Daily Archives: April 27, 2020

Film Review: Angel, Angel, Down We Go (dir by Robert Thom)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh dear Lord.

Listen, I’ve seen some bad movies before.  I’ve seen some annoying films before.  I’ve seen some pretentious movies before.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie as dedicated to being all three of them as 1969’s Angel, Angel, Down We Go appears to be.

Yes, this movie came out in 1969 and it’s one of those late 60s, counter culture films that’s so intent on impressing you by being daring that it doesn’t bother to actually come up with an interesting story or anything like that.  It’s a film that talks a lot but has nothing to say.  It’s a film that’s obviously meant to be very counter cultural and left-wing but it has a streak of such cruel misogyny running through it that it’s nearly impossible to watch certain scenes.

Singer Holly Near stars as Tara Steele, the teenage daughter of two wealthy parents.  Tara’s mother (Jennifer Jones) is a former actress who brags about having starred in over a hundred stag film without ever “faking an orgasm.”  Tara’s father (Charles Aidman) is a former military man who knew Douglas MacArthur and who is gay but closeted.  (The film handles the issue of his sexuality with all of the sensitivity that you would expect from an episode of the 700 Club.)  Tara is insecure because she’s overweight and her family doesn’t show her any love.  The film, it should be said, doesn’t really show her any love either.  Whether its the close-ups of her messily eating with food smeared across her face or the scenes in which other characters casually insult her, the film seems to have little sympathy for her.

Tara meets a rock singer named …. seriously, this is his fucking name …. Bogart Peter Stuyvesant (Jordan Christopher).  With his tight leather pants and his shirtless performances, Bogie (yes, he’s called Bogie) is supposed to be a Jim Morrison-style sex symbol.  Unfortunately, Jordan Christopher doesn’t have enough screen presence to pull off the role.  Bogie pretends to be in love with Tara (“Your breath stinks!” he shouts, “I dig it!”) but it’s just so he can seduce her mother and her father and make off with all of their money.  It’s supposed to have something to do with the hypocrisy of the American establishment or something but …. oh, who cares?

So, this movie is annoying for any number of reasons.  Robert Thom directs as if he was getting paid extra for every time he used a zoom lens or tossed in a jump cut.  Yet, despite all of the camera trickery, the story drags like you wouldn’t believe.  The walls of Jordan’s pad are decorated with a collage of American icons like Humphrey Bogart and Dwight Eisenhower and Thom often pointlessly zooms into the collage whenever he thinks it will help him make his point but since the film doesn’t really seem to have a point, the collage itself gets as boring as Bogie playing a harp.  Yes, Bogie does play a harp.  It goes over forever.

As I watched the film, I found myself growing more and more pissed off.  Every pretentious line of dialogue and arty camera angle just made me angrier and angrier.  Didn’t Jennifer Jones and Holly Near deserve better than this?  Who the Hell decided to cast bland, doughy Jordan Christopher as a sex symbol?  WHY WAS RODDY MCDOWALL IN THIS MOVIE!?  WHY CAST RODDY MCDOWALL AND THEN NOT HAVE HIM DO ANYTHING!?  Why did every scene have to drag on?  Why couldn’t the film just get to the freaking point!?  WHY WERE THEY SKY DIVING!?  WHY DID WE HAVE TO SIT THROUGH FIVE SONGS FROM JORDAN CHRISTOPHER!?  WHY?  WHY?  WHY!?

Anyway, I don’t really recommend this one.

Film Review: Psych-Out (dir by Richard Rush)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

There’s a scene in the 1968 film, Psych-Out, in which a group of hippies are talking to be a liberal-minded minister, asking him if a mysterious figure known as “The Seeker” has even come by his church.  The minister tells them that he has not seen the Seeker, though he has heard of him.  As the hippies politely leave the church, one of them accidentally brushes past a middle-aged woman.  Though the hippie politely apologizes, the woman is still obviously disgusted by his presence in the church.  She asks her companion how the minister can possibly allow people who “dress like that” into the church.

As the woman complains, the camera focuses in on the stained glass window directly over her shadow.  There’s Jesus and the disciples.  They’ve all got beards.  They all have long hair.  They’re all wearing simple clothing …. oh my God, they’re hippies!

That’s actually one of the more subtle moments to be found in Psych-Out, an entertainingly heavy-handed film about hippies and wanderers in California.  Psych-Out was made at the height of the counter culture.  It was filmed on location in the San Francisco neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury, where both the love and the clothes are free and no one is about judging anyone else’s thing.  Into this neighborhood comes Jenny Davis (Susan Strasberg), who has run away from home and who is looking for her brother, Steve (Bruce Dern).  Jenny may have been raised in a conservative household but she’s eager to embrace the counter-culture.  Jenny is also deaf but she can read lips.  She also has the police looking for her but fear not!  The residents of Haight-Ashbury look after one another!  They have to, considering that there are still cops and even a few rednecks hanging out around the neighborhood.

No sooner has Jenny arrived in San Francisco than she falls in with a 30-something hippie named Stoney (Jack Nicholson, with a pony tail).  Stoney is a member of a band, along with Elwood (Max Julien) and Ben (Adam Roarke).  Even though Stoney says that he doesn’t care about material goods, he’s still eager to become a rock star.  Stoney also says that he doesn’t want to get tied down by any commitments.  He wants to do his own thing.  He may sleep with Jenny but that doesn’t mean that either one belongs to the other.  Stoney may say that but he certainly gets jealous when he sees Jenny talking to the local guru, Dave (Dean Stockwell).  Dave calls Stoney for being a phony.  “You may be righteous but you’re not hip,” Dave tells him.   Can Stoney become both righteous and hip before the film ends?  Can Jenny find her brother?  Will the band get signed to a recording contract and will the menacing junkyard rednecks ever see the errors of their fascist ways?

Today, of course, Jack Nicholson is probably the main reason why most people would want to see Psych-Out.  Ironically, for a figure who is so identified with the counter-culture, Jack Nicholson did not make for a very convincing hippie.  A lot of that is because Nicholson’s trademark sarcasm (which is on full display in Psych-Out, as this is a far more typical Nicholson performance than the one that would make him a star a year later in Easy Rider) owed more to the beats than to the hippies.  Nicolson’s persona always had more in common with Jack Kerouac than Abbie Hoffman.  In Psych-Out, he comes across as being too much of a natural skeptic to fit in with the free-spirited hippies all around him.  Nicholson is fun to watch because he’s Jack Nicholson but you never buy him as someone who would really want to live in a commune where no one has any possessions and money is frowned upon.

Dean Stockwell, on the other hand, is a totally believable hippie guru though, to his credit, his still brings some welcome wit to his role.  The script may call for him to recite some fairly shallow platitudes but he does so with just enough of a smile to let use know that not even Dave takes himself that seriously.  As for the rest of the cast, Bruce Dern gets to do his spaced-out routine and Henry Jaglom, who would later become an insufferably self-important director, plays an artist with huge sideburns who tries to chop off his hand while having a bad trip.  Jenny is horrified but everyone tells her not to judge.  Susan Strasberg is sympathetic as Jenny and is convincing as a deaf character.  Unfortunately, the film doesn’t give her much to do other than walk around San Francisco with a dazed expression on her face and stare lovingly up at Jack Nicholson.

Psych-Out‘s greatest value is probably as a time capsule.  It was filmed on location and it features actual hippies.  Watching it is like getting a chance to step into a time machine and go back to San Francisco in 1968.  Of course, judging from this film, San Francisco in 1968 wasn’t that appealing of a place but still, Psych-Out remains an entertainingly silly historical document.  Just a year after the release of Psych-Out, Charles Manson and his followers would come out of the canyons and the Altamont Free Concert would end in murder and the 60s would come to an abrupt end.  Watching Psych-Out, it’s hard to believe all of that was right around the corner.

Film Review: Convoy (dir by Sam Peckinpah)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, it looks like we’ve got ourselves a Convoy!

The 1978 film Convoy opens with the image of a truck passing by some hills that have been covered with snow.  At a certain point, it actually looks like the truck is descending into a sea of white powder.  It’s an appropriate image because, to film lovers and cinematic historians, Convoy will always be associated with cocaine.

Convoy was meant to be a relatively small-scale B-movie, one that was meant to capitalize on the popularity of a novelty song, as well as the recent success of other car chase films.  Instead, it became a notoriously troubled production that went famously overbudget and overschedule as director Sam Peckinpah turned Convoy into a personal statement about modern cowboys and independence.  When the film was finally released, it was the biggest box office hit of Peckinpah’s storied career.  However, because so much money had been spent making the film, it still failed to make a profit and the film is regularly described as being one of the many flops of the late 70s that eventually led to the power in the film industry shifting away from the directors and over to the studio executives.  Many in Hollywood grumbled that it was Peckinpah’s well-known cocaine use that led to him having such trouble with what should have been a simple B-movie.  That’s probably a bit unfair to Peckinpah as it’s been written that just about everyone in Hollywood was using cocaine in 1978.

Add to that …. Convoy‘s not that bad.

Convoy tells the story of Rubber Duck (Kris Kristofferson), a legendary trucker who has never joined the Teamsters.  He’s an independent.  Rubber Duck’s nemesis is Sheriff Dirty Lyle (Ernest Borgnine), who is also an independent.  He’s never joined the policeman’s union.  As Rubber Duck puts it, “There’s not many like us anymore.”

Anyway, for reasons that are only vaguely defined, Rubber Duck leads a convoy of trucks across the southwest while being pursued by the police.  It has something to do with protesting the law enforcement tactics of Dirty Lyle, despite the fact that Rubber Duck appears to kind of like Lyle.  Soon hundreds of other independent truckers are joining Rubber Duck’s convoy, all to protest law enforcement.  Among those in the convoy are Pig Pen (Burt Young), Widow Woman (Madge Sinclair), and Spider Mike (Franklyn Ajaye), who just wants to get home to his pregnant wife.  Traveling with Rubber Duck is Melissa (Ali MacGraw), who is supposed to be some sort of photojournalist.  Rubber Duck and Melissa fall in love but there’s only so much you can do with a love story when it centers around two of the least expressive stars of the 70s.  During the chase, Rubber Duck picks up some non-truckers supporters, including some religious fanatics in a microbus.  He and the truckers also drive through and destroy a lot of buildings, which kind of makes it look like the cops might have had a point.

What sets Convoy apart from other chase films of the 70s is just how seriously it takes itself.  There’s an undercurrent of melancholy that runs through the entire film.  Rubber Duck seems to know that America is changing and as people become more comfortable with the idea of sacrificing their freedoms, his days as an independent trucker are numbered.  Dirty Lyle also seems to be stuck in a permanent existential crisis, taking no joy in being a crook but still forced to do so by being a part of an inherently corrupt government system.  There’s a scene where a truckstop waitress offers herself up as a gift to Rubber Duck on his birthday and Peckinpah films it as if he’s making an Italian neorealist drama about Rome after the war.  When Spider Mike says that he has to get home to his wife, he says it with the pain of a man who knows that the system only cares about control and not happiness.  These aren’t just truckers.  These are men and women who are on the front lines battling a creeping culture of oppression.

Surprisingly enough, the film’s serious tone actually works to its advantage.  You may not fully understand why Rubber Duck is leading that convoy but you hope that it succeeds because you get the feeling that the world might end if it doesn’t.  When the film ends with Ernest Borgnine laughing like a maniac, it comes across less like a moment of amusement and more like an acknowledgment that the universe is a tragic farce.  Life is a riddle wrapped inside an engima and only Rubber Duck and Dirty Lyle seem to understand that fact.

Add to that, this is a film about independents refusing to allow themselves to be limited by the regulatory state.  In its way, it’s one of the most sincerely Libertarian films ever made and, with all of us currently living under “lockdowns” and hoping that our governors don’t join those who have already surrendered their better instincts to their inner tyrant (sorry, Michigan, Kentucky, and New Jersey), Convoy remains an important film.  Go, Rubber Duck, go!

 

Film Review: Frances (dir by Graeme Clifford)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eilqT7dLoBY

Frances Farmer is one of the more tragic figures to come out of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

A talented and beautiful actress, Frances Farmer came out to Hollywood in the 30s and quickly developed a reputation for being difficult.  She was politically outspoken at a time when stars were expected to either be apolitical or unquestioningly patriotic.  She criticized scripts.  She argued with directors and studio heads.  She had a well-publicized affair with communist playwright Clifford Odets and she also had numerous run-ins with the police.  Some say that she was alcoholic.  Some say that she was bipolar.  Some say that she had a mental collapse as the result of the pressure that her mother put on her to succeed.  Frances Farmer ended up in mental institution, where she was subjected to shock therapy.  After she was released, her film career was basically over, though she did end up hosting a local television program.  She died in 1970, reportedly alone and struggling to make ends meet.  In a posthumously published autobiography called Will There Ever Be A Morning?, she wrote that she was beaten, sexually abused, and eventually given a lobotomy while she was institutionalized.  Over the years, there’s been a lot of doubt about whether or not Farmer was actually lobotomized but there is no doubt that Farmer was a woman who was ultimately punished for being ahead of her time.  Frances Farmer refused to conform to the safe manufactured image that Hollywood prepared for her and, for that, she was nearly destroyed.

The 1983 film, Frances, is a biopic of Frances Farmer, starring Jessica Lange as Frances and Kim Stanley as her domineering mother.  It opens with Frances writing a school essay about why she’s an atheist and it ends with her smiling blankly at a television camera, her independent spirit broken by a lobotomy.  In between, we watch as Frances goes to Hollywood and has a self-destructive affair with Clifford Odets (played by Jeffrey DeMunn).  The infamous moment when Frances was dragged out of a courtroom while screaming at the judge is recreated and Frances’s time in the institution is depicted in Hellish detail.

We also learn about Frances’s relationship with a communist writer named Alvin York (Sam Shepard).  It seems like whenever Frances needs to be rescued or just needs someone to talk to, Alvin York pops up.  In fact, you could almost argue that York pops up too often.  Alvin York was a fictional character, one who was apparently created in order for audiences to have someone to relate to.  It’s unfortunate that the film felt that the audience would only be able to relate to Frances if it viewed her life through the eyes of a fictional character because York’s character is a bit of a distraction.  Sam Shepard does a good job of playing him and I certainly wasn’t shocked to learn that Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange were romantically involved during the filming of Frances (and for a long time afterwards) because Lange and Shepard do have a very real chemistry.  However, from a narrative point of view, Alvin York only works as a character if one accepts that he’s a figment of Frances’s imagination.  The film’s insistence that York is an actual person who just happens to show up at every important moment of Frances’s life just doesn’t work.

What does work is Jessica Lange’s performance.  Lange is amazing in the role of Frances, whether she’s playing Frances as a hopeful idealist, an out-of-control rebel, or, tragically, as a glass-eyed zombie who has been reduced to appearing on television and assuring audiences that her rebellious days are over.  Lange was nominated for Best Actress for Frances.  She lost to Meryl Streep for Sophie’s Choice.  I’ve seen Sophie’s Choice and Meryl was good but Jessica was better.

Frances was originally offered to David Lynch.  He turned the film down so he could work on Dune and instead, the film was directed by Graeme Clifford, who takes a far more straight-forward approach to the material than Lynch would have.  Still, Lynch’s interest in Frances Farmer would later lead to him working on stories that centered around a “woman in trouble.”  One of those stories became Twin Peaks.  Another would become Mulholland Drive.

Film Review: Slacker (dir by Richard Linklater)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Wow,” I thought as I recently rewatched Richard Linklater’s first film, Slacker, “Austin hasn’t changed at all!”

That, of course, isn’t true.  Slacker was filmed in 1990 and first released in 1991.  It’s 20 years old and the entire world — including Texas in general and Austin in specific — has changed quite a bit since then.  Slacker is a film about the people of Austin, following one person and then another as they walk down the streets of Austin and, in classic Linklater fashion, have conversations about everything from sex to pop culture to conspiracy theories.  It’s a film that was made before social media and no one carries a phone with them.  The majority of the people the we meet in Slacker would, today, probably be too busy posting 100-tweet threads to actually get outside and walk around the city.  (And, in the age of social distancing, the idea of walking up to a stranger on the street and having a conversation is not only unthinkable to a lot of people but illegal in some places up north.)  Slacker was also made long before SXSW turned Austin in a national hipster hotspot.  There are definitely hipsters in Slacker but they’re all of the Texas variety, as opposed to the Silicon Valley-on-vacation variety.

That said, Slacker does contain an essential truth about Austin that has never changed.  Austin has always been a town that has welcome the eccentrics, nonconformists, and self-styled intellectuals.  As both the capitol of the greatest state in the union and a college town, Austin has a unique style all of its own.  It’s a place where all of the contradictions of Texas — the fierce independence mixed with a strong belief in tradition — meet.  Some people refer to it as being “The People’s Republic of Austin” and the town is considerably more liberal than the rest of the state.  In general, though, Texas liberalism has never been quite as annoying or authoritarian-minded as the rest of America’s liberalism.  There’s a strong Libertarian streak that runs through even the most liberal parts of Texas and it seems somewhat appropriate that Ron Paul makes a cameo appearance of sorts in Slacker:

Slacker is one of those films that’s beloved by film students because it’s very easy to watch it and to think, “Wow, anyone could do that!”  Of course, the truth of the mater is that there is a very definite structure to Slacker.  Despite the way it may occasionally seem, the film is not just a bunch of random footage of people wandering by each other while discussing the Moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, and Madonna’s pap smear.  Instead, each conversation builds on the other until, eventually, Slacker presents a portrait of a community and a generation that has created a culture based on television, movies, and obscure historical references.  Slacker is a film that has been very carefully constructed to appear to be random but there’s a definite structure to it.  The film may look like it was made by someone who just turned on a camera and wandered around for day but Linklater definitely knew what he was doing and I’ve seen enough bad attempts to duplicate Slacker that I can definitely appreciate what Linkler accomplished.

The film, which had a largely nonprofessional cast, is full of interesting and, if you live in Texas, familiar characters.  The bitter hitchhiker, for instance, will be familiar to anyone who has ever had a conversation with an older inhabitant of a college town.  The conspiracy theorist who is writing his own book about the Kennedy assassination can be found in just about every independent bookstore in Texas.  I know people who actually took a class taught by the old man who (foolishly, in my opinion) idolized Leon Czolgosz.  As I said, the film is 20 years old but it captures the essence of Austin so perfectly that it remains timeless.

Slacker was Richard Linklater’s first film.  Appropriately, he’s also the first person to appear in the film and the first one to speak.  (He had a dream while on a bus.)  Linklater has gone on to become one of Texas’s greatest filmmakers.  At a time when cinematic and political conformity is too often celebrated, Linklater remains a unique and authentic voice.

And it all started with a film about Austin, a film called Slacker.

Music Video of the Day: Living In A Ghost Town by The Rolling Stones (2020, directed by Joe Connor)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

This may be the first music video of the COVID-19 era.

This song was recorded about a year ago, for the Rolling Stones’s next album.  That’s a project that the Stones are still working on but, over the past month, Living In A Ghost Town has suddenly become very relevant.  This video was shot around the ghost towns in which we are all currently living.

Just think, all of the new and edgy bands haven’t had anything to say about the coronavirus.  The Rolling Stones had a lot to say and that’s why they’re still the world’s greatest rock and roll band.

Enjoy!