The Hit, shot the year I was born (’84), plays fresh, smart and lean. An Eric Clapton opening riff sets the date, as do the Warriors-style graffiti credits, but the rest of the film is free from period vestiges. It’s one of those films where the parts are a little bit more than the whole, but the parts are entertaining enough to excuse the lack of gestalt. The film is a philosophical criminal picture - bad men talking deep - and is saved from self-serious suicide by witty direction and self-sufficient actors. Terence Stamp - wonderful, always, but perpetually miscast - is a world-wise snitch, hiding out in Spain for a decade after ratting out his bosses back in Britain. Two hitmen, John Hurt and Tim Roth, track him down and shepherd him home for payback. Stamp has a good face, and his arrogance is endlessly charming, but until the film’s final ten minutes his character is useless and forgettable. ”You die when you gotta die,” his Willie Parker intones, and his fatalism is so perfect, so calm and infuriating, you can’t take him seriously as anything but a movie concoction. Hurt and Roth, as the less certain, more human mobsters, buoy the film and save it from Parker’s stoic dead weight. Hurt, as Braddock, is old and slow, with a bemused morality creeping in around the edges of his violent deeds. He hesitates over killing a friend that has wandered into his kidnapping scheme, and he brings a coquettish mole (Laura del Sol), also in the wrong place at the wrong time, along for the ride after hearing she is only 15. As Hurt plays him, it’s uncertain whether Braddock is going soft in his old age or just displeased with the messiness of the situation he finds himself in. He’s a man accustomed to a certain level of propriety and his small acts of kindness (sparing the girl, hesitating over his friend’s death) may in fact be instances of disgust – he can’t bring himself to do work that is so untidy, with so many loose ends. Roth, as the young buck out on his first job, is fierce and flashy. He’s like the pit-bull puppy who gets so excited while playing fetch he starts mauling his master’s leg – his enthusiastic moments find natural, perfect expression in violence. Death makes him happy. Death is the big trip – for other people. Well, of course: he’s a kid. He’s never considered the inevitability of endings – real endings – for himself. Roth’s vicious, asocial absurdity has always made him a force on screen. He’s one of those freebie actors who, if you’re lucky enough to cast him, will be entertaining regardless of what’s happening around him. Frears wrangles Roth’s energies to service the character and the film, and ends up drawing out one of the actor’s best, most in-tune performances.
Direction and acting are strong enough, but the script is just a little too tooled. Dialog is sparse and most of the film takes place in silent action, both good things, but the few bits of vocalization that do find their way past screenwriter Peter Prince’s pen are all tip-toed and mannered – the writing is about as naturalized as in an M. Night Shyamalan picture. The actors play their lines cool and low, but with a script this didactic, it’s hard to get past that feeling of being in class, under the glare of a focused lecture on how things are. Harold Pinter did a fair number of these sorts of things back in his day, and The Dumbwaiter, absurdist and half-real, is about as good as it gets. Prince doesn’t push The Hit’s philosophy far enough, isn’t willing to cross totally out of reality and into the land of stage and thought. It hurts the film - the plot, the script - but gives the director an excuse to stage clever, focused scenes in the real world. It makes the film into a show-reel for Frears’ potential. He directed this early in his career, and you get the sense that he’s trying to save the material, working feverishly to keep the audience’s (and his own) attentions from wandering. Fist fights are staged with an eye towards the comedically awkward, and any scene that can be pushed slightly towards absurdity via camera angles is. The direction injects something of the mania, of the insincerity, that is missing from Prince’s script. It’s not Frears’ best film, but it shows his righteous stuff in waiting.
(Something should be said about Laura del Sol’s Maggie. Del Sol is beautiful and when working in Spanish may be an actress, but she’s given nothing of substance here. Maggie is an idiotic creature of surfaces. She is shrill and bestial, useful to the film only in so far as she can provide slinky looks and tears on command. In her most memorable scene, she bites John Hurt on the hand and the two sustain a test of wills – she dares him to pull his hand away, he dares here to bite down harder. The scene comes off bizarre and insulting. Hurt reacts with an emphatic panic, a very human response of “oh hell,” while del Sol glares flatly while growling. The filmmakers probably thought this gave her character spunk, showed how strong she was, but instead you watch her and think of a puppy in need of training. Maggie is a plot device - she gives Hurt an excuse to debate the big M’s of morality and mortality - and the worst part of an otherwise inoffensive film.)
Spalding Gray talks to the camera (to himself) for an hour and half while being wheeled through a series of themed sets. The background noise is directed by Stephen Soderbergh, but the performance (and the film) is all Gray. He delivers a continuous monologue. He wrote it. It’s good. Any actor will tell you: that’s a rare thing. Good Monologues are stories that would fall flat as essays or bore as coffee anecdotes, but are sharp, clear, and witty when preformed on stage. The explicit element of “performance” is important - the fear of failure must always be imminent. Will Gray forget his lines? Will he over-emphasize a punchline? Will his throat seize up from too much exertion? Filmed, we lose all these anxieties (excitements; everyone wants to see the trapeze artist fall — until she does) and a lot of the tension gets let out of the piece because we know the director can always call for another take. Soderbergh does his best to build sensation by breaking up sections of the monologue into separate thematic set pieces; the gimmick both works and doesn’t. Gray rambles on gamely from behind an aquarium, in a false-wall cathedral, and in front of green screens. Sometimes Soderbergh’s self-justifying strategy works, as when shadow puppets act out a gruesome operation behind Gray while he details the same with words. Other times it seems like a competition between director and star. Who will win: Gray’s booming voice or Soderbergh’s booming camera?
The monologue is neurotic - Gray, suffering from a “corneal pucker,” tries to circumvent Western medicine with fetishes, diet changes, and sweat lodge retreats - and you get the sense, especially when he forces his voice into a false nasal register, that the storyteller was not lying when he claimed to be a WASP born with a Jewish soul. Either by effort or by fate, Gray became on stage a charming and bizarre Woody Allen type, a victim of modernity and self. A Woody with a full head of hair. Gray made four of these monologue films - Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box, and Terrors of Pleasure and this - all in the late 80s and early 90s. After that he acted in other people’s stuff, wrote, and put on revivals of his old shows. In the early 2000’s, a serious car crash left him both emotionally and physically scarred, and his neurotic tendencies came to an awful sort of bloom. He became obsessed with designing a “creative suicide.” His wife, and Oliver Sacks, tried to dissuade him. “You would be much more creative if alive.” In 2004, Gray killed himself by leaping from the Staten Island Ferry. He had watched the film Big Fish the night before.
Spalding Gray was a gifted verbal thinker. Seeing him preform on stage would have been better than going to the movies. Any movies. Gray’s Anatomy, and his other concert pieces, are not the ideal way to experience his intellect or wit. But they’re what we’ve got. Check out one of his films. Swimming to Cambodia was directed by Jonathan Demme, if names matter to you. I don’t know if his family gets a cut from netflix rentals, but it’s worth a shot.
Narrative filmmakers could learn something from Stan Brakhage; they could learn to be brave. The man filmed his interests, not his comforts. He and Herzog would have been great friends. They both have stones in their guts. Here are a few Brakhage films.
Mothlight.
Moth wings glued onto a film strip, one wing to each frame. Brakhage killed and winged about 2,100 moths for this (the film lasts about three minutes). It would be more interesting to see in person - the object of the film strip - then it is to see projected. Projected, it’s just soundless flashes. Shadows of the real thing. Most films are like that (shadow dancers) but usually there’s a pop soundtrack and you can pretend you aren’t a rube. Not so here. Brakhage needed his art to be visceral. He needed to feel connected to the act of creation not in the edit but on the shoot. Gluing your image onto film frame by frame is certainly tactile. I respect Brakhage for knowing his priorities. But those priorities meant he had more fun making his show-and-tell than anyone can have watching it. Some artists hate the act of creation; they pleasure delay and hope for audience approval. Brakhage is not one of those artists. He is selfish (that’s not a pejorative).
Desistfilm.
Requires an artist’s statement. The film speaks in it’s own vernacular, and offers no lessons in its tongue. Either you speak Brakhage and get it, or you don’t and you change the channel. John Cassavettes was fluent. Figures. The film is about a bunch of young men and one young woman sitting in a room acting out. They smoke something, drink something, and start ADHDing around the room (gorilla arms, shifting eyes) while doing foolish things. Brakhage wanted this to be a poem - his statement on the DVD says so - about the “frustration of desisting.” I think that desist means, to him, saying no to bullshit. Brakhage was the sort of artist who saw all human activity with purpose - everything besides non-commercial art - as bullshit. The young men dancing around - well-heeled, semi-serious - are supposed to be the straight laced BS artists. They build card towers and light cigars (I guess these were professions in the 50’s). One naked kid tries to desist by screwing the one woman in the room. The lacers harass him and force him back into clothing. The film gets marred by the presence of smokes and booze; as soon as you decide the kids are high, the film loses its metaphor and becomes just another dumb black and white realist picture. ”This is how it was, in Denver, in 1959.”
The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes.
Thirty minutes of autopsies - real bodies on the table. Thin women with crumpled, muscle-free legs. Fat men with discolored, engorged penises. One man looks green. There is one black woman. I could not keep track of how many bodies in total. It’s impossible to tell if the bodies are attractive, or ugly, or anything. They just are. Dead human beings do not look human; they are no longer human. That is the horror. They are things - bodythings - to be treated with slow care. Embalming fluids are run in and out of veins with industrial tubing. Technicians in white gloves roll the dead men on to their sides, measuring ribs and inspecting spines. The rolling over - a large technician rolls, a small one measures - is horrible to watch. I can’t explain to you what it feels like; I’m not a good enough writer. If you’ve been to an open casket service and watched the pallbearers drop their burden, or once went on a high school field trip to the little room behind the animal shelter, conjure up those memories. This film is similar. You may vomit. ”This is why people turn vegetarian.” There is more to describe in the film - hollowed out torsos, little vacuums for fluids, and ziplock bags full of stuff - but it’s unpleasant to directly describe. Some of it is horrifying. Brakhage is mostly ruthless, but practices some small decency. Decency means: he cuts some shots short (a man’s face with no face) so only the after-image registers. Either Brakhage wanted these shots to seem sensational, or he considered them to be so. I think it is the former, but have very little basis for that claim, only that I expect that the man who made this film found very little of what he saw sensational.
[A little more about the film: It is silent. Sounds of the cutting and the pulling would have been unbearable, which means they would have pushed Brakhage’s point further. But diegetic sound would have included the technicians’ banter - halting, human - and would have normalized what is, to them, a day’s work (occasionally you can see them laugh). It’s far better that the film is shocking, and alien.]
A little boy’s technobabble wet dream recorded at $1 million/minute. This new Trek is everything earlier Trek denied it was but secretly desired to be: fast, sexy, and popular. This film will make money, lots of money, and some basement dwelling fans of the television series may balk, very loudly and very publicly, at the ballooning box office. ”This isn’t Star Trek,” they may say, “this is Dawson’s Creek in space.” The things they wont say - the true things - will be much darker and more pitiful: “but…it was ours…” Try to appreciate their pain: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were, to many American Geeks, exactly what was needed when school and home dissatisfied: a perfect set of pre-formed imaginary friends. Every post-NASA social outcast wanted, not to be, but to be among the crew of the Enterprise - surrounded by good-looking, earnestly moral astronauts with a respect for intelligence and debate. Trek provided them with just such a set of imaginary, but satisfying, friends. Friends drawn from a television show, yes, and technically available to the public, but Star Trek, perhaps because it was so resolutely optimistic, gained only notoriety never universal attention. To Trekkers, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise would always be “theirs.” A special, select few would enter into the shared fantasy and take solace in their having been chosen; the rest of the world was left out and excluded, as the chosen Trekkers had been excluded by the world. Now that J. J. Abrams has released his new, re-worked Trek on the planet - one with Flash! Danger! and Sex! - there will be many a Shatner fan cringing at the betrayal. “Star Trek was ours!” Well, it was. Now it’s everyone else’s too.
The movie is going to do well. Of course. It’s going to make money. Of course. The marketing has been strong (“yer dad’s Trek was a p*ssy”) and the release (summer begins in May, have you heard?) well timed. I’ve talked to many people, fans of the series and newcomers, who have said flattering things about Abrams and his lens-flare-addicting art. Word of mouth will be strong, and I expect high grosses to follow. We’ll see a sequel within two years. Is the film really any good though? Well, speaking personally, I enjoyed it very much. The plot is mechanical and the action scenes – loud expensive examples of high ball capitalism run amok – are tacked on loosely (Abrams may have reserved one or two from the final edit, for use in a later film; “incidental mix-n-match cinema”), but the characters are well-drawn and acted with spirit. And that, to me, is what matters: the rusty hinged, well worn characters. Watching the film I felt that I was back in my gradeschool bed room, imagining myself on the Enterprise’s bridge with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The show, even when it was objectively quite amateur – wooden scripts, cardboard sets, papier-mâché effects – meant a great deal to me when I was young. I connected with the characters. I couldn’t help it; I connect with them now, too. These characters are friends from my youth. Imaginary. Fictional. Yes. But friends nonetheless. I relish seeing them on screen, and in this film they are treated with respect, decency, and good humor. And even if the old upstanding Starfleet brigade has been given over to the masses – even if, starting now, everyone will claim ownership of Scotty’s wit and Kirk’s stumbling heroics – I’ll still love them all. Star Trek is back. Star Trek is back. Live long and prosper. Star Trek is back.
