Barton Fink is a great film about creativity, or the enemy of creativity, which in this case is Barton Fink's ego. He's basically a writer who had one success with a play about working man's struggles in New York and thinks he's the best writer ever and a revolutionary and a champion of the "common man" as he puts it and the greatest ever. He makes big speeches to thin air about how theatre and movies should be about the "common man," and how the heroes and noblemen who are the subject of the old stories are basically false. He's an awkward, image obsessed man who lives in his own big golden frame. He believes solely in himself as the centre of his world and therefore feels he has the right to discriminate against everyone else. The "common man" to him like to Charles Foster Kane, a similarly egotistical and self-centred character, is a precious gem, a trophy, and yet Barton Fink seems to despise the "common man." He's a misanthrope who treats everyone awkwardly and can't warm up to anyone unless they sing his praises and put him on a pedestal. When he's advised to talk to another writer, he accidentally stumbles across a famous novelist and grovels at his feet, and yet when it turns out said novelist is a raging alcoholic who beats his secretary and has her do all his writing, he jumps at the opportunity to condemn him as the devil and takes pride in considering a flawed man beneath him. He also takes the opportunity to play white knight to his secretary and cosy up to her. Barton Fink is the ultimate fraud. He's a crawling, conniving opportunist with his nose in the air. Which isn't to say he's entirely loathsome, when he's empty and real and reacting to real situations and not full of Barton Fink, great writer in capital letters.
His saviour comes in the form of an overweight insurance salesman who warms up to him right away despite his obvious egomania and offers him a drink. This man, the perfect inspiration for the wrestling picture he's been hired to write, who even knows how to wrestle, is ignored completely when offers the great Fink some stories, and instead Fink ends up writing the worst, self-satisfied crap about his struggle as an artist fighting his demons in the form of a "wrestling" picture. No one cares about his struggle. Everyone shares the same struggle so what people want is to escape from it, and that's what his flamboyant studio boss wants to sell. He doesn't even like wrestling. He never listens to anything but his self absorbed inner chatter so he cannot fathom why anyone would want an escapist film about a great hero who defeats a bad guy. The heroes and noblemen of legend he turns his nose at were in fact no less "common" than anyone else. The big eccentric studio executive who gets up in his face and offends him is no less "common" than the bellboy played by STEVE BUSCEMI. They all want the same thing. Eventually the fat Goodman turns out to be a serial killer, or maybe the devil, who is trapped in hell forever. He helps people, and he helps Fink by murdering the woman he slept with and forcing him to face who he really is and give up his tired, boxed in self image. Eventually he carries his box to the sea and sits with it. A woman passes and he says "you're very beautiful. Are you in pictures," to which she replies "Don't be silly." Finally after being completely destroyed he finds redemption in turning away from his frame, from his corner of the world and finding the ocean. Creativity doesn't belong to anyone. It's not a label you can paste onto yourself as if you're the ultimate creator. To just be is creativity enough, and that's what Fink discovers. He may write a great movie someday, or more plays, but it no longer matters whether Barton Fink specifically does it. No matter what you do, someone has probably done it, no matter what idea you have it's shared, so if you're true to that idea, who cares if you take authorship of it or not. True achievement is life as it is. No longer trying to beat the clock, Fink is free.
It's been too long since I watched this, or any Lynch film. Seeing this again I realise just how different it is from the rest of his work. I mean it still has that distinct visual style, that seductive use of lighting and colour to make his dreamscapes and nightmare corridors that I always found alluring, but it feels more modern than anything else he's done, whereas most of his other work has one foot in the 80s/90s/00s and one foot in the the 50s. I never really connected with Lost Highway emotionally like I did Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and most of his work, so it was never my favourite of his work, but looking at it now, even though it still doesn't really hypnotise, it's still a really entertaining, interesting film and totally unique.
Essentially it's about lust, jealousy, identity and redemption, the tale of a weak-willed, impotent, awkward man named Fred Madison who enters into some nightmare, possibly in his sleep after making weird, whispery, clearly unfulfilling love to his wife Renee, in which he's forced to finally take control, assert himself and make his devil serve him through a series of temptations, confrontations and nasty situations. In the opening he's told by an anonymous voice that "Dick Laurent is dead," and then he received several tapes through his door that show the inside of his house. I think the anonymously video-taped house represents his mistrust and second-guessing paranoia about his wife's fidelity and well, things in general. He knows there's an intruder in his house, but who is it?. One night he looks at his wife and sees a ghoulish face projected onto it. His devil is no longer on his leash and is being projected all around him, until in his nightmare he murders his wife and is imprisoned in a small cell, in which he is driven mad and tortured by his demons until he falls into their hell to confront them as Pete Dayton, an angsty, confused young man who represents both Fred's lost youthful drive and his childish emotional weakness. Pete is a shy, meek young man who works as a car mechanic. He is the go-to man for Dick Laurent, an ultraviolent gangster who hates tailgaters and beats one of them in front of him on Mulholland Drive. This is a demonstration and provocation, and the site of Dick Laurent beating a weaker man pokes at Pete's own inadequacy, prompting him to try and assert his own masculinity by banging his hot wife and his own girlfriend on the side and trying to look tough. His wife (Patricia Arquette, who also plays Renee, Fred's wife, they're all the same person anyway), manipulates him and leads him on into a series of encounters that test and resolve his weaknesses. In one scene he questions her as she covers her face, showing off her green fingernails (colour symbolism everywhere in this film), over her past sexual encounters, her promiscuity and her line of work, which he perceives as a transgression. She doesn't actually do anything except lead him to do increasingly stupid and violent things of his own accord, and when he says "we killed him" after throwing a man headlong into the corner of a glass table in a really funny death scene, she corrects him.
Eventually he comes full circle and morphs back into Fred again, who is confronted by the devil (mystery man) with the camcorder who asks him "who the fuck are you?" forcing him to finally decide who he is and get in his red hot car and own himself. When he does this the devil becomes his servant and kills Dick Laurent for him, allowing him to go home and tell Fred through the speaker that "Dick Laurent is dead," and crucify his demons once and for all in a frenzy of speed and red and blue police lights. Fred Madison is redeemed.
I've this film probably over a hundred time since I was a kid and it never ceases to be funny. I know everything that happens in it and every time I watch it all again it's hilarious. It's one of the best of the particular kind of feel-good comedies of the 80s/early 90s, which were hit-and-miss, sometimes funny, sometimes crass. I love a lot of those films, but looking back at them a lot of it's probably nostalgia because they haven't all aged well, although they're refreshingly un-pc, unclean and freewheeling compared with some of the glossier mainstream films I've seen since since the early noughts. Planes, Trains & Automobiles is my favourite of those films. Steve Martin and John Candy are a great comedy duo and they play great characters, wound up businessman Neal Page and travelling shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith who never zips his mouth and lets all be known, even going so far as to take off his black sock and wave it in front of Neal's face on the plane. They meet up when he Del steals Neal's cab and the flight is delayed. Bad weather leads them to a motel room where hilarious hijinks ensue and their sexual orientation and masculinity is threatened.
One of the things I like most about the film is the photography. Nothing is glossed over, the sun isn't shining and there's no beautiful scenery. It never looks set up or faked, it's set in run down motels and bus stations and diners and small drive through towns and it all looks snowed in, dirty, muddy and grim. It all looks natural. All the extras look like random hillbillies, bums and runaways. It all looks real. It's like The Last Detail in a sense, another great travelling film.
Del and Neal are great characters. Neal is an uptight, intolerant control freak who wants everything to go his way, Del is a carefree man who goes with everything and likes it because as is learned later in the film he doesn't really have anything. Neal lashes out at him and Del can only reply that he likes himself and what you see is what you get. Del seems to get them into dangerous and impossible situations and then gets out of them through sheer luck. In one of the funniest scenes in the film and probably my favourite, they're in a car going down a highway and Del gets his parka caught on the seat lever. He wrestles frantically only to get the other side caught in a lever too, so he ends up steering with his legs until a stop sign forces his foot on the breaks and he goes spinning and stops safely. He then drives on and two people shout at him from their car and tell them they're going the wrong way. They think they're drunk, because how would they know where they're going, but then Neal realises and they end up jammed in between two trucks, before stopping safely, only to have the car blow up because of a cigarette Del threw away earlier. Del Griffith is the ultimate agent of chaos, everything he touches goes wrong. The rightfully frightens Neal, who seems too anxious to touch anything but ends up learning the value of what he really has after losing his credit cards and his self-image.
The film has a happy/sad ending, as it turns out Del is a lost character, but Neal takes him in. The finale is a bit soppy as are all the family scenes, but that's nothing because every scene in the film is one laugh after another. Also, what the hell is in Del's big trunk?
The third film from Neil Breen is as weird as the last two films, better than I Am Here...Now, and mercifully modest, for instead of space jesus Neil Breen is now a bestselling novelist/hacker/magic ghost who survives a hit and run that should have killed him and finds himself suddenly compelled to hack into...government stuff and expose the lies and corruption of government and big business the world over. Cos,' in case you didn't know, Neil Breen is the hero of the film, and he can do no wrong. He leaves hospital looking like the elephant man, has hot bandagey sex with his wife and gets on with his work. Interestingly his character, "Dylan" has some flaws in this film, like getting annoyed at his pill popping work-hating wife who he can no longer find time for because of his important mission. He becomes obsessed, soul-searching and tapping away on his (must be seven now) laptops in his home office. Unsurprisingly he's seeing two psychiatrists, and unsurprisingly one is urging him to take his medication because the other is a magic, psychic ghost. There are more prominent supporting characters in this film, like the troubled, hard-working couple who own a ferrari. The man is perpetually drunk and acts like an asshole, and she hates her job and gets mad at him for being a drunk asshole. The daughter acts out her frustration by swimming nude in Neil Breen's pool and using his bath. Can Breen save his pill-popping wife and his dysfunctional friends in time to save the world from evil politicians and bankers? Truly Breen is a tormented soul.
"I am not an animal! I am a human being!"
What strikes me as interesting is the way the film shows the complicity the average man has in the actions of both those around him and the world at large, and the struggle to do great good while loved ones destroy themselves. Breen is a great magic world-saving angel ghost and yet he has to keep his bitch on a leash and stop the poor family who own a ferrari from being drunk and stupid. Of course being rich doesn't solve problems but I really don't see how she needs to have that horrible job at the bank when they have a ferrari. Of course the drunk sex-deprived husband lords over it all day until his wife shoots him out of boredom. Misery loves company, so until Breen can solve all the problems of the world they meet up a lot and have dinner. I can't stress enough how awkward, hilarious and surreal the social scenes are. The weird thing is, there's a logic to it, the reactions make sense, but they're so weird it's like everyone's high on something. When Breen and his wife call to arrange to meet up with them, they're happy about it, and yet instead of getting on with what they're doing until such time as they meet up, they stand in the kitchen and grin with wide eyes like they're on drugs. Of course the film takes a hard anti-drug stance as does his previous film. Or at least anti big-pharma. Breen fatally quits his strong medication and his wife becomes addicted to it after eating it out of the toilet. I can't believe I just typed that, but I think this shows nicely how the success of one can be the fall of another. Breen finds a new lease in life while his wife becomes more depressed, bored and disillusioned. He must balance his great task with meeting the needs of his wife. In one touching scene he pushes everything aside (literally) and rips her clothes. So Breen cannot be satisfied with being a novelist and must do something big to change the world on a global scale, because he realises that small good deeds are always countered by bad ones so any change must be wide scale. The film is about trying to affect change in hopeless situations.
Eventually Breen gets straight to the source, and in a scene reminiscent of the crucified gangsters and politicians in the desert in I Am Here...Now, he speaks before the press and exposes the lies of corrupt senators and businessmen, and in a hilariously surreal scene they one by one admit to their mistakes before killing themselves in various way. One leaves a car running in a garage, two suddenly shoot themselves and one hangs himself. Just like that, instantly, they all give up before Breen's mighty power and the world is made a better place, but not without sacrifice, for Breen loses his wife and friends to the corruption of the world. It simply has to be seen. It could be metaphorical, showing how greed, cheating and lying is inherently self destructive in any form, but we'll never know. The film is on a par with Double Down for me. Both are masterpieces, grand in scope and vision, and I can't wait for his next film "Pass Thru."
Probably one of the most uplifting films ever made, this surrealist fantasy film from Powell & Pressburger (makers of countless awesome films) is a love story set during World War 2 about a downed RAF pilot who falls in love with his radio operator at what are supposed to be the last moments of his life, but there's an administrative problem in heaven and he's left down below where he meets June and they fall in love. He is visited by a conductor, a creepy French girly man in make up who carries a candy cane. The conductor tries to convince him to go to heaven where he's supposed to be, but he wants to stay with the woman he loves so he makes an appeal and has to go through a judicial process to claim his life back, in which he includes an eccentric psychologist, his crewman Bob and June. They have a battle of wits against some American judge guy from 170 years previously. I love the sets in the film, they make today's CGI vistas look positively dull and crap. Constrictions motivate invention, and the painted backdrops and camera techniques make heaven and Earth look awesome. Heaven is depicted as a roof with holes on it that looks down on Earth, and it's a bureaucratic nightmare of red tape, forms and office blocks. Truly wonderful, why would he want to stay on Earth? Also the airmen who have just died don't seem to feel much awe at the possibility of an afterlife, nor remorse over the pain their loved ones are going to go through, and instead are enthused at the prospect of unlimited free coca-cola. Because they're American. It's just a fun film though and nothing to be taken seriously, one of my favourite classic films.
The next film from modern master Neil Breen is an altogether more ambitious film than his debut Double Down. Whereas in Double Down Breen played an all-purpose lone hacker agent full of torment and questioning, used by shadowy organizations for often dubious purposes, here he plays God. Literally. If he's playing God then he'd better have something substantial to live up to that lofty title.
Neil Breen plays an alien planet/species maker who lands on Earth to check up on his creation to see how it's doing. Not so well it turns out as people are knocking people with cancer in wheelchairs over, killing and torturing, and getting high in car boots on hard drugs in the middle of the desert for some reason. Also, politicians are taking pay-offs from gangsters and stopping progress in solar energy research because they're only in it for the money, as they bluntly explain to each other and us. So...Lord Breenus (he's never given a name as I recall) steps in to intervene and make things right, by temporarily killing two people who are taking drugs and firing off guns and being unconvincingly wild and crazy on the boot of a car, making the eyes of a man who pushes a guy in a wheelchair over bleed until he runs off crying, and crucifying all the corrupt politicians and businessmen in the desert, before making a Klaatu-style speech warning us that if we do not change our ways he will destroy us, hoping that the lessons he's taught to a small number of people in Las Vegas will resonate with the rest of humanity. All powerful alien space gods rely heavily on publicity. Those saved people have a lot of work to do if they're to stop humanity from being wiped out. It crosses my mind that Breenus may have doomed them to extended stays in a mental institution, but I have faith that Breenus knows what he's doing.
I don't know what to think of the film because whereas Double Down was morally grey, this film goes straight for black and white morality. Or at least Breenus does. I'm not sure if it's reaching or not to say that the film is symbolic, that the crucifixion of corrupt, greedy, money-grabbing politicians is a metaphor for the cancellation of excuses and second-guessing, where money is a symbol for directing blame and moral culpability through a proxy in order to keep hands clean and preserve vanity. Certainly the film seems completely sincere in it's declarations, even though the stark, blunt look of it suggests something more symbolic. For instance all the gangsters and corrupt politicians and businessmen in Las Vegas have one single place in which they meet up, and for some reason it's a ruined, broken down old building that looks like it's been bombed. Unsurprisingly one of them turns out to be a snitch because any group of people meeting at that place would seem instantly suspicious. They all address each other as either gangsters or corrupt politicians who are after money. It's so completely blunt and explanatory, so there's no mistaking who the bad guys are. Interestingly there are characters who are not clear cut good or bad, like a couple who have both lost their admirable, decent jobs, sharing a joint on a park bench, with each toke coming closer to the conclusion that they need to go into a life of crime and lie to each other. The film seems to be suggesting that corruption and egoistic self-serving preys on the weakened and desperate like a parasite, which is true. By smoking pot and temporarily clouding their cognitive decision making skills the couple find themselves together again with the gangsters who kill the guy and leave the woman alive out of some unnecessary and unwarranted demand for respect.
In the end Breen's interventions, from curing the wheelchair man of cancer and making him twenty years younger, to resurrecting the drugged couple and telling them to contribute and do good, leave us wondering where we're going wrong and what to do now? I don't love this film like Double Down, instead I feel divided. On one hand, the black and white morality and Lord Breenus' police-state attitude to human progress makes me recall the same ideas of Klaatu in The Day The Earth Stood Still, and if the film is to be taken literally I do not agree. It certainly is an interesting and enjoyable film, more chilled than Double Down, very ambient and ethereal. Next up Fateful Findings.
Without any irony I can safely say that Double Down by Neil Breen is a ground breaking masterpiece, and I don't dish out that word for many films. Apparently it's been making the rounds online amongst the "so-bad-it's-good" movie fans, and that's perfectly understandable because at first glance I fell into that mindset, and there are certainly more than a few hilarious moments owing to the flatness of Neil Breen's central performance and lines like "I can't wait to be your wife." But that's just it, this isn't a film trying to be a great film if you get my meaning, like all great films it doesn't have room for indulgence or fancy. It has themes and ideas and it ties them together tightly, and in this way it reminds me of the work of Terrence Malick, which explores very similar themes and is similar in style and execution. Antonioni's The Passenger also comes to mind.
The film is about a kind of freelance super hacker agent played by Breen himself. In the film's masterful opening he awakens in the desert and introduces himself completely as a sort of omnipotent, reclusive shadow figure, free of all attachments, who has major world governments at the very tips of his fingers, and who cannot be touched due to his amazing foresight which allows him to take great precautions to preserve himself, like planting biological weapons under major cities in order to gain leverage over any potential threats to him. He is the superhuman conduit who commands and cancels oppressive pseudo-control agencies from the inside by his very being, and yet with this power comes a great burden. He is completely alone, although never lonely, beset by the demons of his past, struggling with longing, regret and self-doubt despite his cool exterior and effortless ability. While everyone plots and schemes around him one can't help but feel that he is in control of it, and yet completely out of control, as befits the double-edged sword of power.
The film's brilliant narrative has a dreamlike fragmentation to it, mirroring the shattered identity of the lead character, who continually finds himself waking in the arid desert over and over, each time forced to relive old memories while being called back into civilization by shadowy agents with various menial tasks for him, from assassinations to shutting down Las Vegas to prevent a terrorist attack (menial because as he states he could rig presidential elections or cut off a nation's water supply). Rather than give him authority, it seems this omnipotent power has merely imprisoned him in internal questioning because at that level right and wrong have gone out the window, and there is only possibility and cause and effect, which yet is cancelled out by a higher power, a destructive truth. Rather than benefit him personally, it has instead made him the most easily used. When asked to assassinate a couple in Las Vegas he accidentally drugs the wrong couple with a narcotic strawberry (one of the most surreal images is of him sticking a syringe into a strawberry). Throughout the film there is stock footage of different war zones and military operations as he describes the nature of covert warfare. He is the ultimate soldier, because he is the cause of all the wars in the world and war caused him.
In the first act of the film it goes into his past, into the life he once had with the love of his life he met at age 7, who is assassinated after he proposes to her in a pool. This is his carefree innocence, his emotional life, and when she is shot, this becomes a necessary part of him, a void within him that fuels him and makes him ruthless. In piece of brilliant symbolism he lies with his arms outstretched over her as she bleeds, floating in the pool. She becomes a symbol of death to him, as with her his feminine, emotional side died and he became the lone man we see in the film. In the end he drives away again into the barren, lonely desert from whence he came, just another lone wanderer.
And yes, that is his ballsack on display. This f ilm is beyond shame.
I give this film my highest praise. I don't know where this uncanny Vulcan film director came from but his work has been causing a sensation online, with comparisons to The Room among the so-bad-it's-good crowd, and yet while you could look at it that way from a technical standpoint if you wanted, I feel this film is so much more than that without reaching.
Genius filmmaker and real estate guy. No, what are you really?
