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Reviews
The Elegant Spanking (1995)
Timelessly Artful Erotica
The trouble with pornography is that it tends to view desire strictly as a resident of the body, pure atavism with all intellect shunted into the role of providing the simplest available pretext to grant meaning to the acts of the flesh. This two-dimensional view is especially glaring in S+M porn, which is compressed into simplistic displays of aggression and acceptance, it's participants made caricatures of punishment and supplication. Most of the time, the resulting images seem more a cautionary on why we shouldn't want to see or experience it rather than why we would. Even in a well-meaning [and mainstream] film like Secretary, failure to understand the deeper truer meanings and energies of S+M leads the filmmakers to explain the behaviors of the protagonists in emotional shorthand more suited to an After-School Special.
Maria Beatty's films inhabit and reveal a new world. A New York-based performance artist and professional Submissive [bottom], Beatty regards both her films and her lifestyle as art forms demanding [and worthy of] respect [both hers and ours]. Beatty is an omnivorous filmmaker, drawing inspiration from everywhere. German expressionism, the edgy futurism of the best music videos, the larger-than-life personas of early century vamps like Theda Bara, Louise Brooks and Pola Negri, the artful stylish horror films of Whale and Browning, as well as her own experience both in performance and S+M. Shooting in black and white, her best films sculpt and paint light on the screen while glowing skin, dark kohl-smoked eyes and the hard gleam of leather, pvc and metal flash through the velvet shadows. The films are silent, accompanied by fascinating sounds capes that vary from ambiance to atonality. Often the soundtrack becomes an additional character, commenting on the tension that rises in the viewer as desire heightens in the characters. Expertly familiar with the power of sensory stimulation, Beatty uses both sight and sound to draw us in. The best filmmakers have all known the most memorable special effect is the audience's imagination; Beatty takes ours and bends it to her will.
The Elegant Spanking has a near classic silent-era feel, with Rosemary Delain and Beatty portraying Mistress and Maid Kitty respectively in a 'post-modern romantic subversion' that feels like a scene from a lost Anais Nin story. Buoyed by John Zorn's exquisitely fractured score, Delain and Beatty glide through their role-play smoothly and ] elegantly, most notably during their take on water sport, so tender and intimate that it reveals the true nature of the women's dynamic. What Delain and Beatty exchange is stronger than Power
it's something that will linger long after the lovers have parted
Murder, My Sweet (1944)
Film Noir 101
This is the movie that hooked me on "Film Noir." I first saw this on the late show while suffering a killer flu. Even through local TV editing and enough medicine to tranquilize a circus tent, it had me sitting at attention from start to finish. It wasn't until several years later that I got to see it uncut on cable that I got the full effect. Having grown up with Bogart's hard-boiled private eye archetype, Dick Powell was a complete revelation to me. If you double-bill this with Bogart's "Big Sleep," you see at once that Powell truly IS Phillip Marlowe (even Raymond Chandler thought so), and Bogart is much better suited to portray Hammet's colder, meaner Sam Spade. Powell gives Marlowe a vulnerable cynicism as well as a touch of the "everyman," that Bogart wouldn't be able to pull off until later in his career. Powell's background in romantic musicals gives him access to a far deeper emotional range, needed to play the complex and conflicted Marlowe; his cynicism, his humour, his loyalty to his code...it's all there. Powell manages to give extra resonance to some of Chandler's throw-away similes! No wonder he claimed this as his favorite role!
The direction by Edward Dmytryk and cinematography by Harry Wild are perfect, giving the film a tight, economical yet alluring vintage "feel". Working on a tight budget, they manage to infuse it with all the seedy, chaotic topography that would serve as the touchstones for every film of this type from "Night of the Hunter" to "Blade Runner." While this isn't the first Noir film, it may well be the best.
Carnival of Souls (1962)
Strangely strange....
Films like "Carnival of Souls" make me a little sad. Sad that we've gotten too smart and too sophisticated, seen and heard and done too much for anything to scare us anymore. Face it, when was the last time a movie really scared you? Sure, sure, you may have been grossed out, or even shocked by the latest CGI gorefest playing at the Multiplex, but there's nothing really scary anymore.
Anyway, Director Herk Harvey's 1962 mini-opus is the kind of film that unwittingly tips its' hand from the very beginning. Fortunately, Harvey and writer John Clifford put so much gusto into what's really just a Twilight Zone plot that you have to follow along. Also credit the slightly off kilter, vaguely erotic presence of Candace Hilligoss in the lead role of Mary Henry. From the moment her character stumbles from a muddy river inlet after a drag-racing accident, she seems to resonate with a feeling of strangeness that defies explanation. Mary seems to drift from scene to scene, not really rooted to her surroundings or the characters she encounters. Though inadvertent, the wooden, overstated acting of the supporting cast reinforces the otherworldly feeling we get from Mary. What's the deal? Wait and see.
Really, we don't have to wait and see. I saw the ending of this film practically from the beginning, but it really doesn't matter all that much. Harvey and Clifford aren't really trying to scare us.the feeling they give us is one of creeping, impending dread.Modern movies all want to be rollercoasters.each with a bigger and more heart-stopping thrill. Watching `Carnival of Souls' is more like an uncertain and slightly warped merry go round.You may know where you're going and why, but your palms are still gonna sweat until it's all over.
This film is a MUST-SEE for fans of George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead."
Cat People (1942)
Makes us Scare Ourselves
There's a pivotal scene in Vincente Minelli's The Bad and the Beautiful where Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan, portraying a fledgling Hollywood producer and director are given the task of making a horror movie with little more than a title (and a silly one at that). In a flash of desperate inspiration, they eschew the typical men-in-suits method that never works anyway, relying instead on the two oldest and most reliable special effects in filmaking: the Dark and the Imagination. Needless to say their film is a hit. I have no doubt this scene was a direct tribute to the careers and films of an unjustly obscure pair of visionaries, producer Val Lewton and director Jaques Tourneur and their most "famous" film, 1942's Cat People.
Shot at RKO in under a month for less than $140,000, this dark little gem stars Simone Simon as Irena, a Serbian woman (immigrant? refugee?) who is convinced that her blood carries the curse of a race of European Satanist druids, and that any hint of passion, love, desire, anger, jealousy will turn her into a murderous cat-creature. The tiny, lovely Simon plays the role beautifully, with a fragile, feline grace that hints at something very dark (kinky?) lurking just underneath her almond-shaped eyes and alluring smile. Kent Smith plays her husband Oliver Reed rather woodenly by comparison, but Tourneur is smart enough not to try making him any deeper than a typical all-American boy type - at one point he describes his life as `swell' and somehow we don't laugh...maybe you could say stuff like that in the 40s.
DeWitt Bodeen's script efficiently zips through the boy-meets-girl part, but not without giving us things to think about. After brazenly inviting (luring?) Oliver to her apartment for tea after having just met, we soon find Irena humming an exotically European lullaby in the darkened room as Oliver lays on her sofa.though both characters are fully dressed and on opposite sides of the room, the feeling that something did/will/should/wants to happen is palpable. Particularly chilling is a moment when Irena and Oliver enter a pet shop only to find every single animal in the room shrieking with horror, the din ceasing the moment Irena opts to stand by herself in a pouring rain while Oliver shops in the now peaceful establishment. I've seen more graphic depictions of the excluded outsider, but none more poigniant. At a party thrown in honor of their engagement, a mysterious and beautiful stranger who `looks like a cat' according to one guest greets Irena as a familiar, saying something in a language only the two of them understand. It's a simple moment, but a dark one.dark because the audience realizes that Irena truly is something other than what she seems, and because the people around her don't believe it, something bad is going to happen.
This is when Tourneur and photographer Nicholas Musuraca do their work, mixing our own expectation of something awful with shadows, sounds and silence, standing by as we push our own buttons. Utterly normal things like walking to a bus stop, answering the phone, taking a swim and even having coffee and pie morph from the common into hair raising incidents. As we watch we're more frightened each time something dosen't happen, convinced that it's going to be really awful when it finally does. It isn't until the film's bittersweet finale, that we realize that Tourneur and Bodeen have been toying with our very conception of what scary is.conning us into scaring ourselves because we already know how.