Love Streams

One of two pieces I wrote recently about John Cassavetes' not-quite-swan song, his masterpiece Love Streams. An excerpt:

The film’s title alludes to an idea Sarah has as she reels from losing her family, a notion that “love is a stream; it’s continuous, it doesn’t stop.” If it does not stop, however, it can slow and divert like a stream, and contrary to the feverishly over-complicated efforts of Sarah to push love forward and Robert’s own attempt to dam it, it will always take the path of least resistance. At its heart, the film is a comedy: in an oeuvre filled with all-time classic drunk scenes, the sequence of Cassevetes throwing himself in the car of club singer Susan (Diahnne Abbot), driving to her place, crashing, then being unable to get out of the vehicle is a mini-masterpiece. The physicality of Cassavetes’ acting in this moment could be a precursor for Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘luude scene in The Wolf of Wall Street: Robert turns into an assembly of arms and legs all connected to a mass of nerves without an organizing brain, and about the only thing he accomplishes as he tries to get out of the car is to cause noise, from leaving the door open until an alarm goes off to flipping on the radio and sending jazz blaring around the neighborhood.

Read the rest at Spectrum Culture.

Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984)

I've come to Repo Man surprisingly late, given how it contains so many elements I cannot help but love: anti-Reagan social commentary, a cultural snapshot soundtrack (coupled with a willingness to critique the bands it comprises), and a free-for-all style that finds touchstones in the bleakest of noirs, the strangest of '50s-'60s sci-fi and even a bit of Grease. I'm not quite sure it congeals in the final stretch, but then even if all these traits fell into place, the resulting mix would be so strange it might not look cohesive anyway. So many movies these days chase cult film status by also unloading what they can on the screen, but Repo Man has an attitude of ingenuity and self-challenge, not narcissistic promotion. I wish there were more films like it, but I suppose if there were, the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of this curio would be lost.

You can read my longer thoughts on the film at Spectrum Culture.

Capsule Reviews: Macbeth (1971), The Book of Mary, They All Laughed

Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971)

Polanski's Macbeth, made in the wake of his wife and unborn child's brutal murder, manages to extrapolate its settings from the limits of the stage into something even more ascetic and and stripped-down. It takes place in hollow, filthy castles and frigid, craggy hills, and Polanski fills this howling void with blood. The director, grimly exorcising the demons of his own trauma, translates the violence of Shakespeare's drama in viciously straightforward terms. One of the first images is of a dead foe's shirt splotching with more and more blood as a soldier whacks his corpse with a flail, and the murder of Macduff's wife and son is so hellaciously rendered that no one could fail to see shades of Sharon Tate's death. Amending the source text only to make it, inexplicably, yet darker, Macbeth leaves one wondering why anyone would fight so savagely to rule such a realm. In a final stroke of nihilistic despair, Polanski frames the climax not as duel among nobles but little more than a street fight filled with cheap shots and the wild swings of insensible men, one driven mad by paranoia, the other by grief. Grade: B+