The Forbidden Room

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM                B                  

Canada  (130 mi)  2015  director:  Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson        Official site

When they were filled,
he said unto his disciples,
Gather up the fragments that remain,
that nothing be lost.

—John 6:12

Guy Maddin has always had a demented streak in his cinema vocabulary, where he continues to make films like no one else, a complete original, where the entirety of his films seem to take place in the realms of the imagination, often without any rhyme or reason, where he doesn’t really bother with a comprehensible narrative or much of an explanation, as instead it’s something of a visual bonanza.  Drawn to the weird and continually eccentric, the man has made a living reviving the Silent era in a modern subtext, where his films have only grown even more audaciously experimental, where the man always seems to be tainted by madness in one form or another.  Highly exaggerated to the point of absurd only begins to describe his films, where this one seems to thrive on the infinite hidden chambers involved in a really complicated series of flashbacks, much like the heralded fantasy piece THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT (1965), where flashbacks implode into second and third level flashbacks, becoming an absurd commentary on the lost art of storytelling, where every story is a convoluted and fantastical adventure tale that seems pulled out of the delirium that comprises the director’s own crazed dreamlife.  Just reading the surreal storylines of Maddin’s films are an experience in itself, as no one writes more comically hilarious plot twists, where every film plays out like a midnight cult experience.   

Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room Is Ridiculous -- Vulture  Bilge Ebiri

Here’s what happens in the first thirty minutes of Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room:

A grey-haired man in a bathrobe discourses on the history of baths (“In the middle ages, they were called stews, because you had to be stewed to have one”), then proceeds to give us instructions on how to take one. (“Carefully insert your big toe in the water. This will tell you if it’s too hot or too cold.”)

As the camera closes in on the bubbles in the bath, we see a submarine, stranded deep underwater (“Forty fathoms deep, entombed in silence, hidden from God”) with four crew members and no captain. The sailors desperately try to extend their oxygen by breathing from the air pockets in the batter of their flapjacks. Then, they cry and argue over a case of depressurized explosive jelly which will ignite if they ascend to the surface.

Suddenly, a “never-before-seen woodsman” materializes in their submarine, covered in fresh water. He has no idea how he got there. Last thing he remembers, he was in a dark forest in “the blackest part of Schleswig-Holstein.” There, he and three other woodsmen — aspiring lumberjacks — were preparing to save a woman they all collectively loved, named Margot, from the clutches of a woodland gang known as the Red Wolves.

In his flashback, the woodsman infiltrates the Red Wolves, and pretends to want to join them. Their leader, “The Wolf,” demands he complete four trials as follows: Snapping fingers, offal piling, stone weighing, and “bladder slapping.” The woodsman triumphs at all four. But then Margot herself offers him four, more difficult trials. But before he can do them, everybody goes to sleep.

As Margot gyrates among a pile of slumbering Red Wolves, she “escapes… through the doorway of a dream” and finds herself working as a flowergirl in an elegant nightclub, where the men lounge in tuxes and women do exotic, native dances on stage. Margot herself sings a song about the jungle, but has no idea why she knows it. She doesn’t even know who she is. A man named Pancho yells at her for making him wait so long.

Then, an indistinct figure, made up of a rapidly flickering assortment of faces (he’s unseen and unnamed — there’s a blast of static on the soundtrack whenever anyone utters his name), gets on stage to sing about his obsession with butts. As he sings, we see Udo Kier walk the streets lusting after women’s derrieres — whenever he does so, there’s a brief flash of Geraldine Chaplin, as his “Master Passion,” screaming and whipping at him. As the song continues, he makes repeated visits to the doctor to have pieces of his brain removed (“A little bit off the top! A little bit off the top!”) in an effort to cure his insatiable longing for ass.

That’s minute 28, by my count. And it just gets weirder from there.

It should be noted that Guy Maddin is not for everyone, as his films defy comprehension, where logic is left at the theater door, and this one is no exception, where it’s easy to get lost in the dizzying phantasmagoria of what’s happening, yet the bold German Expressionist imagery literally jumps off the screen, calling attention to itself, where it’s hard not to be at least a little impressed by the atmospheric density of what we see, as a B-movie look has never been presented in this way, with the most remarkable production design imaginable.  The problem with Maddin’s films is that so much is compacted into every single frame that it’s impossible not to miss huge chunks of narrative and much of the meticulous artistic design, as it can literally be overwhelming, especially when presented at breakneck speed, but nonetheless, he’s one of the master craftsmen of the business, where every precious image is lovingly composed.  It might be a bit mindblowing, as the brain has a hard time keeping up with the hallucinogenic slipstream, where confusion is part of the game, but pick up whatever you can, as it’s an extraordinary example of what an inventive director can do with cinematic expression.   The film is much longer than usual, more than an hour longer than COWARDS BEND AT THE KNEE (2003), for instance, where there are multiple instances where we have the impression the film is ending, and the length plays into the mentally exhausting experience.  Additionally, Maddin is working for the first time with a co-director, Evan Johnson, a former student who is also credited as a co-writer and visual effects supervisor.  Simultaneous to the release of this film, they also designed a web project resurrecting plots from lost films, most from the first three decades of cinema, and then reenacting them, Seances - Guy Maddin, also see Seances, though the films on the Internet will not contain any of the same scenes as the film, allowing for a completely unique experience.  Yet according to the press release, “Allegedly based on lost films…,” the concept is similar, where literally every idea came from a lost film, where sometimes they recreated an actual story while other times all they had was a title where they had to invent a story, all given the look of old, faded, and partially destroyed film stock, much like Bill Morrison’s documentary DECASIA (2002), which was actually made entirely with old, decaying, nitrate-based, Silent era archival footage that was otherwise pulled out of the scrap heap, then reshaped into an avant-garde tapestry, where Morrison’s intent (which may as well be Maddin’s) was to remind us of “the many dreams we forget upon waking.”      

Completed in 31 days, shooting one film per day, what Maddin and Johnson have actually created is a surreal, stream-of-conscious experience, where these lost films have effectively been unseen for decades, while this film reconnects them to the living, not as a whole, but more often moving from one to another in midstream, where scenes from different films intersect, blending them together in a colliding story of interconnected images.  Actually this sounds very much like the cut-up writing style of William S. Burroughs as he began to approach Naked Lunch, a drug-tinged adventure where the chapters were intended to be read in any order.  This ability to cleverly rearrange the text randomly can be traced back to the Dadaists of the 1920’s, which was preceded by Picasso and Cubism, but these techniques were not really utilized by the silent film directors.  Nearly one-hundred years later, Maddin is fascinated by the idea of reviving long unseen footage, restaging them in the present, using current production techniques and modern actors, then stringing them together as a kind of fever dream, while what inspired Maddin was the idea that the stories could be reassembled in any particular order.  In this way the old becomes the new, as the past is continually feeding into the present, which has been Maddin’s standard practice throughout his career.  Very much like these paintings, books, and other works of art, where it’s hard to tell what they are about, Maddin’s reconstructed film moves so quickly from one idea to the next that certainly part of the fascination is not what’s happening, but the way it looks and feels, as there’s an extraordinary art design associated with the film construction, where at his disposal is the entire history of cinema, where he can use hilarious intertitles, jump cuts, exaggerated melodrama with actors playing multiple roles, chase scenes, unrivaled moments of dreaded suspense, lyrical romance shots, action adventure, dance, horror, musicals, dreamlike interludes, and even the documentary genre and simply move effortlessly between them any way he pleases.  Of course, the flashback device is used almost as a standing joke in transitioning from one scene to the next.  What the film doesn’t do, unfortunately, as we have moved into the automated, digital era (it’s our own fault!), is give instructions to the film projector to assemble the reels in any particular order, so every perspective audience would conceivably enjoy a completely different film experience.  While this might confound the film critics, all of whom would be dumbfounded when comparing notes, it might also generate a stampede for multiple viewings, just to play with all the possibilities.  It’s like a new toy at Christmas that every child looks forward to playing with before eventually growing tired and finding something else to play with.  It’s not inventing the wheel, but it’s as novel an experience as you’re going to have in a movie theater this year. 

Kill Your Darlings

Allen Ginsberg

KILL YOUR DARLINGS       A-          
USA  (104 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  John Krokidas         Official site

Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek 

But in our mind? And if we were not weak, 
Should we be less in deed than in desire? 
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian and Maddalo:  A Conversation, 1818

Well one thing is for certain, that with the recent festival acclaim and even adoration of films with explicit gay sex scenes, like Stranger By the Lake (L'inconnu du lac) (2013) and Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013), gay films are certainly out of the closet, for better or for worse, and judging by this small gem of a film, it’s all for the better.  Of all the movies that touch upon the Beat Generation, this is the first one to get the tone right, making all the difference in the world, as their antics were largely humorous pranks designed to amuse themselves and challenge their intellectual imaginations, which were extraordinary.  Another movie “based on a true story,” the secret of the film’s success lies in choosing an early time period when the as yet unblossomed literary figures were still nobodies, where they were just a bunch of directionless souls still searching for what to do about their mixed up feelings, filled with insecurities and real life problems, where even their “parents” figure into their stories, all of which provides a cultural background for something that all happens in a larger social context afterwards.  In this manner, characters remain surprisingly accessible and believable, as they’re filled with doubt and fears about what they are about to do, yet can’t stop the rising tide of spiritual liberation, all set in a conservatively conformist society that routinely arrests homosexuals in nightclubs even as soldiers are fighting the Nazi’s abroad for American freedom, a point not lost on the viewer.  More typical Beat movies show them as exaggerated caricatures, completely irresponsible and wildly out of control, dizzyingly drunk or high where no one in their right mind would emulate their antics.  But this film hones them in as real characters, where the performances throughout are nothing less than superb, especially Dane DeHaan, a revelation in the role of Lucien Carr, a pretty boy figure beloved by Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), William Burroughs (Ben Foster), and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), all meeting at Columbia University in 1944, forming a kind of libertine club, not to mention a former literary professor, David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall) who was fatally in love.  These men comprised the origins of the Beat Generation which was yet a decade away, as such it plays out as a coming-of-age film, not only of a movement, but each individual who contributed to it.       

DeHaan actually provides one of the best performances of the year, as he’s an enigmatic force that stirs the pot, that spouts poetry from memory on university tabletops, that mixes the strange brew of literary savants that would eventually surprise the world, while he, oddly enough, never writes a single word.  He is to Ginsberg in the 40’s what Neal Cassady is to Kerouac in the 50’s, an inspirational force that looms larger than life.  As a spiritual mentor, he is learned in all things literary, yet oddly enough we never see a single one of them actually reading, yet they voraciously discuss a visionary breakthrough that must cut through the stale syntax of literary rules and definitions still being taught in prestigious institutions like Columbia, heralding Walt Whitman as their emboldened hero, who dared break from rhyme and meter a hundred years earlier, a transcendent force in American literature, who’s sexuality sits alongside his literary merits.  One other thing this film gets right is its treatment of “homo-sex-uality,” the queer issue, still looked upon by mainstream America as if it was the bubonic plague, where insidious forces stealthily track them down by night, hauling them out of bars and nightclubs, arresting them for being who they are, which at the time was still considered a crime, making many of them criminals.  This lawful restriction, as much as anything, was the stifling force of repression that drove their inherent need for freedom and liberation, which they expressed through mad writings, touting Rimbaud, Keats, Blake, and Yeats, reinventing a style of language that was exuberantly free form, associative with jazz improvisations.  But all of that is yet to come, as in the early years, each had yet to discover what drove and inspired them, yet they gravitated towards one another in a city the size of New York, forming a small literary circle.  While we rarely see them in class, while at Columbia Ginsberg contributed to the Columbia Review literary journal, while also winning the Woodberry Poetry Prize, and served as president of the Philolexian Society, the campus literary and debate group.       

While the choice of Jack Huston as Kerouac is questionable, as he feels almost like a last-minute throw-in, barely even included in the script, brilliantly written by Austin Bunn and the director, which is more about Ginsberg meeting Carr, which was like a combustible explosion in Ginsberg’s life, unleashing the inspirational forces at the gate, never to be closed again.  Jennifer Jason Leigh, as Ginsberg’s mentally unstable mother, is jaw droppingly good and literally takes your breath away, while David Cross as Ginsberg’s father actually resembles the grown-up Allen Ginsberg.  Likewise, Elizabeth Olsen, so good in Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), is excellent here as Kerouac’s would-be wife.  Daniel Radcliffe is no slouch as the inquisitive young Ginsberg, smart and still naively cautious, much like his alter-ego at Hogwarts, yet driven by forces he can't begin to understand, where his youthful timidity grows emboldened by Carr’s audacity, who is quite correct at telling him, “You’d be boring without me.”  But the real revelation is Ben Foster’s smirky, perpetually downbeat, yet laceratingly truthful take as the cynically understated William S. Burroughs, hilarious at every turn, who we initially see wearing a gas mask while ingesting nitrous oxide in a bathtub at a party, and we know instantly that this could only be the infamous Burroughs, a walking pharmaceutical dispensary that willingly turns on the uninitiated in the 40’s much like Timothy Leary turned on America in the 60’s.  Burroughs is a key figure in the Beat Movement, as they all recognize his prodigious talent and laser-like intelligence, though his demented nature is prone to going off the rails, almost a metaphor for the rest to follow.  Kyra Sedgwick even has a small role as Lucien Carr’s forlorn mother, so the cast is uniformly excellent throughout, but it’s the tight interplay between Carr and Ginsberg that provides the spark and mad passion that drives the picture.  Shown as a beautiful series of small moments, this is an insightful look at a period rarely seen from these iconic figures, where Radcliffe is just edgy enough to do naked sex scenes, but it’s the exposure of Carr’s anguished soul that really nails what artists are faced with in unlocking their deepest and darkest secrets, as sometimes you never know what you’ll find.  

Ornette: Made in America

Shirley Clarke with Ornette Coleman












Ornette Coleman, William S. Burroughs, and Buckminster Fuller (left to right)

ORNETTE:  MADE IN AMERICA                 B             
USA  (85 mi)  1985  d:  Shirley Clarke

A film twenty years in the making, as Shirley Clarke went over a decade without making any films at all after PORTRAIT OF JASON (1967), initiating a film about jazz with saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whom she met in the 60’s through Yoko Ono, but the project floundered until she discovered the video camera in the 80’s, making a few shorts before returning to this film.  Video techniques play a prominent role in the making of the film, as it allows the director to mix and match how she wants to effect the screen image, mixing realistic images with animation and elements of surrealism, creating an otherworldly effect, which matches the endlessly expanding universe that at least partially explains the music of Ornette Coleman.  Seen in the opening sequence receiving an honorary plaque from the mayor and a key (which astronaut Alan Bean had taken to the moon and back) to the city of Fort Worth, his home town, his first hometown appearance in 25 years, the site of a world premiere of his “Skies in America,” a combined jazz and symphonic work utilizing his regular combo along with the Fort Worth Symphony.  In fact, much of the documentary is a recording of this performance which is the centerpiece of the film.  In it we hear Coleman’s free jazz style, which is completely non-melodic, played at such a rapid tempo with such quickly maneuvering improvisation that some are apt to question whether it even qualifies as music.  During the 50’s, other musicians walked off the stage in defiance when he played, some destroyed his instruments, while others physically attacked and beat him, deemed a jazz pariah, and to some an embarrassment, receiving some of the harshest music criticism along with fellow avant garde pioneer, pianist Cecil Taylor.  Both seem to play in abrasive clusters, characterized by an extremely energetic and physically aggressive approach to sound, never allowing it to remain static, but continually challenging the listener’s capability to comprehend.  Even today, more than half a century later, the jury is still out on that.  But this is not the focus of the film, which instead allows his music, and Clarke’s visual style, to continually expand what the audience is used to.

One of the surprises is realizing just how much of Coleman’s music is written composition, similar to filmmaker John Cassavetes, where both are attributed to using an improvisational style of art, yet each carefully compose and scrutinize every note and word ahead of time.  However, neither artist believes it ends there, as they constantly tinker and adjust and rewrite, allowing the work to breathe like a living organism, where it’s never really cemented in time.  Coleman rarely plays jazz standards, concentrating on his own compositions, where there seems to be an endless flow of enormous sound.  Ironically, Coleman’s demeanor is that of a quiet and unassuming man, not at all vain, egotistic or reflective of the assaultive power of his work, where his mind is continually tinkering with new ideas and perceptions, heavily influenced by Buckminster Fuller, an inventor, futurist, and theorist, and also beat writer William S. Burroughs who is seen performing a reading dedicated to Coleman.  Fuller, however, best represents what feels to Coleman like an ever expanding but mathematically ordered universe, where Clarke shoots a string ensemble sequence inside one of his geodesic domes.  Coleman was particularly influenced by Fuller’s view that there was no up or down, but simply the concept of outward, as we are all effected by being inside or outside the gravitational pull, where he has always been driven to push his music outside orthodox realms, like a spaceship breaking through the boundaries of gravity.  Clarke has some fun with animated sequences of Coleman in a sporty The Jetsons style space ship juxtaposed over grainy images of Neil Armstrong’s moon walk.  During these space images, it was hard not to think of equally controversial jazz leader Sun Ra, whose musical mantra was always “Space is the place,” often seen performing in concerts dressed as a space traveler, with the band wearing an equally distinctive science fiction uniform, where he was an ardent believer that avant garde artists took themselves much too seriously.                          

One of the more questionable ideas was using a child actor to play Coleman as a young child, where he wanders alone by the train tracks carrying a saxophone, images which are interjected periodically throughout the film, rather manipulatively reminding us of the roots but also the pathos of poverty.  Some of her other ideas are equally misguided, using abstract expressionist video techniques coinciding with abstract streams of Coleman’s music which have a diminutive rather than enhancing effect.  Somewhat mysteriously, Clarke may actually misunderstand the musical artform, as she accompanies the music with some trippy psychedelic sequences that may have seemed cutting edge at the time, but they’re completely out of synch with the awesome power of Coleman’s music.  Like many greatly misunderstood artists in their youth, Coleman’s refusal to acquiesce to popular tastes led to a reversal of critical opinion, calling him an uncompromising jazz genius later in his lifetime.  Clarke’s film, showing different stages of his career from 1968 to 1983, doesn’t really capitalize on this clamor of support, where Coleman’s innovation clearly outshines that of the film director, who strains to keep up, using quick cuts, some unusual editing, where time moves simultaneously backwards and forwards, never in a traditional linear fashion, which makes this a somewhat rare and unusual documentary, but one that fails to honor the unique stature of the featured artist. 

Too little information is provided about the man, too few interviews, too few performances, no archival footage, and barely a hint at the peculiar path he took to greatness.  Only one interview from a jazz critic in New York gets it right, recalling a magical moment in New York on a snowy night when Coleman broke out in Charlie Parker style, often copied but never equaled, yet Coleman matched that same eccentric passion and precision, playing on into the night, never once faltering, matching the near impossible physical and technical demands of one of the most heralded musical greats in all of jazz.  Yet when asked to explain his unforgettable performance afterwards, Coleman nonchalantly indicated he likes to do that every once in awhile “just for fun.”  Clarke began her artistic career as a dancer and studied with the Martha Graham Dance Company, among other dance luminaries, developing an artistic kinship to jazz as a free form artistic expression, perhaps similar to what she was trying to accomplish in film.  Her first films were dance movies, becoming more radically experimental, adding racial issues and a social conscience, often blurring the lines between fiction and documentary.  This was Clarke’s last work, failing to capture the energy and imagination of her 60’s films like The Cool World (1964), which also happens to have an exceptional jazz musical soundtrack from Mal Waldron.  Nonetheless, flawed as it is, the fusion between Ornette Coleman and Shirley Clarke can’t help but generate interest, both unheralded yet rare artists whose stature has only grown over time, where this unusual film is a part of jazz and cinema history.

The Beat Hotel

THE BEAT HOTEL                 C-                   

USA  France  Great Britain  (88 mi)  2011  d:  Alan Govenar    Official site

While the subject of the American Beat movement down and out in Paris in the late 50’s certainly has possibilities, especially since so little has been archived other than through literature, so a documentary exposé sounds enticing.  But other than a few still photographs that one could easily find in a library or even online, this film offers no new archival footage from which to base a movie.  Instead, it becomes a nostalgia piece, something the actual Beat writers would abhor, as their works defy sentimentality and formula, continually searching for new ways to express ideas of liberation and transcendence.  Well, you won’t find that here, as instead it’s just a bunch of old geezers boringly trying to recollect what they could remember about sharing the same cramped hotel space of several literary Americans who went on to become icons of the Beat Generation.  And what they remember isn’t much different than listening to relatives talk endlessly about things you’ve already heard a million times.  What’s the interest in hearing someone recollect they were connected to this movement if they can’t get the audience to grasp any part of that experience themselves?  With names like Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs, youthful photographs flashing across the screen, you’d hope there might be some hidden gems of personal insight unique to their experiences together, but we should be so lucky, as that might actually constitute relevant material for a decent movie.  Instead, insist upon reading the books and the poems, as that remains the source of inspiration, not this movie which is largely a waste of time. 

Burroughs and Ginsberg were both involved with obscenity trials in the United States, Burroughs for his unpublished earlier works Junkie and Queer, and Ginsberg for his incendiary counterculture poem Howl, so this eclectic gay group of outsiders fled to Paris to avoid potential arrest (both for their art as well as their lifestyle) and be able to continue working.  What they discovered was an incredibly cheap rooming house in the bohemian section of the Left Bank in Paris called the Beat Hotel, as it was mostly inhabited by American writers and artists, where the communal atmosphere lent itself to shared experiences together, encouraging each other on, including parties and poetry readings.  It was here that Ginsberg developed the needed distance from his mother’s tragic death in a mental institution where her treatment for schizophrenia resulted in a lobotomy, writing Kaddish, while Burroughs, with help from Brion Gysin, completed a published version of Naked Lunch from randomly strung together pieces of earlier manuscripts.  Corso, the youngest member of the Beats, and the next published after Jack Kerouac, composed his poems Bomb and Marriage.  Among the few survivors of the era are British photographer Harold Chapman, who documented much of the period in photographs, and Scottish artist Elliot Rudie, whose animated drawings add a colorful surrealist element.  Do we really need to see one of them show up at the hotel 50 years later with a disinterested teenage daughter in tow? 

The problem here is what a superficial portrait is generated by the film, never getting below the surface to mine anything new.  None of the Americans spoke French, so they collectively stuck together and rarely mixed with the French Parisian artists, as they couldn’t communicate, and when they happened to be at the same parties, the Americans had a reputation for consuming too much alcohol, playing pranks, and acting strangely juvenile.  While there is some free floating jazz playing throughout, none of it is identified and there is little attempt to connect any of the characters to American jazz music, or to musicians that happened to be in Paris, which was an essential component of the Beat Generation, connecting to the improvisational jazz rhythm and liberating expression of feeling.  What this film fails to do is breath any life into what inspired the Beats or indicate why they remain essential to this day, instead feeling like a monotonous misstep, where tired, grandfatherly faces continually attempt to explain the thrills and excitement of youth.  That may be what they remember, but what’s shown onscreen never registers a pulse, where there may 10 or 15 minutes of interest here.  Burroughs is accurately described as the macabre, angel of death, seen as a Grim Reaper in sarcastic animated portrayals, but each attempt to re-enact scenes fails miserably, as there isn’t an ounce of dramatic believability.  Without any emotional connection to the subjects of the film, irreverent rebels and outcasts every one, they are continually described as respectful literary figures, as if being honored with a plaque by an unnamed local dignitary makes a good subject for a film.     

Road to Nowhere

ROAD TO NOWHERE – video                 C+                  

USA  (121 mi)  2010  d:  Monte Hellman         Official site

As in the midst of battle there is room
For thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth;
As gossips whisper of a trinket's worth
Spied by the death-bed's flickering candle-gloom;
As in the crevices of Caesar's tomb
The sweet herbs flourish on a little earth:
So in this great disaster of our birth
We can be happy, and forget our doom.

For morning, with a ray of tenderest joy
Gilding the iron heaven, hides the truth,
And evening gently woos us to employ
Our grief in idle catches. Such is youth;
Till from that summer's trance we wake, to find
Despair before us, vanity behind.

—As in the Midst of Battle There Is Room, by George Santayana (1863 – 1952)

After waiting 21 years between films, one might develop expectations from a director who used to have his hand on the counter culture element of society, constantly taking a look over the edge, where his vision did not reflect that of mainstream America.  Known for making films on a shoestring budget, usually featuring offbeat, obsessive characters, Hellman was never afraid to show plenty of ambiguity and slow pacing.  As the world has changed so much since his last feature, the utterly forgettable SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT III (1989), one can only imagine what prompted his return.  Initially learning his trade in the 1950’s from the Roger Corman school of movies, creating low budget horror flicks, it’s there he began an association with fellow Corman actor Jack Nicholson, teaming up together to make a couple of existential westerns, RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND (1965) and THE SHOOTING (1968).  But it’s Hellman’s collaboration with writer Rudy Wurlitzer that mesmerized the nation with the infamous road movie TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971), a hit even before the film was released, as the script was released ahead of time in Esquire magazine, hailed as an “instant classic,” showcasing the talents of fan favorite Warren Oates, capturing the epitome of the youth market’s changing values in society, where one dropped out in order to see the light, finding new directions to take instead of the competitive rat race that was purely economically motivated, only to lead to an eventual middle age void, a lack of fulfillment, a state of emptiness when the so-called American Dream didn't bring along with it the promise of happiness.  The film, of course, flopped at the box office, but has reached cult status among cinephiles, heralded as a bleak masterpiece (a phrase often repeated to humorous effect in this movie), but viewed as utter trash by others.  Hellman has always represented that divisive cultural point where his appeal is obviously directed to those open minded enough to stories that don’t come packaged, that remain blurred, offbeat, and empty.    

Shot on HD Video, Hellman has created a work that probably reveals more about the effects of alcoholism and drug abuse than anything recognizable about his life.  While supposedly based on a true story, it's true roots feel more reminiscent of the outrageous life of Beat writer William S. Burroughs, a lifelong drug addict who happened to play the game of William Tell in Mexico City with his girl friend, Joan Vollmer, claiming he could shoot the apple placed on her head with a bow and arrow while drunk, only to kill her instead.  This event so traumatized him that it may have inspired him to invent his autobiographical stream of consciousness writing style, writing in the introduction to his first book, Queer, written in 1953 but not published until 1985 due to its alleged obscenity:  “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death.”  Burroughs never told a straight story, where instead his works are filled with fragments, hallucinations, sexual fantasies, dangling thoughts, poetry, dead ends and lengthy run-on monologues.  It is this style that Hellman seems to be emulating, but without the full-fledged nerve and commitment to let it all hang out.  Instead it’s a very deceptive work that appears clouded in trickery, using the device of filming a story that already happened within an existing story, constantly shifting between time periods, becoming more confusing than illuminating.  Hellman unveils his story in fragments, dangling thoughts, plenty of dead ends, and by the end, seems lost in an alcoholic stupor, a state of mental and psychological paralysis, where the blending of what’s real and what’s imagined stopped being interesting to the viewer a good hour into the film.  Much of this is due to an outrageous stroke of fate with one of the characters that the audience is expected to accept, but more likely it’s the out of synch dialogue and listless acting, where even according to the movie storyline 90 % of a director’s responsibility is in the casting, but here Tygh Runyan, who plays the always onscreen filmmaker recreating a tragic event that already took place, couldn’t be less appealing, while his choice of a look-alike actress, Shannyn Sossamon, chosen very much in a duality homage to VERTIGO (1958), is a gorgeous revelation. 

  

It’s never a good sign when a filmmaker uses old vintage movie clips in their film, which instead become the most interesting part of the film you’re watching.  The audience is invited to watch several key scenes from Preston Sturges’ THE LADY EVE (1941), watching child actress Ana Torrent in a non-subtitled Spanish version of Erice’s SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973), and the infamous chess sequence with Death from Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957).  The idea is that artists fill their imaginations with the collected works of other artists, basically blending their own interior worlds with those of fellow artists, creating for filmmakers a seamless mosaic of dreamlike imagery where the artist himself can’t really claim ownership of his own thoughts.  Inspirations come from everywhere.  Similarly, storylines are a sprawling mess in this movie, more like the fractured, incomplete style of Cubists without the use of Surrealism.  What’s really missing is an emotional connection to any of this, as if it’s really personal and autobiographical, as one assumes it is, only the writer himself appears at all interested.  To that degree, this is a writer’s film, where the writer becomes obsessed with his own work, supposedly written by Steven Gaydos, an executive editor at Variety, where he can no longer distinguish the good from the bad, blending it all together in a haze of ambiguous incomprehensibility and expecting the audience to find something they like about it.  Similarly, the raw, extremely confessional country songs by Tom Russell bookended at the opening and closing of the movie, sounding very much like outlaw country artist Waylon Jennings decades ago, almost make the audience cringe, as they have such a personalized, stream of conscious storyline all to themselves, a style that by the end is really calling attention to itself.  It might make a difference if it was a natural outgrowth of the movie in some way, but it feels overly forced and manipulative, basically telling the audience what mood the director expects them to feel, which is the last thing this director needs to be doing.  Otherwise, there was a surprising lack of soundtrack music used during the film, rarely providing a needed change of pace, where over and over again we return to that same movie set watching a somewhat dysfunctional crew try to develop a movie that is mostly taking place inside the director’s head. 

Note:  Much of this is shot at the Balsam Mountain Inn in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina (a place my wife & I have visited and still have a coffee mug as a memento).