Girlfriend is Better

Film: Stop Making Sense
Format: Classic Cinemas Charlestowne 18

A lot of high schools have a tradition, looked down on by faculty, of Senior Ditch Day. All/most of the seniors essentially blow off school for a day, typically a Friday, to get a three-day weekend. For where I grew up, the tradition for many was to spend a day at the Indiana Dunes, about a 2-hour drive from home. My friends and I, though, went to downtown Chicago and saw Stop Making Sense at the Music Box Theater.

Stop Making Sense is a concert film, and it’s nothing more than a concert film. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that, though, because this is a Talking Heads concert, and David Byrne’s style (and less so the rest of the group) is as much about the visuals as it is about the music. It’s about the full experience, something that shouldn’t be too surprising coming from a musical group where 75% of the core members met at art school.

BOSUD

Film: Melvin and Howard
Format: DVD from Mokena Community Public Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’ve said for years that my ideal job would be being an heir to a great fortune. I’d be really good at that. I’d devote my life to some cause or some scientific study or another. I’d set up foundations. Seriously, if I ever win the lottery, you can expect scientific and educational foundations coming out of my home town with my name on them. Melvin and Howard is sort of the sad fantasy version of inheriting a fortune, kinda. This is the first of what has been called a BOSUD, or “biography of someone undeserving.” That person is Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat).

As the film opens, we see an old man (Jason Robards) riding a motorcycle through the Nevada desert. He has an accident and ends up lying on the sand. It’s not until that night that he’s picked up by Melvin and driven back into Las Vegas. Melvin does his best to engage the old man in conversation, asking him to sing with him to pass the time. Eventually, he does, and he also claims to be Howard Hughes. Eventually, Melvin drops him off at a Hughes-owned hotel in Vegas and drives home to discover that his wife Lynda (Mary Steenburgen) is leaving with their daughter Darcy (Elizabeth Cheshire).

Home is Where the Hurt is

Film: Rachel Getting Married
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

I pick a movie on any given day based on a number of potential factors. Mood is part of it, as is naturally availability. But there are some other factors that go into what I decide to watch on a given day. Recently I discovered that, in large part because of the way the 1001 Movies list functions, I’m really behind on movies from the 2000s. Additionally, the 1001 List is extremely lax on adding Best Actress nominations to the official list, so I’m behind there, too. As it happens, 2008’s Rachel Getting Married is the only Best Actress film I haven’t seen currently streaming, which made it an easy choice.

I knew right away I was in for a rough ride. This says nothing about star Anne Hathaway, who I tend to like, nor anything about director Jonathan Demme, who I also tend to like. No, it’s because this is one of those family dramas where everyone gets together and all sorts of issues and problems come out. In this case, the problems all come from Kym (Hathaway), a model doing a stint in rehab, released for a few days to attend the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt).

Quid Pro Quo, Clarice

Film: The Silence of the Lambs
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.


Certain movie scenes are iconic. Chief Brody telling Quint that they need a bigger boat. Nigel Tufnel saying that his amplifiers go to 11. Rhett Butler not giving a damn. Another of these iconic scenes is Hannibal Lecter telling Clarice Starling about what he ate with his fava beans and Chianti.

The Silence of the Lambs is actually the second film featuring Hannibal Lector, but Manhunter (reviewed a few months ago here) sadly flopped. In that film, the cannibalistic Lector (spelled “Lecktor”) was played by the great Brian Cox. Here, of course, is the Lector that everyone knows and loves—the Anthony Hopkins version.

Lector is the one who makes the film what it is, and anyone who has seen this film will agree. However, he is not the focus of the film. He is almost entirely tangential to the actual plot of the film. He shows up a few times and is more of a red herring than anything else, albeit an incredibly fascinating and disturbing red herring.

The plot centers around FBI academy student Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and a serial killer who has been dubbed Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) by the press. She is sent by the head of the Behavioral Science unit, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) to interview the noted serial killer and cannibal, psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lector (Hopkins). The goal of this interview, at least initially, is a simple personality profile of the doctor, but in reality, Crawford is looking for insight into Buffalo Bill, something Lector picks up on right away.

Clarice’s first visit to Lector is a startling one. He has significant insight into her as well as her reasons for being there. Additionally, Clarice encounters the doctor who runs the facility that houses Lector. This is Dr. Frederick Chilton (Anthony Heald), who is a careerist, smarmy, and rather unpleasant. Lector and Chilton despise each other, which becomes evident quite quickly.

Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill kidnaps the daughter of a U.S. Senator, planning on adding her to his collection of murder victims. We learn that he evidently keeps his victims for a couple of days before killing them, and, once they are dead, he partially skins them for a trophy (hence his nom de press). Lector keeps himself relevant here by claiming to know the identity of the killer, but actually sending the FBI on something of a wild goose chase that only hints at the truth. Instead, he gives his real clues to Clarice, demanding that for each piece of information and each hint he gives her that she give him something of herself back.

Lector forces Clarice to relate the most terrible moments of her childhood, specifically the death of her father and her subsequent move to a horse and sheep ranch in Montana. She ran away from the ranch when she discovered the fate of the spring lambs (a moment that also gives us the title of the film). Lector tells her that everything she needs to find Buffalo Bill is contained in the case file.

The Silence of the Lambs really trades on specific key scenes that are disturbing and horrifying. Each of the scenes with Buffalo Bill, for instance, are exceedingly creepy, as they were no doubt intended to be. Bill’s victims, relegated to a deep well in his basement, are forced to lotion themselves at his command to keep their skin soft for his later skinning. We also learn that Bill is not merely skinning his victims, but is using the pieces he takes to fashion a suit of clothing for himself—a woman suit made from the skins of his victims. Bill refers to his victims as “it,” refusing to recognize their humanity. This is the source of one of the film’s more famous quotes: “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.”

Another of these shock sequences is the escape of Lector from his prison cell. Using a piece of a ballpoint pen he stole from Dr. Chilton, Lector picks the lock on his handcuffs and then brutally kills his two guards. One of these he disembowels and strings up. The other, we think initially, is horribly disfigured but left alive. We learn later that Lector—echoing the crimes of Buffalo Bill—has removed the man’s face and is masquerading as him in the ambulance, which he uses to complete his escape. Truly, the reveal as he pulls the “mask” off in the back of the ambulance is one of filmdom’s greatest and most terrifying reveals.

The ending is perhaps a little to Hollywood climax, but still effective. Clarice, naturally, is the one who stumbles upon the true location of Buffalo Bill, and plays cat-and-mouse with him in his darkened basement while he pursues her, armed with both a large pistol and night vision goggles.

The strength of this film rests on those shock scenes listed above as well as others—Buffalo Bill’s naked dance, for instance, cannot be unseen. But had the film merely had these shocking scenes, this film would not be noteworthy. The extreme natures of the crimes depicted as well as the extreme nature of the Lector character would have made any number of slasher film fans and gorehounds want to see it.

It’s the portrayals of these characters—Buffalo Bill, Clarice Starling, and Dr. Hannibal Lector in particular—that make this movie something to seek out by those interested in more than just shock and gore. There’s plenty of that, but with just that, it would be a good shock film. Instead, Clarice Starling is made incredibly human throughout. She is strong, tough, and tenacious, but also terribly vulnerable and disturbed by the events she sees unfolding in front of her. Lector is vicious, evil, and psychotic, but also strangely charming; he’s a character director Jonathan Demme described as being a good man trapped in the mind of psychotic, and that’s what Hopkins gives us. And Buffalo Bill is truly terrifying. In many ways, Ted Levine is the forgotten man in this film. So much attention (deservedly) went to Hopkins that it’s easy to forget the daring and in many ways brave performance of Levine.

Almost twenty years after being filmed, this film has not lost a step and has not aged.

Why to watch The Silence of the Lambs: It rises far above shock value and gore to be a real film that simply happens to be about horrifying topics.
Why not to watch: If you’re squeamish, you won’t make it halfway through.

And Justice for All

Film: Philadelphia
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on middlin’-sized living room television

Hollywood often gets a bug up its ass about one cause or another. Often, this results in a pretty good film, or even a great one. Films like Hotel Rwanda happen not because someone wanted to make a movie about Africa, but because there was a cause that needed to be brought to light to the rest of the world. The same is true for the film Philadelphia, which resulted in an Oscar win for Tom Hanks and one for Bruce Springsteen for best original song.

The story here is a pretty simple one, which tends to work well for cause movies, since it gives the audience an obvious good guy and an equally obvious bad guy. Andrew Beckett (Hanks) is an up-and-coming attorney with a powerful law firm in Philadelphia. The partners in the firm are consistently impressed with Beckett’s work, and give him charge over their most important client. What Beckett isn’t telling them is that a) he’s gay and b) he’s HIV-positive and suffering from AIDS.

Sadly, one of the partners has had experience with AIDS patients and knows what the signs of the disease look like. He spots a lesion on Beckett’s head, and before we can say “Andrew Beckett has AIDS,” he’s being sandbagged at work and his efforts are being sabotaged by co-workers, almost certainly with the tacit approval of the firm’s head, Charles Wheeler (Jason Robards).

This leads to Beckett losing his job. Convinced that he was fired not for incompetence but because he has AIDS, he recruits a lawyer one step above an ambulance chaser. This lawyer, Joe Miller (Denzel Washington) initially doesn’t want the case, not because he thinks he can’t win, but because he dislikes homosexuals. Eventually, however, seeing Beckett struggling with the case and living through obvious discrimination, he decides to come on board and try the case.

That’s pretty much the whole story here. There are no big surprises. In fact, during the start of the trial, Miller comments that there will be no surprise witnesses and no tearful confessions on the witness stand, and there aren’t. We see Beckett’s struggle, watch the court proceedings and the skillful and half-truthful attacks from the defense attorney (Mary Steenburgen) and see Andrew’s struggles both with the damage done to his reputation and the damage done to his body by the disease. Along the way, Miller learns to respect this man who is dying in front of him, and to come to some level of acceptance with the gay community.

Any message movie, or cause movie, tends to be simplistic in terms of story because the goal is to get the message out rather than confuse the viewers. What’s worth mentioning here, though, is that Andrew Beckett is not portrayed as a saint or a perfect man. He certainly has his character flaws, missteps, and mistakes, all of which are brought out in the trial. It would be easy to make him someone so easy to like that we root for him. It’s more impressive to make him a flawed, human individual, and make us want to root for him anyway, and that’s what Hanks and Demme manage here.

There are also great performances. Hanks, naturally, is the one easiest to pour praise on, but there really isn’t a bad one. Denzel Washington gives one of his better performances here as the ambulance chaser-turned crusader, managing to convey a lot of tenderness in the second half of the film with a gesture or a look. Another good performance here is Antonio Banderas as Miguel, Beckett’s partner. It would be easy to look at Banderas’s career and expect him to do little but look pretty, but he too is real, and provides an excellent counterpoint to Hanks’s character. It’s a moving portrayal, and done beautifully.

I don’t generally like films that slam me over the head with a message, and Philadelphia could have easily been that movie. It isn’t, though. Instead, it is a movie first, and a message second, which makes the message all that more effective and penetrating.

Why to watch Philadelphia: A smart movie about a cause that still rankles.
Why not to watch: It’s not like you expect it to be happy, do you?