The Devil Finds Work, by James Baldwin / *****

When I reviews Notes on a Native Son, I talked about how reading James Baldwin’s discussion of cinema was like catnip to me. So it should be no surprise that, when I found out that Baldwin had published a book entirely focused on film criticism, it jumped to the top of my reading list. The Devil Finds Work is that book – a mixture of personal essay, memoir, and criticism that blends into something all the richer, all while being driven by Baldwin’s intelligent, insightful, and dryly funny voice.

Unsurprisingly, The Devil Finds Work is very much a book about what it’s like as an African-American to watch white cinema, giving a new perspective on very familiar films. Yes, Baldwin spends some times on some seminal race relation films – and we’ll come to those soon – but he also talks about some of the films he saw as a child, and the scattered reactions to them along the way. Indeed, the book’s early going focuses on Baldwin’s initial experiences with cinema and some of the formative ones with theater, including a viewing of the famous Haitian-set version of Macbeth staged by Orson Welles. To hear Baldwin talk about these early experiences is to get a reminder of just what a potent and powerful tool cinema can be, and how it can open our eyes to so much.

But The Devil Finds Work really comes to life as Baldwin digs through cinema to look at landmarks of racial depictions on screen to provide commentary. Unsurprisingly, The Birth of a Nation gets a withering, sarcastic evisceration, but just when you think that Baldwin is ready to entirely dismiss the film as cartoonishly racist beyond understanding, he finds an insight into the film’s view of interracial children that allows him to unpack its cultural meaning in terms that I had never considered, and turns it into something more than just horrendously, monstrously racist.

More fascinating, though, is Baldwin’s approach to “progressive” film milestones, particularly In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, both of which receive equal absurd confusion and dry commentary. Through discussing both films, Baldwin makes it clear how much movies like this are designed by white audiences for white audiences, laying bare just how little the actions of the films’ characters – and especially those of Sidney Poitier in both cases – make any sense to an African American audience. That may be most heartbreaking when he’s discussing the way Dinner understands nothing about the complex relationship between black fathers and sons, but really, throughout both films, Baldwin’s insight and analysis is strong and thoughtful, constantly coming back to the same question:

The root motive of the choices made can be gauged by the effect of these choices: and the effect of these deliberate choices, deliberately made, must be considered as resulting in a willed and deliberate act – that is, the film which we are seeing is the film we are intended to see. Why? What do the filmmakers wish us to learn?

There is plenty more to devour here, from Baldwin’s account of his time in Hollywood struggling to write a screenplay out of Malcolm X’s autobiography (side note: one can’t read this section and not lament that we never got to hear Baldwin’s thoughts on Spike Lee’s Malcolm X) to his complex evisceration of Lady Sings the Blues (which “is related to the black experience in about the same way, and to the same extent, that Princess Grace Kelly is related to the Irish potato famine: by courtesy”). But what everyone remembers – and rightfully so – is his closing discussion of The Exorcist. For Baldwin, the once outwardly religious preacher turned racial commentator, the idea of seeing a film about the nature of evil is compelling and yet something he feels unsure about. But his final take on the film is something wholly more powerful and gutpunching than I expected.

For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself. The devil has no need of any dogma—though he can use them all—nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention. He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do.

The mindless and hysterical banality of evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks—many, many others, including white children— can call them on this lie, he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.

This insight – this sense of how The Exorcist comforts us by turning evil into something external and ignoring our own culpability – is the sort of thing that Baldwin makes look effortless, and yet lingers for so long. If you can pass that “we do” without even a pause, more power to you.

In the end, The Devil Finds Work probably isn’t “essential” in the same way that The Fire Next Time or Notes of a Native Son are. It’s brilliant, as ever with Baldwin, and it’s insightful and thoughtful, but if you only read one, you should probably read one of those. But if you’re a lover of film, or already a fan of Baldwin, this one is unmissable – it’s riveting, engaging, entertaining, and thought-provoking, and that doesn’t even get into the craft of it all.

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Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, by Peter Biskind / **** ½

If you were to ask me what the best period for American film was, I’d be hard pressed to argue that it wasn’t the 1970s, a period where a slew of factors gave us some of the most personal – and most interesting – films of all time. From big-budget pictures like The Godfather to personal stories like Mean Streets, from the revolutionary Easy Rider to the predecessor of the modern blockbuster Jaws, the 1970s was a time of incredible growth and change for the film industry, and there are no shortage of films from the decade that can be held up among the greatest films of all time.

Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls tells the story of that decade, explaining just what led to an era in film so dominated by directors who were given free reign to make their own unique pictures, and what happened by the 1980s that brought that to a close. Beginning with Bonnie and Clyde and ending with Heaven’s Gate (more or less), Biskind’s book covers so much ground, and so many careers, that it would be easy for the book to fall into chaos. After all, Biskind isn’t just telling the story of a slew of directors – Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Paul Schrader, Terrence Malick, William Friedkin, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, just to hit the main focuses – but of the studio system of the time, key figures in the decade (Jack Nicholson, Robert Evans, Robert Towne, etc.), and even politics and other key social moments. In other words, there’s a lot going on, and even in a dense read like this, it would be easy to lose track of the story.

But Biskind’s organized, careful approach pays off incredibly well here, with each chapter primarily focusing on a single figure, even as the book proceeds year by year through the decade and beyond. Biskind’s clearly done his research (more on that in a moment), and the book is peppered with anecdotes, quotes, data, stories, and details that bring not only the era to life, but each of these figures, many of whom loom larger than life in the minds of many cinephiles. Biskind is obviously deeply influenced and reverential of many of these films, but he’s also not blind to how so many of these figures changed along the way, and how many of the same things that made them great filmmakers also led to the destruction of the New Hollywood they were building.

That means, of course, that many of these portraits are less than flattering, bringing us back to Biskind’s research. It’s worth noting that many of the figures in this book have accused Biskind of distorting their words, and many of them have come out angrily against the book in general. Is that because of their horrible behavior on display, or because Biskind exaggerated for dramatic effect, or some combination of the two? Hard to say. It’s fairly obvious when Biskind interjects his own opinions into the book – his personal takes on certain movies and people arise unexpectedly, and take away from some of the more objective-feeling portions of the story – and the clear arc of the book is clear from the prologue, as he explains that what happened in the 1970s was both an explosion of creativity but also brought about its own end in its excesses and lack of self-control.

For all of the doubts and opinions, there’s little denying that film fans will find Biskind’s book compulsively readable, from its behind the scenes stories of so many iconic films to its unflinching portraits of towering talents. It humanizes them, and it may tear down their image, but it also doesn’t ever take away from an incredible period in cinema where creativity, originality, and personal voices came through in remarkable ways, leading to some of the greatest films of all time. As a portrait of an essential era in cinema, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a must-read, looking behind the curtain at all the pieces that had to come together to make it all happen – and the same pieces that would probably attempt to keep it from ever happening again.

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Chattanooga Film Festival 2018: Day Two

For the past several years, I’ve gone down to the Chattanooga Film Festival – it’s one of my favorite weekends for film every single year. (You can see my previous year write-ups since moving to this blog here.) A festival that’s in love with genre films, trash cinema, and embraces the weird and wild, CFF’s philosophy is that every film is worth watching in some way, and it’s an idea I can always get behind. This year, I managed to get back down there for all four days, which means there’s a lot to talk about. After a lackluster first day, day two was a move back in the right direction, full of generally interesting – if flawed – films, as well as the first real knockout of the festival.

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The idea of William Friedkin making a documentary about exorcism is an obvious one, but that doesn’t make it a bad idea. After all, here’s the director responsible for the definitive film about exorcism, responsible in no small way for the fact that the practice has found its way into mainstream knowledge. So when The Devil and Father Amorth is sold under a) the promise of a Friedkin documentary about exorcism, and b) reveals that Friedkin was given the chance to film an actual exorcism, performed by Father Gabriele Amorth, the Catholic church’s leading exorcist…well, you can imagine why that’s instantly compelling.

But even at a mere 68 minutes, The Devil and Father Amorth feels overlong and draggy, spending far too long navel-gazing and discussing the impact of The Exorcist on popular culture and exploring Friedkin’s personal beliefs on whether or not demon possession is a true phenomenon. Rather than becoming an engrossing documentary about exorcism and its place in modern times, Friedkin turns the film into either a glorified DVD extra for The Exorcist or, as my friend Adam put it, “the most overqualified episode of Unsolved Mysteries ever filmed.” By the time the film finally (and, again, when you’re using the word “finally” in regard to a 68 minute film, well, that’s something) gets to Amorth and the exorcism, you can forgive viewers for wondering what the point of all this is.

None of that keeps the actual exorcism footage from being less than fascinating, and although I have some questions about the unaltered nature of the footage (mainly with regard to the audio, which felt tweaked to me), it’s gripping and compelling stuff – less showy and Hollywood-like than anything we’ve ever seen, but no less strange and uncomfortable. It’s a shame, then, that Friedkin’s efforts to lead a debate about the footage afterward end up feeling so much like he’s steamrolling any interview subject; this is less a discussion and more of a chance for Friedkin to explain that he’s the smartest guy in the room, and to ask everyone else to confirm it. There’s some fascinating elements of this film, but you can’t help but wish it had been given to someone less interested in turning it into a film about themselves. Rating: ** ½

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Trying to describe why I liked Borley Rectory is going to be a little tough in a verbal medium like a review, since so many of its pleasures come from its style and the experience of how it’s being told. As a documentary, Borley Rectory does its best to recount the fabled history of the titular house, often held up as the “most haunted house in England.” Writer/director Ashley Thorpe gives us a pretty straightforward accounting of events for the most part, tracing the house through its various owners and attempting to figure out some pattern to the sightings and hauntings…at least, until near the end, when the documentary seems to go about dismantling and disproving half of what it’s been claiming this whole time. (The willingness to look at both sides of the house is interesting; the out-of-nowhere swerve in tone at the end is less so, and ends up feeling jarring and disruptive.)

But what makes Borley Rectory worth seeing is less what it’s about, and more how it goes about it. The best way to approach this, I think, is to show you a clip, and I really recommend you pause in this review and take a couple of minutes to watch this brief excerpt, which gives you a sense of the film’s style and method. Mixing animation, re-enactments, old photographs, and a bit of stop-motion animation, Borley Rectory creates a fascinating, compelling atmosphere that’s hard to shake off, often giving you the feeling that you’re watching old photographs come to life. (Less so when original dialogue is introduced, though; the film does best when it’s quoting verbatim from primary sources.) Taken out of context, Borley Rectory could easily come across as little more than an old FMV game with a bit better technology, but when watched as an experience, it’s immersive and strange, plunging you into the supposed unreality of the house in a fascinating way. The result isn’t perfect, but it kept me pretty riveting and in love with its odd, unsettling atmosphere, and its sheer novelty and ambition alone makes it worth watching and seeking out. Rating: ****

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(Before I go any further, I need to say: yes, the poster you see to the right of these words is really the poster for this film. Yes, it’s really that bad. No, I hadn’t seen it before I picked the film to see, or honestly, I might not have gone. Lord, what a nightmare that is.)

“A theater director’s latest project takes on a life of its own when her young star takes her performance too seriously.” So goes the logline for Madeline’s Madeline, a drama about an unstable young actress (Helena Howard, whose performance here is an absolute knockout) whose fractured perspective infects the film, turning it into a disjointed, uncomfortable, sometime surreal affair. There’s a lot to unpack here, from the film’s compelling and nuanced depiction of a deeply dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship (Howard’s mother is played by indie darling Miranda July, and her terror and unease at her unbalanced daughter is played perfectly) to the way it blurs the line between art and madness, between psychosis and coming of age. And there’s little denying that, from a technical and filmmaking perspective, or from an acting vantage, Madeline’s Madeline is pretty incredibly done – the performances are outstanding, and the film’s ambition and desire to push the envelope is mostly matched by the talent behind the camera (director Josephine Decker).

At the same time, I can’t lie to you: I ended up finding Madeline’s Madeline incredibly pretentious and more than a bit dull along the way, and I can’t help but feel that it falls in that category of “well, it may be a ‘good’ movie, but I didn’t really like it at all”. Part of that comes from my natural antipathy towards from about the “powerful inner struggle of art,” where navel-gazing becomes the rule and self-importance can’t be overstated, and there’s definitely a sense that this film is about The Power of Art and how Art Truly Can Change Your Life in a way that gets eye-rolling. More than that, by a certain point, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take away from the film; yes, Madeline is a broken girl, one whose unpredictable and explosive actions are both riveting and dangerous, but I can’t see what Decker or the film wants us to take away from it beyond simply depicting it. I’m sure that this will end up being beloved by a lot of people, and I can’t entirely fault anyone for that – I can imagine this being the kind of movie that a lot of film people will really embrace and run with. But for me, the self-importance, weirdness for its own sake, pretension, and lack of purpose just left me admiring the craft but bored by the film. YMMV, though. Rating: ***

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It’s hard not to think of the works of Guillermo del Toro when talking about Tigers Are Not Afraid, from Mexican director Issa López. Like del Toro’s films – especially The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth -López’s film deals with the harsh realities of a child’s life against a harsh backdrop by using fairy tales and fantastical elements to offset them. In Tigers, that backdrop takes the form of warring cartels that have left whole communities of orphaned children in their wake. Following Estrella, a young girl whose mother disappears, Tigers tells the story of how she falls in with a group of young boys and they build a community together, only to find themselves attracting the attention of cartels – cartels that have no problem murdering children to maintain their position.

That’s dark fare, to put it mildly, but somehow López keeps it from being overwhelming, due in no small part to the way he lets his young cast act like, well, young boys and girls. They’re silly, they’re needy, they’re immature, and they’re fun to be around. At times, Tigers is a testament to the resiliency of youth in much the same way that The Florida Project was – a reminder that children can be children, and even in the face of trauma, there’s something wonderfully innocent about them. But also like Sean baker did in The Florida Project, López never lets us forget what growing up in this world can do to someone, or the emotional toll it takes. There’s a lot involved in protecting young ones from the world, and there’s a lot that happens when you can’t get away from the darkest parts of the world around you.

What that doesn’t even get into is the way the film uses fairy tales and the supernatural as a framework to understand the world, as well as to touch on justice beyond the realm of this world. Tigers Are Not Afraid is a dark film, but there’s a sense that the scales may balance, if not in this world, then in the next. López uses his supernatural elements perfectly, creating a sense of unease and constantly leaving us largely uncertain if the things we are seeing are real or only in Estrella’s head. But, like in del Toro’s films, at a certain point, does it even matter, if she believes it?

Tigers Are Not Afraid was the first real masterpiece of the festival for me; it’s a film I hope gets widespread recognition in America and a wider release. It’s a tough watch at times, but hauntingly so, and the execution across the board – from the use of the slums as backdrop to the heartbreakingly good performances by the child actors – is nearly flawless. It’s the kind of film I come to CFF hoping to see every year, and I’m glad I didn’t miss it. Rating: *****

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One of my all-time favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips involves Calvin creating a fantasy that ends with the most dangerous threat of all: tyrannosaurs in F-14s. “This is so cool,” says Calvin, while Hobbes simultaneous comments, “This is so stupid.”

That dichotomy nicely applies to Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, a truly dumb movie that I kind of enjoyed anyways. A Kill Bill-style female empowerment revenge film, Revenge follows the story of Jen, the mistress of a powerful businessman who is left for dead after a sexual assault by one of the man’s friends. When Jen realizes she’s not dead, however, it’s time to get some payback on these guys for what they’ve done.

I spent an awful long time in Revenge trying to decide if the film was accidentally stupid or knowingly stupid, and even at the end, I’m not entirely sure (although I’ll admit that the film’s wonderfully excessive and blood-soaked ending felt just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek for me). What I can’t argue is that it’s beautifully shot across the board, and finds a flair and style pretty much every chance it gets. More than that, especially in contrast to day one’s dire Downrange, Revenge knows how to bring out the suspense in a scene, taking its time and using pacing and quiet breaks in the action to fill the frame with unease and uncertainty. More than that, the film is gorgeously crafted, with some exquisite long takes and some great use of the desert backdrops.

And, of course, there’s the film’s gender politics, which manage the non-insignificant feat of having an incredibly attractive woman running around largely in her underwear and somehow never feeling leering or ogling. That’s no small thing, and it’s to Fargeat’s credit that she manages to turn that most disreputable of genres – the rape revenge film – into something that comments on women’s subservience to men, social conditioning, male gaze and expectations, and more, all while still never backing away from the demands of the genre. Does it hold together as a story or a plot? Nah, not really. But it’s still more fun than you’d expect. Rating: *** ½

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Also on Day Two: I finally got to catch one of the CFF seminars hosted by famed B-movie connoisseur Joe Bob Briggs, and it was every bit worth the wait. Giving an overview of exploitation film, with a focus on how the genre used sex as a selling point, giving us a fantastic overview ranging from silent films to “educational” roadshows, and still finding a way to turn the last act into a tribute to Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis. It was a love letter to trash cinema from a man who adores it and knows his history, and I both learned a lot and just generally enjoyed myself.

IMDb: The Devil and Father Amorth | Borley Rectory | Madeline’s Madeline | Tigers Are Not Afraid| Revenge

A Head Full of Ghosts, by Paul Tremblay / **** ½

Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts has been greeted rapturously by not only horror fans, but by more “mainstream” critics, which isn’t something that normally happens with horror novels. Normally, horror is a bastard stepchild of a genre, something that most reviewers are “above” reviewing. And in the rare cases in which a book manages to overcome that barrier, it normally does so by being so “literary” that it loses the very things that appeal to horror fans. All of which is to say, it’s notable that A Head Full of Ghosts manages to walk a very thin line, giving us something genuinely scary and creepy, but also something inventive and postmodern enough to make it appeal to those with a more literary bent.

It doesn’t take long for Tremblay’s ambition to make itself known. A Head Full of Ghosts opens with Merry Barrett returning to her childhood home, accompanied by a writer who’s helping her tell the “official” version of her story and what happened to her sister Marjorie. See, a lot of people know the story already, because Merry’s childhood ended up being used as a reality television series called The Possession, a huge hit up until…well, you’ll see. So what we get in A Head Full of Ghosts isn’t exactly an “objective” account of what happened to Marjorie and the Barretts; what we’re getting is mostly Merry’s memories, some of which, she admits, may have been influenced by the TV show, or may be things that she’s lied about for so long she’s struggled to remember the truth. And if that’s not enough, Tremblay throws in some blog post analyses of the episodes of The Possession from a horror fan, discussing the story not only as it was presented on television, but picking at all of the tropes Tremblay is tossing out.

Indeed, there’s little way to explain how much fun this book is to horror fans without getting into the way Tremblay picks apart his own influences and inspirations. Just as you’re thinking “this feels like a rip from The Exorcist” or “do you think anyone in this book remembers the story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper'”, Tremblay uses the blog posts to make the allusions and references clear, laying out for all to see the DNA of the story, but also turning the book and story into something muddier and less clear. Did all of this happen? Is this all a case of people echoing movies and TV shows that shaped their perception of what “possession” was? Where does the truth come in?

To Tremblay’s credit – and to the irritation of many, I bet – there aren’t a lot of clear answers here. A Head Full of Ghosts leaves a lot open to interpretation, down to the final pages, which are filled with moments that might – or might not – change everything. That could be frustrating for many, but for me, Tremblay’s earned his ambiguity; this is a story about how we perceive things, and how motives aren’t always cut and dry. There’s no arguing about the events of the story – everyone agrees on those. What’s more up for debate is what it all means, and what caused it all – and that’s far more compelling fare.

It doesn’t hurt, though, that A Head Full of Ghosts is genuinely scary, maybe all the more so for our inability to understand why some of this is happening. Is Marjorie mentally ill, or is she possessed? Neither explanation is entirely satisfying, because neither can adequately explain some of the truly unsettling, disturbing events of the story – even our blog posts, doing their best to unpack the tricks of the TV trade, struggle on a few points. But that’s okay; what makes the best horror is a degree of uncertainty, of unease as to what’s really going on. It’s just that few books make that part of the text itself, filtering the story through unreliable narrator after unreliable narrator until we’re not sure who to believe. (It’s no coincidence that Merry shares a nickname with one of horror’s great unreliable narrators, We Have Always Lived in the Castle‘s Merrycat.) All we know for sure is the horror that comes out of those primal, uneasy moments – and no explanation is going to help make any more sense out of some of it.

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