Throats Ripe For Polishing
Now Playing: Blur--"To The End"
Tuesday afternoon, after a truly appalling day at work, crabby and depressed, and worried that I'd be less than my usually effervescent self at Planned Parenthood Volunteer Night, I returned home to find my latest Netflix delivery in my mailbox...

Sweeney Todd (1936): Clocking in at a glorious hour and seven minutes (about ten of them devoted to a largely pointless little excursion in "darkest Africa" that could have been handled in about a minute of expository dialogue), the original of Stephen Sondheim's blockbuster musical is creaky, creepy fun, and my personal introduction to the "King of Grand Guignol," Mr. Tod Slaughter. Slaughter was known as one of the great horror actors, a peer of Karloff and Laughton who stayed in the U.K. while they went on to Hollywood fame and fortune, and despite the inevitable dating of that sort of acting, there's still something genuinely sinister in his manner, especially when he's accepting a poor oprhan apprentice from the workhouse and stares long and hard at the lad as if the latter's destined to comprise the next evening's dinner. There's a hilarious amount of plot crammed into an hour, most of it revolving around Todd, a London barber who murders people with the complicity of his baker next door neighbor, and steals their money to become wealthy himself. Nobody cackles malevolently and diabolically rubs his hands together quite like Slaughter, who gloriously lumbers around the proto-Victorian scenery like a bloated, demonic Derek Fowlds. I was still in a shitty mood when I started watching, but by the end was cackling right along with Slaughter and probably rubbing my hands together--I guess I was too wrapped up in the story to notice. Should I worry? Nah.

And then, as always, there were flicks from other sources...

Zardoz (1974): "The gun is good. The penis is evil." While an admirable summation of present-day Republican Party policies, it doesn't sound a very useful conceptual framework for a movie. The Thursday after I returned from Louisiana, I went to the Bluish Barn again to watch John Boorman's fabled conversation piece, the first time I'd done so on the relative big screen and among a group of people who I basically didn't know; it would certainly be interesting to see their reactions. These split evenly down the middle between hilarious astonishment that the movie was even made and sneaking awe at its sheer misbegotten grandeur. It's 2273, and the world's descended into an apocalypse of unspecified origin ("The Darkness"). Bands of orange-diapered "Exterminators" roam the countryside on horseback, killing and enslaving shabby hobo-like "Brutals," rounding up tribute and presenting it to their god "Zardoz," a giant stone Greek drama mask that flies leisurely through the sky to the strains of Beethoven's Seventh. The head Brutal, "Zed" (Sean Connery), hides himself in Zardoz' mouth and later emerges, shooting a mysterious figure and then finding himself in "The Vortex," a verdant, force-shielded country estate peopled by the icy, elegant and telepathic "Eternals," led by May (Sara Kestelman) and Consuella (Charlotte Rampling). May decides to keep Zed for "research," to Consuella's--initial--displeasure, and to the amusement of the ostentatiously droll Friend (John Alderton, who rather shockingly runs away with what there is to steal from the movie). Zed's forceful personality proves too hard to break as he begins to unravel the mystery of the Vortex... On so many levels, the movie is a ridiculous mess, a mishmash of hippie philosophy and Arthurian mystical elements, but it's compelling in a number of bizarre ways. For one thing, it's really awesome to think that this was bankrolled by Twentieth Century Fox only a couple of years before Star Wars; it may be insane, but it's certainly original. Seventies sci-fi movies made before Star Wars fascinate me in the same way as pre-Columbian voyages to America (more interesting in many ways than the actual widescale contact), and Zardoz is probably the most interesting example--with Silent Running (1971) being the best. Living in Ann Arbor, regarded both internally and externally (often wrongly, the myriad mistakes chronicled here and here) as some sort of progressive oasis in the traditionalist Michigan pastures, it's hard not to think of the dismissive, self-satisfied attitudes of the Eternals and make comparisons (of course, the Brutals don't hold sway over the country and state, trying to establish quasi-theocratic laws to ruin people's lives, so that comparison only goes so far). Finally, it really is one of the most visually astonishing movies ever made. Filmed in Ireland, among the gorgeous Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin (the same location Boorman would use six years later when making Excalibur), Zardoz benefits tremendously from Geoffrey Unsworth's lush yet gritty photography, giving it that unmistakable early Seventies feel I love so much in my movies. If there was ever a flick one should see at least once in their lives--regardless of actual quality--this is it.

Do The Right Thing (1989): It somehow took me nearly two decades to see this thing, and now that I have, I must agree (astonishingly enough) with Kim Basinger; it's pretty embarrassing that Driving Miss Daisy won the Oscar instead (but, I mean, it's the Oscars--what can you do?). A day in the life of a neighborhood in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant community, Do The Right Thing's a wonderful symbiosis of style and substance; too often movies end up favoring one over the other. The sun bakes the streets and makes the buildings redder, Terence Blanchard's jazzy score provides an ideal soundtrack, and the jagged camera angles provide an offbeat rhythm to the story. Mookie (Spike Lee) works as a delivery man at Sal's Famous Pizzeria, owned by Sal Frangone (Danny Aiello), a commuter from Bensonhurst with two sons, asshole Pino (John Turturro) and likable but dopey Vito (Richard Edson). Mookie's got a son by neglected girlfriend Tina (Rosie Perez), as well as friends in a multifarious collection of sidewalk denizens: Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito), Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and the endearing elder statespair of Mr. Mayor (Ossie Davis) and Mother Sister (Ruby Dee). Most of the film looks at the complicated relations between and among the different ethnic groups--blacks, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and the Korean grocery store owner (much more complex, in other words, than the simple black-white dichotomy preached by so many reviews at the time of release). Davis and Dee are wonderful in an extended shadow courtship that one senses has gone on for about two decades, and Aiello's unexpectedly compelling as a fish out of water whose vaguely colonial relationship with his customers is headed for trouble as he turns a blind eye (Turturro, as the hothead, blatantly racist son, actually sees more clearly than he on that score). Mookie doesn't want his boat rocked, as the black worker at an Italian business, but can't avoid the trouble coming, sparked by Buggin' Out's ire at Sal's Wall of Fame featuring only celebrities of Italian descent. The neighborhood's events get an alternate soundtrack and Greek chorus from the local DJ (Samuel L. Jackson in a fun performance that hints at the snarky coolness to come--and no, I still haven't seen Snakes On A Plane yet). I really enjoyed this--ethnic politics aside, Mookie's a wonderful heroic figure for downtrodden service workers, although it's both disturbing and hilarious that Mookie, working in 1989 New York, actually makes more money than I do in 2007 Ann Arbor. The tangled ethnic relationships lead to an explosive climax and bittersweet conclusion. I seem to remember reading a review by Stanley Crouch in which he took Lee to task for the "black-white" division in the movie, which didn't make much sense from my perspective; it's also interesting that the "riot" consists of the torching of one business (under rather murky circumstances at that), leading me to wonder why all those critics in 1989 were so fucking hysterical. True to the movie's rhythm, Lee doesn't close with the "riot," but lets life on the street work itself out, as it does in real life, with a memorable final scene between Mookie and Sal. This DVD, by the way, needs a rerelease with some serious extras.