Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) – S. Peckinpah

“No one loses all the time” – except maybe Warren f-ing Oates in this film (in a brilliant turn as a too cool misfit gringo in shades working in a rundown Mexican piano-bar).  But we don’t meet him until after director Sam Peckinpah gives us the set-up:  after his grand-daughter turns up pregnant, a Mexican land baron declares the title phrase, which sets loose the hounds (including tough white guys Gig Young and Robert Webber).  Through his girlfriend (Isela Vega), Oates gets inside information that Garcia is already dead – so it’s just matter of driving across Mexico in a red ’62 Chevy Impala convertible to his grave, digging him up, cutting off his head (with a machete bought for the purpose), and bringing it to the man offering the bounty.  Easier said than done.  Of course, before the film is over, we are given a dose of Peckinpah’s trademark slow motion gunplay. But we also get some 1970s romantic interludes (complete with strings) – unfortunately interrupted by Kris Kristofferson as a would-be rapist.  So, it’s not pretty or light-hearted but it is strange and unpredictable and perhaps a little bit sly (Peckinpah knows his audience by now and might just be messing with them).  But then there’s Oates with his glorious performance (not quite as stylized as in Two Lane Blacktop, more desperate) – you want him to succeed in the end, after all he’s gone through in the film and all that you know he’d already gone through.  However, this is Peckinpah at his most fatalistic and the point is that the world doesn’t cater to losers.  Still, Oates does give it a helluva try.

  

Atlantic City (1980)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Atlantic City (1980) – L. Malle

There’s something quaint and a little bit corny here in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City.  We’re treated to aging Burt Lancaster offered a glimpse of past glories (that may never have been) in a city that has also seen better days.  There’s a rough and gritty 1970s look (the clothes, the cars, the hair, the attitudes, the telephones) that you can’t really be nostalgic for, except somehow you are.  (And sitting here in the 10s, missing the 70s in a movie where they miss the 40s is pretty weird). Everyone’s down at the heels, including thirty-something Susan Sarandon who works at an oyster bar and wants to be a casino dealer (encouraged by Michel Piccoli, in a bit part as the casino owner).  Then a drug deal gone bad places Burt (playing Lou, a former numbers-runner for the mob but now a gigolo of sorts, walking the dog and rubbing the feet of a dead mobster’s widow) in the right place at the right time. So, he attempts to claim some nobility until the real drug dealers figure things out.  Although Lancaster and Sarandon give strong and “real” performances, the rest of the characters here veer toward caricature (the corny part) but there’s a warm and endearing feel nevertheless.  Not perfect by any means but this French look at fading America captures something wistful in the air (before the 80s need for greed quashed it).

The Salesman (2016)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Salesman (2016) – A. Farhadi

Rather harrowing in its portrayal of how sexual assault can affect a marriage (both the victim and her husband and their relationship).  But also rather strange in its fusing of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman to its plot -- as both a thematic parallel (in which a man responds to an apparent threat to his masculinity) and a surprisingly literal denouement (which I’ll leave unexplained so as not to spoil things).  You see the couple are actors who actually star in a community production of the play and a meeting with the local censors is the event that keeps the husband away late at the time his wife is attacked.  Then begins a search for the attacker and director Asghar Farhadi lets this unfold as any mystery might; they find his keys and his abandoned pick-up and try to piece things together without the aid of the police, who probably can’t be trusted. At the same time, we see how the trauma is impacting the couple, separately and together, and their psychological reactions and subsequent actions; Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti manage to convey some very nuanced and ambivalent feelings in their very strong performances.  Farhadi is a master at playing on the ambiguities in situations; it is hard to know who is right and who is wrong and what the best course of action should be – and this is before he throws in a plot twist or two. He won the Oscar for best foreign film for A Separation, 2011, and then again for this film.  His films show us Iranian society and its unique culture and constraints but it also shows us how people living there have the same feelings, needs, and moral choices as anywhere else.  All of Farhadi’s films are great but if I had to rank them, I would probably place About Elly (2009), A Separation (2011) and perhaps Fireworks Wednesday (2006) a bit higher than this one, which feels a little more forced and grimmer than usual.  But that is merely a quibble when all of his output is strides ahead of most challengers.

Call Me By Your Name (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Call Me By Your Name (2017) – L. Guadagnino

A breezy summer romance and/or a coming-of-age tale that also explores the tentative worries and secret freedoms of same-sex attraction.  Oliver (Armie Hammer) is an American graduate student (or post-doc) who comes to stay in Italy for the summer of 1983 to do research with a professor (of archaeology or ancient civilisations, perhaps) and to live in the professor’s summer chalet.  There he meets the professor’s 17-year-old son, Elio (Timothée Chalamet), and it is Elio’s story that we follow.  Although it is not quite clear for most of the first half of the film, in which Elio and Oliver develop a hesitant friendship, each is attracted to the other. You can feel the awkwardness when Elio finds a way to dance near Oliver during the Psychedelic Furs’ Love My Way at a local dance (and yes, “there’s an Armie on the dancefloor” indeed).  For Elio, this is likely to be his first affair with a man (and he initially responds to his own feelings by losing his virginity to a female admirer) but we don’t quite know about Oliver – he is a mystery to us as well as to Elio.  As the movie progresses, so does their relationship.  James Ivory’s Oscar-winning screenplay fortunately does not deal in stereotypes and the characters and their up-and-down relationship feel human and real.  Italy itself seems a fantasy world – and as all summers end, so too must the fantasy (although the wise and sensitive parents encourage Elio to cherish his memories).  I’m not really a big romance movie watcher and although this film avoided most (if not all) of the clichés of the genre, it was the final shot (over which the credits roll and the music of Sufjan Stevens plays) that really elevated the whole film to something special.  It was at that moment that I remembered what it was like to be a heartbroken teen in the ‘80s.

  

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) – L. Milestone

Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s famous novel, Lewis Milestone manages to capture the way that some boys’ hopes for adventure and excitement are quickly destroyed by the real horror of war.  Lew Ayres leads the cast of kids playing schoolboys in Germany who are pushed by a teacher to enlist in the infantry during WWI and sent to the Western Front (France).  Although the basic training scenes show them having fun and engaging in a “battle” with their former postman, now drill sergeant (John Wray), once they are shipped out, they are confronted with real death and misery.  The film (which cost over one million dollars, an enormous sum at the time) excels in locating the characters within a sea of extras in the trenches and no man’s land in between.  Of course, a camaraderie develops among the boys and the older guys in their troop (Louis Wolheim excels as the fatherly Sergeant) and the anecdotal structure helps us to see these relationships play out in a number of settings and situations (from the army hospitals where they recover or die to the French farmhouse where they meet some girls as well as on the field of battle).  Although some scenes may seem clichéd at this point in time, All Quiet was responsible for creating these tropes for the first time.  The camera takes us through the war with memorable tracking shots, long shots, and some gory and horrible scenes that cannot be unseen.  A powerful anti-war statement that helped to convince star Lew Ayres to be a conscientious objector in WWII.  The film won Oscars for both Best Film and Best Director in the third year of the awards.

  

Get Out (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Get Out (2017) – J. Peele

A horror movie with something extra – it’s told from the African-American perspective and it is really about racism.  Yet, it never feels didactic and it somehow manages to be fun, creepy, and in the same ballpark as films like The Stepford Wives (1975).  You see, Chris, an up-and-coming photographer (played by Daniel Kaluuya) is going to meet his girlfriend’s parents for the first time at their posh country estate.  He’s Black, she’s White – the parents don’t know and he’s (justly) apprehensive.  Writer-Director Jordan Peele captures the awkward moments as the White people bring up everything/everyone they know in Black culture and treat Chris as _the_ representative of his ethnic group (played nearly as satire).  But then it gets weird and weirder.  Peele knows how to manage the tension and Kaluuya is expert at reacting naturally to the bizarre events that unfold (which start with his girlfriend’s mom, played by Catherine Keener, hypnotizing him, purportedly to get him to stop smoking).  Unlike many horror films, the script manages to depict its hero as someone with a brain, who seeks to Get Out when things go from bad to worse. And for all its strangeness, the weird elements get nicely tied together at the end, when the big reveal happens.  (So, you might want to go back and watch it again to see the clues that you might have missed the first time).  In the end, the film turns out to be a fun ride that still manages to raise an alarm, shining a light on a particularly vexed and vexing aspect of American culture that shows no signs of getting better – true horror indeed.