- I made my first contribution to a Blog-a-Thon. Sam Peckinpah was one of my first "favorite" directors and I was glad to share my appreciation/admiration for one of his lesser known movies. Other things I learned: I like Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia a lot less than most other Peckinpah buffs. I like Convoy a lot more than most other Peckinpah buffs. But to each his own... (I'll have to write about both movies one day.)
More seriously, this Blog-a-Thon got me thinking about Peckinpah's self-destructive nature and how it fueled his art, while, at the same time, it got in the way of his moviemaking. Maybe it's because I'm also in the middle of reading a Bob Fosse biography, but I have a much greater respect than I used to for guys like Robert Altman, Luis Bunuel, and Jean-Luc Godard, who were able to maintain artistic integrity while making movies without destroying themselves. (And I'm also saddened that I've known so many would-be artists who got the self-destructiveness down, but didn't have any "results" to show for it.) - Blake Bell posted this quote from Seth talking about the difference between European and American cartoonists:
I’m not as attracted to European cartooning as I am to North American cartooning. Where a lot of it is really beautiful and interesting, I find that a lot of the European cartoonists, and this could just be in the translations, but they seem to be missing some kind of passionate spark that I find in the best North American cartoonists. There’s some eccentric quality, generally, amongst North American cartoonists that when they tackle some piece of material, it seems to be invested so deeply in their psyche that, if they’re a good artist, it’s very riveting. I don’t find that as much in the European work. I find it a little more dispassionate. It’s well-crafted and interesting but…
Recognizing that he's making sweeping generalizations, here, I kind of agree with his observation, but, for me, that's one of the best things about Eurocartoonists. They aren't all as "in your face" and they often seem a bit more (dare I say it?) sophisticated in their distance from the material. In my mind I'm comparing two favorites: American Peter Bagge's Buddy Bradley stories and Dupuy & Berberbian's Mr. Jean stories. Both are sharply observed takes on young, creative, slackerish types, but Bagge's work is just a wee bit aggressive (as befits stories appearing in a comic titled Hate), while D&B's is somewhat distanced. They seem to give the reader more room: it's a more relaxing, contemplative reading experience. What's weird is that I get the same relaxed feeling from Seth's own work. - This is complete speculation: My guess is that Paul Muni and Frederic March, who were big, Oscar-winning stars in their day, suffered from backlash from film buffs of the 50s onward, who might have thought these actors - who showed up in lots of prestige pictures - were overrated when compared to performers who worked in less reputable pictures. I wonder if, now, though, they aren't (relatively) underrated.
- Through the Sam Peckinpah Blog-a-Thon I rediscovered the writing of Scott Von Doviak (and some other guys who used to post on a movie message board that I once participated on).
I liked Scott's recent column, where he talks about art house sci-fi movies. At the end, he writes about one of my newest favorites, the time travel brain twister, Primer: "Check out the movie’s Wikipedia page for an obsessive breakdown of the jumbled timeframe and see how far you get before your brain seizes up. So yes, it’s complex and thought provoking, but does this make it a good movie?"
A rhetorical question, maybe, but, as much fun as I have trying to untangle the paradox puzzles, what I really like about the movie is the subtle way it gets at how creative endeavors can end up poisoning friendships when the struggle to have to have the last say in what's best for the company, project, etc. ends up overshadowing any other concerns. In other words, its the human drama that matters to me, (which is really what I'm always looking for in sci-fi stories).
Interesting to think about: I probably would not like Primer as much as I do if I had first seen it in a theater. But, DVR'd off of the Sundance Channel, I was able to pause and rewind so that I could clarify and consolidate my understanding as I went along. And the movie is short enough - just 77 minutes - that it makes it easy enough to watch enough times to get a grasp on what's really going on.
Showing posts with label sam peckinpah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sam peckinpah. Show all posts
Friday, February 23, 2007
Weekly Round-up
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
The Osterman Weekend
Note: This post is my contribution to the Sam Peckinpah Blog-a-Thon hosted by [This Savage Art].
The auteur theory - the idea that some great directors, through will and skill, can infuse an otherwise mediocre film with their personal vision and give it hidden, inside meaning - has no better proof than the oeuvre of Sam Peckinpah and is nowhere more evident than in The Osterman Weekend.
It's based on a Robert Ludlum potboiler - Ian Masters and Alan Sharp are credited with the adaptation - but Peckinpah fuses the twisty-turny, cross-and-double cross story with his own paranoid feelings about loyalty and betrayal, and his ambivalence about technology and progress in such a way that the resulting movie is as much a reflection of his personal vision as any he ever made - even those movies which he had much more control over.
The story involves a TV show host/Edward R. Murrow-style investigative journalist (played by Rutger Hauer), who is coerced into spying on a group of his friends who, according to a CIA agent (John Hurt), are, themselves, Communist spies.
The movie isn't that well-regarded, and, on first viewing, its easy to see why: the plot is convoluted and certain key plot points are either under emphasized or absent, the acting is (to be charitable) inconsistent (the best performances coming from the solid supporting cast), and the design looks cheap - much more like a made-for-TV movie than a theatrical feature by a major American filmmaker.
The purpose of this post is to push the idea that the movie deserves to be reassessed: I think it's one of the most interesting spy movies of its era and, while not nearly as fully-realized, it's a true companion to Brian De Palma's Blow Out. They'd make a great double feature on the themes of paranoia, surveillance, and the limits of technology to get at "the truth".
I'd like to suggest some things to look for in the movie that show what I think Peckinpah is up to.
Video Images: True and False
Video is everywhere in this movie: the character use it to spy on each other, their houses have TV sets in every room, CIA agents sit at banks of monitors in order to control things from a distance.
Take the opening:
Lalo Schifrin's soft jazz score plays underneath a grainy video image of John Hurt in bed with a woman. The cheesiness of the music and the "videoness" of the picture combine to give us the sense we're watching some kind of cheap porno.
But this turns out to be the reverse of Brian De Palma's trick from Blow Out. There, we start out thinking we're watching an "actual" stalking, but it's "really" just an exploitation slasher movie. Here, our expectations - some soft-core sex - get turned upside down when killers come out of the woodwork and (fatally) drug the woman.
The two openings serve the same purpose: the are warning from the director about how easily we can be manipulated by images and they are letting us know that what we see won't always be the truth.
The movie has another great illustration of the deceptiveness of video:
Rutger Hauer's investigative journalist is all about uncovering "the truth", but Peckinpah gives us a look at how he puts together his show, Face-to-Face.
First off: the title itself is a lie. Hauer doesn't actually face off against his guests: they're talking to each other via video hook-up. And though Hauer is supposed to be eliciting candid responses from the politicians he grills, Peckinpah shows us the behind-the-scenes manipulation that goes on to make sure that Hauer remains in complete control. Peckinpah gives us a news program is as managed as the production of the rigged Twenty-One in Quiz Show.
The deceptiveness of video plays an important part in almost every major twist-and-turn in the movie.
Video Cameras: Public and Private
There's another (related) theme that Peckinpah introduces in the opening scene: the video world has helped to blur the line between public and private.
In this movie the characters not only peep on each other's most intimate moments, but these moments get broadcast on TV.
And CIA agent Hurt runs his operation like a mirror image of the TV production - sitting in front of video monitors, directing the action from behind the scenes - but this production plays out in Hauer's actual house, not a studio, and the "performers" are Hauer's family and friends.
In The Osterman Weekend, privacy is always being violated, and the "authority" figures in the movie are always willing to justify this invasion as necessary for the public good.
This leads to another kind of public/private divide that Peckinpah brings out, namely that the government thinks it needs to keep secrets from the public, for its own good.
Burt Lancaster plays the government heavy who's trying to manage a huge cover-up - his signature quote: "Being wrong isn't nearly as important as not admitting it."
Remote Control
It's through Lancaster's character that Peckinpah bring up a theme from earlier films: that the lowest kind of man is one who has his killings done by proxy. Lancaster sets things in motion, orders hits over the phone, but always tries to keep his image clean. This is railroad man Pat Harrigan from The Wild Bunch, the Mexican gangster who puts the bounty on the head of Alfredo Garcia, the business-suited CIA operatives in The Killer Elite.
Trust, Betrayal, and Loyalty
Hopefully, I've at least shown that you can uncover literary evidence in the movie. But that's really academic. What galvanizes the movie is Peckinpah's sure sense of filmmaking - the deliberateness of the editing and staging and his (nearly) unmatched mastery of action sequences - and his obsession with the ideas of trust, betrayal, and loyalty. Peckinpah projects his own (nearly paranoid) feelings of having been betrayed onto the characters in this movie.
The climax of the movie brings everything together: Hauer uses TV production tricks to turn the tables on Hurt and Lancaster, both. At this point, Hauer becomes something like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs: his world has been violated and now he's going to make everything right. But, in a sense, The Osterman Weekend operates on a more sophisticated moral plane than Straw Dogs, where the "making everything right" really meant "use violence to set everything right".
Here, because the bad guys will always be better at violence, Hauer can't just fight them - he has to expose them and their lies. It's Peckinpah's ironic, somewhat bitter twist, that in order to get at the truth, Hauer must use deception, himself.
The Osterman Weekend isn't a masterpiece. The lead performances are perfunctory and, while some movies made on the cheap look great, this isn't one of them. But it is made with thought and passion. Watching it now, or rather, championing it now, a "problem" that comes up is that it was so prophetic in terms of how it saw televideo culture's invasion of private life that a lot of its insights seem a bit passe now. Still, when it comes to movies about paranoia and surveillance, The Osterman Weekend stands behind only a few - The Conversation and Blow Out - and is as worthy of some critical love and attention as better-received movies like The Parallax View.
"What you just saw, in a way, was a live video game." - Tanner (Rutger Hauer), The Osterman Weekend
The auteur theory - the idea that some great directors, through will and skill, can infuse an otherwise mediocre film with their personal vision and give it hidden, inside meaning - has no better proof than the oeuvre of Sam Peckinpah and is nowhere more evident than in The Osterman Weekend.
It's based on a Robert Ludlum potboiler - Ian Masters and Alan Sharp are credited with the adaptation - but Peckinpah fuses the twisty-turny, cross-and-double cross story with his own paranoid feelings about loyalty and betrayal, and his ambivalence about technology and progress in such a way that the resulting movie is as much a reflection of his personal vision as any he ever made - even those movies which he had much more control over.
The story involves a TV show host/Edward R. Murrow-style investigative journalist (played by Rutger Hauer), who is coerced into spying on a group of his friends who, according to a CIA agent (John Hurt), are, themselves, Communist spies.
The movie isn't that well-regarded, and, on first viewing, its easy to see why: the plot is convoluted and certain key plot points are either under emphasized or absent, the acting is (to be charitable) inconsistent (the best performances coming from the solid supporting cast), and the design looks cheap - much more like a made-for-TV movie than a theatrical feature by a major American filmmaker.
The purpose of this post is to push the idea that the movie deserves to be reassessed: I think it's one of the most interesting spy movies of its era and, while not nearly as fully-realized, it's a true companion to Brian De Palma's Blow Out. They'd make a great double feature on the themes of paranoia, surveillance, and the limits of technology to get at "the truth".
I'd like to suggest some things to look for in the movie that show what I think Peckinpah is up to.
Video Images: True and False
Video is everywhere in this movie: the character use it to spy on each other, their houses have TV sets in every room, CIA agents sit at banks of monitors in order to control things from a distance.
Take the opening:
Lalo Schifrin's soft jazz score plays underneath a grainy video image of John Hurt in bed with a woman. The cheesiness of the music and the "videoness" of the picture combine to give us the sense we're watching some kind of cheap porno.
But this turns out to be the reverse of Brian De Palma's trick from Blow Out. There, we start out thinking we're watching an "actual" stalking, but it's "really" just an exploitation slasher movie. Here, our expectations - some soft-core sex - get turned upside down when killers come out of the woodwork and (fatally) drug the woman.
The two openings serve the same purpose: the are warning from the director about how easily we can be manipulated by images and they are letting us know that what we see won't always be the truth.
The movie has another great illustration of the deceptiveness of video:
Rutger Hauer's investigative journalist is all about uncovering "the truth", but Peckinpah gives us a look at how he puts together his show, Face-to-Face.
First off: the title itself is a lie. Hauer doesn't actually face off against his guests: they're talking to each other via video hook-up. And though Hauer is supposed to be eliciting candid responses from the politicians he grills, Peckinpah shows us the behind-the-scenes manipulation that goes on to make sure that Hauer remains in complete control. Peckinpah gives us a news program is as managed as the production of the rigged Twenty-One in Quiz Show.
The deceptiveness of video plays an important part in almost every major twist-and-turn in the movie.
Video Cameras: Public and Private
There's another (related) theme that Peckinpah introduces in the opening scene: the video world has helped to blur the line between public and private.
In this movie the characters not only peep on each other's most intimate moments, but these moments get broadcast on TV.
And CIA agent Hurt runs his operation like a mirror image of the TV production - sitting in front of video monitors, directing the action from behind the scenes - but this production plays out in Hauer's actual house, not a studio, and the "performers" are Hauer's family and friends.
In The Osterman Weekend, privacy is always being violated, and the "authority" figures in the movie are always willing to justify this invasion as necessary for the public good.
This leads to another kind of public/private divide that Peckinpah brings out, namely that the government thinks it needs to keep secrets from the public, for its own good.
Burt Lancaster plays the government heavy who's trying to manage a huge cover-up - his signature quote: "Being wrong isn't nearly as important as not admitting it."
Remote Control
It's through Lancaster's character that Peckinpah bring up a theme from earlier films: that the lowest kind of man is one who has his killings done by proxy. Lancaster sets things in motion, orders hits over the phone, but always tries to keep his image clean. This is railroad man Pat Harrigan from The Wild Bunch, the Mexican gangster who puts the bounty on the head of Alfredo Garcia, the business-suited CIA operatives in The Killer Elite.
Trust, Betrayal, and Loyalty
Hopefully, I've at least shown that you can uncover literary evidence in the movie. But that's really academic. What galvanizes the movie is Peckinpah's sure sense of filmmaking - the deliberateness of the editing and staging and his (nearly) unmatched mastery of action sequences - and his obsession with the ideas of trust, betrayal, and loyalty. Peckinpah projects his own (nearly paranoid) feelings of having been betrayed onto the characters in this movie.
The climax of the movie brings everything together: Hauer uses TV production tricks to turn the tables on Hurt and Lancaster, both. At this point, Hauer becomes something like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs: his world has been violated and now he's going to make everything right. But, in a sense, The Osterman Weekend operates on a more sophisticated moral plane than Straw Dogs, where the "making everything right" really meant "use violence to set everything right".
Here, because the bad guys will always be better at violence, Hauer can't just fight them - he has to expose them and their lies. It's Peckinpah's ironic, somewhat bitter twist, that in order to get at the truth, Hauer must use deception, himself.
The Osterman Weekend isn't a masterpiece. The lead performances are perfunctory and, while some movies made on the cheap look great, this isn't one of them. But it is made with thought and passion. Watching it now, or rather, championing it now, a "problem" that comes up is that it was so prophetic in terms of how it saw televideo culture's invasion of private life that a lot of its insights seem a bit passe now. Still, when it comes to movies about paranoia and surveillance, The Osterman Weekend stands behind only a few - The Conversation and Blow Out - and is as worthy of some critical love and attention as better-received movies like The Parallax View.
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