Knight Moves (1992)

Chess grandmaster Peter Sanderson (Christopher Lambert), of the tragic genius asshole type, takes part in a chess tournament on a very rainy Canadian island. When a serial killer starts murdering blonde women and doing bad makeup jobs on their corpses, Peter quickly becomes the police’s main suspect, his case certainly not helped by the fact he was (casually, as he explains) sleeping with the first victim and lying to the cops about it.

But then, one of the cops, one Detective Wagner (Daniel Baldwin), is an even greater dick than Peter is, so telling the truth to that guy wouldn’t be anyone’s first impulse. The island’s new chief of police Frank Sedman (Tom Skerritt) is rather more competent, and is not so sure about Peter’s guilt. He’s calling in help in form of psychologist Kathy Sheppard (Diane Lane). As all psychologists in thrillers, Kathy will have her problems keeping away from having sex with the guy she’s supposed to help investigate.

Even once someone claiming to be the killer starts phoning Peter as part of a “game” whose rules the mystery caller doesn’t bother to explain, the cops still don’t quite believe in his innocence, while also involving him in their investigation as if he were their favourite amateur detective. Go figure.

German director Carl Schenkel’s Knight Moves regularly lands on lists of non-European giallos, and it’s not difficult to see why. Some might argue this to be rather more of a post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer thriller, but then, that genre’s DNA is certainly shared with that of the giallo, too – and in the case of the Demme film, that’s hardly by chance.

But let me count the film’s giallo ways: there’s the interest in dubious yet fun psychological trauma motivating the killer in a way which clearly comes down from 70s pop psychology more than those books in which former real FBI profilers lay out how awesome they believe they are; the plot that’s convoluted and delightfully nonsensical, preferring any good excuse to show a highly stylized murder scene to sensible plotting; the Lambert-shaped amateur detective trying to solve the case for reasons of his own (at the beginning, mostly Sheppard needling him) and because the police are either violent bullying idiots with even worse manners than he has (Wagner) or not allowed to do proper police work by the script (Stedman), dragging in the female lead one way or the other; the love for style as the most important kind of substance a movie can have, even when it makes as little sense as the half-flooded hotel foundations the police use as the case’s centre of telephone operations. Really, the only things missing are a dozen or so bottles of J&B’s, a pair of black gloves and more nudity, though the film does have more sex in it than most US or Canadian thrillers not carrying the word “Erotic” in front of the thriller.

This is of course not the kind of thriller anyone expecting logic or a sensible narrative will find terribly satisfying. As with the giallo, it’s best to adapt one’s expectations towards understanding the aesthetic pleasures at the film’s surface, enjoying the ways they entwine with themes and mood, while ignoring any ideas about proper narrative and plain sense one may or may not be cursed with. Schenkel is making this particularly easy, too, for he makes a good case for himself here as a director who might have played in the league of the better giallo second-stringers if he had been born a couple of decades earlier.

If this is the sort of thing you might enjoy, you’ll probably find this one very fun to watch. It also has a hell of a cast, Lambert doing the sort of pretty asshole role typical of the male giallo protagonist better than most anyone else (for better or for worse), Lane putting much more effort in than the character work in the script actually deserves, regularly turning into the actual protagonist of the movie; also looking rather incredible, which is of course par for the course, for Lane and the giallo-alike genre. Baldwin is so punchable he makes Lambert’s character more likeable than that guy deserves through his sheer testosterone dickishness, and Skerritt is Skerritt (that’s not a complaint).

Insert some check mate based joke, here, imaginary reader.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1982)

Corinne Burns (Diane Lane), her sister Tracy (Jessica McNeil) and their cousin Jessica (Laura Dern) are disaffected teenagers with crappy lives in the hell that is small town America during a recession for any girl not willing to turn herself into what her society expects her to be. The trio do have a kinda-sorta band named “The Stains”, something only Corinne seems to take seriously – in a disaffected rural punk teen way, of course.

Luck and a pretty great teenage “I don’t give a shit” face land the Stains a support place on the tour of horrible old man hard rock band The Metal Corpses and British punks The Looters, despite the Stains not even having learned the three mandatory chords yet. Complicated developments turn the band – and particularly Corinne – into an over-night voice of female frustration and empowerment.

This partially feminist punk rock movie directed by music biz guy Lou Adler and written by Nancy Dowd had no impact at all when it was (barely) released, certainly also thanks to a row between director and writer about the ending that left the completed film on the shelf for two years. But then, that’s the sort of thing that’s bound to happen when a guy who thinks MTV stardom is the proper happy end for this film works with (against?) the script of a woman who clearly had rather more interesting ideas about success, counting importance in inspiration for others.

Anyway, the years – as well as an increasing interest in feminism in music – has grown the film its deserved cult audience. Adler is a surprisingly competent director for a guy whose only other directing credit is a Cheech and Chong vehicle. He’s certainly not showing many stylistic flourishes but hitting on a direct, semi-documentary tone that fits the material very well most of the time.

That style of direction is usually a good way not just to demonstrate authenticity (which is obviously a dubious concept but that doesn’t have to interest us here) but also to provide room for actors to do their thing. Fittingly, the film is at its best when it lets its very young actresses loose on a specifically female coded version of the classic escape from the American small town nightmare narrative. Art, here read in the proper punk spirit as a form of raw expression of a self that society wants desperately to repress, is treated as an obvious way both out of one’s repressive circumstances as well as one of understanding oneself and communicating this understanding. Whenever the film focuses on this aspect it feels raw and honest, and coming from what very much feels like actual experiences of the young actresses. Teenage Diane Lane is particularly fantastic in doing this. Watching her thoughtful performance, it’s a bit of a shame that not as many of her later films as should have made use of her acting ability as well as her beauty. Which, really, does fit nicely into this film’s general argument about/against the world.


All of this doesn’t always sit well with the more generic rock movie Adler apparently had in mind, so some of the more tropey plot beats known from all rock music movies ever made rub against that much more interesting film I just talked about for no good reason whatsoever. Of course, cleanness isn’t in The Fabulous Stains’ playbook much anyway – there’s a somewhat sprawling and unfocussed quality to the film, caused not only by the two different visions for it but also by the script’s commendable insistence on giving most side characters a backstory as well as some depth. So even the old rock star caricature Lou Corpse (played by Fee Waybill of The Tubes, one among many musicians playing musicians here) gets a moment of actual humanity, and characters most films would just let go about their plot necessities in the background have motivations and what is treated like a life beyond the movie. It’s certainly not something our contemporary love for streamlining in scripts would tolerate, and it does indeed make the film less dramatically focussed, but this treatment of side characters does demonstrate that the film’s idea of empowerment and expression is meant universally, wanting to open the world for women but not in the business of closing it to anyone else.

Things I Liked About Zack Snyder's Man of Steel (2013)

• The film does a not unsuccessful job at working on the great problem with Superman as a hero, namely that actual heroism needs the hero to do heroic things despite of his flaws and fears and failings; being a hero is hard. Usually, Superman is just too perfect for that, and you need to invent a magical element to get him to even break a sweat. Snyder's way here is a bit more organic and human, while still keeping the demigod-like status of the character as much as possible without going the Miracleman route.
  
• On the other hand, the film doesn't make the mistake of turning the character all grim and gritty. Despite a higher body count (not caused by our hero), this guy is not a killer at heart, nor is there anything cynical about him, which even a declared Superman-sceptic like me sees as important for getting the character right.
  
• It's also pretty important to the way the film sees Superman's heroism that it spends time with non-superpowered people doing their parts in saving the world, or "just" saving each other. In fact, the film's most heroic deed in a human understanding of the word falls to Laurence Fishburne's Perry White, doing something that hasn't anything at all to do with saving the world but a lot with all the good parts of being human.
  
• Despite giving her still way too little to do, Snyder does deliver one of the better Lois Lanes. Why, you can even believe she's a competent reporter and a human being beyond being a professional love interest. It does help that Amy Adams is pretty awesome.
  
• When it comes to the carnage, Snyder is often very good at giving the impression of the sheer physical impact of the Kryptonians on Earth, taking his cues on how to show the destruction of the film's final half hour from giant monster movies more than other superhero films, it seems to me.
  
• While the film's plotting is a bit hit and miss (Pa Kent and the dog come to mind with the misses, for example), it does hang well together philosophically with a connection between characters and theme that feels organic instead of forced or random. Of course, this lacks the sheer ambition, confusion and ambiguity of Christopher Nolan's final Batman film but these things would probably not be Superman-like anyhow.
  

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,zack snyder,henry cavill,amy adams,michael shannon,diane lane