Voto: 3 su 5

(Coming soon: Tre millimetri al giorno di Richard Matheson)

Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich, director, 1955 

PITCH: Hard-boiled private eye vs. the atomic age. The P.I. loses. 

STORY: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), a cheap, sleazy, vigilante, is searching for a mysterious box he knows nothing about, save for the fact that it contains something more valuable than anything he has ever chased in the past. This great whatzit is a symbol of truth that promises each character an answer to something inexplicable. The final discovery buried the film noir genre forever.

HOOK: If the 50s seem surreal, this is a b&w Dali masterpiece.

JOHN: Mike Hammer was the tough guy hero of kids my age. Ralph Meeker gives him a snarling brutishness that is necessary for the ending of the film but not the kind of Clint Eastwood, Humphrey Bogart tough guy you want to emulate (even in your male fantasies). The women are more psycho than seductive and the light pulsating form the mysterious case everyone is searching for is the best symbol of evil the movies have ever come up with. Warning: The re-mastered DVD shows a more romanticized ending, the “alternative ending,” which is a bit more existential, is the one that was shown in theaters during the films initial release. In both the final words THE END zoom out from the inside of the exploding house. And it is.

 GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four)

SPANKY: This film fits my category of  “Cars You Love to Chase.” The film starts with a white Jaguar convertible coupe driving down a lost highway. Then we get a classic MG, followed later by an early model Corvette. What we want to do when the Jag plunges off the cliff is stop the film and run it backward. In fact if you did that with the entire film you’d have a contemporary Book of Genesis, starting with a Big Bang and ending with a naked lady running down the road (also that way Ralph would become “meeker”).

“TWO PAWS UP” (4 BARKs out of four)

KEEPER: “Kiss me, Mike. I want you to kiss me…The liar’s kiss that says ‘I love you,’ but means something else. You’re good at giving such kisses. Kiss me.”

I'm sitting here trying to remember the first time I got interested in Mickey Spillane. Must have been sometime around 1982 or 1983, when I was about 14. The first Spillane book I read was I, The Jury, which I just absolutely loved. I've probably read that one four times. I devoured the rest of the Mike Hammer novels in short order, but never really read any of his non-Hammer work.

My love for all things Hard Case Crime is well documented in this blog, so when I heard that the HCC line was going to publish a new Spillane novel, I was thrilled. Then Spillane died and I wasn't sure what that would mean for the new Mike Hammer novels I'd heard about or the Hard Case Crime offering. But the new Spillane, Dead Street, was published right on schedule in November, 2007 as the 37th HCC book.

Spillane had only written eight of the eleven chapters at the time of this death, but left detailed notes and instructions to friend and fellow crime writer Max Allan Collins to finish the book. The result is a great, entertaining read that's at times vintage Spillane, but offering just the right amount of something new to make it a page turner. The plot follows ex-NYPD cop Jack Stang as he's drawn into a 20 year old case - the presumed death of his fiancee. Turns out the girl is alive, but has no memory and is completely blind. Stang moves from the Big Apple to a retirement community for cops in Florida just as things start heating up in the long dead case. Spillane takes the reader on a journey that's both action packed and surprisingly reflexive, contemplating things like 9/11 and terrorism and the potential for a nuclear terrorist attack on US soil.

I expected the novel to end much differently than it did, given some of the endings from the Hammer novels, but this was a mellower happy ending sort of conclusion that made me smile a little, but didn't really pack a punch. I still highly recommend Dead Street and pretty much everything else Spillane's done. But it's just great. Not Spillane Great.

This CLASH BY NIGHT is a British "B" picture from 1964. And by "B" I really mean "W", or possibly "Y".

I didn't get much out of it except enjoying greatly the above shot, from right at the beginning. The guy in the foreground has just lost a heap of money on a dog race. The guy on the right is Stanley Meadows, playing a gangster here just as he did in Cammell and Roeg's seminal PERFORMANCE six years later. And he's equally impressive here -- a cool, crisp, naturally frightening actor who was terribly underused by British cinema. Plus he looks great in motorcycle goggles (his cunning disguise).

And I loved this shot -- Peter Sallis (Wallace from WALLACE AND GROMIT) in the role of halfwitted lunatic "Victor Lush", threatens everybody with a lit match in a paraffin-soaked barn.

That's basically the plot -- a coach full of of prisoners and their guards are imprisoned in said barn while a gang boss makes his getaway. Since all the jailbirds are required to do is sit put until dawn, there's not much suspense - -except that it's Guy Fawkes' Night and fireworks are flying hither and yon.

The transporter full of hardened stereotypes put me in mind of CON AIR, and made me wonder if there's another variation to be pulled on this appealing set-up. Apart from that, the film boasts an appearance by what appears to be future cheesemeister Ray Austen (VIRGIN WITCH) as the world's most inept sexual predator. "My husband will be home shortly," says Jennifer Jayne, whereupon he rips her blouse and is promptly socked to death by the returning hubby. Which is all just by way of illustrating that our appallingly stiff middle-class hero is AN INNOCENT MAN UNJUSTLY CONVICTED. Which turns out to have no bearing on anything, really.

CLASH BY NIGHT has an ability to just barely hold the attention by delivering unnecessary flashbacks, improbable coincidences, pathetic cop-outs and other narrative blunders at a rapid-fire pace. If it were any better it wouldn't really be any fun. Sadly, the only major character who DOESN'T get a flashback is the religious zealot who's been arrested for "trying to take brotherly love a bit too far." Even in the wake of VICTIM (1961) this film didn't feel able to go any deeper into THAT. Given the portrayal of Sallis' character -- is he insane? Is he mentally handicapped? Do they know there's a difference? -- it's unlikely the results would have been terribly illuminating.

Oh, and there's some quite fun X-rated cursing, or "pervasive language" as the MPAA would say. The actors can barely conceal their glee at being allowed to say big grown-up words like "bastard". My Dad once told me that he and his friends used to read Mickey Spillane "for the swearing", so they'd have dug this.

Oddly enough, the reason I like noir is exactly the opposite: noirs have so many familiar elements, so many tropes and customs, that it's fun just to see them all appear. Chiaroscuro lighting? check. A conflicted, maybe-not-entirely-moral man in an entirely immoral world he can't keep up with? check. A femme fatale? check. A delightfully depressing downer denouement*? check.

So really, it's no wonder I liked Kiss Me Deadly. And that I thought the Richard Kelly disaster it engendered was... well, you can read my reaction to that after the jump.

Kiss Me Deadly really is a strange hybrid. It's a noir all right: the source is a hard-boiled novel by Mickey Spillane; the main character, Mike Hammer, is a P.I., who gets tangled up in a web of corruption, but isn't an innocent himself either; and it's a girl that leads Hammer to his doom. But at the same time, while noirs are generally rooted in a dark but not entirely unrealistic world, here there are sci-fi elements thrown into the mix. And while the plot of some noirs (I'm looking at you, The Big Sleep) have plots that are impossible to disentangle, they're not usually willfully mysterious.

I have to admit, though, it's not because of the supernatural elements that I liked Kiss Me Deadly so much. I actually even think the movie goes somewhat off the tracks near the end, and I'm not entirely sure I approve. But what I love is the movies cynicism and gloomy atmosphere. There are no lily-white noir heroes, but few are as dark and twisty inside as Mike Hammer. And the opening... ah, that opening. Heavy panting. A woman's legs. Screeching tires. I could describe it, but Kim Morgan already did that beautifully for the opening shots project. The only thing she doesn't mention is that the titles scroll down, so that we have to read from the bottom to the top: a sign, already, that in this movie everything's upside down. Not as it should be. Hard to 'read'.

That opening is shown in the background in a shot of Southland Tales. It's easy to miss if you don't know the movie: this movie wildly overflows, every frame filled with so much detail and so many meaningless (or are they?) knick-knacks. Also, the panting can easily be mistaken for the sexual panting in a porn movie - the scene, after all, takes place in the house of porn star Krysta Now, given perfect, plastic shape by Buffy herself.

Later in the movie, the final scene (memorably paid homage to in Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark) is also on a TV somewhere, in the background, and one of the characters (or two, depending on how you want to see it) sees his hand glow. One character pleads another to remember her name, even though the name she gave him is a fake one. It's hard to know if these references are relevant. After all, there are so many it's hard to keep track: Clinton/Lieberman is fighting the Eliot/Frost ticket, and poems by both T.S.Eliot and Robert Frost are quoted, Revelations is cited at length, a character uses "Deep Throat 2" as an undercover name... I could go on. The references don't add to the meaning, but maybe that's because there doesn't seem to be much meaning to begin with.

I won't sugarcoat it: Southland Tales is a mess. It's incoherent, overlong, wise like a pretentious seventeen-year-old (which is to say: not very, and certainly not as much as it thinks it is), over-the-top and out-of-control, much of the direction is stilted, the acting is ridiculously bad, and some of the effects are also. But what a glorious mess it is! A mess to laugh at wholeheartedly with the right kind of friends (the kind, for instance, that can talk at length about the difference between the pants worn by Kurt Russell in Escape From L.A. and Escape From New York), to be amazed by.

It's a film brimming with bad ideas, sure, but at least it's brimming with ideas! You simply never know what's coming. Just when you've come to terms with a song called Teen Horniness is Not a Crime, an impromptu musical interlude from Justin Timberlake (who appears as a prophetic sniper) and a nearly unrecognizable Kevin Smith... there's fucking cars. I mean, cars, fucking. And that might not even be the weirdest thing on screen. And how can you not give a movie points for featuring Christopher Lambert as an ice-cream truck driver slash gun salesman?

It's a movie that makes you go "Ok. That was insanely bad. And I think it's my new favorite movie".

I won't go as far as the above, paraphrased from a friend. And I can't really recommend it, because I can imagine being totally left not just bewildered but annoyed by it. But it did make me laugh more than 99% of so-called "comedies", and left me with a silly grin on my face, unable to say anything but "Awesome!", over and over again.

* Ok, that might have been overdoing the alliteration, but indulge me this time. I recently saw a movie which didn't shy back from any excess it could come up with.

Recommended reading: a far smarter defense than mine, by Steven Shaviro, can be found here. I think he gives Richard Kelly a bit too much credit: I think the movie's insane brilliance is largely accidental. But he makes some good points.

Apparently part of a series of films that follow the erstwhile Maiku, I can't wait to see the follow-up at the very least.

Conquest aka La Conquesta (1983). Dir. Lucio Fulci. Maestro Fulci once again delivers a film that literally defies narrative recapping. Visually the film is interesting, flashes of brilliance throughout such as the mask worn my Sabrina Siani as Ocron, as well as the cobweb creatures. And, don't forget the Zombies, which attack one of the heroes in a swamp. But even with the zombies, I was a tad disappointed. Fulci described this as a 'for hire' job, and it shows.

Following one of the least competent heroic leads of all time, this sword & sorcery flick is good, but not great. Better as a film to put on with a group of folks around, just so that the dull parts can be glossed over.  But, it does feature some great gore scenes and frequent appearances by topless ladies, so it's a guaranteed crowd-pleaser in that regard.

It was through her essays that I became interested in the post-modern French authors who were major influences upon the Beat Generation on the other side of the Atlantic. Subsequently those influences which originated in France helped to inspire the  Hippies and now the Goths. Even now their influence continues with the philosophy behind the blogging and writing style of both the Raincoaster and myself . This is a fore-runner of the soon to be recognised Pre-Global Warming Hysteria movement of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

So I rejoiced, when an English translation of this book by the fictional French boxer turned author, Lucien Choufleur who was strongly influenced by both Satre and Camus, didn't cross my desk. As it wasn't written in 1947, I felt impelled to plagiarise a review from Tad Tuleja.

Raymond Salaud is one of those rare works of art - like Goethe's Werther or Mariachi's Etudes Mexicaines - that are more significant for what they generate for what they are in themselves. This is an ironic thing to say about Choufleur, for he presented his novel as an acte gratuit, and would have been astonished to find that his influence, since his death in 1956, extended to such "contingent" arenas as popular movies and modern fashion.

A professional boxer up to 1946, Choufleur, in that year, discovered existentialism and immersed himself in the writings of Satre and Camus. Within a year he had become a café intellectual, building on the tradition of such pugilistes cartesiennes as Robert Cohen to ingratiate himself with the Deux Magots crowd and to earn a reputation (in the words of Gigi Sombreux) as "the only counter-puncher Jean-Paul feared."

It was not enough. In the latter part of 1947, feeling still a "sometime member of the club," he began a work of fiction that would amalgamate the basic Left Bank theories with (in his ingenuous phrasing) "those images that have made me what I am." For Choufleur, this meant American film noir, subway billboards, and boxing newsreels. As a result, his need to impress the "big heads" battled constantly with naïve wonder at "low class" creativity, and the novel he wrenched out of this tension offended Hollywood no less than his café patronizers.

Choufleur's character, Raymond Salaud, is a freelance detective, very much in the Spade and Marlowe mold. But his impulse control is leaner than theirs; he justifies his frequent outbreaks of "gratuitous violence" by invoking Camus's Meursault as a patron saint, and taking as his personal First Commandment the Dostoyevskian notion that "without God all is permitted." Thus, when he suddenly punches a stranger in chapter 1 - blessing her with "fortuity" - his justification is, first of all, Meursault, and then the honour which must be paid to one's own feelings. In his words, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

The café crowd, recoiling at this "abuse" of the current cant, eased Choufleur out of the favoured circles, and he ended up in Marseilles, boxing for brandy. But the reverberations of his work were widely felt. Mickey Spillane first and then the Dirty Harry and Death Wish writing teams, acknowledged Choufleur as an influence on their dramatic styles, and Spillane has gone so far as to admit that "If that froggie hadn't whacked that little old lady, Mike Hammer mighta thought twice about plugging broads."

Choufleur's other claim to fame lies in the fashion field. Salaud's standard costume is not a trench coat but "black on black", and his female companion, the lustrous Cherche Femme, also dresses exclusively in "midnight magic". The vogue for "basic black" during the 1950's - in the haute monde as well as in the demi - has been traced distinctly to the Choufleur fad, and modern bikers parisiens also acknowledge his influence. No doubt this would have pleased the struggling author. His personal motto was Je suis moi (I am me); after his shabby treatment by the Paris set he changed it defiantly to "Paint it black."