The Infinite Napkin

BOLERO has always been a more interesting film not to watch than to watch. I can recall in the halcyon days of audio/video stores being the forefront of video rentals, when starting a video store took a good deal of seed money (hundred dollar tapes, for God’s sake!), the buzz surrounding the arrival of BOLERO on VHS. Back then, your basic dirty movie was available only through adult stores. The local A/V store (in my case it was Albin’s in Lamar, CO) had a rapidly growing shelf behind the counter of the latest video releases–I can recall some delight among my classmates when PRIVATE LESSONS and SPRING BREAK were made available there.

But when word got around about BOLERO, well, plans were formed. BOLERO was another attempt by Hollywood to make an artistically-praiseworthy X rated film. That’s a tough target to hit; the time I was building shelves and tossed a one inch bolt in the air and had it land flush in the right hole comes to mind. MIDNIGHT COWBOY worked, but how X is that now? INSERTS you just wanted to smother with a pillow to stop it from crying. SHOWGIRLS is a perfect inversion (ALL ABOUT EVE as played out at Scores), but it hardly met up with its lofty ambition to be a good high-grossing NR film. All John Derek knew was that if he photographed his wife Bo correctly, and surrounded her with actual actors, this would be a piece of cake.

In the end, BOLERO is one of those films where you’re amazed that they spent so much money on it. There is a reason for BOLERO, and it is Bo Derek. Beyond that, you are taxing the patience of the core audience. Since this was the early 80s, the options available for a successful theatrical run weren’t there. Ah, but video…on video it could play anywhere. Even Lamar, CO. BOLERO was a big box video, the kind with its own molded slipcase. Some stores rented BOLERO out in the personalized original case instead of putting the tape in one of their standard rental boxes, much to the chagrin of folks who wanted to make it look like they’d rented THE GODFATHER again. But rentals for BOLERO were insane; plus it opened the door solidly for movies that weren’t X, but were there for the same reason. Now, video stores could be diverse, and little old ladies weren’t burning the video stores down.

All of this came flooding back to me when I ripped open the NETFLIX packet with BOLERO in it. It was much as I remembered: well-photographed, actors like George Kennedy and Olivia d’Abo giving it a solid try, John Derek ticking through the 70s film technique cliches. The surprise was when I stopped the disc–a screen saver-like poster for BOLERO appeared on the screen. So even stopped, this disc announced that it was BOLERO, dammit. Just like that keep-case that said BOLERO years before, the DVD insists that everyone know that you’re got BOLERO at home.

There are days I can see myself running a video store; but it’s a cherished anachronism, much like renting vids at Albin’s.

Eek, a blog’s worse than a houseplant sometimes. What else have I seen lately?

I saw LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love Greg Kinnear, so the motivational stuff to me was great. Watching the cracks form on his character was almost as fun as watching Steve Carrell’s character try to pave over his own cracks. Why does no-one advertise when they have Alan Arkin in their movie? I WILL GO TO ANYTHING HE IS IN. I even have his LITTLE MURDERS sitting on the DVD player up next. In a movie where the kid is the emotional center of the movie (and we’ve been taught that this means an awful saccharine movie is unfurling), the kid really is the emotional center of the movie. Olive isn’t one of those oh-so-wise adults mapped on to a kid, or an epic brat, or just spooky. Olive is Olive. Hooray, Olive!

A TOWN CALLED HELL has no plot that I can determine, but it’s a spaghetti western, so big deal. Telly Savalas and Robert Shaw cross swords and Stella Stevens rides into town sleeping comfortably in a glass top coffin. Lots of sweating, lots of shooting, and hey, it’s Martin Landau! Did not finish it, sadly. The DVD transfer was so bad that every pool of black started to have moving grey/blue bars moving up and down in them and that’s a trip to the medicine cabinet, folks.

I’ve been watching FRIDAY THE 13th THE SERIES, and it’s just as good as I remember, so shut up about it already. Once upon a time, Fox would actually cast old people as old people. Crazy, I know. I’ll blog about individual episodes as they strike me. I forgot Atom Egoyan directed some of these. Wild.

More as I recall them.

The most terrifying thing about this well-crafted tense film is that every one of the last seconds of it feels like maybe, maybe the passenger uprising will succeed. It is so desperate, so primal, so irresistible a feeling that the end still feels like an awful surprise.

That’s why we needed this movie now. Later on, audiences won’t connect with it that way. They won’t be able to. Later audiences will use this film to try to connect with the feeling of watching it now, a mere five years on from the event. The feelings that make us want history rewritten, that make us want the hijackers to be craven pushovers–that’s what later audiences will wonder about. They will wonder more about how we felt watching it than how certain events were portrayed. Paul Greengrass gave us the facts, and what he had to make up fits with what else we know. UNITED 93 is a mirror.

I think I would have bona fide freaked out watching this in a theater.

Here’s the thing with David Mamet. He gets you with repetition. Everyone speaks carefully, because everything they say is a direct outgrowth of all their to-date experience and beliefs expressed in every line they say. Mamet characters are inside-out people who can’t really hide anything, so the really smart ones distract, repeat and distract, repeat and distract.

The distraction in THE EDGE is that Anthony Hopkins knows Alec Baldwin wants to kill him. Sure, there’s a bear out there that REALLY wants to kill them both, but Alec can’t do it as long as he needs Hopkins to get him out of the woods and keep him bear-free. It isn’t until they reach a settlement, a house, that the woods are forgotten and the complicated crap that makes Alec think killing Hopkins is a good idea resurfaces. Hopkins keeps saying he knows Alec wants to kill him, and it doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t happen. When he finally tries, he’s not up to the task.

Hopkins says early on that he’s a man with no imagination, so he reads and learns all the minutiae of the world. Those minutiae save him, even when they don’t always turn out to describe the world exactly. He’s a man who can’t dream, really, as he’s a billionaire. Anything he could want, he’s got or could get (Elle MacPherson plays his wife–case closed). There’s nothing to dream about, so the minutiae is what’s left. Alec Baldwin dreams of having Hopkins’ money and his wife, and does what a lot of have people thought was a fantastic idea: he’ll just kill the guy who has it all. When the time comes to do the deed, he tries to get drunk to steel himself, and finds it isn’t all that easy.

This ties in with the other repetitive notion in the movie: “Everyone who dies in the forest dies of shame”. People get too tied up in blame and fear and anger and stop thinking. And then they die. Alec the dreamer doesn’t learn this; if he’d thought about how to kill Hopkins, he would have succeeded. But instead he dies of shame. Pragmatism always seems to win in these Mamet movies. I like this one; it’s a good adventure.

Watching Alec Baldwin try to fight the bear, I kept wondering if he wished he’d gotten the second place set of steak knives. “CARCASSES ARE FOR CLOSERS!”