Two kinds of love

We meet Robert (John Cassavetes) first, a novelist living in a spacious Hollywood Hills manor. He has many women around him, most of whom we won’t come to know, all of whom were pulled into Robert’s orbit by way of his stated determination to be granted women’s secrets, though whether this mission is for the sake of his art, a pick-up line, or both, is hazy. He’s middle-aged going on dead, divorced and estranged from his children, a hard-living, alternately charming and terrifying figure closing in on the final stages of some slow collapse. 

Sarah (Gena Rowlands) is Robert’s sunnier, manic counterpart, a woman resisting divorce from a man who, like her daughter, cannot endure her aggressive affections. Sarah doesn’t believe that love ebbs, ends or gets stopped up—love, once born, flows helplessly. Her psychiatrist tells her to get laid, maybe go on a trip; she does both, but really just wants to get back to the people who don’t want her. More than halfway into Love Streams (1984), Sarah and her copious luggage wind up at Robert’s, and their reunion is wonderfully moving. At some point we realize that Robert and Sarah are brother and sister, which feels odd, even disconcerting, since we might already know that Cassavetes and Rowlands were not only one of the movies’ great director-actress pairings, but also husband and wife. Jon Voigt was to play Robert, and when he dropped out at the last minute Cassavetes, already very ill from cirrhosis of the liver, stepped in. He’s falling apart and absolutely brilliant, on par with Rowlands, which is a huge compliment. 

Love Steams was Cassavetes penultimate and last truly personal work—he died in 1989. Now available in a gorgeously transferred, generously supplemented DVD/BD package from Criterion, the film is a masterpiece of finely managed chaos; hilarious, seemingly haphazard, yet fascinatingly structured, it feels more alive with love and loneliness and mystery than any three-hundred other films. Among the extras are Michael Ventura’s making-of documentary I’m Almost Not Crazy and interviews with producer/cinematographer Al Ruban and actors Seymour Cassel and Diahnne Abbott, all of which offer tremendous insight into Cassavetes’ process. There’s also a very good visual essay on Rowlands by critic Sheila O’Malley. 

Meticulously stylized and colour-coordinated, Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) would seem about as far from Cassavetes’ rough and tumble maundering as can be, yet these films share a remarkably similar theme: once touched by love, crazy people will do anything to be together. Upon his release from a psychiatric hospital, Ricki (Antonio Banderas) immediately seeks out Marina (Victoria Abril), a recovering addict and actress transitioning from porn to B-movies. Ricki escaped the hospital and had fleeting sex with Marina some years back. She doesn’t remember it, but it changed his life. Ricki was cured by his love for Marina, or rather, by his obsession. Or not cured exactly, but saved. Or not saved but liberated. And so he breaks into her home, knocks her unconscious and sequesters her until she realizes that they’re meant to be together. And, in a perverse twist that only Almodóvar could conceive of, much less pull off, she does realize it. 

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is about half-screwball comedy and half-post-Hitchcockian romance. It careens between masterfully crafted artifice and moments of arresting intimacy. Banderas and Abril exude a frenetic chemistry and an innate understanding of the essential absurdity and dictatorial nature of high desire. The film was enormously controversial and also happens to be one of Almodóvar’s masterpieces. It too is newly available from Criterion. 

       

Backflipping to a theatre near you

Ready? Okay. Two horny jocks ditch football practice to go to cheerleader camp and fish in a sea of chicks. Has this been done before or does it just feel that way? I confess to an unwillingness to do the research necessary to answer this question, and in any case Fired Up! is hardly concerned with innovation, save perhaps the ushering of male characters to the forefront of what might be deemed the cheerleader comedy sub-subgenre, one that’s now officially gone meta: the movie features a scene where all 300-plus of the participants in hot pants attend an open-air screening of the proto-pom-pom-com Bring It On and chant along with every line of dialogue.

The first scenes of Fired Up! raise provocative questions. Why do these high school seniors look old enough for doctorates? Who is this mysterious screenwriter with the suspicious moniker of “Freedom Jones”? Shouldn’t Philip Baker Hall get a new agent? Could they, ie: “Freedom Jones,” not think of a better running gag for Baker Hall’s Coach Byrnes than having him say “shit” a lot? And, with all due respect to the great PBH, isn’t 77 a little old for a football coach? More pertinently, is it just me showing my age, or do each of the stars of Fired Up! not seem eerily modeled after older famous actors? There’s the new Ralph Macchio, the junior Kate Hudson, and this strange, troubling hybrid of Owen Wilson and Jim Carrey. Where do they breed these kids? What do they feed them?

Such questions do not distract for long however, because Fired Up! is actually fairly diverting. Seriously. Director Will Gluck displays no special finesse with the camera—unless you’re deeply impressed by spiraling crane shots that allow us to take in a maximum number of teenage tits in tight tops without cutting—but between Mr./Ms. “Jones” and the admirably game leads the dialogue often zips quite nicely. An affection for screwball comedy can be felt in these rapid-fire gags and goofball non-sequiturs. Especially in the second act, things move along very fast, and I laughed. Not one bit of the plotting felt even slightly inspired, but the repartee helped the robotic story breeze along. So perhaps it’s safest to call Fired Up! an above average teen sex comedy, which still makes it a fundementally mediocre movie, but of a sort that you can’t really feel too depressed over. I have to defer to Manohla Dargis, who pretty nailed it in her New York Times review: “kind of dumb but also kind of smart-about-being-dumb.”