Using the tools at hand: Off-model casting in Cronenberg's "Shivers"

Almost everything that could be said about Shivers (1975), Canadian sicko-visionary David Cronenberg's pioneering debut feature, had probably been said long before I finally saw it last month at the Museum of the Moving Image's Cronenberg retrospective. So if you don't already know what it is, I'll just note that it's a low-budget, high-gore, deceptively smart science fiction/horror/black comedy set in an ultra-modern Montreal apartment complex infested by a mutant venereal parasite that drives the residents to crazed excesses of sex, rape and murder, and that I prefer its more evocative and specific U.S. release title, They Came from Within. If you want more about the movie as a whole, including the original Yankee trailer, here's a good critical overview at the A.V. Club Toronto.
 

(Image: Photofest & Museum of the Moving Image)



You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.

I have a hazy memory from when I was a very small fry. It was probably from shortly after our house was burglarized while we were on vacation, with no sign of efforts from our dachshund Noodle S. Romanoff III to prevent the dastardly deed. The notion of dogs being used as deterrents to burglars was being discussed with one of my parents. Mom or Dad mentioned the tactic of the burglars' tossing a piece of meat to a guard dog to keep it occupied and feeling friendly. After puzzling for a moment, I proposed, "Well, we could find out where the burglars live and then go to their house and steal all their meat." I don't quite remember what the response was, although I do recall, in my defense, that it occurred to me quite quickly that they could just buy more meat.

I'll give the guy one thing: he does (a lot of) his own stunts, as here...
(image: Paramount Pictures)

Wherein I chew over the idea that it's actually possible for a movie studio to be a century old.

It has been scientifically proven that adding snow to any action scene increases its badassitude, or sweetness level, by a measure of 10-12 mifunes, or 26.4-31.56 eastwoods, as in this example from Seijun Suzuki's 1966 Tokyo Drifter.
(Image: Nikkatsu and Nihon Cine Art)

For several years after moving to New York City in 1996, I attended the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center every fall religiously. I pored over the schedule ahead of time, joined the first wave of blinking, pasty-skinned shut-ins who lined up early in the morning to await the noon opening of the box office for the first day of ticket sales, and cleared my (of course, always bursting) social calendar for a couple of weeks.


That habit has gradually fallen off - the ticket prices have gone up dramatically, and I'm afraid I've grown a tad jaded after fifteen years in a place where I can devour rare and obscure cinema all year long as casually as I flip popcorn into my mouth. This might end up being the first year when I don't see any of the movies in the official main slate (it's even more true than usual that most of them have U.S. distributors already and will be hitting NYC screens in the near future, for less money).


But the sidebar events at the NYFF have only gotten more numerous and ambitious in recent years, and those tend to excite me more than the main slate now. Even my shriveled little soul shimmered and glowed inside my aging body at the prospect of "Velvet Bullets and Steel Kisses," a retrospective series that I would want to check out based on that title alone. Even better, it screens thirty-six movies, spanning the 1920s to this year, from Japan's oldest studio, Nikkatsu, as their 100th anniversary in 2012 approaches. Please notify the Film Society of Lincoln Center I will accept this offering as atonement for the fact that for the first time since I've been going (I think), the main slate includes no East Asian films.


I'm already finding, as usual, that I can't see as many of them as I'd like because of the exigencies of having to conduct a life outside of moviegoing, a circumstance which proves, by the way, that there is no God. But you can watch this space to see how I deal with that sobering yet freeing knowledge over the rest of the series.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..........

(Image: The Van Winkle Project)

...zzzz... hmpf, huh, what?

Oh. Hi.

"Transformers" - More or less what meets the eye.

Whoops, sorry, wrong one!
(Image: DEG and In the Grip of Hysteria)

"That was the worst movie I've ever seen," said my friend as we walked out of Transformers: Dark of the Moon last night. "Why did you want to see that again?"


Uh, it's a little hard to explain. Basically, I wanted to see it for academic reasons. No, seriously, bear with m... shut up.


I've been kinda out of touch with Hollywood blockbuster culture for years, since moving to a city where I can go to the movies all day every day without ever seeing one of the behemoths (though there are always a few each year that attract me). More specifically, I felt it was well past time I saw a Michael Bay movie, and this one looked pretty in the ads. And also it was 104 degrees yesterday and I was tired and gross and I wanted to sit in some air conditioning in the dark and not have to think, or even read subtitles, which I normally have to do when watching my preferred action movies.


Bay has spent the last decade as, on the one hand, the designated whipping boy for critics down on the modern American action film, and on the other hand, as possibly the most commercially successful director working - basically, he is the 21st century avatar of the blockbuster form, the way Spielberg was for the latter 20th century (sorry, James Cameron, you'll have to make more than a movie a decade before you're eligible for the title). In film geek circles, everyone has an opinion on the guy, except me. Yes, basically, it was peer pressure.

Don't you love it when directors turn out to look exactly
how you thought they would?
(Image: The MacGuffinMen)

Verdict? Not as bad as I thought it might be - certainly not the worst movie I've ever seen by a long shot. I enjoyed some of it. With all that I've read about Bay and his big toy commercials, there were few real surprises. I'd expected the migraine-level noisiness and busy-ness of it; the split-second ricocheting of tone among grim portentousness, continent-broad comedy, gauzy sentimentality and rah-rah fist-pumping; the script sodden with "wha? who?" expository dialogue on the series' mythology; the third-rate-comedy-club ethnic stereotyping. So just some random observations on aspects that caught my attention:


-When stuff was blowing up and robots were jumping around and smashing into each other, it was, I'm almost reluctant to say, kind of brilliant, sometimes. The possibilities of state-of-the-art digital effects are pushed to their limits of batty visual extravagance, with often strange and beautiful results (the intricate detail of the robots and all their tiny moving parts is astonishing). I've heard lots of complaints about Bay's typical epileptic-seizure-style shooting and editing, but, as others have observed, the 3D format seems to have tamed that tendency somewhat, as it requires shots to be smoother and held longer in order for the depth of field to register. So here Bay has a nice line in sweeping tracking shots that use the 3D well, and he displays surprising taste in largely avoiding the hurling of objects into viewers' faces (I wouldn't have minded a little more of that, actually). So sometimes Dark of the Moon is actually thrilling, though not nearly as often as the bombastic music tells us it is. It's at its best in an extended sequence wherein a team of human protagonists scrambles around the inside and outside of a slowly collapsing skyscraper pursued by the Bad Robots, especially a gargantuan, burrowing worm-like one that plunges into and out of the building with phallic glee. This is when this type of movie justifies its existence by making my jaw hang and my brain mutter, "I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like that before."


-I was also well-forewarned about the Maxim-photo-shoot treatment of the women in the movie, particularly the puffy-lipped model-turned-actress playing the Shrieking Love Interest. But I was still slightly shocked by the extent of the movie's crude objectification. Practically every woman onscreen looks, dresses and is photographed like she's in a hip-hop music video. The most notable exception is Frances McDormand as a semi-harridan Uniformed Authority Figure. Her face is made-up and lit to look as unflattering as possible - most of her shots seem like calculated insults, to the extent that I wondered if she ever asked Bay what the hell he was doing. Or maybe she knew without asking. I'm guessing Bay is too much of a real man to have a shrink, but if he does, I'd love to get a look at the notes about his relationships with women.


-Which leads indirectly to the question: What the hell are FRANCES MCDORMAND and JOHN MALKOVICH and JOHN TURTURRO doing in this thing? Besides cashing a fat paych... never mind.


-But what the hell is BUZZ ALDRIN doing in this thing?


-On paper, the weirdest aspect of the movie is the flesh-and-blood hero, uberdork Sam Witwicky, played by Shia LaBoeuf (much better cast than he was as a rough-and-tumble greaser in the fourth Indiana Jones). In the eye of Bay's perfect storm of macho attitudes and obsessions is this slight, high-voiced, yammering little dude whose tremulous inadequacy as an action hero is a running joke. It's almost subversive, although I'm not sure Bay is self-aware enough to intend it that way. As long as I'm psychoanalyzing the director from a distance, I'll speculate that Sam is the scared little boy inside him who wants to be surrounded by explosions, cool-ass machines and centerfold models so that he can forget that's what he is. But I'm probably making that up.


-Michael Bay is America's Wong Jing - the Hong Kong director, producer and Emperor of Crass who fills much the same role over there for critics and cineastes.


-I'll see a fourth Transformers movie if Tsui Hark directs it.

Tsui much is never enough.

"Actually, yes... yes, I have produced some of the most
entertaining films ever made. Why do you ask?"
(Image: Hong Kong Movie Database)

Tsui Hark Week continues... although I think this will be my last entry in this series. Or maybe not.

A picture by Tsui Hark is worth 2,000-3,247 words.

You can talk about movies all you want, but sometimes you just have to see them. Some images and clips from work directed and/or produced by the man.

Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983)
(Image: Golden Harvest and Daniel Yun)

The East Is Red (1993)
(Image: Newport Entertainment and David Bordwell)

The Blade (1995)  (Image: Golden Harvest and Cinekulte)

The Blade
(Image: Golden Harvest & Senses of Cinema)

A Chinese Ghost Story: The Animation (1997)
(Image: Golden Harvest and Teleport City)

A Better Tomorrow (1986)
(Image: Cinema City and LoveHKFilm)

A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon (1989)
(Image: Golden Princess and LoveHKFilm)


Peking Opera Blues (1986), my favorite Tsui:



A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), Tsui's best collaboration with director Ching Siu-tung: