In short: Hard Rain (1998)

A violent storm is raging over a US small town. The nearby levee is bound to break rather sooner than later, and most of the people have already been evacuated apart from local sheriff – soon to be a civilian because the populace has voted him out - Mike Collins (Randy Quaid) and his two men, a couple of elderly holdouts (Betty White and Richard Dysart), and Karen (Minnie Driver) who tries to save some church windows.

Close by, an armoured truck transporting three million dollars is halted by four amateur robbers lead by Jim (Morgan Freeman). Despite anyone getting killed certainly not being part of the plan, the youngest, dumbest, member of the robbers shoots one of the security guards (oh, no, it was Edward Asner!). The other guard, Tom (Christian Slater), manages to escape with the money and hides it in the graveyard of the flooding town. A cat and mouse game between him and the robbers ensues, but the locals are going to get involved soon enough. Turns out a sheriff who got the boot might very well be willing to murder a few strangers when it comes to a million dollar prize, so Tom and Jim – as the least murderous people on screen – will eventually find themselves on the same side.

I know, Mikael Salomon’s Hard Rain is not a terribly well loved film, but I do think it is a pretty great film that uses elements of 90s US action cinema, neo noir and disaster movie rather well. The script by Graham Yost is the sort of simple looking thing that can’t be all that simple to realize, creating characters out of a handful of pithy lines and situations, trusting in an audience to understand motivations and the implications of the characters’ actions and then letting these people loose on the simple but not stupid plot. Adding to this particular joy of a straightforward genre tale told with craftsmanship and intelligence is how many different set-pieces the film manages to create from a single flooded town without repeating itself.

Unlike most US action films of this era, Hard Rain doesn’t have much of an air of excess surrounding it, preferring to base the action on characters instead of explosions. This doesn’t mean the action isn’t larger than life and a bit improbable – it’s just the kind of largeness and improbability that feels grounded in something human, in this case humanity as presented by a bunch of fine actors doing fine work despite being soaked to the bone in every single shot.


Even though a lot of what Salomon does here visually is pretty much to the standards of professional filmmaking in 1998, he uses these standard set-ups to create a mood of…well, wetness, bringing the drowning town to life as exactly the sort of place where the natures of people like the Sheriff, Jim and Tom (I’m not mentioning Driver’s Karen much because she just doesn’t get much to do beyond turning on the Driver charm on command, except for a pretty badass moment where she saves Tom from drowning) will be revealed.

Parents (1989)

Little Michael (Bryan Madorsky) and his parents Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) and Nick (Randy Quaid) have just moved into a new suburb, in a new town, with a new job for Nick and a new school and new people for Michael to be afraid of. Ever since they’ve arrived, the family’s – already humungous – consumption of large masses of meat whose appearance suggests vegetarianism as the only healthy and sane reaction has increased even further. Apparently, they are eating the left-overs from their old freezer, but left-overs from what exactly, Michael is not told.

With a father who seems to boil with a kind of cold rage underneath aggressive 50s Dad manners and a mother whose face seems painted on in a perpetual fake smile, it’s not a surprise Michael’s behaviour is rather strange, and he quickly becomes the pet project of his school counsellor.

However, there’s more going on than rampant meat consumption and a kid confused and threatened by everything, even more than suggestions of animalistic sexuality between his parents to a child’s inability to always quite grasp what the adult world expects of him.

On paper, Bob Balaban’s suburban cannibal film as seen through the eyes of a child is a horror comedy, but most of the things here that are funny are also frightful, oppressive, and at best dominated not by the sort of humour that lightens one’s mood but by one based in the grotesque. Michael’s child’s eye view turns what goes by normality in his very white and very clean (both unhealthily so, and with a seething underbelly of rot, you won’t be surprised to hear) suburb and (so-called) home into a relentless attack of Lynchian strangeness. The grown-up world can already look like a confusing nightmare to any child, so Balaban’s very strict adherence to his kid protagonist’s perspective turns even the theoretically most innocuous parts of his world into sources of danger and all kinds of horror, even before we come to the whole bit about his family actually being cannibals acting out the roles their time and society expects of them with an added bit of extra wrongness.

Parents is an incredibly rich film. I’m not just impressed by the style, taste and intelligence Balaban uses to show the nightmarish aspects of childhood, but also by how far and complex he dares to go in every aspect, not stopping at picturing the idea of the dark underbelly of the most normal, instead emphasising that the upside of normality looks just as rotten to the right eyes. There are also parts of the film that can be read as a comment on a child’s inability to cope with his discovery of his parents’ sexuality; angry stabs at conformism and the brutal oppression through the concept of normality it enacts; and over all hovers the shadow of child abuse. It’s not the kind of comedy that’ll get many laughs out of anyone who isn’t like Michael’s father, I believe. That’s not a failing, mind you, it’s just the sort of film this is, and it’s difficult to imagine it any other way.

This doesn’t mean the film is completely hopeless and dark, though. There are acts of actual humanity here as well, and while the ending suggests something that certainly isn’t closure, this seems to be a film more driven by a wish to artfully express anger and perhaps pain over the world and we who dwell in it than to cynically revel in it.
On the sheer visual, atmospheric and technical level, Parents is a straight-up masterpiece (and frequent readers will know how little I like that term), putting Madorsky’s incredible, fragile performance, Quaid’s creepy, nuanced seething (nobody does barely disguised scorn quite like Quaid here), and Hurt’s teetering at the edge of what might still be a rest of sanity and humanity into the context of a film where every moment looks and feels like the archetype of 50s style suburbia and a living nightmare of oppression and dread at once.


Parents is an incredibly film that doesn’t just stand a bit isolated in its director’s – really rather interesting – filmography, but that seems rather unique in anyone else’s too.

In short: The Long Riders (1980)

There’s something peculiar about the fact that various groups of what most certainly were deeply unpleasant men of the Old American West have become folk heroes. But then, there seems to be a strain in US culture that values independence far more than any moral or ethical values. Of course, in the case of the James-Younger Gang, history did make things quite easy for folklore by involving the even more unpleasant boot of the rich and equally lawless in form of the Pinkertons on the other side, and including the taste of betrayal.

Where folklore went, Hollywood followed very early on, so Walter Hill’s film about the rise and fall of the James and the Youngers is only one particularly fine film about these dubious people among many. And a very, very fine film it is, perhaps one of the best – und certainly one of the more underrated – revisionist Westerns ever made. It’s a film that does little wrong, starting out leisurely in a tone of highly stylized authenticity - which of course isn’t authenticity at all, but a way to make the world a film takes place in feel believable and lived in by real people – that slowly but surely turns darker, culminating in the most surreal Great Northfield Minnesota Raid ever put on screen, as far as I know.

In between, the film walks the line of treating its robber heroes as its heroes without ever turning them completely into the folkloric heroes, nor treating them as mere psychopaths. The James’s and Younger’s exploits are also located in a very specific kind of post-US-Civil-War resentment of poor Southern whites towards the Union, not a place I find particularly comfortable to sympathize with (because, d’oh, slavery) but again something that adds complexity to the characters and positions them in a believable social milieu, something Hill is – to my surprise – just as adept at showing as he is at the violence and the underplayed male friendships. And even though this is quite the male dominated film, Hill also finds room to show women with agency and minds of their own; it just doesn’t help them much.

It’s a humanizing effort that is further supported by some fine acting by the collected Keachs, Carradines, and Quaids that make up its cast in what sounds like stunt casting but really does work out very fine in this case, with the various siblings playing siblings with not exactly surprising sibling chemistry. Ironically, at least for me, for once letting actual relations play relations does feel a bit strange in a movie, because I – and I do imagine I’m not the only one – have so gotten used to see siblings on my screen not looking similar at all, the film’s gesture of particular naturalism does feel weird rather than natural. Which, come to think of it, is quite a trick of Hill to play on his audience.

But then, The Long Riders does play quite a few tricks on its audience, subverting expectations and making things much more messy than they appear at first; that the film is also just a fantastic revisionist western might be one of these tricks.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,western,walter hill,david carradine,keith carradine,robert carradine,james keach,stacy keach,dennis quaid,randy quaid

Three Films Make A Post: Blood-curdling giant fly creature runs amuck!!!

Le Saut de l’ange (1971): This is a grim, rather cynical revenge movie by Yves Boisset about a bloody election in Marseille, or rather Jean Yanne coming back from a self-imposed Thai exile to take revenge for his wife and kid who are (quite uselessly) killed for reasons of politics and money he doesn’t actually have anything to do with anymore. In Boisset’s hands, it is a somewhat dry, deliberately paced crime movie with jabs of intense, sharp violence, a basic feeling of hopelessness, and a sense of barely repressed political anger. It is, as they say, quite a good film if you like that sort of thing, which I do, particularly when it includes the handful of moments of brilliant filmmaking this one does, moments when the film stops being dry completely and somehow turns its quite down-to-earth idea of how horrible violence works mythical without actually changing its posture at all. Call it alchemy.

Because Boisset is a director of taste, the film also features fan (that would be me) favourites Gordon Mitchell, Senta Berger and Sterling Hayden.

Espion, lève-toi (1982): Speaking of Yves Boisset, there’s also this spy movie with Lino Ventura as a French sleeper agent situated in Switzerland who finds himself reactivated only to stumble through a business so labyrinthine, he doesn’t even know if the people who tell him he’s working for them are actually who they say they are. On the pacing level, this is also rather slow, but it is again a sure-handed slowness the film needs to get to breathe. It’s less overtly violent than the older movie but that’s because it is really much more useful for the film’s goal of having its audience share its protagonist’s feeling of alienation and confusion to keep the violence off-screen and ambiguous.

If you’re the type to enjoy films that are structured like a peculiarly nasty kind of chess – abstract until they become all too personal – like I sometimes do, this is a pretty perfect example of it. Parts of the film are really about what very abstract strategic goals do to the people who are part of the strategy, the moment when the blind and indifferent forces of politics turn against you, or rather, use your personal loyalties, your humanity, to make you their chess piece until its time for you to disappear forever.

Breakout (1975): If there’s a place in your heart for middling 70s action movies, that’s where Tom Gries’s film probably lives. It’s not a bad film at all, but one that doesn’t make enough use of a great cast (Charles Bronson! Robert Duvall! Randy Quaid! Jill Ireland!), and could do quite a bit more with the basic set-up of a charming rogue (surprisingly enough Bronson) trying to get an innocent rich American (Duvall) out of jail because he’s rather fond of the rich man’s wife (Ireland). And money. I know, it’s “based on a true story” but when has that ever stopped a movie from changing the truth into something more entertaining?

Despite its lack of depth, it’s still a fun enough film, if only because it provides an opportunity to witness Bronson smile and emote and wisecrack.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,action,thriller,spies,yves boisset,jean yanne,gordon mitchell,senta berger,sterling hayden,lino ventura,charles bronson,robert duvall,jill ireland,randy quaid