THE HOUR OF THE WOLF

THE HOUR OF THE WOLF
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Starring Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, and them.
Year: 1968

Bumper: Ryan Wilson




 For those of us whose idea of the horror, as Colonel Kurtz calls it, falls somewhere between “The Shining” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” I’d like to raise an outstretched arm and point a bony finger in the direction of Bergman’s “The Hour of the Wolf.”


An artist friend of mine—well, his predilections have grown so dark lately that I felt I had to dust this one off just to be able to talk to him about anything other than our respective, absurd jobs. In the way of darkness, there really isn’t much floating around in the ocean beyond “The Hour of the Wolf.” It’s a sort of end, really. A bath of fear. Instead of a towel to dry off with, you get a shower of broken glass. It’s an awful lot like being eaten, in courses, internally, beautifully, in black and white, and in Swedish (Sweden, it turns out, can be a hard place to leave).


“Some years ago the painter, Johan Borg, vanished without a trace from his home on the Frisian island of Baltrum. His wife Alma later gave me Johan’s diary, which she had found among his papers. This diary, together with what Alma herself told me, is the basis of this film.”


This chilling, no-nonsense message is delivered in titles by the pen of Bergman himself, of course. Behind the titles we hear a film crew setting up, laughing, hammering, scooting things around. This little meta-touch has a calming effect: a film crew is there. So nothing can really happen, I mean, they’re filming, so everything is okay, they’re just faking and funning… and though you know it’s a fiction, that fact doesn’t serve you when the awful, true, horrible details begin popping onto the screen, mercilessly slow.


Feeling anxious lately? Try enjoying an early scene in which everyone’s favorite good time Charlie, Max Von Sydow (wearing Johan Borg like a glove), subjects his wife to an entire sixty seconds hunched over his watch, eyeing the tiny hand tick by in mad agony. Great fucking cinema. Dynamite way to help yourself or a loved one throw up.


Now, I happen to be drowning in my job at the moment (in fact I was screamed at on the phone today for 51 minutes straight!), always a nice reminder how casually wonderful it feels not to be drowning far more often. I happen to be going a bit insane too, cagey like, but watching Wolf doesn’t serve the same reassuring purpose; that is, to poke you in the ribs and say, hey, at least you’re not losing it like this poor fella. It feels more like an admonition from beyond—should you choose the wrong fork in the road, you will be digested by cannibals, and this is what it will look like.


Bergman sketches Johan and his wife Alma (Liv Ullmann silently tears the part a new asshole) in such a way as to make sure everyone with creative leanings can see himself or herself in their love, the pushing and pulling, from warmth to creation to ego to self-loathing to detached horror, and back through each, repeated ad nauseam. And so, of course, while watching, I envision myself and Sarah, standing atop a hill on a blustery day, looking off to sea, an anguished yet stoic look on my face, Sarah forlorn and sleepless. I’ve been a terrible asshole, but worse, I’ve lost my grip on the point of it all, and I’m sliding, sliding, sliding away… to them, for good, disappeared.


I won’t talk of them, because any description of them kills it. The horror shouldn’t be sullied with description, but rather experienced in the shiny, fresh present moment. All you should really know going into this one is that the hour of the wolf is…. is… is… the hour before the dawn, the hour of the most deaths and births. No tricks, just darkness, no escape, real gone.

THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX

Drawing by John Maurer.

THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, William DeFoe, Michael Gambon, Jarvis Cocker, Helen McCrory
Year: 2009

Bumper: John Maurer

“No. Don’t talk!”

This my 2.61-year-old exclaimed to me with fanned hands outraised to help illustrate the point. The point being, simply, that I should shut up and stop tarnishing the piece of beauty we were co-witnessing. My talk was cheap; and sacrilegious; in such a context; obviously. Let the movie speak for itself, my intrepid young son was exasperating—whether he could read the textual cues or not was beside the point. Equal to this scenario, do you bring a dance aficionado to the ballet to help label each new step and twirl for you? No—you soak in the pirouette and arabesque penchée anonymously, and it does nothing to diminish their sublime appeal.

And now that I mention it, Fantastic Mr. Fox flashes across the screen as nimble and lithe as a prima ballerina… or, well, a fox. The edges might be a little rough—slightly crude, sort of choppy stop-motion puppet animation—but intentionally so. Lends a healthy dose of grit and spit to the film’s hilariously deadpan and yet dapper dialogue. Like those M&M’s and chocolate chips you sometimes find cavorting in an otherwise au naturel trail mix at Trader Joe’s. Ingredients you would expect in any Wes Anderson opus, of whose collection I would honor this one with the dub of “magnum.”

At this point, I will interject that my son obliged us to watch the first half twice before allowing the film to mosey onwards. It’s so unlike his usual fair—the charming yet predictable Disney Pixar flick—that this animation had him scratching his head at first and longing to savor its many quips and quirks. Maybe that’s not exactly what was going through Dezi’s toddler-mind, but him not being thick in vocab yet, that’s my take on it. As proof, he did ask at several points, “What’s going on, Daddy??” It’s a little hard to get across that two well-dressed foxes and a scatter-brained opossum are attempting to steal fine cider from the cellar of the local (human) farmer, a crass and wealthy marksman, but I say as much and Dezi nods in understanding (it seems) and returns his unblinking, laser gaze on the ensuing scene. As do I.

This was a boys’ night home alone, Mommy having departed earlier in the day for a business sojourn depositing her halfway around the planet. We were sad and lonely and the box of Hot Wheels I had bought him earlier had already lost its charm. After having spent the last three hours picking through sticks and rocks and other 2-year-old curios around our apartment complex while Daddy covered all the bases to prevent unexpected mishaps from the world’s numerous threats to those of short stature and spurious attention—oncoming cars, freakishly high curbs, hills with steep slopes, and sharp winds that might blow his ball away—it was a much invited change in pace to relax with a local microbrew (Dad) and Horizon organic chocolate milk (Dez) in front of the latest Netflix arrival, who’s timing could not have been staged more appropriately. I merrily unperforate its contents and slip it into our 9”-screen travel-DVD player set atop a child’s play-table and position ourselves on the couch. (We normally watch flix on our laptop, but that’s presently airborne along with my wife.)

Dezi was immediately enamored in a world of clothed animals and a jaunty soundtrack. I, hanging on to their every expression and spoken word and smiling helplessly along the way, relish zealously in what I knew far in advance was the most absurd and best movie I may ever see.

But wait. Oh yeah. You want some actual details? Not just dribble about me and my son? I get it. OK. Onward, then…

Thesis (or one of them, anyways):

“At the end of the day, we’re all just wild animals.”

Outside the obvious irony that foxes and beavers are wild animals, this message hits plenty home in human circles, too, I think. Another irony being that these animals act more civilized than many of my own neighbors.

It’s an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book. I haven’t read it yet, curiously, but I intend to rectify that omission from my library immediately. I’ve loved all his other stuff, so this decision is an easy one. (On a sidenote, Dahl didn’t just write “children’s” books and I highly recommend reading his more “serious” literature: his Collected Stories being a personal all-time fave.)

Dahl being a bloke himself, the farmers all have British accents in the film. But it’s otherwise obviously set in Americana Tennessee (or vicinity), with plenty of banjo-twang overtones and even a speakeasy scene with a badger in a suit-and-tie playing Prohibition Era Art Tatum at the piano that very much spoke to me (Tatum is a god in my book).

Expect plenty of intentional hodgepodge, sharp wit, intelligent humor, camaraderie, an appreciation for detail, and characters struggling to balance their strengths and weaknesses for the better good of their community/pack. As with other Wes Anderson works, his penchant for glorifying the little things and trivializing mainstream/Hollywood sensibilities is used as a springboard for both underhanded satire and slyly revealing deeper meanings.

There are other details abounding, of course, and rather than filofax (filo-fox?) them here, I heartily invite you to discover them for yourself. Suffice it to say, despite what it may seem on the surface (an animated kid’s flick), this foxhole is sophisticated as Guggenheim’s interior; or even the abstract architecture of… who’s that guy again?—oh yeah: Frank Gehry (sidenote: also queue-bump Sketches of Frank Gehry).

So, for those of you with little rugrats of your own, did it hold Dezi’s attention through to the end? As many questions require, the answer is yes-and-no. There was a spell about ½ to ¾ of the way through where admittedly his attention was diverted to scribbling in my notepad with pens in a variety of colors that I fetched (at his vociferous becking) from various nooks and crannies of our rapidly encroaching bachelor-pad-squalor. The very notepad I wrote this review in along the way, actually. He had so many curly-Q’s and scribbles on each page, I could barely make out many parts of it later on. He did come back to it, though. And when the credits rolled, he summarily blurted, “Yey!” And coming from a critic of his age, I’d say that’s pretty tall praise. He then managed to knock over the table and spill the few sips left of my beer in his mania to exit the couch, but so you have it: we’re just wild animals, afterall. And (to borrow the film’s favorite word) cuss the rest of it!

DON'T LOOK NOW

DON'T LOOK NOW
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, and Donald Sutherland’s hair
Year: 1973

Bumper: Ryan Wilson

Let it be known to all tender, open hearted souls that the willful act of watching Don’t Look Now could maim your consciousness, cause incontinence, destroy already tenuous familial relations. Basically, it could fuck your shit up bad, real bad, for at least a few hours. More likely days. And, in the rare case, I’m sure, for life. It’s that good, on multiple levels, and so is deserving of the lead-off spot in this, the first ever Queue Bump.

I’m a Sutherland guy, always have been, always will be. His expressive face, his hesitations, the moments he averts his eyes, as if suddenly overtaken by the absurdity and wellspring of emotion in this temporal existence. He makes me feel good about basic human acts and parts: listening, thinking, debauchery, tomfoolery, raillery, my shoulders, my hair. The first time I heard the Hawkeye whistle, learning that by God there was something before and beyond Alan Alda, I was hooked. I may have, in those murky moments before drifting off to sleep, attempted to convince myself that he was my biological father, even if Mom was brazenly infatuated with his partner in crime, Trapper John. But I swear to Christ and whoever else should be addressed in this forum that I knew nothing about this film before settling down on our broken futon, already in the midst of the usual emotional turmoil.

Every obsessed keeper of a Netflix queue has a system, obviously. When I’m feeling like no one in this cold goddamn world gives a shit, I pack the top ten with dramas, high on emotional content and gripping performances, usually foreign (not out of preference but necessity). When Sarah grabbed the mail, and I was reminded I had a date with Sutherland and Christie, I gave a little internal 3 note whistle, hoping for the best, but expecting nothing beyond an intriguing premise and fine acting. From the first shot, you know damn well you’re not watching a strictly commercial thriller. This mother’s serious, and it’s going straight for your fucking mind. Beyond dissonance. It’s a scalpel sans anesthetic. Okay, I’m not giving anything away to say it: dead kid. With Sarah 13 months pregnant, the jacket description was more than enough to chase her from the game.


“…death of their daughter… nope.”

“But I bet the way they handle—”

“No fucking way.”

“But Suther—”

“Uh-uh.”

“Okay, darlin’. Okay.”

Watching Sutherland and Christie speak to each other, just the old married banalities in the opening scene, goes beyond fly on the wall. It’s easy to convince yourself that these people know each other’s body odor better than their own, which is both jarring and comforting. What else is there to do but wonder what act of negligence is going to do in the little girl, thus depositing upon them the crippling guilt that will consume their love? Ah, but Don’t Look Now is far too shrewd for that worn out meme. She’s simply going to die, and there is simply nothing they can do about it; but, grab onto your woobie when it comes time for Sutherland and Christie to react to the tragedy—whew.

It’s also giving nothing away to briefly discuss the essential psychic element. So it’s a year later and Christie is crushed, trying to soldier on along the Venetian canals with her strong meds and her gorgeous face. In a restaurant bathroom, she meets the blind psychic and she’s healed! Fine, easy enough. But the transformation in her character, the way she plays it, is not just believable, but simultaneously inspiring and horrifying. The movie is chock full of these emotional dualities played to the tits by S and C. The crux, what’s truly great about this gem, can be found in a still early scene in which Christie tells a deeply scarred and skeptical Sutherland that everything is alright, that their daughter is with them and happy. Both actors, bless them, turn their organs inside out to show you each fragment of thought, each molecule of emotion. Sutherland’s concession, at the end of the scene, isn’t a result of the obvious veracity of Christie’s plea, but of her goddamn tidal wave of beauty that comes with the first joy she’s known since their daughter’s death. You see the real change inspired by real love…for the real Christie!

And, as you may or may not have heard, the sex scene… just… I can’t… thanks…

The camera loves and challenges you constantly. The score makes imitators (Eyes Wide Shut) blush—or should. It generously bestows lush silence and the balls to follow through on the myriad arcana of life. I’d be a terrible glutton to ever ask anything more of a motion picture than what Don’t Look Now serves up on a blood soaked platter.

DEAD MAN

DEAD MAN
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, and many big names in small roles
Year: 1995

Bumper: John Maurer

Could there be any more “fitting” film for The Black Boot to review than 1995’s film noir artsy cowboy flick Dead Man (excusing for the moment that our slogan is “writing alive”)? Figurative comparisons aside, the literal abundance of the black-boot-clad alone warrants this BB editor to don his wide-brimmed hat with a tobacco-spit smile. Add to this kudos the central rôle of poet William Blake (or his accidental imposter, anyways) and things begin to feel uncanny, even. Boot-laden literary sorts?? Suffice it to say (and excuse me in advance for doing so) that I watched this one in reverie ‘til the cows came home.

But “Artsy-Western”? Isn’t that an oxymoron, your raised eyebrow suggests. A peculiar affair, to be sure; unlikely bed-fellows, certainly. A genre of one, perhaps. But aren’t we all?—if we’re lucky, that is.

I had just finished reading Gogol’s Dead Souls (a gem of a novel, btw) and the focus on death had me in a morbid mood, I guess. And then I remembered that old friend of mine, Dead Man. So I stoked the fire, sent some smoke signals over to his Netflix ranch, and had him gallup on by for a cold brew or two to catch up on old times. We set some baked beans on the range and let our worn toes warm by the spitting flames. Both of these œuvres, incidentally, share a dry sense of humor (parched, almost) whose color spectrum leans heavily towards the darker hues. They also involve a conflicted hero who travels great distances through vast countryside. Beyond that, however, Gogol’s being set in early 19^th-century Russia, I won’t attempt to torture the comparison any further.

The movie stars none other than Johnny Depp, and yet how many people have even heard of it? Ironically, in answer to that question, Depp spends most of the duration following a character who goes by the nickname of “Nobody”—a self-fulfilling prophesy? Not exactly the box office success of Chocolat or Pirates of the Caribbean, to say the least; but perhaps on the order of a cult classic. To catapult it even higher, Neil Young provides the soundtrack. A pairing that rivals wine and cheese; or, more fitting, and perhaps even yummier: beanies and weenies. Where dialogue is scant—Depp’s character runs more than a little tongue-shy (though not gun-shy, have you)—and the focus turns to scenery (although nothing on the order of the nearly-mute Gus Van Sant-classic Gerry), Young strums a sonic backdrop of urgent solo electric guitar that drives the movie forward, sometimes with a gentle beckoning, sometimes with a whip.

Depp’s character finds himself ushered through scenarios and shoved into scandals like tumbleweed in a dust storm; or like a canoe floating aimlessly out to sea, until the waves literally carry him passively to his death—the title itself gives away the conclusion, so I’m not stealing anything in saying so (similar in that regard to Gabriel García Márquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold). Innocently seeking a job at the outset, and a boring yet respectable clerical position at that, he suddenly finds himself running from the law at no/little fault of his own and falls in with an opium-puffing Native American outcast named Xebeche (“He Who Talks Loud, Saying Nothing”) who swares Depp is the reincarnated, or actual?, English poet William Blake. The two wander across the then-largely-unpopulated American West with a trio of gruff, heartless bounty hunters snapping at their heels—one of them a cannibal—with instructions to return him dead or alive. Along the way, Bill Blake, an accountant from Cleveland painfully mixed up in the wrong place at the wrong time, imbibes the spirt of the bloke-Blake and learns to write poetry “in blood”.

Anyone who considers themselves more an observer than an actual player on the stage of life—a category many of us “aloof” writers and artists stereotypically fall into—this film illustrates how you may still find yourself thrown onto center stage one day, and with a target painted on your face. Many of the more Type “A” folks in the audience (and I encourage you to invite some, for your own cruel amusement) will squirm in their armchair yearning for Blake to take the reigns and wrangle his life from spiraling haphazardly into the grave, in which regard Depp plays a cowboy-Western anti-hero. And they will hate this movie. And miss the point, frankly. Because even the triple “A” among us are not above a good manhandling now and then at the hands of life and death’s merciless brigade. An appreciation for which—though daunting and seemingly pessimistic on the surface, like any inconvenient truth—can temper misplaced pride and inspire compassion.

Turned inside out (right side in?), the “dead man” can be considered a metaphor for the larger fate of the Native Americans themselves, who as an entire race were pursued and helplessly up-rooted by the arrival of the Stupid White Man and his lethal entourage of “guns, germs, and steel” (to borrow a phrase coined and popularized by author Jared Diamond)—the gravity of which is portrayed in somber tones throughout many parts of the movie. It is probably no coincidence, then, that Depp’s character, similarly caught in the quagmire of the wild west and its injustices, is taken in by Native Americans, and that Depp in real life is part Cherokee.

Unlike the typical shoot-’em-up cowboys-versus-Indians film of a bygone era, guns and gangsters are not glorified and there are no super-human heroes or lone rangers to save the day. There are no dramatic drawn-out death scenes where the victim is permitted to speak his final piece before exiting this life in the warm embrace of his loved ones. In contrast, much of that time period was gruesome and miserable, dirty and dishonest, lawless and life-threatening, quiet and conspicuously lacking in Hollywood-style action, despite what playthings we have subsequently molded from its legacy, like Navajo mud dolls. Though seasoned with humor and entertaining to watch, this tragicomic satire is also a sobering dose of reality regarding a key chapter in our history that some of us may still misguidedly pride ourselves on.

Grizzly? Yes, at times. But bear-ably so. And with bear-sized heart to help heal the claw marks. So, by all means, giddy-up and lasso this tumbleweed to the top of your Netflix totem pole with a hearty “yippee-ki-yay”!

SCARECROW

SCARECROW
Director: Jerry Schatzberg
Starring: Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Eileen Brennan’s naked, heaving bosom
Year: 1973

Bumper: Ryan Wilson

Road movies are tricky animals.  Inherent is the ideal that the journey will not only change the characters, but also the audience.  You will move from this place to that.  You will walk away wiser, better traveled, a few more miles on the engine, sure, but they’re good miles.  Highway miles.  You take it with you, drive with it in the backseat, hear the music in your head on the pillow.  The road movie is a big honking responsibility.  The feckless, trite journey can stick in the craw for days.  Rage and hate may bubble up at the filmmakers and actors who’ve subjected you to their visionary pilgrimage. 

Enter Scarecrow.  If the road calls, let vintage Hackman and Pacino be your guides.  To see these two guys together looking so young, before Pacino became a caricature of himself, is worth the bump alone.  But they enter into rarified air on the screen together.  You might find the movie uneven, but I’ll be damned if you can say these two men don’t display a genuine, aorta busting love on screen. 

With a nod to The Idiot, perhaps, Pacino crafts that oft attempted but seldom mastered character that exhibits the wisdom of the Buddha-Christ without the maddening condescension of looking into the camera, pausing, winking, then whispering in your ear, “I’m pretending to be a simpleton but really I am all-knowing and teaching you how to live peacefully with love in your heart every day for the rest of your life so that you may pass on your love and begin a chain of love and healing that will save our species from self destruction.”  Pacino's Francis Lionel is the real deal.  Okay, so maybe the scarecrow allegory is stretched a little thin (you’ll see); but if you just surrender, just a little, you might just need to crack open that travel pack of Kleenex. 

Is there anyone, anyone at all, who looks at a woman the way Gene Hackman does, searching her face like he might find his keys or his lost soul?  You don’t need to answer that.