Slipping into ruin

We see Dwight Evans (Macon Blair), though we don’t yet know his name, entering a stranger’s house to bathe, foraging for food, living out of rusted Pontiac Bonneville parked near a Virginia beach, a beardy ghost who resembles Iron & Wine’s Samuel Beam were Beam a homeless man barely able to speak much less sing. We sense that things haven’t always been like this for Dwight. He has a friend in a local cop, and seems to have retained his wits, though a comical episode in which he steals a handgun before realizing that he cannot use it without breaking an apparently unbreakable lock on its trigger might make us question his IQ. All of this transpires in the first third of Blue Ruin, which is a transfixing, nearly exhilarating display of spare, eloquent, quietly withholding cinema. There is almost no dialogue in the first 20 minutes—and there is a growing sense of disappointment when people begin to speak.

Writer/director/cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier is clearly very smart and very skilled when it comes to atmosphere and place, and the evocation of ruin generally, but by the time we enter the second half of Blue Ruin those atmospherics are overwhelmed by plot, and that plot is very familiar and more than a little tiresome. Turns out we’re watching yet another American vigilante revenge film, this one about a tit-for-tat family feud: Dwight’s parents were murdered and, harmless as he initially seems, he’s out for blood. Because the style is so strong, the craft so expert, and the story and most of the supporting characters so unimaginative, Blue Ruin feels like a calling card, a way of announcing a promising new filmmaker whose gifts simply need resources and a great script to soar, though this is in fact Saulnier’s second feature, following 2007’s Murder Party, which I haven’t seen. (Saulnier’s also shot some equally evocative films for other directors, like Matthew Porterfield’s I Used to be Darker.) I really look forward to Saulnier’s next film, and certainly recommend this one if it sounds at all up your alley, but I hope he can find a story truly worthy of his filmmaking.

              

Speed limits

In accordance with the title, I’ll make this quick: Need For Speed, based on the beloved video game of the same name, is a lot of fun whenever it kicks into high gear. Unfortunately, Need For Speed is an astonishing 130 minutes long, and every time it gets out of the car the thing just slows to a crawl, offering us way to much time to contemplate how unbelievably dumb it is.

Tobey (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul) runs a garage in the upstate New York backwater of Mt. Kisco, where he and his buddies soup up cars and go racing in the streets. Tobey’s old rival, affluent asshole Dino (Dominic Cooper), comes back to town after having stolen Tobey’s girl and vamoosed to Manhattan. Dino pays poor Tobey and the buddies big money to work on a fancy Mustang, but these fellows just can’t get along. One thing leads to another, and during an impromptu race on the freeway one of the buddies gets blown up to death. Tobey winds up in jail while Dino gets off Scott-free, though everyone knows buddy’s death was Dino’s fault. Except it wasn’t entirely Dino’s fault. One of the appalling things about Need For Speed is the way it keeps making Tobey out to be the bad-ass hero and righter of injustices, when the guy repeatedly puts the lives of countless innocent strangers into harm’s way with his at times needless reckless driving and daredevil stunts. Our engagement depends on our sensing the tragedy of Tobey’s buddy’s death, but we don’t even know how many people were injured, maimed or killed during the multiple chases and crack-ups, most of which are caused by Tobey.

Anyway, the music is wildly overwrought, the movie over-long and the characterizations over the top. Dino is so bad, he only wears black! Paul’s performance is largely a matter of raspy delivery and hard stares. Imogen Poots shows up as a token love interest in misguided headscarves and a posh accent. Michael Keaton has a bit as a pirate jock radio variation on the DJ from Vanishing Point. As promised, the sequences in which Tobey’s behind the wheel—flying over Michigan off-ramps, refuelling without stopping, getting airlifted out of Utah—are truly thrilling, but everything else is a snooze. “This isn’t just about racing,” someone declares. They’re wrong. 

                   

Radiation addiction

Ever wondered what happened to that radioactive Pandora’s box that suddenly transformed Kiss Me Deadly (1955) from a terse, sordid, ultra-stylized little noir into batshit sci-fi apocalypse in the film’s final, unforgettable moments? Turns out it wound up in the trunk of a 1964 Chevy Malibu, driven by a rather peculiar scientist (Fox Harris) with only half a pair of sunglasses, some three decades later. Only now the hell-fiery whatsit has turned into a cache of alien corpses—or do I have it wrong? We first spot its/their emerald glow when said scientist is stopped by a ill-fated highway patrolman somewhere in Southern California, perhaps not too far from Kiss Me Deadly’s exploded beach, in the opening scenes of Repo Man (1984), British writer/director Alex Cox’s truly inspired, tonally singular, frequently hilarious, genre-gobbling feature debut.

What the hell is wrong with me that I hadn’t seen Repo Man before now? I was a little kid when it came out, but its cult status burgeoned rapidly in the months and years following its initial theatrical release. I remember it so often being showcased in the suburban Calgary video stores I would frequent. I somehow missed the appeal. Go figure. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

A film riddled with elaborate conspiracies, boggling cosmologies, rarely seen Los Angeles geographies, old cars and a trove of So-Cal hardcore soon-to-be classics, it follows one Otto (Emilio Estevez), a blank slate of a punk rocker from Huntington Beach who can’t get laid and can’t hold a stupid job long enough to save up any money, while his baby boomer burnout parents give all the family savings to some caffeinated televangelist who insists that God wants their money. Otto impulsively quits his gig stocking generic food items at the local grocery, making a show of shoving a fellow clerk into a pyramid of cans with the same oddball air of faux-aggression he applies to dumping a can of beer all over the floor of the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation, the small automobile repossession agency where he will soon find gainful employment legally stealing people’s cars, and getting chased and attacked by angry drivers who neglect to make their payments. Otto likes the money and he likes the thrills. He even seems to like his mentor, Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), the senior agent who manages to recruit Otto without Otto’s knowing. The job lives up to Bud’s promise, which happens to be one of this imminently quotable film’s many quotable—if often misquoted—lines: “Repo Man’s always intense.”

But is Repo Man intense? More like audacious, spastically inventive and wildly entertaining, an underground comic come to life, with an absurdly economical final act in which our hero is captured and escapes, is captured and escapes and is captured and escapes in short shrift. The film’s parade of memorable supporting characters help streamline what might otherwise seem a narrative derailed by detours: Sy Richardson’s Lite, Dick Rude’s Duke, Del Zamora and Eddie Velez’s Rodrqiguez brothers, and most especially Tracey Walter’s Miller, who outrages the other repo men with claims of John Wayne’s homosexuality and blows Otto’s mind with a philosophy centered around the universe’s “lattice of coincidence.” But Stanton is the film’s enigmatic and weary center and key emblem, a figure of bizarre resilience in Regan-era America. It remains one of this great character actor’s small handful of larger roles. It’s also probably still the most interesting use of Estevez, who is often seen in his bright white underpants. And it remains the best and most successful thing Cox has yet managed in an industry that’s never given him as big a break. 

          

Actual Miles

Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) is among the greatest, most audacious, most truly individual studio-backed movies that could probably only have been made in the 1970s, one that feels like myth from a distance but when you’re actually in it, behind the wheel of it, is really a string of loving detail with no apparent concessions to grand design. It’s about a deal made at some seldom-patronized country service station, a cross-country race for pink slips, with stops only for cheeseburgers, gas and small repairs. One car is a slick yellow GTO, the other a hulking old Chevy, a car that’s all performance, no glamour—it doesn’t even have a heater since a heater might slow it down—and Hellman’s backseat camera shakes with the Chevy’s surges in speed. The movie’s universe is soaked in restlessness, but not the romantic sort. The purity absorbs you without explaining a thing. 

The characters have no names. The Chevy has a Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) and a Driver (James Taylor), a Beach Boy and a famous singer-songwriter, though neither talk much, much less sing—they can’t afford to waste the energy. Even Taylor’s leanness seems calibrated for speed. So these stoic, long-haired hustlers, who are they? Certainly not the counterculture emblems of Easy Rider (1969). Are they young men of their generation or of something much deeper in the American mindset, or maybe that of the late 19^th century European novel? The movie, scripted by Rudy Wurlitzer, opts to keep their mystery intact, while leaving much room for the actors’ low-key charisma to unfurl.

They’re joined by a girl (Laurie Bird, who was pretty mysterious even in real life), a tousled tomboy nymphet vagabond. Her entrance is spied entirely through the window and doorway of a diner; she transfers her body and belongings from one vehicle to another—the Chevy. Driver and Mechanic get in the car as she nests in the back. They drive off without so much as a word, as though her appearance in their car was not planned per se but a perfectly ordinary occurrence. She’s the first to speak. She just wants to make sure they’re not the Zodiac killer. 

Driver and Mechanic, the two-headed lone wolf, are most often seen from the front or behind, while the pilot of the GTO (Warren Oates) is most often seen from the side, the most appropriate point-of-view for a compulsive conversationalist. Few actors in history can be so endearing while being so baldly ingratiating, and Two-Lane Blacktop supplied us with one of Oates’ finest performances. Oates’ affectations are lovingly honed: the stiff collar and cashmere V-necks, the driving gloves with the knuckle-holes, the scarf or ascot or whatever that is round his neck, the tape collection perfectly cued-up so that he can play, say, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ just as a pretty girl slides into his passenger seat. He claims he’s scouting locations for a “down-home movie on fast cars,” which is doubtlessly total bullshit. He tells the girl he wants to take her away, says they can go to Miami or Montreal or Mexico—he’s a one-man Wild Bunch. (That Oates shares a scene with Harry Dean Stanton, the other greatest character actor of the 1970s, should constitute some special section of cinephile heaven, though the truth is that theirs isn’t one of the film’s best bits, with Stanton playing a hitchhiker who gets weepy when Oates won’t accept his unsolicited affections. “I got no time for sidetracks,” he explains apologetically.)

The racing opponents are also companions, helping each other out along the way, taunting each other playfully, exchanging hard-boiled eggs and hooch or drugs as peace offerings. Like the movie itself, which was shot in sequence in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, they’re in for the long haul—there is nothing else. So it’s no surprise that it all ends with the movie itself seemingly burning up on-screen. Everything is obliterated in the slipstream.

Pictures from a revolution/the sounds of Satan

By 1968 Jean-Luc Godard had abandoned the commercial film industry completely, despite international notoriety and success making films that already pushed fiercely against the boundaries of what a commercial film could be. His last such film was the magnificently apocalyptic Weekend (1967), which I wrote about last week. Sympathy for the Devil (1968), also known as One Plus One (Godard’s original and preferred title), is probably Godard’s most famous work from this radicalized, little-seen period, the reason being that the Rolling Stones appear in roughly half the film, though they are not there to provide excitement in any conventional sense.

Godard documented the Stones in the studio in long, uninterrupted, ominously slow tracking shots. They were working on an especially difficult to apprehend new song. Godard isn't dismayed by the ordinary tedium of studio labour; he lets it all play out. ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ which would become one of the most distinctive, sinister, irresistible tunes in the Stones catalogue, chronicles the eponymous narrator’s diabolical accomplishments across two millennia, wearing many guises: “I stole many a man’s soul and face,” Mick Jagger sings. Jagger came in with lyrics and chords but the band had yet to summon the right groove. When they find it, turns out it’s samba, with Keith Richards on bass, Bill Wyman shaking maracas, and later, in the film’s best documentary moment, the whole band, sans Jagger, huddled around a microphone singing the woo woos, along with a thin woman in huge hat and huge pants who I presume to be Anita Pallenberg. Decades of domestication makes it easy to forget that there was a time when some really believed the Stones were in league with Mephistopheles. (For more on this moment in Stonesology see Zachary Lazar’s excellent 2008 novel Sway.) But the cultivation of rock mythology was very far from Godard’s agenda, as is evident in cutaways to people spray-painting slogans like SOVIETCONG and FREUDEMOCRACY on London’s walls, cars, sidewalks and bridges, and in the film’s many elaborate staged sequences.

In the first such sequence a black man reclines in a wheelbarrow, under a bridge, surrounded by piles of wrecked cars—just one year after Weekend and it’s the end of civilization all over!—reading aloud from a book about musical appropriation and the roots of blues. Another man enters the frame to hand the reader a rifle; the camera then follows him back into the labyrinth of this Battersea scrapyard, where still more men, all of them pretend Black Panthers, read from other texts into recording devices, texts about race war and black unity. Soon a red Mini arrives with captive white girls wearing white shifts. One of their captors reads from an ode to white women, how he loves to smell their drawers, and so on. Later a camera crew follows a pretty young woman through a wood, posing questions about drugs, culture, politics, Vietnam, to which she answers only “yes” or “no.” Later still there’s a bookstore crammed with pulp and girly mags, where another man reads aloud and captive Maoists sits miserably in one corner.

So what’s it all about? The film’s too cryptic to be didactic, too detached and adrift to be agitprop. Something forming in the studio, something forming in the streets. Something about rising up, violence, overturning order, but always with posterity in mind. In every scene something’s being enacted, recited, and, above all, recorded. The revolution will not be televised but it will be spoken into machines for future reference. Somewhere in all this, between takes, Jagger sings the title verse of ‘No Expectations.’ Sound advice for prospective viewers of this film. 

Weekend: Godard's eternal flaming car wreck

Title cards flash across the screen in the opening minutes of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967); they inform us that what we’re watching and listening to is both “a film adrift in the cosmos” and “a film found atop a scrap heap.” Very different settings in which to discover a masterpiece of radical post-classical cinema, but either suggests that this is an artifact from a lost time and place, cine-notes from the end of the world. The film’s key images and sounds support this: protracted lines of stalled traffic, the drivers relentlessly, futilely honking their horns, as though the sustaining of this cacophony will do anything to quell their sociopathic road rage; rural landscapes in which the flaming ruins of crack-ups litter the freeways, corpses hanging from shattered windows or scattered across the shoulders like abandoned refuse. A three-car pile-up is overseen by a woman screaming bloody fucking murder, crying out in soul-agony, not for a loved one trapped or maimed or impaled in the wreckage, but for her Hermès handbag. In this only slightly exaggerated version of our world rape and murder is just a shot away, but the loss of designer accessories prompts a level of suffering too painful to bear in silence.

Describing such scenes risks rendering Weekend a very broad anti-consumerist satire, but the film, Godard’s fifteenth feature from his insanely prolific first decade, which begins as something of a neo-noir (a couple conspires to collect a substantial inheritance while each secretly plots the other’s demise) before descending into car-centric social breakdown and casual cannibalism, is dense with nuance, allusion and calculated misdirection. This is an audaciously blunt, bitingly politicized work in so many ways (most notably in its depiction of widespread affectless avarice as a result of high capitalism), yet its overt didacticism, delivered though rampant branding, on-screen text, militant monologues, literary quotations, and absurdist scenes of violent conflict over the most incidental damage to private property, is counterbalanced by formal strategies and narrative twists that, while firmly grounded in the era’s dominant Leftist ideology, always assures us that there's nothing noble about either side of the film’s battle between its haut bourgeoisie and forest-dwelling, Sgt. Peppery anarchist revolutionaries. Godard doesn’t need us to identify with any individual or group in Weekend; his interest seems to lie in the formation of a vast canvas, à la Bruegel, of social turmoil, drawing our attention to horrors that would feel unnervingly true-to-life as the West became increasingly embroiled in Vietnam and France would erupt into strikes and protest the following spring.

Yet Weekend’s prescience expands beyond the special chaos of the 1960s. Its use of the car as the quintessential object of consumerist idolatry is only more resonant in our age of rising oil prices, status anxiety and gaping class divides. Its formalist strategies have inspired countless subsequent satires, even if precious few strike Godard’s uncanny balance of wit, intelligence, craft and provocation. Weekend makes a brilliant double feature with Crash (1996), David Cronenberg’s inspired adaptation of the novel by J.G. Ballard, whose entire body of work could be seen as aligning itself to Godard’s vision of civilization’s auto-destruction (even if in Ballard’s version the cars are fetishized instead of demonized). So what we’ve got here is an apocalypse movie that speaks both to its moment and to the ages, a durable, colorful, endlessly fascinating, surprisingly entertaining ode to catastrophic collapse from an artist who to this day has yet to be outdone in terms of bridging the commercial cinema with the avant-garde. Vive la fin du monde! Vive Weekend!