9/7/1935 — 4/10/2009 5 de outubro de 2009
Naked Lunch (1991)
Um filme de David Cronenberg
Someone asked the other day if David Cronenberg's movie adaptation of William S. Burroughs's novel "Naked Lunch" was "digital or analog." In other words, does the movie follow the author's surrealistic, Rorschach-test prose unit for unit, or does he weave an analogous version of his own?
Cronenberg, definitely, opts for the latter. He does so to his own, very weird degree. This is the guy, after all, who made "Scanners," "The Fly" and "Dead Ringers." He enjoys the grotesque. He grooves on molecular mutation. So, picking up on Burroughs's passing -- and metaphorical -- references to beetles or buglike beings, Cronenberg takes that thought and scuttles with it.
There are bugs all over this movie. They are big, disgusting, coleopterous beings with pincers, sheaths and mandibles. They show up in bars with exoskeletal nonchalance. They metamorphose out of typewriters. One of them claims to be a spy controller. They emit nauseating, appetite-destroying secretions.
Of course, the movie -- set in a brown-tinted, out-there 1950s world -- is filled with people too, most of them writers, drug addicts or both. The central character is Bill Lee (Peter Weller), a pest exterminator and former junkie whose job is to dust people's homes with poison powder. His wife (Judy Davis) happens to be severely addicted to the stuff. She loves to inject it into her breast. An eerie Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider) recommends a different addiction, the black meat of a certain Brazilian centipede.
It's futile, and almost irrelevant, to rehash the plot, but Weller goes through increasingly hallucinatory experiences. He's brought before a large beetle who claims to be Weller's controller in some convoluted secret mission. He plays the William Tell game with his wife but shoots too far beneath the tumbler perched on her head. Running from police capture, he eventually finds himself (or appears to find himself) in a world called Interzone.
In this weird, Tangiers-like city -- thronged with willing Arab boys, jaded expatriates and those typewriter-cum-bugs -- he tries to write the novel "Naked Lunch." He encounters man-sized alien bugs known as "Mugwumps." He meets eccentric writer Ian Holm and half-man-half-creepy-crawly Julian Sands. He runs into Judy Davis again -- but she's another character now.
Despite its outrageous scenes -- including the ravishing of a gay youth by centipedal Sands -- there's something muted about the film. It feels studiously surrealistic, an excuse for cinematic buggery; deep in its center there's a lack of conviction. It's not an emotional movie. It's hard to feel engaged. Weller's well-known, simpatico face affords familiarity. In this psychic terrain, where you're on your own, you take whatever familiarity you can get. He gives as strong a performance as these strange circumstances allow. Yet it's small comfort. This movie feels like what it is -- a Canadian eulogy to a Burroughs novel.
Burroughs cognoscenti should not search for too much of a fix. It's impossible to transmogrify the novelist's extraordinary word play, his dry-ice irony, the beauty and frustration of his drug-muse inscrutability. It's also hard to sum up the book's rounded-spectrum of cruelty, addiction, hypocrisy, lies and truth. Also gone, for obvious reasons, are the passages of cruel, homosexual rape fantasies.
In the movie's press notes, Cronenberg states he isn't really adapting the book so much as dreaming up the circumstances in which Burroughs created "Naked Lunch." To this end, he also draws from the author's real-life history (his apparently accidental killing of his wife), as well as his other works, including "Junky" and "Exterminator!" It has been uttered more than once that Cronenberg is the only director who could have done this movie (adaptations have been attempted and abandoned before). But, if anything, his college-try efforts prove that no one should do it.
Desson Howe, Washington Post in January 1992
4 de outubro de 2009
North by Northwest (1959)
Um filme de Alfred Hitchcock
Since he is a peripatetic operative who loves to beat about the bush while beating about the countryside, director Alfred Hitchcock and a covey of willing and able traveling companions have made North by Northwest, which was unveiled at the Music Hall yesterday, a suspenseful and delightful Cook's Tour of some of the more photogenic spots in these United States.
Although they are involved in lightning-fast romance and some loose intrigue, it is all done in brisk, genuinely witty, and sophisticated style. With Mr. Hitchcock at the helm, moving North by Northwest is a colorful and exciting route for spies, counterspies, and lovers.
The director and Ernest Lehman, his scenarist, are not, to put a fine point on it, really serious about their mystery. With a tongue-in-cheek attitude and a breezy sense of humor, they are off in high gear right at the beginning as they spin the somewhat improbable yarn of a successful, handsome Madison Avenue executive, who is mistaken for a Federal intelligence man by foreign agents and forcibly pushed into a succession of macabre situations that shock, amaze, perplex, and anger our once-debonair hero.
Mr. Hitchcock, who, as has been noted, knows that travel is both fun and broadening, quickly shifts his cast from such locales as the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel and the modernistic interiors of the United Nations Headquarters, to the fancy confines of the Twentieth Century Limited, to the posh Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago, to a vast, flat Midwest cornfield, and finally to the giant faces of the presidents sculptured on Mount Rushmore high above Rapid City, South Dakota.
The complications are introduced with about the same rapidity as the ever-changing scenery. Our beleaguered hero, it appears, is being harried by the villains who want to dispatch him because he seems to be on to their skulduggery. It is, of course, merely a case of mistaken identity, an illusion the Federal boys are desperate to maintain.
In any event, Mr. Hitchcock, et al., take time out now and again to stop strewing red herrings and inject a funny scene here and there, such as one involving our drunken hero in a local hoosegow, or to point up the quickly burgeoning romance between him and the blonde Mata Hari who apparently is aiding the dastards chasing him. Their interlude, to the sounds of slick, romantic dialogue, in a train drawing room, for example, is guaranteed to send viewers' temperatures soaring. The lines and the expert manipulation of the principals are tributes to the outstanding talents of Messrs. Lehman and Hitchcock.
Cary Grant, a veteran member of the Hitchcock acting varsity, was never more at home than in this role of the advertising-man-on-the-lam. He handles the grimaces, the surprised look, the quick smile, the aforementioned spooning, and all the derring-do with professional aplomb and grace. In casting Eva Marie Saint as his romantic vis-à-vis, Mr. Hitchcock has plumbed some talents not shown by the actress heretofore. Although she is seemingly a hard, designing type, she also emerges both the sweet heroine and a glamorous charmer.
Jessie Royce Landis contributes a few genuinely humorous scenes as Mr. Grant's slightly addle-pated mother. James Mason is properly sinister as the leader of the spy ring, as are Martin Landau, Adam Williams, Robert Ellenstein, and Josephine Hutchinson, as members of his malevolent troupe. And Leo G. Carroll is satisfyingly bland and calm as the studious intelligence chief.
Perhaps they and Messrs. Hitchcock and Lehman are kidding, after all. Their climax is a bit overdrawn and there are a few vague spots along the way. But they do lead us on the year's most scenic, intriguing, and merriest chase.
A. H. Weiler, NY Times, August 7, 1959
3 de outubro de 2009
Quero ver isto
Este é o segundo trailer do novo filme de Martin Scorsese intitulado "Shutter Island" e tal como o primeiro mostra um tipo de filme que Scorsese nunca explorou (talvez o mais próximo disto seja "Cape Fear"). Tenho muita curiosidade e pelos trailers fico ainda mais ansioso para ver e optimista quanto à qualidade deste "Shutter Island". A ver vamos...
2 de outubro de 2009
Os Meus Posters de Cinema XIII
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb de Stanley Kubrick
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Porque o cinema sempre me acompanhará para onde quer que vá. Até qualquer dia companheiros.
