Skins

So last week I went to see Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I live In. I'm a fan of his work, and have seen most of his theatrical movies, although, for some reason, and in spit of having a copy of it, I have not seen his last film, Broken Embraces. I think that, after the muted reaction it got from critics at film festivals, I kind of put off seeing it indefinitely. Add to that the fact that the only place that was showing it in Richmond was an art theater I had never been to, and the fact that I always prefer to see foreign films for the first time on the big screen -- otherwise I tend to concentrate so much on reading the subtitles that I quit paying attention to what's going on onscreen -- and it means that I've been lax in my duties as an Almodovar fan.

This film has actually garnered comparatively lukewarm reviews, as well. At the same time, even from a broad plot outline, I was seeing elements from Vertigo and Eyes Without A Face in there, which appealed to me a great deal, so I have been checking with relative frequency to see if it was playing in the area ever since it was released in the U.S. Plus, an old Antonio Banderas is STILL Antonio Banderas, and I have had a thing ever since seeing Law of Desire. So last week, on my lunch break, I checked online, and suddenly it was playing. I've had bad experiences putting off seeing movies, only to find they're gone by the weekend, so I knew I wanted to see it that night. A quick text message to a friend and suddenly I had my plans for the evening!

The movie itself? Very entertaining, but strange. I can see why critics have complained about its coldness: there is an almost clinical detachment from the proceedings that I suppose would be a bit off-putting, if thematically appropriate. It certainly does not have the warmth that you find in, say, Volver or All About My Mother, my two favorite of his movies. And I will say that, in general, I prefer Almodovar's "women's pictures" to his movies that prominently feature men. Talk To Her, for instance, was a great critical success, but it honestly left me completely cold. It's entirely possible this has more to do with my preferring female protagonists in general, but I also think that there's a demonstrable difference in the way he approaches male and female actors.

But the talk I was hearing about this being Almodovar's horror movie? Completely overblown. It uses some horror movie tropes, certainly, and it definitely does rely a lot on suspense. But it's no more horrific than Volver or Bad Education. The characters' actions may be horrific, but not because they're inhuman monsters, but rather because they're all too human.

Twin Peaks

So I've been continuing to watch Twin Peaks, which I mentioned earlier. I've seen it (or most of it) before, having watched it when it was originally on, as well as having re-watched it on DVD a couple years ago. I've just moved beyond the murder of Laura Palmer, to the stretch of the show where things become weird, and not just in a Lynchian way. This is the part of the series where I traditionally begin to lose interest, where the series no longer seems as precariously balanced between soap opera melodramatics and the genuinely uncanny. Instead it seems to think it's enough to rely almost exclusively on melodrama, with a light peppering of Native American lore and extraterrestrial insinuations, just to remind viewers that the show could be legitimately frightening. SPOILER ALERT -- I have some thoughts:

• Before starting to re-watch it, I had sort of come to believe that the acting was pretty dire, almost across the board, but I no longer think that this is true. A lot of what I had previously viewed as acting deficiencies now looks more a matter of the writing: the characters do not have realistic reactions to events, and the actors who seem to deal the best with this are also the most compelling of the series. This is true of Kyle MacLachlan, certainly, and it's true of Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie, as well: the most wrenching moment of the pilot episode is hearing Zabriskie's mournful wail through the telephone. But it's also true for Dana Ashbrook and Mädchen Amick as Bobby and Shelly, who I had never given a whole lot of consideration to in previous viewings. Of the younger actors, they acquit themselves the best with the material. Sherilyn Fenn, while not always particularly convincing in her delivery, at least remains charismatic in her role.
• The same is not true for some of the other actors. I expel an audible sigh whenever there's a scene with both Lara Flynn Boyle and James Marshall in it. Good lord, those scenes are DULL. At least when Maddy was around, Sheryl Lee offered something else to watch than those two. And now we're getting into James's roadtrip to The Postman Always Rings Twice Land, which -- WE DON'T CARE. It was bad enough when the two of them were sleuthing around and driving agoraphobes to kill themselves -- once the murder was solved, there's no reason to care about them at all. And I sincerely, sincerely do not.
• Piper Laurie is the bomb. Seriously, she seems to have the time of her life as the traditional soap opera bitch, a really big fish in a small pond. And coupling her with the eternally squirrelly Jack Nance was kind of brilliant.
• The death of Maddy Ferguson is the most harrowing scene that I have ever seen on a network television show. When it was broadcast, it kind of scarred me, and it continues to exert incredible power over me, to the extent that I was actively dreading the episode that it came in. At the same time, it had such an effect on me because it was just really well done: the scene continues long after the point where any other show would cut. It's brutal and queasy, both in terms of the actions depicted, as well as in relation to the audience. It's just incredibly affecting.
• Considering how much iconic power the dream scenes have, and how associated with the series they are, they don't occur particularly frequently. The Man from Another Place only shows up a couple times in the first season and we haven't seen him since, except in flashbacks. Since the Red Room scenes are basically used as a shorthand for Twin Peaks itself, this is fairly surprising.
• Watching the investigation of the murder of Laura Palmer, I was struck that the first season of Veronica Mars is basically the same story told from the perspective of Donna. Not EXACTLY the same, but enough that it holds up under scrutiny. Teenage girl with a double life murdered by the adult man she was having an affair with? Best friend investigates her murder, and along the way falls in love with the murdered girl's boyfriend? There's a lot of differences, but you can almost imagine Rob Thomas taking note of the problems Twin Peaks encountered, and finding solutions for them. Not that Veronica Mars didn't encounter its own problems in its second season, but that just means in 2021, a visionary TV auteur will make one of the best TV shows around based on the investigation into a school bus crash.
• David Lynch and Mark Frost deserve our appreciation, simply for making the Log Lady a thing.
• During the original run, owing to the network shuffling things around, and the goddamned NFL preempting the show so often with games, I completely lost track of the second half of the second season. So there's a lot about the second season I don't remember, or have never actually seen. But, for some reason, I did see the final scene of the final episode, and that instills the same dread in me that the Maddy episode does. In fact, the last time I watched it, I never got to it, because I just sort of didn't want to get any closer to it. I know it's a stupid reaction, and I'm going to try to make it all the way to the end this time. But the dread is still there. That's the mark of good television.

Peak I Reach

Over the past couple days, spurred on by various factors, I have been re-watching Twin Peaks. I am only up to episode 7, but I always forget how much I enjoy it. I'll have more to say about it tomorrow, but, needless to say, the owls are not what they seem.

Horror-a-rama II: The Horrorier

Just two more films that I forced my roommate to endure last night.

House of the Devil: This is a film that I have had in my queue for a while now, but that I avoided actually watching because someone suggested that it got really gruesome in the last half hour. While it may not be immediately clear, I do not actually deal with either gore or suspense particularly well. I'm better than I used to be, but I still tend to get really keyed up by suspense, to the point where I will pause a movie and walk around a bit. I'm an anxious guy; don't judge. I have an even bigger problem with gore, any movie where the viscera can be described as "frequent and glistening" tends to turn me off. (This is why I tend to avoid zombie movies altogether.) My general rule of thumb is: nothing made in the past 20 years. Something about that temporal distance, or possibly the less complicated visual effects, renders it palatable to me. It's why most of the movies I've mentioned this Halloween are from the 1960s.

This movie, however: it LOOKS like it was made over 20 years ago. The style of the film, the technology they use, the hair, they all scream "early-1980s." And while I have not embraced 80s horror with quite the enthusiasm that I've embraced 70s horror, I enjoyed it a great deal. The performances were strong almost across the board, with Mary Woronov in particular giving a wonderfully creepy performance, given her limited time on screen -- seriously, what an amazing career that lady's had! I love her! As to the gruesomeness of the ending? I actually was a little disappointed that it wasn't even more insane than it was, but that disappointed is tempered a bit by the low-boil of suspense that the movie had us in through most of its running time. I went in with some reservations, but I actually really liked it a lot.

The Vampire Lovers: Well, that was certainly something! This is another Hammer Horror movie that weaseled its way into my queue thanks to Dr. K. I'm pretty sure that I would have gotten more out of this if I got anything out of women's breasts. Or women kissing each other. Or women in general. It was well made enough, and the acting was more consistent than Vampire Circus, but it was just a series of women in peril, usually with a breast or two hanging out. They never explain why this elaborate ruse was necessary just for Carmilla to feed, what the point of it was, nor do they bother to explain the waxy man in black, which I hold against the film. That said, it was entertaining enough, just not particularly scary.

Horror-a-rama

So, I've been binging on horror movies lately, because 'tis the season, and also I was able to bully my roommate into letting me use the Roku unit. All of these movies are available on Netflix Instant. Among the things I watched were:

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors: I'm not really sure why I had this on my instant queue, but it's been there for a while. I seem to recall either a commentary or critical article citing it as an influence on a movie I enjoyed a lot, but what that movie was is lost in the mists of time, leaving only this. It's OK, I guess: the episodic nature of the movie kept things rolling at a steady clip, and my roommate and I amused ourselves by guessing the twist endings to every section. But after a while, it just felt overstuffed: they seriously were just shoving in every genre they could into the stories, and the only thing really unifying them was their fatalism. The cast was surprisingly familiar, with Peter Cushing, Donald Sutherland, Christopher Lee, and Michael Gough -- the last one perhaps most familiar as Alfred from Batman '89. But the protagonists' behavior in the stories didn't make much sense at times, and the threats weren't very imaginative. Plus, and this bugged the hell out of me: Dr. Terror had a more-than-full tarot deck -- the stack he had was so thick I wondered if they were printed on graham crackers -- but the only cards he pulled were from the Major Arcana. That sort of thing almost bugs me as much as when they pull cards that don't exist. Yes, I'm a geek.

Circus of Horrors: How was this, in any way, a horror film? It was more a crime film than anything. The set-up doesn't suck: a rogue plastic surgeon goes underground after changing his own face, inherits a circus via an unfortunate "accident", and then starts stocking the ranks of the circus with scarred criminals that he uses his abilities to pretty up. If there's one thing Eyes Without A Face (released the same year) has taught us, it's that plastic surgeons are seriously creepy. Circuses have been a bottomless well of creepiness for a long time now. So why does this movie play like a domestic drama? The doctor keeps falling in love with the ingénues in his circus, but when they reject him, or try to leave the circus, he has them killed by one of his henchmen. Only the deaths are always made to look like accidents, and always happen while the girls are doing their routine in the ring. The doctor's distance from the murders, his relative lack of passion, and the fact that all the deaths look like accidents, does little to increase the level of suspense. There's a lot of behind the scenes stuff, with unrequited loves and blackmail and investigations, that it starts to seem a lot more like a soap opera than anything else. And, even though he recruits a circus of criminals, they never even do any crime! (Except for killing the 14 girls he's fallen for.) Apparently he just wants criminals so that he'll have information to hold over them if they ever want to rat him out to the police.

Vampire Circus: At least with this movie, I know the reason it was in my queue: Dr. K featured it in his Halloween Countdown last year, and I was intrigued enough to want to watch it. (Dr. K always did a great job with the horror movie write-ups; here's hoping he returns to it again!) This movie did a much better job of making the circus itself clearly awful: putting aside the fact that at least three of its members are vampires, it also has a mute strongman (played by the future body of Darth Vader!), and the creepiest little-person clown imaginable.

Seriously, this fella needs a job as a henchman for the Joker, he's that creepy. And then there's the human woman, introduced at the very beginning of the film, who actually seems to get sexually excited watching her vampire lover drink from and kill a little girl she's brought him from the village. That scene is effectively creepy. As is the fact that the village the movie takes place in is slowly being killed by a strain of rabies carried by the bats in the area: it's clear that the village is dying before the circus comes to town, a victim of an infection within its boundaries, possibly because of a curse left upon it by the vampire they killed at the beginning of the movie. Because of this, the village itself has been quarantined by the government, and anybody who tries to leave it is shot on sight, with nobody allowed to enter the village, either. Nobody, that is, but THE VAMPIRE CIRCUS! It's not a perfect movie, but it is a pretty effective one. Certainly creepier than the other two.

Let The Right One In: I can't explain why I hadn't seen this movie before now: I've certainly seen plenty written about it online, by critics and friends whose opinions I respect speaking about it in glowing terms. Part of it might have just me being contrary. But a couple nights ago, my roommate demanded (SIGH) that he choose a Halloween-type movie for us to watch, and of the options he gave me, this is the one I opted for. It isn't particularly scary, and it isn't particularly gruesome, but it is very well acted, and it is shot absolutely beautifully. Watching its outdoor scenes actually made me feel colder. The ending is more complicated and sad than it seems, although that same description could go for the movie as a whole. It's Bergman-esque horror. I liked it.

Creepshow: Another film selected by my roommate. I had actually seen about 4/5s of this movie before, and had been impressed at the time by the sudden flares of non-natural lighting whenever danger loomed. The set-ups tended to be a tad corny (which I realize was part of the point), and the sudden intrusion of panels and graphics from comics a little distracting -- I thought the lighting shifts, suddenly mimicking four-color printing, accomplished the same thing, less obtrusively. The one segment I hadn't seen, the last one, was genuinely creepy, and it reminded me of Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls." That's a good thing. And the shot of the bugs rupturing from the skin gave me my only genuine moment of queasiness throughout the whole movie, in spite of the latex being a bit obvious.

Well...

So... my laptop died. I'm typing this on an Asus Transformer that i borrowed from work, to see how it works. Pretty good, but not good enough to attempt more than a few sentences. I watched Dr. Terror's House of Horrors: I'll provide my opinion another day. Wish me luck.

I love David Hockney.