Army of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2021)

Corporate, soulless, risible (gee, guess which Cranberries song scores the climactic scene), Army of the Dead drains all life from the viewer as it sediments into a clockwork narrative structure. Snyder has inserted some nifty variations on the zombie theme; the undead here hibernate and have formed into different classes. There's even a zombie tiger! But all that charity is nulled by the dreariest variation imaginable - these zombies can reproduce and thus, Snyder saps our attention with a central heterosexual  couple and a family drama to mirror those in the human story. Which latter, by the way, has all the rhythmic propulsion of a zombie dragging its semi-detached leg. Army of the Dead is seven deadening minutes longer than the Cannes cut of Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) not to mention 48 minutes longer than Snyder's 2004 remake of same which remains far and away his best film (although somehow I missed 2010's Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole). I do too want mainstream Hollywood cinema. I just want it to (handclap) tell (handclap) different (handclap) stories. Tighter ones too. 

Grade: a charitable D

Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, 1967)

I'm in a tailspin when I find myself agreeing with Pauline Kael instead of Dave Kehr. Kehr calls Two for the Road "arguably Stanley Donen's masterpiece" (oooh let's argue) whereas in 5,001 Nights at the Movies, Kael accurately targets "tedious running jokes" and concludes "the facile, comic bits set off audience expectations that are then betrayed, and the clever, bitter stuff just seems sour." For me, Two for the Road goes in my fundamental attribution error category not because the film commits it per se but because its obsessive focus on the heterosexual couple to the detriment of all other considerations contributes to the environment in which such errors are committed. 

For many, that's Two for the Road's most winning quality. In Danny Peary's Cult Movies, Henry Blinder praises screenwriter Frederic Raphael's "desire to create a film in which characters would simply 'live their lives'...[and] avoid, as much as possible, having characters that would represent anything: not the 'impossibility of human communications,' not the 'desirability of the married state.'" If that sounds compelling to you or even at all unique (don't most mainstream Hollywood films operate this way?), then you're free to find yourself in Audrey and Albert's cutesy, temporally jumbled, exquisitely costumed foibles. Me, I'll stick with Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Palm Beach Story, both of which imagine wider, richer contexts beyond their characters' most immediate self-regard.

Grade: B-minus

The President's Analyst (Theodore J. Flicker, 1967)

I take the positive reviews of The President's Analyst from Dave Kehr, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Leonard Maltin (four stars!) (not to mention mountains of IMDb raves) as the final proof that I am constitutionally unable to receive satire because I found this hip, paranoid comedy utterly insufferable. Crazy inventive with a refreshing episodic structure, each skit nevertheless feels interminable; it took me three days to watch the thing. Flicker (what a name!) lacks the intensity that Aram Avakian brought to End of the Road (1970) or the consistent world view that Otto Preminger infused into Skidoo (1968), two much better films with similarly wacky dispositions. Instead, The President's Analyst just sits there all smug and confident in its ability to make you laugh. For once in my life, I wanted to leave a party early.

Grade: C+

Rachel, Rachel (Paul Newman, 1968)

A realer, more lived-in approach to the small-town-ennui story than Pretty Poison from the same year. I wish Newman had the bravery to allow us to glean the inner life of Joanne Woodward's titular schoolmarm from her face and gestures instead of reductive voice-overs. And the frequent explosions into the conditional tense betray the film's wrinkles; what might have comes off jazzy back then now feels rather corny. Still, with a drifty narrative and fantastic performances, Rachel, Rachel honors the textures of daily life for a woman unsure if her actions have any consequence whatsoever. And while I agree with Vito Russo and Michael Koresky that Newman and screenwriter Stewart Stern fail to grant the same sensitivity to the repressed lesbian Calla (a typically terrific Estelle Parsons), I'm comfortable overall with the portrait. Contrary to Russo's assertion, "it" definitely comes up again in the final scene when Rachel and Calla part ways amicably. And Koresky sells Calla short. Just because Rachel is finally leaving town while Calla remains doesn't mean the former will necessarily self-actualize in Oregon and Calla is doomed to embody the sad homosexual stereotype. Both of their stories end there and their futures are unknown. 

Grade: A-minus

Horse Girl (Jeff Baena, 2020)

"Landfill Netflix" doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as "landfill indie," that indelible designation for the acres of pedestrian, post-Libertines Brit bands lining the unplayed corners of our iTunes (although I don't see why we can't apply it to the landfill plowed by the success of Nirvana in 1990s America - Rollerskate Skinny, anyone?). But we need a similar term to describe the acres of pedestrian Sundancery acquired via Netflix's cavernous coffers, a catchall phrase for films like Horse Girl which we need to remember to forget. Nothing too hideous or enraging about it. It merely embodies the indie-film aesthetic (here, the Duplass Brothers Productions house style) with all the excitement of a particularly well-executed toenail clip. There's an excellent, appropriately suffocating electronic score by Josiah Steinbrick and Jeremy Zuckerman. Molly Shannon and Paul Reiser are on board in small roles for that crucial 1990s texture. The narrative in several scenes is attractively clipped. But as with drug addiction in Requiem for a Dream, Horse Girl uses mental illness as a pretext for cheap surrealism and an empty ending. It just sits there being all nice and indie and authentic. In short, Horse Girl is selling substance as novelty, to borrow a terrific phrase from Robert Christgau. Which, come to think, does get rather hideous and enraging when meditating on it for more than a chunky paragraph.

Grade: a generous C+

 

Pretty Poison (Noel Black, 1968)

This is absolutely gorgeous to look at although the Batman-bright colors might be the work of screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. rather than Black who enjoyed an undistinguished career forever after. The scenes where Anthony Perkins is inspecting various chemicals under a huge magnifying window possess a fractalized complexity matched by few Hollywood films of the era. Perkins and Tuesday Weld give typically fine performances, raw and remarkable work from two actors who deserved better roles than they got (although the same could be said about B-movie stalwart Beverly Garland, terrific as Weld's doomed mother). And Black displays a knack here for conveying the vacuous comfort of small-town America. In short, everything is at a high level of commitment. I just don't know what to do with it. Films that attempt to explain serial killers are rarely compelling to begin with; they're even less edifying when a filmmaker allows their vacuity to roam free. The pointlessness of it all is no doubt the point which, in a turn common to such portraits, causes one to wonder about the point of watching in the first place.

Grade: B+

The Rain People (Francis Ford Coppola, 1969)

I wish Coppola took his desire to make an Antonioni-style art film all the way to a deflated ending. Instead, he indulged in the most final and banal ending imaginable with the death of a major character. Still, it's not as if loose ends are tied up for Shirley Knight's disgruntled wife/expectant mother on the run. And overall, The Rain People tells an alarmingly loose tale even for its time. The narrative drift can be summarized in the scene where James Caan's pastured football hero waits at a bus station not for any buses but because that's where people wait. No one here knows what they want and the mercurial behavior and lengthy, nerve-wracked conversations keep this road movie charged up. Knight, Caan, and Robert Duvall are all actorly to the nth but somehow not showy, called upon as they are to "appear as ordinary as Coppola's turnpike, motel room, green hills."* Fresher than The Godfather if only by virtue of still being so little seen. 

Grade: A-minus

* Ethan Mordden: Medium Cool - The Movies of the 1960s, p. 258.