On DVD: The Ambassador (MGM Limited Edition Collection)

The Ambassador is a lot of ridiculous fun with a bizarre combination of elements, including a very 1980s thriller milieu involving middle eastern political strife and terrorism, a 1930s pulp adventure plot, and two major stars of yesteryear - Robert Mitchum and Rock Hudson (his last film) - being directed by the capable and prolific J. Lee Thompson. Throw in good supporting performances by Oscar-winner Ellen Burstyn and former Blofeld Donald Pleasance, and you have an entertaining (and somewhat campy) action picture that's hiding a few interesting surprises.

The film opens with United States ambassador to Isreal Peter Hacker (Mitchum) and his security aide Frank Stevenson (Hudson) traveling out into the Judean desert to secretly meet with representatives of the PLO. The meeting is broken up when the group is attacked simultaneously by the Israeli secret service and members of a radical PLO splinter group; each of these groups first attacks the rendezvous and then each other. It's a chaotic batshit sequence that confuses the participants amid decent aerial camerawork and rapid-fire gunplay.

Meanwhile, Hacker's wife Alex (Burstyn) is involved in an affair with an antiquities merchant who turns out to have ties to the PLO. The same splinter group that attacked Hacker's desert meet with the PLO is tracking Alex's movements and films her illicit trysts, using the footage to blackmail Hacker into desisting from his attempts at diplomacy among the various interested parties. (I would be remiss if I did not at least mention the, uh, two surprises that Burstyn - aged 52 at the time of the film's production - provides in these early scenes.)

As far as the story goes, it's a pulpy mess of cliches and easy action-film tropes. But the cast keeps things interesting, especially the odd dynamic between Mitchum and Burstyn's characters. These middle-aged globe-trotting bureaucrats don't have much of a marriage, and when Burstyn's affair is revealed, Mitchum's response is more empathetic than angry. The situation ends up bringing them closer together. I don't know how realistic this scenario is, but the actors bring it off well, sharing a world-weary closeness that grows interestingly as the film goes on.

Other aspects of the film are muddled at best - particularly the conclusion, which features gathering of students from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who have convened at Hacker's behest to talk peacefully about a way forward. They wind up being massacred by the machine guns of the PLO splinter group in a violent sequence that eerily prefigures (at least in some respects) the 1987 Mecca massacre. It's a bloody scene that, like much of the film in general, doesn't accomplish much dramatically while maintaining the highest standard of sensationalism. Still, The Ambassador is weird, choppy fun that is maintained by a cast of legendary Hollywood stars. 

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On DVD: The Boy Friend (Warner Archive Collection)

The Boy Friend is equal parts throwback and time capsule - an homage to the great Warner Brothers musicals of the 1930s choreographed by the legendary Busby Berkeley, and a record of an era in filmmaking (1971 to be precise) that fostered experimentation beyond the traditions of the Golden Age studio system - even at major studios such as Warner Brothers, which financed and distributed Ken Russell's adaptation of Sandy Wilson's smash Broadway musical. 

Twiggy, fashion icon of the 1960s, stars as Polly, the assistant stage manager at a second-rate theater in an English seaside town. The troupe is in the midst of its run of "The Boy Friend," except that it is short its leading lady, who has recently been injured. So, Polly is thrown in as a last-minute replacement by the troupe's ambitious director (Max Adrian), out to impress the visiting Hollywood director De Thrill. The performance goes on, with Polly gamely struggling to keep up and ultimately stealing the show by virtue of sheer unpracticed charm. Her convincing performance is aided immeasurably by her real crush on the male lead, Tony (Christopher Gable), whose level of reciprocation appears to be ambivalent throughout. 

Russell's conception of the whole is as a play-within-a-movie, an old-fashioned Hollywood musical with fantasy-like dance numbers that extend well beyond the world of the film's setting. In sequences that rhapsodically depart from the creaky stage of the troupe's run-down theater, dancers perform as dice, as the characters on playing cards, as mushroom-dwelling forest gnomes, as Classical libertines, and as bits of kaleidoscopic glass that move upon gigantic revolving turntables. These numbers are made whole thanks to show-stopping music (Wilson's score was ably adapted and supplemented by Peter Maxwell Davies) and infectious, energetic choreography and dancing. The Boy Friend is easily the best Busby Berkeley musical that Berkeley never made.

Taking their cue from silent cinema as well as Hollywood musicals of yore, the cast hams it up appropriately. Gable is toothy and a touch too pretty as Tony. Adrian is anxious and greasy as the director Max. Glenda Jackson appears in a wonderfully modulated cameo as the injured leading lady, letting Polly know she'll never measure up, only to follow that with restrained encouragement. Tommy Tune has a featured role as a predictably dance-savvy cast member. As Polly, Twiggy embodies some of the same qualities that made her so influential in fashion - quiet humility, innocence, and easy, effortless charm - something like a female Oliver Twist. 

Russell is known as an excessive director, and although The Boy Friend is never excessive in its content, it is rather long. I suspect a judicious editor could easily shed 20 or more of the movie's 138 minutes and not harm the film's narrative flow or spectacular dance sequences. Still, that is the only real caveat I can think of. The Boy Friend is old-fashioned filmmaking that captures a classic feel while pushing the cinematic form of the musical forward in ways that still look clever forty years later. 

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News: New Work for the LA Weekly

I've picked up a gig covering books and comedy for the LA Weekly's arts and culture blog, Style Council. My first piece has just been posted. It's an interview with Harold Goldberg, author of a new book called All Your Base Are Belong to Us. It's an engaging cultural history of video games. I have a few other pieces forthcoming, and I hope many more to come. Watch this space for future posts.

In addition, I have some stuff forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books and (fingers crossed) another publication, but that one's too premature to name at the moment. This freelancing thing is finally starting to work...

In Theaters: The Tree of Life

I'm still processing The Tree of Life - still turning over its many ingredients, layers, and moments. The fact that it's been two weeks since the screening and my brain is still stewing means that the film is special and unusual. Yet I don't think I wholly enjoyed Terrence Malick's Palm d'Or-winning sixth feature.

The Tree of Life is everything and nothing - a moving masterpiece and a magisterial mess, gloppy with pretension yet riddled with some of the most jarring and memorable imagery ever committed to film. Good performances and bad dialogue live side by side in Terrence Malick's sixth and most maddening film, as do profound beauty and incoherent editorial choices. The crux of the movie's soulful confusion is that it is both a visionary cosmic statement and an apologia for suburban averageness. The overarching concept here - that religious meaning and spiritual enlightenment can be found on the most unlikely and unexpected city block - is not new, nor is it alien to depiction on film. But the details are divided into two prongs - one that is dramatic and specific, and another that is abstract and impressionistic. In the case of The Tree of Life, this bifurcation is hampered by excessive cutting and, ultimately, a glut of imagery that, despite its high quality, results in a sense of visual over-stimulation and a muddying of the film's thematic waters. Malick's ambition is rare and impressive. But his editorial eye continues to suffer from benign but distracting spasms.

The Tree of Life is a mosaic. Its non-linear narrative is spiked with sequences that somewhat abstractly depict the formation of the solar system and the beginnings of life on earth. The narrative portion of the film (which accounts for the majority of its screen time) concerns the lives of a five-person nuclear family, the O'Briens, who live in the suburbs of west Texas. The close-knit family consists of Mom (Jessica Chastain), Dad (Brad Pitt), and three young boys. The oldest, Jack (Hunter McCracken), is the key figure in the film. A troubled boy, Jack is torn by his love of his parents - the unconditional kind for his mother, and a conflicted love/hate for his domineering but affectionate father.

Pitt's performance is outstanding. His role is wide-ranging and emotional, and the actor brings an authentic sense of character and period to the part. It is a performance of incredible depth and breadth, truly one of the best from any leading Hollywood star in some time. As Mom, Chastain is the object of her son's love and worship - and at the same time a second-class citizen in terms of her dynamic with Pitt's character. Put-upon, and occasionally abused by her husband, Chastain is physically vulnerable and morally inviolate. Pitt's character is very much the opposite - a pillar of physical strength with an occasionally expedient attitude toward morality.

Malick indulges in two of his favorite cinematic devices: a reliance on vague, lyrical voice-over to solidify the film's themes, and a preference for classical music on the soundtrack. Malick's other films, I think, benefit from these devices, whereas The Tree of Life does not. The film's striking imagery and subtle themes don't require the storytelling crutch of narration to sustain them. In fact, the voice-over is distracting rather than additive. On the subject of music, Malick has a well-known knack for nimbly inserting classical pieces in his films that help create an immediate mood and connection to the story: Days of Heaven uses Saint-Saëns' "Aquarium" from The Carnival of the Animals to beautiful and creepy effect, and the opening of The New World features the "Vorspiel" from Wagner's Das Rheingold as the spine-tingling sound of the first meeting between the English and Native Americans. The Tree of Life, on the other hand, feels as if it is cut to the musical selections. At times, there is a feeling that Malick is more interested in creating mini-films around the music than in making a cohesive larger work.

I say that because, in the end, The Tree of Life is not cohesive. It not feel complete. It feels like it is missing pieces here and there, and it feels redundant in other areas. We spend too long milling around in outer space and in the oceans of the early Earth. We spend too long in the O'Brien household, watching the same sets of family dynamics play out over and over again. That Terrence Malick has made a messy film is not a surprise or a disappointment, for Malick's last three films plainly flirt with disaster - they are chunky, disordered, and unpredictable. But The Tree of Life misses the mark because Malick does not seem to have gone far enough in terms of the film's conception: the cosmic inferno and the scenes of early animal life are memorable, but those sequences do not sufficiently interact with the common travails of a single and seemingly isolated family in 1950s west Texas, despite the fact that I enjoyed watching most of what was on the screen - especially the dinosaurs.

On DVD: Deep Red

Deep Red might the most beautifully shot horror film ever made. The whole movie floats amid an array of rich color, sweeping camera movements, and lovingly designed sets that recall scenes from the devil's version of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Deep Red is hardly the only film by Dario Argento to share these qualities, but it might be the most confident and seamlessly executed. For all his visual gifts, Argento's films often suffer from uncomfortable editorial quirks and overly-jarring musical stings - things that take us out of an otherwise hermetic environment that only a visual perfectionist could have created. But Deep Red captivates from frame one, and I was never jostled out of the film's world by technical imperfections. The mood is consistently engaging, and although as a horror film it's not a terribly horrifying one, Argento's standard obsessions - innocent heroes, faceless sources of terror, washes of light, and, of course, flesh being stabbed and slashed by sharp things - are on full display.

A woman who claims to have extrasensory abilities is murdered in her apartment in Rome, while her neighbor, pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), witnesses the attack from the street below. He proceeds to investigate the murder with the help of his gay friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia) and a reporter named Gianna (Daria Nicolodi). Clues pile up - a creepy children's song, a missing painting from the dead psychic's apartment - leading Marcus to an old mansion that holds the key to the killer's identity and motive.

Hemmings is a brilliant casting choice. The heartless photographer turned tenacious detective from Blow-Up is re-cast here as an over-his-head musician with no aptitude for the supernatural - or for the rigors of a dangerous investigation, for that matter. Hemmings has the blank-faced intensity of the single-minded and, although he was famously accused by the Monty Python gang of being "a block of wood," his performance here is appropriately unflashy. But Marcus is driven - obsessed, even, by some of the same ideas with which Argento himself is preoccupied.

A telling - and very funny - scene in which Marcus angrily challenges Gianna to an arm-wrestling match tweaks the nose of the very English interest in following sets of pre-established rules at the same time that it reveals something about Argento's view of women and perhaps something about his proclivity for stories with female protagonists. Another regular Argento theme that runs through Deep Red is the notion of children and adolescents who witness something horrific at an impressionable age and the damage that it does to them over time - an idea present in Suspiria and others, but which relates directly to Deep Red's climax.

Argento's penchant for irregular pacing is not as evident in Deep Red, with the story unfolding at a relatively consistent rate, with set pieces spaced evenly - and, importantly, with enough exposition in between so that the plot feels cohesive. That is to say, Deep Red is more conventional in form than some of Argento's other films - for better or worse, it lacks that dream-state sensation that Argento excels at. The movie is generally rooted to its story. We never feel like we are floating away from it into a netherrealm only to learn that the story really never mattered in the first place. As such, Deep Red might make a good introduction to those who are new to the director's work. 

Whatever one's assessment of the plot, which by itself is not particularly unique, Deep Red succeeds because of its visual accomplishments. Argento creates an alternate Rome where everyone speaks English - well, it's not Rome at all, really, but a bizarre Anglo-pean hybrid movieworld where things work as they do because Argento wants them to. But we see beyond the contrivances because Argento's vision is so unique and his imagery so memorable and convincing.

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