This New Zealand custom

A typically superb post by Reading the Maps on Kiwi Gothic and "the Silent Land". The South Island is indeed another country; I used to be critical of Sam Neill's Cinema of Unease theory until I moved here and understood that it was a South Island idea that couldn't necessarily translate to the north. Films that have fit the canon since have been South Island-set: Brad McGann's adaptation of In My Father's Den, which relocated the action from Maurice Gee's West Auckland to Otago presumably because West Auckland is no longer rural, remote or spooky enough; Glenn Standring's Perfect Creature, vampire steampunk shot in the heritage districts of Dunedin and Oamaru; the careful adaptation of the Aramoana killings in Out of the Blue (pictured). But it would seem that the Waikato has some of this dark quality too, caught in Greg Page's The Locals, with its ghosts of colonialism.
I'm not sure I understood what Laurence Aberhart photos were about until I got here either: something to do with the persistence of the past into the present, the preservation of it, the inescapability of the early, founding histories of these town and cities. Anyway, a few months into my time here, I had a go at pinning this South Island Gothic down. To talk about the ways in which it become has a cliche and the ways in which the cliche might be useful. This is the bit about Cinema of Unease. The opening line about the killer's crib refers to the way that the endings of both Bad Blood and Out of the Blue -- the filmed stories of Stanley Graham and David Gray -- end with the killer's dwelling destroyed by fire (Lynley Hood: "I remember someone from overseas being horrified at this New Zealand custom. It's certainly got all sorts of mythological overtones. It implies the existence of evil in the place and a purification by fire.") Of course it had an update in Christchurch recently when someone tried to torch the so-called "House of Horrors" in Aranui.

The killer's crib burning into the night? That's South Island Gothic, an idea that was most famously taken for a spin in the Sam Neill and Judy Rymer documentary Cinema of Unease. That title has become a kind of shorthand now -- it says, all our films are dark and, therefore, so are we. It's not quite as simple as that. The reality is that cinema of unease is a South Island idea. The film was subtitled "A personal journey through New Zealand film" and the emphasis was on the word personal -- a lot of it had to do with Neill's complicated feelings about emigrating to Christchurch as a boy. The Neills sailed from Britain to this unknown spot on the map where they discovered that someone had built a simulation of an English provincial city on the Canterbury Plains.
But there was something not quite right about it. Something uneasy. So we have Neill interpreting Christchurch's Gothic revival architecture as "the buildings of exile". We have Neill feeling carsick on the Port Hills, intercut with scenes from Heavenly Creatures of the murderers Parker and Hulme swimming at Port Levy. We have Neill risking psychic contagion as he cycles past Sunnyside Hospital. We have Neill wondering if blood stays in the soil of Aramoana.
That was in 1995. About a decade later, Christchurch Art Gallery curator Felicity Milburn developed the idea and built an art show around it, named for Owen Marshall's short story Coming Home in the Dark. The opening lines of the associated text could have come from Neill's tele-prompter: "Lurking behind the South Island's legendary picture-postcard views and the stoic jaw of the Southern Man is a dark side -- a Gothic underbelly of paranoia, alienation and unease."

I'm Walken here

As Frank White in King of New York, Walken commits ultra-violent acts with incredible panache and style (as he does in all of his collaborations with director Abel Ferrara), such as when inviting the guys back to his hotel while shooting bullets into a corpse.

Andrew Paul Wood pays tribute to the greatness of Christopher Walken ("I can’t help it, I love Christopher Walken").

One thing to add. Years ago, there was a Walken profile in, I think, The Face. A source was talking about Walken's guest appearance on Saturday Night Live. As I remember the anecdote, Walken spent all day sitting with the writers, but not saying a thing, not laughing at their jokes. At the end of the day, he says: "You know what's funny? Bear suits are funny."

Influence is by no means simple/use your allusion

Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time. When I was thirteen I purchased an anthology of Beat writing. Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered one William S Burroughs, author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance. Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing. Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the Forties and Fifties, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me. By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.
-- Jonathan Lethem, from "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism"

This thing about Witi Ihimaera ripping people off is pretty funny. Apparently, he took some things other people had done, tweaked them a little, and placed them, unattributed, in his own work.
In art, we do this all the time. It's called appropriation. Some people think it's a postmodernist thing, but it's not. It has a long and illustrious history. I reckon the cave painters busily ripped each other off. However, the examples I'm going to use are a bit more recent than that – from the fifteenth century.
In fifteenth century Italy, it was not uncommon (to say the least) for different painters to paint the same subject. Nor was it uncommon for a painter to take some figures or a compositional device another painter had used when treating the same subject, tweak it, and use it in their own work. -- David Cauchi, from his blog.

It is interesting that, in an age of generally inert remakes and imitations, there is still such insistence on the Romantic concept of originality. In terms of the Hollywood cinema and its critical reception, the term has become thoroughly debased ... when De Palma works his variations of Psycho, this is imitation or plagiarism, whereas when Bob Fosse or Woody Allen imitates Fellini or Bergman, this is somehow, mysteriously, evidence of his originality. Debased or not, the cult of originality is of comparatively recent date.
-- Robin Wood, from Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan.

Other homages are mere illustrations of Paul Schrader's script. Hence, the references to Robert Bresson's work. Travis eats bread soaked in peach brandy, which is a perversion of Bresson's saintly priest in Le Journal d'un Curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951) subsisting entirely on the Eucharist: bread soaked in wine. This is no doubt a comment on Travis who, Scorsese notes, sees himself as very spiritual, but is a “spirit on the wrong road”. Bresson's country priest ironically dies of stomach cancer and Bickle says in voice-over he suspects he has the disease. Schrader confirms that Travis' narration through voice-overs from his diary is borrowed from Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959), the title of which, like Taxi Driver, refers to a role and not a man. Also, Bresson's pickpocket, Michel (Martin La Salle), rehearses his crimes ritualistically. This is the direct inspiration for the deliberateness with which Travis prepares with his guns, in a sequence which was originally much longer. Finally, Schrader includes literary references to Thomas Wolfe's “God's Lonely Man” and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, the titles of which are quoted by Bickle in his voice-over.
-- John Thurman, from "Citizen Bickle, or the Allusive Taxi Driver: Uses of Intertextuality".

Observation of the week

Soap operas are a world where rich people always have chandeliers and hip people have striped hair and the language that they use doesn’t have any flexibility anymore.

Bronson Pinchot, interviewed in The Onion. In the same interview, this exchange:

Did you have a sense that even though Tom Cruise was boring and unpleasant, he would be exciting onscreen?
Oh, no. I thought the movie [Risky Business] would disappear. It just goes to show you, I obviously don’t have the antennae for that. I didn’t see it at all, but neither did any of the actors. All of the actors who talked about him were like, “What is this guy all about?” And you know, honestly, I never got it, and I don’t get it to this day. But it was his breakout film. He always talked about himself like he was a mega-superstar; that was weird, too.

In other Tom Cruise news, Christian Bale based his Patrick Bateman on the Cruise he saw interviewed on TV, according to American Psycho director Mary Harron. From Black Book:

We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.

Or, as the Bateman voice-over puts it:

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable ... I simply am not there.

Four from October, and 25 films you will never be able to enjoy again

FOUR FROM OCTOBER

Up (Pete Docter, 2009): The married-life montage is extraordinary -- and moving. Everything else in Pixar's Americanised Miyazaki outing is just -- no contradiction -- predictably spectacular.

Summer of Sam (Spike Lee, 1999): The Scorsese film Scorsese never made. Or Saturday Night Fever meets Seven in the imagination of Travis Bickle. But no amount of art-directed 70s sleaze and urban dread can ever be as pungent as the real thing.

Strayed (Andre Techine, 2003): Making the nature scene. A French idyll on the edge of WWII. Emmanuelle Beart you know about. Gaspard Ulliel? He looks like he walked out of a Pierre et Giles shoot. How apt that he's soon the gay angel in The Vintner's Luck (but just how gay and how much space he and his theology will get is a discussion that apprehensive Vintner's fans are having somewhere else).

Proof (John Madden, 2005): David Auburn's maths play about that slippery border between genius and insanity gets skilfully adapted by the author for John Madden -- but then, I've never read or seen the actual play, so who knows? Anyway, why do I feel like I've never seen a Gwyneth Paltrow performance as good as this before? And less is thankfully more for mad dad Anthony Hopkins. But can you buy Jake Gyllenhaal as a maths prodigy and rock drummer? Darko excepted, have you ever bought him as anything?

25 FILMS YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO ENJOY AGAIN
This is oldish -- from February 2009 -- but I only just came across it. The arch-conservative National Review has its list of 25 best conservative movies. You expected Red Dawn, Forrest Gump, maybe even Whit Stillman's Metropolitan ("He brings us to see what is admirable and necessary in the customs and conventions of America’s upper class"), the Christian allegories of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the enduring fantasy that Lord of the Rings is somehow prophetic of and applicable to America's mood post-9/11. You also expected that they would read The Dark Knight as an analogy of illegal tactics in the war on terror (but not as a critique of said tactics) and love every minute of United 93. Surprise entry: Team America: World Police, as "the film’s utter disgust with air-headed, left-wing celebrity activism remains unmatched in popular culture". Actually, no surprise -- this is the anti-Sean Penn and Tim Robbins list. I can put up with all that. But this is my question: now I know that it's about how "the fads of modernity are no substitute for the permanent things", will I ever be able to enjoy Groundhog Day again?

Actually, wrong philosophy. A couple of years back, I reviewed Groundhog Day like this:

An existential classic. In the late 19th century, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proposed the doctrine of “eternal recurrence”: “The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight.” In the late 20th century, that Nietzschean dilemma was illustrated with wit, panache and brilliance by the team of Bill Murray (star) and Harold Ramis (writer/director).

Mr Orange and moral conflict

Rewatching Reservoir Dogs this week, the first time in more than a decade, I was caught by a line from critic Amy Taubin on the commentary: Reservoir Dogs unfolds in the time it takes undercover cop Mr Orange (Tim Roth) to bleed to death. Drop the prologue, she says, and that's how it works. After the title sequence, he is seen squealing and bloody in the back of the car driven by Mr White (Harvey Keitel), then he's on the floor of the warehouse the gang is using as a rendezvous in a pool of blood that gets deeper and darker as the film goes on. The first time I saw this -- probably 1993, a film festival -- I was reminded of something by Beckett or Sartre's No Exit. These doomed guys, this one dingy location, black humour and obvious fatalism. That warehouse had the feeling of a stage set (actually, it's a morgue with plastic sheeting draped over coffins and hearses -- apt for a story where almost no one gets out alive). I didn't single out any one character as mattering more than any other: Mr Pink (Steve Buscemi) and Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) are clearly secondary players to Orange and White but Buscemi's comic relief is so well done and Madsen's notorious ear-slicing bit so memorable that they would hold an equal position in your memory of the film. Blonde, Orange and White all get back stories; Pink gets none -- yet he's the one who lives. But Taubin's line suggests that this was never a story about gangsters; it was always a story about an undercover cop. In this reading, the most important scenes in the film are the long flashback in which Orange is coached by another cop in how to tell a story about a criminal situation; he's like an actor learning a part, which is doubly clever when you consider that the British Roth was training himself in an American accent at the same time. These criminals take on identities just as actors do; Roth's character just takes on more layers of identity than most. Identity is conveyed through storytelling and when the criminal Orange, in his back story, encounters cops in a hotel bathroom, we see that they're listening to a long crime anecdote as well. The DVD's deleted scenes give us more of this, more of Orange's back story, more of his preparation, more of the world outside the repurposed morgue -- had these scenes gone into the original film the balance would have been tipped and there would be no question that this was always a film about the moral conflicts and difficulties of the undercover world and the brutality and unscrupulousness of the criminals you encounter in it (the White we warm to in the film is revealed as close to psychopathic in the deleted scene called "background check"). By leaving these scenes out, and making the film less Mr Orange's story and more the story of the cold-blooded White/Pink/Blonde, Tarantino's position in relation to criminality and violence became more ambiguous. Either that or he didn't really know how to get the moral conflict across.

Opportunism knocks

You'd expect that if this press release made it to a newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand, then it's gone everywhere else in the world too:

PRESS RELEASE

Controversial director Damian Chapa to Release Roman Polanski Biopic on DVD in USA and theaters in Europe

Los Angeles, CA (MMD Newswire) October 6, 2009 -- The first biopic about the life of Director Roman Polanski will be released October 20 2009 on DVD everywhere in the United States, and selected theaters across Europe in November.
AMADEUS PICTURES for USA release teamed with Terra Entertainment an Victory Multimedia for the release. Also the film will run in selected theaters across Europe In November.
A monumental day for a revealing film that one critic describes as "a chilling portrait of one of the most controversial figures in the history of movies."
Spanning four decades, the film covers everything from a turbulent childhood in war torn Poland, the murder of his wife Sharon Tate by the infamous Charles Manson cult and the infamous rape case that lead to Polanski's exile to avoid incarceration by escaping to and maintaining residence in Europe.
Polanski Biopic on DVD
Considering the current legal disputes, it is unlikely Polanski will be in attendance, but for the rest you, as a popular critic put it, "Check it out - you'll thank me later." This is a film Hollywood does not want you to see, but must be seen to be believed.
"Polanski Unauthorized" is directed by and stars Damian Chapa who is famous for his lead role in Taylor Hackford's cult classic "Blood in Blood Out" as well as "Under Siege" starring Steven Seagal released by Warner Brothers. Chapa also starred in Brett Ratner's "Money Talks". Co-producer Edmund Druihlet says that it's the only film that has the truth and actually shows the rape.
The main cast includes: Damian Chapa (Roman Polanski), Leah Grimsson (13 year old Girl), Thomas Druilhet (The Devil), Brienne De Beau(Sharon Tate), Silvia Suvadova (Polanski's Mother), Christian Serritiello (Polanski's Father), and Paul James Saunders (Eugene Gatowski).
Reviews:
"A movie to cause talk, raise eyebrows, rattle cages and have Hollywood insiders blow their stacks!"
Robert Osborne, The Hollywood Reporter
"A chilling portrait of one of the most controversial figures in the history of movies."
Terry Keffe, The Hollywood Interview
"Chapa does an excellent job as the lead. Standout performances include Christian Serritiello as Polanski's father and Paul James Saunders as Polanski's financier."
Christopher J. Baca, Entertainment Weekly for El Paso
"Damian Chapa is brilliant he IS Polanski. The movie is a Masterpiece".
David Carradine
----
This press release distributed by Mass Media Distribution LLC, 3350 Riverwood Pkwy Suite 1900, Atlanta, Georgia 30339 USA.

Now, it might be argued that if you think your second-best film was the one you were in with Steven Seagal, then you're in trouble. Todd McCarthy in Variety in February:

Roman Polanski won't lose any sleep over "Polanski Unauthorized," a basement tape-quality slum through the most famously traumatic episodes in a sensation-riddled life. Straight-to-DVD auteur Damian Chapa invested little money, and less talent, in depicting the subject's escape from the Nazis, flirtation with devil worship on "Rosemary's Baby," relationship with Sharon Tate and arrest for raping a 13-year-old girl, moments from all of which are shuffled together almost at random. With production values no better than homemade porn -- most scenes are played in front of drapes -- and dialogue that makes you feel sorry for the actors, this Friday the 13th Los Angeles vanity release isn't even fun in a bad-movie way. Paying customers will feel gypped.
Too tall and too thick through the middle to play Polanski, Chapa does have something of the horny ferret about him that convinces on that level. Sight of Polanski coming on to the underaged model while plying her with drugs and drink is particularly gross, while representations of Frank Sinatra (mulling breaking Polanski's legs) and early producers Gene Gutowski and Martin Ransohoff are ultra-ludicrous.