Xiu Xiu & 'Twin Peaks'

I was lucky enough to see Julee Cruise singing around the same time as ‘Twin Peaks’ was first showing… an unforgettable show. As I recall, she wore a white dress that changed colour depending upon the light that shone on her... and of course, they played the 'Twin Peaks' hits. Of course, it’s easy to forget that at the time she was something quite different; I say that because the sound forged by Cruise, Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch at that time has since become a regular approach.

But anyway, here is Xiu Xiu playing music from ‘Twin Peaks’. And I’m a sucker for that screeching guitar.

"Wicked Game": David Lynch's Chris Isaak video

It starts with fire and panning up Chris Isaak's fabulous suit and guitar to his quiff and that gorgeous opening line. One of the most dreamy and achey songs ever, and one of my alltime favourites. That guitar twang encompasses all the lovelorn songs in the world. "Wicked Game" is a song so full of atmosphere and romanticised heartbreak that it just about stops the world in its tracks as soon as that unforgettable opening swoons in.

Lynch's video is a tie in with "Wild at Heart" when he was at his peak on the reputations of "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks". The Lynchian world kicked up many an artist's career and reputation (Jack Nance, Julee Cruise, Dennis Hopper, etc, etc) and Isaak was one of benefit greatly too. Isaak and Lynch proved to be as complimentary and brilliant an association as Lynch and Badalamenti. Just as there was often the hint of absurd melodrama in the Lynch/Badalamenti collaborations, there was always something playful and not too earnest about Isaak - and Lynch - which made the sudden turns to dark seriousness and unironic heartbreak that often cropped up in Isaak's work all the more upsetting ("Funeral in the Rain", for example). "Nobody loves no one," Isaak concludes on "Wicked Game", and despite the overheated noir-ish drama of the song, I always felt unsettled by the directness of that coda. Isaak was always as offbeat and dark as his snappy manner and sharp suits and, as he seemed to be roaming the streets of Orbisonville, U.S.A. (a place out of time), perfectly apt for Lynch's surreal and nightmarish Americana (a place out of its mind).

The BBFC and "Eraserhead"

Question: Is the BBFC a condescending entity?

Exhibit A:
BBFC Eraserhead report - 15th July 1979
Bonus question: Is there any evidence of sexism in the BBFC opinions?*

Report summary:
"Well, it's certainly different and well enough made to merit some consideration. Fortunately the only criterion for this report is category and we all settled for the 'X' chiefly because of the truly obnoxious foetus. 14- and15-year old girls ought to be spared that, indeed all pregnant women should be advised of the film's content."

* Please note I used the term 'opinions' rather than, say 'conclusions' or 'verdict'.

TEN FILM MUSCIAL MOMENTS

ANIMAL FACTORY

~ Steve Buscemi, 2000, USA

"Rapture" ~ Antony

So you’re just settling into this prison drama with some top notch acting, and a terrible backdrop of decay, barely suppressed violence and rape, when suddenly there’s Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, crooning in his otherworldy quaver to a bunch of hardened convicts. Tony Trejo’s reaction is priceless. It’s a wonderful, almost surreal lull in an otherwise realist and straightforward character drama. Later, another band does a straightforward rock number, but it isn’t the same at all. One can only wonder what Anthony did to end up in that hellhole.

*

PARANOID PARK

~ Gus Van Sant, 2007, USA

"I Can Help" ~ Billy Swan

In "Elephant", Gus Van Sant has his teens walk the corridors of school to a underlying, unsettling, slightly industrial ambient bed of noise: the sound of impending nightmares. Here in "Paranoid Park", the tone of the film is dreamy and flowing so that when our troubled skater protagonist is called to the office and he steps out from class to walk the halls in slow motion, that he is accompanied by such a compressed gorgeous organ sound, such a fresh, bright blast of pop such as "I Can Help" is almost like painting the whole somnambulist world yellow and shaking a bottle of lemonade over it. The different tempos between the youth walking (artificially slowed) and the music provide a frission that is hard to put the finger on, but it feels inspired and almost novel as a choice, even if the song title is more a less-than-subtle metaphor for adults trying to reach alienated teenagers.

*

BLUE VELVET & MULHOLLAND DRIVE

~ David Lynch, 1986 & 2001, USA & France/USA

"In Dreams" & "Crying" ~ Roy Orbison

Firstly, I have traced my very first favourite song to be Orbison’s "In Dreams". At junior school age, I inherited my mother’s music collection, and I have always, always loved this song. It still floors me with its longing, it’s rising melodrama and Orbison’s peerless vocal delivery slowly rising out of the untypical arrangement. No chorus here. "It’s too bad it always seems it only happens in my dreams", he sings with a resigned sobriety that roots this operatic sorrow firmly down to earth. In David Lynch’s "Blue Velvet", Dean Stockwell gives a gloriously mannered karaoke performance of Orbison’s timeless classic. Creepy and funny and delicious all at the same time.

Lynch uses another Orbison classic to send "Mulholland Drive" into otherworldly bliss. This time, Rebekah Del Rio steps onto a stage, unaccompanied, to sing "Crying". In Spanish. With a showstopping voice and a little reverb, this acapella version brings time to a standstill and acts like a black hole for all the sadness in the world.

*

WEST BEIRUT / West Beyrouth (À l'abri les enfants)

~ Ziad Doueiri, France/Norway/lebanon/Belgiun

"Rock Your Baby" ~ George MacCrae

The use of "Rock Me Baby" comes so without warning that it is a total tonal shock halfway into "West Beirut". In this war-torn setting, one of our young rascalish protagonists puts needle to vinyl and out comes this blast of Western disco joy. To these characters, it’s a foreign promise of another world and the promise of good times, a mid-tempo shake-and-boogie of adolescent desire, dance and easy-going fun. It feels out-of-place contextually, so alive and free and totally jubilant. Both sweet and defiant. But rather then taking the neon-drenched night by storm, the guys pop out to the market in the afternoon. Nevertheless, this musical interlude ends with Tarek going to bed smiling at the day, and the song has been the soundtrack of his casual happiness and hope. It was a good day.

*

MAGNOLIA

~ PT Anderson, 1999, USA

"Wise Up" ~ Aimee Mann

I love "Magonolia": it has one of my favourite opening sequences; lots of clever camerawork (he is good at long, mobile takes) and I dug it as overstuffed drama with some nice acting. It’s okay to like Tom Cruise in this one, honest, because he is good. And then… and then the whole thing to stops to become a Aimie Mann music video for "Wise Up" (as featured in "Jerry Maguire"??). One character sings. So does another. They all sing, telling themselves to wise up. A corpse sings. What the hell? And as if someone has turned over from American Masterpiece channel to MTV, the artifice is made clear, suspension of belief and engagement are batted out the window. A bold move? An incalculable error? I am sure PT Anderson thinks it is the emotional crux of the film, but it’s an aesthetic faux pas that shines the drama into light of self-regarding angst affectation. No… I can’t go with it. I just wait until the film starts properly again. Thankfully, it is almost redeemed by the outrageousness of the frogs.

*

[.REC]

~ Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza, Spain, 2007

"Vudú (Extended Version)" ~ Vudu

The sound of the horror film is, apparently, rock music. If you are Oriental horror, it is often slightly creepy pop, but mostly it’s rock. Frequently metal of the old or new school kind. And more often than not, it is not of the atmospheric kind. In those crap teen horrors, you expect it. The use of rock seems to say "HELL YEH!! FUCKIN’ SCARY! FUCKIN’ GORY!! LET’S KICK IT!" A kind of crude egging on from your peers.

That ".Rec" ends with the most inappropriate rock song is nearly an act of total sabotage. It's "Vudú (Extended Version)" by Vudu. Carefully and consummately, the film has cultivated a spiralling into the claustrophobia of horror. It starts with freely walking in airy hallways and ends with scrambling through the dark in corners with no way out… rarely has the finale of a film been so nerve-wracking. It doesn’t have many options available and it doesn’t manage the bluff and odd emotional pay-off of "The Descent", but it ends in real horror. And then the rock song comes and all the atmosphere, mood and horror is dumped as if they really didn’t care after all. A stunning final misstep for an otherwise excellent little horror.

*

8-10...AND REALLY, THEY ARE MUSICALS….

LOLA

~ Jacques Demy, 1961, France
… there are no actual musical dance numbers, but the lightness of touch, and all those sailors, p-leeeessee…

*

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

~ Stanley Kubrick, 1968, UK/USA

The Universe is classical.

*

THE WICKER MAN

~ Robin Hardy, 1973, UK

The sound of horror is folk music. Who knew?

Persona

Ingmar Bergman, 1966

What you hardly read about Bergman is that he is often scary. If you are looking for a precursor to David Lynch's creepiness and surrealism, turn to the opening nightmare sequence of "Wild Strawberries"; or to the hanging woodsman in "Summer’s Children" for a genuine ghost story chill; or death walking the lounge in "Fanny and Alexander"; or the all-round eeriness of "Hour of the Wolf", amongst others. And this is before we have even encountered his essays in psychological breakdown. For someone who isn’t known as a horror writer, Bergman was very assured and casual with the genre’s motifs. "Persona", for example, not only has psychological breakdown and seemingly a personality-transference between an actress and her nurse, but also plays with a wealth of vampire imagery.Or, perhaps, we are dealing in split personality, which we must puzzle out and which is another horror staple. Bergman happily has his characters and dramas interacting with seemingly supernatural elements that may or may not be genuine. I have always loved this because you never know when he is going to spring these moments upon you, and when you are not watching as a horror audience, your guard is often down and the effect is often genuinely surprising and chilling.

"Persona" is a famously unsolvable mystery, and if the opening montage of images are clues, they don’t really help with answers: film stock reeling and burning up; an erect penis (originally censored, naturally); bodies in a morgue; a boy asleep like a corpse in a white empty room. He wakes… is he the actress’ son, dreaming of her, or is she dreaming of him? Or is he a manifestation of the nurse’s aborted child? We can wonder this later or after, when we know some stories concerning our main characters: an actress who refuses to speak or function, apparently in an artistic and existential collapse; and the nurse assigned to oversee her recuperation in a beach house. But it is the nurse who uses the actress’s silence for experiments in unburdening herself in a quintessential Bergman confession of an adulterous dalliance. When the nurse feels her confidence has been condescended and betrayed, a confusion of the women’s characters threatens meltdown. What is real and what is fantastic is not clear: does the actress’s husband really turn up to the beach house and mistake the nurse for his wife? Some kind of emotional vampirism is occurring here, and the actress pours out of fog to seduce her victim. There is also some sucking of blood, completely Nosferatu. Cinematic conventions being played with, where the screen burns up as if the projector is on fire from the drama, but somehow this is more akin to an emotional variation of the formal shock moment from a horror film (rather than, say, the kind of conceited self-reflexive trick of the fast-forward moment of Haneke’s "Funny Games").

It is open to readings of criticism of psychotherapy, and it also acts nicely as a tale of the unreal affinity and emotional demands audiences make of artists: the nurse (Bibi Andersson) may just as well be telling her secrets to a poster of Liv Ullman. But for all this stark, pretty imagery and genre bending, Bergman knows that the real horrors can be existential states of despair and fear, that non-communication, disloyalty and superciliousness can force wide open cracks in vulnerable people. Fascinating, frustrating and compelling, very few can force such ideas to work and transcend. Bergman had a vast output and range, and even now he never fails to surprise and, frequently, to chill.

"Halloween": the biopic (World of Remakes #1)

"HALLOWEEN":

THE BIOPIC

1/ Fear of the Remake.

Firstly, the original "Halloween" is scary. As a kid, it terrified me every time I watched it… for years… I have no idea how many times I have seen it, and even now I am happy to leave it on as wallpaper, because the direction alone is a pure treat. There’s a killer on the loose, and that’s all you need to know. You don’t need to know why.

Come the Twenty-First century and many previously scorned low-budget horrors had be reclaimed as cinematic classics, or at least worthy. And there seemed a greater and more cynical spate of old favourites being remade. Or "re-imagined". This isn’t anything new, and Horror has always been a highly, ahem, cannibalistic and incestuous genre. That and shamelessly derivative, of course. But to be a horror fan is, unlike proper critics, to find the gold in the trashy, and not to criticise the trash for not being shiny enough. Inevitably, a remake of "Halloween" was declared, and they said Rob Zombie was going to remake it. Well Zombie had earned a lot of fandom with his earlier features - "House of a 1,000 Corpses" and "The Devil’s Rejects". They showed promise, but lacked discipline and erred on what I’ll call the "heavy metal" vision of horror. He was known for white trash sleaze. Then we heard Zombie was going to give Michael Myers a proper childhood back-story. A white-trash back-story. It didn’t sound promising. It sounded like blasphemy. A small corner reserving judgement because they believed in Zombie; the rest of us did that thing of snorting our derision at Hollywood defiling the greats.

My first reaction was fascination. I groaned at the un-sophistication of the opening set-up. Repulsive stepfather cussing everyone in sight and if he wasn’t an abuser, that‘s probably only because he didn‘t have enough screen-time to get around to it. Mother-stripper. Michael Myers sister making weak gags about his masturbating. Baby wailing in this maelstrom. On the other hand, we had young Michael starting the morning by cleaning up having murdered another pet, and during the bad white trash breakfast dialogue asking for a replacement furry victim. The shaky-cam began to reveal itself as cinematic, not just Hollywood YouTube. We had standard school bullies who, naturally, brought with them a load of smut-talk concerning Michael’s mother. And then there was the first killing… the bully gets it and it’s horrible. Truly horrible. Something chilling sets in. After the family murders, Malcolm McDowell dominates Act II, which is concerned with Michael’s institutional treatment. Act III, and Michael is a gigantic slab of heavy metal meat, on the rampage in all washed-out ugly colours. There’s a station rest room with a black guy offering a Tarantino-esque segment. There are a lot of bloody bear breasts, firmly staking this as exploitational and unprogressive, maybe even cynical. It’s too long. I was waiting for it to end shoddily, but it doesn’t: the end is straightforward, nothing fancy. And yet.

It finished and it stayed with me. I saw it again. The dialogue was still weak, and yet I found I had remembered, and still recall it mostly as a silent movie. The camerawork is impressive still, utilising a variation on the handheld prowl cam brilliantly used by Carpenter; it shakes around the scenes and glances around the killing, often falling still on framing as consummate as the original. Here, rather than stalking and prowling, it’s like a voyeur-bug, or a detached part of Myer’s psyche watching himself. The early killings are compelling and eschew fast-cutting shock-editing for a more elongated sense of dread. The resonance is of matter-of-fact brutality, rather than cheap thrills. The view shakes around the murder of the stepfather, then it pauses as the blood floods from the bottom of the frame, off screen. As the household slaughter unfolds, Michael takes a moment to look outside at the fake horrors, all those trick-or-treaters. The final rampage has none of the thrills and clutch of suspense of the original, but it does give Michael a moment of utter pleading and confusion when he falls to his knees before his non-comprehending sister; and it does have a finely executed and extended metaphor of the old Myers house being torn apart by Michael from the inside.

As trite as the expression "re-imagining" is (smacking of denial as to the actual nature of the carrion-like "remake" beast eating from the good name of the original), Zombie’s "Halloween" almost validates the term. Zombie has filtered Carpenter’s original through his own agenda, and ultimately that is as it should be. The alternative is the kind of serviceable but unremarkable horror remake in the vein of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". I didn’t care that "Halloween" was too long (I rarely do). I chuckled at Malcolm McDowell showing everyone else how to actually dispense a line. I was convinced by Daeg Faerch’s angel/devil delivery: one minute momma’s boy, next silently creating corpses around the house. I wallowed in the sleaze, the flipside of Carpenter’s clean suburbia (decades later and suburbia had devolved into "Gummo" and "Suburbia"). Damn if the very choices mostly dreaded - extended and coloured-in Myers origins - became that which elevated Zombie’s version and gave a parallel vision of the original. It’s more grungy than heavy-metal. With a more focused basis - using Carpenter’s original rather than Zombie’s own idea - Zombie arguably revealed more disciplined and mature aesthetic compared to, say, the "Natural Born Killers" style of throw-every-at-the-wall-hope-it-hits-on-a-statement of his earlier efforts. It was more "Martin" and "Henry" than "Friday the 13th" and "Black Christmas". There was meaning in this remake.

2/ The Ups and Downs of Michael Myers

In ‘Film Comment Magazine’ (March/April 2008), Nathan Lee lays out the proper way to watch Zombie’s "Halloween": not as a teen-titillating slasher, but as a biopic. Indeed, it sports all the obvious, clunky dialogue typical of biopics of even Oscar-fraternising repute such as "Walk the Line". It follows a linear childhood-to-adulthood timeline, but it also inverts the biopic genre. Whereas many biographies follow the Lazarus and martyrdom templates, Zombie offers up Myer’s life story as an unstoppable, scarcely explicable fall from barely held grace. There are two endings to "Halloween", one where Myers achieves some glint of redemption in sparing his sister, and the other in a faintly ambiguous showdown where she kills him. This latter is the version I saw theatrically, and the one I base my comments upon. The former offers some respite, some speck of humanity for Myers; the latter doesn’t, as he pursues his sister through the wreck of their childhood home only for her to pull a Final Girl turn-around. But even with the more positive ending, this isn’t a story of redemption like many biographies, but of complete psychological collapse. (For your comparison: "There Will Be Blood".)

Zombie is at pains to trace the line between internal and external psychological climates that drive Michael to his first kills - and a second viewing reveals the earliest murders as unforgettable and shocking as Carpenter’s original. Then to the failings and inability of institutions to help, indeed, they compound Myers’ psychosis. When the prison guards go on a despicable spree to abuse their inmates, it’s trashy enough, but also reminiscent of similar scenes in Lynch’s "The Elephant Man". But here, Myers is not salvaged by the kindness of civil society, but crushed in its wheels in a world where everything seems to be devolving, and the niceness of suburbia seems to barely compensate. The institutions, as represented by Malcolm McDowell’s psychologist, seem to be making stabs at humanitarianism, even towards someone like Michael Myers; but their smugness, self-congratulatory manner and inability to prevent their charge’s complete psychological collapse allow Myers the total monster to fester until he sees his chance to unleash himself. It is probably this middle section that bores those that come for the tits-and-blood that Zombie can’t help but wallow in and which, at first glance, appears to be his main conclusion to all that has gone before. But this second act shows the extent of Zombie’s ambition and dedication that he pushes the boundaries of the slasher form, by stopping the whole show to make sure we see the final environmental reasons for the evolution of this monster. Arguably, watching Michael’s psychological retreat from the world is just as distressing as his early murders. And also, Zombie is not interested in evolving Myers into a Myth. Myers is a pure meat-and-potatoes monster.

As a biopic, Zombie’s "Halloween" offers qualities that Carpenter’s peerless original did not: despair, pathos and a genuine slice of tragedy. It is not a delicate piece, but it is considered in its rendering and chilling in its detachment, a detachment that hides a surprisingly curious and humanitarian core. Why is Myers? it asks. The camera not only spies, it pries. It asks without pretensions to knowing. Although rampaging is all it ultimately concludes, this is only because "Halloween" knows we have no answers. For these reasons, it is a worthy remake, a genuine re-imagining, and, I expect over time, it will be revealed as a minor classic on its own merits.