Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

What the hell, there's a "director's cut" of that ad?

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I had bemoaned the apparent decline of certain TIFF audience traditions in this year's festival. So I went into this, my last screening of the festival, determined to make a last stand, determined to make the coarsest, most swashbuckling, freebooting, buccaneering "Arrr!" I could muster when the anti-piracy disclaimer came on screen. And when it finally happened, I was deeply moved to hear at least one other person in the audience partake, weeping internally from this show of moral heroism and respect for tradition. (Not weeping literally, just to be clear. That would be weird unless you've had an actual traumatic pirate-related experience, a la Captain Phillips. Or if someone reported you to the FBI for downloading a movie, which was one of the more notorious incidents that took place on a now defunct internet forum I used to post at.) So even if the movie ended up being shite, my week would have ended on something of a high note.

I'd had reason to worry about the actual movie for a number of reasons. I'd glanced at a few reviews earlier and saw the phrase "Slow Cinema" come up, which is something I've struggled with in the past. In short, I haven't gelled to the low key default mode of modern arthouse cinema, and generally prefer movies where things happen. There was also the runtime of close to three hours, which would definitely be a challenge given that I slept like garbage the previous night and was leaning on a can of Starbucks Tripleshot Cafe Mocha (complete with fancy ingredients like Guarana, Vitamin B...uh, Guano? I think that was one of them, should have read the label more closely) to keep me awake. So I was pleased to find that not only did I not fall asleep during the movie (although the caffeine started to wear off towards the end), but it ended up being my favourite thing I saw from the festival.

The movie takes place in French Polynesia, where a representative of the French government played by Benoit Magimel who essentially tries to keep the peace, helping locals manage their problems. This is something he generally does in open and benevolent ways, although he's not afraid to apply a firm hand. (A pair of early scenes have him agreeing with the locals who want to keep the casino open to keep youth out of trouble, and then casually threatening the priest to buy out his church if he doesn't drop his fight against the casino.) This is cool guy who everybody seems to like (Magimel's easy, nicely worn charisma plays well into this), and we see this infatuation most clearly through the perspective of a character played by Pahoa Mahagafanau. (This is apparently her only IMDb credit, but she's quite magnetic in the role. Eager to see what she does next.) Unfortunately, this peace doesn't seem destined to last, as the increased naval presence and rumours of plans to resume nuclear testing begin stirring up tensions on the island.

The description on the TIFF website calls this a "political thriller", but that's a little misleading, as the movie seems more concerned with relating its story through shifting rhythms than charting concrete plot points. Notice an early scene where the hero goes out by boat to observe a group of surfers, and the tidal waves are captured less as action than an extension of the landscape, part of the rhythms and movements of nature. Then later you see him peering through binoculars at around sunset, and the water seems eerily still...right until he notices the top of a submarine protruding unnaturally from the surface, its manufactured geometry completely incongruent with its surroundings. I think there's a similar dynamic with the hero's appearance. I always like an opportunity to bring up wardrobe, and you can see the hero moving around with ease in the early scenes, his white summer suit blending nicely into the casual, peaceful ambience. But it feels more and more out of place as the movie progresses and he grows less assured of his grasp of the situation. (One scene has him frantically waving a flashlight around in the middle of the night trying to find the submarine again, his white suit sticking out blindingly against the pitch black surface of the water and the night sky.)

These eerie rhythms culminate most powerfully in a scene near the end at a nightclub, where everyone is bathed in cold blue light, and the beats keep going and going, as does the dancing, and an environment that was once welcoming now begins to feel almost purgatorial. (The dancing of the diminutive admiral brings to mind Michael J. Anderson's moves in Twin Peaks, and the monochrome veneer of this scene evokes the Black Lodge.) The digital cinematography is definitely a boon here, as the island initially seems beautiful but never quite inviting, and as things grow more sinister, the coldness of the cinematography nicely complements the hero's increasingly unmoored feeling. (This definitely contrasts with another recent viewing, Goodbye Emmanuelle, which has a certain warmth in capturing its island setting from being shot on film.) And then there's the closing speech by the admiral, which is hard and threatening when so much of the dialogue in the earlier sections had been soft, accommodating or at worst innuendo-laden. The movie never quite explodes, but it's an appropriate note to end on, given the escalating apocalyptic quality that had built over the runtime. (Interestingly, or maybe inanely, the weather changes in the movie roughly matched the circumstances of my screening, as it was sweltering when I entered the theatre and raining as I left.)

If there's a thesis here, it's that colonial rule, no matter how well intentioned or benevolently executed, is bound to conflict with the interests of the colonized. But despite a glib early gag (a French woman cartoonishly practices a bird dance in front of the mirror), I think the languorous approach taken by the movie helps you "feel" this dynamic in a way that never feels didactic. The fact that it takes the perspective of the Magimel character helps as he's caught between the conflicting factions, and his ability to carry out his job is undermined by the institution he serves, so he's best situated to demonstrate how these things would actually play out. There's also an interesting element of queerness here, which I'm probably not that well equipped to address but I'll try anyway. I'll note that Mahagafanau is trans and her character seems to fit in as easily as the hero, while other characters like the admiral and the aforementioned French woman are somewhat covert about their homosexuality. The nightclub features scantily clad staff (male and female) so blatantly that it barely registers, yet the scenes with the most overtly heterosexual gaze (an obese man roughly fondling a topless woman, another topless woman robotically gyrating as she DJs) have a strangely unsettling quality. It's definitely something I'd like to see somebody better unpack.

That's right, folks, I went long on this one (and threw in two paragraphs of shit that had little to do with the actual movie to boot).

AKA 90% of your reviews in this thread.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

Shhhh, you’re giving away the formula.

I might not get to reading that review for quite some time.

You'll miss the most important thing about the movie: me misremembering the ingredients list from the Starbucks Tripleshot Cafe Mocha.

Photo not taken by me.

Pictured: Benoit Magimel reading my misremembered list of ingredients for the Starbucks Tripleshot Cafe Mocha.

Of the two villains in Armand Weston’s The Taking of Christina, Roger Caine has the showier part, seething malevolence and hair-trigger rage. Yet Eric Edwards gives probably the more interesting performance. Edwards can come across effortlessly as nice, maybe a little soft, and far from a forceful alpha male presence. He’s the one who tries to comfort the titular victim played by Bree Anthony after she’s been kidnapped by them and raped by Caine. Yet there’s a certain futility to his gestures. Those qualities which can make him a warm and likable presence elsewhere render him here a study in weakness, a man who may lack his partner’s mean streak, but also lacks completely in moral fibre in backbone. He’s fallen into Caine’s orbit and is unable to push back with any real forcefulness. His apologetic demeanour seems hollow and self serving.

The dynamic between them is a bit like that between Michael Rooker and Tom Towles in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a feeling enhanced by the similarly banal milieus in which this is set. The theatre in which the heroine works. A dive bar where the villains pick up a pair of prostitutes (the always welcome Terri Hall and C.J. Laing), one of whom gets roughed up by Caine while Edwards apologetically pushes back. The snowed-in suburban houses, adorned by posters of Season Hubley and The Lord of the Rings. The film is draped in a certain moody style, thanks to the cinematography by Joao Fernandes (whose work I sadly found harder to appreciate thanks to the lousy transfer I watched), which creates a certain tension with the grim proceedings. It’s a quality foregrounded by this exchange between the protagonist and her boyfriend as they leave the theatre near the beginning of the film:

As a true crime thriller, this is mostly effective, and the final images, with blood spattered across the snow, have an undeniable impact. As porn, this is less so. I can concede that the scenes of sexual violence are appropriately ugly, but the consensual sex scenes, while more pleasant to sit through and shot in the same shadowy style, mesh uneasily with the overall tone of the movie. Trim those down and you have a very good movie.


Expose Me, Lovely, directed by Weston the same year as The Taking of Christina, is quite a bit more cohesive and quite a bit more fun. This is a porno inspired by The Lady in the Lake, and in particular, the earlier adaptation by Robert Montgomery. It’s been a while since I’ve read the novel and I’ve never seen the Montgomery film, so I can’t compare the different versions, but I understand it borrows the use of POV shots from the earlier movie. I also understand it uses them less pervasively, but I found it incorporated them into the overall visual style quite effectively, opting for reaction shots at well chosen times, and holding it all together with more atmospheric, shadowy cinematography by Fernandes. (The transfer I watched of this one was a bit more palatable.) One particularly thrilling scene has a foot chase that snaps between the hero’s POV and his grimy surroundings as he’s trying to flee a crime scene. The POV work does not feature too heavily during the sex scenes outside of the occasional blowjob (the female performers make eye contact with the camera), perhaps because it would have been difficult for the male lead to maneuver with a reasonably hefty film camera in front of him. One wonders how an adaptation of the story would have worked in the gonzo era, but one suspects such a movie would not have this one’s deliberate lighting choices and carefully considered movements. (Certainly Ultimate Workout was nowhere near as atmospheric, even if its opening scene played like a cheeky reversal of a slasher movie.)

The Philip Marlowe stand-in here is played by Ras Kean, who as far as porno noir protagonists go is certainly a better actor than John Holmes in the Johnny Wadd movies, but ranks below the steel-jawed Wade Nichols in Punk Rock (an otherwise shaggier movie). Like Nichols in his movie, Kean gets to dish out an asskicking to Bobby Astyr in this one’s funniest scene. Astyr shows off his karate moves. ("Don't make me use these hands, man. They're registered.") Kean knocks him down, seemingly disappointed at Astyr’s lack of cooperation. ("Why'd you push me into being impolite?") Kean gets the job here from Catherine Burgess, whose delicate features and sense of trepidation make her an appealing noir character. (Although if I personally were casting a porno noir, Annette Haven with her Old Hollywood charm would be my number one pick for the female lead.) And most fun is Jody Maxwell as a sculptor of phallic statues, who plays her role in the same vein as Julianne Moore in The Big Lebowski. And while I could do with most of the sex scenes being trimmed down (the side effect of Weston’s strengths as a thriller director is that I’d much rather be watching the story than the ****ing and sucking), I must concede that her scene is positively scorching.

(We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.)

Maitresse - ouch
Also, "ouch" (*wink, wink, nudge, nudge*)
I'm kind of surprised this isn't one of the movies Strickland cited as an influence on Duke of Burgundy.

I still haven’t seen Maitresse (I meant to see it a while back, but got cold feet after learning certain acts, don’t remember what these were though, it’s been a while), but Schroeder’s Idi Amin documentary is kind of amazing.

The word, "nailing," is involved in describing that scene (ftr, only one scene, so if pressed, you can close your eyes for a few minutes, if need be).
Though, I'd describe the instruments used as large needles than nails, and they're poked through the skin completely before they're nailed to the 2x4.


Weirdly, not the worst thing I've seen on film, but I was cringing hard while watching it. Plus, also, not simulated.

Yeah, this is not making me want to watch the movie in the near future.

Although I’ll be out of town next week, so whatever I manage to squeeze in this week will be the last things I watch before I dive into horror for October.

Oh, I forgot about the slaughterhouse scene. Something I wrote off as someone who doesn't consume meat as, "well, the violence inherent in most people's dinner plates."


I think it takes the unnecessary violence of something like Cannibal Holocaust to really strike a nerve for me.

ETA: as far as slaughterhouse scenes are meant to go though, I think that one was on the more unsettling side. Just fair warning for the reader.

The vast majority of vintage pornography I've watched has been directed by straight men, for straight men, so it was interesting to see something geared explicitly toward lesbian women. Watching the results, I don't know if I detect a huge difference in terms of visual language (one key but fairly static shot is framed strategically to accentuate Nina Hartley's rear end; I suppose if you want your viewers to get off on physically attractive people having sex, there will be similarities in how you shoot them). But you do get perhaps a different set of archetypes, most notably the butch escort played by Sharon Mitchell, clad head to toe in an all black get-up, greaser style, towering over her co-stars. (Mitchell has always registered as "cool" in a way most pornstars haven't, so she's perfect casting here.) "Happy Gay Day, ladies," she announces.

There is a certain charge from having such a forceful, masculine presence enter a non-threatening domestic environment (think of all the home invasion movies you've seen, where a weak, often bespectacled hero is menaced by the more alpha, rough around the edges villain). That being said, any real sense of threat dissipates once Mitchell tells the protagonists about the importance of safe sex and proceeds to demonstrate such techniques. (It's always nice when someone practices what they preach.) This scene represents the climax of the movie, which is about two lovers played by Nina Hartley, who is always a welcome presence, and Pepper, who I'm not familiar with but is not an unpleasant presence either. The movie starts with the two of them in a hot tub, Hartley warning Pepper about "lesbian bed death syndrome" and recounting to her a sexual encounter between friends she happened to see (Pepper calls her a "Peeping Tammy"). The action then moves to the bedroom, where Pepper calls a phone sex line while Hartley listens in, which I assume is the early '90s equivalent of sharing your Netflix password. Finally they decide to call an escort service, and voila, enter Sharon Mitchell.

This is a seemingly low budget SOV production, so there is a certain flatness to how much of the movie looks, especially the climax shot in the heroines' living room (the excess of wood paneling does not provide much of an erotic charge). But you do get bits of stylization, like with the steely blue lighting and closer camera angles in the flashback, and the shadows and canted angles used to shoot the phone sex operator, who sounds like a more foul-mouthed Katharine Hepburn. (I followed this up with Clips from the same director and production company, which is more aggressively stylized, particularly in a ritualistic early segment that lays on the video colour effects thick. I'm definitely interested in exploring further into their body of work.) And the banter between Hartley and Pepper ("Don't let the lesbian bed death get you!") has a nice, unforced quality, and the eventual pillow fight that breaks out carrying a convincing degree of spontaneity. They're quite enjoyable to hang out with, which makes this a pretty easy thirty minutes to sit through.

I recently rewatched Alex Cox's Walker, which I found held up quite nicely. No matter how leaden and glib the attempts at political satire might have been, a quality that I've found increasingly irksome in general these days, Cox's knack for arresting imagery, the idiosyncratic Ed Harris performance, and the way the chaos of the production bled onto the onscreen proceedings still made it an extremely compelling viewing experience. Like Walker, the movie Cox made right before it, Straight to Hell, had been received quite poorly during its release but built something of a cult reputation in the years since. Unlike Walker, when I'd first watched Straight to Hell, I'd been pretty lukewarm on the whole thing, but figured that coming off a pretty positive rewatch of the other movie, it was time to give this another shot and see if it worked better for me this time around. I'm afraid I must report that my opinion did not improve all that much.

I suppose I should start with the positive. Anyone who's seen him in interviews knows that Cox loves spaghetti westerns like nobody else. And from watching this, it's clear that at least on a visual level, he clearly understands he genre. Like some of the best spaghetti westerns, this is beautiful to look at, but not necessarily pretty. It's shot in sun-scorched widescreen cinematography that threatens to give you heat stroke just by looking at it. We alternate between brutal, unforgiving vistas, dilapidated buildings seemingly collapsing under the heat, and ugly, sweaty faces pushed uncomfortably close to the camera. (This contains an endless series of famous faces, and one wonders if Cox cast them in part for how unflatteringly he could shoot them.) And spaghetti western violence has a particular mixture of sadism and visual panache, and this is some Cox captures on a primal level, laying on the gunshots and squibs and having his characters get ripped apart in the carnage as the conflict spins out of control. (I watched the director's cut, which I understand added a number of special effects, including extra blood during the scenes of violence. I didn't find it distracting, aside from some crudely animated skeletons that show up twice during the movie and have no obvious relation to the proceedings.) For these last thirty minutes or so, I'd say the movie is well worth a watch.

Unfortunately, the preceding hour is less easy to sit through. The movie begins with a robbery one might say "went awry" were it not executed so sloppily in the first place. The robbers are played by Sy Richardson, who is the only actor in the movie to play a recognizable human and exercise any amount of understatement, Joe Strummer, who may not be a great actor but looks good scowling and sweating on camera, and the amazingly named Dick Rude, who is a nice softer counterpoint to the meaner characters around him. They're also joined by Courtney Love, who is pregnant with Richardson's child but seems to hold no great affection for him (the feeling seems to be mutual) and spends the movie whining and shrieking. They flee to a remote western town where they expect they can hide and keep a low profile. Alas, the locals do not welcome their presence so readily, and for the rest of the movie, they bear witness to a largely unmotivated series of cruelties, with characters being brutalized and/or killed over misunderstandings or often for the sheer fun of it.

There's definitely a strong element of play acting, enhanced by the way characters from a crime movie intrude upon a western milieu and the overly costume-y apparel of the supporting characters. (As Jean-Luc Godard recently passed away, certain passages from his movies are very much on my mind at the moment, and there are similarities between this movie and Godard's approach to genre thrills.) The problem is that when it comes to comedy, Cox has no sense of timing or how to structure a gag. There are jokes that work (there's a running gag about Strummer's affair with Miguel Sandoval's wife, made all the funnier by the fact that Sandoval's voice sounds a lot like Clint Eastwood), but so much of this is characters we barely know getting killed out of the blue, punchlines with no setup. Imagine someone shouting a bunch of jokes at you with taking even a moment to pause for emphasis (or take a breath in between), and also leaving out the beginning and most of the middle of the jokes so you just get the punchlines, and that's roughly the effect here.

One particularly off putting moment, which sets up the climax, involves a character played by Dennis Hopper coming into town, giving the heroes a shitload of weapons and then leaving right away. Hopper's character is named I.G. Farben, which is also the name of the corporation that manufactured Zyklon B for the Nazis during the Holocaust. It's been a while, but I remember an interview where Cox smugly pointed this out, asserting this was some brilliant act of satire on his part and suggesting that Hopper's character was meant to represent American meddling in Latin America. For how crude I found the satire in Walker, it's actually satirical in that it places its jabs in a greater context and attempts to holistically reflect in its narrative what it intends to criticize. This is literally a single scene in a movie that otherwise supports no such political reading. (Perhaps I'm extra annoyed here because I think Cox has expressed one opinion bad enough to disqualify him as a serious political thinker. For the record, I don't begrudge the man personally and think he's a pretty interesting artist, I just don't take him seriously on a political level, and don't think we should give artists a pass just because they roughly fall on the same side of the political spectrum as we do. But I digress.) I should note that this scene is greatly alleviated by the presence of Dennis Hopper, perhaps the least tortured and most coherent I've ever seen him, as well as Grace Jones.

So this is frequently annoying aside from a few chuckles, but that climax really makes up for it.

I just watched Salo. I can imagine myself rewatching Maitresse one day. That isn't difficult despite the pain of some of the scenes.
I can never imagine myself ever rewatching Salo.