Will wonders never cease? Too much aliens and awe overwhelm the winsome ordinary in Close Encounters

It’s easy to chuckle over the fact that Steven Spielberg’s finest movies exhibit more of a knack for collaborating with alien puppets than with actual human beings, yet revisiting Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) serves to remind us that there was a time when America’s biggest brand-name director could evoke an extraordinary sense of the mundane. Close Encounters’ messy households full of noisy toys, cluttered kitchens, kids beating the shit out of dolls, parents hollering over each other and broadcasted cacophony possess a spontaneity, liveliness and sensitivity rarely repeated in later Spielbergs. Here, the amiable clamour of modern domesticity nicely juxtaposes the cosmic awe that eventually overwhelms everything. 

(So well orchestrated is the familial hum that, in combination with the emergence of the toxic emergency and its accompanying carnival atmosphere, one could arguably spot raw material for Don DeLillo’s White Noise within the movie’s best sequences.)

It has a brilliant first line—“Are we the first ones?”— and a great B-movie set-up, those stoic faces of air traffic controllers all lined up like Rushmore or reflected spookily on the radar screens. It has a little kid with the unlikely name of Barry, cute, boldly inquisitive in that particularly American way, and dopey as all hell, his only comment upon witnessing an alien air show being “Ice cream!” It has a terrific Richard Dryfuss flipping out, tossing uprooted shrubs, bricks and trash into his house to make an impressive installation in the living room, which, in one of the most inspired shots, looms between Dryfuss negotiating desperately with his deserting wife on the horn and a TV frantically whipping out exposition. It has good old Bob Balaban and, bizarrely, Nouvelle Vague forefather François Truffaut as his own kind of alien: a Frenchman, and the only one to acknowledge the heroism of Dreyfus’ crackpot. “Zey belong here more zan we,” he solemnly declares.

Unfortunately, Close Encounters also has John Williams, perhaps the biggest ham in movie score history, supplying accompaniment so bombastic and illustrative as to go over like a limpid parody of the same 50s sci-fi flicks Spielberg is trying to elevate to some sort of blockbuster art. And it has those pesky, anemic aliens, big on minimalist music and laser light shows, who take forever to finish with the New Agey dueling banjo shtick and land the damn ship already. The final act of Close Encounters is way more boring than contact with extraterrestrial life has any right to be, but we can still enjoy the earlier sections, evidence that ordinary humans anticipating a miracle are more fun than the miracle itself.

Silent Light: Carlos Reygadas introduces threads of classicism into his languid strategies, unearths something resonant, moving, miraculous

Set within a Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonite community in Chihuahua, Mexico, Silent Light feels at once otherworldly and very much grounded in the most basic of human experiences. It’s a film about the searing caprices of desire, focusing on a love triangle at the centre of which is outwardly cheerful farmer Johan (Cornelio Wall). Johan loves Esther (Manitoba novelist Miriam Toews), the woman with whom he’s built up his life, but Johan has fallen so deeply in love with Marianne (Maria Pankratz), convinced that she’s the one he truly, spiritually connects with. And the demands of the spirit are not to be underestimated here, as this is also a film about miracles, some of which are found in the alchemical interaction of film and nature, others in acts that defy nature's predetermined logic.

Writer/director Carlos Reygadas book-ended Battle in Heaven with ethereal sequences involving a teary-eyed, pretty, young, upper-class woman fellating a working class, older man whose corporeal girth functions as emotional armour. More than anything else in Reygadas’ small but potent filmography, these sequences earned him his reputation as contemporary Mexican cinema’s enfant terrible. How interesting then to see sequences of such a similar purpose—yet on the opposite end of the taste meter—book-ending Silent Light: long, elegant, unbroken scenes which move from a field of stars to Johan’s family’s fields and back again, once our story closes. It is as though Reygadas’ camera searched the galaxy for its subject and decided to land upon this humble terrain for a spell. The film’s special emphasis on the miraculous is, from the start, made through bearing witness to the glory of the everyday.

But back to Johan’s world, where all quotidian pleasures shrink as his inner torment grows, its shadow looming large enough that his suffering Esther can hardly help but notice. Johan needs to make a serious choice, yet while adulterers in the secular world might have it tough, the milieu in which he exists, has always existed, and has no desire to part from, is far more prescriptive than those most of us know. When Johan speaks of his dilemma in terms of destiny, a friend suggests that a brave man can make destiny with what he’s got. Yet is this bravery? To avoid conflict and heartbreak when a more fulfilling life promises eventual redemption?

Reygadas considers these questions through taking deep, languid pleasure in scenes of bucolic splendour, the one in which we see Johan’s kids swimming and bathing in a local watering hole being especially beautiful—and painful. Johan tries to compliment Esther on the way she scrubs her children and the unintended use of past tense makes the whole moment turn into one of quiet agony—which Reygadas turns away from to take in sumptuously blurry flowers. Yet for all this muted despair, emotions do gradually escalate to high drama, with music (from Jacques Brel!), attempted farewells, rash acts of violence amidst tempestuous weather, and an act of generosity so pure as to summon the mercy of something like a god, while invoking a famous scene from one of the great films of Carl Dreyer in an act of inspired and audacious homage.

Reygadas, it seems, only borrows from the best sources, but he utilizes his borrowings in such a way as to give us something entirely fresh, at once classical and organic, and surely one of the most striking and unusual films you’ll see this year.

Guy down in front next to the lady, he's our man in Panama: a comic chronicle of heartache, humiliation and pathology in Key West, circa 1978

I have never been to Key West, Florida. At least not, you know, in the conventional sense. But I have written about it, several times in fact, and what’s more I even wrote about Key West for the people of Key West. My pal Paul moved down there and got me a gig with a local magazine, interviewing Key Westers or, in any case, people somehow associated with the place, however incredibly tangentially. I’d talk to them and then write about our conversation in such a way that made it seem like I personally had something profound to say about Key West, even pretending it was a place I could in some way call home. The ruse was encouraged by my superiors. It was weirdly fun.

Most of what I do know about Key West I learned the same highly dubious way I learn most things: from reading fiction. Key West’s literary history is of course formidable, with its Hemingways and Tennessees and Elizabeth Bishops, though the period that really got me interested occured after their time, a period that previous to this gig I knew absolutely zilch about. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about Key West seemed to talk about what the place was like in the 70s, the time before colossal gentrification, the time of locally sanctioned madness, cheap real estate, too many guns, too many drugs, rampant corruption and literary outlaws. And I don’t know that any one figure seemed to sum up that time better than Thomas McGuane, a.k.a. Captain Berserko. Dude was so crazy he even married Margot Kidder. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t live there anymore.

The McGuane novel that everyone considers to be the his defining Key West work is Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), which he himself eventually made into an amiably off the wall movie with Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton and Kidder (enough said). But the one that strikes me as the genuine article, the one that comes closest to mapping out the particular pathology of that era/place/generation is in fact the novel McGuane took his biggest critical whipping for, largely on account of its disquieting degree of autobiographical content delivered in the treacherous wake of McGuane’s time spent courting Hollywood and seducing starlets. Literary types tend to find it distasteful when ostensibly serious writers overstep the boundaries of literary celebrity, and Panama (78), dragged McGuane’s private hysteria and public fumbles out into the open. You ask me, it’s a hell of a book, that much better—not to mention funnier—than its predecessor for laying its heart so crudely bare—though like Ninety-two, the mercurial comic prose is in high gear.

Panama’s protagonist is one Chester Pomeroy, returning to Key West to lick his wounds following some sort of debacle, or a perhaps series of them. The back cover blub explains that Chester’s a washed-up rock star, though you’d never glean that from anything described in the meat of the novel. He mentions being on tour, seems to like music, and at one point recalls having lunch with Jean-Luc Godard, but the way he conveys his past vocational adventures tends to be willfully oblique and/or surreally embellished: “I was making a tremendous living demonstrating, with the aplomb of a Fuller brush salesman, all the nightmares, all the loathsome, toppling states of mind, all the evil things that go on behind closed eyes. When I crawled out of the elephant’s ass, it was widely felt I’d gone too far; and when I puked on the mayor, that was it, I was through. I went home to Key West and voted for Carter.”

Chester’s two central concerns upon his return, the poles of some Oedipal wish-fulfillment, are: a reunion with Catherine, a woman he apparently married years ago in Panama, though neither can remember the ceremony, a woman he publicly insulted at some point in his blurry past but whom he still loves with an aching force, so much so that he stalks her in super markets and actually nails his left hand to her door while super-loaded on Bolivian cocaine; and to continue denying that his father is still alive, wealthy and boring, rather than a store detective who died of smoke inhalation in a Boston subway fire years ago. This is just one example of our hero’s selective or severely damaged recall skills. Chester’s memory issues are offered some degree of remedy when Catherine hires a private detective to follow him around so as to report back later on his actions. Yet in Chester’s first-person narration there’s never anything less than a rich sense of someone less than obsessed with coming to terms with his own identity. In an especially memorable moment, that sense of self-actualization is specifically concerned with how his relationship to place: “I didn’t know what I was, not a Southerner certainly. A Floridian. Drugs, alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death.”

In a certain sense Panama is a novel of redemption, though the shape or value of this redemption is hardly clearly defined or entirely resolved. It is a sort of staggering celebration of self-implosion and fiery bullshit, and a treatise on the limitations of willing oneself toward insanity. And it’s thick with a palpable, desperate heartache that refuses to surrender to the notion of a polite, quiet laying down of arms in romantic battle. What’s important too is that it speaks so specifically of a geography and a people as an entry point into persona and story. Whether or not the Key West of Panama really existed matters less than the fact that only Key West, that crazed, slightly suicidal Key West of the 70s, could have helped give birth to this heartfelt, daring, extraordinary goof of a novel.

Otherness versus other people: the dual nature of Werner Herzog's strange, haunting Encounters

The delivery of fresh, wakeful images as an antidote to the world’s endless avalanche of worn, numbing ones has been a guiding promise throughout Werner Herzog’s career, a prolific filmography going back 46 years now. Thus Herzog’s acceptance of The Discovery Channel’s offer to make a film in Antarctica was surely spurred in part by the vast, inhospitable continent’s own promise of abundant, beguiling strangeness. It seemed inevitable. Peruvian jungles, African deserts, Bavarian highlands, outer space, or the South Pole: the landscapes where the unusually determined—and usually highly eccentric—few dare to traipse has always been Herzog’s creative habitat, the places with the strongest current of vision, apparition and mirage.

Indeed, in the opening moments of Encounters at the End of the World Herzog confesses that it was seeing some especially evocative Antarctic underwater photography, taken by his producer Henry Kaiser, that made him want to go. So while Herzog’s bold, observant, opinionated, probing and often dryly hilarious narration is, as always, a highlight, the sequences which unveil the grandest spectacles of the seemingly alien world of Antarctica—coral looming like nicotine thunderheads, jellyfish resembling free-floating atomic explosions—are precisely the ones that leave Herzog speechless, his silent wonder providing all the more space for us to attempt to absorb and grapple with what we see. Not to mention what we hear, like those seal calls that one scientist, at a loss for more empirical points of comparison, simply describes as sounding like Pink Floyd.

(A personal favourite moment: three parka-enveloped scientists silently pressing their ears to the ice floor to listen to seal calls, looking like participants in a Beckett play. Herzog lingers on this, milking it for deadpan comedy.)

Yet the richest source of fascination plumbed in Encounters at the End of the World is, perhaps surprisingly, not the otherness of Antarctica but other people. When Herzog and his crew of one arrive at McMurdo Station, an international encampment of ugly prefab buildings and circling Caterpillars, and are forced to wait some days before they’re able to venture into the white wilderness, they turn inward rather than out, wandering through various dorms and laboratories, meeting the 1000 or so people residing therein: a Colorado banker who joined the Peace Corps in Guatemala and now drives “Ivan” the Terra Bus; a European philosopher who had Homer read to him before he learned to read; a Chicano plumber whose bizarre finger lengths indicate Aztec royal family ancestry; a linguist now working on a continent with no languages. In McMurdo, freaks are the norm. So well-suited are they for the director’s interests it’s almost as though these people are auditioning for Herzog, the preparation for which consumes a lifetime. To paraphrase one of these subjects, it’s as though everyone who wants to fall off the map finds themselves sinking to the bottom of the world, to the point where all lines converge.

In Grizzly Man, his last documentary, Herzog was charged with constructing a portrait of a dead man through the editing together of the dead man’s own video footage, an act of cinematographic archeology that gave Herzog plenty of room to editorialize, drawing lines that convey where the exploratory sensibilities of Herzog and the self-styled bear activist Timothy Treadwell met and parted. In Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog is less inclined to steer the conversation, letting his subjects dictate the themes, a major one of course being the title’s allusions to human extinction, directing our attention to the astonishing manifestations of global warming visible to anyone who lives among the polar ice shelves.

There is one key figure for whom Herzog does however attempt to speak for, a lone penguin fleeing inexplicably from the safety of his brothers, heading straight toward a distant mountain range where only certain death awaits. Why does he do it? Herzog wonders, regarding the penguin’s seemingly suicidal impulse in a way that’s at once comical, philosophical and sad. Herzog reveres the penguin’s mystery and keeps conjecture to a minimum, but it’s parallel to our own species’ rushing toward apocalypse can hardly be missed.

Born slippy: too close for comfort encounters with unidentified life forms, too few encounters between James Cameron and editor

Just a glance at the personnel involved in Alien (1979) serves to remind us just how remarkable this movie—at once science fiction and slasher flick, not to mention a chamber drama—truly was. The cast included John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Skerritt, Yaphet Kotto and Ian Holm, while the director came fresh from his in many ways never bettered debut The Duelists (77), and would thereafter make a little futuristic detective yarn called Blade Runner (82) which managed to revolutionize a genre. His name was Ridley Scott, he came from advertising, and while time hasn’t proved him the world’s deepest director the guy had style to spare and a cunning, merciless sense of economy.

The strength of the ensemble cast is emphasized early on, their first scenes being group ones of seemingly regular folks amiably bitching about their jobs. Intriguingly, the film’s hero only establishes herself roughly halfway through. We only really start to notice—if not entirely trust—Ripley (a long, tall and very cool Sigourney Weaver) after we see just how badly things go with the unidentified creature she alone insisted not be let aboard the spacecraft, the first major spasm of mayhem occurring in that still utterly traumatizing “birth” scene where the only overtly sympathetic character dies writhing in his own blood. It's a scene that instills a sort of corporeal discomfort that would undoubtedly make David Cronenberg smile. From there onward a showdown of intergalactic Darwinism locks the movie between its teeth, playing out on a brilliantly claustrophobic set from one of the great periods in sci-fi design, with gear made of industrial strength material, stuff with actual weight you want to wrap your knuckles on.

Edmonton's Metro Cinema is screening Alien this coming Sunday afternoon along with Aliens (86). There are camps that claim the sequel superior, yet to my eye the relationship between the two is nearly identical to that between The Terminator (84) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (91), which Metro screened last week and which were both directed, like Aliens, by James Cameron. Aliens indeed establishes its themes of ruthless maternal and/or propagatory instincts more clearly, and develops Ripley, awakened after a 57-year sleep to help fight an entire colony of the acid-blooded, multi-mouthed aliens, into a fully fleshed out character with a resonant backstory and inner conflicts. Yet after Scott’s style and economy we go straight to Cameron’s workmanlike flabbiness. Like T2, Aliens is another two-and-a-half-hour movie full of over-cooked sequences and abundant redundancies. The climactic scene where Ripley discovers and then escapes from the queen mother’s lair, all goopy vaginal egg pod thingees, smoke and sweat, is masterfully handled—too bad we’re then forced to sit through a “surprise” second ending that’s not half as thrilling and just takes forever.

There are concessions, like a sinister Paul Reiser as the corporate weasel, Bill Paxton, fresh from playing Chet in Weird Science (85) and reveling in playing a babbling human Nerf ball, and Lance Henrikson, proving robot scientists can actually be nice guys, always lending a hand, even when their bodies are chopped in half. For better or for worse, there’s more of everything in Aliens, though I’d pick its predecessor for the stronger, meaner chills and thrills any day of the week.

Broken circle: Before the Rain endures not for its literal depection of interconnectedness but for the jarring disconnect of its spasms of violence

Milcho Manchevski’s feature debut Before the Rain (1994) operates around a tripartite structure, each strand offering a distinct narrative—one set in England, the other two in Macedonia—that connects in unexpected ways to a whole that comes full circle only in the closing scenes. Thanks to Criterion’s new DVD, I’ve just seen the film again for the first time since its release, and it seems to me now that what’s more important, and certainly more durable than the ways in which these threads literally connect are the ways in which each thread poses a variation on the same build-up toward an act of senseless violence, eviscerating whatever assemblage of order previously existed. Though made during the spike of international awareness of the chaos of the war-torn Balkan states, Before the Rain isn’t really a commentary on that particular political trauma or even on civil war in general. It’s about eruptions and the normally invisible geometry that links them.

An Orthodox Christian monk (the beatific, rather opaque Grégoire Colin) hides an Albanian teenage girl accused of killing a local shepherd. A London photo agent (the late, always wonderful Katrin Cartlidge) having an affair with a famed photojournalist discovers she’s pregnant. A Macedonian (a zesty, deeply watchable Rade Serbedzija) returns home after years abroad to discover a homeland where he’s considered an outsider each time he attempts to apply some moral logic to the madness of tribal disputes. Each of the major players make some sort of an appearance in each of the individual parts, a technique striking in its day that has since been exploited in some of the most awkward, overbearing and self-important films of the last several years, reaching its nadir with the likes of Babel (2006) and, worst of all, Paul Haggis’ Crash (04).

These later movies talk down their audience, straining to emphasize the theme of global interconnectedness by literally connecting their characters in risible feats of dramatic irony, as though we wouldn’t be able to sense the figurative connections without such guidance. If Manchevski’s spin on this feels less schematic, it may come down to simply having origins in an genuinely organic approach to dealing with a story that’s ultimately more about generating a specific feeling than hammering home an outsized message. More problematic are Manchevski’s use of rhymes or echoes throughout the film—a cryptic proverb, a turtle, vomit, the swatting of a fly—something meant to be subtle but actually has the opposite effect, drawing far too much attention to moments and gestures that start to feel awfully banal when trapped under the spotlight of Manchevski’s camera.

Still, it’s a privilege to criticize a movie for such details. While things might not quite mesh with the grace and quiet provocation intended, while certain events, such as the first killing, feel very forced, the poetry of Before the Rain is essentially of a fairly unimposing sort—I love the scenes of people dreaming of someone’s appearance right before the actually appear—while the performances are at times nothing less than sublime. I also feel more endeared toward Manchevski after hearing the audio commentary he does with scholar Annette Insdorf. While Insdorf keeps aligning Manchevski’s work to that of Kieslowski (a comparison that does Manchevski no favours), Manchevski unabashedly and unpretentiously points out the film’s obvious relationship to Pulp Fiction, which came out the same year, while pointing out little homages to Psycho (60) and The Wild Bunch (1969). In the essay included in the DVD package, Ian Christie takes this one step further, wisely seeing Before the Rain’s true lineage as being in late period westerns. With readings like this one, Before the Rain, unlike the movies it’s most obviously influenced, may actually just look better and better with age.

Journey to a hollow Center: new 3D variation on Verne adventure classic is really in your face

3D, they say, is a thrilling experience all over again. By way of confirmation, the vast experiential gulf between watching Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D and “normal vision” is swiftly established in the very first images displayed. A crab thingee’s antennae thingees wave in your face! A guy falls from a cliff and seems to get really far away! Brendan Fraser brushes his teeth in an utterly pointless jump-cut sequence and the glass he gargles from comes really close! Whoa! Of course you also get to wear—and, I think, keep—the new generation of 3D glasses, more nerd chic than Devo. If they keep doing press screenings in 3D, pretty soon I can start my own band! (Of course it'll be a half-blind band, since 3D glasses tend to have the reverse effect of normal prescription glasses.)

But right, the movie. Hunky dreamer Trevor Anderson (Fraser, a perhaps slightly more convincing science teacher than Mark Wahlberg) gets stuck minding grumpy nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson) just as volcanic activity in Bolivia, Hawaii and Iceland is looking really good, so, anxious to prove a longstanding theory about volcanic tubes that would redeem the legacy of his ten-years-missing brother—who’s also Sean’s dad—Trevor scoops up the 13-year-old and flies to Reykjavik, where the pair gear up for high adventure underground. With little in the way of a plan they luck out, meeting Hannah, an Icelandic beauty whose dead dad also shared dead bro’s “Vernian” notions about subterranean wonders, and who also happens to be an expert mountain guide, leading the boys safely into creepy caverns where fun awaits. (In a movie where pretty much everything is a special effect, the filmmakers managed to get a genuine Icelandic beauty, Anita Briem, to pay Hannah.)

A rollercoaster ride through a mine shaft, razor-toothed jumping fish, burbling lava, glow-in-the-dark bird buddies and carnivorous vaginal plants: there’s more than enough stuff in Journey to the Center of the Earth to wave under our noses, though little of it seems terribly frightening. Director Eric Brevig, who, believe it or not, has a resume mostly jam-packed with visual effects work, takes minimal interest in much outside of the film’s stable of spectacles, and the cast can only make up for so much when a solid third of their dialogue consists of screaming each others’ names and saying “Look out!” or “Hang on!” It’s basically an amusement park ride—but it does have the virtue of being half the length of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

Breaching the life/art divide: synthesis, style and seppuku in Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and Mishima's own Patriotism

If Japanese author Yukio Mishima seemed unusually anachronistic it may be above all because he staked so much on the equation of aesthetic power and political power, trusting that attaining the one would naturally lead to possessing the other. Yet that he also staked everything on the romantic belief that beauty and destruction must court one and other on equal terms, the former reciprocating the latter in fortitude, gets perhaps closer to the deeper truth of this man, the only genuine key to the mystery. Great beauty, in Mishima’s highly disciplined ontology, could receive no higher honour than to meet with a magisterial death.

Paul Schrader’s remarkable, at once beguiling and grotesque film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) wisely founds every aspect of its complex portrait of the artist within the consideration of this deeper truth, bookending itself with the event that most boldly exemplified Mishima’s aesthetic convictions. On November 25, 1970, Mishima ate no breakfast. He carefully laid out his pristine uniform, the one he had specially designed for his private army. He gathered his closest aides, laid siege to Japanese military headquarters, and attempted to rouse a disinterested audience of soldiers and journalists with appeals for Japan’s return to imperial rule. He then committed ritual suicide, or seppuku, before having his men chop off his head. In the nearly four decades since, Japan still seems unable to process this event.

United by one of Philip Glass’ finest scores, Mishima’s final hours, shot in quasi-documentary style, are interwoven with biographical episodes, shot in black and white, and dramatizations from three Mishima novels—Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House and Runaway Horses—that help to convey his persona as it paralleled or imitated his fiction. These sections are the most visually extraordinary, vibrantly colourful, highly theatrical sequences that owe as much to the special genius of designer Eiko Ishioka as to the formal brilliance and collaborative skills of Schrader and cinematographer John Bailey. The result, buoyed by the charming, tormented, spookily focused central performance of Ken Ogata, is not a comprehensive bio-pic so much as a study in meticulous self-invention, and an investigation into a very particular psychopathology. As Glass puts it, Mishima is about “how the unimaginable becomes inevitable.”

Watching Mishima on Criterion’s new two-disc set, it occurs to me that the only other movie that shares something of its specific approach to literary portraiture is David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (91), which is more a portrait of William S. Burroughs than it is an adaptation of his famous experimental novel. Both movies fuse their writer’s lives with their fiction, both blur artifice and naturalism, both wrestle with their writer’s complicated relationship to homosexuality in fittingly complicated ways, both fixate beautifully on fetish objects and use the body as the site of drama, and both use death as a catalyst of creative propulsion. I bring up this comparison not to diminish Mishima but rather to try and supply a better idea of just how special the movie is.

Criterion’s supplementary material, generous by even their standards, can of course offer a far better idea. The audio commentary by the always engaging Schrader and producer Alan Poul—recorded two weeks after the death of Schrader’s brother and Mishima’s co-screenwriter Leonard—is especially enlightening and lively. Apparently Schrader’s first idea for a movie about an artist willing himself toward death was a Hank Williams bio-pic, though clearly in Mishima—his brother’s idea—he found a subject that would truly up the ante regarding the themes of narcissism, obsession and death he’d been exploring in Taxi Driver (76) and American Gigolo (80). The bulk of the commentary focuses on the extreme sensitivity of the Japanese toward everything to do with Mishima and the many, sometimes frightening campaigns to shut down production in the country where the film has never been theatrically released to this day. Another highlight is a short video featuring insights from Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, who was also a friend of Mishima’s, and Mishima biographer John Nathan. Both speak eloquently and respectfully about Mishima’s painstaking efforts to stage-manage his own life and construct his own celebrity.

Arguably the greatest example of Mishima’s will to synthesize art and life—outside of his novels—is found in Patriotism (66), the 29-minute film he wrote, produced, directed and starred in, which is also now available from Criterion in a separate package with its own very good array of supplements. Shot secretly with a borrowed crew in silent black and white, Patriotism concerns the double suicide of a Japanese Lieutenant and his wife, based on a real event that occurred in 1936. The film feels wholly disinterested in developing narrative, leaving context and developments entirely to title cards. What we get instead is a stark, theatrical, inventively photographed, eroticized aestheticization of suicide, replete with the spilling of entrails and great splashes of blood on white surfaces. The film, obviously, was one of many unabashed rehearsals for its author’s death.

Besides an informative essay by Tony Rayns, the best material on Criterion’s Patriotism disc comes from Mishima himself, who, in both archival film and audio-only interviews, discusses his ideas on Japan’s defeat in WWII, nationalism, death, literature, the West, and much more. Curiously, Mishima makes consistently compelling arguments for even his most unnerving points of view, and his particular charisma, even weighed against the violence of his life, enchants and entices from beyond the grave.

Not hi-5 nor finger-snap nor knuckle buckle nor forearm grab, The Guatemalan Handshake is hard to learn

It opens with a beguiling slow-motion plume of tire-squalled dust. It then glides through a montage of black and white expository tableau, sumptuous colour images and sonic elements that seem lovingly culled from scrapbooks for David Gordon Green’s first two movies: a little girl swinging over a river backwards through time or a demolition derby, the scenes arcing across the screen while the little girl—her name, which she’ll no doubt come to resent, is Turkeylegs—speaks through voice-over about her best friend Donald. What she says here is, in its way, crucial. There are three things Donald would like to see before he dies, Turkeylegs tells us, “a lake of chocolate, a turtle the size of a horse, and a trophy with his name on it.”

The Guatemalan Handshake unfolds in a Pennsylvania town, dividing its time between various representatives of its citizenry. The film’s catalytic event is a power surge that, in a compelling sequence, inspires a mist of varied voices that speak of malfunctioning appliances with the awe of hurricane survivors or pilgrims who’ve witnessed a miracle. Yet might the real, underlying catalyst that afflicts the characters in writer/director Todd Rohal’s feature debut be something more like a toxic spill? Judging from those reactors lingering in the background, maybe it was a nuclear accident? Something funky must have infected the water supply in these parts, because the local eccentricity meter is way into the red.

The flashback to Spank Williams’ failed public death, a grieving dog owner’s attending her own funeral, a story about Amish time travelers, a guy who sounds like he’s gonna have a coronary every time he talks, a photo of a man posing with Willie Mays and the world’s biggest chewing gum, a handicapped boy who explains that nose-picking is “awesome”—when do such bubbles of quirkiness reach critical mass? There are several inspired gags, like whenever Stool (Rich Schreiber), the movies’ most awkward date since Jackie Earle Haley, spontaneously takes off his shirt in some misguided act of foreplay—but a lot of these gags would probably work better if they weren’t all shoved into a single, heavily saturated comedy.

Rohal’s definitely gone out on a limb here, making something this unapologetically, warmly goofy, yet the goofiness rarely seems to serve much more than goofiness itself. On occasion this tack is so cartoonish that it only distances us further from the characters it purports to have affection for, like that grieving dog owner. Rohal’s story is basically a chain that links characters with accoutrements—a turtle, an electric car, a wheelchair, a headband—and a scattering of events, such as Donald’s disappearance following emotional trauma and a dog’s electrocution, or the double injury at the roller rink. Things feel most harmonious is when we get evidence of what may be Rohal’s true gift: his ability to nurture strong performances from a cast of mostly non-professionals, especially Katy Haywood, who plays Turkeylegs, and Sheila Scullin, who plays Donald’s estranged girlfriend Sadie. There’s also a very appealing performance from musician Will Oldham as Donald himself. Strikingly clean-shaven after his beardy turn in Old Joy, Oldham looks and sounds so endearingly boyish here he could’ve walked right off the set of Matewan, a movie made when he was all of 16.

The Guatemalan Handshake is threaded together by themes of paternal anxiety—manifested in a pregnant woman participating in a demolition derby and the father of her unborn child absconding—and the letting go of childish things. Yet the film itself often feels stunted, closely guarding its own preciousness, retaining each and every affectation whether they actually gel together or not. If Rohal’s next film works better than this one, it will likely be because his eccentricities are the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself.

Mr Universe Goes to Hollywood: on playing robots and barbarians, pumping iron, and the strange case of the movies' most fantastic actor

Is there a case to be made for Arnold Schwarzenegger being heralded a great—or should we say “fantastic”—actor? The hulking, hyperconfident, business-savvy Austrian bodybuilder who so dazzled Hollywood during his ascension into the realm of Californian politics is so resolutely larger than life, bordering on extraterrestrial, so ill-fitting in the role of a mere mortal, only a fool could take up the enterprise of claiming the man could embody all that broad a range of human experience. But there came a time when the movies genuinely needed him, and he answered their call, filling a niche that’s absolutely singular.

Bob Raffelson surely felt he’d struck gold when Schwarzenegger was brilliantly cast in Stay Hungry (1976), but the fledging actor was to take an altogether different, more ostentatious path into stardom, with his prominent role in Pumping Iron (77) making a more definitive debut, even while showing him to be obnoxious. Who else could possibly become the Nietzschean brute in Conan the Barbarian (82)? There’s not a single action hero from whatever athletic or aesthetic discipline, neither a Jean-Claude nor a Dolph, who exudes the same outsized will, the same steely focus, the same base satisfaction and irony-free, near-palpable, unabashed narcissism. In his spooky, unwaveringly Republican appraisal of what is good in life (“to crush your enemies, to see them kneeling before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women”), in his supple swinging of heavy weaponry, in his decidedly arrogant prayers to Crom, Schwarzenegger’s is that treasured thing, a performance of total conviction, crude heroism manifested through sheer, improbably body mass and a 1000-mile stare.

I’d argue Conan remains his career peak, but you could just as easily argue that Schwarzenegger was never more at home in any role as he was playing the killer robot from the future, a role fully utilizing Schwarzenegger’s unusual talent for physical concision and control. The Terminator (84) and The Terminator 2: Judgment Day (91) showcase one of the strangest movie icons to come around since Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster, a model no doubt for Schwarzenegger’s “good” terminator of the second film, a psychologically primitive techno-beast of man’s creation capable of becoming more human through the untainted intentions of an admiring child wonderfully played by Edward Furlong.

This second terminator was by far the more complex character, through T2 was ultimately so wearyingly excessive in every respect—especially duration—that it’s the original film that, for all its technically less advanced effects and pageant of big hair, has aged better and holds more charm. It’s a fiercer, leaner, more impactful story still imbued with writer/director James Cameron’s contagious sense of child-like awe over the time-slipping, apocalyptic scope of his one killer sci-fi idea. Still, even in that first time out there was still too much of at least two things: dull flash-forwards to the dreary future better imagined by the audience, and the even duller performance from Michael Biehn, whose heavy emoting feels all the more ham-fisted next to Schwarzenegger’s terrifying placidity. 

Acting for the movies can be as much about presence as it is about chops, and even if he never makes another movie half as thrilling as those he made in his salad days, Schwarzenegger has struck film history with a presence truly like no other. For better or for worse, he will no doubt do the same for US politics.