Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: In the Cut

This is the final installment of my 2023 bi-monthly series Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro, in which I watched the remaining three films each I had not seen that were directed by Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow.

To paraphrase former football coach Dennis Green, "It was what we thought it was."

Because Jane Campion is the only woman ever to receive two Oscar nominations for best director, winning one of them, there's been an inclination to reappraise her 2003 thriller In the Cut. At the very least, the hosts spoke about it with some favorability when they looked back on it on Filmspotting. It's tempting to give an artist who has made some indisputably great films a little leeway when looking at her misfires. Dare I say this tendency might be even greater when it's a woman, of whom there are relatively few to celebrate at this level in this industry.

But everyone is capable of making a stinker, even Jane Campion.

I should say the rating I am giving my final Campion feature on Letterboxd is two stars. That might clear it from "stinker" territory. So either this film does have some saving graces, or I am not immune to the notion of boosting my appraisal of the films of someone like Campion.

It's just that when it came out in 2003, it seemed like yet another one of those erotic detective thrillers that had their heyday in the 1990s before slowly starting to peter out in the 2000s, and that's pretty much exactly what it is.

In fact, if I were looking for something to differentiate this from others of its ilk -- some little twinkling idea that Campion brought to the project that a lesser director couldn't have -- I can't really find it.

If you're hoping for a strong character from Meg Ryan, representing an undercurrent of feminism in the film, you'll be disappointed. Even someone with Campion's smart sensibilities is unable to prevent this from being a character who has things happen to her, not who drives the action. She spends a fair bit of time crying pathetically as men toss her around like a rag doll. This was standard practice for a woman in a thriller in 2003, but it has not aged well, and it would have seemed like Campion could have done better by her lead character, even back then.

Then there's the men. Each is reprehensible in his own way, which is okay depending on how it's handled -- perhaps this is the feminism of Campion peeking through. But even though their behavior reads to us as vile, within the film itself it is not sufficiently repudiated, leaving an unsavory taste. Particularly unsavory, at least by today's standards, is the monstrous behavior of a young Black man who is one of Ryan's students, one of the red herrings about who might be the killer. There's a scene where it is implied he would have raped her had there not been a deus ex machina sort of intervention.

Mark Ruffalo is good, as he always is, but I loathed his character and his retrograde opinions about women, even some possible racism. (He says the way to flirt with a Black chick is that you stare back at her.) Clearly Campion is not trying to present us a knight in shining armor, but even within his own character there are inconsistencies. For example, he violates protocol by asking Ryan's character out even though he's just interviewed her as a potential witness to a murder. Perhaps it's not the same as asking out a suspect, but it's sketchy anyway. Then later in the movie there's a line where he says "I was doing perfectly fine before I met you," as though she were the instigator of their relationship and to blame for messing with his head. Then he's got a sexually aggressive quality throughout that is especially hard to stomach today.

In the Cut is one of those movies that uses the psychosexual dynamics of its lead characters as a driver for the parts of the story that are supposed to interest us most, and that's the problem with every erotic thriller -- maybe the reason why it essentially died out as a viable genre. Maybe there was a time we did feel like the animal magnetism between two characters and the various ways they tear each other's clothes off was enough to hold our interest. That time has now passed.

Really, I doubt my impression of In the Cut would have been any different 20 years ago -- no better, no worse. I don't think any one of those erotic thrillers became a special favorite of mine, though if I drilled down into my Flickchart account I'd probably start to find the exceptions. Watching this movie, I kept trying to find the Campionisms, the bits of filmmaking prowess that elevated this material. Outside of a few shots -- there's one involving water on an out-of-focus light that I found quite distinctive -- this felt like it could have been the work of any old hack. 

It's also one of those movies that reminds me of something that's probably obvious, which is that 20 years ago is now a long time ago and films looked a lot different back then. There's a lot of super saturation of color and unfocusing of backgrounds that probably registered as visually dynamic back then, but today just ages the film. I don't suppose any film can really escape the era in which it was made, but some are more indebted to it than others. The great films become ageless, while the lesser ones become part of the wallpaper that defined a particular time period.

Well I wish I could say the end result of this series were more positive. It turns out I'd made smart choices in which Campion and Bigelow films I'd seen and which I'd left to catch up with at some future unspecified date.

There's some positive news in that I loved Bigelow's Near Dark, the vampire movie she made in 1987. (Which almost certainly looks like a film made in 1987, though at least that's a look we aspire to nowadays.) However, I was significantly negative on the other two films I watched, The Loveless and Blue Steel, with Blue Steel actually having a huge amount in common with In the Cut. If I were ranking these six films, Bigelow's would be at either end of the spectrum, occupying spots 1, 5 and 6.

It's hard even to say which Campion film I liked best, though I guess it would have to be An Angel at My Table from 1990. The way the film is tied into her New Zealand roots -- almost to the same extent as her debut, Sweetie, which I really like -- gives it a certifiable edge over Holy Smoke, which shares too much in common with In the Cut in terms of the aforementioned psychosexual dynamics. So I suppose, that does make In the Cut a logical part of her oeuvre, even if it's too generic in all other respects. 

Having now done this in three straight years with Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and these two women, I plan to give the "complete a filmography" format a rest in 2024, at least for one year. But that doesn't mean I won't have a bi-monthly series, maybe just the one, as opposed to the three I've been working through in 2023. I'll tell you all about that in January. 

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: Blue Steel

This is the penultimate in my 2023 bi-monthly series watching the remaining films I had not yet seen by Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion, two of the three women who have won the best director Oscar.

Alas. This series' three films directed by Kathryn Bigelow started with a whimper, and also ended with one -- though it seems quite misplaced to describe any of Blue Steel's histrionics as a "whimper."

Her first film The Loveless also disappointed me, so her portion of this series was only salvaged by Near Dark, which I loved and gave four stars on Letterboxd.

Jane Campion isn't doing a huge amount better, though my feelings on her first two films were more like lukewarmth. Whereas my star rating for Blue Steel just kept on dropping and dropping throughout the film's running time, until it was about as low as it could go.

To give you some sense of why I disliked this film so much I will have to spoil it. (The bold and italics are meant to indicate that this is your spoiler warning.) The film is 33 years old so I suspect you will have decided long ago whether you planned to see it. If you still plan to, you can stop reading this now.

Much of my disappointment has to do with mistaken expectations when coming in -- expectations that seem even more mistaken given what I've been able to gather from the tenor of Bigelow's other films, all the rest of which I had now seen. 

Perhaps only because the promotional materials for the movie all show Jamie Lee Curtis in her beat cop uniform, I was under the impression that this was some sort of realistic look at a female police officer -- that still seeming something of an anachronism as late as 1990, when this film was made -- and how she cuts her teeth on the force. I expected sexism to play a role (it only plays a very small one) and I imagined it to be a lot more like a procedural.

No, this is a classic, and very bad, example of that inescapable 1990s thriller, the cat-and-mouse game between a cop and a killer and how the killer gets inside the cop's head.

Yawn.

These can be done well. I'm sure I liked a number of these movies back in the 1990s. This one is not done well. 

We are introduced to Curtis' Megan Turner as an academy hopeful with an earnest desire to work as a police officer. She seems to be a totally by-the-book type who just wants to serve the people and do honor to the badge.

But on her very first shift -- almost as much of a cliche as the very last shift -- she shoots dead a man trying to rob a grocery store. (Tom Sizemore, whom Bigelow would use again, in bigger roles, in Point Break and Strange Days.)

Ordinarily, this first day on the job would just be considered very bad luck and would not, should not, define Officer Turner's upcoming actions in her chosen career. Clearly they need to investigate the shooting, but witnesses would corroborate her story that she told the man to drop his gun multiple times before opening fire, and only did so when he turned the gun on her. 

Unfortunately, she immediately loses all credibility by starting to act incredibly erratically, beyond the standard ways common to a rogue cop who has to break the rules to prove what he or she knows to be true but what no one else can see.

She tries to arrest someone while on desk duty -- or is it actual suspension? -- with a gun she shouldn't have. She handcuffs the internal affairs officer on her case to the steering wheel of his car so she can follow a hunch to try to catch the man who is stalking her. (And nearly gets him killed, for the first of two times.) When she's in the hospital as a patient, she punches out another officer so she can steal his uniform -- for reasons that are totally unclear beyond what seems like Bigelow's interest in staging the final shootout with Turner in her beat cop clothes.

Adding to the ridiculousness, even though it has been established that she shot Sizemore on her first day as a beat cop, she is treated throughout like a veteran, offered benefits of the doubt only accorded to those who have logged countless hours and cases, as well as given their level of access to case files and to higher ups in the NYPD, including, if I'm not mistaken, the police commissioner himself (Kevin Dunn). We're talking about a woman fresh out of cadet school who shot someone five times on the first day of the job! She would be granted exactly zero benefits of the doubt, especially because -- the film notes but does not follow through on -- she's a woman. (Really, the fact that Blue Steel was not more about her gender is a major disappointment that I cannot overstate. Bigelow could have really pushed this and she just didn't.) 

But one of the main reasons she should not be accorded this sort of preferential treatment is because they can't find Sizemore's gun, leading to doubts that it ever actually existed. (The witnesses seem unable to confirm it, which is ridiculous -- they're all on the floor, and they wouldn't be just because a guy was waving around a knife.)

But if she shot Sizemore dead, then his gun would have clattered to the grocery store floor and been collected as evidence, right?

That brings us to the movie's villain, played by Ron Silver, a Wall Street day trader. And boy is he a doozy. 

Silver's Eugene Hunt is at the grocery store at the time of the shooting. He also drops to the ground. When Sizemore is shot, his gun does clatter to the ground -- right next to Eugene. Who surreptitiously takes the gun and leaves the scene without staying to provide witness statements.

Why does he do this? Lord knows, but I will try to hazard a guess.

Apparently this Wall Street day trader has always been a psychopath in the waiting and was just looking for someone to drop their gun next to him in order to push him over the top. And if you're expecting this to lead to an exploration of toxic masculinity on Wall Street and for Eugene to be a character in the mold of Patrick Bateman, I'm sorry to disappoint you there too. Bret Easton Ellis didn't write American Psycho until the following year. Who knows, maybe he was inspired by Blue Steel.

So Eugene has this gun and has gone back to work and we don't really know anything more about him just yet. But then he waits outside in the rain for Megan after she's been stripped of her badge and her gun. She doesn't know him from a hole in the ground because he left the scene of her shooting without anyone seeing him. She just thinks he's a kind stranger -- a kind stranger in a fancy suit and a neatly cropped beard -- who offers her a place in his taxi.

He takes her to dinner and takes her on a helicopter ride and seduces her. Why he's interested in her outside of it being one of those dumb conveniences these movies need is initially unclear, and I think still unclear after the film's bogus explanation. But you should know that now that he has a gun, he has decided to start shooting other random people around the city and carving Megan's name onto the bullet casings. I guess to frame her? But that couldn't be -- people don't have personally monogrammed bullets. Just to mess with her I guess.

He's keeping separate the seduction from the cuckoo behavior until one day he decides to spring on her the idea that she might be his soulmate because she also can unflinchingly shoot someone. So I guess when she shot Sizemore it turned him on and he thought he might have found the woman who can be the psychotic other half of his fetishistic desire to shoot people. (Silver, by the way, has some really demented moments that work in isolation, but as a realization of some actual psychological disorder, they're pretty absurd.)

And this is when she starts behaving more and more erratically, though of course she never has anything solid on him -- and her bringing of her hunches to the police brass is particularly ludicrous given she would know she needs evidence. His lawyer (a young Richard Jenkins) makes sure that nothing can stick to him precisely because of this lack of evidence, and even though Eugene and the lawyer are both supposed to be smarmy and acting in bad faith, you kind of agree with the lawyer that's there's nothing she can actually pin on him. Agreeing with this lawyer is not where we should be at this point in the movie.

The characters here are so poorly drawn, their motivations so sketchily established, that their behavior as the movie advances toward its finale just gets more and more ludicrous. To give you an idea of how hopeless things have gotten by the end of the third act, let's fast forward to the moment when Megan is in the hospital and has just punched out the cop to take his clothes. This was instead of taking a sedative to make her sleep after Eugene broke into her apartment and shot the IA agent (Clancy Brown), though somehow not fatally, and injured her enough to send her into the hospital before himself disappearing again -- as he is, as all mysterious killers are, wont to do.

So Megan is back in her blues that she hasn't worn since that very first night, I suppose walking aimlessly in an attempt to find Eugene. She goes down into a subway, and suddenly he's there on the subway platform, aiming a gun at her back. Despite the fact that aiming a gun at somebody's back does not involve any noise -- they don't show the gun's hammer clicking or anything -- she whirls around and fires a shot at him just before he can try to shoot her.

The staging here is particularly peculiar. It does not seem as though Eugene has followed her down into this subway station. The staging suggests he was already in the subway -- he's finally ditched his suit for the clothes of an indigent person -- and she just happened to walk down onto the platform in this particular station, where he already was. What? That doesn't make a bit of sense.

It appears as though Bigelow wanted to have this showdown in the subway so Megan could be knocked off her feet, with her head exposed to an oncoming train, so she could move it out of the way at the last moment. It wasn't worth it.

Their showdown surfaces to street level where they shoot at each other from behind cars and not once, not twice, but at least three times empty their cartridge and then look stupidly at the gun to see why it's no longer shooting bullets, continuing to pull the trigger despite the lack of further emanations from the barrel. Gee, might the gun have run out of bullets? It's the dumb movie version of someone tapping a microphone and saying "Is this thing on?" only it's "Is this gun working like it's supposed to?"

Finally there's a moment where she has him at close range and after a long pregnant pause, she blasts him three times in the chest -- at which point he falls forward. Not backward, but forward. 

In a modern movie, Megan would have learned from all her reckless discharging of her weapon and would have placed him under arrest, an indication that maybe she does have a future in the police force and she can put this all behind her. Instead, she drops him dead. (Well, he did kill her friend earlier and tried to kill the IA agent whom she had just slept with, despite the fact that she almost got him killed by handcuffing him to his steering wheel.) 

Because you could run the credits without any sort of epilogue back in this era, that's exactly what happens. A dazed Megan is pulled from the front seat of the vehicle where she was sitting when she finally popped a cap in Eugene's ass, the officer who comes across this scenario where she had just shot dead an apparent civilian never wondering for a moment whether she might be the aggressor, some sort of demented person wearing a cop uniform. Indeed, that's pretty much what she is. Indeed, it's not even her own uniform, as she punched out a nice cop who had just offered her a cigarette and whose only crime was being assigned to sit outside her room at the hospital so no one tried to kill her.

I was half expecting an epilogue, though, where we would see the police commissioner draping some kind of medal around her neck for her bravery, or giving her the key to the city. At this point I was so skeptical of the core ethics of the movie that I thought Bigelow might find this completely justified.

I do feel a little bad beating up Blue Steel and Bigelow because of the optics of it; because of the very thing I said I wished this movie had dealt with more. I thought specifically this movie was going to be about a woman's journey on the police force, in an era in which she was scoffed at for choosing this career path and many people didn't think her capable of doing it. It's fine that Bigelow was more interested in making what is effectively an erotic thriller. It's her business if she wants to do that. What worries me is whether I, a male critic and blogger, will be seen as shitting on this work by a female director with a female star, when I'm sure there were so many other terrible movies conforming to this template made at this same time, that were made by and starring men. 

But it isn't this same time now, and I expect I'd find many of those movies equally lacking if I watched them in 2023. It's conceivable that I would have found Blue Steel slightly more useful in 1990, but I don't know. It's pretty bad.

Speaking of 1990, there was one thing I noticed about this movie as it related to another movie that came out in 1990. That's Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, which is also set in New York -- and features two of the actors that this film featured. Yes, Elizabeth Pena (Megan's friend whom Eugene shoots and kills) and Matt Craven (a date Megan is fixed up with, who turns up his nose at her career choice) are both also in Jacob's Ladder, which I found strange. Just a coincidence that the two actors were also in a different movie set in New York and made in 1990? Or at least released in 1990? 

No, actually! Both movies featured Risa Bramon Garcia and Billy Hopkins as casting directors, as it turns out. 

In order to finish the Kathryn Bigelow portion of this series on a more hopeful note, I'll say that Blue Steel does serve a useful purpose if we think of it as a a blue print (so to speak) for Strange Days, which is my favorite Bigelow film and in my top 100 on Flickchart. It seems Bigelow is working out some of the ideas and iconic imagery of that film in this one, and at least by then she has really figured out where she stands on the police and their possibility for corruption. It's a theme she would explore more and more ruthlessly up to and including her most recent feature to date, 2017's Detroit.

It's a bit of a bummer that Bigelow hasn't made -- hasn't gotten to make? -- a film in the six years since then, because one of the reasons I chose her for this series is that when she's on, she's really on. Beyond Strange Days, my favorite of hers by leaps and bounds, we've got other films that worked like gangbusters for others even if they might not have worked to that same extent for me, like Point Break, the best picture winner The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty.

And I'm grateful I did watch her films this year if only because that gave me Near Dark, which may just end up being my favorite of the six films I watch by these two directors. 

In November, we'll see if Campion's final film, In the Cut, has anything to say about that.

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: Holy Smoke

This is the fourth in my 2023 bi-monthly series watching the remaining three films each I had not seen directed by Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow.

I had already thought of Harvey Keitel as our leading portrayer of depraved men with psychosexual hangups before I had even seen Jane Campion's fifth feature, Holy Smoke (1999). (The exclamation point seems to be used sometimes and not other times, though IMDB has it without, so that's what I'll go with. Excessive punctuation in titles usually bothers me, and in any case, the exclamation point doesn't appear on screen in the movie itself.)

The fact that the movie doesn't fully see him this way, despite ample evidence to the contrary, was just one of the problems I had with it. However, I did still like it overall.

Keitel re-teams with Campion after her third feature, The Piano, where he was also a highly sexualized though clearly more sympathetic character. He doesn't show his junk in this one, so Campion must have nixed his request.

It's her first (and so far only) collaboration with Kate Winslet, who does show her junk, if the female genitalia can be referred to as "junk." It's a naked performance in more ways than one, as Winslet portrays Ruth, an Australian in her early 20s who has come under the spell of a guru on an Indian ashram. That choice is an obvious example of her unstable mental state, but the cure by her family -- luring her back to Australia on the false pretense that her father is dying, then handing her over to a man (Keitel) who specializes in extracting people from cults -- is liable to cause even more confusion for the young woman.

Especially when the horndog played by Keitel, DJ Powers, proves quite incapable of keeping his junk in his pants, even if we never see it on screen.

It's probably obvious where things will go with the two of them when the are alone in a remote hut in the outback, within a reasonably close drive of her family if they need to check up on the progress. That's because DJ also has a tryst with Ruth's married (sister? I think? I wasn't sure about all the family connections) earlier in the story, and we already know he has a female partner who stayed back in the U.S. who is also his romantic partner. 

However, I think we assume that DJ has never been unprofessional in situations like this before, with other confused young women who were in cults. This is where seeing the tail end of one of DJ's previous successes may have been helpful. It's an old screenwriting trick to show the skills of a central character in practice at the start of the film, to demonstrate both their talent for their job and what a successful outcome of these skills looks like. (Something, for example, Christopher Nolan's Inception does not do, to its detriment.) If we'd opened with DJ breaking the spell on another innocent young woman, we'd know that he typically earns both his paycheck and his reputation as one of the premier practitioners of this very specialized line of work.

Since this is really Ruth's story, though, the opening is devoted to images of her in India, involved in cult behavior that does not seem all too toxic, and perhaps, may actually be the quest for enlightenment she direly wants and needs. The movie interestingly refuses to condemn the guru, who we see only briefly, leaving us unable to determine whether or not he's a charlatan. The opening credits and the few minutes afterward actually make this whole thing look sort of joyous, as they replicate Ruth's perspective more than the perspective of her concerned friend who dobs Ruth in (to use the Australian lingo) to her family. In these scenes, Campion also dabbles with some visual effects to document the dizzy delirium of it all -- while stopping short of saying this can do Ruth no good. It's a good look on Campion and I'm sorry not to have seen her go back to that sort of thing more often in her career.

So we don't really get DJ until the movie is maybe 20 minutes old, at which point, we are going only on what he's showing us in the here and now. And at first it all looks very promising. He's using an approach that is more cooperative than confrontational, attempting to challenge Ruth's assumptions in unexpected ways that really seem like they have a chance of succeeding. We can see why he's successful at this, so in a way, this does fulfill the script function of showing us DJ at the height of his skills. Since we've never seen him close the deal, though, we have no idea if he falls apart at the end in other cases. (Presumably not, because that sort of thing would have gotten out.)

Since he does fall apart in this case -- it's not spoiling too much to tell you that -- we then don't really know what it is about Ruth that causes this reaction in him. It's very challenging, from a screenwriting perspective, to communicate to a viewer exactly why a particular close-quarters relationship results in something emotionally tumultuous. In his exceedingly frank way, DJ himself admits that his attraction to Ruth is sexual, an immediate inability to deny his physical urges, rather than intellectual or emotional. However, his initial loss of professional distance becomes less of a slip-up and more of a full-bore spiraling downward, at which point it's obvious that there's an intellectual and emotional connection he can't resist. 

Problem is, this isn't really in Campion's dialogue. Ruth is manipulating DJ as much as DJ is attempting to (benignly, at least at first) manipulate her, as much as the guru (possibly benignly) manipulated her. She wants to destroy his defenses, mock and laugh at him, pretend she's interested only to pull the carpet out from under him -- all as a complicated form of payback for being placed in this situation to begin with, even if those feelings would more appropriately be directed at her family. However, Campion also want us to find her genuinely vulnerable and possibly in the midst of some sort of breakthrough -- though we can rarely distinguish this from her (justifiable) trickery.

The end result is that when things go big in the finale, it doesn't really feel earned. If DJ does this for a job, he should be up against these fragile emotional stakes all the time. And if this is the career he's chosen for himself, he himself should not be so vulnerable to the beauty and breasts (at one point he admits to having a particular thing for her breasts) of the women he is trying to help.

Even though it does get a bit confused, and seems to let DJ off the hook too much for behavior that is shamelessly exploitative, I was ultimately won over by Campion's filmmaking and her perspective. If you set aside the two main characters, the way the supporting characters act is quite reminiscent of the eccentricities we saw in her first film, Sweetie, and even on into her second film, An Angel at My Table, which is the first Campion film I watched for this series. There's a sort of wildness to these Australians that we might also see in a film like Mad Max -- a blue collar shagginess that is somewhere between punk and bogan. ("Bogan" being the Australian word for redneck.) 

I want to call attention to two actors in particular, one I didn't know and one I did. The one I didn't know plays Ruth's mum, and her name is Julie Hamilton. She has a lot of traits that are really familiar to me from living in Australia, and I guess she did a lot of work before this, not so much after. She's the neurotic and panicky type, so her trip to India to try to convince Ruth to come home, where she's worried about being touched by everything, is both brave and comedic gold. Then there's Dan Wyllie, a character actor who shows up in Australian TV and movies all the time, but whose work I mostly know from the last ten years. It was good to see him show up here. 

Okay, in September we get to my final Kathryn Bigelow movie for this series, Blue Steel. 

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: Near Dark

This is the third in my 2023 bi-monthly series in which I finish the final three films I haven't yet seen by both Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion.

How much mood-setting work is a score by Tangerine Dream doing? I guess that's like asking what came first, the chicken or the egg. 

One thing about Near Dark is clear, though: In the six years since her directing debut in The Loveless, Kathryn Bigelow has taken major steps forward as a filmmaker.

I should probably clarify that. I didn't have a problem with the filmmaking in The Loveless, I just didn't care for the story (what story?) or the characters.

What I really mean is, in Near Dark, Bigelow has started to show us who she is as a filmmaker, and what sorts of themes and ideas will come to characterize her best work.

I suppose the characters in this movie are not so different from the central characters in The Loveless, a bunch of motorcycle greasers there, and a group of miscreants who similarly disrupt social norms here, though there's nary a motorcycle in sight. Here, though, they are vampires, and it's that little step into genre filmmaking that seems to really set Bigelow free.

The main character wasn't a vampire when this all started. That's Adrian Pasdar's Caleb, a nice enough young man who wears a cowboy hat and looks for potential romantic interest at the local watering hole in his small Oklahoma town. Unfortunately, the one with whom he strikes up a connection on this particular night is Mae (Jenny Wright), whose cryptic comments about planning to still be here when the light from a star takes a billion years to get here don't faze him one bit. Before dawn he's got a bite on his neck, his skin is starting to smoke in the rising sun, and Mae's group of nomadic fellow vampires have to decide if Caleb is worthy of taking up with them, though Caleb refuses to kill to feed his appetites and pass their litmus test for his worthiness. Meanwhile, Caleb's father and younger sister set out looking for him.

I mentioned the Tangerine Dream score earlier, and though a score like that is incomparably effective in the right situation, it takes a director to create that situation. Bigelow really sets the stage with all her shots of the wide open Oklahoma plains at near dusk and near dawn, establishing a southern gothic tone that just deepens as the movie progresses. There's something apocalyptic about the way the sun bleeds into the sky and suffuses everything with a slightly surreal feeling. Tonally, there's nothing remotely like this in her first work.

The next thing I want to focus on is the cast, and specifically, how much of it is part of the greater Kathryn Bigelow-James Cameron universe. I checked just now and it appears those two did not get together until the following year, but in Near Dark Bigelow used three actors who were in Cameron's Aliens the year before, all part of the vampire group. Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton obviously stand out from the Aliens cast, but Jenette Goldstein -- whose name I did not know -- was more recognizable to me from her role in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where she plays John Connor's foster mother. (You know, the one the T-1000 impersonates, ultimately driving an arm turned into a sword through the face and milk carton of John's foster father.)

Speaking of chickens and eggs, I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching the way Cameron and Bigelow came into each other's orbits, but it does indeed seem that Bigelow was offering up the sincerest form of flattery with these casting choices. From a distance of more than 30 years, it surely places a viewer within a certain sort of cinematic universe that has included some of the most memorable genre films of the past four decades.

I should say the cast sharing actually goes one step further than that. There's a small character actor who appears here that I recognized, that maybe not everyone would, name of Robert Winley. You know the biker Arnold Schwarzenegger beats up to get his clothes in T2? "Take it! Take it!" he says, throwing Arnie the keys to his motorcycle. He actually appears here, in a similar sort of seedy biker bar, serving a very similar purpose. So maybe the sincerity and flattery goes both ways.

Also on the topic of the cast, it caused me to wonder why Adrian Pasdar hasn't gotten more work over the years. He has a good look and is a charismatic presence in the lead (as is Jenny Wright as Mae, another actress who should have gotten more work based on her distinct appearance and presence). It's hard to believe that the only really significant thing Pasdar has done in the last 20 years was appearing on Heroes, a gig that did not end up getting him additional work, though it did for much of the cast. (Actually, it appears he's been working a lot on TV, just in shows I don't watch -- but it doesn't mean I can't still miss seeing his face on the big screen.)

Anyway, this movie has cult horror written all over it, but I think it's actually better than that. In addition to the terrific performances by Paxton, Henriksen et al, this movie gives us some really good vampire world-building, and plenty of excellent violence. It's a mood, but it's got its heart in the right place too, ultimately reminding us that these charismatic characters are not the ones we should be rooting for. In its mixture of small-town innocence and murderous darkness, there's even something about it that reminds me a little bit of Blue Velvet.

I should mention that I had significant technical challenges watching this movie, which started with finding it available at all. I ultimately had to order it on Region 1 DVD from the U.S., which means I had to play it on my old laptop that I've reprogrammed to play DVDs from that DVD region. That part went fine, but this laptop is not in great shape, and when I paused the movie at one point, it didn't recover well from coming unpaused. For the next five minutes the dialogue played uninterrupted, but the images froze and then caught up in superspeed. I was actually kind of digging on the frozen images, which were coming fast enough that it almost seemed like a collection of iconic snapshots -- like something you'd seen in a pre-sound film where a reel has been lost, so they supplement it with stills.

But when it became clear that the normal playing of the film was never going to recover on its own, I had to try to exit the video player, and when that wasn't working I had to restart the computer altogether. And then all of the sudden it was running Windows updates and I ultimately couldn't resume the film for another 45 minutes.

Worried about pausing again, I instead fought through sleep on the couch for a significant portion of the film's final 30 minutes. I didn't always succeed, but I was never asleep for more than about a minute and always retained a hazy understanding of what was going on -- which was also kind of a cool way to take in a film with such themes. I reviewed on Wikipedia and it turns out I didn't really miss anything in terms of the plot. And hey, now I own this so I can watch it again whenever the mood strikes me -- and whenever I'm willing to deal with the shortcomings of my old laptop.

So glad to have loved Bigelow's second film for this series after not liking her first. In July we'll turn to Jane Campion's second film I haven't seen, Holy Smoke! 

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: An Angel at My Table

This is the second in a 2023 bi-monthly series finishing the final three films I haven't seen from directors Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow.

I accidentally went and let 11 days pass from when I watched the oldest Jane Campion film I hadn't seen, An Angel at My Table (1990), and when I've finally come to write about it. That kind of delay doesn't benefit the writing of a piece like the current one, especially when the movie in question didn't make a huge impression on you.

I suppose, for the similarity of subject matter, time period and corner of the world, this biopic of a famed New Zealand writer felt most similar to Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career, a biopic-like story of a fictitious Australian writer. It's been a while since I've seen that, though, so I don't know if my comparison holds any water beyond the superficial commonalities. I didn't love My Brilliant Career either, though, so the films have that in common for sure.

To say I didn't love An Angel at My Table, the biopic of Janet Frame, doesn't mean I didn't like it. Or at least admire it. Did I enjoy it? Not really. Did I see the point of making it? Again not really.

Never having heard of Frame outside the context of this movie doesn't have much to do with my feelings about her life having the worthiness to be documented on film. Though at the start, I did wonder why we were watching a movie about this shy redhead, whose hair is her most defining personality trait, who has a flair for behaving oddly but is otherwise a rather normal seeming young woman growing up in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Then I started to see the full design of the movie, and that Frame would be hospitalized for psychiatric reasons multiple times and for long stretches during her young adulthood. In fact, she received frequent doses of electroshock therapy and was even scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled just before, and only because of, the winning of a literary award by a collection of short stories she had written.

When she is ultimately, finally, saved from the clutches of a backwards medical profession, she starts to have a normal life including the fits and starts of relationships, and travel abroad to Spain and England.

One of the things that tested my patience a bit about An Angel at My Table is that it's two hours and 38 minutes long, which was not at all a customary length for a movie in 1990, particularly not a movie that doesn't have ambitions toward being a sweeping epic. Only poking around with some research afterward did I discover why this is: It was originally produced as a television miniseries before being packaged as a film. This explains both its length and its episodic nature, and the overall structure is what it is because it's a dramatization of three different autobiographies by Frame, the middle of which lends its title to the movie.

After I got over some of my initial "why am I watching this?" vibes, I did grow to be interested in Frame, as you do with a character with whom you spend a lot of time -- in, for example, a miniseries. Lacking a prior understanding or appreciation of her career made it difficult for me to place her life in a useful context, but it also occurred to me that there are many, many lesser films made about the lives of people we know very well. Better to have a good film made about someone I don't know than a bad film about someone I do.

Plus it gave me a chance to appreciate the early cinematic gestures of Campion, whose first film, Sweetie (1989), really captivated me when I saw it five years ago. That film captures personality types that have come familiar to me due to living in this part of the world, in all their bedraggled eccentricity, and An Angel at My Table starts out in much the same vein. I'm more naturally inclined toward a modern-day portrait of off-putting weirdos than I am a biopic of a writer, but An Angel at My Table does seem like an important bit of progression for Campion, one that allowed her to really break out with another period film in The Piano three years later. 

I'll check in with the next Campion film I haven't seen, 1999's Holy Smoke!, in July. But in the meantime it's back to Bigelow in May with Near Dark. 

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: The Loveless

This is the first in a 2023 bi-monthly series watching the films of Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow I haven't yet seen.

I'm struggling to the finish line with my 2022 viewings. I have a lot of movies I could watch, but the collective exhaustion is sapping my will a bit.

So when I had an afternoon to myself on Sunday and just wanted to unwind with a movie, I chose to watch something from 1981.

It'll be the first in the new bi-monthly series I announced less than a week ago. I figured I'd be cramming it into the period between January 25th and January 31st, once I'm well and truly done with 2022 movies. But the truth is, after that I like to take a day or two off from watching movies entirely, and I've already got two others I need to squeeze in before the end of the month due to various other commitments, both on this blog and elsewhere.

And though this series is devoted to the films of women, I had to get through one man first. 

I didn't realize it at the time I selected this series, but Kathryn Bigelow had a co-director on her feature debut, who was also making his directorial debut. His name is Monty Montgomery, and I'm choosing to blame him for why I liked The Loveless so little.

It's also the film debut for Willem Dafoe, but I don't blame him for the movie's problems. It's not his fault they asked him to play a too-cool-for-school motorcycle greaser from the late 1950s, one of my least favorite recurring character types on film. But I'll get to the specifics of what I don't like about this film in a moment.

Now, Monty Montgomery has some good credits to his name. He would go on to work as a producer with David Lynch on Wild at Heart, which is not a huge surprise as that movie shares some DNA with this one. (Though to be clear, I like that one much better.) In a particular coincidence for this series, he also served as a producer on The Portrait of a Lady, which is a film directed by Bigelow's series partner, Jane Campion. Who knew I'd be able to link the two so successfully in terms of mutual collaborators. 

Interestingly, though, Montgomery is not a director -- not even on this film, according to IMDB. Yes IMDB lists him as co-director on the film's main page, but if you go to Montgomery's page, he only has producer, writer and actor credits, getting only a writer credit on The Loveless if you were to go just by that. His acting career was not a lot more prolific, as his primary credit is playing The Cowboy in Mulholland Drive. 

David Lynch, Jane Campion and of course Bigelow are great collaborators, but I still want to blame Montgomery for what I dislike about The Loveless, even knowing as little about him as I do.

One of the reasons for that is the movie has a hard time accumulating much of a female perspective. In order to tell you the ways it falls down in that area, I should probably set up the plot a bit.

Plot? Yeah there isn't really one. We meet Dafoe's Vance (heh, a nickname I sometimes use, but it did not ingratiate me to him) as a solo biker out on the road, who stops to help fix a flat of a woman broken down by the side of the road. He proceeds to extract more of a cash fee from her than she wanted to give, plus a non-consensual kiss that she seems to start to like as it goes. I can't specifically fault the film for this sort of thing as not only were we considerably less concerned about the agency of attractive women in films 42 years ago, but the film is also set in what appears to be the late 1950s, when society was even less concerned about such things than it was in 1981.

The opening is a bit of a false friend, though, as Vance is actually part of a larger group of bikers who are on their way from (they say) Detroit to Daytona, when one of the bikers has trouble with his Harley and needs to stop in a small Georgia town to get it repaired. There, now I've given you pretty much the whole plot.

The action, such as it is, involves the bikers standing around looking cool, chain-smoking cigarettes, continuing to pop the tops of ten-cent Coke bottles from the vending machine, sneering at each other and the locals, playing various games of chicken with each other (the most memorable being a game where they repeatedly throw a knife as close as possible to the other's boot without hitting it), and generally creating trouble. Each guy is trying to look tougher and cooler than the guy next to him, though there is also one female biker. 

Anything resembling a story comes in the form of a local teenager Vance hooks up with, who drives a convertible sports car. She tells Vance about how her mother killed herself when she could no longer tolerate the girl's abusive father, and the girl shows a scar on her forehead courtesy of the old man as well. (Since I'm disappointed in the representation of the film's female characters, the least I can do is name the actress here. She's played by Marin Kanter, who only made five more films.) Of course Vance ends up despoiling her, though at least this liaison appears to be consensual.

The father becomes an antagonist to the bikers, eager to run them out of town and perhaps even try to kill them. 

The film spends so much time on nothing that the only conclusion you can really reach is that its primary raison d'etre is to show how cool bikers are. I hardly think that would be a reason Bigelow would list for wanting to make a movie, but it was her first movie, and sometimes you don't get a lot of choice in subject matter in such a situation. I will say that the filmmaking is plenty credible, even though it is in service of something that does nothing for me. 

I've just never thought that someone posturing in a leather jacket and combing grease through their hair made for a very aspirational icon. I'm completely immune to the charms of such a character, which I think might be one of the reasons I was slow to become interested in Elvis Presley, though certainly that's only one incarnation of Elvis as a performer. I did like the Fonz in Happy Days, though, so who knows. Maybe it's just these particular greasers I don't care for. All the sneering and the false bravado and the worshipping of vehicles with loud engines and the idea not to mess with them because they could end you ... it doesn't work for me either when this type is put on a pedestal or when it is critiqued, the latter of which is probably supposed to be the case in The Loveless. I'm just too quick to find such a person an insecure, infantile personality, even in a movie 42 years ago where the character deficits of such a person were not nearly as clear as they are now.

Should I be giving The Loveless a pass for the period in which it was made? I don't think so. In whatever period you make a film, you have to decide whether you are going to put the effort into a compelling story or are just going to trot around your characters for 80 minutes and decide that's story enough. 

And yes, the depictions of women are bad. Other than the biker chick, the stalled motorist and Telena, the girl with the convertible and the bad daddy, the most prominent female character is the bored waitress in the diner where a lot of the action takes place. She ends the film performing a striptease at a local bar, for reasons not entirely clear.

Two telling bits from this end portion of the film that I jotted down:

1) The song that plays during the striptease is something called "You're Wasting My Time." Indeed.

2) In one of his last lines of dialogue in the film, Dafoe's Vance says "We're going nowhere. Fast." You said it Vance, not me. It's an on-the-nose comment not only for these characters, but for how I felt the entire time watching this movie -- which seemed like an eternity even at barely 80 minutes long.

I have no doubt Bigelow's career and her depictions of women will start to improve with Near Dark, her next in the series, and certainly by the time of Blue Steel, which features Jamie Lee Curtis as a cop.

Before then, though, I've decided to go with Campion's first film I haven't seen, An Angel at My Table, in March.

Completing more filmographies, but leaving the old white men behind

To say that I have only completed the filmographies of old white men during my bi-monthly series over the past few years is not exactly accurate. I mean, this whole quest to finish off filmographies sort of started with Spike Lee, who may be old and male, but is certainly not white. Of course, I didn't actually finish his filmography, since there were nine Lee features I hadn't seen and the bi-monthly schedule only allowed me to watch six of them.

As a corrective to failing to finish Lee's movies, I did choose auteurs in 2021 and 2022 whose filmographies I could finish with exactly six movies, though there were asterisks next to each. With Orson Welles, I had to ignore certain movie fragments that existed under his name, and with Martin Scorsese, I had to disregard documentaries. With both, the problem remained that they were old and white and male. 

In 2023, at last, I am turning this impulse in a distaff direction.

The problem is, due to age-old inequities in the film industry, there are almost no female directors who are both significant enough to be worth investigating in a series like this, and have a directing credit on six features I haven't seen. That's partly a credit to me for having stayed on top of the work of the more prolific female directors, but also partly a sad reality that there just aren't that many to choose from.

Now, if I dug back into history, I could find directors who worked decades ago who may be largely unseen by me, people like Lina Wertmuller or Vera Chytilova or Ida Lupino, who may have six or more films I haven't seen. But the impulse behind this series is not to discover somebody I'm unfamiliar with, and then work through their filmography. It's to take somebody I already know, whose work I already admire, and to finish it off.

So I've come up with what I think is a pretty good idea: I'm going to split the six films between two directors.

And to give a clear relationship between them that would make sharing this series logical, they'll be two of the three women who have won best director Oscars.

With apologies to Chloe Zhao, who has directed only one feature-length film I haven't seen, that means I'm focusing on Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion in 2023. 

And because of course I do, I've got a fun name for this series: Campion Champion and Bigelow Pro.

Yes that's a bit of a mouthful, but you only have to say it six times. 

Each director has three feature films I haven't seen, and yes, I may have watched K-19: The Widowmaker last year just to allow that to be the case. I may have. 

With Campion, it's An Angel at My Table (1990), Holy Smoke (1999) and In the Cut (2003). With Bigelow, it's The Loveless (1981), Near Dark (1987) and Blue Steel (1990). 

Is either director particularly a favorite of mine? Not necessarily, but they've each made at least one film that I love. With Bigelow it's Strange Days, which is in my Flickchart top 100, and with Campion, my most passionate feelings would probably be divided between The Piano and The Power of the Dog. 

There can be no doubt of these women's historical significance to the movies, though, considering that they were indeed the first and third women to take home the Oscar for best director, Campion just completing the feat a year ago.

Considering that all of my unseen Bigelow movies come before the first Campion movie I haven't seen, chronologically -- even though Bigelow is only three years older than Campion -- I could just watch all Bigelow's movies first, then switch to Campion for the "back nine," as it were.

Or, I could give the series more of a sense of evenness throughout by alternating titles, starting with The Loveless and then going to An Angel at My Table, and so on. Whatever I decide to do, I will go in chronological order at least within each director's filmography.

However I choose to approach it, I'll make that decision within the next week or two, as I plan to start this in January and have subsequent installments in March, May, July, September and November. 

And while I often do this bi-monthly series starting in February and ending in December, I have another bi-monthly series that will be filling that slot that I haven't announced yet -- partly because I haven't settled on it yet. It will be watching the films of one of two directors, and in this case it will be revisiting films I've already seen.

In either case I will likely start out with The Loveless as the oldest film on the list, having just confirmed its availability on iTunes. If you want to play along, you can watch that now and join me back here in a couple weeks for a discussion.