Psycho (1998, Gus Van Sant)

Profit and hubris are the only logical explanations for Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot retread of Psycho, a rigorous exercise in homage that suffocates under the weight of its source of inspiration. Van Sant attempts to add his signature to “The Master’s” canvas, injecting subliminal stock footage and contemporizing sexual mores, but his supplements are nothing more than extraneous hokum, pallid attempts at the psychosexual that wilt when held against Alfred Hitchcock’s subtle insinuations. The finished product lacks the verve of Hitchcock’s pacing, the formality of his characterizations and starkness of his modest, black-and-white photography, settling instead for a game of compare and contrast that functions only to separate the viewer from the narrative. By attempting to channel the essence of Hitchcock’s genius, Van Sant has sapped the lifeblood from Psycho, leaving the audience to desperately search for the ghost of suspense within a barren forgery.

Remnants of tension can be found lurking in Bernard Herrmann’s score and Saul Bass’ title design, key elements wisely pilfered from the original for the opening credits, apropos of nothing more than their preeminence. The addition of color photography, notable in Anne Heche’s pink business suit and lime green slip, is a nice diversion from the otherwise rigid compliance with the archetype, though it functions as a pleasant distraction instead of organic element. The once-risque opening sequence also benefits from a dash of modernity, presenting frank sexuality in the faint moans and bare flesh that occupy the intimate moments of Marion Crane (Heche) and her hardware-peddling beau, Sam Loomis (Viggo Mortensen). Regrettably, the sweat-soaked sheets and passionate whispers don’t pair well with Joseph Stefano’s buttoned-up dialogue. In 1960, his words were full of insinuation, obscuring their latent eroticism just beneath Ms. Crane’s pointed brassiere. When transported to the 1990s, Stefano’s exchanges feel stiff and artificial, developing into affectation in an environment free of the partition between fantasy and the naked, human form.

Anne Heche’s reading of Marion Crane feels just as lifeless and contrived, operating based on the nuances of Janet Leigh’s iconic lead performance instead of the actual motivations of her character. Van Sant, possibly in reaction to Heche’s indecipherable emoting, placed the lion’s share of the responsibility on cinematographer Christopher Doyle, having him shoot Heche at a low angle during the automobile sequence, creating a clammy, cramped air space that parallels the character’s mounting stress level. Doyle’s eye is the only unequivocal success for Psycho’s B Team, manifesting a claustrophobic environment that imparts anxiety despite the middling performances and lack of narrative drive.

Sadly, Van Sant doesn’t utilize Doyle during the film’s many verbal exchanges, focusing instead on the performers, who falter when forced into established roles. The introduction of Norman Bates and the dialogue-driven dinner sequence that fleshes out his psyche are comprised of nothing but empty gesturing, each word hanging in the air like stale smoke as Vince Vaughn wavers between curious facial tick and melodramatic wailing. Vaughn even attempts to convey menace in his interpretation of Bates, plastering a sinister smile on Norman’s face that betrays the character’s persona. Van Sant buys into this adulteration, allowing Norman to masturbate as he peers at Marion’s nude physique, unnecessarily revealing deeper conflict and playing his antagonist’s hand far too early in the feature.

The modifications to character motivation and mise en scéne don’t end there. A keen eye will detect a diamond-patterned shower curtain, interspersed shots of storm clouds and deeper entry wounds during the infamous shower scene, additions that were intended to revamp a moment of cinematic ubiquity, but end up draining the tension from George Tomasini’s initial sequencing of shots. Avoiding contemporary irony when re-creating an emblematic setpiece is certainly admirable, but all prospects of retaining the zeitgeist are dashed by the addition of pseudo-intellectual inserts, heightened violence and the presence of a canary yellow Walkman. Even more perplexing are the details Van Sant refuses to alter, particularly operator-assisted phone calls and dated fashion sensibilities (i.e. Viggo Mortensen’s cowboy get-up), elements that reek of anachronism at the turn of the 20th Century. It’s hard to determine if Gus Van Sant is having fun with these contradictions or if he was so overwhelmed mirroring the construct of Alfred Hitchcock’s massive achievement that he didn't have time to rectify the inclusion of personal elements. Either way, his vain attempts at faithful adaptation smack of desperation and narcissism, proving once and for all that the general article is always more valuable than a carbon copy.

Psycho (Universal Pictures, 1998)
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Written by Robert Bloch (novel) and Joseph Stefano (screenplay)
Photographed by Christopher Doyle

Thundercrack! (1975, Curt McDowell)

Pornography in the internet era is an extension of guilt and prejudice, wholly dependent on the shame of the viewer and shaming of the participant. High-angle shots in modern erotica assume a superiority over the performers, placing the viewer at a vantage point to conquer and deface the object of their lust, subconsciously punishing the porn star for the inhibitions of the audience. The Oxford English Dictionary wisely notes the lack of artistic catharsis, aligning it to the “erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional…,” capturing the dehumanizing and impersonal nature of an inert form of cinematic enterprise, one bent on negating the essence of sexual expression.

Thundercrack! is incompatible with this contemporary definition of pornography, stressing a consensual, liberated form of exhibition that disposes of orientation and aggression, favoring flamboyant theatricality over brute force. Operating under the guise of parody, this convivial, libidinous sideshow trades in shock and sensuality as it rifles through technique and mood, crafting an inventive and singular world that is facetious without being derogatory and carnal without being exploitative.

A lurid melodrama of the highest order, Thundercrack! carries shades of Gone with the Wind’s fallen majesty, jokingly swapping the grace of Scarlett O’Hara for the sweat-stained drunkenness of Gert Hammond (Marion Eaton). Performing a melancholy monologue in her filthy kitchen, howling to rival the thunder and lightning booming outside of her window, Gert bemoans the loss of her husband and rambles incoherently at the ceiling above, clenching three fingers of bourbon like it was a banister safeguarding her body from slumping onto the linoleum tile.

The decor of her crumbling estate, christened “Prairie Blossom,” resembles a museum of American kitsch, each wall lined with pickled vegetables, sun-bleached children’s toys and tattered pages of vivid pornography. The black and white photography captures this solitary prison in soft focus, generating both alluring beauty and revolting horror from images of neglect and the ravages of time, revealing multitudes from the seams and wrinkles on Gert’s exhausted face.

Overjoyed and perplexed by a knock at the door, Mrs. Hammond scurries to the powder room to draw on her eyebrows and puke up the excess alcohol in her stomach, accidentally dropping her wig into the brown liquid hovering in the toilet bowl. As she embarrassedly straightens the hairpiece in the mirror, struggling to maintain composure, the tone veers from black comedy to fever dream, transitorily painting a horrifying portrait of alcoholism and the crippling mania brought on by isolation.

Seeking shelter from the storm and desperately in need of dry clothing, Gert’s guests arrive with baggage in tow, suffering the indignities of sexual confusion. Screenwriter George Kuchar crafts each character’s backstory to build to a juvenile punchline, all of which are shockingly frank and devilishly humorous. His most amusing blue bits rehash cacti masturbation and spontaneously combustible girdles, all read at a stoned, ironic distance or bellowed in deliberately hammy affectation.

The most uproarious of Kuchar’s “malfunctioning circuits” is his own character, Bing, a high-strung animal tamer with a sweet spot for his “biped” stage partner. Ashamed of his forbidden desires, he hysterically recounts an evening of cross-species copulation to his fellow travelers, each memory illustrated through shots of garish circus ephemera and the eldritch whistle of a calliope. As he reaches his boiling point, detailing the apex of his passionate exchange with the primate, the shot transitions to a close-up of the object of his affection performing manual stimulation, captured in jawdroppingly explicit detail.

Kuchar’s sick sense of humor and Curt McDowell’s leering photography are enamored by the potency of their concoction of sex and aberrance, but beneath the surface lies a healthy attitude towards erotic experimentation, one that attributes a transformative power to indulgence and acceptance. The disrobing sequence in Gert’s “absent” son’s boudoir gives each character space to relieve themselves of social inhibition, providing time to test the waters with penis pumps, blow-up dolls and a variety of synthetic phalluses. As each one of her guests removes their metaphorical masks, Gert observes them through pinholes in a portrait of George Washington, the camera angle replicating the pillars of light and watchful eye of Norman Bates in Psycho. The visual motivation isn’t to make Mrs. Hammond an outsider, despite the skeletons residing in her closet, but welcome her as a participant, utilizing her voyeuristic gaze to mirror the lustful eye of the viewing audience.

The sexuality on display in Thundercrack! is just as diverse as its desired pool of spectators, liberally shuffling pairings and highlighting straight, gay and outré arrangements. The shot composition employed during these acts is far less concerned with the mechanism of intercourse than expected, indulging in facial expression and exaggerated performance, gesturing the viewer toward a snicker or awestruck grin. The droll sense of humor and childish reverence for pun certainly lend the work a sardonic sensibility, but the artful use of split-screen and double exposure provide a pleasant contrast, one that imparts a humble visual grandeur.

Using this unwieldy mass of contradictions as a strength, Thundercrack! wavers between horror, black comedy and stag film, fabricating a distinct and surreal epic poem from a catalog of erotic phenomena and preposterous dialogue. It’s overlong, repetitive and capital-letter CAMPY, but its sensuality is liberating and thoroughly moral, encapsulating a sexual freedom that stresses positivity and consent.

Thundercrack! (Thomas Brothers Film Studio, 1975)
Photographed and Directed by Curt McDowell
Written by Curt McDowell (story), Mark Ellinger (story) and George Kuchar (screenplay)

Murder by Death (1976, Robert Moore)

The sad irony of Neil Simon’s Murder by Death, a grating and smug exercise in parody, lies in its dogged devotion to stereotype, a comedic mean streak that parallels the material it intends to ridicule, emerging as a wolf in sheep’s clothing more insidious than its points of reference. Constructed of the riddles and red herrings that occupy Agatha Christie’s thrillers, Simon’s script glazes over the predominant themes, making Christie’s flimsy characterizations the butt of the joke and stripping the story of a satisfying payoff, cutting all attempts at mystery off at the knees. The resulting study in tedium is one huge false start, loosely-structured to the point of indifference and so enamored with its own wit that it forgets to disguise racism as satire.

Hosting a “Dinner and a Murder” soiree for his competitors, Lionel Twain (Truman Capote), an eccentric private investigator with a taste for the “macabre” and absent pinky fingers, lures his gumshoe foes from every corner of the globe to his sprawling estate for a night of cocktails and benign recreation. Unbeknownst to his lodgers, the evening’s murder won’t be simulated and the inspector who’s crafty enough to survive the night unscathed and collar the assassin will take home a million dollar purse. Standing in the way of victory are an omnipresent black-gloved prowler, precariously dangling swords, toppling stone gargoyles and a poisoned bottle of red wine, booby traps aimed to knock the jetsetting private dicks off of their respective games. Regrettably, a stockpile of promising setpieces can’t save a film devoid of suspense, bogged down by an endless amount of insubstantial character development and rushed to an inadequate resolution.

Simon’s characters are insignificant enough to be described in a single word, many functioning solely to embody ethnic typecasting or perform pratfalls to match their physical disability. The great Alec Guinness struggles to add shading to his take on a blind butler, but little can be done to rehabilitate a character employed exclusively to roll his eyeballs around in their sockets and ladle out bowls of non-existent soup. His difficulty training the manor’s new chef, who just so happens to be deaf and mute, leads to an endless string of miscommunications, many of which delay the already plodding and dreary storyline.

The film’s most flagrantly distasteful performance belongs to Peter Sellers, who seems to take on his buck-toothed, Changshan-bedecked detective with great aplomb. Prattling endlessly in choppy, faux-philosophical aphorisms, Sellers’ Sidney Wang is a riff on Charlie Chan in more objectionable facepaint, each of his stale jokes sinking like a stone before the resounding blast of a gong on the soundtrack. If this characterization sounds offensive as a member of the audience, imagine how appalling it must have been for the Asian actor employed to play Sellers’ adopted Japanese son.

A startling number of Murder by Death’s bits revolve around ethnic accents and manners of speech, showing a blithe disregard for cultural differences in the name of broad humor. The aforementioned Mr. Wang’s inability to elocute in a non-native language is taken to task on multiple occasions, often resulting in a rather uncomfortable and sophistic lesson in pronouns and prepositions from the host of the party. Though the intention of the gag may have been to shed light on class-based racism, it didn’t direct its punchline at the host’s arrogance, but at the struggle of the embarrassed guest, exploiting his linguistic difficulties in the name of comedy. If conveying an underlying theme or exaggerating to illustrate a social concern, race and heritage can be used as fodder for slapstick, but Neil Simon prostitutes identity in the name of a cheap laugh and every one of his cunning attempts at satire is more gutless than the last.

Murder by Death (Columbia Pictures, 1976)
Directed by Robert Moore
Written by Neil Simon
Photographed by David M. Walsh

Clue (1985, Jonathan Lynn)

Culling inspiration from print, screen and pastime, Clue manages to eke out an engaging ensemble comedy from the skeleton of a board game’s rule book, filling in the gaps with tropes pinched from Ten Little Indians and its umpteen cinematic iterations. The employment of shadowy photography and playful gallows humor conjure warm sentiments, striking a tone to match the secret passages and black-gloved malcontents of a thousand mysteries, but leavening any homicidal inclination with a healthy dose of bungling slapstick and saucy banter. The resulting bricolage is frivolity incarnate, a confection of heaving bosoms, vigorous comic performance and jaunty whodunit.

As grey clouds form overhead and spine-tingling organ complements the deluge of rain, guests begin to trickle into Hill House, an ominous manor tucked away at the farthest reaches of New England. The year is 1954 and our unsuspecting visitors mask their trepidations beneath dinner-party-appropriate attire, ladies in evening gowns and matching broaches, gents donning their finest suits and puffing on fragrant pipe tobacco. The mahogany hues of the drawing room are just as evocative as the fashion and part of Clue’s allure is its attention to period detail and capacity for mimicking the visual texture and mise-en-scene of its forebearers.

Supplied with a pseudonym upon arrival, each plucked from the aforementioned party game, the lodgers take solace in their temporary anonymity, slurping up their bowls of monkey brain soup and apprehensively playing a game of question and answer. Though none of the invitees know their host or why they’ve been summoned for a late supper, all quickly uncover their political affiliations and deduce that they share a collective blackmailer, one well-versed in their sexual dalliances and murderous impulses.

Brandishing a unique armament and harboring criminal intent, the company stews quietly over their “financial liability” while Wadsworth (Tim Curry), the effete butler, reveals their transgressions and unveils their mutual exploiter, the disreputable Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving). Pleading for his life and pointing the finger at Wadsworth as the nefarious orchestrator of the evening’s events, the foolhardy Boddy tries to charm his way out of the crosshairs, but a flick of the lightswitch and discharge of a pistol find the scofflaw lying dead on the parlor’s Persian rug. As the guests deliberate over the identity of the killer and suspicions mount, the narrative gets whipped into a frenzy, shuffling through surprise guests, jumpscares and candle-lit clichés, abandoning coherence in the name of brisk pacing and scads of flimsy wisecracks.

The indulgences of the performers and screenwriters plaster over these lapses in continuity, coasting on a juvenile sensuality and winsome hamminess that knowingly wobbles toward the absurd. Taking a page from the Hammer Films book on sexual stimuli, breasts play a role prominent enough to garner screen credit, pouring out over the fringes of a garment’s bustline, acting as a distraction for partygoer and audience member alike. Making the most of her part as duplicitous femme fatale, the buxom and eager Yvette (Colleen Camp) stuffs herself into an exhibitive French maid outfit, one certainly designed for a woman of a smaller cup size and forthright enough to act as muse for Christopher Lloyd’s salacious Professor Plum. Nearly toppling headfirst into her chest as she lays the place settings and boring holes into her bodice with his eyes in the billiard room, Lloyd’s character flails mercilessly at the whim of Ms. Camp’s physique, drawn to her chest like a moth to a flame, recoiling only at the playful swat of her feather duster.

Tim Curry’s performance as Wadsworth is just as playfully unhinged, panting wildly as he lugs the bedraggled troupe through every salon and library in the mansion, expatiating on his elaborate theories concerning the motivations of the killer(s) and chronology of events. Unfortunately, the reveal provided by this handiwork is of little consequence, considering the presumptuous nature of his detection and the three distinct resolutions incorporated into the film’s home video release. This substitution of vigor for logic certainly makes for a convoluted script, but Clue’s success hinges exclusively on its ear for dialogue and unflagging enthusiasm, a moxie that admirably recreates and lampoons the Old Dark House-style mystery in equal measure.

Clue (Paramount Pictures, 1985)
Directed by Jonathan Lynn
Written by Anthony E. Pratt (board game), Jonathan Lynn (story/screenplay) and John Landis (screenplay)
Photographed by Victor J. Kemper

Almost Famous (2000, Cameron Crowe)

Nostalgia permeates Almost Famous, occupying its every word and image, captured in its meticulous recreation of the language, decor and guitar sound that superficially sums up American culture of the 1970s. It’s an honest picture, one willing to point out the dangers of hero worship, even as it pledges allegiance to the cult of personality. Rock enthusiasts will echo the film’s sentimentalism, but those keen on investigating the corrupt aspects of commercial art may find its sensitivity to celebrity insincere, unwarranted in light of the misogyny and narcissism it supposedly abhors. That said, Almost Famous finds strength in these messy contradictions, mirroring the incompatibility of fan and critic and the indecisiveness of its adolescent protagonist, stuck between a desire for acceptance and journalistic objectivity.

William Miller (Patrick Fugit) is a child prodigy, what his mother calls “predominantly accelerated,” a boy nurtured in philosophical discussion and articulate in speech, but sheltered from popular culture and too prepubertal to connect with his classmates. Given the gift of rock ‘n roll by his recalcitrant sister (“It will set you free,” she claims), William fingers through her vibrant record sleeves, finding the adventure and experience he can’t attain in his prohibitive household nestled within each dust jacket. The obsession builds and maturity finds William aspiring to be a rock writer, sending his school newspaper clippings to Creem Magazine’s Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who gives the upstart an assignment, but urges him to avoid befriending his alluring subjects. Bangs acts as a counterpoint to William’s wide-eyed enthusiasm, eulogizing rock’s death just as William aspires to become one of its mouthpieces, chastising a “commercialization” strikingly similar to the one that his mother rallies against.

Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) is the antithesis of Lester Bangs, acquiring fame by standing adjacent to stardom, using her motto of “We’re here for the music” as a shield to protect from emotional investment. Her celebrity fetishism culminates in a gang of female companions know as “Band-Aids,” devotees that function as muse and paramour to touring rock acts, blossoming into veterans of the road even before they celebrate their 21st birthdays. Penny acts as access for William, literally and figuratively, ushering him backstage while on assignment and introducing him to Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), the handsome guitar virtuoso from Stillwater, a “mid-level” band warming up for Black Sabbath. Though Hammond and the boy quickly develop a rapport, his bandmates are reluctant to chat with a journalist, dubbing critics as “The Enemy.” William’s only way to break the ice is by disarming the group with flattery, a technique that violates one of Bangs’ edicts of music journalism and positions William at his knees before the altar of the “industry of cool.”

Fugit’s performance perfectly embodies the physicality of a precocious teen, his character adopting mannerisms from his idols and incorporating new terminology into his lexicon, temporarily abandoning his original efforts at impartiality. This shift from outside observer to participant is symbolized by pens trickling from the mouth of his messenger bag as he hastily rushes to join Stillwater on tour, an attempt at fraternization that will certainly clash with his recent promotion to Rolling Stone feature writer.

Despite his many attempts at blending in, no bond between artist and fan can obscure the fact that William exposes band insecurities, documenting each in-fight over promotional items and struggle over leadership simply by being present, “taking notes with his eyes.” Russell even allows himself to unravel in William’s presence, revealing his false humility by celebrating with the “real people” of Topeka at a high-school party, moments before dropping a Solo-cup full of liquid acid and proclaiming himself a “Golden God.” Faux-spiritual delusions also afflict Miss Penny Lane, making her “a slave to the groove” through unflagging devotion to the two-timing Russell and adherence to her own half-baked ideology.

William’s mother, Elaine, spoke of a “world of compromised values,” and, though it relates mostly to experimentation with drugs, it fits the compromises beset upon rock ‘n roll culture by male chauvinism. Penny is a victim of Stillwater’s sexual irresponsibility and her subsequent dehumanization and quaalude overdose is a testament to the shortcomings of this glamorized, bacchanalian lifestyle. Almost Famous recognizes the danger in transforming earthbound artists into divine vessels, but can’t shake the urge to mythologize, painting a portrait that wavers between investigation and veneration, dangerously teetering toward hyperbole.

Almost Famous (DreamWorks Pictures, 2000)
Written and Directed by Cameron Crowe
Photographed by John Toll

The Wild Life (1984, Art Linson)

Struggling to muster the enthusiasm that Fast Times at Ridgemont High had in spades, The Wild Life feels like a faded photocopy of Cameron Crowe’s previous screenplay, shedding its candor and authenticity in favor of bad-boy posturing and spurious melodrama. Adolescent sexual dynamics are once again the focal point, as they would be for any developing teenager, but Crowe reigns in the scope of the project, favoring a handful of acquaintances over the broader social institution. Investigating the road to maturity at a microscopic level is a brilliant concept, though restricting the focus does require a certain compositional vividness, detail that The Wild Life’s vapid characters curiously lack. Without this definition, the resulting product is little more than an ineffectual string of break-ups and beer blasts, meandering and insignificant in its lack of conflict and emotional attachment.

Bottle-blonde and rippling with pubescent testosterone, Tommy Drake (Christopher Penn) is Spicoli without the charm or wit, exclusively expressing himself through celebratory headbutts, smashed beer bottles and sexual urges. His ideological counterpoint and unlikely confidant is Bill Conrad (Eric Stoltz), a 19-year-old bowling-alley manager who stows away every paycheck in hopes of acquiring a bachelor pad, the obvious first step on his path to personal independence from parent and girlfriend alike. Their relationship consists of nothing more than vacuous discussion of past classmates and current lovers, a state of torpor that acts as a security blanket from the responsibility lurking around the corner and as contrivance for a writer trying to force his leads into pre-ordained stock characters.

Crowe does add one new wrinkle to the old chestnut of youthful naivety, placing Bill at the mercy of a greedy landlord that coerces him into a larger security deposit, an obstacle that forces the greenhorn to reluctantly take Tommy in as a roommate. Sadly, this stillborn idea is only a vehicle for an obligatory string of noise complaints and trite party sequences, setpieces that would be shamelessly derivative if they weren’t held up against the woefully underwritten female characters.

The sole supporting role of interest belongs to Bill’s brother, Jim (Ilan Mitchell-Smith), a combat-obsessed juvenile delinquent who chain-smokes and tosses M-80s like he’s on a tour of duty, desperately seeking the attention of an absentee father. His obsession with a heroin-addicted Vietnam veteran is a welcome dose of reality, but not one that meshes well with the insubstantiality of the rest of the piece, particularly the absence of other outwardly political themes. Despite its brevity, Randy Quaid’s moment on screen as the aforementioned solder is substantial, but it has no context and functions only as a brief respite from the youthful frivolity.

Otherwise, The Wild Life is stuck spinning its wheels, gaining little narrative momentum over a fruitless 96 minutes, stagnant in its adherence to rules set by a far better film. It’s no fault of the middle-class milieu it ventures to define, depicted in the single-parent households, summer jobs and unattainable dreams that occupy the American identity. The fault lies with the scribe, who has reduced a relatable experience to a succession of worthless banalities and cynically given his dramatis personae little more to dream of than raging keggers and bouncing breasts. By playing to juvenile obsessions, Cameron Crowe paints a bleak future for his myopic protagonists.

The Wild Life (Universal Pictures, 1984)
Directed by Art Linson
Written by Cameron Crowe
Photographed by James Glennon

We'd like to thank Teenage Bedrooms on Screen for the high-res screengrabs!

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982, Amy Heckerling)

There’s a telling moment, roughly halfway through the funny and frank Fast Times at Ridgemont High, where the sexually curious Stacy Hamilton and skittish wallflower Mark “Rat” Ratner share a meal at a tacky, dimly-lit German restaurant. As they struggle through small talk and knockwurst, the camera pans back to reveal that they’re barely tall enough to fit into their comically oversized leather chairs. What seems like a subtle and unnecessary sight gag gradually reveals itself as an astute bit of symbolism. These teens are stuck in a purgatory between childhood and adulthood, too old to depend on their parents, but too young to depend on themselves. Fast Times shows them struggle to see over the edge of the table from those big chairs and we can’t help but empathize and laugh along.

Drawn like moths to a flame, these young people of Ridgemont congregate at the local mall, either taking up summer jobs or loitering in the arcade. The aforementioned Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) shuffles through her shifts as a waitress at an Italian cafeteria, dreaming about going steady with college guys and deliberating over the sexual prowess of male classmates with her experienced (but naive) best friend, Linda (Phoebe Cates).

Admiring Stacy from afar, theater usher “Rat” Ratner (Brian Backer) is so incapable of striking up a conversation that he’s willing to take advice from local ticket scalper and self-proclaimed casanova, Mike Damone (Robert Romanus). When he finally musters the courage to ask her on a date (with Damone’s copy of Zeppelin IV firmly in hand), he forgets his wallet at home, has nary an interesting thing to say and bolts seconds into an already uncomfortable sexual dalliance. Unfortunately for Rat, his cold feet eventually drive Stacy into the arms of the half-interested Damone, culminating in a heartbreaking final act that confronts the worst case scenario of teen sex head on.

A few years older and hardly any wiser, Stacy’s brother, Brad (Judge Reinhold), polishes his beloved car in his spare time and endlessly flips burgers to make the monthly payments. As his Senior Year approaches, he practices a break-up speech planned for his “clingy” girlfriend, who, ironically, wants to jump ship just as bad as he does. Single and newly unemployed, Brad’s left to tread water between the pressures of minimum wage work and an embarrassing poolside slip-up in front of the comely Linda (cue iconic, slow-motion fantasy sequence). Despite these setbacks, Brad manages to find self-sufficiency and extends support to his younger sister when their parents aren’t able to provide it.

Offering comic relief is the oft-shirtless and perpetually stoned Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn), a poster child for the Cali-surfing lifestyle who warbles in a spacey Valley accent and regularly runs afoul of authority, particularly ornery History professor, Mr. Hand (Ray Walston). The exchanges between these polar opposites are the film’s finest moments, resembling some kind of microcosmic cold war between sarcasm and antagonism.

Another key to the film’s success is author Cameron Crowe’s insight into the minutiae of teen culture. Details like the scent of syllabi on the first day of class or the number of students donning the “Pat Benatar Look” are the tiny idiosyncrasies that shape a relatively straightforward script into something profound. His influence even trickles into the soundtrack, which features quintessential cuts from Tom Petty, The Cars and Jackson Browne, and carries the right tone for the age group and time period.

Behind the camera, Amy Heckerling does an admirable job of sapping all eroticism from the intimate scenes, leaving behind only the discomfort and inadequacy most people attribute to early sexual experiences. She also understands the exclusive world teens live in, staging scenes in the lunch rooms, bedrooms and vehicles that occupy the slivers of time between class and moments of parental supervision. We wisely never see the parents of the principal cast, allowing each character to adjust to adult roles on their own. It’s not surprising that Heckerling would have similar success with another era of teens 13-years-later (1995’s Clueless).

Though the change in tone leading up to the final moments can be jarring, repeat viewings reveal a shift that consciously resembles the literal and figurative act of “growing up.” This honesty and willingness to show a loss of innocence boosts Fast Times at Ridgemont High above its sex-crazed, hard-partying brethren, creating an authentic portrait of 80’s teens who were still able to have fun despite the creeping weight of adult responsibility.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Universal Pictures, 1982)
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Written by Cameron Crowe
Photographed by Matthew F. Leonetti

Heaven & Earth (1993, Oliver Stone)

Highly subjective and exceedingly stylish, Oliver Stone’s biographical films have his fingerprints all over them, brazenly defying the anonymity of fact and reshaping history to match his singular, paranoid vision. Heaven & Earth attempts to blend Stone’s directorial flair with the memoirs of Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese peasant who was displaced by the Indochina conflict. Telling the tale in her words and from a distinctly Vietnamese perspective, Stone provides a platform for an underserved community, but he never meshes the feminine voice with his overpowering aesthetic choices, allowing Le Ly’s subtle observations to be overshadowed by intrusive montage and compositional bombast. The resulting collaboration is sprawling to the point of ungainly, a well-intentioned and handsome picture complicated by authorial meddling that teeters on the brink of parody.

Born in an idyllic village of lush, green fields and foggy mountaintops, Le Ly (Hiep Thi Le) is the sixth child in a family of rice farmers, a clan spiritually bound to the land they harvest and pledged to maintaining familial honor. Conflict arises in this romanticized Vietnam through ideological differences, dividing her beloved nation into two separate entities at the behest of wealthy “allies” (France, United States, Japan, China), a rift that inspires the formation of the Viet Cong. As a teen, Le Ly absorbs the nationalistic rhetoric of the VC, pledging herself to the struggle for liberation from foreign influence and holding back tears as her younger brother leaves home to physically carry out this fight for freedom. In his absence, Le Ly is forced to adopt the role of a son, both supporting the VC from the homestead and harvesting crops with her aging parents.

Le Ly sees the natural balance of her village recede with the arrival of American troops, their choppers descending upon rice paddies in a swirl of monsoon rains, intervening in the Vietnam War to disrupt the spread of communism. Much like the French before them, their actual intercession in the political landscape is far from noble, resulting in contamination of the land and debaucherous plundering of the village's resources, transforming the once serene countryside into a hotbed of vice and vulgarity.

Mirroring the fury of conflict in her unconscious mind, Le Ly’s dreams are overwhelmed by strobing lights and visceral imagery, bringing her worst fears of captivity and death to the surface. Her premonitions come to fruition after being captured by the Vietnamese government for sabotaging an ARVN ground attack, a transgression punished by excruciating physical and mental torture. Though she’s electrocuted, beaten, and dipped in honey beside a nest of ravenous fire ants, she refuses to sell out the Viet Cong, being freed from bondage only after her mother donates a wedding dowry to the regime’s war coffers. In a bitterly ironic twist, Le Ly’s freedom leads to further abuse, finding her brutally raped and left for dead in an open grave by the Viet Cong, suspicious that her release from prison is tantamount to a confession. The audience experiences the degradation of violence first hand through the protagonist, her suffering honestly representing war, separated from the supposed glories of combat and conquest.

Moving to Saigon and sustaining herself by dealing drugs and sleeping with American G.I.s, Le Ly temporarily finds salvation in the form of a genteel, but disturbed, American serviceman. Worn down by his sensitivity and kind gestures, she acquiesces to Sergeant Steve Butler’s (Tommy Lee Jones) advances and makes the journey to “The New World,” ignoring the demons that plague the soldier’s dreams. The shift in tone that greets the California sun is jarring, finding the lily white suburbs of the USA as placid as a postcard, occupied by burly gluttons that are as loud and substantial as their refrigerators. Stone’s use of a fish eye lens perfectly represents the scope of the American surplus, placing an astonished Le Ly right in the center of the marketplace, capturing her wide-eyed astonishment at the kaleidoscope of colors in each aisle of the supermarket.

Outside of the grocery store, Le Ly struggles to adjust to the American way of life. Butler is supportive and sympathetic, quickly defending her against bigotry and the flippant remarks of ignorant family members, but his best efforts can’t bridge every cultural gap. As his career aspirations crumble at his feet and his passions turn to strong drink, Steve begins to resent Le Ly’s work ethic, condemning her efforts to open a restaurant and venture into the business world. This change in personality is sharp and unprecedented, never developed through expositional scenes or narrative clarification. The lack of polish is obvious during a solemn scene of dialogue that finds Tommy Lee Jones scrambling to color in his character through histrionic screams and forced emoting, turning what would have been a revelatory moment of confession into a frenzy of chewed scenery.

Sadly, excess isn’t a trait exclusive to the acting talent. Kitarô’s distracting score wavers between sweeping orchestral work and location-appropriate flute, faltering during string sections that are far too sentimental, limiting the impact of honest dialogue and realistic turmoil. Stone’s linguistic choices are just as puzzling, allowing Le Ly to speak English eloquently around her family members, but broken English in discussions with American soldiers. Though this tactic may have been employed to illustrate the frustrations of communication between markedly different languages, Hiep Thi Le’s varying degrees of elocution are insulting and distracting, tarnishing an otherwise stunning performance.

The erratic visual scheme also founders, cluttered with extraneous technique, ranging from unnecessary tilts, use of slow-motion and blunt force symbolism, embodied by constant insertion of shots of orange fire enveloping a pristine, blue sky. That being said, when an idea works, it works brilliantly, particularly the evocative photography and masterful shot composition, which captures the sodden fields of Vietnam with the warmth of a watercolor pastoral. Cinematographer Robert Richardson knows how to strike a mood through ambient lighting, stoking vivid imagery from natural illumination as it seeps through wooden shades, casting shadows in dimly-lit parlors.

Satirical notions that trickle into the second half also foster curiosity, paralleling American intemperance at home to the horrors of occupation, but Oliver Stone never reconciles his politics with his artistic flourishes. Heaven & Earth suffers from symptoms of the disease it chastises, relishing in the ugliness of conflict and stuffing itself on a cornucopia of costly cinematic gimmicks. Left stranded in this overwrought soup is Le Ly’s story of triumph, one nurtured in humbleness and a willingness to rebuild and reflect, standing in direct contrast to the voracity of Oliver Stone’s over-elaborate presentation.

Heaven & Earth (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1993)
Directed by Oliver Stone
Written by Le Ly Hayslip (book), Jay Wurts (book), James Hayslip (book) and Oliver Stone (screenplay)
Photographed by Robert Richardson

Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997, Werner Herzog)

Little Dieter Needs to Fly doesn’t function as a strict documentation of Dieter Dengler, but a loose travelogue, a film that develops the character by giving him room to breathe and explore his emotions. A survivor of a prison camp during the Vietnam War, Dengler is a German-American pilot that revels in his independence, so afraid of being restrained that he adorns his living room with paintings of open doorways, symbols of the personal freedom that alluded him as a detainee in Southeast Asia.

Werner Herzog provides him with a platform to expound upon his feelings and dreams, tangents that avoid the trappings of narrative-based documentaries and mine for a deeper understanding of man’s passion for life and inclination to persevere. His recollections are observed with sensitivity and wonder, reflected in airy visuals and spellbinding montages that elevate one man’s struggle into the poignant and fantastical.

Dieter Dengler knew poverty and fear as a child, living in a destitute section of the Germanic Black Forest that was devastated by the second World War. In order to survive, his mother cooked the wallpaper from their home and fed it to her children, hoping to sustain them on the nutrients trapped in the glue. Memories of hunger hang over his head like a dark cloud and he can only sleep at night knowing that hundreds of pounds of dried goods lie beneath the floorboards of his California home.

Ironically, the war that had left his family impoverished and killed his father also inspired his obsession with flight, a fascination born from the low-flying American fighter jets that laid waste to his idyllic village. Armed with little more than pennies and a survival instinct developed through starvation and a grueling apprenticeship as a blacksmith, Dengler left for America to become a pilot, working his way through college and the Air Force before finding a position in the cockpit by way of the U.S. Navy. Military service meant a career, three square meals and keys to the sky, but Dengler couldn’t come to terms with the barbarity of combat, wrestling with anxiety before each mission over Cambodia at the outset of the Vietnam War. He recalls hovering over the jungle, perplexed by the lay of the land, described by Herzog as “alien and abstract… like a distant, barbaric dream.”

Dengler was shot down during a secret mission over Laos, an experience illustrated as if it occurred outside of time, plumes of heavy fog obscuring his field of vision and radiant light spewing from the plane’s damaged right wing. He awoke moments after the crash on dusty terrain, barely stable enough to retreat into the jungle, surviving for two days in the bush before getting apprehended in a viridescent clearing by Laotian rebels. His captors bound his hands behind his back and made him run through the tropical forest for hours, punishing his attempts at escape by sliding splintered pieces of bamboo beneath the skin of arms and suspending him upside down over a well. His refusal to sign documents condemning American intervention in the Second Indochina War only lead to additional torture, but the memory of his grandfather’s opposition to Hitler sustained him and he continued plotting an escape.

Conditions grew dire when Dieter was turned over to the Viet Cong, a guerilla unit that proved to be more precise, organized and vicious than his Laotian gang of captors. Sharing tight quarters with six other prisoners, Dieter and his fellow inmates were overwhelmed by hunger, dysentery and physical trauma, allowed to stew in a cell of infection and waste and offered rotten meat as their only form of sustenance. Realizing that their days were numbered, Dieter developed a plan to steal the guards’ machine guns during the dinner rush and blast their way out of the camp, a coup that succeeded and sent Dengler and Duane Martin stumbling barefoot into the monsoon-drenched forest. They would never hear from their five co-conspirators again.

Dengler and Martin’s trek from Vietnam to Thailand is unfathomable, finding the pair traversing waterfalls, fighting off leeches and stumbling through thorny patches of thicket with only one tennis shoe as protection from the stoney earth. Dieter still hears echoes of his dead friend’s voice, begging for the shoe as he staggers over the jagged terrain on an infected foot. Dengler eventually had to survive on his own, losing Duane to the machete of a villager that caught him rummaging for food. The isolation proved to be more punishing than the landscape and, at his lowest point, Dengler was left to seek companionship from a bear that patiently awaited his demise.

Dieter’s descriptions of death are breathtaking and he equates the absence of being to the transformative experience of flight and the triumphant nature of his survival. Herzog bathes his visions of eternal rest in surreal imagery, likening his graceful insights to neon jellyfish, floating passively in a translucent tank. The narration is just as hypnotic and poetic as the photography, alternating between Dengler and Herzog and juxtaposing their delicate wordplay over images of war-torn landscapes and stock footage of aerial attack. The bond between the two goes beyond author and subject, striking a fascinating marriage between their attraction to and overwhelming fear of the chaos of the jungle.

Scenes that recreate Dieter’s experiences are the most affecting, finding his attention drifting into memory as the camera captures a mournfulness wash over his face. Early in the film, Herzog asks the humble survivor what it’s like to be considered a hero, to which he exclaims “Only dead people are heroes.” As each experience is relived before the camera, you can see Dieter become overwhelmed by the ghosts of his memories, those dead men metaphorically trapped in the jungle somewhere in his past.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1997)
Directed by Werner Herzog
Photographed by Peter Zeitlinger

Dead of Night (1974, Bob Clark)

“You promised you’d come back, Andy. You promised!”

A mother’s prayer echoes in the mind of a soldier under fire in Vietnam, haunting him as bullets perforate his fatigues and plunge deep into his chest. As he collapses to the ground at half-speed, his body enveloped by an opaque darkness and swirling currents of air, her fervent moans preserve his physical form, beckoning him to make the long journey home.

Dead of Night uses Private Andy Brooks’ death march to startling effect, crafting a chilly metaphor out of his putrescent flesh and ghoulish bloodlust, bringing the horrors of war home to roost and demanding that indifferent American suburbanites reciprocate the extent of his service. The dour pall that hangs over the film makes for unsettling satire, one that exposes the frailty of the nuclear family in response to the dehumanizing aspects of combat.

Functioning as the embodiment of the Rockwellian household, the Brooks clan politely chat at dinner through beaming smiles, sparing a moment for prayer in honor of their absent member. A rap on the front door dashes their amiable tone, captured in the sinking smile of a distraught mother, surmising the identity of the unknown knocker. As the messenger gestures kindly at the patriarch, grasping a certified letter in his right hand, the father clutches the man’s wrist, desperately hoping to delay the inevitable. The maudlin strings that hang over the scene suggest melodrama and cliché, but beneath the score lies a keen sense of direction, one astute enough to linger on the tear-stained faces of the bereaved, churning authenticity out of tired sentimentalism.

The warm lights dim and winding staircases darken as Andy arrives home, coaxed back from the beyond by the nocturnal yearnings of his despondent mother. Altered by his time in the infantry, Andy has grown pale and morose, receding inward despite an outpouring of familial endearment. When his father, in a state of absolute elation, reveals that the Army inaccurately designated the boy as deceased, Andy sardonically replies, “I was,” resulting in a moment of uncomfortable laughter. As the camera pans back through the dining room window, creating a framed portrait of the quartet from the lawn, Andy’s face droops into a scowl, his presence morphing into the rotting core at the center of his parents’ marriage.

The new Andy sits stoically in his bedroom, sarcastically swaying in a clangorous rocking chair, stirring up an awful din intended to antagonize his anxious father. Each creak of his chair symbolizes the prolonged, nagging pain of losing a child, embodied by Dad’s lust for strong drink and Mom’s penchant for paranoid delusions and aggressive outbursts. As Andy scours the streets at night, draining his victims of blood to preserve a decomposing human vessel, his doting parents cover the tracks and enable his addiction, even fabricating a story to deceive inquisitive police. Yet, consumption and cooperation can’t match the steady deterioration of human flesh and Andy is forced to accept his fate, coercing his mother into burying him alive as he claws dirt onto his sodden, maggot-infested remains. The camera cranes over the cemetery plot as sheriffs surround the mother and son in their final embrace, functioning as an ironic military funeral for the undead soldier.

Dead of Night drifts like a dream, carrying disembodied whispers on the score like imagined voices passing in gusts of wind. The soft, elegiac nature of the photography stands in stark contrast to the gruesome appearance of the boy’s decaying body and graphic shots of intravenous blood transfusions, captured in thrifty, but convincing, make-up effects. Hints of black humor wander in through the hominess of the local color, replete with town drunk, sassy diner staff and chatty mailman, quaintly occupying a world of woodgrain wallpaper and earth-toned family sedans. Nevertheless, any goodwill bestowed upon suburban contentment is only intended to spark incongruity, epitomized in the festering sores of Andy Brooks, a truly frightening personification of the barbarity of the Vietnam War.

Dead of Night (Quadrant Films, 1974)
Directed by Bob Clark
Written by Alan Ormsby
Photographed by Jack McGowan

Titicut Follies (1967, Frederick Wiseman)

A penetrating and unflinching examination of rehabilitation and the practice of medicine, Titicut Follies employs fly-on-the-wall filming techniques to expose the inhumane living conditions at Bridgewater State Hospital, a facility intended to treat the criminally insane. The resulting work was so gut-wrenching that the state of Massachusetts barred it from public performance for nearly 22 years, an act of censorship that director Frederick Wiseman claimed was a result of the damning evidence on display and not due to an infringement on patients’ rights.

The irony of the court’s suppression of the film lies in the work’s obvious defense of human rights, depicted through a loose chronology that exposes the absence of meaning and irrelevance of time in a life comprised of torture and indifference. Power is also exposed as a corrupting element, encapsulating the chain of abuse as it descends from physician to guard, finding the incarcerated at the bottom rung to suffer the brunt of structural violence.

Commencing with a hospital talent show and theatrical revue (the “Follies” noted in the title), Wiseman employs footage of the festive event at the outset to act as a symbol of public perception of the institution, one feigning equality and friendship between staff and prisoner. Life off stage is far less harmonious, finding inmates in a constant state of undress and sequestered to filthy sleeping quarters, enduring solitude only through the slivers of light that pass through their barred window. The only treatment or consideration received by patients is through overmedication and salacious psychoanalysis, a battery of questions that consists of masturbatory inquiry and probing the minutiae of sexual identity.

Mental and physical abuse also run rampant at the facility, ranging from bullying to excessive use of restraint. Pestering an inmate about the cleanliness of his cell, guards force an obviously nervous and elderly patient into responding to the same question multiple times, a pattern that leaves the man battering the tile and walls of his chamber until his knuckles are bloodied, desperately searching for a way out. Another ailing detainee is pinned to a gurney by belligerent orderlies and force-fed soup through a tube inserted into his nose. As he gags on the rubber that’s continually being thrust deeper into his esophagus, Wiseman edits in footage of the man’s subsequent embalming, showing the lifeless, ragged texture of his face as it receives one last shave and gets cosmetic cotton balls stuffed into its sunken eye sockets.

Interspersing shots of the before and after functions as the piece’s primary symbol, showing the state’s calculated adherence to protocol in both the life and death of a convict, a passivity that stands in direct contrast to the tenets of treatment. All three of Frederick Wiseman’s earliest works share this common thread, examining the habits and behavior of people in varying degrees of captivity and the ambivalence of those intended to nurture, protect and reintegrate these individuals. Titicut Follies is the saddest of these films, detailing the failures of modern medicine and the pathetic attempts at reform by the American penal system.

Titicut Follies (Zipporah Films, 1967)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Photographed by John Marshall

Law and Order (1969, Frederick Wiseman)

Law & Order opens with a series of mugshots strung through a slide projector, each face pallid and drained of color, exhibiting only fear, anger and confusion. The stills depict emotional archetypes, functioning only as “objective” record of a crime, not representation of a person or personality. Frederick Wiseman models the focus of his police-and-thieves documentary on this facelessness, never revealing names or creating characters, merely observing the indifference of a system that oppresses parties on both sides of the thin blue line.

Compiled from snippets of arrests, interrogations and idle chatter, the camera acts as impartial third party to the daily grind of the Kansas City Police Department, magnifying small moments of conflict between civilians and officers into a broader statement on authority and class in America. Filmed with a handheld camera and employing tight shots of furrowed brows and quivering lips, the stark, monochromatic footage organically captures heartbreak in the eyes of every victim and victimizer, often drawing parallels between the two parties through their race, distrust of authority and lack of income.

The palpable tension lingering between the predominantly white force and the black community they “serve and protect” is the result of excessive violent behavior, an extreme response administered to both petulant and compliant suspects. On one hand, the arrest of an aggressive carjacker typifies composed police work and a reasonable amount of physical force, taking into consideration the terroristic threats made by the perpetrator and the erraticness of his conduct. On the other hand, a prostitution sting devolves into a docile suspect being choked into submission by a plainclothes officer, her nightgown falling from her body as she desperately struggles for oxygen against the forearm thrust into her windpipe.

As harrowing as this snapshot is, Wiseman doesn’t want the piece to focus solely on the most appalling example of public service, but fixate on the concept of authority and how it functions in a free society. The arbitrary nature of law and the exclusive right to administer punishment negate ambiguity and individuality, enforcing black-and-white rules that only function to proliferate a class-based system and thwart liberty. Wiseman perceives the civilian and cop as subjugates to “respectful law and order,” indoctrinated into a culture of resignation beneath the chain of privilege that symbolically towers over their heads. His absorbing exposé catalogs the tyranny of this plutocracy, never inserting itself into the field of view or sensationalizing suffering, capturing the insidiousness of oppression through austere observation.

Law and Order (Zipporah Films, 1969)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Photographed by Bill Brayne

High School (1968, Frederick Wiseman)

Intended as an uncontaminated snapshot of an institution, Frederick Wiseman’s High School wisely acts as a non-participant, using no narrative, focal point or linear plot line. What it manages to capture is an authentic look at education in America, made all the more powerful because of a lack of specifics, allowing the viewer to relate based on their own experiences.

Wiseman’s films are documentaries in the purest sense; works that catalog moments and occurrences without reaction, maintaining a stoic distance from the people and objects on the screen. The town, school, students and administrators don’t necessarily matter to the intention of the work, instead acting as a reflection of the banal, collective consciousness.

Moments are seemingly edited together at random. Scenes of a hallway between classes will segue into lunchroom discussion, band practice or a parent-teacher conference. The impermanence never feels haphazard, gradually building a theme from seemingly disconnected elements, exhibiting the roles of the student and teacher and how they act as a microcosm for society on a grander scale.

Taking on the role of authority figure, teachers and administrators pass down judgment and punishment under the guise of education. On the receiving end of discipline is the student, who plays the role of subordinate. More like helpless captor than willing participant, students are incapable of expressing themselves as individuals, often lashing out in frustration. While individualism is promoted by authority figures in theory, its practice is rarely rewarded, often resulting in charges of insubordination or further punishment.

Resigned to being sheep, most of the teens spied by Wiseman’s camera seem bored and distant during lectures, blankly staring off into space or slumped over the hard surface of their desks. The only moments of engagement come through a poetry lesson on Simon & Garfunkel and a flight simulation, both of which require active participation, not quiet reverence.  Sadly, lessons of this type are fleeting and most of the day is spent reinforcing conformist ideals about the benefits of being part of the “majority.”

Wiseman seems to think this oppressive experience won’t end the moment these kids grab a diploma and bolt for the exit. They’ll probably have someone telling them to “get on the ball” every day for the rest of their lives, whether that be a college professor, employer or police officer. It’s this helplessness that makes High School such an infuriating and confrontational documentary. Teen angst may be temporary, but subservience and complacency are eternal.

High School (Zipporah Films, 1968)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Photographed by Richard Leiterman

Pain & Gain (2013, Michael Bay)

Can we sympathize with a villain without rooting for him?

Pain & Gain poses that question as it smudges the line between comedy and tragedy, daring us to pity the leads as they commit callous acts in the name of prosperity. If it was a work of fiction, advocating three muscle-bound goons as they shakedown Miami’s nouveau riche would be second nature, following in the footsteps of cinema’s storied history of exalted scoundrels. The only snag here is that the Sun Gym Gang was real and the violence they bestowed on their victims actually transpired, a harsh fact that lends a queasy discomfort to the film’s nihilistic passages of dismemberment and torture.

Told in a resolute voiceover that ricochets wildly between characters, Pain & Gain is a tale of “developing potential,” self-actualization gained through weight lifting, positive thinking and barbaric extortion. Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) is an enthusiastic, but simpleminded, personal trainer, rippling with muscle that tests the elasticity of his flesh, obscuring the inadequacy that lies just beneath the surface. Lugo’s spirited bouts of rhetoric carry a nationalistic thread, marrying fantasies of the “American Dream” to a bitter resentment of immigrants, speaking in hollow platitudes lifted from self-help seminars. His imagination knows no bounds, but reality finds Lugo as an average salesman with an above-average physique, suffering from a limited skill-set, empty bank account and severe case of mythomania.

Hearing opportunity knock in the form of sandwich mogul Victor Kershaw’s (Tony Shalhoub) unfiltered blabbering, Lugo takes note of the speed boat, off-shore accounts and Schlotzsky’s franchise, dreaming up a heist that will sufficiently milk the Colombian-born miser dry. Compiling a team that somehow exceeds his own ineptitude, Lugo places his trust in the ungovernable violent streak of Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and child-like naivety of reformed felon Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), an ill-advised measure that results in a bungled snatch-and-grab mission outside of Kershaw’s prominently-located deli.

Michael Bay mines the opening heist sequences for laughs, arming his small-time crooks to the teeth like out-of-work mercenaries and staging their failures with a frivolity akin to the Three Stooges. When the tone dramatically shifts and Kershaw is finally captured and looted, it’s intended to knock the wind out of us, paralleled by the victim struggling for breath as a plastic bag is forced over his head and his chest is pummelled with the bulbous end of a dildo. Bay precariously tips the scales even further, testing our limits, staging Kershaw’s forced suicide like an action setpiece, replete with a high-speed crash into a bulldozer, immolation and cranial trauma by way of truck tire.

As the trio circles the drain and their behavior becomes increasing ghoulish and sadistic, Bay sneakily wavers between stern glance and wink, leavening bits of bodily dismemberment with pitch black humor. When the boys ask for a refund on a saw with human hair kinked in the chain and Paul burns fingerprints off of severed hands on a charcoal grill, we’re dizzied by the drastic tonal shift, laughing out of disbelief as much as amusement. The baseness of the character’s actions and mean-spirited nature of the humor also curiously clash with the sleekness of the visual palette, an intended maneuver which mirrors the superficiality of the gang through the eroticization of symbols of wealth and veneration of their sinewy bodies.

At once humorous and harrowing, Pain & Gain purposely toys with our emotions, indicting the participatory nature of cinema and the allegiances it nurtures between audience and protagonist, despite the real-life implications of on-screen brutality. Whether Michael Bay intended for his viewers to question the ethics of aestheticized violence is up for debate, but the composition manages to strike a complex dichotomy between craft and content, succeeding as experiment, despite its culpability.

Pain & Gain (Paramount Pictures, 2013)
Directed by Michael Bay
Written by Pete Collins (magazine articles), Christopher Markus (screenplay) and Stephen McFeely (screenplay)
Photographed by Ben Seresin

The Island (2005, Michael Bay)

A flood of reverse motion images captured in colored filters and fisheye lens, The Island bursts onto the screen in a frantic fever dream, caterwauling through faint remembrances of childhood, destruction and persecution before submerging into steely blue water. The nightmare belongs to Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor), a resident of an authoritarian society that shelters itself from chemical contamination in a domed structure, one lined with lofty elevators and chilly arctic columns, resembling a pressure-washed variant of Metropolis’ underground factories.

Lincoln inhabits a cell that monitors his sleep cycles and temperament, governing his clothing, dining habits and work schedule, all through soothing, but autocratic, loudspeaker dictation. The strictness of his labor regimen is offset by the promise of reward, a lifetime of relaxation and procreation at an island refuge, “nature’s last remaining pathogen-free zone,” gained only by weekly lottery and conformity to the compound’s “rules of proximity.”

Discontent with the lack of variety and physical interaction in his life, Lincoln desperately wishes “there was more” and stresses the doubt and fear that plagues his dreams to Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean), the staff psychoanalyst and shadowy patriarch of their community. Surprised by the subject matter of Lincoln’s nocturnal visions and perturbed by his disputative nature, Merrick stresses cooperative behavior and healthy mental outlook, implanting sensors into Lincoln’s brain to track the firing of his synapses and emphasizing the paradise that awaits the devoted.

Uninspired by Merrick’s platitudes, Lincoln’s lingering questions compel him to creep through restricted areas of the complex, seeking answers to the ominous manifestations in his nightmares. Following a moth as it flutters through the rafters of the structure, Lincoln confirms his greatest fears, discovering a lottery winner dissected on an operating table, mined for his vital organs and deliberately allowed to plummet into cardiac arrest. Startled by the true intentions of the organization, which synthesizes human clones and grooms them as surrogates and organ donors for silk-stocking celebrities, Lincoln seizes Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), the subject of his innocent hormonal desires, and dashes for an indeterminate exit.

In a heartbreaking moment, the pair discover the genesis of their people, stumbling into an incubation chamber where memories and personalities are impregnated through subliminal images, beamed directly into the synthetic womb. It’s a moment rife with symbolism, intended to parallel an American culture indoctrinated by religion and consumerism, unflagging in its devotion to a power-fueled machine that exists to exploit superstitions of the ignorant and widen the gap between wealth and poverty.

Michael Bay does a satisfactory job illustrating the pitfalls of faith, pinpointing the oppressiveness of the afterlife myth on the clones and their symbolic counterparts, documenting the exchange of free will for the promise of eternal pleasure. As expected, his role as a proponent of the Hollywood blockbuster machine doesn’t mesh well with his attempts at anti-consumerist rhetoric, evident through rampant bits of product placement, which reach their nadir in a sustained shot of a glistening bottle of Michelob Light.

Bay’s aesthetic tendencies further betray the philosophical aspects of the story, favoring stylistic gimmick over natural plot progression. Tinting the color of the film, intended to lend the picture a sun-drenched, bleached sheen, only dulls and softens the focus of the image, forcing the viewer to strain in hopes of capturing photographic detail. Tired visual motifs from previous films also work their way into the narrative, providing enough extraneous footage of flowing fabric and aerial whirlybird shots to successfully choke the suspense out of an otherwise engrossing piece of science fiction.

The remaining specimen is a heap of twisted metal and bone-crunching violence, a compelling narrative perverted into the type of motorhead pornography that has become Michael Bay’s stock-in-trade. The promise of the opening reels hinted at a more sophisticated filmmaker, one free of immature predilections and enthusiastic about crafting a spellbinding story, but the moment Bay refashioned Lincoln and Jordan’s quest for experience into an interminable car chase, the film shed its emotional core and became the consumerist product it claimed to despise.

The Island (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2005)
Directed by Michael Bay
Written by Caspian Tredwell-Owen (story/screenplay), Alex Kurtzman (screenplay) and Roberto Orci (screenplay)
Photographed by Mauro Fiore

Bad Boys (1995, Michael Bay)

High on a potent cocktail of screeching tires and sassy dialogue, Bad Boys is a jumbled mess of a buddy comedy, far too invested in its bewilderingly swift action sequences and trite mistaken identity scenario to nurture genuine chemistry between its leads or inspire anything aside from ambivalence. Emotional resonance may be a bridge too far for a brainless actioner, but it’s impossible not to envision a deeper connection between the protagonists, a bond reduced to broad strokes and glib exchanges in favor of brevity and superfluous f/x work.

Polar opposites in every way, Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) are Miami narcotics detectives that bicker like Felix and Oscar, wholly discordant in their demeanor, tax bracket and sexual prowess, only bonded by a mutual profession and undisclosed backstory. Marcus is diminutive in height and self-confidence, too delicate for police work or the struggles of a sexless marriage, relegated to a perpetual state of distress and emotional overeating. Mike is his casanova counterpoint, shuffling through paramours and greenbacks with a devil-may-care bravado, incensed only by questions of his charmed upbringing or Marcus’ passion for spilling french fries between the seats of his pristine Porsche 911.

Tasked with tracking down the architect behind a police department vault heist, Marcus and Mike have 72 hours to retrieve the contents of the coffer before Internal Affairs figures the caper for an “inside job” and curmudgeonly captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) is forced to shutter the doors and maniacally gnash the head of his cigar at an alternate location. After a trail of fresh corpses proves to be fruitless, Mike spreads the word to his army of informants to keep their eyes peeled for hot-shot crooks blowing through wads of cash, a tip his prostitute ex-girlfriend Maxine (Karen Alexander) heedlessly pursues. Gunned down in grandiloquent fashion by a double-dealing detective’s criminal cohorts, Maxine’s death spins the story off into two equally clichéd and insipid directions: an underdeveloped vengeance plot for Mike and comedy of errors for Marcus.

In an effort to assuage the concerns of a petrified witness, Marcus must fool Maxine’s roommate Julie (Téa Leoni) into thinking that he’s the debonair Lothario they’ve always gossiped about, a gambit that spins a tangled web of lies and familial drama that strains for laughs while it paints each character into a one-dimensional corner. Marcus’ wife suffers the brunt of these ham-fisted narrative shortcuts, settling uncomfortably into the role of nagging wife, existing only to bust Marcus’ balls and misconstrue the objective of his detective work and devotion to his family. Surely the wife of a veteran police officer would have a better understanding of the job’s requirements and long hours, but the character only exists as a device to turn the gears of the convoluted plot, never developing beyond the cinematic glass ceiling of “disapproving spouse.”

The technical aspects of the film feign elegance on the surface, but are just as vapid at their core as the written material. Sapped of richness and natural color, Michael Bay and photographer Howard Atherton shoot Miami in washed-out, burnt siennas and oranges, visually reproducing the humidity of the region and the sun’s irradiance, creating a visual desert to match the barrenness of the discourse. Alternately, interiors are shot in cool blue filters and muted greys, mirroring the sterility of the precinct and the psychological implications of the color itself (representing loyalty and stability). This artistic choice holds water when held against the relationship of the male leads, but does not couple well with the litany of civil rights infringements that occur in the field.

Flashes of flowing curtains and trickling water recur incessantly, shaping the sort of tacky visual motif that passes muster in a music video (where Bay cut his teeth), but feels tawdry and amateurish on the big screen. Unnatural camera motion and ground-level shooting perspective prove to be just as jarring, further besmirching the composition with rapid-fire tracking and impatient editing, effectively morphing the succession of images into an incomprehensible puddle of color.

Despite these glaring flaws, Bad Boys is actually one of the most subdued efforts in Michael Bay’s catalog, relying far more on performance and practical effects than expected for a director who plies his trade staging CGI battles between sentient sports cars. It even shows signs of restraint, waiting for the final reel to introduce his trademark arc shot and crash a garbage truck through an airplane hanger.

Fusing the raw materials of Bad Boys together must have been strenuous work and Bay is an undoubtedly talented filmmaker, but he desperately lacks finesse, favoring brute force over methodical pacing. What’s ironic is that this adherence to breakneck speed renders most of the explosive setpieces inert, resulting in a blur of displaced shots and tinnitus-inducing gunshot echo.

Bad Boys (Columbia Pictures, 1995)
Directed by Michael Bay
Written by George Gallo (story), Michael Barrie (screenplay), Jim Mulholland (screenplay) and Doug Richardson (screenplay)
Photographed by Howard Atherton

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones)

A satire of religion and nobility produced by a cross-dressing English comedy troupe, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is as ridiculous as it reads on paper, a free-form foray into the surreal and sacrilegious that operates on the steam of its own irreverence. Everything on screen is a deconstruction, spoofing the authority of religion, politics and the artistic elite to create a film as incensed by structure as it is by the powers that be, liberating in its disregard for the confines of society and logic.

Even the opening credit sequence is drenched in sarcasm, but don’t confuse flippancy for lack of passion, especially when the Python team crams more jokes into the open seconds than most films have in their first reel. Capturing the sturm und drang of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal through pounding drum and icey keys, the stark black and white scrolling credits even boast counterfeit Scandinavian subtitles, replete with English words bastardized by a “slashed O” and rampant misspelling.

Not content to simply smirk at the austerity of art cinema, the pranksters slowly morph the titles into a tourism advertisement for Sweden, “sacking” their translator in favor of whooping mariachi music and a jarring array of strobing lights. These interruptions occur incessantly, creating disorder through disjointed animated sequences, clips of a historical documentary gone haywire and a flashy intermission in the final reel. The objective is to remove meaning from space and time and the only way to laugh at the joke is to disregard your predilection for plot and coherence.

That isn’t hard to accomplish when dialogue and narrative are nothing more than a platform for absurdist humor. Following King Arthur and his motley crew of knights, the storyline progresses from assembling the team to searching for the holy grail, diverting along the way to debate the carrying capacity of an African swallow and the preeminent method for detecting a witch. The best gags deal with incongruity, whether it be the ferocious fangs of a bunny rabbit or a group of mud farmers who chat about “imperialist dogma” like first-year political science majors, rubbing King Arthur’s repressive behavior in his unsullied face.

The production design is appropriately mucky, benefiting from the Scottish Highlands’ rainfall and lush greenery, captured through natural photography and faint clouds of artificial fog. Interspersed bits of animation are painted onto the landscape, carrying the delightfully blasphemous stop-motion work of director Terry Gilliam, who emulates period art in an effort to pervert the sacrosanct. His most memorable mortal sins consist of cherubs farting out a song of praise, a nun marvelling at an exposed backside and an impatient God chastising the miserable hymns of his groveling, insufferable acolytes.

Reluctant to settle for a mere merger of cartoon and comedy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail churns through a myriad of styles, lampooning the musical, fairy tale, police procedural, porno and documentary, rarely settling to catch its breath and shouting “Get on with it!” when the pace threatens to flag. Adjusting to the rapidity of the jokes and contrarian attitude does require some compromise, but embracing the recklessness and structural complexity can lead to ample laughter and aesthetic admiration.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (EMI Films, 1975)
Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones
Written by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin
Photographed by Terry Bedford

Blazing Saddles (1974, Mel Brooks)

Broader in scope than the average genre spoof and far more impolite, Blazing Saddles takes the conventions of the Western and refashions them into an uproarious indictment of American race relations, skewering intolerance by confronting it head-on and making it the brunt of the joke. The plain-spoken dialogue, often trading in the taboo, crude and bluntly pejorative, toes the line between wisecrack and insult, zeroing in on a certain term that made the film controversial in 1974 and makes it absolutely incendiary now. Yet, it’s this candor and eagerness to offend that generates the most profound insights, transposing the social issues on screen into a modern setting through the shock of laughter, allowing the viewer to directly address intolerance by unmasking its ignorance.

We open on a vista of golden desert sand, the vastness of the landscape broken only by a string of railroad workers, hammering away at the blunt side of rail spikes. It’s an inconspicuous opening shot, differing very little from the “oaters” that Mel Brooks saw as a child, barring the bevy of whip cracks that diminish the sincerity of Frankie Laine’s themesong. Thankfully, the similarities end there, as the sheer stupidity of the denizens of Brooks’ American West makes its way onto the screen, parading on horseback and belaboring the exhausted, multi-racial “gandy dancers” into singing a minstrel song, despite the brutal 104-degree heat.

Always keen to make his intellectual inferiors look even sillier, the mischievous “Black” Bart, played with impeccable comic timing by Cleavon Little, gives his superiors an anachronistic taste of Cole Porter instead of “Camptown Races,” confusing the shitkickers into performing their own rendition of the racist tune in response. It’s a trivial bit in comparison to the bigger laughs en route, but it sets a precedent early on, defining racists as buffoons worthy of our derision, even if they’re too dull-witted to pick up on the joke.

Speaking of buffoons, corrupt Attorney General Hedley Lamarr (not Hedy Lamarr) bankrolls the expansion of the railroad and sees dollar signs in the property lying just beyond the tracks, despite its current occupation. His primary focus is Rock Ridge, an unsophisticated village settled by one incestuous family and fostering a dialect primarily consisting of “authentic frontier gibberish,” which remains steadfast in its residency despite the violent siege Lamarr and his gang of convicts has waged against the townspeople. Try not to snicker during the mayhem, particularly when an old maid pouts into the camera, “Have you ever seen such cruelty?” as a gang of ruffians punches her in the gut.

In a stroke of genius or sheer insanity, Lamarr joins forces with a brain-dead, cross-eyed hornball of a governor (played by Brooks) and constructs a plan to “so offend” the citizens of Rock Ridge that they’ll run for the hills and leave their land free for the pilfering. Pulling Bart from the lengthy queue of the local executioner, Hedley assigns him the role of town sheriff, despite his “crimes” against his white foreman, predicting the reaction of the townspeople to a black lawman to result in abandonment or murder by committee.

Spinning a genre cliché on its ear, the new sheriff trots into town to save the day, but isn’t met with a ticker-tape parade or hero’s welcome. “The sheriff’s a ni----!” shouts the town cryer as Bart rolls into city center, a moment that leaves the jaws of the citizens and moviegoers hanging wide open, for very different reasons. While the slur is obviously meant to illicit laughter, it’s not a joke made at Bart’s expense, since he always has the upper-hand and relishes playing right into white prejudice. In one of the funniest line deliveries in film history, Bart smirkingly declares “‘Scuse me while I whip this out” as he reaches for his induction speech, having a laugh at stereotypes of black male sexual potency and the people who cling to such preconceived notions.

Mel Brooks also wants to demolish audience presumption, particularly in relation to the three-act structure and boundaries of fiction storytelling. Bucking narrative “law” in favor of anachronism and an ill-defined fourth wall, Brooks allows his characters to directly address the audience and is more than willing to step outside of reality to tell a joke, even at the expense of confusing the viewer. The disorientation of the final reel, which pans back from the predesignated melee between citizens and convicts to reveal a soundstage, destroys the fantasy of moviemaking, both adding an infectious frivolity to the affair and alternately injecting some gravity into its focus on real-world bigotry.

The anarchy on display is invigorating and for all its transgressions, ranging from racism to homophobia and sexism, Blazing Saddles is never anything less than hysterical, wearing down our better judgment through an equal opportunity willingness to offend and an endless stream of irresistible gags. In a world obsessed with progress and exposing injustice, could Blazing Saddles be American cinema at its most progressive, wholly righteous in its refusal to shy away from the root of the problem?

Absolutely.

Blazing Saddles (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1974)
Directed by Mel Brooks
Written by Andrew Bergman (story/screenplay), Mel Brooks (screenplay), Norman Steinberg (screenplay), Richard Pryor (screenplay) and Alan Uger (screenplay)
Photographed by Joseph Biroc

Horse Feathers (1932, Norman McLeod)

Anemic and a tad exasperating, Horse Feathers finds the Marx Brothers flailing wildly between serpentine verbal shtick and prop-based visual gag, throwing so much material at the audience that the prospect of retention or laughter seems improbable. Flickers of the family’s wit are present, seen in fleeting bits of Groucho’s sarcastic banter and Harpo’s cartoonish jest, but inexpressive camerawork and structural inconsistency cripple the anarchic spirit of the performers, leaving them to overcompensate for technical mediocrity.

The adherence to a traditional narrative is particularly frustrating, especially when considering the emptiness of the dialogue and the lack of restraint on behalf of the performers. Discourse is nothing more than a springboard for Groucho’s smart-assed quips and conversational misinterpretations, many of which fall flat as the viewer rushes to catch up to the rapid-fire chatter. These semantic games only bear fruit when the joke is detached from the progression of the plot and allowed to operate as surrealistic art piece, not as representation of the whole. The best of these sketches is the “swordfish” gag, which takes a cryptic game of password and corrupts it with a gaggle of near rhymes and silly word associations, humorously flipping “sturgeon” into “surgeon” and “haddock” into “headache.” The segment reaches its zenith when Harpo interrupts Groucho and Chico’s discussion to hold up a rubber fish with a sword stuck in its throat, pronouncing the password through pantomimed gesture and wide-eyed grin.

Comedic stylings of this nature have their roots in vaudeville and are better suited for an episodic structure, a point made blatantly obvious by Horse Feathers’ superfluous plot and static camera angles. Revolving around a college football rivalry, a pair of bootleggers and an opportunistic gold digger, all elements of the narrative stand in contrast to the objective of the comedy troupe, which is to lampoon authority and romance by any means necessary. Groucho’s opening song seems to be the only number that captures this gleeful negativity, relishing the opportunity to honk the noses of Huxley College’s elite board members and bellow “Whatever it is, I’m against it” at their suggestions for administrative restructuring and a renewed interest in education.

This disillusioned attitude and distaste for polite society is better suited for a more substantial target and stronger script, one capable of eliciting anything besides scant laughs and passive viewership. As it stands, the desperation of the weaker bits only magnifies the slapdash nature of the production, making for an intermittently funny featurette coasting on half-baked ideas. The poetic physical comedy of Duck Soup and rigid framework of A Night at the Opera remedied these flaws behind the scenes, proving that a lawless quartet like the Marx Brothers functions best when afforded absolute freedom or reigned in by dictatorial restraint. Horse Feathers is stuck in purgatory between these two methods, flagged by a lack of devotion to both story and satire.

Horse Feathers (Paramount Pictures, 1932)
Directed by Norman McLeod
Written by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone
Photographed by Ray June

Touki Bouki (1973, Djibril Diop Mambéty)

Inscrutable in its rebellion against both traditionalism and modernism, Touki Bouki represents the prison of both ideologies through a haunting and illusive succession of images, revolutionary in its disparity of tone and willingness to provoke. Its defining symbol lies in the struggle of an ox to avoid the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, wrestling hopelessly against the ropes that bind its legs. As the startled beast falls to the ground, unable to find balance, a butcher opens the animal’s throat and blood sprays from the wound, forming a pool on the white tile beneath its quivering form. It’s an unforgettable, potentially unethical, vision, one that encapsulates the lives of the protagonists as they struggle beneath the knife of a repressive culture.

Squeezed between a claustrophobic mass of colorful shanties and a sea of hostile foot traffic, life in Dakar is too close for comfort for the restless Mory and Anta, a pair of young lovers out of step with the morality of their parents and philosophy of their peers. Blazing through town on a motorcycle adorned with an ox’s horns, Mory has “no class, no job, no shame,” earning his keep through elaborate cons and sporting the care-free demeanor and shaggy locks of an American “hippie.”

Standing in direct opposition to pre-assigned gender roles, Anta abandons a life of scrubbing linens and housekeeping to attend college, finding a new form of oppression at the hands of her horny classmates, whom she rebuffs at every given opportunity. In retaliation for her prudence, a gang of student activists tie up and assault Mory, dehorning his mechanical steed and desecrating his symbol of individual freedom and masculinity. Helpless to the attack, Mory is brutalized and strapped to their truck like a trophy kill, resembling a cow awaiting its turn at the abattoir.

Desperate to abandon Africa and bewitched by the soulful cadence of Josephine Baker (“Paris, Paris, Paris” is prominently featured), the pair set their sights on a romanticized version of Paris, paying their way by swindling a state-sponsored wrestling event and raiding the closet of a decadent, homosexual acquaintance. Swept up in delusions of grandeur and drunk on their pilfered riches, the prodigal couple fantasize about their return home after years abroad, deified by the locals for their haughty French mannerisms, signified in their daydreams by Mory’s boater hat and tailored suit and Anta’s en vogue cigarette holder.

Ironically, the qualities they admire most in the French (class, wealth, autonomy) are the means by which they are ostracized, resulting in an uncomfortable realization atop an ocean liner intended for Gay Paree. As the French patrons loudly discount the Senegalese people as intellectually barren, unrefined and unartistic, Mory has a pang of conscience and dashes back into the capital, searching for his abandoned motorcycle. Discovering the bike in the middle of the street, totaled beyond repair, the boy learns a harsh lesson about human isolation, one that will follow him no matter his location or destination.

Merging the emotional with the aesthetic, Touki Bouki is a shade more personal than Badou Boy, but no less interested in blurring the line between reality and fantasy, often at the expense of narrative clarity. Djibril Diop Mambéty prefers to abandon coherence in favor of formal maneuvering, carrying the storyline on the viscera of his imagery, a tactic that functions through the photographic contrast between poetic beauty and crushing brutality. These opposing aspects often contend for space in a single sequence, best exemplified through the feverish dicing of shots of Anta’s sylphlike contours with the bleeding out of a frightened goat.

Whatever symbolic mileage the film gains from unsimulated depictions of animal cruelty is up for debate, but it’s hard to excuse exploitation for the sake of dramatic impact. In this case, it severely limits an otherwise exceptional work, forcing the audience to reflect on the responsibility of the artist in lieu of the despondency of the story’s characters.

Touki Bouki (International Film Circuit, 1973)
Written and Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty
Photographed by Georges Bracher