Three Films Make A Post: She's a fabulous, loving, caring mother, who er... ...happens to be a serial killer!

Paper Moon (1973): If you ask me, I’d argue that at the point in time when this was shot, Ryan O’Neal was usually a frightfully wooden actor with a peculiar voidal quality to him. Turns out that Peter Bogdanovich’s choice to cast him alongside his first-time acting little daughter Tatum O’Neal worked absolute wonders on that front, the rapport between the two bringing out Ryan’s personality and easing Tatum into as natural a performance as you could ask of any child actress. Their performances stand at the core of a movie that sometimes seems nostalgic for Depression era America, but never forgets the abject poverty and the other horrors of that time while still somehow managing to still be a comedy. The film carries a deep belief in the ability of people to get through the hardest times with a love it treats without any sentimentality; there’s great sadness at the core of the film, but that sadness is always smaller than the warmth of Alvin Sargent’s script and and that between the O’Neals.

The Spectacular Now (2013): I think I’ve expressed my discomfort with mainstream film critics’ and their love for coming of age films about teenage boys at the cusp of adulthood who learn some lesson or other via an encounter with The Mystery of Femininity™ – or as we here call it “desperately underwritten female characters”. James Ponsoldt’s film belonging to that genre featuring Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley does seem to deserve most of the accolades it gets, though, seeing as it never pretends its female main character Aimee is somehow completely unknowable because she’s a girl, or only interesting to the audience because she teaches the male main character Sutter something. The film does centre around Sutter, mind you, but it never forgets that he’s not the centre of the actual world. Otherwise, the film quite precisely explores the influence parents have on their children, the way love and sex and confusion intersect. It always feels honest about its own convictions and more interested in also being honest about its characters than in making a point about them. It’s also beautifully shot, and well acted, so there’s nothing here even for me to complain about.


Bottom of the World (2017): This is another one of these somewhat Twilight Zone-like small films of a type we get four or five a year of at the moment. There’s your typical for the sub-genre tendency to present mild mind-fuck ideas, a use of Americana that reminds a little of a less interesting David Lynch, and a plot resolution that seems a bit too moralizing to be fully satisfying. Douglas Smith and Jena Malone are certainly convincing enough in the main roles, and from time to time, director Richard Sears (apparently the guy who’ll direct the next Transformers film, because that’s how blockbuster cinema rolls at the moment) hits on an interesting, ambiguous element and doesn’t resolve it too clearly. Just as often, the meaning of metaphors is much too on the nose and things are just too clean and simple to make for a truly satisfying film of this sort. Well, at least I’d argue that this sort of film thrives on the elements that aren’t completely resolved and explained. It’s not a bad film, though, it’s just not a terribly satisfying one either.

Zero Effect (1998)

Daryl Zero (Bill Pullman) is your typical eccentric master detective. When he’s not working on a case, he locks himself in his costly home to cower and whimper and write horrifying songs, only communicating with and through his pitiable assistant Steve Arlo (Ben Stiller, but don’t worry, he’s wasn’t that deeply unfunny “Ben Stiller” persona yet when this was made but rather a serviceable actor). Zero’s not exactly a people person, though once he works a case, he’s pretty good at emulating one, approaching the rest of humanity as something he has studied carefully, yet isn’t a true part of.

Zero is hired by a sleazy business tycoon named Gregory Stark (Ryan O’Neal) to get back some mysterious keys and solve a case of blackmail for him. Stark’s not exactly forthcoming with details, but then, as Arlo explains early on, in the end, Zero will find out everything anyway, including the mandatory dark secrets of the past. Why, he might even find out something about himself thanks to the case and ambulance driver Gloria Sullivan (Kim Dickens) who may or may not be involved in the whole affair.

By now, there’s hardly any cop or detective show running on TV that doesn’t feature some kind of eccentric/mentally ill/supernatural/perfectly idiotic detective, so the basic idea of Jake Kasdan’s Zero Effect doesn’t sound terribly fresh anymore from our benighted age. However, the eccentric Great Detective wasn’t actually invented by 00s television desperate to rip off Columbo (nor by Columbo itself). Even leaving that Great Detective aside, there are many more literary detectives – particularly outside the hardboiled genres – who are dysfunctional in various degrees. A serial character needs a gimmick after all. Going by the intelligent and often very inventive way he uses the genre and what comes with it, I’m reasonably sure Kasdan knows about this tradition rather well, so this is not a case of Hollywood using an old trope thinking it to be new.

Zero is a rather extreme case of dysfunctionality, isolated, pathologically afraid of everything and positioning himself as a complete outside observer of the world of humanity as he is. At first, it’s easy to believe the film will mostly play out as a comedy that’s going to use its protagonist’s eccentricity as an easy way to earn its laughs; the film does after all indeed get quite a few very funny scenes out of Zero’s curious habits and the inspired way Pullman portrays him. However, the longer the film goes on, the clearer it becomes how much more ambitious it is, and the simple comedy turns out to also be a rather well constructed mystery, a romance, a meditation about the nature of the figure of the Great Detective and his relations to the figure we know as The Woman, a poignant and somewhat hopeful film about loneliness and isolation and the way isolation caused by outside forces and the kind that come from inside can go hand in hand, and even a film concerned with questions of morality and justice. While this sounds like rather a lot for a single film to take on, Kasdan manages to do all of these questions and themes justice, seemingly with ease always finding the right thematic point to emphasise – as well as the right question to ask – and using every scene’s potential to its fullest. In the intelligence of the film and how easy Kasdan makes it look to apply his own, this is as good as direction gets; I have honestly no idea how this director ended up doing stuff like Bad Teacher for a living later on.

The film isn’t just clever and thoughtful, it is also emotionally satisfying, handling a romance that might feel like a complete cliché in a very convincing and natural manner. There’s also something pleasantly and effectively hopeful in the film’s emotional core, the idea that isolation can and will end, and that, while there’s not necessarily a glorious happy end waiting for the lonely, there’s hope and life even for those who only ever observe. And the best thing about it? It never feels too easy, dishonest, or disrespectful of its characters while doing it.


I’m not going to end this happy rambling about a wonderful film without giving Pullman a special nod. He does, after all, have the difficult job to not just portray a dysfunctional genius and the embodiment of an archetype and turn him into a human being, but also stands at the core of nearly all of the film’s shifts in tone and theme. He does this while making it look as easy as Kasdan does filmmaking.

In short: Wild Rovers (1971)

Aging cowhand Ross Bodine (William Holden) and his much younger friend Frank Post (Ryan O’Neal) are working on the ranch of patriarchal Walter Buckman (Karl Malden) and his sons John (Tom Skerritt) and Paul (Joe Don Baker), with all the exciting prospects you have in that kind of job gaping before them.

So, Frank out of youthful stupidity and Ross because he’s got nothing to show for his fifty years, the cow hands decide to rob the local bank. The robbery does succeed, even, thanks to a rather ruthless plan, and doesn’t end in any bloodbath whatsoever. As to not leave any bad blood behind, they even leave the money meant for the payroll of their home ranch with the banker. Because the territory line behind which the sheriff (Victor French) has no jurisdiction anymore is so near, Frank and Ross seem to get away scot free despite a few minor troubles.

Unfortunately, the banker and his family embezzle the money, leaving Buckman very angry because of the perceived betrayal (though I’m not too sure his reaction would have been much different otherwise), sending his sons out to go as far beyond the borders as necessary to bring his wayward cowhands back, preferably alive but not necessarily so.

Wild Rovers’ director Blake Edwards is – of course – much better known as a director of comedies but he seems to have made it a point to work in a few different genres in between the comedies. Even though these films generally have their problems they also feel a lot like labours of love to me, Edwards milking his commercial success to get astonishing amounts of money for his dream projects.

The film at hand is a case in point, with its Jerry-Goldsmith-doing-Aaron-Copland score, the lavish photography by Philip Lathrop, and its mostly excellent cast, often looking and sounding like someone’s wet dream of a Western. Unfortunately, it’s at the same time a much too self-indulgent movie for my tastes, the sort of thing where a director seems so in love with parts of his movie he just can’t let them stop, leading to some scenes that barely should be in the film at all going on forever, some ill-advised The Wild Bunch without the punch-style slow motion, and pacing that at times slows to a crawl. Then there’s the musical Overture and Entr’acte (seriously) that has no business at all in a film this slow and long already, something so useless to the film I don’t even know what to say about it.

Less a problem of self-indulgence than one of miscasting is Ryan O’Neal, who isn’t at his worst here, but whose specific kind of blandness and lack of a projected screen personality chafes badly against a William Holden who at this point of his career made things look easy and natural even when they were getting rather theatrical.

On the other hand, Wild Rovers features nearly as many moments of brilliance as it does of self-indulgent bloat, moments when Edwards’s pretensions stop being pretensions and start becoming the real thing, like basically every time Holden opens his mouth, that ill-fated poker game in Benson, or some of the shots of Holden and O’Neal travelling.

As a matter of fact, I found myself enjoying Wild Rovers more often than not, regularly buying into its world building, as well as its attempt at reaching the archetypal by way of the specific, and while I was bored for more than one scene, I can’t help but recommend it for all the parts of it that aren’t boring.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,western,blake edwards,william holden,ryan o'neal,karl malden,joe don baker,tom skerritt

In short: The Driver (1978)

A nameless man, let's call him The Driver (Ryan O'Neal), works as a highly successful hired-gun escape car driver for various criminals, if he deigns those criminals to be professional enough for him. The Driver doesn't like guns much, or rather, the people he works for actually shooting their guns, he's big on punctuality, as well as his prospective partners not being fools that'll get him killed or caught. In exchange for reasonable manners and a rather exorbitant fee, the Driver provides his business partners with near-miraculous escape driving that is too controlled to be called crazy, and highly successful.

So successful that a police Detective (Bruce Dern) has become rather obsessed with Driver, whom he dubs "Cowboy", and is willing to use highly unorthodox - even for a policeman who conducts all of his business, even interrogations, in a bar and a security van - methods to catch his prey. The Detective is even willing to press a small-time robber (Joseph Walsh) and his small gang consisting of exactly the kind of people Driver doesn't like to work with into organizing a bank robbery with Driver as the prospective escape driver.

Things get complicated and violent soon for Driver.

Walter Hill directed The Driver, his second feature film, in the middle of that phase of his career - ending after 1985's Streets of Fire - when he could do no wrong, and every film he made came out as some kind of classic.

In The Driver's case, it's a crime movie that pares every element of its plot down to its archetypal form, with characters that are nameless representation of their functions with no actual backstory even suggested (Hill often seems to prefer archetypes to characters). In this context, a film like The Driver actually looks like the Platonic Ideal of an 80s movie despite being made at the tail end of the 70s. Here, the hyper-realism and conscious grittiness of the older era turns into cool stylisation and a filmic language so composed (highly fitting for a main character who is always in control of himself when he is behind the wheel of a car) even the film's most chaotic car chases never look chaotic.

There's a distance between Hill's camera - and with it the audience - and the things it depicts that could - and later on, in different films, did - kill a film through its sheer lack of emotionality but here, this distance is exactly the point, as it mirrors Driver's cold, possibly sociopathic (really, he's closer to Westlake's Stark than most of the characters in actual Stark adaptations are) distance that enables him to live the life he leads in the way he leads it. The audience does share in Driver's emotions, it's just that he doesn't have many.

Ryan O'Neal is quite a clever bit of stuntcasting for a role that turns his weaknesses, an aura of professionalism and emptiness and the inability to emote convincingly, into the central points of his performance. And say what you will against O'Neal, he does hold his void-like ground against Dern and Isabelle Adjani, both much more classically able actors.

Oh yeah, the night car chases under neon lights are pretty great, too.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,crime,action,walter hill,ryan o'neal,isabelle adjani,bruce dern