Argento, Miike, Cohen, Romero (hey wait a minute…what happened to Romero?) – set practically loose in a one hour format, on a liberally disposed cable source, had fans revved on a planet-wide level. But concept may have exceeded capability.

The results are interesting, and in ways troublesome, and those same devoted fans were quick to criticize. A favorite episode would often be singled out, and the rest trashed. Everyone knows that fans are a tough crowd, but what was really happening with that series?

50-60 minute films are short features, like the ‘B’s of old, (though the “Masters’ series, despite ‘B’ budgets, manages to summon up ‘A’ appearances). Other examples: Orson Welles’ IMMORTAL STORY – 58-62 mins; Bunuel’s SIMON OF THE DESERT – 40-45 mins; Robert Florey’s MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE – 61 mins.; Peter Watkins’ THE WAR GAME – 49 mins; Gerard Damiano’s LET MY PUPPETS COME – 45 mins; Reginald Le Borg’s THE MUMMY’S GHOST – 61 mins; William C. McGann’s SH! THE OCTOPUS – 54 mins. HOP-A-LONG CASSIDY – 60 mins.

The episodes I’ve seen so far have disconcerting similarities in art direction and cinematography. A revolving crew (who’d previously worked on ‘The X Files’) made itself available for the productions, so in a sense this became a studio personality imposing itself on the directors’ work. It’s one thing if it were an ongoing narrative – like ‘The X Files’ or ‘CSI’ – where consistency of mise en scene were mandatory, but this was the directorial work of a dozen very different psyches, working off original and independent screenplays. Think of MGM, or Warner Bros., or the distinctly European Paramount of the 30s and 40s. You could tell which studio’s films you were watching, regardless of who was directing, because of telltale visual markings. MGM considered shadows to be the equivalent of dirt – they were the upper class studio – and I was bored stupid by the look of those films; I’m only starting to appreciate them now. I was more of a noir man, a German expressionist guy, though I couldn’t verbalize it when I was growing up, and so I favored the Universal and Warner Bros looks. Paramount was a little too exotic for me.

In just that way, the Masters’ series has its studio-imposed personality, and I believe that this may have been a large part of what some viewers reacted against. The photography throughout tends to be crisp and clear, with bold colors, even though lit darkly – there are no grainy, gritty productions so far. The art department tends to be working in overdrive; set design, props, wardrobe, all make themselves felt, often more strongly than plot. The result is that these departments have homogenized the series to a degree; it all feels a little too clean and redundant for its own good. But amid the difficulties of finding a way to allow the directors their very separate voices, some special moments, scenes, and even entire episodes, have been created.

DEER WOMAN, the Landis episode, was the 7th (12/9/05) in order of release, and is firmly entrenched in the ‘50’s horror flicks the director must have loved so much as an adolescent – innocent ‘B’ fodder like THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE – with humor intentionally added instead of being unintentional as was the case with many of those ‘B’ classics. It also feels like an homage to the revered 70s TV series KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER – in which a nearly-hapless protagonist stumbled weekly onto a supernatural scenario in an otherwise normal world, no one believed his findings, and he managed to roust the antagonist, leaving no evidence to prove that he was right after all. Considering these influences from more innocent times, there was no way the gore- or sex-meters were going to register off the scale as in later episodes.

DEER WOMAN is about a Wendigo-like Indian spirit, taking form as a gorgeous, busty babe (definitely more revealing than in the flix of the 50s, but also right up Landis’ alley – remember his show ‘Dream On’?) who haunts the American Indian casinos. The casting of Brazilian Cinthia Moura as the titular (forgive me) character is visually spectacular, but budgetary limitations keep the effects subdued until the third act, at which point – too late, but you really must see it – Landis successfully recaptures the era of the ‘B’ to a ‘T’. Those last ten minutes are as good as the third act of THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, or even the climaxes of some of the 40’s FRANKENSTEIN sequels. You’ll know exactly what I mean. I wish he could have spread more of it throughout the narrative. He didn’t, so it’s not a keeper, but it is a rental.

H.P. LOVECRAFT’S DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE (2nd in the series, telecast on November 4th, ’05), Stuart Gordon/Dennis Paoli’s entrée, achieves a palpably Lovecraftian tone. Gordon does passable-to-excellent Lovecraft, most successfully, to my mind, with his feature DAGON. This one’s solid enough, intelligently written, with mood and detail to spare. It’s a respectable work, though finally lacking in punch.

Don Coscarelli’s INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD (the first episode out of the gate, a Halloween entrée, on October 28th, ’05) is a simple, classic campfire tale. Shot well, cast well, flowing along as if the most popular camp counselor was at the helm, making all the kids’ hair stand on end with his grisly tale. Lead femme screamer Bree Turner is Coscarelli’s extremely good fortune – she’s a capable actress, visually and physically riveting, and I hope she goes on to a rewarding career. Making a guest appearance is Angus Scrimm of PHANTASM fame. I anticipated this obviously nepotistic gesture as certain disaster in the making. Fortunately I was wrong – his is a great bit of grimly comic relief, and the best performance he’s given to date. Smaller in its goals than some of the others, this is nonetheless the best installment I’ve seen, tight, consistent and artistic.

Dario Argento’s contribution, JENIFER, the 4th to be shown, is a ribald blast. Even though it’s an adaptation of a comic novella, it also manages to be pure Argento, playing into the director’s unrepentant fascination with sexual perversity/violence. It’s perhaps even raunchier than his previous features have been because he could get away with attributing its decadence to a pre-existing source, but I’m not fooled.

Leading actress Carrie Anne Fleming, who performs marvelously throughout, is facially deformed by a not-terribly-convincing prosthetic. However, without it her face is visually wrong for the role, so the mediocre appliance is preferable. She’s undoubtedly got a career ahead of her, and she’s a looker, but she’s not a classic Argento heroine without the face-piece.

JENIFER is ‘Beauty and the Beast’ with the sexes reversed. It should be double-billed with Etore Scola’s PASSIONE D’AMORE , which deals more realistically with the idea of a man being sexually obsessed with an ugly woman. (It’s not that Argento’s a dirty old man at heart, it’s that he’s a horny adolescent kid.) This takes that conceit and stretches it like silly putty. The title character is grotesque beyond endurance. She’s not, for instance, akin to the featured female zombie wearing Greg Nicotero’s prostethic in LAND OF THE DEAD, where there’s something sexy beneath the twisted Ms. Sardonicus face. There is no way anyone could find anything erotic in this countenance. Yet she has a phenomenal body, and that – in Argento’s world – is all it takes. Screenwriter Steven Weber also plays the lead, a cop who rescues the lass and then falls into orbit around her. He’s an Argento everyman type, and his descent is upsetting. Nudity and gore abound, and in the supplemental featurette entitled “So Hideous My Love’, we get to see three shots that were removed from the film for being deemed too strong for TV…and apparently home video release as well, since they haven’t been restored. But they should have been; they would have reversed anyone’s mixed feelings about the episode, and represented a step forward in deliciously gratuitous exploitation. (Maybe some day. Argento admits he wouldn’t be disappointed to see them back in.)

The score by Goblin, a group long associated with Argento, is quite good, whether aping Hitchcock/Herrmann, or striking out in new areas, and is another plus for this episode.

Elder Statesman John Carpenter unfolds a picaresque mystery decorated with ungodly images, in what was the 8th episode, CIGARETTE BURNS, first shown on December 16th, ’05. I didn’t warm up to the investigative protagonist (Norman Reedus), nor buy some of the pretentious dialogue from cast members such as Gwynth Walsh. But it’s funny how one endearing performance can tilt the balance toward the positive, and that piece of work was the product of Udo Kier. Can anyone honestly tell me that in his Warhol days it could have been predicted how fine an actor he would become? His scene with Willem Dafoe outside in the dark in SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE was that film’s only magnificent moment. Kier enriches anything he’s in nowadays. He’s wonderful in CB, and near the end, eager to luxuriate in the find of a lifetime, he walks into the screening room, where a little table holds a single champagne glass and bottle to complete the experience; it’s a touch of genius, perhaps the only one in the entire series (but then, there are still several to go…)

Lucky McKee’s episode, SICK GIRL, is the sole episode (so far) that really feels like a feature film. The relationship between the two lead actresses is so enjoyably fulfilled that I occasionally wished there weren’t a monster plot lurking beneath it, that’s how much fun I was having with their performances. Angela Bettis is an absolute delight as an uptight lesbian entomologist. Erin Brown is the quirky object of her desires. Formerly a ‘Z’ film soft core scream queen, Brown ratchets up her resume with a competent, amusing performance, and you’re rooting for both of them all the way; you’re even dismayed when the horror insinuates itself into their idyllic romance. McKee gets the most out of both actresses (and actresses seem to be scoring big time in this series), and his co-authored script manages to be both witty and worrisome. Ms. Bettis reveals in an accompanying featurette that her role was originally written for a man, and that she kept some male characteristics in the performance. One thing’s for sure, same-sex on screen is no longer something written with the purpose of being shunned or punished (except by the closed-minded antagonists in the episode, who we are clearly meant to despise); in fact, it’s used for comic relief here, and much mileage is mined from it.

On my yearly lists – best film, best performances, best art direction, best use of locations, etc – I have a list of ‘best moments’. And there’s one here – SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER – when the landlady goes over the banister. The image of her splayed legs and skirt in ungainly mid-tumble is so perfect and funny I had to run it back immediately.

There is an almost wall-to-wall score for this installment, and in the end credits we are informed that it can be had on a CD.

Did I mention how much I like the box cover art for the series? Lovely matte finishes are the first tactile things you encounter, then the actual box and disc slide out from inside this second cover. The supplements have been attended to with great care – including featurettes on the directors, actors, production, etc. And though I began this review by pointing out how homogenized the series was on some levels, after perusing these mini-reviews you can see that each episode has its own virtues and directorial trademarks, so… There are plenty of reasons to own some of these discs, even if you already caught them on the tube.

DVDs are proliferating more quickly then the cane toads of Australia, and that, judging from the First Run Features DVD release (Cane Toads: An Unnatural History; 65 mins, color), is a pretty frightening phenomenon. I don’t know if it qualifies as Halloween screening material…but for a documentary it comes close. Very tongue-in-cheek, rather enlightening, and a bit too long for its own good.

In this country, when you’re making a film near an hour in length, they suggest tightening it to 55-57 minutes so that it can be shown on tv with room for commercials. What kind of a running time is 65? Besides, with seven or eight minutes less, or even five, its seams wouldn’t have shown.

From Universal we have perhaps fifteen recent spooky titles on DVD, and what’s mindboggling is that I believe the studio actually planned their release for the Holiday season. I’ll mention two here.

The remastered, more elaborate Collector’s Edition release of their previously distributed An American Werewolf in London, finds director John Landis in great form dolloping out devilish doses of black humor, and counterpointing the rock standard ‘Blue Moon’ with Rick Baker’s daringly overlit lycanthropic transformation, the absolute state of the art in Special Makeup until CGI stepped in several years later and complicated the issue. Landis isn’t on the commentary track, though he is present in an interview. Instead, the commentary features cast members David (the pathotic werewolf) Naughton, and Griffin (his unlucky friend and victim) Dunne. Rick Baker also discusses his work in a separate supplementary piece.

As a double bill with the above, also from Universal, check out the original 1935 Werewolf of London, featuring Henry Hull and Warner Oland as two lost souls out for blood. This one may creek a bit, but there are some clever effects, and what could be more satisfying than experiencing the history of it all? Since the orig lacks the humor of the remake, make it the first screening of the evening.

Universal has also chosen at this time to release Son of Frankenstein & Ghost of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman & House of Frankenstein, Dracula’s Daughter & Son of Dracula, The She-Wolf of London & Werewolf Of London, The Mummy’s Tomb & The Mummy’s Hand, and The Mummy’s Curse & The Mummy’s Ghost. Hopefully, from the way I used my ampersands, you deduced that these are double-bills. Gone are the extraordinary productions that we saw over the previous two years, spearheaded by David Skal and featuring remarkable documentaries and commentary tracks, but…I guess the trade-off is that we are being delivered so incredibly many of them. The transfers are excellent, the films are great fun, with a few less fun than others, and I bet there are collectors out there grousing about the omission of House of Dracula, or the Invisible Man sequels. But I think that’s really looking a gift horse in the mouth. (Although, come to think of it, I wish the 1934 Karloff-Lugosi-Ulmer The Black Cat would still be given the royal treatment.)

And though David Skal is nowhere to be found on these new releases, he is lurking at your neighborhood Barnes and Nobles, just in time for Halloween, with a revised edition of his comprehensive insight into the genre, ‘The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.’ Watch the films in the evening, then read the book before you go to bed, and guarantee yourselves a nightmare or two.

MGM has given us a slew of goodies, mainly exploiters, for the holiday, and that’s fine, is it not? Several are Roger Corman concoctions, but I’d go with two of their ‘Midnight Movies’, It! The Terror From Beyond Space (69 minutes, 1958), and The Monster That Challenged the World (84 minutes, 1957), B’s, but damn good ones. You can sit there amused at the low budgets and B-film thinking and still revel at the tight stories and moderate amount of satisfying thrills.

I’m sure I’m the last one to inform you that It! is the indisputable source material for Ridley Scott’s Alien. Director Edward L.Cahn (1899-1963) spent his celluloid life toiling in second feature bins. He surfaced in ‘A’ territory briefly, in ’32, with the Walter Huston (as Wyatt Earp) starrer, Law and Order. However, later it was titles such as The Creature With the Atom Brain all the way. Clearly he had no pretentions in regards to his career. Which is alright; he made a nice little programmer anyway. The screenplay is by ‘Twilight Zone’ scribe Jerome Bixby. One thing to be aware of: on the back jacket cover the MGM home video people got a little carried away and identified the film as being in color. There was no color when I saw the film back in the theaters, still no color when I cherished my bootleg 16mm print, and there’s no color on the DVD either.

The Monster That Challenged the World, following in the podprints of such giant bug/mollusk delights as Them! and The Black Scorpion, has a serviceable performance from a somewhat bloated Tim Holt, whose career didn’t go forward in stellar fashion after either The Magnificent Ambersons or, somewhat later, The Treasure of Sierra Madre. It’s nice to see him again, even fighting giant sea snails. Director Arnold Laven, stuck in the exploiter swamps, rose above it by becoming a producer on Sidney Pollack’s The Scalphunters in 1968, which starred Burt Lancaster. Again, if you’re a lover of these little thrillers, you’ll feel, as I do, that the man had nothing to be ashamed of.

Double Bill these two, for a nostalgic return to the wonderful, terrible world of the 50s, when the fear was that science would go awry, and nature would strike back.