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When Barry Met Sally

when barry met sally…

Always irreverent, filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld offers his thoughts on the 4K release of the classic 1989 romantic comedy he shot for director Rob Reiner

by Michael Gaughn
October 20, 2022

Before he was the director of such iconic movies as Men in Black, The Addams Family, and Get Shorty and of groundbreaking series like Pushing Daisies, The Tick, and A Series of Unfortunate Events, Barry Sonnenfeld was a much sought after cinematographer whose credits include the early Coen Brothers movies and such hits as Big, Throw Momma from the Train, Misery, and the film considered here, When Harry Met Sally… . After watching the recent 4K release of the classic Rob Reiner romantic comedy, I was curious to see what Barry thought of the new transfer. As always, he was beyond generous with both his time and his comments, and not shy about saying exactly what was on his mind.

Barry on 4K and HDR

“The problem with some of the new tools available to electronic cinematography is that they’re more marketing than necessarily aesthetic choices. For instance, 4K doesn’t necessarily give the viewer a better experience. All the major streamers insist on shooting with 4K equipment but truthfully every pore on an actress’s face or every line of makeup is visible in 4K. So what what we often do is soften or reduce the resolution of the 4K camera by using old non-coated lenses or by putting filtration in front of the lens. So, yes, in theory you’re filming in 4K but we are doing everything in our power to make the image look like HD, or 2K.

“It’s the same problem with HDR. On A Series of Unfortunate Events, we were asked to release the last two seasons in HDR. But HDR took our beautiful muted, low-contrast, low-saturation image and—as per its name, ‘high dynamic range’—would increase our perfect and designed low dynamic range and brighten the image, adding saturation to the colors, doing what it was designed to do—add dynamic range—which unfortunately made the show less soulful and dreary.”

related review

Kaleidescape | Get Shorty

MGM decided to do When Harry Met Sally… as a straight 4K transfer, sans HDR. How true is it to what you shot?

I was very pleased with how muted the colors were and how unelectronic the 4K transfer looked. I’m thankful that it was not released in HDR. Just because you have that tool doesn’t mean you have to use it. If it had been in HDR, all those colors would have been video-game colors. The reds would have been super saturated, the yellows would have been super saturated. So I liked that there was a soft, non-saturated look to it.

The transfer was very true to the original color timing. There were a couple of interior scenes I would have timed slightly different, though. At that period in my life as a DP, for some reason I had a problem with the color yellow, so a lot of the scenes are slightly—like a point more—magenta than I would have timed them now. When Harry Met Sally… , Big, and Throw Momma all tended slightly on the cooler side.

There’s something else I would have done in retrospect. Some of the closeups are too tight. They felt slightly claustrophobic. If I were shooting it now, I would have asked Rob [Reiner] to widen out just a little bit on the dolly to have more breathing room around faces.

Some HDR versions of classic films, like 2001, look amazing but sometimes an HDR release seems like an opportunity to scrub away grain, screw around with the color palette, etc.—à la The Godfather—and basically create a new version of the film.

I totally agree. I think there should be only one version of a movie. I don’t like special director’s cuts because every time you see one, whether it’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the 42 different cuts of Apocalypse Now, they always add stuff. You look at it and go, “I see why the theatrical cut was the way it was.” It was actually the best version. I don’t think there should be seven versions of Picasso’s Guernica, like, “Hey, look—we have acrylics now. Let’s repaint it without oils.” Just because you can improve something—and “improve” is a relative word—doesn’t mean you should.

Joel Coen and I recently worked on rereleasing Miller’s Crossing in 4K for Criterion. During the title sequence, a hat lands in the foreground and then the wind picks it up and the hat flips and flips and goes into the distance and up into the trees, and then the title says “Miller’s Crossing.” Joel and I joked that if we were doing that today, we would have just shot a plate of the background and the hat would have been totally CG. Instead, we had a piece of monofilament tied to the hat that went a hundred yards down into the distance and 80 feet up in the air, where we had it tied to a motor in a cherry picker that pulled the hat.

The problem was, during every take, the hat just got dragged across the ground, got to the base of the tree, and then went up like an “L”. What we ended up doing is—and you can see it if you frame-by-frame that shot—we had three little sticks in the foreground so that when we threw the hat in, it landed in front of the sticks, so that when it then got pulled by the monofilament, the twigs forced the hat to immediately flip instead of being dragged. And that flip gave it aerodynamics, and then it went up into the air.

So I said to Joel, “Now that we’re doing this remastering, should we get rid of the sticks?”— because now it would just be a two-minute electronic thing to remove them. Joel said that he had the same idea but realized we shouldn’t do it, that it’s fun to see if anyone notices the three sticks. I think that these remasterings, it’s great if you can remove dolly tracks—with the Coens, there were always dolly tracks, lights, all sorts of stuff, since I was a terrible camera operator—and it’s OK to remove a microphone that had always been sticking into the top of the frame, but to change the look of the whole show is nuts.

I was wondering if seeing Harry Met Sally again triggered any memories about shooting the film.

There’s that scene where Sally drops Harry off outside of Washington Square Park, with that mini Arc de Triomphe. And on that shot, we pulled up into the air. I got really uncomfortable when I watched that because Rob and I almost died on that crane. We were riding it together to see what the shot was going to look like, and the crane came off the track and teetered. The weights were balancing us and the back of the bucket, and if the crane had completely come off the track, we would have been launched to Asbury Park, New Jersey. Luckily, the crew caught it just as it was going to flip over.

Nowadays, that would have been a Technocrane—no one is riding cranes anymore. Or, it would have been a drone, and we would have gone 10 times further back. I’m not saying it would have been better but we would have shot it differently.

Joel and Ethan and I always joke that if we were reshooting Blood Simple or Raising Arizona today, they would be 10 ten times the cost and wouldn’t be as good. You know that shot in Raising Arizona where we go over a fountain, over a car, up a ladder, though a window, into Florence Arizona’s mouth? We would have shot that totally on a drone in one continuous shot and it would have had a different energy. The fact that Joel and I were running on either side holding a 2 x 12 carrying an Arriflex 2C camera with a 9.8mm Century Optics lens gives it a different feel than if we had shot it on a drone.

Directors feel obligated to work in drone shots now and the shots feel so similar that it’s always obvious they were done with a drone.

I don’t want to sound like an old guy but you don’t want to fix what ain’t broken. And I really feel that these new techniques are fixing what ain’t broken. For instance, in terms of sound—and some people disagree with me—just because you can put certain sounds in the surrounds doesn’t mean you should. I work with Paul Ottosson—three-time Academy Award winner, four-time nominee, for Hurt Locker and other things. He’s done several movies for me and he did all three seasons of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Occasionally he’ll put a knock on a door in back of the room because the person’s going to come in from off camera, and it drives me crazy because it literally takes you out of the movie because the screen is in front of you. That is an affect and a “look what I can do,” but it doesn’t help me tell the story. In fact, it takes me out of the story because I’m looking back to see what that was. My point is, just because you can put sound everywhere doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can use HDR doesn’t mean you should. Because I think it’s hurting the experience of watching a movie.

Miller’s Crossing

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

Review: Bullets Over Broadway

review | Bullets Over Broadway

Kaleidescape | Blue Jasmine

Kaleidescape | Manhattan

Amazon Prime | 12 Monkeys

see more in Reviews

One of Woody Allen’s best, this comedy about the absurdity of creating was also one of his last completely satisfying films

by Michael Gaughn
October 17, 2022

Bullets Over Broadway comes from the end of Woody Allen’s last consistently strong period as a filmmaker. After that, and Mighty Aphrodite in 1995, he would wander in the woods for the next three decades, managing to come up with something truly worthy only about once every 10 years. A lot has fed into that protracted “lost” period (some of which I’ll speculate on below) but the sad truth is that, somewhere around 1996, Allen lost touch with the elements essential to sustaining his work.

Bullets shows him radically reinventing himself as a filmmaker, a process he’d begun with Husbands and Wives two years earlier but didn’t fully realize until this film. He succeeds mightily, forging a vigorous and responsive and seemingly resilient style that consistently heightens the material. Why he wasn’t able to carry forward and build on what he’d wrought and why it instead led to embarrassing messes like Everyone Says I Love You just two years on remains one of the great mysteries. Allen must have kept the formula in a jar somewhere, though, since he was able to bring it to bear again, in full force, almost 15 years later for Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

In Bullets, he took a looser, higher-stakes approach to his fondness for long-take master shots and semi-improvisational dialogue and applied it to larger, more diverse ensembles in a way that essentially drove the whole work. It’s a nervy form of filmmaking, one that could have easily unraveled if he hadn’t had sufficient confidence in his abilities. It also could have easily become mannered, but applied to the world of Broadway theater, and to the crafting of a play in particular, it feels like a natural extension of the fictional environment.

But there are frustrations. Allen, with his career-long belief that the best way to keep material fresh is to avoid working it too hard, rarely lets his scripts steep enough, and there are moments here that feel embryonic rather than fully fledged and gags that just feel like gags instead of arising naturally from the situations.

It also takes a few minutes for Bullets to get up on its feet, partly because of its unusual visual style, which ultimately yields big dividends but does take some getting used to, but also because Dianne Wiest’s first scene gives the impression she’s going to lean a little too hard on Norma Desmond throughout. Some more screen time needs to pass before it becomes apparent there’s a character there and not just a lot of derivative posturing.

The bigger problem is the inadequate John Cusack in the lead. He doesn’t have the range to convincingly play a self-important struggling playwright, and his failed attempts to rise to the challenge create something of a void at the center of the film. Allen has always relied on casting the flavor of the month as a way of ensuring some box office for his movies—something he slyly comments on in Bullets through the Cusack character’s difficulties with casting his play—but it doesn’t do him any favors here.

Fortunately, the combined efforts of Wiest; a surprisingly strong Jennifer Tilly; Chazz Palminteri, in a nicely modulated performance; the rock-solid Jack Warden; the always enjoyable Jim Broadbent (in an underwritten role); and even Tracy Ullman, during the moments when she’s able to rise above her trademark schtick, more than compensate for the presence of the seemingly lost Cusack.

Thanks to Palminteri, Bullets includes one of the best moments in all of Allen’s work as he and Cusack sit at the counter in a pool hall talking about writing. It’s a seemingly simple scene but the way Palminteri begins to open up, convincingly showing his character is something more than a stereotypical goon, the whole accompanied by the tapping of cues and crack of billiard balls, becomes the almost imperceptible pivot for the whole film. (Allen would largely recapture this 22 years on in a couple of the key exchanges between Jesse Eisenberg and the otherwise unexceptional Blake Lively in Café Society.)

Of all the older movies I’ve looked at recently, Bullets Over Broadway most cries out for a better presentation. Not that it’s unwatchable in HD on Prime but the saturated, constantly bordering on soft, heavy on grain images are ill served by this jittery transfer. Some scenes, like one between Warden and Cusack in a steam bath and the ones in the mob boss’s apartment, with its vast stretches of off-white walls, are full of distracting noise. Luckily, the cinematography is strong enough to punch its way through how it’s presented here, offering a tantalizing glimpse of how Bullets would likely look if it were treated to a straight 4K transfer.

This is such a good film—one of Allen’s best, although not quite at the level of Annie Hall, Manhattan, or Stardust Memories or the much later Blue Jasmine—that it’s sad Allen wasn’t able to continue to fruitfully mine the vein he’d struck here. You just need to compare Bullets to his effort to cover the same thematic ground in 2005’s Match Point to realize how badly he’s been flailing in his late period.

There are many possible explanations for those struggles, none of them completely satisfying, but I would point to two big factors. The more simplistic one is that Allen always needed an onscreen anima to define his work against—Diane Keaton up to 1980 and the more problematic—but no less fruitful because of that—Mia Farrow from ‘80 to ‘92. He tried to fill that void for a few years with Scarlett Johansson, but that only resulted in one great film, Vicky Cristina. That Allen, for obvious reasons, was far more distant from Johansson than he was from either Keaton or Farrow, and that she has no discernible comedic chops, made her a comparatively meager source of inspiration.

The more substantial explanation is likely that not just the movies but the culture had changed so drastically that it no longer provided fertile ground for sustaining Allen’s form of romantic fantasy. As I mentioned when reviewing 12 Monkeys, it was around 1995 that films became colder, nastier, and more cerebral, in the detached, game-playing sense. They suddenly stopped being about lived experience and, as the children of the Regan era began calling the shots, became movies about movies instead, divorced from realistic cause and effect, only tenuously tethered to reality. While Allen’s films have always been about fantasy and often about people yearning for lives more like what they see up on the screen, they need that credible anchoring in the messiness of day-to-day urban life, that more emotion-based grounding, to have any resonance at all. Come the mid ‘90s, all of that disappeared from the culture, likely forever, and Allen’s efforts since to build movies on memories of a more substantial world have, not surprisingly, almost inevitably failed.

PICTURE | Bullets is watchable in HD on Prime but the saturated, constantly bordering on soft, heavy on grain images are ill served by this jittery transfer

Manos and the Myth of the Bad Movie

also on Cineluxe

Amazon Prime | Ed Wood

October 13, 2022

Having gone B-movie with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and down to C with Carnival of Souls, I flirted with the idea of descending deep into the bowels of the filmworld underbelly with the infamous Manos: The Hands of Fate. Not that everyone shouldn’t experience Manos at least once in their lives but there’s just not enough to the movie or its presentation to justify an entire review. But there is something to be said about its reputation.

Manos has replaced Plan 9 from Outer Space as the worst movie of all time. It rests in the crosshairs of the definitive, and still best, MST3K episode. It’s the movie that gave us Torgo, with no good way to exchange the gift for something a little less repulsive. I’m taking the time to write about it partly because, like Linus, I don’t think it’s such a bad little movie, and partly because most people don’t even know what a bad movie is—at least not when it comes time to make, or accept, “worst ever” lists.

There are all kinds of ways for a movie to be bad—it can stem from a bad idea, it can have a terrible script, it can be shot poorly, the editing can suck, the director can have all kinds of great resources at hand but just have no idea what he’s doing (the most common cause of badness—especially on the star-studded, big-budget level), it can be well made but utterly inert, and on and on. But the gulf between run-of-the-mill bad movies and the worst ones ever is vast. While any of the things listed above can be a paving stone on the path to a truly abysmal film, there’s only one thing that can unassailably qualify a movie as worst—it has to be unwatchable.

The world is awash in unwatchable movies. But none of them ever make the “worst ever” lists. And therein lies the rub. That’s because those lists never—ever—represent the worst movies of all time—just the ones we find easiest to make fun of.

The ones we call worst tend to be stuff that’s in some way naive—or, to reference Linus again, sincere. It’s less a reflection on the movie and more on our cynicism that we usually pick on the ones that wear their hearts on their sleeves.

“The movies we call worst tend to be stuff that’s in some way naive. It’s less a reflection on the movie and more on our cynicism that we usually pick on the ones that wear their hearts on their sleeves.”

a little touch of Manos in the night

Defined this way, Ed Wood, who, by consensus, is considered the worst director ever, is actually a pretty good filmmaker with a strong body of work. Wood, with his pulpy fascination with the occult, sci-fi, and skin flicks, did an extraordinary job of channeling the vast pool of muck that’s been a fertile source for American pop culture since the beginning of the Industrial Era and the rise of the big cities. Yes, it’s raw—but it’s also unfiltered, and there’s a considerable virtue in that.

And to make the key point, we’re only able to bully Wood and his films because they’re actually entertaining. If he wasn’t able to engage and hold an audience, Plan 9 or Glen or Glenda or Bride of the Monster or The Sinister Urge wouldn’t be on anybody’s lists because we would have been bored or repelled and unlikely to even remember their names, let alone their plots or favorite scenes.

Ditto for Manos. It’s exactly because Harold P. Warren was a fertilizer salesman who had never made a movie in his life and only made this one as part of a bet that he couldn’t get too fancy and had to stick to an unvarnished tale from the dark undercurrents of the culture. Sure, just about everything about the film is inept—or, to quote MST3K, “there’s a buffet of loathsomeness in this movie”—but once we start watching it, we don’t turn away. It could be argued that’s because it gives us something to feel superior to, but that just underlines my point about the dubiousness of the whole “worst of” thing.

When we ridicule a “bad” movie, we get the high that comes with thinking we’re owning it. But we’re actually the ones being owned, duped as easily as a bunch of rubes at a county fair. The world of “worst ever” is actually a Potemkin village erected to divert your attention from the fact you’re being tricked into paying to watch a bunch of movies you otherwise would never go near. Like almost everything in contemporary culture, it’s all just a marketing exercise, and whether it’s some mega-budget effects-laden action film or some made-on-a-dime exploitation throwaway from the ‘50s is irrelevant. Your money still ends up in somebody else’s pocket. (The irony is that something like Jail Bait will always have a way longer shelf life than the blockbusters that make $250 million their first weekend then disappear forever.)

Let’s not be so smug. Let’s stop treating the past as in some way inferior—less enlightened, less accomplished, or whatever than the present. There is nothing in human history (or human nature) to support that position—just the money-mad need to make us believe we’re somehow better than our forebears so we’ll more readily snap up the cultural equivalent of junk food. The next time you come across Manos or Ed Wood or Coleman Francis or Bert I. Gordon (even I hesitated to type that last one), give them the benefit of the doubt. Put yourself in their shoes and look at their work on their terms instead of the way the carnies want you to see it. You’ll be doing all of filmmaking a huge favor.

“When we ridicule a ‘bad’ movie, we get the high that comes with thinking we’re owning it. But we’re actually the ones being owned, duped as easily as a bunch of rubes at a county fair.”

Review: Carnival of Souls

review | Carnival of Souls

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Given how it was made, this classic horror movie shouldn’t be a classic, or even a movie, and yet it remains one of the most influential films to come out of the genre

by Michael Gaughn
October 10, 2022

If the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a B movie, then Carnival of Souls is a solid C—a wild fling at moviemaking by a bunch of naive and repressed Midwesterners meant for second, or third, billing at Kansas drive-ins, a kind of Bergman-goes-to-Topeka thing that must have confused the hell out of the 2 a.m. hangers-on expecting to get off on something like Chain-Gang Girls. And yet somehow out of that impossible equation came art.

To give a quick, urban-legend take on its genesis for those unfamiliar with the film, Herk Harvey, a staff director at Centron, best known for its ‘50s industrial-arts and hygiene shorts, stumbled upon a Bergman film, which inspired him to take his one and only stab at feature filmmaking by grafting European art cinema onto the American exploitation horror movie, the whole thing done on zero budget. By rights, the result should have been a disaster, and in some ways it is; and yet, miraculously, out of that compost heap emerged a very beautiful and, in the best sense, haunting little film.

(Just so it doesn’t sound like I’m unfairly dumping on the decidedly staid Centron, it was something of a filmmaking powerhouse, within its lane, and the place where Robert Altman got his start.)

The best explanation for why Carnival of Souls works is channeling. The filmmakers, by their own admission, had no idea what they were doing so they had no choice but to surrender to what was in the air. And the cultural winds were so strong at the time that they ultimately steered Harvey and his team safely into a very snug little harbor.

This is completely naive, seat-of-the-pants filmmaking—the kind of thing a lot of us hoped would become legion in the wake of camcorders and cellphones and The Blair Witch Project, but we got a bunch of unimaginative dolts aspiring to make superhero movies instead. By aping arty gestures without understanding them, Harvey and friends were somehow able to conjure up a film that bears an uncanny resemblance to Polanski’s Repulsion (which was three years in the future at the time) and that can actually pretty much hold its own against that other more carefully crafted and deeply felt film.

Souls’ ineptness is actually a virtue. Taking a trained New York actress and dropping her in the middle of a bunch of well-intended but obviously unsophisticated Midwestern actors heightened the sense of the main character’s extreme alienation. A lot of the movie’s justly famous atmospherics can be attributed to the disparity between the onscreen action and dubbed dialogue that sounds like it was recorded in somebody’s closet. The Foley work consistently maintains an earth-to-Alpha-Centauri distance from whatever it’s trying to enhance or depict. And only about a quarter of the shots work but they’re just strong enough to keep the film from unraveling completely. This is a movie held together with chicken wire, spit, and a prayer.

That lays bare a fundamental truth about all mainstream filmmaking, no matter what the budget: The audience almost always contributes at least half the experience of a movie—sometimes considerably more. Producers figure out what people will respond to and then provide just enough emotional and intellectual triggers to allow audience members to fill in the blanks with their own projections. That explains why most films have no staying power—people move on to new fads and preoccupations, so they’re no longer able to bring anything relevant to watching the film. It also explains why most movies that do hang in there are wrapped in a nostalgic glow—because the viewer has commingled it with the emotional resonance of their own memories from the time they first saw it. It also helps to explain why franchises—the safest and least creative moviemaking bet there is—have spread like the plague.

That’s not to say there isn’t a substantial movie here. Candace Hilligoss somehow managed to craft a legitimate performance while having to contend with throw-it-at-the-wall direction and lousy continuity. You keep wondering if she’ll be able to bring any consistency to her character but then the roadhouse scene happens, where she convincingly conveys the sense of clinging to whatever shred of reality she can find because she knows letting go will mean she’ll disappear forever. I didn’t realize until this viewing how much of what’s best about Souls can be attributed to Hilligoss. They could have pulled off all the spooky atmospherics they wanted but none of it would have mattered if she hadn’t been able to rise several levels above the material and the circumstances. That makes it all the more amazing that the filmmakers were able to create a powerful and fairly nuanced portrait of radical dissociation while having no real grasp of their own subject matter.

There’s something—a lot—to be said for naivety. Movies have gotten thinner and thinner—and longer and longer—as each successive generation has found the basics of film technique working their way deeper and deeper into their DNA. Practically every sentient being now knows how to make a presentable movie. But it’s become almost impossible to find anyone who knows to how to do anything meaningful with the tools once they’re given to them. I realize it’s an impossibility, but a new take on cinema that took its cues from Carnival of Souls wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to us—not by a country mile.

SOULS ON PRIME
I know it’s my job but I don’t know what to tell you about the UHD presentation on Prime—mainly because this is such an unorthodox film it’s hard to know what matters. Although it’s been repackaged in all kinds of ways, Souls has never looked great—and, given the shooting circumstances, it’s not hard to understand why. To say that watching a subpar version can add to the creepiness is true up to a point, but it’s also a bit of a cheat. I’d prefer to see something that comes as close as possible to what Herk Harvey actually shot.

This presentation doesn’t do that. Yes, it’s UHD but it’s been processed with such a heavy hand that everything looks waxy. Occasional shots do look exceptional but it’s frustrating to have them be the exception and not the rule. All I can say is that, if you can get onto this film’s wavelength—something that can be hard for the increasingly jaded to do—the presentation isn’t likely to have much impact on your experience one way or the other, which is praising by faint damning.

The last thing I want to do is find myself in the middle of an aspect-ratio pissing contest, but the film is presented in 1.37:1—the ratio of the negative and how the usually definitive Criterion has chosen to offer it as well. But IMDB says it was meant to be seen at 1.85:1, which, if true, helps to explain what seem like some unusually bad compositions and why camera gear appears in the top of the frame during the whirling dancing shots near the end. I can’t say it ought to be shown 1.85 because I’ve never seen it that way—just curious why it’s not.

—M.G.

Review: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

review | Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

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The first Body Snatchers movie and the precursor of the modern zombie film, the original still packs a bigger punch than any of its descendants

by Michael Gaughn
October 7, 2022

I create Top 10 lists but never as a permanent enshrinement of anything but more as a snapshot of how I value things at a certain moment in time. To believe you’ve permanently decided on the definitive of anything—let alone believe anything as fluid and zeitgeist-driven as movies can be correlated in any meaningful way—is pure hubris, and to etch your choices in stone is to essentially embalm, not appreciate, them, like pinning butterflies to a board. All of which is to say that I once had the original, 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers in my No. 1 slot. That troubled me a lot at the time but it also felt somehow right.

I don’t know if I would ever put it back at No. 1 but it still feels somehow right. If there’s an inherent value in a piece of pop cinema being able to both capture the angst of an era and use it as a springboard to perfectly project the trajectory of the culture, then Body Snatchers has that, and in spades. The film was too easily dismissed at the time and subsequently as an expression of Red Scare paranoia. It’s not. It’s a low-budget B-movie depiction of the loss of self, or soul—depending on how you want to parse that—uncannily prescient, and done with a power that lends it a continuing relevance it never would have achieved as an A-list project.

I can’t think of another movie that’s done a better job of portraying that fatal pivot in the culture, nor any that come close to it that approach the subject with as much restraint. That restraint compresses the film’s energy, allowing it to resonate just as strongly (more so?) 66 years on, eclipsing all the remakes, off-shoots, and imitators.

I’m not saying Body Snatchers is what would traditionally be considered a masterpiece, in the technical or even the cinematic sense. At the end of the day, it’s still a B movie, with all the basic flaws that come with pandering to that segment of the audience. But it captures something tremendously important, and captures it better than could have been done if it had been put in more accomplished hands. Its B-movie weaknesses are its virtues, forcing its makers to keep the action intimate and the practical effects modest. And the material seems to need the rough energy, the inherent luridness, that comes with aiming for the cheap seats.

The wraparound—tacked on after the fact because the ending was considered too depressing—remains pointless. The film means nothing, packs no punch, if it’s not hopeless, and to enjoy it (in the troubling sense of the word) you have to edit those bookends out in your mind as you watch it. (But there is a certain giddy frisson to seeing the ubiquitous Whit Bissell, the embodiment of bland, benign mid-‘50s authority; Richard “The Dick Van Dyke Show” Deacon; and the hit man who tried to rub out Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross all being called up for active duty to do a couple of completely unnecessary scenes.)

The movie’s Santa Mira is a typical small American city the way Santa Rosa is in Shadow of a Doubt, but Body Snatchers doesn’t waste any time establishing that because, like in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, that almost mythic sense of place was so thoroughly understood, was such a shared and reassuring cultural reference point, that any kind of stage-setting would have been unnecessary and just slowed everything down. Unlike most horror movies and thrillers, Body Snatchers jumps right into laying down its “there’s something wrong here” vibe, which makes it infinitely creepier.

From that opening scene on, the film is breathless—but without once seeming to break a sweat. The mood deepens, the shadows thicken, and the thrills are placed as quietly and cunningly as the seed pods, building to an overwhelming sense of inevitability and dread. There’s no big rush to get to a big effect—the first developing pod doesn’t even appear until the halfway point—and yet no scene lingers. Each says exactly what it needs to say and moves on.

Body Snatchers is really a chamber drama with a perverse sense of humor and the occasional practical effect. Everything is grounded in basic human interaction and kept plausible for as long as possible. It never overreaches. For all the cheesy horror makeup and monster suits with zippers in ‘50s films, the effects here remain remarkably convincing, which has a lot to do with the film’s staying power.

That’s not to say there aren’t problems—it’s a B movie, so it’s brimming with problems. Dana Wynter’s entrance is so badly handled it always gets a laugh, you have your pick of cringe-worthy lines, and poor Kevin McCarthy seems to be in over his head throughout. And then there’s the constant churning and over-insistence of the Carmen Dragon score. But the premise is so strong and the film clings to it so tenaciously and develops it so powerfully that the fumbles almost feel like grace notes.

The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers spawned the modern zombie movie—although not in the ways you’d think. The characters recoil upon discovering their pod doubles not because they’re alien but because they’re so much like themselves. Similarly, zombie movies aren’t about the undead being other—they’re one of us, just a too easily taken step away from who we are now. Depending on your angle of approach, Body Snatchers can induce an even bigger shudder today than it did in its time because it’s a pretty accurate depiction of who we once were and who we’ve, c. 1985, become.

PICTURE | The usual Amazon Prime spiel—watchable, with occasional standout moments, with little that could be called exceptional. But this was always meant to be a second-on-the-bill potboiler, never exquisite or pristine.

Review: 12 Monkeys

review | 12 Monkeys

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Terry Gilliam’s most successful attempt to work within the system, this apocalyptic thriller proved to be prescient—but not just for the expected reasons

by Michael Gaughn
October 3, 2022

Having had an affirmative experience getting reacquainted with Brazil after the rout of Baron Munchausen, I wanted to do some more digging around to try to figure out if Terry Gilliam was something of a one-hit wonder. I’d watched The Fisher King again a few months ago and, while some of it remains powerful, too much of it feels out of scale with the material. It’s a good movie—far better than most—but can’t even begin to compare with Brazil. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has its moments but is basically a rambling mess that gets squeezed much too thin. The bottom line seems to be that Gilliam without a solid script is mainly an occasionally compelling diversion.

The Peoples’ script for 12 Monkeys is way too full of itself but gets most of the structural stuff right enough to let Gilliam build something pretty substantial atop it. But his greatest achievement here—which definitely isn’t derived from the script—is the tone, the ability to give a presence to the impalpable. 12 Monkeys feels like an elegy—one that manages to be both moving and troubling without being either depressing or sentimental. As soon as we know almost every character we see on the screen is soon going to die, a consistent tenor takes hold that makes everything feel both tenuous and more vivid.

And Gilliam establishes that tone—it can’t really be called a mood—so strongly that even his lapses and indulgences can’t queer it. The Britishisms and silly gags he was able to make work, to some degree, in Fisher King feel alien here and push you damn close to the point of “O, come on.” But the film’s portrayal of the end is so credible that it carries you over the errors in judgment.

And a lot of the credit for that—and I can’t believe I’m writing this given that I’m talking about Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt—goes to the acting. Bruce Willis is always Bruce Willis, or something less than that, but Gilliam gets him to stretch well beyond his persona and, by adeptly molding the individual moments of his performance, succeeds in piecing together a nuanced and forceful whole. Pitt, in probably his only convincing role, takes what can be seen as just goofing and makes it feel like that absurdity, in sum, is the character. Although his Jeffrey Goines is something of a red herring, it was crucial to the film to show that there’s a menacing chaos at the heart of all his acting out.

Why didn’t Madeleine Stowe ever have a career? Her performance, which is the film’s fulcrum and is subtly modulated but in a way that becomes powerful, should have led to her having her pick of standout roles. It could have been a personal thing or an industry thing or just a dearth of good enough parts, but it’s a tremendous mystery, and a huge loss. She brings much needed weight to the the film through her believable pivot from intelligent and perceptive but hopelessly smug to utterly lost and desperate to believe.

Seen as a madcap stylist, a Goldbergian concoctor of cinematic gadgets, Gilliam has never received his due as an actor’s director. But his films, going back to Time Bandits, have been graced by exceptional performances, even when the material didn’t seem substantial enough to hold that kind of weight. 12 Monkeys is driven by the acting, not the style.

My comments about the HD presentation on Prime (as a portal for Starz) are made knowing a 4K remaster was done this year and a new home release could be imminent. Parts of the film are in surprisingly bad shape for something from as recent as 1995, with the quality sometimes varying tremendously from shot to shot, especially near the beginning. While much of the movie holds up well watched on a big screen, those sudden soft or super contrasty moments can be jarring.

As we’ve seen repeatedly, 4K is no panacea—it can even be an older film’s worst enemy. Depending on the elements they had to work with for the remaster, a new release could be a benison or could be uneven as hell. I’d be especially concerned it would accentuate the flaws in the decent enough but definitely now creaky CGI. That said, I’m keen to check out the 4K, if or when it comes.

Allow me to ruminate for a moment on my way out the door.

The intuitiveness of the mass consciousness can be startling. The dire events portrayed in this film, until then just the shouts of lone voices, weren’t even thinkable on the mass level until around 1995. It’s as if we were beginning to prepare ourselves for everything that’s transpired over the past few years, and for the worse to come.

And, as often happens, the surface content of a film—or wave of films—also has a self-reflexive cinematic complement. By getting you to feel the death of the race in a way that gets into your bones, 12 Monkeys gets you to sense the death of emotion in movies as well. It’s hard to pin down exactly but there was a distinct moment when the movies (all entertainment, actually) crossed a rubicon from being grounded in humanity to deriving from a kind of unfeeling viciousness, when creativity devolved into facile cleverness, when it all shifted from grounded in emotion to cruel, abstract exercises in the coldly cerebral.

That moment seems to be right around the time of 12 Monkeys’ release, with the solidifying of the Coens and the rise of Fincher, Jonze, the Andersons (Paul Thomas and Wes), Nolan, and others of their ilk. Their work resonates as long as you can view it with an arm’s-length detachment, don’t invest too much in it emotionally, and don’t bring your full being to bear. In other words, as long as you don’t allow yourself to feel. None of the above-mentioned could have summoned up any of the bittersweet sense of passing that pervades 12 Monkeys because none of them could have sensed it to begin with.

12 Monkeys is the cry of the canary in the coal mine, the voice essential to survival we’ve since opted to drown out with the screeching din of an increasingly brutal culture. Given that we were just capable of hearing that warning at the time the movie came out, I have to wonder if it has any value as anything other than an evening’s amusement now.

PICTURE | While 12 Monkeys holds up well seen on a big screen, there’s a surprising amount of inconsistency between shots at times

SOUND | Dating from the early days of DTS surround, it can all get very ping-pongy but the material lends itself to that kind of treatment, for the most part

Survival of the Savviest

“I don’t think I need to show any examples of the kinds of rooms I’m talking about. Everyone’s walked one of these crime scenes at some point in their life.”

The responsibility for creating entertainment spaces has traditionally fallen on the person least capable of doing the job—until now

by Michael Gaughn
September 29, 2022

For decades, the person with the most sway over the look of the entertainment spaces in most homes has been the one with the weakest sense of design—or no design sense at all. And I’m not just talking mass-market man caves but high-end home theaters, (the miserably named) media rooms, and other places where people like to enjoy their games, music, movies, and series.

And by design sense, I’m not talking the ability to make bold statements. An asset elsewhere in the home, those showier traits tend to be a negative in spaces where the room shouldn’t be allowed to overwhelm the experience. I’m just talking about what’s appropriate—what’s judicious and shows taste; what’s apt.

Interior designers are partly to blame for this hegemony. Traditionally tech averse, they far too easily ceded their ground here—which has been especially unfortunate because these spaces, with all their screens and devices and control, are essentially harbingers of what the entire home will soon be. Better to figure out now how to keep them from looking like domestic outliers than to have to tackle them later as a fait accompli.

So these design chores have too often fallen on the custom integrator instead. But expecting the average AV guy to bring some tact and flair to the proceedings is kind of like letting your lawn crew plan your daughter’s wedding. The parts of the brain needed to run wire, decipher specs, patch together a system, and calibrate a room don’t tend to be on speaking terms with the areas needed to fully grasp a client’s lifestyle or empathize with their more subtle aesthetic needs—essential traits for being able to create a suitable, inviting space that doesn’t feel utterly alien from the rest of the home.

brain needed to run wire, decipher specs, patch together a system, and calibrate a room don’t tend to be on speaking terms with the areas needed to fully grasp a client’s lifestyle or empathize with their more subtle aesthetic needs—essential traits for being able to create a suitable, inviting space that doesn’t feel utterly alien from the rest of the home.

The Last Days of the Man Cave

gear as possible into a room with little concern for its impact on the experience or the space caused architects and designers who could have helped smooth the waters to throw up their hands and walk away.

I don’t think I need to show any examples of the kinds of rooms I’m talking about. Everyone’s walked one of these crime scenes at some point in their life. The number of atrocities committed in the name of home theater is so massive it warrants a war crimes tribunal.

But this once dire situation is changing for the better—and fast—as a new generation of architects and designers emerges that, having been weaned on

The most positive way to spin all this is to say integrators jumped into the breach because no one else wanted to take on the job, and there’s more than a little truth to that. Less charitably, it could be said that their zeal to pile as much gear as possible into a room with little concern for its impact on the experience or the space caused architects and designers who could have helped smooth the waters to throw up their hands and walk away.

But this once dire situation is changing for the better—and fast—as a new generation of architects and designers emerges that, having been weaned on lifestyle tech, no longer views it as the enemy—but also doesn’t stroke it as a fetish—and knows how to make it feel like a not just unintrusive but organic part of the home.

Achieving Serenity

lifestyle tech, no longer views it as the enemy—but also doesn’t stroke it as a fetish—and knows how to make it feel like a not just unintrusive but organic part of the home.

Flexible, innovative private cinemas like the one featured in “Achieving Serenity” show just how fluid this has all become. Architect Ty Harrison also functioned as the lead designer—which, in a home that ambitious, meant also having to have a good grasp of how to integrate sophisticated and elaborate enough entertainment systems to satisfy the client’s needs. He then brought in the right integrator to make all the behind-the-scenes

technical stuff happen, who in turn assembled the right team of specialists to handle things like the acoustics and calibration.

That is how it should be—an architect or interior designer attuned to the client’s lifestyle who can then translate their desires structurally, technically, and aesthetically.

I’m not saying there are no integrators capable of rising to the challenge, just that the hopeless gear-heads among them should never be allowed within striking

distance of a book of swatches. The exceptions tend to be members of the emerging generation, with some functioning basically as design firms that are also able to handle the tech—like the British outfit Equippd, profiled in “Secret Cinema.” As up on look and feel as they are on gear, they always place the latter clearly in the service of the former. And because they get design and know how to make it exciting without letting it overwhelm an entertainment space, it’s something they can offer enthusiastically, not grudgingly or ineptly.

Thanks to the ascendance of these tech-savvy architects

That is how it should be—an architect or interior designer attuned to the client’s lifestyle who can then translate their desires structurally, technically, and aesthetically.

I’m not saying there are no integrators capable of rising to the challenge, just that the hopeless gear-heads among them should never be allowed within striking distance of a book of swatches. The exceptions tend to be members of the emerging generation, with some functioning basically as design firms that are also able to handle the tech—like the British outfit Equippd, profiled in “Secret Cinema.” As up on look and feel as they are on gear, they always place the latter clearly in the service of the former. And because they get design and know how to make it exciting without letting it overwhelm an entertainment space, it’s something they can offer enthusiastically, not grudgingly or ineptly.

Secret Cinema

Thanks to the ascendance of these tech-savvy architects and designers, and a small but growing coterie of integrators, entertainment spaces are, after far too long, becoming congruent with people’s expectations and how they actually live their lives. We’re far from free of the butt-crack brigade and their zeal for pushing tweaked-out unloved and unlovely rumpus rooms, but the glow of their pocket flashes is waning fast. There will always be a need to have someone run wire—the same way you’ll always need a plumber. But design will never be the AV guy’s strong suit and the coming paradigm shift will not only open up fertile new territory but help finally restore the natural order of things.

and designers, and a small but growing coterie of integrators, entertainment spaces are, after far too long, becoming congruent with people’s expectations and how they actually live their lives. We’re far from free of the butt-crack brigade and their zeal for pushing tweaked-out unloved and unlovely rumpus rooms, but the glow of their pocket flashes is waning fast. There will always be a need to have someone run wire—the same way you’ll always need a plumber. But design will never be the AV guy’s strong suit and the coming paradigm shift will not only open up fertile new territory but help finally restore the natural order of things.

Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

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Diving into late-period Woody Allen is always a gamble but this lively Johansson/Bardem/Cruz vehicle remains a pretty sure bet

by Michael Gaughn
September 26, 2022

It’s not exactly news that the quality of Woody Allen’s work became incredibly uneven once he emerged from his succession of mid-period classics like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories. For every Purple Rose of Cairo or Zelig there was a Shadows and Fog; for every Husbands and Wives, an Alice. And it only got more erratic as time went on, having to slog through films like Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, and Whatever Works to be able to pluck a Blue Jasmine from the heap.

Not having seen Vicky Cristina Barcelona in a while and not sure what my impression was of it at the time, I was surprised by how strong it is—much more so than expected. More uneven than it needs to be, it’s still consistently engaging. It’s probably Allen’s loosest, most fluid and energetic film. And it still serves as viewer bait for Scarlett Johansson fans, dating from the era when she was allowed to do legitimate roles, before she succumbed to just being a prepackaged marketing commodity.

VCB is Allen’s second-best late-period work after Blue Jasmine. (This will seem incredible to some but I’d put Café Society at No. 3.) Allen was so confident in his skill as a filmmaker by this point that he could just resonate with his material, knowing he’d find some deft and distinctive way to express it. Even at the early peak of his powers he was utterly incapable of making a film like this one, which makes his mid-period triumphs feel constipated by comparison. (To be fair, though, films like Vicky Cristina and Blue Jasmine just don’t have the repeat appeal of those earlier efforts.)

Allen takes a novelistic—or at least short-storyish—approach to the film—something he’s also done in movies like Manhattan and Café Society. But with Vicky Cristina he was so sure of himself that he could be far more improvisational without fear it would unravel in the editing, taking the literary and playing it off the cinematic and somehow getting them to coexist without having it feel like a forced marriage.

The dabs and strokes and feints of the opening, where he sets the action in motion by making a series of suggestions—snatches of dialogue, telling images, evocative sounds, avoiding traditional linearity because he knows films always move forward so a story will arise no matter what—is bravura but completely on point and without being showy. As the film proceeds and Allen further plays around with these ideas, it’s as if the cinematic knows the literary is just there to lay the foundation for moments that are purely about an image, a movement, a sound, a dissolve, a cut, sometimes highlighting just one element, sometimes mixing and matching the emphases. The point, I suspect, is to keep any one character from being dominant and instead keep the focus on the shifting relationships between the characters and on the tentativeness of fleeting emotions.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is what Sweet and Lowdown should have been but Allen hadn’t yet broken far enough free of his mid-period technique to pull something like that off. It’s a serious mistake—one often committed—to try to attribute what’s best about Allen’s work to his cinematographer of the moment—here, Javier Aguirresarobe, whose images are undeniably both striking and restrained without indulging in romantic clichés—in other words, apt. Instead of taking the obvious approach, VCB makes place—the location, the geographic-cum-cultural-cum-psychological locus—the spring of the romance, and the mise en scène and montage are just extensions—expressions—of it. No further emphasis is needed.

But this all arose from the efforts of both Allen and Aguirresarobe, not because Allen gave his DP free rein. Yes, he’s worked with masters like Willis, DiPalma, Nykvist, and (unfortunately) Storaro, but you’d have to be blind not to see that, no matter how strong the cinematographer’s style or big his personality, Allen has always been able to put it in the service of his material and that there’s a consistent look and feel to his movies no matter who’s manning the camera.

The material here is so fertile that it’s not seriously hampered by the mixed bag of the acting. Strongest is Javier Bardem. I’ve never been a fan, but Allen gives him a lot of room to run with his character, and Bardem takes advantage of every inch of it. Rebecca Hall’s mannered kvetching, and resemblance to a Modigliani, can get annoying, especially early on, but isn’t a dealbreaker and actually helps bolster the film’s payoff. Penelope Cruz comes across as a tad overwrought, sometimes hitting the mark, often flailing to define her character. Johansson is more a presence than an actor, of course, a walking encyclopedia of knowing looks who knows how to smolder her way through a scene but rarely helps to elevate the ensemble.

But, again, VCB is less about individuals than the treacherously unstable ground of relationships, territory Allen captures incisively, and with surprisingly little sentiment. He doesn’t get enough credit for being the first American filmmaker to figure out how to show sex on screen in a natural, convincing, non-gratuitous way. His renderings of carnal encounters are so effortless we don’t realize how brilliant they are, even with more than a century of awkward, overweening, giggly, grotesque counterexamples to draw on.

Because of the whole evanescence of emotion thing, this film really didn’t need a traditional plot, and things get messy and awkward whenever one decides to rear its head. Needing something resembling an ending, Allen introduces some small-arms fire into the proceedings—but he’s always sucked at gunplay. The shotgun dispatching of Johansson in Match Point is one of the most inept, implausible, and unconvincing murders in all of cinema. Here, Cruz firing off rounds in the general direction of Bardem and Hall is a huge false note, a contrivance that sticks out as egregiously as it does because so much of what precedes it is so well done. Somehow, this misstep doesn’t damage the overall impact of the film, partly because Allen redeems himself a few moments later with a lingering silent closeup of Hall who—again, subtly—looks convincingly like a changed person.

I can’t abide lazy, unimaginative reviewers who write the same review over and over, just plugging in some new nouns each time (without varying the adjectives) as if every movie is just like every other and reviewing them is a robotic form of Mad Libs. That said, there’s not a lot new to say about Amazon’s presentation of relatively recent films, which tends to range from acceptable to occasionally extraordinary. This one falls somewhere in the middle, not harming Aguirresarobe’s work but not fully honoring it either. That will take a 4K transfer—but because this is an Allen film and there’s no justice in this world, I’m not holding my breath.

The warmth of almost every frame is almost there. The subtly muted tones—a look digital has yet to achieve—are pleasing but not as beguiling as they should be. On the other hand, the soft-focus tracking shot of massive sparklers going off in front of a church—the kind of thing streaming consistently bungled just a couple of years ago—is surprisingly solid and clean.

The phrase “a Woody Allen movie for people who don’t like Woody Allen movies” has always made me cringe—for a lot of reasons, but mainly because the two films most often mentioned in association with it—Midnight in Paris and Match Point—are among his worst. I guess it could be applied fruitfully, though, to Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which definitely stands on its own. But to not have the context of the best of the rest of Allen’s body of work and to not know how it both syncs up with and veers away from all that is to be deprived of one of the richest parts of the experience.

PICTURE | Not quite capturing the film’s overall warmth or subtly muted tones, Amazon’s presentation doesn’t harm Javier Aguirresarobe’s work but doesn’t fully honor it either

SOUND | It’s a Woody Allen movie, for chrissakes. You can clearly hear people talking and the music cues sound fine—in stereo.

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Dr. Strangelove and the Power of Blackness

Brazil was hugely influential at the time of its release, changing movies forever, but nobody talks about it anymore. Why?

by Michael Gaughn
September 19, 2022

I approached revisiting Brazil with extreme trepidation. About a year ago, wanting to write something about my admiration for Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, I was horrified to find that it hasn’t held up at all, that it’s just an exercise in stylistic indulgence, as dull and thin and lifeless as tissue paper, and that the studio was right to be furious with Gilliam for pissing all its money away.

Certain things immediately set Brazil apart, though—all related to its reputation and influence and not the film itself but that still lend it some stature. It was the movie, thanks to Gilliam’s long and bloody battle with Universal, that established the modern conception of the director’s cut. And, thanks to the exhaustive and gorgeously presented Criterion boxed-set laserdisc edition, it set the standard for home video releases going forward, laying the groundwork for DVDs and Blu-rays, with their alternate cuts, extensive bonus features, and so on.

But all of that is obviously secondary to reapproaching Brazil as a movie. Adding to my concern was that, while all kinds of films from the mid ’80s are being buffed, repackaged, and remade because they appealed on a preconscious level to the uncritical child and teen audiences of the time, Brazil has faded from view. It didn’t make sense that something that had once had a seismic influence on moviemaking didn’t seem to be on anyone’s radar anymore.

Having now watched it again, I can affirm that it remains a masterpiece—a flawed one, more deeply so than most films of its rank, but still something that stands many tiers above almost anything else that was made during that mostly dismal decade. The irony is that it appears to be the things that make it great—specifically its very deliberate and trenchant reaction to the carefully calibrated vacuousness of popcorn cinema—that have led to its repression. But I’ll get to that.

Brazil is so labyrinthine and rich it’s hard to zero in on a best point of entry. It could be its style—so influential its presence can be felt in almost every movie made since, even if the filmmakers have no idea where that influence came from—but I think the best place to begin, oddly, is with Tom Stoppard’s screenplay. Gilliam and Charles McKeown get a screen credit for it too, but given that they’re the ones who made an unholy mess of Munchausen you have to assume Stoppard had something—or everything—to do with Brazil holding together as well as it does. (Sorry to be quoting Thoreau for the zillionth time, but there is something in his maxim that there’s no reason you can’t have your dream castle as long as you build a foundation beneath it as well.)

The casting is flawless—with one exception that comes dangerously close to sinking the whole enterprise. I didn’t fully appreciate until now how extraordinary Johnathan Pryce’s performance is, even when he’s doing material for Gilliam he doesn’t seem to be fully on board with. Pryce immediately establishes the contrast between the real and fantasy Sam through his presence alone, and he fully embodies both, even to the slightest details of their gestures.

Ian Holm’s Kurtzmann is similarly pitch perfect, as is Jim Broadbent as the obsequious plastic surgeon. (The precision of British acting can often feel affected but when it’s in a groove with the material, like here, it can be pure pleasure to experience.) De Niro is in full Rupert Pupkin mode, right down to the mustache, obviously enjoying not having to play De Niro for a change—and it’s sad that this was probably the last time he was able to get away with that.

Sheila Reid’s Mrs. Buttle is stunning—I never realized just how good until this time around. Everything pivots on the scene where Pryce brings her the refund check for her husband. If Gilliam hadn’t risen to the potential of the material here, if he had played it too light, the entire film would have foundered. But it remains powerful—with a lot of the credit going to Reid for bringing a tremendous depth and breadth of emotion to the character, the scene, and the movie, every ounce of which is needed to counter the more arch and glib material elsewhere.

(And any movie that includes a cameo by Raymond Chandler’s Orange Queen—“‘It’s the wall,’ she said. ‘It talks. The voices of the dead men who have passed through on the way to hell.’”—can’t be all bad.)

The one massive mistake is Kim Greist as the object of Lowry’s obsession. What was Gilliam thinking? She clearly isn’t comfortable with anything about the role, making her scenes just unpleasant to watch. The only explanation that makes sense is that she’s part of his savaging of the giggly adolescent conventions put in place by movie brats like Spielberg, Lucas, Zemeckis, and Ridley Scott, who clearly weren’t comfortable with women (and still aren’t) and instead leaned on tomboys for the traditional female roles. But you can get all that and still feel like Greist doesn’t belong in this film at all.

There’s so much to savor here, though, that you can even look past a bungled female lead. The intricacy of the staging is dazzling, with Gilliam exhibiting masterful control, never letting it become gratuitous or indulgent. And the fantasy sequences, surprisingly, still work—mainly because they’re actually about character and story and theme and not just an excuse to goose the audience awake every 15 minutes with some artificially generated excitement.

There are a few moments where Gilliam gets overly ambitious—which in itself isn’t a bad thing but does lead to some sloppiness in the execution. And he hits some rough spots at around the two-thirds point—like most movies do, usually because the director has come up with amazingly fertile and provocative base material but, not fully realizing its implications, begins to let it get away from him. Gilliam doesn’t completely lose control but his grip on the film, which was iron tight until that point, does start to weaken. And although the ending remains powerful, it becomes so inchoate that it veers damn close to becoming the kind of sound and fury cinema he was trying to skewer—partly because he severs the bond between plausible cause and effect too soon, seriously diluting the impact of Sam’s descent into madness.

But let’s get to why Brazil has come to be shunned like a black-sheep uncle. Almost all dystopian films undercut themselves by fetishizing technology, which results in conveying the idea of, “Well, yeah, people suck, but aren’t their machines wonderful?” which in turn ends up feeding the whole capitalist/positivist impulse dystopian fiction is putatively meant to counter. In other words, by misplacing the emphasis, it ultimately gets us to take comfort in our own annihilation.

But Gilliam, very much like Godard in Alphaville, deliberately downplays the tech—here, making it decidedly analog and archaic—so Brazil doesn’t slip into the superficially dystopian but actually boosterish technocratic hoohah most sci-fi films embrace. Both he and Godard wanted to keep their movies about people, not their things—even if those things are meant to replace them.

Brazil has been swept under the rug because we now stand on the other side of our utter capitulation to both technology and bureaucracy. Having abdicated individual responsibility and placed our faith in a world of invisible hands, we would rather get lost in fantasy than be reminded that it doesn’t have to be this way, that there were and are alternatives. We’ve come to see not just controlling but defining bureaucracy as inevitable and rationalize its dominance through our indulgence in franchises, in all their various forms.

And we’ve completely bought into one of Gilliam’s sharpest barbs—that if you tell somebody convincingly enough that crap is caviar, they’ll accept it blindly and devour it with zeal. If we didn’t passively embrace that core tenet, our franchise-driven society would quickly shrivel up and die.

Most importantly, though, Brazil is about the death of romanticism and the limits and costs of fantasy, with how getting swept up in fantasy worlds is a far from free ride—something Woody Allen was examining, just as incisively, at that same moment in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Both Gilliam and Allen must have felt the same tremor because it was right after that the massive eruption of fantasy occurred that has since engulfed cinema, thriving on the beyond dangerous notion that this is all somehow healthy and benign.

Simply put, we’ve so completely become Gilliam’s creatures—and worse—that we don’t want to be reminded of how far we’ve fallen. Having come to believe it’s OK to exist suspended in a perpetual adolescence in a world of perpetual play, we want to purge anything that would suggest it could be any other way. Which is why watching Brazil is a better investment of your time than any movie released in the past 40 years.

Brazil on Prime

That Brazil wasn’t one of the first titles out when 4K became available shows just how irrational the release patterns have been. That we’re now this far into the format without a release is an even stronger indictment. While Brazil deserves to be seen in 4K, I’m not so sure HDR is the best way to go. Being such a brash, stylistically extravagant film, it would take a very deft touch to bring anything meaningful to its look. Go too far and it would become all artificial highlights, whereas a constant murk is essential to its effect, or it could become cartoonish, in the pejorative sense.

In HD on Amazon Prime, it ranges from acceptable to surprisingly vivid—which is to say that it gives you an accurate sense of the brilliance of Roger Pratt’s groundbreaking cinematography but all feels just a tad flat. I suspect, without having any way of knowing, that a new transfer in 4K that hews as closely to the original material as possible without wandering into the netherworld of restoration would be a significant step up.

The stereo mix—apparently the original—is unexpectedly engaging, even exhilarating. I hadn’t realized how much Gilliam leaned on sound to compensate for his insufficient budget, drawing deeply on his animation background—how he used sound to significantly up the impact of the primitive cutouts in his Python vignettes—to make his visuals work.

Not a big fan of Michael Kamen, I’ve always liked his score here. It’s all basically just one big Mahler pastiche but it works because it underlines both the grandiosity of Sam’s fantasies and desires and the key theme of romanticism’s demise.

Thankfully, no one’s gotten around to enhancing the titles, which look, as they should, like type on film not a cold, distracting digital reinterpretation of the originals.

—M.G.

Dr. Strangelove and the Power of Blackness

Dr. Strangelove and the Power of Blackness

Why This Isn’t a Review

I ultimately decided to not review this release of Strangelove because 4K HDR takes away as much as it brings to the experience, so while there’s no great harm in watching it that way, there’s no real benefit either.

One of the biggest problems is one common to many 4K upgrades of older films. Nobody has figured out how to accurately translate backdrops and matte paintings that looked convincing when run through a projector and shown on a big screen. Here, the opening painting of Burpleson Air Force Base and the later one of the Pentagon are so obvious that they pull you out of the film. Similarly, the model shots of the B-52, which were only borderline successful on film, look too clean and sterile and model-y now.

While someone could argue that the HDR increases the impact of the nuclear bomb blasts, I would have to counter that this isn’t an action or war film and that, since Kubrick relied on archival footage rather than effects shots, that’s not what he was after. Pumping the shots up that way is akin to adding cannon blasts to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—which I’m sure has been done, but not by anybody who deserved to live afterward. A more accurate example might be someone deciding to improve the impact of the Scherzo in the Ninth by doubling all the orchestral lines with synthesizers. I suspect that would make the work more compelling for those listeners with duller nerve endings but it would be an egregious violation of Beethoven’s original intent and a travesty of his work. Sure, anyone’s free to reinterpret Beethoven—or Bach or Stravinsky or Mahler—but don’t pretend you’re presenting the original work. Leaning too heavily on HDR is like deciding the original compositions need an injection of testosterone.

And then there’s the kerfuffle over the aspect ratios. The best I can determine, Kubrick decided it would enhance the home video release of Strangelove by showing the frame ratios of the original footage, alternating between various ratios for the War Room, the Burpleson interiors, the bomber interior, and the documentary footage of the attack on Burpleson. Yes, this was him allowing for the Academy ratio of pre-HDTV home video and, yes, his similar tack with the release of The Shining was a disaster. But the point is that, with Strangelove, it worked, and I don’t get why this current release reverts back to 1:66:1.

But, again, this isn’t a review. It’s just an explanation of why I didn’t want to do a review.

—M.G.

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Who Killed Film Noir?

Strangelove is considered a classic comedy and an unequaled satire, but a recent re-viewing revealed that comedy and satire might not have been Kubrick’s ultimate aim here

by Michael Gaughn
December 25, 2020

I wasn’t going to review the latest release of Dr. Strangelove. After having basked in the 4K HDR editions of 2001 and The Shining, it didn’t feel right to underline that this newest upgrade isn’t all it could or should be. Reviews of older films should focus on the ones worth watching, not the ones to avoid. But, on a whim, I watched Strangelove again a few nights ago and experienced it in ways I never have before, and ultimately decided that, transfer quality be damned, it’s well worth encouraging others to go check it out.

Keep in mind, before we dive into this, that I’ve seen this movie countless times. I’ve studied various drafts of the screenplay and pored over every relevant comment from the cast and crew. I’ve even watched an archive print on a Moviola at the Library of Congress. But this last time around, the film, for whatever reason, revealed things that had always been hidden to me before.

The biggest revelation—and what will be the crux of my comments here—is that Strangelove is only superficially a comedy. At its heart, it’s a film noir—and, at the end of the day, might even represent the pinnacle of that genre.

For that conclusion to make sense, you have to be willing to roll with my definition of noir in “Who Killed Film Noir?”—that the crime element is just a pretext and that these movies are instead always about chumps—more specifically, male chumps—guys who think they know the score only to find they really don’t have a clue, only to then have everyone and everything conspire against them, usually with fatal results. If you accept that definition, then noir fits Strangelove as snugly as the mad doctor’s Rotwang glove.

Yes, the film is heavy on noir atmospherics—dark recesses, menacing shadows, closeups that make it look like the subject is being interrogated under hot lights, etc.—but dwelling on that kind of misses the point, because Strangelove pulls just as many stylistic elements from crime dramas, war films, horror films, psychological thrillers, documentaries, and newsreels. The one genre it doesn’t look anything like is comedy, and that is central to what I’m positing here.

Strangelove is really comedy by other means. Its laughs—which are many and legitimate—spring almost solely from the extreme gruesomeness of the situation, from a kind of squeamishness and disbelief that ultimately reinforces the dominance of the Death Drive over the Pleasure Principle, and that people will blindly follow through on the inherent logic of their institutions and devices—all the while believing they’re exercising intelligence and will—even if it will result in their own annihilation.

This movie is satire first and comedy second. And it’s stunning, on reflection, what a serious film it is, that it trumps all of the more sophomoric stuff that considers itself satire by diving down deep into the same disturbing roots and unblinking take on humanity that motivated Swift. This is satire with some real meat, with more than a little gristle, on its bones—definitely not for the SNL crowd.

It’s also stunning to realize what a leap it is beyond the mess of Lolita. You can sense Kubrick trying to recover his creative integrity after the rout of his previous film, where the material, the censors, and, most importantly, the narrative tradition all got the better of him. Knowing that the story is always the least interesting thing about a movie and something filmmakers tend to lean on as a crutch, he had tried to subvert the conventions by notoriously moving Humbert’s murder of Quilty to the beginning of the film—a huge miscalculation that only served to deflate the whole enterprise. He was way bolder with Strangelove, exposing the sheer contrivance of narrative by taking a clockwork-type suspense plot and twisting it around to serve ends no one would have thought it could ever possibly serve, and along the way exposing storytelling for what it mainly is: A manipulative mechanical device for efficiently getting you from Point A to Point Z, which in this case is the end of the world.

With Strangelove, Kubrick hit on the formula that would serve him well for the rest of his career of mimicking just enough genre conventions to entice and enthrall the groundlings and ensure the studio’s ROI, while having the movies actually function at levels that ultimately made hash of their seeming reasons to be. So Strangelove has just enough silly comedy and thriller elements to keep the masses in their seats but continuously moves up a creative chain, subsuming the more rudimentary elements along the way, until it ultimately arrives at noir—but noir in a way no one had ever seen it before.

To put it another way: Having been too conservative with Lolita, Kubrick decided to completely trust his gut with Strangelove, and his gut told him to make a suspense thriller that was, incongruously, a comedy, but was actually, ultimately, a film noir. But that’s not the genius part. The genius part is that he made all three dovetail so seamlessly that the transitions from the cheap seats on up don’t feel so much perverse as inevitable.

Watch Strangelove through the lens of noir—noir stripped of most of its genre clichés in order to expose its white-hot core—and it becomes a different, much more nuanced and brilliant film. Noir wasn’t new to Kubrick. Killer’s Kiss and The Killing are both overt takes on the genre, the latter unapologetically feeding from John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle. (Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre was another Kubrick favorite.)

But there’s another dimension to this that also deepens the experience of the film and that hadn’t been obvious to me until this most recent viewing, when I realized how heavily Kubrick tapped into his photo-journalistic beginnings. Fresh out of high school, he had been the youngest staff photographer ever at Look magazine, and it was his experiences there that supplied the subject matter for his early documentary shorts and for Killer’s Kiss, which look like photo essays come to life.

He returns to those formative experiences and that style in Strangelove, with much of the film resembling his magazine work, most obviously in the faux documentary attack on Burpleson Air Force Base, but far more subtly and strikingly in the War Room. He went there mainly to underline that no matter how surreal, irrational, and immature a lot of the behaviors and actions are in the film, they have very real consequences.

(But there are more layers to it than that, because Kubrick hired the controversial tabloid photographer Weegee—whose body of work essentially transformed sordid reality into noir—as his on-set photographer. That led to Peter Sellers, fascinated by Weegee’s edgy hardboiled patois, using his voice as the inspiration for Strangelove.

(And to complete my digression, It should be mentioned that Kubrick got to know fashion-turned-art photographer Diane Arbus well during his Look years, and later referenced her work explicitly in The Shining—which raises the point that his films are far more autobiographical and personal than the cliché take on him as cold, detached, clinical would allow.)

Rather than give a complete recitation of all the ways noir permeates and defines the film, I’ll just highlight a couple of key moments and you can work backward from there. Just before Sterling Hayden’s General Ripper trudges off to the bathroom to commit suicide, Kubrick holds on an uncomfortably close shot of his face, rimmed so tightly with shadows that it already resembles a death mask. As Sellers’ Group Captain Mandrake sits next to Ripper, prattling on about the recall code, Kubrick just stays on the general. And although there are no obvious changes in Ripper’s expression, you can tell he’s realizing the full enormity of what he’s done right before disappearing completely into madness. But this is done with amazing restraint, with Kubrick resisting the temptation to go to the kind of crazy stare he would later cultivate with Jack in The Shining and Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. You just sense the descent happening—almost imperceptibly, but undeniably. It might be the ultimate film noir moment.

This shot could have been Hayden as Johnny Clay in The Killing or as Dix Handley in The Asphalt Jungle—it wouldn’t have looked out of place cut into either of those films. And Kubrick uses that commonality to create a through-line that traverses all of noir, pointing inevitably to Strangelove as its culmination.

Comedies usually rely on master shots instead of closeups, but Kubrick comes in similarly close on Strangelove to emphasize how much he’s caught up in, and boxed in by, his own calculations and obsessions, his own form of culturally sanctioned insanity. You’re placed just inches from a madman, and it’s as frightening as it is funny.

The most outrageous noir before Strangelove was Robert Aldrich’s beyond cheeky Kiss Me Deadly, which took the hugely popular Mike Hammer character and exposed him for the clueless goon he was. This isn’t the place to go into it, but Strangelove seems to riff on Deadly, seems to devour and digest and regurgitate it, taking the cocksure bumbling of an L.A. detective and projecting it onto the whole world, making chumps of us all.

Watching Strangelove today is hardly just an exercise in either nostalgia or film appreciation, something only tangentially relevant to our present. The basics of human nature haven’t changed since 1964—if anything, the blind, primal aspects have only become emboldened as the machines have taken over and we’ve become free to play. It’s not like the methods of the West have changed all that much either—except that they’ve been so successfully exploited that a YouTube video from Melbourne looks identical to a YouTube video from Bhopal looks identical to one from Des Moines. And it’s not like the world doesn’t continue to bristle with nuclear arms. And it’s not like it’s become impossible for a madman to ascend to the highest levels of power.

Noir is who we are when we have the guts to face ourselves squarely in the mirror. And it says a lot that it’s been more than five decades since the last time any one’s bothered to take a good look.

Where in Hell is Major Kong?

Another thing that jumped out at me watching Strangelove this time around was the missile attack on the B-52, which is for the most part an extremely believable documentary-style scene (especially for 1964) with nothing remotely funny about it. Of course, I’ve noticed this scene before—it’s so compelling it’s hard to ignore—but I realized this time how unique it is, since the list of comedies that can afford to go full-bore dramatic for this amount of screen time without losing their momentum or completely throwing the audience is so short it probably doesn’t exist. One of Kubrick’s most brilliant set pieces, it convincingly places you inside the plane with the crew as they fight for their lives, so you identify with their efforts and then root for them to complete their mission—which has to create extremely conflicted emotions in all but the most jaded. The crew’s ability to overcome is the thing seals the fate of the world. The scene is also worth savoring for the way its chaotic handheld camera goes from documentary to abstract, turning it into a mini art film. Most movie scenes are too stage-bound or veer too close to radio—even today. This one is pure cinema.

—M.G.

Dix Handley

Michael Gaughn

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What Have You Done with His Movie?

Dr. Strangelove and the Power of Blackness

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