Blindspot: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Directed by Sidney Pollack (1969)

Starring: Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin, Susannah York, Gig Young

I know that we live in a world of Battle Royale and The Hunger Games right now, but I don’t think those dystopias come close to the eerie microcosm of the dance hall in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?  True, kids aren’t being forced to kill one another for entertainment, but there are some weird parallels.

On the California coast in 1932, a dance marathon is held with the grand prize of $1500.  It attracts a disparate group of desperate people, including Gloria (Fonda) who is partnered with Robert (Sarrazin) after he wanders into the dance hall.  The marathon lasts more than forty days with only ten minute breaks every two hours.  As the couples get more desperate, more of them compete for the crowd’s attention by performing talents for pennies.

Where Robert is a wanderer who happens by the coast, Gloria is a cynical woman who has had her dreams crushed by the Hollywood machine.  They make a strange pair, but they get along well on the dance floor.  Other colorful characters include wannabe-starlet Alice (Susannah York), her partner Joel (Robert Fields), an “ancient mariner” Harry (Red Buttons), and a young pregnant woman Ruby (Bonnie Bedelia).  They are urged on by the MC (Young), a man named Rocky who is trying to pack in the crowds every day.

Like The Hunger Games, the participants success winds up depending on how well the crowd likes them as well as how long they can stay on their feet.  Gloria and Robert catch the eye of a woman who can get them a sponsor, which means four dollars a day and clean socks.  That doesn’t seem so important early on in the contest, but when the camera cuts to day 18, it suddenly makes sense why something as small as new socks could mean so much.

The camera movement is really spectacular in a few scenes.  In order to cut down on competing couples, the contest official sets up a “derby” where they have to run around the dance floor.  The woman have a harness that they use to hold onto the men and other than that, it’s just hope you don’t fall down and keep up.  The camera spins around with the contestants, drifting over their desperate faces and the eager looks from the crowd.  In another scene, the camera moves through the exhausted, dancing contestants before backing up to examine the scene from above.  It’s downright eerie to see the party atmosphere of the decorations and the big-band, then contrast that with a scene when Gloria enters the dance hall and sees no one.

The ending might be one of my favorites in cinema, despite how heavily it was foreshadowed by the movie.  Gloria becomes more and more worked up and strained during the contest, but Robert seems almost unnaturally calm in the whole situation.  The ending shows how their relationship works, but also shows how cracked Robert has become.

Blindspot: Blue Velvet

Directed by David Lynch (1986)

Starring: Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern

This also counts as a Weekly Netflix Challenge, hahaha!  Aren’t I lazy clever.

So January’s Blindspot goes to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, since I’ve recently become interested in Lynch’s work.  Blue Velvet always seemed kind of notorious to me, although I can’t place why.  Not a lot of my friends have seen it before, so it’s not like I heard much word of mouth about it.  It is one of the few movies I can name off-hand that was filmed entirely in North Carolina, an important factoid for my home state.

Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan) goes home to Lumberton after his father has an accident in order to look after the hardware store.  While wandering through an open field, he finds an ear and reports it to the police, but finds himself drawn to the mystery.  It leads him to the seedy underbelly of his town, especially to singer Dorothy Vallens (Rossellini) and villainous Frank Booth (Hopper).

I like Lynch’s aesthetic a lot.  There’s a fantastic nightmare sequence in the middle of the film when Jeffrey realizes how far into the rabbit hole he’s gone.  It features many of the same tropes that appear in Twin Peaks.  The pacing is actually pretty slow, which helps build tension.  Every instance of violence feels like a shock to the system.  Frank Booth’s proclivities involve ritualistically huffing gas before assaulting Dorothy, but its equally connected to other instances – when he runs after Jeffrey in the climax, for example.

I kept thinking the ear was just a MacGuffin.  Its practically missing from the majority of the film, even though the plot is ostensibly about it.  It’s all so weird, as if in investigating the missing ear, Jeffrey has found himself through the looking glass.  I can’t even figure out if I really like it, beyond that it was really interesting to watch.  If I outlined the plot to its basic components, it’s still a fairly straightforward story, reminiscent of Hitchcock or film noir.

Here’s to the New Year

Hey blog-readers!

Seeing as I’ve been fairly blog-neglectful in 2012, I’ve been thinking about ways to continue this for the New Year.

For starters, I think I will participate in the Blindspot Series again.  While I wasn’t able to write about every movie I saw from my list, I did see a majority of these movies.  So here are my picks for 2013:

Goodfellas

Night Train to Munich

Jules and Jim

Grand Illusion

Soy Cuba

The Blue Angel

Ran

Heat

Dracula (1931)

Blue Velvet

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Five Easy Pieces

I also like having Netflix-oriented goals, so I’m picking the first 26 movies on each of my queues as a one movie per week watch-list.  I wanted to be able to watch movies that had caught my attention when I first found them, but have wound up pushing them further and further down the queue when other things caught my attention.

I’m also taking a leaf out of Ryan‘s book and will try to keep up with every movie I watch in 2013, including re-watches.

And, in general, I’m summarizing my New Year’s Resolutions with being more like this guy:

Blindspot 2012: Nil by Mouth

Written and Directed by Gary Oldman (1997)

Starring: Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke, Charlie Creed-Miles, Laila Morse

Nil by Mouth is, primarily, a difficult movie to watch.  For years I had known that it existed as Gary Oldman’s directorial debut and being a bit of a completionist when it comes to actors I admire filmographies, I knew I was going to watch it.  But I really, really didn’t want to.  It is the realistic depiction of a working class neighborhood in London, with social ills such as drug use, alcoholism, and spousal abuse prominent in the narrative.

The film works best as a series of moments in life for the extended family.  Valerie (Burke) is married to Ray (Winstone) and expecting their second child.  Her brother Billy (Creed-Miles) is living with them, but gets kicked out for stealing Ray’s drugs.  He goes to live with his mother Janet (Morse), who supports his drug habit because she can’t stand his withdrawal.

I never want to watch someone shoot up ever again.  I also never want to watch someone drink Smirnoff vodka or start fights.  Subjects that other directors have handled as romantic are stripped down to the realistic results of addiction and abuse.  Over the course of the film Ray beats Valerie and causes her to lose the baby.  He proceeds to drink and harass her as she moves to her mother’s and a friend’s house to stay away from him.  When she does confront Ray she eloquently gives a speech about their relationship, but it seems like the sentiment won’t last.  They still have a child together and Ray still has legal rights.

Ray himself does not seem like an inhuman figure.  He tells his friend a story about watching his father in the hospital and their difficult relationship.  Its an important reminder to the audience that even though Ray is a person who does terrible things, he’s still a person.

Its just a really difficult two hours to get through to see that.

Blindspot 2012: Umberto D.

Directed by Vittorio de Sica (1952)

Starring: Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari

This is exactly the kind of movie dog lovers would bawl their eyes at.  And look at that dog!  Adorable.  But Umberto D. is firmly located in a time and place – Rome, post World War II, when there was still rubble to clean away and mandatory retirement has left Umberto Domenico Ferrari in a very tight situation.  The movie opens with a protest for higher pensions, reminiscent of the Occupy movement.  Umberto is a tenant behind on his rent with a callous woman as his landlord.  His only friends are his dog Flike and the maid, Maria, although she’s concerned about her pregnancy.

It’s an Italian Neorealist masterpiece, and it is so sad.  Umberto is crushed by his circumstances, trying desperately to find enough money to pay for his back rent.  It’s a case study of being nickeled-and-dimed by societal pressures: from buying food and rent to paying for a doctor.  Even the landlady rents out rooms for couples, although for her it is to maintain her lifestyle.  She wants to remove Umberto just to make her sitting room larger.

It’s beautiful in its starkness – whether around the streets or in the apartments,  the clean lines juxtapose against the crumbling areas of characters’ lives.

I can’t rank Umberto D. comfortably against the other films of  this movement.  It’s not as relatable as The Bicycle Thieves, but I remember it better than Rome, Open City.  I’m just not at the point that Umberto is in his life.  Even Maria’s problem – getting a soldier to take responsibility for her pregnancy seems pretty distant.  The lynchpin of the movie is the dog.  I was so much more concerned about Flike than any other character in this movie, which means I’m terrible, but damn that dog!  That dog broke my heart.

Blindspot 2012: Primer

Written and Directed by Shane Carruth (2004) Starring: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan

Primer is one of those grapevine movies, one of the few that had a lot of people talking about it after it premiered.  It is also a really smart science fiction film that approaches time travel in one of its more plausible scenarios, although I feel like most of the science went right over my head.  That creating a machine for time travel that the inventors might not even know what they’ve created seem fitting.

Abe (Sullivan) approaches his friend and business partner Aaron (Carruth) one day and explains that the machine they had been working on doesn’t error check.  This conclusion is drawn mostly by fungus, then by the fact that Abe has already built a machine for himself, and it is telling Aaron it exists from the future.

What Primer succeeds best in is building tension in a quiet, suburban manner.  The men aren’t trying to change history when they first travel with the machines, just to win money through the stock market.  Pretty soon, the notion of creating “doubles” and abusing the time streams is brought to an ethical quandary.  Notably, the fact that Abe and Aaron are consciously aware that they are destroying themselves through the machine.  Traveling back in time results in injuries that men discuss, but they slide over the fact that the man who goes into the box doesn’t exist at the end of the day.  Identities are drawn clearly as “doubles” rather than acknowledging the paradox of ending one’s own life to pursue time travel.  It poses an interesting double to a film like Moon where science effects the identity of the man experiencing it.

It’s worth another, more careful watch, if only to follow the engineer chatter that sets up the excellent third act.  I will admit that I had to look up a Wikipedia article for fully understand the time loop the characters create and to clear up some plot quibbles I had.  It doesn’t tie up perfectly, but it’s a movie that takes a popular topic for science fiction and turns it into an obscure dialogue into scientific ethics.