M (1931)

Fritz Lang's M is a great timeless thriller, a great thriller for the atmosphere of dread and paranoia it cultivates, timeless because the sequence of events of the film, the deliberation and the plotting of the police and the gangsters is nothing more than a mask being peeled back as the film unfolds.  As the film unfolds it feels less like a procedural and more like the psyche of the beast unmasking itself methodically, as if the chase after child murderer Becket (Peter Lorre) is nothing more than the humanity itself exposing its' own devil, the problem of evil it struggles with in eternity.  The city is like an organic machine, and Becket merely filling in the ultimate quota.  He is pure evil, and yet innocent in that purity.  He commits the most appalling crime of all, the murder of innocents, and yet he is a symbol for society's own corruption, the way the machine systematically murders its' own innocence from within.  Because Becket is absolutely responsible, he is also absolutely absolved, because his crime is beyond reason, it is insanity, good and evil wrestling but joined in symbiosis, the ultimate monster none of us can bear.  Trapped by the criminals who want him perished so they can continue their vices without restriction by police and civilian paranoia, he finds himself charged guilty by the guilty, by those that greedily profit from the weak, those criminals of 10 000 reasons who cannot deal with the devil directly.  Becket must do that for their sake, god forbid they face the ultimate truth.

The film is a tense, taut, brilliant thriller.  The opening scene of the murder of little Ellsie is done with subtlety, shown only as a mother crying out for her daughter and the balloon Becket gave her caught in power lines.  It's a powerful image to kick off the meticulous frenzy as the gangsters plot to remove themselves from the murders so as to continue business unhindered by the police raids.  From there the tension only builds, until Becket is cornered in safe house by the gangsters.  He is their ultimate treasure, that which has been locked up and hidden, that which they want killed so they can finally be free.  But he cannot be killed, even by his own hand, such is his madness.  The final scene with the criminal courtroom is incredible and must be seen, and Lorre's performance as the tortured soul is devastating.  The film goes beyond merely pitying Becket, rather it simply shows the necessity of evil and the problems that arise when people try to take this into their own hands.  

The Wolf Man (1941)

"Even a man pure of heart, who says his prayers every night, may be bitten by a wolf, when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright."

This film is the ideal horror film for me.  A lot of modern horror goes for shock value, each film trying to out grim the last, and of what I've seen it neither entertains me or scares me.  I like my horror films bright, tongue-in-cheek, clever and fun.  Unfamiliar with golden age Hollywood horror movies, I gave The Wolfman a try having heard nothing but praise, particularly for the powerhouse performance of Lon Chaney Jr, and he is great.  This film has all the werewolf cliches, probably because it invented them, like death by the silver bullet among others.

The film drips with atmosphere, with misty forest scenes shot in beautiful b/w.  The cast is all great, from Chaney to Claude Rains who plays his rational astronomer father and Warren William who plays the psychiatrist.  Lon Chaney Jr. certainly shines as the distressed Larry Talbot, returned from California and beset on all sides by paranoia in the sleepy Welsh town populated by psychic gypsies and countryfolk.  In a scene that reminded me of Body Double, another great light hearted horror/thriller, Larry spies a pretty girl through a powerful telescope and pursues her, teasing her about jewellery in her room that no one could know about unless they were peaking in her window with a powerful telescope.  I guess he picked up some bad habits in America.  It's set in a Welsh town that for some reason is populated almost entirely by Americans and gypsies, and I won't question that any further.  

Quantum Leap - continued

Well season 3 was off to a great start with the two parter "The Leap Home," especially the second part which had Sam in Vietnam trying to save his brother Tom from an ambush.  It fit nicely with the finale to season 2, M.I.A, in which we learn that Al was held by the Vietcong for five years.  The next episode is a blatant anti-drug episode in which Sam has to stop a model from overdosing on amphetamines.  The funniest part of the episode is Sam's line "drugs are no laughing matter" which he says earnestly as he does everything else.  This is in character for straight-laced white boy Sam Beckett, but not for a 60s fashion photographer, as another character even points out.  Apparently no one notices when otherwise very flawed characters suddenly turn into the embodiment of all that is good and noble when Sam takes over.

The whole idea of leaping into different people in time is never explained logically, nor does it have to be, although there are some things that raise eyebrows, like Sam's build-up of urine apparently leaping from person to person through time, as when he finds himself in the body of a kid named "Butchie" (apparently dog names are popular in America) on a road trip and suddenly has to pee while his parents point out that he just did.  This is no accident, the way it's written suggests they actually had time travelling pee in mind.  It's not a great episode which resolves things by having the character who needs help suddenly dangle off a cliff in order to be saved, end of episode.  Sometimes the conclusions are a bit tacked on.  There are many episodes in which Sam leaps into a woman, and it makes sense that he would, but Scott Bakula in drag isn't as funny as they thought, although when he acts serious it is pretty funny.

The episode "The Boogieman" is one of my favourites, not necessarily because it's good.  In fact it's very bad, hilariously so.  He leaps into a horror novelist and tries to solve a mystery in a small town that seems to have a population of five.  Many cheap scares later and Sam finds himself face to face with the devil, in the form of Al, who taunts Sam about his leaping around putting right what he put wrong.  Dean Stockwell is hilarious as "the devil" and has to be seen to be believed.  Before long, in quite possibly the silliest looking scene ever, they grab each other and start spinning around, faster and faster, Al turning into various characters from the episode, and then into a goat.  In one final kick to the face Sam wakes up and it was all a dream.  Then it turns out his assistant is Stephen King.  Seeing as Sam is apparently being leaped around by God, I thought they were actually going to go with the devil thing.  

There are a few other good episodes, like Black on White on Fire, a tense episode about the Watts race riots, and Rebel Without A Clue.  I don't know if I like the more serious episodes or the dumber ones more.

Predator 2 (1990)

I loved this film. It's really, really bad, but easily one of the funniest films I've seen recently. For some strange reason it's set a mere seven years into the future from 1990, 1997, during a heat wave and gang war in LA. The fact that it's in the future doesn't add much to the story, but I guess the cars look a little different. And the guns. Danny Glover is wound up in the most ridiculous way and for no justifiable reason. One minute he climbs out of a gangster's limo in a cloud of smoke and tells them to lay of the ganj as he goes to see a mystic informant, and the next he's rushing around mad and wound up for no reason like a raging paranoiac with a fear of heights and no time to masturbate who curses birds. Bill Paxton is also ridiulous as his short-lived up and coming partner. The funniest scene in the film has him try to get in the hotboxed limo that takes Glover to the informant, before running after it and shouting "f--k!" as it drives off. I don't know, I guess he really wanted to get stoned. 

It's a weird film, and does not make much sense. Danny Glover's character has an intense fear of heights that means the finale of the film is a little longer than usual. I guess it serves to give him a disadvantage to the predator but they don't use it. Instead he climbs out down a ledge and curses about how he doesn't need birds, then finds himself in a spaceship.  The characters are all ridiculous, especially Glover's character, who shouts at everything and runs around talking to himself.  In one scene he rushes after Gary Busey's equally frustrated agent and grabs him by the collar, but while other films would have him approach casually like a bad ass, or meet him in a corridor, this film has him run out of his office and run down stairs, barging past people, despite the fact that Busey is walking slowly away.  It just looks silly and I'm sure it's intentional, because there are many other things that make no sense.  In one scene Paxton and Glover are both wearing suits and trilbies, despite having never worn them before, and they never wear them again.  It's just slightly bewildering, and kudos to the film makers if it was intentional, because it works without being obvious or self conscious.

I don't know, I'll definitely be watching this again, but although unique it's not as good an action film as the first Predator.  

Bend of the River (1953)

I have a thing for westerns.  I think it appeals to my inner child more than any other genre except maybe sci-fi because it's set on the "frontier," or what was the frontier of the American west, which means unexplored terrain, wide open spaces, sun and adventure.  Of course it's not a realistic depiction of the wild west by any means, but there's a cosy innocence to that ideal that is appealing, and a youthfulness and sense of adventure.

This is my favourite of the Anthony Mann westerns so far for a number of reasons.  Like Red River it is about a journey to a new place, in this case a place for a bunch of settlers to call home.  The film opens with the hero, played by James Stewart, and his roguish friend played by Arthur Kennedy defending the settlers from a group of Indians.  They find themselves at Portland, a small harbour town, and then head up river to find a new land beyond the mountains.  So far so corny, but beyond the beautiful cinematography, what I liked about this film is the conflict between the two leads, one of mercenary nature who likes the town life, and James Stewart's character, who's no longer cares for monetary gain and wants to live a quiet life in the new settlement.  This divide is not only between the main characters but between the settlers and the greedy bandits of the local gold mine.  Fate has them discover gold at just the right time so that the two are separated by their motivations, one turns to the evil of materialism and quick gains and the other follows his heart.  In the end of course it's obvious how it turns out, but I liked the idea and the look of the film as much as anything, and it's one of the most entertaining.  

Quantum Leap - continued

MIA has to be one of the best TV episodes I've ever seen, and a great end to season 2.  It's a pretty hard-hitting episode that deals with regret, loss and yearning, as experienced by Al when Sam finds himself in San Diego at the time that Al's wife re-marries while his younger self is rotting in a Vietcong prison camp.  Al, desperate to change his life so that his wife doesn't remarry, violates his own code of conduct and tries to stop Beth Calivicci from marrying a lawyer, lying about Sam's real mission, which is actually to save a Vietnam vet and top detective from being killed in an ambush in which he freezes up due to similarities to an ambush he experienced in Vietnam.  It's a great episode that's not too heavy on nostalgia, although there are hippies and drugs and Marvin Gaye's Heard it Through The Grapevine.  It's an enjoyable episode, but the final scene is the best in the series so far, in which Al, invisible and unable to communicate with his ex sees her one last time, pleading with her.  It's a great episode and Dean Stockwell is great in it.

So far a great series, I hope it continues to be that way, despite warnings of an infamous white rap from Dean Stockwell.  

Quantum Leap - continued

Yeah so I really like this series, and it's a great series, but Sam Beckett might as well be Jesus.  He's so inherently good, so full of virtue, so boyishly innocent and without corruption that it's at times hilarious.  In one episode, the second episode to deal with racism in the the deep south in the 50s might I add, Sam leaps into a lawyer defending a young black woman named Lyla accused of murdering the son of some...wealthy southern gentleman who apparently owns a a whole town.  Without any prior knowledge of who he's leaped into, he pleads not guilty on her behalf, causing an uproar in the racist town.  When he hears the dreaded n-bomb he takes it personally in the funniest way, shuddering, seizing up and lifting his finger and telling Captain Cod to never ever use that word again in his presence.  As if Sam has any reason to take it so personally, unless I'm missing something and Sam spent some of his childhood in the ghetto.  So far Sam's only weakness has been towards his old piano teacher, whom he finds himself drawn to while performing a play in another episode.

The show has plenty of lame moments, and plenty of great moments.  Some episodes are very bland, some are great fun.  So far the highlights have been the ghost episode, in which he leaps into a parapsychologist who has to help a grieving woman find out if her husband is haunting her.  This episode has a few hysterical moments involving Al.  So far my favourite episode is Good Morning, Peoria, which has Sam play a radio DJ fighting to keep rock n roll on the air against the local stuffed shirts who think it's contaminating the youth.  It's helped by the great music and setting.  Another highlight is a pretty daring episode in which he leaps into the body of Jimmy, a young man with down's syndrome who has to be accepted by co-workers at a new job and by his brother's wife.  To himself and Al, Sam (Jimmy) is coherent and understands all that is asked of him, and yet he still makes mistakes anyway and finds himself bullied and berated by his co-workers.  It's as if Jimmy is like Sam, a normal, smart person trapped within a system, and it's a thought-provoking episode.

As I said the show isn't meant to be taken seriously but there are some episodes in which Sam and Al should be causing more harm than good to the timelines of others.  Throwing aside the fact that even getting in somebody's way in the street could drastically alter the lives of random people, one little girl who for some stupid reason, something about being "pure of heart" can see both Al and Sam, and the memory of a strange man impersonating her mother and claiming to be an angel who has come to help them might well confuse her mind with unanswerable questions for a long time for better or worse.  But of course the writers have an excuse, because apparently the only explanation for Sam leaping into specific people and only being able to leap out when he's solved a problem is some kind of higher intelligence; basically god I guess.  I guess it conveniently fills in all the plot holes, not that it matters anyway, since it's not serious and the pseudo-scientific time travel plot basically serves to have Sam and Al leap into various situations and nostalgic times in the 20th century.