“She's So Lovely”...

Sometimes a complex and thoughtful film will offer a clue, often as a throw-away line within a deceptively mundane seen, towards the deep truths and meaning held within the film author's wholly intended expression...

The single most important line in the film Inception, a thoroughly thought-provoking film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, follows Ellen Page's antagonistic inter-subconscious run-in with Marion Cotillard, in one such seemingly mundane scene where Page's character is speaking with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and she asks:

“What was she like in real life?”

Here, Gordon-Levitt pauses before answering, “She was lovely.”

This is the exact point where the entire explanation of the film should come into focus. But before I can explain this, let's take a look backwards at the situational aspects of these characters:

Marion Cotillard is the dead wife of widower Leonardo DiCaprio.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the longtime friend and business partner of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Leonardo DiCaprio runs a freelance business, based on his own research and development of invading interfering in peoples' subconscious version of their own 'selves'.

When Ellen Page's character asks the question, “What was she like in real life?”, Cotillard's character would be thus far setup to appear as a confrontational, somewhat unlikable character.

And at this point, if more exposition is required for you to understand what's been set up for the film, then it would be better if you watched the film before proceeding...

Whist in a training session, Page enters DiCaprio's subconscious mind, which is where she ran into Cotillard, who is in a twisted way, acting as a stereotypical jealous ex-wife, is presented as “defending” DiCaprio's psyche from invasion. Hence the aforementioned antagonistic inter-subconscious clash. But if we dig deeper into this allegorical presentation, what is really going on here? With Cotillard's character having already maliciously thwarted at least one of DiCaprio's subconscious business endeavours (and thusly putting the protagonist dream team in actual, physical peril), can we then take a deeper inspection of this subconscious relationship between DiCaprio's and Cotillard's characters and decide, with the information that we're given by Nolan in his own film, that DiCaprio's character is holding some sort of grudge against Cotillard's character – or, perhaps, his subconsciously is more widely seeing her in a negative light? I think the answer to both halves of this question is YES. And again, herein lies part of the key to solving the puzzle of Inception...

Throughout Inception, DiCaprio's and Cotillard's children are involved as a motivational factor – DiCaprio must make it back to America, from France, so that he can reunite with his children – children whose faces are never fully realized within DiCaprio's mind, indicating guilt and regret at being a non-present father, and also indicating DiCaprio's wishes to redeem himself in this regard. So, then, who does DiCaprio's character point his subconscious finger at as being the “bad guy”? His wife and the mother of the children – Cotillard's seemingly aloof character. And this is where the answers and true theme of Nolan's film really start to shine out, if, as audience members, we're willing to dig until we get to this fracted light.

Like any human being(s), becoming the victims of the mundanity of life is a psychological danger that resonates. Falling victim to this is quite severe in the sense that we start to loath our ourselves, our loved ones, and then perhaps start to blame these loved ones for our own insecurities, and our own shortcomings. Like being an absentee father. And like Sidney Poitier said in To Sir, With Love, “Marriage is no institution for the insecure”. So then, we start to build a subconscious reality where we can comfortably shift our blame. The real challenge is to be able to destroy – and to allow the destruction of – this subconscious world. In Nolan's vision, DiCaprio's subconscious world is at least rotting and falling apart, indicating his willingness to accept the idea that he's merely blaming his own wife for his paternal shortcomings.

The character played by Ken Watanabe represents (directly), within his dream-setting, the subconscious-invaded-by-DiCaprio's consciousness (and this explains the opening shot of DiCaprio waking up dazed on a beach, or, the initial “awakening” of his character, both subconsciously and in reality), and he also represents indirectly the symbolic aspect of DiCaprio's own character – if he, DiCaprio's character, doesn't save Watanabe (in essence, himself), then he'll grow old and become lost in how own blame-and-guilt-soaked subconsciousness. Here, Watanabe is the insertion of the objective correlative in Nolan's movie. Or in other words, symbolically speaking, DiCaprio's character is Watanabe's character. DiCaprio is waking up, mentally, in order to be able to wake himself from the deep slumber of his own guilt and inaction.

So then, in the aftermath of this initial “awakening”, we come back to the proverbial ground-floor of Nolan's cinematic puzzle (and it is a puzzle, as Nolan left it “up to the audience” whether DiCaprio's experience was taking place in the real world on in a subconsciously-manufactured reality...) – Constructed in its purely subconscious form, DiCaprio's character, dealing with emotions of guilt, loss, and regret, and avoiding self-realization and the responsibility and results of his own actions (i.e. the neglect of his children), he shifts this blame to his wife Cotillard (whom, in real-reality, is “Lovely”, which is spoken by Gordon-Levitt's character but is also a true notion buried deep within the “defence” psyche of DiCaprio's character). Somewhere outside of the borders of this cinematic tale, DiCaprio's character, finally realizing that this subconscious subterfuge can't last, even in the state of dream, he creates an escape scenario (the action of the film); and following this, he “awakens” on the shores of a finally ebbing dream-tide; now finding himself physically and mentally enabled enough to save the Watanabe character – i.e himself. The final frames of Inception are now just the full waking of DiCaprio's dream-world, the final images before our eyes flutter open to the morning light after a night of dream-epiphany, to an ending that has been hinted throughout Nolan's cinematic vision through flash-forward repeating shots. And although the focus of the story (the dream) was placed on the foggy memories of his children, DiCaprio's ultimate boon, after his own internal redemption (which on all levels of the story's “reality” is what Nolan's film is all about), is that he will likely be able to stand with his lovely wife in his perceived and genuinely desired forgiveness from her.

~V.

 

Their Later Films Vol. 5 – Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Outside of Hollywood's most fanous cinematic releases, it's the auteurs whose films people really remember seeing for the first time. Argento, Romero, Bava, Fulci, Franco, Tarantino, Rodriguez, Lynch, Carpenter, and several others... but perhaps it's the surrealists that we really remember because, well, the films are fucking weird – and inspiring, on many levels (intellectually, emotionally, creatively)... Hands down any cinephile I've ever conversed with remembers the first David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and Alejandro Jodorowsky film they ever saw; usually because it changed their lives. I was a late-comer to the world of Alejandro Jodorowsky, having discovered him roughly a year-and-a-half before the first film in his new (intended) trilogy was released, Dance with Reality – but I'll get back to that film in a moment.

Funnily, it had all started with 2005's Masters of Horror television series, created by Mick Garris. The film (episode?) that would launch Garris' horror anthology series would be Cigarette Burns, by John Carpenter, in which a sort of film detective (played by a pre-Walking Dead Norman Reedus, fresh off of Guillermo Del Toros' Blade II) is hired (by Udo Kier) to track down a lost film; a movie that caused bloody riots upon its festival release and sent the enigmatic director into hiding. I don't know why I thought this at the time, but I felt, somewhere deep in my cinematic heart, that John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns was fictionally referring to Alejandro Jodorowsky. Upon seeing Carpenter's episode, I went out and purchased the then-new Alejandro Jodorowsky DVD boxset from Anchor Bay. And upon this purchase, I threw his first film, Fando y Lis, into the DVD player – a surreal, black-and-white, sexualized travel-epic. But I truly digress, as this essay is not about the first Jodorowsky film I ever watched – as I'd said, this is about the first time I actually discovered Jodorowski, and that wasn't until 2012, when I witness, for the first time (and from that very boxset), The Holy Mountain...

Following the life-changing experience of Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, Vancouver's Cinemateque held a retrospective of Jodorowsky's work, where I went both backwards and forwards in the filmmaker's stunning career – first, having the pleasure of experiencing El Topo in the cinema, and then experiencing Vancouver's first theatrical screening of his 2013 film, Dance of Reality. This latter film was not like Jodorowsky's previous Fando y Lis, El Topo, or The Holy Mountain, yet no less important as those films because Dance of Reality so thoroughly infused Jodorowsky's own life and perspectives into the over-the-top and transgressive drama that had been his signature trademark throughout his career that Jodorowsky actually managed to recreate himself as a professional artistic filmmaker at the point in his life when most cinematic auteurs were well on their way downhill to artistic and commercial failure. He hired his son to play his father, and gave us a genuine life sentiment in the midst of a surreal cinematic experience that flirts with exploitation but in far more comfortable in arthouse, but in the end is a rich visual exposition of truth and things that we, as human beings, might prefer to keep buried under a shallow pile of earth.

There are few filmmakers that can manage to evoke emotional and intellectual engagement in their films that seem to transcend the mere opinions of the mainstream (or rather, those who control the mainstream media content), and Jodorowsky is one of the three – the other two being Lloyd Kaufman of TROMA Entertainment, the longest-running independent movie studio... well, ever; whose latest films Poultrygeist and Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High aka Vol. 2 epitomize his wildly outrageous and directorial and creative career with astounding over-the-top satirical and meaningful anti-conformist showcases contained as exploitation cinema (although anything of Kaufman's from Tromeo and Juliet forward is worth delving into if you're game to be exploring in this arena); and the director of the Mad Max films George Miller, whose latest Mad Max: Fury Road showed that this stratospheric auteur could not only deliver a surrealist, artistic, and exploitive film to international audiences (and with immense praise), but could also receive industry and commercial accolades in doing so. In one UK film critic's opinion, Mad Max: Fury Road was the “Movie of the Century”. I could be close to agreeing with this reactive sentiment. For all of this appreciation, it might be worth noting that Jodorowsky, Kaufman, and Miller were all in their seventies while enjoying these artistic successes; and in the case of all three of these auteurs' latest movies, each one of them at some point reminded me of each others' works.

After Dance of Reality, Jodorowsky had the opportunity, thanks to crowd-funding platforms, to create the second film in his late-life trilogy, Endless Poetry, which premiered at international film festivals in 2016. In this latest film Jodorowsky leans towards the far-more personal aspects of his life, and so Endless Poetry is far more autobiographical than even Dance of Reality – this time, not only does Jodorowsky's son play his father, but his grandson plays himself. The actress who played his mother in both films, Pamela Flores, also plays his life-changing girlfriend in Endless Poetry in a dual-role. Here we also get emotional closure between the father/son characters, as well as some closer in regards to what made Jodorowsky make the life choices that he acted upon, and it brings up some personal regrets, which he directs his real-life son and grandson to act out in front of the camera. Endless Poetry could be Alejandro Jodorowsky's most mainstream-accessible film, but really, without the history of his films, would it really have the same meaning...? 

~V.

Fury Road...

Lloyd Kaufman's brilliant "Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High aka Vol. 2"...

Endless Poetry...

 

Their Later Films Vol. 4 – Dario Argento.

 Argento's colorful career in horror/thriller cinema began with the violent murder mystery The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which ignited a wild fever for post-sixties (post-Bava) giallo films in Italy and made Dario Argento an international filmmaking star. Riding a hugely impressive creative high beginning with Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) and Suspiria (1975 & 1977) and continuing through Inferno, Tenebrae, Phenomena (Creepers), his work in the flashy and exciting giallo genre arguably peaked in 1987 with Opera (Terror at the Opera). Well, whether one believes Opera to have been Argento's creative peak or not, there is no denying that his lush style and over-the-top camera trickery was toned down in his subsequent films, Trauma and The Stendhal Syndrome. For me personally, I believe Argento's creative genius continued up until The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), it was this film that marked the last in Argento's reliable cinematic era, and following this, his films became more and more subdued and/or erratic, in the context of his overall giallo catalogue. Of course many fans maintain the point where his creative train was diverted to a diffident set of tracks was his work post-Opera, and fair enough, stylistically Opera is a force to be reckoned with.

Post-Stendhal Syndrome, though, we have a myriad of weird misfires and comebacks from the man once dubbed the “Italian Hitchcock”. Sleepless was primed to mark a creative comeback for Argento in the new millennium, Sleepless celebrated the style, the sexuality, and the bloodletting of Argento's best gialli from his glory years, and fans would hope for this success to continue, creatively speaking, as the prolific filmmaker continued to get his genre films produced in Italy. On fortunately, this was not to be the case, and to follow Argento's next series of gialli would be like riding a dizzying rollercoaster. From the appallingly pedestrian The Card Player to the successful Do You Like Hitchcock?, which was made for Italian television, it was getting harder and harder to get a grasp on the filmmaker's later body of work. While all three are no doubt giallo films, Sleepless, The Card Player, and Do You Like Hitchcock? couldn't be more stylistically apart from each other. And at this point in the director's career, Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005) would mark the end of the second chapter, artistically speaking, before he moved onto more television projects with Mick Garris' “Masters of Horror” series, where Argento would direct two stunning one-hour films, Jenifer and the gory Pelts, seemingly back to his old creative self once again. In fact, while returning filmmakers John Landis and John Carpenter were toning down their second entries in the “Masters of Horror” series, Argento was ramping his blood and thunder up. Argento's “Masters of Horror” episodes were segues into his third, and most dividing chapter in his cinematic works.

Dario Argento's latest films, Giallo, The Mother of Tears (The Third Mother), and Dracula 3D, have had most fans feeling luke-warm – far from his best works, his last three films aren't exactly terrible, but when compared to his films from the seventies and eighties, we start to wonder how much of his stylistic decline is the fault of the creator, and how much lies with the changing, and likely frustrating demands of Italian and international film and television expectations. Indeed Argento himself has spoken about the diminishing lack of style in his own films in relation to the anti-cinematic requests of the studios producing his films in the later years, beginning with The Card Player. One key thing about the latest of these films, Dracula 3D, is that it reunited the actress-daughter with the director-father, on the tip of Asia Argento's retirement from acting altogether. Prior to this, The Mother of Tears (which also starred Asia Argento) was actually a fast-paced, gory, and exciting apocalyptic supernatural horror tale, mixing the best of Argento's Inferno, Demons and The Church – until it wrapped up an a mind-boggling ridiculous turn... and the purposely-designed giallo vehicle titled, well, Giallo, was nowhere near as bad as the majority of fans and critics had made it out to be. As said, not his best work, but there are still many merits to Agento's final giallo film, including some fantastic art and production design and attractive performances by international actors Adrien Brody, Emmanuelle Seigner, and the lovely Elsa Pataky. If anything lets this films down it's Argento's cinematic portrayal of the antagonist – the killer seems like he'd be more at home in a William Lustig movie. Not exactly a coordinated opera of photographic style and blood & gore like the films from Argento's early-to-mid career, I would still highly recommend Do You Like Hitchcock?; meanwhile Giallo and Mother of Tears might not be as bad as some fickle audience members might have us believe – after all, weren't we far more forgiving as an audience, and as fans, to Argento's cinematic quirks and stylish blunders in the 70s and 80s? 

--V.

(Sleepless)

 (Do You Like Hitchcock?)

(Jenifer)

(The Mother of Tears)

(Giallo)

 

Their Later Films Vol. 3 – Wes Craven.

The late horror-meister Wes Craven's 2010 horror-thriller My Soul to Take gets a bad rap. I remember reading a fan's tweet to Wes Craven, after its initial release, saying “It's okay, Wes, we still love you”. Clearly this film failed to strike a chord with horror audiences and with Craven's die-hard fans alike – originally titled 25/8, the film then sat on the shelf for over a year and a half after its completion, only to then be renamed, and then to be post-converted into 3D, which was all the rage in 2010, even though the film had not been shot with that in mind. Already the studio was worried about its reception and preemptively created the 3D theatrical release hoping to lure in the teenage audiences. Oh, yes, and his film was cut, too – some of the bloody horror toned down to get it from an “R” rating to a “PG-13” for its theatrical release. Really, from any aspect, it looks like Craven's film had gone through hell and back, and it did not come out unscathed, not it the least.

I never did see My Soul to Take in its theatrical 3D, PG-13 incarnation; instead I found a used (uncut and non-3D) blu-ray for three dollars at a store that was closing down. To be honest, I would have grabbed it if it was thirteen dollars; I was also a die-hard Wes Craven fan and I'd actually been looking forward to his film for a while, though at that time I was intentionally avoiding all things 3D at the movie theatres. After giving Craven's film a spin, I was immediately left wondering what the hell all of the negative feedback had been about. Okay, before I get too far ahead of myself, let's go back to the storyline for a quick moment here –

My Soul to Take concerns a group of high school kids (like Scream) who have been selected to die at the hands of a supernatural serial killer – or maybe not, maybe this killer is just out for vengeance, in a plot that vaguely echoes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street. Craven then throws more secondary horror themes into the mix, including the spirit of the killer who is able to body-jump from person to person (as in Craven's film Shocker), and the film's story starts to go down a not-entirely-necessary, yet weirdly exciting labyrinth of horror sub-plots and backstory; and Craven is impressively able to handle off this within his story without it fleeing into convoluted territory. The thing is, this is one of the trademarks of Craven's horror style, right out of his earlier films that had become part of his cult-hit cannon. So, why, then, I wondered, did My Soul to Take not hit it with his intended audience? Was Craven's signature style of storytelling no longer relevant? I find that even seven years later, I can't figure that one out. My only though on this is that perhaps, with time gone by, it might be time for fans to revisit My Soul to Take along side of his classics Shocker, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and his epitomic mind-bending meta-horror A New Nightmare (or, “Wes Craven's A New Nightmare”).

That being said, Wes Craven, ever the horror meister, was able to rebound with a vengeance (well, overseas, anyway) merely a year after-the-fact when his cinematic swan sang, Scream 4, was released into cinemas. A commercial hit overseas, and a moderate hit in North America, Scream 4, which this time concerned a grown-up Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and newcomer Emma Roberts (Scream Queens), was able to overcome the bad publicity and criticisms of My Soul to Take as well as the previous and dreadful Scream 3 (which had featured the ill-advised cameos of Jay and Silent Bob). Not quite as good as the first and hugely original (for its time) Scream, this fourth entry – fifteen years after-the-fact – was still just as good as Scream 2, despite the awkwardness from the internal jokes which couldn't make out if Scream 4 was supposed to be an actual sequel or a Hollywood reboot, and despite the trendy but unfortunate miscasting of Alison Brie and Marley Shelton. Still, Hayden Panettiere and Emma Roberts were a blast to watch, and Craven's last high school slasher film prevailed and subsequently spawned a new television series based on his work.

I still feel now, in the wake of his sad passing near the end of the first season of the Scream television series, that Wes Craven had another horror film in him. This could certainly be chalked up to wishful thinking on my part, but judging from the creativeness of My Soul to Take and Scream 4, there might've been something else that went untapped.

RIP, Wes Craven, 1939-2015.

--V. 

 

Their Later Films (Vol. 2)

Vol. 2 – Vampires.

Vampires, as a sub-genre of the horror cinema genre, is not an uncommon playground for genre film directors to flash their talents in at the beginning of their careers – George Romero gave us Martin at this beginning of his, Tony Scott bestowed the bloody arthouse supernatural opus The Hunger at the beginning of his, and even Tobe Hooper went all Stephen King on us with Salem's Lot – also an early novel for genre king King. Post-seventies and -eighties, Robert Rodriguez and Tarantino got into the toothy action as well, with their collaborative gore-a-thon From Dusk till Dawn. However, my recent musings on this is not about those early vampire films from these celebrated genre directors; instead, I'd been thinking about the later films of celebrated genre directors – filmmakers who decided, later on in their careers, to dabble in cinematic vampire lore, and how these films differed (apart from been more poorly received than their colleagues' early vampire movies). It's really no mystery as to why early-career vampire films were better received than later ones; in the horror genre early films in general have a wider and more boisterous cult following and cult reception than later films in genre directors' careers. But what's interesting about these receptions when it comes to vampire films is just how thematically different the vampire film can be depending on the directors' career trajectory and artistic disposition at that point in their careers. Martin and The Hunger were genius arthouse experiments, and completely different from each other aesthetically. Salem's Lot was a for-hire gig by Warner Brother produced fo broadcast television. From Dusk till Dawn was just a wild ride by two filmmakers at the hugely energetic start of their careers (and which was also a loose rip-of of Richard Wenk's freshman film, Vamp). Later on, though, the vampire film gets more creative, and a little more high-concept, and not always to the appreciation of the audience. Because, really, we're going to out-concept strippers and vampires?

A Vampire in Brooklyn came about in Wes Craven's career between his excitedly-anticipated masterpiece New Nightmare (a Freddy Kruger meta-re-boot) and his insanely successful launching of the Scream franchise. In fact, Wes Craven is the only genre film director I can think of who was so conceptually talented that he was able to start two successful long-running horror franchises, both of which even spawned their own television series. His vampiric collaboration with comedian Eddie Murphy was not exactly a commercial success, and unfortunately marked a personal low-point in Craven's career when Angela Bassett's friend and personal stunt double was killed when filming a stunt-fall on set. However, when looking at the film itself, few people realize that it was Craven's and Murphy's vision that really reignited the idea on not only the horror-comedy, but in having the lead character playing the oblivious straight-man to his far more comedic sidekick, taking the cue from Young Frankenstein. Since Craven's vampire film, this shtick has come back into style with a vengeance. Also moving in on the comedy-vampire territory was John Landis with his movie Innocent Blood, about a vampire who takes it upon herself to wipe out a mob family. When she fucks that up, the mob systematically goes about turning themselves into a gang of vampires. This high-concept guilty pleasure suffered for no other reason than the fact that horror fans would only be comparing it to Landis' masterpiece, An American Werewolf in London. No matter what Landis threw at us in Innocent Blood, he was not going to exceed the giddy excesses of his early horror-monster film. If anyone other than Landis had directed this movie, it would never have had the baggage of comparison attached to it – but on the flipside, really only Landis could have delivered this vampire movie. Stupid catch-22s. Tobe Hooper, who had helmed Stephen King's Salem's Lot, returned to the vampire sub-genre by going sub-sub-genre with his concept and bringing us an adaptation of Colin Wilson's “Space Vampires” under the moniker Lifeforce. Here, a group of astronauts discover, and bring back to earth, the corpse of a female space vampire, only to have her resurrected where her “Lifeforce” begins jumping from one victim's body to the next, until the entire story winds up caught in an apocalyptic-disaster scenario. Without a doubt, this is Hooper's wildest film, which was produced after his catastrophic collaboration with Steven Spielberg and before he signed his groundbreaking horror film work off to Michael Bay and the Hollywood-franchise circle of hell.

Some popular horror genre directors managed to go without touching on the vampire sub-genre at all, such as Sam “Evil Dead” Raimi, and for a long time it seemed Dario Argento would be avoiding the entire vampiric affair as well (although this was not ultimately to be), when in 1998 John Carpenter himself helmed his own vampire opus. Loosely based on the novel by the late John Steakley, John Carpenter's movie was the fist to associate the obvious themes of the vampire and the western movies, and it was also one of the only films to bring the intense idea to the audience that the vampire monsters are actually really hard to kill. This latter fact of the film is really what drives the interest in it, with the heroes constantly stressed and struggling to kill the supernatural beings in a dusty, down-to-earth way. The film unfortunately does come undone despite its stellar cinematic themes, due to the winding-down of Carpenter's career at the time, and the budgetary decision to utilize only the first three chapters of Steakley's clever novel and to extend those limited concepts into a feature-length story. It's a shame, as Steakley's novel (titled Vampire$) shows us the vampire-hunting team as what is really a glorified pest-control unit in the midst of a global infestation, and ultimately as a band of misfits who were clever enough to cash in on the world's situation. All of this was lost in Carpenter's filmed version, including the team's heroic arc, but Carpenter nevertheless left us with one of the meanest, grittiest, vampire scenarios ever put to film, in only a way that Carpenter could have done. In the end, this was probably the last great John Carpenter film.