MOVIE REVIEW: Into the Badlands (Sam Pillsbury, 1991)

Into the Badlands on IMDb

I was looking desperately for a moody western the other day, something with solitary blues instead of symphonic openings, and dirty yellow deserts instead of hardworking, brave little towns. And by god I found it. This little TV movie contains a world just outside the gates of Heaven and Hell, a cross between an eerie Limbo and the Twilight Zone, centered on and voiced by the bounty-hunter to bury all bounty-hunters, so wonderfully archetypal he might as well have been drawn in pencil.

The man doesn't just look like the end of the world, he talks like it too:
A bounty man, he don't live for nothing but that poster reading, "Wanted dead or alive" and blood money that will line his pockets. Always taking, never giving nothing in return, except sometimes, with the folks he meets, he leaves behind a little bit of his contagion, that poison, that rot. It can sneak itself inside behind your eyes, and all of a sudden, it's like rats let loose in your skull, and life's a place you only ever seen before in your nightmares.
 
The movie is composed of 3 different stories. In the first one, a wanted outlaw, played by the too pretty Dylan McDermott, falls in love with the weary prostitute played by Helen Hunt, none of which is too interesting if it weren't for Helen's expression of bitterness, with the corners of her mouth turned downwards and a glimpse of desert in her eyes. In the second story, we have Mariel Hemingway defending herself and a pale, huge-eyed Lisa Pelikan against the wolves of their own fears. And the third story, the most lovely of them all, is a reminder of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, with Bruce Dern's bounty hunter, Barston, trying to obtain the signatures of four zombified rednecks for the Indian / Irish wretch he had finally killed (and thus turned into his only friend :D). Barston recounts the eerie events ending up with his own killing and burial in the arms of his bounty, and his eventual refusal of death, leading back to the scene in the beginning of the movie. Either the Badlanders are all caught in a never-ending mirage of pain, or Barston alone is endless Retribution, watching over the lives and demises of the wretched souls this side of the River.
 
And over all, the slow guitar riffs and harmonica tunes, the dry rot of the desert, of ghostly loves and palpable fears. I loved this thing.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980)

The Blues Brothers on IMDb

click here to read the plot summary 

This movie is an odd cross of many things, some of them delightful, others dissonant and tiresome. We are being introduced to the two main characters (apparently brothers indeed, and indeed named Blues), one of whom is being released from prison. And then the surreal, metaphorical and unreasonable break loose. The two gentlemen have to say hello to a quasi-maternal nun with superpowers - most notably, the power to close doors from afar, to float on the floor and project ominous shadows:

This persuades the junior of the black clad and sunglassed duo that they are on a mission from God, which is to gather tax money and save the mission they grew up in. Obviously, the way to go is getting the band back together and organizing an end-of-the-world blues and soul concert. 
And so we find ourselves in this church here -

...which contains a hysterical James Brown, and we bump into John Lee Hooker singing Boom Boom while arguing with some random fellow that yes, it IS him who wrote the song. Then we end up in Aretha Franklin's Soul Cafe, who fails to stop her husband from rejoining the band. Finally, we get to have Ray Charles prove to us that the old piano in his instrument shop is working perfectly.

In the meantime, we manage to annoy the police, a bunch of country-singers called The Good Old Boys, the Nazi faction in Chicago, and Princess Leia, who keeps popping up out of the blue to launch bombs and rockets our way. Not that explosions and crumbling buildings had any effect on us, other than making our black coats dusty, on a second thought quite an annoyance.

But before dodging all of these and getting our act together for the concert, we spend a quiet relaxing night in this cozy hotel room:

...which frankly seems to come straight from a Wong Kar-Wai movie. 

Next day, we do manage to complete our business, but not before a car chase through Chicago, between us and pretty much the whole police and army force in the area, trying to get to us in cars, boats, tanks, helicopters and possibly submarines.

 Yes, the movie is mad.
And prettier than I expected (as seen in the screen shots above), full of self-aware and often ridiculous cool, and bent on destroying its own universe; among other things we witness a car chase in a gigantic mall, with cars smashing, crashing and tearing through anything that isn't a concrete wall. So if you gather all your destructive glee and love for dark streets, soul, blues and carnivals, this movie should be Heaven. I could only muster affection for about half of these, but I thoroughly enjoyed them whenever they appeared in front of my eyes and ears.

Over all and apart from being a musical, the movie plays as a urban fairy tale, which is something I tend to love thoroughly. Although I'd probably place it at the bottom of my favourite urban fairy tales list, which would certainly contain Dick Tracy, In Bruges, Kitano's Kikujiro, Wong's Chungking Express, Cast a Deadly Spell, Brazil and Running Scared.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Man Who Wasn't There (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2001)

The Man Who Wasn't There on IMDb

click here to read the plot summary


I'll be lazy and quote the Barber Paradox from Wikipedia: 

"The barber is a man in town who shaves all those, and only those, men in town who do not shave themselves."
From this, asking the question "Who shaves the barber?" results in a paradox because according to the statement above, he can either shave himself, or go to the barber (which happens to be himself). However, neither of these possibilities are valid: they both result in the barber shaving himself, but he cannot do this because he only shaves those men "who do not shave themselves".
 
Now, Bertrand Russell devised this paradox for more technical reasons, but I believe that in this movie it is alluded to in order to express the chronic, almost logical not-belonging of the main character, who is a barber. Of course, he begins the narration by stating that he never considered himself a barber, he just "worked there"...
 
So much about normality. As soon as Ed Crane, Billy Bob Thornton's main character, starts talking about his daily life, we find out that he and his wife go once a week in a strange establishment called "church", presided by a man in priestly attire, but where people play Bingo and exclaim "Jesus, Bingo!" when the right random combination of signs and squares is met. There we go, already neck-deep in Coenland.
 
So the business is grooming - an external, neutral, harmless affair which is nevertheless called at some point "the most important part in business". But we're still not in, we're on the outskirts of life, tending to it as it pulses and whirls by itself, only paying us regular monthly visits.
 
And this we find out from the forever lovely John Polito, as he explains, with his immensely expressive face, the wonders of dry-cleaning. Tending to life, again. With him, the narrative fabric begins to take shape. We get the motive - as usually in the noir-ish universe, the motive is a way out, in our case a way out of the flat predicament of Ed the barber. Then we get the means - blackmail, crime paying off further crime, again typically noir. Then the story turns briefly into a roller-coaster - life plans crumbled, torture, revelations, murder, wrong imprisonment, the cold gods of the noir in full swing.
 

Then we are introduced to Tony Shalhoub's lawyer, Freddy Riedenschneider, whom the camera films in Citizen Kane-ish angles and shadows, and the narrative comes to a halt, the alien laws behind it gradually exposed. First off, Ed has to keep his mouth shut, because he is the barber, he doesn't know anything. After which his detachment becomes even more apparent - he's looking at the people on the streets and perceives them as belonging to a different universe, "like he'd made it to the outside and somehow they were still struggling way down below". Outside of what? Outside the social matrix probably, when you are caught between the threads of inter-human relationship, desires fears and purpose. But he isn't the weaver either, he is simply an observer, temporarily immune to causality and impulse. He is us. He is looking at his own world as if through a fourth wall. Ironically, Ed got his "way out", except it was much farther out than he would have imagined. In the end we find out one other source for the inner fourth wall feeling - Ed's voice throughout the story hadn't been just an inner monologue, it was him telling his own story, which automatically placed him behind a fourth wall, an inner fourth wall, between the narrating voice and his own life.
 
That Freddy has this effect on Ed's existential status is not so bizarre - he is a lawyer, one of the ultimate builders of reasons and weavers of stories. And he starts talking about a quantum-mechanical angle on scientific observation, the Uncertainty Principle, where the observer changes the system while measuring it. Your looking changes it, which is why you can't know the reality of what happened. Looks like this is the case for very small particles and human stories - by looking at them you change them. And indeed, in most Coens movies the characters have little idea of what is happening, what shakes the shape of their world. Except for the Barber - he knows everything, he's outside Freddy's principle, because he's out of it all. But, of course, nobody listens to him. 

Now, sure that Freddy's speeches were mostly bullshit to confuse the jury and anyone who listened, and give him a free hand in switching opinions his way, in fact he admits that his purpose is not to deliver facts but to raise doubts in everyone. After all, he's the one who mentions the "barber's dilemma", which is the paradox I mentioned in the beginning of this comment, but he's not thinking about Russell's story. That's a hint from the Coens themselves. But just like the dilemma, some of Freddy's words have meanings beyond his own understanding, coming from his creators and delivered without his explicit awareness through the walls of his narrative aquarium. Man he'd be surprised to see us all staring at him.
 
Ed, on the other hand, would just throw us a flat stare and turn around back to his prison cell, like he did to those aliens. After all, he's not even really in his own story...
 
I liked this movie so much I actually watched it again now for the review. And I kind of want to end the commentary with Billy Bob Thornton singing Earl Scruggs's Ring of Fire, because I've been listening to it a lot these days, and it's just soothing to hear Billy's calm voice after talking so much about his crazy flick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITjrAUI_NYQ