Murder by Numbers (2002)

Reasons:
☻ Will watch anything with Michael Pitt in it (Justin)
☻ Directed by Barbet Schroeder, who lived in Venice, California for a while. It has nothing to do with this film, but predisposes me to like his work

In a high school class, spoiled rich kid Richard (Ryan Gosling) heckles dweeby rich kid Justin, but they are secretly friends who hang out together and have a weird relationship. For instance, Richard pretends to be an attacker, etc. Justin says, “Freedom is crime because it thinks first of itself and not the group.”

The girl Lisa tells him, “You really need to get laid, Bonaparte.” It is explained why she calls him that, but I forget. She likes Justin and wants him to help her study, because he’s a genius. But she shuns Richard, and he spies on them together.

Justin and Richard hang out in this great abandoned house at the edge of a cliff, where they burn candles, drink absinthe, smoke cannabis, and plan the perfect murder, which Richard is very eager to get busy and commit. It involves killing a random person and blaming it on the school janitor. It is hard to buy into the fact that high school kids would do anything to take their pot supplier out of business. And later, the cops say there was a “significant stash of marijuana buds” at the janitor’s place – yeah, that proves he’s a killer, all right.

(Just by the way, IMBD notes that this opus has 172 plot keywords. Marijuana is among them, also absinthe. But “drinking”? No. But “alcohol”? No.)

Cassie Mayweather (Sandra Bullock) is the tough cop who rocks black leather and demonstrates her efficiency by talking so fast you can’t understand her. She arrives with a “very important crime scene tool,” a box of doughnuts to pass out to the other cops. Her subordinate is a man, who moved over from the vice squad. She calls him “Vice.”

Mayweather goes to see the corpse of girl beautifully posed like a Disney heroine. Of course it gets ugly fast. Then there’s a microscopic camera travel along her skin, seeing the fibers that the boys took from the janitor’s house and carefully placed on the dead female. At her house where she was killed, a broken clock says 9:27. It’s the perfect clue.

Detective Sandra Bullock lives in a houseboat. She seduces a male cop who is below her in rank. She pushes him down, sits next to him, and extends her arm along the back of the couch – the stereotypical male move. It’s a corny way to indicate she’s after him, but a movie needs shorthand. In real life, the chase might last days or weeks, stretched out over time and more subtle. But this is a movie, so you have to show it blatantly.

In another scene she tries again to seduce him – it’s bigtime sexual harrassment – but fails and they have a fight. Again, in real life, this disillusioning process would take days, weeks or months but this is a movie. So far, there are two sexually bold women in this story. Also, proof that a woman can have her asshole moments too, just like a man. Ain’t equality wonderful?

She opens a “notice of hearing” from the parole board, wanting her to testify in regard to a Carl Hudson. At work, the boss tells her, “You’re supposed to be identifying with the killer, not the victim. Remember that.” Words of wisdom for cops everywhere!

At her houseboat home, she has pictures from one case spread all over her table, but then gets out the file from the old, troubling case, and starts shuffling through it and looking at pictures from that – IMHO, creating the likelihood of mixing up the evidence from the two cases, misfiling, etc., certainly not a Best Practice. If she’s supposed to be such a hotshot, this doesn’t prove it. On the other hand, when she steals trash from outside the home of one of the boys, she’s so competent she takes along a fake trash bag to replace it, just in case anyone notices.

She has dinner with the cop she seduced. Just like hippies and teenage serial killers, the cops also like to imbibe psychoactive substances in an atmosphere of candlelight.

Justin vomited near where the boys left the body of the woman they killed, and Richard gets mad at him. But Richard left footprints!

Richard videotapes himself screwing Lisa and shows it to Justin, who confronts Lisa. Richard wants to prove to Justin what a slut she is, and that he’s better off without her. Justin is not grateful for the revelation. Earlier, one of them had created a composite portrait of them blended into one person. To show that he is symbolically separating himself, Justin takes the picture back apart, then blanks the Richard one.

In this film, Gosling mainly plays a kid who is acting – first in the sick games with Justin, then the scene in the bleachers where the cops question him is brilliant. He does sincere so well. He’s an actor playing a kid who is acting, but with an insolent edge that dares the cop to prove that he’s acting. Part of the game is to taunt the cops and let them know he’s bullshitting, but he dares them to prove it because he knows they can’t. He wants the cops to doubt his sincerity just to drive them nuts, because he has an airtight alibi.

The janitor supposedly commits suicide.

I slept through a lot of this and didn’t see the end. Mayweather the cop ends up in the hospital but won’t stay, and shows how tough she is by ripping out her IV line. She knows the boys did the murder, and gets in trouble for cowboying the investigation.

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Mata Hari (2014)

David Carradine and Barbara Hershey in Boxcar Bertha

No disrespect to Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, whose filming stretched over many years as the boy grew up. But when some Slate people said it’s “completely unique” and “Nobody else would undertake this project,” I was like, “Just a minute, please.”

David Carradine wrote and directed a movie about Mata Hari, starring his daughter Calista Carradine. It was meant to follow from her teen years to age 41, when the famous spy was executed by a firing squad. The first installment was filmed in 1977, with a couple weeks more of shooting added every year or so, as money was available. Some scenes were shot in Europe and India. It was a monumental passion project, and David Carradine talked about it in his book Endless Highway.

Various journalists have said it was meant to span 30 years. Somebody else reported that it would cover Mata Hari’s life from 15 to 30, and would thus be a 15-year project. There seems to have been confusion. In a 1981 interview, D. Carradine mentioned that even though the subject had been dead for more than 60 years, new facts about her life were still being discovered. He said, “It may be three movies.”

Just before that he said, “The film will probably not exist at a single level or reality.” Which it makes sense to interpret as, it’s a mystery AND a biography AND a war story, or some similar trio of genres. But another writer took that literally and spoke as if the work would actually be three separate movies, and someone else called it a trilogy. And there’s a Carradine quotation about being almost done with the first film, with maybe one more scene to do.

Movie star crush

I fondly remember the TV series Kung Fu, and I’m sure David Carradine’s character Kwai Chang Caine had something to do with the formation of my preferences in men. Later on when the movie Boxcar Bertha came out, it was my favorite for a long time. The picture on this page is from a Playboy photo session commemorating the movie, extra hot because Carradine and Barbara Hershey were deep in love in real life.

What follows is from a 1979 chapter of my book Call Someplace Paradise:

On the way to work night shift, at the Lincoln Boulevard onramp to the Santa Monica Freeway, I saw a family group looking for a ride. They were headed for Hollywood but decided Westwood would do just as well. My front door on the passenger side is still crunched in so they piled in the back with a guitar case and backpack and various other paraphernalia. The man was Bill Sunshine, a filmmaker who documents births, mostly home births, for people who want to relive the moment on video. This is what people get now instead of bronzed baby shoes.

He introduced his wife as Calista Carradine, who plays Mata Hari in her father’s film, which they have been working on since she was a child. The concept is to have the same actress fill all the different age roles by the simple method of shooting the film as she grows up. I read about David Carradine’s ambitious project a couple weeks ago, and said so. Bill Sunshine talked some about the movie and, since I work at the hospital, a little about the advancing age and medical problems of John Carradine. The couple have been married for six weeks and are reduced to hitchhiking because of a drunk driving incident during their honeymoon. The boy, about 9, was introduced as Jason Sunshine. The guitar case contained picnic supplies. They’d spent the day at the beach.

A few months later I was at a screening that David Carradine attended. Though I had watched Kung Fu religiously, I figured half the world probably told him that. So I told him I’d picked up his daughter hitchhiking. In another of his books, The Kill Bill Diary, a page says…

…a promo reel for Mata Hari which I made to show at Cannes in 1980, made up of scenes from the first three years, ’77. ’78 and ’79, starring my daughter, from fourteen years old in India to her execution at the age of seventeen in a forest in Holland….

How did that get published? Mata Hari wasn’t executed at 17. WTF? Anyway, at the international film festival, D. Carradine was given a special award for writing the score of the fragmentary film. Over time, Mata Hari grew its own legend. A lot of people heard of it, few saw any of it. There were disturbing rumors and reports, a mild example being someone’s comment about watching D. Carradine directing a scene where his daughter and a male actor were naked and going at it.

The film was included in a couple of “greatest movies never made” webpages. One of them said the action spanned 20 years, and noted that it was supposed to have been released in the summer of 1998. The reviewer called it “an incredible concept that would have made a groundbreaking film that would have served as a fine legacy to Carradine.” It must have been money that stood in the way of completing and releasing the movie, because the filmmaker lived until 2009. According to IMBD, Mata Hari now seems to be one movie, scheduled for release in December of 2014.

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Two Bitches – A Woman’s Face (1941) and The Little Foxes (1941)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In A Woman’s Face and The Little Foxes we meet two of cinema’s baddest bad girls: Anna Holm (Joan Crawford) and Regina (Bette Davis.) First, how did they get to be so bad?

Anna was physically scarred in childhood by a fire. Subjected to rudeness and mockery by pitiless smooth-faced people, she decided at age sixteen that if the world was going to be against her, she would be against the world. Consequently Anna embarked on a career of blackmail and presumably other criminal activity as well. Even as an adult, when we are introduced to this woman, she is still mocked by her cohorts on account of her disfigured face and abrasive personality. We understand that her character has been formed by her face, that beneath the scars there is another potential Anna. The cause of her problems is physical and amenable to correction.

Regina’s personality has been formed by different forces. Although quite presentable in appearance and possessing social status, she became embittered about being passed over in her father’s will which divided the estate between her two brothers. Further disappointment came with her husband, who was never sufficiently acquisitive or ruthless in business to satisfy her lust for wealth. The root causes of Regina’s personality could be called sociological. Her situation is the converse of Anna’s: Regina’s hard, aristocratic, disdainful face has been formed by her character.

Anna is influenced by sexual attraction and a certain kind of misdirected loyalty to become the pawn of Torsten Byrig, the lover who “saw the hard shining brightness of her.” He attempts to manipulate her into doing his dirty work, which she goes along with by posing as a governess and planning to kill the nephew who stands between Byrig and a fortune. Like the original causes of her personality, the cause of her willingness to murder a child is also physical (her infatuation for Byrig).

Regina is nobody’s pawn. Instead, she manipulates others. She sends her daughter to Baltimore to convince her husband to return, and attempts to coerce the same daughter into marrying her dumb cousin Leo. She rejects the girl’s young newspaperman suitor out of hand., Regina does not dissemble or pretend to be other than she is – even though her brother Ben repeatedly counsels “softness and a smile,” Regina makes no bones about the fact that she is a disciple of naked power. Her machinations are inspired only secondarily by material greed – her primary focus is hatred for the husband she perceives as weak and worthless. She tells him quite clearly, “I hope you die – I’ll be waiting for you to die” – she despises the man. The murder she commits is rather a sin of omission – she watches as he has a heart attack, spills his medication, crawls up the stairs… throughout all this, Regina sits rigid and implacable. When she’s sure Horace is dead, she makes a fuss and calls for help. Afterwards, when she finds out about the stolen bonds, her manipulations continue – if she’s not cut in for 75% she threatens to put her brothers in jail.

Anna is capable of change. Influenced by love for the boy under her care, and good feelings toward the doctor, Anna becomes a different woman. When her chance to carry out the planned murder comes, a ride in an aerocar, she is unable to proceed. When the second opportunity presents itself – the sleigh ride – she comes to a crux of decision and shoots Byrig rather than allow him to kill the boy. Another change in Anna is that somewhere along the way she has realized that sex does not equal love. Capable of change, Anna is also capable of guilt – after writing a note to the consul warning him of Byrig’s plans for murder, she planned to kill herself. But she is redeemed by love, and admits to the doctor that she just wants to be like the rest of the human race – get married, have babies, and so on.

Regina is not influenced by love for anyone. She probably thinks she loves daughter Zan and has Zan’s best interests in mind when arranging the marriage and scheming for money. She is capable of change only slightly and temporarily – crumbling near the end of the film, she shows unfamiliar weakness and asks Zan to sleep in her room for comfort – but this softness doesn’t last long. In the last shot of the film, Regina’s sinister face, mask firmly back in place, is seen at the window. She is her old self again, the self whose motives are plain. As she has told Zan, “I’m going to get you the world I always wanted.” – the world of wealth and power. She began with these priorities and she ends with them.

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