Saturday August 21, 2010 at The Brattle Theater, Cambridge, MA.

THE HARDER THEY COME, written & directed by Perry Henzel, starring Jimmy Cliff, Janet Barley, Carl Bradshaw and Basil Keane.

The Boston area has a long history with Perry Henzel’s first film. THE HARDER THEY COME was a midnight classic showing every Saturday for ten years at The Orson Welles Cinema until that theater was lost to an electrical fire in 1986. I became aware of the movie via Jimmy Cliff’s music video when I was in high school, back when MTV played songs. After numerous missed opportunities to see THE HARDER THEY COME in revival houses, the Brattle Theater offered the irresistible proposition of pairing it with Henzel’s second and final film, NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

It was worth the wait. Jimmy Cliff plays Ivanhoe Martin, a young man who leaves his deceased grandmother’s home in the Jamaican countryside, traveling to the city to bring his mother the remaining pocketful of cash from his grandmother’s savings. From there, Ivan’s path follows two cliched story lines — a) naive lad with a song in his heart trying to break into the music scene and b) decent but desperate unemployed guy descending into a life of crime. After a few false starts, Ivan succeeds both in recording his song, and establishing a foothold has a soldier in the ganja trade. The waters begin to muddy when corrupt local police team with flame-thrower bearing American soldiers, ostensibly to restrict international smuggling, while also potentially seizing distribution of a sacrament within Jamaica’s Rastafari movement.

As murky as the socio-political landscape becomes, so too does Ivan’s destiny. Within this story it appears Jamaica’s penal system has a problem similar to America’s: negative or violent behavior is not reformed but reenforced and enhanced. Early in the film, Ivan spends a brief period in jail, where he is humiliatingly beaten for a relatively minor crime. After being released from prison, Ivan gets in a fight with another man over a bicycle and brutally slashes his opponent’s face. If any confusion remains about Ivan’s path to becoming a bad@$$ anti-hero rather than a noble hero, compare his ambivalence during a church sermon to his exaltation while watching a spaghetti western. The latter sequence is hauntingly echoed as Ivan revels in his outlaw notoriety and imagines the eyes of the nation on he and his blazing guns.

THE HARDER THEY COME has been dismissed by some as being poorly made. I adamantly disagree. Cheaply made? Yes. It was shot in an impoverished nation on Super16mm, which in the ’70′s was a notch above your Uncle Larry’s home movie camera. It is unrealistic to fault a film made under these circumstances for not looking as crystal clear as the crane shots from THE CONSTANT GARDNER. This is no reason to ignore what has been captured here: the cracked and worn city across the tracks from the idyllic-fishing-village Jamaica most of the world had previously glimpsed in DR. NO. Henzel not only shows us a Caribbean nation as no feature film had done before, he shows what few have managed to do since. DePalma’s SCARFACE rushed to bask in the glamorous life, glossing over an opportunity both in Cuba and Miami to explore how Tony Montana’s street-level crime fed a much larger empire. THE HARDER THEY COME remains firmly rooted in that daily struggle that deludes thugs into thinking they can gain control simply by killing their immediate competitors, while unseen men grow rich on the blood of both factions.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME, written & directed by Perry Henzel, starring Carl Bradshaw, Susan O’Meara, P.J. Soles and Countryman.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME had as unusual a journey to the screen as could be imagined. Perry Henzel shot this quasi-metafiction story, in which actors and non-actors play versions of themselves, as an imperialism themed follow-up to the corruption themes of THE HARDER THEY FALL. What exists in the way of a linear story concerns an American camera crew attempting to shoot a shampoo commercial in Jamaica. The star of the commercial, P.J. Soles, disappears without a trace. Producer Susan O’Meara recruits driver-gofer-guy-in-the-know Carl Bradshaw to help her search the countryside for their star as the clock ticks on Madison Ave.

…And then … Henzel’s footage vanished. No friends, this is not a CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST or BLAIR WITCH trick, Henzel’s film actually vanished before he was able to edit it together! In a twist that would be considered incredible if one tried to pass it off as fiction, Henzel’s footage was recovered in a New York film lab nearly 30 years later. Henzel completed NO PLACE LIKE HOME, which premiered to a sold-out crowd at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, but he succumbed to cancer days before it was to premiere in Jamaica.

The resulting film is, on the surface, sexier and more playful that THE HARDER THEY COME. Carl Bradshaw finds time for afternoon delight (with Grace Jones!) in the middle of a workday, P.J. Soles lounges topless under a waterfall waiting for the camera crew to stop arguing, and Susan O’Meara notices that Carl is a pretty interesting fella while both of them are supposed to be searching for missing P.J. This is all surface, mind you. The point that Henzel drives home is that while these luxurious distractions occur, high-rise hotels are springing up and commercials are being shot, but little of the money being generated reaches the local economy. In 1972, Ivanhoe Martin risked the “If you can’t beat ‘em” option, as the aforementioned unseen criminal empire benefited from the blood on Jamaican streets. By 1976 the unseen benefactors of Jamaica’s sweat and tears had become more legitimate businesses, forcing Carl Bradshaw to face the “Join ‘em?” end of the equation.

From Wednesday, March 17, 2008

Directed by John Frankenheimer, starring Rock Hudson, John Randolph and Jeff Corey, featuring an early score by the late great Jerry Goldsmith.

Arthur Hamilton (Randolph), an aging banker, fears his hum-drum yet wealthy life may be sputtering to an end. He is confronted by an agency that offers to give him a new face, a new identity and new youth … by murdering the person with Hamilton’s ideal life and surgically altering him to replace that man. When Hamilton awakens to find that his has become international jet-setter Tony Wilson (Hudson) he also awakens to the greater price that that the shadowy agency charges for their service.

SECONDS was the third in what is considered Frankenheimer’s “Paranoia trilogy,” after THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE in 1962 and SEVEN DAYS IN MAY in ’64. These films were in many ways ahead of their time. Paranoid political/social thrillers became a standard American genre in the 70′s, but few measured up the the hand-held camera/fish-eye-lensed nightmares Frankenheimer unleashed on an audience who had yet to learn to distrust The Powers That Be.

It’ll finish Friday,
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 8.26.10
Aside from an intriguing story and unique photography by James Wong How, SECONDS is also a subtle and evocative study in duality. Arthur Hamilton is a Manhattan bank manager who is well regarded at his job. If he is not overly happily married, he and his wife at least seem content in their manicured Scarsdale home. One could expect a man this established in the east coast in the 1960′s to be living the Don Draper life, but he’s feeling more Bert Cooper. Having acquired just about everything a man of his stature could want, everything he’d worked for, Hamilton remains so unsatisfied that he is willing to pay $30,000 to reboot his life. Bear in mind that fee would translate to nearly $200,000 today!

The new life Hamilton receives, established artist Tony Wilson living a stones throw from the Pacific in a Malibu bungalow, fails to deliver the comfort he seeks. Tony Wilson had already earned his reputation before Hamilton assumed his life, leaving Hamilton with no sense of accomplishment for Tony’s deeds. Further, Tony runs within a circle of counter-cultural folks whose sexually and spiritually liberation outright confuses and scares Hamilton. An extended bacchanalian sequence during harvest in Santa Barbara wine country is staged as a sun-drenched nightmare for a buttoned-up gent like Hamilton.

Arthur Hamilton, the aging repressed solitary man from back east, could not be much more different from young bon vivant Tony Wilson from out west. The one thing unifying these divergent bodies is the ability for their singular heart and mind to despair. The horror of SECONDS is that you can find misery anywhere you seek it, and you cannot afford comfort. Personal note: as a devout fan of Santa Barbara wine country, since before SIDEWAYS brought the world to its door, it is really cool to see from what ragged roots that region sprung.

Written & Directed by Michael Stephenson, starring George Hardy, Claudio Fragasso, Connie Young and Margo Prey.

In 1999 there was no such thing the classic TV series “Galaxy Quest;” the show was invented so that the endearingly hilarious film GALAXY QUEST could exist. Had TROLL 2 not existed, it would have been worth inventing, if only to supply the back-story to BEST WORST MOVIE. TROLL 2 is a goofy fun horror film shot in Utah in 1989 but not released until 1992. The documentary BEST WORST MOVIE examines the making of, vanishing of, and unexpected resurgence of TROLL 2. The film’s voyage to cult status began when HBO aired it in 1993. Possibly the most slowly contagious viral video ever, TROLL 2 spent the next 10+ years growing a following of fans that held parties to screen it on worn VHS copies.

Word of these parties reached Michael Stephenson, who as a child appeared in TROLL 2 as Joshua Waits. Stephenson’s curiosity became two-fold: 1) who were these people who had embraced a movie that was regarded as preferably forgotten even by some of it’s cast and 2) what had become of that cast? BEST WORST MOVIE is Stephenson’s document of his exploration of both these questions. His very fortunate first move was to enlist George Hardy, who had played his father Michael Waits, to help him track down the rest of the TROLL 2 cast. George Hardy is a man too friendly, too funny, too decent, too all-around positive for fiction. If BEST WORST MOVIE were a fictitious lampoon of cult status like GALAXY QUEST, some development exec dork in a suit would have insisted Mr. Hardy be a secret alcoholic with a terrible mystery in his past to give him some lazy version of “depth.” But this is real life, and in real life and in BEST WORST MOVIE, even George Hardy’s ex-wife has only good things to say about him. The great joy of BEST WORST MOVIE is watching the semi father and son team of Stephenson and Hardy retrace their family tree. What I have given you here is prologue, plus a hint of who the principle characters are now — I am reluctant to say any more, other than that their journey is funny, sad and always intriguing. It is a trip worth taking for anyone who has ever opposed a chorus of disapproval to champion a movie, actor, singer, song, painter, building or any other artist or work of art.

With the exception of TROLL 2′s director Claudio Fragasso, everyone in Stephenson’s cast and crew family seems astounded by the recent success of TROLL 2. I read one review of BEST WORST MOVIE that made the interesting point that some ironic hipster audiences these days find it easier to laugh at a movie than to truly love it. I agree that this may account for some of the adoration Stephenson and Hardy experience in midnight TROLL 2 screenings across the country, but I think there is something else. TROLL 2 comes from an absurd premise, as does John Carl Buechler’s 1986 film TROLL, but it is a wildly inventive completely off the wall premise. When you watch either of these films, you may not like them, but you sure as hell won’t find yourself saying “I’ve already seen this in That Movie,” or “This is such a rip-off of Fill In The Blank!” No friends, the TROLL films are an unmistakably distinct experience. I submit that this is what GOBLIN-shirt wearing fans line up for; they’d rather see a low budget ridiculously inventive green-goop splatter-fest than a bloated big studio action movie without a prayer for something unique because it was made by the same committee formula as every other “summer tent-pole event” movie.

It could also be suggested that BEST WORST MOVIE benefits heavily from the slowly creeping growth of the ranks of TROLL 2 fans. Some more recent cult films like THE BIG LEBOWSKI and DONNIE DARKO found their core audience so quickly after their under-performing initial theatrical release that there was no time to sit back and take stock of what was reeling in these die-hard fans. As unusual as was the story of TROLL 2, so too is the singular experience at the heart of BEST WORST MOVIE, of this cast and their nearly generational transition with their fans. At the end of this year, I expect there will be no $100M high-octane movie hero whose quest I will have enjoyed rooting for as much as I did Mark and George’s.

Written & Directed by Nicholas Winding Refn, starring Mads Mikkelson and Maarten Stevenson.

I love it when a movie completely subverts my expectations and still gets me to go along for the ride. Considering Refn’s contemporary films, his urgent PUSHER trilogy and last year’s kinetic BRONSON, I expected VALHALLA RISING to be an explosively violent medieval epic. Bludgeonings, beheadings and the most nonchalantly delivered evisceration I’ve ever witnessed are all on the menu — albeit in very controlled portions. In between the skull crushings are stretches of physical and spiritual quest that have been broken up into six chapters: Wrath, Silent Warrior, Men Of God, and … I’ll spare you the spoiler of revealing more of the chapter titles. Suffice it to say that if you are unfamiliar with Refn’s character driven films, and stumble in expecting THE 13th WARRIOR or CLASH OF THE TITANS, you will be disappointed.

VALHALLA RISING follows a one-eyed savage fighter whom we first meet being dragged in chains across windswept barrens. The fighter is mute, but capable of fleeting glimpses of his near future; we never learn whether his silence is by choice or inability to speak. His keepers bet on his skill with annihilating the champion in each village they pass through. The fighter eventually slips his bonds and slays his keepers, sparing only a young boy named Are who had given him food and water during his long march. Are repays the favor by christening the fighter, imaginatively enough, One-Eye.

One-Eye and Are soon find themselves in the company of Christian Vikings intent on a crusade to Jerusalem. The Vikings have conflicting reasons for their crusade, but One-Eye’s second sight suggests that he belongs on this quest. When the Vikings’ ship becomes lost at sea, they wonder if they are headed for Hell rather than The Holy Land, and whether Are or One-Eye is the cause of their misfortune.

VALHALLA RISING, both in style and substance, questions the nature of spiritual awakening. Rejecting the operatic scores of Hollywood medieval epics, Refn uses a creeping and droning symphony of dread, broken more often by unnerving silence than screaming combat. We are not following heroes; this expedition is as lost spiritually as it is geographically. Each of the Vikings falls short of their mission, some seeking personal glory and others fortune. None are on this crusade for personal salvation or the glory of God, begging whether it is One Eye who has led them to Hell or these false prophets who have created their own damnation. VALHALLA RISING underscores the damage that weak men do to the faith of innocents, and the strength of courageous men to transcend the manipulations of cowards.

It wouldn’t be Pilot Season without the most vicious comedy ever made about the Television business. The News Division has become an albatross around the neck of the floundering UBS Network. The solution devised by network chief Frank Hackett (Duvall) is simple: fire their over-paid anchorman Howard Beale (Finch) at week’s end, and fold the News Division into the Entertainment Division. Complications arise when Beale announces his firing on-air, and says he will commit suicide on live television at the conclusion of his final broadcast.

It’ll finish Wednesday,
Love, Jim
TRAILER

AFTER THOUGHT from 7.31.10
The television business in the 1970′s, and to a large extent today, has four seasons. They are not called winter, spring, summer and fall. They are called development, pilot, staffing and hiatus. Development roughly coincides with what the rest of us call fall. As new shows air, some under perform and others flat-out fail, networks begin developing new shows for the fall a year away. Pilot season is when a few hundred scripts are bought out of the thousands of stories that get pitched to network development executives. From those few hundred scripts, a few dozen pilots are shot, all in an effort to decide which stories might make a show on which companies will gamble their advertising budget. A lot of hurry up & wait happens during these two seasons, until sometime (it shifts every year) in what the rest of us know as spring, when each network announces next fall’s schedule and staffing season breaks loose. Many young folks working in their first entertainment job find themselves pulling 70-80 hour weeks during pilot and staffing season. They try to hire the best crew they can before another show steals away the person their show’s entire success hinges upon, and get them all working so at least a few episodes are in the can come … whatever the hell the next season is. Each year in that frenzied pace, we would watch NETWORK to remind us that we did not cause this insanity, it is simply the nature of the beast.

NETWORK is a great movie because it is of its time, ahead of its time, and for all time. Virtually nothing in this movie looks artificial; it feels so New York in the 70′s that when Howard Beale hails a cab, we could expect Travis Bickle to show up. Rather than building a set for the UBS News control room, they went to Toronto to shoot in a real control room. NETWORK is so ahead of its time that, as Bob one of my agent mentors pointed out, it was created as a satire that today plays like drama. Among the current phenomena that NETWORK warned us about in sharply witted barbs: the rise of sensationalism, the muddying of objective and subjective analysis, in our nightly news and television in general, and the decline of the position of journalists to challenge their audiences with facts rather than comforting the audience’s own social and political sensibilities. The conundrum of the UBS board’s duty to shareholders, advertisers and other investors versus responsibility to their audience, existing in radio even before television, now rears its head in the digital media world as some try to figure out how to monetize Twitter tweets to advertise Tatter Tots.

All that aside, if you really want to see what makes NETWORK impressive and vital, take a glance at the IMDB message boards. I challenge you to find another film with so many people whining about characters’ use of — no joke — “big words,” “esoteric words” and “long diatribes.” Sadly there is more than one thread devoted to people clamoring for their perceived right to be entertained without needing to “reach for a thesaurus.” NETWORK is a primal scream against illiteracy and willful ignorance. I did all that I could to bring its message to as many would-be television execs as possible.

In the 18th century Spain and Portugal vied for land in South America. Father Gabriel (Irons) a Jesuit missionary from Spain, ventures deep into the Amazon rainforest to convert Indians and protect them from Portuguese slave traders. One of those traders, Rodrigo Mendoza (DeNiro) is an outlaw unable to return to Portugal. Mendoza is offered asylum and salvation by Father Gabriel if he will lay down his sword and help build a Mission in the jungle. When Spain loses the Mission’s land to Portugal, Gabriel and Mendoza defy the Church and both their nations over the fate of the Indians.

Never mind Christopher Menges’ Oscar winning cinematography. Never mind Morricone’s BAFTA and Golden Globe winning score. Never mind the litany of other nominations or that THE MISSION won the Golden Palm at Cannes. 41 minutes into this film DeNiro captures, without a line of dialogue, a true spiritual epiphany. It’s exhausting and beautiful and I promise you will never see anything like it in any other movie. Even if the rest of the movie sucked, this moment would justify its existence … but the rest of it is pretty impressive too!

It’ll finish Wednesday,
Love, Jim
TRAILER

AFTER THOUGHT FROM 7.27.10
I am not a Christian. I am a hopeful agnostic who’s faith has long been shaken more by men who claim to speak for God than by anything I read in The Bible. The story of THE MISSION is an experience that strengthens my faith by helping me define it in a more positive and less judgmental way. There is a sparseness to the filmmaking that aids the audience’s focus on the story. Joffe refrains from elaborate camera set-ups, allowing the beauty of the Brazilian and Argentine rivers and forests to appear as they would to anyone entering them for their first time. Though Morricone’s score occasionally soars with a full choir, it is rendered most often with an oboe and a pan flute. The presence of those two simple instruments is so natural that one could be forgiven for thinking “yes, of course, this must be what the wind sounds like there!” It is through having all these elements in such perfect concert that moments like Mendoza’s personal enlightenment can become a transcendental experience for the entire audience.

SOUL KITCHEN Directed & Co-Written by Fatih Akin, starring Adam Bousdoukos, Mortiz Bleibtreu, Anna Bederke, Pheline Roggan & Birol Unel.

Within the past year or so, I don’t recall if he was on a talk show or a stand-up special, Robin Williams recounted a conversation with a German interviewer. When asked his thoughts on why Germany does not have the comedic culture of some other nations, Williams answered “Maybe it’s because you killed all the funny people.” After I stopped laughing it occurred to me that I have not seen many German comedies. I hope this is due more to their thin distribution in the U.S. than a lack of any good German comedies. Fatih Akin, the writer/director of SOUL KITCHEN, was born in Hamburg to parents who had emigrated from Turkey in the 1960′s. If this film is any evidence, Germany has a joyful mine of multigenerational and multiethnic culture waiting to be explored.

SOUL KITCHEN follows the comical daily grind endured by a young Greek immigrant named Zinos. Soul Kitchen is a broken down cafe Zinos runs out of a freight warehouse on the wrong side of the train tracks from Hamburg. If it weren’t for a small group of regulars (including one friendly drunk living as a squatter in the warehouse’s loading dock) Zinos would barely be able to keep his doors open. Zinos’ girlfriend suddenly decides to move to China, his recently paroled brother shows up on his doorstep looking for a zero-responsibility job to satisfy a parole work requirement, and a chance encounter with an old friend has him pondering selling his property to satisfy his debts. A lesser man might give up his dream of running a great restaurant, but Zinos makes a last ditch effort at that dream when he hires an enigmatic knife-throwing chef with a questionable past.

If it sounds scattered, it isn’t really. This is the same motley-crew-banding-together-to-save-a-place-they-love story that has been the subject of good movies (THE BLUES BROTHERS) and not so good movies (HARLEY DAVIDSON & THE MARLOBORO MAN). Put this one in the same column with Jake & Elwood. Avoiding stereotypes of Germans, Greeks or any other nationality, Fatih Akin and co-writer Adam Bousdoukos (who also plays Zinos) populate their movie with an eccentric crowd of thugs and foodies, clubbers and rockers, land schemers and unqualified providers of holistic medicine. A movie with such character diversity often becomes about the forces that divide them. Bousdoukos heads a pitch perfect cast from across eastern Europe, playing characters united by the same thing everybody in our current global economic crisis wants: the ability to earn a living by your own work and ingenuity.

I’ve read some IMDB comments written by Europeans who suspect that some jokes may get lost in translation. If that is true, then I would probably have a heart attack from laughing if I got every single joke. I laughed more in SOUL KITCHEN than I did in any movie in recent memory, and even when I wasn’t laughing, I had a big dopey smile on my face. This is a film made by people who love their city, their countries, food, rock-n-roll, and the intrinsic joy of surviving another day against a sea of troubles. It seems ripe for an American remake, but I hope this does not happen; rather than straining and pouring it into a weaker concoction, this sort of lightening in a bottle is best passed around and shared at full strength.

Yeah, the acting is laughable (hence Apollionia Kotero’s Razzie nomination).
Yeah, the story is thin … and also pretty laughable (brooding boy meets pretty girl meets funnier boy!).
Yeah, it’s loaded with rock cliches (a battle of the bands? Who’da thunk?! And your parents just don’t understand?! No way!)
Who cares?!
In all the years of the Lunch Movie, we finally have a TV big enough, clear enough and loud enough to do justice to the Oscar winning soundtrack and explosive club performances. Since those make up more than 1/2 the movie, I can promise most of your time will be well-spent.

I’ll finish 2morro
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 6.30.10

From Sunday May 30, 2010 at Cinespia at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Cinespia, the organizers of summer screenings at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, send out an email each Spring to solicit fans requests for the coming season. Since 2005, PURPLE RAIN has been on my list. Each year I request fewer titles, hoping to give greater emphasis to the ones I hope to see. When I left Los Angeles in 2009, I promised my friends I would return if ever Cinespia played PURPLE RAIN. This Spring I requested a single title. A few weeks later, my friend Sahara told me that it’s put-up-or-shut-up time. Yes, I flew over 6,000 miles round-trip to see a movie I’ve already seen, and already own. And it was worth it.

I have always been a sucker for stories of redemption. PURPLE RAIN is unusual among these sorts of movies in that, if you simply take your cues from dialogue and events, you won’t get much of a sense of epiphany. The script has its shortcomings in revealing the stages of The Kid’s transformation. If you are paying attention to the total experience though, moments that would have been shortchanged by the script are made up for both in Magnoli’s direction and Prince’s songs.

During it’s initial release, PURPLE RAIN did not escape controversy for what some saw as glorifying violence against women. This concern was echoed by a few friends of mine who saw the movie for their first time at Cinespia. Why, isn’t this after all a movie about musicians!?! Aren’t they all supposed to be junkies, especially in the 80′s?! Their vice is booze, weed, blow, horse, whatever else they’ve been getting their hands on between Preminger’s THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, through Eastwood’s BIRD and Stone’s THE DOORS, and as recently as CRAZY HEART.

By rejecting the stereotypical movie-musician’s deadliest sins of Greed or Gluttony and imbuing The Kid (Prince) with a mix of Wrath and Pride, screenwriter William Blinn and co-writer/director Albert Magnoli have also changed the journey The Kid’s transformation takes. Rather than confronting demons within him, he needs to confront his inability to face anyone else. I suspect that scenes of men hitting women would have drawn less scorn had they been in a standard drama about a seemingly regular, i.e. white or non-interracial, Main Street family coping with some terrible secret. Co-writer Blinn created STARSKY & HUTCH, raising television violence to unprecedented levels in 1975. He had earned a pass dealing with domestic abuse before by setting it in police or crime-focused dramas.

A more obvious film would have made a conversational point of the degrees of separation The Kid uses to distance himself from any real emotional or spiritual connection. Magnoli instead illustrates this with repeated use of masks and obscured faces. Look at how often The Kid hides behind one mask or another: the moment he meets Apollonia, on go his over-sized mirrored Lennon-specs. Sure, he thinks he’s being cool and mysterious, but with the shot placing you in Apollonia’s shoes, it’s just friggin’ creepy. The same shades reappear when Jill, a cocktail waitress smitten with The Kid, tries to hand him a cassette of a song written by two women in The Kid’s band The Revolution.

In a sequence as psychologically abusive as any of the physical moments, during his performance of the songs “Computer Blue” and “Darling Nikki,” The Kid taunts Apollonia from stage with his eyes hidden behind a black lace mask. If that is not enough evidence, then I refer you to the epic cast of clowns, harlequins and painted eyes adorning the basement where The Kid lives. Seeing the movie on a large screen for the first time in 25 years showed me two mask-related details that do not play as well on video: Jill’s trembling reflection in The Kid’s shades when she hands him the cassette, and three portraits of beautiful tragic and lonely Marilyn Monroe among the faces in The Kid’s basement lair.

Magnoli keeps more than masks up his sleeve. He manages to exemplify an epic warrior’s journey in a single shot during the montage accompanying “When Doves Cry.” On video you would easily enough spot The Kid riding his purple Honda bike through a concrete underpass tunnel. It takes a massive screen image to spot the details on the sides of the tunnel: graffiti on one side bears the circle/cross female symbol, and the other the circle/arrow male symbol. On one side is spray-painted “Love,” the other “God,” and The Kid needs to ride through all of it to reach his destination. It doesn’t get any more pronounced than that without someone breaking down in a tearful monologue.

We are told by several characters that The Kid’s music only makes sense to him. If you can separate the background songs on the soundtrack from the songs The Revolution performs on stage, you will see what those other voices were saying, and you will also see Prince’s illumination of The Kid’s journey. The Revolution’s opening song “Let’s Go Crazy” is an ode to fun and an anthem of irresponsibility. The next time we see The Revolution, “The Beautiful Ones,” is loaded with wounded suffering and mocking jealousy. If you have any doubt that The Kid has hit a personal rock bottom and lost all sight of himself, I refer you to the aforementioned “Computer Blue”/”Darling Nikki” sequence. It follows a dreary moment where The Kid tries to confront his father for abusing his mother, and instead finds his father drunkenly playing a piano in the basement. “Never get married,” his father admonishes him as we segue into “Computer Blue,” wherein The Kid’s guitar solo — listen carefully y’all — is exactly the same tune his father had been playing on the piano. Coincidence, or learned behavior from an abusive father to a growingly abusive son?

Stories of redemption only resonate when the character being redeemed hits rock bottom, realizes it, and then tries to change. I’ve already said too much about the first two acts. I don’t want to ruin the transcendental lyrics of the final set for the uninitiated, but I urge you to listen most closely to “I Would Die 4 U.” Balance that brief song against the opening “Let’s Go Crazy,” and then chart the course Prince, Magnoli and Blinn have taken you on. PURPLE RAIN is less than perfect, but I respect the hell out of it for trying to tell a more introspective story than often emerges from a Hollywood summer popcorn movie. I leave you with the thought that the photo above does not do justice to the amount of lighters, cellphones, sparklers and souls alight during the finale at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and I wish you could have seen it

WINTER’S BONE Directed & Co-Written by Debra Granik, starring Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey & William White.

When last we met, I noted that Film Noir was alive and kicking in Australia. After having a great time at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, I can happily report that it also looks pretty lively in the U.S. Whether as a period piece on a modest budget as THE KILLER INSIDE ME, or a low budget contemporary thriller like WINTER’S BONE, the desperate and dirty heart of Film Noir was beating in Somerville, Mass.

Based on Daniel Woodrell’s novel, WINTER’S BONE follows a young woman named Ree Dolly through the Ozark Mountains searching for her father, after learning he had put up the family home as collateral on a bail bond. With the county days away from forcing Ree, her younger brother and infant sister and their shut-in mother off their land, Ree is less concerned with whether her father is alive or dead than with simply locating him. We follow her through backroads and woodsheds once used for distilling moonshine but now given over to cooking methamphetamine. As the product has grown more dangerous, so have the producers, with not even blood-ties enough to keep Ree safe in her father’s world. Film noir has taken its fair share of decent hard-working characters across the tracks. This film replaces asphalt and shadows on the wrong side of town with agoraphobic wilderness.

I was unfamiliar with most of the cast of WINTER’S BONE. I wondered if some were not professional actors, so natural was this ensemble that you rarely catch them acting, only being. John Hawkes as Ree’s uncle Teardrop was my first hint that these are in fact seasoned professionals. Hawkes brings to Teardrop the same meticulously observed worn soul that he and another powerhouse ensemble offered on HBO’s DEADWOOD. He and Jennifer Lawrence (Ree Dolly) are both so strong that they could have shown each other up with award-baiting grandiosity. Instead they embrace how unusual their characters’ relationship is, and explore it for all the threats, concerns and defiance that it offers.

Deborah Granik’s script asks an awful lot of her cast. As a director she was impressively able to wrangle all those emotions and themes while making the most out of every location available to her. During the Q&A after the screening, she mentioned that Ree’s home is only seen from the front and left side, so that the back and right sides could double for another character’s home. Even more economical, that house is where one of the cast members actually lives! This sort of resourcefulness not only helps keep the budget down, it also lends a reality that could never have existed if a movie with ten times the budget had cleared away some trees and built the town they needed. When a movie looks, feels, smells and sounds as real as WINTER’S BONE, it is very easy to get lost in its web.

THE KILLER INSIDE ME Directed by Michael Winterbottom, starring Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba and Ned Beatty.

Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel THE KILLER INSIDE ME was previously filmed in 1976 with Stacey Keach as the murderous sheriff Lou Ford. Casey Affleck plays Ford in this year’s model, with Kate Hudson as his fiance Amy. Jessica Alba plays a hooker named Joyce with whom Ford falls in love after he is sent to run her out of town. The problem with Lou Ford, and a bigger problem for the women in his life, is that the has a head full of loose screws that will not allow him to accept the comforts of love for very long before he needs to destroy it.

Judging from the reactions I heard after the Somerville screening, and from what I’ve read about the audience response at Sundance earlier this year, THE KILLER INSIDE ME is on track to become the type of movie that people either love or hate. Semi-spoiler — Here is what most people hate about it: two scenes wherein Lou Ford punches, kicks and stomps a woman character, genuinely amusing himself with her suffering. These scenes prompted one of the organizers of IFFBoston to issue a warning before the film, noting that this is the first time in the Festival’s eight year history that they have made such a warning.

Here is what I loved about this movie: two scenes wherein Lou Ford commits unspeakable violence upon women are portrayed with absolutely blunt honesty. There is nothing cool about this, no cute quip delivered at the end of the scene, nothing glamorous or stylized to hint that you should be entertained by this. Let me be clear — I did not enjoy THE KILLER INSIDE ME, but in the same vein as HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and IRREVERSIBLE, I respect it as well-made film. There is nothing cartoonish or over-the-top about this story. As such the violence, and the rage that precipitates it, are delivered unsparingly. This sort of violence in real life should prompt outrage. The violence of a character like Lou Ford being committed by an actor as generally likable as Casey Affleck could prompt always needed discussion of an uncomfortable issue.

Sadly, the knee-jerk reaction to scream for a bans and boycotts “to protect our children” (whose have no business seeing this movie to begin with!) will probably sidetrack any thoughtful examination. Sociopathic antiheroes have often reared their ugly heads in pulp novels by Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, James M. Cain and most recently James Ellroy. Film adaptations have tended to soften the rage of these characters, or even allow it to happen off screen. THE KILLER INSIDE ME is far from perfect, but it dares to go where most films won’t in allowing the story to be told from the point of view of a man the audience will truly dread.

Directed by Nash Edgerton, starring David Roberts, Claire van der Boom, Anthony Hayes and Joel Edgerton.

If you put a gun to my head and gave me three seconds to tell you what my favorite film genre is, I’d probably say Film Noir. I was raised on some glorious science fiction and horror movies. I’ve given many hours to my affection for westerns and war movies. I’ve even developed an appreciation for a precious few romances and romantic comedies. But film noir, via THE MALTESE FALCON, was the genre that first bonded me with my father. This latest tale of the boulevard of broken dreams comes to us from Syndey, Australia.

The Edgerton Bros story concerns two staples of classic noir: an affair between married partners and a bag of money. Raymond and Carla are both married to other people, and both dream of running away with each other. When Carla spies her husband Greg hiding a small fortune in a duffel, she does not waste any time figuring out where or how he got it, she only sees an opportunity to put hers and Raymond’s dream into action. An effort to cover the adulterers’ tracks so they can blow town with Greg’s cash results in an accidental murder. The murder hatches scams on top of schemes, threats on top of blackmail, and creeping suspicion among the residents of a suburban lakeside community.

Many a noir has been knocked from the classic shelf by characters making completely ridiculous decisions for the sole purpose of pushing the story in a direction it did not want to go. THE SQUARE is all the more compelling because George and Carla, and everyone in their web, avoid those decisions. While your idea of a perfect murder may not include their plan, it is important to remember that murder was never part of their plan, it was an unintended consequence. From there, every move they make is reasonable within the context of desperate people running scared. You don’t notice the great feeling of buying a story hook-line-sinker as much as you’d notice the jarring shake of a movie that jolts you back to reality with an unbelievable twist. The Edgerton’s exemplary cast hits every paranoid note in the their air-tight script.

THE SQUARE has another feature that sets it above the vast majority of suspense thrillers, an element lacking in most movies of any genre, which is the possibility of chance. Suspense is destroyed in lesser movies once you realize that everything happens by someone’s design. Everything. One character or another is always in control. As soon as you know what each character wants, you can guess what will happen next, and the rest of the movie becomes a clock winding down to what you knew would happen from 10 minutes in. THE SQUARE makes use of my personal favorite device for throwing a monkey in this wrench: weather.

Rain is the uncontrollable element that drives THE SQUARE into directions no character could have taken it. Rain is a 100% believable wild card because everyone in the audience can relate to having it ruin their best-laid plans. If it sounds like I am making too much of this, go back and watch BODY HEAT and imagine it without the sweltering humid heat wave. Kenneth Branagh and Clint Eastwood are masters of deploying weather in their films. Other random occurrences push Raymond and Carla together, and pull them apart, but rain is so pervasive that nature itself almost becomes a character. If THE SQUARE is any evidence, Noir remains alive and well to bond future generations of movie nerds.